I don't listen to much radio, but this was the topic of a local morning call-in show on... Tuesday? I was happy that 4 of 5 thought it is an inane idea for one reason or another (or none given..), yet #5 still said she didn't care what the government does to protect us.
Or is the point here that Snyder put together a rebuttal of whatever quality?
My experience with attempting to view over-the-air digital signals begs to differ - there has been enough coughing and hacking (blockiness, miscoloring, audio missing video) and going completely to black in normal weather that the digital signals they've left us with are far from ideal.
The worst thing about the conversion is that there is no redundancy in the signal. No multi-cast, spread-spectrum, nothing useful for checking or comparing signals.
And that kind of broadcast is only useful over hard-wired, land-lines with guaranteed hardware in the middle. Which means paying a multi-conglomerate for permission to watch "over the air" signals.
Thanks, stupid government. I hope you learn next time!
For anyone writing a book review, please be specific: if you're referring to the publisher's or book's website, say so. Otherwise you confuse the issue by talking about non-existent pages in the book!
My own anecdote is that the DVD player is crap - I've found 3 DVDs that freeze the player and one so far that crashes the OS! How is that possible in a microkernel architecture?
Anecdotes I've heard include: an earlier MBP can rarely come out of sleep mode (sounds like Sony laptops), and one guy had major problems with external USB hard drives.
Doesn't sound that stable to me!
Statistically significant? Maybe not, but if it happens then it happens! Windows XP has been much more stable for me than those problems. But y'know I don't blame the OS for application problems. (DVD player came with the machine, so it is still Apple's fault, right?)
And the Apple computer management UI is for sh*t. They need a new organizational structure so something, *anything* is in a place that makes sense.
So from other people's numbers, does this mean AES-256 and AES-192 break in 2^110-ish while AES-128 breaks in 2^128? Are there similarly comparable numbers for PGP, GPG, and, well, everything else? I'm still trying to figure out the best algorithm to choose and these metrics could help. Or should they?
I've been in a similar boat for a while, and the solutions have varied a lot.
Many comments so far talk about getting exercise and sleep - which can help immensely depending on you and your situation. What they are really addressing is your energy level and where it is focused. If you love vacations, meaning if you enjoy them and you'd be able to forget (even briefly) about what you're doing while you're there, then a vacation might be a more effective energy reset. However I've had and seen the problem where people don't note down where they are and what they're doing before leaving so getting back to it is even harder.
Sometimes making the lists external instead of keeping everything in your head can help. I keep a log of what I'm doing where I end up listing things I need to do in the future or be careful of and am putting an app together to help with all that. It has saved my sanity... but also got me let go from one job when a manager saw that I was swearing in it! I don't do that on logs for client projects now...
I agree that the 'doing it alone' part can be somewhere between detrimental and impossible - without either someone to bounce ideas off of or get any kind of feedback, your project becomes sysiphean and continually drains energy instead of replenishing it. Sourceforge needs a "Coding Project Advice Line" for open sourcing project feedback 8)
But another solution has sort-of been mentioned by others: the book Power of an Hour was a great read for me - the idea to divide your effort into 1-hour periods and have a prep/plan at the start, an evaluation at the end, and 10 minutes of time for non-work (non-effort) things helped me. Making plans and estimates on such a short term and then listing successes afterwards might help you see that you are progressing and help keep you from getting lost in the thousands of hours of time spent. However it has also been difficult for me just like Agile programming - if you don't consciously follow it (have a 40-minute timer! And set it!) you will tend back to your old patterns of just spending a lot of time coding instead of meta-coding.
At a Fortune 500 company I was at early this year near the end of my stay they suddenly came out with a few regulations during our group's sexual harassment "seminar":
1. You are not allowed to do ANY social networking while at work
2. Anytime you are in public and anyone can recognize you as an employee (even if there is no visible or audible means), you need to talk and behave as if you are an employee
3. And they removed any non-regulated means of electronic communication from the internal networks.
I'd already realized the company was no good for me, but this just seemed insane! Even if it is just an excuse to be able to fire people... this is not a business practice, this is discrimination and, well, I'm not sure what all. Fascism?
More than 10 years ago I installed Linux on a tower, got some thing setup, and then tried running SaMBA so I could get to all my files on Windows. After a weekend of working on it with 2 "Getting Started with Linux" books it wouldn't work and there were no diagnostic tools to figure out at what level it failed. So Linux was worthless to me.
