"If you don't like a product with DRM, don't buy it."

Problem is most people buying products are addicts. Diablo 3 and starcraft 2 are a case in point.

"I hope not"

You are naive.

http://www.trueachievements.com/forum/viewthread.aspx?threadid=1632336

Have you ever examined the history of why these things came into being? Thomas jefferson never lived in a highly specialized technocratic society, hence the many founders views whom you worship aren't even relevant in a modern economy.

The amount of lies and propaganda in your post is disturbing. You are operating off a false understanding of the world.

"This should not be rocket surgery for a bunch of card-carrying Slashdot nerds and geeks, unless they've sold their geek cards to emotional rather than logical identity politics and class warfare, and abandoned logic and intellectual honesty"

Anyone who DOESN'T believe in class warefare HAS lost their logic and intellectual honesty. My god, you are one of the historically illiterate people here. People had to fight for social security and the eight hour work day. It wasn't just handed to them by the glorious free market gods you worship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

Not to mention the pro-active monitoring and co-opting of political dissent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

"Corporation gets out of control, "BUY THIS BUY THIS BUY THIS!""

Tell that to blackwater.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi

... the gaming industry has turned into a crime syndicate over the last 6-7 years. It's been discusting with the rise of F2P and charging for virtual items in MMO's with both WoW and diablo 3 being among the biggest offenders.

Reality is we need to crack down on software you can never own and can be "turned off" whenever a company says so. So many older apps/games functionality is fubar because of current anti-customer industry practices. The bad thing is kids and stupid adults feed these companies money year after year.

"but whose business model consists of stripping us of our privacy and funneling our Internet experience through its pipes."

You already have that with your regular ISP. Most ISP's would capitulate in the face of any legal challenge or are already mining/selling your customer info. Since most ISP's people have are from regular monopolies (cable TV and telco companies). Not to mention many traditional ISP's hate their customers. I remember when you could get unlimited internet and now it's completely metered (at least in north america) and there is no good for it since bandwidth not utilized is forever gone.

The games robots are butt ugly. :P

... sometime.

The breakneck pace of innovation we saw for the last 30 years is slowing down. The reality is as hardware power increased software cost (like games) increased in time and money to develop. Compare a game that is ugly by today standards - descent - to any modern game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=_-slr7wL8KE#t=85s

Then on top of that add ghz and heat break wall that was hit around the time of the pentium 4. If you all remember right the P4 was to scale towards 10Ghz eventually it never got even close and the industry went a bit nuts because not all software can be parralelized. Just many trends have converged is all that makes PC's last a lot longer.

... the best way to go about improving the 'linux inside' brand is to avoid it entirely. The same way blackwater a private military company kept changing it's name when it's name became known in the media. Linux has the stigma so it would be best to rename and disassociate from linux and call it ANYTHING other then linux.

Most people are not hardware/software geeks. They just want something that works and pay someone else to take care of their worries. Linux biggest problem is that there needs to be an actual commercial incentive to develop a 'commercial fork' that just deals with things like drivers, compatability, etc. OS's are complicated and it's a full time job to manage all that complexity and that means it needs to earn $.

"The productive people IN society who do the innovation and perform the real work"

Most productive things are done by machines, gas and electricity. The idea that you are some cowboy superhero is a nice part of american mythology.

"I don't mind licensing a game."

And this right here is the problem. The whole idea of game licensing is bullshit. I can only imagine what future gaming history is going to look like with the inability to preserve older games because they are all locked down and defectively designed by the corporations.

"But for the rest: very little abuse of power."

That you know about.

... are crap. While I enjoyed FTL and thought it was one of the few indie games worth anything. Most indie games are worse then NES/SNES/PC games from 20 years ago.

The reality is the middle market for game development is coming back via kickstarter and indie games were really mostly smaller developers attempt to push mostly crapware on a gullible consumer base that will eat garbage if they propagandize properly via popular gaming sites.

The internet is a bizarre echochamber of gullible morons when it comes to gaming and you especially see this with how games have become homogenized as they've gotten more popular with the masses. For us expert gamers, gaming has really gone to shit everything has become lowest common denominator. Oldsters like myself hope to see a bit of a renewal of more complex games via kickstarter but most of us older geeks are taking a wait and see approach to see how it will all pan out given the limited funds for projects like PA.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts

"That's my snarky point."

It wasn't a point at all. I wouldn't have made the comment if I hadn't felt the urge but do the thing in question a million times but to the lack of feature to flag 'insightful' posts as false. The point is NOT to metamod, it's to have expert members flag false "insight". You have meta moderation + expert members flagging badly modded posts to warn other members of its low quality.

Say you have +5 insightful bullshit post, but you being 1 mod do not want to get into a war with the ignorant masses, so you being an expert member are capable of flagging the post as 'incorrect/false/likelybullshit', this is the whole point of color coding the post.