Despite the fact that they're owned by a multinational with annual sales in the billions and voracious shareholders, they feel they've made enough money on their most successful property, and are thinking of going in a new creative direction: sewing kits for middle school girls. After that, maybe shutter the WoW datacenters and use them for the world's best air-conditioned homeless shelters.
1) "It won't matter that my database is absolutely overflowing with garbage answers because I can hand-score a test subset". Great. So you are now hand-scoring a test subset, which will be known good, but this in no way allows you to delete the garbage on words not in the test subset.
2) You can avoid serving captchas to bots. Brilliant plan! One question: who are the bots? Answer: we've got no bloody clue who the bots are, *thats why we have captchas*. If your captcha is only secure when you can guarantee that no bots are using it, *your captcha is useless*.
The reCAPTCHA strategy is that one of the following two things will happen:
1) No improvement in OCR happens and the CAPTCHA remains effective 2) Spammers improve OCR substantially and we get books digitized for free
It fails to account for the 3rd option
3) Spammers improve OCR marginally, achieve a 20 ~ 25% success rate on reCAPTCHA. There is no penalty for getting it wrong if you can generate requests for free and only care about maximizing successes! Its a multiple choice test with infinite questions and a fixed bar for passing! As soon as this happens, spammers will flood the legitimate users out of the system, because they can generate infinite requests and legitimate users can not. Its usefulness as a CAPTCHA is compromised and its usefulness for text digitization is zero, because the "multiple users checking each other" becomes multiple instances of the same lobotomized spam OCR program vouching for its own accuracy, with an infintessimal portion of humans being drowned out by sheer numbers.
>> AI in the form of image processing is now about the same "intelligence" as a human >>
Not even close, but it doesn't need to be.
What useful work could you do with an OCR program which was correct only 25% of the time? Nothing -- any book you read would look like one of those Babblefish English-by-way-of-Russian-by-way-of-English monstrosities. But a 25% accurate OCR is a 100% solution to the captcha, because you have a big freaking botnet and can generate additional requests for free.
Aside from botnets, the cloud-based outsourced captcha busting business model ($1 per 1,000 captchas done by a subcontractor of a subcontractor in a place where paying people to get a repetitive-stress injury makes excellent economic sense as long as they have an automated assistant to keep the queue full, like a factory line) is also doing some severe damage. Forget the old "Ahh, we'll give you porn for breaking a captcha you didn't even realize was Yahoo's" exploit, which was mostly theoretical. This gives you a *controllable, constantly available, scaleable* level of whatever the resource protected by the captcha is.
If you're one of 15,000 charging orcs and then run into a single foppish elf who has time to preen as you charge him down, face it, you're "#$"#%ed.
MMORPGs do a lot of play balance vis a vis the other players, but play balance versus the system is making absolutely, positively sure that the system loses the overwhelming majority of encounters.
I know, it would sort of undercut the "righteous anger at EA" theme, but in my experience Amazon is one of the most customer-friendly companies I know. Especially if you're a regular customer (even if "regular" just means "every Christmas and sometimes when a new console launches") they bend over backwards for you. I previously worked in a different company with roughly similar CS standards and, hypothetically supposing we had a similar issue with a vendor (which I frankly kind of doubt is actually accurate as you describe it), the CS rep would have picked "Refund Issued: Product Arrived Broken" before you got a minute into the conversation.
(Like we're going to threaten OUR relationships over a vendor's desire to avoid returns?! Hah. A vendor asking for that misunderestimates the power of the entity which actually, you know, has people happily hand over money to it.**)
** Which is yet another reason why EA and every other software publisher would give their right eyetooth to get everyone onto online distribution yesterday.
You should've practiced basic security precautions and repainted the tilde key red. (Why tilde? Because it looks mysterious and powerful but is actually harmless. Sort of like Opus Dei, whose unofficial motto should be "By Grace Of God, Keeping Bad Fiction Authors Employed The World Over".)
Most AIDS tests are 99%+ accurate at telling you that a person with HIV actually has HIV. They're also 99% accurate at saying a person who doesn't have HIV, doesn't have HIV. Its the combination of those two facts plus "Very few people in the general population have HIV" which makes mass one-time AIDS screenings a bad idea -- you successfully pull the guy out of 100 who had HIV, then you throw in one negative bystander, and you end up adding 99% accurate + 99% accurate to get 50% accurate.
