How about releasing a single OS that scales suitably and automatically to the users' dynamic needs, rather than piling options on the user who neither knows nor cares what the options do.
The rest of the show was about how people who don't normally game were getting into the Wii and DS.
Maybe they're finally realizing that there are a lot more would-be customers out there who want to play console games but can't last 30 seconds in games designed for the hardcore. My wife spends far more on console games than I do, and does so in hopes that she'll have fun... and then invariably discovers that she has no idea how to play these convoluted things and lacks the years of experience necessary to do so with agility. Upshot is potentially lucrative enthusiastic customers are discouraged from continuing before they reach the critical mass of fun that will propel them into the "hardcore" realm.
You're a hardcore gamer. You're going to buy more games. There are more games coming for you. You're not going away anytime soon.
For just one conference, they decided to focus on trying to attract and retain more customers. You may sneer at Wii Fit, but that (a typically lame attempt at reaching out to the luddites) is a step toward figuring out what non-"gamers" want in a game.
I just hope they don't make a phone based on the iPod Shuffle.
Jokes about calling random numbers aside, I've long wanted such a gizmo. Just give me a phone with voice dialing and audio prompts - no screen - and I'd be happy. It would be totally tiny, have minimal buttons for volume/mute/start/end, a built-in USB plug (per classic Shuffle) for no-cables charging and visual access from any computer. Include the iPod Shuffle guts as the MP3 player.
I use the classic Shuffle all the time for select music (there's only about a half-dozen CDs I want to listen to at any time), info transfer (usually have about a half-gig of data on it), and other than headphones no cables are needed (built-in USB plug). Considering how tiny the actual phone part of a cell phone is (minus battery, screen, mic, speaker, and extra gee-whiz gludge), and how the Shuffle was further miniaturized, surely a very usable audio-only phone could be built into the classic Shuffle design.
Maybe the market wouldn't be huge, but there is a market.
I do value the Inuit culture, but at a certain point clinging to old ways becomes a Luddite reaction to change. They don't need to hunt whale, and their continuing hunts of whales endanger their future ability to hunt whales.
Mankind needs to move on. Lingering in old ways does not exalt the past, it mocks the past.
Inuits do value advanced culture,but at a certain point clinging to new ways becomes a selfish reaction to stability. They don't need Internets to eat, and their continuing industrialization to sustain/. endangers their ability to do anything fundamentally useful.
Mankind needs to back up. Impassioned pursuit of new ways does not exalt the future, it mocks the future.
Upshot: those who say "I value cultue X, but..." don't.
Many polls, published on many sites, indicate that the business world is nonplussed with Vista and many have no plans to migrate over.
[Yawn] This is the exact same reaction we've seen with the introduction of every new Microsoft operating system for decades. Nobody wants it, system requirements are too high, too buggy, many have no plans to migrate, won't run key apps, etc.
Funny thing is, this complaining is inevitably followed by nearly everyone eventually upgrading to the new OS. Yes there are always a few holdouts ("I'm still running Win98!") and rebels ("F this, I'm buying a Mac"), but on the whole the "it sucks" mantra is inevitably followed by assimilation.
Such is the nature of varying population distributions.
South Korea has 1/4th their population in a single city, packed in so dense that broadband penetration is relatively cheap - contrasted with the US population's fondness for distance from neighbors, and the resultant per-foot cost aggregation. China has over 4x the population of the USA - we could wire everyone, and they could still out-subscribe us with 75% of their population remaining entirely unconnected.
Guess the report just reflects the realities of supply-and-demand.
"Kelly is charged under a state law that bars the intentional interception or recording of anyone's oral conversation without their consent."
An axiomatic presumption of this law is that the parties involved have the option of terminating the conversation upon being notified that it will be recorded. That's not the case here: under no sane conditions would the officer say "oh, if you're going to record the conversation then we're not going to have a conversation" and walk away.
If the cop wins in this case, we could very well see criminals getting surveilance recordings thrown out of court for the same reason: they weren't notified that their "conversation" was being recorded. Unintended consequences...
It's about time the American academia and military ditch the Cold War mindset they've been stuck in since 1947, and start adjusting to the new realities of warfare and conflict resolution.
