Unfortunately studies show that even these unpleasant experiences can increase purchases. The event was so trivial that you don't remember it when you go to make a purchase.
Unless they really overdo it. Remember X-10? I know what they sell, I like the concept, but their ads are so annoying that the ads are what I remember them for. I guarantee I never ever will pay a cent for the stuff. Of course these days X-10 is horribly out of date, but that's another issue.
Those shock the monkey ads that used to be everywhere? I have no clue what they sell, but if I find out, I guarantee I won't buy it either.
Normal ads are a minor annoyance. This stuff is much, much worse. If I run into it, I'll simply close the page and go elsewhere. If I must put up with it for some reason I'm sure I'll remember and hate whoever is involved. If it really annoys me for some reason, it might tempt me to mess with the ad statistics.
That last thing is unlikely, but the point is, that I have more options than just absorbing the ad and doing it's bidding.
Since even advertising like this works, I suspect that you are the idiot.
It works for making sure I remember I hate the company, yeah. That's not the kind of thing that leads to great sales, though.
First, rare earth is not that rare. There's lots and lots of the stuff in the crust. The recent issue with China is just because China beat everybody on price. The only reason everybody else is not mining it is because they couldn't compete with China, not because there's any lack of it.
Second, there are different ways of making solar cells. Silicon ones are made from (duh) silicon, which is 27% of the crust. The stuff is absolutely everywhere, the hard thing is making it pure enough for semiconductor applications. Fortunately, as pretty much everything has silicon in it these days, I expect there's a lot of interest in making production cheaper.
Third, even if the most efficient cells do require something unusual, IMO it's not really necessary. What's needed is cheap cells. If you can plaster cheap solar cells on every surface they don't need to be especially efficient.
All methods have some disadvantages. That doesn't mean however that they're all equivalent in their badness.
For instance, AFAIK, windmills killing birds isn't a particularly big deal. They don't kill that many, we kill lots by just making buildings, driving cars and owning cats (nobody seems to mention that when listing disadvantages like you just did), and progress has been made in making them kill as few as possible. Also the existing powerplants poison them instead.
Solar causes problems in the desert, sure. But that's not the only place where a solar panel can go. There's plenty room on top of buildings and those aren't exactly active ecosystems.
Advertising as used today is the most effective behavioral control mechanism every devised by man. There's nobody, not one person, who is not directly affected by advertising, in the way they live, the way they spend their money, the way they deal with other people.
I find that highly dubious. Originally I'm sure it made a difference. These days there's so much saturation, that the vast majority of it goes to waste.
If you think you are immune, or that you are capable of doing other than what the marketers want you to do after being exposed to their advertising, you are fooling yourself.
That conflicts with there being many different advertisers.
For expensive things, I always do research. I don't buy stuff like laptops because I saw an ad, or it looks cool, or everybody is getting one. For me it's a process of selection from a massive list, often taking hours.
For cheaper things like food, I'll go through the entire range available until I try everything I find edible, then choose from those I liked best.
The things you like, the way you see yourself, the way you see the world, are all a product of advertising.
That's a bit of an exageration.
But since you're so sure, try to guess something I purchased, the company I bought it from, and where I saw the ad for that.
No, I'm still arguing with the statement you originally made: "The only thing DRM is preventing you from is breaking the law". We'll argue one subject at a time.
I think we can agree that there are many kinds of DRM, and one of them is region locking. One way of testing your sentence is replacing "DRM" in your sentence with every specific kind of it, and seeing if it still holds in all cases. So:
"The only thing region locking is preventing you from is breaking the law".
So I ask again. Which law?
There's no law against that hence my pointing out you can buy regionless players and play anything you wnat without restriction.
Ok, you admit it yourself. Do you agree then that your original statement, "The only thing DRM is preventing you from is breaking the law" is incorrect?
Whether a legal workaround exists or not is entirely irrelevant for that specific question. It's either true, or false, no ifs or buts.
Pretty much, yeah. People generally stare at the monitor in disbelief for a while, before saying "WTF was that?" or some variant of it.
Also often a discussion ensues of just how do you get such a thing made. Try to imagine the script for this and the writer presenting it to somebody with a straight face.
The amount of money I have, mostly, and my long term plans. For instance, do I see myself using public transport every day and only using the car ocassionally, or will it be a workhorse?
How do you determine which features are must-have?
Price/performance ratio, my own testing.
Do I need AC? Living in a place where 35C (95F) is a common temperature, yeah, I do. The heat turns my brain to mush.
