It doesn't matter that IE6 is a security risk because the IT department has probably proposed upgrading but due to systems X, Y and Z not working under IE7/8/9 and the costs involved in upgrading/rewriting those business applications the business case has been denied. Sure, that is CYA but the IT department doesn't generally get to overrule the business side that way. That doesn't mean they want to take on other risks they don't see a gain from and haven't got anybody's sign-off for.
You don't mention the size of the company but most large companies have some form of software directory, these are all the approved applications and versions that employees must use. If you want anything not on that list, it's either a huge approval process to get on that list or an exception process that requires lots of sign-off and disclaimers that they don't support anything that software does. Your request sounds like something they'd wisely tell you to forget, because it'd be at the bottom of the pile and probably rejected in the end too.
Pardon me for saying so, but you sound like one of those annoying business users that thinks the IT department is there as your personal hand-holding staff to tune your PC just the way you like it. What you're asking for is more obscure than dvorak and I still haven't seen a person use that. It is a support unit but they're not being paid more than it makes sense from a productivity point of view. If they can cut IT costs with $10k and lower your productivity with $8k, they will. So IT is just there to make most of the people get most of their work done most of the time. Any special needs you have better have a good reason, that you can't work with a keyboard 99.99% of the population does really isn't it unless you have some kind of disability preventing you from using what the rest do.
If XP does it for you, keep at it. That said, unlike Vista which was a dog there's no particular reason not to use Win7 in my opinion. It works very well, handles all the bells and whistles like SSD alignment, 64 bit everything including >4 GB ram and so on.
It's more than feasible to do on everyone, in fact the latest "straight out of 1984" directive from EU demand they store positions on all phone communication - which for smart phones is roughly 100% of the time - for 6-24 months.
In a way, the internet is a lot like real life. If you do or say something really stupid, chances are nobody will ever let you live it down anyway.
In a limited fashion yes, but the degree matters. A lot of kids went waving a stick pretending to be a Jedi, but before the Internet there'd be no Star Wars Kid. Perhaps some would still have taped it, maybe shared around the school but it probably would have died down fairly quickly. Instead you have the Internet which is like pouring gasoline on a spark, spreading uncontrollably.
Internet is not just a place where stuff gets spread around, it gets connected. Head on over to/b/ and look for one of the threads where they match topless/nude/porn pics with that person's facebook profile, full name and contact details. How we look nude or having sex isn't that unique, but it's not like people want that cling to you for the rest of your life. It's not easy hiding from Google.
I wish you could say we'd all have just as much shit on each other, so it'd all work out. But you know and I know that's not going to happen, people will try pretending they're a saint until the skeletons come tumbling out of the closet.
I'd rather phase them out and make all 3+ letter domains TLDs in their own right. 99% of the time any serious corporation or organization will buy up all the TLDs to avoid the others being spam or virus or troll or hate pages, there's few enough it's a marginal cost and nothing but a money grab for new TLDs. Make it some kind of arbitration/auction who gets the TLD-less name. So slashdot would just be slashdot, google just google, yahoo just yahoo...
Practically the.com TLD is so big, it could easily be scaled to handle all. If you need to cheat you could make the last letter a TLD so your browser could do a lookup of "slashdo.t" to the "t" TLD to lower the load on the root servers while legacy clients still function. I think slashdot is almost the only site I visit that doesn't have either a country TLD or the.com TLD.
Black and white isn't so much the issue, what you don't want to be managed by is a manager who'd like to be an engineer again but felt he had to get promoted that way to get any career progress and benefits. It happens far too often that people don't get enough seniority for "just" being a doer. The job of a manager - at least in terms of what I want as an employee - is run interference for me. You don't bring a building engineer to a discussion of whether this should be commercial or residential area, means of getting funding, land permit contacts and so on. You bring him in when you're ready to build something, the same should be true of IT projects.
