It's far more of a problem for casual, non-technical pirates than the handful of legitimate customers who have been misidentified.
I personally know of at least half a dozen people who have subsequently either a) purchased a legitimate copy of Windows, b) downgraded back to their older, legitimate version or c) bought a Mac, because they lack the technical knowledge to keep up with the WGA arms race.
WGA is certainly going to reduce the level of Windows piracy. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it's going to do so because some people will move away from Windows altogether.
Simple fact is that WGA is utterly transparent and utterly irrelevant to most legitimate users, and even those it isn't, it isn't an issue for very long.
It's not that simple. Google is a middle-man, they're not creating the ads. Joes Pizza shop pays Google to display their ad when certain keywords are found on a web-page. They pay different rates for different words, and they pay by the number of times their ad is displayed.
Click-fraud hurts Joes Pizza because hey's paying Google to show his ad to potential customers, but during click-fraud, no-one is actually seeing it. He's paying for nothing. Google just takes a cut of what Joe paid, and passes the rest on to the websites that actually displayed the ads (or claimed they did).
Google only cares about this because if Joe thinks he's paying for nothing (i.e. no real people are actually seeing his ads, and all the "clicks" he's charged for are actually fraud), he might stop paying Google to farm out his ads. If that happens, Google loses their revenue stream.
Lots of clicks are good for Google, they get to charge Joes Pizza more. But they're only good if Joe thinks he's getting his message out to lots of people.
My company has about 2MM in sales annually, and we spend almost $500,000 a year on Google Adwords. Over 90% of our sales come from Google. We're getting a conversion rate that is less then one percent and it's gotten worse over time. If it continues to drop we'll have no choice but reduce our adwords cost-per-click limit and take our advertising dollars elsewhere. No matter how you spell it, that means problems for the GOOG.
It amazes me anyone would pay any attention to them in the first place.
Google has a great solution for that. If the transaction is online, you can embed a small piece of HTML/Javascript code in your 'thank you for purchasing' page that allows Google to check the value of a cookie they placed on a customer's computer when they clicked an ad.
The cookie links the click to the sale. And there is value to the advertiser as well: Google can then help you track which ad resulted in a sale, and which keywords it was linked to. (So you don't have to buy an expensive but poor-return keyword.)
(I may be mis-describing: Check Google's docs to be sure.)
Or maybe it really is that bad. It depends on how you collect this data thus creating an error margin, and if there is a sufficiently huge volume of fraud, well... the results can look very skewed but be correct nonetheless.
The biggest problem is tracking the click through to the action verifiably. Once a user clicks and ad and goes to WidgetsForSale.Com, the WidgetsForSale folks would need to track their activity and determine whether a sale results (q: within how long?), and report those sales results to Google so they can pay for the ads. That doesn't sound like a very tenable model - it relies on the WidgetsForSale folks tracking data and reporting to Google how much they should pay, rather than Google billing them.
The only way I could see that working is with mandated use of the Google payment system perhaps, so they could generate some link between ad clicks and purchasing activity. That seems a mighty steep hill to climb, however...
For the past few years we have had ads running on adsense... 2 weeks ago, we decided we would rather lose the sales that adsense was bringing in than continue to pay google for ads that weren't generating enough revenue.
For comparison, our conversion rates:
Google Search: 3.5% Google adsense: 0.25%
I don't know what other companies are doing.. but I wouldn't be surprised companies are considering dropping adsense. There is just to much fraud.
Meanwhile, two friends of mine had their google accounts cancelled and funds withdrawn because Google accused them of click-fraud. Of course they had nothing to do with it and when they pleaded their cases to Google they got no reply. Google doesn't have to care because they have so many other willing partners. They were even willing to provide click logs and etc. But they just ignored ignored it. I guess it's cheaper to just cancel accounts who are suspected of click-fraud then actually investigate. But if all it takes is a few malicious users with some scripting knowledge and open proxies to ruin my revenue why should I as a publisher use Google Adsense?
