Oh for fuck's sake. Stop, please stop. Really. You're failing Econ 101 and business development.
There are such things as natural monopolies. Specifically, natural monopolies occur in markets where there is a very high barrier to entry with an existing player. One example would be any market requiring massive infrastructure investments up front... like, I don't know, the telecom market. Wiring something like the US with high-speed cabling - or heck, California for that matter- requires several billion dollars in up front investment, before any revenue can be generated. The initial years have to be spent recouping that investment.
Here's how things pan out: 1) New player lays cable, to the tune of several billion dollars. 2) New player signs up new customers. Price is Operating Costs + Amortization of investments + profit margin. 3) Existing player sees customer base being eaten by new player. Existing player decides to play hardball and lower prices. 3a) New prices from existing player are based on Operating Costs + profit margin and a smaller chunk of investment amortization than the new player. 4) New player tries to compete on lower prices.
End result is that unless the incumbent is so inefficient and has so few cash reserves that it cannot be cheaper than the new player with its billions in fresh investments, the new player will have to exit the market, or gets bought out at a bargain.
The end result is that the first one to market has a significant competitive advantage - so significant, in fact, that it is entirely possible to create monopolies without much backroom effort.
Note how nowhere was it necessary for a government to create a monopoly? Yes, some markets get skewed even further by stupid local governments. I have them right where I live. But to argue that it would all be flowers and peaches if the government would just butt out is naive to the point of fantasy.
I can't stand idealistic tree-huggers who think that if everyone could just get along, the world would be a better place. But even more so I hate idealistic conservatives who think if we'd just get rid of all rules, the world would be a better place.
That would require emotional stamina from the kids, involved parenting from the parents, toleration of lawsuit-generating situations by school officials... yeah right. I'm all for beating this particular drum until the cows come home, but I'm also not particularly confident that anything will actually happen.
Yes, because all laws resulting in felony convictions are only for serious crimes. It couldn't possibly for something as meaningless in the long-term as an online girl-fight.
The discussion is polar because either a market is dominated by a monopoly, or it isn't. Any monopoly that exists next to another business in the same market isn't a monopoly. Furthermore, once you get away from the concept of smart nodes and dumb pipes, you are right where ESPN360 plays: content tied to carriers.
It's a bipolar syndrome because we have both ends of the polar discussion being a reality: monopolies in the carrier area, and smart nodes on dump pipes. One of the two will have to give. It doesn't take a genius to figure out who is working for what.
And the treatment of Carthage was savage by the standards of the time. This was NOT expected. As for the distinction between military and civilian population, it started with the Romans, who had the first significant professional army (to be distinguished from mercenaries). It stands to reason that before that, the distinction was meaningless.
And if you want to point to an instance of total war (as opposed to that of a total defeat), only WW2 really works. At that point, no matter how large the nation, no matter how populous it was, everybody was at risk of dying from a direct effect of the war - the USA being one of the few notable exceptions.
When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country.
Ah, I see you subscribe to the theory that war is a state of affairs completely separated from regular politics. It isn't. It's merely the pursuit of political goals with other means.
Here's what killing "every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country" nets you: eternal war, with one person left standing. You want to know why? Because for one, it is impossible to kill every man, woman and child in your enemy's country. More capable people than you have tried and failed. Furthermore, a country is not an isolated entity. It is comprised of people who have connections to many other countries. Those connections will result in war being declared with other countries. Even if you have two completely polarized sides (which wasn't even the case in WW2), and one side manages to completely wipe out the other (which it won't), you're still left with the problem that today's allies can become tomorrow's enemies. Remember how chummy we used to be with Russia and Iraq? And suddenly, the circle starts from scratch.
War is the means by which people attempt to achieve political goals that they couldn't through the regular political process. As a result, war has to have a clear political goal, or it won't work. Furthermore, it has to have an end-state where the old enemy isn't an enemy anymore - and as I pointed out earlier, just killing all the bad guys won't work.
More people should first read Clausewitz, then Powell. First to understand what the point of a war is, and then how you're supposed to fight it.
Ah, nothing like writing about an article when you didn't even read the headline of the article in question. "Right to broadband" sounds so much better than "right to access to broadband" when writing a flame about nanny states.
I've directly seen the lawsuit that are thrown at companies. I've also seen everyone in my list speak internally about cases I was intimately involved in. I found that that kind of talk was always there, regardless of how blatantly bad the situation might be.
As for your comment about irony, it is possible to dislike frivolous lawsuits as much as corporate double-speak. Just as an FYI.
