Let's be honest here: which 1st world country even wants U.S. citizens moving there? All of the people I know that routinely travel to Europe and Asia on vacation tell people they're Canadian now, because when they were honest and told them they were from the U.S. they were treated like absolute shit, made fun of, kicked out of pubs and restaurants, and generally just fucked with; not all the time, but often enough that it made them feel totally unwelcome even as tourists. Even people that they were engaged in pleasant conversation with would sometimes simply walk away once they found out they were from the states. Now that they tell them they're Canadian none of that happens anymore.
If you keep on electing the same morons who push controls on the internet for big corporate friend donors, then the only person you can blame is yourself.
If you lived here you would see the sheer numbers of completely ignorant people there are in this country that don't give a fuck about anything beyond what is happening on Keeping Up With the Kardashians
Far too many of our populace has become completely complacent. Throw some McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and NASCAR at them and nothing else in the whole goddamned world matters, so long as we're "fighting the terrorists".
Things will change, it is inevitable as this level of ignorance is unsustainable; unfortunately, this country is going to have to suffer a total economic collapse before people start opening their eyes. I wish it were not so, but there's been a real anti-intellectual bent in this country over the last 30 years or so, so there are just too many people that can't see beyond tomorrow or their own backyards. Hell, any attempt to upset the status quo is widely dismissed and mocked, go to CNN and read the comments on any article about an Occupy protest here in the states and you'll see for yourself what we're fighting against.
So you tell me, Non-American: what do we do? Start locking up stupid people? Require IQ tests to vote? How do we nullify the moron voter base? They don't want to hear reason, because they're trained by Talk Radio ideologues to distrust anyone that disagrees with them. So what's your solution? Because honestly, we could use one, and I would really like to find one that doesn't involve Hitler-esque eugenics programs...
Or it wasn't worth their effort to fight it after it was reinstated.
Then why do they yank them in the first place? To fuck with people? The DMCA take down notices are supposed to be filed in good faith when the rights holder has a reasonable belief that the content in question infringes on their intellectual property. If they did not have enough reasonable belief to defend the claim, or they're not interested in defending the claim, why the fuck are they allowed to make the claim and get the videos yanked in the first place?
It seems to me by choosing not to fight every single Fair Use counter-claim they are either demonstrating that the original claim was not made in good faith, or that the intellectual property is not worth their time to defend...and if that is the case, why the hell are we playing this game to begin with?
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily want UMG's lawyer brigade to come repelling through my windows because I used 30 seconds of a song clip in a home movie, but at the same time, I don't want them yanking my fucking videos down if they don't even care enough about their copyrights to have a human being checking the results in their content detection programs before they fire off another batch of DMCA takedown notices.
Re:Its a battle win, maybe not victory.
on
No SOPA Vote Until 2012
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I realize that recall is in the rules, but you guys have to be the sorest losers ever.
Says the guy stumping for the party that less than a year ago was screaming "The people have spoken! The people have spoken!!" then, 8 months after "dropping the bomb", falls all over itself trying to prevent the people from exercising their right to recall their elected reps. They shot their wad and figured that the opposition would just piss and moan and sit on their hands; now that they're using the system to push back, now all of a sudden we need to start playing all sorts of games with voter ID, try to force the recalls to happen in the newly created districts that don't even legally take effect until November 2012, invoke a law that hasn't been used in a century to legally place their own operatives in the polls as part of their "strategy" (gee, I wonder why that could be?), pushing to try and declare it illegal to sign a recall petition more than once (which people were almost forced to do by all the Tea Party idiots screaming on Facebook about how they were going to collect signatures and shred them later, ha ha ha, oops, that's a felony?!). Talk about sore losers, we're not sitting here trying to change the rules when we're losing the game like a bunch of spoiled brats.
And a voter-ID law--what? students don't carry school photo IDs and/or driver's licenses? You can't cash a check or board a plane without ID, but a voter-ID law is "disenfranchisement"?