New realities? What is new? Nothing is new, save perhaps the scale.
There is nothing essential about the Iraq war which is new: the government of two countries are at odds, one sends troops into the other and eviscerates the existing government, attempts to instantiate a more friendly government in its place, and spends years trying to be nice to the population at large while quelling violent opposition.
"Asymmetric warfare" is nothing new; it has simply re-emerged as a relevant issue after decades of being more focused on symmetric warfare. The American academia and military are ditching the Cold War mindset they've been stuck in since 1947, and adjusting to the old realities of standard warfare and conflict resolution.
To deal with the old realities of asymmetric warfare, they are exploring the so-called notion of "hyperwar": the natural extention of blitzkreig, Sherman's March, etc., with an attempt to achieve great speed without the "scorched-earth policy". This was indeed achieved in Iraq, with the primary goal (overthrow of Saddam) achieved practically in a matter of days. The under-appreciated and under-handled old issue - separate from the initial goal - is coping with the subsequent power vacuum.
If anything is "new", it's the operational precision which results in (this will freak some out) astoundingly low casualties: rates which take years to accumulate into what was suffered in months or days in prior wars.
we already have a federal ID. It's called a passport....and nobody is required to have one unless they are entering the country (even then, there are alternate options), and nobody is expected to carry it everywhere and produce it on demand.
By the Constitution, nobody is required to produce ANY paperwork (IDs included) for the feds unless a judge specifically says a specific person has to under specific conditions. "Real ID" grossly violates the Constitution.
In none of these cases, be they printed or on-screen EULAs for hardware or software, does the buyer have the option whatsoever to read the contract before closing it. Sure there may be some verbiage to the effect of "if you don't agree you can send this back for a full refund" but even that is not seen until they already have your money. Basically they're unfairly/unexpectedly springing extra contracts on you after the deal has already been done. I could equally send them a post-purchase letter saying "by keeping my payment for this product you hereby grant me all rights to the material purchased, including reverse-engineering & copying and relief from any DCMA issues; if you do not agree, send me a full refund plus postage-paid return packaging"; not really any different, is it?
I've been imagining, and trying to figure out how to do, a combination of the two. Have a truck drive around photographing everything, and run the photos into software to generate the 3D model. Now we see - in practically the same week - both parts of that in place. Just string the two together, throw in public-accessable photos, crunch a few terabytes, and we'll have one of the coolest applications EVAR.
I've long held (mostly out of sheer amusement) that the reason we haven't been contacted by space aliens is that every intelligent species proceeds through roughly the same sequence of scientific discovery, and they all get to an inevitable point of trying an experiment which invariably wipes out their entire planet & civilization.
We almost had it with the first nuke test, when scientists allegedly acknowledged there was a non-trivial chance that detonating the first fusion bomb would set the planet on fire.
Maybe the Higgs boson test will, like other species that tried to make one, turn us into merely a dark stain on the space-time fabric.
Why not? Better to have an organized process promoting design improvement than the long-tired attempt to take financial control far too late and to the detriment of further production & enhancement.
The Western AR-15 design has been wildly successful in this regard, with what is a de-facto open-source system. It's a highly modular design which has been widely tested with numerous production variations, accessories, and consumables.
Make it trivial - I mean easy like breathing - to place a call by numbers, voice, contact list, repeat/callback, etc., all mode-less.
Incoming calls should just happen. Dorking around with finding the phone and/or earpiece and determining which one is activated... please just make that nonsense stop. Again, mode-less.
Get the order of things right. Don't show me "do you want to access voicemail?" before "these people called" - I don't want to waste time dorking around with voicemail when it could have showed me that the calls I missed are ones I don't want to deal with now. Don't display "you missed one call", show me who called.
Memory is cheap. There's no reason for the call history list to end, much less end at just 25 calls. Put that info to work - data-mine it! When scrolling thru contacts, show me the most common contacts first; alphabetical order means I see that entry every time even though I haven't called that number in two years. Help me get to the numbers I want; there's enough processing power, use it smartly. Keep every number incoming and outgoing, and go fetch related data ASAP to tell me more.
Stop teasing me with demo functions. I bought an appliance; don't treat it like the fourth toaster slot only works for 30 days, then I have to pay extra monthly for it.
