...unlike the parent. However, I don't forsee this one anytime soon. It requires some sort of positional scheme, and I'd think that you'd need re-writeable portions of the media or a carrier with a firmware chip that tracked positional info...
1) DVD handles chapter forward and back (a VHS doesn't DO that...) and via the remote (and in some cases, on the front panel...) you can fast-forward/reverse in at least 4-5 different speeds and slow-forward at at least 2-3 different speeds. Now some discs have some obnoxious feature that prevent you from doing this sort of thing to the "previews" (ads?) on the disc- but they're actually in the very small minority of late because people bitched about that... Item 1 on your list has pretty much been a non-issue since the beginning- always HAS been.
2) Tape's much worse- haven't you seen VHS tapes strewn across roadways by rowdy teenieboppers? All it'd take to ruin a tape is to give it a couple of swirlies, moosh food or spill juice/kool-aid into the thing, or stick one's fingers into the loader gaps in the door (which little fingers would be adept at doing) and PULL (ooh... Such fun that!). DVD's can be snapped and scratched up- the other "mishaps" that would trash a VHS tape don't even figure into a DVD, they're non-problems. Light to medium scratching can usually be ignored by a player and when it isn't, one can typically resurface the optical portion of the disk with various products on the market, which do, amazingly work well.
Simply put, neither of your reasons work as being valid concerns. (And the people that modded you up as "Interesting" never went through this little mental exercise to see if you really were "Interesting"...)
There's the DVD-CCA and the MPAA that are absoposilutely pissed off about the whole situation- it's just that there's stronger laws with regard to what they can do to consumers over in the UK and other locations (Or weaker, but don't give a flying fsck about 'em in that arena...) and they pretty much can't do a damn thing about the situation.
Which makes ME all the more happy about it.:-)
Too bad we can't see this sort of thing happening in the States- I'd be even happier about it because it's happening where I am.
"If so, please ship me the next complete program that you've worked on and I'll freely distribute it- that would be fair would it not?"
Sure... Specific device drivers are complete programs that enable a device to work under a given operating system. Here, let me put them up on a website for you to download so you can get right to the task at hand- I'd send them to you, but I'm kind of busy right at the moment trying to be the CTO of a startup, working on porting games to Linux, and being Lead Software Engineer at a different startup.
(Sorry, cheap shot, I know, but you set yourself up for it all the same...)
It is all a lie (losing compensation due to file downloads...) because most labels are the ones ripping off the artists in the first place. You're the exception not the norm. It's a lie because there's other means for people to get the music- and pay for it. Means that have little relation to what the RIAA member labels seek to achieve.
And a simple question back- is it justifiable in any way for someone to take a copyrighted work and distribute it without compensation to the individuals that made it?
No it's not justifiable to distribute it without compensation to the individuals that made it. What the labels consider to be compensation is highly debateable. And file sharing isn't precisely right, but it's not 100% wrong like you and the *AA orgs make it out to be. Ever hear of the American Home Recording Act (AHRA)? If I make a copy of a friend's record, this is a similar act to filesharing- and the AHRA provides a compulsory license (with a ZERO amount) to non-commercial duplication of this nature. In that, whether it's "fair" or not, it's legal. Is that one costing you thousands of dollars? Better deal with it- it's completely legal and fair to everyone since someone DID pay you for your troubles and they're not taking your public performance rights away from you in the process.
If you're talking consumer electronics devices that don't have to deal with any x86 software, then yeah, ARM's the one that dominated that market. The overall situation, however, is a different story. You're going to find that people that can afford to roll their own SOC based solutions will tend to pick a favorite, being something like an even mix of Dragonball, MIPS, and ARM based designs. If the players in question (which is the bulk of the embedded systems industry) are forced to use off the shelf components, they will pick x86 implicitly as all the MIPS and ARM solutions that are off-the-shelf are anywhere from 4-10 times more expensive.
I actually am... I've been on sabbatical because of personal issues and I'm going back to the currently outstanding projects this week. Ballistics has one show-stopper bug that's stymied all of the team up until recently. Not sure what's the story on Disciples2 or Bandits (Though work had started on it about around the time I'd suspended my work on things...).
...(not that I'm a lawyer, mind...) that technically, they're supposed to file the John Doe filings seperately anyhow. The large problem with this is, that unwitting people could be offering the material (therefore, they're not guilty of infringement, per se- but the *AA people just filed a subpoena to that effect... Think about it....) and this whole thing infringes on their rights just so they can score control on all of us. Worse, they're not even checking in most cases as to whether the stuff's infringing or not- which makes the whole thing dead wrong in my book.