Uh, school photo ID's weren't acceptable until the UW jumped through a lot of strategically placed hoops to have their ID's recognized at a cost of $700,000 to the state. Tech school ID's are still not allowed because "tech school students typically commute to school" or some bullshit reason. But in order to qualify, the ID must have the student's signature and expire within two years of the date of issuance. Within two years? My driver's license, which is an acceptable form of ID to vote, expires in 2018. So, please, explain to me why a school ID isn't good enough if it's more than 2 years old but my driver's license, which still has my address on it from like 4 apartments ago, is?
And you don't explain how the elderly are being kept from voting. They can always get IDs if they need them.
Simple: Elderly people are less likely to be driving, and thus are far more likely to have an expired ID card. How many people in nursing homes do you think are concerned with running down to the DMV when their license, which they haven't used in years, is expired? And how the hell do they get down there to renew it? What if they're bedridden, or don't have anyone to drive them down there? They just don't get to vote anymore? And yes, expired ID's are allowed to vote via absentee ballot, but the ID must be dated no later than the last election, November 2010 in this case. They must also be photocopied and mailed in ahead of time. I mean, everyone has a photocopier in their home, especially the elderly, amirite?
Obama and the lousy National economy are as much to blame...
You think I'm cheering for Obama? I don't give a fuck about him or any other Democrats, either. They're all equally corrupt, they're all on the take. But, unlike the typical partisan assholes flooding this state as of late, my absolute disgust with Scott Walker and the other Tea Party Republicans in our state legislature does not translate to an endorsement for their opponents. I don't want to just recall the Republicans, I want to recall everyone, again and again and again, until the special interests and lobbyists either run out of money or get tired of throwing it away on perpetual campaigns.
Exactly. If they weren't just yanking down whatever the fuck they wanted to with impunity then there would be no issue. There isn't even a human being involved in the process as it is used now, a computer program scans for matches, and if something hits, it's automatically pulled down, even when it is clearly Fair Use. They obviously are abusing their power to pull videos without considering whether it is legally infringing or not.
The burden is already on the users to assert their videos are indeed protected under the Fair Use clause. They're not checking the usage of their infringing material, their computers detect a pattern that matches something they own the rights to and automatically pulls the video, regardless. They are supposed to respect Fair Use, but they clearly do not. That is the abuse I'm referring to.
I have no problem with DMCA, but I have a big problem with the abuse of it. Like I said, every single video I have had taken down, a challenge on the grounds of Fair Use has resulted in the video getting reinstated. You think they're actually checking to see if the video they're yanking may be acceptable under Fair Use guidelines? Of course not, they yank first, and the onus is on the uploader to assert their rights. That's bullshit.
Why do they not respect Fair Use? Like I said, because they know that most people will just give up, or be scared away by the threat of a lawsuit present in the Fair Use challenge on Youtube. They're abusing the process.
Not nearly enough to prevent abuse, though. There needs to be a financial penalty for obviously illegitimate DMCA claims. Fair Use seems not to mean a damn thing to them...
UMG had admin privileges and was able to take videos down on it's own, Youtube gave them this ability in order to keep from getting hit with thousands of lawsuits. Of course, Youtube expected UMG to act in good faith with this power, and it is no clear that they have not. Hopefully, Youtube will be rescinding their privileges now that we see they can't be trusted with them...
I don't know, I've heard more non-techy people in my circle talking about stuff like SOPA and this Megaupload shit than I ever heard before. People generally don't care about these things because they don't know it's happening in the first place, which is why it is important for those of us that do know to keep people informed.
This shit is why there should be penalties for abuse. These guys routinely do whatever the fuck they want regardless of Fair Use or any other rights the people have. I have seen this myself as every single video I have uploaded that had a DMCA claim made, when I challenged it, the videos were reinstated within a day or two. They know the claims are bullshit, but they're banking on the fact that people won't assert their rights.
Start hitting them with damages when they file these erroneous claims and watch how fast that shit stops....
Re:Its a battle win, maybe not victory.
on
No SOPA Vote Until 2012
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
And then, when the people start to band together and unite to recall the governor and the rest of the filth following the rules of recall here in Wisconsin, well hell, let's just change the rules! Let's redraw the districts to be totally favorable to the Republican party and then sue to try and force the recalls to happen following the new districts! And if that doesn't disenfranchise enough people, let's pass a voter-ID law so that students can't vote (they're all dirty socialists anyway, amirite?) and not only that, but the elderly, gotta keep them from voting, too, since they're furious at Paul Ryan and the Republican plan to destroy Medicare. That laser focus on jobs, meanwhile Wisconsin has lost jobs for the last 5 months, Scott Walker says "no thanks" to a billion dollars in Federal Aid to beef up our rail infrastructure prompting that money to go to California instead (Here's an op-ed from the L.A. Times rubbing it in.)
