..the more sales slip between your fingers.

Please, by all means use more Draconian DRM on your games. I DO NOT HAVE TO BUY THEM, I PROMISE!

I don't pirate, either. Pirating a game would mean I actually liked it, but I won't even acknowledge the existence of games/companies which employ asinine DRM measures.

It is fast coming to the point where indie game quality is as good as, if not better than, AAA title quality. I'm happy to give my AAA title business to smaller indie devs who understand the concept of not punishing their customers because they live in a perpetual state of fear for their bottom line.

Most people will go "Stratwho?", shrug their shoulders and go back to eating their turkey sandwiches.

That's as far as I get before I skip to the next article.

If I were a "leftist/socialist", I'd say I was not against somebody getting more than others, but I would be against somebody gaming the system to TAKE more than others, without putting anything significant back into the system that enabled them to take in the first place. I would be against the notion of "privatize the profits / socialize the losses". Either do one or the other. "Socialism", in theory is neither good nor evil; it's just a way of things. Socialism is how you act when you "love thy neighbor as thy brother". The entire reason we even HAVE a modern civilization is because of the benefits of "socialism". Humans are social creatures; we assemble into groups and support one another. We don't all live as isolated individuals. When one member of the group is hurt and cannot participate, we take care of him until he can again. If a member refuses to participate, we eventually ostracize/banish/kill him. If a member CANNOT participate, then his fate depends on the charity of others. In more well-off/unstressed groups, he lives as comfortably as fortune will allow. In less well-off/stressed groups, he may not survive. Even still, on the average, humans will lean towards the former than the latter, which is a defining characteristic of "socialism".

Depends on what kind of behavior your trying to reward/punish, doesn't it? Would you reward murderers and thieves or punish honest hard-working folks? If we removed all punishments, what are we supposed to do when someone doesn't want the offered reward but goes after a different, more lucrative one, hurting others in the process?

As for me, I desire to live in a world which has both rewards AND punishments. Doing the correct things nets you a reward. Doing the incorrect thing earns you a punishment. Then the only task (and it's a big one) is to figure out what behavior is correct and what is incorrect, and reward/punish accordingly and fairly.

Seagate has always been crap, so no great loss there.

Oh, I agree. There are some cases where policy overhead becomes too much to justify its existence, but those cases are not the norm.

It works great in practice, too. After seeing it in action and being part of the "High Priesthood of IT" in a Fortune 100 company for a number of years, I can attest to the fact that it does work, and works well.

In just about every case where another department/division of the corporation tried to "buck the system", they ended up paying significant portions of their budgets for IT to clean up their messes, which in turn led to more adherence to IT "best practices" policies.

Never doubt for a minute that expressing the consequences in terms of money is the most powerful motivator of policy. That, and making IT policy into an employee code of conduct issue.

I'll tell you a little anecdote. Back in the late 90s, the biggest network disaster at this particular company was HP network printers. The network was mostly bridged token ring, and of course, HP printers LOVE to communicate via broadcasting. Even better, there was this quaint little piece of software that came packaged with every printer called HP JetAdmin. It was HP's pride and joy; effortless administration of your network printers -- if you only had a couple printers on a tiny SOHO network. So, here we are, clients (as they called "users") getting a brand-spanking new HP networked printer, unboxing it, plugging it in, and popping the install disk into their computers. At that time, there was a single install, which installed printer drivers, AND HP JetAdmin. Shortly thereafter, large segments of the network would go down from thousands of printers broadcasting "Hey JetAdmin!! Here I am!" back to these systems.

The problem was, HP printers were on the "approved" list of printers for purchasing, so any client could order one from the contract suppliers, and it would show up in a day to a week. Some people wouldn't wait for IT to get them a proper "drivers only" install onto their computer, so broadcast storms were a weekly event. Eventually, the IT department, backed by the affected organizations in the company who got the bill for the network outages and recovery time, had it out with HP and got them to only supply printers with "driver only" install disks with the printers that came into the company.

I remember that day like it was yesterday; there's nothing quite like an executive-level ass-reaming of a major manufacturer to brighten your day.

Every other department that uses IT pays for it. Those who use more IT services, or otherwise cost the company money from their IT fuckups, pay more. Eventually, they learn to work WITH the IT department to lower their overhead costs so they can meet their budgetary targets. That means doing the kinds of things that the idiots best represented by the author of that article abhor: the things recommended/enforced by those "High Priests" as best practices.

I mean, yeah, there are bad IT people and departments out there, to be sure, just like there are bad users. Unlike bad users, though, bad IT people and departments don't last very long.

The ignorance of our elected officials was never funny. It was sad and grossly pathetic, and still remains so.

Given the democractic system, it is a direct reflection on who we are as a people. As much as people piss and moan about the retards we end up electing, vanishingly few of said people either vote for non-retards, or run against the retards. As such, we get the government we deserve; the government that WE THE PEOPLE voted for.

Just like the corporatocracy/plutocracy/Fascist state that we're fast becoming (which is an obvious symptomatic effect of the problem), people don't get how they are empowering the very evil they rail against. Corporations would have NO power if people stopped feeding them.

Nor are we talking about such increases when humans, let alone our civilizations, were around at all.

Yes, of course! There are only two factors at play, and they are both directly proportional in their effects when they are changed. Someone call Climate Research and inform them of your astounding simplification of the climate system.

Like when? When were CO2 concentrations "several times what they are today" last? Oh, that's right, over 100 million years ago. Again, your ridiculously oversimplified take on climate science must astound your peers! That is beyond the fact that you're arguing with yourself, since I never claimed that there were any "runaway effects" in the first place. More of your 1337 mind-reading skillz letting you down again, apparently.

MANY times. Have you? Is the best you can do a single Wikipedia reference? What did that take, all of two minutes? Do you even know what the fuck you're looking at with that single graph?

Am I? Let's see...

Yeah, I obviously mistook "since the start of the industrial revolution" to mean "since the start of the industrial revolution", rather than what you actually were thinking when you wrote those words: "than during WWII". Unlike you and your awesome mind-reading skillz, I just have to go on what people say. I'm sure you understand.

Someone better let the Chinese know that their current form of government has been consigned to the "dustbins of history". As for Fascism, it's alive and well in the US in the form of the corporatocracy/plutocracy enabled by current political "climate".

A whole lot of humanity today would heartily disagree.

No, in the same words, because that's PRECISELY what I said. Your failed attempt to spin the obvious is pretty epic there.

Only If you can quote where I made any such claims; otherwise, you're just practicing more of your uber mind-reading skillz.

No, you completely misread and spun what I said. I brought it up SPECIFICALLY to cast doubt on it, and offered a lesser, but still significant set of criteria to justify taking SOME action; I didn't specify what action to take; you added that yourself.

How many times do I have to say "I never claimed any such thing" before it sinks in?

Since when did that stop you? Sauce for the goose, pal.