Do I need leather seats? Well, that's more debatable. I'd look at how much that costs, try to figure out about how long each kind normally lasts, and if the comfort provided is worth the price.
If you think those decisions are not being constantly manipulated by others, guess again.
Sure, I don't exist in a vacuum. That doesn't mean that just because I see an ad for something that'll make me more likely to buy it. It's more likely that I'll get interested in the concept itself (like an affordable plug-in hybrid) than the specific model being advertised. And I'll still research before buying, so I'll probably find about things like that at that point anyway.
Well, take this one for instance. Who cares what's it advertising? It's one of those things that's just great for showing people and watching their reaction.
I actually read about X-10 in some magazine and thought the idea was really cool. That thought completely vanished from my head when I went online and ran into their ads.
Ocassionally I do watch trailers, when I'm interested in finding something new to watch. But what I'll do is rewinding a few seconds into it to skip past the titles, take a quick look to see if it looks interesting, if so rewind back, and if not skip to the next one. So an unskippable one would still annoy the heck out of me.
Some ads are indeed a work of art, like the car ad with the rube goldberg machine made from pieces. But I don't remember which company it was for, and don't particularly care about what's it advertising. When I buy a car, I'll still come up with a price I'm willing to pay, the features I need, find every model that matches those requirements then pick something from there.
Really? Even if these captchas actually turn out easier to use than the current ones? I mean no more guesstimating which bit of what overlapping miscoloured squiggles belong to which potential letters (and is that a 1 or an l? O or 0?), just a quick message and an easily identifiable word within it.
Really.
Or, to rephrase the question: would you oppose the system if it wasn't about ads but just another innovation in captchas? Assuming, of course, that this innovation does actually make captchas less of a hassle. Just sayin' that this isn't necessarily bad and you might find that the benefits outweigh the agony of having to listen to an ad message (is that really so bad?).
Probably not. It's the advertising angle that's offensive.
Also, normal use of captchas works to my advantage, like helping ensure every third comment isn't an ad for Viagra. That I can cooperate with.
I generally play DVDs with mplayer, which happily skips past all that junk. I've seen a few Disney movies on VHS some years back, but that had rewinding.
Your initial claim is "The only thing DRM is preventing you from is breaking the law". So, why is there such a thing as a region lock? To make your statement true, there must necessarily be something that makes playing a DVD from the wrong region unlawful.
In that sentence, you're painting DRM as something that enforces an existing law, and helps people avoid accidentally infringing it. A bit like a car that automatically knows the maximum speed on each road, and refuses to go faster than the limit. The existence of a car without such a limit only means that you must obey the limit on your own. It doesn't suddenly become lawful to speed, just because you found a car that allows it to happen. Even if that car is completely legal to sell.
So in the same way, to make that sentence true, a region lock must necessarily be a way of making the user comply with some law that says "The user must not play a DVD from the wrong region", and in the absence of technological enforcement, the user must still comply with the rule, and not play it.
Otherwise, I win the argument and there's such a thing as DRM that forbids people from doing things that are perfectly legal.
Your claim is "The only thing DRM is preventing you from is breaking the law". I challenge you to prove it. Especially since by your own logic, those restrictions only stop me from doing something that would be illegal. That is, there has to be some law that makes it illegal to play a russian DVD on an american player, and the DRM is only helping me to avoid accidentally breaking the law.
Quote me the law that makes it illegal to play a russian DVD on an american player, or that requires me to watch the unskippable junk in the beginning.
I mostly agree, though I wouldn't go so far, as there are exceptions.
I'd say that the vast majority of deeds are for selfish reasons, with varying probabilities of a positive outcome for the person. A lot of those then get alternative explanations, because saying you're acting purely out of self-interest generally doesn't look very good.
A number of deeds are done due to outside influences that force an action that's not in the person's interest. In my view and experience, such things are rarely good for a person, and too much of that kind of thing can mess people up. Eg, forcing an unwilling person to kill somebody, or guilt tripping somebody into donating money they don't really want to.
And some other deeds are pretty much random. The human brain is a complicated and failure prone machine, and I'm not convinced that every single action can be attributed to reasoning of some kind. Sometimes there's no discernible correct decision to make, like between strawberry and chocolate icecream, or multiple options all of which seem about as bad or good. Sometimes there is a correct decision to make, but people don't take the time to even realize there is one, or to work out which is it.
I guess my problem in extending the word "selfish" to include things that are also "cooperative behavior" (that ultimately also benefit the individual, possibly in the long term) is that you then can easily find yourself labeling almost all behavior as selfish.
