"and that is why private schools are generally better."
And what research would show this? Informed people don't go by anecdotes and ideology anymore. Every study shows that little to no difference and that's with public schools huge disadvantage with ideologically aligned billionaires sabotaging it.
"private schools' quality is driven by market forces "
Not quite. Market forces simply cannot operate effectively in an education environment. Private school is really about screening rich from poor, high class/good behavior people from low class/bad behavior people.
It's all about getting away from other people you deem in some way culturally/behaviorally/intellectually inferior. Not to mention the right wing attacks on education funding from billionaire lobbyists in the government and elsewhere.
Part of the reason school is so shit is because right wing forces are constantly meddling and sabotaging public schools so then they can take them all private.
Guys like bill gates and Koch are such believers in the market (as I like to call them) they have no problems saying "public schools are so bad" yet not paying taxes and hiring others to sabotage public institutions. The real problem in america is that corporations and money have corrupted every single institution in america to such an extent people are grasping at anything to solve problems. Instead of the difficulty of reigning in corps that pay no tax and going after those moneyed interests who sabotage education and leave public institutions starved for cash.
Only in america could someone say something so fucking illiterate. How about you check the facts? Conservative propaganda is just up to the nines in the uneducated kids at slashdot lately. Slashdot has become the haven of illiterates.
"I play in a group and have seen several Gold Founders (people who paid $120 to get into the closed beta) walk away in disgust or boredom."
Everyone had the big warning light flashing called "F2P" when mechwarrior went online only. That alone should have told anyone in the know all they needed to know. The reality is the fans who paid for MWO are stupid fucks. They are the reason developers are exploiting gamers, the dumb half of the gaming community is just so huge and missing brain cells.
People SAY this but they don't know what it means. MEDIOCRE ideas are a dime a dozen, GOOD IDEAS are hard to come by. There are tonnes of small things game developers could do when they are endlessly rehashing some first person/third person shooter and they NEVER do it. One can only conclude: They've never had the idea. Because many fantastic and quality ideas are cheap and easy to implement. I look over a game like Rage and I can only shake my head at the level of idiocy and lack of scope control on that project. They put way too much emphasis on graphics so most of their budget was sucked up by stuff that really didn't matter. Knowing what ideas/aspects of the game to put emphasis on is absolutely CRITICAL and that requires knowing WHAT IDEAS HAVE VALUE. Idea's are the schematic for a game, so saying 'ideas are a dime a dozen' sounds wise in principle but HAVING THE WRONG ideas (schematic) for a game means you'll be developing it in the wrong direction. So ideas are in fact critical at every point else you can't make decisions concerning quality.
Someone out there has some killer ideas that no one can understand the value of, because if you're good at game design and coming up with ideas for gameplay. You need someone at your skill level or higher to understand their value.
The real issue is dunning krueger.
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes."
"Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding."
The difference is, it's interviews with real politicians saying "yes we could do this but...(insinuating the majority of the public is too stupid/can't grasp this)", did you see what May and Layton said? skip to their interviews if you didn't.
The fact that the politicians know what is possible but they are stuck in a system that would never allow it and because the public is just too fucking stupid / brainwashed.
"With the way national governments keep piling up debt"
That debt is to private banks, you do know that each nation is supposed to have it's own national bank making that kind of debt impossible? The worlds banking cartel launched a coup against most nation states to keep them under their control via national debt.
Don't think so? Why not look at what even these canadian politicians have to say. Money is political fiction, the national debt exists because private power wants it to exist to prevent progressive social change under the fear mongering of national debt.
... most kids are tech illiterate. To have any real privacy you have to understand the technology and what it's implications are and most average people will never grasp how easy it is for people to get your information if you use any technology at all.
"If you have a system that enables abuse without the proper safeguards against abuse..."
I think the whole concept of safeguards has been discredited because once you have sufficient money and resources you can erode, destroy and work around them with impunity.
I think people who think 'we just need to fix the system' are totally deluded. People have been saying that since the founding of the USA. The entire US style system is corrupt but most are simply not intelligent enough, nor educated enough to recognize how corrupt the modern western world has become. Add up all the wars america has been involved in, over the last 60 years and you can really only come to one conclusion: The average citizen is a moron incapable of seeing the world as it is.
