Master Malstrom, more on the reasons why you should not use Steam:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/119739-Steam-TOS-Leads-to-Trouble-in-German
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What surprises me is that nowadays the trend in entertainment has been to make every service based on some iteration of the Steam bussiness model – that´s why Windows 8 is such a threat to Valve Corporation. The digitalization of media was supposed to make us more and more independent of large corporations who monopolize the content, but nowadays it seems that in the future you will have less and less options – you will either choose company A or company B to be able to access the content you desire, in their terms, or not have a choice at all.
As a fan of science fiction, it didn’t see the computer and Internet boom coming as it did. Instead, science fiction was all about nanotechnology and bio-technology and all that. It should be realized that nanotechnology and bio-technology (and all that other cool stuff like flying cars) are already heavily regulated and taxed. People trying to make flying cars are so frustrated because they have to uphold these certain regulations like their flying car must have… at least… six parachutes. And it must be *perfect* (as if anything is perfect?). Today’s automobiles can be awfully dangerous, yet they expect flying cars to be safer than anything?
The computer and Internet revolution grew so fast because it wasn’t regulated or taxed. No one expected it to grow so fast. Even people in the computer industry had no idea what was occurring. IBM didn’t see the PC revolution until it was happening. Bill Gates didn’t see the Internet revolution until it was on top of him. So if people in the computer industry couldn’t see it, the dumbass bureaucrats were way, way further behind.
Now there is a considerable drive to control and tax the hell out of the computer/Internet. There is no interest in letting this technological egg hatch to its fullest degree.
Above: Hard to believe but this is from 1998. That’s only fifteen years ago and it seems like the stone age.
The spirit of the Internet is to remove control, not add to it. People trying to create ‘controls’ and all, be they private or government, are doing it wrong. “They don’t know what they are doing.” Oh, they do know what they are doing. They are seeking control because they know they will cease to exist without it.
I’ve always described three eras which consist of educational and financial contexts beyond just the technological: the Agricultural Era, the Industrial Era, and this new era (which I will not GIVE away the name, I will only sell that information). Computers and Internet are to this new era as the first sailing ships were to the Industrial Era. You think you’ve seen the New World, but you have seen nothing yet.
It is becoming clear that not everyone transfers well into the future. Many people wish to turn the clock back. They may not perceive it as such. To them, what they are doing is the ‘norm’. Many wars break out over this. The past eras do not go quietly into the night. (For example, America’s Civil War is best defined as an Industrial North against a Feudalistic Agrarian South. In that example, agriculture was romanticized by the South.)
Anyway, I’ve learned to become extremely suspicious when someone romanticizes the previous era. In the present, the previous era is the Industrial Era. Romanticizing the Industrial Era would include waxing poetic about factory workers, about the old unions, about the school system back then, about how academic education was the primary education, about modern villains always being strangely painted as a 19th century top hat persona of the Monopoly board game character, about the ‘good guys’ being the scrappy ‘Common Man’, and so on and so forth. All of this is as absurd as romanticizing the little house on the prairie, of farmers living off the ‘fat of the land’, of education being in a one room school house with a blackboard, and so on and so on.
Names are extremely important. Why incorporate a company under the name ‘Valve’ anyway? And why name the digital platform ‘Steam’? What is with these allusions to the Industrial Revolution? Is this some romanticizing for the past? People who win the future do not use the names of the past.
