Because the European market is more often bigger than the US, depending on what/how you measure it and what you're looking it.
More people than the US, more money than the US, more trade than the US, more production than the US.
You keep forgetting that the US is only a *country*, the EU is a *continent*. You just lost access to an entire *continent* of potential customers. Suppliers. Importers. Financial Services. All because they don't appear on your Google.
Think of it like this... if the US was to disappear off the radar for all of Europe and not show on Google, would we be affected? Answer: Yes. The other way round is not only the same - it's actually WORSE.
You might like to think that the US stands alone, needs no-one else, and you don't need to care about EU law, trade, visitor eyeballs, etc. but they likely form a much larger percentage of the visitors and income than you might think.
If it happened on Slashdot, you'd lose at least half the articles, half the commentors and half the advertising revenue.
You think that happening on Google wouldn't affect you just because you don't personally go to a www..co.uk site very often?
Pretty sure I've read a dozen articles alone on Slashdot alone just this year about "breakthroughs". Not actually seen any of them come to fruition.
P.S. You know a battery tech is useful when it appears in the shops. Until then, the information is useful only to investors and scientists. As a consumer, none of that matters. I can no more buy these things than a hydrazine powered skateboard.
So... until then... even if they are incredibly expensive, I can't really do anything with the information.
If you can't buy it, it's not worth worrying about.
And when someone DOES make a viable battery technology that appears in a consumer product (even a car) then people will hear about it, and ask for it, and apply it to other areas.
You know where you'll see a new battery tech? Same place I first saw NiCd, NiMH, Li-ion and Li-Po. It'll be in a laptop or a small gadget.
All the grandiose claims mean nothing until it's in production. Because, quite literally, a story every week claims this and nothing comes of it. I'm sure if you went looking you could find dozens of new stories every day saying the same. And maybe *ONE* of those, per decade, will actually end up in a product you can buy.
Ammonia is less energy dense than most compressed gas fuels.
It also required temperatures in the range 400-500 degrees to break it down. About 5-6 more than the majority of your car engine components and their cooling systems.
It also creates an extraordinary hazard - ammonia (as a gas, typically, compressed to a liquid) with catalysts heated to beyond-your-oven temperatures producing a highly flammable gas, often with a lot of flammable by-products or catalysts too. It's a horribly nasty and destructive bomb just waiting to go off.
Now all energy-dense materials are bombs. But that's what we're trying to curb. Lithium is so dangerous BECAUSE of the run-away reaction problems. That's what we need to eliminate to make them safer. Lead-acid can be a bomb if you do it right, and you they put warning labels about throwing alkaline batteries on a fire for a reason.
Then when you get the ammonia out, convert it to hydrogen, etc. with all the safeties required that Joe Spanner at the local garage knows what to touch and what not to touch, it's less efficient than just about every other power source.
Ammonia is classed as an "extremely hazardous substance" for a reason, where even all the petroleum and lithium (except hydride) products aren't.
Trust me, you don't want a tank of liquid ammonia sloshing around under your back seats. In comparison, petroleum derivatives are positively safe.
Where an unarmed lynch mob (however, in this case, "right" they were) killed a guy, in India, who tried to kidnap a girl at gunpoint.
Your guns do not stop lynch mobs. They merely amplify the situation, not solve it. You *hope* that you amplify it out of bounds to mutually-assured destruction and that all parties recognise that. That's NOT always the case, and NOT always possible, and NOT always better than the outcome otherwise.
Now, if the lynch mob had managed to get hold of incorrect information and done the judge-jury-and-executioner part ON THE WRONG MAN, then a gun still wouldn't have helped him against an unarmed crowd. And if the crowd had had guns, it would have been *even worse*.
You can't justify the use of guns on the basis that "nobody would ever", because it's just not true. Provide them enough incentive (money, drugs, getting your gun off you, etc.) and they'll happily rush towards you anyway and make that weapon useless very quickly.
I realise I'm actually posting a counter-example here - where the lynch mob were "right" for once. It's a very, very rare exception.
My point though: You having a gun won't stop a lynch mob, even if they don't have them.
You having a gun and THEM having a gun certainly won't.
Because this is peer-to-peer communication, there's no central point putting out these rumours. Do you think the "vaccines cause autism" rumours were only done from a handful of identifiable sources or do you think they were passed from person to person?
What about the Facebook posts I see about "this guy was photographed after trying to snatch a child" posts I see shared from friends once a week or so - I have absolutely no evidence that they were genuine either, but they got around, and they re-circulate often?
What about newsgroups, emails, meme-sharing sites, all of which have had the same problems. People have been SWAT'd because of rumours on forums, and though you might trace the perpetrators of the call, you can't trace who originated the rumour, nor could you likely prosecute them if you could.
Laying the blame at the communications medium is like blaming newspapers because you could write a ransom note using their headline letters. Just as "untraceable" if someone has even a modicum of sense.
You really, really, really don't want WhatsApp and similar services policing EVERYTHING you say on them, trust me. Because then you get to the ridiculousness that is being SWAT'd because of a rumour, or having Microsoft breathe down your neck because you mentioned your dodgy copy of Windows in a private chat.
But teach people that you can't stone someone to death just because you read something on your phone about them, and you can take a step towards civilisation that transcends all technology boundaries, past, present and future.
I saw a study once that said you have to re-use a "bag for life" (the sturdy reusable palstic bags) over 178 times before it's actually economically / ecologically viable over just making thin disposable plastic bags. For a shopping bag, that's probably, what... several years of usage?
I imagine the aluminium bottle is similar.
That said, why people are drinking bottled water at all over what comes out of the tap, or just refilling those same bottles from... say... a 50l bottle of the same water... Isn't that what water-coolers were for?
Are you really stupid enough to think that having unique passwords for absolutely everything gives you security?
Or you do you believe that two services which basically access identical amounts of information about you can happily share a password because any breach of either only means compromise of the exact same information / access?
For example, I really don't care that my Slashdot password is the same as other web forums where the worst that can happen is someone posts something under my name. I really don't want a unique password for every single one of dozens of such "unprivileged" accounts.
Thus I *tier* my passwords. These ones let you do X, these let you do Y, these let you do Z. At the highest tier, yes, unique passwords per service because of the import of the access gained from them. But ALL THE OTHER tiers? Not so important.
People who suggest you should memorise a thousand passwords or store them all centrally (e.g. password management software) are a lot more stupid and out of touch with reality than those that say "Have a consistent password for such services".
Hint: When you lose your password, it's really easy. What access does that account have? Therefore it must be one of Tier X passwords, therefore it's not going to be a chore to remember what it is. And a damn sight better than typing in your OTHER passwords thinking "Well, I must have used that then" into what might actually be a compromised website.
