Not so. Unpasteurized milk and cheeses made from it are widely available at...
Look at those cheeses again. Are they aged? Read my comment again. Also, just because a young, soft cheese doesn't say it was made with pasturized milk on the package doesn't mean it wasn't.
Again, you are spreading misinformation. The only thing that I see routinely ultrapasteurized is heavy cream. And the reason for doing that is to extend the shelf life, not to reduce costs. I don't often see ultra-pasteurized milk in stores because the normally pasteurized stuff is cheaper.
I was just at the grocery store last night. (Roche Bros. in Acton MA if anybody cares) All of the milk, even the organic milk was ultra-pasturized. I'm willing to accept that things may be different where you are, but around here the dairys seem to choose the method that only takes a few seconds rather than many minutes.
I'm trolling because you think I referred to the wrong agency? Give me a break.
Besides that I'm not even wrong. The FDA does deal with imports. The USDA controlls imports on an economic and agricultural level, but the FDA is responsible for the safety of imports.
With the exception of most meat and poultry, all food, drugs, biologics, cosmetics, medical devices, and electronic products that emit radiation, as defined in the FD&C and related Acts, are subject to examination by FDA when they are being imported or offered for import into the United States. Most meat and poultry products are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
I would prefer staying on a diet of food that exposes me to what my body has evolved to handle well, and won't expose me to vulnerability if my supply of irradiated food suddenly stops.
We don't need to irradiate *everything*. Just things that spoil quickly (personally I'd be happy if they only did it to beef and pork), and even then you should have a choice between the irradiated and non-irradiated option. If you cook the hell out of your meat to avoid salmonilla anyway, you're killing off any microbes that are living in/on there anyway.
I've done some research on the subject, and importing dairy products is surprisingly easy and has surprisingly few restrictions (a permit and a quota), and I don't believe that pasteurization is a requirement for imported products.
Are these hard, aged, cheeses? There are less restrictions on aged goods, which is why I specified "young" cheeses in my post.
Due to the elementary physics fact that kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the speed, so is the braking distance. E.g., the speed difference between 50 km/h and 70 km/h is 40%, but the braking distance _doubles_.
Ok, it doubles. Two time what?
The fact of the matter is that they have to make the speed limits sane for the least common denominator of stopping distances. Your little beater going 50km/h probably has a greater stopping distance than a car going 70 km/h that happens to have wide tires and high performance vented disc brakes. Then there's the matter of reflex times, training, etc... It is *not* a matter of "elementary physics" as you so condecendingly put it.
not driving like an irresponsible maniac
Given what I said above... You can hardly say that everybody going over the speed limit is being irresponsible or a maniac. Sure you should obey the law, but many people who have well maintained and well designed cars certainly have well founded complaints about those speed limits. They're not nescicarily "endangering" anybody more than somebody driving the speed limit might be.
for some people speeding is like _the_ proof of their manhood.
And some people aren't out to prove anything, they just actually enjoy driving. Imagine that.
Of course there's always the beef industry/grocery store conspiracy theory that they like the fact that non-irradiated meat goes bad so quickly since it makes people go to the store more often or buy more meat when old meat goes bad, so they don't push for adoption...
I suppose it's too much to hope that someday I'll be able to buy a steak and have it still be good three or four days later if my plans change suddenly without the use of chemical preservatives or the freezer.
At least we can import Japanese technology. Customs won't confiscate something for not complying with FCC regulations, but they will confiscate food!
In Europe you're allowed to make and sell things that contain non-pasturized dairy products. In the US, you're not. Apparently americans aren't allowed to determine for themselves what is or isn't an acceptable risk. So the best European young cheeses and chocolates have poor substitutes as their namesakes in the US.
To make matters worse, they've convinced people here that "ultra-pasturized" means "better", even though it just means they used extra high temperatures to get it done more quickly and save money at the expense of flavor. That means the milk here doesn't taste nearly as good as it could under the current regulations. All this in the name of safety, yet at the same time, you can't get irradiated beef...
Sure it is mentioned in that article but his comment is that zip is too CPU heavy and RAM intensive to be useful and that no-one uses it.
Mentioned, but it's total bull.
The server could cache the compressed copy such that they only run the (sub-second) compression once per feed update. A 2ghz P4 can compress about a megabyte of XML with zlib down to about 150kb in under a tenth of a second. If you're only doing that once every few minutes it's negligable. Sure, the client has to decompress, but so what? Even the most modest machine these days can decompress that in under a second, and the server doesn't care how much processing time the client is using. With an RSS reader, the processing is happening in the background anyway, and the user doesn't realize they are waiting.
