"has long had it be illegal to engage in communications that are preliminary to serious crimes."
But there's the crux - where's the evidence this is preliminary to a serious crime? Where is there anything which strongly indicates *intent* to build a bomb or commit a crime.
I mean, it's one thing if they've got a phone recording of someone giving very explicit instructions to a hitman to kill someone, and making arrangments for payement. That's communications preliminary to a serious crime. That shows definite intent.
How does downloading plans, but never acquiring any parts, making any threats or anything else, show actual intent?
I don't really know, but I'd suspect that it has something to do with like,electrical charge or something, not size - e.g. they're both small enough to fit through, but the helium experiences some sort of repulsive force which the water does not as it passes through the field created by the graphene.
I know someone who made up a bunch of clear plastic or acrylic name "cards" for the guests, to set at their tables, using like a laser-etching machine or something. The clear name cards were inserted into a small base that had an LED, so that you could turn on the base, and the guest's name sort of glowed. You could also potentially etch some sort of artwork or decorative border.
Things that are nice about that:
*everyone can appreciate "Oh, pretty" *Not terribly expensive or time consuming *People can take them home as keepsakes. *Doesn't put any requirement on the guest (e.g. knowing how to scan a QR Code with their phone, etc) *Not "too geeky"
Honestly, in an emergency, the vehicle should probably shutdown the auto navigation and require the driver to drive. The driver should always have the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that his car is obeying the law (whatever the local law may be).
"autonomous vehicles need to be programmed to safely pull off to the side of the road when an emergency vehicle has its lights flashing and siren on."
Unless the emergency vehicle is already off the road - at least here in Ohio, when there's a big traffic jam, the police, fire, and ambulance will drive down the shoulder of the highway to get to the accident, because the "regular" lanes are all stopped. Wouldn't do to have the autonomous vehicle "pull off the road" right in front of the emergency vehicle.
But what you have failed to give is any indication that anyone has ever suffered any medium-term (one month to 1 year) hospitalization due to radiation exposure.
I would say my position is stronger than yours, as I am making an appeal from what is known (even if what is known is limited), as opposed to an appeal to ignorance: "We don't absolutely know that's correct, so let's assume the worst".
Until you can show that people actually do get medium-term lingering health problems from radiation exposure, the most reasonable position is to go with what is known, even if that is limited.
Do you have even a *single* example of someone who has suffered a months-long health problem as a result of radiation exposure?
Also, there's lots of people who get high radiation doses - for medical treatments. I suspect we know a lot more than you admit to, because of all the nuclear medicine in use around the world. How could we not with such a large pool of people?
Web Browsers are much more sophisticated than a text editor. If all you used them for was rendering html, then 32-bits would probably be fine. But, 64-bit could potentially be nice for things like 64-bit plugins and extensions - true, most plugins/extensions are just fine as 32-bit apps, but there could be some specialized plugins which might benefit from access to full memory.
I'm no expert, but the explanation I've seen about the health effects of radiation, would indicate the parent can't be right about people being in the hospital. . .
The way I've heard it explained is that there's basically four categories of effects you can get from radiation, based on dosage:
* High or Very high levels - severe radiation poisoning, die within hours or days, maybe a few weeks if you're unlucky - so wouldn't still be in the hospital.
* Moderate levels - something very similar to sunburn, might be in hospital for a short time for treatment, have increased risk of cancer developing, but that will take 5 - 25 years. People in this category would have been out of the hospital in maybe April or May of last year.
* Low levels - No immediate health effects. Increased risk of cancer in 5 - 25 years.
* Very low levels - No health effects, essentially no increased risk of cancer (maybe something like.01 percent increased risk, but so close to zero as to be effectively zero increase in risk of cancer).
None of those categories would still be in the hospital - you either die quickly, or die years later.
So how come the visible partition doesn't overwrite the hidden partition? If it's truly indistiguishable from unused space, then TrueCrypt itself would overwrite that area as you add files, wouldn't it?
What does "unused" mean in this context? I mean, a filesystem can have "unused" space which is still allocated to the filesystem - e.g., the filesystem in 1TB, but only 210GB is currently in use. Or, the filesystem could be 600GB, with 210GB used, and 400GB completely unallocated and unmanaged by the filesystem.
If I'm looking at a truecrypt volume, and see any *unallocated space*, I'm going to assume there's a hidden volume there, why else would you have unallocated space?
