If it is (or has a high risk of being) harmful for people other than the user/consumer you regulate it more tightly.
If it's only harmful for the user/consumer you apply the more general, light regulation (i.e. make sure it's properly labeled and people know what it does and then stand out of the way).
Which is why say, cars, guns and tobacco are more tightly regulated while potatoes, fishing rods and tricycles are not.
Drug laws fall outside this pattern in that the drugs themselves are really only harmful for the consumer and yet drug laws represent some of the tightest regulation there is (in some countries they'll even incarcerate the consumers, which pretty much proves those laws are not there to protect consumers).
As I see it, pirating a game is only excusable if you're doing it to try it, after which you either buy it or stop playing.
Just recently I did this with Galactic Civilizations II - I downloaded it, played it for a while, liked it, went out and purposefully bought the game: Stardock got another sale when, had I not had a chance to check the game, they would have gotten nothing (I don't trust the industry - been burned once too many by some of the over-hyped turds they put out)
Way too many games out there come out not working well or not at all. The game reviews press is no help at all - they'll give glaring reviews to games which are pretty enormous turds, and conveniently forget about the bugs and lack of long term playability.
In my view, it's not at all morally reprehensible to pirate a game for testing - as long as you buy it if you keep playing it.
Maybe you guys are frozen in time - or maybe you're some kind of elitist-coder types.
From where I stand, the most relevant optimizations have to do optimizing the data flows between systems - the most typical of which are appServer-database and GUI-appServer and between storage and memory. We're talking about shaving hundreds of miliseconds, maybe even seconds per-operation: not nanoseconds.
Even if you work in standalone, small size applications, were knowing the basic principles of algorithms can be more important, hand-coding your own is not only useless (there are plenty of libraries out there with good implementations) it's actually counter productive (it introduces a complex piece of code which is often not properly tested and might be even slower than the library ones)
Understanding the basic principles = important. Being able to code your own = only important for those who never evolved beyond just-a-coder.
If you get a silent water cooling kit (like the Reserator) then you can have a good gaming PC which is completely silent - no large and loud CPU fans, no jet-engine-taking-off-like sounds coming out of your PC when you are playing 3D games.
I do admit that most water cooling kits out there are targeted at the "crazy overclocking and maybe compensating for something" crowd, not the "gamers with silent PCs" one.
With regards to heat, in a water cooling setup the heat from the CPU/GPU goes directly to the radiator outside of the PC case where it will radiate directly to the large volume of air in the room where the computer is. With air cooling, the heat radiates to the volume of air inside the case which in turn has to be forcefully refreshed with air from outside the case (usually using case fans). Although in the end, both systems move the heat out to the air in the room, water cooling is much faster at doing it since water can transport a lot more heat out, it flows faster and since it travels inside pipes is barely affected by the geometry inside the case (e.g. obstructions to the air flow such as cables, boards and everything else in the path of the air coming inside and going outside). Even with a passive water cooling setup like I have, the increase in efficiency versus air-cooling is so large that my CPU usually runs at around 32C instead of the 57C that where usual with air-cooling.
The last point is important - anti piracy organisations have lots of employees and could easily ask those employees to run some sort of tool from their home DSL connection, or they could buy a few DSL modems and stick them in the basement, or use a VPN to a pool of residential IP connections. I.e. it's quite easy for them to get hold of IP addresses which are not in their organisational IP block. So long as they don't attack torrents from those IP addresses there is no reason for those addresses to be blacklisted.
So basically, said large organizations will detected the hard-core pirates by cross-checking each seeding IP between their corp-assigned IP block (which should not see the PeerGuardian ones) and the machines of their employees or some servers sitting in the basement on DSL modems (which should see them).
That's quite a roundabout way of tracking down a nebulous group of people (those that know about PeerGuardian and are technically knowledgeable enough to know what it does and how to install it).
And here I was, thinking that the music industry specialized in picking the low hanging fruit and going after easy, soft targets like old ladies and single mothers.
Here's another theory: - MediaSentry and other MAFIAA associated organizations, having an already exceptionally low standard of gathering proof for lawsuits (their "proof" has been thrown out in a court of law more often than not) will concentrate on the easy pickings (those without defensive measures such as PeerGuardians or custom HOSTS files) instead of deploying intricate technical solutions which potentially taint even further their "proof" to go after a small, technically knowledgeable minority.
PS: Please note that I am currently not wearing my tin foil hat.
