Which could be interpreted to mean that any copyright holder now has the right to effectively block or render moot HTTPS across all of India. I mean, do you trust your bank account info to an ISP-provided "secure proxy"? I sure wouldn't.
Some aspects of a game could probably be covered by utility patents, certainly, but anything that could even remotely be eligible for copyright protection would probably fall well outside that space.
Electronic doesn't necessarily mean insecure. Public key cryptography with keys in voter cards is a possibility.
That doesn't really help. PK crypto only improves security if the private key remains private and under the control of the user. Just a couple of years ago, I heard a stat that 59% of U.S. Windows PCs were infected with malware. Those systems cannot be trusted to keep that private key private.
Further, putting the key in a device does not help with this problem at all. As long as that device is doing signing at the request of the computer, the computer is still effectively in control of the private key and can puppeteer the smart card to sign a completely different set of votes than the ones the user things he or she is casting. This is not even a particularly difficult hack. In fact, it is so simple that it is very nearly guaranteed to occur with any online voting system if the stakes are high enough.
About the best that you could hope for would be that the vote fraud cancelled itself out on average....
Now maybe if every voter were assigned a special, locked down tablet device that ran special software, required all sorts of crypto to update its software, and had no external ports, then if it miraculously contained no remotely exploitable security holes, you might have a prayer, but....
Impossible. Fundamentally and unquestionably. Bear in mind that this article is not talking about electronic voting in a booth. It is talking about online voting. If someone wants to know how you voted and is able to coerce you (I want proof of your vote or you're fired), then it is very easy to install appropriate screen logging software on your home computer to fairly definitively prove how you voted. Yes, someone could ostensibly defeat it without being detected, but that's beyond many people's ability, and would require a fair amount of effort even for those of us who could do it.
Worse, as soon as you have online voting, the security of your vote is entirely dependent on the security of hundreds of millions of Windows machines owned by individuals. These are not your corporate, locked-down Windows boxes. These are random devices owned by random people, more than half of which are (statistically) infected with some form of malware. Therefore, more than half of the machines out there could completely lie to the voter and vote a different way (a man-in-the-middle attack), and there's no way the voter would ever know that his or her vote didn't really count.
No, electronic voting in a voting booth might be possible to secure. Online electronic voting, by contrast, is a terrible, terrible idea that cannot possibly lead to anything other than massive vote fraud on a scale this country can barely even imagine. Think Stephen Colbert suddenly winning the Presidential election by the world's largest write-in campaign... without actually running.
Honestly, I think it would be a miraculous accident if the X-ray screeners ever caught anything dangerous, with the sole exception of the handguns that those scanners were originally intended to detect. I mean, think about it. You're looking at an X-ray screen that at best shows you the basic shape and (to some extent) density of certain objects, shadowed by the shapes of other objects. If it's a gun, you can probably pick out that shape. Anything less obvious based on its exterior shape is unlikely to be noticed.
Now the new EDS systems (MRI-based) are at least ostensibly more useful (but only because a computer is doing what amounts to chemical analysis). I haven't seen these used for carry-on bags, though.
The original (and current) intentions of copyright law is to spur innovation by giving people control of their inventions for a period of time.
Bzzt. Sorry. Thanks for playing. The original (and current) purpose of patent law is to give people control over their inventions for a period of time. The purpose of copyright law is to give people control of their literary and artistic works for a period of time.
The entire notion of a game being protected by copyright is dubious. This is what design patents are for, and they would have expired by now, precisely because we don't want things like this to enjoy hundred-ish-year protection.
To the extent that someone used actual copyrighted resources from the original Tetris game, e.g. the actual images for the blocks, the source code, etc.), that's a copyright violation. However, copyright was never intended to protect the idea of a square box, or even specific combinations of square boxes. That is so far outside the scope of copyright that it makes no sense whatsoever. The district court judge should have his or her head examined for this ruling, which attempts to assign ridiculous amounts of protection to something that is far too simple to be afforded copyright protection.
Also, this decision should be trivial to overturn on appeal, as the supposedly protected elements fundamentally fail both the creativity test and the originality test, both of which any work must pass in order to be eligible for copyright protection.
Making an arbitrary decision, such as choosing a number of columns or rows (which were both almost certainly determined solely by the need to be of a size easily distinguished by the human eye given the graphics capabilities of the original hardware and the size of its screen) is not a creative act. Choosing which four or five of the seven possible tetrominos to use is not a significant creative act, either. Deciding to make a game in which they fall is ostensibly a creative act, but it is a functional property of the game mechanics, and is thus ineligible for copyright protection. (You can patent functional aspects, but the patents would have already expired.)
