Yeah, that was my other thought... I haven't seen many lamp posts on golf courses.
Though after reading it again the best part about his post is the only logical analogy one could actually interpret (after fixing typos) IS in fact that Javascript = golf and hacked = lightning, and that both are "bad ideas".
Other bad ideas in the same vein: driving. flying. cycling. hell, walking. cooking. eating. In general, living - there is a fairly good chance by living something will eventually get you...
Actually, there is some evidence that your personality is shaped by your interaction to external stimuli.
*Shaped* by a *longer term* process, sure, but your "personality" isn't by definition (and this definition is purely a construct of the field of psychology anyway, there is no inherent physical/biological structure that is a "personality" of course) changed just because you are cranky since haven't eaten in a few hours.
All I was saying is the OP has his definitions confused. Personality is (roughly defined as) the semi-predictable *pattern* of how one responds to these situations, not individual responses themselves.
I know my "personality" changes a bit when I'm hungry, tired, in physical pain, aroused
No, your "personality" doesn't change in response to these stimuli - the definition of personality IS an individual's response patterns to these. You are thinking of "mood".
Maybe an even simpler definition would be just to look at the term "transplant" - ie. whichever part is literally being moved to a new location during the procedure (assuming as you say in most cases the smaller part is "transplanted" since the surgical team would rather move a 10lb head than a ~150lb body).
Wow, seriously? A pump that has an average lifespan of 80+ years, is able to adapt over time to varying long term loads and almost immediately to short term loads 2-3x the average, contains its own distributed timing mechanism and in many cases is capable of self healing. Yeah, that's a terrible piece of work, it is...
I'm pretty sure health gains received from burning all of the unhealthy surplus calories the majority of sedentary people consume and drastically improving their cardiovascular health could practically offset the entire expenditure on gasoline. (factoid: in the US in 2011 $500B was spent on gasoline, and $3T on healthcare).
That's a pointless question, since there will always be a bootstrap cost. But it just takes an initial investment in current resources to bootstrap the use of the next to power itself.
Or for a Slashdot analogy - the first C compiler was written in assembly, but after that you could just use it to compile itself, and compiler development got a LOT more efficient.
I'm still trying to figure out what it would look like to be struck by lighting while playing golf... maybe a lamp post could fall on him? Or someone threw a flashlight out of an airplane?
Well, if you want to solve the problem with technology, I can think of solutions that would be a lot more fun! I'd go for an usher with night vision goggles and a switchboard seating chart in an overhead booth allowing him to apply a mild shock to the seat of anyone he sees using a cell phone.
Don't disagree with some of your complaints, but they are nothing new, and the same complaints people have had for decades. And CLEARLY they do not in fact significantly dissuade people from going to the theater, as 2012 was the biggest box office gross in history, and 2013 is on par to match or exceed it. Yes, SHITLOADS of people still "go to the movies", to the tune of almost $11B in ticket revenue last year...
Seriously! And really, even if you let your kid/dog run across my lawn on their leash on a nightly walk, I can live with that. But when you let that kid/dog shit on said lawn and don't pick it up don't be offended when said shit is sitting on your front step the next morning. And don't try to deny it afterwards, HD night vision cameras are cheap and plentiful these days. All hypothetical, of course...
Umm, "rudeness" by definition is "practicing a different set of values."
That's a bit of a cop out. There are plenty of examples of "rudeness" that are pretty much universally acknowledged (in which case you could probably just call them "selfishness" or "self-absorbtion"). But even if not universal, the VAST majority of the time the "rude" person was not some recent transplant to a social situation and clearly knew the local "values", they just didn't care...
What would be better is the *reverse* - a soundproof glass enclosed room at a premium price where people can smoke, talk, and be on their cell phones all they want while the rest of the theater gets to watch a movie in peace.
Or maybe the mainstream theaters could just just get some balls and do what Alamo Drafthouse did...
And you're not just going to pop out at lunch to hit up that new trendy lunch kiosk or the funky clothing store.
Which is something about 1% of the engineers I have met have any interest in doing at lunch on a workday. Did you RTFA? *Tech Reign*...
Or after work catch a play in a small off-off-Broadway type show that you are intrigued by, that perhaps your coworker is in.
Saw my coworker in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum a few years ago at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts, actually. I've also gone to a few local premieres of PDI/Dreamworks and Pixar movies via friends who worked on them. And though I live a bit outside of SF now I have been to a bunch of plays and concerts there, of course. Ever hear of the Fillmore?
Nor pop out for your own audition, or to record a voiceover, or to meet your girlfriend/boyfriend (or both!) the dancer at the studio.
And something about 0.01% of the engineers I have met have any interesting in doing...
Or join a group run training for a marathon.
Now that's just silly, group runs are everywhere around here.
I've worked in office parks that were technology hubs in the overall New York Metro but in New Jersey, in the Greater Boston Metro on the Route 128 Corridor, but half-hour or more away, in some cases in another state (eg the failed/killed DEC's real-estate in NH taken over by BigGreenPyramidFinancialCo). In North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, but thus not in Raleigh nor Durham city centers or urban village areas themselves
Ah, I see, you are one of the NYC snobs, where "anything more than 10 miles from Manhattan is the boonies" and can't imagine that anyone could possibly enjoy nature more than wall-to-wall buildings, constant noise pollution, and a dull glow in the sky every night.
