I'm getting Free's gigabit FTTH in Febuary. Just wait. Fibre is being deployed. If you're too far from a dslam, it sucks, I know (7mbit now), but it's not going to be better outside of paris.

In Paris, after using the local taxis several times, and after experiencing the horrifically rude drivers. I swore them off in favor of Uber. Now, France is trying to do the same thing as Germany (at the behest of the existing monopoly of asshole taxis). What you're witnessing here is the preservation of a state granted monopoly on sub-par service, not any real protection of the consumer. Personally, I prefer Uber's system when higher rated drivers get priority and users rate their rides to one where I have no choice, one where the state had made the decision for me (with predictably bad results). After all, what is the incentive to be a nice guy to your customers if they have no choice in choosing you.

Small scale piracy, yes, but not large scale. The scene dudes at that time just compressed the audio assets using lossy compression and/or removed the videos entirely. They then wrote their own installers to decompress the assets. Maybe 5 games or more on a CD-R using this technique. I used to buy them in Romania for about 5-10 USD a piece from street vendors.

You're incredibly naive if you think that there is a society or a species that is inherently altruistic. Our survival required being selfish and this is the basis of our evolution as a species. Even other species, such as wolves, will fight over resources. The strong survive. The weak die. Countless generations of this have resulted in who we are and it is completely futile to fight it. Greed is in our nature and it is to our collective benefit that we acknowledge this "unfortunate" fact and take advantage of it. Capitalism is the only system that does. The rest only pretend to deliver equality while in reality setting the stage for inevitable tyranny. There is a reason a strong central state doesn't work. It's comprised of people who are greedy. No matter how altruistic they pretend to be, it is in their nature to maintain that power and dominate others. Power doesn't corrupt, it just allows us to express the inner person we all are but wish we weren't. It's better this power be restricted, which is why a constitutional republic, governed by law rather than humanity, will always be superior to those moral busybodies who claim themselves to have our best interest in heart.

Even requesting that of incorrect data is unreasonable. Who is to determine truth? Only the courts can do that.

As far as I understand, Valve says you can install from other sources. Also, not all Steam games have DRM. Quite a few actually don't have any protection at all. Steam is primarily a distribution service. It's the game developers who demand the DRM.

See for yourself. Portal as well. It may be a newer change, but I think It has worked like this for a while.

Believe it or not, Half Life 2 and episodes are DRM free and can be run without Steam. Lots of steam games don't have DRM. Steam is simply a distrobution platform that provides optional DRM that actually works pretty well. On top of all this, Steam's family sharing even lets you share your games with family and friends. The only games that don't work with family sharing are those with additional DRM on top, like Uplay, GFWL, Rockstar, etc. because they require a secondary login and the key can only be registered to one account.

Still is in many countries outside the US, especially in Europe. My husband works for a major IT company in France and they often have drinks with lunch. On friday they have company provided champagne (and other drinks).

Very true. I wonder how many fake Europeans will be taking advantage of this. I mean if all it takes is sending takedown request and there is no real penalty for false ones... We've seen what happened with the DMCA.

As far as I know, there is a US law that already allows companies to refuse foreign court orders that would conflict with the first amendment. I'm not sure on the specifics of how that would factor in here. Time will tell, I suppose.

I can't imagine Google complying if that's the case. My feeling is they'll restrict viewing for European IPs and that will be compliance enough.