The trick to being an informed voter and an effective citizen is to listen between the elections. Everyone gets so fired up about elections because it's a competition and we love competition! But realistically elections are not the most important part of being a member of this democracy. You get the best insight and can have the most impact by staying tuned in and engaged.
Elections make everything crazy, including candidates. But if you already know the issues and candidates you can have a much better view of what is really going on.
Don't be silly. The US government doesn't spend taxpayer money when a ridiculously overblown problem is presented, the US government spends DEBT.
Quite right (see: Iraq), but in the cases of AIG and Freddie/Fannie, the U.S. has received assets for their money. There is no reason AIG cannot be righted over the next several years and be profitable once again. When that happens, 80% of that value will accrue to the U.S. Treasury. Once the U.S. housing market turns upward again (probably in 2-3 years), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be able to turn profits once again, and those will accrue 100% to the Treasury.
People are always wishing their government would act more like prudent person and save money instead of spending it. Well in this case they ARE saving it by investing in assets that can appreciate. But people are still bitching about it.
There is nothing to deny that tomorrow everything could just float away (though extremely unlikely); the facts didn't change, just a new set of facts have been introduced into the discussion set.
As you rightly note, existing facts don't change or disappear just because new facts are introduced. Gravity is a fact today; if it disappeared tomorrow that would not change the fact that it existed today. The theory of gravity would have to change, to encompass and explain its sudden absence. But the theory would also have to encompass and explain its former existence as well--because that happened too. A working theory has to explain all known facts, past and present.
The law of gravity describes the current data data set. The theory of gravity takes things a step further to introduce method for predicting future observations.
The "law of gravity" is just an older name for the theory of gravity. Two different names for the same thing. Scientists today recognize your main point (that all knowledge is provisional), and thus have shied away from using the word "law" anymore.
There are actually several kinds of ads. Some aim to be informative (notice of a sale for instance), whereas others are "brand" advertising that simply seek to make you aware of a certain product or company.
The first goal of brand advertising is that the viewer should remember the ad. Without that there is no point in it at all.
The second goal is that the viewer should remember the company or brand being advertised. Again--no point in it without that.
The third goal is that the ad become the subject of conversations (aka going viral). This extends your advertising dollar since other people spread it for free. And, some studies seem to indicate that you will be more receptive to the same ad if it is conveyed by your friend rather than viewed cold.
The fourth goal is that the ad creates a positive feeling about the product. It seems weird that this would be so low but it is honestly not that important from a brand advertising point of view. Of course you don't want to create or reinforce a negative opinion about the product or service, but that is a pretty low bar. As long as you don't do that, ads can be weird, pointless, or even unpleasant, just so long as they are memorable and chattable.
So by those criteria, with their first new ad Microsoft has scored very well on items 1, 2, and 3, and have not violated number 4. So far so good (we're all talking about it after all). I think later ads in the series will go harder for number 4.
[Note: here on/. we have no shortage of knowledge or memory of Microsoft, so we're not really the target audience. The random people in sports bars and watching TV at home are.]
Conversely, imports from China are about 2% of the U.S. GDP. So, macroeconomically at least, they need us about 5 times as much as we need them.
This does not get into the trade in the opposite direction...much of the high-technology capital goods that Chinese companies use are imported from the U.S., Japan, or the EU. Airplanes for instance.
One of the features of the new browser is an anti-phishing and malware service, which downloads updated lists of "trouble" domains from Google. I would bet that is what the update service you found is doing.
The Mac windowing paradigm gives each "thing" its own Web page, even within apps. If you have two files open in Photoshop, each is its own window on the desktop. Macs have this great thing called Expose that makes it dead simple to manage all your open windows and switch between them. Tabbed browsing breaks all of this. I always turn off tabbed browsing in Firefox on my Mac. I'm so used to using Expose, and if I have more than one tab open within a Firefox window that content is effectively hidden from my normal workflow.
To address the topic of this discussion--I certainly hope the Mac version of Google Chrome has an option to put each "tab" in its own OS-level window.
