Ugh, so much misinformation in the responses to this post (and the OP itself) I'm giving up mods to post.
I'll just throw out some facts on both sides:
-Milk, in its natural state, is a highly nutrient-dense food that is highly beneficial to feeding nations (ie: europeans domesticating cattle)
-Milk, as sold in stores in modern times, has been reduced primarily to fat, protein (casein), lactose, and artifical hormones
-About 50% of Europeans can digest lactose. The others get stomach pains and gas from consuming dairy. Most people of european ancestry still generate excess mucus due to the glue-like protein in milk (casein).
-The majority of people of African and Asian descent can not digest lactose or casein
-I don't know the details, but the hormones you get in milk can affect the human body (i've heard it said it makes kids grow bigger, which might not even be bad?)
-The high protein content of dairy offsets any calcium you get from it (protein leeches calcium from bones). Dairy and meat-focused diets cause osteoporosis. Asian populations, for example, which have the same lifespan as europeans, have seen an increase in osteoporosis as consumption of dairy has increased. A large study of nurses also showed that milk consumption did not correlate with a decrease in osteoporosis.
-Studies (the lollipop study) have shown that calories from drinks do not decrease appetite and thus result in overconsumption (obesity). However the lollipop study compared soda to candy, and it's possible the fat content of milk reduces appetite to offset the lack of chewing. I have not heard for certain of dairy consumption correlates with obesity. However I suspect that it does.
For your average American, the high caloric content of milk, plus intolerances (mucus and gas/stomach pain), plus the absence of nutrition (from industrial processing), plus hormones all combine to dairy being generally a bad thing to consume. At best, it should be compared to junk food as a 'treat' that should be eaten with caution.
All that said, "nature" is pretty irrelevant. It's pretty clear that milk in its natural (nutritious) form was such a success that it evolved the population towards lactose tolerance.
However, that history has very little to do with the reality of modern americans consuming over-processed dairy products.
Safety isn't the only problem. I bought a replacement battery for an LG phone off Amazon. The pictured battery was labeled as an official Verizon/LG battery.
The one I was shipped was a knockoff battery, and it turns out it was only about 2/3 the size of the original battery.
I'm not sure that justifies blocking 3rd party batteries. But blocking them certainly makes things simpler and cleaner for the customer as well as the device manufacturer/seller.
Of course it's handily more profitable too, but given reasonably priced batteries (unlikely when they have a monopoly for their device) I wouldn't mind using the 1st-party batteries.
I definitely agree on OpenOffice, those guys are in a tight spot where they have to "duplicate" MS Office interfaces to make it easier for users to switch, but then many MS Office interfaces are....really bad.
It's bizarre that OpenOffice would choose to implement things like Autocorrect and Clippy in the same obtrusive way MS Office does. Why not create a Better product that users genuinely enjoy using instead of MS Office?
(Ok, I'm not sure if OO actually put in Clippy, but they've tried to mimic everything else:)
I don't think there's any debate that SLI with two top-of-the-line cards is the best performance available. But in any other scenario (ie: low or mid-range) SLI is never an cost-effective solution. Except in some contrived cases like "someone gave me 2 GPUs for free".
AMD/ATI isn't even competing in single-GPU (or CPU) high-end chipsets anymore, so you're already better off spending your money on Intel/Nvidia if you're a high-end consumer. Much less the ultra-high-end where dropping $800 on dual GPUs is considered a sane option to play videogames.
With all that considered, AMD spending resources on SLI is kinda pointless, isn't it?
That doesn't mean SLI is stupid, it's just not that market AMD is targeting with their products.
Could you explain about the "drivers still suck" part?
I bought a radeon 4850 and it auto-scales the fan to keep the card cool, and it runs my games faster than the 8800GT I had before it.
The Nvidia 8800GT I got had the fan speed locked at 30% and required 3rd-party software just to prevent the card blowing itself up through overheating. On top of that, it's "nTune" software caused my comp to enter an infinite-reboot loop that even Safe Mode didn't get around. Had to reinstall the OS before I figured out what had caused it.