But they certainly belong in the statements of anybody speaking on behalf of the corporation. The originators of these types of comments are always PR, marketing, legal and executive people. Which is also why I think that there a special place in hell that should be reserved for them.
I was intrigued by the concept of adaptable games until I played Oblivion. Granted, Oblivion made the worst possible decisions when it came to adapting Mobs to your level: it had an uneven leveling "curve" to the point where gaining a level could make previously easy monsters into a nightmare. It used obscure leveling mechanisms where you could gimp your character to an unplayable point if you didn't happen to pick the right class or jump often enough between leveling.
Since then, I don't care about adaptive leveling, because it is a much harder problem than it appears to be on the surface. Part of the fun for me is to go from getting stomped by the computer to stomping the computer, just because I got better at the game. Sometimes I want the challenge, but then I select it, not the game. Judging from the amount of Starcraft games that are labeled "7v1 stomp the comp", I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.
Adaptive difficulty should really come only in two flavors: select an overall game difficulty, so that you know what to expect; or enter some dungeon or bonus level/path that you know is much harder than what you've done so far. Don't force me into a harder game just because I've been doing so well so far. It could have been just a lucky streak, in which case I'll get really frustrated with the sudden ramp-up in difficulty.
Yes, we all know that lonely men tend to chase after anything that remotely smells like a woman. I've seen it in WoW, I've seen it here, I've seen everywhere. No need to prove that again.
However, that's not what I was talking about or what the article discussed. The article talked about the fact that there is sexism at work in the field of FOSS. What I was talking about is that certain defensive comments indicate that the men uttering them are insecure little weasels who deserve all the contempt they get from women.
Here are a couple of points to keep in mind: * not every presentation needs to be laced with porn in order to indicate sexism is present in an industry * sexism generally doesn't take place in comments on technical mailing lists. Sexism generally takes place during the social interaction of a social group. * You of all people should know that statistics can be gamed nine ways till Sunday. To dismiss specific instances of sexism as not broad enough to indicate a problem is disingenuous and insulting to those who were subjected to those instances.
Finally, you know why I'm convinced that sexism is rampant in various software and videogame environments? Because I've met only a very small handful of women who weren't turned off enough by it that they switched industries. No, it doesn't mean that every male they meet at Comic-Con, in a software class, in a game or in a software development group is a chauvinist pig. What it does mean though is that they all meet enough chauvinist pigs to turn them off the field in general.
Here's the reality for those of us who aren't sexist: the few bad apples are spoiling the fun for the rest of us. I'm perfectly ok with the topic being aired out on a regular basis, because it allows those little weasels I mentioned earlier to be properly smacked down.
I don't think you do. Because you do exactly what you accuse women of doing: stereotyping an entire gender based on what a few idiots are doing. Are you so insecure that you have to take every accusation personally that any woman brings against any man? And then extrapolate it to all women and all men?
Yes, because any attempt to do anything positive that somehow relates to women is merely a desperate attempt to get laid. *rolleyes* From my experience, you're merely betraying your own attitude - that when you take a stance that somehow benefits women, it is to merely to get laid.
I've dealt with this kind of stuff (did my masters in AI), and even though that stuff was a while ago, I'm thoroughly skeptical. My main issue is that there's a lot of magic involved: "just sketch this out, add some tags, and presto! beautiful wedding picture!" To me, this sounds like a lot of the great ideas that were kicked around when I was in school, and which worked well in the lab - but which always, always fell apart when presented with a real use case.
Without looking into the code to figure out how it works exactly, here are my suspicions: - it requires manual pre-tagging of background images and subjects - it requires the manual identification of what is a dog, a salmon, a bear, etc. - the code looks up tags, does an overall scene analysis for the background, and a matching of some image vectors for both the sticks and the image items in the db.
The reason I say this is that if everything happens automatically, they just solved two hard AI problems (where by hard I mean that solving these problems will result in an AI that should pass the Turing test with flying colors): automatic image categorization and automatic semantic understanding.
Sorry, I don't buy that. What this does say to me though is that we're getting far enough with AI that with just some manual work, we can write some really interesting and creative software.
Because one's fictional, the other one isn't. It's like watching a movie about 18th century France, and see that there's a BMW Z4 parked outside the local castle - courtesy of an ad campaign by BMW.
Yes, I play games for the story and setting. Why do you ask?
Thank you. I was starting to wonder whether I was the only gamer out there who was surprised that I was "consuming the experience of ads".
