If you assume that the user is on a desktop sits next to his shelf full of game discs. On the other hand, if the user has a laptop (which may not even have an optical drive) and doesn't feel like lugging all his game discs around with him all the time, it is a huge inconvenience -- so much of one, in fact, that he'd be very likely to pirate the game out of pure spite!
People will calculate invoices and bank statements with that intel chip. It might control airplanes or god knows what. It needs to be foolproof and highly reliable.
Graphics chips draw pretty pictures on the screen.
Nvidia is increasingly marketing its chips as "stream processors," rather than "graphics processors." They are becoming increasingly used for scientific computation, where reliability and accuracy are just as important as in the general-purpose case (which reminds me, I need to check if they support double-precision and IEEE 754 yet). It could be the case in a few years that the structural analysis for the building you'll be in might be done by a program running on one of these chips.
Nah, I think what we're talking about here are Veblen goods. If you had read the Wikipedia article you linked to more carefully, you'd see that the example they talk about for Giffen goods is actually on the cheap end of the price scale:
The classic example given by Marshall is of inferior quality staple foods, whose demand is driven by poverty that makes their purchasers unable to afford superior foodstuffs. As the price of the cheap staple rises, they can no longer afford to supplement their diet with better foods, and must consume more of the staple food.
I use that when connection quality doesn't matter.
You do realize we're talking about a $499 ethernet cable that claims to "bring out nuances" here, right? If the idiot believed that the $499 cable was actually different in the first place, then he would only be compounding his idiocy by failing to care whether the repair was sloppy.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm not going to respond to your entire argument as I've been doing so far. My last response took me two hours to write, and the lengthiness is becoming rather daunting.
If you knew about the condition before making a purchase, then it would have been a condition of sale.
Oh, sure. But that's a big "if." Up to this point, we've been arguing about what would happen if I didn't know about the condition before making the purchase.
And let's go back to my example of the book with the jumpy-clucky-wavey-dance requirement. In the usual case, I'm not buying that book directly from you. Instead, I'm buying it from a bookstore, which also sells thousands of other books that don't have that requirement. So, what's the standard by which I should be expected to "know" this? Does it have to be written up in a contract presented to me by the cashier before the sale? Does the cashier have to verbally notify me of it? Must the book be enclosed in shrink wrap and the notice be printed on a sticker on top? Does it need to be on the first page? Can it be on the inside back cover, in 1pt font?
Now, I admit, the courts have ruled that the "sticker on shrinkwrap" is sufficient notice in the case of software. However, there are still a few problems with that: almost all software today does not provide the EULA on the outside of the package, and (since, unlike software, they do not typically come with an EULA) books and other media should be held to a different standard.
But more importantly, the law allows me as a copyright holder to take technological measure within that product to protect my copyright and that you can't defeat that.
Fine, I'll concede that point. However, the DMCA is a single law, and a bad one. I remain hopeful that it will be overturned.
Oh, and by the way: you cannot claim protection under the DMCA for any GPLv3'd code you distribute. Section 3 specifically forbids it.
How many times have you purchased something that said warranty void is seal is broke?
There's a difference between withdrawing access to a warranty, which is an ongoing relationship between you and the manufacturer, and withdrawing access to the product itself, which is a physical object that the manufacturer no longer has access to.
How many times have you purchased something that said do not concentrate and inhale? *there is actually a federal concerning that)
Just like a copyright notice, that's a statutory requirement, not one imposed by the seller.
Well, that is unless your saying that when I purchase an online service, I have no contract with them and therefore no right to demand a refund when the services weren't delivered. I hope that isn't your perspective, I just renewed my magic the gathering online account and if I can't log in, play, or do anything else they told me I would be able to do, I will be demanding my money back.
First of all, we weren't talking about services. We were talking about products. Physical objects, which until very recently were very nearly always sold at a store by employees who made no mention of any contract and with no strings attached. Buying an MP3 online is not like signing up for a MMO, it's like buying a CD. And CDs don't have EULAs!
Second, are you kidding? The Internet is full of people complaining about how they couldn't access their WoW account, or how Comcast went down for a week, or whatever, and that they got no restitution whatsoever.
So when I buy a book from barns and noble, I own the thing, I can xerox it and pass it out to my friends...
Yes, you own the thing! No, you can't give copies to your friends. But that's because of copyright law, not
It makes perfect sense. There are limitations imposed by existing laws. The sale of anything, including the first sale doctrin, doesn't remove those limitations. If you purchase something that has a limitation on it, that limitation exists regardless of how many times it is sold.
