[monster99]

People who don't sellout to the corporate agenda... watching HN'ers downvote me for pointing out the videogame industry has been stealing PC games for the last 20 years was alarming. We went from owning diablo, warcraft and starcraft games to not owning them... that is a major change and to see a place that calls itself the place of "hackers" and nerds, who theoretically should all be about fighting to preserve culture against the corporate onslaught against our basic rights to own our own software and not have it tied to "the cloud" is disturbing in it's own right.

Seems everyone wants to be a slave to the mainframe and have no privacy and no general computing.

Not getting that the corporations of the world are hell bent on turning the PC into a dumb client and everyones bending over is disturbing.

The stuff Microsoft has in the pipe with UWP and encrypted computing is alarming on its own, "honest files" of the past, not trapped in some vm or some remotely controlled new microsoft file system and license servers for this new Software as a service (aka stealing your software an selling to back to you at inflated prices) is madness itself.

There is no reason for any piece of software whether that be an OS, Office application or Game to be divided between our computers and the companies.

[paulriddle]

I see what you're saying. But I'm curious what the future you described will actually look like. I am NOT curious in the least about the good old days. I know it, it's boring to me. Having privacy and total control over your computing is fine, whatever, I've seen it a thousand times already. It's good. But in today's world what is the benefit of that? The market doesn't respond to that, does not reward it. Human psychology likes the alternative of thin client and total survelience much better because it's more convenient and because it already has more momentum.

So I'm curious what will happen when you can't do almost anything on your computer without it being inside proprietary cloud. When everything I do is recorded, aggregated, and analyzed by mismanaged big data experts. When real life decisions are made that affect me based on this data by some faceless entity without consulting me. Kind of like what China does with their social credit score but much more elaborate. When there are people who are within this system and those who are outside because they are rich and powerful.

It really fascinates me. It can't get so bad as to be intolerable in my lifetime. And what if I become rich and get real power? The ability to make important decisions that change the global landscape. Will I be good or evil? Nowadays rather than complain about the top 0.0001% it's better to put the energy into becoming the top 0.0001%.

And by the way, you never owned Warcraft or Diablo. I suspect that to satisfy you all one needs to do is to realse a few really good and engaging games. You shall have your games and you will play them in the evenings. But during the day you WILL write survelience code for collecting plausable reasons to crush somebody inconvenient to the illuminati.