Stretch that battery life. Cut the cuteness; give me something that works for a long time between charges.
It's not a TV, GPS, IM, etc. - just give me totally smooth PHONE functionality.
And for Pete's sake: show the current time while I'm talking! Why do phones suddenly lose the pocketwatch function right when I'm most likely to need it to make arrangements with someone? I finally had to go back to wearing a watch precisely because the phone wouldn't show the time when most needed, even though it shows time 99.99% of the time?
1. The 4th Amendment states you have a right "to be secure in your papers". That means squat if, by looking at one card for any reason, a gov't bureaucrat can pull up darn near ANYTHING about you. Does your participation in Social Security really have anything to do with being pulled over for speeding? Are your travel records really necessary for borrowing a book from the library? Does pulling health records really need cross-linking with when you got a driver's license? Is your credit rating really needed to board an airplane?
2. Sure, they'll promise to only use relevant data appropriately. Right. Governments do not have a good history of using such pervasive data without oppression (up to and including genocide).
3. The more ID is needed to function in society, the more valuable IDs become. A national ID becomes a one-stop-shop for ID theft. Crack one card, and I become you.
4. Without the national ID, you can't participate in government. You can't enter a courthouse, visit your Congressman, etc. because you won't be able to even enter the building - no ID, no entry.
5. Ultimately a national ID is a license to exist. No license shown on demand? You're detained until your ID is found, one is created, or you get removed from society. The fact that you exist means nothing; no card, no you.
6. Corrupted data screws you over. Your file gets marked "deceased"? You're officially dead, and no amount of "but I'm standing here ranting at you!" won't help. At least with diverse cards & databases you can argue "8 out of 9 government databases say I'm still alive; please correct yours!"
7. Pervasiveness. No card, you can't function. Without that one centralized ID card, which you don't get unless everything is in order, you can't drive, fly, ride, vote, own property, get married, file suit, work,... YOU CAN'T EVEN BUY BEER!
8+ months for me. When I moved, I deliberately did not have cable TV hooked up. Broadcast TV is pretty much pointless where I am. No TV? it's wonderful. There's too many other things to do than stare at the tube, and if I _am_ going to watch something it's deliberate, worthwhile, and ad-free: DVDs.
When I _do_ happen to watch TV (somewhere else), all I can think is how lame it is.
Read your own quote. Without a RealID......you can't enter federal buildings. You can't participate in your own government's processes, even if required to (insofar as entering federal buildings is involved)....you can't travel by air, train, or long-haul bus....you can't receive federal benefits, even though the money involved was compulsarily taken from your pocket.
In many areas, police CAN stop and ask for ID, and detain you if you don't comply.
Just because the totality of the potential of this "license to exist" groundwork hasn't been finished doesn't mean now isn't the time to start resisting it. They've learned to phase things in gradually, a la "boiling the frog".
Heck, this means you soon won't even be able to BUY BEER without a gov't-mandated RealID "license to exist".
National IDs are basically a license to exist. If you can't show one on demand, you are detained (to wit: your participation in society is suspended) until your license to exist or one is issued, or you are removed from society.
Not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind when creating a free country.
You're making my point. To most people in this discussion, and for the purposes of this discussion, it suffices to presume that "CD" means "one of those shiny discs you stick in a CD player and hear music". That there are some technical variants which may or may not comply with the strict definition of what constitutes a "CD", and that some of those technically non-"CD" variants are subject to some bent form of DRM, ad nauseum, is understood by those folowing this thread and who have not, as the GP said, been living under a rock.
Do we REALLY need to re-hash the voluminous tomes of strict boundaries of knowledge, protocols, technical definitions, etc. every time we touch on these subjects? Or, given the subject of the thread, consider it sufficient to allow for intelligence of the reader and the lack of necessity for pervasive precision in casual conversation, and continue the discussion on the 99% true statements "CDs do not have DRM, and iTunes downloads do"? YES there are exceptions... we assume you and others have not been living under a rock, understand that there are exceptions, and that discussion of those exceptions only wastes time bickering over vanishingly small relevance, when we'd rather be focusing on the main point.
