People who pirate your game are not your customers. The number of people who, in the absence of an easily available pirated copy will instead purchase the game is vanishingly small.
A number of games have been released with no DRM. They have been pirated, heavily. Some have even been available for free. Piracy is not tied to the existence of DRM or even the ease/availability of the original. Piracy exists as a social phenomenon independently (or perhaps, intertwined with) the material being copied.
Finally, many games that have been released DRM free and/or at significant discounts to their launch price have shown an increase in sales - massive increases in some cases. From this, it seems to me that the key to piracy, the cost of development, DRM and customers is to recognise that chasing/preventing piracy is a cost with almost no return; that if you want to increase revenue by increasing customer base, then the largest group of potential customers are those who are currently not purchasing based on price.
Will this save a non-selling but technically or artistically excellent game? Maybe. But increasing DRM on the same game most certainly will not.
I would argue that $0.60 is the value people ascribe to the _promise_ that their privacy will be protected. How many times have we seen those who have made such promises fail to keep them - either by accident, attack or incompetence? Enough to make most other such promises seem pretty close to worthless.
Rich and poor are part of something that is close to a zero-sum game. For the rich to be rich, a lot of someone-elses need to be poor. To the extent that this is the inevitable outcome of people of different ability and circumstance, I agree there should be no foul. Beyond that, attempting to maximise personal gain, even while within the 'legal rules' is likely to cost someone, everyone or some combination in between. More, by working those rules as hard as they can, they become at least partially responsible for the ever growing body of law.
Finally, if you are describing their behaviour as "understand[ing] the [ethical] rules and... what you can do with them" you are either missing the point of ethics or have a profoundly cynical view of what ethics are.
I, too, am colour-blind and have excellent night vision.
It may be that I/we are more used to picking up visual cues that do not rely on colour information - in low-light conditions, the ability to distinguish colours drops first so people are brought to a playing field that we are much more familiar with. Playing paintball, I disdained wearing camouflage because it was useless - I could see people wearing cam., so clearly they could see me. It took a number of years and some interesting tests to work out that for most people, camouflage is much more effective. For that reason, WWII reconnaissance photos were examined by a team of people that included someone who was colour blind (but I am having trouble quickly finding a reliable citation at the moment).
I had no idea who GreatBunzinni was until your crapflood.
I see no evidence in your posts of GreatBunzinni using multiple accounts to shill. I see a possible AC post. I see someone questioning bonch.
You on the other hand are a spammy bastard who is haunting Slashdot and amassing a GNAA-worthy number of FPs. One has to wonder whether you are paid for your attentiveness.
I recognise some of the names on GreatBunzinni's list and thought they sounded a little 'shill'. Now this. It adds weight to my suspicions.
If you are one of the aggrieved, respond to posts where they out you. Logged in. Maybe the GreatBunzini has included some names they shouldn't have. Until then, _your_ crusade has just confirmed the GreatBunzini's accusations, as far as I am concerned. Well done.
Yes, well. I was 'twilight' a bunch of places, but someone had already used that name by the time I created and account, here back around the turn-of-the-millenium, so...
Then there was the book/movie. But that was OK. I figured it was a flash in the pan. Then there were the sequels.
But that's OK. I figure in 5-10 years I'll be able to use the name and only a few old farts will snigger.
I am sorry, where do I defend this action? I was pointing out to the AC that was calling for action that action has been taken and neither he nor I are the ones who took it. I am sorry that facts offend, but there they are.
It's people like you who, when told to help us fight this shit, loudly declare that "they have already won" so you can justify always saying that "one can't change anything" and continue to sit on your asses!
Is it? What have you done? What are you doing? I saw a wonderful and generic call for 'action' like so many arm-chair generals do and pointed out that the 'enemy' has 'stolen the march' and have already acted. Please, offer me a suggestion of what I should be doing and I will discuss that - make generic noises about 'action' and I will gently tease.
To address your accusation more directly - I have written to my local member; I have participated in public discussions, government surveys and requests for comments and I have actively recruited people from the community to do the same with respect to legislation like this in my own country. I advise and provide assistance to friends and family on a range of technical issues and take the time and opportunity to explain why actions like this are bad for me, them and the community as a whole. If I can, I provide alternatives and workarounds.
