Doing what is most economically efficient is not always what's best for society as a whole. The bankers and deregulators that helped create the Great Recession were just doing what was most economically efficient at the time. Tunnel vision like that often leads to very huge negative unintended consequences. Doing what is most economically efficient readily contributes to the destruction of the commons, whereby all of us suffer in small and large ways.

Most strawberry farms won't be replaced with a Disneyland, they'll be replaced with just another shopping mall. As a counter thought, consider what would happen if you decided to sell off Central Park in Manhattan. It's prime real estate and a lot of folks could do some very economically efficient things with that land. However, it would absolutely gut the character of Manhattan and a huge portion of the appeal of living there.

Building a city worth living in and being a part of cannot be viewed in strictly economic terms. And what's best for the economy is not always best for the people inhabiting a society. Some level of balance should be struck.

Doing what is most economically efficient is not always what's best for society as a whole. The bankers and deregulators that helped create the Great Recession were just doing what was most economically efficient at the time. Tunnel vision like that often leads to very huge negative unintended consequences. Doing what is most economically efficient readily contributes to the destruction of the commons, whereby all of us suffer in small and large ways.

Most strawberry farms won't be replaced with Disney, they'll be replaced with just another shopping mall. As a counter thought, consider what would happen if you decided to sell off Central Park in Manhattan. It's prime real estate and a lot of folks could do some very economically efficient things with that land. However, it would absolutely gut the character of Manhattan and a huge portion of the appeal of living there.

Building a city worth living in and being a part of cannot be viewed in strictly economic terms. And what's best for the economy is not always best for the people inhabiting a society. Some level of balance should be struck.

You're responding to a thread in which the person already stated they're on a disability budget. So kudos to you for calling a disabled person lazy!

This is actually one of the main things that keeps me on Macs. They're the only ones who's product line for laptops is primarily 16:10 for the displays. I abhor the general conversion to 16:9. That additional vertical resolution is important to me.

This! After Enigma was cracked in WWII, the allies went to great length to make sure it remained cracked. They would fly fake recon flights near the locations of subs they knew about. This would make it appear as though the subs where found through conventional means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra#Safeguarding_of_sources

While I didn't have an entire curriculum dedicated to anti-piracy, I did have to take CompSci as a graduation requirement from my high school. One of our assignments consisted of writing a children's book on the evils of hacking and piracy. Naturally, I took the opportunity to make a complete mockery of the assignment. Mr Peepers and the MegaVirus was the result. Highlights included an over the top evil mastermind wearing an adamantium mask, a virus causing a computer to get so hot it exploded, and impalation on a mounted unicorn head. Oh good times.

Actually, Valve uses the word "own" as well. Just go check out anyone's steam profile. When they buy a game there's a message: "Bob owns BioShock Infinite." So Valve themselves are using the same misleading ownership language.

It's barely added functionality. If you use your steam account on anything approaching a regular basis the feature is useless. For a collection of casual gamers who play half an hour here or there some utility exists. However, a core component of Steam’s audience: hard core gamers with large libraries, will often be using their accounts and therefore be ineligible to share. For the hard core gamer, Steam's bread and butter, this feature is a carrot followed by a punch in the face.

Apple’s policy of five authorized machines is more sensible and actually enables family sharing across multiple computers and family members. Something more akin to that, but with a division of accounts, would be truly useful.

If you play any one game from your library it kicks the person you're sharing with from your library. A library is an all at once or nothing share. So my wife can't play Skyrim from my account while I'm playing Borderlands 2. Without being able to share individual games, the feature is pretty worthless. Step in the right direction, sure, but barely. I still have to make sure I'm not in my account (or go offline) if my wife wants to play one of my games. It's pretty much no change from how we have to do things now. Hence, worthless.

I setup the shared computer with Linux and problems went away. As long as they had a web browser that covered most of their computing needs. One of my roommates even commented she liked it better after I switched because of how much faster the computer became. If guests are persnickety about OS, they can bring their own device. After all, you are doing them the favor by providing them with anything.

You can submit comments about the bill yourself at:

http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=5211&year=2013

Even though the amendment has already been withdrawn, it never hurts to add your voice in opposition such that it won't be reintroduced. The new system where the public can comment on pending legislation is pretty cool

No, it's part of being human. Oh, and being part of the somewhat sexually repressed culture of the United States.

First I'd like to say thanks for the tip about the Keyboard preference. I've been a Mac user for years and that's something that has always annoyed me, having to go to mouse when I dialog pops up where the default is Cancel and I can't keyboard over to OK.

As to the menu navigation thing, it's always sucked compared to Windows and that's one thing I missed when I switched. I never used to know the shortcuts in Windows because a combination of Alt, then accellerator keys made it so incredibly fast to navigate the menus to do what I needed. Only since switching to Mac did I have to learn the shortcuts. I still wish I could navigate the menus in Mac. Even the Ctr+F2 to get to the menu is weak. Especially because on a mac laptop this means it's a hand contortion of Ctrl+Fn+F2. Far less elegant than a simple Alt in Windows. Also the lack of single character underlines makes navigating the menus much more painful.

However, the biggest thing I love is switching between applications vs switching between windows. I tend to keep a lot of windows open, so just simple task switching in Windows can be a chore because the Window list is so long. By comparison the Mac app list is much shorter and switching to the app via the Dock or Cmd+Tab brings up the last opened window for that app anyway which is most often what I want. Mac multi-tasking is vastly superior to me for this reason. Combine that with Expose is a huge reason it'd be hard for me to switch away from OS X. Those features are just too good.