If you want precision at every turn, go carry on your discussions via submissions in peer-reviewed publications./. is a soundbite-oriented forum, where we assume others actually have a clue about what is and is not relevant to the discussion.
Gotta like how someone participating in a soundbite-oriented society (/.) will criticize another for not writing a comprehensive tome detailing the limits and degrees of a statement which is, for 99% of purposes of discussion, true in just a few words.
OF COURSE some CDs have DRM. MOST DON'T. This in contrast to the subject at hand, being songs downloaded from iTunes, which practically all DO have DRM.
A comparable problem faced another industry years ago. In trying to implement regulations, the government discoverd that firearms are not monolithic devices, but instead consist of a number of parts, each of which can be replaced and which can do nothing harmful on their own or even fully assembled save for one part.
The legal solution was to declare a key part, the "receiver", as the regulated item. That hunk of metal is harmless/useless on its own, yet - due to intentions to control an industry - was declared THE essential part and is thus is the precise subject of otherwise over-broadly worded "firearms" regulations.
Relevance? Considering the billions of $$$ perceived at stake and intense motivation of the *AA, coupled with the intense opposition's creativity, the DCMA will be modified to declare decryption keys something equivalent to a firearm's receiver: federally registered, and if you're caught possessing one (even if plainly harmless on its own) without proper licensing, very bad things will happen to you.
Yes, the key on its own is useless - as is they decryption software lacking the key. However, the intention is clear and the motivation to regulate/restrict combining and using them is powerful, so possession of the essence of decryption - the key - will eventually be regulated.
And yes, they WILL hunt down anyone distributing decryption keys without a license. While warm fuzzy arguments about "anyone with a lathe & drill press..." may be true, nonetheless the BATFE exists as a very large, powerful and motivated government agency.
Someone paid a quarter-billion dollars to make SpiderMan 3, not to mention hundreds of other 9-digit-buget movies. That someone will see to it that a government agency is enacted, empowered, and funded enough to be motivated to ensure every bit moving from camera/mic to screen/speakers moves entirely within a fully licensed (i.e.: aggregating massive royalties) environment.
You just want a few free movies, and to play movies on hardware of your choice. They're not going to let you. Don't underestimate their motivation.
Slashdot Mirror
How about releasing a single OS that scales suitably and automatically to the users' dynamic needs, rather than piling options on the user who neither knows nor cares what the options do.
"Make it go."
The rest of the show was about how people who don't normally game were getting into the Wii and DS.
... and then invariably discovers that she has no idea how to play these convoluted things and lacks the years of experience necessary to do so with agility. Upshot is potentially lucrative enthusiastic customers are discouraged from continuing before they reach the critical mass of fun that will propel them into the "hardcore" realm.
Maybe they're finally realizing that there are a lot more would-be customers out there who want to play console games but can't last 30 seconds in games designed for the hardcore. My wife spends far more on console games than I do, and does so in hopes that she'll have fun
You're a hardcore gamer. You're going to buy more games. There are more games coming for you. You're not going away anytime soon.
For just one conference, they decided to focus on trying to attract and retain more customers. You may sneer at Wii Fit, but that (a typically lame attempt at reaching out to the luddites) is a step toward figuring out what non-"gamers" want in a game.
I just hope they don't make a phone based on the iPod Shuffle.
Jokes about calling random numbers aside, I've long wanted such a gizmo. Just give me a phone with voice dialing and audio prompts - no screen - and I'd be happy. It would be totally tiny, have minimal buttons for volume/mute/start/end, a built-in USB plug (per classic Shuffle) for no-cables charging and visual access from any computer. Include the iPod Shuffle guts as the MP3 player.
I use the classic Shuffle all the time for select music (there's only about a half-dozen CDs I want to listen to at any time), info transfer (usually have about a half-gig of data on it), and other than headphones no cables are needed (built-in USB plug). Considering how tiny the actual phone part of a cell phone is (minus battery, screen, mic, speaker, and extra gee-whiz gludge), and how the Shuffle was further miniaturized, surely a very usable audio-only phone could be built into the classic Shuffle design.
Maybe the market wouldn't be huge, but there is a market.
Mankind needs to move on. Lingering in old ways does not exalt the past, it mocks the past.