I do not 'sit on my ass'; I strongly believe that the only change possible is that which happens individually and actively pursue exactly that.
Now, pull your head in; stop projecting and re-read what I wrote. The AC I replied to was the one calling for 'someone' to act. They offered neither useful suggestion nor, as far as I can tell, are doing anything themselves.
told to help us fight this shit
I don't like being 'told' anything, neither do most people. Especially not being 'told' to do something that in all probability I have been doing longer than they have even been aware of the issue.
Add me to the list of those who use Start->Run. Regedit, iexplore, calc, winver, ntbackup, cmd, mstsc, eventvwr... either they don't have convenient links, or it's quicker to type than play 'where's the icon on _this_ machine'.
GUI might reward exploration but you are dead wrong when you think that what most people do is _not_ repetition. People learn a pattern of movements and clicks. Change the icon's location and they are lost. They don't 'explore' to find it again. Those who are happy to poke about a GUI are also happy enough to play with a CLI if they get shown one. Of course it's going to be a bot confronting if all they have seen is a GUI, but that doesn't make it inherently more challenging than working out how to get the 'classic' control panel so you can find the link you remember from the last version of Windows.
You have a serious case of subjectivity and preconception. You hear what you want to hear - like your Linux admin's claim about new tasks.
You know Windows. I get it. You've met some obnoxious FOSS advocates. Me too. But you are ranting. You often rant. You are rude and obnoxious... Hey, wait - all the things you claim to have experienced you, in fact, exhibit. You justify your behavior by what amounts to straw men. No one you are responding to made the claims you are attacking. Seriously mate, you come across as though some Linux user killed your dog when you were a kid.
It's quite another to be so completely stuck in one and only one form of learning that you are completely dysfunctional in any other. It's a choice one makes and it's really that simple.
I agree and as someone capable of the meta-cognition necessary to recognise my own preferred learning methods and to adapt to the ones being offered, I understand the value of that choice.
And also how few people are equipped to recognise it, let alone make it.
I am not sure of your educational background, but I was certainly never taught to think about thinking. That was something that a fortunate combination of aptitude and circumstance allowed me to develop on my own. I'm far from unique, but equally, I am far from common.
I'm certainly not comfortable condemning those who both lack the ability to live comfortably in the world as it is and who also lack the means to recognise how they might change that. Doubly damned, to be sure.
I acknowledge that there are those who play the victim and who demand sympathy and/or consideration for their lack of effort but that's not the whole story.
Forgive me, I didn't see anything in your initial post that addressed heritability - either genetic or cultural. I understood you to mean that ADD was a response to the increasing pace of change in society. I've seen reports of decreased attention span and what looks like a decrease in depth of thought and yes, these get lumped in with ADD and ADHD. I think there's still value in distinguishing between people who are not primarily visual/auditory learners and who don't find mono-focussing for hours at a time a natural mode of thought and people who, by dint of being exposed to a large amount of stimulation and competition for their attention have a poor ability to discriminate or focus.
There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable. There's some that suggests that it has been around a lot longer than just the modern period, but that in the past there was a greater variety of work that allowed people who aren't comfortable with a 9-5 office routine to still be useful and productive.
Decrease access to certain types of work and increase the number of children who don't get to grow up with adult males who can teach and show them ways of using AD in useful ways (it's Y linked) and you are going to see more people who are 'disordered'. The 'attention deficit' part contains a large chunk of people who are just not suited to focusing on a single task for eight hours at a time and/or who aren't primarily audio/visual learners and thinkers.
Perhaps calling your argument 'nonsense' is going too far - social change has resulted in more people exhibiting 'symptoms', but it's not some kind of adaption or reaction to the rate of change.
The more interesting statistic is the percentage of "religious" people who think that there is conflict.
After having read the article, I am not convinced that the questions asked showed that there was common ground at all. It may well be that scientists recognise that religion and science are orthogonal and therefore do not conflict.
