Indeed. No-one is arguing that abolishing copyright today wouldn't be good for everyone but the rightsholders tomorrow. It's whether it's still good for everyone next week or next year or ten years from now that is in question.

Your point about the best amateur work today competing with good professional work from a decade or two ago is well made, and it's a sign of how far and how fast technology has evolved in recent years. However, it's also a sign that amateurs now have access to tools and techniques originally developed for professionals a few years ago. You're ignoring that in a world where no-one has any incentive to make big budget productions like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, there is also no budget to develop those professional-grade tools in the first place and nothing to start the trickle down effect.

I think you're also overstating the case dramatically. While today's dedicated and skilled amateurs can make work rivalling professional quality from yesteryear, few amateurs have the time and skill to actually do it. The rest of the time, you get music recordings that are good, but not as good as they would have been if someone had hired a professional recording studio with the right acoustics and equipment. You get the occasional brilliant piece of writing, but you have to filter out a thousand uninspired works of fan fiction to find it. You get a fun film project, but it looks like someone's friend held the camcorder and they ran through a couple of After Effects tutorials afterwards, because that really is what happened. And of course they used After Effects, probably downloaded from a pirate site, to do that, because for the most part the community-built alternatives to professionally created software don't cut it.

As a final point, the growth in capabilities and scale for modern creative projects is astounding. Twenty years ago, a single developer could create a state-of-the-art game, maybe with a little help from specialists on the graphics and audio fronts. Today, a single good developer can still create a fun game, but it won't look like the state-of-the-art, or anything close to it. I'm all for games with interesting gameplay and films with interesting storylines, and I'll be the first to agree that those are more important than the latest big budget effects and a full soundtrack. But professional quality work today can produce all of the above, and no small group of amateurs will ever compete with that, no matter how enthusiastic or skilled they might be or how long you wait.

So I don't think it's self-evident from your valid point about what some today's amateurs can do today that amateurs in a few years would match today's best professional work if we abolished the incentives for big budget productions tomorrow. Star Wars was released in 1977, nearly four decades ago, and today's hobbyists on YouTube are still doing light saber effects. At that rate, most of us will be dead before anyone is keeping up with what today's commercial industry can do.

Right, but it's that scarcity that matters in this case, because that is the part that takes serious time and money to do. Copyright is just a way of amortizing those costs over a large user base who are only willing to contribute a small amount individually, such that expensive-to-create works are still viable. I would argue that having some economic model that allows this distribution of costs, whether copyright or something else, is clearly a good thing if we value the creation and distribution of high quality work.

Yes there are, and there are some interesting ideas there that might offer better alternative models in time. Moreover, as you say, there is a question of how much distributors artificially distort the markets using copyright; one of the more infamous examples is Disney's strategy of releasing a movie on disc for only a very limited time and then locking it back in the vault for years.

Even so, right now, today, alternative funding models have yet to reach within about two orders of magnitude of funding what copyright does. Therefore, while copyright obviously has some undesirable properties, as an economic tool I claim it is currently the least bad model we have found.

You're doing it wrong.

Not wrong as in "that's wrong to do", but wrong as in "you'll do better with people you interact with in the real world."

If, of course, you can put the cellphone/iPad/keyboard down for enough minutes to interact with the people around you.

Online profiles are far more "crafted" than real-world interactions, and real-world interactions provide far more clues when someone is gaming you.

Of course you are, and I have no problem with that. Copyright wasn't supposed to be a mechanism for locking up culture indefinitely. As long as enough people still want things soon enough to pay for them at reasonable prices, creators can still make a decent return and will still create and share stuff, and that is what it's all about.

I agree that OS/2 represented one of the greatest marketing screw-ups in the history of marketing. They should have eaten Microsoft's lunch with OS/2 but instead found themselves on the outside looking in. IIRC they tried the brilliant slogan of "I just totally warped my computer!" which a lot of people had a hard time comprehending to be a good thing.

It was, nonetheless, an excellent product for its time. IIRC it was still running on ATMs and other embedded platforms not too long ago.

I think they could have saved this without breaking their necks for GHz. That said, they did pull off quite a feat when they had all three of the current-generation home gaming consoles running on PowerPC or PowerPC-derived CPUs. The CPUs were able to to great things at lower clock speeds, but once again IBM was failed - at least in part - by wholly inept marketing.

Maintenance wasn't great, but they brought some important technologies to the consumer.

I would say this was yet another case of IBM collapsing under failures of bad marketing. They had one generation of drives that went down badly, and ended up giving up the whole shooting match as a result. DeskStars on either side of the "DeathStar" generation were excellent, I owned many over the years. There is a reason why Hitachi kept the DeskStar name going after buying it from IBM, it represented quality hard drives (excluding one awful generation).

From my experience it was worth it to get an IBM server due to ease of maintenance and better service contract terms.

A lot of people will tell you it still is, even under Lenovo. I'm using a Lenovo ThinkPad right now and it's doing as well as the IBM ThinkPad it replaced. I haven't tried out the Lenovo warranty yet, though.

Well, I was talking about Cygwin at that point. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. ;-)

In California, the law said that if you were within 3 years you had a misdemeanor, and outside that a felony, at least as pertains to statutory rape. I became sexually active at 15, so this was fairly relevant information

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.

• 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.