But the analogy fails (as computer-car analogies often do), because while a seatbelt actually tends to work, anti-virus software is horribly inept at detecting modern mutating computer viruses and other malware, even with the best-of-breed "heuristic" scanning software.
In addition, wearing seat belts doesn't tend to use up half of the cars power. Much unlike any virusscanners I've seen for Windows, which seem to take the approach that all development in chip design and harddisk speed during the last two decades was done for the sole purpose of having more cycles to spend on scanning for viruses. They leak memory, use up lots of CPU time (thus also battery power on laptops) and contain buffer overflows themselves as well, which sometimes makes the risks worse, rather than mitigating them.
Apart from that, there's the problem that scanning for viruses rather than trying to solve the security model of an OS is putting the horse behind the cart in the first place, but that's a different matter.
Well there's your problem. Who in their right mind designed these? No encryption either. Or maybe it was their plan all along...No, I'd go with just stupidity.
Stupidity of the gullible people buying this, that is.
The guys who designed this (and, more importantly, marketed it) are certainly not stupid - they are essentially selling low-grade USB sticks at probably a 10x markup, at the cost of having a couple programmers write a Windows-only driver that makes it look like there is a security layer. I wouldn't call this stupid (although certainly ethically questionable, but that's a different matter)
This is not the first USB-stick sold for a high price (typically 10 times the price of a normal USB stick of the same size) that doesn't actually add any security whatsoever.
Here is an article by a dutch website (the article is in english though) that does a thorough job (technical details included) of debunking a similar product.
Meanwhile, the scary thing is that government and military organizations are reported to have been actually using such products...
Seriously, they're sending in this clueless company "Web Sherrif"?
I'm sure thepiratebay is getting scared now - see the links about halfway on that page to read the fine letters mailed between "the white stripes/Web sherrif" and thepiratebay admins.
I grew up in Oregon. A state that requires an attendent to pump your gas. The article talks about the Netherlands though. I have *never* seen gas stations where an attendant actually pumps the gas in all of Europe. I'd go as far as to say that many Europeans, when asked, would find the very idea to be ludicrous (once you have explained it to them).
In fact, it goes even further - it's very common to have completely "unattended" gas stations, i.e. you authorize the payment by credit card/electronic bank transfer using a PIN, and then the amount you actually take to fill up the tank gets debited automatically. There is no shop etc. whatsoever, which allows a gas station to be run on very thin margins.
I just tried it a few times, but whatever I do I just feel the pressure at the tip of my fingers.
Same here so you're not the only one. (So that makes two of us with braindamage at least!)
I can see two ways to explain this, though:
1) I've got a problem with the way my brain or my hand function
2) your experiment is a different kind of psychological experiment: it's an experiment in suggestion:
Or:
3) It doesn't work because you are now trying to think consciously about it, whereas normally it would work like that - i.e. when you don't think about it.
3 years running AVG: $0 3 years running Ad-aware, Spybot, and CCleaner: $0
Time wasted installing, running, updating those tools, not even counting CPU cycles wasted on things that should not be necessary in the first place: I'd guess at least 250 (and that's if your time is cheap)
After all, in a democratic country, if a very large percentage of the population willingly infringes a law, there is a very strong case that the law is wrong, not the people.
FYI, in many countries, downloading (music) for personal use does not constitute copyright infringement in the first place. (though uploading often does, but that's a different point).
So it is not at all clear that copyright law is currently being broken by a lot of people, as most countries have proficiencies for fair use in their copyright laws (even for the "distributing" part, not just the receiving side). IMO, the real debate is about the problem where fair use stops, and copyright infringement begins.
My humble opinion, not being a lawyer and all, is that fair use should stop where people start *making money* using the work of others (without their consent), e.g. by selling (for a profit) illegally produced CD's or other media.