It's legal due process. DMCA tends to try to do away with most of it in favor of the rightsholders- which is the rights of the few getting in the way of the rights of the many.
"The artists are the ones who get screwed in this- they deserve just compensation for their work and should be given such. When you can't pay the bills with your craft, you change to another craft. How many decent artists does that deny us the pleasure of seeing or hearing?"
Well, that's all well and good, but all of this stupidity isn't really affecting the artists as you claim. It's affecting the bottom line of the labels that are member companies of the RIAA. For each record, unless you're a BIG act, you can expect to see $0.05-0.10 of that $12-20 per album from the label. Tell me again who's screwing whom?
No, I don't fileshare, but I DO write code and fiction for a living so it does concern me greatly that people are doing the filetrading of things. But it concerns me even further when someone comes forward and states "what about the poor artists" or somesuch like that- because these people keep perpetuating a lie even larger than the ones the RIAA and MPAA type organizations are spreading about the "damage" caused by P2P and that it should be outlawed, etc. You probably don't even realize what you just said was wrong. If so, I'm sorry for being so forthright and forward about this. If not, I have absolutely no remorse whatsoever for stepping on your toes.
If they can't subpoena the IP lists, a John Doe filing is pretty useless- because it doesn't identify a specific Defendant.
You can't have an action held against you unless they have good reasoning to do so, they can have sanctions handed down to them if they do attempt it without backing, and you can countersue the Hell out of them for trying.
It may protect the ISP, but it makes it pure Hell for them to get at you because they can't identify you specifically. Now, I'm not one that does the fileswapping BS, but I have a BIG problem with the way they're all going about this shite.
Bandwidth hogs are the ones paying for all of it in the first place. The people providing it. The people consuming it. Just because they provide a load on the system, if they weren't there, they'd pretty much have nowhere near the customer base.
If they rat out their customers, they lose Common Carrier status, which is protecting them in the first place. This is an excessively bad idea. Ratting them out now can open them up to future liabilities in the form of not handling future outbreaks- so they end up spending a hell of a lot more on trying (in vain) to lock down the filesharers. Either of the situations due to that wouldn't sit well with their stockholders.
If they rat out their customers, the ones that didn't get ratted out go elsewhere if at all possible. Most of this sort of stuff is going on in Urban areas and therefore more often than not, the customers in question have alternatives at thier disposal and the ones that don't will have them soon. That means you're losing customers disproportionate to the costs of the loading from those "hogs". That sort of thing doesn't sit well with stockholders.
Your math's sound, but only from a single perspective and you failed to factor in tons of other things that place such actions soundly in the negative for a business that knows what it's legal obligations and rights are.
1) Nowhere in the parent was it stated or implied that this was the case.
2) Nowhere in the Plantiff's complaint did they really, really meet the criteria of identifying a specific infringer (Required by law, both for Copyright and for the obviously Unconstitutional DMCA...)- ergo, a very probable instance of where the DMCA's provisions are at odds with the Fourth Ammendment. If they don't have anything on you specifically, they can't go on a fishing expidition- which is what the RIAA was on.
...eS-I-ms1234, while your Friend, the Computer, does appreciate your efforts to apprehend the Treasonous Purple Security Clearance Citizen, Xavior-P-Enguin123, it is worth noting that impersonating a Troubleshooter assigned to security is a Treason Offense.
Please report to the nearest self-incrimination center for summary Trial-And-Execution immediately.
Have a Happy Day and remember that The Computer is your Friend!
You can opt for (or have foreced on you...) a "lower bandwidth" that makes sense. Most hotspots can manage something like 10 or so 20-30kbps streams- and that's really, really all you need for a better than mobile phone quality session. G.711's nuts. G.729, GSM, or SPEEX will do a much better job at 8-16kbps for each voice channel (one up, one down...). Sadly, most of the people doing VoIP are using G.711 because of QoS reasons. It's much more resilliant to dropouts and latencies than the other codecs.
That there are basically four primary dialects of the English language:
British American Australian Indian
I don't think they're going to have as much problems as you'd think. That, combined with the fact that a good portion of the actually usable functionality is available as Open Source code and has already been internationalized or is in the process thereof for India... Well, let's just day your argument kind of falls flat on it's face- hard.
