I would ask why you believe in forcing people to monetarily support an institution they don't believe in.
Do you believe in financial support of Israel? The invasion of Iraq? The invasion of Afghanistan? The prosecution of marijuana users? The prosecution of prostitution? The prosecution of churches that claim tax-free status while simultaneously engaging in political speech? Funding of social services by Jews, Christians, or Muslims through Faith-Based government programs? The bailout of GM? The bailout of AIG? Financial support for the UN?
In all likelihood, there are some government expenditures that you think are a good idea. For those same expenditures there are others who object to being forced to monetarily support that institution or program that they don't believe in.
Whining that you don't believe in program X, so you shouldn't be forced to pay for it, but that everyone should be forced to pay for Y and Z is hypocritical.
(In the event that you actually object to all of the above, great! But if you're such a dedicated libertarian or anarchist, why are you worried about something as minor as the teaching of evolution in public schools?)
To understand why people are complaining about X, try resizing a window quickly.
Right. Let's open up Slashdot in another window and resize it. That was kinda dull. Maybe I need to go faster. No, still dull. Let's keep resizing it. Nope. Still dull. Why am I doing this?
It doesn't matter what computer you are using, on X you get flicker.
This big black and grey box to my right appears to be a computer of some sort. And when I logged in the big logo assured me that this was Red Hat Enterprise 5. Yet I'm seeing no flicker. Firefox is merrily re-rendering the contents just about as fast as I can see. Looks about the same as Vista to me.
I was going to say that occasionally resizing is slow because the poor application is doing a lot of work, usually a web browser reflowing a complex page, but that I saw this on both Windows and Linux. But I can't remember the last time that happened on either platform.
Try opening a bunch of apps on one workspace, then move away and to that workspace.
Right. Back and forth I go. This is still dull. Why am I doing this?
Notice how each window is redrawn one by one, first the frame and then the window contents.
Erm, no? They redraw nice and zippy.
Now, I have seen the behavior you describe. Of course, I only see it when the application or applications on a particular workspace haven't been used for a long time. On the order of hours. Then it takes a while to draw. But that's not a matter of X, that's a matter of the program having been swapped out to disk, and needing to wait for it to get back into RAM.
At home I run Vista on a quad core machine with 4Gb of RAM. It's pretty zippy. I run Ubuntu on a much lower end laptop. It's also pretty zippy. I occasionally use my wife's Mac. It's also pretty zippy. As I switch back and forth between these platforms, I never get frustrated that any of the GUIs feels slow. They all feel like fast, responsive modern GUIs. X11 on Linux has felt this way, well, not forever, but for long enough that I can't remember when it was slower than Windows. Maybe 5 or so years? Maybe longer?
Clearly the crippling limitations of X's architecture are less severe than you suggest.
Part of my concern is for history. Physical media with little to no DRM means that future generations can have access to the past. Future game designers can see what has gone before, to mine it for good ideas, to avoid reinventing the wheel. If everything is online locked, games can go away, forever. The only people with long term access, our video game history custodians, will end up being those will infringing copies. Not a future I look forward to. Sure, you chose to not take care of your physical media. But I do. And I know others who do.
If we had an option between Steam and physical media, we'd both be happy. Heck, if I could get both for a small premium, I'd pay for it in a minute. (Telltale Games has a hundred or so bucks of money because they do exactly this.) But that's an option. It's (at least for Valve's games), Steam or nothing.
If once a month I need to have my car serviced by dozens of people, yes, it requires dozens of people operate. (Oh, and there is some magic device in the car that limits the servicing to dozens of people working for the manufacturer, meaning I can't do it myself, not even with dozens of my friends.)
Second, Gabe himself said that if steam were ever to go down, he would remove any and all restrictions from playing your game, without the steam servers.
And he has agreements from the third-party games to do so? I doubt it.
And if Steam hits a bad year, or is crushed under, say, a patent lawsuit, and gets taken over in a hostile takeover, perhaps out of bankruptcy, and the new owner decides to shut down Steam because they just wanted to scavenge assents, is Gabe's promise binding on the new owner? I doubt it.
Gabe seems like a nice guy. I genuinely believe he means what he says. But the sort of circumstances that mean that Steam goes down are exactly the sort of circumstances that would render Gabe's promise void. If the company goes into bankruptcy and I ask the bankrupt company to spend more money to pay developers to unlock games I purchased (and testers to test it, and for servers and bandwidth to distribute the patch), the judge will laugh me out of the courtroom.
Is your point that publishers should work to minimize infringing copies of their works while encouraging purchase of legal copies? Well, I'm with you there!
Or is your point that publishers need DRM to accomplish that? Why would you believe that?
There is copyright infringement of music. And major music labels swore on their bibles, torahs, korans, and stock options that they needed strong DRM, or else there would be rampant copyright infringement and no new music would ever be created.
Today the market has largely rejected DRM on music. It's easier than ever to make and distribute infringing copies of songs. There is absolutely nothing preventing infringing copies from being made. Yet the world hasn't ended. Music is still being made.
A combination of ways to discourage infringement and encourage purchasing legal copies were found: Lower prices. Watermarking of songs. Making the legal market more convenient than the illegal market. Ensuring that the legal versions were just as good as the illegal versions. Encouraging people to support the artists they like by paying for the songs. But DRM went out the window.
