One objection I can see to putting games in the public domain is that they are starting to reach a level of sophistication and maturity where age (tied to hardware performance) is getting to be less of an issue in relation to quality gameplay. In other words, the hardware started to catch up to what people were trying to design, and has passed it in many cases (if you look at many mobile apps). thief, for example, might have dated visuals, but there's nothing lacking in terms of gameplay or experience, and if given some fresh visuals, could stand against some other things I've played lately. In other words, it's like suggesting that Monopoly is out of date because it used relatively simple artwork. Sure, the weed and CoD crowd might want CoD 15, but there is a lot of good gaming out there when the "sell by" date is a decade or more ago. The one compelling argument that could be made is that since publishers feel the older catalogues compete with the newer stuff, they sometimes take it off the market (try to find some of EA's older titles), which could be a real concern in the digital distribution model.

Those are some good points...I am really not sure why they aren't stressed by content providers. There's nothing attractive to me about piracy, one way or the other. Most of my recreational content is gaming and Steam makes it stupidly easy (and relatively cheap), to where piracy would be less convenient and less certain (older, unsupported images; no support; possibility of viruses; not supporting the studio, etc) than buying the game outright. The only valid point that is made is the possibility of Steam going away sometime down the road or whatnot, but when you can pick up a legal copy of something for half off or more, keep it up to date, and run it with no real problems, the argument then comes down to economics. I will say that I feel strongly about draconian DRM (and avoided Ubisoft's titles for that reason, among others), but that is not necessarily any worse than pirating it.

TPB is one drop in a sea. If "piracy" is a diversion of unrealized profits, then the content distributors have to accept percentage of use as a ratio between legal and illegal use. It's up to them to move the needle one way or the other by creating enough value to consumers for the legit product as opposed to pirating it. Otherwise, people will determine that it's in their own best interests to bypass the distribution model and just acquire the content by what means they see fit. I cannot figure out -- thirty-plus years into the piracy debate -- why this point hasn't stuck with content distributors is beyond me.

In my personal experience, their quality has been declining in recent years (poor internal design, bad fit and finish, on the boxes by them that I've had to use). A shift to mobile computing is part of the blame, probably, but I don't think the Dell brand has the same strength in recent years as it had in the past.

A lot of it depends on where you are at in your career and what your long-term goals are. A paycheck is a paycheck is a paycheck. Few of us get to work on our ideal sorts of projects, and even those jobs eventually go away as the company and market changes. Part of the issue is that you really don't "own" the code, in the sense that you're not familiar with it and weren't there for a lot of the decisions that went into creating it. On my old project, I could tell nearly to the line where the problem areas were and how to fix them. On my current project (which is a large, fragile, and poorly engineering Frankenstein app that I walked into), I'm kinda in the same boat as the OP. I can see a dozen places where the architecture needs to be changed and updated, but it won't happen because of budgets and a resistance to change here. Anyway, once you've spent some time with it, you'll get to understand it better, in spite of yourself. You do have to ask yourself what you're trying to achieve, though...career advancement into an architect/lead job, or just passing time until the next coding gig. I show up, do quality work, and go home to pursue my side projects at the end of the day, as I've gone probably as far as I'll go in terms of advancement. Outside of keeping my skills current and being one step ahead of the obsolescence curve, I don't care all that much what I work on during the day...so, if I were you, my big concern would be whether or not I'm falling into a code rut -- is this old tech and old approaches, or newer stuff that is still in demand? If it's something old, learn what you can, then plan an exit. If it's newer stuff, get some good experience and move on when you feel like you've left things in a good place.

One thing I forgot to add to my post is that the passionate, high-performing coder is more likely to run into issues with burnout at some point. They don't realize when they've crossed the line, most of the time.

I completely agree with this. When I started at my current place, I was like "Hey, we can fix X, change Y, and implement Z," all of which would have slashed the time spent on maintenance. As a result, I got off on the wrong foot with my boss, who is conservative, almost cautious, about changing code. I understand his perspective, that they are happy with a system that works, and that incremental improvements are what people are used to and want here. One of the other guys I work with here is the same way as me, wanting to improve the app, but not being allowed to start making substantive changes. I understand my boss' position, and I don't actually have a problem with it, because it is what is expected of him and what suits the company. At the same time, it's not an environment I'm actually happy in, so it's just a matter of good and bad fits for each type of coder.

