Ah, but this isn't true. We buy lots of things that we have no expectation of being able to resell it. If our hypothetical person X buys a cup of coffee, walks into his office and is fired - can he sell the cup of coffee? It would be rare circumstance in which he could.

Anything personalized falls into this category; I don't want to buy your business cards off you, your nameplate, any of that. I might spend a lot of money on a portrait of my family, but there isn't going to be much chance anyone is going to buy that from me. One can buy cell phone service plans, house insurance, food, gourmet food, rose bulbs, club memberships, magazines - never with the thought that these things will be able to be traded in for something else if your circumstance changes.

Now, the fact that you can't resell something naturally reduces it's value to you, and in turn should reduce it's market price, ceterus paribus. But there is nothing inherently wrong with creating a product (or service) that is not resellable. It is only your expectation that is suggesting otherwise. But that should simply be reflected in price, not a moralistic rant against the whole idea.

That is an assumption on your part. Networking back-ends can be complicated; maybe Steam provides an actual component that is most realistically hosted with them. I'm not saying this is the case, but it's not an unreasonable possibility given the ability to save ones games remotely, and so on. They've added capabilities, not just taken them away. For that matter, I see the Steam client as essential to get at what they're offering - painless updates, ability to load up my games anywhere, ability to browse a bunch of games from home, regardless of many other distinctions between them.

Where did your use of the phrasing "sell [a] game 'on'" come from? It's odd.

A game that requires x thing - in this case Steam - is not really a new thing. Games require the Windows operating system at times. Or Direct X version 47. Or 'at least an Intel 486 Processor'. Or a CD ROM drive. Or some other game - unless expansions don't count? From an abstract perspective the complaint that you need something 'extra' doesn't hold much water. The extra thing has changed, but how does that inherently make a difference? Why does this thing cause a problem and not some other thing.

Second Hand Markets. Ok, so you're saying you want to buy a game for some period of time, and then sell it, recouping some money. How is that different from a 'service'? And if the game were to simply drop in cost, would that mean your complaint here would go away?

Frankly, I don't see the sentiment of "DRM should not in any way inconvenience the user" as being particularly salient. The world is inconveniencing. Why don't I get all games ever made now, in the past or in the future, in my head right now? It's inconvenient that I don't. Hell, that I have to work to pay for games - second hand or not - is inconvenient. The world is full of limitations. There may be a way around this one, but on the other hand there is an opportunity cost for everything, and being sad that there that is true is like being sad we don't all get what we wish for, and a pony.

Right now, the opportunity cost derives from the fact that developers need to retain some ability to pay for food. Or buy other games. It's sort of a headache for the rest of us... but if you're willing to pay for the game at a certain price, where exactly are your rights getting trampled? You even seem to be implying you'd eventually offload a game - so why are you worried about when Steam goes away as a company?

(Never mind the irony that you're both advocating this and complaining about it.)

My point is this; we're entering a new way of looking at property. Treating it as a physical item is becoming increasingly silly. Second hand markets are a reflection of the limits of physical items; I'm only going to be able to make so many tables. There are simply only so many trees in the world, and they become increasingly expensive the more I use. Eventually people will only be able to afford second hand tables. This does not hold for data. Data is no more expensive to send across the internet the 6 billionth time (total population of the Earth) than it is the first. If anything, it's cheaper.

So your complaint really seems to be; why can't you get a price reduction because you don't want to buy the game 'forever'? Am I wrong?

I love that people who rail against having to pay some arbitrary price to the developers of a game immediately turn around and claim they have a right to resell their copy of the game. Despite Steam, you have the option to buy games in a box, and furthermore you have the option to buy them second hand.

What you are failing to grok is that the cost for these options are increasingly not based on the intrinsic value of the physical item. (Which is ridiculous in this case because we're just talking about data.) The value you're getting is the ease at which you get at what you want.

I'm not a fan of DRM, but I think Steam has come up with an imperfect but workable solution. What I would love to see is for someone (and believe you me I'm working on a variant of this idea) to attack what the real problem is; namely that Steam has controlled the source. They have a superior method by which to deliver the product, but presently if you want that you have to go through them.

So, what is the product? The product (service?) is the personal use of games on any system you choose to install them on, combined with the ability to get them whenever you want (assuming net connection), and (and this is important) the ability to seamlessly connect into a social networking utility whose interface is constant throughout those games.