And originality? Children have been putting together jigsaw puzzles and playing with toy blocks for hundreds of years. The only thing original is that the puzzle pieces fall, and being a functional aspect, that can't be protected by copyright.
This case needs to be appealed as high as is necessary for the Tetris company to be thoroughly stomped into the ground over their flagrant abuse of our legal system.
As far as I'm aware, regulations do not currently prohibit screwdrivers (7 inches in length or shorter), wire, circuit boards, or candy. Now blades are another matter.
Dubya is just George Walker Bush. His father is George H.W. Bush. Also, the Republicans Love using Obama's full name (minus the President and the II) as part of their little "paint the guy as a Muslim" campaign of deceit. That said, I agree with your other points. BTW, the correct term is "porno scanner", not "nude scanner". The latter sounds too benign. Just FWIW.:-D
Bear in mind that most schools are not PhD programs. Most schools are in those right two columns, and thus have maybe one or two people making over 100 grand, with most of their higher level administrators making in the fifties and sixties.
Also bear in mind that an administrator at the top of any business of comparable size is likely to be making considerably more than that. So although the numbers may seem high at first glance, they really aren't. If anything, they struggle to compete for the best people.
So stop using that site. If enough people say, "No", they'll fix it. As long as their users coddle them by switching browsers, there's no incentive for them to improve.
And I don't know a single college student -- business major, agriculture, engineering, whatever -- who doesn't have a preferred browser.
Yes, and most of them use that preferred browser nearly all the time. They don't just suddenly decide to switch to Safari for an hour, switch to Firefox for 10 minutes, then switch over to Chrome for a while, then switch back to IE.
Point being, there's never been a time in my life when I DIDN'T need to switch browsers on a near daily basis, for reasons that have nothing to do with being a 'power user' or web developer.
I haven't used any browser other than Safari in more than five years except when dealing with one very specific website (a county government site), and even that site now works correctly in Safari. Your situation is unusual. Even most school websites work correctly with WebKit-based browsers (Chrome, Safari, etc.) these days. They pretty much have to.
And there's a lag in building facilities. However, this is happening continuously, so for every university that is in a pinch to try to get enough faculty or facilities, there is always some university that just finished adding extra faculty or facilities and thus has extra capacity. It averages out (over all the schools in a region) to be elastic even if it may not appear to be when you look at a single school in isolation.
The problems I have with that logic are that A. schools are not for-profit entities, with few exceptions, so there's no incentive to raising the price because the market will bear it, and B. the cost of running a school is for the most part roughly linear in the number of students (except that the cost per student increases when the size of the school drops below a certain threshold) because there are no scarce resources involved. Even facility upgrades (to handle more students) average out to be roughly linear based on the number of students over the long term.
Now using Uniques, you'd show that person as an IE user. Or at maybe you'd 50/50 it. Both methods poorly represent that person's browser usage than the total pageviews by browser. It's not perfect, but it does make sense.
Yes, but this is a relatively unusual workflow. Even as a power user, the only time I ever launch a different browser is when I'm testing a website to make sure it works in another browser. Unless you use some particular site that works correctly only in a particular browser, most people simply do not use multiple browsers on a regular basis, and sites that work correctly in only a single browser should be excluded from this sort of statistic anyway. So basically, the benefit they're claiming is better precision for the 0.5% of people who have intranet sites that are IE6-only and then forget to switch browsers when visiting a web page initially. It's lost in the noise. More to the point, because those people forgot to switch browsers, they don't really care which browser they use, so as far as web developers go (deciding how important it is to support a given browser), they really are 50-50 because your site could support one or the other, and those users wouldn't really care which.
By contrast, most people use only a single browser. Thus, for the 99% case, if there are differences between the page count stat and the per-user stat, this tells you that people who use certain browsers tend to look at fewer pages. This may be an indication that the browser sucks, but it also may be an indication that your site does not support that browser well enough, or it may be an indication that the sorts of users who use that browser are simply too busy to spend time browsing a lot of sites. Thus, the two numbers provide significantly different information, and the question of which one is more useful is largely dependent on why you are asking the question. If you are trying to find out how many people will hit your site with a given browser, the per-user stat is more useful. If you are trying to figure out which browser is more likely to have people browsing around your site and looking for products, the per-page-hit stat is more useful. Understanding the differences between the two metrics can also help you better tailor your site to the sorts of users that browse it using different varieties of browser.