I have two identical (or sufficiently similar) items. One is cheaper than the other. All other things being equal, cheaper is better.
The GP is making a valid point that the manufacturer _is_ attempting to make the product better by differentiating from competitors on price. One feature of many and arguably one of the more dominant.
Gigabyte's D525TUD offers 4xSATA, 1xIDE and PCI for a RAID card. Asus have the AT4NM10T and AT5NM10T which lose the IDE port of Gigabyte, but replaces PCI with PCIe x4. Jetway do a board with 4xSATA and ION graphics - your fileserver could double as a media center, although the power is going to jump to 30W+. Zotac have a DTX board with 6xSATA and PCIe x16.
Some of these can run passively, although if you are going to want more than 4 drives you are going to need some kind of cooling.
I have been using the D510UD as a home server in a 4RU case with some large, slow Noctua fans. It's not noiseless, but it is very quiet.
Or have a different set of needs and wants to you.
You are correct. The iPad is less open than many Android devices. Your mistake is in assuming that this is as important to everyone as it is to you. Assuming technical ineptitude says more about your own lack of imagination than it does about the use case of those who purchase Apple products.
I downloaded a torrent of World of Goo as, at the time, there was no demo available for it.
20 minutes later I was paying for and downloading an official copy. Then picked it up again as part of the Humble Indie Bundle.
I purchased a copy of Machinarium after being alerted to its existence by the author complaining about piracy - and after downloading a torrent of the game, first. Got it again with the HIB.
I know that this is anecdotal, I assume I am not typical but find it hard to believe I am unique. More, if there were some magical breakthrough that made DRM perfectly effective and prevented me from doing this, my response would not be to risk purchasing a game where all I know of it is the (paid for) 'review', it would be to not purchase it in those first few weeks but to wait until people I know can provide a report I can trust or to simply not buy at all. In my case, more effective DRM reduces the possibility of sale.
People just rather pirate than buy, if they can
Many, maybe even most, but not all and those who do are not going to turn into customers if you can somehow prevent piracy. Quite the reverse, some of those pirates may become customers.
even if just to keep the piracy out for a little bit during the first few weeks so that people who want to play it buy it because they cant pirate it
Perhaps, but the number of those who when unable to pirate the game pay, rather than wait, is smaller than the total number of pirates and I see very little work trying to quantify that number. More often it is assumed that all piracy represents lost sales.
I thought the same until someone pointed me at some studies that show that there is a kind of 'normalising' process that helps justify violence in some people's minds. The aggressors are convinced that their behaviour is normal, that everyone does it, it's just that people don't talk about it. Jokes about violence are then seen as a kind of sly reference to that-which-isn't-talked-about and is used to reinforce the idea that what they do is acceptable.
Yes it's an aberrant mind set. Yes it is delusional. No, I don't think that any instance is going to have a marked impact on someone's decision to commit violence but cumulatively and culturally...
I'm a little late and dangerously offtopic, but for a list of 21stC movies that compare favourably (IMHO) to the 20th, I recommend the following;
Pitch Black
Avalon
Donnie Darko
28 Days Later
Minority Report
Solaris
Immortal
Night Watch
Primer
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
A Scanner Darkly
Children of Men
Renaissance
V for Vendetta
District 9
Moon
Watchmen
X-Men First Class
I've cribbed from the wiki pages for SF films of the 2000s and 2010s. Grain of salt. YMMV, etc.
This sort of ignorance and paranoia does the work for Microsoft. They don't have to be assholes, they can be nice to you... and you'll turn around and make yourself look like an ignorant paranoid asshole for them. You are your own worst enemy, spend less time looking for them in the fields and more time looking for the enemy in the mirror. This childish BS is well past the point of being old.
One of the 'tricks' of abusers in abusive relationships is to 'play nice' when people are watching. The abused either comes across looking like an "ignorant paranoid asshole" or is forced to 'play along'.
Microsoft's behaviour in a number of arenas has been abusive. When there has been substantial evidence of a change in culture and direction away from these methods, then you can start accusing people of being "whiny bitches". Until then, an animated happy birthday hardly cuts it.