Plus a lot of times compressed XML is smaller than the comprable binary format. This is kind of stuff that zlib was designed for. I used to be anti-XML as a protocol too, until I actually tried it and compared the numbers. Binary formats are for when you need low latency (parsing XML is a bitch CPU and memory wise), but if you don't care so much about latency and you're optimizing for size, compressed XML is the way to go.
With the speed optimized stettings in zlib, XML containing mostly ASCII content (like most RSS feeds) compresses to about 15% of it's original size.
Don't think about the downloader, think about the server which may have tens of thousands of users polling every few seconds. Do the math, that's *gigabytes* a second. Now, if you were the host for that feed, wouldn't you like to cut that traffic to less than a sixth of it's current size?
Compressed XML compares favorably in size with comprable binary protocols.
So your proposal is: just ignore the current research until somebody found the magic bullet.
Not at all.
There will never be a magic bullet. My proposal is to attack the problem by making efficiency less expensive rather than making inefficiency more expensive. I just used a lot more words than needed to say that.
There are several problems with what you suggest. Many people disagree with me, but I consider it immoral to use taxes to encourage changes in the behavior of others. That's just for starters though.
Working towards efficiency is a good over all goal, but raising taxes on energy as a means to that end assumes that we want not only increase efficiency, but reduced overall energy consumption. While this is currently the case due to the poluting nature of our current energy generation methods, once we overcome the polution problems we may not care to, or may not even want to reduce consumption. This is especially the case if you consider that increased energy consumption generally goes along with improved quality of life. If we want the entire world to be able to enjoy the quality of life that a distinct minority of us (you included, since you seem to at least have the capablilty to access this site), in the long term we want to increase consumption overall. So really we need to look for solutions that encourage increasing efficiency that don't also discourage consumption. In other words, rather than raising taxes on energy and punishing people for improving their quality of living, we should work towards making efficiency less expensive, and making energy production clean and cheap. There is no magic bullet...
My stepdad has a garage and I maintain his systems (or at least talk him through it on the phone if I can get away with not going there it). The average lifespan of a machine there is about a year. He used to use DEC VT-100s. Those things lasted 10+ years easily (except the keyboards), but in a PC, he needs new fans every six months or so and a new hard drive every year or so. FOr his current batch I've got him using rack mount equipment since it has built-in air filtration, but he hasn't been using it long enough for me to tell you if that's helping.
We keep his server in a dehumidified space in a rack with doors and air filters over all the openings. That machine seems to be OK...
I don't think reinstating Debtors Prisions would really help anyone, do you?
No, I was being sarcastic.
You need a legal way to wind up a company or make a fresh start
That's not what bankruptcy protection is for. It's to reduce the risk to people and companies that comes from expanding or creating their businesses. It's there to encourage people to take risks under the assumption that the successes will outweigh the failures in their benefit to our society as a whole. We have bankruptcy protection to benefit our society, not to benefit the individuals and corporations that use it.
Not coincidentally, that same limitation of risk is the reason we have limited liability, which is why I used bankruptcy as an example in my post.
Should we get rid of bankruptcy laws and bring back debtor's prisons too?
Limits on liability are important to the progres of our society and represent a balance of risks and rewards. Sure, sometimes - and rarely - terrible things happen, and perhaps there's room to tweak the rules a bit, but what you're proposing is far too drastic.
It probably doesn't help that the record heat in Europe in 2003 was matched by near recod low temperatures on the east coast of the US that same summer.
But are you guys so addicted to your gas guzzlers and inefficient houses that you refuse to even discuss your behaviour's more or less possible/probable consequences?
Man, so many problems with this statement that I'm not sure where to begin.
First of all, there are over 250,000,000 people over here. Not only can we all think for ourselves and don't deserve to be lumped together as one group, but *most* of us don't own SUVs. In fact, the best selling cars over here are Japanese four door sedans that actually get pretty decent gas milage. Sure, SUVs are popular, but you're really stretching to say that we all refuse to consider other options. The same thing goes for your house example. Believe it or not, people make decisions like that based on cost effectiveness. If it's more for the super-low-energy usage model of some home appliance than it is for the inefficient model plus the energy savings over 5-6 years, people are more likely to go with the more wasteful model. The same thing goes for energy saving home improvements. If what exists isn't wasting enough energy to justify an upgrade, people keep what they've got. It doesn't help that energy saving appliances typically cost at least three times as much as the inefficient models....
