Not ignorant. Its not what the card does that is important, its the implication in the article that everyone would want to conduct electronic busniess this way. Then you have a stack of tokens or you subject yourself to some centralized data scheme.
That what Winn-Dixie said when they implemnted their grocery store discount card... and Petsmart, and BiLo, and Waldens, and MediaPlay, and Kroger, and Sams,I have stack of cards 2 inches thick.
The only time I have ever had money stolen from my account was when someone looked over my shoulder at the teller window. When I left, they filled out a counter check for $700 with my account number and the teller gave them the money. Fortunately I happend to check the web page 30min later and saw the with drawal. After two weeks of dealing with... humans... I got my money back.
I am really sick of all the convient things in life suddenly become too cumbersome to use. I would really, really hate to have a hard token to carry around. IT has so many band features: 1. I have to carry it around 2. I may lose it 3. It will probably break 4. Its code could be duped
scifiction.com is currently the highest paying market for science fiction period. It is edited by Ellen Datlow (from Omni) and the combination of the best editor and the best pay means it has in general the best ficiton.
I always read things and watch series in the order they were written, not in the order of the books. It is better to watch Star Wars this way, read the Foundation series this way, and just about anything I can think of. In this way you follow the natural creative process of the writer rather than an artificial storyline; you grow with the writer and the story, the last three Star Wars movies certainly don't flow like Lucas wrote them all at the same time, maybe he had a vague treatment...
Businesses frequently will sell their product to foreign countries at greatly reduced prices. The reason for this is that the distributor in the foreign country will assume the marketing costs of the product, so they are given a deep discount. No one actually makes any more money off this practice it just allows the marketing to be paid for locally and performed locally by people who understand the local culture and customer needs. The problem lies in that certain unscrupulous foreign distributors will take that discounted merchandise and sell it back into US bargin stores (in violation of their distribution contract). This way the distributor gets the benefit of the marketing already being done in the US even though he was compensated through discounts for marketing the product in his own country. HP's decision seams like a reasonable solution to prevent this problem.
No. Felony is based on seriousness of the crime, not necessarily bodily harm. There is felony tax evasion. I just noticed in my state that, in certain circumstances, trespassing on railroad tracks is a felony.
The ipod works with lots of download sites. I have an ipod, I don't buy from itunes. I download a lot of legal tunes. I have used emusic, disclogic, mindawn, magnatune, digitalsoundboard.net, studiodownloads.net, livephish.com, primuslive, live metallica.com, and some others I am probably forgetting. If none of these places have the music I want, I just order the cd for usually less than $12 new or $8 used. (which usually winds up being cheaper than most of the download sites especially when you include buring and labelling cds) The "doesn't work with any major retailer" complaint seems to mean "doesn't work with windows media drm".
On the other hand market research seems to indicate that people do not want to own music, they simply want to rent it, by paying a subscription service and using the new windows media drm to allow subsription services to be used on portable players. If this is so, it will give M$ another monopoly and Apple will be screwed. I want to own all my music, the rest is radio. Rental is probably the music industry's dream scheme, they can sell you the same music over and over in perpetuity without having to come up with anything new.
Another take on this issue is that MP3 players have had the slowest and least market penetration (15% of households - Forbes) of any major consumer electronics product. So maybe this is not the wave of the future... maybe we don't know what's coming at all.
The ideal situation would be hundreds of these little sites popping up so that no one site has a huge selection, but you can get what you want somewhere with no drm. Lots of competition, good for everybody. Certainly successful bands could all make there own sites (Metallica, Phish, Primus) and screw the record companies now. Even some smaller bands are making a living with their own sites. This would also be the best situation for the ipod. Buy lossless music and then pick your own format, don't let someone pick it for you.
I have purchased over 3000 CDs and LPs over the years, they are ripped into flacs and stored on about 1.2 TB on a linux box which streams them to various squeezeboxes and steros in the house. I have the collection also ripped as 128 AAC (about 100GB) for the iPoD in the car (since the car noise makes sound quality largely irrelevant to me). For headphone or home stereo it drives me nuts if its not losseless. The cost of this whole setup is really insignificant campared to the cost of the CDs, LPs, and the stero equipment itself.
Can I sue because my xbox format game won't play on my playstation. No, I would have had to buy the Playstation version. When you buy something from iTMS you know what you are getting. You are not getting a freely open version of music that will play on any player, you know that. If you don't agree to that you can buy ALL THE SAME MUSIC somewhere else and play it on whatever you want. There is no user lock in. Maybe it's not as convienient as iTMS, but it might be better quality. All costs are not measured in dollars.