The ONLY reason why it's not supported is the Telcos don't want you using it- partly because of VoIP capabilities and partly due to the fact that they want you using their expensive data service instead of a potentially cheaper/faster WiFi hotspot.
In this context, they should own up the lie and, at the minimum, come clean on it. This is the same sort of crap about crippled Bluetooth on some Moto models except worse, they came up with a lame-ass lie to cover for the real reasons. In all honesty, they should eat the pain from the Telcos and the Telcos should be revealed for what they are over all of this.
...is that people take his comparisons as overall performance instead of overall performance with his chosen settings (I'll admit he's good...) and transcoding from an MPEG2 source. Sadly, most of these codecs he's using aren't for transcoding- they're for encoding never before compressed feeds. So, in all honesty, he should take care when he makes comments along the lines of none of the codecs are capable of DVD quality (Which he made in the current comparison...).
He really, really ought to qualify that remark- it should be one of "No single current codec can achieve DVD quality transcoding from any other codec source" If he did this, he'd be telling the truth as many of the distortions he describes would come from the imperceptable distortions that MPEG-2 introduces to the feed, even on a DVD. DVDs aren't lossless. Why should one expect the same quality out of two differing lossy codecs with differing schemes for reducing the amount of data preserved by the encoding proceess?
The game developers won't make Linux versions because they don't see the market and the driver support's still "not there" for them.
The hardware vendors won't make Linux versions because they don't see the market and the game developers are largely not making games for the platform.
The end-users aren't there because the hardware's often lagging Windows and there's less games for Linux (Never mind that most of the games that are "out there" for Windows are crap to begin with...).
...OpenAL is used in commercial cross-platform games such as Unreal Tournament 2k3 and 2k4. They use their own framework for the other pieces most probably because they feel they need finer-grained control than SDL provides or they produced their own framework like SDL that they're happier with.
Now, this is my opinions and should be viewed as such...
There's instances where it strongly appears to me that they've sold out. There's also repeated instances where they just-don't-get-it and spout personal opinions rather than facts. Sometimes they get it right, many times they don't- the only reason why they're still a going concern is that people haven't twigged onto these little facts about the site and they get it all right enough to be "useful" to most people.
Nowadays, I give more credence to AnandTech (Though Anand has missed on a few things himself of late...) and [H]ardOCP (Hi, Kyle! In his case he clearly states things that are merely opinion as such- I can deal with someone stating something is opinion, I can't deal with people making opinions as statements of fact...)
Standards that update themselves...
on
Does Linux Have Game?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...aren't all they're cracked up to be. If you code to DX8 you're largely coding to features of a Radeon R200 or better. Sure, your cards "support" it, but the features of DX8 was that of the ones initially offered only by ATI products. DX9's NVidia's playground and so forth.
It's not really a standard save by Microsoft- everyone else uses OpenGL, even MS offers it. That, my friend is the definition of a standard.
LokiGames failed, not because of lack of sales...
on
Does Linux Have Game?
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· Score: 1
...it failed because of excessively BAD business decisions by Loki's executives (Look making 50k copies of a title and 50k special tins and then delaying the damn thing because the tins were tied up in US Customs is a BAD business decision no matter how you slice it- and that's what Loki's execs decided to do on Q3:A for Linux and it's why in the hell it didn't sell well over anything else. People could buy the Windows version and "patch" it to be the Linux version with no real effort or tracking of those sorts of sales.
Get your facts straight before posting...
on
Does Linux Have Game?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Direct3D (otherwise known as D3D) is simply Microsoft's answer to OpenGL- period, end of story.
What you're referring to is DirectX which is the framework comprising:
And as far as the legalities go, your guess is as good as mine. First off, I Am Not A Lawyer... My take is that they're commiting the same crimes that any other AdWare/SpyWare/Virii/Worm writer is guilty of and therefore has unclean hands with regards to ANY act of enforcement of the IP rights of the labels that use this bunch.
As for avoiding this- there's two answers...
1) Don't listen to their stuff in the FIRST place. 2) If you can't keep from doing that and insist on sharing the stuff, use MP3 or Ogg Vorbis, not WMA. I don't care how much "better" it sounds, like all things Microsoft, there's some nasty catch waiting for you in the end.
Considering that only Dell and HP largely use those unified chipsets with everything integrated, and largely only on their low-end machines, I don't consider the availability of an all-in-one solution as big a deal as you seem to make it. 'sides, VIA offers the very thing you talk about- even makes a good office machine for most setups.
