Hmm, well, I managed to find the old article that gave me the impression of what I said, and this is the relevant text:
In 1996, Congress tried to address a wave of tax-driven expatriation by the wealthy by requiring former citizens to file tax returns for a decade and forbidding Americans who renounced their passports for tax reasons from visiting the United States.
The article does go on to say that it's not generally enforced, and it doesn't bother to link to, or even name the law they're basing this on, so it could simply be inaccurate. However, it is from the NY Times, so I'd like to hope they'd done a little fact checking.
By default sales taxes are regressive, but they can be manipulated to be so to a lesser degree. It was already mentioned that food, basic clothing, etc can be make exempt, so the poor would pay next to nothing. You can also have higher rates for luxury items. If you haven't guessed already, I'm also a fan of replacing income taxes with a National sales tax. It's easier to enforce at retail locations than for every individual, so fewer people are able to evade taxes. There are also fewer loopholes to legally pay less than you really should be.
Don't forget too that money in a savings account/investment fund is being put to use, generating revenue that will be taxed. The largest benefit of a national sales tax, however, is making domestic businesses more competitive. Income taxes add to the cost of domestic goods, but not foreign goods. Sales tax adds to both evenly. So domestic goods become cheaper compared to foreign alternatives, both domestically and when sold abroad. This is a huge benefit to businesses that would help businesses and create jobs. At least until every country makes the same change. But I'd rather be on the front end of that shift than pulling up the rear.
Correct. Also, as an added note, there's a law stating that if you give up your US citizenship just to get out of this tax, you're banned from ever entering the US again. Of course everyone will give another reason for why they're giving it up, but that's a very harsh punishment if the courts don't buy it.
I admit I'm impressed if you actually make that work in the UK. If it does work just like that for you, then sure, no reason to change it. Sadly, experience has shown it's not nearly so well done in the US. Good luck getting thousands of people to watch the count on TV. I bet a number of you remember the story of that small US town where no one actually voted in the election, including the candidates themselves.
Also, recounts can and do go on for weeks after the election in the US, especially for statewide and presidential elections. And we cases where the number of ballots were significantly off from the number of people who signed in as having voted when recounts were done.
For small, local elections, you're correct that paper ballots will be more secure. However, I still believe that for large elections with 10s of millions of people voting in many different locations, it'd be too easy for someone to find the few weak areas where security isn't very tight to mess with the election. I just happen to like the idea of having to lock down a single device, and make sure it can't be tampered with. You can then mass produce it. I think that sounds easier than having to guarantee the security of every single voting location in the nation. Because if you miss even one, it can change the election.
Granted, and with the current state of electronic voting, I'd much prefer physical votes. However, I don't believe that just because it's harder means we should give up on the idea. Voting is important enough that we should continue to strive toward the best possible system of handling it. As I've already said, I think we could really get something good in just a few short years if we really invested in it.
Obviously there's no method for voting on the scales we see where you can guarantee the results are accurate. The benefits of electronic voting are that it can be cheaper and faster with near instant results and no recounts. I also believe that with enough work an electronic system can end up being harder to tamper with than a paper one. I mentioned that in a little more detail elsewhere in this thread.
And all the boxes are under watch by representatives of all parties 24/7 throughout the recount process? And none of them could have possibly missed a person dropping two ballots into the box, having brought one that was already filled in with them?
And you're certain every box was checked in advance to make sure it didn't come with some votes already in it? And you're positive that in no location anywhere in the country did someone manage to distract the polling workers long enough to add/swap a box? And even if such an act was caught on camera, you can guarantee that all the film from every station was watched even if there wasn't any indication of tampering?
My point is that there's plenty of opportunity for tampering even with physical copies. I'd much prefer a system of open source electronic machines locked down with layers of security. Copies of the physical machines would be made available year round with people encouraged to try to tamper with them without it being detected.
I'm pretty confident that with a few years of hard work, we could get electronic machines that made it harder to effect the result of an election than if paper ballots were used.