P.S. The reason that NOBODY, NIST, NSA, GCHQ, etc. recommend that you don't expire passwords any more (and there's been an article on here from "the guy who set the rules for passwords" saying the same): Give people too many passwords and they destroy the security of them in order to satisfy their own convenience.
A set of tiered passwords shared across services which can't give any more access than ANY of those services already gives up from that password is no worse. At absolute worst, it means you have to reset a couple of passwords if one is compromised, instead of one.
Security has to meet reality every once in a while. Pouring concrete into your car and chiselling it away every morning means nobody will steal it, yes, but it's so inconvenient as to be impractical which means nobody will ever do that.
"How living in a society where people think it's okay to stone people based on rumour, and the police are unable to stop or prosecute them Destroyed A Village"
being the more accurate headline.
Whatsapp did nothing more than allow people to communicate, no different to a book, radio, post-it notes or anything else.
But if you live in a community where people will stone you to death without consequence, no amount - or absence - of technology can save you.
The memorisation thing is always used as an excuse.
You want to memorise it? Set your important passwords to it. Make yourself type it in a thousand times a day. Guess what, you'll be able to screw up the piece of paper with it on by next week because you'll be so frustrated at having to refer to it and you'll have typed it so often that you'll get it stuck in your head.
The problem with it being just "in your head" is that if you're hit by a bus and forget it - all your stuff is gone forever. Even though you may well require access to it to continue with your life.
So you need build a 2km square waterproof (not necessarily water-tight, granted) bag.
And then drag that, full of water, behind you for several thousand miles. The reason an iceberg is so "easy" to tow is that it floats very well. A 4 square kilometer bag full of water?... not so good.
If anything, that's an even nuttier idea than using the iceberg in the first place.
This is *possible*. Whether it's *sensible* is a completely different matter.
Hint: If you're towing it by sea to its final destination... there's water. Maybe not fresh water, but water. Which you could remove the salt from. If only it were a hot country with plenty of available power!
Bigger question: One company does this, it works, makes money. What now? Now you have a thousand companies the world over stealing icebergs to sell. Nobody (technically) owns the icebergs themselves (I believe the agreements only apply to the land masses in Antarctica, and a region within the Arctic).
We're more worried about icebergs, not because they are breaking off and showing the raises in temperature over the Arctic regions, but because when they melt, millions of tons of freshwater is released that was previously locked in ice, and the interaction between ice-cold freshwater and sea-water can easily disrupt major sea currents, let alone local currents.
Dump 100 million tons of iceberg water into the ocean on a regular basis and you're gonna royally fuck up the local wildlife.
It would cost Apple more to make the iPhone in the US.
Probably twice as much, if not more.
Now, most of the iPhone cost is nothing but profit, so they could in theory absorb it but... why would they? If they could absorb it, they'd own the entire phone market by now by just cutting their ridiculous phone prices.
They'd also have a couple of years of utter mayhem as they built factories, hired workers, moved stock and parts, etc etc.
Much as I hate Apple, it's a stupid idea. The reason that companies *don't* already do everything themselves in the US (or most of the first-world nations) is because it's just too expensive for them to do so. And people likely wouldn't pay the prices they'd have to charge, or their shareholders would revolt at suddenly cutting their (stupendous, sickening) profit in half overnight.
Trump doesn't get economics at all. And he certainly doesn't get trade.
Sure, Apple moving back gives you taxes and jobs. And then China will have no money from you, less incentive to be favourable in their trades, more expensive for everything you DO need them for (which is an awful lot, not least landfilling those phones once they're dead).
And if they were to, say, have a huge electronics manufacturing industry, they could make your life hell overnight, not least by making you source and produce every chip from somewhere else, but also having to compete against their phones that do more for less money. With almost no effort at all.
1) Get proper walls. I mean, seriously. 2) Projector screens are just fine... secure them to the wall, pull them down and tie them off properly. Don't stick them on a wobbly tripod. 3) If in doubt, even 75" touchscreens are "affordable".
And the "lights-out" thing is nonsense.
I know... because I spend my life in schools where every classroom is a projector or a huge interactive touchscreen. They operate in broad-daylight, with south-facing windows, onto white and reflective surfaces, and operate just fine. If you're worried, buy something with slightly higher lumens output.
You know what happens when we have an event like a World Cup, a Royal Wedding, etc.? Staff actually COME ON SITE on their days off etc. to load it up in a classroom and watch it.
Unless you are going more than 55 inches and sitting 4 feet away, you likely can't even detect 4K etc.
Or you could just get an 85 inch 1080p and sit 11 feet away. Still comfortably within an ordinary household.
To see 8K, you need to sit within 3 feet. I would argue that NOBODY can sit 3 feet away from a decent-size display comfortably and even see the whole movie.
Yeah, that little tin-pot town with 8 million people in it and no cinemas...
Where it costs GBP15 per adult ticket, minimum, in the out-of-town ones.
Theatres from Vue, Cineworld, Odeon. Yeah, those three franchises that own over 75% of all the cinemas in the country.
The particular one I use actually states on their website:
"Sony 4K Video" "All screens are fitted with Dolby 6.1 surround."
But hey, that's just my local 11 screen 3000-plus seat cinema. Others in the area may vary - there are a dozen within a ten minute car journey of me.
Or, say, the one that's 20 minutes from me in the middle of London's West End (that's like "our" version of "your" Broadway) - Leicester Square and costs nearly twice as much.
You assume I'm riffing. I have access to some of the best cinemas in the country, including IMAX showcases, just a short Tube ride away. And I'll tell you that I'd prefer a projector in a living room.
Because ALL the things you're favouring (colour gamuts, HDR, Dolby, etc. etc. etc.) really mean nothing to me whatsoever, and certainly don't justify the rest of the downsides of cinema.
Like... if you look on this post... most people. I pity you, that you spend money chasing some perfection that only you can perceive, I really do. But the majority of the people... don't. Hence the dying cinemas.
At best, admissions numbers are holding steady, but don't even compare favourably to the 1970's, let alone the fact that they've halved or much worse since the 60's. Box office takings (so not just the blockbusters but everything they see come in) are flat and have been for nearly a decade. In terms of inflation, that's a loss.
Compared against the vast number of new media and viewing that happens now compared to them, cinema is just about clinging on - as a percentage it's pathetic.
And there's me with a barely-HD projector on an 8-foot white projection screen, with the audio coming out of it in what might as well be mono sound because the directionality makes no difference (i.e. the thing making the sound in the movie isn't off to my left, it's just on the left of the screen most of the time, which is... in front of me, and the box making the sound is behind me anyway), streaming the videos off my phone over a ChromeCast via a 4G connection on a "SD-only" package.
And you know what? It's not just as good as any cinema... it's better. Because an 8-foot screen from a sensible distance away (the calculator I found says 17 feet) fills your vision just the same while also offering a res that they'd need 8-16K or greater on an humongous screen to match, and most cinemas aren't that.