My wife and I live in Virginia, which does not recognize common-law marriages. Being married creates a number of legal rights with respect to each other, that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to create.
Common law is also not an option for many military couples. A person shipping out to Iraq may want to establish married status with their partner before they go.
Also, while you might not see a difference between common-law marriage and (for lack of a better term) decisive marriage, others do. I wanted to take an affirmative step of greater commitment, and would have wanted to get married even if we did live in a common-law state. But my wife and I don't like big expensive parties so we held a small cheap wedding...the emotion was no smaller, just the guest list and the bill.
My wife proposed to me and did not want an engagement ring because she does not like jewelry. We paid for our own small, inexpensive wedding only because I wanted to have something for my family--she wanted to elope. Instead we spent our money on 3 weeks in New Zealand and a house down payment.
We bought each other our wedding rings. I told her what I wanted (plain titanium) and she told me what she wanted (plain yellow gold). We were happy to buy each other exactly what the other wanted. The whole point is to serve as a positive reminder of the other person...you don't want to look down at your finger a couple years later and think "man this isn't really what I wanted."
If she wants to pick the color of the flowers at the ceremony, yeah sure fine. But this idea that the best thing for the guy to do is sit back passively on everything wedding-related is really counter-productive. That strategy absolutely will not work for any of the other major decisions in the rest of your marriage. So don't get into a bad habit early.
We're not talking about "operating in" the U.S., we're talking about data being sent through the U.S. And while other nations might be more openly corrupt, that does not help your data security one bit. There is no amount of bribe you can pay to a Chinese official that will keep them from inspecting your data if they are technically capable of doing so. Same goes for Nigeria, Sweden, Russia, Germany, Great Britain, etc.
The GP is exactly correct: every nation in the world inspects data passing through it to the greatest extent of its ability. Until recently the U.S. held the distinction of having some of the greatest limits on its ability by virtue of legal frameworks, which was one reason it had the most data flowing through it. Those have been dismantled and now we see data flows spreading out in response--there is no longer an advantage to routing through the U.S. But if people think there is a greater likelihood of data security in other nations they are kidding themselves.
Actually, we have slightly more nuanced picture over here (Europe). The proverb is that America has the world's five best universities, but also 500 of the worst ones.
Well there's about 2700 4-year colleges and universities in the U.S., so you're missing about 2200 of the pretty-good to really-good to great ones. That's one reason the U.S. has such a strong system...step below those top 5 universities and there are hundreds that are still very good.
Many of them are publicly funded to keep costs low. You mention Berkeley, which is typically ranked the #1 public university in the U.S. If you live in California your tuition at Berkeley is going to be about $9000 per year. What's the next few below Berkeley? UVA, UCLA, Michigan, USC, UNC, William and Mary...all with in-state tuitions around $10k, all world-class institutions.
Before we went to Google Analytics we tried using referrer in the logs to track paths through our site. Something like 40% of browser visits (i.e. excluding known robots) did not report referrer properly. It was random and therefore totally useless.
If there is no referer then I set a cookie to track session.
We thought about that, but at that point we were doing the exact same thing Google Analytics does anyway. We figured why not just use them, which is way easier and more powerful.
The thought that you can get three out of three perfect collapses by splashing them with a bit of aviation fuel must have demolition companies shaking in their boots.
Your premise is ridiculously flawed. The collapses were very, very far from "perfect" by the standards of controlled demolition. The buildings did not fall straight down at all--the outer walls peeled outward and disintegrated, with debris landing hundreds of yards away and thoroughly destroying all neighboring buildings.
Any controlled demolition company watching the fall would feel very comfortable about their jobs. Those companies don't get paid just to knock buildings down. They get paid to drop the debris where it is supposed to go, and only where it is supposed to go.
I'm conducting an experiment now. My hypothesis is that God makes it rain here at least once a month, so if it rains anytime in the next 30 days I'll have proved that God causes rain. Science, right?
There are a lot of wacky experiments that people can perform themselves, and fool themselves into thinking that they have significant results. Two of the things that make science science are the concepts of rigour and repeatability.