Nonsense. That figure might be accurate for a 3000-sq-ft McMansion, but a 1000 sq ft house is nowhere near that much, unless you're demanding that everything be WAY overbuilt.
You've been living in California too long if you think 3,000 square feet is even remotely a "mansion" or that 1,000 square feet is a standard house. A standard double-wide mobile home is about 1,800 square feet. A two story home typically starts at about 2,500 square feet and goes up from there, except when the first floor is really a garage. 3,000 square foot is just at the boundary between a medium-sized home and a large home. You don't hit mansion territory until at least 4,500 or 5,000 square feet, and most homes that we think of as actual mansions are 10k and up.
No, no, no. You're not seeing the whole cost. A month of Spotify is $9.99, but a month of cellular data with a 5 GB cap is another $30, and if you are streaming 128 kbps music, that will give you about 3.8 days of continuous music. If you listen to music more than 3.8 days per month, unless you're doing it from the comfort of your home or a Wi-Fi-equipped café, you're going to be paying cellular overage charges to the tune of hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
the music being produced today, just isn't worth keeping
I don't understand this. You have an incredibly narrow taste in music.
Actually, it's probably the reverse. The people producing music have an incredibly narrow taste, and people tend to burn out quickly when each new song sounds only subtly different from the song that came before it. There are times when it has been so bad that I've sung one song while listening to another just for the entertainment value of poking fun at the awful rehash.
This is not to say that all new music is crap, just that nearly all new music that actually gets airplay is crap. Of course, this has always been true. What makes a song a "classic" is that it is one of the few songs that wasn't crap, and so still gets airplay today (on the right stations). Time has a way of filtering the wheat from the chaff.
Reminds me of the old joke about the old Italian man. He wrote to his son in prison saying that he wouldn't be able to plant the tomatoes this year because he couldn't dig up the plot and that he wished his son were there to help. The son wrote back that he shouldn't dig there anyway because that's where the bodies were buried. After the agents swarmed in and dug up the garden, his son wrote another letter saying, "Sorry for the agents, but it was the best I could do."
If the terms to use AES, blowfish, etc., were onerous would you just create your own cryptosystem to get around it? Unless you happen to be a world class cryptologist it isn't likely to end well for you.
Having done both movie production and a bit of light crypto work, I can definitively state that making movies is a hell of a lot easier than designing a robust encryption scheme. Making good movies takes creativity, a lot of work, a fair number of people, and enormous amounts of time and patience, but it isn't remotely on the same order of difficulty as something that involves hundreds of researchers with advanced academic degrees staring at complex mathematical proofs for years looking for flaws.
More to the point, the cost of failure is much, much lower. If you create a movie that sucks, you've wasted some time, some effort, and some money. If you create a crypto system that turns out to be flawed, you've put people's private data at risk, potentially put billions of dollars of financial transactions at risk, and created a problem that tens or hundreds of thousands of system administrators worldwide will have to fix at enormous cost to the companies involved. Hollywood math notwithstanding, moviemaking really isn't comparable to crypto.
Just saying "well, just create your own movie studio" is idiotic and ignores the skill required to work outside the system and succeed (in terms of trying to turn market forces against the wealthy, entrenched criminals) and the money required to stand up to them.
Twenty years ago, they said the same thing about books. Then e-book publishing happened, and the world changed. If you create the content, the distribution channels will take care of themselves in time. They always do.
That's still a battered wife. She's letting affairs and abuse that shouldn't have happened in the first place pass.
Not really. A battered wife is someone who is afraid to get out of the relationship. The people I'm talking about are making calculated decisions to "stay in the relationship" for appearance purposes, but are not actually still in the relationship in any meaningful sense of the word because no actual relationship still exists to remain in.
In much the same way, there is no actual relationship of consequence between media consumers and the big media conglomerates. They don't honestly care what a few individuals think, say, or do; it takes motion of millions of people to get them to notice. Similarly, the public mostly doesn't care how broken the movies are as long as they can still watch them on their DVD and Blu-Ray players. Thus, the relationship exists purely in appearance rather than in actual fact. It is a marriage of convenience and nothing more.
My solution is in fact an essential first step towards yours.