If you feel that way, could you explain to me what benefit a paper vote actually has? You can confirm your vote was recorded correctly when you drop it into a box, but how do you know that box doesn't get swapped out? Or that another stuffed box doesn't get set right next to it? I don't see the benefit in knowing it's accurate when you voted if you don't know whether or not it's accurate when it's counted.
I strongly support open source for electronic voting systems; what gets me is the cry for a paper trail. Unless they have some way to identify who voted for whom on the paper trail (something I strongly oppose) it's just as subject to tampering as a computer run tally, possibly more so. Obviously you don't want the voting machines networked in any way to make it harder to significantly alter the outcome.
However, I would actually consider the inability to have a recount a positive. It saves money for the taxpayer and reduces confusion and legal challenges after the election. People also seem to forget the fact that recounts can be tampered with as well. There will be more scrutiny for sure, but everyone who wants to cheat in order to help their side from all around the country can now converge on the few elections they know are close enough for them to make a difference on. There's really no guarantee the recount will be more accurate than the original.
I'm no expert on US law, much less Australian, but I believe that if someone doesn't answer their door when the police knock to give a restraining order, there's nothing they can do. With an arrest warrant, they could force their way into the building. I know I never answer my door unless I'm expecting someone. Too many solicitors/Jehova's Witnesses to bother with that.
To be fair, the summary says that "the dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead." So the argument wouldn't have anything to do with how good the OS is, or how well it works for you. It comes down entirely to what it's chances are of taking a significant share of the desktop OS market.
It can vary from rural area to rural area, I guess. I spent my four years of high school life living in a rural area in Western NY. Cost of living was far lower than the Central NJ area I'm in now. When I moved, I immediately noticed that food was literally about twice as expensive on average. Granted, part of that may simply be having no discount grocery stores like Aldi or Save-a-Lot. By parents boast about how they're still paying $1.49 for a gallon of milk as an example. There's also so many farmers in the area that getting vegetables from a roadside stand is always cheap at the very least.
Gas wasn't particularly cheap, but housing is where the huge savings are. My parents built a large house on 41 acres of land back in 1997. Even putting in the driveway, digging the well, connecting power and everything else that entails getting a house up and running cost less than $100,000. Where I'm living now, even after the housing crash, a small one bedroom place that's halfway decent with barely a yard to speak of is going to cost more than twice that. Figure in interest on the mortgage and lower property taxes and that's a huge cost difference right there.
More than fifteen minute drive to town just to buy anything, what I found the worst about rural living was the internet. Even today my parents have the choice of satellite with very high latency, 3G with a 5GB monthly cap, or... dail-up. They can't even get DSL, and certainly not cable or fiber. I don't really want to go back to rural living, but I admit that I'd have far more disposable incoming without my $1100 a month rent (utilities not included.)
I'm confused both by why you feel inflation is a terrible metric and why you feel the minimum wage would be a better metric. According to a department of labor page I pulled up here, in 2009 only 3% of workers aged 25 or up made at or below the minimum wage. So you've got a number that's only important to a very small percentage of adult workers that's supposed to someone be more important then inflation, which effects everyone?
I could see arguing about which inflation metric to use, ie core inflation rather than the overall inflation rate. However, I think minimum wage is far less valuable to compare prices between time periods than inflation.
Perhaps for some people you could be right. However, I used to argue with people that there was no benefit to using actual swear words. That one could simply replace them with euphemisms, nonsense words, or just screaming Kahn. Then one would never need to worry about accidentally dropping a swear word during a job interview, or around someone's kids, either of which could have serious social and/or professional repercussions.
However, every time I made that point, it was argued that it was the very edginess of the words that made them cathartic. It's not that they're being said to shock people, but just the knowledge that they're considered somewhat less than polite is what gives them their effect. With enough people giving me the same argument, I was eventually forced to admit there was something to it.