Living here in Wisconsin for the last 10 years, I never expected the depths to which politics would sink here in this state. Scott "dropped the bomb" all right, they're on a scorched-earth campaign. If there is civil war in this country, I fully expect Wisconsin will be where the opening shots ring out. Everyone is at each other's throats now.
At least the Canadian border is close by. If the shit truly hits the fan, I'm throwing the family in the car, running north, and claiming refugee status.
Yeah, alas, not all of us can upgrade from our still working computers to newer ones just for the sake of gaming.
Hell, how many PC games nowadays are just shitty console ports in the first place?
I haven't played a game that really taxes a system since the original Crysis, and my circa-2008 Q6600 gaming rig with a couple Radeon 4670's in it has been able to play anything that's come out at perfectly reasonable medium/high settings to this day.
The era of needing to upgrade every 6 months to play new computer games is dead, and it's been dead for a while now.
I haven't had a "wipe/reinstall" issue with my Windows PCs since probably '02 or '03...
That's not to say that I haven't done a full wipe/reinstall of my own volition in the intervening years...but it hasn't been due to a serious issue since soon after XP came out.
The whole "Windows is so broken you have to reinstall it every 3 months because ZOMG VIRUSSESSSS AND SPYYYYYYWARE" meme is getting retarded at this point. I use a ton of cracked and hacked shit on my Windows 7 system and I haven't had a problem yet. I really don't know what all the people that are having these problems are doing (if they aren't just full of crap in the first place). I suspect it is mostly PEBKAC errors.
Ubiquity of technology empowers protest movements just as much as it empowers government, creating a public accountability that wasn't there previously and enabling a transfer of information beyond government restrictions.
Which is why they're putting the legal mechanisms in place to shut down this technology at a moment's notice. The "internet kill switch" is just one facet of this, but there are other developments (National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012, for instance) that are related to shutting down protests and silencing dissension right here in the U.S.. There are reports that our armed forces are being trained to handle domestic civil unrest situations currently, as well.
Plus with the work that government contractors have been caught doing in the way of astroturfing, I seriously wonder if the technology will remain clean enough to function. I wouldn't put it past the government to put people to work obstructing the flow of information. There's been plenty of comments I've seen on Occupy articles (particularly on CNN) that are almost too antagonistic, reposted over and over every time it gets bumped off the first page, coupled with scores of other similar comments by people using handles like "John126421" and "BearsFan583".
Google will censor search results if the government tells them to, just like any other company with a presence here in the U.S., the ISPs will cut service, the phone companies will turn off the towers. It hasn't gotten to that point yet but it will if unrest gets to the point of Arab Spring here. There is so much back scratching going on between these telecoms and the government that there's no way that the people can be sure that they will maintain the ability to communicate on their infrastructure. Short of putting our own networks in (which won't happen without massive collaboration, not to mention a lot of money) I'm thinking that we're not going to have these avenues when we really need them, so we'd better come up with some lo-tech alternatives.
The vast majority of customers will be downloading directly. This allows the same systems to be used for everyone without requiring the high speed connections that are only available in metropolitan areas in the U.S.
Walmart would be all over it, provided they got their cut; they don't have to pay someone to open the glass case anymore, no more physical copies of games to inventory, no more waste in the form of unsold copies, the DLC can be pushed with the original game image and thus allow even people without a web connection at all to buy the map packs and everything else. No more making jewel cases, no more printing instruction books...
Hell, depending on the area, Walmart wouldn't even need to touch the machines at all, the local Microsoft rep can do it. All they need to provide is a power outlet and a web connection.
So what? You can rip and burn 360 games now; the internet is full of pirated images. You still need to modify your Xbox 360 to play them, which will still result in a ban of your gamertag if you're caught, which in itself is a huge deterrent to many people. Honestly, all of the people I know that do pirate 360 games actually bought two consoles, one for the pirated games that never gets hooked up to the internet, and one that is legit.