Well, my problem with excluding cooperative behavior is that more selfishness it looks like extreme stupidity. You get something that describes an odd case of a sociopath with no thoughts of self-preservation. The kind of person who punches people in the face because he feels like it at the moment, and shoplifts because he doesn't feel like paying, giving zero thought as to what is going to happen next. Such people exist, I knew one. He ended up dead. He was fairly successful when he was the biggest bully in his area, but his luck ran out as soon as he ran into somebody who was a bigger asshole.
I just think that this kind of person isn't really worth discussing much when speaking of society on a large scale. Such people are an oddity, most of the population doesn't behave in such an extreme way, if only because it's bad for self-preservation. If they don't end up dead, it still easily leads to getting beaten up on a regular basis, lack of friends and money.
Yes, I agree that by this logic pretty much all behavior is selfish. But IMO, it makes sense. Evolution works through natural selection, and natural selection favours those who think about their own survival.
For instance, compare a child who won't share his cookies -- so he can have more cookies -- to one who shares -- so he can gain friends. The latter one may find greater benefits than the former, but still, the word selfish applies more to the first.
I think that for making a real decision in this case, one needs to have a developed morality, and young children don't have one yet. They start without an understanding of what "right" and "wrong", or "long term benefit" mean. Children who share their cookies are probably doing it more because that's what their parents telling them what they're supposed to do, than out of deep thought of what's the right thing to do in the situation.
IMO for an action to be really selfish, there needs to be a stage of reasoning involved.
Eg, "There's food, I want food, so I'll take it" is neither selfish nor not, it's simply amoral. Like a dog will just tend to automatically eat food that happens to be close enough. If you hold your ice cream low enough for the dog to lick it, don't be surprised if it does.
"There's food, I want food, but dad says I'm not allowed to take it" isn't a whole lot better. It's simply compliance with a command, but there's no reasoning involved. Dogs can be trained this far, and IIRC experiments show that dogs that show "remorse" fail to distinguish between things that are their fault and things that aren't. Eg, a dog will feel "remorseful" about poo on the carpet, even if it isn't theirs.
For morality to be involved, there has to be a conscious evaluation step: "There's food, I want food, it is correct for me to take it in this situation, so I will", or "There's food, I want food, and it will work okay for me if I take it, so I will".
Why? You can do good deeds for selfish reasons. I see it like this:
A stereotypically good person will always tip at a restaurant. Got to help those poor people.
A stereotypically selfish person will never do it. I need my money, dammit, I pay what it says in the menu and not a cent more.
IMO an actual selfish person does neither. They sit there for a while, consider the pros and cons of each choice, including how much money they have, what is the local social convention on tipping, what can they gain if they do and what they can lose if they don't, and make a decision based on that.
So for instance, they don't tip when knowing they will never visit the place again, and tip generously when trying to gain favour, maybe because they like the waitress, maybe to ensure they look like a respected customer when they bring somebody important with them for lunch. Externally it looks generous, internally it's calculated to give the right impression.
Hence the Slughorn example. This is a guy who does networking in a big way, seeking out exceptional students and organizing parties for them. Then he gets to act as the center of a network that includes future politicians, headmasters, celebrities and so on. And he stars while they're still in school. Long term planning.
IMO, there's nothing wrong with selfishness when things are thought out long term. Being known as a jerk who can't be trusted isn't in most people's interest.
A sucessful selfish person would be somebody like Slughorn from Harry Potter.
1. Haul 6 year old girl into the court. 2. ??? 3. Justice!
It's bizarre. If they judge her, then what?
She can't be sent to prison, has no income to pay a fine, and I doubt very much she can be made to perform community service. So I'm just wondering.
Also, there's this:
Wooten also disagreed with the lawyer's assertion that Juliet Breitman should not be held responsible because her mother was supervising the children at the time. "A parent's presence alone does not give a reasonable child carte blanche to engage in risky behavior such as running across a street," Wooten wrote. He added that "the term 'supervising' is too vague to hold meaning here."
But running around is what 4 year old children do. I think pretty much everybody has noticed that young children have some problems with fine motor control and are ocassionally running into people while playing. They're children, they haven't completely figured it yet. What are the parents supposed to do, keep them on a leash?
1. IP is a stateless protocol, that's inconvenient for some things, so 2. We build TCP on it to make it stateful and bidirectional. 3. On top of TCP, we build HTTP, which is stateless and unidirectional. 4. But whoops, that's inconvenient. We graft state back into it with cookies. Still unidirectional though. 5. The unidirectional part sucks, so various hacks are added to make it sorta bidirectional like autorefresh, culminating with AJAX.
