Oh, I just don't get it if I am prevented from purchasing it at all. It's not like I need a certain game or song to go. In that case I boycott the product, and yes, that includes not playing it.

There's no bigger form of protesting against an artistic creation than paying it no attention whatsoever.

iTunes doesn't carry certain songs into Europe, so even if they are under one Euro a pop, we just can't get it through there.
I am not sure about Netflix but when I checked it back in the day it was as region locked as Hulu, is that still the case?

Likewise certain mobile apps are also region-locked, even when they are free.
The whole region lock is a very complex issue, not to mention certain governments tax multimedia content on customs even if it's just a $2 comic book, to discourage importing physical content.
It's not as easy as just paying for it, at least for us. If it was just paying for it, it wouldn't be a big issue. I have absolutely no reservations about paying for what I want, and most of the stuff I like is actually rather cheap.

Yeah, in places like Europe you can't get certain content even paying, and the content we have is more expensive than in the US (at least videogames and movies). And importing certain content in Spain will make it automatically taxed on customs, with a bullshit "handling" tax our government sneaked upon us, above 60â for importing a $30 videogame or movie. Since few people imports anything here, nobody ever speaks of it.

I use only three desktop effects, but those have been a productivity boost for me.
First the "show all windows in a mosaic" kind of effect. My workflow can require having a large number of programs, some with multiple instances overlapping on the taskbar, so I activate the effect using a window corner and quickly picking the window I need. By now it's a bit of a reflex move and I can activate real fast.

Second is making translucent windows. When working with graphics, specially when following a model, it's really handy. Can also serve to make some windows see-through so you can still read stuff going on below while you are fiddling with them.

And third is live desktop magnifying. Useful for a few specific tasks where bad app coding doesn't allow resizing a display, so I just zoom in for those cases.

I know my use case is niche at best, because I work with images/sound/models/code/notes all at once, but desktop effects used with some ingenuity can really enhance management of a desktop.
I also use a few transition effects, but those are actual glitter, although my specific desktop of choice does minimize transitions towards the taskbar and when switching things quickly it provides a visual cue as where to click to reopen it without mentally parsing the taskbar contents.

Anyway the point is that some can be useful. A desktop cube has the same usefulness as a wallpaper, but a few effects are used to manage things and can be really handy if you integrate them in your workflow.

Strange, I use and code plenty of games using shaders like that, and I run KDE4 in Linux, in both GL composite and regular X11 mode, and have never experienced any crash like you describe. Is it because I use Nvidia drivers or something, or maybe because I happened to have had the luck to only play games that do it right, and had the luck to never code any shaders triggering that? Seems rather unlikely, but I am genuinely curious here.

Whoa, I didn't know about such restrictions. What a strange rule. Explains a lot though.

And yeah, I guess you are right about IAPs. I prefer to avoid games with such systems, and so far I feel like I haven't lost anything of value.

It's funny, and excuse the storytelling, back in the day I had no problem paying for playtime (arcades), just bringing a handful of quarters and having fun. For some reason, that doesn't feel as right when you aren't inside an arcade. I guess I enjoyed the cabinets being larger than anything at home, or having unique stuff like gun games or "full-body" games like those rotating Afterburner II cabinets, or simply games that never existed on consoles or PCs.
Nowadays if some home game wants me to pay for credits, I don't feel it. Even if it was 5 cents a credit it's just not the same. And besides, pressing some buttons and waiting for some online transaction to finish...cannot compare to dumping quarters and hearing them clang inside the machine. It's like if one literally felt that money was having an actual effect on something instead of being some number that you can't go below a certain range or you get a game over (eviction). They handle your real life money like some other stat like your EXP or health.

At least, back in the day of paying for credits, developers were creative in finding devious ways to make the game hard, creating challenging levels that were, unless the game was crap, possible to surpass with enough raw gaming skills, even infamous quarter-munchers like Gauntlet II were possible to enjoy for a long time with one single credit and skill. Nowadays they just put a lot of random digital diarrhea of the mind behind a purchase button and that's it. Gotta get that top hat.

Ah, sorry for the verbose, I hope it conveys the point though. Which is basically "their creativity has stagnated to the point of where IAPs and DLCs get more creative thought than the actual game itself". Your mileage may vary, good games are still being made, but it seems to be the trend at the lower tiers of gaming, if you imagine gaming as a pyramid with the good and scarce stuff at the top, and stuff like candy crush saga and farmville clones forming the crap but common bottom.

Yep, I think that is a correct analogy. Pity Slashdot won't let me rate your comment.

Doom turned 20 years old in December, so I got quite into it recently, actually making mods and playing the newest ones from the community. I fully recommend doing the same. If you find maps and weapons stale, go grab GZDoom and play it in glorious GL with fancy new modded weapons, system mechanics (the "wrath of cronos" mod is pretty competent as an RPG mod for example), and if you search for Oblige (at sourceforge) and enter the forums you can download a WIP for a really good random map generator. You can make Doom into a roguelike if you are so inclined, nowadays.
And I fully recommend a full conversion named Reelism, it's a blast for short bursts of 5-10 minute gaming.

Oh? I really want a patch to restore BBC, it gave really accurate weather for my area, and wetter.com not only was making up the weather prediction, it also gives multiple connection problems.
Can I have that patch to apply it locally, or is it still a WIP?
I love the weather app when it's not using wetter.com, it's been there in my system tray ever since it was possible to add it to the system tray. Can't wait to have it back with accurate predictions!

