McFreedom

This is, of course, not scientific - but then, most audience surveys are voluntary and have self-selection problems, anyway. Geek news site Slashdot is currently running a poll, "What is Your Least Favorite Acronym?" It offers as choice the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Record Industry Association of Americ (RIAA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB, the video game adult-content ratings agency) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA, the primary anti-software-piracy group).

As of this writing, there are 46,629 total votes. Anti-piracy groups (MPAA, RIAA and BSA) have an incredible 75% of the vote, with the RIAA taking 58% on its own. The IRS is only 16%. If you hate anti-piracy groups more than the IRS, it must be because you don't make any money and must pirate your entertainment rather than paying for it. Put another way, as a grownup with a job, if I wished I could get more music the easiest and most satisfying way to do so would be for the IRS to let me keep my money and buy more CDs with it.

Interestingly, 3% said the FBI, setting an upper barrier on the number of true-hardcore civil libertarians and wannabe crackers reading Slasdhot. Finally, 3% also said the ESRB, which means that there is a noticable demographic of Slashdot users who don't pirate significant amounts of anything and don't pay a significant number of taxes, but are annoyed at the ratings the video games they buy are assigned. Either that, or the margin of error on the poll is greater than +/- 3% (which seems likely).