Here's another example of the straw man.

You're claiming that the Laws of Thermodynamics are straw men.

Physics shows that you are wrong.

Sure, you can't make a detectable object perfectly undetectable by definition.

You can when there is a planet between you. That is why stealth works on Earth.

That is why stealth fails in space.

It's about being much harder to detect so that various militarily-useful activities can be conducted such as sneaking up on some target and shooting it.

Light travels at over a million kilometers an hour. Which means that anyone you are sneaking up on will have hours of advance warning.

There is no such thing as a perfect detector - among other things it would need infinite area both to observe perfectly and to store the infinite amount of information it received.

Who said it had to be perfect? I'm pointing out that your exhaust will be radiating heat in all directions. Over billions of kilometers. Maybe trillions of kilometers.

And that light will be travelling at a million kilometers an hour.

And I already explained how rocket exhaust can cool that fast.

No you have not. You just keep repeating that it will.

The universe has been cooling for billions and billions of years.

Why would the exhaust cool to that same temperature in a day?

The Laws of Thermodynamics say you are wrong.

It's physics.

Not really. If there is sufficient demand for something, the market would tend to provide it at a viable price. For more niche uses, it wouldn't, but that's always the deal when you go outside the mainstream with any technology.

The difference in "my world" is that there would be a much shorter time limit on how long any sort of lock-in could last for. If anything, that should create a greater incentive to maximise availability via different channels as broadly and quickly as possible to gain the maximum commercial advantage from the limited-time opportunity. Creators and distributors would not be able to play the waiting game or lock people into very expensive payment schemes, because they would always be competing with the not-so-far-away alternative of completely free access, so it would almost inevitably be more profitable to promote more access sooner while it still brings in revenues for them.

On the other hand, I simply don't subscribe to the "everything must be free" camp. It costs a lot to make good content, and someone has to pay for it. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that a lot of people aren't holding up their side of the deal, and that means some combination of the content providers and the other consumers who do pay for content are picking up the slack unfairly. So, want to play something on Linux? Get Linux to support my idealised bulletproof DRM and show there's enough of a market to justify any overheads in making the content available on that platform -- just like any other platform has to. Don't want to play by the same rules as everyone else? No problem, you aren't forced to, but unlike today you'll still get to enjoy the content within a relevant time frame after its statutory protection expires.

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.