I sincerely hope we're not at the brink of self inflicted global destruction.
While we have the power to change things drastically, I doubt we can cause global destruction. The planet isn't going anywhere. Bad things have happened before and life went on.
There are some companies where the hiring manager has a bias towards big name schools, but it's more who you know and what you know than where you learned it.
The last company I worked at had a hiring manager that kept two folders of resumes in his desk. One with MIT resumes and one with all the rest. I still got a job there, but it was because of who I knew, not where I went to school. Talk to everybody you get a chance to talk to, because your social network is what gets you hired. Also, when you ask people for references, make sure you ask if they're going to give you a good reference first (this goes for applying to colleges as well as interviewing for jobs BTW. Don't let your teachers submit recomendations that you haven't read!). If you're not good at talking to people, try contributing to open source projects. Last time I went interviewing, more than half of the people I interviewd with had a pile of printouts from websites listing Open Source work I've done and they all were eager to hear about it.
You came into my business, rented time on one of my computers and then copied licensed software from my system. You are not welcome back. I don't care if you cam in last week and didn't copy anything... I don't want you as a client.
They didn't come in and "rent time." They bought a license to use something within the terms of that agreement. It doesn't matter if you don't want that person as a client. You took their money and enterd into a contractual agreement with them. Until they violate that agreement or you have the agreement terminated by a court you have to live up to your end of it wether you like it or not. This is all about who interprets and enforces the law. Is it our legal system, or is it individuals and companies?
Imagine if all software were sold this way. If whichever company was in charge decided you did something they didn't like, or you broke some law outside of the scope of your agreement with them they would essentialy be allowed to deny you the ability to use any software again without paying for it a second time. We could take this analogy to extremes and start talking about why we don't use capital punishemnt for all crimes, even the most petty....
Valve should have recourse against software pirates, but they shouldn't be the judge, jury and executioner.
And it's your right to say "I don't think your proposed settlement is fair. Prosecute me and let my punishment be determined by a judge." That's really not an option in this situation though.
I don't have any problem with people being punished for breaking the law, but we have a system for determining what those punishments are, and it's not Valve's job to take the law into their own hands and punish users outside of that system.
If you try to shoplift something from Sears and get caught, you have to pony up 8x the price of the item you were stealing to avoid charges.
Or you could go to jail like the law says. Sears wouldn't get to dictate your punishment. But then, shoplifting is a criminal act and copyright infringement is civil, not criminal, so you're comparing apples to oranges anyway.
The days of stealing are over.... You were the one who initiated an act of thievery first.
I don't intend on playing this game pirated or otherwise, so I haven't "stolen" anything, but the people who purchased other games through Steam had a license for them; a contract with Valve allowing use. Unless the license for those older titles says something about the license being terminated if you violate theoretical future license for products that didn't exist at the time there's a good chance that Valve is violating their contract with these users on the older titles, no matter what they did or tried to do with Half-Life 2.
Pay your way and if you get screwed, don't start whining about your treatment.
First of all, read that. I don't think it means what you meant to say.
Secondly, we don't live in a society where people or corporations can take the law into their own hands. No matter how wronged Valve is be software pirates, their remedies should be determined by the the legal authorities we have for exactly this purpose. Just because they are capable of imposing penalties on these software pirates outside of thwarting their efforts doesn't make it right.
So, you try to pirate Half-Life 2, and they lock you out from playing it... That's all well and good. But if you've got other products you've legitimately purchased through Steam you can no longer access those either because you tried to pirate Half-Life 2? That sounds like a great reason to never use Steam. If you ever do something they disapprove of with one of Valve's products you could lose access to hundreds of dollars of software that is completely unrelated.
Why aren't they just blocking those users from Half-Life 2 instead of revoking (shall we say "stealing" since they like to mis-use the word too) ligitemately purchased licenses for other products too?
Slashdot Mirror
Not so. Unpasteurized milk and cheeses made from it are widely available at...
Look at those cheeses again. Are they aged? Read my comment again. Also, just because a young, soft cheese doesn't say it was made with pasturized milk on the package doesn't mean it wasn't.
Again, you are spreading misinformation. The only thing that I see routinely ultrapasteurized is heavy cream. And the reason for doing that is to extend the shelf life, not to reduce costs. I don't often see ultra-pasteurized milk in stores because the normally pasteurized stuff is cheaper.