From everything I've seen Nvidia is the one with some severe software and driver problems.
Oh, and ATI lets you download the driver without the Catalyst Control Center, afaik. I gave up on boycotting the.NET framework a long time ago so I just get the CCC too these days, but YMMV.
Exactly. All that matters is what I can get for the $50-100 range. AMD has won every time I've compared that, and even moreso when you factor in motherboard costs.
ATI and Nvidia have been pretty comparable in the GPU market lately. But when I got an Nvidia 8800GT the fan was locked at 30% speed and had NO internal logic to speed up the fan when it started overheating. Which it did, Often. Had to get Rivatuner and hack some weird ass settings just to get the Nvidia card to work, as did every friend of mine who got an Nvidia card lately.
Now we're all back to ATI cards which actually handle fan speed automatically. Amazing thought, huh?
I don't recall any promises by Valve to add twice as much content to L4D and give it all away for free. L4D was an excellent and complete game upon launch and well worth the cost.
If you didn't like L4D or enjoy the replayability of the extremely well-designed game rules and levels, that's OK. You're probably also not one of the people who played CS and CS:S for a decade with over half of that time being spent in Dust, Dust2, and Office.
L4D is about well-designed and replayable multiplayer game rules and maps, not about dumping crappy content on users.
It would be nice to have a unifying GUI theme on linux, but it would also kill off a lot of innovation.
Lack of users will already kill off any app that significantly diverges from standard desktop GUI mechanisms without enough redeeming factors to make it worth learning.
Copy-pasting on the other hand....some things that are cross-application need to be locked down to be useful =\
As an example, I saw some lovely code recently where the developer had used prepared statements all through his code, but still left it wide open to SQL injection by not using variables in the prepared statements. He just prepared entire strings already containing the relevant form variables concatenated with the SQL. Genius.
I almost said in my post that they should require prepared statements - but then I thought of that scenario and decided against saying that =D
Arguably, if a game has a part that's ridiculously hard, it's just a bad game. The player does share responsibility for making efforts to get past the part.
But if the game hasn't made the player aware of the tactics or abilities required to get past that point, and the players options are Quit or Cheat, then that's a massive failure on the game's part.
And of course thats all true only for the easiest game mode - if you put the game on a harder difficult and it's too hard, the answer is to scale back the difficulty (hopefully without having to start over from level 1), not cheat.
The basic issue here is that most PHP code does not currently use Frameworks, and many PHP developers aren't exactly experienced enough to know what XSS or SQL Injection are.
The problem will never really be fixed in PHP until some framework or at least methodology wins out as the PHP framework of choice.
It'd be nice if the PHP guys picked one and put their backing behind it, maybe even included it by default like they did APC for caching.
I think you're right in your GP post that software engineering isn't "really" engineering, by certain definitions.
Software engineering is a lot more like house design than house construction. Architecture is where those two meet, and thats about as close as you come to what we call "Software Engineering".
In Software Engineering you do have to actually build the thing. But it's more about building what the stakeholders (business) wants and can maintain, than it is about algorithms or science.
A super-fast java website with a dozen layers and a dozen frameworks is still useless compared to a PHP app that takes 1/100th the time to create, but actually gets the job done.
You're talking about Carpentry, not Planning. Architecture is made up of both - you have to be able to make a building that stands and has doors and doesn't fall apart. It's an entirely different human-centric side of the discipline to put the doors [i]where people want them to be[/i]. That's what TFA is talking about.
Software Engineering and Computer Science are not the same thing.
Computer scientists tend to make for really crappy software engineers. They tend to make overarchitected apps that don't meet the business need, aren't maintainable, and take years longer than planned.
What the stakeholder actually needed was a Visual Basic app that would have taken 3 months, been easy to maintain, and actually filled their business need. The app would probably have changed direction 1 month in, but thats OK - thats why you make mockups and lightweight proof-of-concept code to help steer them.
