Please - Think of the ponies!

I've got old 500MB harddrives that read/work just fine

I have got data from when 5MB H/Ds were introduced ON TAPE, written with tar that is still readable. Good luck reading your ST506 interface H/Ds written with DOS 4.2.

The manufacturers claimed 30 years for CDs, few of which seem to last even one year on my desk.

OTOH, I have read tapes after 30 years. If long term storage is what you want, the LTOx is the answer. Make multiple tapes and put them in different places (countries, continents).

They mean, it's been tested for a few months at high temperature and humidity, and assume that translates to 1000 years.
They also claim in comparison your data is only safe on a hard drive for 1.5 years, DVD 3 - 7 years, USB drive 5 - 8 years.

Sounds like a crock of shit to me.

Even in Finance, they've done that. Look at PayPal. The only reason that it exists is that the banks and credit card companies dragged their feet with online payments. They're now doing free electronic person-to-person transfers, but it's still expensive to take credit card payments online.

Exactly. Go back a couple of hundred years and you even have well-off people saying 'I don't need to learn to write, I can afford to hire a scribe'. You had people saying 'not everyone needs to learn to read and write, there aren't enough jobs for that many scribes anyway'.

Before he retired, my stepfather was the head groundskeeper on a golf course. Not exactly the kind of job you think of as requiring coding skills. Except that they had a computerised irrigation system that could trigger sprinklers in response to various events (humidity sensors, motion sensors, time, and so on). It came with a partly-graphical domain-specific programming language for controlling it. It's going to be very hard in the next 50 years to find a job that doesn't require some programming to do it competently - even this kind of stereotypically low-tech job requires it now.

I used to pirate games and I used to buy games. I eventually couldn't be bothered with pirating and worrying about malware or with trying to jump through the hoops that the publishers wanted, so I stopped playing games altogether. Then gog.com launched and sold me games that I was nostalgic about, cheaply. Then they started selling newer games. I spent more with them last six months than I did on total on games in the five years since Steam was launched and the industry wend DRM-happy. I can download DRM-free installers for all of the games, often in OS X, Windows, and Linux versions.

It turns out that there's another answer to piracy that works: sell your product in a way that's easy to use at a reasonable price. Stop worrying about pirates and start worrying about customers. Someone who wouldn't buy your game anyway who pirates it is not a lost sale, but someone who can't be bothered to put up with your treating them like a criminal and so doesn't buy from you is. Buying a game from gog.com is easier than pirating and, if you factor in the cost of your time, probably cheaper as well.

Give me a product I want for a reasonable price and I will happily hand over my money, because I feel that I'm getting something valuable in return. Don't, and... well, computer games are not the only form of entertainment available.

I'd also like to plug the FFII for anyone in Europe. They have a few MEPs among their members and have had some important successes. Less relevant in this particular issue, but they have a lot of overlap with the EFF in other places.

Nope. The solution for XP expiring is Linux.

The equivalent for Andoid is to require the boot loader to be unlocked for free if there is no free availability of security updates. Then you can use the ROM of your choice. It is open source, so people can, and probably will, fix bugs if there is still a significant user base*. If not unlocked, then Google or the manufacturer is wilfully converting the phone landfill, and should be billed accordingly.

Clearly, this needs to be a legal right. There is a remote chance of this in Europe, but probably none in the USA - there are no consumer rights in the land of the free.

* I would argue that the source (and data sheet) for device drivers should be compulsorily released to public domain where the hardware manufacturer is not maintaining them.

Adult phone users have slightly more grownup expectations: If the hardware is not busted, then the phone should be fixable by the end user following a viable procedure - eg taking it to the local phone shop.

We do not need any more landfill.

I have two Android phones, one running the latest software available for it - the other, CM. I also use two Nokias that are 5 and 8 years old. My computer has been regulary upgraded, but is, in the vewi of most of my family, over 10 years old (runs Linux Mint). If Android phones have a very short life, I wont be buying more of them, considering the extremely high price.

If Google do not address security risks, then their market share means this is a National Security Risk and I expect my government to act - using RPGs and nuking from high orbit if required.

However, if this security failing leads to a major loss of money or privacy for Android users, I suspect Google could be on the recieving end of a multi-gazillion dollar class action.

And so could the handset manufacturers.

This is going to be so big, the lawyers wont bother laughing all the way to the bank - the banks will come to them.

Right. It doesn't seem like a threat to say 'if you pass this then we'll have to actually do our jobs!' It just makes you wonder what they're doing now instead...

One of the tell-tale signs of the quality of a country's democracy in the internet age is the difference in upload versus download bandwidth allocated to the average internet user. Do the people get a voice, or is the internet a receive-only medium?

Actually, a lot of these games just use WINE's implementation of DirectX. This either translates the calls to OpenGL or implements a DirectX state tracker directly if you have Gallium drivers configured correctly. The same is true of a lot of Mac games. Good luck getting WINE to run on a console though...

Your typical GPU driver is about 10MB of object code. It contains a complex optimising compiler and controls a device that has complete DMA access to your computer. It is written with speed as the only significant goal. Making a GPU driver 1% faster contributes enough to sales to pay the salaries of several driver developers. Making the GPU driver more secure generates zero additional sales.

The shader code that's fed into this stack from WebGL is sanitised and is completely safe to run, assuming that your driver stack is 100% bug free. Still feel safe?