"The GOP around here is substantially less crazy than it is down south. The problem is that we allow the party that wins to draw the districting lines and that we allow the party to decide who the candidates in the election will be."
You miss the point, the entire nation is incapable of sound judgement to a large extent.
The entire voting base that's voting for D & R is delusional at this point, trying to end that delusion with all the science corporations and the masters of the universe have learned along with billions of dollars they have to astroturf and you're pissing into the wind.
Right now the whole entire thing is a lost cause because a sizable chunk of the voting electorate is simply incapable of seeing and accepting the truth. Current western governments are descendants of the enlightenment view of man and his reasoning and science shows that is incorrect.
"The obvious reason for this to fail is that currently there is no way (nor should there be) to test someones blood to determine if they are suffering from depression."
More then likely a lot of long term depression is probably a break down in the body's resiliency from being exposed to long term stress over time. i.e. being bullied in school, anxiety, constant work, etc.
All these things add up over time and most likely do some damage to regulatory mechanisms that most people are oblivious to but some people would like to blame it on genes of parents. I'm certain our modern environment plays a huge role in breaking people because by and large human beings are still deeply confused animals who don't really live in reality of how scientifically their body works and how to live in a way that doesn't break it.
... Human beings are not THAT radically different from computers in that our electric circuits ARE comparable to some extent with electronics because they both use matter and energy and possess similar natural electrical characteristics. Although they may be shaped differently. I'm certain there are MANY insights and cross over ideas and concepts from computer science and how it applies to mind, and the reverse, how biological concepts apply to computer science and electrical circuits in general.
Let's not forget both the brain and computers are made of atoms, electrons, etc. So there's going to be some cross over whether people like it or not.
We can think of the brain as a big electric converter made of biological molecules that converts electromagnetic signals from one form to another (in a general sense) it just does it in foreign way which we think is 'radically different', but more or less the mind is just a DIFFERENT take on a fundamental theme (fundamental natural relationships) of how nature can organize and process information. It's just that no one has sat down to find and expose all the relationships and expose them in detail. So that the unlearned and those who are invested in romantic view of mankind can be disqualified from the conversation.
Diablo 2 was also an online game and DIDNT have single player lag. Perhaps you should go play diablo 2 before coming up with such poor thinking.
You're using language to redefine reality because you have such poor and sloppy thinking. Single player lag is a defect, architecting the single player game in such a way as to need a server connection is an evil thing to do, period.
Trying to say "they intended it to be an MMO" is bullshit since the mutiplayer and single player aspect are separate. There is no need to ever contact a server while playing by yourself, ever, and also even in multiplayer. The fact that you buy into such shit because you're so technologically illiterate is mind boggling.
Consider that you can start a multiplayer game in diablo 2 and play by yourself and not have any LAG yet technically you are running a diablo 2 multiplayer server. Try to learn how technology works for fuck sakes.
It's not a 'side effect' its a defect they programmed the game as a DRM mechanism in such a way as to chain it to a server across the internet, the single player lag is deeply embedded single player DRM. Take a typical multiplayer diablo 2 local server (i.e. where your computer and internet connection is the server). You also can start an internet multiplayer game online and have no lag even though your playing internet single player. There is no lag because the communication from your cpu to the server is on the same computer. In the case of where you start a diablo 2 'online' internet game, the program (game) is simply not programmed in a way to chain it to get permission from a server for the program to continue operating even though you are playing 'mmo' or 'online'. In diablo 3 the program is constantly making DRM requests to the server to get permission to continue by breaking the game code and taking parts of the game code hostage (functionality) and having to 'send' game functionality to the dumb Diablo 3 single player dumb client. It's the most fucking evil thing imaginable.
Just because you call something an "mmo" or "intended to be online" is meaningless. INTENTIONS ARE MEANINGLESS. WORDS ARE MEANINGLESS when you have no programming background or any history of PC gaming to understand that computer programs (which games are) can be built in evil and unethical ways that purposely make the program operate in a stupid, fucked up and broken manner.
Most gamers who are 'yay F2P/MMO/Online' are just too illiterate to make sound decisions and see how evil game companies because they have no understanding of how computers and computer programs work.
"A campaign is not supposed to be about marketing, it's supposed to be about voting someone into office that will look out for the citizens best interests."