Whether or not most people learn things themselves or from other people is not an issue specific to science. It simply reflects the specialization within a structured society. This is a good thing since it allows us to expand human capability beyond what any one single person is capable of.
Here's what I'd say, but such a nuanced approach would almost certainly fail before evangelicals: Life begins at conception, but the government's interest in a citizen begins at viable birth. So while I might believe that a 2-month fetus is "alive", there is no practical way for the law to treat it independently of the mother...at most you could force a C-section and then it would die anyway.
The government, being a constitutional republic of free people, does not have the legal authority to force mothers to carry the baby until it is viable. If it did, it would ALSO have the power to force mothers to get pregnant in the first place, or to take children from their parents for no reason whatsoever. Abortion is legal not because anyone likes it, but because it is on one side of a bright line that we don't want government to cross.
Your post has two interesting parts that are not related to one another. The phytoplankton that produce oxygen in the sea are free-floating throughout the oceans' euphotic zone, while the "killer algae" must grow on a substrate and so is limited to shallowest areas of the ocean (where the bottom receives significant sunlight). And, even in those areas, any local phytoplankton would be floating in the water column above the algae, and thus have first crack at the sunlight.
It is engineered to reduce turbulence but no more than other top-level pools around the world. Pools with 10 lanes, slop gutters to eat waves, and greater then 2m depth are not unheard of. Besides, while plenty of world records are being beaten at these Olympics, plenty were also beaten before the Olympics...in the last year or two many world records have gone down at other events. Before each race NBC puts up a listing of the current world record for that event. Take a look--many are dated 2006 or 2007; some date back a few more years, but none are very old.
We happen to be in a period of dramatic change in swimming right now, and there are probably a number of reasons. If you want to point to just one, it is probably that there is a lot more money in the sport now. So Michael Phelps could afford, through endorsements and grants, to train at a full-time professional level since he was an early teen. This has huge implications for his technique, fitness, health, and mental toughness for competition.
Before the development of most of the copying technologies and legal concepts that we know and love today.
There is actually nothing preventing the patronage model of funding the arts today. Plenty of art each year is commissioned by private or commercial patrons, and there is nothing preventing someone from choosing to become the "de Medici of videogames" and fund development of new games as a patron. It just doesn't happen much though, which is what I meant when I said it's unlikely. The fact that copies + copyright are more widely used is basically a market decision.
for who, the producer or the consumer? I believe the parent is arguing that patronage represents a fairer balance from the consumer's point of view than copyright, which is too loaded in favour of the producer.
For the consumer. The GP mentions Mozart and Bach, who both made nice livings when they were alive. However during their time, almost no one heard their music. Only the very richest and most well-connected slice of society was able to attend their performances. Whereas today anyone can listen to dozens of different performances of each piece of their music for almost nothing--a few dollars a piece.
Copying technologies are way, way better for consumers than the patronage model. In fact they are so tilted toward the consumer that a new area of law--copyright--had to be developed to ensure that producers would be able to make money.
It is important to keep a historical perspective on things. Our ability to access the creative products of our society would blow away anyone from Mozart's time. Today janitors and garbage men can easily afford to hear everything Mozart or Bach ever wrote, whenever they want.
The old style of patronage did not work very well, which is why we have our legal concepts of "intellectual property" today.
Remember that the system you advocate predates, and was largely replaced by, the concept of copyright. That happened for a reason. Simply asserting that the other way was better betrays a lack of historical knowledge. If it was better we would still be using it. There is absolutely nothing preventing a patronage model today--the reason it is not common for things like music and software is simply that it does not work as well.
But the ones who can adapt will choose another business model, based on selling the service of writing software rather than selling a disc in a box. From our viewpoint here in the present, we can't know exactly what that future model would look like. We can, however, see that the fundamentals are all there: programming and game design skill is a scarce resource (unlike data), and it's one that people are already willing to pay for.
So who pays for it? Perhaps a rich benefactor pays for the development of a game for their personal use, then decides to release it to the public free of charge. That seems unlikely though.