So if by "finding an acceptable solution" you mean "lowering prices, watermarking games, making the legal market more convenient than the illegal market, ensuring the legal versions are just as good as the illegal versions, and encouraging people to support developers whose games they like by paying for games," great! But if you mean "We just need to find the magical level of DRM," not necessarily.
The deal breaker for me is that a Steam game, like any DRMed game, is not as good as the illegal version. What if Steam goes out of business? Or moves to Steam2 and decides they don't want to support Steam1 anymore? I lose access to all of the games I "own." Surely I can trust a large corporation like Valve, right? Ha! Large companies who screwed their customers in exactly this way include Yahoo, Google (although you got a refund), Major League Baseball, Microsoft (temporary reprieve for a few years), Wal-Mart, and Sony. Given that lineup, why should I trust an itty-bitty little company like Steam/Valve?
(To be fair, I can actually see a DRM system I would whole heartedly support: a binding public commitment to strip the DRM from the game after a short period of time. Maybe 6 to 12 months. This would hamper illegal copies during the highest profit part of the games lifespan. The binding public commitment means that someone like me would buy sooner than later.)
"The workaround is laughable -- 'call fsync(), and then wait(), wait(), wait(), for the Wizard to see you.'"
The "workaround" has been the standard for decades! Twenty years ago when I was learning programming I was warned: Until you call fsync(), you have no guarantee that your data has landed on disk. If you want to be sure the data is on the disk, call fsync(). While it's a complication for application developers, the benefit is that it allows filesystem developers to make the filesystem faster. That ext3 in its default configuration happened to work as erroneously expected has always been a happy coincidence, not something to rely on.
You might as well be complaining about the "workaround" that you have to shutdown your computer properly instead of yanking the cord out of the wall; since it didn't used to lose data when you did that.
Glossing over some details, what is happening is closer to this:
The goal is to replace config with a new version. The programmer is essentially doing this:
1. Create config.new. (Should be empty, because it's new)
2. Write the new contents into config.new
3. Move config.new onto config
The goal is that when you replace config, you're replacing it with a guaranteed complete version, config.new. Assuming it happens in this order (and that step 3 is atomic; it happens or doesn't, never partially) if you crash midway through, you'll either end up with the old config or the new config, but never a partial config. Unfortunately the operating system tries to speed things up, and for a variety of good reasons delaying step 2 makes sense. Doing so is allowed by the standards specifically for these good reasons. So what actually happens is this:
1. Create config.new. (Should be empty, because it's new)
3. Move config.new onto config
2. Write the new contents into config.new (which is actually config now, so it works)
This works fine... unless something happens between steps 3 and 2. If we stop there, we have a new, empty file in place of "config." With ext4, the window between 3 and 2 could be as long as a minute, a window during which you can lose data.
The correct solution is for the program, not the operating system, to take care with files it cares about:
1. Create config.new. (Should be empty, because it's new)
2a. Write the new contents into config.new
2b. Wait until the contents are on disk. ("fsync")
3. Move config.new onto config
Now it's not possible to move 2a after 3, so you're guaranteed safe behavior. But you lose the speed benefits of reordering. For data you care about, this is a good idea. For data you don't care about (Your web browser cache leaps to mind), it's overkill and makes you slower.
ext3 (and the new ext4 option) essentially adds 2b automatically. It's good in that it's safer for everyone involved, but it's bad in that everyone takes a speed hit, even in cases where speed is more important than safety.
If you mean: "I do photography for a magazine," or "I do big budget advertising work." Yeah, sure. Lack of CMYK support and good color calibration are a killer. The GIMP is not a suitable tool for those professionals.
If you mean: "I'm a reporter for a small weekly newspaper who is also expected to be her own photographer and do her own photo cropping and correction," the GIMP is ready today. It was ready several years ago when a friend in exactly that position gave it a try. She was using Photoshop to do the work and found that the GIMP was a complete replacement. (She didn't like the interface, but GIMPshop instantly eliminated that complaint.) If you mean, "I'm doing web design for a small company," the GIMP is ready today.
I am also curious what people did before Photoshop itself got CMYK support, or good color calibration, or whatever it is you're whining about today. Were there just no professionals in the field then?
Five or so ago my wife bought a cell phone from from Best Buy, and she sprang for the extended warranty. She had gotten at the time the standard pitch: if anything goes wrong, just bring it in and walk out with a new phone. A year and a half later her phone's battery has stopped holding a charge; it dies after a few hours, even if unused. So in we go to make use of the warranty. They agreed the fault was covered. But... they didn't sell the same phone. They didn't even sell a comparable phone. All of the phones they had in stock were significantly more expensive. My wife would have had to have paid the difference. My wife understandably complained: she paid for the extended warranty to ensure that if something went wrong she wouldn't have to pay anything. At the point the manager said it was unreasonable to expect Best Buy to be able to provide a free of charge equivalent, since "How could we know that you'd show up a year later expecting it." I dunno, maybe the warranty you sold her? We pushed harder, and the manager threatened to terminate the warranty, refunding the price of the warranty, but naturally without interest for the free loan she'd given Best Buy
Best Buy staff stupid enough to try and sell me extended warranties get lectures these day. Hasn't actually come up in some time, but I guess avoiding Best Buy if at all possible does that.