This is not a problem that K&R, Bjarne, or Turing addressed. This is software engineering. Read TFA.
Can disable the upper-casing functionality of the key, while still letting apps receive the keypress?
Its a perfect easy to reach and not-yet used key, but removing it or disabling it wastes that space entirely.
I think I've heard of people "binding" Caps to another hard-to-reach key at a low level, like RightShift or KeyPad*? That way apps can identify it (eg games or shortcuts).
I was just posting about dailies in the wow forums too - I think these are really interesting.
Personally I have zero interest in repeating the same quest over and over every day. And I don't. You can equip tabards for most rep in LK and get it "incidentally" through going to dungeons/raids. It's also optional, as rep just gives gear that you can get through dungeons/raiding as well.
But there are some people who just seem to *love* repeating their dailies every day. I've got one friend who I see on every single day in Icecrown doing the same set of horrificly bad quests (I did them once, and never again, yet I'm exalted with both factions out there). Beats me, but I guess it's the same thing as the people demanding that they want leveling to take a year, etc. Some people *want* MMO's to being mind-numbingly boring time sinks.
I'm glad Blizzard is choosing to ignore that crowd and move towards just making a fun game.
In a sense, pirating my convey this cost even more than not buying. Pirating gives an indicator of high demand to parallel low sales. In a very optimistic hypothetical world, the producers can compare two products that have equal demand (purchased copies + pirated copies) and the non-DRM product will have more purchased copies than the DRM product.
Not that such a comparison is trivial or exact. But just as we optimistically conflate DRM with pirating, the producers conflate low demand with a bad product and choose to ignore that DRM may be causing that low demand. "Copies not bought" is a very difficult thing for producers to measure and draw meaning from.
As of the latest WoW expansion, the grind is pretty much gone. They massively sped up leveling through the original content and first expansions (1-70) and the new 70-80 content is well-paced and actually Fun to play.
In fact, the forums are now full of people whining that things are "too easy" and that content is being cleared too fast (by people other than them..lol)
Even if one argues that WOW went from being a million times too grindy to a thousand times too grindy, it still got better by a factor of a thousand ; )
Thanks for sharing. I was reading the OPs post and wondering how Tor.net managed to set up reverse DNS for all the random user IPs (eg. cable modems) being used as exit nodes...
So you think there can be no middle ground between "Everything is completely free" and "There are legal and/or technological protections to encourage/allow profitability of media creation"?
I think most everyone on Slashdot would agree both the legal AND technological sides have swung too far towards restriction. But it feels like overcompensation to claim we should do away with copyright protections entirely.
Whether it's overcompensation or not, it's also a lot easier to make progress incrementally. Copyright is not going to be abolished entirely any time soon.
FWIW, Valve gets a lot of goodwill by being a very honest company with its customers' interest at heart. I truly believe that Gabe Newell himself would fund the authentication removal if it came down to it.
(Sorry GP, too late for your last sentence already by the time I got here =X
Plenty of people don't buy it - why do you think so many DRM-reliant services have utterly failed? How many different DRM services has Microsoft alone churned through?
But what's being discussed in the OP is when you have a bit of content you want to consume (play, watch, listen to) and are OK with paying the requested price to purchase legally.
The options that people are choosing between to consume said media are:
1) Find a seller of the media, usually a brick-and-mortar store with limited hours and supply. Alternatively, a heavily-DRM-laden online store. Pay for the content. Have a huge headache trying to get it installed and working (and swapping cds, so on). Possibly end up using a crack just to get the media working.
2) Commit copyright infringement (considered trivial by most people these days, unfortunately) and get the same content for free, very quickly, off the internet.
These 2 options are the ones that people are *actually* choosing between these days, on a daily basis. The DRM hoops surrounding legal purchase are driving otherwise paying customers to copyright infringement when they want to consume media.