Many human beings (and hence citizens) don't know what their interests are unfortunately because the way the mind reasons doesn't work how we thought it did. Western governments are based on enlightenment view of citizenship that science shows is totally false.
"99.9999999999999999999999999999% of all the resources in the universe start a few hundred thousand miles above our heads."
Yes and you have not asked the question of whether it is cost efficient to get at those resources, i.e. by your comment you think getting at those at those resources is going to be space magic. I have serious doubts you've investigated the energy economics of space travel and ferrying space meteorites/debris back and forth across the solar system.
"Right because a laggy game totally justifies you to threaten to butcher the developers family and vivisect their children."
It's not just a 'laggy game', you purposely PUT LAG (a defect) in the game. Not just anywhere, but THE SINGLE PLAYER portion of the game. That's something an evil person would do. Then you purposely sell the defective product to a largely gullible and illiterate public WHILE lobbying to make defective products protected by LAW. Which just makes sensible people even more angry.
So this does justify you getting insults like getting pitchforked because you're missing the larger trend of corruption in the corporate world of which you are taking part. You are just one of many and either are willingly ignorant or have inured yourself so deeply in corruption and delusion you are beyond any kind of moral sense. You are just one of many people in the corporate world who think you're being a cute and intelligent. The reality is the more informed among the public sees little bastard who is trying to hide behind a mask of morality when your only goal is to try to reshape reality and the concept of fairness using legal trickery and skeevy marketing techniques for your own personal profit.
"So don't buy or play the game if you know it's got issues."
That's not the way the world works. This is a typical american go-to statement that americans use to shut down serious analyses about how the world actually works. As an adult you can go ahead and not buy the game, but how many kids and teens/20 somethings who never grew up in the PC game era of doom, quake, etc are going to know the game industry is totally corrupt when they never experienced or lived through gaming during the 1990's?. Kids who grew up on WoW and steam as their first exprerience of 'what gaming is' on the PC are totally not in a position to make sound market choices at all because of lack of history and general immaturity of their minds, nor will most of them ever be most of them because 'that's what they grew up with'.
In the real world, people are impulsive, irrational creatures, especially kids bugging mom and dad for games. Does anyone REALLY believe "just don't buy the game" when thinking about how kids and parents in the real world behave? Your statement isn't really credible.
... from the F2P scam, DRM, and taking away peoples ability to own games by making everything F2P or online, where Diablo 3 introduced us to the DEFECT of SINGLE PLAYER LAG. The entire industry at present and the corrupt whiny little bastard game devs (those who are among the corrupt) deserve everything they get.
The Game industry is among the most corrupt on the planet:
-Taking the ability to own and mod games away from players -Enclosing games by using MMO/F2P server chaining strategy -F2P/MMO games are locked down and that makes a suffocating environment for fan creativity, mods, hacks, etc, to the original game and more and more games are being completely locked down and gamers being locked out.
Nanny corporation is trying to make people dependent on it in the exact same way as an overbearing totalitarian state would. They want to force a relationship where they continually draw money from people and you never own anything.
This is just more of a trend of game industry not aware of the industry wide corporate corruption that people are getting sick and tired of and the are too oblivious to the justified anger people have at price gouging, bank bailouts, and wars based on lies.
"The only thing I really worry about is if gaming communities start getting like what happened to League of Legends."
The problem with league of legends isn't the people, it's the developers. Older games like Quake allowed you to run your own servers, because everything is centralized and matchmaking is forced you are forced to be with assholes. It's just game companies desire for absolute control over the game that creates these issues. The F2P and MMO developers won't give their audience the ability to run their own servers because of desire for power and money bringing up red herrings over piracy.
They want to be little princes of culture, and you must kiss their ring and get permission for everything.
Are you a butthurt right wing american, who politicizes and incorrectly interprets any factual information as an attack on your ideology? Look intelligent adults are capable of discussing important issues and not getting offended at the drop of a hat because they are paying attention to and research the corruption in the world at large, both in governments and corporations. I know reality tends to offend those who yearn for a simple worldview and believe the world is mostly a just place, but it's not.
It's not about left/right, it's about morals that transcend ideology. The abuses of power and implementation of authoritarian and profiteering ideology into domains it doesn't belong (i.e. getting rid of the ability to OWN, modify and repair what you by using legal con-artist techniques and trickery is fucking evil).