Who knows what else we'll end up adding to this pile.
Install restrictions -- Install on as many computers as you like, just have your account handy. Each install gets three "guest" accounts on the machine, which have no access to online play, and don't record achievements.
Internet connection -- there's a one time authentication, don't have internet connection on the computer you're installing on? There's a offline activation code available from the website. This supposedly has to be re-entered once a year if you don't connect online.
No deal. Activation is completely out of the question. Existence of Blizzard must be completely optional for anything other than online play.
The future -- It's always playable in offline mode, it doesn't need battle.net to run, just for the online aspects. And given you can still actually buy Diablo I in stores, Blizzard keeps supporting most of its games.
You just mentioned activation, though, and "has to be re-entered once a year"
The bugs -- They don't use sony style drm. Blizzards philosophy is to control the online space, and not worry about normal piracy. They see the future in online multiplayer and social gaming, thus the removal of lan in sc2, which takes out the legal loophole in South Korea starcraft I had.
And thus my much decreased interest the moment I heard about the lack of LAN play, even before I started pondering if there was any DRM or not.
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Unless they really overdo it. Remember X-10? I know what they sell, I like the concept, but their ads are so annoying that the ads are what I remember them for. I guarantee I never ever will pay a cent for the stuff. Of course these days X-10 is horribly out of date, but that's another issue.
Those shock the monkey ads that used to be everywhere? I have no clue what they sell, but if I find out, I guarantee I won't buy it either.
Normal ads are a minor annoyance. This stuff is much, much worse. If I run into it, I'll simply close the page and go elsewhere. If I must put up with it for some reason I'm sure I'll remember and hate whoever is involved. If it really annoys me for some reason, it might tempt me to mess with the ad statistics.
That last thing is unlikely, but the point is, that I have more options than just absorbing the ad and doing it's bidding.
It works for making sure I remember I hate the company, yeah. That's not the kind of thing that leads to great sales, though.
Several things:
First, rare earth is not that rare. There's lots and lots of the stuff in the crust. The recent issue with China is just because China beat everybody on price. The only reason everybody else is not mining it is because they couldn't compete with China, not because there's any lack of it.
Second, there are different ways of making solar cells. Silicon ones are made from (duh) silicon, which is 27% of the crust. The stuff is absolutely everywhere, the hard thing is making it pure enough for semiconductor applications. Fortunately, as pretty much everything has silicon in it these days, I expect there's a lot of interest in making production cheaper.
Third, even if the most efficient cells do require something unusual, IMO it's not really necessary. What's needed is cheap cells. If you can plaster cheap solar cells on every surface they don't need to be especially efficient.
Then you're watching at the wrong theater. At the good ones they use the polarized system.
All methods have some disadvantages. That doesn't mean however that they're all equivalent in their badness.
For instance, AFAIK, windmills killing birds isn't a particularly big deal. They don't kill that many, we kill lots by just making buildings, driving cars and owning cats (nobody seems to mention that when listing disadvantages like you just did), and progress has been made in making them kill as few as possible. Also the existing powerplants poison them instead.
Solar causes problems in the desert, sure. But that's not the only place where a solar panel can go. There's plenty room on top of buildings and those aren't exactly active ecosystems.
I find that highly dubious. Originally I'm sure it made a difference. These days there's so much saturation, that the vast majority of it goes to waste.
That conflicts with there being many different advertisers.
For expensive things, I always do research. I don't buy stuff like laptops because I saw an ad, or it looks cool, or everybody is getting one. For me it's a process of selection from a massive list, often taking hours.
For cheaper things like food, I'll go through the entire range available until I try everything I find edible, then choose from those I liked best.
That's a bit of an exageration.
But since you're so sure, try to guess something I purchased, the company I bought it from, and where I saw the ad for that.
No, I'm still arguing with the statement you originally made: "The only thing DRM is preventing you from is breaking the law". We'll argue one subject at a time.
I think we can agree that there are many kinds of DRM, and one of them is region locking. One way of testing your sentence is replacing "DRM" in your sentence with every specific kind of it, and seeing if it still holds in all cases. So:
"The only thing region locking is preventing you from is breaking the law".
So I ask again. Which law?
Ok, you admit it yourself. Do you agree then that your original statement, "The only thing DRM is preventing you from is breaking the law" is incorrect?