My title is misleading since as long as people are paying me to use Linux, I've used it. Ubuntu makes it fairly reasonable as a stand-alone server, but drivers, FS, and other compatibility problems mean it is worthless as an everyday OS for me.
If I'm going to use an alternate OS, I prefer something fun and useful like BeOS!
I was shutting down an email account which got maybe 30 spam a week and the more "requested SPAM" I opted out of, the more spam I got. Several (idg and others) wouldn't even drop me from their mailing lists, or signed me up for OTHER mailing lists when I opted-out. No, not even after their "8-10 days" estimate. By the end it was averaging 20+ spam a day.
I didn't know what was going on, but I typically keep a lot of small text files open in JEdit. Fortunately JEdit checks the status of files when it gets focus again - and this started when a couple dozen files "changed on disk" though I hadn't done anything. I didn't investigate at the time, but then it happened again early next week: a couple files I hadn't touches were reported "changed on disk". I looked and the directory was now empty! I still don't know what if anything else was affected the same way.
Further investigation showed that a couple directories reported 4-10GB of space used. While trying to copy over files to another drive another 4 directories failed such that the total reported file size on the 16GB flash drive was WAY over 20GB. I have screen shots if that helps any. Looking at those directories in Total Commander (Windows XP) shows dozens to hundreds of files with gibberish names and file sizes.
I tried using Nero 9's recovery tool, but it seems to only be made for people trying to recover a single file - I can't see how any programmer would consent to release such a shitty UI. I still haven't done a compare to see if Nero was able to recover anything more than a simple copy did. (besides hundreds of zero-size files)
AND I'm possibly out dozens of files I may never know about. Of course if I wasn't using JEdit I don't know how I'd be able to identify the problem at all. I don't feel like I can trust SDs anymore with critical data.
This was after trying to use the SD as my personal data drive in a laptop since last July. I wouldn't even call it heavy use - fortunately I kept my repositories on an HD instead of the SD card. But everything is backed up again...
I agree with others that this needs to be reported to the school's governing bodies, and that if she ripped it out of your hands, well, you may never get them back if she's already shredded them.
But the question becomes: what is teaching? and what does 'learning' mean?
My uncle actually asked me a similar question earlier this year. He's a big-time construction consultant but is to teach a class at a college and wanted to know how he could make his notes available from the internet without letting anyone copy them. I'm unclear as to what proprietary information there might be on them, but I think this was also about limiting information for future classes.
Several people relate this to RIAA and MPAA legal motions and battles, and while it seems similar I'm not convinced it is the same.
But what is learning? Is it, as the government standards say, your ability to get a higher percentage of multiple choice questions correct? Ie. just enough for the state, city, or district to get the promised funding?
What is that threshold of literacy? Of learning? Of Education?
And, what people seem more concerned about, what is the most expedient method to qualify a million people a year that they do or do not meet or exceed those thresholds?
Or is that the same question as: how do you pass a Turing Test? Or maybe: is this the same question as the (apparently more necessary) 'build a better captcha' experiment?
If the site has been up for 8 or more years, there's got to be some interesting stuff there. My question includes, as a lot of people here: How do I learn more about it? (since I haven't heard of it before), and especially if there are "creepy" things... is the wayback machine the only saviour, or is he going to tgz the site and put it on BitTorrent? I don't even see a mention in Wikipedia...
Short version: You have to specifically request something less than 40-hours a week, and even then you have to work against Americans' (and many states') prejudices that the only full-time is 40hrs.
Many companies won't go for it because they have horrible management practices or don't trust their employees. They simply don't have the processes in place to take advantage of resources without having constant access (on-site, forever).
Caveat: Unfortunately I've seen a lot of evidence saying a significant portion (>1%) of employees can't be trusted even if they have deliverables.
8-PP ---- Background:
After my first stint as an employee of a consulting firm (consulting to other companies) I knew that I couldn't handle the mindless, frustrating, constant limitation of working on projects I didn't care about for a full 40 hours a week. The next firm I applied to I made it a condition that I work 32 hours a week. They went for it. Only it didn't manifest until I complained a while later and reminded the owners of their agreement.
They countered that it was dependent on the clients' needs (the positions I was fulfilling) which is understandable. So it took a couple years after joining, but I was able to work 32-hours a week. In my state (U.S.) 32-hours is still full-time and you get all the benefits of a 40-hour employee. And of course now it annoys me that so many people and companies have a single definition of full-time as 40-hours a week.