If you don't believe that then you shouldn't even bother posting because you are lacking both the intelligence and maturity to understand that it's not about capitalism vs communism, or left vs. right, it's about you know being a decent moral human being who isn't a total asshole.
"Stallman's piece focuses exclusively on TPM being implemented as a mandated piece where either the gov't or the media industry has the keys. "
Not quite, the same way F2P games and always online DRM made it so far. Most people are tech illiterate, all that's needed to get TPM out there is a dumb public and some widget they will always buy mindlessly like phones. I expect phones and/or some aspect of videogames to be where TPM is first implemented. The upper classes in america are obsessed with manipulating the public mind for their own corporate profits. I suspect there are people working right this moment to find a way to push more hardware DRM and legal bullshit. I imagine we'll first see this from the game industry and then it will seep into other industries.
The idea that Stallman is 'alarmist' given how dystopian, authoritarian and anti-freedom american copyright and patent law has become and its negative effect on people owning the digital products they buy is already cause for alarm. The fact that digital goods are effectively infininite and people are talking moronically about selling 'used digital games' (bizarre aspect of american capitalist thinking in the non scarce digital world).
See this article, game developers and publisher are seriously totally in bizarro world trying to get rid of the used game market.
... the reason all this nonsense is happening is because the game industry has seen the sick money from World of warcraft and F2P's and they want in on the action. Nintendo shutting down video's of people playing games and commenting them on youtube. The vast gaming masses are dumb stupid, passive, tech illiterate sheep. Gaming is suffering because of market expansion (aka appealing to the lowest common denominator).
The worst part about it is the kids and adults who defend this crap.
.... too slow to do backups with if you have any sizable amount of data at all. Mirroring SSD's saves huge amount of time in cost and fiddling in terms of backing up important data.
Hard drives are really for huge libraries of stuff you want to keep but dont use often and dont mind slow backups on because they are of lower relative importance (movies, games,etc).
Slashdot Mirror
"and that is why private schools are generally better."
And what research would show this? Informed people don't go by anecdotes and ideology anymore. Every study shows that little to no difference and that's with public schools huge disadvantage with ideologically aligned billionaires sabotaging it.
"private schools' quality is driven by market forces "
Not quite. Market forces simply cannot operate effectively in an education environment. Private school is really about screening rich from poor, high class/good behavior people from low class/bad behavior people.
It's all about getting away from other people you deem in some way culturally/behaviorally/intellectually inferior. Not to mention the right wing attacks on education funding from billionaire lobbyists in the government and elsewhere.
Part of the reason school is so shit is because right wing forces are constantly meddling and sabotaging public schools so then they can take them all private.
Guys like bill gates and Koch are such believers in the market (as I like to call them) they have no problems saying "public schools are so bad" yet not paying taxes and hiring others to sabotage public institutions. The real problem in america is that corporations and money have corrupted every single institution in america to such an extent people are grasping at anything to solve problems. Instead of the difficulty of reigning in corps that pay no tax and going after those moneyed interests who sabotage education and leave public institutions starved for cash.
"Personally I think social security is fraud."
Only in america could someone say something so fucking illiterate. How about you check the facts? Conservative propaganda is just up to the nines in the uneducated kids at slashdot lately. Slashdot has become the haven of illiterates.
http://www.nasi.org/research/2012/video-social-security-just-facts
"I play in a group and have seen several Gold Founders (people who paid $120 to get into the closed beta) walk away in disgust or boredom."
Everyone had the big warning light flashing called "F2P" when mechwarrior went online only. That alone should have told anyone in the know all they needed to know. The reality is the fans who paid for MWO are stupid fucks. They are the reason developers are exploiting gamers, the dumb half of the gaming community is just so huge and missing brain cells.
"Ideas are a dime a dozen ... "
People SAY this but they don't know what it means. MEDIOCRE ideas are a dime a dozen, GOOD IDEAS are hard to come by. There are tonnes of small things game developers could do when they are endlessly rehashing some first person/third person shooter and they NEVER do it. One can only conclude: They've never had the idea. Because many fantastic and quality ideas are cheap and easy to implement. I look over a game like Rage and I can only shake my head at the level of idiocy and lack of scope control on that project. They put way too much emphasis on graphics so most of their budget was sucked up by stuff that really didn't matter. Knowing what ideas/aspects of the game to put emphasis on is absolutely CRITICAL and that requires knowing WHAT IDEAS HAVE VALUE. Idea's are the schematic for a game, so saying 'ideas are a dime a dozen' sounds wise in principle but HAVING THE WRONG ideas (schematic) for a game means you'll be developing it in the wrong direction. So ideas are in fact critical at every point else you can't make decisions concerning quality.