The existing methods of copy protection will work just fine. They're never going to stamp out piracy, not until every game dials home and checks that it is legit every time you load it up, and until every single person in this country has internet, that's not going to be a viable solution in a console...not if they want to be able to capture every sale they can, which I'm sure they do.
Eventually these developers are going to have to realize that piracy is never going to go away as long as the customers have access to the code, so until they figure out a way to viably stream the code from a server (which I'm sure is going to be the way we do things in the future, provided the ISP's don't start really clamping down on bandwidth) their best option is the standard encryption/detection methods and hope for the best, in my admittedly layman's opinion.
So put the bandwidth burden on retailers. Dump the discs, go to a flash drive like system, and put kiosks in every Walmart across the country. Stock the machine with a large hard drive full of the game images and a shit ton of blank flash drives, customer goes in, swipes credit card (or enters their XBL information), kiosk dumps the image on a flash drive, prints a label for it, shits it out the slot on the bottom, and there you go.
Walmart wouldn't object to the system provided they got their cut, it would eliminate needing any shelf space for physical copies, no more shipping and receiving games so that saves them a ton of the associated costs, no more games getting RMA'd after they sit and rot on the shelf for months, and because the game images are stored locally on a hard drive, the customer can have a game printed in seconds. Certainly faster than waiting for the surly neckbeard covering electronics that day to lumber over to you and unlock the case where the games are stored now.
Plus the ability to purchase any game, not just the 25 most popular ones, would increase revenues as well with hardly any overhead.
Slashdot Mirror
It appears that in US politics, appearing intelligent is bad for one's career.
Well, of course! After all, getting educated is a sign of liberal indoctrination!
Let's be honest here: which 1st world country even wants U.S. citizens moving there? All of the people I know that routinely travel to Europe and Asia on vacation tell people they're Canadian now, because when they were honest and told them they were from the U.S. they were treated like absolute shit, made fun of, kicked out of pubs and restaurants, and generally just fucked with; not all the time, but often enough that it made them feel totally unwelcome even as tourists. Even people that they were engaged in pleasant conversation with would sometimes simply walk away once they found out they were from the states. Now that they tell them they're Canadian none of that happens anymore.
The "ignorant, brutish American" stereotype has spread across the entire globe, and I can't necessarily even argue against it; the only things many people around the world know about us are totally negative. For every thoughtful, reasonable American citizen there are 10 mouth-breathing retards comparing Islam to Nazism, cheering the deaths of the uninsured and booing one of our own soldiers because he is gay.
In other countries, it seems. Maybe we can import some? May as well offshore our political candidates along with everything else, amirite?
If you keep on electing the same morons who push controls on the internet for big corporate friend donors, then the only person you can blame is yourself.
If you lived here you would see the sheer numbers of completely ignorant people there are in this country that don't give a fuck about anything beyond what is happening on Keeping Up With the Kardashians
Far too many of our populace has become completely complacent. Throw some McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and NASCAR at them and nothing else in the whole goddamned world matters, so long as we're "fighting the terrorists".
Things will change, it is inevitable as this level of ignorance is unsustainable; unfortunately, this country is going to have to suffer a total economic collapse before people start opening their eyes. I wish it were not so, but there's been a real anti-intellectual bent in this country over the last 30 years or so, so there are just too many people that can't see beyond tomorrow or their own backyards. Hell, any attempt to upset the status quo is widely dismissed and mocked, go to CNN and read the comments on any article about an Occupy protest here in the states and you'll see for yourself what we're fighting against.
So you tell me, Non-American: what do we do? Start locking up stupid people? Require IQ tests to vote? How do we nullify the moron voter base? They don't want to hear reason, because they're trained by Talk Radio ideologues to distrust anyone that disagrees with them. So what's your solution? Because honestly, we could use one, and I would really like to find one that doesn't involve Hitler-esque eugenics programs...
If it is "user generated" why would anyone take it down?
Ask Universal Media Group, since they did just that less than a week ago.
Which representative isn't in someone's pocket? Good fucking luck finding one...