I'm an EE (non-practicing) and he's right. This is even worse with twisted pair 'cause the EM emissions come out all twisted and curvy and can cause serious interference with other cables.
It's also important to always cut your cable in multiples of 30 cm if you're going to use Gigabyte Ethernet to make sure your wave always gets to the other side in phase - you don't want a phase mismatch to happen.
Don't forget to terminate everything - i can tell you that the actual speed of a cable where one of the sides is neither connected to anything nor properly terminated is ZERO bps.
Last but not least, always make sure that both sides of the connection send equal amounts of data so that the cable doesn't get a transmission fatigue problem due to the electrons always going in the same direction.
Here you have it, the secrets of professional cable making and usage at your fingertips: don't waste them!!!
Without the producers being able to subsidize niche channels through fees for their popular, flagship channels
I think you're interpretation of the motivations of the "producers" is wrong - they're for profit companies: they're in it for the money, they won't subsidize anything ("subsidizing" = less profit).
If the specialist channels are part of the packages, that's because the producers believe they can make more money by having them there than by not having them there.
Interestingly enough there recently was an article floating around (in the Economist, maybe 2 weeks ago) about how in the US the broadcasters are loosing market share to other channels - which seems to contradict your theory of flagship channels subsidizing niche ones.
Some months ago, when a bunch of stories starting coming up of large ISPs starting up voluntary schemes and trials and whatnot I actually left BT and moved to a smaller, friendlier ISP exactly with the expectation that this sort of thing would come to be.
*big pat on the back*
Shameless plug for my current ISP, ADSL 24 - cheaper (for the typical user), just as fast (maybe even faster), no traffic shaping, no blocking, no bullshit. Never got any problem with them.
By the way, last I checked, the ISPs to avoid at all costs in the UK (with regards to things like blocking and traffic shaping) where BT, Virgin and Tiscalli.
Nah it has nothing to do with copy protection: in this world of high quality OCR applications, scanning a book a making a text file out of it is very easy.
It's all about maximizing income by partitioning the market into segments and then charging each segment the maximum they can. Same as region coding for DVDs.
You see, in an ideal world (from the point of view of the seller), a seller would be able to charge each and every buyer the maximum said buyer is willing to pay for the product or service being sold (something like what Amazon tried to do at some point by setting different prices for different people, depending on their buying history). Since in practice that's difficult to do, the second best is to artificially split the market into geographical areas and for each area charge different prices: - You sell it for peanuts in Africa and most of Asia and Latin America - You charge North Americans a stiffer price - You squeeze Europeans and Japanese for all you can
Politics is the art of managing image. More so in democratic countries - in large nations (most of them) the choice of a representative has everything to do with one's perception of said representative's qualities, not their real qualities: a politician whose only skill is to sell himself will almost always beat one who is a competent leader but a bad salesman.
In democratic nations, the way politicians do it at the moment is:
Keep the idiots (that being the vast majority of people) deceived long enough for said politicians to get re-elected
Protect their high net worth buddies so as to get (more) campaign contributions and have cushy jobs in the private sector when not in power or when retiring from politics
Finding a scapegoat is an often used trick in image management so this kind of thing is not at all unexpected.
Try playing 1/2h - 1h of some RPG or other before you go to sleep. It can be just as engaging and your dreams will be around fighting monsters, finding cool gear and going over a hill and finding a new land you never saw before. (beats logic/mathematical dreams any day)
The country is full of terrorists, child molesters and subversives and something has to be done about it.
This being the UK, government needs to be able to track down and follow dangerous people that might endanger the social and political stability of the country, like: members and supporters of anti-war movements, ecologist movements, free-speech/privacy movements, Tories, Lib Dems, Scots, Welsh and Irish nationalist parties, teenagers ('cause of knife crime), investigative journalists, anybody that makes request under the Freedom of Information act, people that complain about the government, anybody that talks too loud in a 1 mile circle around Parliament, whistle-blowers of government wrongdoing and more.
As usual our masters, being wiser than everybody else, have gotten their laws passed using the EU so that they can blame it on the European Union - a trick that always works with the unwashed masses around here.
All hail the fascist-Labour party!
[Having been born in a country under a fascist dictatorship and having been raised hearing my family's stories about it, it's impressive how things in the UK are slowly moving towards a modernized version my mental image of how it was - in the UK we now even have police adverts pretty much telling people to denounce their neighbors.]