Someone out there has some killer ideas that no one can understand the value of, because if you're good at game design and coming up with ideas for gameplay. You need someone at your skill level or higher to understand their value.
The real issue is dunning krueger.
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes."
"Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
The difference is, it's interviews with real politicians saying "yes we could do this but...(insinuating the majority of the public is too stupid/can't grasp this)", did you see what May and Layton said? skip to their interviews if you didn't.
The fact that the politicians know what is possible but they are stuck in a system that would never allow it and because the public is just too fucking stupid / brainwashed.
"With the way national governments keep piling up debt"
That debt is to private banks, you do know that each nation is supposed to have it's own national bank making that kind of debt impossible? The worlds banking cartel launched a coup against most nation states to keep them under their control via national debt.
Don't think so? Why not look at what even these canadian politicians have to say. Money is political fiction, the national debt exists because private power wants it to exist to prevent progressive social change under the fear mongering of national debt.
http://www.ohcanadamovie.com/
... most kids are tech illiterate. To have any real privacy you have to understand the technology and what it's implications are and most average people will never grasp how easy it is for people to get your information if you use any technology at all.
"If you have a system that enables abuse without the proper safeguards against abuse..."
I think the whole concept of safeguards has been discredited because once you have sufficient money and resources you can erode, destroy and work around them with impunity.
I think people who think 'we just need to fix the system' are totally deluded. People have been saying that since the founding of the USA. The entire US style system is corrupt but most are simply not intelligent enough, nor educated enough to recognize how corrupt the modern western world has become. Add up all the wars america has been involved in, over the last 60 years and you can really only come to one conclusion: The average citizen is a moron incapable of seeing the world as it is.
"The GOP around here is substantially less crazy than it is down south. The problem is that we allow the party that wins to draw the districting lines and that we allow the party to decide who the candidates in the election will be."
You miss the point, the entire nation is incapable of sound judgement to a large extent.
"Revolution isn't the answer."
The entire voting base that's voting for D & R is delusional at this point, trying to end that delusion with all the science corporations and the masters of the universe have learned along with billions of dollars they have to astroturf and you're pissing into the wind.
Right now the whole entire thing is a lost cause because a sizable chunk of the voting electorate is simply incapable of seeing and accepting the truth. Current western governments are descendants of the enlightenment view of man and his reasoning and science shows that is incorrect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
Nothing short of either a miracle in voters minds or serious conflict is going to change the system at this point.
"The obvious reason for this to fail is that currently there is no way (nor should there be) to test someones blood to determine if they are suffering from depression."
More then likely a lot of long term depression is probably a break down in the body's resiliency from being exposed to long term stress over time. i.e. being bullied in school, anxiety, constant work, etc.
All these things add up over time and most likely do some damage to regulatory mechanisms that most people are oblivious to but some people would like to blame it on genes of parents. I'm certain our modern environment plays a huge role in breaking people because by and large human beings are still deeply confused animals who don't really live in reality of how scientifically their body works and how to live in a way that doesn't break it.
... Human beings are not THAT radically different from computers in that our electric circuits ARE comparable to some extent with electronics because they both use matter and energy and possess similar natural electrical characteristics. Although they may be shaped differently. I'm certain there are MANY insights and cross over ideas and concepts from computer science and how it applies to mind, and the reverse, how biological concepts apply to computer science and electrical circuits in general.
Let's not forget both the brain and computers are made of atoms, electrons, etc. So there's going to be some cross over whether people like it or not.
We can think of the brain as a big electric converter made of biological molecules that converts electromagnetic signals from one form to another (in a general sense) it just does it in foreign way which we think is 'radically different', but more or less the mind is just a DIFFERENT take on a fundamental theme (fundamental natural relationships) of how nature can organize and process information. It's just that no one has sat down to find and expose all the relationships and expose them in detail. So that the unlearned and those who are invested in romantic view of mankind can be disqualified from the conversation.
"If it's really corrupt the kids will figure it out."