While I think a lot of the anti-piracy stance of the media groups is still driven by the assumption that piracy hurts sales, demonising pirates has turned into a great way to justify a kind of balkanisation of the market.
Regional restrictions allow them to sell the same product at the price that the local market will bear without diluting the higher markets with product sold in the lower.
Encryption and laws against circumventing it that are supposed to stop piracy also act to stop you buying one copy of something and then transcoding it to the form most useful to you.
Ultimately, the cost of distribution for purely digital material is drastically smaller than for physical items, but media companies are still claiming costs for breakages associated with LPs in the CD age. If they can blame 'pirates' then they don't have to let competition drive the price of a digital copy down to reflect the reduced cost of distribution.
It's oddly long-sighted of them. They have a monopoly and are fighting to keep it that way. This isn't about short term profit. It's about keeping control of the entire profit-making industry.
I have heard this argument, in various forms, many times.
Let's posit your idealised government with idealised economics. Let's also posit a perfectly efficient distribution method, let's move most cities off the arable land they sit on and into less 'useful' regions. Now we can support an even greater population.
Which we will proceed to reach and then attempt to exceed as we have done every other time the constraints on food have been lifted.
Until we consciously and deliberately manage our populations, then we are going to keep seeing 'food crises'. Increasing the food supply, food distribution or even quality of food is not going to change that.
If you want to solve the global food crisis, adopt socialistic policies
Don't get me wrong, I tend towards the socialist end of the spectrum politically and philosophically, but if you _really_ want to solve the food crises, activate for increased levels of education (this has a high correlation with lowered birth rates) and against social and cultural mores that put a premium on multiple children and/or reject contraception.
Slashdot Mirror
As a non-USian, thank you for this insight.
People who pirate your game are not your customers. The number of people who, in the absence of an easily available pirated copy will instead purchase the game is vanishingly small.
A number of games have been released with no DRM. They have been pirated, heavily. Some have even been available for free. Piracy is not tied to the existence of DRM or even the ease/availability of the original. Piracy exists as a social phenomenon independently (or perhaps, intertwined with) the material being copied.
Finally, many games that have been released DRM free and/or at significant discounts to their launch price have shown an increase in sales - massive increases in some cases. From this, it seems to me that the key to piracy, the cost of development, DRM and customers is to recognise that chasing/preventing piracy is a cost with almost no return; that if you want to increase revenue by increasing customer base, then the largest group of potential customers are those who are currently not purchasing based on price.
Will this save a non-selling but technically or artistically excellent game? Maybe. But increasing DRM on the same game most certainly will not.
I would argue that $0.60 is the value people ascribe to the _promise_ that their privacy will be protected. How many times have we seen those who have made such promises fail to keep them - either by accident, attack or incompetence? Enough to make most other such promises seem pretty close to worthless.
Rich and poor are part of something that is close to a zero-sum game. For the rich to be rich, a lot of someone-elses need to be poor. To the extent that this is the inevitable outcome of people of different ability and circumstance, I agree there should be no foul. Beyond that, attempting to maximise personal gain, even while within the 'legal rules' is likely to cost someone, everyone or some combination in between. More, by working those rules as hard as they can, they become at least partially responsible for the ever growing body of law.
... what you can do with them" you are either missing the point of ethics or have a profoundly cynical view of what ethics are.
Finally, if you are describing their behaviour as "understand[ing] the [ethical] rules and
I, too, am colour-blind and have excellent night vision.
It may be that I/we are more used to picking up visual cues that do not rely on colour information - in low-light conditions, the ability to distinguish colours drops first so people are brought to a playing field that we are much more familiar with. Playing paintball, I disdained wearing camouflage because it was useless - I could see people wearing cam., so clearly they could see me. It took a number of years and some interesting tests to work out that for most people, camouflage is much more effective. For that reason, WWII reconnaissance photos were examined by a team of people that included someone who was colour blind (but I am having trouble quickly finding a reliable citation at the moment).
I had no idea who GreatBunzinni was until your crapflood.
I see no evidence in your posts of GreatBunzinni using multiple accounts to shill. I see a possible AC post. I see someone questioning bonch.
