That may be their argument, but it's incomplete. "Completely emptying a cartridge might be detrimental" *to whom*? An empty cartridge is just as useless as a cartridge that isn't working. I have no use for the old cartridge in either case -- it's just pre-landfill plastic once it's empty. So I don't care if I run it down to bubbles or dried ink.
This is really being designed to help the army commanders answer the age-old question: "TK-421, why aren't you at your post?" Now they can just ask the LANDroids.
How can Consensus be a threat to Democracy? Aren't they one and the same?
A consensus of smart people who actually have a clue is still not a democracy. A consensus of all people is a democracy.
Historically, the people at the "low" end of the spectrum have never been fairly represented. Slaves have always been denied the right to vote. And slave-owners have kept the slaves deliberately ignorant to prevent them from both voting and learning that a democracy should include everyone. Jim Crow laws were another recent attempt to deny democracy to the illiterate. It's much easier to repress the ignorant.
But the ignorant have their rights, too. It's up to the scientific community to convince them of the truth, and to disabuse them of the bullshit that "there are two sides to every story." Scientifically sound theories are not "stories."
It's completely immoral and irresponsible for a politician to take the side opposing science (and the truth) simply for the political gain of the "ignorant vote." Unfortunately, it's not illegal.
Wow, so my computer would have cost $85,899,345.92 back then (not counting RAM, CPU, RAIDed hard drive or copy of Windows XP.)
Yeah, it probably would have.
You'd think that here in the future with all this computing power I'd be able to design a time machine to go back to 1974 and sell it to the NSA, and invest it all in Microsoft and Apple. But noooo.... we don't even have flying cars yet! Curse this miserable time-line!
Hey, this thing was a giant step up from the Porta-term I used to bring home. Instead of a screen it had a tractor-fed printer and took greenbar paper. (Hmph. Firefox thinks "greenbar" isn't a word. Punk kids and their incomplete dictionaries.)
When we made the leap from paper output to electronic (screen) output it was actually a step "down" for some of us. Not only did we lose the paper record we had of whatever we were doing, but the resolution was only something like 40 columns across. But just about every screen-based terminal we had was 300 baud, instead of the slow 110 baud ASR-33 Tele-Type machines ( affectionately known as "Tele-Tanks" and "chugga-chugga-ding!ding!"s ), and they were a helluva lot quieter. That made all the difference in acceptance.
Yeah, when I saw that letter I thought to myself "this guy sure is atherosclerosis on the series of tubes, isn't he?"
And it kind of pains me to be anywhere near the same side as this Grade A certifiable nut-case, but then that's what public comments are all about.
Fortunately I saw that he could barely figure out how to submit this rambling nonsense to Wired, let alone on the FCC comment form. That's one nice thing about the internet -- the bar to entry is still high enough that it keeps at least a few of the stupidest people from stepping over it.
The problem with this approach is it's borderline vigilantism.
I'd love it if ISPs would set snares for bot-infested computers, and technologically it's not hard: nobody at home-66-99-11-22.comcast.net should ever be forwarding packets from any external networks, let alone a hundred random networks a second. And some ISPs do trap that traffic and block it. But apart from DDoS attacks, what constitutes "legitimate" from "illegitimate" traffic? Connecting on odd ports to distant machines? That's how the internet works!
So the ISPs can identify them. Botnet investigators can identify some of them, too. But the computer still belongs to the owner. Neither the ISP nor the botnet investigators nor the FBI have the right to "hack into" the machine to try to fix it -- even if it would be best for everyone, even if the owner would appreciate the effort, they can't touch it unless they have explicit permission from the owner. Otherwise they're violating the law just as much as the original infector. So they will have to go to the machine owners, one at a time, and ask them to clean them up. With a million machines, and a million clueless users, that's a lot of work.