That being the case, for those people at least my initial claim stands. They depend on the very people they say they despise to get the benefits of the words they're defending. Or they were just making stuff up because they didn't like admitting there was no real logical reason for their use of swear words.
You have to remember that curse words are only attractive because there are people who find them offensive. If nobody blinked an eye no matter what word you used or where it was used, curse words would lose their cathartic value.
The question of which group is pirated more isn't very relevant to my point. What is relevant is which group sells more copies, and there is strong evidence that belongs to the consoles. Now I'm not going to claim that's solely because it's harder to pirate, but I do consider it a factor
Let's look at it from a slightly different angle. There are currently people who choose to purchase a game rather than simply pirate it. It doesn't matter if only 8% of people are afraid of getting sued and 15% find the process of piracy too much effort (numbers made up obviously.) Even with some overlap, those can add up to become a sizable and steady sources of revenue if nurtured.
So now we need to look at which sources of revenue would remain if we remove those factors. I can think of two: people who don't pirate because they feel it's morally wrong and people who are willing to spend money to support the developers.
Now, if even 1 in 5 sales fall into the first group rather than the second, then in a DRM/lawsuit free environment, where everyone can get a pirated copy as easily as a real one, there would be a major gaming contraction. Try to find any industry that doesn't consider a 20% drop in revenue to be a catastrophe if you disagree. And with my opinion of humanity, I think the number would be much higher than 1 in 5.
What alternate universe did you come from? Pirating software is and always has been easy and virtually risk free.
First off, it's not about how easy and safe it actually is, it's about the public perception of how easy and safe it is. Look at how many people are afraid of flying in an airplane despite how statistically safe they are.
That's the main purpose of the lawsuits. Worry as many people as you can just enough that they'll decide it's not worth the risk over $60.
As for ease of piracy, you're still looking at it from a PC point of view. On consoles it's often been much more difficult. Installing special mod chips, or constantly updating to the newest special firmware so you can still connect online to beat the latest fix. Then there's all the people who get online accounts banned and such.
Even with the PC market, there are many people that still that still have very small monthly bandwidth caps and/or slow download speeds. Not having the option to simply download games makes getting a pirated copy more inconvenient. Then there's the whole 'you'll get viruses when you pirate games' to scare people. Granted, that's not entirely related, but if servers weren't ever getting raided by governments you'd find more well publicized sites with a good reputation.
I'll take your word for it. You may not believe this, but I've never downloaded music legally or otherwise. I just don't listen to it.
Music has the lowest percieved value, smallest file size, and lowest barrier to entry. It's the most likely to be pirated, not the least. Note that Napster was created for sharing music, not for piracy of games, porn, etc.
The question isn't which would be pirated the most, but which would be most likely to be profitable despite piracy. The theory being that far more people will spend a couple dollars here and there to help the musician than $60 at once to help the developers.
The reason to ditch DRM is every copy of software they sell requires a staff of people to keep unlocking and troubleshooting it after the purchase. Instead of a one-time sale, now they can watch the individual profits of their games slowly get eaten away over the years. They're also increasing the value of piracy but not effectively stopping it. Go look up what happened to Spore just before it launched.
Being overly draconian with DRM can certainly hurt sales. Making a point of releasing a game DRM free can also be used as a gimmick to get the anti DRM crowd to show their support. But if there was no DRM and no lawsuits against pirates, they'd all be on even ground in that regard.
In such a case, I don't think nearly enough people would choose to spend money on the game to support the number and quality of games being made now. We'd see a major contraction in the number of games, an increase of in game ads, and more developers switching to smaller simpler titles they can sell cheaply.
I'd like to point out that in all three of those markets DRM is alive and well and people have been sued for pirating them. That said, music is a different market, and I think it would have a much better chance of surviving DRM free because of the low cost per song. Even if people do end up paying more on music overall, they're more likely to pay a couple dollars each time for a song than drop 60 on a game.