Well, I can confirm to you that Portuguese programmers living and working in Portugal do not have technical discussions in English - the discussions are in Portuguese peppered with heavily accented English words for technical terms which have no widely accepted translation (so, for example, the term "firewall" is used as is, but we say "computador" instead of "computer").
Actually some of my colleagues that still live in Portugal have trouble speaking English even though they can understand it, especially in the written form. Even though a large part of TV programming in there is in English (with subtitles) and 3 years of learning English at school are compulsory (with an optional extra 4 years) and that has been so for at least 30 years, a lot of people simply loose most of their knowledge of English as years go by and they don't use it.
Also keep in mind that knowing enough English to follow a book or an article on a specific area of human knowledge (such as IT) is not the same as really knowing the language (words like "yaw" and "leek" don't often pop-up when talking about computer programming).
Keep in mind that one's experience dealing with expat workers whose mother-language is not English is not a proper sample when considering those people still living in the nation where they were born.
I have left the country more than 10 years ago, and my experience with some of my friends still in Portugal who work in IT is that they know enough English to read technical documentation but not enough to write long documents in English or hold a fluent conversation in English.
That was pretty much how any national domain name registrar worked in the 90s - your description could just as easily apply to.pt instead of.ie
At the time most national domains where managed by a clique of university teachers many of which were elitist unprofessional pricks with egos larger than their IQ.
I vaguely remember that it was easier to get a.com domain name than most of the national ones.
I got Resident Evil 4 for the Wii: the game was very well integrated with the Wii controls and a lot of fun to play on it. Graphics quality was not an issue at all - while playing you don't really notice the absence of specular reflections on metal surfaces or whatever is the graphics fetish du jour. I do believe that the Wii version of the game did appear in the top charts at the time.
However, the problem with the Wii is that most games for it are not games target at late-teens/adults but instead are targeted at 5 year olds. My Wii at home has been gathering dust since Resident Evil 4 and whenever I peruse the shops looking for games (I'm an avid gamer on the PC) I check the Wii section and all I see is cuteish racing/platform games with cartoonish visuals or jerky path-restricted world 3D platform quasi-shoot-them-up games (like Metroid Prime) which seem to have been made for 13 year olds with ADD.
Where's the Star Wars Jedi Knight style of game for the Wii (no, not the Lego version) with light sabers or a space combat game or a deity simulator or any other of a million styles of gaming which would work really well with a controller you can wave and twist and turn and point?
As anyone which is exposed to media sources outside the US knows, when compared with pretty much every other party in the planet, both the Republicans and the Democrats are right-wing parties - the only difference is how far to the right they are.
I don't know how many times you've worked with outsourced software developers, but my experience with them is that: - If the code done by the outsources needs to connect to code done locally you need to explain them all about the existing code - Specifically for the teams I work for in India, about 1 in 4 is really good, the rest not really (India seems to be suffering from the same effect as the Internet bubble caused in 2000 - due to the size of the demand for IT professionals, large numbers of people that should never have gone into IT are working as Software developers) - If you're just outsourcing your coding you need much more detailed requirements and design specs than otherwise. Unfortunately, in this industry good specs (of any kind) are few and far between. - Any large enough project will have a lot more time spent in requirements gathering, analysis and design than in coding. Actually, with a proper design code is the trivial part. - You often don't have that much influence in the hiring choices in the remote site. Often enough that means you get landed with completely inappropriate personnel.
My personal experience from working with remotely located developers is that, unless you can give them full, well-specified, self-contained projects, the local developers actually end up spending more time supporting the outsourced developers (due to all the documentation and explanations needed) and reviewing/fixing the code developed in the remote site than they would if they just did the project themselves.
My point being: - Don't confuse the company with it's people: even if we're talking about the owners here.
Maybe tomorrow there will be a different set of owners, maybe the company will go belly-up, maybe the owners have to break their promises to save the company, maybe the owners choose to break their promises to "allow the company to explore significant new growth venues" (I'm sure they'll convince themselves that it's for the greater good if they do so).
Trust relations between people that know each other, have spoken to each other and maybe even met face-to-face are something completely different from trust relations between a customer and a company even though "it's owners seem trustworthy but I've never talked to them and they never talked to me and they probably don't know I exist as a person only as a number in their ledger book under 'sales'".
Slashdot Mirror
If it is (or has a high risk of being) harmful for people other than the user/consumer you regulate it more tightly.
If it's only harmful for the user/consumer you apply the more general, light regulation (i.e. make sure it's properly labeled and people know what it does and then stand out of the way).