What you mention isn't relevent- really, it isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
...unlike the parent. However, I don't forsee this one anytime soon. It requires some sort of positional scheme, and I'd think that you'd need re-writeable portions of the media or a carrier with a firmware chip that tracked positional info...
1) DVD handles chapter forward and back (a VHS doesn't DO that...) and via the remote (and in some cases, on the front panel...) you can fast-forward/reverse in at least 4-5 different speeds and slow-forward at at least 2-3 different speeds. Now some discs have some obnoxious feature that prevent you from doing this sort of thing to the "previews" (ads?) on the disc- but they're actually in the very small minority of late because people bitched about that... Item 1 on your list has pretty much been a non-issue since the beginning- always HAS been.
2) Tape's much worse- haven't you seen VHS tapes strewn across roadways by rowdy teenieboppers? All it'd take to ruin a tape is to give it a couple of swirlies, moosh food or spill juice/kool-aid into the thing, or stick one's fingers into the loader gaps in the door (which little fingers would be adept at doing) and PULL (ooh... Such fun that!). DVD's can be snapped and scratched up- the other "mishaps" that would trash a VHS tape don't even figure into a DVD, they're non-problems. Light to medium scratching can usually be ignored by a player and when it isn't, one can typically resurface the optical portion of the disk with various products on the market, which do, amazingly work well.
Simply put, neither of your reasons work as being valid concerns. (And the people that modded you up as "Interesting" never went through this little mental exercise to see if you really were "Interesting"...)
Everyone is happy, including me.
:-)
There's the DVD-CCA and the MPAA that are absoposilutely pissed off about the whole situation- it's just that there's stronger laws with regard to what they can do to consumers over in the UK and other locations (Or weaker, but don't give a flying fsck about 'em in that arena...) and they pretty much can't do a damn thing about the situation.
Which makes ME all the more happy about it.
Too bad we can't see this sort of thing happening in the States- I'd be even happier about it because it's happening where I am.
Sure... Specific device drivers are complete programs that enable a device to work under a given operating system. Here, let me put them up on a website for you to download so you can get right to the task at hand- I'd send them to you, but I'm kind of busy right at the moment trying to be the CTO of a startup, working on porting games to Linux, and being Lead Software Engineer at a different startup.
http://vsbc6.sourceforge.net
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pport1/
Go knock yourself out now...
(Sorry, cheap shot, I know, but you set yourself up for it all the same...)
It is all a lie (losing compensation due to file downloads...) because most labels are the ones ripping off the artists in the first place. You're the exception not the norm. It's a lie because there's other means for people to get the music- and pay for it. Means that have little relation to what the RIAA member labels seek to achieve.
No it's not justifiable to distribute it without compensation to the individuals that made it. What the labels consider to be compensation is highly debateable. And file sharing isn't precisely right, but it's not 100% wrong like you and the *AA orgs make it out to be. Ever hear of the American Home Recording Act (AHRA)? If I make a copy of a friend's record, this is a similar act to filesharing- and the AHRA provides a compulsory license (with a ZERO amount) to non-commercial duplication of this nature. In that, whether it's "fair" or not, it's legal. Is that one costing you thousands of dollars? Better deal with it- it's completely legal and fair to everyone since someone DID pay you for your troubles and they're not taking your public performance rights away from you in the process.
If you're talking consumer electronics devices that don't have to deal with any x86 software, then yeah, ARM's the one that dominated that market. The overall situation, however, is a different story. You're going to find that people that can afford to roll their own SOC based solutions will tend to pick a favorite, being something like an even mix of Dragonball, MIPS, and ARM based designs. If the players in question (which is the bulk of the embedded systems industry) are forced to use off the shelf components, they will pick x86 implicitly as all the MIPS and ARM solutions that are off-the-shelf are anywhere from 4-10 times more expensive.
I actually am... I've been on sabbatical because of personal issues and I'm going back to the currently outstanding projects this week. Ballistics has one show-stopper bug that's stymied all of the team up until recently. Not sure what's the story on Disciples2 or Bandits (Though work had started on it about around the time I'd suspended my work on things...).
...(not that I'm a lawyer, mind...) that technically, they're supposed to file the John Doe filings seperately anyhow. The large problem with this is, that unwitting people could be offering the material (therefore, they're not guilty of infringement, per se- but the *AA people just filed a subpoena to that effect... Think about it....) and this whole thing infringes on their rights just so they can score control on all of us. Worse, they're not even checking in most cases as to whether the stuff's infringing or not- which makes the whole thing dead wrong in my book.
