Or perhaps you're incapable of understanding that not all opinions are created equal and yes there are some issues that are pretty cut and dry, like software repair. Not to mention orphaned works which cannot be updated because the source is allowed (by law) to be confiscated / lost / destroyed. It's a special kind of insanity that allows such wasteful bullshit.
So yes people who disagree and say software repair shouldn't be allowed are in fact stupid.
Yes it is. Why can't I repair games or get access to source code? Why don't videogames and their source-code and art assets go into a library (being a cultural work like books)? I could go on and on about all the people who's ability to create and solve problems are constrained by such criminal laws.
The current laws are merely rent seeking protectionist conservative nanny statism for corporations. Anyone who disputes this is naturally not very bright.
In economics, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth.
And what is copyright? Government enforced monopoly pushed by big business. How is preventing people from using non-scarce ideas a good idea over the long term? You can't justify it at all rationally. You're creating huge amounts of inefficiency because it puts up barriers to creativity and problem solving by anyone who is not fairly wealthy.
... american corporations and their complaint criminal government have no credibility. Any society that allows such insane acts to be passed over and over again is not a country who's laws and businessmen should be taken seriously.
Relevance to your interests. Most information you get from books is not up to date and a lot of it isn't really that interesting, you have to wade through a lot of crap for the 'highlights' the internet tends to focus on and cut to the chase with 'just the good parts'. The reality is, interacting with other human beings in near-real-time is more addictive then a lower level stimulation that requires actual effort and energy to understand.
The internet concentrates the things that give us the biggest addictive hits that are bite sized and easy to digest. Doing any kind of 'heavy reading' causes some level of stress and energy demand biologically in order to grasp what is being said. Most people balk at anything requiring serious effort on their part, even intelligent people.
People generally want other people to think for them and be given bite sized opinions they then can use to repeat over and over to other people to give themselves the illusion that they are thinking.
If you think about your own personal growth, you've probably grown more from discussion online with people at your peer level or above then you will reading most literature. Simply because a lot of literature is not up to date in terms of language, relevance or vernacular so it's more difficult to relate psychologically in a fast and quick manner then the hyper focus online social media sites and discussion forums create.
People can now ask other people with same or similar experiences about things relevant to their own lives very quickly, this was impossible in ages past.
I know you're being funny but I think if you look at long term trends DRM has become more entrenched in the software world and small incremental changes on the hardware front and pressure from software industry/government to 'lock down' software, it could very well happen.
More and more new PC games lately have been MMO's, or a variations there-of. To think "It couldn't happen here" is naive at best given the attack on software and digital content ownership on multiple fronts.
"Why are there no European Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook. "
Because Europe is not completely a fascist state like America is. America is basically corporate utopia, don't think so? The bank bailout was huge evidence corporations are privileged above everything.
Facebook would cause huge concerns in Germany because of germany's history for instance. Europe because of internal strife and war is weary of concentrations of corporate power and otherwise. In america having big corporations own the government is seen as just peachy. Just look at the slap on the wrist microsoft got when it was under investigation in the anti-trust case during the 90's
... walking believe it or not. Walking steadily for multiple half hour to one hour stints over the entire day adds up. I lost 40lbs walking 4 hours a day/7 days a week for 4 months. It's all about commitment, don't make excuses when it comes to your health. Without your health nothing else matters. Take it from someone fairly aged, as you get older you're not as energetic as when you're younger so get it done ASAP. People tend to under-estimate how important it is to prioritize health over everything else. IMHO health should come even _before_ your job because without it you're just digging yourself a whole that is harder to climb out of as you get older.
But before you even begin to exercise DO find out how much you are eating or exercise is pointless. A great site is fitday, for the first week or so monitor religiously and input data on everything you eat including days you over-eat.
In my opinion if you eat a lot of unhealthy foods you should start to remove some of the worst from your life and replace it with something healthy. You don't have to go all health nut but eating better goes a long way when coupled with exercise. Take it from someone who has been there, done that.
"What's sad is that it's almost impossible to find SLC drives now, due to consumerism."
For most people they don't need SLC. You only need SLC if you're writing a lot to a drive (things like enterprise apps). The thing killing SLC is cost and the fact that hard drives still have a huge lead because they are dirt cheap. Even a 512GB SSD right now is roughly $369 bucks, you can get 9TB of hard drive space (3x3tb drives) for that kind of money. So you can get roughly ~17x the space of a 512GB SSD for the same money. That is significant.