I find this fascinating (not necesary this specific response). If artistic creations have no value, then why are people falling all over themselves to aquire them. If you aquire it without paying for it, then you have stolen real money from me. I don't see the difference in making an illegal copy of a record and stealing the record from the store. Records cost very little to make and ship, so the hard value of what you are stealing is very small, almost non-existant to a large company. This is like saying it is perfectly leagal to to sneak in and use any unsold seat on an airplane or at a concert or a sporting event, in these cases you are no stealing anything physical from someone, but you are clearly stealing money.
I am just playing devil's advocate here becaue (particularly in the open source community) everyone assumes that information should be free. If information has no economic value then the economy would stop, there would be no incentive to work on these things. If it does have value, then by copying it, you are stealing. I know a lot of the logic for free flow of information comes from the academic information sharing model, but I have been involved in academics for a long time and EVERYHTING IN ACADEMICS IS DONE FOR MONEY. Papers are published and shared in the community, but it is not altruistic, it is to add to your totals to bring in raises, grants,and tenure.
Also I never assumed stuff has umlimited value, I am saying stuff has limited value that is determined by the legal system, in this case, it is a fundamental part of the consitituion that intellecutal property has value for a definite time.
Certainly coprorations are abusing patent and copyright for locking up intellectual property however the abuse of the same system by individuals is not a crusade to fix the system, it is simply the same act as that of the corporations , greed, you increase the number of things you have.
It is hard to beleive that you (generic you) have never created anything that you thought you deserved to profit from. Certainly you may have made it GPL or open source or public domain; in this case you have simply chosen your mode of profit (respect, cred) rather than money.
It is not FUD to look at the flip-side of an issue, that is how we progress in our understanding of things. And trust me, I am a firm opponent of the way patents and copyrights are used in our system, however I do beleive that patents, copyright and intellectual property should exist, because intellectual propery has definite value.
I phrased my post the way I did because I think looking at things in fundamental ways is the most beneficial, yes there are lots of subtlties to the discussion, but copyright violation is just a semantic difference from theft. The act is the same.
Intellecutal property laws exist solely to provide incentive for the progression of science and art (which we all benefit from). Yes they are miss used today, but most of what we have, we would not have without them. If you have a natural right to copy, then progress will definitely slow and you will eventually have less than you do now.
When people are stealing my stuff, I would do everything in my power to stop them whether I was a large company or a single individual. The law exist to protect us from people stealing our stuff. If you establish a site that essential does nothing but facilitate the stealing of stuff then you should be arrested. If people do not like the current market arrangements, prices, etc, then they should not buy the product, not steal the product and self-riteously say the theft was justified. This behavior harms me as a huge user of leagal bit torrent sites, which will now be under unjustified scrutiny.
JMS is an adequate (although inconsistent plotter), but a truly pathetic writer of dialog. Painfully, teeth-gnashingly horrible. I saw two really good smooth flowing episodes of B5 and they were written by someone elese.
Someone said that the value of wikipedia was that it learns in the same way that communities learn and that it asymptotically approaches the truth. While I realize that in specific carefully controlled instances this may be true, in general, communties don't learn, they cycle. By every measure of the global characteristics of a community we don't learn. We repeat the same mistakes of harrasment of minorities, surrender of freedoms, transplanting wars from one geographic location to another. What we (as individuals) see as learning or enlightenment is simply an upswing in the cycle. We are now facing the same racial issues, evolution issues, econmics issues that we have in the past. There may be minor changes in the practicality of things, but the general issues cycle. Reference books such as encycopedias serve as anchors against the cycle or rather calibration points. If the calibration points are allowed to float freely with the cycles of society, there can be no progress. In the 70s the prominent view of American history was that a bunch of enlightened men established a country with as much freedom as possible. Now there are many people who want to rewrite those articles saying that a bunch of hard-core Chirstian men founded a Christian country whose laws would be based on Christian beliefs even if there was no objective means of determining morality. I'm not saying who is correct here, I am saying that articles about these men would be rewritten over and over in wikipedia and as time passed it would become increasingly difficult to separate cultural whims from some idealistic objective truth. Truth is what the current community decides it is. There is no reason to assume that any article would asymtotically move in any direction. Just because we don't see how someone could change something we consider fundamental science now doesn't mean it won't change in the future. Getting community agreement on something does not mean it is true. Take all of the major scientific revolutions (Thomas Kuhn). Scientific revolution was not made in these cases because someone was able to PROVE something, it was made because the people disagreed eventaully died off or were out-marketed. It is a fallacy to assume that because an idividual researches a topic that he can't provide a better encyclopedia article than a community. If he holds his ground he may eventyally be able to change the world, if the work is constantly maleable he will not.
developers story that was beat to death about Spotlight/Launchbar, Dashboard/Konfabulator issues? Does Apple get some credit for seeing technologies they wanted to incorporate and then compensating the company that they chose.. and then making an offer to the one they didn't!
