While you are certainly right about the unemployment rates being low, you are probably mistaken in your implied assumption that investment in technology is necessarily good for anyone.
The economic prosperity in the USA in recent years has two major drawbacks that have been pointed out elsewhere, but still I'll mention them in short:
Investment money must come from somewhere. A significant portion of America's technology boom was and is built on debts: individual debt, public debt, all sorts of crap. This is why, during the last year, we saw the stock markets come to the brink of collapse: because the money that was invested wasn't actually there. A borrows a sum of $n from B, invests it in enterprise C, makes a profit of $k*n and gives B back his $n, keeping (k-1)*n for himself. This is how investment works. The whole thing is based on debt, however, and when C crashes in the meantime, both A and B are in trouble. We had the chance to witness that over the last months. In times of trouble, investment makes large numbers of people poor instead of making them rich. Rule #1 of investment banking.
It is not as easy as "everybody profits from prosperity". The sentence conveys an idea of equality that is not based on facts. Fact is that some people profit greatly, while others profit not so greatly and others do not profit at all. A 50-year-old mine worker who has been replaced by a robot may actually recover from the loss of his job, but on average, most of them would have been better off without having been replaced. As far as the idea of more money in the system leading to higher taxes and better social security, this is misleading again, since in America, thanks to the election campaign funding system, richer people actually pay less tax, at least in a large number of cases. And as far as the 25 unemployed miners are concerned, well, the added profit the process owner makes is never going to generate enough tax volume to actually provide for them. This is a naive assumption that believes in the quality of a system on the basis of a theoretically nice view of the world, while ignoring some of the less shiny aspects.
All in all, a clear case of cognitive dissonance. Sorry for having been explicit.
And just for the obvious reply that my comment is going to generate: when you replace, say, 25 miners by one well-paid process controller, the process controller's job is new, admittedly, but the 25 miners still fall through the grid, or at least the remaining 24 of them who are redundant after one has been made process controller.
I think it is a complete illusion to think that rationalizing mining will enhance the economy enough so that even a limited number of former miners who now face unemployment can find employment elsewhere.
When you've spent 25 years mining underground only to find yourself replaced by a robot, nobody is going to employ you. We had this effect with automation practically anywhere that things are automated.
Automation leads to a number of processes getting cheaper, and hence the process owners make substantially more money. This money goes into the economy sooner or later, since obviously they don't hoard it in their hidden vaults that the automated miners have built underground, but it will definitely not serve the victims of automations directly (since they don't get any money), and its overall effect in the economy will not have enough impact to enable all these people to find new, different jobs elsewhere or be trained for them.
Face facts: Automation replaces people. These people fall through the social grid. A substantial number of these people is never going to have a proper job again. Everything else is either a cheap lie or self-deceit on behalf of the process owners. This is one of the instances where we can actually predict the future from the past.
But just because Dubya is a protestant Christian who takes the bible as literal Truth, which I am not and which I disagree with, it does not mean that giving moral considerations any thought at all was not an improvement. Effectively, I'll probably disagree with most that Dubya does, but the idea as such that technology is something that should be valued against moral standards (whichever particular moral standard, is a matter for different discussion) beyond primitive Darwinian/genetic explanation of social phenomena to which it shouldn't be applied sounds good to me.
I fail to see why trying to align technology to moral standards should a bad thing, which JK seems to suggest.
Of course, there is still the right to free speech, and I am definitely in favour of a right to information as well, but still it can't hurt to consider the moral, social etc. implications of technological development every now and then.
Mine is powered by an ancient Grundig amplifier called the LT 227 (not very much of a meaningful name, is it?), and I've added a 5-way Surround decoding circuit to the outputs as well as a difference channel for the main speakers. The best thing is that the entire hardware has cost me about twenty bucks. Except for the home theater bit, that's a Mac PowerBook G3:-)
The plural "metropolae" is wrong, since it assumes that the word "metropolis" was Latin. It should be "metropoleis" instead, since it's Greek. Just my $0.02, though.:-)
Or even looking at them, seeing that most of them are in languages other than English, which a rather large portion of English native speakers can't be bothered to learn sufficiently to be able to read an online news site. Among computer enthusiasts, the portion is even larger, probably.
You can try the often-mentioned, often-flamed-against-because-it's-in-German Heise Newsletter, for example, where you'll find links to the legal situation in the European Union fairly often, or the online version of the Spiegel magazine that has its own Net Culture section. For a left-wing perspective, try reading the taz online.
