Nonsense. Squeezing every last cent out of consumers only works when demand is completely inelastic, and increasing the price doesn't lead to lost sales.
If making it slightly difficult for you to create backups keeps people from easily doing massive copying and distribution without permission, isn't that a fair trade-off?
DRM doesn't prevent people from easily doing massive copying and distribution at all.
It makes it harder for the first person to "rip" that first copy, but once it's done preventing anyone else from "ripping" that copy is irrelevant.
And DRM does much much more than "making it slightly difficult for you to create backups".
It makes it impossible for you to keep a copy of a work indefinitely. Your copy is only usable as long as the company that made the DRMed document still exists. If you think this doesn't matter you need to talk to a historian.
It makes it impossible for you to view the work except through a specific application. I have precisely one DRM-protected e-book now... I recently deleted the Microsoft Reader documents I owned, because they're worthless now I don't have a Pocket PC. Oh, that's right, you want me to buy another copy for that. Why should I?
It makes it impossible for you to use a work in ways the application doesn't want you to. If I own a movie, why shouldn't I be able "enter" it by feeding captured scenes into a VR viewer? Because you want me to have to pay again for the VR version of the movie (if you ever bother making one)?
How many times should I have to buy The White Album anyway?
When Linux fails, either it's something in hardware (Linux seems to be more sensitive to bad RAM than Windows, which I consider to be a Good Thing), or it's something easily fixable -- not even by a kernel hacker, but by a competent admin with a little shell scripting ability. Even Gentoo isn't usually that hard to fix.
When Mac OS X fails, either it's something in hardware, or it's something easily fixable -- not even by a kernel hacker, but by a competant admin with a little shell scripting ability.
At least if it had been Linux with a stupid keybinding problem, I could fix it myself -- and I'm no expert, but it would take me less than a fucking year to fix it.
Did you even try? OS X is UNIX, it's got all the UNIX shells and pretty much all the configuration is in files you can edit automatically if you have "a little shell scripting ability".
In this case it sounds like a startup script to poke an NSUserKeyEquivalents entry in ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist would be the UNIX way to do things.
When it Just Works, it's beautiful, and when it Just Doesn't, there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.
Wehn it Just Works, it's beautiful, and when it Just Doesn't, it's no harder to fix with "a little shell scripting" than Linux. If you CHOOSE to treat it as a black box, that's YOUR problem, not Apple's.
First, there's already code to prevent cheating by monitoring what you run on your computer built in to the games, so people playing multiplayer online games are apparently willing to accept draconian restrictions on what they can run on their computer as a condition of playing the game.
Second, you can't play a multiplayer game without servers, so it people don't care if it has to connect to a server to authorize or decrypt local data, if the company's defunct the game's useless anyway.
But most importantly, the vast majority of these games don't need DRM to enforce payment. They can give the game away without any protection at all, since you need an account on their servers to log into them.
This is really not readily generalizable beyond the gaming market.
Something that I thought of while responding to another message...
DRM-protecting online music sales does absolutely nothing to prevent people distributing copyrighted music illegally online. The fact that both action stake place online is a red herring: the two areas are completely unrelated. Whether the "pirate" got the copy he's distributing online from iTMS online or Borders down the street is irrelevant.
If the labels really wanted to do something about people sharing files they'd have Apple remove the DRM from the iTunes version, and instead watermark each track with a hash of the credit card number or other identifying information of the person who purchased it. Then when they found a copy online they could simply give Apple the watermark and get the identity of the person who originally distributed it.
Of course, any savvy "pirate" would filter the file and remove the watermark - but any savvy pirate would be ripping the higher quality version from a CD in the first place. After a few high profile cases, people would be less likely to share a downloaded track than one they ripped from a CD. Pretty soon the labels would be experimenting with un-DRMed watermarked online-only distribution to protect their copyrights.
Check the title of this thread. "Beware the Apple iPhone iHandcuffs". Read the message in context.
That doesnt work unless you sacrifice sound quality even further or battery time/storage space by reripping as lossless.