Why is that so strange? I have 3500 CDs and LPs. I have never illegally downloaded a tune from the internet. I have never copied a friend's CD. I have never even considered these things. Most every CD I have ever wanted I could get used for $5-$8. I have downloaded about 40 cds in flac formats from online stores. I have downloaded about 200Cd in flac format from trader friendly artists. I know about six other iPods out there that do the same thing I do. I know some people who have filled ipods by taping off the radio, but that's legal. I don't understand pirating music off the internet or other people's cds and I don't understand the industry's assumption that everyone is a thief.
...as recognition for being a the company for several years. Actually, they gave my a catalog I could choose from. I chose the lava lamp, which cam inscribed with the company logo and is now in use in my office causing great consternation with managment.
... now typing, is an essential everyday commodity. People learn how to do it because they need to. I am typing this very quickly without looking at the keyboard and have never taken a typing class; I just became adept at something I needed to do. Imagine if all high-school classes were taught with the perspective that it was something you needed, rather than something to be swallowed and rote regurgitated. Think of the learning...
1. You have a source copy of the software to decode mp3s. You OWN it. You don't have to get it "fixed". It works, it's there. That's like worrying about kfc going out of biz 'cause they make fried chicken. The recipie isn't a secret.
I am aware that I will always be able to play the music on my computer. That is not where I listen to music. I do not beleive you will always be able to purchase a device that will play mp3s. I don't own the device.
Over 15 years, you've never learned to build a backup system?
I think my comments explained fairly well that I know how to build a backup system. I see it as a disadavange to HAVE to do it for music, especially when I see so many other disadvantages.
No, it's not sad. You are being a zealot. Get over yourself. I was giving you credit where credit is due before, but forget it. Just another flaming idiot on this "information superhighway"
Ok. Let me get this straight. I post an opinion in a forum for opinions and one of your major complaints is that I have an opinion and listed out why I have that opinion. I reply stating my disappoint at being criticised for having an opinion, and I have been demoted from "where credit is due" to "idiot". Boy, these rules are complicated. Thanks for pointing that out.
They weren't saying that there was something wrong with the AAC one. Rather, they were telling you that they couldn't tell the difference, and asking you to explain why the second sample was somehow "wrong"..
I conceed that my choice of words left my meaning in semantic jepordy however this absolutely not the case. I have not played this test for anyone (even people who don't care much about music or recording quality) who immediately notice that there was a problem with the recording.
Also, something you seem incapable of understanding is that codecs are software, not hardware. Assuming you're intelligent and are using a digital music player instead of burning your stuff to CD, you can almost always add as many codec plugins as you want. So just because a new format's offered doesn't mean you have to unplug and throw away your old codec, nor does it mean you can no longer listen to the music bought with it.
Its nice that you can take so few of my words and deduce that I don't know that codecs are software. Congratulations. However I do understand this. In ten years I will no doubt be able to play anything I buy from iTMS on my Linux bos, but it is highly likely that Apple or anybody else will change its format so that they will not work on my portable player or stereo, as the matter of fact Apple's business model is centered on reseller items to its cusomers. If I buy CDs now, I will likely always have hardware support and when formats change so that we have something that is losseless I can rerip them. This gives me ultimate freedom to make use of all the presenet and future software codecs. You may be able to translate an AAC into a new format, but you won't be able to make it sound any better.
What the hell are you talking about? iTMS generally has lower prices and better file quality than any other store.
The hell I am talking about is that there are a lot of albums on iTMS that cost a anywhere from 1-4 dollars more than at Best Buy. Your statement is simply incorrect. The proportion of iTMS albums that are more expensive than normal cds seems to be increasing.
Slashdot Mirror
Not ignorant. Its not what the card does that is important, its the implication in the article that everyone would want to conduct electronic busniess this way. Then you have a stack of tokens or you subject yourself to some centralized data scheme.