That's where being a manager is different, you have to deal with all those sides to it. Not just ahead of projects, but during projects when they mid-way decide they'd rather make this into a football stadium. When they try stealing half your resources but still demand you deliver on time. When people aren't able to reach any decisions but at the same time they refuse to move the deadline, asking you to implement three months work in three weeks. When some absurd requirements come dropping down from management that it must be done in two weeks and built entirely out of plywood, you have to go deal with them. If there's some access rights or whatever I need and don't get, you have to be the escalation point that'll yell at them and get all those non-technical problems out of the way. Your job is to make us productive by shielding the team from all the craziness outside.
Of course there are some internally oriented issues too in how you behave to us on the team. But about 9 out of 10 times the issue is that the manager hasn't been able to deal with the external issues and tries whipping his team into rewriting reality to deliver on these horribly mismanaged expectations. Particularly the engineering managers who'd rather just end it or ignore it by agreeing to something than to trigger even more long meetings. Nothing is worse than a person who ignores doing his job because he'd rather still do my job, that'll just land us both in a pile of shit.
I don't quite see the connection between a court case being having broad or narrow implications and how sympathetic or unsympathetic the defendant is.
Take for example the Betamax case, we had a very sympathetic producer of VCRs compared to some of the companies that have tried hiding under that shield, like for example Napster, Grokster, Limewire etc.
DVD-Jon was also a very sympathetic case, they couldn't find any evidence he was involved in any form of piracy, he just wanted to watch his own discs. That case settled all cases of owning and using DeCSS in Norway, at least until they passed the EUCD.
Getting an unsympathetic case doesn't have to be all bad either, if the court is forced to take action. Take for example the Thomas-Rasset case, one of the judges felt he had to step in and lower the verdict from 2 million dollars to 50,000 dollars. It went to a third trial with a 1.5 million dollar ruling so the matter is still ongoing, but if the US Supreme Court agrees with that judge they can't threaten you with 150,000$/song anymore. They'd have to say up to 2,250$/song, which is an awful lot less.
Narrow cases aren't good, but you can't avoid them. There'll always be cases where things brush up against each other, like between free speech and yelling fire in a crowded theater. Or exactly where the borders of "negligent" or "premediated" goes, or what degree of violence something qualifies for, ambiguous phrases in complex contacts and so on. Once you pick any subject there will always be a bunch of relevant case law or precedents, no matter what legal system you're in.
(it drives me crazy when I see someone with a 21 inch monitor who maximizes every single window and uses the task bar to switch between them. Totally defeats the point of a large monitor).
Every time I've tired to work differently I've found that positioning windows is more work than it's worth. With efficient keyboard/mouse cooperation I can cut and paste between apps with practically zero lag and I don't typically run any monitoring apps that I'd need to keep a permanent eye on. The upside is that all the menus/buttons/panels are in exactly the same place each time. Sometimes I have some docs or specs I'd like to look at and throw that up on my other monitor, but that's more a replacement for looking at a printout.
Complex applications tend to have rather complex interfaces of their own, I have apps with a "main" area in the center with toolbars on top, two levels of menus on the left, toolboxes on the right and status/output windows on the bottom. It's not just one double-ultra wide block of text, it's actually very nice to have a 24" monitor to fit it all.
This is a related problem. But unlike travel which can be mitigated by either avoiding it or traveling by car/train
How? If one hour is a problem, you'll have a problem crossing any timezone. And if you're travelling multiple time zones, it's not likely your boss will pay for days of travel each way either. To be honest this might be triggering on the statistics, but those people must be pretty fragile to begin with. It's like how they say the flu kills thousands each year - the weak and elderly that can't take it, but it's only the last straw and something would have did them in.
Even a full nuclear strike wouldn't produce enough EMP to do that, it'd probably be easier to get an asteroid out of orbit and do a dino-killer than to produce a continent-wide EMP blast.
If you follow the link to Doe v. Reed you will see the US Supreme Court has already decided in June 2010 and in a 8-1 ruling held that the law was not unconstitutional then send it back down to a lower court. In any case anonymous speech is mostly protected under the first amendment, not the fourth amendment.