(My other fond extended warranty memory is amusing also from Best Buy. A friend and I pop in to buy some then new video game console. GameCubes, I think. The console isn't on the floor; someone from staff needs to get it, and she tries to sell us on the extended warranty. "You guys look like serious gamers." Yes, indeed. "You know how often they break down." Umm, almost never? Maybe you should stick to pushing it on people who don't already own a half-dozen consoles.)
Microsoft abandoned the Xbox because it was hacked? Bwahahahahaha. They abandoned it because consoles have limited lifespans, beyond which consumers expect higher quality graphics. The PS3 was imminent and and Microsoft had to step up with a new machine or bow out of the market. By moving slightly faster than Sony to release the next generation system, Microsoft took the lead in sales. That the original Xbox was hacked was completely irrelevant to their decision to release the 360. (It probably might have influenced the decision to make the anti-hacking measures even stronger, but that's pretty much what happens at every console generation shift.)
"I understand both sides of the argument. It's a tough call."
No. No it's not. Businesses have no inherent legal or moral right to money on ongoing sales. If they didn't want me to muck about with it, instead of selling it to me, they should have had me sign a contract up front. I didn't sign a contract when I bought my Xbox 360, and I'm betting the Kindle doesn't have one either. (I imagine you might face a contract to buy electronic books, but that's a separate transaction.) Presenting a user with a contract after the item is paid for and delivered is illegal. (Thanks to abuse of copyright law, there is some support for this immoral trickery for software. But it has never been supported for physical things.)
This is exactly why some of us get so angry about being sloppy about copyright law. You actually think businesses have some sort valid claim on stuff they were paid for and delivered. No, no, a thousand times no.
My wife and I check it every time we consider trying something new. We first look 'em up. If they don't have an A; we don't eat there.
You're probably keeping yourself away from some perfectly fine restaurants that make great, safe food.
I have a number of friends who have worked in restaurants. Their stories are pretty uniform: 1. you probably don't want to know what's really happening in the kitchen, and 2. they don't care. A friend who loves telling horror stories about working at a particular major pizza chain still loves eating at that chain Another friend who told me about taking steps to actively thwart a health inspector maintains that the restaurant in question makes the best steaks in the city and continued to eat their after quitting for a better job. A restaurant can get dinged a few points and end up with a non-perfect rating for relatively minor slip ups. It's a kitchen, not a surgical theater. Put another way: unless you're obsessive about it, your own kitchen and food preparation would occasionally fail to get an A rating. The same goes for your friends whose food you've been eating. (Again, I'm generalizing. Perhaps Texarcana has particularly lenient standards.)
Do keep an eye on the reports! If a restaurant gets a particularly low rating (which is vary from area to area), yeah, they're probably a hole. But if a restaurant is near the top, occasionally bobbling, I wouldn't worry about it. And, not knowing much about the "critical violations" in your area, yeah, I'd be worried about those, even if the restaurant ended up getting an A.
Some people draw the short straw in the lottery of life.
A cousin of mine have an extremely rare genetic trait that means they have problems processing protein. I don't remember the exact details, or sadly the name, but the gist was that if they ate normal food, some chemical would end up accumulating in their bodies and they would die. It was first diagnosed sometime around the beginning of 20th century, and the prognosis at the time was death within a few days or weeks.
These day, someone with the trait can live a relatively normal life. They can eat normal food if they're very careful, but of course they'll miss many essential nutrients. Treatments to keep my cousin alive run something like $100,000 a year.
Fortunately my cousin was born to a couple with stable jobs with good health coverage. It was still a major financial hit for them, but they made do, and my cousin recently graduated college and is now in the work force. So in my cousin's case, the system worked.
However, whenever I see an argument like yours, I think of my cousin. The genetic trait is extremely rare. Surely occasionally someone has the trait and is born into poverty. Or maybe it's a different expensive condition. Their parents lack health insurance, or the health insurance's limits won't cover the treatment.
You have said, quite clearly, "Those children should die."
A friend of mine from college had a heart valve defect. It wasn't diagnosed until he was in college and suddenly started getting worse. Fortunately he had good health insurance, and a relatively simple heart surgery fixed him right up. As he joked afterward, he was The Sixty-Five Thousand Dollar Man. Of course some people will turn 20, already be in the workforce because college wasn't a realistic option, and won't have good health insurance because the job market sucks.
You have said, quite clearly, "Those people should die."
(Sorry, no personal sob story here, but I'm confident they exist.) Some people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They work hard, they save up. But they started with a disadvantage, so they couldn't get too far. But they are saving money for the future, they are skipping luxuries. They live spartan existances. Then there is an economic slump. They lose their job. They're unable to find new work for a long time. They eat through their savings paying health insurance out of pocket. They they get a surprise genetic problem, or a serious accident. Bills pile up. They can't afford them.
You have said, quite clearly, "Those people should die."