I think you're conflating limitations imposed by the law, such as copyright, with limitations imposed by the seller, such as these "licenses." Limitations imposed by law are valid, I agree, but limitations imposed by the seller are not valid if the transaction is considered to be a "sale."
For example, let's say I bought a book. It happened to come with a "license" saying that I was obligated to hop on one leg while waving the book over my head and clucking like a chicken. It was also copyrighted. Now, there are two restrictions here: I am restricted by copyright law from duplicating and distributing the book, and I am restricted by the "license" from failing to do the book-wavey-chicken-clucky-hoppy-dance. Only one of these restrictions is reasonable and enforcible. Which one is it?
But it doesn't negate the fact that it is there and you purchased the device with something covered by it...
And I could also purchase a device with an agreement that said that the manufacturer could hire a hit man to come shoot me in the head. But it's not a valid or enforcible agreement!
And, of course, we're also (up to this point) ignoring the difference between agreements entered into prior to the sale and ones entered into subsequent to the sale. If you want to argue that these agreements are entered into before to the sale, then the buyer must be presented with and sign a contract before forking over his money. If you agree that these agreements are entered into after the sale, as I believe is the case, then the user must -- under contract law -- receive "valuable consideration" in return for his agreeing to be bound by the contract. Since he already owns the thing, use of the thing cannot be considered "valuable consideration." With most of these things, he doesn't get anything else, so there is no "valuable consideration" and the contract is not valid. And all that's beside the point anyway, because such a contract would also be a contract of adhesion because, at that point, he is being forced to agree with it whether he likes it or not.
first sale doesn't negate any licensing obligations.
Yes it does, because if you already own a thing, there's nothing that needs to be "licensed!"
Well, not necessarily. You wouldn't always have the key, at least in a form that you could access.
Okay, let's make this clear once and for all: in your example, is the code that decrypts the file GPL'd code?
My understanding so far is that it is. In that case, then the code necessarily has access to the key in order to perform the decryption, by virtue of how decryption fundamentally works. If you then have access to the code, as you do considering that it's GPL'd, then you necessarily have access to the key. But that doesn't particularly matter anyway, because (again, as a consequence of how decryption fundamentally works), you also have access to the decrypted stream, which you can then use any way you please, within the bounds of statutory -- that is, required by law rather than required by invalid agreements with the seller -- requirements.
Although you could change the output of the program just as you could also build a program that captured the information from memory or even the video memory. Once you do that, you have brought the GPLed work into conflict with section 3 of the GPLv3 so it couldn't be licenses from that.
If microsoft wanted to play hardball they would halt sales and imports of their software to those countries...
I hate to break it to you, but Microsoft only has a product to sell there in the first place by the grace of those countries' copyright laws. Since they are the sovereign entities, not Microsoft, if Microsoft tried to pull that kind of stunt they'd be well within their rights to simply declare Microsoft's software to be Public Domain and use it all they want!
Well, no. You can't buy a book and copy it then distribute it, you can't buy a movie and copy it then distribute it. Well, there is nothing physically stopping you other then the law and a fear or punishment. First sale doctrine doesn't negate any of those restrictions so where is the problem?
You're not making any sense: the doctrine of first sale applies to the original, not the copy. If you're making a copy, then the copy isn't the original object anymore, now is it?
If you sell that to someone, you have to pass on the same restrictions as a condition of the sale just like you would pass on the restrictions in the GPL (which first sale doesn't negate either).
Of course the GPL doesn't negate the doctrine of first sale; it can't. No license can! In fact, you don't even have to agree to the GPL in order to use the software anyway; it only applies when you make and distribute copies (i.e., when copyright law kicks in).
Copyright law and the doctrine of first sale are two entirely separate and orthogonal concepts. The latter applies only to the original object you buy; the former applies only to the copies you make.
As long as the program creating the hash that makes the key isn't GPLv3 (v2 is ok) and the program that encrypts the file isn't either, then any decoder or player wouldn't trip that clause. When you attempt to modify it specifically to involve those functions, then you would be puting it into that realm which you can't under the GPLv3. Now take the mythical program I created above, if the two keys are separate and the encryption happens on the content providers side, then the player/decrypter could be GPLv3. As soon as you started tampering it to manipulate the keys or hashes, you would have tripped section 3 of the GPLv3 making it impossible for you to distribute it because of the GPL itself.