Not really. If anything, your solution will likely make the problem worse. All 12,000 people who care about the issue could take the step of severing their relationship with the industry, and the industry would not even notice. To put it in real-world terms, if the members of an ethnic group that is being persecuted by a repressive regime elect to leave a country, it is less likely that the people will later overthrow the regime, because A. there are fewer people in the country who care about the problem, and B. there are fewer people telling others about the problem. In much the same way, refusing to consume current media means that those media outlets will hear fewer complaints about their policies, as will hardware manufacturers that build hardware to support that media. And the average consumer won't know about subtle changes that make the DRM more draconian, because the people who would care most about those changes will have stopped paying attention.
Worse, to the extent that you do manage to get people to stop consuming the media, those media outlets will blame piracy for the drop in sales, and will use this as justification for even more draconian measures to protect their content. It's a no-win scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't imagine I'm the only one.
Which could be interpreted to mean that any copyright holder now has the right to effectively block or render moot HTTPS across all of India. I mean, do you trust your bank account info to an ISP-provided "secure proxy"? I sure wouldn't.
*shrugs* They probably are by now. Still, snarky comments aren't meant to be precisely correct. That misses the whole point of the snark.
Here's twenty years to life.
Some aspects of a game could probably be covered by utility patents, certainly, but anything that could even remotely be eligible for copyright protection would probably fall well outside that space.
That doesn't really help. PK crypto only improves security if the private key remains private and under the control of the user. Just a couple of years ago, I heard a stat that 59% of U.S. Windows PCs were infected with malware. Those systems cannot be trusted to keep that private key private.
Further, putting the key in a device does not help with this problem at all. As long as that device is doing signing at the request of the computer, the computer is still effectively in control of the private key and can puppeteer the smart card to sign a completely different set of votes than the ones the user things he or she is casting. This is not even a particularly difficult hack. In fact, it is so simple that it is very nearly guaranteed to occur with any online voting system if the stakes are high enough.
About the best that you could hope for would be that the vote fraud cancelled itself out on average....
Now maybe if every voter were assigned a special, locked down tablet device that ran special software, required all sorts of crypto to update its software, and had no external ports, then if it miraculously contained no remotely exploitable security holes, you might have a prayer, but....
Impossible. Fundamentally and unquestionably. Bear in mind that this article is not talking about electronic voting in a booth. It is talking about online voting. If someone wants to know how you voted and is able to coerce you (I want proof of your vote or you're fired), then it is very easy to install appropriate screen logging software on your home computer to fairly definitively prove how you voted. Yes, someone could ostensibly defeat it without being detected, but that's beyond many people's ability, and would require a fair amount of effort even for those of us who could do it.
Worse, as soon as you have online voting, the security of your vote is entirely dependent on the security of hundreds of millions of Windows machines owned by individuals. These are not your corporate, locked-down Windows boxes. These are random devices owned by random people, more than half of which are (statistically) infected with some form of malware. Therefore, more than half of the machines out there could completely lie to the voter and vote a different way (a man-in-the-middle attack), and there's no way the voter would ever know that his or her vote didn't really count.
No, electronic voting in a voting booth might be possible to secure. Online electronic voting, by contrast, is a terrible, terrible idea that cannot possibly lead to anything other than massive vote fraud on a scale this country can barely even imagine. Think Stephen Colbert suddenly winning the Presidential election by the world's largest write-in campaign... without actually running.
Honestly, I think it would be a miraculous accident if the X-ray screeners ever caught anything dangerous, with the sole exception of the handguns that those scanners were originally intended to detect. I mean, think about it. You're looking at an X-ray screen that at best shows you the basic shape and (to some extent) density of certain objects, shadowed by the shapes of other objects. If it's a gun, you can probably pick out that shape. Anything less obvious based on its exterior shape is unlikely to be noticed.
Now the new EDS systems (MRI-based) are at least ostensibly more useful (but only because a computer is doing what amounts to chemical analysis). I haven't seen these used for carry-on bags, though.
Bzzt. Sorry. Thanks for playing. The original (and current) purpose of patent law is to give people control over their inventions for a period of time. The purpose of copyright law is to give people control of their literary and artistic works for a period of time.
The entire notion of a game being protected by copyright is dubious. This is what design patents are for, and they would have expired by now, precisely because we don't want things like this to enjoy hundred-ish-year protection.
To the extent that someone used actual copyrighted resources from the original Tetris game, e.g. the actual images for the blocks, the source code, etc.), that's a copyright violation. However, copyright was never intended to protect the idea of a square box, or even specific combinations of square boxes. That is so far outside the scope of copyright that it makes no sense whatsoever. The district court judge should have his or her head examined for this ruling, which attempts to assign ridiculous amounts of protection to something that is far too simple to be afforded copyright protection.