The Steam client is a beautiful illustration of what the end result should be; but what you're quibbling with, and what this whole discussion is about, is how the internals work. What you want is a service that can deliver the data and track what rights you have to it based on your identity - which can be worked out via another service. There is no reason that you have only one delivery service... and I don't mean 'Steam' and 'Greenhouse' per se. I only want to install one client. Rather, I mean that that client ought to be able to connect to either. It ought to be able to get my identity information (what I've bought) from any (valid) source I identify. And it ought to be able to network me across not only games delivered through different providers but also also social networks delivered through different providers.

In short; stop griping that it doesn't work like it used to. When humans came down from the trees they left off with the tail. Yeah, it sucks not being able to hold a banana with your tail, but we got over it. The key is to figure out how we can allow those normal market forces to work on what is the superior technical solution. Which requires a refining of that solution. At that point your money complaints will evaporate.

However, for the love of all that is good, lay off with the arguments that one person's quest for profit is evil, but yours is somehow sanctified.

I think you have a great point here; most workplaces don't have much idea how to effectively use highly-academically-trained individuals. Most workplaces expect a high-school educated person; they know their 'letters and numbers', and the jobs are geared towards that entry level as a result. However, when you have people who are capable of higher-level thinking, most jobs simply don't know how to integrate them effectively.

That doesn't mean buy them a plane ticket for Rome, of course, but it does mean treating them as something more than one more drone.

Null References Don't Kill People... Programmers Kill People.

But it's also funny. Wasn't it Heinlein who posited that all humor is based in pain?

From where I'm sliding, we're sliding into a corporate oligarchy - assuming we're not already there. I think you vastly underestimate how much money affects the outcome of elections.

The assumptions being made here are where I think you're losing the GGP. It's entirely possible to compete without 'fighting', or more importantly, as you insinuate, 'fight dirty'. And, frankly, having a 'very big piece' of the (mythical) pie is not necessarily the best goal to have in mind. Finally, you are assuming a discrete world with discrete resources - that there is a pie, and that pie is only so big and does not change.

Now, one could argue that the pie is actually shrinking, what with the economic and environmental disasters we're facing. But our ability to increase said pie is not gone. Further, you can act virtuously while you do this. It is not unethical to not tell anyone else about a job you're looking at getting (it would be unethical to hide it from them, though, or lie about it when asked) - but the comparison of doing a job (delivering a service in exchange for money) to sharing code is not there. Simply because code is 'open' does not mean any monkey can use it, or use it well.

In fact, open source very likely expands the pie faster - and while it may seem against the individual best interest to open source, it is very much in the common interest to do so. Code gets better, faster, when it's open. It's far more likely to get into the hands of people passionate about the task at hand, rather than just into the hands of people being paid to do the task. This is good, because ultimately you, as a human being, don't care about the value of the code (which, outside of a context, is equal to nothing). What you care about is the value you get from what the code does.

And, ultimately, what code does is remove redundant tasks that are inefficient to do manually by a human. This removal of redundancy means more things can be made faster, and humans are freed to do more sophisticated tasks - or nothing at all, if they so choose.

In the aggregate, this is a good thing. In the specific, the difficulty is having the end value pass through to the people doing the work. That is one of the sophisticated problems I wish we had more time and energy to address. But deciding to limit open source is to decide to limit the pie growth - and that's ultimately self-defeating, keeping you 'in your place'.

The fact is that the impression you're implying of the 'real world' is one we're habituated to. We expect it to not be all puppies and ponies. But the people who get ahead choose to rework some set of assumptions that free them from a system that is very, very good at keeping wealth and knowledge in the hands of the few upon the backs of the many. The ethical person should start by rejecting those premises and finding ways to accrue wealth, knowledge and anything else of value through means that do not screw the people around them.

Of course, if all you actually care about is the Benjamins, then all of that is meaningless. But I'd posit that such a mindset is actually terribly regressive - it's a primitive thought pattern barely worthy of your average mammal, nevermind humans. There has to be something more to it.

Why even make it an 'Internet Ready' TV? This technology is not poorly understood. Computers have been piping cable into their TV cards for years.