Um, I said that in the original post. You quoted it in your first reply:
Yes, if you turn it around and Mix, Burn, Rip, you can lose some quality in the Rip step if you use a lossy format, but that's true whether you're ripping stuff you burned from iTMS or you're importing a CD you bought at Borders.
That doesnt work unless you sacrifice... battery time...
If you're concerned about battery time, you're talking about portable players, and you're listening to music through cheap earbuds in a noisy environment.
By the way, does anyone have the comments section from Slashdot for the introduction of the iPod?
You won't find me there. You might find me griping about Steve slandering flash players when he introduced the iPod Mini, though... I thought he was really missing the boat there. I'd been using a small flash player that only held a few hours of music, and loading it from a random playlist in iTunes. A lot like the wildly popular iPod Shuffle that came out a year later, and next year the "only $50 more" mini was dead.
Then there were all the people complaining that Apple didn't have a "headless" low end Mac, and Steve's response to that was "No Ugly Monitors on Nice Macs"... right up until he introduced the Mac mini. Which also sold like hotcakes, just like we expected. Hopefully he'll figure out that giving it decent graphics or at least a video upgrade path is a good idea... any month now... but until then the fanboys will be insisting that you don't need 3d support on a Mac.
Apple makes mistakes, too, see.
When they fix them, Apple fanboys like you seem to forget that they'd ever screwed up.
Anyone who's read much of what I've written knows I'm no fan of Microsoft. But I'm not as doctrinaire as I sometimes sound, and so I spent two years with a Pocket PC because I felt I owed Microsoft a fair shake at testing it. There are indeed some areas where it's very good, but using it was a mistake and going back to Palm was a tremendous relief.
Many of the features of the Pocket PC Phone Edition that I used have been faithfully copied by the iPhone.
Many more haven't.
Many of features that caused me problems on the Pocket PC are the ones copied in the iPhone, the top two were the touch-screen for dialling numbers that kept me from dialling by touch, the way playing music and reading eBooks and basically using it as anything but a phone dragged down the battery and kept me from being able to use it as a phone.
The good features of the Pocket PC, like good text input (better than what Palm's currently using) and being able to run third party and my own software on it, these have been set aside.
As a company, "Hewlett-Packard, post-Carly Fiorinia", is a stable and well-respected producer of computers and computer gadgets. It makes solid products that people use. However, it is not known for its innovation (though it does innovate). It doesn't capture the awe and high respect that it did in its heyday, but it's ok.
OK, you mean "during and after Carly's rain of error". Not "since Mark Hurd took over". In the context of a discussion about an Apple, post Jobs, talking about "Hewlett-Packard, post-Carly Fiorinia" brought up some very strange conflicts in my neural nets... because while Steve's 'tree trimming' at Apple when he came back was a bit over the top there's no comparison between that and what Carly did.
Oh, Christ, Darwin is just a UNIX variant. Porting UNIX to a new processor, especially a version of UNIX that already runs on two processors, is routine.
And Apple's the copyright holder. The APSL doesn't prevent them from releasing a Darwin version not under APSL, any more than the GPL keeps developers who dual-license their software from releasing non-redistributable versions.
I use eMusic, all the time. I tell people to use eMusic when they start griping about the iTunes "monopoly". You can use eMusic too. The iTunes Music Store, however can not ignore the major labels the way you, and I, and eMusic can. So talking about indie labels on eMusic or experimental distribution is a fish encarnadine.
Apple tells you how to get rid of their DRM. They even ran an ad campaign about it.
Yes, if you turn it around and Mix, Burn, Rip, you can lose some quality in the Rip step if you use a lossy format, but that's true whether you're ripping stuff you burned from iTMS or you're importing a CD you bought at Borders.
If Apple's DRM wasn't simply an "honor system" approach to DRM, I'd be worried. But I'm moderately hopeful Apple isn't that stupid.
But, after all, Steve Jobs himself said it's impossible to protect music.
Jobs? make excuses? When has he ever made excuses?
Oh, yeh.
I suspect he will have to drink his own blood on this one, like he did on "No ugly monitors on nice Macs" before the Mac Mini and hard disk players being "only fifty dollars more" than flash players before the iPod Shuffle, and what he's currently going through denial about with the two-button mouse.