I think it would be easier to have the ISPs examine their terms of service, then reroute all traffic from any bot-infested address to termsofservice.random-isp.com and wait for their owners to complain to their ISP. Have the ISP tell the owners "Your computer is violating your Terms of Service agreement. You must fix it before we will reconnect you to the internet. If you need help, "... blah blah blah. It would be a lot easier to contact a thousand ISPs than a million clueless users, and the ISPs would probably be more willing and able to help than the users.
This solves the problems of distributing fixes AND the legal issues. You have no constitutional right to connect to the internet, and most contracts for ISP service include stipulations against operating malicious software, which gives the ISPs the right to disconnect you for violating their TOS. It'd still be a pain in the butt, but at least it would be a manageable pain in the butt.
maybe at some point the Chinese government would feel forced to bend their rules for these companies to come back in order to not become technologically retarded.
The only reason Microsoft deals with China at all is to try to stem the tide of piracy. If Microsoft gave China the finger, China would respond in kind. Factories across China would start spitting out pirated copies of every Microsoft application in every language, giving them away and flooding the world markets with free copies of Office, just for the pleasure of crippling Microsoft.
And do you really think they'd care about "technological retardation?" Not that they wouldn't be distributing Chinese copies of all modern software to anyone who wanted it (avoiding retardation); but China cares so little that they still have a peasant population the size of the United States. We're talking real, live, Monty-Python-style, oxcart-through-the-mud peasants. Do you honestly think China cares what happens to their people, or what others think of them?
I'm not trying to absolve the board of blame. I am saying though that the blame is also owned by the individual shareholders, and not just the board.
The thing that got me when Google entered the Chinese market was their idea that "we can't effect change in China if we're not inside China." So they compromised their morals in order to provide the Chinese people with a Tienanmen-free search engine, and tried to do something controversial like tagging the results with "These results have been censored by the Chinese government." I don't know if Yahoo's idea was the same, but Google has publicly expressed regret for making the decision.
Of course Google.cn is still doing it, so "regret" obviously means one thing while "profit" means another...
The proposal has been made and the board of directors have recommended voting against it proposal brought about by other shareholders. So it is the directors who are placing profit above human rights and not the shareholders at large. The very idea that the shareholders at large are responsible is ridiculous. The people responsible for the decisions made are far fewer and less obscure than you are trying to indicate.
It's not ridiculous at all. The directors have only recommended that the shareholders vote against the proposal. It's still up to the shareholders themselves to vote to make the final decision. The shareholders are ultimately responsible, not the board.
That said, boards of directors traditionally have a lot of sway in how the shareholders vote. Many companies are owned largely by various mutual funds and not by individual people, and the shares owned by the funds are voted for them by the fund manager. And fund managers almost always vote the way the board of directors recommend, meaning this might be the kiss of death for the proposal.
The shareholders do have another option, though. They can divest themselves from a stock they consider morally repugnant. This was done with modest success back in the 1980s to companies who did business with apartheid Africa; But mutual funds have grown much larger since then, and a sell-off by concerned individuals would probably have little effect on Yahoo!s stock price.
There are also mutual funds that pledge to invest in only socially responsible companies (can't think of their names right now, but they're pretty easy to find.) If they own any Yahoo! stock today, their fund managers would probably vote their shares for the proposal, and if it failed to pass they would probably divest themselves.
I'd say! I met my wife on MECC 27 years ago, back when I was online 80 hours a week just for fun. Now I have to be online 40 hours a week for work (the other 40 is just for fun.)
Do you remember "limbo" in MTC, where the program's "supervisors" would send you if you annoyed them too much? It was a loop where you had to solve octal math problems before a timer expired (or hang up and get back on again if you couldn't figure them out.)
The best I ever got was estimating and altering my rotation speed to track the opponent's ships instead of the easier high-speed rotating past them, and waiting for them to drift in front of me. I also remember building up speed, swerving left and right, and eventually swinging 180 degrees as I passed my opponents and timing lasers to fire within a few hundred km after passing them. It was a totally devastating attack, on those few occasions when it worked.:-) But I never considered myself in the same league as Coiled Snake.