The monitor+computer biome is well understood (*cough*Apple*cough*); all you need is two different connectors. People are likely to have internet, and likely to have cable.

Now you just need to write software to parse between these things and provide an interface people already know. You can even arrange their downloaded media as "channels" that they can watch. Over time, that's all anyone would watch. You could have it remember what you watch and go ahead and download that stuff before you even ask for it. And you can market it as... *gasp* 'A TV'. Because it looks like a TV, works like a TV, and quacks like a TV. But it also has some other stuff.

Cable didn't take off as an industry because it was awesome, but because it was easy. You plug it in. The infrastructure was the hard part - but someone else handled that. There is nothing new here to teach people, just some internals that need reworking.

Times like this, I wish I was out of college and had venture capital.

Ha! You should be modded funny.

The problem, of course, is that advertisers want to push their product, and they want to make sure you notice. They can't do that in a show without turning you off of the show... and thus them.

Sperm do not decide anything, never mind that they're going to volunteer for a race up the vaginal canal. That's like saying the Moon decides to orbit the Earth, or that electrons decide to seek positive charge.

Choice - if it exists at all - is very clearly a rare thing in the universe. You may wish to re-examine your argument.

You are entirely correct; Hulu is rolling over for these mysterious and un-named 'content providers' (so much for a transparent culture...). But Boxee is rolling over for Hulu. It's not that Boxee can't get Hulu's feed - it's that Boxee isn't going to, because presumably that would result in forcing Hulu to respond legally, or respond technologically with some arbitrary set of bloated interlocks.

I think, as I noted above, that the real unknown here is who is forcing this move. Of course, it's a bad move, but one does wonder as to the motivation - which is effectively cloaked from the masses. That, I think, is the cardinal sin. There could be good reasons to remove support, but we have no choice now but to assume the malicious reasons.

The gp was modded flamebait no doubt because he's attacking the idea because it's been strongly associated with the stereotypical 'liberal' mindset, not because it's a bad idea.

Your argument against said modding is a bit incoherent. Gates was not using an appeal to pity, nor was he threatening the audience. Rather, he invoked the audience's imagination, which would better describe what it's like to live under such a threat. Simultaneously, he drew attention to the fact that this a problem poor people have, because they're forced to live in disease-ridden areas. To say the rich and the poor are equally affected by disease is like saying that a man behind a bullet proof piece of glass and one who is not is equally affected by a bullet fired at them. You have to take away the context in which they exist for that to hold.

The ultimate point is that the efforts to reduce Malaria are not misguided - and to score cheap points off their similarity to environmentalism in this country is flamebaiting. It assumes the precondition that the 'liberal' mindset is not only wrong but the cause for any issue we've seen in the past - which is a ridiculous assertion.

And as long as we're racking up ridiculous assertions, let's try this one; that because something provides a short term gain one should use it if nothing better is available, regardless of the side effects. To make an exaggerated point - one could dose the malaria affected regions with radiation; spread around uranium or something else radioactive enough to kill the mosquitos - and everything else - dead. Even if you remove the humans beforehand, that land becomes unusable.

One should be mighty cautious when intoxicating an environment, even if it saves some from a present threat. The lives saved in the meantime aren't going to mean much if they're also cancer-ridden, or have other diseases. There is a real cost there. This is not an issue of 'needing to be ecologically correct'. It's an issue of understanding that humans are impacted by their environment, and that environment is hard to control. Willy-nilly short-term attempts to do so can and regularly do end in disaster.

In any event, the solution is pretty simple; we have a non-toxic medicine that will inoculate people. The issue is simply cost. So, to propose DDT as a cheap solution is basically saying that it's acceptable to kill people slowly rather than saving them. Yes, it may be better than killing them outright - but then you get no points for humanity, ethical behavior or moral righteousness.

They did use to use - and in some cases still do use - mercury as a preservative for immunizations. There is no direct evidence that it does anything, but it's not a myth.

But yeah, anyone who doesn't know anything about the ban on DDT shouldn't be using it as an excuse to claim that some liberal conspiracy is destroying the world through inanity. Any claim that disease affects the rich and poor equally is ridiculous.

Yeah... because you should totally attribute the expense of drugs to 'those liberals'. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with so-called conservatives in this country and their desire to segment markets to drive up the price - the side effects be damned.