As for the PC market, I admit it's much easier to pirate PC games than console games. However, considering the differing states of the two markets, that might not be the best sales pitch for ditching DRM.
I'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons beyond pirating games to mod a system. Nor that no one would ever buy a game if the could get it for free. I'm just considering what would happen if anyone could go online and download and play whatever game they wanted for free without any fear of being sued or criminally charge.
I don't believe the market could support anywhere near the number and quality of games it currently does under that business model.
I don't know the technical details of this particular hack and how easy it will be for hackers to get around the patch. However, even if they're unable to stop the pirates for long, the money may not be as wasted as it initially seems. Imagine if it actually were as many people here would like. No DRM was ever put on games, and no one was ever prosecuted for piracy, or even running servers to distribute pirated material.
Once it got into the public perception that pirating games was easy and virtually risk free, I think you'd see a whole new floodgate open that really would destroy the gaming market. You'd get many people who formerly bought games deciding they can save some money by just pirating everything. Then, as piracy becomes more and more commonplace, even many of those who firmly believe it's wrong will start to grow bitter.
Knowing they're continuing to spend money trying to support the game makers only to see nearly everyone they know just grabbing the titles for free. Then watching as company of company struggling just to keep afloat despite making critically acclaimed games that are being played by millions. Many of them will decide it's just not worth it anymore and decide to save their money before the inevitable crash.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't think humanity is selfless enough to support a thriving software market on the honor system. I suppose it's possible games could survive in some form as interactive ads that endlessly try to market products to you, but not much beyond that. DRM may always doomed to failure, and lawsuits seem excessive and overly heartless. Even so, I believe the fear of getting in trouble and the effort of getting around DRM provides benefit to the companies that practice them that goes beyond the cost of their implementation.
I obviously don't know whether I'd have any serious issues with alcohol. However, my life is going pretty smoothly. I'm not stressed out and I'm pretty content with where things are. So it comes down to, if it's not broke, why fix it? Even if the vast majority can drink sensibly, there is the minority whose lives it does ruin. It just doesn't seem to be worth the risk to me. Not to mention that it saves a lot of money and I've always been a very frugal person.
As for self control, it's much easier to say 'no, never' than it is to say 'okay, but in moderation.' So there's no guarantee I'd be able to handle the latter.
I agree with you that it would likely be a pretty rare event, but the effect on life expectancy can be much greater. I didn't see any actual life expectancy numbers in the article so I'll just make some up for an example. Imagine heavy drinkers have a life expectancy of 80 and non drinkers 79.
Now picture a drunk driver causing an accident that kills a young couple, 25 years of age each and their two small children, 1 and 2 years old. That single accident would have a total 263 years of reduced life expectancy. So that single accident wiped out the gains of 263 heavy drinkers who weren't responsible for any deaths. Granted it could still end up being just a small sliver of the difference. I don't even know for certain that teetotalers aren't more likely to go postal and kill a bunch of people ending up worse in the category as well.
All I really know is that I'm content with my life. So why risk ruining it with alcohol?
I wonder what the numbers would be like if they factored in deaths caused in accidents and fights by heavy drinkers, moderate drinkers and teetotalers. Consider the person's own life expectancy and the subtract the average number of years they'll cut short other peoples' lives.
I have no problem with other people drinking (as long as they aren't driving under the influence) but I've never even tried an alcoholic beverage myself for exactly that reason. I don't care what it does for my own life expectancy, I'm much more concerned I'd do something incredibly stupid under the influence and ruin my life. If you can handle your alcohol and behave responsibly even when drinking, more power to you. I, however, am not going to gamble over how I'll behave when my judgment is impaired.
Yeah, potentially interesting, but I leave gmail open in a tab virtually all the time and check emails as they come in. So I don't know if it really has much benefit to me. Could be useful when I take extended trips where I don't have email access in helping the important emails catch my eye. But seeing as I honestly can't even remember the last time I've gone a full week without checking my email, I really doubt this is going to be all that helpful.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, well, I managed to find the old article that gave me the impression of what I said, and this is the relevant text:
In 1996, Congress tried to address a wave of tax-driven expatriation by the wealthy by requiring former citizens to file tax returns for a decade and forbidding Americans who renounced their passports for tax reasons from visiting the United States.
