They don't need the blind eye anymore at least in North America. There's one defacto standard in computing, an Intel box running Microsoft Windows, they've got over a 90% market share. They probably can't dramatically grow the market share anymore so they have to look for new markets if they want to maintain growth. Consumers? Whoops, we've already dominated that area. Business? Hey, what do you know, we've hammered the competition there as well.
About the only way they can increase market share is if the market itself is growing or if they can use their thumbscrews to extract more seats from that market.
I'm not against big business at all, I'm against big business being allowed to push around ordinary people though. If the seeds were blown onto his farm and grew then thats the companies problem. If they're that worried about propogating the seeds then they'd better do there job and make sure they can't propogate. This guy didn't steal a bushel of seed from the company and plant them, they were intermixed with his crop. The farmer has more right to a lawsuit in my opinion, the genetically modified seeds contaminated his crops.
As for pharmaceutical companies, guess what, there's a huge industry in generic drugs. The industry seems to be doing just fine despite this. Pharmaceutical companies have been increasing spending as a percentage of there finances on advertising, direct to consumer ads have jumped from 55 million in 1991 to 1.6 billion in 1996. This isn't a sign of a business struggling under the weight of competition from generic drugs.
Plants and animals have been undergoing genetic modification by humans for a long time, now we're just being a bit more direct about it. When you walk through the fruit section of the grocery store and see a dozen varieties of apples you're looking at genetically modified food. Most of those breeds of apple didn't grow through the whims of nature. I know at least the grocery store I shop in has a little sign that describes the taste, texture and origin of the apple.
The method involved in this genetically enhanced canola might be more high-tech, but it has really been done before, and for quite a long time. Canada grew based on genetically enhanced wheat for instance, 'natural' wheat wouldn't grow in the Canadian plains due to the cold.
I admit that there's a lot of skill involved in coming up with new strains but if they were that worried about propogating their seeds 'illegaly' then they should've also engineered them to be incapable of reproduction.
I don't know anything about farming, but it seems to me that this is one area where civil disobedience can make a huge impact. Think of a crop duster dusting a few square miles with these mutant canola seeds. I have no idea if this would actually work though, but if it did it'd cause enough of a problem in the legal system to make them think hard about whether growing seeds should be illegal.
And what happens when that DVD breaks, gets scratched, etc.? Do you have to shell out (whatever the price of a
DVD is, my DVD drive has never even seen a DVD before.) again just to have the media that you were only
licencing before? Maybe if you owned the contents of the disk it may be worth spending the money, but since it is
just a licence to use the contents of the disk it isn't. Maybe the MPAA should have to replace unusable DVDs?
I don't agree with any of the MPAA's tactics, but I find most arguments for copying DVD equally inane. This is one of them. What do you do when your brand new car gets in a wreck? You replace it, not the manufacturer. Warranty problems are another issue, but this is handled the same way. If you buy a disc and it doesn't work out when you get home you can replace it. If you buy it then use it on your rotary sander you don't get a free replacement.
These kind of things have always seemed pretty lame to me. Somebody gets canned or they get fed up, part ways with the company then go and lambaste them in public... for profit. I don't see that this is any more humorous, informing or worthwhile than the typical unauthorized celebrity biography. If he expected to make millions off his time at Amazon and didn't and is upset over this, well, to fucking bad. Grow up, get a job at a 7-11 and start over. Unless you were a grade-A moron you knew there was a lot of risk in these overly valued and underly financially sound companies.
It doesn't sound like this is completely what he does from his press releases, but it still reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where this female stand-up comedian based her entire show around "Jerry is the Devil".
I do support his right to do it, I just think he's a slimy troll for doing it.
Maybe, maybe he was truthful, I don't know. I was impressed with the knowledge he had on the subjects however. Sure, staffers were probably involved at some point, but he seemed genuinely knowledgable. This knowledge would indicate that he has some interest in the internet beyond pleasing the moral and corporate majorities. If he's just pandering in my opinion he's doing a rather dangerous pandering. It's much safer, more lucrative and politically rewarding to pander to rich special interest groups.
The BSD layer isn't a subsystem, its the guts. Your argument is the same as arguing that running a KDE or Gnome application doesn't count as running linux, since there's an abstraction layer in between.
Will most users be typing in 'cp' for copying files? Nope, not likely. They will be running applications that make use of the kernel though, they just won't realize it.
Yes, most unix users don't do anything beyond running applications either. If they're brave they may run make (and probably fail) and go back to using applications.