You are, like, talking of the shareware "demo" version of Doom. The complete game doesn't act like that, and what you say might confuse younger readers that never knew shareware was pretty much the demo version of it. It also made the game famous back in the day, but nobody considered the shareware release to be the actual game of Doom.
Comparing it to those little time/money suckers is just wrong. You should be ashamed of yourself, I hope cacodemons invade your house and turn the floor into lava or something.

Jokes aside, that one gave you one episode in full and once you purchase the full game you have the actual full game. In those examples you mention, if I am not mistaken, it's about purchasing little items, characters or playtime, in several small payments instead. Even if the basics are similar (pay for a game) in one case it was a demo given out to promote a full game, while in the others paying for stuff is an actual core mechanic of an otherwise freeware game.
Sure you can argue that Thy Flesh Consumed was some form of DLC addon by today's standards but back in the day we used to call those "expansions" and tended to bring something minimally juicy to the table instead of just one character or silly hat or single map.

Maybe this is just my love of Doom speaking, but I don't know, comparing it to my little pony hurts man. And purchasing Doom/DoomII back in the day eventually gave access to a near-infinite amount of free mods that are still coming even today. Few games offer as much value as Doom.

I can't eat stuff like yogurt or kefir or similar things because of lactose intolerance. If it's true that I need to have it all sorted out, what could I eat to replenish my gut bacteria without having to resort to painful milk derivatives?

You underestimate the effect of cheats on an online game. Basically since the game is unwinnable because of those 570 players, people stops bothering and will only remember the game as a cheat-infested hellhole.
Those people targeted by this VAC procedure PAID for their cheat tools. That's the real news here, that people are sad enough to paid for cheat programs. Cheat programs WITH DRM.

When people can go to such lengths, expect their effect to be noticeable.

Yes, you aren't mistaken, VAC only runs in specific games AND specific servers. I for example don't have any game using VAC in any form (and then again I am in linux, and I do nothing but steam on my windows install)

Actually, yes, you don't have to visit them, but you have to be actively using the cheat, because the VAC method involves checking for DRM checks (phoning home for verification) for cheat programs (believe it, it's actually a thing). Looking online for cheats and all those FUDdy things people keeps spewing in the comments is not the point, the point is recognizing the DRM servers for the cheat tools, only sanely accessible when using the tool itself, I don't think anyone will stumble upon that host during daily browsing, no matter how many cheats they look at online.

And, damn, If you look around you can see this is true, such cheat programs exist and, yes, I also think that paying for a cheat program with DRM is incredibly stupid. I had a hard time believing it until I looked around and saw that people is stupid enough to pay to cheat in games, AND allowing DRM on them to boot!

The real news here is that some people is obsessed with winning random games to the point of using such services with perhaps more DRM than Steam itself... it's really sad when you think about it.

Do you know of any false positive? Because with all the people misunderstanding what's going on, I am surprised nobody has jumped with "I got banned" whether it's true or not.

Out of all the "privacy outrages" this one doesn't even qualify. And they aren't being criticized with the hope of them changing because they already did. Anything else is just FUD at this point.
I know reddit is a nest of weird people but go read the threads where this stuff originated, and then the response. And with read I mean read it, not reading someone else's interpretation of it.
The accusation threads are the most FUD-filled package of half-truths you can see around, it's really worth a check just to laugh at this "incident" that really isn't.

And besides do you know the kind of shit anti-hack programs do? VAC is extremely tame in comparison, hashed DNSs or not.

Count another happy KDE user here.

I have an unconventional setup with one big window and three smaller windows at the side, didn't need to do much to keep that layout consistent over the years. It's also set up similar to Unity (sidebar with launchers instead of horizontal) because I wrote a few things to make use of the Unity API, supported by the "Icon-Only Task Manager plasmoid", which I believe is available by default.
However, unlike Unity, my window controls are on the right side because I am used to that, the behavior when clicking on window groups is much more rational and fast (not to mention you can use the mousewheel to quickly switch), and I use either regular menubars or menus hidden in a window decoration button. The global menubar paradigm is not my thing. I basically took what I liked from Unity while keeping a more normal behavior, yet using an unorthodox layout.
Time spent configuring? Like 2 hours over the years.

KDE gives me a lot of control. I can tab windows together, from different processes, automatically or manually; have specific windows appear with specific sizes at specific places, or have them remembered geometry if the app doesn't support that, all through an easy-to-use GUI; I can give windows hotkeys to quickly switch focus to them (I use winkey+X to quickly switch to my terminal, Konsole), or disable compositing if I am developing with OpenGL. I was even able to tame GIMP's 2.5.x oddball interface back in the day using a few rules (not needed anymore though, I love the new GIMP)
It doesn't get as much love with plasmoids as gnome gets with extensions, but you can still find a few handy 3rd party plasmoids here and there.
Anyway, I am very satisfied with KDE. The first two releases of KDE4 were ass, but it got way better by the fourth/fifth release, and nowadays it's really good to work with, even akonadi behaves as it should, which I thought I'd never see the day.

As you, my second choice of desktop is also XFCE. As you say it's pretty good using few resources, behaves pretty much as you'd expect if you are used to windows desktops, and while it's a bit lacking in terms of addons, it's pretty decent at what it does. I love it on old laptops or netbooks.
I also appreciate the fact that they managed to make a tasteful "mascot" (just a mouse silhouette, it's cutesy but not too much), unlike other projects using animal/mascot motifs. I cringue every time I see remmants of that cartoony dragon that was the KDE mascot. It's not that it looks bad, but feels so out of place being so...cutesy. Looks like the dragons there were in children cartoons of the 80s.