It is quite clear that 99,9999% of torrent traffic does not fall under this category (being done for a profit, that is). For-pay "binary usenet" server providers however... Ironically though, the rise of such providers is largely due specifically to a better guarantee of anonymity - thus limiting the chance of ridiculous lawsuits by the likes of the MAFIAA. Well, apart from generally being faster as well, but I think many people care much less about that part.
It's probably insufficient money to buy you a congressman or two to introduce the necessary changes to the laws concerned.
Because changing the laws or TSA guidelines to drop these required checks would probably be the best way - or at least the way that makes the most sense. The checks at airports don't provide much real security - mostly, they are there to provide a (false) sense of security. According to severalreports, the checks don't actually catch most real threats at all (and even very low-tech threats like knives slip through a lot of the time), and are just costing everyone involved a lot of time/money. Also see snake oil security.
Not that the EU is much better in this regard btw - the ridiculous bans on liquids on planes are still in place, even though the European Parliament wants to lift those (at some point).
We're all well aware of the scams that sometimes happen in online games like Eve Online. But despite this looking primarily like a problem with Eve Online [..]
(emphasis mine)
Uhmmmm, hello?
Eve Online is specifically designed to have a player-driven economy and market. As in real life, it is possible to scam people in such a market. This is not just allowed in Eve online, it has in fact been close to actively encouraged (as in, people have asked devs/GM's whether it's ok to do certain things, and got a reply that amounts to "if it's not obviously prohibited by the EULA, go right ahead". It has made for some nice stories as well, some people may remember the story about the Eve Intergalactic Bank piramid scam.
The devs consider this kind of thing to be exactly as intended and have even stated so in public forums. So yes, it's a harsh game. It is actually possible to lose the work of several months in a matter of minutes.
Of course, there are still rules/an EULA, for example it's not OK to phish for account details, to sell or buy in-game money for real-world money, etc. However, if you manage to convince hundreds of people that they should invest in your piramid scheme, you should absolutely go right ahead.
You and everyone else: the office is to be shared with the NETWORKING racks, not the SERVER racks. There'll be a jillion blinky LED's and a few low volume fans but there won't be the A/Cs, blaring fans, etc, that everyone is going on about.
Ha ha ha, clearly you've never sat down in the same room as any 19" networking equipment?
Because I have, and noticed that
1) It's a nice way to reduce the heating bill (not the electricity bill though) 2) If you think those fans don't make much noise, it's probably time to check whether your hearing is anywhere close to OK.
Also, if you believe it will contain just networking stuff, you're being a bit naive. Which company would need 4 racks containing just *networking* equipment? And if the company is so big that it would require this, why on earth would they put that equipment in a different location than the servers, which are likely going to use the majority of the connections to said network equipment?
I have the Sony PRS-505 and I love it. It feels wonderful. The screen is amazing (I believe it is the same screen as is used in the Kindle). I use linux, so I don't use the Sony Connect software. I use libprs500, which is a nice little program available for windows, linux and mac. I get my books from places like ebooks.com in Microsoft Reader (win2k in a virtual machine) format because the DRM can be broken and the files are easy to convert to a properly formatted PDF with OpenOffice.
Yes. These steps sound so trivial, as compared to, let's say, opening a book. I'd absolutely go for one of these.
Not everyone has all the disk space in the world or a dedicated file server.
I fail to see the connection between needing a single 500 GB sub-$100 harddisk in your desktop system and needing a file server. If you bought the system in the last 2 years it should already have 200GB+ anyway which is already plenty of space *if you use it mainly to store music*.
Not good enough, especially if, like I said above, you just have a laptop with a 40 gig drive or something.
That's why I said "desktop system". Also, 160 GB 2.5" disk ~$75, fits ca. 500 albums using FLAC. QED.
I ripped my whole CD collection in ogg about a year ago. Last week, I went to buy my first mp3 player, and I can't find a single one in my "budget" price range that has ogg support
That is because, with hindsight, you where doing it wrong.
