Nope not miserable at all. In fact pretty happy.
However, many things these days ARE very 'twisted'. All you have to do is listen to the news to see and hear that.
The time has come where what is right is called wrong and what is wrong is called right. We were warned centuries ago that this time would come - and it has.

As for modelling - If you ever want to try 'modelling' - take a picture of a plane you like, draw yourself some plans to a size you like, then build yourself a model from those plans and fly it. There is nothing - NOTHING - like the satisfaction of watching YOUR plane take to the air for the first time and flying your own plane. My last one was a quarter scale Fokker DR1. Had over $1200 worth of materials in it (and remember, that was many years ago) , plus a little over two years of building time in it. That particular plane was built straight and light and was meant to fly, which it did very well. I hung it up several years ago. By now the glue joints are old enough to be questionable, so it is now just for display. No ARF can compare to modelling what you like and want to fly.


"The copy protection is by the way, not in the code, but in the index of the CD which organized the data on the CD. It has nothing at all to do with bugs"

Sorry to have to disagree with you, but In the not to distant past, it WAS in the code. I know that for a sure, certain fact - not if, or maybe - but fact. AND, it (the copy protection) had much to do with buggy software. In many cases it was refered to as crippleware. Again, Sorry to have to disagree with you, but that's just the way it was. Programmimg, like everything else, changes too I suppose. And the use of CDs really opened up a whole new world. I remember when those 3.5" floppies first came out and they seemed so big (capacity wise) while being smaller to carry around than the 5.25" floppies. But after some time, it took more and more of even those to put a program on. Another point - All that copy protection is only needed in the mind of the programmer. Some very successful software was written as shareware and made the programmer rich. One example was a game called DOOM. This was probably before your time though.

As to copying software - I have always copied my software the first thing when I get it and then run the program off of my copy. I think it's called 'fair use' or something like that. That way I have a disk that has only been used once to make myself another copy when that first copy goes bad. However, with something that isn't 'copyable' .... the user is left to the mercy of the paranoid company it was bought from, and they always think everybody is stealing them blind. I don't want any part of all that, which is one reason I buy very little if any software these days.

And that doesn't make me unhappy at all. I stay pretty happy by staying away from those things that are wrong and only going with what is right.