More likely is the development of a model whereby the public can pay developers directly for the service they provide. Perhaps this would take the form of commissions, where members of the public get together and pool their money to pay for the development of a new game. But this raises many questions of coordination--how would the decisions be made as to what the game would be, and which developers will get picked to provide the service? As you mention, this would require a huge middleman layer.
or a new payment model to allow millions of individual gamers to fund development rather than a handful of investors
Perhaps the cost of the development service of each game could be broken up into many shares, and each person who plays the game could pay one share. That way only the direct benefactors would pay for the service, which seems fair.
Is this sounding familiar yet?
The unimaginative ones might decide that making games just isn't possible anymore, since they wouldn't be able to look past the business model they've been relying on for the past couple decades. But the ones who can adapt will choose another business model, based on selling the service of writing software rather than selling a disc in a box.
I would say that you are the unimaginative one, since you seem fixated on the disc without realizing that the current business model is in fact the same one you're advocating. Developers are directly paid for their service by the public in the form of "shares" known as game licenses.
You can't have it both ways. If you want to make the point that games are essentially a service not a product, then you have to ask who is the recipient of the service? The person playing the game, obviously. The current business model apportions the service cost to each service recipient through the concept of the software license. Forget the disk, what you are paying for is a small part of the service that developed what's on the disk.
This idea of infinite abundance is totally ridiculous. Yes, after a service has been performed, the end result is already in existence. That does not mean that games are highly abundant in general, it simply reflects the reality of any service, which is that once it has already been performed, there is no natural incentive to pay. Pirating games is like dining and dashing. "Why pay for this dinner? I'm already full." People say, "Why pay for games? I can already get a perfect copy for free." But the very first copy does not just appear out of thin air.
Most people do not dine-and-dash for two reasons. First, people recognize that it took time, effort, and expertise to prepare their food, and feel a moral obligation to pay for that. Even if they did not like the food. Second, this feeling has been codified in the law so that it is a crime to dine and dash. I would say the same concepts apply to game piracy.
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The trick to being an informed voter and an effective citizen is to listen between the elections. Everyone gets so fired up about elections because it's a competition and we love competition! But realistically elections are not the most important part of being a member of this democracy. You get the best insight and can have the most impact by staying tuned in and engaged.
Elections make everything crazy, including candidates. But if you already know the issues and candidates you can have a much better view of what is really going on.
Don't be silly. The US government doesn't spend taxpayer money when a ridiculously overblown problem is presented, the US government spends DEBT.
Quite right (see: Iraq), but in the cases of AIG and Freddie/Fannie, the U.S. has received assets for their money. There is no reason AIG cannot be righted over the next several years and be profitable once again. When that happens, 80% of that value will accrue to the U.S. Treasury. Once the U.S. housing market turns upward again (probably in 2-3 years), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be able to turn profits once again, and those will accrue 100% to the Treasury.
People are always wishing their government would act more like prudent person and save money instead of spending it. Well in this case they ARE saving it by investing in assets that can appreciate. But people are still bitching about it.
There is nothing to deny that tomorrow everything could just float away (though extremely unlikely); the facts didn't change, just a new set of facts have been introduced into the discussion set.
As you rightly note, existing facts don't change or disappear just because new facts are introduced. Gravity is a fact today; if it disappeared tomorrow that would not change the fact that it existed today. The theory of gravity would have to change, to encompass and explain its sudden absence. But the theory would also have to encompass and explain its former existence as well--because that happened too. A working theory has to explain all known facts, past and present.
The law of gravity describes the current data data set. The theory of gravity takes things a step further to introduce method for predicting future observations.
The "law of gravity" is just an older name for the theory of gravity. Two different names for the same thing. Scientists today recognize your main point (that all knowledge is provisional), and thus have shied away from using the word "law" anymore.
There are actually several kinds of ads. Some aim to be informative (notice of a sale for instance), whereas others are "brand" advertising that simply seek to make you aware of a certain product or company.
The first goal of brand advertising is that the viewer should remember the ad. Without that there is no point in it at all.
The second goal is that the viewer should remember the company or brand being advertised. Again--no point in it without that.