Just rip all your CD's to FLAC, which is a lossless format. Then just transcode it for whatever device you want, from the "original" FLAC's. Admittedly, what is lacking (at last in Linux) is some easy software to do this, at least as far as I'm aware. (It's much worse on Mac OS X, because iTunes does not support FLAC). Of course, someone might write a trivial script to do the transcoding automatically, but it would be much more convenient if you could just select part of your music library for syncing with other devices, then have the transcoding happen automatically. (sure, it would slow down syncing a bit, but on todays Core 2 Duo's, who cares really..). In other words, it needs a convenient GUI.
Then, before you complain about the amount of space needed for FLAC files as compared to OGG or MP3: the FLAC encoder will compress most albums (even classical music) down to somewhere between 33-50% of their original size. That means about 200-300 MB for the average (1 hour) album. A 500 GB harddisk these days sets you back slightly less than $100. It will fit about 2000 full albums (you do the math).
Now of course I'm not sure how many CD's you own, but certainly if you would own more than 2000 full albums I'm sure you could also afford another $100 harddisk.
If you have less than 500 albums (which I think would be true for about 99,999% of the population) you could even get away with just storing the raw PCM/WAV files, and only encoding them while transferring them to portable devices. The need to compress at least *music* on desktop machines is really a thing of the past now. It's just that most people didn't realize this is the case, yet.
Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license?
No. In principle, because you don't own the copyright, you are not permitted it to use it in any way unless you obtain a license or written permission from the original author.
If not, what's the best way to deal with this kind of situation?
Have the same functionality rewritten by someone who did not see the original ("stolen") code.
If there is no copyright claim by the original author then I don't see what the problem is. AFAIK that means it's in the public domain
This is, of course, utter bullshit.
You don't need to "claim" copyright in any way to have it. Whenever you write anything, you automatically have the copyright on it. Whether enforcing it is feasible (or easy) is another matter, certainly it will help to prove it's yours by putting your name on it, yes.
In addition, things cannot end up "in the public domain" just because nobody put a copyright notice on it. The public domain is said to be the body of works of which the copyright has expired (i.e. which are written or published over 70 years ago). Apparently it is not even technically possible (according to copyright law, that is) to put things in the public domain by simply stating that they are; although such a written statement could probably be considered a license that allows anyone to do whatever they want with that code.
IANAL fortunately, so I may be slightly of on the details, but what you're stating above is utterly and completely wrong, that much I'm sure of.
Moreover, if the source code for your application is not being released, who the heck cares?
Hopefully you are aware that several GPL copyright cases (e.g. look at busybox) have been won (or settled because it was blatantly obvious they would be won otherwise) by looking at binaries only? For example, by looking at the strings contained in both binaries, or by testing the presence of identical undocumented command line options, features, or easter eggs.
That being said, I agree with the part that 200 lines is probably considered a trivial amount of code, you could also just write it over from a textbook or whatever, surely nobody is ever going to make a problem about it (that still doesn't mean it's OK btw, just that its very unlikely to get you into any kind of trouble). However it's also the principle of the thing. If copying 200 literal lines of code that you didn't write (and then putting your companies copyright on it) is OK, how about 500 lines? 1000? 2000? Where are you going to draw the line?
a) You also will probably have to start drinking the Kool-Aid... I'm not sure I want to do that just yet.
Well, if you decide you don't like it, you can always install Linux or Windows XP on it (dual-boot if you like). I bought a Mac Mini about a year ago, and am currently using it more than my (much faster) XP machine, which basically serves as a sort of game console these days. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't do this.
2) The Apple Tax and associated other 'benefits', such as the free Kool-Aid, are a pretty high price to pay.
This discussion is quite old by now, but just to make sure, ever tried putting a 13" Dell laptop together, with the same hardware as a MacBook? Because last time I tried to do that, the Dell was about EUR 400 more expensive (not kidding..). I am of course aware that there are much, much cheaper 15" models with lesser specifications available from Dell, whereas lesser hardware is an option you simply don't get with Apple. So yes, you pay for it, that's true. But you also get nice hardware.
D) There is no OS that I want to use. I use applications. The various OSs out there enable that activity.