Whether a legal workaround exists or not is entirely irrelevant for that specific question. It's either true, or false, no ifs or buts.
Pretty much, yeah. People generally stare at the monitor in disbelief for a while, before saying "WTF was that?" or some variant of it.
Also often a discussion ensues of just how do you get such a thing made. Try to imagine the script for this and the writer presenting it to somebody with a straight face.
The amount of money I have, mostly, and my long term plans. For instance, do I see myself using public transport every day and only using the car ocassionally, or will it be a workhorse?
Price/performance ratio, my own testing.
Do I need AC? Living in a place where 35C (95F) is a common temperature, yeah, I do. The heat turns my brain to mush.
Do I need leather seats? Well, that's more debatable. I'd look at how much that costs, try to figure out about how long each kind normally lasts, and if the comfort provided is worth the price.
Sure, I don't exist in a vacuum. That doesn't mean that just because I see an ad for something that'll make me more likely to buy it. It's more likely that I'll get interested in the concept itself (like an affordable plug-in hybrid) than the specific model being advertised. And I'll still research before buying, so I'll probably find about things like that at that point anyway.
Well, take this one for instance. Who cares what's it advertising? It's one of those things that's just great for showing people and watching their reaction.
Exactly!
I actually read about X-10 in some magazine and thought the idea was really cool. That thought completely vanished from my head when I went online and ran into their ads.
Ocassionally I do watch trailers, when I'm interested in finding something new to watch. But what I'll do is rewinding a few seconds into it to skip past the titles, take a quick look to see if it looks interesting, if so rewind back, and if not skip to the next one. So an unskippable one would still annoy the heck out of me.
Some ads are indeed a work of art, like the car ad with the rube goldberg machine made from pieces. But I don't remember which company it was for, and don't particularly care about what's it advertising. When I buy a car, I'll still come up with a price I'm willing to pay, the features I need, find every model that matches those requirements then pick something from there.
Really.
Probably not. It's the advertising angle that's offensive.
Also, normal use of captchas works to my advantage, like helping ensure every third comment isn't an ad for Viagra. That I can cooperate with.
I generally play DVDs with mplayer, which happily skips past all that junk. I've seen a few Disney movies on VHS some years back, but that had rewinding.
No, you still don't get it. I repeat:
Your initial claim is "The only thing DRM is preventing you from is breaking the law". So, why is there such a thing as a region lock? To make your statement true, there must necessarily be something that makes playing a DVD from the wrong region unlawful.
In that sentence, you're painting DRM as something that enforces an existing law, and helps people avoid accidentally infringing it. A bit like a car that automatically knows the maximum speed on each road, and refuses to go faster than the limit. The existence of a car without such a limit only means that you must obey the limit on your own. It doesn't suddenly become lawful to speed, just because you found a car that allows it to happen. Even if that car is completely legal to sell.
So in the same way, to make that sentence true, a region lock must necessarily be a way of making the user comply with some law that says "The user must not play a DVD from the wrong region", and in the absence of technological enforcement, the user must still comply with the rule, and not play it.
Otherwise, I win the argument and there's such a thing as DRM that forbids people from doing things that are perfectly legal.
You didn't answer the question.
Your claim is "The only thing DRM is preventing you from is breaking the law". I challenge you to prove it. Especially since by your own logic, those restrictions only stop me from doing something that would be illegal. That is, there has to be some law that makes it illegal to play a russian DVD on an american player, and the DRM is only helping me to avoid accidentally breaking the law.
It prevents many other things.
Quote me the law that makes it illegal to play a russian DVD on an american player, or that requires me to watch the unskippable junk in the beginning.
I mostly agree, though I wouldn't go so far, as there are exceptions.
I'd say that the vast majority of deeds are for selfish reasons, with varying probabilities of a positive outcome for the person. A lot of those then get alternative explanations, because saying you're acting purely out of self-interest generally doesn't look very good.
A number of deeds are done due to outside influences that force an action that's not in the person's interest. In my view and experience, such things are rarely good for a person, and too much of that kind of thing can mess people up. Eg, forcing an unwilling person to kill somebody, or guilt tripping somebody into donating money they don't really want to.
And some other deeds are pretty much random. The human brain is a complicated and failure prone machine, and I'm not convinced that every single action can be attributed to reasoning of some kind. Sometimes there's no discernible correct decision to make, like between strawberry and chocolate icecream, or multiple options all of which seem about as bad or good. Sometimes there is a correct decision to make, but people don't take the time to even realize there is one, or to work out which is it.