That what Winn-Dixie said when they implemnted their grocery store discount card... and Petsmart, and BiLo, and Waldens, and MediaPlay, and Kroger, and Sams,I have stack of cards 2 inches thick.
The only time I have ever had money stolen from my account was when someone looked over my shoulder at the teller window. When I left, they filled out a counter check for $700 with my account number and the teller gave them the money. Fortunately I happend to check the web page 30min later and saw the with drawal. After two weeks of dealing with... humans... I got my money back.
Good gosh, I can't type... sorry..
I am really sick of all the convient things in life suddenly become too cumbersome to use. I would really, really hate to have a hard token to carry around. IT has so many band features:
1. I have to carry it around
2. I may lose it
3. It will probably break
4. Its code could be duped
Too little security, too much inconvieniece
scifiction.com is currently the highest paying market for science fiction period. It is edited by Ellen Datlow (from Omni) and the combination of the best editor and the best pay means it has in general the best ficiton.
I always read things and watch series in the order they were written, not in the order of the books. It is better to watch Star Wars this way, read the Foundation series this way, and just about anything I can think of. In this way you follow the natural creative process of the writer rather than an artificial storyline; you grow with the writer and the story, the last three Star Wars movies certainly don't flow like Lucas wrote them all at the same time, maybe he had a vague treatment...
Businesses frequently will sell their product to foreign countries at greatly reduced prices. The reason for this is that the distributor in the foreign country will assume the marketing costs of the product, so they are given a deep discount. No one actually makes any more money off this practice it just allows the marketing to be paid for locally and performed locally by people who understand the local culture and customer needs.
The problem lies in that certain unscrupulous foreign distributors will take that discounted merchandise and sell it back into US bargin stores (in violation of their distribution contract). This way the distributor gets the benefit of the marketing already being done in the US even though he was compensated through discounts for marketing the product in his own country. HP's decision seams like a reasonable solution to prevent this problem.
No. Felony is based on seriousness of the crime, not necessarily bodily harm. There is felony tax evasion. I just noticed in my state that, in certain circumstances, trespassing on railroad tracks is a felony.
The ipod works with lots of download sites. I have an ipod, I don't buy from itunes. I download a lot of legal tunes. I have used emusic, disclogic, mindawn, magnatune, digitalsoundboard.net, studiodownloads.net, livephish.com, primuslive, live metallica.com, and some others I am probably forgetting. If none of these places have the music I want, I just order the cd for usually less than $12 new or $8 used. (which usually winds up being cheaper than most of the download sites especially when you include buring and labelling cds) The "doesn't work with any major retailer" complaint seems to mean "doesn't work with windows media drm".
On the other hand market research seems to indicate that people do not want to own music, they simply want to rent it, by paying a subscription service and using the new windows media drm to allow subsription services to be used on portable players. If this is so, it will give M$ another monopoly and Apple will be screwed. I want to own all my music, the rest is radio. Rental is probably the music industry's dream scheme, they can sell you the same music over and over in perpetuity without having to come up with anything new.
Another take on this issue is that MP3 players have had the slowest and least market penetration (15% of households - Forbes) of any major consumer electronics product. So maybe this is not the wave of the future... maybe we don't know what's coming at all.
The ideal situation would be hundreds of these little sites popping up so that no one site has a huge selection, but you can get what you want somewhere with no drm. Lots of competition, good for everybody. Certainly successful bands could all make there own sites (Metallica, Phish, Primus) and screw the record companies now. Even some smaller bands are making a living with their own sites. This would also be the best situation for the ipod. Buy lossless music and then pick your own format, don't let someone pick it for you.
I have purchased over 3000 CDs and LPs over the years, they are ripped into flacs and stored on about 1.2 TB on a linux box which streams them to various squeezeboxes and steros in the house. I have the collection also ripped as 128 AAC (about 100GB) for the iPoD in the car (since the car noise makes sound quality largely irrelevant to me). For headphone or home stereo it drives me nuts if its not losseless. The cost of this whole setup is really insignificant campared to the cost of the CDs, LPs, and the stero equipment itself.
Can I sue because my xbox format game won't play on my playstation. No, I would have had to buy the Playstation version. When you buy something from iTMS you know what you are getting. You are not getting a freely open version of music that will play on any player, you know that. If you don't agree to that you can buy ALL THE SAME MUSIC somewhere else and play it on whatever you want. There is no user lock in. Maybe it's not as convienient as iTMS, but it might be better quality. All costs are not measured in dollars.