I was just at the grocery store last night. (Roche Bros. in Acton MA if anybody cares) All of the milk, even the organic milk was ultra-pasturized. I'm willing to accept that things may be different where you are, but around here the dairys seem to choose the method that only takes a few seconds rather than many minutes.
I suspect you're just trolling.
I'm trolling because you think I referred to the wrong agency? Give me a break.
Besides that I'm not even wrong. The FDA does deal with imports. The USDA controlls imports on an economic and agricultural level, but the FDA is responsible for the safety of imports.
Observe: http://www.fda.gov/ora/import/default.htm
And a quote from said page:
With the exception of most meat and poultry, all food, drugs, biologics, cosmetics, medical devices, and electronic products that emit radiation, as defined in the FD&C and related Acts, are subject to examination by FDA when they are being imported or offered for import into the United States. Most meat and poultry products are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Now. Are you trolling?
I would prefer staying on a diet of food that exposes me to what my body has evolved to handle well, and won't expose me to vulnerability if my supply of irradiated food suddenly stops.
We don't need to irradiate *everything*. Just things that spoil quickly (personally I'd be happy if they only did it to beef and pork), and even then you should have a choice between the irradiated and non-irradiated option. If you cook the hell out of your meat to avoid salmonilla anyway, you're killing off any microbes that are living in/on there anyway.
Not entirely true...
You are correct. If something is aged for long enough I believe that you are then allowed to import it.
I've done some research on the subject, and importing dairy products is surprisingly easy and has surprisingly few restrictions (a permit and a quota), and I don't believe that pasteurization is a requirement for imported products.
Are these hard, aged, cheeses? There are less restrictions on aged goods, which is why I specified "young" cheeses in my post.
Due to the elementary physics fact that kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the speed, so is the braking distance. E.g., the speed difference between 50 km/h and 70 km/h is 40%, but the braking distance _doubles_.
Ok, it doubles. Two time what?
The fact of the matter is that they have to make the speed limits sane for the least common denominator of stopping distances. Your little beater going 50km/h probably has a greater stopping distance than a car going 70 km/h that happens to have wide tires and high performance vented disc brakes. Then there's the matter of reflex times, training, etc... It is *not* a matter of "elementary physics" as you so condecendingly put it.
not driving like an irresponsible maniac
Given what I said above... You can hardly say that everybody going over the speed limit is being irresponsible or a maniac. Sure you should obey the law, but many people who have well maintained and well designed cars certainly have well founded complaints about those speed limits. They're not nescicarily "endangering" anybody more than somebody driving the speed limit might be.
for some people speeding is like _the_ proof of their manhood.
And some people aren't out to prove anything, they just actually enjoy driving. Imagine that.
Of course there's always the beef industry/grocery store conspiracy theory that they like the fact that non-irradiated meat goes bad so quickly since it makes people go to the store more often or buy more meat when old meat goes bad, so they don't push for adoption...
I suppose it's too much to hope that someday I'll be able to buy a steak and have it still be good three or four days later if my plans change suddenly without the use of chemical preservatives or the freezer.
At least we can import Japanese technology. Customs won't confiscate something for not complying with FCC regulations, but they will confiscate food!
In Europe you're allowed to make and sell things that contain non-pasturized dairy products. In the US, you're not. Apparently americans aren't allowed to determine for themselves what is or isn't an acceptable risk. So the best European young cheeses and chocolates have poor substitutes as their namesakes in the US.
To make matters worse, they've convinced people here that "ultra-pasturized" means "better", even though it just means they used extra high temperatures to get it done more quickly and save money at the expense of flavor. That means the milk here doesn't taste nearly as good as it could under the current regulations. All this in the name of safety, yet at the same time, you can't get irradiated beef...
Sigh.
Sure it is mentioned in that article but his comment is that zip is too CPU heavy and RAM intensive to be useful and that no-one uses it.
Mentioned, but it's total bull.
The server could cache the compressed copy such that they only run the (sub-second) compression once per feed update. A 2ghz P4 can compress about a megabyte of XML with zlib down to about 150kb in under a tenth of a second. If you're only doing that once every few minutes it's negligable. Sure, the client has to decompress, but so what? Even the most modest machine these days can decompress that in under a second, and the server doesn't care how much processing time the client is using. With an RSS reader, the processing is happening in the background anyway, and the user doesn't realize they are waiting.