This is an off topic post that is out of the scope of this site but I decided to publish it anyway. Steve Jobs might be ill. He looked somewhat weak. Could the cancer be back? Recall that he was diagnosed and treated for a "very rare" type of pancreatic cancer. Steve conducted the keynote by leveraging comments and demonstrations by three other Apple executives. Steve would present, call on an executive, then reappear. This happened several times. Steve had neither the stamina nor the passion he's put forth in past keynotes. You'll see that Jobs looks much thinner than he did eight months ago at Macworld.
This is very troubling news. I also thought Steve looked unwell during the keynote and it really surprised me that he handed nearly the entire presentation to subordinates. Hopefully all is well with him and he will rebound just like he did before.
The simple fact is that while we use senses in our bodies to do things, the similar versions for robots and autonomous vehicles are crude, expensive, and no-one is quite sure how to make them work the way we think they should. Computer vision is becoming a big thing, and despite the millions of people working with it or on it around the globe, there is still no standard way to immitate what a biological organism does with one eye, let alone two.Then there is that inner-ear thing, and this tells us many things: if we are vertical, falling, rising, moving forward or sideways... Our eyes do way more than a movie camera does. People are only now beginning to understand how many ways that we analyze the visual data presented to us through our eyes.
Fortunately the problems of autonomous underwater vehicles similar to planes and they are not as bad as the problems faced by ground-based vehicles. On the surface, there is so much to run into, get stuck on, fall off of etc. Just writing some code to keep a toy robot from getting stuck under the kitchen table is a huge task without boatloads of sensory data and processing power.
The tasks these vehicles are trying to accomplish ARE that difficult, well, using animal brains might help.
There are two groups you can try if you are interested in finding out more about hobbyists that are working on these problems http://www.dprg.org/ and http://www.seattlerobotics.org/index.php. There are many others, of course, but these two are fairly active groups.
While we are good at developing machinery and electronics, programming AI into the system has always been the problem.
The solution: Borrow an existing solution from nature. All you need is an insect, rat, or reptile to interface with the device and for them to obtain feedback with sensors it would closely be accustomed too.
Just imagine for a moment using a pigeon mounted inside a scramjet with the only purpose to get an item from point A to B in a battle field autonomously. How about using rodents to operate a robotic vehicle provide surveillance or rescue missions. The list goes on.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you MacPro/Leopard fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a MacPro (a quad core Xeon with 1GB RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my 2.5GHz G5 running OS X 10.4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even TextMate is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Mactels, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its PowerPC counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My Dual G4 with 128 megs of ram runs faster than this 3 ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
I do not understand why he put those other three managers on stage at all. The first was especially bad; the guy was stumbling over his words and appeared to be clueless about the subject matter. All were patently uninteresting and stiff. The keynote usually features great new developments, but it is also about image and is supposed to be entertaining. Jobs is good at delivering all that. Is he having another bout with cancer?
Of course, who needs VirtualPC: yes, it certainly “works,” but it is a clumsy product in everything from installation to managing environments. It sucks and if it were not for the fact that it is emulating and x86 virtual machine on Power, I would guess its developers had no idea what they were doing. Apart from that, dropping the VisualBasic scripting support is certainly anticompetitive. There are no technical reasons whatsoever and basically spells out “we dislike that you are competing with us, so we are going to eliminate your chances of entering the corporate market.” (I hope I do not have to spell out why this is an anticompetitive practice in comparison to recent actions by Apple.) If this doesn't prove that Microsoft are complete failures when it comes to technology, I don't know what will. Instead of responding to Apple with real progress (and, hey, maybe even releasing a product), they are behaving like petulant little babies and taking their toys home (maybe throw a chair or two).