Also, this decision should be trivial to overturn on appeal, as the supposedly protected elements fundamentally fail both the creativity test and the originality test, both of which any work must pass in order to be eligible for copyright protection.
Making an arbitrary decision, such as choosing a number of columns or rows (which were both almost certainly determined solely by the need to be of a size easily distinguished by the human eye given the graphics capabilities of the original hardware and the size of its screen) is not a creative act. Choosing which four or five of the seven possible tetrominos to use is not a significant creative act, either. Deciding to make a game in which they fall is ostensibly a creative act, but it is a functional property of the game mechanics, and is thus ineligible for copyright protection. (You can patent functional aspects, but the patents would have already expired.)
And originality? Children have been putting together jigsaw puzzles and playing with toy blocks for hundreds of years. The only thing original is that the puzzle pieces fall, and being a functional aspect, that can't be protected by copyright.
This case needs to be appealed as high as is necessary for the Tetris company to be thoroughly stomped into the ground over their flagrant abuse of our legal system.
As far as I'm aware, regulations do not currently prohibit screwdrivers (7 inches in length or shorter), wire, circuit boards, or candy. Now blades are another matter.
Yes, but have a bomb-repelling rock that protects me when I walk down a crowded city street, so I'm only concerned when I get on an airplane....
Dubya is just George Walker Bush. His father is George H.W. Bush. Also, the Republicans Love using Obama's full name (minus the President and the II) as part of their little "paint the guy as a Muslim" campaign of deceit. That said, I agree with your other points. BTW, the correct term is "porno scanner", not "nude scanner". The latter sounds too benign. Just FWIW. :-D
Bear in mind that most schools are not PhD programs. Most schools are in those right two columns, and thus have maybe one or two people making over 100 grand, with most of their higher level administrators making in the fifties and sixties.
Also bear in mind that an administrator at the top of any business of comparable size is likely to be making considerably more than that. So although the numbers may seem high at first glance, they really aren't. If anything, they struggle to compete for the best people.
So stop using that site. If enough people say, "No", they'll fix it. As long as their users coddle them by switching browsers, there's no incentive for them to improve.
Yes, and most of them use that preferred browser nearly all the time. They don't just suddenly decide to switch to Safari for an hour, switch to Firefox for 10 minutes, then switch over to Chrome for a while, then switch back to IE.
I haven't used any browser other than Safari in more than five years except when dealing with one very specific website (a county government site), and even that site now works correctly in Safari. Your situation is unusual. Even most school websites work correctly with WebKit-based browsers (Chrome, Safari, etc.) these days. They pretty much have to.
Sure, but most college administrators aren't exactly raking in the dough. Here are some hard numbers.
And there's a lag in building facilities. However, this is happening continuously, so for every university that is in a pinch to try to get enough faculty or facilities, there is always some university that just finished adding extra faculty or facilities and thus has extra capacity. It averages out (over all the schools in a region) to be elastic even if it may not appear to be when you look at a single school in isolation.
The problems I have with that logic are that A. schools are not for-profit entities, with few exceptions, so there's no incentive to raising the price because the market will bear it, and B. the cost of running a school is for the most part roughly linear in the number of students (except that the cost per student increases when the size of the school drops below a certain threshold) because there are no scarce resources involved. Even facility upgrades (to handle more students) average out to be roughly linear based on the number of students over the long term.
Yes, but this is a relatively unusual workflow. Even as a power user, the only time I ever launch a different browser is when I'm testing a website to make sure it works in another browser. Unless you use some particular site that works correctly only in a particular browser, most people simply do not use multiple browsers on a regular basis, and sites that work correctly in only a single browser should be excluded from this sort of statistic anyway. So basically, the benefit they're claiming is better precision for the 0.5% of people who have intranet sites that are IE6-only and then forget to switch browsers when visiting a web page initially. It's lost in the noise. More to the point, because those people forgot to switch browsers, they don't really care which browser they use, so as far as web developers go (deciding how important it is to support a given browser), they really are 50-50 because your site could support one or the other, and those users wouldn't really care which.
By contrast, most people use only a single browser. Thus, for the 99% case, if there are differences between the page count stat and the per-user stat, this tells you that people who use certain browsers tend to look at fewer pages. This may be an indication that the browser sucks, but it also may be an indication that your site does not support that browser well enough, or it may be an indication that the sorts of users who use that browser are simply too busy to spend time browsing a lot of sites. Thus, the two numbers provide significantly different information, and the question of which one is more useful is largely dependent on why you are asking the question. If you are trying to find out how many people will hit your site with a given browser, the per-user stat is more useful. If you are trying to figure out which browser is more likely to have people browsing around your site and looking for products, the per-page-hit stat is more useful. Understanding the differences between the two metrics can also help you better tailor your site to the sorts of users that browse it using different varieties of browser.