Which is why say, cars, guns and tobacco are more tightly regulated while potatoes, fishing rods and tricycles are not.
Drug laws fall outside this pattern in that the drugs themselves are really only harmful for the consumer and yet drug laws represent some of the tightest regulation there is (in some countries they'll even incarcerate the consumers, which pretty much proves those laws are not there to protect consumers).
As I see it, pirating a game is only excusable if you're doing it to try it, after which you either buy it or stop playing.
Just recently I did this with Galactic Civilizations II - I downloaded it, played it for a while, liked it, went out and purposefully bought the game: Stardock got another sale when, had I not had a chance to check the game, they would have gotten nothing (I don't trust the industry - been burned once too many by some of the over-hyped turds they put out)
Way too many games out there come out not working well or not at all. The game reviews press is no help at all - they'll give glaring reviews to games which are pretty enormous turds, and conveniently forget about the bugs and lack of long term playability.
In my view, it's not at all morally reprehensible to pirate a game for testing - as long as you buy it if you keep playing it.
Maybe you guys are frozen in time - or maybe you're some kind of elitist-coder types.
From where I stand, the most relevant optimizations have to do optimizing the data flows between systems - the most typical of which are appServer-database and GUI-appServer and between storage and memory. We're talking about shaving hundreds of miliseconds, maybe even seconds per-operation: not nanoseconds.
Even if you work in standalone, small size applications, were knowing the basic principles of algorithms can be more important, hand-coding your own is not only useless (there are plenty of libraries out there with good implementations) it's actually counter productive (it introduces a complex piece of code which is often not properly tested and might be even slower than the library ones)
Understanding the basic principles = important.
Being able to code your own = only important for those who never evolved beyond just-a-coder.
If you get a silent water cooling kit (like the Reserator) then you can have a good gaming PC which is completely silent - no large and loud CPU fans, no jet-engine-taking-off-like sounds coming out of your PC when you are playing 3D games.
I do admit that most water cooling kits out there are targeted at the "crazy overclocking and maybe compensating for something" crowd, not the "gamers with silent PCs" one.
That said, I do have a Reserator (picture: http://www.zalman.com/DataFile/product/RESERATOR-1-V2_01_b(0).jpg - notice the radiator tower) so maybe I'm compensating for something myself ;)
With regards to heat, in a water cooling setup the heat from the CPU/GPU goes directly to the radiator outside of the PC case where it will radiate directly to the large volume of air in the room where the computer is. With air cooling, the heat radiates to the volume of air inside the case which in turn has to be forcefully refreshed with air from outside the case (usually using case fans).
Although in the end, both systems move the heat out to the air in the room, water cooling is much faster at doing it since water can transport a lot more heat out, it flows faster and since it travels inside pipes is barely affected by the geometry inside the case (e.g. obstructions to the air flow such as cables, boards and everything else in the path of the air coming inside and going outside).
Even with a passive water cooling setup like I have, the increase in efficiency versus air-cooling is so large that my CPU usually runs at around 32C instead of the 57C that where usual with air-cooling.
Wow, that's quite a nice bit of FUD.
So basically, said large organizations will detected the hard-core pirates by cross-checking each seeding IP between their corp-assigned IP block (which should not see the PeerGuardian ones) and the machines of their employees or some servers sitting in the basement on DSL modems (which should see them).
That's quite a roundabout way of tracking down a nebulous group of people (those that know about PeerGuardian and are technically knowledgeable enough to know what it does and how to install it).
And here I was, thinking that the music industry specialized in picking the low hanging fruit and going after easy, soft targets like old ladies and single mothers.
Here's another theory:
- MediaSentry and other MAFIAA associated organizations, having an already exceptionally low standard of gathering proof for lawsuits (their "proof" has been thrown out in a court of law more often than not) will concentrate on the easy pickings (those without defensive measures such as PeerGuardians or custom HOSTS files) instead of deploying intricate technical solutions which potentially taint even further their "proof" to go after a small, technically knowledgeable minority.
PS: Please note that I am currently not wearing my tin foil hat.
Mod parent up!
I'm an EE (non-practicing) and he's right. This is even worse with twisted pair 'cause the EM emissions come out all twisted and curvy and can cause serious interference with other cables.
It's also important to always cut your cable in multiples of 30 cm if you're going to use Gigabyte Ethernet to make sure your wave always gets to the other side in phase - you don't want a phase mismatch to happen.