Your comments are useful and I agree for the most part. However, I disagree with your assertions that Java proponents claim rapid application development. (And really, I am just nitpicking for argument sake.) Java development has a lot of programmer overhead in that there are many ways to solve the problem and nobody has decided which are the best. With that, you end up having to experiment with a variety of frameworks at every tier of your application. JSF or Tapestry? Hibernate, JDO, or Toplink? EJB or Spring? Swing or SWT? W3C DOM or dom4j? Saxon or Xalan? Ant or Maven? Jakarta Commons. JBoss, WebSphere, WebLogic, Tomcat, JRun. The mind boggles when trying to grasp all the tools and libraries you have available when building anything in Java, and while all this choice is good in some respects, it is nice to have some authority say “this is how you do it.” Java lacks that (at the moment) and so a lot of suboptimal (perhaps not necessarily bad) decisions get made. Another point is Java is really geared towards strict development practices and principles. Every application should be MVC and all the tools encourage it. Every application should have multiple tiers. Keeping distributed computing in mind is a good idea. None of this really lends to building applications fast, but certainly for reliability and extensibility. Of couse, these opinions may be due to the industry in which I do most of my work (and you can probably guess based on most of the projects I mentioned).:)
It is unfortunate the grandparent post is full of personal remarks, but the points are valid nonetheless. Your comment about Eclipse memory consumption is a bit odd. Just because top says “64M” does not mean that you have that much less physical memory available. Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory Also, Eclipse is a huge application with a lot of useful features built on a very extensible platform. I would recommend getting aquainted with it before complaining about its memory footprint. As for Java computers requiring a “supercomputer” to run: I always wonder how people get hooked on this. Do you have an example of a slow Java application? Have you ever used a slow Java application? Do you realize that there plenty of Java-based web applications out there serving millions of transactions every day? Do you realize there is a very good chance your cellphone, a remarkably barebones and minimal device, uses Java? People complain that Java is slow or that Java developers are incompetent but I have yet to receive any evidence. Meanwhile, there is plenty of material that shows Java is fast. Would you care to back-up any of your claims?
But without the great taste. Think about it: the Slashdot editors get paid (more ad exposures) for reposting comments (which were sorted out of hundreds by moderators in the viewing public for free) with some useless commentary tacked on. All in the same of extending the conversation on a few silly topics beyond the original submission. Ultimately, it means more income. It also appears to be a substitute for a steadily decreasing volume of worthwhile news. Yes, Blackslash sucks!
Whenever I see journalists talking about technology, I notice that most of the time they are completely wrong or way off the mark. When I think about it, I cannot recall any instance of mainstream media getting a technology story right. Whether it is ignorance or an overwhelming need to sensationalize, I do not know. But that is besides the point.
If they are getting all of this stuff wrong, what are they getting wrong about topics in which I am not well-versed? Could it be that everything they are reporting is as erroneous and confused yet we take it at face value because we know little about the subject matter? I think that if you find reporting on technology to be crap, you should be a little concerned about everything else you read and hear on the news. But then, you should be sceptical regardless.
About as much as VMS, CVS, Subversion, or any other (file) system which tracks revisions. Look, people, not everything is a privacy concern. Chill out. This is actually something useful. It formalizes the fact that deletion does not (and never did) actually remove data. It all comes down to the level of protect you want. If you do not want others to recover your data, use encryption. Same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you are. To uphold liberty and other liberal values does make you a liberal. (Not liking Clinton does not make you less of a liberal either. Clinton is just a man—not a liberal idea—who happened to do many unliberal things.) And of course, you should hardly be ashamed of that since all those people you just quoted were liberals themselves. “Liberal” is not a bad word ands its demonization is the work of the same people who stand opposed to every ideal you enumerated in your post.
Regardless of the medium, a story can compel powerful emotions. Video games, books, movies, you name it. Their contents can make you laugh and cry. As for video games, I have frequently found myself moved by the plight of the characters in various Final Fantasy games. (For example, most people I know cried when Aerisdied.) Same goes for many other adventure and role-playing games and it depends a lot on how much the story takes the time to get you acquainted with the characters. It matters little if they are 20x30 pixels, as long as there is something common for you to associate with, then you can and likely will become emotionally attached.
Slashdot Mirror
It's far more of a problem for casual, non-technical pirates than the handful of legitimate customers who have been misidentified.