It has worked out really well for me, but I have also been a developer working with some good companies in both on-site and off-site work over the last 6 years. I have done some 40-hr work a couple times if absolutely needed, and I pay attention to my email most of the time. Being in touch is necessary, yes. Hard to think if how any on-call position could be fair without being hourly of having good flex/comp-time/overtime policies.
But I am a developer who has worked on all parts of a project (minus funding/selling), and with managed projects whether or not I'm the one defining the requirements with the client, whichever position I'm playing on the team (or alone), working less hours whether at 8-hour days or 5-day weeks, has worked out very well for me. And helped me keep my sanity.
However... finding this kind of thing is very, very hard with U.S. company's preconceptions may be nigh impossible. Some say that a tough economy means consultants thrive, but I don't know if it will influence managers and HR departments to consider creative solutions.
Also, yes, it seems many companies equate 40-hours/week with "unlimited employee time for standard pay" so if you suggest 32/wk they think "uh oh, there's some actual limit on their time!". The whole EA/unpaid overtime crisis is one tiny example of an industry-wide problem... Uh, though I haven't let myself be exposed to it much.
While functional programming and other paradigms are important to computer science, they are NOT important to a beginning programmer. Why not have them doing graduate-level compiler optimizations in their second week?
First thing you have to do with new programmers is get them to relate what they're doing to what they already know. The classic "tell me how to make a Peanut butter and Jelly sandwich" exercise is a way to engage the group and get them to realize how literally everything is taken by the computer. Then start them making similar programs - Ruby, Python, whatever seems fine as a way to program without cruft and less confusion for the students.
I had programmed in Apple BASIC and MSDOS C before taking MIT's SCIP course, and I still couldn't make heads nor tails of their functional programming. I barely survived by doing pattern matching to make somewhat functional programs once we hit the part of using true Scheme/LISP paradigms, but that is no environment to encourage understanding nor creativity. Possibly because I already understood procedural, but I doubt it. I don't see how picking someone off the street has a chance of understanding functional programming. (Oh? You who are protesting: How much programming is a prerequisite for an INTRO course?)
Just because you present the material doesn't mean you've made it understandable. MIT definitely proved that to me, even when Abelson and Sussman taught the course. Well, presented it.
Object oriented, however much others protest, is just an abstraction on procedural (ie. the definition of C++) and has nothing to do with functional programming. OO languages may have other features which lend them to functional programming (or functional ones with OO features) but they're hardly equivalent nor disjoint sets.
Also, yes, after the first course have additional courses in functional, ASM, etc. 6.004 was a blast building computers first with ANDs/ORs and later programming chips to interpret 'languages' all the while wiring them together. I hope everyone has the chance to do that!
I'm a harsh critic, but they really need to fix the original game before people will flock to it. Just as with all games for the last few year they may have made their deadline and maybe even kept to the spirit of their original designs, but they have to FIRST make the games usable, THEN make them interesting for there to be any chance at being FUN.
UI seems to always be the part that suffers the most.
That may or may not work (I believe copyrights longer than 20 years are certainly immoral, and 10 years is questionable), but the simple fact is that as soon as you add rules (esp. ones which the government is expected to enforce or rule on) someone is going to change the game to maximize their profits.
For this one what I see is either the marketers, distributors, or even ISPs or hackers making it impossible for people to get out that they have a new product for 3-5 years. Or even getting injunctions against the new products for that time thereby making the copyright if not the creation worthless. Which doesn't (typically) work against the established companies because they've already got everything...
Slashdot Mirror
Companies are considering officially releasing *worse* and *less finished* products?? They call them MMOGs, bub.
I've always hated that, whether through DLC or episodes or... well I put up with DOW and Civ4 releasing expansions but...
Please, god, will someone release a finished game? When's the last time that happened?
8-PP
I don't listen to much radio, but this was the topic of a local morning call-in show on... Tuesday? I was happy that 4 of 5 thought it is an inane idea for one reason or another (or none given..), yet #5 still said she didn't care what the government does to protect us.
Or is the point here that Snyder put together a rebuttal of whatever quality?
8-PP
My experience with attempting to view over-the-air digital signals begs to differ - there has been enough coughing and hacking (blockiness, miscoloring, audio missing video) and going completely to black in normal weather that the digital signals they've left us with are far from ideal.