To be fair, I'd say that is about as reliable as the media, not necessarily more or less.
Or it wasn't worth their effort to fight it after it was reinstated.
Then why do they yank them in the first place? To fuck with people? The DMCA take down notices are supposed to be filed in good faith when the rights holder has a reasonable belief that the content in question infringes on their intellectual property. If they did not have enough reasonable belief to defend the claim, or they're not interested in defending the claim, why the fuck are they allowed to make the claim and get the videos yanked in the first place?
It seems to me by choosing not to fight every single Fair Use counter-claim they are either demonstrating that the original claim was not made in good faith, or that the intellectual property is not worth their time to defend...and if that is the case, why the hell are we playing this game to begin with?
Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily want UMG's lawyer brigade to come repelling through my windows because I used 30 seconds of a song clip in a home movie, but at the same time, I don't want them yanking my fucking videos down if they don't even care enough about their copyrights to have a human being checking the results in their content detection programs before they fire off another batch of DMCA takedown notices.
I realize that recall is in the rules, but you guys have to be the sorest losers ever.
Says the guy stumping for the party that less than a year ago was screaming "The people have spoken! The people have spoken!!" then, 8 months after "dropping the bomb", falls all over itself trying to prevent the people from exercising their right to recall their elected reps. They shot their wad and figured that the opposition would just piss and moan and sit on their hands; now that they're using the system to push back, now all of a sudden we need to start playing all sorts of games with voter ID, try to force the recalls to happen in the newly created districts that don't even legally take effect until November 2012, invoke a law that hasn't been used in a century to legally place their own operatives in the polls as part of their "strategy" (gee, I wonder why that could be?), pushing to try and declare it illegal to sign a recall petition more than once (which people were almost forced to do by all the Tea Party idiots screaming on Facebook about how they were going to collect signatures and shred them later, ha ha ha, oops, that's a felony?!). Talk about sore losers, we're not sitting here trying to change the rules when we're losing the game like a bunch of spoiled brats.
And a voter-ID law--what? students don't carry school photo IDs and/or driver's licenses? You can't cash a check or board a plane without ID, but a voter-ID law is "disenfranchisement"?
Uh, school photo ID's weren't acceptable until the UW jumped through a lot of strategically placed hoops to have their ID's recognized at a cost of $700,000 to the state. Tech school ID's are still not allowed because "tech school students typically commute to school" or some bullshit reason. But in order to qualify, the ID must have the student's signature and expire within two years of the date of issuance. Within two years? My driver's license, which is an acceptable form of ID to vote, expires in 2018. So, please, explain to me why a school ID isn't good enough if it's more than 2 years old but my driver's license, which still has my address on it from like 4 apartments ago, is?
And you don't explain how the elderly are being kept from voting. They can always get IDs if they need them.
Simple: Elderly people are less likely to be driving, and thus are far more likely to have an expired ID card. How many people in nursing homes do you think are concerned with running down to the DMV when their license, which they haven't used in years, is expired? And how the hell do they get down there to renew it? What if they're bedridden, or don't have anyone to drive them down there? They just don't get to vote anymore? And yes, expired ID's are allowed to vote via absentee ballot, but the ID must be dated no later than the last election, November 2010 in this case. They must also be photocopied and mailed in ahead of time. I mean, everyone has a photocopier in their home, especially the elderly, amirite?
Obama and the lousy National economy are as much to blame...
You think I'm cheering for Obama? I don't give a fuck about him or any other Democrats, either. They're all equally corrupt, they're all on the take. But, unlike the typical partisan assholes flooding this state as of late, my absolute disgust with Scott Walker and the other Tea Party Republicans in our state legislature does not translate to an endorsement for their opponents. I don't want to just recall the Republicans, I want to recall everyone, again and again and again, until the special interests and lobbyists either run out of money or get tired of throwing it away on perpetual campaigns.
Don't be one of those people, Anonymous Coward. R
Exactly. If they weren't just yanking down whatever the fuck they wanted to with impunity then there would be no issue. There isn't even a human being involved in the process as it is used now, a computer program scans for matches, and if something hits, it's automatically pulled down, even when it is clearly Fair Use. They obviously are abusing their power to pull videos without considering whether it is legally infringing or not.