I have a serious problem with this. What is the court going to do if anyone refuses to give the encryption key? It is up to the prosecutors and cops to build a case. If you won't give them your decryption key, then they'll have to build a case without that evidence (or find a way to break the encryption).
It's not a defendant's job to help the police build a case against them. I don't think any defendant should ever be legally compelled to cooperate with the police. The police should be able to prove them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt with no cooperation. If they can't, you shouldn't be able to throw someone in jail when you've failed to prove a crime, by inventing another crime of not cooperating with the police. In other words, turning someone who's not a criminal into a criminal.
I've often wondered about truecrypt and similar schemes - if you have a hidden volume, and if a forensic investigator did a low level analysis of the volume, wouldn't they see a size mismatch? E.g. an unexplained "hole" in the truecrypt volume the size of your hidden volume, which isn't being managed by the VFAT/NTFS/Whatever filesystem? So, your partition is, say, 1 TB, but the true crypt volume is only, say, 600GB, with 400GB mysteriously "unused" by the filesystem, or something along those lines?
Which is exactly why I think everyone but Tesla is going about this wrong. The only way EVs are going to launch is as high-end luxury status symbols. Do that for a few years to begin to develop economies of scale, then try to down-scale the cars into the mid-range market around $25,000.
Selling a car which has gas-equivalents at 2x the price, seemingly targeted at the average income family, makes no sense.
While you make a good point that you will get the most benefit from people who drive the most using an EV, there's also the reality that we need to start *somewhere*, and if you're ever going to hope to be able to get to the point of helping the heaviest users, you might just have to start with helping lower-mileage drivers first to develop the technology further.
It seems to me the problem with trying to create a new technology sedan for the "everyman" is that, in order to get "everyman" pricing, you need the kinds of economies of scale you just can't get when you make 10,000 or 12,000 cars.
I think that GM made a huge mistake with the Volt. I love the idea of a volt - a plugin hybrid that uses electricity till it can't, then uses gas when necessary.
The problem is, it seems they made a car with no glamour or mystique to it. If you're going to only make 10,000 vehicles and they are going to be more expensive than most people can afford, then just go ahead and make it a luxury car. The volt should have been a Cadillac, not a Chevy. It should have had lots of interior luxury and beautiful exterior that was to die for. Maybe it should have cost $50,000+.
GM should have done everything it could to make it the year's "It Car", getting tv, movie, music and athletic celebrities, the children of the rich, and hipster-CEO's to buy it as a green conspicuous consumption item. Then, use those profits to ramp up the economies of scale. Meanwhile, the "average joe" sees all the "cool rich people" driving them, and maybe has increased desire for one of them.
That seems to be the model that Tesla is pursuing. I think GM could have had more clout to get the Volt to be an "It Car" if they had pursued that strategy, but since they didn't, I wish Tesla luck.
I know, I know, at first blush, it sounds insane - Nuclear Reactors in a *passenger* vessel? Wouldn't that be a worse environmental disaster in a shipwreck?
But, there's a guy named Rod Adams who started a company (which he had to shutdown a few years ago because of lack of investor confidence) who proposed using small, nitrogen cooled pebble bed reactors in cargo and cruise ships.
Pebble Beds actually have several advantages over anything else I've ever heard of for maritime propulsion:
* They are melt-down proof. They simply can't melt down. * They are very, very unlikely to set on fire (they are made from a special grade of graphite which needs to reach insanely high temperatures to set on fire - temperatures which the pebbles physically *cannot achieve* from fission.
*The fuel "pebbles" have further containment - the fuel itself is contained in many small 'particles' embedded within the graphite sphere, where the uranium fuel itself is encased in fireproof silicon carbide, inside the graphite.
Worst case scenario: The ship loses some or all pebbles in the water. Water is a great radiation shield - a few meters of water will stop all radiation. So, in essences, you have some fairly hot (temperature-wise) "pool balls" on the seabed, heating up some of the nearby water a few degrees. The actual radioactive material is so contained it will not leak out into the surrounding water.
Much, *much* better than the petroleum fuels currently used in cargo and cruise ships. Plus, the ship would only need to be refueled once every few years, and the fuel would be a lot cheaper than the many millions of tons of petroleum fuel these ships currently consume over time.
I appreciate your answer, but I also would like to point out that it would have been just as valid if an American had said it. I don't think we should ever allow such idiocy as essentially asserting that any person or group of people are inherently barred from answering an argument because of who they are.