You're not making any sense. If you're talking about DRM then you necessarily have the key you need to decrypt the media. If you have the source of the decrypter/player, you can modify it to save the decrypted version of the media instead of playing it and you're already done. And yes, you can distribute that modified decrypter! Why? Because the part of the GPL you talk about isn't saying that you can't make a program that performs encryption, it says that you can't cryptographically sign the binary of the program itself to prevent a user from modifying it to do things you don't want (like saving the stream instead of only displaying it, as I just explained above) unless you allow the user to do the same (in which case you're defeating the purpose of signing it).
When the player presents the key, the third party software would encrypt the file and present it to you.
That doesn't make any sense. If "the third party software would encrypt the file" then that means it was not encrypted to begin with. If you wanted the decypted file (which you would), then why would you ever run the encryption program?
If you altered the decryption program to bypass the keys, the GPL forbids your distribution of it.
But you're not altering it to "bypass the keys" (that doesn't make sense either; without the key, how would you decrypt the file?!). You're altering what it does with the decrypted stream after the (unmodified) decryption routine finishes, for example, to save it instead of play it.
Let me try to restate all this to be as clear as possible. Under the GPL (and in particular, version 3):
You can make a program that encrypts files.
You can make a program that decrypts files.
You can cryptographically sign a binary that is compiled from GPL source code.
...And then defines "unreasonable" immediately afterwards. Unreasonable means without probable cause. Nothing less! And merely traveling is not probable cause!
Obviously, if you are dumb enough to by a device that uses DRM to stop you from accessing it in the the first place, then you have already conceded that you don't own the device.
Except that, legally, that's not true. You do own the device, because of the doctrine of first sale. Vendors of these crippled devices would like to pretend that you have to follow their rules, but that doesn't make their fantasies real.
Bruce Perens told me at one time that DRM is perfectly acceptable with F/OSS. He even said it was acceptable with the GPLv3. As long as it isn't being used to restrict something that is already allowed in the license or provided for in the license, there the GPL doesn't care.
Of course it is! You're allowed, under the GPL, to try to make any kind of software you want. But the practical upshot is that any DRM that doesn't restrict something allowed in the license would also not work.
DRM doesn't just lock someone out of a device. It also controls access to content and the outputs of programs. Those are two things that free software has specifically stayed away from.
Except that it's not possible to control access to content or outputs of programs without controlling the device the content or program runs on. You're perfectly well able write a GPL DRM system, but then I'm perfectly well able to change it to decrypt everything whether it has authorization or not. And removing my ability to do that violates the GPL.
Your car is pulled over, and the officer has reasonable cause to suspect that you were driving under the influence of alcohol. The officer is allowed, required, and in good common sense would, look around the inside of your car to be sure you don't have any weapons.
This is not true. In fact, there is a video by some civil rights group that explains, among other things, how when you're asked to step out of your car you should lock the door behind you to prevent the officer from "assuming" you gave him permission to search. Ah, here it is.
There is not now, nor has there ever been a right to privacy at border crossings... unwarranted searches at border crossings is standard practice, and has been for a while, and has been upheld as being constitutional.
And that's complete and utter bullshit, and always has been!
The Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
See how it says "people?" That does literally mean people. Not "citizens." Not "people in some particular place." Just people. Everywhere. Period. Full stop!
If I'm an American citizen in America, I have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. If I'm an American in Afghanistan, I have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. If I'm a fucking Afghan in Afghanistan, I still have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures! Now, granted, I might have trouble enforcing that right, but it still fucking exists!
Why is this so fucking hard for the dumbasses on the Supreme Court to fucking understand?!
While I agree with the privacy infringements, I really wish it wasn't someone suspected on child porn complaining about it. It certainly won't garner much support from the general public, informed or not.
And that's exactly why they accused him of having child porn instead of something else!
I really don't understand what all the fuss about DRM in an open source world is.
The entire point of Free Software is to allow you, the user, to have control over your device.* The entire point of DRM is to prevent you, the user, from having control over your device.
Do you see the problem yet?
(* Ensuring that you have both the source code to the software (what all versions of the GPL did) and the ability to install and run it (what the GPL3 does, which is why it was necessary) is merely the mechanism by which the Free Software Foundation attempts to accomplish this.)
The Tesla has a reasonable range. However, its batteries have an unreasonable price tag. Granted, the market they're aiming at isn't very price-sensitive, so the car itself can be a reasonable price for that market despite the batteries, but that strategy wouldn't fly for the $20K econobox.
but then again the Aveta at $29K is starting to look pretty cool.