I find this fascinating (not necesary this specific response). If artistic creations have no value, then why are people falling all over themselves to aquire them. If you aquire it without paying for it, then you have stolen real money from me. I don't see the difference in making an illegal copy of a record and stealing the record from the store. Records cost very little to make and ship, so the hard value of what you are stealing is very small, almost non-existant to a large company. This is like saying it is perfectly leagal to to sneak in and use any unsold seat on an airplane or at a concert or a sporting event, in these cases you are no stealing anything physical from someone, but you are clearly stealing money.
I am just playing devil's advocate here becaue (particularly in the open source community) everyone assumes that information should be free. If information has no economic value then the economy would stop, there would be no incentive to work on these things. If it does have value, then by copying it, you are stealing. I know a lot of the logic for free flow of information comes from the academic information sharing model, but I have been involved in academics for a long time and EVERYHTING IN ACADEMICS IS DONE FOR MONEY. Papers are published and shared in the community, but it is not altruistic, it is to add to your totals to bring in raises, grants,and tenure.
Also I never assumed stuff has umlimited value, I am saying stuff has limited value that is determined by the legal system, in this case, it is a fundamental part of the consitituion that intellecutal property has value for a definite time.
Certainly coprorations are abusing patent and copyright for locking up intellectual property however the abuse of the same system by individuals is not a crusade to fix the system, it is simply the same act as that of the corporations , greed, you increase the number of things you have.
It is hard to beleive that you (generic you) have never created anything that you thought you deserved to profit from. Certainly you may have made it GPL or open source or public domain; in this case you have simply chosen your mode of profit (respect, cred) rather than money.
It is not FUD to look at the flip-side of an issue, that is how we progress in our understanding of things. And trust me, I am a firm opponent of the way patents and copyrights are used in our system, however I do beleive that patents, copyright and intellectual property should exist, because intellectual propery has definite value.
I phrased my post the way I did because I think looking at things in fundamental ways is the most beneficial, yes there are lots of subtlties to the discussion, but copyright violation is just a semantic difference from theft. The act is the same.
Intellecutal property laws exist solely to provide incentive for the progression of science and art (which we all benefit from). Yes they are miss used today, but most of what we have, we would not have without them. If you have a natural right to copy, then progress will definitely slow and you will eventually have less than you do now.
When people are stealing my stuff, I would do everything in my power to stop them whether I was a large company or a single individual. The law exist to protect us from people stealing our stuff. If you establish a site that essential does nothing but facilitate the stealing of stuff then you should be arrested. If people do not like the current market arrangements, prices, etc, then they should not buy the product, not steal the product and self-riteously say the theft was justified. This behavior harms me as a huge user of leagal bit torrent sites, which will now be under unjustified scrutiny.
and will this guy want royalties on the new one?
Amen!!!!!
JMS is an adequate (although inconsistent plotter), but a truly pathetic writer of dialog. Painfully, teeth-gnashingly horrible. I saw two really good smooth flowing episodes of B5 and they were written by someone elese.
Someone said that the value of wikipedia was that it learns in the same way that communities learn and that it asymptotically approaches the truth. While I realize that in specific carefully controlled instances this may be true, in general, communties don't learn, they cycle. By every measure of the global characteristics of a community we don't learn. We repeat the same mistakes of harrasment of minorities, surrender of freedoms, transplanting wars from one geographic location to another. What we (as individuals) see as learning or enlightenment is simply an upswing in the cycle. We are now facing the same racial issues, evolution issues, econmics issues that we have in the past. There may be minor changes in the practicality of things, but the general issues cycle. Reference books such as encycopedias serve as anchors against the cycle or rather calibration points. If the calibration points are allowed to float freely with the cycles of society, there can be no progress. In the 70s the prominent view of American history was that a bunch of enlightened men established a country with as much freedom as possible. Now there are many people who want to rewrite those articles saying that a bunch of hard-core Chirstian men founded a Christian country whose laws would be based on Christian beliefs even if there was no objective means of determining morality. I'm not saying who is correct here, I am saying that articles about these men would be rewritten over and over in wikipedia and as time passed it would become increasingly difficult to separate cultural whims from some idealistic objective truth. Truth is what the current community decides it is. There is no reason to assume that any article would asymtotically move in any direction. Just because we don't see how someone could change something we consider fundamental science now doesn't mean it won't change in the future. Getting community agreement on something does not mean it is true. Take all of the major scientific revolutions (Thomas Kuhn). Scientific revolution was not made in these cases because someone was able to PROVE something, it was made because the people disagreed eventaully died off or were out-marketed. It is a fallacy to assume that because an idividual researches a topic that he can't provide a better encyclopedia article than a community. If he holds his ground he may eventyally be able to change the world, if the work is constantly maleable he will not.
