I will agree with a subset of your proposition.

A system of agreed upon contracts by two or more entities, enforceable through a civil legal system, is a normal state of affairs.

Such a contract implicitly agreed upon by a vast number of third parties, and also enforceable against said third parties, is not.

It may have been an acceptable state of affairs due to technical limitation, but no longer. This system has been taken to its logical extreme and appropriated not for its original purpose of furthering of the arts through limited legal monopoly, but rather as having the primary purpose of giving individuals what are in practice infinite duration personal rights of monopoly, similar rights having previously been a means to an end.

At minimum changes and additions to these laws should be reversed. Quite possibly the entirety of the idea is no longer desirable.

To pirate in this case is to do the amoral thing.

By bypassing the maker's attempts at DRM you disincentivise (or at least do not incentivise) them to pull that sort of crap, whether you ignore it or play it.

nevermind ethics or morality, I enjoy paying for a product that is well made. I don't when it's chock full of invasive DRM. So then I pirate, and any gratitude felt will be towards the release group that went to the trouble of trimming off the worse than useless cruft.

You just scroll down and more results are loaded. It's worth using Bing for that feature alone.

I use the Firefox plugin AutoPager for much the same purpose. It has the added benefit that it also does this for almost every single site I routinely visit, and a lot of the ones I just randomly stumble upon.

I see that your approach to what to do with convicted killers would be to punish them to the point that others in their position would consider their options and opt out of these acts in order to avoid severe punishments. Or is it more about vindictiveness?

In the former case, I can't agree with that approach as from what I've seen it does not appear to actually work. In the latter, I won't object as the sense of justice is a fairly strong instinctual motivator and I won't downplay that.

The approach of reforming those guilty of criminal acts so as to produce individuals less likely to commit such acts again seems by its very definition like a much more results oriented approach, and as such seems to give decent results overall.

Wish it were just as easy as "turning it around" for me. Having a particular section of my frontal lobe not develop properly resulting in very low neuron density rather screws up my ability to stick to what I consider to be a very well developed sense of work ethic. Not to mention the psychological blowback of that discrepancy, which has only gotten better once I discovered the cause.

I suspect that what you're really asking is whether personal responsibility is compatible with materialism.

It can be, as a social construct it is a partly successful strategy for keeping people to whatever set of values is most pronounced in a society.

But since in materialism there is always a chain of cause and effect which can conceivably be understood and then systematically changed for better outcomes, materialists (and thus most atheists due to overlap) tend to look towards what has been shown to work in changing behavior rather than the universal approach of simply metering out punishment.

While yes, we can push the amount of information displayed to high enough levels (e.g. resolution and bit depth) that fidelity shouldn't matter anymore, there are still colors that we can perceive which are yet not in the standard RGB color gamut, and similar issues regarding sound reproduction, e.g. the unnaturally consistent and repetitive reproduction of in game sounds.

Besides which rendering methods, A.I. programming and physics simulation are all far from having attained the fidelity required in order to be similarly complex to our senses as the real world is, even as reproduced on a monitor and sound system.

But yes, it is true that small refinements and occasional novelties will be the driving force behind game sales. That's not really a change.

This is a completely incomprehensible analogy.

Could we have a car analogy please?

This sort of information asymmetry is the classic cause of the problem known as a Moral Hazard.

I'm seeing a lot of comments discussing various flaws of Steam, but nothing which I recognize as anti-competitiveness. Now I'm not terribly well informed on what constitutes anti-competitive practices, so I did what any random Joe Slashdot on the street would do, which is look it up on WP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices

Looking at the list of typical anti-competitive practices, I see none which I can imagine applying to Valve's Steam, so I'd imagine that their high popularity with publishers given their high cut of the price is simply due to a lack of good competition rather than Valve pushing all their competitors in online game distribution off the market.

If Steam wasn't ultimately providing a profitable service, I'm sure publishers would simply stick with the physical retail market.