Oh, and I always used L1999 instead of L2000, or L999 instead of L1000. It was the same number of keystrokes to type but recharged in 59 seconds instead of 60, or 29 instead of 30, doing virtually the same amount of damage. That little trick saved my butt in lots of battles where I was always able to keep the first shot.
Some of the groups were fun to pick on, because they were a bunch of pretty loose alliances with poor loyalty. Plus, some of them were just groups of ruggies, and it was possible for a halfway decent player to take them all on simultaneously. I vaguely remember DMF as one of the bigger and better ones.
When my dad first made that game, just after the first PET came out... [MECC] magically came out with their famous nationwide best seller "Oregon Trail" the very next year, which of course was pretty much exactly "Trail West".
Like everyone else on MECC I played some Oregon Trail, but it was too random to be lots of fun. Far too much was out of the player's control -- fording rivers or descending hills was always a roll of the dice (sorry, a call to RANDOM.) But COMBAT -- now there was a thinking nerd's game.
It's amazing to me that I still can't describe just how much fun it was to play a multi-player shoot'em'up with nothing but quickly printed tables of polar coordinates and vectors. How the advent of 300 baud modems made some people kings over a world of 110 baud modems. How to tweak the output to minimize response time, and interrupting it as soon as you could to get another shot off. How alliances were forged and broken, and "kill stealing" was both commonplace and frowned upon. Accusations of people writing cheat software on their Apple ][s. And blasting the Gorns, of course!
It's a shame that even if there was a duplicate of the software available today, it probably wouldn't be enjoyable anymore. It was a different era of computing.
Or I could buy an $1100 MacBook that could do all the stuff I want AND be small and well made AND not be a pain in the ass to use. If I keep it for 3 years, that's $200 extra a year or about 55 cents a day. Given that I use my computer every day, I'd say that extra 55 cents to avoid a bunch of frustration is quite worth it. I used to not might arguing with my appliances to get them to do stuff, but I'm old now and life is too short. I want stuff that just works.
As I said, if they understood TCO, or even expenses over time, I could probably convince some of them to buy a Mac. But look at the U.S. 60% of the population has no savings at all, and a large percentage of the country is deep in consumer credit debt, has unfavorable mortgages, etc. I'm not saying they wouldn't finance their Mac purchase, but pointing out these are people who have no basic understanding of money. They have no view of the long term. Trying to explain differences between an $1100 dollar machine and a $500 machine is like explaining the differences between a Ford and a BMW. Even if they get it, even if they'd love the features that keep it from pissing them off or from being infested with crapware, there's nothing they'll do differently about it. They'll still buy the Ford.
Yes, but your non-tech savvy friends who are in the market for $500-$1000 laptops are there because they can't tell the difference. They most likely use them for web browsing, word processing, email, spreadsheets, slide shows and the occasional game of solitaire. For people like that, price is the single most important factor. For that kind of user an $1100 machine is $600 of waste if a $500 machine can do the same job, regardless of whether it's a PC or a Mac.
If you were to explain Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to them, how they won't have virus and worm problems and porno-popups, and will have fewer updates, and how everything typically just works better together, they might be more inclined to consider a Mac. But really, purchase price is most likely going to remain their most important focus.
Thanks for the explanation. Your initial post kind of "triggered" me, but I failed to explain my point very well.
You said that unsecured media was an invitation to take it. My point (and the point of most slashdotters) is that DRM in any form denies legitimate users their rights, is therefore by definition always defective, and treats all of us as potential criminals. This is in itself a criminal act violating our rights, and is one to be worked around. The DMCA is a bought-and-paid-for piece of legislation that is trying and failing to give the air of legitimacy to this appalling industry practice. Yet your post seemed to imply a desire to see DRM used to stop casual copying in order to remind people that they're trying to do something criminal. Since I was seeing legitimate fair use being denied due to this exact usage I took offense, and for that I apologize.
That would require you to build DRM capability into every device to recognize that it is in fact DRM...is that what you really want?