I personally know of at least half a dozen people who have subsequently either a) purchased a legitimate copy of Windows, b) downgraded back to their older, legitimate version or c) bought a Mac, because they lack the technical knowledge to keep up with the WGA arms race.
WGA is certainly going to reduce the level of Windows piracy. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it's going to do so because some people will move away from Windows altogether.
Simple fact is that WGA is utterly transparent and utterly irrelevant to most legitimate users, and even those it isn't, it isn't an issue for very long.
It's not that simple. Google is a middle-man, they're not creating the ads. Joes Pizza shop pays Google to display their ad when certain keywords are found on a web-page. They pay different rates for different words, and they pay by the number of times their ad is displayed.
Click-fraud hurts Joes Pizza because hey's paying Google to show his ad to potential customers, but during click-fraud, no-one is actually seeing it. He's paying for nothing. Google just takes a cut of what Joe paid, and passes the rest on to the websites that actually displayed the ads (or claimed they did).
Google only cares about this because if Joe thinks he's paying for nothing (i.e. no real people are actually seeing his ads, and all the "clicks" he's charged for are actually fraud), he might stop paying Google to farm out his ads. If that happens, Google loses their revenue stream.
Lots of clicks are good for Google, they get to charge Joes Pizza more. But they're only good if Joe thinks he's getting his message out to lots of people.
My company has about 2MM in sales annually, and we spend almost $500,000 a year on Google Adwords. Over 90% of our sales come from Google. We're getting a conversion rate that is less then one percent and it's gotten worse over time. If it continues to drop we'll have no choice but reduce our adwords cost-per-click limit and take our advertising dollars elsewhere. No matter how you spell it, that means problems for the GOOG.
It amazes me anyone would pay any attention to them in the first place.
Google has a great solution for that. If the transaction is online, you can embed a small piece of HTML/Javascript code in your 'thank you for purchasing' page that allows Google to check the value of a cookie they placed on a customer's computer when they clicked an ad.
The cookie links the click to the sale. And there is value to the advertiser as well: Google can then help you track which ad resulted in a sale, and which keywords it was linked to. (So you don't have to buy an expensive but poor-return keyword.)
(I may be mis-describing: Check Google's docs to be sure.)
Or maybe it really is that bad. It depends on how you collect this data thus creating an error margin, and if there is a sufficiently huge volume of fraud, well... the results can look very skewed but be correct nonetheless.
The biggest problem is tracking the click through to the action verifiably. Once a user clicks and ad and goes to WidgetsForSale.Com, the WidgetsForSale folks would need to track their activity and determine whether a sale results (q: within how long?), and report those sales results to Google so they can pay for the ads. That doesn't sound like a very tenable model - it relies on the WidgetsForSale folks tracking data and reporting to Google how much they should pay, rather than Google billing them.
The only way I could see that working is with mandated use of the Google payment system perhaps, so they could generate some link between ad clicks and purchasing activity. That seems a mighty steep hill to climb, however...
For the past few years we have had ads running on adsense... 2 weeks ago, we decided we would rather lose the sales that adsense was bringing in than continue to pay google for ads that weren't generating enough revenue.
For comparison, our conversion rates:
Google Search: 3.5%
Google adsense: 0.25%
I don't know what other companies are doing.. but I wouldn't be surprised companies are considering dropping adsense. There is just to much fraud.
Meanwhile, two friends of mine had their google accounts cancelled and funds withdrawn because Google accused them of click-fraud. Of course they had nothing to do with it and when they pleaded their cases to Google they got no reply. Google doesn't have to care because they have so many other willing partners. They were even willing to provide click logs and etc. But they just ignored ignored it. I guess it's cheaper to just cancel accounts who are suspected of click-fraud then actually investigate. But if all it takes is a few malicious users with some scripting knowledge and open proxies to ruin my revenue why should I as a publisher use Google Adsense?
You mean you don't want Linux nerds making autonomous vehicles? I don't see the problem.
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http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/3118/ms1by.jpg
http://img270.imageshack.us/img270/7789/linuxnylu
Oh... well, then there is always the Mac people.
http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/7792/img08079i
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/3600/img10156rv.