I don't think there will be a Chinese hegemony in the way there's been an American hegemony where the average Chinese will be much richer than the average American. The labor market has become far more fluent, once you hit some minimum standard of education, technology and political stability the jobs flow, both the "IP economy" jobs and manufacturing jobs because shipping is a relatively small part of the cost.
While there's a different stretch between the workers and the capitalists, I think the differences between workers internationally will diminish. Those that are below average like China and India will come up, those that are above average like the US and Europe will come down. While there's been an awful lot of crap code coming from outsourced development they are working up experience and improving their education and training, there's no reason your typical Indian teenager starting out today should do worse than your typical American teenager. The days where you got a huge advantage just for being born in the US is over, the green card is no longer winning the lottery.
To be honest, even though it may suck for us I think it might be good for the world in the long term. I see it in a "mini"-format here in Europe, anyone from an EU state can apply for work here in Norway and vice versa. While there are some cultural issues to work with, it really lowers economic and nationalist tensions, if you don't like it just move to where the jobs and money is, no need to start a damn war or anything.
Secondly, I do have a privacy interest in my IP address. If I didn't, then why do services like Tor exist to hide it? If nobody cared about that, then nobody would use Tor, but many people clearly do. So people do have a privacy interest in their IP address. So the 4th amendment does apply.
That's not what the judge said, she said there's no 4th amendment privacy interest. You may have a large privacy interest in your ex not talking about your infidelity, STDs and poor lovemaking but you have no 4th amendment protection of it. For the most part, the courts have strictly interpreted the 4th amendment to mean places you own or have exclusive control over like your apartment and bank deposit box. Whatever information third parties have registered about you generally only requires a subpoena of the third party, not you. Same as if you store your drugs in the neighbor's garden shed and his subpoena is valid then you have no 4th amendment protection.
The end user picks the games that are good. The games pick the engines that are good. The engines pick the interfaces that are good.
So if the engines find DirectX is best, that's what they bring fastest to market with best performance and least bugs then it cascades down to the user having a lot of DirectX games to pick from. Which of course means Windows, unless you want to mess with WINE. Also games do care about code quality, if the average OpenGL implementation is buggier and less optimized than the DirectX implementation that would reflect poorly on the game. So it doesn't matter to the end user, but it matters to the people who'll decide what the end user has to choose from.
No, labor will always have value to others that also have no money. Imagine two dead broke people and Wal-Mart. Since they have no money, Wal-Mart isn't going to sell them anything. However if one is a carpenter and the other is a plumber it makes sense that they exchange services. In practice there will always be some people that are willing to part with a little money for a lot of labor, because the rich will prefer personal service over robots for many years to come even if you can automate a McDonalds. I don't think we'll see that much accelerating unemployment, it's simply too much waste to not work at all. It will probably stay high and push prices down though and there will be many "by laborers, for laborers" jobs who pay very little, compared to the rich.
In any case, unless you haven't noticed all kinds of manual labor and production industry was the first to be automated. If we are agreeing to your doomsday scenario the "IP based economy" is at least hoping we'll never have strong AI and that there's some things you'll need people to do. That it's easy to copy is one thing, but the other challenge that is hitting people harder is that it can be done from anywhere, like everything being outsourced to India and other low-cost countries. That is because the dollar still is a strong currency, if the US weakened it jobs would return but living costs would rise. In an IP economy it's unlikely the US can sustain a living standard much higher than the rest of the world and that will be a tough pill to swallow.
Maybe the problem is that open source developers aren't very good capitalists? Imagine 1000 people, they each have the choice to pay 1000$ to have it custom developed once or 10$ each to buy a proprietary tool. What will they do? Buy the proprietary tool, every one of them. It doesn't matter that they'll pay 10,000$ total instead of 1000$ because they're not coordinated. Everybody feels the choice is to pay 100 times more for "nothing". If they're lucky one of those 1000 people is an open source fan and will write the tool to scratch his own itch, but nobody will cash out.