You on the other hand are a spammy bastard who is haunting Slashdot and amassing a GNAA-worthy number of FPs. One has to wonder whether you are paid for your attentiveness.
I recognise some of the names on GreatBunzinni's list and thought they sounded a little 'shill'. Now this. It adds weight to my suspicions.
If you are one of the aggrieved, respond to posts where they out you. Logged in. Maybe the GreatBunzini has included some names they shouldn't have. Until then, _your_ crusade has just confirmed the GreatBunzini's accusations, as far as I am concerned. Well done.
With apologies for the offtopicness of this post.
Yes, well. I was 'twilight' a bunch of places, but someone had already used that name by the time I created and account, here back around the turn-of-the-millenium, so ...
Then there was the book/movie. But that was OK. I figured it was a flash in the pan. Then there were the sequels.
But that's OK. I figure in 5-10 years I'll be able to use the name and only a few old farts will snigger.
actively defend their own enemy the way you do it
I am sorry, where do I defend this action? I was pointing out to the AC that was calling for action that action has been taken and neither he nor I are the ones who took it. I am sorry that facts offend, but there they are.
It's people like you who, when told to help us fight this shit, loudly declare that "they have already won" so you can justify always saying that "one can't change anything" and continue to sit on your asses!
Is it? What have you done? What are you doing? I saw a wonderful and generic call for 'action' like so many arm-chair generals do and pointed out that the 'enemy' has 'stolen the march' and have already acted. Please, offer me a suggestion of what I should be doing and I will discuss that - make generic noises about 'action' and I will gently tease.
To address your accusation more directly - I have written to my local member; I have participated in public discussions, government surveys and requests for comments and I have actively recruited people from the community to do the same with respect to legislation like this in my own country. I advise and provide assistance to friends and family on a range of technical issues and take the time and opportunity to explain why actions like this are bad for me, them and the community as a whole. If I can, I provide alternatives and workarounds.
I do not 'sit on my ass'; I strongly believe that the only change possible is that which happens individually and actively pursue exactly that.
Now, pull your head in; stop projecting and re-read what I wrote. The AC I replied to was the one calling for 'someone' to act. They offered neither useful suggestion nor, as far as I can tell, are doing anything themselves.
told to help us fight this shit
I don't like being 'told' anything, neither do most people. Especially not being 'told' to do something that in all probability I have been doing longer than they have even been aware of the issue.
It's time that someone take a stand and show these mother fuckers who is really in charge here.
They have. They did. It's not you. It's not me.
Add me to the list of those who use Start->Run. Regedit, iexplore, calc, winver, ntbackup, cmd, mstsc, eventvwr ... either they don't have convenient links, or it's quicker to type than play 'where's the icon on _this_ machine'.
... Hey, wait - all the things you claim to have experienced you, in fact, exhibit. You justify your behavior by what amounts to straw men. No one you are responding to made the claims you are attacking. Seriously mate, you come across as though some Linux user killed your dog when you were a kid.
GUI might reward exploration but you are dead wrong when you think that what most people do is _not_ repetition. People learn a pattern of movements and clicks. Change the icon's location and they are lost. They don't 'explore' to find it again. Those who are happy to poke about a GUI are also happy enough to play with a CLI if they get shown one. Of course it's going to be a bot confronting if all they have seen is a GUI, but that doesn't make it inherently more challenging than working out how to get the 'classic' control panel so you can find the link you remember from the last version of Windows.
You have a serious case of subjectivity and preconception. You hear what you want to hear - like your Linux admin's claim about new tasks.
You know Windows. I get it. You've met some obnoxious FOSS advocates. Me too. But you are ranting. You often rant. You are rude and obnoxious
It's quite another to be so completely stuck in one and only one form of learning that you are completely dysfunctional in any other. It's a choice one makes and it's really that simple.
I agree and as someone capable of the meta-cognition necessary to recognise my own preferred learning methods and to adapt to the ones being offered, I understand the value of that choice.
And also how few people are equipped to recognise it, let alone make it.