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/2539/soho0uj.j
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/5614/img66606p
http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/6756/img64271jj.
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/5082/bleeder0w
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/1672/img85083c
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/7234/img82642a
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/787/img60047ow
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/4819/img58719t
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/9681/img46882w
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/8519/img45081g
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/3102/img39464t
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/7783/img07414p
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/5816/img07328r
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/5096/img07309m
Err, okay, nevermind. Better stick with Windows.
=)
Think Strogg.
The simple fact is that while we use senses in our bodies to do things, the similar versions for robots and autonomous vehicles are crude, expensive, and no-one is quite sure how to make them work the way we think they should. Computer vision is becoming a big thing, and despite the millions of people working with it or on it around the globe, there is still no standard way to immitate what a biological organism does with one eye, let alone two.Then there is that inner-ear thing, and this tells us many things: if we are vertical, falling, rising, moving forward or sideways... Our eyes do way more than a movie camera does. People are only now beginning to understand how many ways that we analyze the visual data presented to us through our eyes.
Fortunately the problems of autonomous underwater vehicles similar to planes and they are not as bad as the problems faced by ground-based vehicles. On the surface, there is so much to run into, get stuck on, fall off of etc. Just writing some code to keep a toy robot from getting stuck under the kitchen table is a huge task without boatloads of sensory data and processing power.
The tasks these vehicles are trying to accomplish ARE that difficult, well, using animal brains might help.
There are two groups you can try if you are interested in finding out more about hobbyists that are working on these problems http://www.dprg.org/ and http://www.seattlerobotics.org/index.php. There are many others, of course, but these two are fairly active groups.
While we are good at developing machinery and electronics, programming AI into the system has always been the problem. The solution: Borrow an existing solution from nature. All you need is an insect, rat, or reptile to interface with the device and for them to obtain feedback with sensors it would closely be accustomed too. Just imagine for a moment using a pigeon mounted inside a scramjet with the only purpose to get an item from point A to B in a battle field autonomously. How about using rodents to operate a robotic vehicle provide surveillance or rescue missions. The list goes on.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you MacPro/Leopard fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a MacPro (a quad core Xeon with 1GB RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my 2.5GHz G5 running OS X 10.4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even TextMate is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Mactels, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its PowerPC counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My Dual G4 with 128 megs of ram runs faster than this 3 ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Notice what the desktop is missing.
I do not understand why he put those other three managers on stage at all. The first was especially bad; the guy was stumbling over his words and appeared to be clueless about the subject matter. All were patently uninteresting and stiff. The keynote usually features great new developments, but it is also about image and is supposed to be entertaining. Jobs is good at delivering all that. Is he having another bout with cancer?
No bottom lines or consumer interests were harmed by the making of those posters.
Of course, who needs VirtualPC: yes, it certainly “works,” but it is a clumsy product in everything from installation to managing environments. It sucks and if it were not for the fact that it is emulating and x86 virtual machine on Power, I would guess its developers had no idea what they were doing. Apart from that, dropping the VisualBasic scripting support is certainly anticompetitive. There are no technical reasons whatsoever and basically spells out “we dislike that you are competing with us, so we are going to eliminate your chances of entering the corporate market.” (I hope I do not have to spell out why this is an anticompetitive practice in comparison to recent actions by Apple.) If this doesn't prove that Microsoft are complete failures when it comes to technology, I don't know what will. Instead of responding to Apple with real progress (and, hey, maybe even releasing a product), they are behaving like petulant little babies and taking their toys home (maybe throw a chair or two).