Analog for me!
The worst thing about the conversion is that there is no redundancy in the signal. No multi-cast, spread-spectrum, nothing useful for checking or comparing signals.
And that kind of broadcast is only useful over hard-wired, land-lines with guaranteed hardware in the middle. Which means paying a multi-conglomerate for permission to watch "over the air" signals.
Thanks, stupid government. I hope you learn next time!
8-PP
If Duke is shutting their server down, can we download the current status - like a Wikipedia ZIP?
Or is it all on the wayback machine somewhere?
Thanks,
8-PP
Uh, that was in 2006 - that exemption is now off the books. Unless you have proof that they renewed it.
Anyone?
Is the author trying to average out the verticals?
"points out" is the English version.
For anyone writing a book review, please be specific: if you're referring to the publisher's or book's website, say so. Otherwise you confuse the issue by talking about non-existent pages in the book!
Has Google already been corrupted? That depends on your perspective of who "Google" is.
But then we each have our own swaths of what constitutes "evil" - and most of the world has separate "evil" for people than corporations.
If someone is corrupted, couldn't their definition of evil be anything they are not/would not do?
8-PP
My own anecdote is that the DVD player is crap - I've found 3 DVDs that freeze the player and one so far that crashes the OS! How is that possible in a microkernel architecture?
Anecdotes I've heard include: an earlier MBP can rarely come out of sleep mode (sounds like Sony laptops), and one guy had major problems with external USB hard drives.
Doesn't sound that stable to me!
Statistically significant? Maybe not, but if it happens then it happens! Windows XP has been much more stable for me than those problems. But y'know I don't blame the OS for application problems. (DVD player came with the machine, so it is still Apple's fault, right?)
And the Apple computer management UI is for sh*t. They need a new organizational structure so something, *anything* is in a place that makes sense.
8-PP
Does this affect us who never upgraded from 7/8?
So from other people's numbers, does this mean AES-256 and AES-192 break in 2^110-ish while AES-128 breaks in 2^128? Are there similarly comparable numbers for PGP, GPG, and, well, everything else? I'm still trying to figure out the best algorithm to choose and these metrics could help. Or should they?
Thanks!
I've been in a similar boat for a while, and the solutions have varied a lot.
Many comments so far talk about getting exercise and sleep - which can help immensely depending on you and your situation. What they are really addressing is your energy level and where it is focused. If you love vacations, meaning if you enjoy them and you'd be able to forget (even briefly) about what you're doing while you're there, then a vacation might be a more effective energy reset. However I've had and seen the problem where people don't note down where they are and what they're doing before leaving so getting back to it is even harder.
Sometimes making the lists external instead of keeping everything in your head can help. I keep a log of what I'm doing where I end up listing things I need to do in the future or be careful of and am putting an app together to help with all that. It has saved my sanity... but also got me let go from one job when a manager saw that I was swearing in it! I don't do that on logs for client projects now...
I agree that the 'doing it alone' part can be somewhere between detrimental and impossible - without either someone to bounce ideas off of or get any kind of feedback, your project becomes sysiphean and continually drains energy instead of replenishing it. Sourceforge needs a "Coding Project Advice Line" for open sourcing project feedback 8)
But another solution has sort-of been mentioned by others: the book Power of an Hour was a great read for me - the idea to divide your effort into 1-hour periods and have a prep/plan at the start, an evaluation at the end, and 10 minutes of time for non-work (non-effort) things helped me. Making plans and estimates on such a short term and then listing successes afterwards might help you see that you are progressing and help keep you from getting lost in the thousands of hours of time spent. However it has also been difficult for me just like Agile programming - if you don't consciously follow it (have a 40-minute timer! And set it!) you will tend back to your old patterns of just spending a lot of time coding instead of meta-coding.
Good luck to you!
It is the sudden deceleration.
Outlaw stop signs!
8-PP
At a Fortune 500 company I was at early this year near the end of my stay they suddenly came out with a few regulations during our group's sexual harassment "seminar":
1. You are not allowed to do ANY social networking while at work
2. Anytime you are in public and anyone can recognize you as an employee (even if there is no visible or audible means), you need to talk and behave as if you are an employee
3. And they removed any non-regulated means of electronic communication from the internal networks.
I'd already realized the company was no good for me, but this just seemed insane! Even if it is just an excuse to be able to fire people... this is not a business practice, this is discrimination and, well, I'm not sure what all. Fascism?