People also forget that "1080p" is really "2 Megapixel". 4K might be "33 Megapixel" but there is no way in hell it's 10+ times better, or that you can see 10 times more detail at any sensible distance.
Sorry, but cinema is dying in my country. Too expensive. Empty most of the time. Too much upselling and ads. No technical incentive to watch it compared to buying even the cheapest of projectors.
How? How have I magically avoided this? How? I'm asking specifically how I avoided that, despite living between neighbours who were both burgled and in high-burglary areas, and not having advanced security systems, how?
Yeah, it's my neighbour's fault that someone sneaked round the back, smashed the door in, and stole things, running off before anything could be done. It's the other neighbour's fault that someone forced their way into their house, threatened a teenaged girl and stole jewellery.
It's all their fault for not having advanced security systems, not keeping weapons, not training themselves in the martial arts... right?
You've been lucky (no threats). I've been lucky (by only having received threats that were never credible). When we're not lucky, does that make it not a death threat? Does that make it our fault? Do you think that someone who's stupid enough to make a death-threat on a public forum is actually applying rational logic to who they threaten and why? Do you think that because you get into a heated argument, you're "inviting" death threats?
P.S. Go ask females that you know how many times they've been threatened with violence where they had done nothing to "deserve" that... In my experience it's almost every one, whether it's because they turned down someone's advances, didn't want to be groped in a club, or were raped (1/3rd of all women). A death-threat doesn't require some impetus to be issued from the people stupid enough to issue them.
And no amount of "polite" appeasing behaviour stops them. You've been lucky. Go ask your local A&E (Casualty / ER) staff how many death threats they've had, and they're just literally trying to help people as a career. A paramedic. A firefighter. Front-line customer service staff.
You're saying that the victim is doing something "wrong" that somehow incites people to threaten them, where you don't do that thing. Then drawing the line as "victim therefore does something that causes someone to issue death threat", rather than "guy who issues death threat is the problem".
I could walk up to you in the street and swear and shout at you. A death threat, in that context, is still unjustified, uncalled-for, disproportionate, illegal and arrestable.
The problem is "people who issue death threats". Whether they claim that's because you're the wrong religion, because you insulted Mohammed by drawing a cartoon, because you "look funny", because you're gay, because you support the wrong team, because you like Donald Trump, because you're different somehow, or whatever - it does not mean that you should be blamed for those things leading to a death threat. Those things are NOT ENOUGH to justify a death threat. Because pretty much nothing is. That's it.
As such, the person on the receiving end of a death-threat because they do those things... is being blamed as the victim. And they are the victim - because it's a crime to utter a death threat. But it's not a crime to be rude to people, kick them out a game, block them from being on a website, etc. etc. etc.
"He swore at me so I hit him" is the essence of this. One of you committed a criminal act. Hence is a victim. And no amount of incitement, in law, justifies a death threat.
It's INCREDIBLY worrying that you don't get this. Your behaviour, attitude, or approach has *nothing* to do with whether you received a death threat or not. Statistics did. Similarly, your behaviour, attitude or approach also has ZERO relevance to any issuance of a death-threat - you could call the guy the worst names in the worse and harass him to the end of the earth, and do all sorts of shit. And it still doesn't justify receiving a death threat from him.
I admin game servers, moderate forums, write articles, etc.
I have received such things. I treat them as the worthless, uninformed, non-threat that they are (it's not like they even know who I am, thus not a threat to me).
But that doesn't mean I invited them or even, in some cases, was even part of the dialog that led to them until people were asked to moderate their tone, leave, etc.
"but behave in ways that makes them more prevalent receivers of abuse?"
Abuse is very different to a death threat. Abuse begats abuse in many cases. It's unlikely they are a moderator for a platform for long if they are the cause or incitement of such abuse. But a death threat isn't justified, no matter what. Honestly, there is no wording of a single statement in law that can justify retaliating with a death threat, even a death threat itself.
Hence why this is victim-blaming. Maybe the victim said something nasty which incited it? Still a death-threat. Maybe they were being a prick? Still a death-threat. Maybe the victim was literally threatening to beat people up? Still a death-threat. Describing them as somehow "inciting" the abuse because of the way they deal with a situation? Maybe that's a reason to question their skills as a moderator, or blame them for inciting larger arguments or trolling, but it's not a reason to blame them for receiving death-threats.
Hey, I once had a guy threaten to do all kinds of things to me "because I banned his friend, who only cheated once!". Literally nothing to do with him, and he went from server to server of mine yelling and threatening until I just banned his ID globally from all my servers.
Sure, I'm thick-skinned and know that he wasn't a serious threat, not least because he wouldn't know who I was anyway. But if I had credible belief that he would know who I was and continued to make those threats... police action (even though I know it would just be recorded and not much else).
Victim-blaming is precisely what "Well maybe they did something to prompt a death prompt" is.
There are people on the Internet that will issue death threats because they disagree with you - whether or not you enter into any argument whatsoever.
And it doesn't matter how "controversial" you are. A death threat is a criminal offence. People can, do, have and will go to jail for uttering them in a serious manner.
"A key thing about responsible web usage" is that it's no different to the real-world, because it is the real-world. And you can no more threaten someone's life online as you can offline.
Trust me, threaten my life - not in jest - offline and I'll prosecute. Do so online, and it's the same. Especially if you take it anywhere beyond actually just posting a comment (e.g. private messaging, revealing information, chasing, harassment, etc. etc. etc.). Just because it's online doesn't grant you an exception.
And there's no web-forum-argument in the world that's justifiable of a death-threat, the same way that there's no web-forum-argument in the world worth going to jail for, or living in fear of death threats of.
I have a friends who's a children's author. He's received death-threats because he posted a political comment that wasn't in any way offensive. He's had actual death-threats, over involved and proloned conversations (including literal offers of meeting him at the airport when he flies to an announced meeting to kill him, including threats of gun use) because he was mildly sexist in jest in a tweet.
Sorry, but the world's full of nutters. We can no more live in fear of saying something that might offend them in case they make a death threat than we can allow people who make death threats to say "Oh, it's just a joke", or "oh, that happens online, just deal with it".
The second they gave me windows I couldn't break off, or shrink, or remove, a ton of extra stuff all popping up, tried to take over my entire screen rather than be a small list of people on the right that I could double-click to talk to someone... I never bothered to run it or update it ever again.
Steam just did the same with Steam Friends but at least I can just close that shit, but it's annoying that when you Shift-Tab or when you load up the program it's back again. Seriously, fuck off with that. I don't talk to people on Steam, I don't want it.
Skype's already lost all my usage by doing that. Steam has other purposes.
Microsoft buying Skype, joining it with Lync, and integrating it all into the office suite sounded really good. They managed to botch every single aspect of that - from Skype for Business being different to Skype for Home, introducing Skype for Metro and removing Skype for Desktop, and then not actually putting it into some part of the Office suite that'll use it most (Home & Student) at all. Then tie it all into a Microsoft account that some people might not want at all.