"Aveta" seems to be some kind of medical-related thing; did you mean Aptera?
As for the Aptera, I think it's great in theory, but I have serious doubts that they'll manage to pull it off. I'll be surprised if they manage to surpass the Corbin Sparrow in sales, let alone something mainstream like a Honda Insight or Lamborghini Gallardo.
Okay, let me put it this way: say you need a net 100 units of energy to provide a reasonable range for the car. A gasoline engine is only 20% efficient, but you can easily hold 500 ( *.20 = 100 net) units of gas. Or you can try to use a 100% efficient (for numerical simplicity) battery, but you can only fit one big enough to hold 50 units of energy in the car. So what do you do? Obviously, you pick the gasoline engine because the battery simply doesn't hold enough energy regardless of how efficient it is!
I didn't say you had to carry it around all the time.
But you do have to carry it around all the time, if you want to be able to play games that insist on having the CD in the drive.
You leave it on your desk at home / work.
No, you fucking can't, because anyone who could do that would have just bought a heavier laptop that included an optical drive to begin with! Here's a newsflash: if you have a laptop so small that it doesn't have an optical drive, then portability is obviously really important to you. If portability is that important for you, then it's probably for a reason, such as the fact that you don't fucking have a desk!
But what kind of dumbfuck wants to carry it around all the time, especially when he went out of his way to get the smallest and lightest laptop he possibly could in the first place?!
Sure, power lines don't work when I want to send energy across a continent or an ocean. But I have this wild idea where smaller solar plants dotting the landscape can decentralize the grid, improve transmission efficiency, and use existing infrastructure and proven technology.
And here's the part of your argument that gives me a headache: since when were "smaller solar plants dotting the landscape" and "decentraliz[ing] the grid" considered to be "existing infrastructure?!" Either it does exist, or it doesn't. You can't argue it both ways in the same fucking sentence!
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If you assume that the user is on a desktop sits next to his shelf full of game discs. On the other hand, if the user has a laptop (which may not even have an optical drive) and doesn't feel like lugging all his game discs around with him all the time, it is a huge inconvenience -- so much of one, in fact, that he'd be very likely to pirate the game out of pure spite!
Nvidia is increasingly marketing its chips as "stream processors," rather than "graphics processors." They are becoming increasingly used for scientific computation, where reliability and accuracy are just as important as in the general-purpose case (which reminds me, I need to check if they support double-precision and IEEE 754 yet). It could be the case in a few years that the structural analysis for the building you'll be in might be done by a program running on one of these chips.
Nah, I think what we're talking about here are Veblen goods. If you had read the Wikipedia article you linked to more carefully, you'd see that the example they talk about for Giffen goods is actually on the cheap end of the price scale:
You do realize we're talking about a $499 ethernet cable that claims to "bring out nuances" here, right? If the idiot believed that the $499 cable was actually different in the first place, then he would only be compounding his idiocy by failing to care whether the repair was sloppy.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm not going to respond to your entire argument as I've been doing so far. My last response took me two hours to write, and the lengthiness is becoming rather daunting.
Oh, sure. But that's a big "if." Up to this point, we've been arguing about what would happen if I didn't know about the condition before making the purchase.
And let's go back to my example of the book with the jumpy-clucky-wavey-dance requirement. In the usual case, I'm not buying that book directly from you. Instead, I'm buying it from a bookstore, which also sells thousands of other books that don't have that requirement. So, what's the standard by which I should be expected to "know" this? Does it have to be written up in a contract presented to me by the cashier before the sale? Does the cashier have to verbally notify me of it? Must the book be enclosed in shrink wrap and the notice be printed on a sticker on top? Does it need to be on the first page? Can it be on the inside back cover, in 1pt font?
Now, I admit, the courts have ruled that the "sticker on shrinkwrap" is sufficient notice in the case of software. However, there are still a few problems with that: almost all software today does not provide the EULA on the outside of the package, and (since, unlike software, they do not typically come with an EULA) books and other media should be held to a different standard.
Fine, I'll concede that point. However, the DMCA is a single law, and a bad one. I remain hopeful that it will be overturned.
Oh, and by the way: you cannot claim protection under the DMCA for any GPLv3'd code you distribute. Section 3 specifically forbids it.