I am not sure of your educational background, but I was certainly never taught to think about thinking. That was something that a fortunate combination of aptitude and circumstance allowed me to develop on my own. I'm far from unique, but equally, I am far from common.
I'm certainly not comfortable condemning those who both lack the ability to live comfortably in the world as it is and who also lack the means to recognise how they might change that. Doubly damned, to be sure.
I acknowledge that there are those who play the victim and who demand sympathy and/or consideration for their lack of effort but that's not the whole story.
Forgive me, I didn't see anything in your initial post that addressed heritability - either genetic or cultural. I understood you to mean that ADD was a response to the increasing pace of change in society. I've seen reports of decreased attention span and what looks like a decrease in depth of thought and yes, these get lumped in with ADD and ADHD. I think there's still value in distinguishing between people who are not primarily visual/auditory learners and who don't find mono-focussing for hours at a time a natural mode of thought and people who, by dint of being exposed to a large amount of stimulation and competition for their attention have a poor ability to discriminate or focus.
Nonsense.
There's a fair bit of evidence to show that ADD is heritable. There's some that suggests that it has been around a lot longer than just the modern period, but that in the past there was a greater variety of work that allowed people who aren't comfortable with a 9-5 office routine to still be useful and productive.
Decrease access to certain types of work and increase the number of children who don't get to grow up with adult males who can teach and show them ways of using AD in useful ways (it's Y linked) and you are going to see more people who are 'disordered'. The 'attention deficit' part contains a large chunk of people who are just not suited to focusing on a single task for eight hours at a time and/or who aren't primarily audio/visual learners and thinkers.
Perhaps calling your argument 'nonsense' is going too far - social change has resulted in more people exhibiting 'symptoms', but it's not some kind of adaption or reaction to the rate of change.
The more interesting statistic is the percentage of "religious" people who think that there is conflict.
After having read the article, I am not convinced that the questions asked showed that there was common ground at all. It may well be that scientists recognise that religion and science are orthogonal and therefore do not conflict.
Please note, GP didn't say "cheaper is best".
I have two identical (or sufficiently similar) items. One is cheaper than the other. All other things being equal, cheaper is better.
The GP is making a valid point that the manufacturer _is_ attempting to make the product better by differentiating from competitors on price. One feature of many and arguably one of the more dominant.
With the caveats that none of these make it to your 5W (but get close at between 7W and 15W) and acknowledging that none of these are server grade , http://www.linuxtech.net/features/intel_atom_pineview_motherboards_overview.html has a fantastic list of Atom based boards.
Gigabyte's D525TUD offers 4xSATA, 1xIDE and PCI for a RAID card. Asus have the AT4NM10T and AT5NM10T which lose the IDE port of Gigabyte, but replaces PCI with PCIe x4. Jetway do a board with 4xSATA and ION graphics - your fileserver could double as a media center, although the power is going to jump to 30W+. Zotac have a DTX board with 6xSATA and PCIe x16.
Some of these can run passively, although if you are going to want more than 4 drives you are going to need some kind of cooling.
I have been using the D510UD as a home server in a 4RU case with some large, slow Noctua fans. It's not noiseless, but it is very quiet.
Or have a different set of needs and wants to you.
You are correct. The iPad is less open than many Android devices. Your mistake is in assuming that this is as important to everyone as it is to you. Assuming technical ineptitude says more about your own lack of imagination than it does about the use case of those who purchase Apple products.
Googling turned up the reference to Giordano Bruno crater and reference to eyewitness reports of an event on June 18, 1178.
20 minutes later I was paying for and downloading an official copy. Then picked it up again as part of the Humble Indie Bundle.
I purchased a copy of Machinarium after being alerted to its existence by the author complaining about piracy - and after downloading a torrent of the game, first. Got it again with the HIB.
I know that this is anecdotal, I assume I am not typical but find it hard to believe I am unique. More, if there were some magical breakthrough that made DRM perfectly effective and prevented me from doing this, my response would not be to risk purchasing a game where all I know of it is the (paid for) 'review', it would be to not purchase it in those first few weeks but to wait until people I know can provide a report I can trust or to simply not buy at all. In my case, more effective DRM reduces the possibility of sale.
