Compare it to a book, with a great plot and a compelling story, but typed on a typewriter and littered with corrections, typos and spelling errors.
Looking at some examples of present-day typography, typewriter could actually be somewhat of an improvement...
I suppose that's an issue of subjective vs. objective value.
There would have to be some objective notion of value first, of which I'm not currently aware.
The orange never changes; it's value to you is decreased, but if you're starving again its value 'increases'. If you put a starving person and a person who's just eaten a four-course meal in a room with a single orange, the orange's value to the starving person will be much greater than to the person who's just eaten- but this has nothing really at all to do with the orange.
Probably the closest thing to "objective value" we have is expressend in how much are peaple willing to pay for it (and this being rather vague definition). And such value changes pretty easily—you can create it if you grow oranges or make a chair, you can destroy it if you eat the fruit or destroy the item. In fact the object does not have to change itself to change its value, that can by achieved for example just by moving it around: if you have ton of oranges at your farm you can try to sell them there, but it's often better idea to move them to some market, where they can be sold for better price, hereby increasing their value.
I think what he's saying is that we all have things that we value; and this 'value' does not go away.
I think it can.
We do not suddenly end up valuing nothing or valuing everything.
Probably not in such absolute terms, but I wouldn't be that sure.
But what we value often changes, and how we express those values also changes. 'Value' is not created or destroyed, but the way we perceive it is consistently in a state of flux.
Value is created and destroyed all the time; for how we perceive it is precisely what matters.
The content industry, like any other industry, must keep an eye on the perception of 'value' and modify what it is selling accordingly.
Agreed.
and if Valve ever goes out of business, they have already developed and tested a "kill switch" patch for the client, to remove all activation requirements.
What I wonder is: will Valve actually be allowed to do this? Sure, they can free their own products (Half Life, etc), but to "unprotect" games from other publishers that are hosted on Steam seems of dubious legality. I have a hard time imagining EA has agreed to such a thing.
As far as I understand, Valve's part in this bussiness is to copy-protect the games, if they go of ou bussiness, they just stop doing that — protecting the games (using "kill switch"). This has nothing to do with voiding copyrihts or something.
"Time is money and money can't buy you love and I love your outfit" - T.H.U.N.D.E.R. #1