There's a difference between withdrawing access to a warranty, which is an ongoing relationship between you and the manufacturer, and withdrawing access to the product itself, which is a physical object that the manufacturer no longer has access to.
Just like a copyright notice, that's a statutory requirement, not one imposed by the seller.
First of all, we weren't talking about services. We were talking about products. Physical objects, which until very recently were very nearly always sold at a store by employees who made no mention of any contract and with no strings attached. Buying an MP3 online is not like signing up for a MMO, it's like buying a CD. And CDs don't have EULAs!
Second, are you kidding? The Internet is full of people complaining about how they couldn't access their WoW account, or how Comcast went down for a week, or whatever, and that they got no restitution whatsoever.
Yes, you own the thing! No, you can't give copies to your friends. But that's because of copyright law, not
Good! You should be (at least until you have a lawyer confirm that it doesn't have any copyright or patent entanglements).
I think you're conflating limitations imposed by the law, such as copyright, with limitations imposed by the seller, such as these "licenses." Limitations imposed by law are valid, I agree, but limitations imposed by the seller are not valid if the transaction is considered to be a "sale."
For example, let's say I bought a book. It happened to come with a "license" saying that I was obligated to hop on one leg while waving the book over my head and clucking like a chicken. It was also copyrighted. Now, there are two restrictions here: I am restricted by copyright law from duplicating and distributing the book, and I am restricted by the "license" from failing to do the book-wavey-chicken-clucky-hoppy-dance. Only one of these restrictions is reasonable and enforcible. Which one is it?
And I could also purchase a device with an agreement that said that the manufacturer could hire a hit man to come shoot me in the head. But it's not a valid or enforcible agreement!
And, of course, we're also (up to this point) ignoring the difference between agreements entered into prior to the sale and ones entered into subsequent to the sale. If you want to argue that these agreements are entered into before to the sale, then the buyer must be presented with and sign a contract before forking over his money. If you agree that these agreements are entered into after the sale, as I believe is the case, then the user must -- under contract law -- receive "valuable consideration" in return for his agreeing to be bound by the contract. Since he already owns the thing, use of the thing cannot be considered "valuable consideration." With most of these things, he doesn't get anything else, so there is no "valuable consideration" and the contract is not valid. And all that's beside the point anyway, because such a contract would also be a contract of adhesion because, at that point, he is being forced to agree with it whether he likes it or not.
Yes it does, because if you already own a thing, there's nothing that needs to be "licensed!"
Okay, let's make this clear once and for all: in your example, is the code that decrypts the file GPL'd code?
My understanding so far is that it is. In that case, then the code necessarily has access to the key in order to perform the decryption, by virtue of how decryption fundamentally works. If you then have access to the code, as you do considering that it's GPL'd, then you necessarily have access to the key. But that doesn't particularly matter anyway, because (again, as a consequence of how decryption fundamentally works), you also have access to the decrypted stream, which you can then use any way you please, within the bounds of statutory -- that is, required by law rather than required by invalid agreements with the seller -- requirements.
You don't understand section 3 of the G
I hate to break it to you, but Microsoft only has a product to sell there in the first place by the grace of those countries' copyright laws. Since they are the sovereign entities, not Microsoft, if Microsoft tried to pull that kind of stunt they'd be well within their rights to simply declare Microsoft's software to be Public Domain and use it all they want!
You're not making any sense: the doctrine of first sale applies to the original, not the copy. If you're making a copy, then the copy isn't the original object anymore, now is it?
Of course the GPL doesn't negate the doctrine of first sale; it can't. No license can! In fact, you don't even have to agree to the GPL in order to use the software anyway; it only applies when you make and distribute copies (i.e., when copyright law kicks in).
Copyright law and the doctrine of first sale are two entirely separate and orthogonal concepts. The latter applies only to the original object you buy; the former applies only to the copies you make.
You're not making any sense. If you're talking about DRM then you necessarily have the key you need to decrypt the media. If you have the source of the decrypter/player, you can modify it to save the decrypted version of the media instead of playing it and you're already done. And yes, you can distribute that modified decrypter! Why? Because the part of the GPL you talk about isn't saying that you can't make a program that performs encryption, it says that you can't cryptographically sign the binary of the program itself to prevent a user from modifying it to do things you don't want (like saving the stream instead of only displaying it, as I just explained above) unless you allow the user to do the same (in which case you're defeating the purpose of signing it).
That doesn't make any sense. If "the third party software would encrypt the file" then that means it was not encrypted to begin with. If you wanted the decypted file (which you would), then why would you ever run the encryption program?