Inuits do value advanced culture,but at a certain point clinging to new ways becomes a selfish reaction to stability. They don't need Internets to eat, and their continuing industrialization to sustain
Mankind needs to back up. Impassioned pursuit of new ways does not exalt the future, it mocks the future.
Upshot: those who say "I value cultue X, but
[Yawn] This is the exact same reaction we've seen with the introduction of every new Microsoft operating system for decades. Nobody wants it, system requirements are too high, too buggy, many have no plans to migrate, won't run key apps, etc.
Funny thing is, this complaining is inevitably followed by nearly everyone eventually upgrading to the new OS. Yes there are always a few holdouts ("I'm still running Win98!") and rebels ("F this, I'm buying a Mac"), but on the whole the "it sucks" mantra is inevitably followed by assimilation.
Anyone here running DOS 3.1?
Such is the nature of varying population distributions.
South Korea has 1/4th their population in a single city, packed in so dense that broadband penetration is relatively cheap - contrasted with the US population's fondness for distance from neighbors, and the resultant per-foot cost aggregation.
China has over 4x the population of the USA - we could wire everyone, and they could still out-subscribe us with 75% of their population remaining entirely unconnected.
Guess the report just reflects the realities of supply-and-demand.
FOSS => Taxpayer-subsidized software development?
To be polite: let's not go there.
An axiomatic presumption of this law is that the parties involved have the option of terminating the conversation upon being notified that it will be recorded. That's not the case here: under no sane conditions would the officer say "oh, if you're going to record the conversation then we're not going to have a conversation" and walk away.
If the cop wins in this case, we could very well see criminals getting surveilance recordings thrown out of court for the same reason: they weren't notified that their "conversation" was being recorded. Unintended consequences...
New realities? What is new? Nothing is new, save perhaps the scale.
There is nothing essential about the Iraq war which is new: the government of two countries are at odds, one sends troops into the other and eviscerates the existing government, attempts to instantiate a more friendly government in its place, and spends years trying to be nice to the population at large while quelling violent opposition.
"Asymmetric warfare" is nothing new; it has simply re-emerged as a relevant issue after decades of being more focused on symmetric warfare. The American academia and military are ditching the Cold War mindset they've been stuck in since 1947, and adjusting to the old realities of standard warfare and conflict resolution.
To deal with the old realities of asymmetric warfare, they are exploring the so-called notion of "hyperwar": the natural extention of blitzkreig, Sherman's March, etc., with an attempt to achieve great speed without the "scorched-earth policy". This was indeed achieved in Iraq, with the primary goal (overthrow of Saddam) achieved practically in a matter of days. The under-appreciated and under-handled old issue - separate from the initial goal - is coping with the subsequent power vacuum.
If anything is "new", it's the operational precision which results in (this will freak some out) astoundingly low casualties: rates which take years to accumulate into what was suffered in months or days in prior wars.
we already have a federal ID. It's called a passport. ...and nobody is required to have one unless they are entering the country (even then, there are alternate options), and nobody is expected to carry it everywhere and produce it on demand.
By the Constitution, nobody is required to produce ANY paperwork (IDs included) for the feds unless a judge specifically says a specific person has to under specific conditions. "Real ID" grossly violates the Constitution.
I can see Uwe making more films.
What flabergasts me is that major actors are still voluntarily acting in them.
I'd like to point out that 1680x1050 is huge.
[Ahem] The new standard is 1920x1080. Cope.
In none of these cases, be they printed or on-screen EULAs for hardware or software, does the buyer have the option whatsoever to read the contract before closing it. Sure there may be some verbiage to the effect of "if you don't agree you can send this back for a full refund" but even that is not seen until they already have your money. Basically they're unfairly/unexpectedly springing extra contracts on you after the deal has already been done. I could equally send them a post-purchase letter saying "by keeping my payment for this product you hereby grant me all rights to the material purchased, including reverse-engineering & copying and relief from any DCMA issues; if you do not agree, send me a full refund plus postage-paid return packaging"; not really any different, is it?
I've been imagining, and trying to figure out how to do, a combination of the two.
Have a truck drive around photographing everything, and run the photos into software to generate the 3D model. Now we see - in practically the same week - both parts of that in place. Just string the two together, throw in public-accessable photos, crunch a few terabytes, and we'll have one of the coolest applications EVAR.