If the content producers/distributers really wanted to compete with copyright infringement they would be offering option 3:
3) Visit content producer's website, purchase media online in DRM-free format, consume immediately without any difficulties.
Not sure about the GoTY problem, but I once bought a friend Counterstrike (1.6, not Source) for his birthday. My other friends and I played and were trying to get him to join up. He took it home and tried to install, only to find the cd-key was listed as already-in-use.
It turns out they double printed some cd-keys. I've also heard issues of people copying down (or cellphone snapshotting) cd-keys in stores then installing from a friend's copy. Also brute-force cracking.
There was some process where you could scan/mail them receipts and boxes and UPCs and whatnot to get them to send you a working cd-key and play the game you already bought. But look at this scenario - I already bought this game for a friend to try to twist his arm into playing it with us. Is he going to go through all that rigamarole? Nope. But they still got $20 for selling an unusable game.
Nevertheless, removing UOP does not always provide navigation function in the restricted parts of the DVD. This is because those parts are sometimes lacking the navigation commands which allow skipping to the menu or other parts of the DVD. This has become more common in recent titles, in order to circumvent the UOP disabling that many applications or DVD players offer.
I only have a passing knowledge of DVD structure from ripping my own collection, but it sounds like they can put content (including the entire movie) such that it is inaccessible from, eg, the "home" menu. Instead there are commercials with no standard "next" item after it - like how Next is meaningless at the home menu. Instead they can use DVD programming to "trigger" continuing to the movie after all the commercials have played.
It seems like fast forward might still get around this, but like Next, Fast forward isn't meaningful at the Home Menu. So even that may be blockable using DVD programming.
At this point we're basically talking about overtly malicious abuse of the DVD spec to annoy consumers. Sadly, it sounds like the media companies are already going down this route.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh, so much misinformation in the responses to this post (and the OP itself) I'm giving up mods to post.
I'll just throw out some facts on both sides:
-Milk, in its natural state, is a highly nutrient-dense food that is highly beneficial to feeding nations (ie: europeans domesticating cattle)
-Milk, as sold in stores in modern times, has been reduced primarily to fat, protein (casein), lactose, and artifical hormones
-About 50% of Europeans can digest lactose. The others get stomach pains and gas from consuming dairy. Most people of european ancestry still generate excess mucus due to the glue-like protein in milk (casein).
-The majority of people of African and Asian descent can not digest lactose or casein
-I don't know the details, but the hormones you get in milk can affect the human body (i've heard it said it makes kids grow bigger, which might not even be bad?)
-The high protein content of dairy offsets any calcium you get from it (protein leeches calcium from bones). Dairy and meat-focused diets cause osteoporosis. Asian populations, for example, which have the same lifespan as europeans, have seen an increase in osteoporosis as consumption of dairy has increased. A large study of nurses also showed that milk consumption did not correlate with a decrease in osteoporosis.
-Studies (the lollipop study) have shown that calories from drinks do not decrease appetite and thus result in overconsumption (obesity). However the lollipop study compared soda to candy, and it's possible the fat content of milk reduces appetite to offset the lack of chewing. I have not heard for certain of dairy consumption correlates with obesity. However I suspect that it does.
For your average American, the high caloric content of milk, plus intolerances (mucus and gas/stomach pain), plus the absence of nutrition (from industrial processing), plus hormones all combine to dairy being generally a bad thing to consume. At best, it should be compared to junk food as a 'treat' that should be eaten with caution.
All that said, "nature" is pretty irrelevant. It's pretty clear that milk in its natural (nutritious) form was such a success that it evolved the population towards lactose tolerance.
However, that history has very little to do with the reality of modern americans consuming over-processed dairy products.
Safety isn't the only problem. I bought a replacement battery for an LG phone off Amazon. The pictured battery was labeled as an official Verizon/LG battery.
The one I was shipped was a knockoff battery, and it turns out it was only about 2/3 the size of the original battery.