An argument is either right or wrong based on facts, logic, and things like scientific theory, not by who says it. Would we allow someone to get away with asserting that a Jew couldn't answer an anti-semitic tirade because they're Jewish, a black person couldn't answer a racist rant because they're black, etc?
Education is certainly a big concern, but it's also other things. We have lost a commitment to leadership in R&D in America. We've basically *voluntarily* shutdown some important research in America.
As an example, from the 50's to the 90's there was a LOT of research going on in advanced nuclear reactor designs. Molten Salt Reactors, Liquid Metal Breeder Reactors, Pebble Bed Reactors, etc. We basically shut all that down, and when we were frustratingly close to having some practical, useable designs for truly "next generation" reactors.
They're doing this because they have to live with the problems of coal plant pollution every day (people are *always* complaining about air quality problems in China) and they also face energy constraints on their economy the same as the U.S. They know the coal will only last them so long, and they need something else when the coal starts to get scarce.
Now, China is leading the world on advanced reactor R&D. They're working on MSRs, Pebble Beds, and I think LMBRs too). In 20 years, we'll all be buying our meltdown-proof 4th Gen reactors from China. More than that, China will be selling small reactors to everyone - developing nations that just want a 100-200MW plant, developed nations that need many GWs of power.
I'm pretty sure Nuclear is not the only area of R&D where this is true. Since much of the manufacturing has moved to China, I believe much of the manufacturing R&D has moved to China too.
We can be prison guards, drive armored vehicles to transport prisoners, work building more prisons, cook food for the prisoners. There'll be plenty of jobs. Relax.
In reply to 1), to play the devil's advocate, you could make the same argument about *all* copyrights/patents, and yet, the Constitution takes the view that the exclusive Rights promotes that progress.
2) Over the years, I've been very much in agreement with most/.ers that Congress is going overboard in extending copyright terms. I still think that. However, in the case in question, the issue was simply that the U.S. had a discriminatory system that granted longer copyright terms to U.S. authors (I use the term loosely since not all copyrightable works are writings, of course) than it did to works from authors in other nations.
Is such discrimination really fair? I don't think so.
This law was intended to make the copyright term for domestic and international copyrighted works be the same. I can't fault Congress for that. That seems reasonable.
I just happen to think that all copyrights, for both domestic and international works, should be shortened to more reasonable lengths.
I will add this: the SCOTUS ruling does seem to open the door to Congress pulling any old thing out of public domain that it wishes to - the Greek Myths, Grimms' Fairy Tales, The Bible, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, whatever. That worries me.
You can make derivative works from things still under copyright. Derivative works kind of have this multiple-copyright thing going on. The part of the work which represents your creative contribution is copyright to you. The portion which is either public domain, or copyrighted by someone else, is public domain or copyrighted, respectively.
So, if you created a derivative work of one of these works which *were* public domain in the US, but now have had copyright re-instated, you would probably have to stop distribution of the work (unless you can enter into a license with the holder of the copyrighted work which your derived work incorporates), *but* you would still have copyright on your original portion of the derived work.
Until they go out of business. Problem solved. They can try to blame piracy, but if they don't actually have any data to back it up (which they most definitely do, right now; they can definitely find quite a bit of piracy out there if they look), it doesn't matter.
What matters is if you *do* pirate their products, you make them right, in a way.
An appeal: Don't pirate Ubisoft games. Don't buy them either. Just completely ignore them. Don't be their bitch. If you pirate the game, you will distract their ADD-addled minds from the fact that their DRM is alienating their customers. What they see instead, if they have evidence of a lot of piracy is "We have a lot of people who like are games, we gotta make it harder for them to pirate so they'll pay", and so the DRM just gets worse, and worse, and worse.
If people start refusing to both buy and pirate the games, then what they are forced to face is "all our games are failures - even ones that got great critical reviews; why are all our games failures", then maybe, maybe, they will eventually reach the conclusion, "Because our customers absolutely hate our crappy DRM, and we've driven them away".
Google's motto isn't "Do no evil", it's "Don't be evil". You can do as much evil actions as you want as long as you're doing them for a good cause (Google's success), then you aren't being evil.
Slashdot Mirror
"has long had it be illegal to engage in communications that are preliminary to serious crimes."