The third goal is that the ad become the subject of conversations (aka going viral). This extends your advertising dollar since other people spread it for free. And, some studies seem to indicate that you will be more receptive to the same ad if it is conveyed by your friend rather than viewed cold.
The fourth goal is that the ad creates a positive feeling about the product. It seems weird that this would be so low but it is honestly not that important from a brand advertising point of view. Of course you don't want to create or reinforce a negative opinion about the product or service, but that is a pretty low bar. As long as you don't do that, ads can be weird, pointless, or even unpleasant, just so long as they are memorable and chattable.
So by those criteria, with their first new ad Microsoft has scored very well on items 1, 2, and 3, and have not violated number 4. So far so good (we're all talking about it after all). I think later ads in the series will go harder for number 4.
[Note: here on /. we have no shortage of knowledge or memory of Microsoft, so we're not really the target audience. The random people in sports bars and watching TV at home are.]
Conversely, imports from China are about 2% of the U.S. GDP. So, macroeconomically at least, they need us about 5 times as much as we need them.
This does not get into the trade in the opposite direction...much of the high-technology capital goods that Chinese companies use are imported from the U.S., Japan, or the EU. Airplanes for instance.
One of the features of the new browser is an anti-phishing and malware service, which downloads updated lists of "trouble" domains from Google. I would bet that is what the update service you found is doing.
Interesting, thanks. Learn something new every day I guess.
The Mac windowing paradigm gives each "thing" its own Web page, even within apps. If you have two files open in Photoshop, each is its own window on the desktop. Macs have this great thing called Expose that makes it dead simple to manage all your open windows and switch between them. Tabbed browsing breaks all of this. I always turn off tabbed browsing in Firefox on my Mac. I'm so used to using Expose, and if I have more than one tab open within a Firefox window that content is effectively hidden from my normal workflow.
To address the topic of this discussion--I certainly hope the Mac version of Google Chrome has an option to put each "tab" in its own OS-level window.
They are just elective, as they should be. But any kid wanting to learn comparative religion can do so.
My wife and I live in Virginia, which does not recognize common-law marriages. Being married creates a number of legal rights with respect to each other, that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to create.
Common law is also not an option for many military couples. A person shipping out to Iraq may want to establish married status with their partner before they go.
Also, while you might not see a difference between common-law marriage and (for lack of a better term) decisive marriage, others do. I wanted to take an affirmative step of greater commitment, and would have wanted to get married even if we did live in a common-law state. But my wife and I don't like big expensive parties so we held a small cheap wedding...the emotion was no smaller, just the guest list and the bill.
My wife proposed to me and did not want an engagement ring because she does not like jewelry. We paid for our own small, inexpensive wedding only because I wanted to have something for my family--she wanted to elope. Instead we spent our money on 3 weeks in New Zealand and a house down payment.
We bought each other our wedding rings. I told her what I wanted (plain titanium) and she told me what she wanted (plain yellow gold). We were happy to buy each other exactly what the other wanted. The whole point is to serve as a positive reminder of the other person...you don't want to look down at your finger a couple years later and think "man this isn't really what I wanted."
If she wants to pick the color of the flowers at the ceremony, yeah sure fine. But this idea that the best thing for the guy to do is sit back passively on everything wedding-related is really counter-productive. That strategy absolutely will not work for any of the other major decisions in the rest of your marriage. So don't get into a bad habit early.
We're not talking about "operating in" the U.S., we're talking about data being sent through the U.S. And while other nations might be more openly corrupt, that does not help your data security one bit. There is no amount of bribe you can pay to a Chinese official that will keep them from inspecting your data if they are technically capable of doing so. Same goes for Nigeria, Sweden, Russia, Germany, Great Britain, etc.
The GP is exactly correct: every nation in the world inspects data passing through it to the greatest extent of its ability. Until recently the U.S. held the distinction of having some of the greatest limits on its ability by virtue of legal frameworks, which was one reason it had the most data flowing through it. Those have been dismantled and now we see data flows spreading out in response--there is no longer an advantage to routing through the U.S. But if people think there is a greater likelihood of data security in other nations they are kidding themselves.