I've long held (mostly out of sheer amusement) that the reason we haven't been contacted by space aliens is that every intelligent species proceeds through roughly the same sequence of scientific discovery, and they all get to an inevitable point of trying an experiment which invariably wipes out their entire planet & civilization.
We almost had it with the first nuke test, when scientists allegedly acknowledged there was a non-trivial chance that detonating the first fusion bomb would set the planet on fire.
Maybe the Higgs boson test will, like other species that tried to make one, turn us into merely a dark stain on the space-time fabric.
Why not? Better to have an organized process promoting design improvement than the long-tired attempt to take financial control far too late and to the detriment of further production & enhancement.
The Western AR-15 design has been wildly successful in this regard, with what is a de-facto open-source system. It's a highly modular design which has been widely tested with numerous production variations, accessories, and consumables.
A phone.
... please just make that nonsense stop. Again, mode-less.
I just want a phone.
I just want to make/take calls.
Get the little things right.
Make it trivial - I mean easy like breathing - to place a call by numbers, voice, contact list, repeat/callback, etc., all mode-less.
Incoming calls should just happen. Dorking around with finding the phone and/or earpiece and determining which one is activated
Get the order of things right. Don't show me "do you want to access voicemail?" before "these people called" - I don't want to waste time dorking around with voicemail when it could have showed me that the calls I missed are ones I don't want to deal with now. Don't display "you missed one call", show me who called.
Memory is cheap. There's no reason for the call history list to end, much less end at just 25 calls. Put that info to work - data-mine it! When scrolling thru contacts, show me the most common contacts first; alphabetical order means I see that entry every time even though I haven't called that number in two years. Help me get to the numbers I want; there's enough processing power, use it smartly. Keep every number incoming and outgoing, and go fetch related data ASAP to tell me more.
Stop teasing me with demo functions. I bought an appliance; don't treat it like the fourth toaster slot only works for 30 days, then I have to pay extra monthly for it.
Stretch that battery life. Cut the cuteness; give me something that works for a long time between charges.
It's not a TV, GPS, IM, etc. - just give me totally smooth PHONE functionality.
And for Pete's sake: show the current time while I'm talking! Why do phones suddenly lose the pocketwatch function right when I'm most likely to need it to make arrangements with someone? I finally had to go back to wearing a watch precisely because the phone wouldn't show the time when most needed, even though it shows time 99.99% of the time?
So where's the cheap per-watt solar panels we've long been promised?
1. The 4th Amendment states you have a right "to be secure in your papers". That means squat if, by looking at one card for any reason, a gov't bureaucrat can pull up darn near ANYTHING about you. Does your participation in Social Security really have anything to do with being pulled over for speeding? Are your travel records really necessary for borrowing a book from the library? Does pulling health records really need cross-linking with when you got a driver's license? Is your credit rating really needed to board an airplane?
... YOU CAN'T EVEN BUY BEER!
2. Sure, they'll promise to only use relevant data appropriately. Right. Governments do not have a good history of using such pervasive data without oppression (up to and including genocide).
3. The more ID is needed to function in society, the more valuable IDs become. A national ID becomes a one-stop-shop for ID theft. Crack one card, and I become you.
4. Without the national ID, you can't participate in government. You can't enter a courthouse, visit your Congressman, etc. because you won't be able to even enter the building - no ID, no entry.
5. Ultimately a national ID is a license to exist. No license shown on demand? You're detained until your ID is found, one is created, or you get removed from society. The fact that you exist means nothing; no card, no you.
6. Corrupted data screws you over. Your file gets marked "deceased"? You're officially dead, and no amount of "but I'm standing here ranting at you!" won't help. At least with diverse cards & databases you can argue "8 out of 9 government databases say I'm still alive; please correct yours!"
7. Pervasiveness. No card, you can't function. Without that one centralized ID card, which you don't get unless everything is in order, you can't drive, fly, ride, vote, own property, get married, file suit, work,
8+ months for me. When I moved, I deliberately did not have cable TV hooked up. Broadcast TV is pretty much pointless where I am. No TV? it's wonderful. There's too many other things to do than stare at the tube, and if I _am_ going to watch something it's deliberate, worthwhile, and ad-free: DVDs.