Textbook example of how to buy a piece of software without understanding it and not only destroying it, but failing to then even use your competing software to do that job better. I could justify the business case behind buying and killing Skype if they wanted to push Lync / their own product. But they just ballsed up every aspect of it.
I hope the $8.5bn was worth it guys. I know I haven't used it since.
20 things in your house / neighbour's houses? That 450Mbps can drop to 22.5Mbps each. Which is a pittance.
Ethernet generally *isn't* shared so, at least not on the cable - a Gigabit cable is a Gigabit per computer. The cheapest of switches will handle multiple gigabits.
But if you're being swamped by neighbours etc. then Wifi is likely the bottleneck much more than the cable that comes into your house.
Have you ever tried to make a game and sell it? Only the other day on here I was reading an article about "review copies " that were basically scammed out of games-makers. Something that DRM could stop.
There are numerous instances of games-makers tracking pirated downloads, and releasing games without DRM to see how they fare. Piracy is rampant. Even for a small indie, it's a problem... I can't imagine how you think that will scale for a profit-seeking business.
That's not to say that all DRM measures are valid. Some go too far. But DRM is a necessary part of consuming modern life. Out of all the "DRM free" stores (e.g. app-stores, etc.) out there, how many are bundled on phones or computers in preference to the DRMd ones? None.
There's *always* a way to run non-DRMd software, but the equivalents don't always exist in the way you'd like.
I'm massively pro-open-source (which basically makes DRM moot). But I can't ever justify having a huge, successful, idea and then trying to monetise it... at the point you monetise DRM makes sense and nothing else does. I've seriously considered my "big project" games that I've worked on for years and I can't picture how you'd get anything back if they were non-DRM or open-source. It just wouldn't happen.
With money comes DRM, that's the problem. I'm happy to give away much of the fruits of my labour for free, I do so personally and professionally all the time. But I can't ever imagine a commercially successful game without DRM of some kind (even if it was just "online account necessary").
I'm a pragmatists and a realist. The fact is, at the hourly rates that my free time costs me (i.e. how much do I have to work to get X amount of free time, and how much would that cost charged to a client) it's literally NOT worth me trying to bypass or avoid DRM in order to watch a movie, play a game, read a book or anything else. Especially not when the DRM doesn't interfere with the ordinary usage of said product.
In the same way, I'm sure I can make my own soap, farm my own bees, knead my own bread. But the effort, time and money involved is much better spent on "big corporate" products, and then getting all that free time back to do things more entertaining. Like watch a movie.
While your attitude to DRM is "fuck you", you're never going to win that argument. Because everyone else on the planet has bigger things to do, and that their game only runs on 3 computers at once is right as the very bottom of the pile of things they give a shit about. You can't instigate change that way.
I'd much more happily give MONTHS of my time to initiatives that make open-source games, libraries, cross-platform ports, etc. than try to convince an ordinary person that DRM is "a bad thing". Even though it's present in everything from coffee-makers to computer games, car tires to 3D printers.
Because, at the end of the day, if you want a reliable commercial product it needs a revenue stream to sustain itself. DRM is a guardian of that revenue stream (though far from perfect, yes, any DRM is breakable and you can't make one that isn't, but that's not the point - like the BluRay AACS stuff... it's about making it difficult to do things in a timely manner at release, not be impenetrable... and lots of companies remove DRM from products after that initial period).
If you think this is bad now, then it's only EVER going to get worse, whether or not I support it. But you're fighting the wrong battle. "No DRM" is stupid. What you need is "Reasonable DRM" instead. Lumping it all together just teaches companies that they might as well go the whole hog as they've gonna catch flak for it anyway.
I find Steam DRM (not the additional stuff that some companies put on their Steam offerings) perfectly reasonable. It's never hindered me in any way. It likely never will. I accept it as a reasonable compromise and would protest if it get too strict. But I also accept that "No DRM" just means rampant casual piracy (no matter what peopl
Indeed... like all the privacy and other problems, it's not that we can't solve them, it's that nobody cares.
Every person who has Alexa in their living room. Every person who uses Steam or Netflix or whatever else.
None of them care. They paid for certain rights, got them, and enjoy them. Beyond that, the "ideal" of ownership is, to them, too difficult to obtain and they can't be bothered.
It's a political/legal issue that basically affects a tiny minority of users, who probably don't purchase that content anyway because of it.
Though I like GoG being DRM-free, I can't say that I care too much. I just want a copy of an old game in a playable format, and that's why I give them money (100+ titles I think?). But Steam has DRM - and some games have EVEN MORE bolted on top - and I have 1000+ games on there. Because, despite understanding all the issues, writing my own software, avoiding DRM in certain instances (e.g. professional life where possible), etc. I can't actually care enough about a game to do anything about it.
I buy game. I play game. I'm happy and got what I paid for. Much more likely is the game is made obsolete on the basis of platform support than anything to do with the DRM, and the DRM really doesn't get in my way at all, in any way, whatsoever, for the things I want to do.
Buy game. Double-click. Install. Play. If that doesn't work, I'd be complaining. I tell you now that I have at least 10 games that DON'T work like that on Steam any more (due to DLL issues, deactivated multiplayer networks, OS compatibility problems, the game being revoked, etc.). I'm more annoyed about those than anything DRM-related which hasn't caused me to have a single bad purchase.
Same with DVD's and audio and all kinds of things. So long as it works, I'm happy. My time and effort finding a DRM-free equivalent is expensive, more expensive than the loss of a DRM-encumbered product (which hasn't happened to me, maybe I'm lucky). I can rip DVD's and defeat region protection, and so on but it's easier to not buy it at all if it doesn't work as intended (i.e. in my DVD player, etc.).
Most people see only a choice of "get the thing I want" or "not". And though we can all choose not, as a majority we don't. I have. I went without all kinds of media for years. I didn't suffer. But now I'm like most people... if my cheap entertainment purchase keeps me entertained for long enough, I got value out of it and it was worth it. But reading a EULA, defeating DRM, or avoiding it isn't worth the time and effort to worry about.
Yes, I know that I could lose my content one day. But you know what? I already lost all my old DOS games, my VHS tapes and all kinds of stuff several times over anyway. Sure I "could" get it working again in some fashion, but the time and effort isn't worth it.
Technology advances killed more of my content than anything to do with DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the US is not the world.
http://www.worldometers.info/p...
Because the European market is more often bigger than the US, depending on what/how you measure it and what you're looking it.
More people than the US, more money than the US, more trade than the US, more production than the US.
You keep forgetting that the US is only a *country*, the EU is a *continent*. You just lost access to an entire *continent* of potential customers. Suppliers. Importers. Financial Services. All because they don't appear on your Google.