The article does go on to say that it's not generally enforced, and it doesn't bother to link to, or even name the law they're basing this on, so it could simply be inaccurate. However, it is from the NY Times, so I'd like to hope they'd done a little fact checking.
By default sales taxes are regressive, but they can be manipulated to be so to a lesser degree. It was already mentioned that food, basic clothing, etc can be make exempt, so the poor would pay next to nothing. You can also have higher rates for luxury items. If you haven't guessed already, I'm also a fan of replacing income taxes with a National sales tax. It's easier to enforce at retail locations than for every individual, so fewer people are able to evade taxes. There are also fewer loopholes to legally pay less than you really should be.
Don't forget too that money in a savings account/investment fund is being put to use, generating revenue that will be taxed. The largest benefit of a national sales tax, however, is making domestic businesses more competitive. Income taxes add to the cost of domestic goods, but not foreign goods. Sales tax adds to both evenly. So domestic goods become cheaper compared to foreign alternatives, both domestically and when sold abroad. This is a huge benefit to businesses that would help businesses and create jobs. At least until every country makes the same change. But I'd rather be on the front end of that shift than pulling up the rear.
Correct. Also, as an added note, there's a law stating that if you give up your US citizenship just to get out of this tax, you're banned from ever entering the US again. Of course everyone will give another reason for why they're giving it up, but that's a very harsh punishment if the courts don't buy it.
I admit I'm impressed if you actually make that work in the UK. If it does work just like that for you, then sure, no reason to change it. Sadly, experience has shown it's not nearly so well done in the US. Good luck getting thousands of people to watch the count on TV. I bet a number of you remember the story of that small US town where no one actually voted in the election, including the candidates themselves.
Also, recounts can and do go on for weeks after the election in the US, especially for statewide and presidential elections. And we cases where the number of ballots were significantly off from the number of people who signed in as having voted when recounts were done.
For small, local elections, you're correct that paper ballots will be more secure. However, I still believe that for large elections with 10s of millions of people voting in many different locations, it'd be too easy for someone to find the few weak areas where security isn't very tight to mess with the election. I just happen to like the idea of having to lock down a single device, and make sure it can't be tampered with. You can then mass produce it. I think that sounds easier than having to guarantee the security of every single voting location in the nation. Because if you miss even one, it can change the election.
Granted, and with the current state of electronic voting, I'd much prefer physical votes. However, I don't believe that just because it's harder means we should give up on the idea. Voting is important enough that we should continue to strive toward the best possible system of handling it. As I've already said, I think we could really get something good in just a few short years if we really invested in it.
Obviously there's no method for voting on the scales we see where you can guarantee the results are accurate. The benefits of electronic voting are that it can be cheaper and faster with near instant results and no recounts. I also believe that with enough work an electronic system can end up being harder to tamper with than a paper one. I mentioned that in a little more detail elsewhere in this thread.
And all the boxes are under watch by representatives of all parties 24/7 throughout the recount process? And none of them could have possibly missed a person dropping two ballots into the box, having brought one that was already filled in with them?
And you're certain every box was checked in advance to make sure it didn't come with some votes already in it? And you're positive that in no location anywhere in the country did someone manage to distract the polling workers long enough to add/swap a box? And even if such an act was caught on camera, you can guarantee that all the film from every station was watched even if there wasn't any indication of tampering?
My point is that there's plenty of opportunity for tampering even with physical copies. I'd much prefer a system of open source electronic machines locked down with layers of security. Copies of the physical machines would be made available year round with people encouraged to try to tamper with them without it being detected.
I'm pretty confident that with a few years of hard work, we could get electronic machines that made it harder to effect the result of an election than if paper ballots were used.