Because of the nature of open source you're not likely to make the 2nd or 3rd or 4th customer pay, all the cost is loaded onto the first customer and the rest get a free ride. Over time, that just gets worse as you need more and more development just to catch up to the proprietary software. Nobody in their right mind picks a custom developed solution where they bear 100% of the cost when there's an off-the-shelf solution available - particularly one where the cost is spread across thousands or millions of users as the mass market software is.
When you suggest it you just come across as a complete idiot or plain crazy that think this is worth hundreds or thousands of dollars to people to get fixed. Customers don't care what your paycheck is, they care what they pay. That open source isn't able to distribute the burden doesn't make your prices more reasonable, it just makes it a market failure. It's you that must find a competitive offering, you can't just dictate that you deserve to bill 150$/hour any more than record execs can dictate what album prices will be to pay for their yacht.
in ANY country in modern civ, if you pay for a product and the vendor refuses to deliver, that's breach of contract.
The essential question is "Who broke the contract first?" If you pay with a check and the check bounces the vendor is not in breach of contract when he doesn't deliver, because you broke it first. In this case it seems he broke the contract on the forum first, which terminates the vendor's obligations. To take another example, if you buy one Red Hat license but install it on ten servers and they find out they can terminate your service. Doesn't matter if you paid for it, you don't even get support on the one. Why? Because you broke the contract first. That's the general rule of contract law everywhere and I don't see how this case is any exception. It's nasty to link it all to your account but I'd say fully legal.
Its really a story about idiots who buy their games online. Unless you're getting seriously steep discounts, physical media should always be preferred.
My experience is that it doesn't really matter anymore. Almost every game has some kind of online activation or account, if that one is down having the CD/DVD won't help you. And if that works then it doesn't matter if the download is a few bytes or ten gigabytes.
I suppose in theory having physical media give you other options like phoning for a code - if that number is still active, of course. And if you first need a crack, surely someone will pack the full game + crack as well.
How does one get a job as a power user of a [browser]? Usually when I use my [browser] I'm looking to do things other than tweak the interface the entire time. If someone wants to pay me to "power use" a [browser], I'm game.
With your logic, Firefox wouldn't need extensions. Hey, it lets you view web pages and that's all everybody could ever want from a browser, right? I do agree that there's people that go way overboard and spend more time tweaking their computer than using it, but that doesn't take away that many of those extensions are useful. If all you do when you boot is launch Photoshop and work there all they, you're a power user in many respects but not of the desktop environment. Maybe that's all you need, but it's not all everybody needs.
To be honest I don't care if Nokia tanks, but I think they took Qt down with them. For the last three years it has moved *very* slowly when it comes to desktop features and by relicencing from GPL to LGPL I think they killed off any chance to reboot the Trolltech business model of GPL/commercial dual licensing. Digia may milk the existing customers but they lost both three years working on mobile features no one will use and many proprietary software vendors will use the LGPL version without paying or contributing. That sucks because whatever you may think of KDE, Qt is actually a very good development platform. If Gnome won't cooperate, I think Shuttleworth should just clone the look and feel and make Unity/Qt instead.
You have no idea how often people would get their credit card number wrong if there wasn't a) a check digit and b) if it fails, you get an instant response. Mail typically gets there even if you typo the zip code as the postal office will typically work it out as long as the street and city is correct. Or if you misspell the street. Obviously they don't know what house number you live in, but the mail service is pretty forgiving.
Typo the payment code? You'll never know until the recipient gets it with an "invalid postage code, please pay up or return this letter/package unopened to the post office". That's pretty inconvienient all around.
And in general, I would be astonished if more than 1% of households with consoles in them did not have a computer.
I think the part you missed is that almost everyone has a laptop with a crappy non-upgradable IGP. Many of those who have a desktop have it for the discrete graphics card, if you didn't need it you would have a laptop instead. Don't get me wrong, I like my desktop + nettop combination but we're in a minority.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter that IE6 is a security risk because the IT department has probably proposed upgrading but due to systems X, Y and Z not working under IE7/8/9 and the costs involved in upgrading/rewriting those business applications the business case has been denied. Sure, that is CYA but the IT department doesn't generally get to overrule the business side that way. That doesn't mean they want to take on other risks they don't see a gain from and haven't got anybody's sign-off for.