Plus a lot of times compressed XML is smaller than the comprable binary format. This is kind of stuff that zlib was designed for. I used to be anti-XML as a protocol too, until I actually tried it and compared the numbers. Binary formats are for when you need low latency (parsing XML is a bitch CPU and memory wise), but if you don't care so much about latency and you're optimizing for size, compressed XML is the way to go.
With the speed optimized stettings in zlib, XML containing mostly ASCII content (like most RSS feeds) compresses to about 15% of it's original size.
Don't think about the downloader, think about the server which may have tens of thousands of users polling every few seconds. Do the math, that's *gigabytes* a second. Now, if you were the host for that feed, wouldn't you like to cut that traffic to less than a sixth of it's current size?
Compressed XML compares favorably in size with comprable binary protocols.
BTW I'm no good at maths or grammar, yet I can fix computers in my sleep and have a top 5% IQ rating, what does that make me?
Lazy.
So your proposal is: just ignore the current research until somebody found the magic bullet.
Not at all.
There will never be a magic bullet. My proposal is to attack the problem by making efficiency less expensive rather than making inefficiency more expensive. I just used a lot more words than needed to say that.
There are several problems with what you suggest. Many people disagree with me, but I consider it immoral to use taxes to encourage changes in the behavior of others. That's just for starters though.
Working towards efficiency is a good over all goal, but raising taxes on energy as a means to that end assumes that we want not only increase efficiency, but reduced overall energy consumption. While this is currently the case due to the poluting nature of our current energy generation methods, once we overcome the polution problems we may not care to, or may not even want to reduce consumption. This is especially the case if you consider that increased energy consumption generally goes along with improved quality of life. If we want the entire world to be able to enjoy the quality of life that a distinct minority of us (you included, since you seem to at least have the capablilty to access this site), in the long term we want to increase consumption overall. So really we need to look for solutions that encourage increasing efficiency that don't also discourage consumption. In other words, rather than raising taxes on energy and punishing people for improving their quality of living, we should work towards making efficiency less expensive, and making energy production clean and cheap. There is no magic bullet...
My stepdad has a garage and I maintain his systems (or at least talk him through it on the phone if I can get away with not going there it). The average lifespan of a machine there is about a year. He used to use DEC VT-100s. Those things lasted 10+ years easily (except the keyboards), but in a PC, he needs new fans every six months or so and a new hard drive every year or so. FOr his current batch I've got him using rack mount equipment since it has built-in air filtration, but he hasn't been using it long enough for me to tell you if that's helping.
We keep his server in a dehumidified space in a rack with doors and air filters over all the openings. That machine seems to be OK...
I don't think reinstating Debtors Prisions would really help anyone, do you?
No, I was being sarcastic.
You need a legal way to wind up a company or make a fresh start
That's not what bankruptcy protection is for. It's to reduce the risk to people and companies that comes from expanding or creating their businesses. It's there to encourage people to take risks under the assumption that the successes will outweigh the failures in their benefit to our society as a whole. We have bankruptcy protection to benefit our society, not to benefit the individuals and corporations that use it.
Not coincidentally, that same limitation of risk is the reason we have limited liability, which is why I used bankruptcy as an example in my post.
Should we get rid of bankruptcy laws and bring back debtor's prisons too?
Limits on liability are important to the progres of our society and represent a balance of risks and rewards. Sure, sometimes - and rarely - terrible things happen, and perhaps there's room to tweak the rules a bit, but what you're proposing is far too drastic.
It probably doesn't help that the record heat in Europe in 2003 was matched by near recod low temperatures on the east coast of the US that same summer.
But are you guys so addicted to your gas guzzlers and inefficient houses that you refuse to even discuss your behaviour's more or less possible/probable consequences?
Man, so many problems with this statement that I'm not sure where to begin.
First of all, there are over 250,000,000 people over here. Not only can we all think for ourselves and don't deserve to be lumped together as one group, but *most* of us don't own SUVs. In fact, the best selling cars over here are Japanese four door sedans that actually get pretty decent gas milage. Sure, SUVs are popular, but you're really stretching to say that we all refuse to consider other options. The same thing goes for your house example. Believe it or not, people make decisions like that based on cost effectiveness. If it's more for the super-low-energy usage model of some home appliance than it is for the inefficient model plus the energy savings over 5-6 years, people are more likely to go with the more wasteful model. The same thing goes for energy saving home improvements. If what exists isn't wasting enough energy to justify an upgrade, people keep what they've got. It doesn't help that energy saving appliances typically cost at least three times as much as the inefficient models....