No. I do not consume the experience of ads. Here's what I do: I play multiplayer games with friends, where the goal is generally to beat something or each other. I don't give a rat's ass about ads at that point. The fact that the walls around a soccer field say adidas instead of amiras doesn't matter one lick to me. Just to show how little names matter: I don't care whether I have Ronaldinho on my team, or Rohualdo. I play single player games, where I want to be told a story, or have my brain and hand-eye coordination challenged. Ads can add to the story in the situation of a story. But really, if Psychonauts would have had an ad for a $5 footlong from Subway, I would have put the game away immediately. The one product placement that I was able to tolerate very well were the Dole bananas in Monkeyball: the logo was tiny, I rarely saw it anyway, and it kinda made sense.
But here is what I do expect from actual ads in a game: a cheaper game. I'm willing to put up with ads and product placement on two conditions: they fit into the world the game describes, and they result in a game that would not have been possible without them. If Shenmue would have had actual ads from the 80s, with payment going towards production costs, I would have been ok with that.
However - and this is why I consider marketing executives evil - the idea that I consume the experience of ads requires a mindset that I can't even begin to imagine. Ads are a necessary evil. They are not something I want to experience.
Yeah, I remember the tax cut I got when Bush was in office. I got a whopping $300 dollars, which was only for one year. Before that, I didn't make enough money to actually feel a difference when my tax rate went down. And the cost to the nation of that $300? A massive jump in debt. If that's what it takes to give me tax cuts, no thanks.
If you think Democrats are the only ones who increase taxes, or are somehow responsible for you living on the bleeding edge of your means, that's your problem.
As for your "Fuck the Good Old Boys club" comment, you fail to realize that being white and male, you are already part of it. You have no idea of the benefit that that gives you.
No - the joke is that it is damn near impossible to award the peace prize in any year and be serious about it. You either set the bar impossibly low, or you award it once every generation.
I'll bite... what has been accomplished? What has Obama done to change the world and promote peace?
I'll bite as well. I'll ignore the legitimate criticism that he was nominated before he had done anything on the world stage at all, and focus instead on what he has done before he was awarded the prize.
The biggest dangers to world peace right now are environmental issues around water supplies and a brewing worldwide conflict based on religion.
When it comes to the religious conflict, Obama has done more to disarm that conflict than any one else has in the left 10 years. Granted, he had the benefit of coming after Bush Jr., who has managed to play right into the hands of muslim extremists. As a result, anything short of directly continuing in Bush's footsteps would have improved the situation. But the key factor is that Obama took ideology out of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict, told the muslim word about it in language that they understand and accept, and killed the retarded Axis of Evil concept. The only thing that could have a bigger impact on the current world-wide religious antagonism is if Israelis and Palestinians bury their hatchets and sing Kumbaya.
Yes, nothing has actually happened yet. To some extent, that is an achievement in and of itself. I'd be quite happy if nothing happens for the next 30 years, because that's not the road we were going down under Bush.
I think your comment needs to be put in the proper context of American politics, by which the Democrats are solidly right of center in the rest of the world, and the Republicans are the equivalent of the Front National, the BP and Deutsche Volkspartei.
The US political climate is not the measuring stick by which the political leanings of other countries are measured.
I was wondering whether to mention this, or whether I was just going to needlessly Godwin the situation. I'm glad I didn't, because you did a much more nuanced job than I would have.
I'll just add a few things to this: the term for the person responsible for collecting that information was "Blockwaechter", and loosely translates to "Block Warden". It is one of the more reviled legacy words in Germany right now, as the Block Warden was the collector of exactly the reports you described. And yes, it was indeed abused in the exact fashion that you described... small-minded people, of which there were and are many, submitting reports about people they don't like, those people disappearing, and then the accusers denying in later years that they ever did that.
It brought out the worst behavior in the population, and my suspicion is that this would not be restricted to Germans.
I guess you're hoping that the PS3 doesn't have XBox360 like failure rates. I know a few people who would have already lost access to their downloaded content under this scheme. Not to mention that restricting DLC to be played only on PS3s is ridiculous. I buy a movie via the PS Store, and I can only play it on a PS3? That's not buying anything, that's renting some code to be played on some proprietary hardware.
In other words, this scheme is only a fair deal if your use case doesn't happen to fall outside of the boundaries that Sony designed. And that will happen at some point, even to you. I just hope you won't have sunk a lot of money into that scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh for fuck's sake. Stop, please stop. Really. You're failing Econ 101 and business development.