The burden is already on the users to assert their videos are indeed protected under the Fair Use clause. They're not checking the usage of their infringing material, their computers detect a pattern that matches something they own the rights to and automatically pulls the video, regardless. They are supposed to respect Fair Use, but they clearly do not. That is the abuse I'm referring to.
I guess you could hire RIAA lawyers to calculate the damages for you.
Eleventy Trillion Dollars!!!
I have no problem with DMCA, but I have a big problem with the abuse of it. Like I said, every single video I have had taken down, a challenge on the grounds of Fair Use has resulted in the video getting reinstated. You think they're actually checking to see if the video they're yanking may be acceptable under Fair Use guidelines? Of course not, they yank first, and the onus is on the uploader to assert their rights. That's bullshit.
Why do they not respect Fair Use? Like I said, because they know that most people will just give up, or be scared away by the threat of a lawsuit present in the Fair Use challenge on Youtube. They're abusing the process.
It also puts liability against fake DMCA notices.
Not nearly enough to prevent abuse, though. There needs to be a financial penalty for obviously illegitimate DMCA claims. Fair Use seems not to mean a damn thing to them...
UMG had admin privileges and was able to take videos down on it's own, Youtube gave them this ability in order to keep from getting hit with thousands of lawsuits. Of course, Youtube expected UMG to act in good faith with this power, and it is no clear that they have not. Hopefully, Youtube will be rescinding their privileges now that we see they can't be trusted with them...
You're assuming that the laws apply to UMG. They pay good money to our representatives to ensure that they never do.
I don't know, I've heard more non-techy people in my circle talking about stuff like SOPA and this Megaupload shit than I ever heard before. People generally don't care about these things because they don't know it's happening in the first place, which is why it is important for those of us that do know to keep people informed.
This shit is why there should be penalties for abuse. These guys routinely do whatever the fuck they want regardless of Fair Use or any other rights the people have. I have seen this myself as every single video I have uploaded that had a DMCA claim made, when I challenged it, the videos were reinstated within a day or two. They know the claims are bullshit, but they're banking on the fact that people won't assert their rights.
Start hitting them with damages when they file these erroneous claims and watch how fast that shit stops....
And then, when the people start to band together and unite to recall the governor and the rest of the filth following the rules of recall here in Wisconsin, well hell, let's just change the rules! Let's redraw the districts to be totally favorable to the Republican party and then sue to try and force the recalls to happen following the new districts! And if that doesn't disenfranchise enough people, let's pass a voter-ID law so that students can't vote (they're all dirty socialists anyway, amirite?) and not only that, but the elderly, gotta keep them from voting, too, since they're furious at Paul Ryan and the Republican plan to destroy Medicare. That laser focus on jobs, meanwhile Wisconsin has lost jobs for the last 5 months, Scott Walker says "no thanks" to a billion dollars in Federal Aid to beef up our rail infrastructure prompting that money to go to California instead (Here's an op-ed from the L.A. Times rubbing it in.)
Living here in Wisconsin for the last 10 years, I never expected the depths to which politics would sink here in this state. Scott "dropped the bomb" all right, they're on a scorched-earth campaign. If there is civil war in this country, I fully expect Wisconsin will be where the opening shots ring out. Everyone is at each other's throats now.
At least the Canadian border is close by. If the shit truly hits the fan, I'm throwing the family in the car, running north, and claiming refugee status.
Yeah, alas, not all of us can upgrade from our still working computers to newer ones just for the sake of gaming.
Hell, how many PC games nowadays are just shitty console ports in the first place?
I haven't played a game that really taxes a system since the original Crysis, and my circa-2008 Q6600 gaming rig with a couple Radeon 4670's in it has been able to play anything that's come out at perfectly reasonable medium/high settings to this day.
The era of needing to upgrade every 6 months to play new computer games is dead, and it's been dead for a while now.
I haven't had a "wipe/reinstall" issue with my Windows PCs since probably '02 or '03...
That's not to say that I haven't done a full wipe/reinstall of my own volition in the intervening years...but it hasn't been due to a serious issue since soon after XP came out.