But, so what? They're still using unix even if they aren't developers. If you really want to bitch about true market share, then show me the the breakdown of people who routinely run linux compared to those who installed it/had a friend install it on an unused partition and occasionaly boot it up.
Apple has a long history, going back to near day one, of trashing the previous generation of hardware every few
years. It's one of the things that allows the company to prosper- they require you to throw away your old Apple
hardware and buy all new.
This is an idiotic statement and utterly devoid of any basis in reality. Until MacOS 8 was released every previous generation of the Macintosh, all the way back to 1986 and the Mac Plus, could run current software. So your 1986 Mac Plus could run Systen 7.55 which was released in 1996. You could even upgrade your 1984 128K Mac to a Mac Plus and run System 7.55. That's 12 years.
MacOS 8 and higher did force an upgrade, but only against relatively ancient machines. It just won't fit in 128K of memory.
MacOS X is officially supported on Macintoshes originally running G3 and G4 processors. Unofficially it will at least run on older machines with a G3 upgrade card (~ 130 bucks) but probably on any PowerPC based Macintosh.
Apple has a long history, going back to day one, of going to drastic measures to guarantee that their operating systems will run on any generation of Macintosh. Recently they've realized that while it may an admirable goal it doesn't make fiscal or technical sense to release bleeding edge software on hardware that isn't really equipped to run it properly.
In the Ciena case the article says that the one year prohibition on working for a competitor was in the contract. In this case the manager loses through his own stupidity, you should never sign a contract like that. Maybe he had some personal justification for it, such as he expected his stock options to earn him a retirement, but assuming that they'd play nice and not apply it isn't a bright expectation.
What is really frightening are the cases where no non-compete agreement was signed yet companies managed to enforce one after the fact. This can only happen with a collusion between a corrupt company and an equally corrupt government. In the doubleclick case the accusation was that these workers stole information. If that really was the case go for a prosecution. Alleging this and getting an injunction preventing them from working is criminal though.
Companies now seem to have the power not only to force you to sign your rights away as a requirement for employment but also to make up new rules after the fact if their legal teams didn't put the thumb screws on hard enough initially.
If you're a fan of science fictions set in a dystopian future, welcome to the future for the future is now.
No, it doesn't mean you're MENSA, but it still doesn't mean its a good interface. A good interface is intuitive. Almost anybody can grasp setting an analog watch, even little kids. Your rotate a knob and the hands move. The action is a metaphor for what you're doing.
Most digital timepieces have a couple of buttons. One puts it into programming mode and cycles through am/pm, hours and minutes. The other causes a number to increment. It distances the user from manipulating the time by requiring you to use a tool for what might be a frequent occurence. Sure, the tool is just a pen or something else to depress the tiny unlabeled buttons, but its still an obstacle. The interface was designed to be dirt cheap, not easy to use.
As a further insult VCR manufacturers can't be bothered to invest a quarter for a decent capacitor to backup the time and program data. So even if people do make it past the inane obstacles their reward is a flashing 12:00 at the next power failure.
I'd hope that for a change an organization would be clueful. If the MPAA actually does realize the writing is on the wall and works out an electronic distribution mechanism I hope they do it justice. I'm willing to pay for streaming movies, but only around the price that I pay for a rental right now. I've not rented a movie in a while, but I think thats around a couple bucks for a new release.
I've downloaded a few DIVX videos, the quality is not bad but its not great either. I still want to be able to purchase DVD's of movies I'd like to own. (No, decss will not make me boycott DVD any more than sweat shop labour will stop most people from buying clothes)
If the MPAA is smart they'll jump on the bandwagon soon. In my opinion the infrastructure isn't really there yet. Most people don't have broadband, and the broadband we do have isn't broad enough. Even given that its still important to be there first and get people used to the technology (and kill off the "if I had some legal way of getting movies online I would" argument)
Long and off topic, but why is this a troll? When DeCSS was censored at least the first few people who posted it, or posted links to it were 'rewarded' with karma. I don't really agree with the reward, but why is this a troll?
I can see not giving it karma, or, debatedly, marking it as off topic, but its not a troll.
They need to have a hole that seals up behind itself in combination with a sterile drilling rig. The laser would be sterile but I'm not sure if it could seal up as well. You don't want surface contamination leaking through the hole and contaminating the lake.
The hole is probably the easy part, the hard part is introducing measurement devices without contamination.
States already do try to collect taxes on items exported from another stae, or at least Wisconsin does. On my state tax form it requests that I declare purchases made in other states. I'm probably not alone in saying that I've never actually reported anything, but the attempt is still there.