There are such things as natural monopolies. Specifically, natural monopolies occur in markets where there is a very high barrier to entry with an existing player. One example would be any market requiring massive infrastructure investments up front... like, I don't know, the telecom market. Wiring something like the US with high-speed cabling - or heck, California for that matter- requires several billion dollars in up front investment, before any revenue can be generated. The initial years have to be spent recouping that investment.
Here's how things pan out:
1) New player lays cable, to the tune of several billion dollars.
2) New player signs up new customers. Price is Operating Costs + Amortization of investments + profit margin.
3) Existing player sees customer base being eaten by new player. Existing player decides to play hardball and lower prices.
3a) New prices from existing player are based on Operating Costs + profit margin and a smaller chunk of investment amortization than the new player.
4) New player tries to compete on lower prices.
End result is that unless the incumbent is so inefficient and has so few cash reserves that it cannot be cheaper than the new player with its billions in fresh investments, the new player will have to exit the market, or gets bought out at a bargain.
The end result is that the first one to market has a significant competitive advantage - so significant, in fact, that it is entirely possible to create monopolies without much backroom effort.
Note how nowhere was it necessary for a government to create a monopoly? Yes, some markets get skewed even further by stupid local governments. I have them right where I live. But to argue that it would all be flowers and peaches if the government would just butt out is naive to the point of fantasy.
I can't stand idealistic tree-huggers who think that if everyone could just get along, the world would be a better place. But even more so I hate idealistic conservatives who think if we'd just get rid of all rules, the world would be a better place.
That would require emotional stamina from the kids, involved parenting from the parents, toleration of lawsuit-generating situations by school officials... yeah right. I'm all for beating this particular drum until the cows come home, but I'm also not particularly confident that anything will actually happen.
Yes, because all laws resulting in felony convictions are only for serious crimes. It couldn't possibly for something as meaningless in the long-term as an online girl-fight.
The discussion is polar because either a market is dominated by a monopoly, or it isn't. Any monopoly that exists next to another business in the same market isn't a monopoly. Furthermore, once you get away from the concept of smart nodes and dumb pipes, you are right where ESPN360 plays: content tied to carriers.
It's a bipolar syndrome because we have both ends of the polar discussion being a reality: monopolies in the carrier area, and smart nodes on dump pipes. One of the two will have to give. It doesn't take a genius to figure out who is working for what.
And the treatment of Carthage was savage by the standards of the time. This was NOT expected. As for the distinction between military and civilian population, it started with the Romans, who had the first significant professional army (to be distinguished from mercenaries). It stands to reason that before that, the distinction was meaningless.
And if you want to point to an instance of total war (as opposed to that of a total defeat), only WW2 really works. At that point, no matter how large the nation, no matter how populous it was, everybody was at risk of dying from a direct effect of the war - the USA being one of the few notable exceptions.
When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country.
Ah, I see you subscribe to the theory that war is a state of affairs completely separated from regular politics. It isn't. It's merely the pursuit of political goals with other means.
Here's what killing "every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country" nets you: eternal war, with one person left standing. You want to know why? Because for one, it is impossible to kill every man, woman and child in your enemy's country. More capable people than you have tried and failed. Furthermore, a country is not an isolated entity. It is comprised of people who have connections to many other countries. Those connections will result in war being declared with other countries. Even if you have two completely polarized sides (which wasn't even the case in WW2), and one side manages to completely wipe out the other (which it won't), you're still left with the problem that today's allies can become tomorrow's enemies. Remember how chummy we used to be with Russia and Iraq? And suddenly, the circle starts from scratch.
War is the means by which people attempt to achieve political goals that they couldn't through the regular political process. As a result, war has to have a clear political goal, or it won't work. Furthermore, it has to have an end-state where the old enemy isn't an enemy anymore - and as I pointed out earlier, just killing all the bad guys won't work.
More people should first read Clausewitz, then Powell. First to understand what the point of a war is, and then how you're supposed to fight it.
Ah, nothing like writing about an article when you didn't even read the headline of the article in question. "Right to broadband" sounds so much better than "right to access to broadband" when writing a flame about nanny states.
I've directly seen the lawsuit that are thrown at companies. I've also seen everyone in my list speak internally about cases I was intimately involved in. I found that that kind of talk was always there, regardless of how blatantly bad the situation might be.
As for your comment about irony, it is possible to dislike frivolous lawsuits as much as corporate double-speak. Just as an FYI.
But they certainly belong in the statements of anybody speaking on behalf of the corporation. The originators of these types of comments are always PR, marketing, legal and executive people. Which is also why I think that there a special place in hell that should be reserved for them.