There are a heck of a lot less terrorists than 1% of the flying public.
There is a countermeasure, of course -- you use the magic machine not as a definitive test but as a screening mechanism. Know why we aggressively screen high risk groups for AIDS? Because they're high risk -- if 1 out of every 4 screenies is known to be positive (not hard to reach with some populations) then the 99%/99% math adds up to better than 95%. Better news. (You then independently run a second test before you tell anyone they're positive. Just like you wouldn't immediately shoot anybody the machine said is a terrorist -- you'd just escalate the search, like subjecting them to a patdown or asking for permission to search their bags or what have you.)
So you could use the magic machine to, say, eliminate 75, 90, 99%, whatever of the search space before you go onto whatever your next level of screening is -- the whole flying rigamarole, for example. Concentrate the same amount of resources on searching 20 people a plane instead of 400. Less hassle for the vast majority of passengers, less cursoryness to all of the examinations.
The quick here will notice that this is exactly the mechanism racial profiling works by -- we know a priori that the 3 year old black kid and the 68 year old white grandmother is not holding a bomb, ergo we move onto the 20 year old Saudi who it is merely extraordinarily improbable to be holding a bomb. That would also let you lop off a huge section of the search space off the top.
The difference between the magic machine and racial profiling is that racial profiling is politically radioactive, but the magic machine might be perceived as neutral. Whether you consider that a good or a bad thing is up to you. Hypothetically assuming that the machine achieves, oh, 80% negative readings for true negatives, many people might consider it an awfully nice thing to have 80% of the plane not have to take off their shoes or get pat down -- they could possibly get screened as non-invasively as having to answer two of those silly, routine questions.
(Of course, regardless of what we do, people will claim we're racially profiling. But that is a different issue.)
* He admits his objective was to gain material to use to sabotage Palin's bid for VP * He hacked into the email account of the freaking governor of Alaska to do so * He knew that, unsurprisingly, this is both illegal and a real bad idea
You're a college student? Lovely. I'm sure they'll let you take correspondance courses from prison. You can complain to the guy in the cell next to you, who was a high school student when they busted him for posession with intent to sell. Boo hoo, you're comfortably middle class and should have your felony excused -- tell it to the dealer, he'll have plenty of time to listen to you.
35 years ago was 1973. Richard Nixon was in office. We were decades away from the personal computer, the Internet, MUDs, and MMORPGs. Who in God's name could predict how instancing in WoW trades off versus public quests in Warhammer? For that matter, who PRIOR TO THE RELEASE OF FREAKING DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS would have predicted that **ten million people** really want to spend their time pretending to slay those green thingees that English professor dude wrote some fairy tale about?
#1) You can't practice enough to be the Best Fragger The World Has Ever Seen because you can't pay $3 for the map you want to play 4,000 times #2) You can't practice enough to be the Best Fragger The World Has Ever Seen because you can't donate $3,000 of billable hours to play the map 4,000 times
This is more of a serious question with MMORPGs, particularly those whose grind is not actually fun to play. (WoW was fun, the first time through. I think WAR is really, really fun from what I've seen so far. Every other grind was called a grind for a reason.) If the "real game" costs *four figures* of an employed person's time to unlock, you're ALREADY paying to play. Don't come telling me that putting in a shortcut for $5 kills the meritocracy, because there is none -- its already an aristocracy ruled by the Dukes of Unemployed Single Men.
This requires that Candidate A and Candidate B will BOTH have a degree from a good school AND 3 years in their last job AND experience with Java, Struts, and Prototype. However, when it comes down to brass tacks, A "gets it" much more than B does. HR would obviously want to hire A over B, but the only way to figure out which is to do a skill test.
There are some experienced engineers with good degrees who nonetheless cannot solve FizzBuzz in under 15 minutes. Do you want to hire them for a programming position?
Don't write your own mod, you'll just screw it up. Use the % operator built into your language -- it will be faster and always come up with the right answer.
... about, hmm, about two Bejeweled clones, one-third to one-fourth of a Nintendo handheld strategy game, or a wing of an instance in WoW.
A titanic presence in the gaming industry 8 man-years is not. (It also vanishes into Google's petty-cash budget. Compare it to, say, Microsoft's spending on gaming. OK, that was unfair. Compare it to the US Army's spending on gaming. OK, that was unfair too. Compare it to, say, the flash games produced under a Department of Education grant for who can best teach the concept "hurricanes are destructive events" to 7 year olds. That's about the right ballpark.)