Maybe you're cold enough to run the raw numbers and decide that we need more people dieing because of bad luck. I'm sure it makes you a popular guy at your Ayn Rand fan club. But that's one cold-hearted way of looking at the world. You might trying starting more conversations with "If you can't personally afford medical care, you should die." It would be a very efficient way of sorting out the leeches from your fellow objectivists.
Each country or area has a different supply vs.
demand curve.
Except we're not talking about buying goods and services
inherently limited to a particular area (perishable food, bellhop
service). We're talking about multinational corporations that
ship products throughout the world. We're talking products that
could easily be shipped around. The supply and demand curves
should very similar across the world, as third parties
engage in arbitrage to remove the artificial barriers.
Of course, this isn't the case, thanks to government-granted
monopolies in the form of patents and government-protectionism in
the form of restrictions on re-importing drugs.
Getting the right balance will maximize profits and
matching pricing for the right areas is more
profitable.
Yes, indeed. Taking advantage of government meddling,
lobbying to maintain the advantages you've been handed, and
engaging in price
discrimination will certainly lead to higher profits.
Other handy techniques for higher profits include
realizing that sometimes it's cheaper to pay wrongful death
lawsuits than to recall dangerous products and moving costs
into externalities in the form of pollution.
Price discrimination sucking value out of the market as a
whole, leading to a less efficient market and a lower quality of
life as a whole. No matter one's views of the market, this
should be repugnant. It is a case of capitalism in practice
failing. The solution (more or less regulation) is debatable,
but I don't think you'll find many economists suggesting that the
status quo is the best option.
This is the only experiment in human history where we cannot learn from our mistakes.
If, and only if, the mistake destroys the world.
You might as well argue that we can't learn from our mistakes when we learn to drive a car; after all, there is a chance the car might explode! Strictly true, but not very insightful.
We have to be 100% certain it is safe, before each new step up is even attempted.
Nothing in the history of humanity has ever been 100% safe. Scientists at the first nuclear explosion theorized that it was possible (albeit unlikely) that the explosion would ignite the entire world's atmosphere.
If you're worried about humanity, there are far more serious risks. Global warming. MSRA or any of a number of other bacterial infections that may become immune to existing antibiotics due to abuse of antibiotics. Asteroid strikes.
Holding the LHC or any other human endeavor to "100% safe" is not and will never be feasible. The scientists involved believe that it is reasonably safe. As best they can tell, if they're wrong about the theory, the most likely result isn't a growing black hole; it's no black hole in the first place.
I'm guessing at the AC's specifics, but back when I was a student the problem was the people were hogging computers in the crowded computer labs. Of course, for this to be true, you need to go back far enough that internet access is a bit more precious, although it was still true in the early 90s. Most people wouldn't have high speed internet in your dorm or apartment. You might have dial up, but you probably only had one phone line and your roommates would bitch if you hogged it for hours on end.
As people started getting more computers at home, better computers, and better internet, the demand at the labs dropped off and the rules disappeared. I think at my school it's still officially forbidden to play games, but I know it's not enforced. I see people playing online poker all the time. There are lots of machines available, the bandwidth is negligible, so why bother?
What a great idea? The police don't have time to pick over seized machines, so we can just automate scanning for crime. And obviously the government doesn't have time to analyze accounting records for crime, so let's just invent a machine to automate that too. Also, I'd like a machine to make a pony. Let's get right on that!
Yeah, this is total bullshit! Next you know the government will be telling me that I can't have a few beers and drive! Just because some lowest common denominator can't hold their liquor doesn't mean they should stop me.
I am curious how you're planning on enforcing "not checking blind spots" or, as you failed to mention, "paying enough attention to stay in your lane, but not enough attention to react promptly to surprises." I mean, other than waiting until there is an accident because some idiot fails. I am kinda in favor of nipping that sort of thing in the bud before some idiot plows into my car.
By that reasoning we don't need drunk driving laws; we can just bust them for reckless driving.
You can't bust someone for reckless driving unless you observe them making dangerous decisions, at which point it may be too late. Sure, you'll catch the really stupid people weaving back and forth as they talk with a reckless driving law. But that's not the point. The point is the people who aren't weaving around, but the ones just driving down a lane, seemingly fine. But someone suddenly stops or swerves and the two second gap isn't long enough to compensate for the additional latency of the driver's brain switching for background driving mode to focused driving mode. Bam, an accident. Oooh, great, you can hit them with reckless driving. That will be a great consolation to the person dealing with insurance to get his car repaired.
Driving in inherently dangerous. There are costs to society as a whole because of dangerous driving. So we regulate it. Some optional activities are dangerous enough that we blanket ban them. We ban driving drunk. Society isn't infringing on some inalienable right to talk on the phone while you drive.
So what's your point? Children in a car are absolutely distracting. I have no doubt that a study of children in cars versus no-children in cars will show that kids in the car increase accident rates. However, hauling kids around isn't really optional for most people. Talking on the phone is.
In a decade, when I decide I want to replay it, and SecureROM has been bought out by another company and the SecureROM servers been turned off because no games in the last five years have used it (They're using SuperSecureROM3) and it's now just a money sink, will I still be able to play the game? No? Rock Star can suck a dick.
Out of curiosity, who are you replying to? Because I'm comparing what I wrote to what you appear to be responding to, and they don't jive up. Perhaps there was a post by Straw Man; it sounds like you're refuting the sorts of arguments he makes.
