But if the produced material sucks, you're stuck wasting your money on something that isn't any good.

Or in the alternative, you could allow investors to shoulder that risk, and in exchange be allowed the exclusive right to distribute and charge for the produced material. This way, if the game sucks, you don't have to spend any money on it. But if the game is good, you've got to give the investor some money to cover his cost, plus some to cover his risk, plus some to provide a return on his investment to encourage him to take the risk to begin with. Of course, if people could just copy it, the investor wouldn't be able to recoup the investment, so he wouldn't be able to do it. So maybe there could be some kind of law for that. But that kind of brings us full circle doesn't it.

So it looks like you fall into the category of naive. A little more.

A hell of a lot more than it does today with a cheap Mac? Quality hasn't exactly gone up with falling costs and more amateurs.

How well do shareware games cope with piracy again? What was the last shareware game purchased by over five million people?

The free software movement works well for one and only one type of software, software used by programmers, in particular, library code. This includes things like operating systems, web browsers, programming languages, web servers, and other related code. My company has launched several open source projects, and we contribute code to open source projects that we use. The reason that we do this isn't some greater good bullshit, it's to externalize the continued development and maintenance cost of software that isn't core to our business. In other words, we'll only open source in house projects in the hopes that we'll generate some feature additions and bug fixes from the community. Along those same lines, we don't contribute bugfixes and feature additions back to help out a project. We do it because we want to get our changes merged into the head so we don't have to pay to maintain our own branch. You'll notice that it doesn't translate to entertainment.

You still haven't answered the question. What are you going to replace copyright with so that large projects are still undertaken? You're either stupid, ignorant, or naive if you think the answer is amateurs working for free.

The same reason there are so few open-source games of a reasonable quality. Time and complexity. Unlike a book, it can take a large team of people years to produce a modern game. The average cost to produce a modern videogame is over $15m. And before you say it wasn't always that way, keep in mind it cost $100,000 to produce Pacman way back in 1982.

And to cut you off again, not many people are going to work on something for your enjoyment full time for years on end. It's a fantasy, nothing more, nothing less.

So what is your solution to this problem? You still want these same "oligarch's" to fund the creation of the content you want, right? Why would they do so if there was no possibility of a return on their investment? You are aware that a large percentage of projects fail, right? What would inspire people to take the risk if there was no reward? More government? Magic fairy dust? Bullshit fantasy land?

So fight to change it at the local level. We don't have tough franchise agreements, so we have three companies competing to provide cable television and internet access. The result is faster speeds and lower prices. It was kind of a hassle having the lawn dug up three times to install lines, but we probably save $500 a year because of the competition.

If cooling or changing weather patterns in certain areas doesn't disprove global warming, the opposite doesn't prove it either.

Hypocritical much?

How awful of them to use the name of San Fransisco's sister city, the "Silicon Valley" of India, as a product codename. Were you equally offended when Ibex Peak, Tylersburg, Alviso, Calistoga, Lakeport, Broadwater, Eaglelake, Crestline and Cantiga were used as codenames?

  You don't need to get your panties in a twist over this. Although it is worth mentioning that it makes you look like a racist when you assume that an innocuous naming decision is some form of racial bigotry or social commentary.

From the article:

The government didn't include network redundancy in the RFP. Poor planning on the part of the government.

Government can't properly spec a problem causing outages, and it's the fault of "free enterprise". You people sure have a vivid imagination. From the article:

Smells like government incompetence.

Incompetent government employees? Impossible.

Welcome to the world of uninformed slashdotters. This contract was likely best value, not low-bid. Low-bid procurements are pretty rare, especially for something like this. It's not the contractors job to overbid the contract to provide services the government decided it didn't need.

Then maybe the real issue is people using the school system to indoctrinate people. It's no secret that educators across America push liberal ideals. Just take a look at the list of Obama's top donors, http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00009638. It should be stopped all around.

How can you see it as not relevant, in a discussion of government taking over for the private sector.

I guess you missed the citation in my post. Again, number of papers does not equal dollars spent. The US supports 82% of biomedical R&D.

Talk about irrelevancies. Way to bring global warming into this. And that further discredits you, there is clear evidence they bs'd their evidence to support their agenda. That's why they "lost" their data.