Which is a polite way of saying...
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
"Just because every person who has ever said this in the history of the world has been wrong, doesn't mean you should let that influence your perceptions or anything."
After all, petting that kitten COULD cause Xa'gnoth the Destroyer Of Worlds to believe you have desecrated his holy symbol, thus causing him to order the Merciless Legions of Xart'thudin to vaporize the Milky Way galaxy in a fit of pique.
I take that back -- comparing the LHC to Xa'gnoth is likely to insult him further, as the notion that His Bleak Countenance is only as likely to cause global destruction as a billion-dollar high school science fair project would probably grate on him.
Here in Japan (which is only an Asian country when it wants to be and, most of the time, it doesn't), they teach kids to do mathematics by visualizing a calculator. Its only in Asian-all-the-time-countries like Thailand where you're too poor to afford a good imaginary calculator that you need to revert to the old imaginary abacus.
And if you think Japan is advanced, I hear eight year olds in the US are starting to do imaginary Google searches on their imaginary Wikipedia... creating the fastest lookup of worthless trivia about Matter-Eater Lad ever seen in the history of the human race. [needs citation: OK, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter-Eater_Lad , there, are you happy?]
Despite your clear ability to get a copy of the game, you're worried that you wouldn't be able to get a copy of the game you paid for at some indefinite point in the future, which justifies you not paying for a copy of the game in the first place.
It is about as valid as simplification in this circumstance as saying "OK, assume that Java can execute all operations in the same time that C can operate the same operation. Ergo, Java is no slower than C."
Back in reality, prepaying $5000 on a 6 year car loan at the prevailing rate of 6.52% means that you're signing up for six years of payments of $84 a month. This will entail you paying $1,055 in interest payments, increasing the time-to-break-even by roughly a year.
"But what if I pay cash for my car?"
Your money *still* has time value to it. For example, instead of overpaying for your car, you could put that $5,000 into an index fund and hope for the long-term historical average of roughly 8% appreciation a year. In this circumstance, the math is even more punishing to the Prius than it is in the above. Alternatively, you could stick it in a 100% safe FDIC-insured CD at 4% for five years. If you compare the $5k CD to someone who paid the Prius Premium, at the 5 year mark the CD holder has $6,083 in their bank account and the Prius owner has net savings of $6,120 on their gasoline bills -- i.e. tied at 60 months.
If you keep your car for 8 years... well, I hope you have good luck in the reliability lotto. My family had a Toyota which we finally euthanized after 9 years -- and we bought it used! Some cars have major, expensive failures far earlier than that. Its no decision to save $1,000 a year in gas and then pay $600 every 6 months for one of those old-car-blues types of problems.
And look at lawyers vis-a-vis open source
on
Should IT Unionize?
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· Score: 1
Let's say you're a landlord. You want to offer a tenant a lease. This activity happens a million times a year in your city. There are no real surprises in the vast majority of cases -- you pay money, I fix leaks in roof over your head.
Do you think your local lawyers would be happy with there being just one OSS Model Lease Agreement which fulfilled the needs of 99% of landlords and saved them one million billable hours a year? Oh, heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeck no.
Do you think the IT union is going to be in favor of any OSS software which obsoletes union members? For example, if there is a Java Struts Configuration File Operator (Level 2) on the union chart, do you think they will be very happy when someone comes up with a convention-over-configuration framework (Rails, etc) which obsoletes those JSCFO(2)s? Oh heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeck no.
You will use the tools that the union approves. You will write your code the union way. You will support the candidates the union supports. You will, in all things, comply with the will of the union. Or they will find you troublesome. And that could end very, very badly for you -- capiche?
Players say its because they hate DRM and won't buy any game that doesn't have it.
Industry says WoW is thriving because it forces non-piracy -- the content is only usable with an account checked by the server, which costs $15 a month.
Either way the effect is the same -- you'll get your gaming without DRM, because they'll protect the game in an alternative manner, using all sorts of things that also piss you off. Monthly fees, phone home activation, and micropayments sound like great ideas to you? Then please, continue boycotting DRMed games to send a message. The message the industry receives might not be the one you think you're sending, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the fact that they're owned by a multinational with annual sales in the billions and voracious shareholders, they feel they've made enough money on their most successful property, and are thinking of going in a new creative direction: sewing kits for middle school girls. After that, maybe shutter the WoW datacenters and use them for the world's best air-conditioned homeless shelters.