Think of it like this... if the US was to disappear off the radar for all of Europe and not show on Google, would we be affected? Answer: Yes. The other way round is not only the same - it's actually WORSE.
You might like to think that the US stands alone, needs no-one else, and you don't need to care about EU law, trade, visitor eyeballs, etc. but they likely form a much larger percentage of the visitors and income than you might think.
If it happened on Slashdot, you'd lose at least half the articles, half the commentors and half the advertising revenue.
You think that happening on Google wouldn't affect you just because you don't personally go to a www. .co.uk site very often?
So that's, what... a technology once per decade.
Pretty sure I've read a dozen articles alone on Slashdot alone just this year about "breakthroughs". Not actually seen any of them come to fruition.
P.S. You know a battery tech is useful when it appears in the shops. Until then, the information is useful only to investors and scientists. As a consumer, none of that matters. I can no more buy these things than a hydrazine powered skateboard.
So... until then... even if they are incredibly expensive, I can't really do anything with the information.
If you can't buy it, it's not worth worrying about.
And when someone DOES make a viable battery technology that appears in a consumer product (even a car) then people will hear about it, and ask for it, and apply it to other areas.
You know where you'll see a new battery tech? Same place I first saw NiCd, NiMH, Li-ion and Li-Po. It'll be in a laptop or a small gadget.
All the grandiose claims mean nothing until it's in production. Because, quite literally, a story every week claims this and nothing comes of it. I'm sure if you went looking you could find dozens of new stories every day saying the same. And maybe *ONE* of those, per decade, will actually end up in a product you can buy.
Ammonia is less energy dense than most compressed gas fuels.
It also required temperatures in the range 400-500 degrees to break it down. About 5-6 more than the majority of your car engine components and their cooling systems.
It also creates an extraordinary hazard - ammonia (as a gas, typically, compressed to a liquid) with catalysts heated to beyond-your-oven temperatures producing a highly flammable gas, often with a lot of flammable by-products or catalysts too. It's a horribly nasty and destructive bomb just waiting to go off.
Now all energy-dense materials are bombs. But that's what we're trying to curb. Lithium is so dangerous BECAUSE of the run-away reaction problems. That's what we need to eliminate to make them safer. Lead-acid can be a bomb if you do it right, and you they put warning labels about throwing alkaline batteries on a fire for a reason.
Then when you get the ammonia out, convert it to hydrogen, etc. with all the safeties required that Joe Spanner at the local garage knows what to touch and what not to touch, it's less efficient than just about every other power source.
Ammonia is classed as an "extremely hazardous substance" for a reason, where even all the petroleum and lithium (except hydride) products aren't.
Trust me, you don't want a tank of liquid ammonia sloshing around under your back seats. In comparison, petroleum derivatives are positively safe.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/...
Where an unarmed lynch mob (however, in this case, "right" they were) killed a guy, in India, who tried to kidnap a girl at gunpoint.
Your guns do not stop lynch mobs. They merely amplify the situation, not solve it. You *hope* that you amplify it out of bounds to mutually-assured destruction and that all parties recognise that. That's NOT always the case, and NOT always possible, and NOT always better than the outcome otherwise.
Now, if the lynch mob had managed to get hold of incorrect information and done the judge-jury-and-executioner part ON THE WRONG MAN, then a gun still wouldn't have helped him against an unarmed crowd. And if the crowd had had guns, it would have been *even worse*.
You can't justify the use of guns on the basis that "nobody would ever", because it's just not true. Provide them enough incentive (money, drugs, getting your gun off you, etc.) and they'll happily rush towards you anyway and make that weapon useless very quickly.
I realise I'm actually posting a counter-example here - where the lynch mob were "right" for once. It's a very, very rare exception.
My point though: You having a gun won't stop a lynch mob, even if they don't have them.
You having a gun and THEM having a gun certainly won't.
Really?
Because this is peer-to-peer communication, there's no central point putting out these rumours. Do you think the "vaccines cause autism" rumours were only done from a handful of identifiable sources or do you think they were passed from person to person?
What about the Facebook posts I see about "this guy was photographed after trying to snatch a child" posts I see shared from friends once a week or so - I have absolutely no evidence that they were genuine either, but they got around, and they re-circulate often?
What about newsgroups, emails, meme-sharing sites, all of which have had the same problems. People have been SWAT'd because of rumours on forums, and though you might trace the perpetrators of the call, you can't trace who originated the rumour, nor could you likely prosecute them if you could.
Laying the blame at the communications medium is like blaming newspapers because you could write a ransom note using their headline letters. Just as "untraceable" if someone has even a modicum of sense.
You really, really, really don't want WhatsApp and similar services policing EVERYTHING you say on them, trust me. Because then you get to the ridiculousness that is being SWAT'd because of a rumour, or having Microsoft breathe down your neck because you mentioned your dodgy copy of Windows in a private chat.
But teach people that you can't stone someone to death just because you read something on your phone about them, and you can take a step towards civilisation that transcends all technology boundaries, past, present and future.
I saw a study once that said you have to re-use a "bag for life" (the sturdy reusable palstic bags) over 178 times before it's actually economically / ecologically viable over just making thin disposable plastic bags. For a shopping bag, that's probably, what... several years of usage?
I imagine the aluminium bottle is similar.
That said, why people are drinking bottled water at all over what comes out of the tap, or just refilling those same bottles from... say... a 50l bottle of the same water... Isn't that what water-coolers were for?
Depends.
Are you really stupid enough to think that having unique passwords for absolutely everything gives you security?
Or you do you believe that two services which basically access identical amounts of information about you can happily share a password because any breach of either only means compromise of the exact same information / access?
For example, I really don't care that my Slashdot password is the same as other web forums where the worst that can happen is someone posts something under my name. I really don't want a unique password for every single one of dozens of such "unprivileged" accounts.
Thus I *tier* my passwords. These ones let you do X, these let you do Y, these let you do Z. At the highest tier, yes, unique passwords per service because of the import of the access gained from them. But ALL THE OTHER tiers? Not so important.
People who suggest you should memorise a thousand passwords or store them all centrally (e.g. password management software) are a lot more stupid and out of touch with reality than those that say "Have a consistent password for such services".
Hint: When you lose your password, it's really easy. What access does that account have? Therefore it must be one of Tier X passwords, therefore it's not going to be a chore to remember what it is. And a damn sight better than typing in your OTHER passwords thinking "Well, I must have used that then" into what might actually be a compromised website.
P.S. The reason that NOBODY, NIST, NSA, GCHQ, etc. recommend that you don't expire passwords any more (and there's been an article on here from "the guy who set the rules for passwords" saying the same): Give people too many passwords and they destroy the security of them in order to satisfy their own convenience.
A set of tiered passwords shared across services which can't give any more access than ANY of those services already gives up from that password is no worse. At absolute worst, it means you have to reset a couple of passwords if one is compromised, instead of one.