I'm not sure that justifies blocking 3rd party batteries. But blocking them certainly makes things simpler and cleaner for the customer as well as the device manufacturer/seller.
Of course it's handily more profitable too, but given reasonably priced batteries (unlikely when they have a monopoly for their device) I wouldn't mind using the 1st-party batteries.
I definitely agree on OpenOffice, those guys are in a tight spot where they have to "duplicate" MS Office interfaces to make it easier for users to switch, but then many MS Office interfaces are....really bad.
It's bizarre that OpenOffice would choose to implement things like Autocorrect and Clippy in the same obtrusive way MS Office does. Why not create a Better product that users genuinely enjoy using instead of MS Office?
(Ok, I'm not sure if OO actually put in Clippy, but they've tried to mimic everything else :)
I don't think there's any debate that SLI with two top-of-the-line cards is the best performance available. But in any other scenario (ie: low or mid-range) SLI is never an cost-effective solution. Except in some contrived cases like "someone gave me 2 GPUs for free".
AMD/ATI isn't even competing in single-GPU (or CPU) high-end chipsets anymore, so you're already better off spending your money on Intel/Nvidia if you're a high-end consumer. Much less the ultra-high-end where dropping $800 on dual GPUs is considered a sane option to play videogames.
With all that considered, AMD spending resources on SLI is kinda pointless, isn't it?
That doesn't mean SLI is stupid, it's just not that market AMD is targeting with their products.
Could you explain about the "drivers still suck" part?
I bought a radeon 4850 and it auto-scales the fan to keep the card cool, and it runs my games faster than the 8800GT I had before it.
The Nvidia 8800GT I got had the fan speed locked at 30% and required 3rd-party software just to prevent the card blowing itself up through overheating. On top of that, it's "nTune" software caused my comp to enter an infinite-reboot loop that even Safe Mode didn't get around. Had to reinstall the OS before I figured out what had caused it.
From everything I've seen Nvidia is the one with some severe software and driver problems.
Oh, and ATI lets you download the driver without the Catalyst Control Center, afaik. I gave up on boycotting the .NET framework a long time ago so I just get the CCC too these days, but YMMV.
Exactly. All that matters is what I can get for the $50-100 range. AMD has won every time I've compared that, and even moreso when you factor in motherboard costs.
ATI and Nvidia have been pretty comparable in the GPU market lately. But when I got an Nvidia 8800GT the fan was locked at 30% speed and had NO internal logic to speed up the fan when it started overheating. Which it did, Often. Had to get Rivatuner and hack some weird ass settings just to get the Nvidia card to work, as did every friend of mine who got an Nvidia card lately.
Now we're all back to ATI cards which actually handle fan speed automatically. Amazing thought, huh?
I don't recall any promises by Valve to add twice as much content to L4D and give it all away for free. L4D was an excellent and complete game upon launch and well worth the cost.
If you didn't like L4D or enjoy the replayability of the extremely well-designed game rules and levels, that's OK. You're probably also not one of the people who played CS and CS:S for a decade with over half of that time being spent in Dust, Dust2, and Office.
L4D is about well-designed and replayable multiplayer game rules and maps, not about dumping crappy content on users.
^
|
|
This
It would be nice to have a unifying GUI theme on linux, but it would also kill off a lot of innovation.
Lack of users will already kill off any app that significantly diverges from standard desktop GUI mechanisms without enough redeeming factors to make it worth learning.
Copy-pasting on the other hand....some things that are cross-application need to be locked down to be useful =\
I was with you up until you mentioned Vista and MS Office.
"Hold Alt to see the menus that are required to perform most application functionality"
It took me several weeks to figure out that out on Vista and the new MS Apps that use this bizarre convention.
Is that how Microsoft managed to misinterpret the Mac's lack of File menus attached to each and every application window?
As an example, I saw some lovely code recently where the developer had used prepared statements all through his code, but still left it wide open to SQL injection by not using variables in the prepared statements. He just prepared entire strings already containing the relevant form variables concatenated with the SQL. Genius.