Don't forget to terminate everything - i can tell you that the actual speed of a cable where one of the sides is neither connected to anything nor properly terminated is ZERO bps.
Last but not least, always make sure that both sides of the connection send equal amounts of data so that the cable doesn't get a transmission fatigue problem due to the electrons always going in the same direction.
Here you have it, the secrets of professional cable making and usage at your fingertips: don't waste them!!!
I think you're interpretation of the motivations of the "producers" is wrong - they're for profit companies: they're in it for the money, they won't subsidize anything ("subsidizing" = less profit).
If the specialist channels are part of the packages, that's because the producers believe they can make more money by having them there than by not having them there.
Interestingly enough there recently was an article floating around (in the Economist, maybe 2 weeks ago) about how in the US the broadcasters are loosing market share to other channels - which seems to contradict your theory of flagship channels subsidizing niche ones.
Some months ago, when a bunch of stories starting coming up of large ISPs starting up voluntary schemes and trials and whatnot I actually left BT and moved to a smaller, friendlier ISP exactly with the expectation that this sort of thing would come to be.
*big pat on the back*
Shameless plug for my current ISP, ADSL 24 - cheaper (for the typical user), just as fast (maybe even faster), no traffic shaping, no blocking, no bullshit. Never got any problem with them.
By the way, last I checked, the ISPs to avoid at all costs in the UK (with regards to things like blocking and traffic shaping) where BT, Virgin and Tiscalli.
Nah it has nothing to do with copy protection: in this world of high quality OCR applications, scanning a book a making a text file out of it is very easy.
It's all about maximizing income by partitioning the market into segments and then charging each segment the maximum they can. Same as region coding for DVDs.
You see, in an ideal world (from the point of view of the seller), a seller would be able to charge each and every buyer the maximum said buyer is willing to pay for the product or service being sold (something like what Amazon tried to do at some point by setting different prices for different people, depending on their buying history). Since in practice that's difficult to do, the second best is to artificially split the market into geographical areas and for each area charge different prices:
- You sell it for peanuts in Africa and most of Asia and Latin America
- You charge North Americans a stiffer price
- You squeeze Europeans and Japanese for all you can
SkySail: using the a computer controlled parasail to improve fuel efficiency. Article http://www.popularmechanics.com/outdoors/boating/4235055.html
Politics is the art of managing image. More so in democratic countries - in large nations (most of them) the choice of a representative has everything to do with one's perception of said representative's qualities, not their real qualities: a politician whose only skill is to sell himself will almost always beat one who is a competent leader but a bad salesman.
In democratic nations, the way politicians do it at the moment is:
Finding a scapegoat is an often used trick in image management so this kind of thing is not at all unexpected.
PS: In my personal opinion, the rougher the
Try playing 1/2h - 1h of some RPG or other before you go to sleep. It can be just as engaging and your dreams will be around fighting monsters, finding cool gear and going over a hill and finding a new land you never saw before. (beats logic/mathematical dreams any day)
Obama's pattern all through out his campaign was to charm and sweet-talk people into supporting him.
In his presidency he is following the same pattern of behaviour: going around charming and sweet-talking people into supporting him.
His actions, however, do not match the talk.
The country is full of terrorists, child molesters and subversives and something has to be done about it.
This being the UK, government needs to be able to track down and follow dangerous people that might endanger the social and political stability of the country, like: members and supporters of anti-war movements, ecologist movements, free-speech/privacy movements, Tories, Lib Dems, Scots, Welsh and Irish nationalist parties, teenagers ('cause of knife crime), investigative journalists, anybody that makes request under the Freedom of Information act, people that complain about the government, anybody that talks too loud in a 1 mile circle around Parliament, whistle-blowers of government wrongdoing and more.
As usual our masters, being wiser than everybody else, have gotten their laws passed using the EU so that they can blame it on the European Union - a trick that always works with the unwashed masses around here.
All hail the fascist-Labour party!
[Having been born in a country under a fascist dictatorship and having been raised hearing my family's stories about it, it's impressive how things in the UK are slowly moving towards a modernized version my mental image of how it was - in the UK we now even have police adverts pretty much telling people to denounce their neighbors.]
I'm willing to sell them the Moon for $1 Billion or Mars for $1.5 Billion
Well, I can confirm to you that Portuguese programmers living and working in Portugal do not have technical discussions in English - the discussions are in Portuguese peppered with heavily accented English words for technical terms which have no widely accepted translation (so, for example, the term "firewall" is used as is, but we say "computador" instead of "computer").