All of this is in German, because I read news mainly in German and English. (I occasionally read things in Arabic and Finnish as well, but there I'm not as qualified as in the other two)
I fail to see why being able to buy Linux distributions at retail chain stores should be innovative. In Germany where I live one could buy the DLD distribution [now acquired by Red Hat, so the URL doesn't really make sense] in markets like Real or Novo (no link for them, sorry) as early as three years ago, and SuSE is spreading virtually anywhere at the moment.
BTW regarding the "deluxe" package that came complete with virtually every free -- as in either speech or beer -- piece of software: I think that free-as-in-beer software includes free-as-in-speech software, since free-as-in-speech software comes to you at no price, hence it's free-as-in-beer as well and it's superfluous to mention the two together. Any comments?
According to the unnervingly slow KOffice site, KOffice is still in beta stage. At least it says that KWord etc. are still in beta stage, which does lead to the conclusion that the whole thing is still beta. It's rather useable at the moment, better than AbiWord and to some extent better than StarOffice or WordPerfect [at least on my BSD], but it's beta nonetheless.
One factor they ignore is the general Microsoft-mindedness of computer users, especially corporate users. For example, while it is known that StarOffice and to some extent KOffice (even though that's still in beta and is going to remain there for more than just a while) are as compatible as it can be expected with Microsoft applications, still the average user thinks it is best to stick with MS Office for "compatibility reasons". The same applies to Internet browsing, and to some extent to OS choice as well ("I've got Windows at work, and I know how to use it, so I'll stick to it at home as well". Swap work and home, same effect.).
Another thing they ignore is that computers are not only used for productive work. This was to be expected from Gartner, them being analysts, but still the fact remains that Windows is a better platform for games and will be, especially with the anticipated rise of technologies like the X-Box.
A final thing they ignore is that OS choice appears to be less deterministic than one thinks it should be - while a number of people know that non-MS platforms are better for some applications, they still use Windows, and Windows does have its advantages, some geeks would rather be hanged than use it and stick to sometimes less comfortable and/or less powerful solutions.
As far as I remember from doing some explosives, C12 definitely did not have buckyball shape. In fact, a buckyball would probably not have the necessary shape to unfold rapidly, which, for example, makes PETN, C4 and TNT so violent. (TNT is quite harmless, actually)
In case the post was an actual question, however, yes, it was carbon.:-)
As I've expressed in a previous post, I don't mind reading foreign-language stories on the Net as long as they contain something informative. Information should not be restricted to the actual form of presentation. (Which includes foreign languages.) Anyway, I'd like to know the Slashdot policy on this, if such a thing exists.
How about allowing people to customize their accounts to not being shown non-English stories? If they miss interesting pieces of information, it is probably their own trade-off for the luxury of not being shown them.
It is quite improbable, I think, that he was able to write an intelligible answer in German while not being able to understand the text he was referring to, don't you think?
In fact, I think language competency is a wonderful thing that should be embraced and encouraged because it is one of the prerequisites of inter-cultural communication that one is able to communicate with others on their ground instead of forcing them to cross over to one's own.
BTW the.sig is Finnish, but I doubt the Fish would translate it properly...
Before saying anything else, I'd like to express my opinion that if this guy was serious, I think he's really sad, ad if he was not, then he has quite a bad humour.
One point that might be worth discussing, though, is if there's some kind of Slashdot policy regarding posts to articles in foreign languages (foreign for most of you, anyway.) Speaking German myself, I don't mind the occasional post of some article in c't magazine, one of the best computer magazines in the world. Does this aggravate people with no foreign language competence that much that this sort of post should be entirely forbidden, or should it be encouraged as being a valuable contribution to the inter-cultural communication aspect of the Internet?
I have a few points to make about this article and a couple of others I have read on Slashdot and elsewhere on this topic. (Otherwise I wouldn't be posting, ha, ha.)
At first, it seems that the Internet is generally seen as some kind of cultural integrator between the First and Third World, between the sexes, between people of different colour and so on. At least where the First and Third World are concerned, this is plain wrong, as pointed out, for example, at the famous e-commerce criticism page BlowTheDotOutYourAss.com, where you see a rather well-made campaign under the slogan "ButWeDon'tEvenHaveElectricityInAfrica.com" - I think the point is quite clear. In fact, Jon has even pointed this out himself unwillingly, when he says:
... a New Jerusalem, potentially welcoming [...] First World and Third, is open to anyone who can afford a personal computer and a monthly Internet access fee...