Yes, that's exactly what I want. If Sony builds DRM into a device, I want it in a 24 point bold blinking font screaming, "THE SONY CORPORATION THINKS YOU ARE A THIEF FOR TRYING TO COPY THIS FILE!" If Sony wants to restrict our rights, I want Sony to loudly acknowledge exactly what they are doing and why. I want it exposed for what it is, a violation of the user's rights. Sunshine is a great disinfectant..
I was thinking in terms of bit torrent, unsecured wifi, etc... [...] DRM is intended to prevent you from sharing with all your friends. Does your family member think it is okay to share iTunes songs with other people?
Thanks for trying to divert attention from the root problem, but they are not sharing anything. In both cases they bought the material through legitimate sources (iTMS and Best Buy.) Their opinion on the question of "is sharing right or wrong?" is completely irrelevant.
And not that I know her opinions on intellectual property rights (she's only 13,) but in the case of the "iTunes niece" every song I saw in her iTunes collection was bought and paid for -- I saw no MP3 files, just AAC files. She's spent hundreds of dollars at the iTMS and can't copy a note of it to her LG phone. Yet DRM is somehow justifiable because she might be an IP thief; because she might harbor dark inner thoughts of audio piracy?
That they can't, is that a computer error or a violation of their user agreement?
Are you asking me? You can't ask them, because they're not computer geeks -- they can't tell the difference between an actual error and a licensing violation. They see a black screen, or they see no options, or they get a "Player error, click here for details" (and clicking "here" yields a dialog box that reads something like "Error code C1234567 - Invalid access to protected content".) The industry doesn't even have the courage to tell people the truth, instead they hide DRM behind error windows and inscrutable codes and ambiguous legalese. The industry thrives on the confusion, because it deflects the blame for DRM violations to they mystical realm of "computer errors".
If the industry is going to continue with DRM, they owe it to all of us to go balls-to-the-wall with their accusations. It would be much better if a full screen window popped up and said "Your computer is not broken. The legitimate owners of the material you are trying to play believe that you are attempting to steal their intellectual property without paying for it. Click here to send them the $20.00 required to unlock this media and then we will rescind our reporting of you to the FBI for attempted piracy so that you will not have to face fines of up to $250,000 and 25 years in jail. This threat has been brought to you by Dell and Microsoft on behalf of Sony Entertainment." At least it would be honest, and I wouldn't get asked all these questions like "did I break my computer?" And it would reduce piracy, which is their stated goal.
The big problem is that there is an entire generation of college kids that think everything digital is free for the taking unless it is properly secured, and if it is not properly secured then it is basically an invitation to take it.
That's simply not true at all. I have yet to meet a non-geek who thinks "it's locked therefore it must be wrong." This weekend I was asked these two questions from two different family members: "why do I get this error message on my PC trying to watch a DVD?" and "why can't I copy my iTunes music to my cell phone?"
All their experiences in the physical world have taught them that if they buy something, it's theirs. This is no different: they both assumed that because they bought the products that they had the right to use them. They see only that "the computer" is giving them error messages. They've never heard of DRM. They have zero assumption that they're doing anything wrong (which is good because they're not.) Yet the products are refusing to cooperate.
In this case, DRM itself is instilling the "mentality" of "this is a stupid computer bug I have to get around." At no point does "right vs wrong" enter into the thought process.
Be careful with this. I've found many "reviews" in the forums to be nothing more than astroturfing. Fortunately, the people doing the astroturfing are usually really, really bad at it, blatantly shilling the products in question, and that makes them pretty easy to spot.
Not that I want to give away all my tells, but if a posting is 100% positive with absolutely no flaws, there's very little chance of the post being fair. Every product has flaws or deficiencies of some nature, and a poster who can't find them is either being paid to shill or did such a crummy job at reviewing that it's not worth reading.
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That may be their argument, but it's incomplete. "Completely emptying a cartridge might be detrimental" *to whom*? An empty cartridge is just as useless as a cartridge that isn't working. I have no use for the old cartridge in either case -- it's just pre-landfill plastic once it's empty. So I don't care if I run it down to bubbles or dried ink.