If you feel that way, could you explain to me what benefit a paper vote actually has? You can confirm your vote was recorded correctly when you drop it into a box, but how do you know that box doesn't get swapped out? Or that another stuffed box doesn't get set right next to it? I don't see the benefit in knowing it's accurate when you voted if you don't know whether or not it's accurate when it's counted.
I strongly support open source for electronic voting systems; what gets me is the cry for a paper trail. Unless they have some way to identify who voted for whom on the paper trail (something I strongly oppose) it's just as subject to tampering as a computer run tally, possibly more so. Obviously you don't want the voting machines networked in any way to make it harder to significantly alter the outcome.
However, I would actually consider the inability to have a recount a positive. It saves money for the taxpayer and reduces confusion and legal challenges after the election. People also seem to forget the fact that recounts can be tampered with as well. There will be more scrutiny for sure, but everyone who wants to cheat in order to help their side from all around the country can now converge on the few elections they know are close enough for them to make a difference on. There's really no guarantee the recount will be more accurate than the original.
I'm no expert on US law, much less Australian, but I believe that if someone doesn't answer their door when the police knock to give a restraining order, there's nothing they can do. With an arrest warrant, they could force their way into the building. I know I never answer my door unless I'm expecting someone. Too many solicitors/Jehova's Witnesses to bother with that.
To be fair, the summary says that "the dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead." So the argument wouldn't have anything to do with how good the OS is, or how well it works for you. It comes down entirely to what it's chances are of taking a significant share of the desktop OS market.
It can vary from rural area to rural area, I guess. I spent my four years of high school life living in a rural area in Western NY. Cost of living was far lower than the Central NJ area I'm in now. When I moved, I immediately noticed that food was literally about twice as expensive on average. Granted, part of that may simply be having no discount grocery stores like Aldi or Save-a-Lot. By parents boast about how they're still paying $1.49 for a gallon of milk as an example. There's also so many farmers in the area that getting vegetables from a roadside stand is always cheap at the very least.
Gas wasn't particularly cheap, but housing is where the huge savings are. My parents built a large house on 41 acres of land back in 1997. Even putting in the driveway, digging the well, connecting power and everything else that entails getting a house up and running cost less than $100,000. Where I'm living now, even after the housing crash, a small one bedroom place that's halfway decent with barely a yard to speak of is going to cost more than twice that. Figure in interest on the mortgage and lower property taxes and that's a huge cost difference right there.
More than fifteen minute drive to town just to buy anything, what I found the worst about rural living was the internet. Even today my parents have the choice of satellite with very high latency, 3G with a 5GB monthly cap, or ... dail-up. They can't even get DSL, and certainly not cable or fiber. I don't really want to go back to rural living, but I admit that I'd have far more disposable incoming without my $1100 a month rent (utilities not included.)
I'm confused both by why you feel inflation is a terrible metric and why you feel the minimum wage would be a better metric. According to a department of labor page I pulled up here, in 2009 only 3% of workers aged 25 or up made at or below the minimum wage. So you've got a number that's only important to a very small percentage of adult workers that's supposed to someone be more important then inflation, which effects everyone?
I could see arguing about which inflation metric to use, ie core inflation rather than the overall inflation rate. However, I think minimum wage is far less valuable to compare prices between time periods than inflation.
Perhaps for some people you could be right. However, I used to argue with people that there was no benefit to using actual swear words. That one could simply replace them with euphemisms, nonsense words, or just screaming Kahn. Then one would never need to worry about accidentally dropping a swear word during a job interview, or around someone's kids, either of which could have serious social and/or professional repercussions.
However, every time I made that point, it was argued that it was the very edginess of the words that made them cathartic. It's not that they're being said to shock people, but just the knowledge that they're considered somewhat less than polite is what gives them their effect. With enough people giving me the same argument, I was eventually forced to admit there was something to it.