Even in the more developed Third World countries, it is very uncommon that anyone from a not-so-wealthy social environment can afford a personal computer; and as far as the Internet access fee is concerned, well, in Sudan the Internet costs a thousand dollars per year, at a flat rate. (If you're interested, the provider is SudanNet. The website is not very impressive, but you can contact them that way, and the access providing works, which I know from experience.) Did you know that in Egypt, which is definitely one of the more developed countries of the Third World, so that one might argue that it doesn't even belong to the third world at all, university professors get a monthly salary of eight hundred Egyptian pounds per month, equalling two hundred dollars? That settles it, I'm afraid. The Internet is a tool or a toy, whichever you prefer, for the rich. In the West, practically all of us are rich, which you undoubtedly will notice if you ever set foot on African soil, for example [possibly excluding South Africa].
A second thing is that this is just another example of a quasi-mystical attitude towards the Internet, as if it was some spiritual entity that eventually will lead to the solution of all problems on Earth. I personally don't believe in the Internet possessing any metaphysical qualities - it is just a very powerful facility of communication. When telegraphs or telephones were invented, the leap in ease of communication was probably just as great as the leap introduced with the Internet, yet no one would probably attribute metaphysical qualities to a plain telephone, not even then. It was just a practical, useful innovation.
To me, it appears that one of the unique qualities of Internet communication is that unlike in meatspace, you can choose your partners and means of communication with unrivalled ease and flexibility. The result is that people with a more technical interest (i.e. "geeks") who often lack social skills of communication hang around at discussion areas like this or communicate with people like themselves, while persons who are of a maybe more sociable type, possibly with less technical interest, interact with others of their sphere. As a result, the Internet only serves to give anyone what they want and to enhance the character traits that people already possess: geeks interact with geeks, which is communication, of course, but which doesn't help them at all in interacting with non-technical people and/or in the real world, while non-geeks interact with non-geeks, thus enhancing their communication abilities because the topics of their communication are most often derived from some social sphere in meatspace. The same applies to political opinions, with ethnic groups (if you find me a nationalist Israeli discussing things in a civilized way with a nationalist Palestinian, you are good) and so on. The Internet, as a result, does not help people interact with others of a different frame of mind.
Part of the argumentation here is derived from the notion that the Internet is not the cyberspace invented by Lem in the sixties and made popular by Gibson in the late seventies and early eighties, and that it is not some sort of place apart from the "normal world". Lem's and Gibson's idea of cyberspace encompasses the notion of it being ever-present, which the internet is not (go looking for Internet adverts in Kaduna, Nigeria), and it providing sensual immersion beyond looking at a however-large screen and being played the occasional streaming noise. At its present stage, the Internet is just an addition to meatspace, and as long as we still live, dream, eat and raise children in the "real world" as opposed to the "cyberspace" that the Internet is (erroneously, I think, but that's just my humble opinion) commonly referred to as by the media, it will not serve to raise people's problems from the frame defined for them by their environment provided in the real world. To assume that the Internet would solve any real world problem beyond some people not making enough money and some other people not having anything to play around with is in my opinion mainly a na?ve, progress-optimistic, overly-Modernist self-delusion about the nature of problem solutions.
BeOS had industry support in the media industry for some time, until Be managed to scare them all away with their switch towards Internet Appliances.
There is a Windows Media Player for the Macintosh. It can be installed as an add-on for the Internet Explorer for MacOS. While the IE for the Mac is an acceptable browser, though, the Media Player for the mac is a bit too unstable to be used productively, I'm afraid. On the other hand, it's the only program to display ASF content on the Mac, and occasionally one needs this. At least it's available, as opposed to the BeOS.
is to use Linux on the Mac, of course. You get cool-looking hardware instead of the drab grey box kind of ugly high-tech dust-catcher, and you get a spiffy user interface, at least if you use something that looks cool.
Of course, then there's Aqua. May not break beauty records in everyone's taste, but the usual movie author, then.... it's something different.
PDF version on a mirror site
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 2
I've converted the document to PDF and mirrored it here because the original site is both being slashdotted and not all of you can probably read PostScript. The mirror is on a 40 MBit connection and should be capable of handling the load.
From what I understand, the decoding of the music is done in software.
That means, some piece of software that runs on some operating system, whatever it may be, takes files and plays them back using the operating system's built-in multimedia sound playback facility.