You don't mention the size of the company but most large companies have some form of software directory, these are all the approved applications and versions that employees must use. If you want anything not on that list, it's either a huge approval process to get on that list or an exception process that requires lots of sign-off and disclaimers that they don't support anything that software does. Your request sounds like something they'd wisely tell you to forget, because it'd be at the bottom of the pile and probably rejected in the end too.
Pardon me for saying so, but you sound like one of those annoying business users that thinks the IT department is there as your personal hand-holding staff to tune your PC just the way you like it. What you're asking for is more obscure than dvorak and I still haven't seen a person use that. It is a support unit but they're not being paid more than it makes sense from a productivity point of view. If they can cut IT costs with $10k and lower your productivity with $8k, they will. So IT is just there to make most of the people get most of their work done most of the time. Any special needs you have better have a good reason, that you can't work with a keyboard 99.99% of the population does really isn't it unless you have some kind of disability preventing you from using what the rest do.
If XP does it for you, keep at it. That said, unlike Vista which was a dog there's no particular reason not to use Win7 in my opinion. It works very well, handles all the bells and whistles like SSD alignment, 64 bit everything including >4 GB ram and so on.
Yep, I'd like to see the stats on version distribution. It'll be many years until this PC is on IE9...
It's more than feasible to do on everyone, in fact the latest "straight out of 1984" directive from EU demand they store positions on all phone communication - which for smart phones is roughly 100% of the time - for 6-24 months.
In a way, the internet is a lot like real life. If you do or say something really stupid, chances are nobody will ever let you live it down anyway.
In a limited fashion yes, but the degree matters. A lot of kids went waving a stick pretending to be a Jedi, but before the Internet there'd be no Star Wars Kid. Perhaps some would still have taped it, maybe shared around the school but it probably would have died down fairly quickly. Instead you have the Internet which is like pouring gasoline on a spark, spreading uncontrollably.
Internet is not just a place where stuff gets spread around, it gets connected. Head on over to /b/ and look for one of the threads where they match topless/nude/porn pics with that person's facebook profile, full name and contact details. How we look nude or having sex isn't that unique, but it's not like people want that cling to you for the rest of your life. It's not easy hiding from Google.
I wish you could say we'd all have just as much shit on each other, so it'd all work out. But you know and I know that's not going to happen, people will try pretending they're a saint until the skeletons come tumbling out of the closet.
As for #4, why phase out anything?
I'd rather phase them out and make all 3+ letter domains TLDs in their own right. 99% of the time any serious corporation or organization will buy up all the TLDs to avoid the others being spam or virus or troll or hate pages, there's few enough it's a marginal cost and nothing but a money grab for new TLDs. Make it some kind of arbitration/auction who gets the TLD-less name. So slashdot would just be slashdot, google just google, yahoo just yahoo...
Practically the .com TLD is so big, it could easily be scaled to handle all. If you need to cheat you could make the last letter a TLD so your browser could do a lookup of "slashdo.t" to the "t" TLD to lower the load on the root servers while legacy clients still function. I think slashdot is almost the only site I visit that doesn't have either a country TLD or the .com TLD.
Black and white isn't so much the issue, what you don't want to be managed by is a manager who'd like to be an engineer again but felt he had to get promoted that way to get any career progress and benefits. It happens far too often that people don't get enough seniority for "just" being a doer. The job of a manager - at least in terms of what I want as an employee - is run interference for me. You don't bring a building engineer to a discussion of whether this should be commercial or residential area, means of getting funding, land permit contacts and so on. You bring him in when you're ready to build something, the same should be true of IT projects.