So you've got two fixes for the problem:
1) "It won't matter that my database is absolutely overflowing with garbage answers because I can hand-score a test subset". Great. So you are now hand-scoring a test subset, which will be known good, but this in no way allows you to delete the garbage on words not in the test subset.
2) You can avoid serving captchas to bots. Brilliant plan! One question: who are the bots? Answer: we've got no bloody clue who the bots are, *thats why we have captchas*. If your captcha is only secure when you can guarantee that no bots are using it, *your captcha is useless*.
The reCAPTCHA strategy is that one of the following two things will happen:
1) No improvement in OCR happens and the CAPTCHA remains effective
2) Spammers improve OCR substantially and we get books digitized for free
It fails to account for the 3rd option
3) Spammers improve OCR marginally, achieve a 20 ~ 25% success rate on reCAPTCHA. There is no penalty for getting it wrong if you can generate requests for free and only care about maximizing successes! Its a multiple choice test with infinite questions and a fixed bar for passing! As soon as this happens, spammers will flood the legitimate users out of the system, because they can generate infinite requests and legitimate users can not. Its usefulness as a CAPTCHA is compromised and its usefulness for text digitization is zero, because the "multiple users checking each other" becomes multiple instances of the same lobotomized spam OCR program vouching for its own accuracy, with an infintessimal portion of humans being drowned out by sheer numbers.
>>
AI in the form of image processing is now about the same "intelligence" as a human
>>
Not even close, but it doesn't need to be.
What useful work could you do with an OCR program which was correct only 25% of the time? Nothing -- any book you read would look like one of those Babblefish English-by-way-of-Russian-by-way-of-English monstrosities. But a 25% accurate OCR is a 100% solution to the captcha, because you have a big freaking botnet and can generate additional requests for free.
Aside from botnets, the cloud-based outsourced captcha busting business model ($1 per 1,000 captchas done by a subcontractor of a subcontractor in a place where paying people to get a repetitive-stress injury makes excellent economic sense as long as they have an automated assistant to keep the queue full, like a factory line) is also doing some severe damage. Forget the old "Ahh, we'll give you porn for breaking a captcha you didn't even realize was Yahoo's" exploit, which was mostly theoretical. This gives you a *controllable, constantly available, scaleable* level of whatever the resource protected by the captcha is.
Captchas: pretty much screwed.
If you're one of 15,000 charging orcs and then run into a single foppish elf who has time to preen as you charge him down, face it, you're "#$"#%ed.
MMORPGs do a lot of play balance vis a vis the other players, but play balance versus the system is making absolutely, positively sure that the system loses the overwhelming majority of encounters.
99% of music listeners want to listen to the song on their PC or iPod.
99% of game purchasers care that it will function on their PC for the next 6 months at a maximum.
I'm not poor -- $.99 to download DRM-encrusted whatever to my iPod is easy. MySpace could, quite possibly, kill me. This is not a tough choice.
Next up:
* OSS firmware-updater: Brick
* Rails anti-virus plugin: acts_as_used_tissue
* Microsoft patch utility: BrokenWindows
* Apple iPhone widget: iPaid2Much
I know, it would sort of undercut the "righteous anger at EA" theme, but in my experience Amazon is one of the most customer-friendly companies I know. Especially if you're a regular customer (even if "regular" just means "every Christmas and sometimes when a new console launches") they bend over backwards for you. I previously worked in a different company with roughly similar CS standards and, hypothetically supposing we had a similar issue with a vendor (which I frankly kind of doubt is actually accurate as you describe it), the CS rep would have picked "Refund Issued: Product Arrived Broken" before you got a minute into the conversation.
(Like we're going to threaten OUR relationships over a vendor's desire to avoid returns?! Hah. A vendor asking for that misunderestimates the power of the entity which actually, you know, has people happily hand over money to it.**)
** Which is yet another reason why EA and every other software publisher would give their right eyetooth to get everyone onto online distribution yesterday.
You should've practiced basic security precautions and repainted the tilde key red. (Why tilde? Because it looks mysterious and powerful but is actually harmless. Sort of like Opus Dei, whose unofficial motto should be "By Grace Of God, Keeping Bad Fiction Authors Employed The World Over".)
I need +2, Meta-Funny.
... everybody involved in Idle dies horribly at the end.