That being the case, for those people at least my initial claim stands. They depend on the very people they say they despise to get the benefits of the words they're defending. Or they were just making stuff up because they didn't like admitting there was no real logical reason for their use of swear words.
You have to remember that curse words are only attractive because there are people who find them offensive. If nobody blinked an eye no matter what word you used or where it was used, curse words would lose their cathartic value.
The question of which group is pirated more isn't very relevant to my point. What is relevant is which group sells more copies, and there is strong evidence that belongs to the consoles. Now I'm not going to claim that's solely because it's harder to pirate, but I do consider it a factor
Let's look at it from a slightly different angle. There are currently people who choose to purchase a game rather than simply pirate it. It doesn't matter if only 8% of people are afraid of getting sued and 15% find the process of piracy too much effort (numbers made up obviously.) Even with some overlap, those can add up to become a sizable and steady sources of revenue if nurtured.
So now we need to look at which sources of revenue would remain if we remove those factors. I can think of two: people who don't pirate because they feel it's morally wrong and people who are willing to spend money to support the developers.
Now, if even 1 in 5 sales fall into the first group rather than the second, then in a DRM/lawsuit free environment, where everyone can get a pirated copy as easily as a real one, there would be a major gaming contraction. Try to find any industry that doesn't consider a 20% drop in revenue to be a catastrophe if you disagree. And with my opinion of humanity, I think the number would be much higher than 1 in 5.
ROFL
What alternate universe did you come from? Pirating software is and always has been easy and virtually risk free.
First off, it's not about how easy and safe it actually is, it's about the public perception of how easy and safe it is. Look at how many people are afraid of flying in an airplane despite how statistically safe they are.
That's the main purpose of the lawsuits. Worry as many people as you can just enough that they'll decide it's not worth the risk over $60.
As for ease of piracy, you're still looking at it from a PC point of view. On consoles it's often been much more difficult. Installing special mod chips, or constantly updating to the newest special firmware so you can still connect online to beat the latest fix. Then there's all the people who get online accounts banned and such.
Even with the PC market, there are many people that still that still have very small monthly bandwidth caps and/or slow download speeds. Not having the option to simply download games makes getting a pirated copy more inconvenient. Then there's the whole 'you'll get viruses when you pirate games' to scare people. Granted, that's not entirely related, but if servers weren't ever getting raided by governments you'd find more well publicized sites with a good reputation.
The music industry gave up on DRM yonks ago.
I'll take your word for it. You may not believe this, but I've never downloaded music legally or otherwise. I just don't listen to it.
Music has the lowest percieved value, smallest file size, and lowest barrier to entry. It's the most likely to be pirated, not the least. Note that Napster was created for sharing music, not for piracy of games, porn, etc.
The question isn't which would be pirated the most, but which would be most likely to be profitable despite piracy. The theory being that far more people will spend a couple dollars here and there to help the musician than $60 at once to help the developers.
The reason to ditch DRM is every copy of software they sell requires a staff of people to keep unlocking and troubleshooting it after the purchase. Instead of a one-time sale, now they can watch the individual profits of their games slowly get eaten away over the years. They're also increasing the value of piracy but not effectively stopping it. Go look up what happened to Spore just before it launched.
Being overly draconian with DRM can certainly hurt sales. Making a point of releasing a game DRM free can also be used as a gimmick to get the anti DRM crowd to show their support. But if there was no DRM and no lawsuits against pirates, they'd all be on even ground in that regard.
In such a case, I don't think nearly enough people would choose to spend money on the game to support the number and quality of games being made now. We'd see a major contraction in the number of games, an increase of in game ads, and more developers switching to smaller simpler titles they can sell cheaply.
I'd like to point out that in all three of those markets DRM is alive and well and people have been sued for pirating them. That said, music is a different market, and I think it would have a much better chance of surviving DRM free because of the low cost per song. Even if people do end up paying more on music overall, they're more likely to pay a couple dollars each time for a song than drop 60 on a game.