Actually some of my colleagues that still live in Portugal have trouble speaking English even though they can understand it, especially in the written form. Even though a large part of TV programming in there is in English (with subtitles) and 3 years of learning English at school are compulsory (with an optional extra 4 years) and that has been so for at least 30 years, a lot of people simply loose most of their knowledge of English as years go by and they don't use it.
Also keep in mind that knowing enough English to follow a book or an article on a specific area of human knowledge (such as IT) is not the same as really knowing the language (words like "yaw" and "leek" don't often pop-up when talking about computer programming).
Keep in mind that one's experience dealing with expat workers whose mother-language is not English is not a proper sample when considering those people still living in the nation where they were born.
I have left the country more than 10 years ago, and my experience with some of my friends still in Portugal who work in IT is that they know enough English to read technical documentation but not enough to write long documents in English or hold a fluent conversation in English.
That was pretty much how any national domain name registrar worked in the 90s - your description could just as easily apply to .pt instead of .ie
At the time most national domains where managed by a clique of university teachers many of which were elitist unprofessional pricks with egos larger than their IQ.
I vaguely remember that it was easier to get a .com domain name than most of the national ones.
You might get away with DefecateUrinateVaginaPenisaspiratorMothercopulatorBreasts.ie
Or maybe just breasts.ie ?
I got Resident Evil 4 for the Wii: the game was very well integrated with the Wii controls and a lot of fun to play on it. Graphics quality was not an issue at all - while playing you don't really notice the absence of specular reflections on metal surfaces or whatever is the graphics fetish du jour. I do believe that the Wii version of the game did appear in the top charts at the time.
However, the problem with the Wii is that most games for it are not games target at late-teens/adults but instead are targeted at 5 year olds. My Wii at home has been gathering dust since Resident Evil 4 and whenever I peruse the shops looking for games (I'm an avid gamer on the PC) I check the Wii section and all I see is cuteish racing/platform games with cartoonish visuals or jerky path-restricted world 3D platform quasi-shoot-them-up games (like Metroid Prime) which seem to have been made for 13 year olds with ADD.
Where's the Star Wars Jedi Knight style of game for the Wii (no, not the Lego version) with light sabers or a space combat game or a deity simulator or any other of a million styles of gaming which would work really well with a controller you can wave and twist and turn and point?
As anyone which is exposed to media sources outside the US knows, when compared with pretty much every other party in the planet, both the Republicans and the Democrats are right-wing parties - the only difference is how far to the right they are.
I don't know how many times you've worked with outsourced software developers, but my experience with them is that:
- If the code done by the outsources needs to connect to code done locally you need to explain them all about the existing code
- Specifically for the teams I work for in India, about 1 in 4 is really good, the rest not really (India seems to be suffering from the same effect as the Internet bubble caused in 2000 - due to the size of the demand for IT professionals, large numbers of people that should never have gone into IT are working as Software developers)
- If you're just outsourcing your coding you need much more detailed requirements and design specs than otherwise. Unfortunately, in this industry good specs (of any kind) are few and far between.
- Any large enough project will have a lot more time spent in requirements gathering, analysis and design than in coding. Actually, with a proper design code is the trivial part.
- You often don't have that much influence in the hiring choices in the remote site. Often enough that means you get landed with completely inappropriate personnel.
My personal experience from working with remotely located developers is that, unless you can give them full, well-specified, self-contained projects, the local developers actually end up spending more time supporting the outsourced developers (due to all the documentation and explanations needed) and reviewing/fixing the code developed in the remote site than they would if they just did the project themselves.
Firefox is gonna be like the Emacs Operating System ... only bigger
Promoted to management
My point being:
- Don't confuse the company with it's people: even if we're talking about the owners here.
Maybe tomorrow there will be a different set of owners, maybe the company will go belly-up, maybe the owners have to break their promises to save the company, maybe the owners choose to break their promises to "allow the company to explore significant new growth venues" (I'm sure they'll convince themselves that it's for the greater good if they do so).
Trust relations between people that know each other, have spoken to each other and maybe even met face-to-face are something completely different from trust relations between a customer and a company even though "it's owners seem trustworthy but I've never talked to them and they never talked to me and they probably don't know I exist as a person only as a number in their ledger book under 'sales'".
As somebody pointed out already, even Steam's Offline mode will periodically force you to go online for authentication/validation.
So yes, you need an internet connection at the time the game is being played.