Re:Nope, sorry
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If I refused to read, watch, or listen to books, movies, or music from people who were massive douches, I'd be left with almost nothing.
There are almost certainly authors, directors, software companies, and the like that are providing significant financial support to causes you hate. But they're not as outspoken about it. Your little boycott isn't a boycott against being a douche, it's a boycott about being outspoken in your douchiness.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the reality-based community "liberal" and "political shill" are not synonyms.
Do you believe in financial support of Israel? The invasion of Iraq? The invasion of Afghanistan? The prosecution of marijuana users? The prosecution of prostitution? The prosecution of churches that claim tax-free status while simultaneously engaging in political speech? Funding of social services by Jews, Christians, or Muslims through Faith-Based government programs? The bailout of GM? The bailout of AIG? Financial support for the UN?
In all likelihood, there are some government expenditures that you think are a good idea. For those same expenditures there are others who object to being forced to monetarily support that institution or program that they don't believe in.
Whining that you don't believe in program X, so you shouldn't be forced to pay for it, but that everyone should be forced to pay for Y and Z is hypocritical.
(In the event that you actually object to all of the above, great! But if you're such a dedicated libertarian or anarchist, why are you worried about something as minor as the teaching of evolution in public schools?)
Right. Let's open up Slashdot in another window and resize it. That was kinda dull. Maybe I need to go faster. No, still dull. Let's keep resizing it. Nope. Still dull. Why am I doing this?
This big black and grey box to my right appears to be a computer of some sort. And when I logged in the big logo assured me that this was Red Hat Enterprise 5. Yet I'm seeing no flicker. Firefox is merrily re-rendering the contents just about as fast as I can see. Looks about the same as Vista to me.
I was going to say that occasionally resizing is slow because the poor application is doing a lot of work, usually a web browser reflowing a complex page, but that I saw this on both Windows and Linux. But I can't remember the last time that happened on either platform.
Right. Back and forth I go. This is still dull. Why am I doing this?
Erm, no? They redraw nice and zippy.
Now, I have seen the behavior you describe. Of course, I only see it when the application or applications on a particular workspace haven't been used for a long time. On the order of hours. Then it takes a while to draw. But that's not a matter of X, that's a matter of the program having been swapped out to disk, and needing to wait for it to get back into RAM.
At home I run Vista on a quad core machine with 4Gb of RAM. It's pretty zippy. I run Ubuntu on a much lower end laptop. It's also pretty zippy. I occasionally use my wife's Mac. It's also pretty zippy. As I switch back and forth between these platforms, I never get frustrated that any of the GUIs feels slow. They all feel like fast, responsive modern GUIs. X11 on Linux has felt this way, well, not forever, but for long enough that I can't remember when it was slower than Windows. Maybe 5 or so years? Maybe longer?
Clearly the crippling limitations of X's architecture are less severe than you suggest.
Part of my concern is for history. Physical media with little to no DRM means that future generations can have access to the past. Future game designers can see what has gone before, to mine it for good ideas, to avoid reinventing the wheel. If everything is online locked, games can go away, forever. The only people with long term access, our video game history custodians, will end up being those will infringing copies. Not a future I look forward to. Sure, you chose to not take care of your physical media. But I do. And I know others who do.
If we had an option between Steam and physical media, we'd both be happy. Heck, if I could get both for a small premium, I'd pay for it in a minute. (Telltale Games has a hundred or so bucks of money because they do exactly this.) But that's an option. It's (at least for Valve's games), Steam or nothing.
If once a month I need to have my car serviced by dozens of people, yes, it requires dozens of people operate. (Oh, and there is some magic device in the car that limits the servicing to dozens of people working for the manufacturer, meaning I can't do it myself, not even with dozens of my friends.)
Steam's offline mode requires monthly online activation. Steam games require online activation.
And he has agreements from the third-party games to do so? I doubt it.
And if Steam hits a bad year, or is crushed under, say, a patent lawsuit, and gets taken over in a hostile takeover, perhaps out of bankruptcy, and the new owner decides to shut down Steam because they just wanted to scavenge assents, is Gabe's promise binding on the new owner? I doubt it.
Bioshock lead designer Ken Levine promised that Bioshock's online DRM would eventually be removed. It's been over a year and a half. I'll see that patch any day now. right? I doubt it.
Gabe seems like a nice guy. I genuinely believe he means what he says. But the sort of circumstances that mean that Steam goes down are exactly the sort of circumstances that would render Gabe's promise void. If the company goes into bankruptcy and I ask the bankrupt company to spend more money to pay developers to unlock games I purchased (and testers to test it, and for servers and bandwidth to distribute the patch), the judge will laugh me out of the courtroom.
What exactly is your point?
Is your point that publishers should work to minimize infringing copies of their works while encouraging purchase of legal copies? Well, I'm with you there!
Or is your point that publishers need DRM to accomplish that? Why would you believe that?
There is copyright infringement of music. And major music labels swore on their bibles, torahs, korans, and stock options that they needed strong DRM, or else there would be rampant copyright infringement and no new music would ever be created.