As for the PC market, I admit it's much easier to pirate PC games than console games. However, considering the differing states of the two markets, that might not be the best sales pitch for ditching DRM.
I'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons beyond pirating games to mod a system. Nor that no one would ever buy a game if the could get it for free. I'm just considering what would happen if anyone could go online and download and play whatever game they wanted for free without any fear of being sued or criminally charge.
I don't believe the market could support anywhere near the number and quality of games it currently does under that business model.
I don't know the technical details of this particular hack and how easy it will be for hackers to get around the patch. However, even if they're unable to stop the pirates for long, the money may not be as wasted as it initially seems. Imagine if it actually were as many people here would like. No DRM was ever put on games, and no one was ever prosecuted for piracy, or even running servers to distribute pirated material.
Once it got into the public perception that pirating games was easy and virtually risk free, I think you'd see a whole new floodgate open that really would destroy the gaming market. You'd get many people who formerly bought games deciding they can save some money by just pirating everything. Then, as piracy becomes more and more commonplace, even many of those who firmly believe it's wrong will start to grow bitter.
Knowing they're continuing to spend money trying to support the game makers only to see nearly everyone they know just grabbing the titles for free. Then watching as company of company struggling just to keep afloat despite making critically acclaimed games that are being played by millions. Many of them will decide it's just not worth it anymore and decide to save their money before the inevitable crash.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't think humanity is selfless enough to support a thriving software market on the honor system. I suppose it's possible games could survive in some form as interactive ads that endlessly try to market products to you, but not much beyond that. DRM may always doomed to failure, and lawsuits seem excessive and overly heartless. Even so, I believe the fear of getting in trouble and the effort of getting around DRM provides benefit to the companies that practice them that goes beyond the cost of their implementation.
I obviously don't know whether I'd have any serious issues with alcohol. However, my life is going pretty smoothly. I'm not stressed out and I'm pretty content with where things are. So it comes down to, if it's not broke, why fix it? Even if the vast majority can drink sensibly, there is the minority whose lives it does ruin. It just doesn't seem to be worth the risk to me. Not to mention that it saves a lot of money and I've always been a very frugal person.
As for self control, it's much easier to say 'no, never' than it is to say 'okay, but in moderation.' So there's no guarantee I'd be able to handle the latter.
I agree with you that it would likely be a pretty rare event, but the effect on life expectancy can be much greater. I didn't see any actual life expectancy numbers in the article so I'll just make some up for an example. Imagine heavy drinkers have a life expectancy of 80 and non drinkers 79.
Now picture a drunk driver causing an accident that kills a young couple, 25 years of age each and their two small children, 1 and 2 years old. That single accident would have a total 263 years of reduced life expectancy. So that single accident wiped out the gains of 263 heavy drinkers who weren't responsible for any deaths. Granted it could still end up being just a small sliver of the difference. I don't even know for certain that teetotalers aren't more likely to go postal and kill a bunch of people ending up worse in the category as well.
All I really know is that I'm content with my life. So why risk ruining it with alcohol?
I wonder what the numbers would be like if they factored in deaths caused in accidents and fights by heavy drinkers, moderate drinkers and teetotalers. Consider the person's own life expectancy and the subtract the average number of years they'll cut short other peoples' lives.
I have no problem with other people drinking (as long as they aren't driving under the influence) but I've never even tried an alcoholic beverage myself for exactly that reason. I don't care what it does for my own life expectancy, I'm much more concerned I'd do something incredibly stupid under the influence and ruin my life. If you can handle your alcohol and behave responsibly even when drinking, more power to you. I, however, am not going to gamble over how I'll behave when my judgment is impaired.
Yeah, potentially interesting, but I leave gmail open in a tab virtually all the time and check emails as they come in. So I don't know if it really has much benefit to me. Could be useful when I take extended trips where I don't have email access in helping the important emails catch my eye. But seeing as I honestly can't even remember the last time I've gone a full week without checking my email, I really doubt this is going to be all that helpful.