I almost said in my post that they should require prepared statements - but then I thought of that scenario and decided against saying that =D
Arguably, if a game has a part that's ridiculously hard, it's just a bad game. The player does share responsibility for making efforts to get past the part.
But if the game hasn't made the player aware of the tactics or abilities required to get past that point, and the players options are Quit or Cheat, then that's a massive failure on the game's part.
And of course thats all true only for the easiest game mode - if you put the game on a harder difficult and it's too hard, the answer is to scale back the difficulty (hopefully without having to start over from level 1), not cheat.
The basic issue here is that most PHP code does not currently use Frameworks, and many PHP developers aren't exactly experienced enough to know what XSS or SQL Injection are.
The problem will never really be fixed in PHP until some framework or at least methodology wins out as the PHP framework of choice.
It'd be nice if the PHP guys picked one and put their backing behind it, maybe even included it by default like they did APC for caching.
People use Java in web browsers? And it's enabled by default? O.o
WHY
I think you're right in your GP post that software engineering isn't "really" engineering, by certain definitions.
Software engineering is a lot more like house design than house construction. Architecture is where those two meet, and thats about as close as you come to what we call "Software Engineering".
In Software Engineering you do have to actually build the thing. But it's more about building what the stakeholders (business) wants and can maintain, than it is about algorithms or science.
A super-fast java website with a dozen layers and a dozen frameworks is still useless compared to a PHP app that takes 1/100th the time to create, but actually gets the job done.
You're talking about Carpentry, not Planning. Architecture is made up of both - you have to be able to make a building that stands and has doors and doesn't fall apart. It's an entirely different human-centric side of the discipline to put the doors [i]where people want them to be[/i]. That's what TFA is talking about.
Software Engineering and Computer Science are not the same thing.
Computer scientists tend to make for really crappy software engineers. They tend to make overarchitected apps that don't meet the business need, aren't maintainable, and take years longer than planned.
What the stakeholder actually needed was a Visual Basic app that would have taken 3 months, been easy to maintain, and actually filled their business need. The app would probably have changed direction 1 month in, but thats OK - thats why you make mockups and lightweight proof-of-concept code to help steer them.
This is not a problem that K&R, Bjarne, or Turing addressed. This is software engineering. Read TFA.
Can disable the upper-casing functionality of the key, while still letting apps receive the keypress?
Its a perfect easy to reach and not-yet used key, but removing it or disabling it wastes that space entirely.
I think I've heard of people "binding" Caps to another hard-to-reach key at a low level, like RightShift or KeyPad*? That way apps can identify it (eg games or shortcuts).
I was just posting about dailies in the wow forums too - I think these are really interesting.
Personally I have zero interest in repeating the same quest over and over every day. And I don't. You can equip tabards for most rep in LK and get it "incidentally" through going to dungeons/raids. It's also optional, as rep just gives gear that you can get through dungeons/raiding as well.
But there are some people who just seem to *love* repeating their dailies every day. I've got one friend who I see on every single day in Icecrown doing the same set of horrificly bad quests (I did them once, and never again, yet I'm exalted with both factions out there). Beats me, but I guess it's the same thing as the people demanding that they want leveling to take a year, etc. Some people *want* MMO's to being mind-numbingly boring time sinks.
I'm glad Blizzard is choosing to ignore that crowd and move towards just making a fun game.
In a sense, pirating my convey this cost even more than not buying. Pirating gives an indicator of high demand to parallel low sales. In a very optimistic hypothetical world, the producers can compare two products that have equal demand (purchased copies + pirated copies) and the non-DRM product will have more purchased copies than the DRM product.
Not that such a comparison is trivial or exact. But just as we optimistically conflate DRM with pirating, the producers conflate low demand with a bad product and choose to ignore that DRM may be causing that low demand. "Copies not bought" is a very difficult thing for producers to measure and draw meaning from.