Today the market has largely rejected DRM on music. It's easier than ever to make and distribute infringing copies of songs. There is absolutely nothing preventing infringing copies from being made. Yet the world hasn't ended. Music is still being made.
A combination of ways to discourage infringement and encourage purchasing legal copies were found: Lower prices. Watermarking of songs. Making the legal market more convenient than the illegal market. Ensuring that the legal versions were just as good as the illegal versions. Encouraging people to support the artists they like by paying for the songs. But DRM went out the window.
So if by "finding an acceptable solution" you mean "lowering prices, watermarking games, making the legal market more convenient than the illegal market, ensuring the legal versions are just as good as the illegal versions, and encouraging people to support developers whose games they like by paying for games," great! But if you mean "We just need to find the magical level of DRM," not necessarily.
The deal breaker for me is that a Steam game, like any DRMed game, is not as good as the illegal version. What if Steam goes out of business? Or moves to Steam2 and decides they don't want to support Steam1 anymore? I lose access to all of the games I "own." Surely I can trust a large corporation like Valve, right? Ha! Large companies who screwed their customers in exactly this way include Yahoo, Google (although you got a refund), Major League Baseball, Microsoft (temporary reprieve for a few years), Wal-Mart, and Sony. Given that lineup, why should I trust an itty-bitty little company like Steam/Valve?
(To be fair, I can actually see a DRM system I would whole heartedly support: a binding public commitment to strip the DRM from the game after a short period of time. Maybe 6 to 12 months. This would hamper illegal copies during the highest profit part of the games lifespan. The binding public commitment means that someone like me would buy sooner than later.)
"The workaround is laughable -- 'call fsync(), and then wait(), wait(), wait(), for the Wizard to see you.'"
The "workaround" has been the standard for decades! Twenty years ago when I was learning programming I was warned: Until you call fsync(), you have no guarantee that your data has landed on disk. If you want to be sure the data is on the disk, call fsync(). While it's a complication for application developers, the benefit is that it allows filesystem developers to make the filesystem faster. That ext3 in its default configuration happened to work as erroneously expected has always been a happy coincidence, not something to rely on.
You might as well be complaining about the "workaround" that you have to shutdown your computer properly instead of yanking the cord out of the wall; since it didn't used to lose data when you did that.
Glossing over some details, what is happening is closer to this:
The goal is to replace config with a new version. The programmer is essentially doing this:
The goal is that when you replace config, you're replacing it with a guaranteed complete version, config.new. Assuming it happens in this order (and that step 3 is atomic; it happens or doesn't, never partially) if you crash midway through, you'll either end up with the old config or the new config, but never a partial config. Unfortunately the operating system tries to speed things up, and for a variety of good reasons delaying step 2 makes sense. Doing so is allowed by the standards specifically for these good reasons. So what actually happens is this:
This works fine... unless something happens between steps 3 and 2. If we stop there, we have a new, empty file in place of "config." With ext4, the window between 3 and 2 could be as long as a minute, a window during which you can lose data.
The correct solution is for the program, not the operating system, to take care with files it cares about:
Now it's not possible to move 2a after 3, so you're guaranteed safe behavior. But you lose the speed benefits of reordering. For data you care about, this is a good idea. For data you don't care about (Your web browser cache leaps to mind), it's overkill and makes you slower.
ext3 (and the new ext4 option) essentially adds 2b automatically. It's good in that it's safer for everyone involved, but it's bad in that everyone takes a speed hit, even in cases where speed is more important than safety.
What professionals are you talking about?
If you mean: "I do photography for a magazine," or "I do big budget advertising work." Yeah, sure. Lack of CMYK support and good color calibration are a killer. The GIMP is not a suitable tool for those professionals.
If you mean: "I'm a reporter for a small weekly newspaper who is also expected to be her own photographer and do her own photo cropping and correction," the GIMP is ready today. It was ready several years ago when a friend in exactly that position gave it a try. She was using Photoshop to do the work and found that the GIMP was a complete replacement. (She didn't like the interface, but GIMPshop instantly eliminated that complaint.) If you mean, "I'm doing web design for a small company," the GIMP is ready today.
I am also curious what people did before Photoshop itself got CMYK support, or good color calibration, or whatever it is you're whining about today. Were there just no professionals in the field then?
Five or so ago my wife bought a cell phone from from Best Buy, and she sprang for the extended warranty. She had gotten at the time the standard pitch: if anything goes wrong, just bring it in and walk out with a new phone. A year and a half later her phone's battery has stopped holding a charge; it dies after a few hours, even if unused. So in we go to make use of the warranty. They agreed the fault was covered. But... they didn't sell the same phone. They didn't even sell a comparable phone. All of the phones they had in stock were significantly more expensive. My wife would have had to have paid the difference. My wife understandably complained: she paid for the extended warranty to ensure that if something went wrong she wouldn't have to pay anything. At the point the manager said it was unreasonable to expect Best Buy to be able to provide a free of charge equivalent, since "How could we know that you'd show up a year later expecting it." I dunno, maybe the warranty you sold her? We pushed harder, and the manager threatened to terminate the warranty, refunding the price of the warranty, but naturally without interest for the free loan she'd given Best Buy
Best Buy staff stupid enough to try and sell me extended warranties get lectures these day. Hasn't actually come up in some time, but I guess avoiding Best Buy if at all possible does that.