Security has to meet reality every once in a while. Pouring concrete into your car and chiselling it away every morning means nobody will steal it, yes, but it's so inconvenient as to be impractical which means nobody will ever do that.
"How living in a society where people think it's okay to stone people based on rumour, and the police are unable to stop or prosecute them Destroyed A Village"
being the more accurate headline.
Whatsapp did nothing more than allow people to communicate, no different to a book, radio, post-it notes or anything else.
But if you live in a community where people will stone you to death without consequence, no amount - or absence - of technology can save you.
The memorisation thing is always used as an excuse.
You want to memorise it? Set your important passwords to it. Make yourself type it in a thousand times a day. Guess what, you'll be able to screw up the piece of paper with it on by next week because you'll be so frustrated at having to refer to it and you'll have typed it so often that you'll get it stuck in your head.
The problem with it being just "in your head" is that if you're hit by a bus and forget it - all your stuff is gone forever. Even though you may well require access to it to continue with your life.
So you need build a 2km square waterproof (not necessarily water-tight, granted) bag.
And then drag that, full of water, behind you for several thousand miles. The reason an iceberg is so "easy" to tow is that it floats very well. A 4 square kilometer bag full of water?... not so good.
If anything, that's an even nuttier idea than using the iceberg in the first place.
This is *possible*. Whether it's *sensible* is a completely different matter.
Hint: If you're towing it by sea to its final destination... there's water. Maybe not fresh water, but water. Which you could remove the salt from. If only it were a hot country with plenty of available power!
Bigger question: One company does this, it works, makes money. What now? Now you have a thousand companies the world over stealing icebergs to sell. Nobody (technically) owns the icebergs themselves (I believe the agreements only apply to the land masses in Antarctica, and a region within the Arctic).
We're more worried about icebergs, not because they are breaking off and showing the raises in temperature over the Arctic regions, but because when they melt, millions of tons of freshwater is released that was previously locked in ice, and the interaction between ice-cold freshwater and sea-water can easily disrupt major sea currents, let alone local currents.
Dump 100 million tons of iceberg water into the ocean on a regular basis and you're gonna royally fuck up the local wildlife.
Not to mention one of the ideas suggested to Brewster in Brewster's Millions.
It would cost Apple more to make the iPhone in the US.
Probably twice as much, if not more.
Now, most of the iPhone cost is nothing but profit, so they could in theory absorb it but... why would they? If they could absorb it, they'd own the entire phone market by now by just cutting their ridiculous phone prices.
They'd also have a couple of years of utter mayhem as they built factories, hired workers, moved stock and parts, etc etc.
Much as I hate Apple, it's a stupid idea. The reason that companies *don't* already do everything themselves in the US (or most of the first-world nations) is because it's just too expensive for them to do so. And people likely wouldn't pay the prices they'd have to charge, or their shareholders would revolt at suddenly cutting their (stupendous, sickening) profit in half overnight.
Trump doesn't get economics at all. And he certainly doesn't get trade.
Sure, Apple moving back gives you taxes and jobs. And then China will have no money from you, less incentive to be favourable in their trades, more expensive for everything you DO need them for (which is an awful lot, not least landfilling those phones once they're dead).
And if they were to, say, have a huge electronics manufacturing industry, they could make your life hell overnight, not least by making you source and produce every chip from somewhere else, but also having to compete against their phones that do more for less money. With almost no effort at all.
1) Get proper walls. I mean, seriously.
2) Projector screens are just fine... secure them to the wall, pull them down and tie them off properly. Don't stick them on a wobbly tripod.
3) If in doubt, even 75" touchscreens are "affordable".
And the "lights-out" thing is nonsense.
I know... because I spend my life in schools where every classroom is a projector or a huge interactive touchscreen. They operate in broad-daylight, with south-facing windows, onto white and reflective surfaces, and operate just fine. If you're worried, buy something with slightly higher lumens output.
You know what happens when we have an event like a World Cup, a Royal Wedding, etc.? Staff actually COME ON SITE on their days off etc. to load it up in a classroom and watch it.
P.S. https://stari.co/tv-monitor-vi...
Unless you are going more than 55 inches and sitting 4 feet away, you likely can't even detect 4K etc.
Or you could just get an 85 inch 1080p and sit 11 feet away. Still comfortably within an ordinary household.
To see 8K, you need to sit within 3 feet. I would argue that NOBODY can sit 3 feet away from a decent-size display comfortably and even see the whole movie.
London.
Yeah, that little tin-pot town with 8 million people in it and no cinemas...
Where it costs GBP15 per adult ticket, minimum, in the out-of-town ones.
Theatres from Vue, Cineworld, Odeon. Yeah, those three franchises that own over 75% of all the cinemas in the country.
The particular one I use actually states on their website:
"Sony 4K Video"
"All screens are fitted with Dolby 6.1 surround."
But hey, that's just my local 11 screen 3000-plus seat cinema. Others in the area may vary - there are a dozen within a ten minute car journey of me.
Or, say, the one that's 20 minutes from me in the middle of London's West End (that's like "our" version of "your" Broadway) - Leicester Square and costs nearly twice as much.
You assume I'm riffing. I have access to some of the best cinemas in the country, including IMAX showcases, just a short Tube ride away. And I'll tell you that I'd prefer a projector in a living room.
Because ALL the things you're favouring (colour gamuts, HDR, Dolby, etc. etc. etc.) really mean nothing to me whatsoever, and certainly don't justify the rest of the downsides of cinema.
Like... if you look on this post... most people. I pity you, that you spend money chasing some perfection that only you can perceive, I really do. But the majority of the people... don't. Hence the dying cinemas.
At best, admissions numbers are holding steady, but don't even compare favourably to the 1970's, let alone the fact that they've halved or much worse since the 60's. Box office takings (so not just the blockbusters but everything they see come in) are flat and have been for nearly a decade. In terms of inflation, that's a loss.
Compared against the vast number of new media and viewing that happens now compared to them, cinema is just about clinging on - as a percentage it's pathetic.
And there's me with a barely-HD projector on an 8-foot white projection screen, with the audio coming out of it in what might as well be mono sound because the directionality makes no difference (i.e. the thing making the sound in the movie isn't off to my left, it's just on the left of the screen most of the time, which is... in front of me, and the box making the sound is behind me anyway), streaming the videos off my phone over a ChromeCast via a 4G connection on a "SD-only" package.
And you know what? It's not just as good as any cinema... it's better. Because an 8-foot screen from a sensible distance away (the calculator I found says 17 feet) fills your vision just the same while also offering a res that they'd need 8-16K or greater on an humongous screen to match, and most cinemas aren't that.
People also forget that "1080p" is really "2 Megapixel". 4K might be "33 Megapixel" but there is no way in hell it's 10+ times better, or that you can see 10 times more detail at any sensible distance.