As of the latest WoW expansion, the grind is pretty much gone. They massively sped up leveling through the original content and first expansions (1-70) and the new 70-80 content is well-paced and actually Fun to play.
In fact, the forums are now full of people whining that things are "too easy" and that content is being cleared too fast (by people other than them..lol)
Even if one argues that WOW went from being a million times too grindy to a thousand times too grindy, it still got better by a factor of a thousand ; )
Thanks for sharing. I was reading the OPs post and wondering how Tor.net managed to set up reverse DNS for all the random user IPs (eg. cable modems) being used as exit nodes...
So you think there can be no middle ground between "Everything is completely free" and "There are legal and/or technological protections to encourage/allow profitability of media creation"?
I think most everyone on Slashdot would agree both the legal AND technological sides have swung too far towards restriction. But it feels like overcompensation to claim we should do away with copyright protections entirely.
Whether it's overcompensation or not, it's also a lot easier to make progress incrementally. Copyright is not going to be abolished entirely any time soon.
FWIW, Valve gets a lot of goodwill by being a very honest company with its customers' interest at heart. I truly believe that Gabe Newell himself would fund the authentication removal if it came down to it.
(Sorry GP, too late for your last sentence already by the time I got here =X
Plenty of people don't buy it - why do you think so many DRM-reliant services have utterly failed? How many different DRM services has Microsoft alone churned through?
But what's being discussed in the OP is when you have a bit of content you want to consume (play, watch, listen to) and are OK with paying the requested price to purchase legally.
The options that people are choosing between to consume said media are:
1) Find a seller of the media, usually a brick-and-mortar store with limited hours and supply. Alternatively, a heavily-DRM-laden online store. Pay for the content. Have a huge headache trying to get it installed and working (and swapping cds, so on). Possibly end up using a crack just to get the media working.
2) Commit copyright infringement (considered trivial by most people these days, unfortunately) and get the same content for free, very quickly, off the internet.
These 2 options are the ones that people are *actually* choosing between these days, on a daily basis. The DRM hoops surrounding legal purchase are driving otherwise paying customers to copyright infringement when they want to consume media.
If the content producers/distributers really wanted to compete with copyright infringement they would be offering option 3:
3) Visit content producer's website, purchase media online in DRM-free format, consume immediately without any difficulties.
Not sure about the GoTY problem, but I once bought a friend Counterstrike (1.6, not Source) for his birthday. My other friends and I played and were trying to get him to join up. He took it home and tried to install, only to find the cd-key was listed as already-in-use.
It turns out they double printed some cd-keys. I've also heard issues of people copying down (or cellphone snapshotting) cd-keys in stores then installing from a friend's copy. Also brute-force cracking.
There was some process where you could scan/mail them receipts and boxes and UPCs and whatnot to get them to send you a working cd-key and play the game you already bought. But look at this scenario - I already bought this game for a friend to try to twist his arm into playing it with us. Is he going to go through all that rigamarole? Nope. But they still got $20 for selling an unusable game.
The third paragraph of UOPs from Wikipedia:
Nevertheless, removing UOP does not always provide navigation function in the restricted parts of the DVD. This is because those parts are sometimes lacking the navigation commands which allow skipping to the menu or other parts of the DVD. This has become more common in recent titles, in order to circumvent the UOP disabling that many applications or DVD players offer.
I only have a passing knowledge of DVD structure from ripping my own collection, but it sounds like they can put content (including the entire movie) such that it is inaccessible from, eg, the "home" menu. Instead there are commercials with no standard "next" item after it - like how Next is meaningless at the home menu. Instead they can use DVD programming to "trigger" continuing to the movie after all the commercials have played.
It seems like fast forward might still get around this, but like Next, Fast forward isn't meaningful at the Home Menu. So even that may be blockable using DVD programming.
At this point we're basically talking about overtly malicious abuse of the DVD spec to annoy consumers. Sadly, it sounds like the media companies are already going down this route.