I was intrigued by the concept of adaptable games until I played Oblivion. Granted, Oblivion made the worst possible decisions when it came to adapting Mobs to your level: it had an uneven leveling "curve" to the point where gaining a level could make previously easy monsters into a nightmare. It used obscure leveling mechanisms where you could gimp your character to an unplayable point if you didn't happen to pick the right class or jump often enough between leveling.
Since then, I don't care about adaptive leveling, because it is a much harder problem than it appears to be on the surface. Part of the fun for me is to go from getting stomped by the computer to stomping the computer, just because I got better at the game. Sometimes I want the challenge, but then I select it, not the game. Judging from the amount of Starcraft games that are labeled "7v1 stomp the comp", I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.
Adaptive difficulty should really come only in two flavors: select an overall game difficulty, so that you know what to expect; or enter some dungeon or bonus level/path that you know is much harder than what you've done so far. Don't force me into a harder game just because I've been doing so well so far. It could have been just a lucky streak, in which case I'll get really frustrated with the sudden ramp-up in difficulty.
Yes, we all know that lonely men tend to chase after anything that remotely smells like a woman. I've seen it in WoW, I've seen it here, I've seen everywhere. No need to prove that again.
However, that's not what I was talking about or what the article discussed. The article talked about the fact that there is sexism at work in the field of FOSS. What I was talking about is that certain defensive comments indicate that the men uttering them are insecure little weasels who deserve all the contempt they get from women.
Here are a couple of points to keep in mind:
* not every presentation needs to be laced with porn in order to indicate sexism is present in an industry
* sexism generally doesn't take place in comments on technical mailing lists. Sexism generally takes place during the social interaction of a social group.
* You of all people should know that statistics can be gamed nine ways till Sunday. To dismiss specific instances of sexism as not broad enough to indicate a problem is disingenuous and insulting to those who were subjected to those instances.
Finally, you know why I'm convinced that sexism is rampant in various software and videogame environments? Because I've met only a very small handful of women who weren't turned off enough by it that they switched industries. No, it doesn't mean that every male they meet at Comic-Con, in a software class, in a game or in a software development group is a chauvinist pig. What it does mean though is that they all meet enough chauvinist pigs to turn them off the field in general.
Here's the reality for those of us who aren't sexist: the few bad apples are spoiling the fun for the rest of us. I'm perfectly ok with the topic being aired out on a regular basis, because it allows those little weasels I mentioned earlier to be properly smacked down.
I don't think you do. Because you do exactly what you accuse women of doing: stereotyping an entire gender based on what a few idiots are doing. Are you so insecure that you have to take every accusation personally that any woman brings against any man? And then extrapolate it to all women and all men?
Yes, because any attempt to do anything positive that somehow relates to women is merely a desperate attempt to get laid. *rolleyes* From my experience, you're merely betraying your own attitude - that when you take a stance that somehow benefits women, it is to merely to get laid.
I've dealt with this kind of stuff (did my masters in AI), and even though that stuff was a while ago, I'm thoroughly skeptical. My main issue is that there's a lot of magic involved: "just sketch this out, add some tags, and presto! beautiful wedding picture!" To me, this sounds like a lot of the great ideas that were kicked around when I was in school, and which worked well in the lab - but which always, always fell apart when presented with a real use case.
Without looking into the code to figure out how it works exactly, here are my suspicions:
- it requires manual pre-tagging of background images and subjects
- it requires the manual identification of what is a dog, a salmon, a bear, etc.
- the code looks up tags, does an overall scene analysis for the background, and a matching of some image vectors for both the sticks and the image items in the db.
The reason I say this is that if everything happens automatically, they just solved two hard AI problems (where by hard I mean that solving these problems will result in an AI that should pass the Turing test with flying colors): automatic image categorization and automatic semantic understanding.
Sorry, I don't buy that. What this does say to me though is that we're getting far enough with AI that with just some manual work, we can write some really interesting and creative software.
The first version. The second version powered his suit. Gah. I can't believe I'm arguing Comic book canon.
Because one's fictional, the other one isn't. It's like watching a movie about 18th century France, and see that there's a BMW Z4 parked outside the local castle - courtesy of an ad campaign by BMW.
Yes, I play games for the story and setting. Why do you ask?
Thank you. I was starting to wonder whether I was the only gamer out there who was surprised that I was "consuming the experience of ads".