It's legal due process. DMCA tends to try to do away with most of it in favor of the rightsholders- which is the rights of the few getting in the way of the rights of the many.
Well, that's all well and good, but all of this stupidity isn't really affecting the artists as you claim. It's affecting the bottom line of the labels that are member companies of the RIAA. For each record, unless you're a BIG act, you can expect to see $0.05-0.10 of that $12-20 per album from the label. Tell me again who's screwing whom?
No, I don't fileshare, but I DO write code and fiction for a living so it does concern me greatly that people are doing the filetrading of things. But it concerns me even further when someone comes forward and states "what about the poor artists" or somesuch like that- because these people keep perpetuating a lie even larger than the ones the RIAA and MPAA type organizations are spreading about the "damage" caused by P2P and that it should be outlawed, etc. You probably don't even realize what you just said was wrong. If so, I'm sorry for being so forthright and forward about this. If not, I have absolutely no remorse whatsoever for stepping on your toes.
If they can't subpoena the IP lists, a John Doe filing is pretty useless- because it doesn't identify a specific Defendant.
You can't have an action held against you unless they have good reasoning to do so, they can have sanctions handed down to them if they do attempt it without backing, and you can countersue the Hell out of them for trying.
It may protect the ISP, but it makes it pure Hell for them to get at you because they can't identify you specifically. Now, I'm not one that does the fileswapping BS, but I have a BIG problem with the way they're all going about this shite.
Bandwidth hogs are the ones paying for all of it in the first place. The people providing it. The people consuming it. Just because they provide a load on the system, if they weren't there, they'd pretty much have nowhere near the customer base.
If they rat out their customers, they lose Common Carrier status, which is protecting them in the first place. This is an excessively bad idea. Ratting them out now can open them up to future liabilities in the form of not handling future outbreaks- so they end up spending a hell of a lot more on trying (in vain) to lock down the filesharers. Either of the situations due to that wouldn't sit well with their stockholders.
If they rat out their customers, the ones that didn't get ratted out go elsewhere if at all possible. Most of this sort of stuff is going on in Urban areas and therefore more often than not, the customers in question have alternatives at thier disposal and the ones that don't will have them soon. That means you're losing customers disproportionate to the costs of the loading from those "hogs". That sort of thing doesn't sit well with stockholders.
Your math's sound, but only from a single perspective and you failed to factor in tons of other things that place such actions soundly in the negative for a business that knows what it's legal obligations and rights are.
But you should note the following:
1) Nowhere in the parent was it stated or implied that this was the case.
2) Nowhere in the Plantiff's complaint did they really, really meet the criteria of identifying a specific infringer (Required by law, both for Copyright and for the obviously Unconstitutional DMCA...)- ergo, a very probable instance of where the DMCA's provisions are at odds with the Fourth Ammendment. If they don't have anything on you specifically, they can't go on a fishing expidition- which is what the RIAA was on.
...eS-I-ms1234, while your Friend, the Computer, does appreciate your efforts to apprehend the Treasonous Purple Security Clearance Citizen, Xavior-P-Enguin123, it is worth noting that impersonating a Troubleshooter assigned to security is a Treason Offense.
Please report to the nearest self-incrimination center for summary Trial-And-Execution immediately.
Have a Happy Day and remember that The Computer is your Friend!
You can opt for (or have foreced on you...) a "lower bandwidth" that makes sense. Most hotspots can manage something like 10 or so 20-30kbps streams- and that's really, really all you need for a better than mobile phone quality session. G.711's nuts. G.729, GSM, or SPEEX will do a much better job at 8-16kbps for each voice channel (one up, one down...). Sadly, most of the people doing VoIP are using G.711 because of QoS reasons. It's much more resilliant to dropouts and latencies than the other codecs.
That there are basically four primary dialects of the English language:
British
American
Australian
Indian
I don't think they're going to have as much problems as you'd think. That, combined with the fact that a good portion of the actually usable functionality is available as Open Source code and has already been internationalized or is in the process thereof for India... Well, let's just day your argument kind of falls flat on it's face- hard.
The ONLY reason why it's not supported is the Telcos don't want you using it- partly because of VoIP capabilities and partly due to the fact that they want you using their expensive data service instead of a potentially cheaper/faster WiFi hotspot.