The whole "Windows is so broken you have to reinstall it every 3 months because ZOMG VIRUSSESSSS AND SPYYYYYYWARE" meme is getting retarded at this point. I use a ton of cracked and hacked shit on my Windows 7 system and I haven't had a problem yet. I really don't know what all the people that are having these problems are doing (if they aren't just full of crap in the first place). I suspect it is mostly PEBKAC errors.
Ubiquity of technology empowers protest movements just as much as it empowers government, creating a public accountability that wasn't there previously and enabling a transfer of information beyond government restrictions.
Which is why they're putting the legal mechanisms in place to shut down this technology at a moment's notice. The "internet kill switch" is just one facet of this, but there are other developments (National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012, for instance) that are related to shutting down protests and silencing dissension right here in the U.S.. There are reports that our armed forces are being trained to handle domestic civil unrest situations currently, as well.
Plus with the work that government contractors have been caught doing in the way of astroturfing, I seriously wonder if the technology will remain clean enough to function. I wouldn't put it past the government to put people to work obstructing the flow of information. There's been plenty of comments I've seen on Occupy articles (particularly on CNN) that are almost too antagonistic, reposted over and over every time it gets bumped off the first page, coupled with scores of other similar comments by people using handles like "John126421" and "BearsFan583".
Google will censor search results if the government tells them to, just like any other company with a presence here in the U.S., the ISPs will cut service, the phone companies will turn off the towers. It hasn't gotten to that point yet but it will if unrest gets to the point of Arab Spring here. There is so much back scratching going on between these telecoms and the government that there's no way that the people can be sure that they will maintain the ability to communicate on their infrastructure. Short of putting our own networks in (which won't happen without massive collaboration, not to mention a lot of money) I'm thinking that we're not going to have these avenues when we really need them, so we'd better come up with some lo-tech alternatives.
The vast majority of customers will be downloading directly. This allows the same systems to be used for everyone without requiring the high speed connections that are only available in metropolitan areas in the U.S.
Walmart would be all over it, provided they got their cut; they don't have to pay someone to open the glass case anymore, no more physical copies of games to inventory, no more waste in the form of unsold copies, the DLC can be pushed with the original game image and thus allow even people without a web connection at all to buy the map packs and everything else. No more making jewel cases, no more printing instruction books...
Hell, depending on the area, Walmart wouldn't even need to touch the machines at all, the local Microsoft rep can do it. All they need to provide is a power outlet and a web connection.
So what? You can rip and burn 360 games now; the internet is full of pirated images. You still need to modify your Xbox 360 to play them, which will still result in a ban of your gamertag if you're caught, which in itself is a huge deterrent to many people. Honestly, all of the people I know that do pirate 360 games actually bought two consoles, one for the pirated games that never gets hooked up to the internet, and one that is legit.
The existing methods of copy protection will work just fine. They're never going to stamp out piracy, not until every game dials home and checks that it is legit every time you load it up, and until every single person in this country has internet, that's not going to be a viable solution in a console...not if they want to be able to capture every sale they can, which I'm sure they do.
Eventually these developers are going to have to realize that piracy is never going to go away as long as the customers have access to the code, so until they figure out a way to viably stream the code from a server (which I'm sure is going to be the way we do things in the future, provided the ISP's don't start really clamping down on bandwidth) their best option is the standard encryption/detection methods and hope for the best, in my admittedly layman's opinion.
So put the bandwidth burden on retailers. Dump the discs, go to a flash drive like system, and put kiosks in every Walmart across the country. Stock the machine with a large hard drive full of the game images and a shit ton of blank flash drives, customer goes in, swipes credit card (or enters their XBL information), kiosk dumps the image on a flash drive, prints a label for it, shits it out the slot on the bottom, and there you go.
Walmart wouldn't object to the system provided they got their cut, it would eliminate needing any shelf space for physical copies, no more shipping and receiving games so that saves them a ton of the associated costs, no more games getting RMA'd after they sit and rot on the shelf for months, and because the game images are stored locally on a hard drive, the customer can have a game printed in seconds. Certainly faster than waiting for the surly neckbeard covering electronics that day to lumber over to you and unlock the case where the games are stored now.
Plus the ability to purchase any game, not just the 25 most popular ones, would increase revenues as well with hardly any overhead.