That's where being a manager is different, you have to deal with all those sides to it. Not just ahead of projects, but during projects when they mid-way decide they'd rather make this into a football stadium. When they try stealing half your resources but still demand you deliver on time. When people aren't able to reach any decisions but at the same time they refuse to move the deadline, asking you to implement three months work in three weeks. When some absurd requirements come dropping down from management that it must be done in two weeks and built entirely out of plywood, you have to go deal with them. If there's some access rights or whatever I need and don't get, you have to be the escalation point that'll yell at them and get all those non-technical problems out of the way. Your job is to make us productive by shielding the team from all the craziness outside.
Of course there are some internally oriented issues too in how you behave to us on the team. But about 9 out of 10 times the issue is that the manager hasn't been able to deal with the external issues and tries whipping his team into rewriting reality to deliver on these horribly mismanaged expectations. Particularly the engineering managers who'd rather just end it or ignore it by agreeing to something than to trigger even more long meetings. Nothing is worse than a person who ignores doing his job because he'd rather still do my job, that'll just land us both in a pile of shit.
I don't quite see the connection between a court case being having broad or narrow implications and how sympathetic or unsympathetic the defendant is.
Take for example the Betamax case, we had a very sympathetic producer of VCRs compared to some of the companies that have tried hiding under that shield, like for example Napster, Grokster, Limewire etc.
DVD-Jon was also a very sympathetic case, they couldn't find any evidence he was involved in any form of piracy, he just wanted to watch his own discs. That case settled all cases of owning and using DeCSS in Norway, at least until they passed the EUCD.
Getting an unsympathetic case doesn't have to be all bad either, if the court is forced to take action. Take for example the Thomas-Rasset case, one of the judges felt he had to step in and lower the verdict from 2 million dollars to 50,000 dollars. It went to a third trial with a 1.5 million dollar ruling so the matter is still ongoing, but if the US Supreme Court agrees with that judge they can't threaten you with 150,000$/song anymore. They'd have to say up to 2,250$/song, which is an awful lot less.
Narrow cases aren't good, but you can't avoid them. There'll always be cases where things brush up against each other, like between free speech and yelling fire in a crowded theater. Or exactly where the borders of "negligent" or "premediated" goes, or what degree of violence something qualifies for, ambiguous phrases in complex contacts and so on. Once you pick any subject there will always be a bunch of relevant case law or precedents, no matter what legal system you're in.
(it drives me crazy when I see someone with a 21 inch monitor who maximizes every single window and uses the task bar to switch between them. Totally defeats the point of a large monitor).
Every time I've tired to work differently I've found that positioning windows is more work than it's worth. With efficient keyboard/mouse cooperation I can cut and paste between apps with practically zero lag and I don't typically run any monitoring apps that I'd need to keep a permanent eye on. The upside is that all the menus/buttons/panels are in exactly the same place each time. Sometimes I have some docs or specs I'd like to look at and throw that up on my other monitor, but that's more a replacement for looking at a printout.
Complex applications tend to have rather complex interfaces of their own, I have apps with a "main" area in the center with toolbars on top, two levels of menus on the left, toolboxes on the right and status/output windows on the bottom. It's not just one double-ultra wide block of text, it's actually very nice to have a 24" monitor to fit it all.
Wouldn't that be a quirks mode test, not a performance test?
This is a related problem. But unlike travel which can be mitigated by either avoiding it or traveling by car/train
How? If one hour is a problem, you'll have a problem crossing any timezone. And if you're travelling multiple time zones, it's not likely your boss will pay for days of travel each way either. To be honest this might be triggering on the statistics, but those people must be pretty fragile to begin with. It's like how they say the flu kills thousands each year - the weak and elderly that can't take it, but it's only the last straw and something would have did them in.
Maybe someone EMPed North America.
Even a full nuclear strike wouldn't produce enough EMP to do that, it'd probably be easier to get an asteroid out of orbit and do a dino-killer than to produce a continent-wide EMP blast.
If you follow the link to Doe v. Reed you will see the US Supreme Court has already decided in June 2010 and in a 8-1 ruling held that the law was not unconstitutional then send it back down to a lower court. In any case anonymous speech is mostly protected under the first amendment, not the fourth amendment.