No they won't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
Diablo 2 was also an online game and DIDNT have single player lag. Perhaps you should go play diablo 2 before coming up with such poor thinking.
You're using language to redefine reality because you have such poor and sloppy thinking. Single player lag is a defect, architecting the single player game in such a way as to need a server connection is an evil thing to do, period.
Trying to say "they intended it to be an MMO" is bullshit since the mutiplayer and single player aspect are separate. There is no need to ever contact a server while playing by yourself, ever, and also even in multiplayer. The fact that you buy into such shit because you're so technologically illiterate is mind boggling.
Consider that you can start a multiplayer game in diablo 2 and play by yourself and not have any LAG yet technically you are running a diablo 2 multiplayer server. Try to learn how technology works for fuck sakes.
It's not a 'side effect' its a defect they programmed the game as a DRM mechanism in such a way as to chain it to a server across the internet, the single player lag is deeply embedded single player DRM. Take a typical multiplayer diablo 2 local server (i.e. where your computer and internet connection is the server). You also can start an internet multiplayer game online and have no lag even though your playing internet single player. There is no lag because the communication from your cpu to the server is on the same computer. In the case of where you start a diablo 2 'online' internet game, the program (game) is simply not programmed in a way to chain it to get permission from a server for the program to continue operating even though you are playing 'mmo' or 'online'. In diablo 3 the program is constantly making DRM requests to the server to get permission to continue by breaking the game code and taking parts of the game code hostage (functionality) and having to 'send' game functionality to the dumb Diablo 3 single player dumb client. It's the most fucking evil thing imaginable.
Just because you call something an "mmo" or "intended to be online" is meaningless. INTENTIONS ARE MEANINGLESS. WORDS ARE MEANINGLESS when you have no programming background or any history of PC gaming to understand that computer programs (which games are) can be built in evil and unethical ways that purposely make the program operate in a stupid, fucked up and broken manner.
Most gamers who are 'yay F2P/MMO/Online' are just too illiterate to make sound decisions and see how evil game companies because they have no understanding of how computers and computer programs work.
"A campaign is not supposed to be about marketing, it's supposed to be about voting someone into office that will look out for the citizens best interests."
Many human beings (and hence citizens) don't know what their interests are unfortunately because the way the mind reasons doesn't work how we thought it did. Western governments are based on enlightenment view of citizenship that science shows is totally false.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
"99.9999999999999999999999999999% of all the resources in the universe start a few hundred thousand miles above our heads."
Yes and you have not asked the question of whether it is cost efficient to get at those resources, i.e. by your comment you think getting at those at those resources is going to be space magic. I have serious doubts you've investigated the energy economics of space travel and ferrying space meteorites/debris back and forth across the solar system.
"Right because a laggy game totally justifies you to threaten to butcher the developers family and vivisect their children."
It's not just a 'laggy game', you purposely PUT LAG (a defect) in the game. Not just anywhere, but THE SINGLE PLAYER portion of the game. That's something an evil person would do. Then you purposely sell the defective product to a largely gullible and illiterate public WHILE lobbying to make defective products protected by LAW. Which just makes sensible people even more angry.
So this does justify you getting insults like getting pitchforked because you're missing the larger trend of corruption in the corporate world of which you are taking part. You are just one of many and either are willingly ignorant or have inured yourself so deeply in corruption and delusion you are beyond any kind of moral sense. You are just one of many people in the corporate world who think you're being a cute and intelligent. The reality is the more informed among the public sees little bastard who is trying to hide behind a mask of morality when your only goal is to try to reshape reality and the concept of fairness using legal trickery and skeevy marketing techniques for your own personal profit.
"So don't buy or play the game if you know it's got issues."
That's not the way the world works. This is a typical american go-to statement that americans use to shut down serious analyses about how the world actually works. As an adult you can go ahead and not buy the game, but how many kids and teens/20 somethings who never grew up in the PC game era of doom, quake, etc are going to know the game industry is totally corrupt when they never experienced or lived through gaming during the 1990's?. Kids who grew up on WoW and steam as their first exprerience of 'what gaming is' on the PC are totally not in a position to make sound market choices at all because of lack of history and general immaturity of their minds, nor will most of them ever be most of them because 'that's what they grew up with'.