No. I do not consume the experience of ads. Here's what I do:
I play multiplayer games with friends, where the goal is generally to beat something or each other. I don't give a rat's ass about ads at that point. The fact that the walls around a soccer field say adidas instead of amiras doesn't matter one lick to me. Just to show how little names matter: I don't care whether I have Ronaldinho on my team, or Rohualdo.
I play single player games, where I want to be told a story, or have my brain and hand-eye coordination challenged. Ads can add to the story in the situation of a story. But really, if Psychonauts would have had an ad for a $5 footlong from Subway, I would have put the game away immediately. The one product placement that I was able to tolerate very well were the Dole bananas in Monkeyball: the logo was tiny, I rarely saw it anyway, and it kinda made sense.
But here is what I do expect from actual ads in a game: a cheaper game. I'm willing to put up with ads and product placement on two conditions: they fit into the world the game describes, and they result in a game that would not have been possible without them. If Shenmue would have had actual ads from the 80s, with payment going towards production costs, I would have been ok with that.
However - and this is why I consider marketing executives evil - the idea that I consume the experience of ads requires a mindset that I can't even begin to imagine. Ads are a necessary evil. They are not something I want to experience.
Then I guess you're hoping that Sony never goes bankrupt and turns off the PSN store.
Yeah, I remember the tax cut I got when Bush was in office. I got a whopping $300 dollars, which was only for one year. Before that, I didn't make enough money to actually feel a difference when my tax rate went down. And the cost to the nation of that $300? A massive jump in debt. If that's what it takes to give me tax cuts, no thanks.
If you think Democrats are the only ones who increase taxes, or are somehow responsible for you living on the bleeding edge of your means, that's your problem.
As for your "Fuck the Good Old Boys club" comment, you fail to realize that being white and male, you are already part of it. You have no idea of the benefit that that gives you.
To make a long story short: yes.
No - the joke is that it is damn near impossible to award the peace prize in any year and be serious about it. You either set the bar impossibly low, or you award it once every generation.
Sometimes I really can't stand humanity.
I'll bite ... what has been accomplished? What has Obama done to change the world and promote peace?
I'll bite as well. I'll ignore the legitimate criticism that he was nominated before he had done anything on the world stage at all, and focus instead on what he has done before he was awarded the prize.
The biggest dangers to world peace right now are environmental issues around water supplies and a brewing worldwide conflict based on religion.
When it comes to the religious conflict, Obama has done more to disarm that conflict than any one else has in the left 10 years. Granted, he had the benefit of coming after Bush Jr., who has managed to play right into the hands of muslim extremists. As a result, anything short of directly continuing in Bush's footsteps would have improved the situation. But the key factor is that Obama took ideology out of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict, told the muslim word about it in language that they understand and accept, and killed the retarded Axis of Evil concept. The only thing that could have a bigger impact on the current world-wide religious antagonism is if Israelis and Palestinians bury their hatchets and sing Kumbaya.
Yes, nothing has actually happened yet. To some extent, that is an achievement in and of itself. I'd be quite happy if nothing happens for the next 30 years, because that's not the road we were going down under Bush.
I think your comment needs to be put in the proper context of American politics, by which the Democrats are solidly right of center in the rest of the world, and the Republicans are the equivalent of the Front National, the BP and Deutsche Volkspartei.
The US political climate is not the measuring stick by which the political leanings of other countries are measured.
I was wondering whether to mention this, or whether I was just going to needlessly Godwin the situation. I'm glad I didn't, because you did a much more nuanced job than I would have.
I'll just add a few things to this: the term for the person responsible for collecting that information was "Blockwaechter", and loosely translates to "Block Warden". It is one of the more reviled legacy words in Germany right now, as the Block Warden was the collector of exactly the reports you described. And yes, it was indeed abused in the exact fashion that you described... small-minded people, of which there were and are many, submitting reports about people they don't like, those people disappearing, and then the accusers denying in later years that they ever did that.
It brought out the worst behavior in the population, and my suspicion is that this would not be restricted to Germans.
I guess you're hoping that the PS3 doesn't have XBox360 like failure rates. I know a few people who would have already lost access to their downloaded content under this scheme. Not to mention that restricting DLC to be played only on PS3s is ridiculous. I buy a movie via the PS Store, and I can only play it on a PS3? That's not buying anything, that's renting some code to be played on some proprietary hardware.
In other words, this scheme is only a fair deal if your use case doesn't happen to fall outside of the boundaries that Sony designed. And that will happen at some point, even to you. I just hope you won't have sunk a lot of money into that scheme.