I don't think there will be a Chinese hegemony in the way there's been an American hegemony where the average Chinese will be much richer than the average American. The labor market has become far more fluent, once you hit some minimum standard of education, technology and political stability the jobs flow, both the "IP economy" jobs and manufacturing jobs because shipping is a relatively small part of the cost.
While there's a different stretch between the workers and the capitalists, I think the differences between workers internationally will diminish. Those that are below average like China and India will come up, those that are above average like the US and Europe will come down. While there's been an awful lot of crap code coming from outsourced development they are working up experience and improving their education and training, there's no reason your typical Indian teenager starting out today should do worse than your typical American teenager. The days where you got a huge advantage just for being born in the US is over, the green card is no longer winning the lottery.
To be honest, even though it may suck for us I think it might be good for the world in the long term. I see it in a "mini"-format here in Europe, anyone from an EU state can apply for work here in Norway and vice versa. While there are some cultural issues to work with, it really lowers economic and nationalist tensions, if you don't like it just move to where the jobs and money is, no need to start a damn war or anything.
Secondly, I do have a privacy interest in my IP address. If I didn't, then why do services like Tor exist to hide it? If nobody cared about that, then nobody would use Tor, but many people clearly do. So people do have a privacy interest in their IP address. So the 4th amendment does apply.
That's not what the judge said, she said there's no 4th amendment privacy interest. You may have a large privacy interest in your ex not talking about your infidelity, STDs and poor lovemaking but you have no 4th amendment protection of it. For the most part, the courts have strictly interpreted the 4th amendment to mean places you own or have exclusive control over like your apartment and bank deposit box. Whatever information third parties have registered about you generally only requires a subpoena of the third party, not you. Same as if you store your drugs in the neighbor's garden shed and his subpoena is valid then you have no 4th amendment protection.
DirectX, OpenGL.... why should the end user care?
The end user picks the games that are good.
The games pick the engines that are good.
The engines pick the interfaces that are good.
So if the engines find DirectX is best, that's what they bring fastest to market with best performance and least bugs then it cascades down to the user having a lot of DirectX games to pick from. Which of course means Windows, unless you want to mess with WINE. Also games do care about code quality, if the average OpenGL implementation is buggier and less optimized than the DirectX implementation that would reflect poorly on the game. So it doesn't matter to the end user, but it matters to the people who'll decide what the end user has to choose from.
No, labor will always have value to others that also have no money. Imagine two dead broke people and Wal-Mart. Since they have no money, Wal-Mart isn't going to sell them anything. However if one is a carpenter and the other is a plumber it makes sense that they exchange services. In practice there will always be some people that are willing to part with a little money for a lot of labor, because the rich will prefer personal service over robots for many years to come even if you can automate a McDonalds. I don't think we'll see that much accelerating unemployment, it's simply too much waste to not work at all. It will probably stay high and push prices down though and there will be many "by laborers, for laborers" jobs who pay very little, compared to the rich.
In any case, unless you haven't noticed all kinds of manual labor and production industry was the first to be automated. If we are agreeing to your doomsday scenario the "IP based economy" is at least hoping we'll never have strong AI and that there's some things you'll need people to do. That it's easy to copy is one thing, but the other challenge that is hitting people harder is that it can be done from anywhere, like everything being outsourced to India and other low-cost countries. That is because the dollar still is a strong currency, if the US weakened it jobs would return but living costs would rise. In an IP economy it's unlikely the US can sustain a living standard much higher than the rest of the world and that will be a tough pill to swallow.
Maybe the problem is that open source developers aren't very good capitalists? Imagine 1000 people, they each have the choice to pay 1000$ to have it custom developed once or 10$ each to buy a proprietary tool. What will they do? Buy the proprietary tool, every one of them. It doesn't matter that they'll pay 10,000$ total instead of 1000$ because they're not coordinated. Everybody feels the choice is to pay 100 times more for "nothing". If they're lucky one of those 1000 people is an open source fan and will write the tool to scratch his own itch, but nobody will cash out.