Some do better at this than others, though. You probably understand this perfectly well, but I'll bite just in case you aren't: the OS these days is considered to include such stuff as a desktop environment, window manager, standard utilities, a program to compile and burn DVD's/CD's, play music, play movies, browse the web, read email, manage photo's, do some simple sound editing, etc. etc. I have seen both Vista's and Mac OS X's version of those, and happen to like Mac OS X version of all such apps a lot better. Then there's the amount of effort required to set up your hardware (drivers etc.), all of which happen to work a lot nicer on Mac OS X. So I completely disagree. There is definitely such a thing as "an OS that you want (or don't want) to use". After seeing Vista or Windows ME, in fact I wonder how anyway could say there is no such thing.
If you already have a PC, you'll run XP (or in my case W2K SP4) 'cos it just works. If you buy a new PC, you'll run Vista.
Indeed, and this is exactly where things could go downhill for Microsoft. Notice that "*if* you buy a new PC" part in your statement? (and I'm reading "PC" in the generally accepted "a computer running Windows" sense.)
You correctly stated "if" instead of "when", because for me, those times are over.
My next laptop will be a Mac, as the hardware is nice and this seems to be about the only way to get decent, supported laptop hardware without paying the Microsoft tax. Sure, you pay an Apple tax instead, but at least this provides you with an OS that you actually want to use! Any new desktop systems (if any!) will either be home-built (something I used to do when I still had plenty time to waste), or in the future will likely come with Ubuntu pre-installed (from Dell).
So yes, if I'd buy a new PC, it'd probably run Vista. This is indeed exactly why I'm not planning to buy any more PC's (in the generally accepted sense of the term PC).
If they enforce the patent, there will likely be less DVD's that actually use this technology (assuming most content distributors won't want to pay for a license on the patented technology).
Then again, who cares anyway. TV is already dead, now if DVD's also get killed by gratuitous advertising left, right and center, it will only drive people towards other alternatives (such as iTunes or using bittorrent) even faster.
In fact, this has been happening for a while, what with many DVD-players forcing you to watch the MAFIAA warnings they put in front of each and every movie these days.
- The first release will only work on IE 7/Windows. - It will require/use windows media player rather than flash. Or, even better, use that Silver-somethingorother-thingamajig that nobody has installed or uses. - There will be 30 seconds of banners/ads before each movie starts - It will not allow embedding of movies on other sites - The interface will overuse Ajaxy web 2.0 (TM) technology, slowing down the interface/browser - DRM will somehow have to be involved, such that even if you could save the stream your browser is playing, the content would be useless. Adding new components to Windows to reach this goal is perfectly acceptable. It won't have to run on other OS'es anyway so that's just fine, right? - Bonus points if necessary DRM/windows media player updates are forced to install through the famous windows "critical" update system.
Finally, it will be a "me too" version of existing websites, not adding any new or worthwhile features. (maybe you will be able to "squirt" movies to your Zune - oh wait, you don't have a Zune).
Slashdot Mirror
In addition, wearing seat belts doesn't tend to use up half of the cars power. Much unlike any virusscanners I've seen for Windows, which seem to take the approach that all development in chip design and harddisk speed during the last two decades was done for the sole purpose of having more cycles to spend on scanning for viruses. They leak memory, use up lots of CPU time (thus also battery power on laptops) and contain buffer overflows themselves as well, which sometimes makes the risks worse, rather than mitigating them.
Apart from that, there's the problem that scanning for viruses rather than trying to solve the security model of an OS is putting the horse behind the cart in the first place, but that's a different matter.
Stupidity of the gullible people buying this, that is.
The guys who designed this (and, more importantly, marketed it) are certainly not stupid - they are essentially selling low-grade USB sticks at probably a 10x markup, at the cost of having a couple programmers write a Windows-only driver that makes it look like there is a security layer. I wouldn't call this stupid (although certainly ethically questionable, but that's a different matter)
This is not the first USB-stick sold for a high price (typically 10 times the price of a normal USB stick of the same size) that doesn't actually add any security whatsoever.