In this context, they should own up the lie and, at the minimum, come clean on it. This is the same sort of crap about crippled Bluetooth on some Moto models except worse, they came up with a lame-ass lie to cover for the real reasons. In all honesty, they should eat the pain from the Telcos and the Telcos should be revealed for what they are over all of this.
...is that people take his comparisons as overall performance instead of overall performance with his chosen settings (I'll admit he's good...) and transcoding from an MPEG2 source. Sadly, most of these codecs he's using aren't for transcoding- they're for encoding never before compressed feeds. So, in all honesty, he should take care when he makes comments along the lines of none of the codecs are capable of DVD quality (Which he made in the current comparison...).
He really, really ought to qualify that remark- it should be one of "No single current codec can achieve DVD quality transcoding from any other codec source" If he did this, he'd be telling the truth as many of the distortions he describes would come from the imperceptable distortions that MPEG-2 introduces to the feed, even on a DVD. DVDs aren't lossless. Why should one expect the same quality out of two differing lossy codecs with differing schemes for reducing the amount of data preserved by the encoding proceess?
That would sum up things nicely...
The game developers won't make Linux versions because they don't see the market and the driver support's still "not there" for them.
The hardware vendors won't make Linux versions because they don't see the market and the game developers are largely not making games for the platform.
The end-users aren't there because the hardware's often lagging Windows and there's less games for Linux (Never mind that most of the games that are "out there" for Windows are crap to begin with...).
...OpenAL is used in commercial cross-platform games such as Unreal Tournament 2k3 and 2k4. They use their own framework for the other pieces most probably because they feel they need finer-grained control than SDL provides or they produced their own framework like SDL that they're happier with.
Now, this is my opinions and should be viewed as such...
There's instances where it strongly appears to me that they've sold out. There's also repeated instances where they just-don't-get-it and spout personal opinions rather than facts. Sometimes they get it right, many times they don't- the only reason why they're still a going concern is that people haven't twigged onto these little facts about the site and they get it all right enough to be "useful" to most people.
Nowadays, I give more credence to AnandTech (Though Anand has missed on a few things himself of late...) and [H]ardOCP (Hi, Kyle! In his case he clearly states things that are merely opinion as such- I can deal with someone stating something is opinion, I can't deal with people making opinions as statements of fact...)
...aren't all they're cracked up to be. If you code to DX8 you're largely coding to features of a Radeon R200 or better. Sure, your cards "support" it, but the features of DX8 was that of the ones initially offered only by ATI products. DX9's NVidia's playground and so forth.
It's not really a standard save by Microsoft- everyone else uses OpenGL, even MS offers it. That, my friend is the definition of a standard.
...it failed because of excessively BAD business decisions by Loki's executives (Look making 50k copies of a title and 50k special tins and then delaying the damn thing because the tins were tied up in US Customs is a BAD business decision no matter how you slice it- and that's what Loki's execs decided to do on Q3:A for Linux and it's why in the hell it didn't sell well over anything else. People could buy the Windows version and "patch" it to be the Linux version with no real effort or tracking of those sorts of sales.
Direct3D (otherwise known as D3D) is simply Microsoft's answer to OpenGL- period, end of story.
What you're referring to is DirectX which is the framework comprising:
DirectPlay (networking), DirectInput (keyboard/mouse/joysticks), DirectSound (sound (duh...)), and DirectGraphics (2D rendering).
In each of these there's an analogous or similar platform under Linux and MacOS (which, amazingly enough, are the same things...).
And as far as the legalities go, your guess is as good as mine. First off, I Am Not A Lawyer... My take is that they're commiting the same crimes that any other AdWare/SpyWare/Virii/Worm writer is guilty of and therefore has unclean hands with regards to ANY act of enforcement of the IP rights of the labels that use this bunch.
As for avoiding this- there's two answers...
1) Don't listen to their stuff in the FIRST place.
2) If you can't keep from doing that and insist on sharing the stuff, use MP3 or Ogg Vorbis, not WMA. I don't care how much "better" it sounds, like all things Microsoft, there's some nasty catch waiting for you in the end.
Considering that only Dell and HP largely use those unified chipsets with everything integrated, and largely only on their low-end machines, I don't consider the availability of an all-in-one solution as big a deal as you seem to make it. 'sides, VIA offers the very thing you talk about- even makes a good office machine for most setups.
What you mention isn't relevent- really, it isn't.