But you're not altering it to "bypass the keys" (that doesn't make sense either; without the key, how would you decrypt the file?!). You're altering what it does with the decrypted stream after the (unmodified) decryption routine finishes, for example, to save it instead of play it.
Let me try to restate all this to be as clear as possible. Under the GPL (and in particular, version 3):
...And then defines "unreasonable" immediately afterwards. Unreasonable means without probable cause. Nothing less! And merely traveling is not probable cause!
Except that, legally, that's not true. You do own the device, because of the doctrine of first sale. Vendors of these crippled devices would like to pretend that you have to follow their rules, but that doesn't make their fantasies real.
Of course it is! You're allowed, under the GPL, to try to make any kind of software you want. But the practical upshot is that any DRM that doesn't restrict something allowed in the license would also not work.
Except that it's not possible to control access to content or outputs of programs without controlling the device the content or program runs on. You're perfectly well able write a GPL DRM system, but then I'm perfectly well able to change it to decrypt everything whether it has authorization or not. And removing my ability to do that violates the GPL.
This is not true. In fact, there is a video by some civil rights group that explains, among other things, how when you're asked to step out of your car you should lock the door behind you to prevent the officer from "assuming" you gave him permission to search. Ah, here it is.
Or that there is no such thing as "illegal data."
And that's complete and utter bullshit, and always has been!
The Fourth Amendment:
See how it says "people?" That does literally mean people. Not "citizens." Not "people in some particular place." Just people. Everywhere. Period. Full stop!
If I'm an American citizen in America, I have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. If I'm an American in Afghanistan, I have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. If I'm a fucking Afghan in Afghanistan, I still have the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures! Now, granted, I might have trouble enforcing that right, but it still fucking exists!
Why is this so fucking hard for the dumbasses on the Supreme Court to fucking understand?!
And that's exactly why they accused him of having child porn instead of something else!
If the entire drive is encrypted, how does the OS work? Does Truecrypt have it's own bootloader?
QUOTE the part of the Constitution where it says the Fourth Amendment ends at the border, or SHUT THE FUCK UP!
The entire point of Free Software is to allow you, the user, to have control over your device.* The entire point of DRM is to prevent you, the user, from having control over your device.
Do you see the problem yet?
(* Ensuring that you have both the source code to the software (what all versions of the GPL did) and the ability to install and run it (what the GPL3 does, which is why it was necessary) is merely the mechanism by which the Free Software Foundation attempts to accomplish this.)
The Tesla has a reasonable range. However, its batteries have an unreasonable price tag. Granted, the market they're aiming at isn't very price-sensitive, so the car itself can be a reasonable price for that market despite the batteries, but that strategy wouldn't fly for the $20K econobox.
"Aveta" seems to be some kind of medical-related thing; did you mean Aptera?
As for the Aptera, I think it's great in theory, but I have serious doubts that they'll manage to pull it off. I'll be surprised if they manage to surpass the Corbin Sparrow in sales, let alone something mainstream like a Honda Insight or Lamborghini Gallardo.
Okay, let me put it this way: say you need a net 100 units of energy to provide a reasonable range for the car. A gasoline engine is only 20% efficient, but you can easily hold 500 ( * .20 = 100 net) units of gas. Or you can try to use a 100% efficient (for numerical simplicity) battery, but you can only fit one big enough to hold 50 units of energy in the car. So what do you do? Obviously, you pick the gasoline engine because the battery simply doesn't hold enough energy regardless of how efficient it is!
But you do have to carry it around all the time, if you want to be able to play games that insist on having the CD in the drive.
No, you fucking can't, because anyone who could do that would have just bought a heavier laptop that included an optical drive to begin with! Here's a newsflash: if you have a laptop so small that it doesn't have an optical drive, then portability is obviously really important to you. If portability is that important for you, then it's probably for a reason, such as the fact that you don't fucking have a desk!
But what kind of dumbfuck wants to carry it around all the time, especially when he went out of his way to get the smallest and lightest laptop he possibly could in the first place?!
Jailbreak is not a solution because I shouldn't have to crack my own damn device just to run my own damn software on it!
I know, actually. I was just trying to gently correct him.
And here's the part of your argument that gives me a headache: since when were "smaller solar plants dotting the landscape" and "decentraliz[ing] the grid" considered to be "existing infrastructure?!" Either it does exist, or it doesn't. You can't argue it both ways in the same fucking sentence!