Here is an article by a dutch website (the article is in english though) that does a thorough job (technical details included) of debunking a similar product.
Meanwhile, the scary thing is that government and military organizations are reported to have been actually using such products...
I mean, what better excuse could you want for asking "Want to go outside with me to look at the stars?"
;)
Pretty sure it'll beat "Hey, haven't we met before?" or "Got a light?" any time
They are property alright, but not "just" property.
Just like slaves used to be (legal) property a few centuries ago, but that doesn't mean they weren't humans, either.
Microsoft execs on Vista problems is an excellent summary of the affair so far.
This class action suit isn't looking too good for Microsoft, I would say (though I'm not a lawyer, fortunately)
Seriously, they're sending in this clueless company "Web Sherrif"?
I'm sure thepiratebay is getting scared now - see the links about halfway on that page to read the fine letters mailed between "the white stripes/Web sherrif" and thepiratebay admins.
In fact, it goes even further - it's very common to have completely "unattended" gas stations, i.e. you authorize the payment by credit card/electronic bank transfer using a PIN, and then the amount you actually take to fill up the tank gets debited automatically. There is no shop etc. whatsoever, which allows a gas station to be run on very thin margins.
Same here so you're not the only one. (So that makes two of us with braindamage at least!)
Or:
3) It doesn't work because you are now trying to think consciously about it, whereas normally it would work like that - i.e. when you don't think about it.
Time wasted installing, running, updating those tools, not even counting CPU cycles wasted on things that should not be necessary in the first place: I'd guess at least 250 (and that's if your time is cheap)
..you shouldn't use perl "In an obfuscated fashion".
Wait...there are ways to use perl in a non-obfuscated fashion!?
Ahhh, you mean involving a ribbon, which you could use to hang yourself?
FYI, in many countries, downloading (music) for personal use does not constitute copyright infringement in the first place. (though uploading often does, but that's a different point).
So it is not at all clear that copyright law is currently being broken by a lot of people, as most countries have proficiencies for fair use in their copyright laws (even for the "distributing" part, not just the receiving side). IMO, the real debate is about the problem where fair use stops, and copyright infringement begins.
My humble opinion, not being a lawyer and all, is that fair use should stop where people start *making money* using the work of others (without their consent), e.g. by selling (for a profit) illegally produced CD's or other media.
It is quite clear that 99,9999% of torrent traffic does not fall under this category (being done for a profit, that is). For-pay "binary usenet" server providers however... Ironically though, the rise of such providers is largely due specifically to a better guarantee of anonymity - thus limiting the chance of ridiculous lawsuits by the likes of the MAFIAA. Well, apart from generally being faster as well, but I think many people care much less about that part.
It's probably insufficient money to buy you a congressman or two to introduce the necessary changes to the laws concerned.
Because changing the laws or TSA guidelines to drop these required checks would probably be the best way - or at least the way that makes the most sense. The checks at airports don't provide much real security - mostly, they are there to provide a (false) sense of security. According to several reports, the checks don't actually catch most real threats at all (and even very low-tech threats like knives slip through a lot of the time), and are just costing everyone involved a lot of time/money. Also see snake oil security.
Not that the EU is much better in this regard btw - the ridiculous bans on liquids on planes are still in place, even though the European Parliament wants to lift those (at some point).
(emphasis mine)
Uhmmmm, hello?
Eve Online is specifically designed to have a player-driven economy and market. As in real life, it is possible to scam people in such a market. This is not just allowed in Eve online, it has in fact been close to actively encouraged (as in, people have asked devs/GM's whether it's ok to do certain things, and got a reply that amounts to "if it's not obviously prohibited by the EULA, go right ahead". It has made for some nice stories as well, some people may remember the story about the Eve Intergalactic Bank piramid scam.
The devs consider this kind of thing to be exactly as intended and have even stated so in public forums. So yes, it's a harsh game. It is actually possible to lose the work of several months in a matter of minutes.