But there's the crux - where's the evidence this is preliminary to a serious crime? Where is there anything which strongly indicates *intent* to build a bomb or commit a crime.
I mean, it's one thing if they've got a phone recording of someone giving very explicit instructions to a hitman to kill someone, and making arrangments for payement. That's communications preliminary to a serious crime. That shows definite intent.
How does downloading plans, but never acquiring any parts, making any threats or anything else, show actual intent?
I don't really know, but I'd suspect that it has something to do with like,electrical charge or something, not size - e.g. they're both small enough to fit through, but the helium experiences some sort of repulsive force which the water does not as it passes through the field created by the graphene.
I know someone who made up a bunch of clear plastic or acrylic name "cards" for the guests, to set at their tables, using like a laser-etching machine or something. The clear name cards were inserted into a small base that had an LED, so that you could turn on the base, and the guest's name sort of glowed. You could also potentially etch some sort of artwork or decorative border.
Things that are nice about that:
*everyone can appreciate "Oh, pretty"
*Not terribly expensive or time consuming
*People can take them home as keepsakes.
*Doesn't put any requirement on the guest (e.g. knowing how to scan a QR Code with their phone, etc)
*Not "too geeky"
Honestly, in an emergency, the vehicle should probably shutdown the auto navigation and require the driver to drive. The driver should always have the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that his car is obeying the law (whatever the local law may be).
"autonomous vehicles need to be programmed to safely pull off to the side of the road when an emergency vehicle has its lights flashing and siren on."
Unless the emergency vehicle is already off the road - at least here in Ohio, when there's a big traffic jam, the police, fire, and ambulance will drive down the shoulder of the highway to get to the accident, because the "regular" lanes are all stopped. Wouldn't do to have the autonomous vehicle "pull off the road" right in front of the emergency vehicle.
But what you have failed to give is any indication that anyone has ever suffered any medium-term (one month to 1 year) hospitalization due to radiation exposure.
I would say my position is stronger than yours, as I am making an appeal from what is known (even if what is known is limited), as opposed to an appeal to ignorance: "We don't absolutely know that's correct, so let's assume the worst".
Until you can show that people actually do get medium-term lingering health problems from radiation exposure, the most reasonable position is to go with what is known, even if that is limited.
Do you have even a *single* example of someone who has suffered a months-long health problem as a result of radiation exposure?
Also, there's lots of people who get high radiation doses - for medical treatments. I suspect we know a lot more than you admit to, because of all the nuclear medicine in use around the world. How could we not with such a large pool of people?
Web Browsers are much more sophisticated than a text editor. If all you used them for was rendering html, then 32-bits would probably be fine. But, 64-bit could potentially be nice for things like 64-bit plugins and extensions - true, most plugins/extensions are just fine as 32-bit apps, but there could be some specialized plugins which might benefit from access to full memory.
I'm no expert, but the explanation I've seen about the health effects of radiation, would indicate the parent can't be right about people being in the hospital. . .
The way I've heard it explained is that there's basically four categories of effects you can get from radiation, based on dosage:
* High or Very high levels - severe radiation poisoning, die within hours or days, maybe a few weeks if you're unlucky - so wouldn't still be in the hospital.
* Moderate levels - something very similar to sunburn, might be in hospital for a short time for treatment, have increased risk of cancer developing, but that will take 5 - 25 years. People in this category would have been out of the hospital in maybe April or May of last year.
* Low levels - No immediate health effects. Increased risk of cancer in 5 - 25 years.
* Very low levels - No health effects, essentially no increased risk of cancer (maybe something like .01 percent increased risk, but so close to zero as to be effectively zero increase in risk of cancer).
None of those categories would still be in the hospital - you either die quickly, or die years later.
So how come the visible partition doesn't overwrite the hidden partition? If it's truly indistiguishable from unused space, then TrueCrypt itself would overwrite that area as you add files, wouldn't it?
What does "unused" mean in this context? I mean, a filesystem can have "unused" space which is still allocated to the filesystem - e.g., the filesystem in 1TB, but only 210GB is currently in use. Or, the filesystem could be 600GB, with 210GB used, and 400GB completely unallocated and unmanaged by the filesystem.
If I'm looking at a truecrypt volume, and see any *unallocated space*, I'm going to assume there's a hidden volume there, why else would you have unallocated space?
"Couple TPB with a cheap method of accurate 3D scanning, though, and I wonder what illegal shapes will emerge."