I, for one, predict a fleet of "I, for one, welcome our deck-of-card-sized LANdroid overlords" jokes.
This is really being designed to help the army commanders answer the age-old question: "TK-421, why aren't you at your post?" Now they can just ask the LANDroids.
A consensus of smart people who actually have a clue is still not a democracy. A consensus of all people is a democracy.
Historically, the people at the "low" end of the spectrum have never been fairly represented. Slaves have always been denied the right to vote. And slave-owners have kept the slaves deliberately ignorant to prevent them from both voting and learning that a democracy should include everyone. Jim Crow laws were another recent attempt to deny democracy to the illiterate. It's much easier to repress the ignorant.
But the ignorant have their rights, too. It's up to the scientific community to convince them of the truth, and to disabuse them of the bullshit that "there are two sides to every story." Scientifically sound theories are not "stories."
It's completely immoral and irresponsible for a politician to take the side opposing science (and the truth) simply for the political gain of the "ignorant vote." Unfortunately, it's not illegal.
"Papiere, bitte" has become "Deine Ausweiskarte ablichten, bitte" (thanks, Google Translate!)
Only this time it'll be spoken in English.
Yeah, it probably would have.
You'd think that here in the future with all this computing power I'd be able to design a time machine to go back to 1974 and sell it to the NSA, and invest it all in Microsoft and Apple. But noooo.... we don't even have flying cars yet! Curse this miserable time-line!
When we made the leap from paper output to electronic (screen) output it was actually a step "down" for some of us. Not only did we lose the paper record we had of whatever we were doing, but the resolution was only something like 40 columns across. But just about every screen-based terminal we had was 300 baud, instead of the slow 110 baud ASR-33 Tele-Type machines ( affectionately known as "Tele-Tanks" and "chugga-chugga-ding!ding!"s ), and they were a helluva lot quieter. That made all the difference in acceptance.
Fortunately I saw that he could barely figure out how to submit this rambling nonsense to Wired, let alone on the FCC comment form. That's one nice thing about the internet -- the bar to entry is still high enough that it keeps at least a few of the stupidest people from stepping over it.
And just in case they can't think of their own reasons, let's send them Jack Thompson. We're certainly done with him.
I'd love it if ISPs would set snares for bot-infested computers, and technologically it's not hard: nobody at home-66-99-11-22.comcast.net should ever be forwarding packets from any external networks, let alone a hundred random networks a second. And some ISPs do trap that traffic and block it. But apart from DDoS attacks, what constitutes "legitimate" from "illegitimate" traffic? Connecting on odd ports to distant machines? That's how the internet works!
So the ISPs can identify them. Botnet investigators can identify some of them, too. But the computer still belongs to the owner. Neither the ISP nor the botnet investigators nor the FBI have the right to "hack into" the machine to try to fix it -- even if it would be best for everyone, even if the owner would appreciate the effort, they can't touch it unless they have explicit permission from the owner. Otherwise they're violating the law just as much as the original infector. So they will have to go to the machine owners, one at a time, and ask them to clean them up. With a million machines, and a million clueless users, that's a lot of work.
I think it would be easier to have the ISPs examine their terms of service, then reroute all traffic from any bot-infested address to termsofservice.random-isp.com and wait for their owners to complain to their ISP. Have the ISP tell the owners "Your computer is violating your Terms of Service agreement. You must fix it before we will reconnect you to the internet. If you need help, " ... blah blah blah. It would be a lot easier to contact a thousand ISPs than a million clueless users, and the ISPs would probably be more willing and able to help than the users.
This solves the problems of distributing fixes AND the legal issues. You have no constitutional right to connect to the internet, and most contracts for ISP service include stipulations against operating malicious software, which gives the ISPs the right to disconnect you for violating their TOS. It'd still be a pain in the butt, but at least it would be a manageable pain in the butt.