Most AIDS tests are 99%+ accurate at telling you that a person with HIV actually has HIV. They're also 99% accurate at saying a person who doesn't have HIV, doesn't have HIV. Its the combination of those two facts plus "Very few people in the general population have HIV" which makes mass one-time AIDS screenings a bad idea -- you successfully pull the guy out of 100 who had HIV, then you throw in one negative bystander, and you end up adding 99% accurate + 99% accurate to get 50% accurate.
There are a heck of a lot less terrorists than 1% of the flying public.
There is a countermeasure, of course -- you use the magic machine not as a definitive test but as a screening mechanism. Know why we aggressively screen high risk groups for AIDS? Because they're high risk -- if 1 out of every 4 screenies is known to be positive (not hard to reach with some populations) then the 99%/99% math adds up to better than 95%. Better news. (You then independently run a second test before you tell anyone they're positive. Just like you wouldn't immediately shoot anybody the machine said is a terrorist -- you'd just escalate the search, like subjecting them to a patdown or asking for permission to search their bags or what have you.)
So you could use the magic machine to, say, eliminate 75, 90, 99%, whatever of the search space before you go onto whatever your next level of screening is -- the whole flying rigamarole, for example. Concentrate the same amount of resources on searching 20 people a plane instead of 400. Less hassle for the vast majority of passengers, less cursoryness to all of the examinations.
The quick here will notice that this is exactly the mechanism racial profiling works by -- we know a priori that the 3 year old black kid and the 68 year old white grandmother is not holding a bomb, ergo we move onto the 20 year old Saudi who it is merely extraordinarily improbable to be holding a bomb. That would also let you lop off a huge section of the search space off the top.
The difference between the magic machine and racial profiling is that racial profiling is politically radioactive, but the magic machine might be perceived as neutral. Whether you consider that a good or a bad thing is up to you. Hypothetically assuming that the machine achieves, oh, 80% negative readings for true negatives, many people might consider it an awfully nice thing to have 80% of the plane not have to take off their shoes or get pat down -- they could possibly get screened as non-invasively as having to answer two of those silly, routine questions.
(Of course, regardless of what we do, people will claim we're racially profiling. But that is a different issue.)
Assuming what I've read is accurate:
* He admits his objective was to gain material to use to sabotage Palin's bid for VP
* He hacked into the email account of the freaking governor of Alaska to do so
* He knew that, unsurprisingly, this is both illegal and a real bad idea
You're a college student? Lovely. I'm sure they'll let you take correspondance courses from prison. You can complain to the guy in the cell next to you, who was a high school student when they busted him for posession with intent to sell. Boo hoo, you're comfortably middle class and should have your felony excused -- tell it to the dealer, he'll have plenty of time to listen to you.
... useless.
35 years ago was 1973. Richard Nixon was in office. We were decades away from the personal computer, the Internet, MUDs, and MMORPGs. Who in God's name could predict how instancing in WoW trades off versus public quests in Warhammer? For that matter, who PRIOR TO THE RELEASE OF FREAKING DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS would have predicted that **ten million people** really want to spend their time pretending to slay those green thingees that English professor dude wrote some fairy tale about?
#1) You can't practice enough to be the Best Fragger The World Has Ever Seen because you can't pay $3 for the map you want to play 4,000 times
#2) You can't practice enough to be the Best Fragger The World Has Ever Seen because you can't donate $3,000 of billable hours to play the map 4,000 times
This is more of a serious question with MMORPGs, particularly those whose grind is not actually fun to play. (WoW was fun, the first time through. I think WAR is really, really fun from what I've seen so far. Every other grind was called a grind for a reason.) If the "real game" costs *four figures* of an employed person's time to unlock, you're ALREADY paying to play. Don't come telling me that putting in a shortcut for $5 kills the meritocracy, because there is none -- its already an aristocracy ruled by the Dukes of Unemployed Single Men.
This requires that Candidate A and Candidate B will BOTH have a degree from a good school AND 3 years in their last job AND experience with Java, Struts, and Prototype. However, when it comes down to brass tacks, A "gets it" much more than B does. HR would obviously want to hire A over B, but the only way to figure out which is to do a skill test.
There are some experienced engineers with good degrees who nonetheless cannot solve FizzBuzz in under 15 minutes. Do you want to hire them for a programming position?
Don't write your own mod, you'll just screw it up. Use the % operator built into your language -- it will be faster and always come up with the right answer.