"There are two extremes, the protect copyright until the end of time crowd and the lose it right after you publish crowd. I think there's a reasonable medium."
The opposite is true, moderates like yourself in the past said the same thing every time copyright legislation came up for debate over history. See below:
The moderates have been defeated and absolutely ROUTED repeatedly. With such defeats the moderates at this point have no credibility.
The beginning of copyright began as a moderate thing and as always when you give an inch of power to ANYONE they will never give it back and will seek to increase their privileges as we've seen. If you give ANY privilege at all it will be expanded on, this is the historical norm. The moderates have no historical evidence that moderation is even possible because corporations have the money, time and lobbyists on their side to undo any moderation if it ever was enacted as the evidence of history attests.
"Well, don't be part of the problem then. I propose as part of the 21st century thinking, we cut out the "socialize the losses" aspect of the above."
The problem is that, you can't enforce it under the current model. Human beings are too ignorant, too irrational, too uninformed, too uninterested and too divided to do as you suggest.
And what restrictions were in place when the system got bailed out? NONE. The entire banking sector was bailed out because for the rich upper class, them getting ousted from power was not a "politically acceptable outcome".
They didn't want a repeat of the 1930's and the rise of unions and strife, so they did the safe thing to protect capitalism once again. So please spare me your rhetorical bs. We already socialism already, just for a minority. You'd have to be a moron to deny the "gifts" Mr wolff was talking about as well, which is just more actually existing socialism for companies. Once corporations become critical institutions people are easily manipulated into spending money in the naive "hopes" of a company staying. It's idiocy and they do it out of fear and imbalance of power and the ease at which technology has enabled businesses to 'pump and dump' the worlds people. This creates huge instability in peoples lives because they don't have the capital to just up and move anywhere they please.
The reality is technology is a game changer and we have social order and ideology trapped in 19th century thinking.
"If our technology is so advanced, why do we need to work so much?"
Capitalism, you allow unlimited ownership and no cap on profits you end up with a few monopolies or cartels in every industry and the rest are all losers. This is the normal functioning of capitalism, it was just hidden by the threat of socialism. Now that people have effectively become apolitical and brainwashed by the corporate media that all that is capitalism is good, we're going back in time because there is no effective political resistance at the moment.
"It's a shame, because of the whole going out of the house thing"
I've never considered movie watching a social activity, it's the least social thing you can do with a person when you 'get together' with them. Sharing the same space and warming the same air staring at a screen while not talking is not my idea of meaningful social interaction.
What everyone should most be concerned about is the lack of PC focused design in games. All the games we're getting are designed for the lowest common denominator, while there may be a lot of games being released their generic design leaves a lot to be desired.
"Jesus fuck, it's $15 a month, the average person with a life spends way more than that monthly for much less hours of enjoyment than a MMO can a provide you in a month"
MMO's are a giant rip off, you can get more value out of stand alone videogames. Anyone who thinks MMO's are a deal is part of the braindead gaming generation who in their stupidity have fed dollars to the industry to better exploit them and fucking up games permanently.
Sadly you don't understand that words change definitions over time "GONE" and "WENT" are equivalent in common everyday usage. Went can be used as a synonym for gone. Since words definitions evolve with how the populations use them. It's the same reason why a word like "liberalism" has different meanings depending on whether you are in europe or america. People and places define the meanings of words, the dictionary just hasn't been updated with how people actually use it.
... none of the major players give a shit about the PC as a platform. Since Microsoft has abandoned the PC as a gaming platform for Xbox. This leaves a huge opening but unfortunately big companies aren't very bright. Valve sadly has went the data-mining DRM route and is adding more barriers and cluster-fuckery to gaming that doesn't need to be there.
If I was Intel right now I would see the profits apple is making and attempt to standardize the PC space and prevent bargain basement PC chaos from occurring. When one looks at steam hardware surveys one see's most people have very little clue about their computers and tend to buy the cheapest shit.
As much hate as intel gets if it was intelligent it would get serious about creating a platform and not pull the software shenanigans like DRM/closed ecosystems like what the big software companies do (ms, valve, etc). Software is becoming hugely inefficient to create because software parts the equivalent of ROADS and SEWERS are being patented and copyrighted/protected.
Software really needs public R&D investment in 'foundation level' like stuff to get over these barriers and solve these problems, but barring that Intel (one of the biggest hardware companies) doesn't seem to seriously grasp the need for a software ecosystem that drives people to need their stuff. They are too content with idiocy and clusterfuckery of the current batch of software companies.