Sorry, but cinema is dying in my country. Too expensive. Empty most of the time. Too much upselling and ads. No technical incentive to watch it compared to buying even the cheapest of projectors.
I've never been burgled in my life.
How? How have I magically avoided this? How? I'm asking specifically how I avoided that, despite living between neighbours who were both burgled and in high-burglary areas, and not having advanced security systems, how?
Yeah, it's my neighbour's fault that someone sneaked round the back, smashed the door in, and stole things, running off before anything could be done. It's the other neighbour's fault that someone forced their way into their house, threatened a teenaged girl and stole jewellery.
It's all their fault for not having advanced security systems, not keeping weapons, not training themselves in the martial arts... right?
You've been lucky (no threats). I've been lucky (by only having received threats that were never credible). When we're not lucky, does that make it not a death threat? Does that make it our fault? Do you think that someone who's stupid enough to make a death-threat on a public forum is actually applying rational logic to who they threaten and why? Do you think that because you get into a heated argument, you're "inviting" death threats?
P.S. Go ask females that you know how many times they've been threatened with violence where they had done nothing to "deserve" that... In my experience it's almost every one, whether it's because they turned down someone's advances, didn't want to be groped in a club, or were raped (1/3rd of all women). A death-threat doesn't require some impetus to be issued from the people stupid enough to issue them.
And no amount of "polite" appeasing behaviour stops them. You've been lucky. Go ask your local A&E (Casualty / ER) staff how many death threats they've had, and they're just literally trying to help people as a career. A paramedic. A firefighter. Front-line customer service staff.
You're saying that the victim is doing something "wrong" that somehow incites people to threaten them, where you don't do that thing. Then drawing the line as "victim therefore does something that causes someone to issue death threat", rather than "guy who issues death threat is the problem".
I could walk up to you in the street and swear and shout at you. A death threat, in that context, is still unjustified, uncalled-for, disproportionate, illegal and arrestable.
The problem is "people who issue death threats". Whether they claim that's because you're the wrong religion, because you insulted Mohammed by drawing a cartoon, because you "look funny", because you're gay, because you support the wrong team, because you like Donald Trump, because you're different somehow, or whatever - it does not mean that you should be blamed for those things leading to a death threat. Those things are NOT ENOUGH to justify a death threat. Because pretty much nothing is. That's it.
As such, the person on the receiving end of a death-threat because they do those things... is being blamed as the victim. And they are the victim - because it's a crime to utter a death threat. But it's not a crime to be rude to people, kick them out a game, block them from being on a website, etc. etc. etc.
"He swore at me so I hit him" is the essence of this. One of you committed a criminal act. Hence is a victim. And no amount of incitement, in law, justifies a death threat.
It's INCREDIBLY worrying that you don't get this. Your behaviour, attitude, or approach has *nothing* to do with whether you received a death threat or not. Statistics did. Similarly, your behaviour, attitude or approach also has ZERO relevance to any issuance of a death-threat - you could call the guy the worst names in the worse and harass him to the end of the earth, and do all sorts of shit. And it still doesn't justify receiving a death threat from him.
I admin game servers, moderate forums, write articles, etc.
I have received such things. I treat them as the worthless, uninformed, non-threat that they are (it's not like they even know who I am, thus not a threat to me).
But that doesn't mean I invited them or even, in some cases, was even part of the dialog that led to them until people were asked to moderate their tone, leave, etc.
"but behave in ways that makes them more prevalent receivers of abuse?"
Abuse is very different to a death threat. Abuse begats abuse in many cases. It's unlikely they are a moderator for a platform for long if they are the cause or incitement of such abuse. But a death threat isn't justified, no matter what. Honestly, there is no wording of a single statement in law that can justify retaliating with a death threat, even a death threat itself.
Hence why this is victim-blaming. Maybe the victim said something nasty which incited it? Still a death-threat. Maybe they were being a prick? Still a death-threat. Maybe the victim was literally threatening to beat people up? Still a death-threat. Describing them as somehow "inciting" the abuse because of the way they deal with a situation? Maybe that's a reason to question their skills as a moderator, or blame them for inciting larger arguments or trolling, but it's not a reason to blame them for receiving death-threats.
Hey, I once had a guy threaten to do all kinds of things to me "because I banned his friend, who only cheated once!". Literally nothing to do with him, and he went from server to server of mine yelling and threatening until I just banned his ID globally from all my servers.
Sure, I'm thick-skinned and know that he wasn't a serious threat, not least because he wouldn't know who I was anyway. But if I had credible belief that he would know who I was and continued to make those threats... police action (even though I know it would just be recorded and not much else).
Victim-blaming is precisely what "Well maybe they did something to prompt a death prompt" is.
Established case law indicates otherwise.
Sure, it's got to be more than just a idle childish threat, but if it's at all sustained or targetted, they'll take it seriously.
Hell, they have identified and prosecuted any number of people who said racist things on public transport.
Nice victim-blaming there.
There are people on the Internet that will issue death threats because they disagree with you - whether or not you enter into any argument whatsoever.
And it doesn't matter how "controversial" you are. A death threat is a criminal offence. People can, do, have and will go to jail for uttering them in a serious manner.
"A key thing about responsible web usage" is that it's no different to the real-world, because it is the real-world. And you can no more threaten someone's life online as you can offline.
Trust me, threaten my life - not in jest - offline and I'll prosecute. Do so online, and it's the same. Especially if you take it anywhere beyond actually just posting a comment (e.g. private messaging, revealing information, chasing, harassment, etc. etc. etc.). Just because it's online doesn't grant you an exception.
And there's no web-forum-argument in the world that's justifiable of a death-threat, the same way that there's no web-forum-argument in the world worth going to jail for, or living in fear of death threats of.
I have a friends who's a children's author. He's received death-threats because he posted a political comment that wasn't in any way offensive. He's had actual death-threats, over involved and proloned conversations (including literal offers of meeting him at the airport when he flies to an announced meeting to kill him, including threats of gun use) because he was mildly sexist in jest in a tweet.
Sorry, but the world's full of nutters. We can no more live in fear of saying something that might offend them in case they make a death threat than we can allow people who make death threats to say "Oh, it's just a joke", or "oh, that happens online, just deal with it".
The second they gave me windows I couldn't break off, or shrink, or remove, a ton of extra stuff all popping up, tried to take over my entire screen rather than be a small list of people on the right that I could double-click to talk to someone... I never bothered to run it or update it ever again.
Steam just did the same with Steam Friends but at least I can just close that shit, but it's annoying that when you Shift-Tab or when you load up the program it's back again. Seriously, fuck off with that. I don't talk to people on Steam, I don't want it.
Skype's already lost all my usage by doing that. Steam has other purposes.