All it takes is a couple of hackers (à la DeCSS) out there to write a sound card driver that samples the data it receives to disk, just like the "print-to-disk" option in most printer drivers for most operating system that enables anyone to convert proprietary, non-copiable documents to PostScript.
Then, one would have a raw, 100% digital dump of the audio data, which one could then happily encode to whatever format one likes.
I realize that this is so obvious that there must be some way the industry has thought of this. The only way to avoid it would be to do decryption in hardware. This would mean, however, that you'd need a special piece of hardware on your computer to play the music back with (like a special set of speakers), another special piece of hardware to hook between your computer and your HiFi equipment in order to be able to play back music from the internet on your home HiFi, a special type of chip inside your mobile playback equipment etc. Which sums up to enormous amounts of hardware and the whole thing being so user unfriendly and so expensive that I fail to see how this is to generate a lot of market share in a tech environment. (After all, you can still just download the crap.)
And against the hardware solution there is the fact that I could still take a digital sample using S/P-DIF digital audio from the HiFi and record that on the computer, possibly putting a $20 copybit inverter in between. So in the end, this would still be copiable without much hassle.
Slashdot Mirror
The economic prosperity in the USA in recent years has two major drawbacks that have been pointed out elsewhere, but still I'll mention them in short:
- Investment money must come from somewhere. A significant portion of America's technology boom was and is built on debts: individual debt, public debt, all sorts of crap. This is why, during the last year, we saw the stock markets come to the brink of collapse: because the money that was invested wasn't actually there. A borrows a sum of $n from B, invests it in enterprise C, makes a profit of $k*n and gives B back his $n, keeping (k-1)*n for himself. This is how investment works. The whole thing is based on debt, however, and when C crashes in the meantime, both A and B are in trouble. We had the chance to witness that over the last months. In times of trouble, investment makes large numbers of people poor instead of making them rich. Rule #1 of investment banking.
- It is not as easy as "everybody profits from prosperity". The sentence conveys an idea of equality that is not based on facts. Fact is that some people profit greatly, while others profit not so greatly and others do not profit at all. A 50-year-old mine worker who has been replaced by a robot may actually recover from the loss of his job, but on average, most of them would have been better off without having been replaced. As far as the idea of more money in the system leading to higher taxes and better social security, this is misleading again, since in America, thanks to the election campaign funding system, richer people actually pay less tax, at least in a large number of cases. And as far as the 25 unemployed miners are concerned, well, the added profit the process owner makes is never going to generate enough tax volume to actually provide for them. This is a naive assumption that believes in the quality of a system on the basis of a theoretically nice view of the world, while ignoring some of the less shiny aspects.
All in all, a clear case of cognitive dissonance. Sorry for having been explicit.And just for the obvious reply that my comment is going to generate: when you replace, say, 25 miners by one well-paid process controller, the process controller's job is new, admittedly, but the 25 miners still fall through the grid, or at least the remaining 24 of them who are redundant after one has been made process controller.
When you've spent 25 years mining underground only to find yourself replaced by a robot, nobody is going to employ you. We had this effect with automation practically anywhere that things are automated.
Automation leads to a number of processes getting cheaper, and hence the process owners make substantially more money. This money goes into the economy sooner or later, since obviously they don't hoard it in their hidden vaults that the automated miners have built underground, but it will definitely not serve the victims of automations directly (since they don't get any money), and its overall effect in the economy will not have enough impact to enable all these people to find new, different jobs elsewhere or be trained for them.
Face facts: Automation replaces people. These people fall through the social grid. A substantial number of these people is never going to have a proper job again. Everything else is either a cheap lie or self-deceit on behalf of the process owners. This is one of the instances where we can actually predict the future from the past.
But just because Dubya is a protestant Christian who takes the bible as literal Truth, which I am not and which I disagree with, it does not mean that giving moral considerations any thought at all was not an improvement. Effectively, I'll probably disagree with most that Dubya does, but the idea as such that technology is something that should be valued against moral standards (whichever particular moral standard, is a matter for different discussion) beyond primitive Darwinian/genetic explanation of social phenomena to which it shouldn't be applied sounds good to me.
- Almost any moral system is preferable to having none.
- Up to the 20th century, most civilizations were able to at least formally agree on something called ethics
Discourse on the respective standard is itself part of a productive, "good" moral system.Of course, there is still the right to free speech, and I am definitely in favour of a right to information as well, but still it can't hurt to consider the moral, social etc. implications of technological development every now and then.
