Then the PC maker could install only Windows plus a package manager analogous to Mac App Store, Ubuntu Software Center, or Steam. Then when the user inserts a DVD-Video disc, the package manager could connect to the Internet and send the machine's serial number to the repository to present a list of "third-party crapware" that the machine's administrator is entitled to install. For a PC configured with an optical drive, this would include DVD player software. If the user knows he's going to play a DVD while away from the Internet, he could start the package manager and install it ahead of time. A copy of the qualified packages could even ship (uninstalled) on the hard drive, with an option in the package manager to purge them to reclaim the space.

That's an interesting idea, at least from the accessibility perspective. I've wondered for a while what'd be the most effective way for someone who can only push one button to control a mouse-driven application.

I think the point was that additionally requiring "appropriate Internet connectivity" limits the market for the product too much compared to requiring only electricity and a computer. The same is true of requiring a bleeding edge computer instead of the computer one is more likely to already own.

Yes. Comcast still has the 300 GB per month limit in many markets, and cellular has a cap two orders of magnitude smaller than even that.

For someone born in a country whose home Internet pricing expectation is stuck in the past, such as the United States, Canada, or especially Australia or New Zealand, it can be expensive and a pile of red tape to relocate to a country in the present.

Now after having waited a couple days for this to cool down and for the offtopic police to move on: I agree that travel is necessary. I'm just unsure about the means. Will I need to buy a car to get a job?

I decided to fact check this claim. Eusociality, according to Wikipedia and the references it cites, is defined as three aspects of the behavior of a species:

• "cooperative brood care (including brood care of offspring from other individuals)": Daycare is a thing.
• "overlapping generations within a colony of adults": Grandparents are a thing.
• "a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups": Humankind appears to be moving in the direction of breeder vs. thinker classes. More affluent classes already tend to produce fewer children, and the public has become more accepting of a gay lifestyle. Furthermore, I've seen plenty of contempt for "breeders" and other childfree-by-choice advocacy on Slashdot.

I agree that humans are not as close to the eusocial ideal as bees and mole rats, but we're closer than a lot of other species.

I guess you'd stream a game for about three days to see if you like it, after which you'd buy your own copy. But wouldn't buying your own copy run up a 30 GB bandwidth bill by itself, now that console games ship on BD-ROM and PC games are BD-ROM-sized downloads?

Let me clarify: It's the difference between a game being available to players for rental over this sort of streaming service and a game not being able for rental at all.

Video games are less substitutable than passenger cars. Someone who wants Super Smash Bros. 4 isn't going to be satisfied with Destiny nor vice versa.

A video game publisher is likely to view people stuck on satellite as a rounding error. For one thing, satellite players are already locked out of online multiplayer due to latency. For another, a publisher might be under the impression that people who can afford to live in the city are likely to buy more games and/or subscribe to a game longer. It's the same reason that many apps hit iPhone and iPad before Android: studies show that iOS users tend to spend far more online per capita than Android users.

The player would choose this because he game he wants to play is otherwise unavailable.

You have to clean out the pipes every once in a while before the sperm, well, mature.

That explains the popularity of Precious Moments and other super-deformed franchises. The problem with that in real life, of course, is that it's harder for a big head to fit out mama's birthin' hole. Bulldogs already have big enough heads to run a serious risk of cephalopelvic disproportion.

Then what not-correlation thing does imply causation?

Let me count the guesses: A publisher paranoid about prohibited copying may be willing to license its game at a lower price if the game program never leaves the server. Or it might be cheaper and faster to send a video stream than to send sufficiently powerful hardware and 50 GB of game at once. Or sufficiently powerful mobile hardware might not even exist. Or it might want to ensure that all players connected to the same server have comparable lag and the same inability to install cheat mods.