Microsoft buying Skype, joining it with Lync, and integrating it all into the office suite sounded really good. They managed to botch every single aspect of that - from Skype for Business being different to Skype for Home, introducing Skype for Metro and removing Skype for Desktop, and then not actually putting it into some part of the Office suite that'll use it most (Home & Student) at all. Then tie it all into a Microsoft account that some people might not want at all.
Textbook example of how to buy a piece of software without understanding it and not only destroying it, but failing to then even use your competing software to do that job better. I could justify the business case behind buying and killing Skype if they wanted to push Lync / their own product. But they just ballsed up every aspect of it.
I hope the $8.5bn was worth it guys. I know I haven't used it since.
Agreed.
VLAN. With RADIUS. Or the very least MAC-based RADIUS and blocking any unknown devices.
Wifi's a shared medium.
20 things in your house / neighbour's houses? That 450Mbps can drop to 22.5Mbps each. Which is a pittance.
Ethernet generally *isn't* shared so, at least not on the cable - a Gigabit cable is a Gigabit per computer. The cheapest of switches will handle multiple gigabits.
But if you're being swamped by neighbours etc. then Wifi is likely the bottleneck much more than the cable that comes into your house.
You mean the one that runs this:
https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=w...
Yeah, hardly "new" Slashdot.
Seriously, the quality of technical content vs "hey look this is cool" crap is really putting me off now.
Have you ever tried to make a game and sell it? Only the other day on here I was reading an article about "review copies " that were basically scammed out of games-makers. Something that DRM could stop.
There are numerous instances of games-makers tracking pirated downloads, and releasing games without DRM to see how they fare. Piracy is rampant. Even for a small indie, it's a problem... I can't imagine how you think that will scale for a profit-seeking business.
That's not to say that all DRM measures are valid. Some go too far. But DRM is a necessary part of consuming modern life. Out of all the "DRM free" stores (e.g. app-stores, etc.) out there, how many are bundled on phones or computers in preference to the DRMd ones? None.
There's *always* a way to run non-DRMd software, but the equivalents don't always exist in the way you'd like.
I'm massively pro-open-source (which basically makes DRM moot). But I can't ever justify having a huge, successful, idea and then trying to monetise it... at the point you monetise DRM makes sense and nothing else does. I've seriously considered my "big project" games that I've worked on for years and I can't picture how you'd get anything back if they were non-DRM or open-source. It just wouldn't happen.
With money comes DRM, that's the problem. I'm happy to give away much of the fruits of my labour for free, I do so personally and professionally all the time. But I can't ever imagine a commercially successful game without DRM of some kind (even if it was just "online account necessary").
I'm a pragmatists and a realist. The fact is, at the hourly rates that my free time costs me (i.e. how much do I have to work to get X amount of free time, and how much would that cost charged to a client) it's literally NOT worth me trying to bypass or avoid DRM in order to watch a movie, play a game, read a book or anything else. Especially not when the DRM doesn't interfere with the ordinary usage of said product.
In the same way, I'm sure I can make my own soap, farm my own bees, knead my own bread. But the effort, time and money involved is much better spent on "big corporate" products, and then getting all that free time back to do things more entertaining. Like watch a movie.
While your attitude to DRM is "fuck you", you're never going to win that argument. Because everyone else on the planet has bigger things to do, and that their game only runs on 3 computers at once is right as the very bottom of the pile of things they give a shit about. You can't instigate change that way.
I'd much more happily give MONTHS of my time to initiatives that make open-source games, libraries, cross-platform ports, etc. than try to convince an ordinary person that DRM is "a bad thing". Even though it's present in everything from coffee-makers to computer games, car tires to 3D printers.
Because, at the end of the day, if you want a reliable commercial product it needs a revenue stream to sustain itself. DRM is a guardian of that revenue stream (though far from perfect, yes, any DRM is breakable and you can't make one that isn't, but that's not the point - like the BluRay AACS stuff... it's about making it difficult to do things in a timely manner at release, not be impenetrable... and lots of companies remove DRM from products after that initial period).
If you think this is bad now, then it's only EVER going to get worse, whether or not I support it. But you're fighting the wrong battle. "No DRM" is stupid. What you need is "Reasonable DRM" instead. Lumping it all together just teaches companies that they might as well go the whole hog as they've gonna catch flak for it anyway.
I find Steam DRM (not the additional stuff that some companies put on their Steam offerings) perfectly reasonable. It's never hindered me in any way. It likely never will. I accept it as a reasonable compromise and would protest if it get too strict. But I also accept that "No DRM" just means rampant casual piracy (no matter what peopl
Indeed... like all the privacy and other problems, it's not that we can't solve them, it's that nobody cares.
Every person who has Alexa in their living room.
Every person who uses Steam or Netflix or whatever else.
None of them care. They paid for certain rights, got them, and enjoy them. Beyond that, the "ideal" of ownership is, to them, too difficult to obtain and they can't be bothered.
It's a political/legal issue that basically affects a tiny minority of users, who probably don't purchase that content anyway because of it.
Though I like GoG being DRM-free, I can't say that I care too much. I just want a copy of an old game in a playable format, and that's why I give them money (100+ titles I think?). But Steam has DRM - and some games have EVEN MORE bolted on top - and I have 1000+ games on there. Because, despite understanding all the issues, writing my own software, avoiding DRM in certain instances (e.g. professional life where possible), etc. I can't actually care enough about a game to do anything about it.
I buy game. I play game. I'm happy and got what I paid for. Much more likely is the game is made obsolete on the basis of platform support than anything to do with the DRM, and the DRM really doesn't get in my way at all, in any way, whatsoever, for the things I want to do.
Buy game. Double-click. Install. Play. If that doesn't work, I'd be complaining. I tell you now that I have at least 10 games that DON'T work like that on Steam any more (due to DLL issues, deactivated multiplayer networks, OS compatibility problems, the game being revoked, etc.). I'm more annoyed about those than anything DRM-related which hasn't caused me to have a single bad purchase.
Same with DVD's and audio and all kinds of things. So long as it works, I'm happy. My time and effort finding a DRM-free equivalent is expensive, more expensive than the loss of a DRM-encumbered product (which hasn't happened to me, maybe I'm lucky). I can rip DVD's and defeat region protection, and so on but it's easier to not buy it at all if it doesn't work as intended (i.e. in my DVD player, etc.).
Most people see only a choice of "get the thing I want" or "not". And though we can all choose not, as a majority we don't. I have. I went without all kinds of media for years. I didn't suffer. But now I'm like most people... if my cheap entertainment purchase keeps me entertained for long enough, I got value out of it and it was worth it. But reading a EULA, defeating DRM, or avoiding it isn't worth the time and effort to worry about.
Yes, I know that I could lose my content one day. But you know what? I already lost all my old DOS games, my VHS tapes and all kinds of stuff several times over anyway. Sure I "could" get it working again in some fashion, but the time and effort isn't worth it.
Technology advances killed more of my content than anything to do with DRM.