Mine is powered by an ancient Grundig amplifier called the LT 227 (not very much of a meaningful name, is it?), and I've added a 5-way Surround decoding circuit to the outputs as well as a difference channel for the main speakers. The best thing is that the entire hardware has cost me about twenty bucks. Except for the home theater bit, that's a Mac PowerBook G3 :-)
The internet is probably destroying Irish as well, in spite of your noble .sig effort... :-)
With the advent of MacOS X, it is becoming a lot easier to port existing applications to the Mac when you've already got a Unix version.
However, .mil is consistently valid, they don't even accept domains such as redarmy.mil which would be 100% in the spirit of the system.
BTW Does anyone know how to get an e-mail address (just that!) in .gov or .mil space when one is associated with neither body?
The plural "metropolae" is wrong, since it assumes that the word "metropolis" was Latin. It should be "metropoleis" instead, since it's Greek. Just my $0.02, though. :-)
Or even looking at them, seeing that most of them are in languages other than English, which a rather large portion of English native speakers can't be bothered to learn sufficiently to be able to read an online news site. Among computer enthusiasts, the portion is even larger, probably.
You can try the often-mentioned, often-flamed-against-because-it's-in-German Heise Newsletter, for example, where you'll find links to the legal situation in the European Union fairly often, or the online version of the Spiegel magazine that has its own Net Culture section. For a left-wing perspective, try reading the taz online.
All of this is in German, because I read news mainly in German and English. (I occasionally read things in Arabic and Finnish as well, but there I'm not as qualified as in the other two)
BTW regarding the "deluxe" package that came complete with virtually every free -- as in either speech or beer -- piece of software: I think that free-as-in-beer software includes free-as-in-speech software, since free-as-in-speech software comes to you at no price, hence it's free-as-in-beer as well and it's superfluous to mention the two together. Any comments?
According to the unnervingly slow KOffice site, KOffice is still in beta stage. At least it says that KWord etc. are still in beta stage, which does lead to the conclusion that the whole thing is still beta. It's rather useable at the moment, better than AbiWord and to some extent better than StarOffice or WordPerfect [at least on my BSD], but it's beta nonetheless.
Don't mistake me, I'd be really grateful for an answer.
Another thing they ignore is that computers are not only used for productive work. This was to be expected from Gartner, them being analysts, but still the fact remains that Windows is a better platform for games and will be, especially with the anticipated rise of technologies like the X-Box.
A final thing they ignore is that OS choice appears to be less deterministic than one thinks it should be - while a number of people know that non-MS platforms are better for some applications, they still use Windows, and Windows does have its advantages, some geeks would rather be hanged than use it and stick to sometimes less comfortable and/or less powerful solutions.
In case the post was an actual question, however, yes, it was carbon. :-)
How about allowing people to customize their accounts to not being shown non-English stories? If they miss interesting pieces of information, it is probably their own trade-off for the luxury of not being shown them.
In fact, I think language competency is a wonderful thing that should be embraced and encouraged because it is one of the prerequisites of inter-cultural communication that one is able to communicate with others on their ground instead of forcing them to cross over to one's own.
BTW theOne point that might be worth discussing, though, is if there's some kind of Slashdot policy regarding posts to articles in foreign languages (foreign for most of you, anyway.) Speaking German myself, I don't mind the occasional post of some article in c't magazine, one of the best computer magazines in the world. Does this aggravate people with no foreign language competence that much that this sort of post should be entirely forbidden, or should it be encouraged as being a valuable contribution to the inter-cultural communication aspect of the Internet?
At first, it seems that the Internet is generally seen as some kind of cultural integrator between the First and Third World, between the sexes, between people of different colour and so on. At least where the First and Third World are concerned, this is plain wrong, as pointed out, for example, at the famous e-commerce criticism page BlowTheDotOutYourAss.com, where you see a rather well-made campaign under the slogan "ButWeDon'tEvenHaveElectricityInAfrica.com" - I think the point is quite clear. In fact, Jon has even pointed this out himself unwillingly, when he says:
Even in the more developed Third World countries, it is very uncommon that anyone from a not-so-wealthy social environment can afford a personal computer; and as far as the Internet access fee is concerned, well, in Sudan the Internet costs a thousand dollars per year, at a flat rate. (If you're interested, the provider is SudanNet. The website is not very impressive, but you can contact them that way, and the access providing works, which I know from experience.) Did you know that in Egypt, which is definitely one of the more developed countries of the Third World, so that one might argue that it doesn't even belong to the third world at all, university professors get a monthly salary of eight hundred Egyptian pounds per month, equalling two hundred dollars? That settles it, I'm afraid. The Internet is a tool or a toy, whichever you prefer, for the rich. In the West, practically all of us are rich, which you undoubtedly will notice if you ever set foot on African soil, for example [possibly excluding South Africa].