Actually, we have slightly more nuanced picture over here (Europe). The proverb is that America has the world's five best universities, but also 500 of the worst ones.
Well there's about 2700 4-year colleges and universities in the U.S., so you're missing about 2200 of the pretty-good to really-good to great ones. That's one reason the U.S. has such a strong system...step below those top 5 universities and there are hundreds that are still very good.
Many of them are publicly funded to keep costs low. You mention Berkeley, which is typically ranked the #1 public university in the U.S. If you live in California your tuition at Berkeley is going to be about $9000 per year. What's the next few below Berkeley? UVA, UCLA, Michigan, USC, UNC, William and Mary...all with in-state tuitions around $10k, all world-class institutions.
Before we went to Google Analytics we tried using referrer in the logs to track paths through our site. Something like 40% of browser visits (i.e. excluding known robots) did not report referrer properly. It was random and therefore totally useless.
If there is no referer then I set a cookie to track session.
We thought about that, but at that point we were doing the exact same thing Google Analytics does anyway. We figured why not just use them, which is way easier and more powerful.
The thought that you can get three out of three perfect collapses by splashing them with a bit of aviation fuel must have demolition companies shaking in their boots.
Your premise is ridiculously flawed. The collapses were very, very far from "perfect" by the standards of controlled demolition. The buildings did not fall straight down at all--the outer walls peeled outward and disintegrated, with debris landing hundreds of yards away and thoroughly destroying all neighboring buildings.
Any controlled demolition company watching the fall would feel very comfortable about their jobs. Those companies don't get paid just to knock buildings down. They get paid to drop the debris where it is supposed to go, and only where it is supposed to go.
Neither of those statements are true.
I'm conducting an experiment now. My hypothesis is that God makes it rain here at least once a month, so if it rains anytime in the next 30 days I'll have proved that God causes rain. Science, right?
There are a lot of wacky experiments that people can perform themselves, and fool themselves into thinking that they have significant results. Two of the things that make science science are the concepts of rigour and repeatability.
Whether or not most people learn things themselves or from other people is not an issue specific to science. It simply reflects the specialization within a structured society. This is a good thing since it allows us to expand human capability beyond what any one single person is capable of.
Here's what I'd say, but such a nuanced approach would almost certainly fail before evangelicals: Life begins at conception, but the government's interest in a citizen begins at viable birth. So while I might believe that a 2-month fetus is "alive", there is no practical way for the law to treat it independently of the mother...at most you could force a C-section and then it would die anyway.
The government, being a constitutional republic of free people, does not have the legal authority to force mothers to carry the baby until it is viable. If it did, it would ALSO have the power to force mothers to get pregnant in the first place, or to take children from their parents for no reason whatsoever. Abortion is legal not because anyone likes it, but because it is on one side of a bright line that we don't want government to cross.
Your post has two interesting parts that are not related to one another. The phytoplankton that produce oxygen in the sea are free-floating throughout the oceans' euphotic zone, while the "killer algae" must grow on a substrate and so is limited to shallowest areas of the ocean (where the bottom receives significant sunlight). And, even in those areas, any local phytoplankton would be floating in the water column above the algae, and thus have first crack at the sunlight.
It is engineered to reduce turbulence but no more than other top-level pools around the world. Pools with 10 lanes, slop gutters to eat waves, and greater then 2m depth are not unheard of. Besides, while plenty of world records are being beaten at these Olympics, plenty were also beaten before the Olympics...in the last year or two many world records have gone down at other events. Before each race NBC puts up a listing of the current world record for that event. Take a look--many are dated 2006 or 2007; some date back a few more years, but none are very old.
We happen to be in a period of dramatic change in swimming right now, and there are probably a number of reasons. If you want to point to just one, it is probably that there is a lot more money in the sport now. So Michael Phelps could afford, through endorsements and grants, to train at a full-time professional level since he was an early teen. This has huge implications for his technique, fitness, health, and mental toughness for competition.
"...then you call your lawyer."
Because everyone has a lawyer on retainer for just such a situation...