8-PP
More than 10 years ago I installed Linux on a tower, got some thing setup, and then tried running SaMBA so I could get to all my files on Windows. After a weekend of working on it with 2 "Getting Started with Linux" books it wouldn't work and there were no diagnostic tools to figure out at what level it failed. So Linux was worthless to me.
My title is misleading since as long as people are paying me to use Linux, I've used it. Ubuntu makes it fairly reasonable as a stand-alone server, but drivers, FS, and other compatibility problems mean it is worthless as an everyday OS for me.
If I'm going to use an alternate OS, I prefer something fun and useful like BeOS!
8-PP
I was shutting down an email account which got maybe 30 spam a week and the more "requested SPAM" I opted out of, the more spam I got. Several (idg and others) wouldn't even drop me from their mailing lists, or signed me up for OTHER mailing lists when I opted-out. No, not even after their "8-10 days" estimate. By the end it was averaging 20+ spam a day.
Yuck.
8-PP
I just had this happen to me!
I didn't know what was going on, but I typically keep a lot of small text files open in JEdit. Fortunately JEdit checks the status of files when it gets focus again - and this started when a couple dozen files "changed on disk" though I hadn't done anything. I didn't investigate at the time, but then it happened again early next week: a couple files I hadn't touches were reported "changed on disk". I looked and the directory was now empty! I still don't know what if anything else was affected the same way.
Further investigation showed that a couple directories reported 4-10GB of space used. While trying to copy over files to another drive another 4 directories failed such that the total reported file size on the 16GB flash drive was WAY over 20GB. I have screen shots if that helps any. Looking at those directories in Total Commander (Windows XP) shows dozens to hundreds of files with gibberish names and file sizes.
I tried using Nero 9's recovery tool, but it seems to only be made for people trying to recover a single file - I can't see how any programmer would consent to release such a shitty UI. I still haven't done a compare to see if Nero was able to recover anything more than a simple copy did. (besides hundreds of zero-size files)
AND I'm possibly out dozens of files I may never know about. Of course if I wasn't using JEdit I don't know how I'd be able to identify the problem at all. I don't feel like I can trust SDs anymore with critical data.
This was after trying to use the SD as my personal data drive in a laptop since last July. I wouldn't even call it heavy use - fortunately I kept my repositories on an HD instead of the SD card. But everything is backed up again...
8-PP
I agree with others that this needs to be reported to the school's governing bodies, and that if she ripped it out of your hands, well, you may never get them back if she's already shredded them.
But the question becomes: what is teaching? and what does 'learning' mean?
My uncle actually asked me a similar question earlier this year. He's a big-time construction consultant but is to teach a class at a college and wanted to know how he could make his notes available from the internet without letting anyone copy them. I'm unclear as to what proprietary information there might be on them, but I think this was also about limiting information for future classes.
Several people relate this to RIAA and MPAA legal motions and battles, and while it seems similar I'm not convinced it is the same.
But what is learning? Is it, as the government standards say, your ability to get a higher percentage of multiple choice questions correct? Ie. just enough for the state, city, or district to get the promised funding?
What is that threshold of literacy? Of learning? Of Education?
And, what people seem more concerned about, what is the most expedient method to qualify a million people a year that they do or do not meet or exceed those thresholds?
Or is that the same question as: how do you pass a Turing Test? Or maybe: is this the same question as the (apparently more necessary) 'build a better captcha' experiment?
8-PP
Around 4 percent of the country is ALWAYS employed, generally due to some chronic issue...
I always knew it was detrimental to my health!
8-PP
If the site has been up for 8 or more years, there's got to be some interesting stuff there. My question includes, as a lot of people here: How do I learn more about it? (since I haven't heard of it before), and especially if there are "creepy" things... is the wayback machine the only saviour, or is he going to tgz the site and put it on BitTorrent? I don't even see a mention in Wikipedia...
8-PP
Short version: You have to specifically request something less than 40-hours a week, and even then you have to work against Americans' (and many states') prejudices that the only full-time is 40hrs.
Many companies won't go for it because they have horrible management practices or don't trust their employees. They simply don't have the processes in place to take advantage of resources without having constant access (on-site, forever).