A second thing is that this is just another example of a quasi-mystical attitude towards the Internet, as if it was some spiritual entity that eventually will lead to the solution of all problems on Earth. I personally don't believe in the Internet possessing any metaphysical qualities - it is just a very powerful facility of communication. When telegraphs or telephones were invented, the leap in ease of communication was probably just as great as the leap introduced with the Internet, yet no one would probably attribute metaphysical qualities to a plain telephone, not even then. It was just a practical, useful innovation.
To me, it appears that one of the unique qualities of Internet communication is that unlike in meatspace, you can choose your partners and means of communication with unrivalled ease and flexibility. The result is that people with a more technical interest (i.e. "geeks") who often lack social skills of communication hang around at discussion areas like this or communicate with people like themselves, while persons who are of a maybe more sociable type, possibly with less technical interest, interact with others of their sphere. As a result, the Internet only serves to give anyone what they want and to enhance the character traits that people already possess: geeks interact with geeks, which is communication, of course, but which doesn't help them at all in interacting with non-technical people and/or in the real world, while non-geeks interact with non-geeks, thus enhancing their communication abilities because the topics of their communication are most often derived from some social sphere in meatspace. The same applies to political opinions, with ethnic groups (if you find me a nationalist Israeli discussing things in a civilized way with a nationalist Palestinian, you are good) and so on. The Internet, as a result, does not help people interact with others of a different frame of mind.
Part of the argumentation here is derived from the notion that the Internet is not the cyberspace invented by Lem in the sixties and made popular by Gibson in the late seventies and early eighties, and that it is not some sort of place apart from the "normal world". Lem's and Gibson's idea of cyberspace encompasses the notion of it being ever-present, which the internet is not (go looking for Internet adverts in Kaduna, Nigeria), and it providing sensual immersion beyond looking at a however-large screen and being played the occasional streaming noise. At its present stage, the Internet is just an addition to meatspace, and as long as we still live, dream, eat and raise children in the "real world" as opposed to the "cyberspace" that the Internet is (erroneously, I think, but that's just my humble opinion) commonly referred to as by the media, it will not serve to raise people's problems from the frame defined for them by their environment provided in the real world. To assume that the Internet would solve any real world problem beyond some people not making enough money and some other people not having anything to play around with is in my opinion mainly a na?ve, progress-optimistic, overly-Modernist self-delusion about the nature of problem solutions.
Only a few additions:
is to use Linux on the Mac, of course. You get cool-looking hardware instead of the drab grey box kind of ugly high-tech dust-catcher, and you get a spiffy user interface, at least if you use something that looks cool.
Of course, then there's Aqua. May not break beauty records in everyone's taste, but the usual movie author, then.... it's something different.
I've converted the document to PDF and mirrored it here because the original site is both being slashdotted and not all of you can probably read PostScript. The mirror is on a 40 MBit connection and should be capable of handling the load.
From what I understand, the decoding of the music is done in software.
That means, some piece of software that runs on some operating system, whatever it may be, takes files and plays them back using the operating system's built-in multimedia sound playback facility.
All it takes is a couple of hackers (à la DeCSS) out there to write a sound card driver that samples the data it receives to disk, just like the "print-to-disk" option in most printer drivers for most operating system that enables anyone to convert proprietary, non-copiable documents to PostScript.
Then, one would have a raw, 100% digital dump of the audio data, which one could then happily encode to whatever format one likes.
I realize that this is so obvious that there must be some way the industry has thought of this. The only way to avoid it would be to do decryption in hardware. This would mean, however, that you'd need a special piece of hardware on your computer to play the music back with (like a special set of speakers), another special piece of hardware to hook between your computer and your HiFi equipment in order to be able to play back music from the internet on your home HiFi, a special type of chip inside your mobile playback equipment etc. Which sums up to enormous amounts of hardware and the whole thing being so user unfriendly and so expensive that I fail to see how this is to generate a lot of market share in a tech environment. (After all, you can still just download the crap.)
And against the hardware solution there is the fact that I could still take a digital sample using S/P-DIF digital audio from the HiFi and record that on the computer, possibly putting a $20 copybit inverter in between. So in the end, this would still be copiable without much hassle.
Am I missing anything?