Of course, there are still rules/an EULA, for example it's not OK to phish for account details, to sell or buy in-game money for real-world money, etc. However, if you manage to convince hundreds of people that they should invest in your piramid scheme, you should absolutely go right ahead.
Ha ha ha, clearly you've never sat down in the same room as any 19" networking equipment?
Because I have, and noticed that
1) It's a nice way to reduce the heating bill (not the electricity bill though)
2) If you think those fans don't make much noise, it's probably time to check whether your hearing is anywhere close to OK.
Also, if you believe it will contain just networking stuff, you're being a bit naive. Which company would need 4 racks containing just *networking* equipment? And if the company is so big that it would require this, why on earth would they put that equipment in a different location than the servers, which are likely going to use the majority of the connections to said network equipment?
Yes. These steps sound so trivial, as compared to, let's say, opening a book. I'd absolutely go for one of these.
I fail to see the connection between needing a single 500 GB sub-$100 harddisk in your desktop system and needing a file server. If you bought the system in the last 2 years it should already have 200GB+ anyway which is already plenty of space *if you use it mainly to store music*.
That's why I said "desktop system". Also, 160 GB 2.5" disk ~$75, fits ca. 500 albums using FLAC. QED.
That is because, with hindsight, you where doing it wrong.
Just rip all your CD's to FLAC, which is a lossless format. Then just transcode it for whatever device you want, from the "original" FLAC's. Admittedly, what is lacking (at last in Linux) is some easy software to do this, at least as far as I'm aware. (It's much worse on Mac OS X, because iTunes does not support FLAC). Of course, someone might write a trivial script to do the transcoding automatically, but it would be much more convenient if you could just select part of your music library for syncing with other devices, then have the transcoding happen automatically. (sure, it would slow down syncing a bit, but on todays Core 2 Duo's, who cares really..). In other words, it needs a convenient GUI.
Then, before you complain about the amount of space needed for FLAC files as compared to OGG or MP3: the FLAC encoder will compress most albums (even classical music) down to somewhere between 33-50% of their original size. That means about 200-300 MB for the average (1 hour) album. A 500 GB harddisk these days sets you back slightly less than $100. It will fit about 2000 full albums (you do the math).
Now of course I'm not sure how many CD's you own, but certainly if you would own more than 2000 full albums I'm sure you could also afford another $100 harddisk.
If you have less than 500 albums (which I think would be true for about 99,999% of the population) you could even get away with just storing the raw PCM/WAV files, and only encoding them while transferring them to portable devices. The need to compress at least *music* on desktop machines is really a thing of the past now. It's just that most people didn't realize this is the case, yet.
Right, because I am absolutely going to buy a device that requires me to rename all my files before I can actually use them. /sarcasm.
No. In principle, because you don't own the copyright, you are not permitted it to use it in any way unless you obtain a license or written permission from the original author.
Have the same functionality rewritten by someone who did not see the original ("stolen") code.
This is, of course, utter bullshit.
You don't need to "claim" copyright in any way to have it. Whenever you write anything, you automatically have the copyright on it. Whether enforcing it is feasible (or easy) is another matter, certainly it will help to prove it's yours by putting your name on it, yes.
In addition, things cannot end up "in the public domain" just because nobody put a copyright notice on it. The public domain is said to be the body of works of which the copyright has expired (i.e. which are written or published over 70 years ago). Apparently it is not even technically possible (according to copyright law, that is) to put things in the public domain by simply stating that they are; although such a written statement could probably be considered a license that allows anyone to do whatever they want with that code.
IANAL fortunately, so I may be slightly of on the details, but what you're stating above is utterly and completely wrong, that much I'm sure of.
Hopefully you are aware that several GPL copyright cases (e.g. look at busybox) have been won (or settled because it was blatantly obvious they would be won otherwise) by looking at binaries only? For example, by looking at the strings contained in both binaries, or by testing the presence of identical undocumented command line options, features, or easter eggs.