If I were intel I would turn GOG.com into a platform and increase R&D in how to make better games for cheaper as well as invest in better tools to drive down costs. The biggest problem we have today is making complex apps people want costs too much time and money so there need to be serious R&D in tools, software aided-creativity and automation.
"The irony here is you can't copyright information"
Actually information has already been copyrighted, games are just 1's and 0's but you can't get the source code because of copyright/IP/patents/etc. Anything can be defined under the broad rubric of 'information' just like how information has been defined as 'intellectual property'. Why can't gamers modify and repair and update their old games because of the 'facts' of how the code works? It's just a set of computer instructions.
"This is a disingenuous thing to say in the extreme."
No it's not. The fact that you'd sell a "USED DIGITAL COPY" of something that ISN'T SCARCE is something on the border of insanity. The fact that steam gets a cut of the "second hand sale" of the non-scarce game is all the more ludicrous.
Well considering computing power and the fact that 8GB of ram is $40 and 32GB of ram is around $130ish, 210MB seems awful small. Since 210MB is roughly around 2.6% of 8 Gigabytes.
"One blindingly obvious way to cut down on fake and artificial reviews: only allow reviews from people who have actually purchased the product."
Big companies can easily game this, big ad company buys X many products dumps a load of positive reviews. There is no system you can't game when you have a lot of money. The best I think is going to websites with authors you trust that have forums where you can hash out errors/details/etc.
This is what I love about sights like Anandtech.com. While anandtech is not perfect it's more often then not the place to go to understand the flaws with any new technology. This was especially apparent when SSD's were just being released. Anand had a huge breakdown on how they work and what to look for and what to avoid. Which for many of us caused us to delay our adoption of SSD's until capacity/price/maturity becomes good enough for us to plunk down the money.
Slashdot Mirror
"Maybe you're not as smart as you think you are."
Or perhaps you're incapable of understanding that not all opinions are created equal and yes there are some issues that are pretty cut and dry, like software repair. Not to mention orphaned works which cannot be updated because the source is allowed (by law) to be confiscated / lost / destroyed. It's a special kind of insanity that allows such wasteful bullshit.
So yes people who disagree and say software repair shouldn't be allowed are in fact stupid.
"Is it really insane folks?"
Yes it is. Why can't I repair games or get access to source code? Why don't videogames and their source-code and art assets go into a library (being a cultural work like books)? I could go on and on about all the people who's ability to create and solve problems are constrained by such criminal laws.
The current laws are merely rent seeking protectionist conservative nanny statism for corporations. Anyone who disputes this is naturally not very bright.
In economics, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth.
And what is copyright? Government enforced monopoly pushed by big business. How is preventing people from using non-scarce ideas a good idea over the long term? You can't justify it at all rationally. You're creating huge amounts of inefficiency because it puts up barriers to creativity and problem solving by anyone who is not fairly wealthy.
... american corporations and their complaint criminal government have no credibility. Any society that allows such insane acts to be passed over and over again is not a country who's laws and businessmen should be taken seriously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
"What is it?"
Relevance to your interests. Most information you get from books is not up to date and a lot of it isn't really that interesting, you have to wade through a lot of crap for the 'highlights' the internet tends to focus on and cut to the chase with 'just the good parts'. The reality is, interacting with other human beings in near-real-time is more addictive then a lower level stimulation that requires actual effort and energy to understand.
The internet concentrates the things that give us the biggest addictive hits that are bite sized and easy to digest. Doing any kind of 'heavy reading' causes some level of stress and energy demand biologically in order to grasp what is being said. Most people balk at anything requiring serious effort on their part, even intelligent people.
People generally want other people to think for them and be given bite sized opinions they then can use to repeat over and over to other people to give themselves the illusion that they are thinking.
If you think about your own personal growth, you've probably grown more from discussion online with people at your peer level or above then you will reading most literature. Simply because a lot of literature is not up to date in terms of language, relevance or vernacular so it's more difficult to relate psychologically in a fast and quick manner then the hyper focus online social media sites and discussion forums create.
People can now ask other people with same or similar experiences about things relevant to their own lives very quickly, this was impossible in ages past.
I know you're being funny but I think if you look at long term trends DRM has become more entrenched in the software world and small incremental changes on the hardware front and pressure from software industry/government to 'lock down' software, it could very well happen.