When I _do_ happen to watch TV (somewhere else), all I can think is how lame it is.
Read your own quote. Without a RealID... ...you can't enter federal buildings. You can't participate in your own government's processes, even if required to (insofar as entering federal buildings is involved). ...you can't travel by air, train, or long-haul bus. ...you can't receive federal benefits, even though the money involved was compulsarily taken from your pocket.
In many areas, police CAN stop and ask for ID, and detain you if you don't comply.
Just because the totality of the potential of this "license to exist" groundwork hasn't been finished doesn't mean now isn't the time to start resisting it. They've learned to phase things in gradually, a la "boiling the frog".
Heck, this means you soon won't even be able to BUY BEER without a gov't-mandated RealID "license to exist".
National IDs are basically a license to exist.
If you can't show one on demand, you are detained (to wit: your participation in society is suspended) until your license to exist or one is issued, or you are removed from society.
Not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind when creating a free country.
You're making my point. To most people in this discussion, and for the purposes of this discussion, it suffices to presume that "CD" means "one of those shiny discs you stick in a CD player and hear music". That there are some technical variants which may or may not comply with the strict definition of what constitutes a "CD", and that some of those technically non-"CD" variants are subject to some bent form of DRM, ad nauseum, is understood by those folowing this thread and who have not, as the GP said, been living under a rock.
... we assume you and others have not been living under a rock, understand that there are exceptions, and that discussion of those exceptions only wastes time bickering over vanishingly small relevance, when we'd rather be focusing on the main point.
/. is a soundbite-oriented forum, where we assume others actually have a clue about what is and is not relevant to the discussion.
Do we REALLY need to re-hash the voluminous tomes of strict boundaries of knowledge, protocols, technical definitions, etc. every time we touch on these subjects? Or, given the subject of the thread, consider it sufficient to allow for intelligence of the reader and the lack of necessity for pervasive precision in casual conversation, and continue the discussion on the 99% true statements "CDs do not have DRM, and iTunes downloads do"? YES there are exceptions
If you want precision at every turn, go carry on your discussions via submissions in peer-reviewed publications.
Gotta like how someone participating in a soundbite-oriented society (/.) will criticize another for not writing a comprehensive tome detailing the limits and degrees of a statement which is, for 99% of purposes of discussion, true in just a few words.
OF COURSE some CDs have DRM. MOST DON'T. This in contrast to the subject at hand, being songs downloaded from iTunes, which practically all DO have DRM.
A comparable problem faced another industry years ago. In trying to implement regulations, the government discoverd that firearms are not monolithic devices, but instead consist of a number of parts, each of which can be replaced and which can do nothing harmful on their own or even fully assembled save for one part.
The legal solution was to declare a key part, the "receiver", as the regulated item. That hunk of metal is harmless/useless on its own, yet - due to intentions to control an industry - was declared THE essential part and is thus is the precise subject of otherwise over-broadly worded "firearms" regulations.
Relevance? Considering the billions of $$$ perceived at stake and intense motivation of the *AA, coupled with the intense opposition's creativity, the DCMA will be modified to declare decryption keys something equivalent to a firearm's receiver: federally registered, and if you're caught possessing one (even if plainly harmless on its own) without proper licensing, very bad things will happen to you.
Yes, the key on its own is useless - as is they decryption software lacking the key. However, the intention is clear and the motivation to regulate/restrict combining and using them is powerful, so possession of the essence of decryption - the key - will eventually be regulated.
And yes, they WILL hunt down anyone distributing decryption keys without a license. While warm fuzzy arguments about "anyone with a lathe & drill press..." may be true, nonetheless the BATFE exists as a very large, powerful and motivated government agency.
Someone paid a quarter-billion dollars to make SpiderMan 3, not to mention hundreds of other 9-digit-buget movies. That someone will see to it that a government agency is enacted, empowered, and funded enough to be motivated to ensure every bit moving from camera/mic to screen/speakers moves entirely within a fully licensed (i.e.: aggregating massive royalties) environment.
You just want a few free movies, and to play movies on hardware of your choice.
They're not going to let you.
Don't underestimate their motivation.
It happened before. It will happen again.