"When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content.
What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock -- open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it -- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. So what you have to do is compete with it." -- Steve Jobs
Funny, the last thread I posted this quote to was titled Will Apple Follow Microsoft's Lead to Restrictive DRM? iTunes is a success because its DRM is basically "honor system", because that's about as far as DRM can be pushed.
Still, something like IMM implemented directly on the phone would be nice so you're not wasting screen real estate and/or having to bring up an app just to use your phone.
You know, the idea of a multitasking operating system on a personal computer was pretty radical in 1985, but it's more than 20 years later... surely the implications have sunk in?
OK, well, let's add another 1985 invention, layered screens on the Amiga... you know, like the Dashboard thing people thing Apple invented? Think that might help?
And you could, like, add an extra key on the keyboard to bring the phone interface up? Using something like a USB consumer control key... you know, those extra buttons you can't get a keyboard without these days... to bring it up?
Wow, you *really* hate Jobs. Even when he's at his dumbest, I wouldn't put him down there with Carly "let's buy Compaq, compare the product lines, and pick the worst products from each to keep and kill the rest" Fiorina.
I'd say "Classic Jobs", except Jobs didn't stick NeXT users with the single-button mouse. But it's classic Jobs *at* Apple. Style is everything, and everything is secondary to making the bling show off.
The iMac was cute as hell, but he killed the desktop Mac and forced everyone back to the damned all-in-one model when he brought it out. Killed the best keyboard, best designed desktops, and the best monitors too... the monitor on my Beige G3 was a wonderfully crisp Trinitron... my iMac's this horrible little fuzzy thing.
Even now I have to use an external mouse and keyboard on my Macbook because the trackpad is one-button (don't bring up double-tap, thanks) and the keyboard is painful to use. The camera is worthless to me because I can't pivot or aim it. There's no docking station, instead it's got a power cable that's so easy to pull out I have to run an app to remind me when it IS pulled out. And to add insult to injury... after I pull out all those cables I have to open the lid to wake up the display to sleep it... and watch for a subtle throbbing effect to be sure it really IS asleep.
The overheating Cube. The bloated Quartz GUI that made a system that was responsive on a 68040 a dog on a G3 at 5 times the clock rate with 50 times the RAM. But boy was it pretty. The iPod itself is full of stupid problems that Mac fans will swear are features...
And that means, of course, that this damn thing may well succeed on style *despite* its flaws. But it would be better off dead.
When I played around with a few, and found that they didn't come with any compilers or interpreters that I could use, I quickly lost interest.
Applescript?
Don't think of it as a scripting language, think of it like the UNIX shell, a universal glue between applications. And it's a better language than anything that came free with Windows.:)
The big problem with pre-OSX Mac OS was that it was just too bloody clumsy and unstable to support software development in the way people wanted to become accustomed to. Even Mac OS 9 was *maybe* as sophisticated as Windows 3.11 and definitely behind AmigaDOS, or the OS-9 (no relation) on the Radio Shack Color Computer, or... well, just about anything else that was designed after 1981 or so. Even if it had come with "Make", you sure wouldn't want to risk running a compile in the background while doing anything else.
The fact that they had a deal with a provider (Cingular) already strongly implied that Apple had taken a "fuck the users" attitude. This merely confirms it.
You can't sell a cellphone without dealing with a provider.
And there's plenty of smartphones that don't have a "fuck the users" attitude.
You can't lay the blame on Cingular on this... this is pure Apple "fuck the users" in operation.
I guess even having to back down on the single-button mouse, even in the passive-aggressive way they did it, freaked them out so much they had to apply some smackdown somewhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
> squeeze every last cent out of customers
This is called "capitalism".
Nonsense. Squeezing every last cent out of consumers only works when demand is completely inelastic, and increasing the price doesn't lead to lost sales.
If making it slightly difficult for you to create backups keeps people from easily doing massive copying and distribution without permission, isn't that a fair trade-off?
DRM doesn't prevent people from easily doing massive copying and distribution at all.
