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A Brief History of Failed Digital Rights Management Schemes
antdude points out this article at opensource.com on the "graveyard" of digital rights management schemes — the death of each of which has left customers out in the cold. An excerpt: "There are more than a few reasons digital rights management (DRM) has been largely unsuccessful. But the easiest way to explain to a consumer why DRM doesn't work is to put it in terms he understands: 'What happens to the music you paid for if that company changes its mind?' It was one thing when it was a theoretical question. Now it's a historical one ..."
It's deliberate - /. tries to force you to spell-check and proofread your posts before posting them. To quote the FAQ:
No. We believe that discussions in Slashdot are like discussions in real life- you can't change what you say, you only can attempt to clarify by saying more. In other words, you can't delete a comment that you've posted, you only can post a reply to yourself and attempt to clarify what you've said.
In short, you should think twice before you click that 'Submit' button because once you click it, we aren't going to let you Undo it.
It's still rather common to see someone make a foolish mistake, like using BBCode instead of HTML, or using the wrong SI prefix on something.
US federal Constitution was a pretty significant attempt at trying to keep the corruption out of politics. It was eventually cracked (it was cracked a number of times, a few times the problems have been fixed, but eventually it was cracked for good.)
The way they cracked it finally is by ensuring that not only Congress and Senate and White house had trojans introducing viruses, but they also broke the court system, especially the Supreme Court.
They used a distributed denial of law attack from all levels of government, including the Supreme Court and they were able to introduce all of the necessary 'back orifice' style tools into the system to make sure it cannot be patched again. They appealed to the self interest of the majority (employees) in order to pass legislature that at first only undermined the rights of minority (employers), allowing the government to grow faster and to take up more resources. They eventually used these back doors to grab enough power that they couldn't be stopped. They redefined money, government power, introduced regulations of businesses that were unauthorized allowing to sell more power to the highest bidders, destroying competition and creating monopolies/oligopolies. They violated every law that there is, every human right, every bit of Constitution and every bit of law.
Eventually the unavoidable thing happened, the resource consumption became 100% of what was available and the system started spreading its disease around the world, forcing/letting other systems (nations to pick up the slack of processing power - useful production). The system is now poisoned, no more useful production can happen in it, it's impossible to reform the existing government and it has to be formatted and reinstalled but it also needs a lot of patching, to ensure that the next version is less penetrable to these sorts of attacks.
Unfortunately the current batch of coders (the population) is so deaf blind and dumb it can't understand even what happened, never mind understanding the necessary steps that must be taken to fix the problem.
You can't handle the truth.