No problem. Even 32-bit systems will let you use 2GB per process.

There is a lot of ugly misogyny in games.

Yes there is. And in society as a whole. And it isn't just misogyny.

If you're a woman gamer, and you don't respond to certain male gamers they way they want you to, you will get death threats, rape threats and doxxing.

I wish that someone with better gaming skills than me would do a few tests. As such:

Create an account with a female name and avatar. Play some games. Record the reactions.

Create an account that appears to be African American. Play some games. Record the reactions.

Create an account that appears to be LGBT. Play some games. Record the reactions.

Create an account that appears to be Jewish. Play some games. Record the reactions.

Create an account that appears to be Muslim. Play some games. Record the reactions.

Create an account that appears to be a teenage male. Play some games. Record the reactions.

I'd say that you'd find an amazing amount of hatred for each of those categories. Not because there really is that degree of specific hatred. But because the people losing are trying to hurt the victor with whatever insults they think might work.

The fact that most games are written and told from an adolescent male point of view does not help. It creates a sort of greasy milieu where it's easy to believe that any behavior toward a woman is acceptable.

While I believe that that is a MAJOR factor I think it is also an unconscious strategy on the part of the less competent gamers.

If a woman beats you at that game and you call her a whore and she leaves and never comes back then that is one less player who is better than you.

In my experience, no one bothers with directed insults at someone who is a worse player or who agrees with your opinions.

So, IMO, there is no solution in the larger context. But there are ways to mitigate it in the specific category of playing games. And the easiest to implement would be to restrict messages until a player has sufficient investment in a system to behave themselves.

I also hope that, someday, someone will come up with a variation of the Bechdel test to demonstrate how women are depicted in games. If the woman can be replaced with a bowling ball then there is a problem with the writing.

My daughter was kidnapped and is going to be auctioned into sexual slavery! I must kill all the peoples.
vs.
My bowling ball was stolen and is going to be auctioned on eBay. I must kill all the peoples.

IBM has sold off or abandoned many of their best consumer products:

• OS/2
• ThinkPads (and ThinkCentres)
• The PowerPC CPU line
• (what became) Lexmark Printers
• DeskStar hard drives
• x86 servers

And yet they still seem to be doing fine. While some of us may miss Lotus it doesn't appear that IBM will.

Agreed. Systems at work I keep locked down and secured much differently. At home only one system is accessible to the outside world at all, and only on two ports.

Such as portraying stealth as perfect invisibility? Yes, that's a straw man.

Learn what a straw man is.

The whole point of this is that there is no horizon to hide behind in space so stealth does not exist because there is no way to be undetectable.

You are claiming that the exhaust will cool to background radiation levels. That is, the temperature of the rest of the universe that has been cooling for billions and billions of years. You cannot explain how it will cool that fast.

So then you say that it doesn't have to be perfect, as long as everyone is blind. That's not stealth. That's blindness. You aren't invisible because a blind person cannot see you.

It's physics.

The Laws of Thermodynamics.

Keeping software requirements low is a good thing, and there isn't really any justification for making a basic desktop OS require good hardware if all people want to do is the same stuff they were doing ten years ago. If they wanted to weed out underpowered PCs, they should mandate an improved version of the Windows Experience Index be advertised alongside PCs with simple numbers for office and gaming performance, and maybe energy efficiency.

On the other hand, it's long past time to put 32 bit out to pasture, at least on the desktop. Remember, this OS will probably still be supported in the mid-2020s. I'm not going to want to maintain a 32 bit legacy codebase when PCs are coming with 256GB of ram standard.

I've still had tax disc reminders this year, and my partner only just got hers even though she's in this first October tranche of no paper disc folks so even with the change to paperless taxation they're still sending out the reminders thankfully.

I agree about the MOT btw, I find it a royal pain in the arse because it's not like the tax disc where you get a reminder and do it online, as you say you get no reminder and then you're at the whims of the fucking garages as they determine when you must give up your car to them. It's so stupidly inconvenient, especially as we only do about 3000 miles a year on one of our cars- the fact it has to be MOT'd as much as the car we do about 25,000 miles a year on is just plain fucking stupid as it's the mileage wear and tear that makes a difference - the 25,000 mile a year car frankly never passes it's MOT so probably isn't really technically roadworthy for a short while before it's MOT given that it's being driven around with those failures prior to the test, whilst the 3,000 mile a year one hasn't failed an MOT for about 5 years now and never needs anything doing to it so it shows what a farce the MOT system really is - it's highly inconvenient and doesn't solve the problem it's meant to solve, low mileage cars are getting penalised for the sake of it, and high mileage cars are driving around unsafe regardless.