OK, they don't blow it out of the water. Instead they do a couple of things:
They generate evidence of them trafficking drugs.
They generate evidence of them being involved with terrorist groups.
They stick a couple large and well armed ships in the vincinity.
Now Sealand doesn't get any supplies. No food, no fuel for their generators. From what has been said by Sealand personel on slashdot it sounds like they are actually a very well run organization, so they probably have a substantial cache of the necessities. Eventually a war of attrition would likely work though.
I think Sealand needs to operate like swiss bank accounts used to work. No questions asked. They don't do anything explicitly illegal but they don't do any checking into the legality of what they're storing either.
The RIAA and friends have billions of dollars to throw around, they've bought large segments of the government, otherwise DMCA and other anti-consumer actions such as shutting down implementations of algorithms wouldn't happen. How much money do you think it would take to silence the conscience of people who are used to being bought and payed for anyway?
First of all, Sealand is only a haven till some country gets pissed off enough to blow it out of the water. Assuming that this doesn't happen then there is a possibility but its remote. Sealand itself, or a citizen of Sealand, would have to offer the Napster service.
This is remote for two reasons: Sealand itself probably wants to avoid doing anything thats outright illegal. Sure, they store data, and maybe that data is suspicious, but they can claim ignorance of it. It's all encrypted ones and zeroes to them. Once they offer a service that violates the law of some country their "see no evil, here no evil and speak no evil" act disappears. It may not be contrary to Sealands laws, but its contrary to other countries laws. This increases the chances of them being blown out of the water.
The second reason is that even if they threw caution to the wind, is Sealand really suitable for this? They've got a 256K connection, how saturated would it be? They'd effectively apply their own slashdot effect against themselves. Their other business interests would not be able to connect (the ones who actually pay the bills).
I think the only real solution is civil disobedience, but be prepared and willing to take your lumps if they come. Do your best to minimize this though. Don't take funds, don't run a site with banner adds and don't engage in any form of barter. Make sure that YOU DO NOT BENEFIT IN ANY WAY FROM SHARING FILES, in fact MAKE SURE THAT IN TOTAL YOU CAN SAY THAT IT COSTS YOU.
He still did get some niggling details wrong though, which in all honesty doesn't really matter. If you try to explain any subject, even relatively simple ones, that you're not yourself well versed in an expert in that field will be able to pick it up.
I try not to be a pedant, if the stories good I don't bother with small details. I work with a lot of people who like to tear apart every little problem in a book or movie. It's just a mental circle jerk to me.
The CDA is bad, it presumes that all pornography is vile and evil. Maybe to some people it is, they can choose not to look at it. They've also not really made a good definition of what they find indecent, which to me is rather frightening.
Now I agree that child pornography is wrong, but I still don't agree with the CDA. The CDA isn't about stamping out child pornography, its about stamping out everything that the "moral majority", or whatever they call themselves now, think is wrong.
There are already laws against child pornography, they come with stiff penalities. I'd be happy if they were even harsher, castrate the offenders, lobotomize them, I don't care. These laws obviously don't stop 100% of the abuse or this article wouldn't have been posted. There are not enough police officials assigned to this to really make a dent. Increasing the amount of stuff that they're supposed to contend with, which is what the CDA effectively does, is assinine.
Sticking to the real problems, such as child pornography, allows a more effective job to be done. If they really want to pretend they're serious on child pornography, dump the war on drugs. I'm not a drug user. I've never used them, I never will. But I think its assinine to spend the billions that are spent on preventing people from harming themselves when it can be spent preventing people from harming others. It obviously isn't all that effective since a cocaine user is in the highest office in the United States anyway.
Terminal velocity depends on the air density. People normally parachute from relatively low altitudes where there is still significant air density. This guys going to be parachuting from 100000 feet, or about 19 miles. Very little air density so his terminal velocity is much higher.
As he descends the air density will pick up and he will slow down.
No, probably not. Did they license the patent or did they license the technology. It seems to me that it would be easy enough to justify some fuzziness there so that Amazon could say in court: "Oh, they licensed the patent, but they also licensed technology from us". I also think Apple was the only company that licensed the one click patent.
I'm not sure what the deal terms were, I'm very suprised that the deal wasn't that Amazon would sell Apple products.