It makes it harder for the first person to "rip" that first copy, but once it's done preventing anyone else from "ripping" that copy is irrelevant.
And DRM does much much more than "making it slightly difficult for you to create backups".
It makes it impossible for you to keep a copy of a work indefinitely. Your copy is only usable as long as the company that made the DRMed document still exists. If you think this doesn't matter you need to talk to a historian.
It makes it impossible for you to view the work except through a specific application. I have precisely one DRM-protected e-book now... I recently deleted the Microsoft Reader documents I owned, because they're worthless now I don't have a Pocket PC. Oh, that's right, you want me to buy another copy for that. Why should I?
It makes it impossible for you to use a work in ways the application doesn't want you to. If I own a movie, why shouldn't I be able "enter" it by feeding captured scenes into a VR viewer? Because you want me to have to pay again for the VR version of the movie (if you ever bother making one)?
How many times should I have to buy The White Album anyway?
My first thought was "man, what does all that ROT13 text on Usenet mean in Inuit?".
When Linux fails, either it's something in hardware (Linux seems to be more sensitive to bad RAM than Windows, which I consider to be a Good Thing), or it's something easily fixable -- not even by a kernel hacker, but by a competent admin with a little shell scripting ability. Even Gentoo isn't usually that hard to fix.
When Mac OS X fails, either it's something in hardware, or it's something easily fixable -- not even by a kernel hacker, but by a competant admin with a little shell scripting ability.
At least if it had been Linux with a stupid keybinding problem, I could fix it myself -- and I'm no expert, but it would take me less than a fucking year to fix it.
Did you even try? OS X is UNIX, it's got all the UNIX shells and pretty much all the configuration is in files you can edit automatically if you have "a little shell scripting ability".
In this case it sounds like a startup script to poke an NSUserKeyEquivalents entry in ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist would be the UNIX way to do things.
When it Just Works, it's beautiful, and when it Just Doesn't, there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.
Wehn it Just Works, it's beautiful, and when it Just Doesn't, it's no harder to fix with "a little shell scripting" than Linux. If you CHOOSE to treat it as a black box, that's YOUR problem, not Apple's.
MBP uses ATI, not NVidia
I bet you wish you could delete your message, now, because he said "Mac Pro" not "Macbook Pro".
First, there's already code to prevent cheating by monitoring what you run on your computer built in to the games, so people playing multiplayer online games are apparently willing to accept draconian restrictions on what they can run on their computer as a condition of playing the game.
Second, you can't play a multiplayer game without servers, so it people don't care if it has to connect to a server to authorize or decrypt local data, if the company's defunct the game's useless anyway.
But most importantly, the vast majority of these games don't need DRM to enforce payment. They can give the game away without any protection at all, since you need an account on their servers to log into them.
This is really not readily generalizable beyond the gaming market.
They will not go bust, just back to more traditional forms of media sales.... you'll have to buy them ... as CDs ...
Which are not DRM-protected
See Better copyright protection than DRM....
Something that I thought of while responding to another message...
DRM-protecting online music sales does absolutely nothing to prevent people distributing copyrighted music illegally online. The fact that both action stake place online is a red herring: the two areas are completely unrelated. Whether the "pirate" got the copy he's distributing online from iTMS online or Borders down the street is irrelevant.
If the labels really wanted to do something about people sharing files they'd have Apple remove the DRM from the iTunes version, and instead watermark each track with a hash of the credit card number or other identifying information of the person who purchased it. Then when they found a copy online they could simply give Apple the watermark and get the identity of the person who originally distributed it.
Of course, any savvy "pirate" would filter the file and remove the watermark - but any savvy pirate would be ripping the higher quality version from a CD in the first place. After a few high profile cases, people would be less likely to share a downloaded track than one they ripped from a CD. Pretty soon the labels would be experimenting with un-DRMed watermarked online-only distribution to protect their copyrights.
So, who's going to patent this one?
Check the title of this thread. "Beware the Apple iPhone iHandcuffs". Read the message in context.
That doesnt work unless you sacrifice sound quality even further or battery time/storage space by reripping as lossless.
