Approach #1 obviously makes a lot of sense in small, tribal societies. If you don't work for the good of the group, they'll kick you out and survival on your own in pre-civilization days is very difficult if not impossible. However, #2 is quite doable these days. All you have to do is work a job for money, and use that money to pay for your living expenses. Then, for personal relationships, you can treat people poorly and take advantage of them for your own personal gain. There's countless sociopaths who do just that every day, and it seems to work well for them. They're even running all our large companies and our government.

I have a sense of rightness that derives from empathy. It doesn't take any notion of the supernatural or any deity to understand that if I can feel pain, then I can expect that my fellow humans can as well. If I feel that someone causing me pain is "bad" then it follows that causing others' pain is bad.

Why is causing pain to others bad? Why do you care about what other people feel? Yes, most of us agree that it's wrong to willfully hurt others, but why? If you think that we're just collections of cells, then the only thing you should care about is your own personal survival and comfort, and nothing else.

Surely you've heard of the Golden Rule? This requires zero belief in the supernatural or any sort of sacredness.

Except that it doesn't explain why you should follow it. Most people seem to use "karma" (or "what comes around goes around") as a not-quite-as-supernatural-as-an-omnipotent-God reason for following the Golden Rule.

Good for you, but the average person on the street doesn't give two shits about the opinion of some anonymous poster on Slashdot. They do care about the opinion of Dr. Dre, at least for musical stuff, which is why his headphone company was worth billions when Apple bought it. Personally, I don't give two shits about Dr. Dre's opinion on headphones either, but I'm not the average person on the street either. Obviously, there's lots of people out there who do care about Dre's opinion, or else Beats wouldn't have sold for billions.

Personally, I like my Sennheiser HD-280s.

I love how the default attitude is spite. Blame America for doing something wrong, instead of the obvious choice - make your own version of kickstarter. With blackjack, and hookers. Then you don't have to listen to what the Americans say at all. Better yet, you can exclude Americans from participating. You can even go so far as to redirect any American IP address to a landing page where you let them know all the problems you have with the US federal government.

Kickstarter doesn't do deals outside the USA for well-known legal reasons. Maybe you can discover what these are when you start your own - but you won't, so the question is moot. Still, I wish someone would. I just don't see it happening, though.

whether (in light of what's known) default strong encryption for everything is something users should just get whether they like it or not.

There are many unsolved problems for making strong end to end secured communications work. Key management is only one. A bigger and even more complicated problem is that people derive significant benefits from sharing their message contents with big, powerful third parties, for example spam filtering, importance filtering, ability to search 10 years of email from a cheap battery powered device, ability to receive messages when all personal devices are offline, ability to reset passwords if they are forgotten and so on.

To make truly end to end communication ubiquitous you would have to find a way to recreate all these features in the purely decentralised end to end context. Otherwise "giving" e2e crypto to people "whether they like it or not" is a quick way to find an angry mob with pitchforks outside your house. A lot of people care a lot more about those features than (somewhat theoretical) privacy against the NSA.

So if all the hackers switch to alternative WMs, and leave the main ones to the "conventional desktop users", who's going use these main ones?

All the conventional desktop users are using Windows and MacOS, not Linux.

Worse, if some non-hackers do start using Linux with Gnome, then ask their hacker friend for help, the hacker is just going to say "sorry, I don't use Gnome, I can't help you." If you want Linux on the desktop to take off, you have to court both the hackers and the regular users. The only way to do that is by having advanced features available for the hackers.

And "If everyone used Linux, there would no doubt be less demand for cleaning up PCs"...? No. People make that mistake all the time

Sorry, but yes. Your post makes the mistake of conflating professional IT Department staffers with Geek Squad. IT people maintaining corporate infrastructure are not the people who make a business out of going to peoples' homes and cleaning up all the adware and crapware that has infested their Windows PCs. The former is not terribly threatened by Linux (except that they might need to learn something new), but the latter certainly is. If home users all switched to Linux, they wouldn't need the constant maintenance that home Windows PCs require. Just take a look at someone running Windows on their personal laptop; it's likely filled with a dozen different "toolbars" that have somehow installed themselves into their browser (even Firefox), even though the user never asked for them, and the computer runs at a crawl. I've seen it over and over.

Thinkpads used to have titanium frames, but those were internal and I don't think they were one-piece.

I thought they were magnesium.

The communist party has a hand in pretty much every large Chinese corporation these days, and in the end they have the final call

I think you do not rightly know what socialism means.

I see, thanks for the info.

Interesting how open-source software is far superior to proprietary stuff: with the proprietary stuff, you're paying good money for something which is, in fact, crippled: it sees some watermark and won't work. The open-source software, OTOH, doesn't care about some watermark and plays what it's told to play, because it isn't made in collusion with media corporations.

>Not sure what you're referring to, but I've yet to encounter a DVD (not Blu-Ray) that Media Player Classic and VLC can't play, and since they aren't officially licensed players that means they're cracking whatever DRM is on the disc.

Yeah, I already said that, basically. DVDs have been cracked for ages. I don't know what this watermark thing the parent poster referred to is.

It's actually a good strategy for MS, I think, and I believe Ballmer screwed up by not following this strategy.

For other companies, it only works in the short term because their competitors win in the long term because without good employees, the company can't develop new products. However, for MS, this just isn't a concern. They're a monopoly in many markets, especially in business software; companies aren't going to suddenly stop buying Windows, Exchange, Office/Outlook, etc. MS can milk their existing customers for a couple of decades I think, and could easily jack up prices greatly.

I think MS (and their products) will get worse before this gets better.

Doesn't matter, people will still buy MS products no matter what. Businesses aren't going to wean themselves from MS's enterprise software anytime soon. This was a good decision: the research efforts were costing money which wasn't being made up in new sales.

MS's best course of action is to cut out as much R&D as possible and other bottom-line costs, and then try to extract as much money from existing customers as possible by jacking up prices. Thanks to their monopoly position in several markets, this shouldn't be hard.

That's a really good point. But I guess they could just disable bluetooth. I'm starting to wonder if today's Apple is as incredibly stupid as Sony was 10-15 years ago. Though, Apple might actually be right: the people who buy Apple stuff are such sheep they, unlike Sony's prospective customers a decade ago when they tried to push proprietary audio formats, might actually buy into Apple's proprietary junk.