More and more new PC games lately have been MMO's, or a variations there-of. To think "It couldn't happen here" is naive at best given the attack on software and digital content ownership on multiple fronts.
"Why are there no European Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook. "
Because Europe is not completely a fascist state like America is. America is basically corporate utopia, don't think so? The bank bailout was huge evidence corporations are privileged above everything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJqM2tFOxLQ
Facebook would cause huge concerns in Germany because of germany's history for instance. Europe because of internal strife and war is weary of concentrations of corporate power and otherwise. In america having big corporations own the government is seen as just peachy. Just look at the slap on the wrist microsoft got when it was under investigation in the anti-trust case during the 90's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft.
You don't have to do it the way I've done it. If you're serious about losing weight/staying fit check out this site for motivation and support
http://www.johnstonefitness.com/
... walking believe it or not. Walking steadily for multiple half hour to one hour stints over the entire day adds up. I lost 40lbs walking 4 hours a day/7 days a week for 4 months. It's all about commitment, don't make excuses when it comes to your health. Without your health nothing else matters. Take it from someone fairly aged, as you get older you're not as energetic as when you're younger so get it done ASAP. People tend to under-estimate how important it is to prioritize health over everything else. IMHO health should come even _before_ your job because without it you're just digging yourself a whole that is harder to climb out of as you get older.
But before you even begin to exercise DO find out how much you are eating or exercise is pointless. A great site is fitday, for the first week or so monitor religiously and input data on everything you eat including days you over-eat.
http://www.fitday.com/
In my opinion if you eat a lot of unhealthy foods you should start to remove some of the worst from your life and replace it with something healthy. You don't have to go all health nut but eating better goes a long way when coupled with exercise. Take it from someone who has been there, done that.
"What's sad is that it's almost impossible to find SLC drives now, due to consumerism."
For most people they don't need SLC. You only need SLC if you're writing a lot to a drive (things like enterprise apps). The thing killing SLC is cost and the fact that hard drives still have a huge lead because they are dirt cheap. Even a 512GB SSD right now is roughly $369 bucks, you can get 9TB of hard drive space (3x3tb drives) for that kind of money. So you can get roughly ~17x the space of a 512GB SSD for the same money. That is significant.
"There are two extremes, the protect copyright until the end of time crowd and the lose it right after you publish crowd. I think there's a reasonable medium."
The opposite is true, moderates like yourself in the past said the same thing every time copyright legislation came up for debate over history. See below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
The moderates have been defeated and absolutely ROUTED repeatedly. With such defeats the moderates at this point have no credibility.
The beginning of copyright began as a moderate thing and as always when you give an inch of power to ANYONE they will never give it back and will seek to increase their privileges as we've seen. If you give ANY privilege at all it will be expanded on, this is the historical norm. The moderates have no historical evidence that moderation is even possible because corporations have the money, time and lobbyists on their side to undo any moderation if it ever was enacted as the evidence of history attests.
... a black market for guns that don't have these features should it ever come to pass.
"Well, don't be part of the problem then. I propose as part of the 21st century thinking, we cut out the "socialize the losses" aspect of the above."
The problem is that, you can't enforce it under the current model. Human beings are too ignorant, too irrational, too uninformed, too uninterested and too divided to do as you suggest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=-Tw1ZU5gfpc#t=5118s
And what restrictions were in place when the system got bailed out? NONE. The entire banking sector was bailed out because for the rich upper class, them getting ousted from power was not a "politically acceptable outcome".
They didn't want a repeat of the 1930's and the rise of unions and strife, so they did the safe thing to protect capitalism once again. So please spare me your rhetorical bs. We already socialism already, just for a minority. You'd have to be a moron to deny the "gifts" Mr wolff was talking about as well, which is just more actually existing socialism for companies. Once corporations become critical institutions people are easily manipulated into spending money in the naive "hopes" of a company staying. It's idiocy and they do it out of fear and imbalance of power and the ease at which technology has enabled businesses to 'pump and dump' the worlds people. This creates huge instability in peoples lives because they don't have the capital to just up and move anywhere they please.
The reality is technology is a game changer and we have social order and ideology trapped in 19th century thinking.
You represent the person I'm talking about: Totally ignorant of what is going on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiCTli2W15s
There is actually existing socialism, for the rich.
"If our technology is so advanced, why do we need to work so much?"