You've been living in California too long if you think 3,000 square feet is even remotely a "mansion" or that 1,000 square feet is a standard house. A standard double-wide mobile home is about 1,800 square feet. A two story home typically starts at about 2,500 square feet and goes up from there, except when the first floor is really a garage. 3,000 square foot is just at the boundary between a medium-sized home and a large home. You don't hit mansion territory until at least 4,500 or 5,000 square feet, and most homes that we think of as actual mansions are 10k and up.
No, no, no. You're not seeing the whole cost. A month of Spotify is $9.99, but a month of cellular data with a 5 GB cap is another $30, and if you are streaming 128 kbps music, that will give you about 3.8 days of continuous music. If you listen to music more than 3.8 days per month, unless you're doing it from the comfort of your home or a Wi-Fi-equipped café, you're going to be paying cellular overage charges to the tune of hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Actually, it's probably the reverse. The people producing music have an incredibly narrow taste, and people tend to burn out quickly when each new song sounds only subtly different from the song that came before it. There are times when it has been so bad that I've sung one song while listening to another just for the entertainment value of poking fun at the awful rehash.
This is not to say that all new music is crap, just that nearly all new music that actually gets airplay is crap. Of course, this has always been true. What makes a song a "classic" is that it is one of the few songs that wasn't crap, and so still gets airplay today (on the right stations). Time has a way of filtering the wheat from the chaff.
Reminds me of the old joke about the old Italian man. He wrote to his son in prison saying that he wouldn't be able to plant the tomatoes this year because he couldn't dig up the plot and that he wished his son were there to help. The son wrote back that he shouldn't dig there anyway because that's where the bodies were buried. After the agents swarmed in and dug up the garden, his son wrote another letter saying, "Sorry for the agents, but it was the best I could do."
Having done both movie production and a bit of light crypto work, I can definitively state that making movies is a hell of a lot easier than designing a robust encryption scheme. Making good movies takes creativity, a lot of work, a fair number of people, and enormous amounts of time and patience, but it isn't remotely on the same order of difficulty as something that involves hundreds of researchers with advanced academic degrees staring at complex mathematical proofs for years looking for flaws.
More to the point, the cost of failure is much, much lower. If you create a movie that sucks, you've wasted some time, some effort, and some money. If you create a crypto system that turns out to be flawed, you've put people's private data at risk, potentially put billions of dollars of financial transactions at risk, and created a problem that tens or hundreds of thousands of system administrators worldwide will have to fix at enormous cost to the companies involved. Hollywood math notwithstanding, moviemaking really isn't comparable to crypto.
Twenty years ago, they said the same thing about books. Then e-book publishing happened, and the world changed. If you create the content, the distribution channels will take care of themselves in time. They always do.
Not really. A battered wife is someone who is afraid to get out of the relationship. The people I'm talking about are making calculated decisions to "stay in the relationship" for appearance purposes, but are not actually still in the relationship in any meaningful sense of the word because no actual relationship still exists to remain in.
In much the same way, there is no actual relationship of consequence between media consumers and the big media conglomerates. They don't honestly care what a few individuals think, say, or do; it takes motion of millions of people to get them to notice. Similarly, the public mostly doesn't care how broken the movies are as long as they can still watch them on their DVD and Blu-Ray players. Thus, the relationship exists purely in appearance rather than in actual fact. It is a marriage of convenience and nothing more.
Not really. If anything, your solution will likely make the problem worse. All 12,000 people who care about the issue could take the step of severing their relationship with the industry, and the industry would not even notice. To put it in real-world terms, if the members of an ethnic group that is being persecuted by a repressive regime elect to leave a country, it is less likely that the people will later overthrow the regime, because A. there are fewer people in the country who care about the problem, and B. there are fewer people telling others about the problem. In much the same way, refusing to consume current media means that those media outlets will hear fewer complaints about their policies, as will hardware manufacturers that build hardware to support that media. And the average consumer won't know about subtle changes that make the DRM more draconian, because the people who would care most about those changes will have stopped paying attention.
Worse, to the extent that you do manage to get people to stop consuming the media, those media outlets will blame piracy for the drop in sales, and will use this as justification for even more draconian measures to protect their content. It's a no-win scenario.