Caveat: Unfortunately I've seen a lot of evidence saying a significant portion (>1%) of employees can't be trusted even if they have deliverables.
8-PP
----
Background:
After my first stint as an employee of a consulting firm (consulting to other companies) I knew that I couldn't handle the mindless, frustrating, constant limitation of working on projects I didn't care about for a full 40 hours a week. The next firm I applied to I made it a condition that I work 32 hours a week. They went for it. Only it didn't manifest until I complained a while later and reminded the owners of their agreement.
They countered that it was dependent on the clients' needs (the positions I was fulfilling) which is understandable. So it took a couple years after joining, but I was able to work 32-hours a week. In my state (U.S.) 32-hours is still full-time and you get all the benefits of a 40-hour employee. And of course now it annoys me that so many people and companies have a single definition of full-time as 40-hours a week.
It has worked out really well for me, but I have also been a developer working with some good companies in both on-site and off-site work over the last 6 years. I have done some 40-hr work a couple times if absolutely needed, and I pay attention to my email most of the time. Being in touch is necessary, yes. Hard to think if how any on-call position could be fair without being hourly of having good flex/comp-time/overtime policies.
But I am a developer who has worked on all parts of a project (minus funding/selling), and with managed projects whether or not I'm the one defining the requirements with the client, whichever position I'm playing on the team (or alone), working less hours whether at 8-hour days or 5-day weeks, has worked out very well for me. And helped me keep my sanity.
However... finding this kind of thing is very, very hard with U.S. company's preconceptions may be nigh impossible. Some say that a tough economy means consultants thrive, but I don't know if it will influence managers and HR departments to consider creative solutions.
Also, yes, it seems many companies equate 40-hours/week with "unlimited employee time for standard pay" so if you suggest 32/wk they think "uh oh, there's some actual limit on their time!". The whole EA/unpaid overtime crisis is one tiny example of an industry-wide problem... Uh, though I haven't let myself be exposed to it much.
Good luck to us all,
8-PP
While functional programming and other paradigms are important to computer science, they are NOT important to a beginning programmer. Why not have them doing graduate-level compiler optimizations in their second week?
First thing you have to do with new programmers is get them to relate what they're doing to what they already know. The classic "tell me how to make a Peanut butter and Jelly sandwich" exercise is a way to engage the group and get them to realize how literally everything is taken by the computer. Then start them making similar programs - Ruby, Python, whatever seems fine as a way to program without cruft and less confusion for the students.
I had programmed in Apple BASIC and MSDOS C before taking MIT's SCIP course, and I still couldn't make heads nor tails of their functional programming. I barely survived by doing pattern matching to make somewhat functional programs once we hit the part of using true Scheme/LISP paradigms, but that is no environment to encourage understanding nor creativity. Possibly because I already understood procedural, but I doubt it. I don't see how picking someone off the street has a chance of understanding functional programming. (Oh? You who are protesting: How much programming is a prerequisite for an INTRO course?)
Just because you present the material doesn't mean you've made it understandable. MIT definitely proved that to me, even when Abelson and Sussman taught the course. Well, presented it.
Object oriented, however much others protest, is just an abstraction on procedural (ie. the definition of C++) and has nothing to do with functional programming. OO languages may have other features which lend them to functional programming (or functional ones with OO features) but they're hardly equivalent nor disjoint sets.
Also, yes, after the first course have additional courses in functional, ASM, etc. 6.004 was a blast building computers first with ANDs/ORs and later programming chips to interpret 'languages' all the while wiring them together. I hope everyone has the chance to do that!
8-PP
I'm a harsh critic, but they really need to fix the original game before people will flock to it. Just as with all games for the last few year they may have made their deadline and maybe even kept to the spirit of their original designs, but they have to FIRST make the games usable, THEN make them interesting for there to be any chance at being FUN.
UI seems to always be the part that suffers the most.
8-PP
That may or may not work (I believe copyrights longer than 20 years are certainly immoral, and 10 years is questionable), but the simple fact is that as soon as you add rules (esp. ones which the government is expected to enforce or rule on) someone is going to change the game to maximize their profits.
For this one what I see is either the marketers, distributors, or even ISPs or hackers making it impossible for people to get out that they have a new product for 3-5 years. Or even getting injunctions against the new products for that time thereby making the copyright if not the creation worthless. Which doesn't (typically) work against the established companies because they've already got everything...
Yeah, part-time pessimist.