Um, I said that in the original post. You quoted it in your first reply:
That doesnt work unless you sacrifice
If you're concerned about battery time, you're talking about portable players, and you're listening to music through cheap earbuds in a noisy environment.
By the way, does anyone have the comments section from Slashdot for the introduction of the iPod?
You won't find me there. You might find me griping about Steve slandering flash players when he introduced the iPod Mini, though... I thought he was really missing the boat there. I'd been using a small flash player that only held a few hours of music, and loading it from a random playlist in iTunes. A lot like the wildly popular iPod Shuffle that came out a year later, and next year the "only $50 more" mini was dead.
Then there were all the people complaining that Apple didn't have a "headless" low end Mac, and Steve's response to that was "No Ugly Monitors on Nice Macs"... right up until he introduced the Mac mini. Which also sold like hotcakes, just like we expected. Hopefully he'll figure out that giving it decent graphics or at least a video upgrade path is a good idea... any month now... but until then the fanboys will be insisting that you don't need 3d support on a Mac.
Apple makes mistakes, too, see.
When they fix them, Apple fanboys like you seem to forget that they'd ever screwed up.
One lossy encoding is at least semi-acceptable.
If you're ripping classical music or anything else where lossy encoding actually matters, then you should be ripping lossless in the first place.
But, mate, look at what we're talking about here. An iPhone.
For music you're listening to in a noisy environment with little earbuds while you're doing other stuff? Give me a break.
Except it's not as good.
Anyone who's read much of what I've written knows I'm no fan of Microsoft. But I'm not as doctrinaire as I sometimes sound, and so I spent two years with a Pocket PC because I felt I owed Microsoft a fair shake at testing it. There are indeed some areas where it's very good, but using it was a mistake and going back to Palm was a tremendous relief.
Many of the features of the Pocket PC Phone Edition that I used have been faithfully copied by the iPhone.
Many more haven't.
Many of features that caused me problems on the Pocket PC are the ones copied in the iPhone, the top two were the touch-screen for dialling numbers that kept me from dialling by touch, the way playing music and reading eBooks and basically using it as anything but a phone dragged down the battery and kept me from being able to use it as a phone.
The good features of the Pocket PC, like good text input (better than what Palm's currently using) and being able to run third party and my own software on it, these have been set aside.
And it costs two hundred dollars more.
As a company, "Hewlett-Packard, post-Carly Fiorinia", is a stable and well-respected producer of computers and computer gadgets. It makes solid products that people use. However, it is not known for its innovation (though it does innovate). It doesn't capture the awe and high respect that it did in its heyday, but it's ok.
OK, you mean "during and after Carly's rain of error". Not "since Mark Hurd took over". In the context of a discussion about an Apple, post Jobs, talking about "Hewlett-Packard, post-Carly Fiorinia" brought up some very strange conflicts in my neural nets... because while Steve's 'tree trimming' at Apple when he came back was a bit over the top there's no comparison between that and what Carly did.
Oh, Christ, Darwin is just a UNIX variant. Porting UNIX to a new processor, especially a version of UNIX that already runs on two processors, is routine.
And Apple's the copyright holder. The APSL doesn't prevent them from releasing a Darwin version not under APSL, any more than the GPL keeps developers who dual-license their software from releasing non-redistributable versions.
I use eMusic, all the time. I tell people to use eMusic when they start griping about the iTunes "monopoly". You can use eMusic too. The iTunes Music Store, however can not ignore the major labels the way you, and I, and eMusic can. So talking about indie labels on eMusic or experimental distribution is a fish encarnadine.
Apple tells you how to get rid of their DRM. They even ran an ad campaign about it.
Yes, if you turn it around and Mix, Burn, Rip, you can lose some quality in the Rip step if you use a lossy format, but that's true whether you're ripping stuff you burned from iTMS or you're importing a CD you bought at Borders.
If Apple's DRM wasn't simply an "honor system" approach to DRM, I'd be worried. But I'm moderately hopeful Apple isn't that stupid.
But, after all, Steve Jobs himself said it's impossible to protect music.
That's what I thought of first, too.
Our is Jobs just making excuses?
Jobs? make excuses? When has he ever made excuses?