That is a fair point, but I think it's orthogonal to the main issue. There are already laws about accessibility and discrimination for various other commercial activities, and I see no reason similar rules could not be extended to cover provision of creative content within the kind of scheme I described.

As a curious aside, technically there is already a provision for raising problems caused by DRM with the government in the UK. However, it's so obscure and awkward that I've never heard of anyone actually trying to use it.

That is one of many options.

I find it amusing to see how hard some people will work to try to compromise my inconsequential system. I set my messages log to turn over at a very high file size now so I can see the activities more readily through only one file. Even with people attacking at this frequency they pose no real danger to my system, either by way of filling my "logs with crap" or by actually trying to get it (as a prohibited user name).

My home box has seen a dramatic up-tick in frequency of ssh attempts - particularly as root (even though I don't allow remote logins as root regardless of whether the password is right or not) - but the frequency of attacks via PHP and other potential shellshock vectors hasn't changed much.

I recently had one IP address in China make over 10,000 attempts to log in as root via ssh in one morning. By comparison on the same day I saw only 109 failed attempts to load various php configuration pages.

Think about the content that is created today through the work of skilled, creative people. We're talking thousands of person-years for blockbuster movies, AAA games, top TV shows. Just presenting TV news and weather bulletins takes a not-so-small army of people working 24/7. For smaller scale works like, say, academic textbooks, we're still looking at a whole team of people working over several years.

The question is, is that kind of content naturally abundant? If society truly would continue to benefit from the same quantity and quality of such work even if those skilled, creative people didn't get paid, then you're right and the scarcity is artificial. Otherwise, we're not talking about artificial scarcity, we're just talking about economics.

But the law doesn't say, for example, that you have a legally protected right to make back-ups. It just says that making back-ups under certain conditions doesn't infringe copyright, which is a completely different statement.

The guys who negotiated these laws are not new at this. These changes have been in negotiation and consultation for several years, and despite the apparent wishful thinking of many posting in this Slashdot discussion, they didn't get to that process and then accidentally give away the keys to the kingdom without noticing.

Personally, in an ideal world but one where we accept the basic principle of copyright as a reasonable economic tool? I'd have:

1. 100% effective DRM. (Yes, really, but read on for what balances it.)

2. Compulsory escrow for any work being distributed commercially with DRM applied, and criminal sanctions for those who fail to provide the unprotected content to the relevant regulatory authority.

3. Much shorter copyright durations, probably varying by industry/type of work and dictated by what creates a reasonable commercial incentive but not an excessive one in each context, which I suspect would be around 5-10 years in most cases.

4. Original creators keeping the master copyright to any work they do, so big media distributors can only ever have exclusive licensing for relatively short periods (maybe 1-2 years) after which they have to renegotiate with the original creators if they want to renew their licence.

In short, I would give the creators primary control for the duration of the copyright, I would make big distribution channels into a market that is subservient to creators rather than the other way around, and then within that structure, members of the general public get a clear choice to enjoy a work immediately on whatever terms the market will support (one-off purchase, rental, library subscription, etc.) or to wait a significant but not absurd length of time until the work enters the public domain forever.

In shorter, I'd screw the distributor middlemen, make copyright back into something that provides a reasonable incentive to create and share good works, and make the default legal position that everyone can enjoy everything once that incentive has done its job.

What does America have to do with anything? This is about the UK, I live in the UK, and I'm talking about UK law. Here we have the EUCD, which is hardly "murky" on this matter, and the relevant provisions have been incorporated into UK law for around a decade now.

When do you think this hasn't held up in court? There have been various cases elsewhere in Europe where things like mod chips have survived a court challenge in various ways. However, in the UK, the judiciary seems to have taken a very consistent and pro-rightsholder view in such cases so far.

Also, what "clearer law saying something is specifically allowed" do you think applies here? The changes taking effect today have little to say about TPMs.

Perhaps you should read the Intellectual Property Office guidance (PDF) about this issue. Pay particular attention to the FAQ on page 4, where for example it notes:

Or just go straight to reading the changes themselves, which are written in legalese but clear enough for a non-lawyer to understand.

That's not how I read the BBC article, but if that is what it meant then it is wrong.

We have the EUCD here, which in somewhat similar to the DMCA. In fact, it is arguably stricter in this particular area, because it covers not only access control mechanisms but also copy protection mechanisms. The relevant details of the EU directive have been incorporated into UK law for roughly a decade.

Rightsholders can therefore pursue not only those circumventing such technical measures but also those making or distributing the equipment used to do so, and in some cases this can fall under criminal rather than civil law. Moreover, this has actually happened, for example in the Sony PS2 mod chip case.