Lots and lots of phalluses.
I have a serious problem with this. What is the court going to do if anyone refuses to give the encryption key? It is up to the prosecutors and cops to build a case. If you won't give them your decryption key, then they'll have to build a case without that evidence (or find a way to break the encryption).
It's not a defendant's job to help the police build a case against them. I don't think any defendant should ever be legally compelled to cooperate with the police. The police should be able to prove them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt with no cooperation. If they can't, you shouldn't be able to throw someone in jail when you've failed to prove a crime, by inventing another crime of not cooperating with the police. In other words, turning someone who's not a criminal into a criminal.
I've often wondered about truecrypt and similar schemes - if you have a hidden volume, and if a forensic investigator did a low level analysis of the volume, wouldn't they see a size mismatch? E.g. an unexplained "hole" in the truecrypt volume the size of your hidden volume, which isn't being managed by the VFAT/NTFS/Whatever filesystem? So, your partition is, say, 1 TB, but the true crypt volume is only, say, 600GB, with 400GB mysteriously "unused" by the filesystem, or something along those lines?
Which is exactly why I think everyone but Tesla is going about this wrong. The only way EVs are going to launch is as high-end luxury status symbols. Do that for a few years to begin to develop economies of scale, then try to down-scale the cars into the mid-range market around $25,000.
Selling a car which has gas-equivalents at 2x the price, seemingly targeted at the average income family, makes no sense.
While you make a good point that you will get the most benefit from people who drive the most using an EV, there's also the reality that we need to start *somewhere*, and if you're ever going to hope to be able to get to the point of helping the heaviest users, you might just have to start with helping lower-mileage drivers first to develop the technology further.
It seems to me the problem with trying to create a new technology sedan for the "everyman" is that, in order to get "everyman" pricing, you need the kinds of economies of scale you just can't get when you make 10,000 or 12,000 cars.
I think that GM made a huge mistake with the Volt. I love the idea of a volt - a plugin hybrid that uses electricity till it can't, then uses gas when necessary.
The problem is, it seems they made a car with no glamour or mystique to it. If you're going to only make 10,000 vehicles and they are going to be more expensive than most people can afford, then just go ahead and make it a luxury car. The volt should have been a Cadillac, not a Chevy. It should have had lots of interior luxury and beautiful exterior that was to die for. Maybe it should have cost $50,000+.
GM should have done everything it could to make it the year's "It Car", getting tv, movie, music and athletic celebrities, the children of the rich, and hipster-CEO's to buy it as a green conspicuous consumption item. Then, use those profits to ramp up the economies of scale. Meanwhile, the "average joe" sees all the "cool rich people" driving them, and maybe has increased desire for one of them.
That seems to be the model that Tesla is pursuing. I think GM could have had more clout to get the Volt to be an "It Car" if they had pursued that strategy, but since they didn't, I wish Tesla luck.
"there is a whole cottage industry that handle these situations."
Somehow, I think you and I don't have the same definition of a "cottage industry".
I know, I know, at first blush, it sounds insane - Nuclear Reactors in a *passenger* vessel? Wouldn't that be a worse environmental disaster in a shipwreck?
But, there's a guy named Rod Adams who started a company (which he had to shutdown a few years ago because of lack of investor confidence) who proposed using small, nitrogen cooled pebble bed reactors in cargo and cruise ships.
Pebble Beds actually have several advantages over anything else I've ever heard of for maritime propulsion:
* They are melt-down proof. They simply can't melt down.
* They are very, very unlikely to set on fire (they are made from a special grade of graphite which needs to reach insanely high temperatures to set on fire - temperatures which the pebbles physically *cannot achieve* from fission.
*The fuel "pebbles" have further containment - the fuel itself is contained in many small 'particles' embedded within the graphite sphere, where the uranium fuel itself is encased in fireproof silicon carbide, inside the graphite.
Worst case scenario: The ship loses some or all pebbles in the water. Water is a great radiation shield - a few meters of water will stop all radiation. So, in essences, you have some fairly hot (temperature-wise) "pool balls" on the seabed, heating up some of the nearby water a few degrees. The actual radioactive material is so contained it will not leak out into the surrounding water.
Much, *much* better than the petroleum fuels currently used in cargo and cruise ships. Plus, the ship would only need to be refueled once every few years, and the fuel would be a lot cheaper than the many millions of tons of petroleum fuel these ships currently consume over time.