(My other fond extended warranty memory is amusing also from Best Buy. A friend and I pop in to buy some then new video game console. GameCubes, I think. The console isn't on the floor; someone from staff needs to get it, and she tries to sell us on the extended warranty. "You guys look like serious gamers." Yes, indeed. "You know how often they break down." Umm, almost never? Maybe you should stick to pushing it on people who don't already own a half-dozen consoles.)
Microsoft abandoned the Xbox because it was hacked? Bwahahahahaha. They abandoned it because consoles have limited lifespans, beyond which consumers expect higher quality graphics. The PS3 was imminent and and Microsoft had to step up with a new machine or bow out of the market. By moving slightly faster than Sony to release the next generation system, Microsoft took the lead in sales. That the original Xbox was hacked was completely irrelevant to their decision to release the 360. (It probably might have influenced the decision to make the anti-hacking measures even stronger, but that's pretty much what happens at every console generation shift.)
"I understand both sides of the argument. It's a tough call."
No. No it's not. Businesses have no inherent legal or moral right to money on ongoing sales. If they didn't want me to muck about with it, instead of selling it to me, they should have had me sign a contract up front. I didn't sign a contract when I bought my Xbox 360, and I'm betting the Kindle doesn't have one either. (I imagine you might face a contract to buy electronic books, but that's a separate transaction.) Presenting a user with a contract after the item is paid for and delivered is illegal. (Thanks to abuse of copyright law, there is some support for this immoral trickery for software. But it has never been supported for physical things.)
This is exactly why some of us get so angry about being sloppy about copyright law. You actually think businesses have some sort valid claim on stuff they were paid for and delivered. No, no, a thousand times no.
You're probably keeping yourself away from some perfectly fine restaurants that make great, safe food.
I have a number of friends who have worked in restaurants. Their stories are pretty uniform: 1. you probably don't want to know what's really happening in the kitchen, and 2. they don't care. A friend who loves telling horror stories about working at a particular major pizza chain still loves eating at that chain Another friend who told me about taking steps to actively thwart a health inspector maintains that the restaurant in question makes the best steaks in the city and continued to eat their after quitting for a better job. A restaurant can get dinged a few points and end up with a non-perfect rating for relatively minor slip ups. It's a kitchen, not a surgical theater. Put another way: unless you're obsessive about it, your own kitchen and food preparation would occasionally fail to get an A rating. The same goes for your friends whose food you've been eating. (Again, I'm generalizing. Perhaps Texarcana has particularly lenient standards.)
Do keep an eye on the reports! If a restaurant gets a particularly low rating (which is vary from area to area), yeah, they're probably a hole. But if a restaurant is near the top, occasionally bobbling, I wouldn't worry about it. And, not knowing much about the "critical violations" in your area, yeah, I'd be worried about those, even if the restaurant ended up getting an A.
A cousin of mine have an extremely rare genetic trait that means they have problems processing protein. I don't remember the exact details, or sadly the name, but the gist was that if they ate normal food, some chemical would end up accumulating in their bodies and they would die. It was first diagnosed sometime around the beginning of 20th century, and the prognosis at the time was death within a few days or weeks.
These day, someone with the trait can live a relatively normal life. They can eat normal food if they're very careful, but of course they'll miss many essential nutrients. Treatments to keep my cousin alive run something like $100,000 a year. Fortunately my cousin was born to a couple with stable jobs with good health coverage. It was still a major financial hit for them, but they made do, and my cousin recently graduated college and is now in the work force. So in my cousin's case, the system worked.
However, whenever I see an argument like yours, I think of my cousin. The genetic trait is extremely rare. Surely occasionally someone has the trait and is born into poverty. Or maybe it's a different expensive condition. Their parents lack health insurance, or the health insurance's limits won't cover the treatment.
You have said, quite clearly, "Those children should die."
A friend of mine from college had a heart valve defect. It wasn't diagnosed until he was in college and suddenly started getting worse. Fortunately he had good health insurance, and a relatively simple heart surgery fixed him right up. As he joked afterward, he was The Sixty-Five Thousand Dollar Man. Of course some people will turn 20, already be in the workforce because college wasn't a realistic option, and won't have good health insurance because the job market sucks.
You have said, quite clearly, "Those people should die."
(Sorry, no personal sob story here, but I'm confident they exist.) Some people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They work hard, they save up. But they started with a disadvantage, so they couldn't get too far. But they are saving money for the future, they are skipping luxuries. They live spartan existances. Then there is an economic slump. They lose their job. They're unable to find new work for a long time. They eat through their savings paying health insurance out of pocket. They they get a surprise genetic problem, or a serious accident. Bills pile up. They can't afford them.
You have said, quite clearly, "Those people should die."
Maybe you're cold enough to run the raw numbers and decide that we need more people dieing because of bad luck. I'm sure it makes you a popular guy at your Ayn Rand fan club. But that's one cold-hearted way of looking at the world. You might trying starting more conversations with "If you can't personally afford medical care, you should die." It would be a very efficient way of sorting out the leeches from your fellow objectivists.