Truthfully, there are a lot of jobs which basically require a person to show up and write competent code according to decent instructions, then shut it down and go home for the day. There are some jobs which require a high, if not manic, level of commitment to the job, because it's difficult, the tech is hard to work with, the requirements or deadlines are insane, etc. A high-performing coder is going to get bored at a 9 to 5 maintenance job...while an average code is not going to be able to take on the latter kind of job, but will do fine at maintenance. I worked for several years at a place that was a start up with a lot of big dreams and long hours, then it basically folded and I took a job which is a 9 to 5 maintenance job. When I get out of here for the day, I go home and start coding for fun, while keeping an eye out for the next high-pressure, high-demand gig. I get bored in this kind of environment, and so do most of the people I used to work with at the start-up. It's just about the right person and job and not some latest buzzword or ideal about who a candidate should be.

Ironically, the only people affected by snark would be anyone with a normal level of self-esteem, which is typically not found in the coding world.

Programming always has been, and always will be, a mess. There is a reason that maybe two percent of the people in the world can actually do this work -- the other ninety-eight percent are sane and don't think like psychotics locked in the Red Bull factory.

My anecdotal evidence is based on the seven or eight households I know of that followed that pattern. I'm not an Xbox/PS fanboy and enjoyed using the Wii ("playing with the Wii" sounds wrong on several levels), and am not particularly happy to see Nintendo struggling in the market, being as I think it's a been a great system for the younger or more casual gaming market.

I do find the luv/hate libertarian thing kinda funny when these things come up. Statist sorts believe that since people are fallible, there needs to be people to regulate people. Libertarians believe that since people can't be trusted to run the lives of other people, then we need to trust individuals instead of groups. Both sorts miss the fact that the basic problem is that we recognize there are people we can't trust. Anyway, as far as regulation goes, I've gotten salmonella twice in my life, both times from large corporate food chains that were regularly inspected by the health department, had food handling standards in place, etc. I've eaten plenty of time at mom and pop greasy spoons and have not gotten sick from them. Likewise, I didn't go to a coding boot camp, but got my degree from an accredited four year college. While most of my professors were good, the guy teaching the .NET class I took had simply gone to a weekend seminar on coding in .NET and copied all the .ppt slides and used them as his own (I knew more than he did about .NET). I had another professor for calc who, while not intentionally being a fraud, absolutely could not communicate the subject matter in a way that was comprehensible. In both of these cases, I figure I was out money because of fraud, so it can happen anywhere. If the coding boot camps are making false claims, then it seems more like grounds for a hefty lawsuit by former students, than grounds for another layer of regulatory compliance, particularly when the products of the four year colleges may or may not be subject to the same type of scrutiny in terms of product quality (disclaimer -- I don't know what the process for this is in CA).

I absolutely detest the word "compliance." For some reason, it seems out of character to be used in what is ostensibly a "free society."

When the Wii came out, people who were not typical gamers embraced it because they saw it was a way to have fun and stay active. However, the novelty wore off and most of the people who bought them at that point have not done much with them since. I don't see another round of trying to tap into the same market as going anywhere at all for them, this time around.

Nuance requires looking at both sides of an issue, weighing the information, then coming to a conclusion that there are situations which don't fit a template. In America, our educational system is reduced to teaching to the test, so only basic pieces of information matter. Critical thinking is discarded, because it does not produce good semi-automatons who trot out every two years and fill in the bubble next to a D or an R. All thought has to be as part of a template, because we are urged to give up our individual identities, priorities, and heuristics to become sheep-like consumers, citizens of sports-team and music "nations," and so on. Really, to be honest, to understand the Snowden situation requires having enough depth and background in political history to see where mass surveillance inevitably leads, the dangers of the state which grows too large, etc, and then to be able to analyze the present stage by using those facts to form some sort of model. Sadly, that's a skill which is vanishing in America, because we have been on top so long that few people feel "hungry" enough to learn and think for themselves.