The only reason Microsoft deals with China at all is to try to stem the tide of piracy. If Microsoft gave China the finger, China would respond in kind. Factories across China would start spitting out pirated copies of every Microsoft application in every language, giving them away and flooding the world markets with free copies of Office, just for the pleasure of crippling Microsoft.
And do you really think they'd care about "technological retardation?" Not that they wouldn't be distributing Chinese copies of all modern software to anyone who wanted it (avoiding retardation); but China cares so little that they still have a peasant population the size of the United States. We're talking real, live, Monty-Python-style, oxcart-through-the-mud peasants. Do you honestly think China cares what happens to their people, or what others think of them?
The thing that got me when Google entered the Chinese market was their idea that "we can't effect change in China if we're not inside China." So they compromised their morals in order to provide the Chinese people with a Tienanmen-free search engine, and tried to do something controversial like tagging the results with "These results have been censored by the Chinese government." I don't know if Yahoo's idea was the same, but Google has publicly expressed regret for making the decision.
Of course Google.cn is still doing it, so "regret" obviously means one thing while "profit" means another ...
It's not ridiculous at all. The directors have only recommended that the shareholders vote against the proposal. It's still up to the shareholders themselves to vote to make the final decision. The shareholders are ultimately responsible, not the board.
That said, boards of directors traditionally have a lot of sway in how the shareholders vote. Many companies are owned largely by various mutual funds and not by individual people, and the shares owned by the funds are voted for them by the fund manager. And fund managers almost always vote the way the board of directors recommend, meaning this might be the kiss of death for the proposal.
The shareholders do have another option, though. They can divest themselves from a stock they consider morally repugnant. This was done with modest success back in the 1980s to companies who did business with apartheid Africa; But mutual funds have grown much larger since then, and a sell-off by concerned individuals would probably have little effect on Yahoo!s stock price.
There are also mutual funds that pledge to invest in only socially responsible companies (can't think of their names right now, but they're pretty easy to find.) If they own any Yahoo! stock today, their fund managers would probably vote their shares for the proposal, and if it failed to pass they would probably divest themselves.
Do you remember "limbo" in MTC, where the program's "supervisors" would send you if you annoyed them too much? It was a loop where you had to solve octal math problems before a timer expired (or hang up and get back on again if you couldn't figure them out.)
The best I ever got was estimating and altering my rotation speed to track the opponent's ships instead of the easier high-speed rotating past them, and waiting for them to drift in front of me. I also remember building up speed, swerving left and right, and eventually swinging 180 degrees as I passed my opponents and timing lasers to fire within a few hundred km after passing them. It was a totally devastating attack, on those few occasions when it worked. :-) But I never considered myself in the same league as Coiled Snake.
Oh, and I always used L1999 instead of L2000, or L999 instead of L1000. It was the same number of keystrokes to type but recharged in 59 seconds instead of 60, or 29 instead of 30, doing virtually the same amount of damage. That little trick saved my butt in lots of battles where I was always able to keep the first shot.
Some of the groups were fun to pick on, because they were a bunch of pretty loose alliances with poor loyalty. Plus, some of them were just groups of ruggies, and it was possible for a halfway decent player to take them all on simultaneously. I vaguely remember DMF as one of the bigger and better ones.
I'm not sure why the author of "Trail West" would have made such a claim.
It's amazing to me that I still can't describe just how much fun it was to play a multi-player shoot'em'up with nothing but quickly printed tables of polar coordinates and vectors. How the advent of 300 baud modems made some people kings over a world of 110 baud modems. How to tweak the output to minimize response time, and interrupting it as soon as you could to get another shot off. How alliances were forged and broken, and "kill stealing" was both commonplace and frowned upon. Accusations of people writing cheat software on their Apple ][s. And blasting the Gorns, of course!
It's a shame that even if there was a duplicate of the software available today, it probably wouldn't be enjoyable anymore. It was a different era of computing.
If you were to explain Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to them, how they won't have virus and worm problems and porno-popups, and will have fewer updates, and how everything typically just works better together, they might be more inclined to consider a Mac. But really, purchase price is most likely going to remain their most important focus.