Except we're not talking about buying goods and services inherently limited to a particular area (perishable food, bellhop service). We're talking about multinational corporations that ship products throughout the world. We're talking products that could easily be shipped around. The supply and demand curves should very similar across the world, as third parties engage in arbitrage to remove the artificial barriers.
Of course, this isn't the case, thanks to government-granted monopolies in the form of patents and government-protectionism in the form of restrictions on re-importing drugs.
Yes, indeed. Taking advantage of government meddling, lobbying to maintain the advantages you've been handed, and engaging in price discrimination will certainly lead to higher profits. Other handy techniques for higher profits include realizing that sometimes it's cheaper to pay wrongful death lawsuits than to recall dangerous products and moving costs into externalities in the form of pollution.
Price discrimination sucking value out of the market as a whole, leading to a less efficient market and a lower quality of life as a whole. No matter one's views of the market, this should be repugnant. It is a case of capitalism in practice failing. The solution (more or less regulation) is debatable, but I don't think you'll find many economists suggesting that the status quo is the best option.
Oh, that zany, zany CIA. I can't think of anything more whimsical than names of states! Oh, the hilarity!
*sigh*
If, and only if, the mistake destroys the world.
You might as well argue that we can't learn from our mistakes when we learn to drive a car; after all, there is a chance the car might explode! Strictly true, but not very insightful.
Nothing in the history of humanity has ever been 100% safe. Scientists at the first nuclear explosion theorized that it was possible (albeit unlikely) that the explosion would ignite the entire world's atmosphere.
If you're worried about humanity, there are far more serious risks. Global warming. MSRA or any of a number of other bacterial infections that may become immune to existing antibiotics due to abuse of antibiotics. Asteroid strikes.
Holding the LHC or any other human endeavor to "100% safe" is not and will never be feasible. The scientists involved believe that it is reasonably safe. As best they can tell, if they're wrong about the theory, the most likely result isn't a growing black hole; it's no black hole in the first place.
I'm guessing at the AC's specifics, but back when I was a student the problem was the people were hogging computers in the crowded computer labs. Of course, for this to be true, you need to go back far enough that internet access is a bit more precious, although it was still true in the early 90s. Most people wouldn't have high speed internet in your dorm or apartment. You might have dial up, but you probably only had one phone line and your roommates would bitch if you hogged it for hours on end.
As people started getting more computers at home, better computers, and better internet, the demand at the labs dropped off and the rules disappeared. I think at my school it's still officially forbidden to play games, but I know it's not enforced. I see people playing online poker all the time. There are lots of machines available, the bandwidth is negligible, so why bother?
What a great idea? The police don't have time to pick over seized machines, so we can just automate scanning for crime. And obviously the government doesn't have time to analyze accounting records for crime, so let's just invent a machine to automate that too. Also, I'd like a machine to make a pony. Let's get right on that!
Yeah, this is total bullshit! Next you know the government will be telling me that I can't have a few beers and drive! Just because some lowest common denominator can't hold their liquor doesn't mean they should stop me.
I am curious how you're planning on enforcing "not checking blind spots" or, as you failed to mention, "paying enough attention to stay in your lane, but not enough attention to react promptly to surprises." I mean, other than waiting until there is an accident because some idiot fails. I am kinda in favor of nipping that sort of thing in the bud before some idiot plows into my car.
By that reasoning we don't need drunk driving laws; we can just bust them for reckless driving.
You can't bust someone for reckless driving unless you observe them making dangerous decisions, at which point it may be too late. Sure, you'll catch the really stupid people weaving back and forth as they talk with a reckless driving law. But that's not the point. The point is the people who aren't weaving around, but the ones just driving down a lane, seemingly fine. But someone suddenly stops or swerves and the two second gap isn't long enough to compensate for the additional latency of the driver's brain switching for background driving mode to focused driving mode. Bam, an accident. Oooh, great, you can hit them with reckless driving. That will be a great consolation to the person dealing with insurance to get his car repaired.
Driving in inherently dangerous. There are costs to society as a whole because of dangerous driving. So we regulate it. Some optional activities are dangerous enough that we blanket ban them. We ban driving drunk. Society isn't infringing on some inalienable right to talk on the phone while you drive.
So what's your point? Children in a car are absolutely distracting. I have no doubt that a study of children in cars versus no-children in cars will show that kids in the car increase accident rates. However, hauling kids around isn't really optional for most people. Talking on the phone is.
In a decade, when I decide I want to replay it, and SecureROM has been bought out by another company and the SecureROM servers been turned off because no games in the last five years have used it (They're using SuperSecureROM3) and it's now just a money sink, will I still be able to play the game? No? Rock Star can suck a dick.
Out of curiosity, who are you replying to? Because I'm comparing what I wrote to what you appear to be responding to, and they don't jive up. Perhaps there was a post by Straw Man; it sounds like you're refuting the sorts of arguments he makes.
If I refused to read, watch, or listen to books, movies, or music from people who were massive douches, I'd be left with almost nothing.
There are almost certainly authors, directors, software companies, and the like that are providing significant financial support to causes you hate. But they're not as outspoken about it. Your little boycott isn't a boycott against being a douche, it's a boycott about being outspoken in your douchiness.