developers story that was beat to death about Spotlight/Launchbar, Dashboard/Konfabulator issues? Does Apple get some credit for seeing technologies they wanted to incorporate and then compensating the company that they chose.. and then making an offer to the one they didn't!
to fix all the bad acting in the films... that seems like it would be a worthwhile investment for film restoration.
Why is that so strange? I have 3500 CDs and LPs. I have never illegally downloaded a tune from the internet. I have never copied a friend's CD. I have never even considered these things. Most every CD I have ever wanted I could get used for $5-$8. I have downloaded about 40 cds in flac formats from online stores. I have downloaded about 200Cd in flac format from trader friendly artists. I know about six other iPods out there that do the same thing I do. I know some people who have filled ipods by taping off the radio, but that's legal. I don't understand pirating music off the internet or other people's cds and I don't understand the industry's assumption that everyone is a thief.
with a line in to the mac and AudioHijack Pro. You set a time and it records. I'm sure you don't need to write your own special software.
...as recognition for being a the company for several years. Actually, they gave my a catalog I could choose from. I chose the lava lamp, which cam inscribed with the company logo and is now in use in my office causing great consternation with managment.
... now typing, is an essential everyday commodity. People learn how to do it because they need to. I am typing this very quickly without looking at the keyboard and have never taken a typing class; I just became adept at something I needed to do. Imagine if all high-school classes were taught with the perspective that it was something you needed, rather than something to be swallowed and rote regurgitated. Think of the learning...
1. You have a source copy of the software to decode mp3s. You OWN it. You don't have to get it "fixed". It works, it's there. That's like worrying about kfc going out of biz 'cause they make fried chicken. The recipie isn't a secret.
I am aware that I will always be able to play the music on my computer. That is not where I listen to music. I do not beleive you will always be able to purchase a device that will play mp3s. I don't own the device.
Over 15 years, you've never learned to build a backup system?
I think my comments explained fairly well that I know how to build a backup system. I see it as a disadavange to HAVE to do it for music, especially when I see so many other disadvantages.
No, it's not sad. You are being a zealot. Get over yourself. I was giving you credit where credit is due before, but forget it. Just another flaming idiot on this "information superhighway"
Ok. Let me get this straight. I post an opinion in a forum for opinions and one of your major complaints is that I have an opinion and listed out why I have that opinion. I reply stating my disappoint at being criticised for having an opinion, and I have been demoted from "where credit is due" to "idiot". Boy, these rules are complicated. Thanks for pointing that out.
They weren't saying that there was something wrong with the AAC one. Rather, they were telling you that they couldn't tell the difference, and asking you to explain why the second sample was somehow "wrong"..
I conceed that my choice of words left my meaning in semantic jepordy however this absolutely not the case. I have not played this test for anyone (even people who don't care much about music or recording quality) who immediately notice that there was a problem with the recording.
Also, something you seem incapable of understanding is that codecs are software, not hardware. Assuming you're intelligent and are using a digital music player instead of burning your stuff to CD, you can almost always add as many codec plugins as you want. So just because a new format's offered doesn't mean you have to unplug and throw away your old codec, nor does it mean you can no longer listen to the music bought with it.
Its nice that you can take so few of my words and deduce that I don't know that codecs are software. Congratulations. However I do understand this. In ten years I will no doubt be able to play anything I buy from iTMS on my Linux bos, but it is highly likely that Apple or anybody else will change its format so that they will not work on my portable player or stereo, as the matter of fact Apple's business model is centered on reseller items to its cusomers. If I buy CDs now, I will likely always have hardware support and when formats change so that we have something that is losseless I can rerip them. This gives me ultimate freedom to make use of all the presenet and future software codecs. You may be able to translate an AAC into a new format, but you won't be able to make it sound any better.
What the hell are you talking about? iTMS generally has lower prices and better file quality than any other store.
The hell I am talking about is that there are a lot of albums on iTMS that cost a anywhere from 1-4 dollars more than at Best Buy. Your statement is simply incorrect. The proportion of iTMS albums that are more expensive than normal cds seems to be increasing.