Because its so hard in the U.S. to find a lawyer. :-)
Before the development of most of the copying technologies and legal concepts that we know and love today.
There is actually nothing preventing the patronage model of funding the arts today. Plenty of art each year is commissioned by private or commercial patrons, and there is nothing preventing someone from choosing to become the "de Medici of videogames" and fund development of new games as a patron. It just doesn't happen much though, which is what I meant when I said it's unlikely. The fact that copies + copyright are more widely used is basically a market decision.
for who, the producer or the consumer? I believe the parent is arguing that patronage represents a fairer balance from the consumer's point of view than copyright, which is too loaded in favour of the producer.
For the consumer. The GP mentions Mozart and Bach, who both made nice livings when they were alive. However during their time, almost no one heard their music. Only the very richest and most well-connected slice of society was able to attend their performances. Whereas today anyone can listen to dozens of different performances of each piece of their music for almost nothing--a few dollars a piece.
Copying technologies are way, way better for consumers than the patronage model. In fact they are so tilted toward the consumer that a new area of law--copyright--had to be developed to ensure that producers would be able to make money.
It is important to keep a historical perspective on things. Our ability to access the creative products of our society would blow away anyone from Mozart's time. Today janitors and garbage men can easily afford to hear everything Mozart or Bach ever wrote, whenever they want.
The old style of patronage did not work very well, which is why we have our legal concepts of "intellectual property" today.
Remember that the system you advocate predates, and was largely replaced by, the concept of copyright. That happened for a reason. Simply asserting that the other way was better betrays a lack of historical knowledge. If it was better we would still be using it. There is absolutely nothing preventing a patronage model today--the reason it is not common for things like music and software is simply that it does not work as well.
But the ones who can adapt will choose another business model, based on selling the service of writing software rather than selling a disc in a box. From our viewpoint here in the present, we can't know exactly what that future model would look like. We can, however, see that the fundamentals are all there: programming and game design skill is a scarce resource (unlike data), and it's one that people are already willing to pay for.
So who pays for it? Perhaps a rich benefactor pays for the development of a game for their personal use, then decides to release it to the public free of charge. That seems unlikely though.
More likely is the development of a model whereby the public can pay developers directly for the service they provide. Perhaps this would take the form of commissions, where members of the public get together and pool their money to pay for the development of a new game. But this raises many questions of coordination--how would the decisions be made as to what the game would be, and which developers will get picked to provide the service? As you mention, this would require a huge middleman layer.
or a new payment model to allow millions of individual gamers to fund development rather than a handful of investors
Perhaps the cost of the development service of each game could be broken up into many shares, and each person who plays the game could pay one share. That way only the direct benefactors would pay for the service, which seems fair.
Is this sounding familiar yet?
The unimaginative ones might decide that making games just isn't possible anymore, since they wouldn't be able to look past the business model they've been relying on for the past couple decades. But the ones who can adapt will choose another business model, based on selling the service of writing software rather than selling a disc in a box.
I would say that you are the unimaginative one, since you seem fixated on the disc without realizing that the current business model is in fact the same one you're advocating. Developers are directly paid for their service by the public in the form of "shares" known as game licenses.
You can't have it both ways. If you want to make the point that games are essentially a service not a product, then you have to ask who is the recipient of the service? The person playing the game, obviously. The current business model apportions the service cost to each service recipient through the concept of the software license. Forget the disk, what you are paying for is a small part of the service that developed what's on the disk.
This idea of infinite abundance is totally ridiculous. Yes, after a service has been performed, the end result is already in existence. That does not mean that games are highly abundant in general, it simply reflects the reality of any service, which is that once it has already been performed, there is no natural incentive to pay. Pirating games is like dining and dashing. "Why pay for this dinner? I'm already full." People say, "Why pay for games? I can already get a perfect copy for free." But the very first copy does not just appear out of thin air.
Most people do not dine-and-dash for two reasons. First, people recognize that it took time, effort, and expertise to prepare their food, and feel a moral obligation to pay for that. Even if they did not like the food. Second, this feeling has been codified in the law so that it is a crime to dine and dash. I would say the same concepts apply to game piracy.