I appreciate your answer, but I also would like to point out that it would have been just as valid if an American had said it. I don't think we should ever allow such idiocy as essentially asserting that any person or group of people are inherently barred from answering an argument because of who they are.
An argument is either right or wrong based on facts, logic, and things like scientific theory, not by who says it. Would we allow someone to get away with asserting that a Jew couldn't answer an anti-semitic tirade because they're Jewish, a black person couldn't answer a racist rant because they're black, etc?
Education is certainly a big concern, but it's also other things. We have lost a commitment to leadership in R&D in America. We've basically *voluntarily* shutdown some important research in America.
As an example, from the 50's to the 90's there was a LOT of research going on in advanced nuclear reactor designs. Molten Salt Reactors, Liquid Metal Breeder Reactors, Pebble Bed Reactors, etc. We basically shut all that down, and when we were frustratingly close to having some practical, useable designs for truly "next generation" reactors.
They're doing this because they have to live with the problems of coal plant pollution every day (people are *always* complaining about air quality problems in China) and they also face energy constraints on their economy the same as the U.S. They know the coal will only last them so long, and they need something else when the coal starts to get scarce.
Now, China is leading the world on advanced reactor R&D. They're working on MSRs, Pebble Beds, and I think LMBRs too). In 20 years, we'll all be buying our meltdown-proof 4th Gen reactors from China. More than that, China will be selling small reactors to everyone - developing nations that just want a 100-200MW plant, developed nations that need many GWs of power.
I'm pretty sure Nuclear is not the only area of R&D where this is true. Since much of the manufacturing has moved to China, I believe much of the manufacturing R&D has moved to China too.
We can be prison guards, drive armored vehicles to transport prisoners, work building more prisons, cook food for the prisoners. There'll be plenty of jobs. Relax.
In reply to 1), to play the devil's advocate, you could make the same argument about *all* copyrights/patents, and yet, the Constitution takes the view that the exclusive Rights promotes that progress.
2) Over the years, I've been very much in agreement with most /.ers that Congress is going overboard in extending copyright terms. I still think that. However, in the case in question, the issue was simply that the U.S. had a discriminatory system that granted longer copyright terms to U.S. authors (I use the term loosely since not all copyrightable works are writings, of course) than it did to works from authors in other nations.
Is such discrimination really fair? I don't think so.
This law was intended to make the copyright term for domestic and international copyrighted works be the same. I can't fault Congress for that. That seems reasonable.
I just happen to think that all copyrights, for both domestic and international works, should be shortened to more reasonable lengths.
I will add this: the SCOTUS ruling does seem to open the door to Congress pulling any old thing out of public domain that it wishes to - the Greek Myths, Grimms' Fairy Tales, The Bible, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, whatever. That worries me.
You can make derivative works from things still under copyright. Derivative works kind of have this multiple-copyright thing going on. The part of the work which represents your creative contribution is copyright to you. The portion which is either public domain, or copyrighted by someone else, is public domain or copyrighted, respectively.
So, if you created a derivative work of one of these works which *were* public domain in the US, but now have had copyright re-instated, you would probably have to stop distribution of the work (unless you can enter into a license with the holder of the copyrighted work which your derived work incorporates), *but* you would still have copyright on your original portion of the derived work.
Until they go out of business. Problem solved. They can try to blame piracy, but if they don't actually have any data to back it up (which they most definitely do, right now; they can definitely find quite a bit of piracy out there if they look), it doesn't matter.
What matters is if you *do* pirate their products, you make them right, in a way.
An appeal: Don't pirate Ubisoft games. Don't buy them either. Just completely ignore them. Don't be their bitch. If you pirate the game, you will distract their ADD-addled minds from the fact that their DRM is alienating their customers. What they see instead, if they have evidence of a lot of piracy is "We have a lot of people who like are games, we gotta make it harder for them to pirate so they'll pay", and so the DRM just gets worse, and worse, and worse.
If people start refusing to both buy and pirate the games, then what they are forced to face is "all our games are failures - even ones that got great critical reviews; why are all our games failures", then maybe, maybe, they will eventually reach the conclusion, "Because our customers absolutely hate our crappy DRM, and we've driven them away".
Google's motto isn't "Do no evil", it's "Don't be evil". You can do as much evil actions as you want as long as you're doing them for a good cause (Google's success), then you aren't being evil.