In the real world, people are impulsive, irrational creatures, especially kids bugging mom and dad for games. Does anyone REALLY believe "just don't buy the game" when thinking about how kids and parents in the real world behave? Your statement isn't really credible.
... from the F2P scam, DRM, and taking away peoples ability to own games by making everything F2P or online, where Diablo 3 introduced us to the DEFECT of SINGLE PLAYER LAG. The entire industry at present and the corrupt whiny little bastard game devs (those who are among the corrupt) deserve everything they get.
The Game industry is among the most corrupt on the planet:
-Taking the ability to own and mod games away from players
-Enclosing games by using MMO/F2P server chaining strategy
-F2P/MMO games are locked down and that makes a suffocating environment for fan creativity, mods, hacks, etc, to the original game and more and more games are being completely locked down and gamers being locked out.
Nanny corporation is trying to make people dependent on it in the exact same way as an overbearing totalitarian state would. They want to force a relationship where they continually draw money from people and you never own anything.
This is just more of a trend of game industry not aware of the industry wide corporate corruption that people are getting sick and tired of and the are too oblivious to the justified anger people have at price gouging, bank bailouts, and wars based on lies.
"The only thing I really worry about is if gaming communities start getting like what happened to League of Legends."
The problem with league of legends isn't the people, it's the developers. Older games like Quake allowed you to run your own servers, because everything is centralized and matchmaking is forced you are forced to be with assholes. It's just game companies desire for absolute control over the game that creates these issues. The F2P and MMO developers won't give their audience the ability to run their own servers because of desire for power and money bringing up red herrings over piracy.
They want to be little princes of culture, and you must kiss their ring and get permission for everything.
"Don't you have some OWS picketing to do?"
Are you a butthurt right wing american, who politicizes and incorrectly interprets any factual information as an attack on your ideology? Look intelligent adults are capable of discussing important issues and not getting offended at the drop of a hat because they are paying attention to and research the corruption in the world at large, both in governments and corporations. I know reality tends to offend those who yearn for a simple worldview and believe the world is mostly a just place, but it's not.
It's not about left/right, it's about morals that transcend ideology. The abuses of power and implementation of authoritarian and profiteering ideology into domains it doesn't belong (i.e. getting rid of the ability to OWN, modify and repair what you by using legal con-artist techniques and trickery is fucking evil).
If you don't believe that then you shouldn't even bother posting because you are lacking both the intelligence and maturity to understand that it's not about capitalism vs communism, or left vs. right, it's about you know being a decent moral human being who isn't a total asshole.
"Stallman's piece focuses exclusively on TPM being implemented as a mandated piece where either the gov't or the media industry has the keys. "
Not quite, the same way F2P games and always online DRM made it so far. Most people are tech illiterate, all that's needed to get TPM out there is a dumb public and some widget they will always buy mindlessly like phones. I expect phones and/or some aspect of videogames to be where TPM is first implemented. The upper classes in america are obsessed with manipulating the public mind for their own corporate profits. I suspect there are people working right this moment to find a way to push more hardware DRM and legal bullshit. I imagine we'll first see this from the game industry and then it will seep into other industries.
The idea that Stallman is 'alarmist' given how dystopian, authoritarian and anti-freedom american copyright and patent law has become and its negative effect on people owning the digital products they buy is already cause for alarm. The fact that digital goods are effectively infininite and people are talking moronically about selling 'used digital games' (bizarre aspect of american capitalist thinking in the non scarce digital world).
See this article, game developers and publisher are seriously totally in bizarro world trying to get rid of the used game market.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanRogers/20130806/197733/THE_FUTURE_OF_RESELLING_DIGITAL_VIDEO_GAMES.php
... the reason all this nonsense is happening is because the game industry has seen the sick money from World of warcraft and F2P's and they want in on the action. Nintendo shutting down video's of people playing games and commenting them on youtube. The vast gaming masses are dumb stupid, passive, tech illiterate sheep. Gaming is suffering because of market expansion (aka appealing to the lowest common denominator).
The worst part about it is the kids and adults who defend this crap.
.... too slow to do backups with if you have any sizable amount of data at all. Mirroring SSD's saves huge amount of time in cost and fiddling in terms of backing up important data.
Hard drives are really for huge libraries of stuff you want to keep but dont use often and dont mind slow backups on because they are of lower relative importance (movies, games ,etc).