This is just using a digital solution to an analog problem for no real gain in efficiency. In theoryland sure, you can replace books with ereaders and possibly save money. And at certain levels of education this works out, middle/high school. In earlier levels, there are two issues. One, kids break things. Cheaper to replace a book than an ereader. Two, kids associate the tablet form factor with entertainment. Kids rely a lot on symbols for interpreting the world. It’s hard to get them into education mode when the symbol on front of them puts them into entertainment mode. Books signify learning, it helps the kids get into the right headspace.

No, getting rid of smartphones in classrooms is the only way to actually teach critical thinking. Using devices in classrooms teaches kids that all the answers are on Google and that they don’t need to think, only search.

Google/wikipedia is an incredibly useful tool, but before you learn to use them you first need to be taught basics. The scientific method is the first things kids need to learn: how to observe the world around them, form ideas of how it works, test those ideas, change them based on further observation. This kind of reasoning is sabotages when the kid learns that if they just use Google they can get the answer without learning how to do the work.

Takes like yours generally come from a place of well-meaning but are far removed from the actual reality of the classroom. Kids need to learn first how to figure out information in the real world hands-on before they are introduced to the abstract digital world.

You actually can successfully ban devices in the classroom through a variety of methods.

Twitter isn’t and never was useful as an organizing tool. Arab spring was a failure. Twitter is actually more useful to the ruling class than not because it gives a way for the masses to expend it’s restless energy without changing anything.

I use vanilla gnome. Dead simple, no nonsense, gets out of my way. Perfect DE for me.

Switched recently and using Nvidia. It’s a headache either way but I’ve had less issues with Wayland than x11.

As a non-technical user, I think if you have a modicum of technical knowledge it’s easy to switch to Linux. But it still takes time and patience. I’m using Linux now on all of my devices (if you count Android as Linux). There is still a lot of idiosyncracy to the ecosystem but overall it’s usable. I’ve found Vanilla OS to be a great experience overall. I had some troubles with Pop_OS! On my Nvidia GPU, that was because it’s still using x11 and I use a 4k monitor with a 1080p monitor and needed fractional scaling. Haven’t had any issues on Vanilla OS because it uses Wayland. But boy, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on and why my apps were blurry and games weren’t displaying properly. Took a lot of googling and perseverance to figure it out, as I didn’t know what a display server.

Yep, this is patently absurd and doesn’t tell you much about humans only that western thought is so flattened an AI can come up with answers just about perfectly.

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue.

I’ve selected this text as I think it’s the heart of your post, if you disagree then let me know. I don’t agree with this statement, I think that it is a rights issue, and I think I can prove that with a thought experiment.

Suppose for example, game companies took this idea to heart and did not do anything to stop piracy, they only focused on providing the most seamless storefront and gaming experiences possible. They create a store that works perfectly, has all the features you’d want, and has no DRM of any kind - this includes no log in needed, they go by the honor system. They expect people to only download a game that they’ve paid for. Here’s the question: will people pay for the games or not? I have a view of human nature that people generally go along the path of least resistance, and I think this is born out by evidence (but I could be wrong about this). Some people will pay for the games on moral grounds, the vast majority will not. If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.

This, to me at least, proves that piracy is only a service issue in a world where DRM exists. Because DRM makes piracy annoying. If people find the DRM more annoying than piracy, it has failed to be effective DRM.

So to get to the heart of things, I agree with you that when DRM is more annoying than piracy something has gone terribly wrong. Denuvo, in my life, for the way I play games, is not and never has even gotten close to being more annoying than piracy.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think it is morally or ethically wrong to put DRM on a game or storefront. I just see it as something to work out on a practical level, case by case. But I made my original comment in the first place because it seems to me like a lot of people have issues with it on a moral level, which I think is silly.

Because you didn’t make it. I’ll grant that western ideas about intellectual property are weird and inconsistent, but I’m taking it as a given that we hold that idea in common. If a writer writes something, that sequence of words in the order they wrote is their “property” and they get to determine who gets to see it.

I am cognizant that in this kind of space a lot of people probably won’t hold this view of intellectual property and there are good arguments as to why it shouldn’t exist at all. I suppose at this moment I’m not really in the mood to go down this rabbit hole, so forgive me if that is where you want to go.

It’s not evil. DRM as a concept is not evil. There is actually no real philosophical justification for why it is wrong to use DRM to protect your software. Because if you made it, it is yours and you get to decide how other people use it.

The paranoia that surrounds things like DRM show just how laughably selfish and entitled some gamers are.