I think hackstervism can actually harm the cause much the way celebrity spokespersons often harm the causes that they support. It's not done intentionally, but it still can harm the image of the cause. I've read interviews with scientists or other informed advocates of various causes are posed the question: "Don't you think having that famous movie star `this space intentionally left blank' is promoting your cause?". Often the response is something to the effect of I really wish `this space intentionally left blank' would shut up. Think of the hemp movement, there's a lot of credibility to the research behind it, but when stars support it and then get busted for marijuana posession it undermines the image. Whether marijuana should be legalized is a seperate issue, one that hemp supporters want to distance themselves from.
So what happens when corporate web sites are defaced? Usually two undesirable things happen, only one of which is important to this posting. First hackers get a bad name since the press abuses the use of the term. Second the cause gets a bad name because people resort to vandalism. To make matters worse most of the vandalisms seem to be done by the barely literate.
The corporation makes the news (more press for them, somewhat sympathetic even if the vandalism accuses them of clubbing baby seals with Tibetian infants and using the fur in a southeast asian sweatshop/child labor camp), there is yet more outcry against 'hackers' and the message behind the cause gets buried beneath the bad press.
I don't know what the answer to good advocacy are, only that these are more often than not harmful. If you stage a peaceful demonstration it might not make the news which doesn't accomplish anything. Maybe whats needed are vigilante press agents releasing easily consumed memes for the masses to propogate.
I rarely went to class. When I did go I was usually drunk or stoned (or both.) Anything to pass the time was
good, I especially liked doing liquid hits of high quality acid and staring at the walls.
And yes, I did graduate. Now I work for a fortune 500 company doing IT stuff with half of my brain and
learning new code and stuff with the other half. No more drugs (except caffine, I haven't been able to shake
that one yet.)
I think this explains how online stores end up with services that store the product price in a format that allows the customer to modify it.
This could happen, I can see a lot more single-purpose appliances around the house. In a lot of ways this could be good for the consumer. For instance a relatively simple device for browsing the web and email priced cheaply enough that its like a phone. Have teenaged kids monopolizing your web browser? Buy a couple 100 dollar devices.
Most consumers already use their machines as high priced game consoles (honest dad, its for homework!) or web browsers already. (don't reply posting that you code, design or whatever - slashdot hasn't degraded to a forum for "most consumers" yet) From the manufacturers point of view its probably better to create inexpensive devices with a higher profit margin, priced so that people can purchase multiple units. The computer manufacturers have been taking a beating on profit expectations, in a large part due to the razor thin margins on personal computers.
While I don't think this will mean the end of the general purpose computer, I do think it'll mean the end of the insanely cheap general purpose computer. There's always going to be a demand for machines that serve as a swiss army knife, but the demand will be dwarfed by the need for the digital media box for the family room and the kids rooms, the communication pad in every room in the house and so t o
I don't think the copy protection to be built in to drives will be what brings this about, it'll be the desire of hardware manufacturers to make more profits. The built in copy protection is an evil thing, but isn't the evil that caused this.
My real question is this: if you don't want to hear other people's conversations, why are you out in public?
Because I'm out in public to watch a movie, or have a nice meal. There are some times when people have the right not to be disturbed by other peoples phones. I think a better question is this: If you can't exist without a phone for a couple of hours, why don't you stay home?
Which is exactly what I had to ask somebody last weekend as I was trying to see a movie with my friends. Some idiot couldn't stand to be parted from the electronic tether he calls a cellular phone and was incessantly talking on it, or it was incessantly ringing. I consider cellular phones in the wrong places (not just public places, many public places are fine) just as invasive and obnoxious as if the person behind me put their feet on the back of my chair.
Slashdot Mirror
About the only way they can increase market share is if the market itself is growing or if they can use their thumbscrews to extract more seats from that market.
As for pharmaceutical companies, guess what, there's a huge industry in generic drugs. The industry seems to be doing just fine despite this. Pharmaceutical companies have been increasing spending as a percentage of there finances on advertising, direct to consumer ads have jumped from 55 million in 1991 to 1.6 billion in 1996. This isn't a sign of a business struggling under the weight of competition from generic drugs.
The method involved in this genetically enhanced canola might be more high-tech, but it has really been done before, and for quite a long time. Canada grew based on genetically enhanced wheat for instance, 'natural' wheat wouldn't grow in the Canadian plains due to the cold.
I admit that there's a lot of skill involved in coming up with new strains but if they were that worried about propogating their seeds 'illegaly' then they should've also engineered them to be incapable of reproduction.
I don't know anything about farming, but it seems to me that this is one area where civil disobedience can make a huge impact. Think of a crop duster dusting a few square miles with these mutant canola seeds. I have no idea if this would actually work though, but if it did it'd cause enough of a problem in the legal system to make them think hard about whether growing seeds should be illegal.