Because of the nature of open source you're not likely to make the 2nd or 3rd or 4th customer pay, all the cost is loaded onto the first customer and the rest get a free ride. Over time, that just gets worse as you need more and more development just to catch up to the proprietary software. Nobody in their right mind picks a custom developed solution where they bear 100% of the cost when there's an off-the-shelf solution available - particularly one where the cost is spread across thousands or millions of users as the mass market software is.
When you suggest it you just come across as a complete idiot or plain crazy that think this is worth hundreds or thousands of dollars to people to get fixed. Customers don't care what your paycheck is, they care what they pay. That open source isn't able to distribute the burden doesn't make your prices more reasonable, it just makes it a market failure. It's you that must find a competitive offering, you can't just dictate that you deserve to bill 150$/hour any more than record execs can dictate what album prices will be to pay for their yacht.
in ANY country in modern civ, if you pay for a product and the vendor refuses to deliver, that's breach of contract.
The essential question is "Who broke the contract first?" If you pay with a check and the check bounces the vendor is not in breach of contract when he doesn't deliver, because you broke it first. In this case it seems he broke the contract on the forum first, which terminates the vendor's obligations. To take another example, if you buy one Red Hat license but install it on ten servers and they find out they can terminate your service. Doesn't matter if you paid for it, you don't even get support on the one. Why? Because you broke the contract first. That's the general rule of contract law everywhere and I don't see how this case is any exception. It's nasty to link it all to your account but I'd say fully legal.
Its really a story about idiots who buy their games online. Unless you're getting seriously steep discounts, physical media should always be preferred.
My experience is that it doesn't really matter anymore. Almost every game has some kind of online activation or account, if that one is down having the CD/DVD won't help you. And if that works then it doesn't matter if the download is a few bytes or ten gigabytes.
I suppose in theory having physical media give you other options like phoning for a code - if that number is still active, of course. And if you first need a crack, surely someone will pack the full game + crack as well.
How does one get a job as a power user of a [browser]? Usually when I use my [browser] I'm looking to do things other than tweak the interface the entire time. If someone wants to pay me to "power use" a [browser], I'm game.
With your logic, Firefox wouldn't need extensions. Hey, it lets you view web pages and that's all everybody could ever want from a browser, right? I do agree that there's people that go way overboard and spend more time tweaking their computer than using it, but that doesn't take away that many of those extensions are useful. If all you do when you boot is launch Photoshop and work there all they, you're a power user in many respects but not of the desktop environment. Maybe that's all you need, but it's not all everybody needs.
To be honest I don't care if Nokia tanks, but I think they took Qt down with them. For the last three years it has moved *very* slowly when it comes to desktop features and by relicencing from GPL to LGPL I think they killed off any chance to reboot the Trolltech business model of GPL/commercial dual licensing. Digia may milk the existing customers but they lost both three years working on mobile features no one will use and many proprietary software vendors will use the LGPL version without paying or contributing. That sucks because whatever you may think of KDE, Qt is actually a very good development platform. If Gnome won't cooperate, I think Shuttleworth should just clone the look and feel and make Unity/Qt instead.
Look for the guys in red shirts. /gets instantly pummeled by scifi nerds.
You have no idea how often people would get their credit card number wrong if there wasn't a) a check digit and b) if it fails, you get an instant response. Mail typically gets there even if you typo the zip code as the postal office will typically work it out as long as the street and city is correct. Or if you misspell the street. Obviously they don't know what house number you live in, but the mail service is pretty forgiving.
Typo the payment code? You'll never know until the recipient gets it with an "invalid postage code, please pay up or return this letter/package unopened to the post office". That's pretty inconvienient all around.
And in general, I would be astonished if more than 1% of households with consoles in them did not have a computer.
I think the part you missed is that almost everyone has a laptop with a crappy non-upgradable IGP. Many of those who have a desktop have it for the discrete graphics card, if you didn't need it you would have a laptop instead. Don't get me wrong, I like my desktop + nettop combination but we're in a minority.