You said that unsecured media was an invitation to take it. My point (and the point of most slashdotters) is that DRM in any form denies legitimate users their rights, is therefore by definition always defective, and treats all of us as potential criminals. This is in itself a criminal act violating our rights, and is one to be worked around. The DMCA is a bought-and-paid-for piece of legislation that is trying and failing to give the air of legitimacy to this appalling industry practice. Yet your post seemed to imply a desire to see DRM used to stop casual copying in order to remind people that they're trying to do something criminal. Since I was seeing legitimate fair use being denied due to this exact usage I took offense, and for that I apologize.
Yes, that's exactly what I want. If Sony builds DRM into a device, I want it in a 24 point bold blinking font screaming, "THE SONY CORPORATION THINKS YOU ARE A THIEF FOR TRYING TO COPY THIS FILE!" If Sony wants to restrict our rights, I want Sony to loudly acknowledge exactly what they are doing and why. I want it exposed for what it is, a violation of the user's rights. Sunshine is a great disinfectant..
Thanks for trying to divert attention from the root problem, but they are not sharing anything. In both cases they bought the material through legitimate sources (iTMS and Best Buy.) Their opinion on the question of "is sharing right or wrong?" is completely irrelevant.
And not that I know her opinions on intellectual property rights (she's only 13,) but in the case of the "iTunes niece" every song I saw in her iTunes collection was bought and paid for -- I saw no MP3 files, just AAC files. She's spent hundreds of dollars at the iTMS and can't copy a note of it to her LG phone. Yet DRM is somehow justifiable because she might be an IP thief; because she might harbor dark inner thoughts of audio piracy?
Are you asking me? You can't ask them, because they're not computer geeks -- they can't tell the difference between an actual error and a licensing violation. They see a black screen, or they see no options, or they get a "Player error, click here for details" (and clicking "here" yields a dialog box that reads something like "Error code C1234567 - Invalid access to protected content".) The industry doesn't even have the courage to tell people the truth, instead they hide DRM behind error windows and inscrutable codes and ambiguous legalese. The industry thrives on the confusion, because it deflects the blame for DRM violations to they mystical realm of "computer errors".
If the industry is going to continue with DRM, they owe it to all of us to go balls-to-the-wall with their accusations. It would be much better if a full screen window popped up and said "Your computer is not broken. The legitimate owners of the material you are trying to play believe that you are attempting to steal their intellectual property without paying for it. Click here to send them the $20.00 required to unlock this media and then we will rescind our reporting of you to the FBI for attempted piracy so that you will not have to face fines of up to $250,000 and 25 years in jail. This threat has been brought to you by Dell and Microsoft on behalf of Sony Entertainment." At least it would be honest, and I wouldn't get asked all these questions like "did I break my computer?" And it would reduce piracy, which is their stated goal.
That's simply not true at all. I have yet to meet a non-geek who thinks "it's locked therefore it must be wrong." This weekend I was asked these two questions from two different family members: "why do I get this error message on my PC trying to watch a DVD?" and "why can't I copy my iTunes music to my cell phone?"
All their experiences in the physical world have taught them that if they buy something, it's theirs. This is no different: they both assumed that because they bought the products that they had the right to use them. They see only that "the computer" is giving them error messages. They've never heard of DRM. They have zero assumption that they're doing anything wrong (which is good because they're not.) Yet the products are refusing to cooperate.
In this case, DRM itself is instilling the "mentality" of "this is a stupid computer bug I have to get around." At no point does "right vs wrong" enter into the thought process.
And I voted for Cthulu, whose slogan is: "Why settle for the lesser of two evils?"
Not that I want to give away all my tells, but if a posting is 100% positive with absolutely no flaws, there's very little chance of the post being fair. Every product has flaws or deficiencies of some nature, and a poster who can't find them is either being paid to shill or did such a crummy job at reviewing that it's not worth reading.