Capitalism, you allow unlimited ownership and no cap on profits you end up with a few monopolies or cartels in every industry and the rest are all losers. This is the normal functioning of capitalism, it was just hidden by the threat of socialism. Now that people have effectively become apolitical and brainwashed by the corporate media that all that is capitalism is good, we're going back in time because there is no effective political resistance at the moment.
"Asinine shit like this is why we need to maintain our right to trial by jury."
Not quite as easy at it sounds. The way the human mind reasons is not as the enlightenment thought.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
"It's a shame, because of the whole going out of the house thing"
I've never considered movie watching a social activity, it's the least social thing you can do with a person when you 'get together' with them. Sharing the same space and warming the same air staring at a screen while not talking is not my idea of meaningful social interaction.
... so platform is rarely a concern anymore.
What everyone should most be concerned about is the lack of PC focused design in games. All the games we're getting are designed for the lowest common denominator, while there may be a lot of games being released their generic design leaves a lot to be desired.
"Jesus fuck, it's $15 a month, the average person with a life spends way more than that monthly for much less hours of enjoyment than a MMO can a provide you in a month"
MMO's are a giant rip off, you can get more value out of stand alone videogames. Anyone who thinks MMO's are a deal is part of the braindead gaming generation who in their stupidity have fed dollars to the industry to better exploit them and fucking up games permanently.
Sadly you don't understand that words change definitions over time "GONE" and "WENT" are equivalent in common everyday usage. Went can be used as a synonym for gone. Since words definitions evolve with how the populations use them. It's the same reason why a word like "liberalism" has different meanings depending on whether you are in europe or america. People and places define the meanings of words, the dictionary just hasn't been updated with how people actually use it.
... none of the major players give a shit about the PC as a platform. Since Microsoft has abandoned the PC as a gaming platform for Xbox. This leaves a huge opening but unfortunately big companies aren't very bright. Valve sadly has went the data-mining DRM route and is adding more barriers and cluster-fuckery to gaming that doesn't need to be there.
If I was Intel right now I would see the profits apple is making and attempt to standardize the PC space and prevent bargain basement PC chaos from occurring. When one looks at steam hardware surveys one see's most people have very little clue about their computers and tend to buy the cheapest shit.
As much hate as intel gets if it was intelligent it would get serious about creating a platform and not pull the software shenanigans like DRM/closed ecosystems like what the big software companies do (ms, valve, etc). Software is becoming hugely inefficient to create because software parts the equivalent of ROADS and SEWERS are being patented and copyrighted/protected.
Software really needs public R&D investment in 'foundation level' like stuff to get over these barriers and solve these problems, but barring that Intel (one of the biggest hardware companies) doesn't seem to seriously grasp the need for a software ecosystem that drives people to need their stuff. They are too content with idiocy and clusterfuckery of the current batch of software companies.
If I were intel I would turn GOG.com into a platform and increase R&D in how to make better games for cheaper as well as invest in better tools to drive down costs. The biggest problem we have today is making complex apps people want costs too much time and money so there need to be serious R&D in tools, software aided-creativity and automation.
"The irony here is you can't copyright information"
Actually information has already been copyrighted, games are just 1's and 0's but you can't get the source code because of copyright/IP/patents/etc. Anything can be defined under the broad rubric of 'information' just like how information has been defined as 'intellectual property'. Why can't gamers modify and repair and update their old games because of the 'facts' of how the code works? It's just a set of computer instructions.
"This is a disingenuous thing to say in the extreme."
No it's not. The fact that you'd sell a "USED DIGITAL COPY" of something that ISN'T SCARCE is something on the border of insanity. The fact that steam gets a cut of the "second hand sale" of the non-scarce game is all the more ludicrous.
Well considering computing power and the fact that 8GB of ram is $40 and 32GB of ram is around $130ish, 210MB seems awful small. Since 210MB is roughly around 2.6% of 8 Gigabytes.
"One blindingly obvious way to cut down on fake and artificial reviews: only allow reviews from people who have actually purchased the product."
Big companies can easily game this, big ad company buys X many products dumps a load of positive reviews. There is no system you can't game when you have a lot of money. The best I think is going to websites with authors you trust that have forums where you can hash out errors/details/etc.
This is what I love about sights like Anandtech.com. While anandtech is not perfect it's more often then not the place to go to understand the flaws with any new technology. This was especially apparent when SSD's were just being released. Anand had a huge breakdown on how they work and what to look for and what to avoid. Which for many of us caused us to delay our adoption of SSD's until capacity/price/maturity becomes good enough for us to plunk down the money.