... about, hmm, about two Bejeweled clones, one-third to one-fourth of a Nintendo handheld strategy game, or a wing of an instance in WoW.
A titanic presence in the gaming industry 8 man-years is not. (It also vanishes into Google's petty-cash budget. Compare it to, say, Microsoft's spending on gaming. OK, that was unfair. Compare it to the US Army's spending on gaming. OK, that was unfair too. Compare it to, say, the flash games produced under a Department of Education grant for who can best teach the concept "hurricanes are destructive events" to 7 year olds. That's about the right ballpark.)
"Just because every person who has ever said this in the history of the world has been wrong, doesn't mean you should let that influence your perceptions or anything."
After all, petting that kitten COULD cause Xa'gnoth the Destroyer Of Worlds to believe you have desecrated his holy symbol, thus causing him to order the Merciless Legions of Xart'thudin to vaporize the Milky Way galaxy in a fit of pique.
I take that back -- comparing the LHC to Xa'gnoth is likely to insult him further, as the notion that His Bleak Countenance is only as likely to cause global destruction as a billion-dollar high school science fair project would probably grate on him.
Here in Japan (which is only an Asian country when it wants to be and, most of the time, it doesn't), they teach kids to do mathematics by visualizing a calculator. Its only in Asian-all-the-time-countries like Thailand where you're too poor to afford a good imaginary calculator that you need to revert to the old imaginary abacus.
And if you think Japan is advanced, I hear eight year olds in the US are starting to do imaginary Google searches on their imaginary Wikipedia... creating the fastest lookup of worthless trivia about Matter-Eater Lad ever seen in the history of the human race. [needs citation: OK, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter-Eater_Lad , there, are you happy?]
Despite your clear ability to get a copy of the game, you're worried that you wouldn't be able to get a copy of the game you paid for at some indefinite point in the future, which justifies you not paying for a copy of the game in the first place.
It is about as valid as simplification in this circumstance as saying "OK, assume that Java can execute all operations in the same time that C can operate the same operation. Ergo, Java is no slower than C."
Back in reality, prepaying $5000 on a 6 year car loan at the prevailing rate of 6.52% means that you're signing up for six years of payments of $84 a month. This will entail you paying $1,055 in interest payments, increasing the time-to-break-even by roughly a year.
"But what if I pay cash for my car?"
Your money *still* has time value to it. For example, instead of overpaying for your car, you could put that $5,000 into an index fund and hope for the long-term historical average of roughly 8% appreciation a year. In this circumstance, the math is even more punishing to the Prius than it is in the above. Alternatively, you could stick it in a 100% safe FDIC-insured CD at 4% for five years. If you compare the $5k CD to someone who paid the Prius Premium, at the 5 year mark the CD holder has $6,083 in their bank account and the Prius owner has net savings of $6,120 on their gasoline bills -- i.e. tied at 60 months.
If you keep your car for 8 years... well, I hope you have good luck in the reliability lotto. My family had a Toyota which we finally euthanized after 9 years -- and we bought it used! Some cars have major, expensive failures far earlier than that. Its no decision to save $1,000 a year in gas and then pay $600 every 6 months for one of those old-car-blues types of problems.
Let's say you're a landlord. You want to offer a tenant a lease. This activity happens a million times a year in your city. There are no real surprises in the vast majority of cases -- you pay money, I fix leaks in roof over your head.
Do you think your local lawyers would be happy with there being just one OSS Model Lease Agreement which fulfilled the needs of 99% of landlords and saved them one million billable hours a year? Oh, heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeck no.
Do you think the IT union is going to be in favor of any OSS software which obsoletes union members? For example, if there is a Java Struts Configuration File Operator (Level 2) on the union chart, do you think they will be very happy when someone comes up with a convention-over-configuration framework (Rails, etc) which obsoletes those JSCFO(2)s? Oh heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeck no.
You will use the tools that the union approves. You will write your code the union way. You will support the candidates the union supports. You will, in all things, comply with the will of the union. Or they will find you troublesome. And that could end very, very badly for you -- capiche?
Either way the effect is the same -- you'll get your gaming without DRM, because they'll protect the game in an alternative manner, using all sorts of things that also piss you off. Monthly fees, phone home activation, and micropayments sound like great ideas to you? Then please, continue boycotting DRMed games to send a message. The message the industry receives might not be the one you think you're sending, though.