I sincerely hope we're not at the brink of self inflicted global destruction.
While we have the power to change things drastically, I doubt we can cause global destruction. The planet isn't going anywhere. Bad things have happened before and life went on.
There are some companies where the hiring manager has a bias towards big name schools, but it's more who you know and what you know than where you learned it.
The last company I worked at had a hiring manager that kept two folders of resumes in his desk. One with MIT resumes and one with all the rest. I still got a job there, but it was because of who I knew, not where I went to school. Talk to everybody you get a chance to talk to, because your social network is what gets you hired. Also, when you ask people for references, make sure you ask if they're going to give you a good reference first (this goes for applying to colleges as well as interviewing for jobs BTW. Don't let your teachers submit recomendations that you haven't read!). If you're not good at talking to people, try contributing to open source projects. Last time I went interviewing, more than half of the people I interviewd with had a pile of printouts from websites listing Open Source work I've done and they all were eager to hear about it.
Watts over time gives you watt hours, not more watts. Time is already included in the watt unit.
If you take 100 watts for 3 hours, you don't get 300 watts as this totally bogus article says.
I certainly hope your post was a joke.
I have one. They aren't flimsy. They're also signifigantly quieter than the old models.
Try one, then form an opinion. That king of speculation if trolling.
You came into my business, rented time on one of my computers and then copied licensed software from my system. You are not welcome back. I don't care if you cam in last week and didn't copy anything... I don't want you as a client.
They didn't come in and "rent time." They bought a license to use something within the terms of that agreement. It doesn't matter if you don't want that person as a client. You took their money and enterd into a contractual agreement with them. Until they violate that agreement or you have the agreement terminated by a court you have to live up to your end of it wether you like it or not. This is all about who interprets and enforces the law. Is it our legal system, or is it individuals and companies?
Imagine if all software were sold this way. If whichever company was in charge decided you did something they didn't like, or you broke some law outside of the scope of your agreement with them they would essentialy be allowed to deny you the ability to use any software again without paying for it a second time. We could take this analogy to extremes and start talking about why we don't use capital punishemnt for all crimes, even the most petty....
Valve should have recourse against software pirates, but they shouldn't be the judge, jury and executioner.
And it's your right to say "I don't think your proposed settlement is fair. Prosecute me and let my punishment be determined by a judge." That's really not an option in this situation though.
Heaven forbid we might actually get punished for using software we stole
Please read my other reply in this thread.
I don't have any problem with people being punished for breaking the law, but we have a system for determining what those punishments are, and it's not Valve's job to take the law into their own hands and punish users outside of that system.
If you try to shoplift something from Sears and get caught, you have to pony up 8x the price of the item you were stealing to avoid charges.
... You were the one who initiated an act of thievery first.
Or you could go to jail like the law says. Sears wouldn't get to dictate your punishment. But then, shoplifting is a criminal act and copyright infringement is civil, not criminal, so you're comparing apples to oranges anyway.
The days of stealing are over.
I don't intend on playing this game pirated or otherwise, so I haven't "stolen" anything, but the people who purchased other games through Steam had a license for them; a contract with Valve allowing use. Unless the license for those older titles says something about the license being terminated if you violate theoretical future license for products that didn't exist at the time there's a good chance that Valve is violating their contract with these users on the older titles, no matter what they did or tried to do with Half-Life 2.
Pay your way and if you get screwed, don't start whining about your treatment.
First of all, read that. I don't think it means what you meant to say.
Secondly, we don't live in a society where people or corporations can take the law into their own hands. No matter how wronged Valve is be software pirates, their remedies should be determined by the the legal authorities we have for exactly this purpose. Just because they are capable of imposing penalties on these software pirates outside of thwarting their efforts doesn't make it right.
So, you try to pirate Half-Life 2, and they lock you out from playing it... That's all well and good. But if you've got other products you've legitimately purchased through Steam you can no longer access those either because you tried to pirate Half-Life 2? That sounds like a great reason to never use Steam. If you ever do something they disapprove of with one of Valve's products you could lose access to hundreds of dollars of software that is completely unrelated.
Why aren't they just blocking those users from Half-Life 2 instead of revoking (shall we say "stealing" since they like to mis-use the word too) ligitemately purchased licenses for other products too?