It doesn't sound like this is completely what he does from his press releases, but it still reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where this female stand-up comedian based her entire show around "Jerry is the Devil".
I do support his right to do it, I just think he's a slimy troll for doing it.
Maybe, maybe he was truthful, I don't know. I was impressed with the knowledge he had on the subjects however. Sure, staffers were probably involved at some point, but he seemed genuinely knowledgable. This knowledge would indicate that he has some interest in the internet beyond pleasing the moral and corporate majorities. If he's just pandering in my opinion he's doing a rather dangerous pandering. It's much safer, more lucrative and politically rewarding to pander to rich special interest groups.
The BSD layer isn't a subsystem, its the guts. Your argument is the same as arguing that running a KDE or Gnome application doesn't count as running linux, since there's an abstraction layer in between. Will most users be typing in 'cp' for copying files? Nope, not likely. They will be running applications that make use of the kernel though, they just won't realize it.
But, so what? They're still using unix even if they aren't developers. If you really want to bitch about true market share, then show me the the breakdown of people who routinely run linux compared to those who installed it/had a friend install it on an unused partition and occasionaly boot it up.
MacOS 8 and higher did force an upgrade, but only against relatively ancient machines. It just won't fit in 128K of memory.
MacOS X is officially supported on Macintoshes originally running G3 and G4 processors. Unofficially it will at least run on older machines with a G3 upgrade card (~ 130 bucks) but probably on any PowerPC based Macintosh.
Apple has a long history, going back to day one, of going to drastic measures to guarantee that their operating systems will run on any generation of Macintosh. Recently they've realized that while it may an admirable goal it doesn't make fiscal or technical sense to release bleeding edge software on hardware that isn't really equipped to run it properly.
What is really frightening are the cases where no non-compete agreement was signed yet companies managed to enforce one after the fact. This can only happen with a collusion between a corrupt company and an equally corrupt government. In the doubleclick case the accusation was that these workers stole information. If that really was the case go for a prosecution. Alleging this and getting an injunction preventing them from working is criminal though.
Companies now seem to have the power not only to force you to sign your rights away as a requirement for employment but also to make up new rules after the fact if their legal teams didn't put the thumb screws on hard enough initially.
If you're a fan of science fictions set in a dystopian future, welcome to the future for the future is now.
Most digital timepieces have a couple of buttons. One puts it into programming mode and cycles through am/pm, hours and minutes. The other causes a number to increment. It distances the user from manipulating the time by requiring you to use a tool for what might be a frequent occurence. Sure, the tool is just a pen or something else to depress the tiny unlabeled buttons, but its still an obstacle. The interface was designed to be dirt cheap, not easy to use.
As a further insult VCR manufacturers can't be bothered to invest a quarter for a decent capacitor to backup the time and program data. So even if people do make it past the inane obstacles their reward is a flashing 12:00 at the next power failure.
I've downloaded a few DIVX videos, the quality is not bad but its not great either. I still want to be able to purchase DVD's of movies I'd like to own. (No, decss will not make me boycott DVD any more than sweat shop labour will stop most people from buying clothes)
If the MPAA is smart they'll jump on the bandwagon soon. In my opinion the infrastructure isn't really there yet. Most people don't have broadband, and the broadband we do have isn't broad enough. Even given that its still important to be there first and get people used to the technology (and kill off the "if I had some legal way of getting movies online I would" argument)
I can see not giving it karma, or, debatedly, marking it as off topic, but its not a troll.
The hole is probably the easy part, the hard part is introducing measurement devices without contamination.
States already do try to collect taxes on items exported from another stae, or at least Wisconsin does. On my state tax form it requests that I declare purchases made in other states. I'm probably not alone in saying that I've never actually reported anything, but the attempt is still there.
- They generate evidence of them trafficking drugs.
- They generate evidence of them being involved with terrorist groups.
- They stick a couple large and well armed ships in the vincinity.
Now Sealand doesn't get any supplies. No food, no fuel for their generators. From what has been said by Sealand personel on slashdot it sounds like they are actually a very well run organization, so they probably have a substantial cache of the necessities. Eventually a war of attrition would likely work though.I think Sealand needs to operate like swiss bank accounts used to work. No questions asked. They don't do anything explicitly illegal but they don't do any checking into the legality of what they're storing either.