Your comments are useful and I agree for the most part. However, I disagree with your assertions that Java proponents claim rapid application development. (And really, I am just nitpicking for argument sake.) Java development has a lot of programmer overhead in that there are many ways to solve the problem and nobody has decided which are the best. With that, you end up having to experiment with a variety of frameworks at every tier of your application. JSF or Tapestry? Hibernate, JDO, or Toplink? EJB or Spring? Swing or SWT? W3C DOM or dom4j? Saxon or Xalan? Ant or Maven? Jakarta Commons. JBoss, WebSphere, WebLogic, Tomcat, JRun. The mind boggles when trying to grasp all the tools and libraries you have available when building anything in Java, and while all this choice is good in some respects, it is nice to have some authority say “this is how you do it.” Java lacks that (at the moment) and so a lot of suboptimal (perhaps not necessarily bad) decisions get made. Another point is Java is really geared towards strict development practices and principles. Every application should be MVC and all the tools encourage it. Every application should have multiple tiers. Keeping distributed computing in mind is a good idea. None of this really lends to building applications fast, but certainly for reliability and extensibility. Of couse, these opinions may be due to the industry in which I do most of my work (and you can probably guess based on most of the projects I mentioned). :)
It is unfortunate the grandparent post is full of personal remarks, but the points are valid nonetheless. Your comment about Eclipse memory consumption is a bit odd. Just because top says “64M” does not mean that you have that much less physical memory available. Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory Also, Eclipse is a huge application with a lot of useful features built on a very extensible platform. I would recommend getting aquainted with it before complaining about its memory footprint. As for Java computers requiring a “supercomputer” to run: I always wonder how people get hooked on this. Do you have an example of a slow Java application? Have you ever used a slow Java application? Do you realize that there plenty of Java-based web applications out there serving millions of transactions every day? Do you realize there is a very good chance your cellphone, a remarkably barebones and minimal device, uses Java? People complain that Java is slow or that Java developers are incompetent but I have yet to receive any evidence. Meanwhile, there is plenty of material that shows Java is fast. Would you care to back-up any of your claims?
I have been a Java developer for eight years. What problems have plagued Java garbage collection?
Why not just invite the hackers to do their best at breaking it? (Before electing to pay them.)
But without the great taste. Think about it: the Slashdot editors get paid (more ad exposures) for reposting comments (which were sorted out of hundreds by moderators in the viewing public for free) with some useless commentary tacked on. All in the same of extending the conversation on a few silly topics beyond the original submission. Ultimately, it means more income. It also appears to be a substitute for a steadily decreasing volume of worthwhile news. Yes, Blackslash sucks!
Whenever I see journalists talking about technology, I notice that most of the time they are completely wrong or way off the mark. When I think about it, I cannot recall any instance of mainstream media getting a technology story right. Whether it is ignorance or an overwhelming need to sensationalize, I do not know. But that is besides the point.
If they are getting all of this stuff wrong, what are they getting wrong about topics in which I am not well-versed? Could it be that everything they are reporting is as erroneous and confused yet we take it at face value because we know little about the subject matter? I think that if you find reporting on technology to be crap, you should be a little concerned about everything else you read and hear on the news. But then, you should be sceptical regardless.
Most wiki software, including that used by Wikipedia stores every revision. Why not blow that up into a privacy concern also?
About as much as VMS, CVS, Subversion, or any other (file) system which tracks revisions. Look, people, not everything is a privacy concern. Chill out. This is actually something useful. It formalizes the fact that deletion does not (and never did) actually remove data. It all comes down to the level of protect you want. If you do not want others to recover your data, use encryption. Same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you are. To uphold liberty and other liberal values does make you a liberal. (Not liking Clinton does not make you less of a liberal either. Clinton is just a man—not a liberal idea—who happened to do many unliberal things.) And of course, you should hardly be ashamed of that since all those people you just quoted were liberals themselves. “Liberal” is not a bad word ands its demonization is the work of the same people who stand opposed to every ideal you enumerated in your post.
Regardless of the medium, a story can compel powerful emotions. Video games, books, movies, you name it. Their contents can make you laugh and cry. As for video games, I have frequently found myself moved by the plight of the characters in various Final Fantasy games. (For example, most people I know cried when Aeris died.) Same goes for many other adventure and role-playing games and it depends a lot on how much the story takes the time to get you acquainted with the characters. It matters little if they are 20x30 pixels, as long as there is something common for you to associate with, then you can and likely will become emotionally attached.