Oh, yeh.
I suspect he will have to drink his own blood on this one, like he did on "No ugly monitors on nice Macs" before the Mac Mini and hard disk players being "only fifty dollars more" than flash players before the iPod Shuffle, and what he's currently going through denial about with the two-button mouse.
"When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content.
What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock -- open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it -- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. So what you have to do is compete with it." -- Steve Jobs
Funny, the last thread I posted this quote to was titled Will Apple Follow Microsoft's Lead to Restrictive DRM? iTunes is a success because its DRM is basically "honor system", because that's about as far as DRM can be pushed.
Still, something like IMM implemented directly on the phone would be nice so you're not wasting screen real estate and/or having to bring up an app just to use your phone.
You know, the idea of a multitasking operating system on a personal computer was pretty radical in 1985, but it's more than 20 years later... surely the implications have sunk in?
OK, well, let's add another 1985 invention, layered screens on the Amiga... you know, like the Dashboard thing people thing Apple invented? Think that might help?
And you could, like, add an extra key on the keyboard to bring the phone interface up? Using something like a USB consumer control key... you know, those extra buttons you can't get a keyboard without these days... to bring it up?
Christ, maybe I ought to patent that idea.
Hewlett-Packard, post-Carly Fiorina.
Wow, you *really* hate Jobs. Even when he's at his dumbest, I wouldn't put him down there with Carly "let's buy Compaq, compare the product lines, and pick the worst products from each to keep and kill the rest" Fiorina.
The iPhone (in its current form) is shaping up to be Apple's PS3.
/// was Apple's PS3.
I thought the Apple
I'd say "Classic Jobs", except Jobs didn't stick NeXT users with the single-button mouse. But it's classic Jobs *at* Apple. Style is everything, and everything is secondary to making the bling show off.
The iMac was cute as hell, but he killed the desktop Mac and forced everyone back to the damned all-in-one model when he brought it out. Killed the best keyboard, best designed desktops, and the best monitors too... the monitor on my Beige G3 was a wonderfully crisp Trinitron... my iMac's this horrible little fuzzy thing.
Even now I have to use an external mouse and keyboard on my Macbook because the trackpad is one-button (don't bring up double-tap, thanks) and the keyboard is painful to use. The camera is worthless to me because I can't pivot or aim it. There's no docking station, instead it's got a power cable that's so easy to pull out I have to
run an app to remind me when it IS pulled out. And to add insult to injury... after I pull out all those cables I have to open the lid to wake up the display to sleep it... and watch for a subtle throbbing effect to be sure it really IS asleep.
The overheating Cube. The bloated Quartz GUI that made a system that was responsive on a 68040 a dog on a G3 at 5 times the clock rate with 50 times the RAM. But boy was it pretty. The iPod itself is full of stupid problems that Mac fans will swear are features...
And that means, of course, that this damn thing may well succeed on style *despite* its flaws. But it would be better off dead.
When I played around with a few, and found that they didn't come with any compilers or interpreters that I could use, I quickly lost interest.
:)
Applescript?
Don't think of it as a scripting language, think of it like the UNIX shell, a universal glue between applications. And it's a better language than anything that came free with Windows.
The big problem with pre-OSX Mac OS was that it was just too bloody clumsy and unstable to support software development in the way people wanted to become accustomed to. Even Mac OS 9 was *maybe* as sophisticated as Windows 3.11 and definitely behind AmigaDOS, or the OS-9 (no relation) on the Radio Shack Color Computer, or... well, just about anything else that was designed after 1981 or so. Even if it had come with "Make", you sure wouldn't want to risk running a compile in the background while doing anything else.
The fact that they had a deal with a provider (Cingular) already strongly implied that Apple had taken a "fuck the users" attitude. This merely confirms it.
You can't sell a cellphone without dealing with a provider.
And there's plenty of smartphones that don't have a "fuck the users" attitude.
You can't lay the blame on Cingular on this... this is pure Apple "fuck the users" in operation.
I guess even having to back down on the single-button mouse, even in the passive-aggressive way they did it, freaked them out so much they had to apply some smackdown somewhere else.