The RIAA and friends have billions of dollars to throw around, they've bought large segments of the government, otherwise DMCA and other anti-consumer actions such as shutting down implementations of algorithms wouldn't happen. How much money do you think it would take to silence the conscience of people who are used to being bought and payed for anyway?
This is remote for two reasons: Sealand itself probably wants to avoid doing anything thats outright illegal. Sure, they store data, and maybe that data is suspicious, but they can claim ignorance of it. It's all encrypted ones and zeroes to them. Once they offer a service that violates the law of some country their "see no evil, here no evil and speak no evil" act disappears. It may not be contrary to Sealands laws, but its contrary to other countries laws. This increases the chances of them being blown out of the water.
The second reason is that even if they threw caution to the wind, is Sealand really suitable for this? They've got a 256K connection, how saturated would it be? They'd effectively apply their own slashdot effect against themselves. Their other business interests would not be able to connect (the ones who actually pay the bills).
I think the only real solution is civil disobedience, but be prepared and willing to take your lumps if they come. Do your best to minimize this though. Don't take funds, don't run a site with banner adds and don't engage in any form of barter. Make sure that YOU DO NOT BENEFIT IN ANY WAY FROM SHARING FILES, in fact MAKE SURE THAT IN TOTAL YOU CAN SAY THAT IT COSTS YOU.
I try not to be a pedant, if the stories good I don't bother with small details. I work with a lot of people who like to tear apart every little problem in a book or movie. It's just a mental circle jerk to me.
Now I agree that child pornography is wrong, but I still don't agree with the CDA. The CDA isn't about stamping out child pornography, its about stamping out everything that the "moral majority", or whatever they call themselves now, think is wrong.
There are already laws against child pornography, they come with stiff penalities. I'd be happy if they were even harsher, castrate the offenders, lobotomize them, I don't care. These laws obviously don't stop 100% of the abuse or this article wouldn't have been posted. There are not enough police officials assigned to this to really make a dent. Increasing the amount of stuff that they're supposed to contend with, which is what the CDA effectively does, is assinine.
Sticking to the real problems, such as child pornography, allows a more effective job to be done. If they really want to pretend they're serious on child pornography, dump the war on drugs. I'm not a drug user. I've never used them, I never will. But I think its assinine to spend the billions that are spent on preventing people from harming themselves when it can be spent preventing people from harming others. It obviously isn't all that effective since a cocaine user is in the highest office in the United States anyway.
As he descends the air density will pick up and he will slow down.
I'm not sure what the deal terms were, I'm very suprised that the deal wasn't that Amazon would sell Apple products.
So what happens when corporate web sites are defaced? Usually two undesirable things happen, only one of which is important to this posting. First hackers get a bad name since the press abuses the use of the term. Second the cause gets a bad name because people resort to vandalism. To make matters worse most of the vandalisms seem to be done by the barely literate.
The corporation makes the news (more press for them, somewhat sympathetic even if the vandalism accuses them of clubbing baby seals with Tibetian infants and using the fur in a southeast asian sweatshop/child labor camp), there is yet more outcry against 'hackers' and the message behind the cause gets buried beneath the bad press.
I don't know what the answer to good advocacy are, only that these are more often than not harmful. If you stage a peaceful demonstration it might not make the news which doesn't accomplish anything. Maybe whats needed are vigilante press agents releasing easily consumed memes for the masses to propogate.
Most consumers already use their machines as high priced game consoles (honest dad, its for homework!) or web browsers already. (don't reply posting that you code, design or whatever - slashdot hasn't degraded to a forum for "most consumers" yet) From the manufacturers point of view its probably better to create inexpensive devices with a higher profit margin, priced so that people can purchase multiple units. The computer manufacturers have been taking a beating on profit expectations, in a large part due to the razor thin margins on personal computers.
While I don't think this will mean the end of the general purpose computer, I do think it'll mean the end of the insanely cheap general purpose computer. There's always going to be a demand for machines that serve as a swiss army knife, but the demand will be dwarfed by the need for the digital media box for the family room and the kids rooms, the communication pad in every room in the house and so t o
I don't think the copy protection to be built in to drives will be what brings this about, it'll be the desire of hardware manufacturers to make more profits. The built in copy protection is an evil thing, but isn't the evil that caused this.
Which is exactly what I had to ask somebody last weekend as I was trying to see a movie with my friends. Some idiot couldn't stand to be parted from the electronic tether he calls a cellular phone and was incessantly talking on it, or it was incessantly ringing. I consider cellular phones in the wrong places (not just public places, many public places are fine) just as invasive and obnoxious as if the person behind me put their feet on the back of my chair.