Well, my problem with excluding cooperative behavior is that more selfishness it looks like extreme stupidity. You get something that describes an odd case of a sociopath with no thoughts of self-preservation. The kind of person who punches people in the face because he feels like it at the moment, and shoplifts because he doesn't feel like paying, giving zero thought as to what is going to happen next. Such people exist, I knew one. He ended up dead. He was fairly successful when he was the biggest bully in his area, but his luck ran out as soon as he ran into somebody who was a bigger asshole.
I just think that this kind of person isn't really worth discussing much when speaking of society on a large scale. Such people are an oddity, most of the population doesn't behave in such an extreme way, if only because it's bad for self-preservation. If they don't end up dead, it still easily leads to getting beaten up on a regular basis, lack of friends and money.
Yes, I agree that by this logic pretty much all behavior is selfish. But IMO, it makes sense. Evolution works through natural selection, and natural selection favours those who think about their own survival.
I think that for making a real decision in this case, one needs to have a developed morality, and young children don't have one yet. They start without an understanding of what "right" and "wrong", or "long term benefit" mean. Children who share their cookies are probably doing it more because that's what their parents telling them what they're supposed to do, than out of deep thought of what's the right thing to do in the situation.
IMO for an action to be really selfish, there needs to be a stage of reasoning involved.
Eg, "There's food, I want food, so I'll take it" is neither selfish nor not, it's simply amoral. Like a dog will just tend to automatically eat food that happens to be close enough. If you hold your ice cream low enough for the dog to lick it, don't be surprised if it does.
"There's food, I want food, but dad says I'm not allowed to take it" isn't a whole lot better. It's simply compliance with a command, but there's no reasoning involved. Dogs can be trained this far, and IIRC experiments show that dogs that show "remorse" fail to distinguish between things that are their fault and things that aren't. Eg, a dog will feel "remorseful" about poo on the carpet, even if it isn't theirs.
For morality to be involved, there has to be a conscious evaluation step: "There's food, I want food, it is correct for me to take it in this situation, so I will", or "There's food, I want food, and it will work okay for me if I take it, so I will".
Why? You can do good deeds for selfish reasons. I see it like this:
A stereotypically good person will always tip at a restaurant. Got to help those poor people.
A stereotypically selfish person will never do it. I need my money, dammit, I pay what it says in the menu and not a cent more.
IMO an actual selfish person does neither. They sit there for a while, consider the pros and cons of each choice, including how much money they have, what is the local social convention on tipping, what can they gain if they do and what they can lose if they don't, and make a decision based on that.
So for instance, they don't tip when knowing they will never visit the place again, and tip generously when trying to gain favour, maybe because they like the waitress, maybe to ensure they look like a respected customer when they bring somebody important with them for lunch. Externally it looks generous, internally it's calculated to give the right impression.
Hence the Slughorn example. This is a guy who does networking in a big way, seeking out exceptional students and organizing parties for them. Then he gets to act as the center of a network that includes future politicians, headmasters, celebrities and so on. And he stars while they're still in school. Long term planning.
IMO, there's nothing wrong with selfishness when things are thought out long term. Being known as a jerk who can't be trusted isn't in most people's interest.
A sucessful selfish person would be somebody like Slughorn from Harry Potter.
That explains organizations like the Red Cross perfectly. Why, right this minute they're planning world domination.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
1. Haul 6 year old girl into the court.
2. ???
3. Justice!
It's bizarre. If they judge her, then what?
She can't be sent to prison, has no income to pay a fine, and I doubt very much she can be made to perform community service. So I'm just wondering.
Also, there's this:
But running around is what 4 year old children do. I think pretty much everybody has noticed that young children have some problems with fine motor control and are ocassionally running into people while playing. They're children, they haven't completely figured it yet. What are the parents supposed to do, keep them on a leash?
Let's see:
1. IP is a stateless protocol, that's inconvenient for some things, so
2. We build TCP on it to make it stateful and bidirectional.
3. On top of TCP, we build HTTP, which is stateless and unidirectional.
4. But whoops, that's inconvenient. We graft state back into it with cookies. Still unidirectional though.
5. The unidirectional part sucks, so various hacks are added to make it sorta bidirectional like autorefresh, culminating with AJAX.
Who knows what else we'll end up adding to this pile.
No deal. Activation is completely out of the question. Existence of Blizzard must be completely optional for anything other than online play.
You just mentioned activation, though, and "has to be re-entered once a year"
And thus my much decreased interest the moment I heard about the lack of LAN play, even before I started pondering if there was any DRM or not.