People just rather pirate than buy, if they can
Many, maybe even most, but not all and those who do are not going to turn into customers if you can somehow prevent piracy. Quite the reverse, some of those pirates may become customers.
even if just to keep the piracy out for a little bit during the first few weeks so that people who want to play it buy it because they cant pirate it
Perhaps, but the number of those who when unable to pirate the game pay, rather than wait, is smaller than the total number of pirates and I see very little work trying to quantify that number. More often it is assumed that all piracy represents lost sales.
I thought the same until someone pointed me at some studies that show that there is a kind of 'normalising' process that helps justify violence in some people's minds. The aggressors are convinced that their behaviour is normal, that everyone does it, it's just that people don't talk about it. Jokes about violence are then seen as a kind of sly reference to that-which-isn't-talked-about and is used to reinforce the idea that what they do is acceptable.
...
Yes it's an aberrant mind set. Yes it is delusional. No, I don't think that any instance is going to have a marked impact on someone's decision to commit violence but cumulatively and culturally
I'm a little late and dangerously offtopic, but for a list of 21stC movies that compare favourably (IMHO) to the 20th, I recommend the following;
Pitch Black
Avalon
Donnie Darko
28 Days Later
Minority Report
Solaris
Immortal
Night Watch
Primer
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
A Scanner Darkly
Children of Men
Renaissance
V for Vendetta
District 9
Moon
Watchmen
X-Men First Class
I've cribbed from the wiki pages for SF films of the 2000s and 2010s. Grain of salt. YMMV, etc.
This sort of ignorance and paranoia does the work for Microsoft. They don't have to be assholes, they can be nice to you ... and you'll turn around and make yourself look like an ignorant paranoid asshole for them. You are your own worst enemy, spend less time looking for them in the fields and more time looking for the enemy in the mirror. This childish BS is well past the point of being old.
One of the 'tricks' of abusers in abusive relationships is to 'play nice' when people are watching. The abused either comes across looking like an "ignorant paranoid asshole" or is forced to 'play along'.
Microsoft's behaviour in a number of arenas has been abusive. When there has been substantial evidence of a change in culture and direction away from these methods, then you can start accusing people of being "whiny bitches". Until then, an animated happy birthday hardly cuts it.
Control.
While I think a lot of the anti-piracy stance of the media groups is still driven by the assumption that piracy hurts sales, demonising pirates has turned into a great way to justify a kind of balkanisation of the market.
Regional restrictions allow them to sell the same product at the price that the local market will bear without diluting the higher markets with product sold in the lower.
Encryption and laws against circumventing it that are supposed to stop piracy also act to stop you buying one copy of something and then transcoding it to the form most useful to you.
Ultimately, the cost of distribution for purely digital material is drastically smaller than for physical items, but media companies are still claiming costs for breakages associated with LPs in the CD age. If they can blame 'pirates' then they don't have to let competition drive the price of a digital copy down to reflect the reduced cost of distribution.
It's oddly long-sighted of them. They have a monopoly and are fighting to keep it that way. This isn't about short term profit. It's about keeping control of the entire profit-making industry.
The joint.
He's likely to be more relaxed and less prone to road rage, competitiveness or getting caught up in someone else's issues.
If the journey is likely to be a longer one, not having the driver start to get 'jittery' from nicotine withdrawal is also a major plus.
Next question?
Let's posit your idealised government with idealised economics. Let's also posit a perfectly efficient distribution method, let's move most cities off the arable land they sit on and into less 'useful' regions. Now we can support an even greater population.
Which we will proceed to reach and then attempt to exceed as we have done every other time the constraints on food have been lifted.
Until we consciously and deliberately manage our populations, then we are going to keep seeing 'food crises'. Increasing the food supply, food distribution or even quality of food is not going to change that.
If you want to solve the global food crisis, adopt socialistic policies
Don't get me wrong, I tend towards the socialist end of the spectrum politically and philosophically, but if you _really_ want to solve the food crises, activate for increased levels of education (this has a high correlation with lowered birth rates) and against social and cultural mores that put a premium on multiple children and/or reject contraception.