That being said, I agree with the part that 200 lines is probably considered a trivial amount of code, you could also just write it over from a textbook or whatever, surely nobody is ever going to make a problem about it (that still doesn't mean it's OK btw, just that its very unlikely to get you into any kind of trouble). However it's also the principle of the thing. If copying 200 literal lines of code that you didn't write (and then putting your companies copyright on it) is OK, how about 500 lines? 1000? 2000? Where are you going to draw the line?
Well, if you decide you don't like it, you can always install Linux or Windows XP on it (dual-boot if you like). I bought a Mac Mini about a year ago, and am currently using it more than my (much faster) XP machine, which basically serves as a sort of game console these days. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't do this.
This discussion is quite old by now, but just to make sure, ever tried putting a 13" Dell laptop together, with the same hardware as a MacBook? Because last time I tried to do that, the Dell was about EUR 400 more expensive (not kidding..). I am of course aware that there are much, much cheaper 15" models with lesser specifications available from Dell, whereas lesser hardware is an option you simply don't get with Apple. So yes, you pay for it, that's true. But you also get nice hardware.
Some do better at this than others, though. You probably understand this perfectly well, but I'll bite just in case you aren't: the OS these days is considered to include such stuff as a desktop environment, window manager, standard utilities, a program to compile and burn DVD's/CD's, play music, play movies, browse the web, read email, manage photo's, do some simple sound editing, etc. etc. I have seen both Vista's and Mac OS X's version of those, and happen to like Mac OS X version of all such apps a lot better. Then there's the amount of effort required to set up your hardware (drivers etc.), all of which happen to work a lot nicer on Mac OS X. So I completely disagree. There is definitely such a thing as "an OS that you want (or don't want) to use". After seeing Vista or Windows ME, in fact I wonder how anyway could say there is no such thing.
Indeed, and this is exactly where things could go downhill for Microsoft. Notice that "*if* you buy a new PC" part in your statement? (and I'm reading "PC" in the generally accepted "a computer running Windows" sense.)
You correctly stated "if" instead of "when", because for me, those times are over.
My next laptop will be a Mac, as the hardware is nice and this seems to be about the only way to get decent, supported laptop hardware without paying the Microsoft tax. Sure, you pay an Apple tax instead, but at least this provides you with an OS that you actually want to use! Any new desktop systems (if any!) will either be home-built (something I used to do when I still had plenty time to waste), or in the future will likely come with Ubuntu pre-installed (from Dell).
So yes, if I'd buy a new PC, it'd probably run Vista. This is indeed exactly why I'm not planning to buy any more PC's (in the generally accepted sense of the term PC).
If they enforce the patent, there will likely be less DVD's that actually use this technology (assuming most content distributors won't want to pay for a license on the patented technology).
Then again, who cares anyway. TV is already dead, now if DVD's also get killed by gratuitous advertising left, right and center, it will only drive people towards other alternatives (such as iTunes or using bittorrent) even faster.
In fact, this has been happening for a while, what with many DVD-players forcing you to watch the MAFIAA warnings they put in front of each and every movie these days.
- The first release will only work on IE 7/Windows.
- It will require/use windows media player rather than flash. Or, even better, use that Silver-somethingorother-thingamajig that nobody has installed or uses.
- There will be 30 seconds of banners/ads before each movie starts
- It will not allow embedding of movies on other sites
- The interface will overuse Ajaxy web 2.0 (TM) technology, slowing down the interface/browser
- DRM will somehow have to be involved, such that even if you could save the stream your browser is playing, the content would be useless. Adding new components to Windows to reach this goal is perfectly acceptable. It won't have to run on other OS'es anyway so that's just fine, right?
- Bonus points if necessary DRM/windows media player updates are forced to install through the famous windows "critical" update system.
Finally, it will be a "me too" version of existing websites, not adding any new or worthwhile features. (maybe you will be able to "squirt" movies to your Zune - oh wait, you don't have a Zune).