Well, I don't see the Bay Area on that list, so I'm not sure why you are talking like you really know what life is like here. I have lived all over the Bay Area, from the city, to the "suburbs", to the hills with a 50-mile view from my back porch. For a few years I even lived in the northern Santa Cruz foothills and commuted 20 miles (which on 280 is about 20 minutes - probably less than many commutes on public transit in NY) into SF.
MANY people (me included) honestly don't want to live in the middle of a city, and it's absurd to pretend many of the "multii-talented multi-intelligenced people" can't think the same way. If you want to be in or around a world-class city, San Francisco is SO much more accessible than New York. No one here thinks "oh my god the city is 20 miles away I can't imagine going that far!" Plus you are 3 hours from world class skiing in Tahoe, 3 hours from Yosemite, an hour from Napa and Sonoma, 1/2 an hour from world class surfing, 1/2 hour from hiking though old growth Redwood/Giant Sequoia forests, probably the some of the best roads for cycling Skyline through the Santa Cruz Mountains, not to mention Monterrey, Big Sur, etc. And, sure, you need a car to get to most those, but who cares? That's kind of the point - to get OUT. I also love to drive cars, and there are some amazing twisty roads in the mountains as well as 2 world-class race tracks (Sears Point and Laguna Seca) within 2 hours where I can track my C2S.
I suppose Californians will never really understand New Yorkers and vice versa. Different lifestyles, but both can be equally valid and fulfilling, and there are PLENTY of people wanting one of the other to keep both regions thriving, as long (in both areas) people can continue to afford living there. I'm not knocking the NY or the city lifestyle, I know lots of people who love it, but I know many more who don't. And many of those who do have still decided to move out once they started raising a family - despite what the media wants you to think, for every 20 year old college dropout starting a company there are dozens of experienced senior engineers (who have done the urban lifestyle and are ready for something else) doing the same (or actually making that 20 year old's idea work).
Yes, it is incredibly boring, AND it is ridiculously expensive.
Expensive? Sometimes. Boring? Only if you are *complete* shut-in, in which case why are you complaining anyway!?
In the past month I have gone to the beach in Santa Cruz (quirky fun) and Half Moon Bay (awesome - heard of Mavericks? - and relatively remote - dog loved it), hiked Big Basin (prehistoric redwood forest, better than Muir Woods IMO) and Skyline Ridge (hard to describe the views), eaten in some awesome Indian and Thai restaurants as well as great dim sum and sushi, and made dinner almost entirely from vegetables in my backyard (tomatoes, peppers, artichokes, green onions, and arugula in a salad and oranges, strawberries, plums, and olallieberries for dessert/snacks).
Next month I'm planning on going up to Lake Tahoe (only a 3 hour drive in the summer - a bit more in the winter but also world class skiing) - but you could do Yosemite in the same drive time if you wanted. Have some friends coming in September, will probably go on a wine tour in Napa then.
And you know what? Most of those things didn't even cost much money (having a backyard, maybe, but you can get the same stuff year round at all of the local farmers' markets).
The "Silicon Valley Tech Reign" is not going to end any time soon. And why? Because in fact it IS fun to live in Silicon Valley. I moved out here from the midwest 20 years ago and have no interest in moving back - same can be said of every coworker of mine (I think maybe 1 of 20+ of them are from the Bay Area originally). It's the fucking Mediterranean climate with 6 figure starting engineering salaries. Yeah, I have to admit those not in the industry will have a harder time with the housing expenses - and that is a valid issue that needs to be addressed - but that's irrelevant to the "tech reign"...
Well, the whole thing is complicated by the fact that the HTML5 video tag is fairly basic, and to do decent streaming also requires some implementation that supports adaptive bitrate streaming. Apple does HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), MS solutions use MSS (Microsoft Smooth Streaming), but hopefully things start standardizing on MPEG-DASH. Currently many solutions implement it in Flash, possibly using StrobeMedia/OSMF. In the end there needs to be a decent implementation of adaptive streaming, which *could* be built in to the browser (but currently isn't except for Safari) or through a plugin (IE11 does this via WMF, which supports MSS "in the box" and others via 3rd party components).
And THAT just covers getting the bits to you. The other major parts (which make up "DRM") are key exchange (securely getting a key that can decrypt the stream) and decryption (using that key securely to get the unencrypted bits to the display in a way they can't be intercepted). Those parts would be handled by either the DRM component or the OS/HW modules the plugin uses.
AFAIK the Flash plugin leaves the HTTP download (or however the byte are delivered) up to the Flash Actionscript code and/or browser HTTP client, but does the key exchange and stream decryption in the plugin itself.
No, see, that's the whole POINT of the 1st Amendment - you ARE supposed to be able to say dumb statements like that, and it should only be able to be considered making a "terrorist threat" if there is even the most remote shred of evidence or proof it could have been serious. Given the police didn't even QUESTION the kid until a month after they imprisoned him it's pretty clear they didn't care about said proof.
Perhaps?? It was't even a *sentence*. He hasn't even had a trial yet. According to the article the police didn't even question him for a MONTH after they arrested and imprisoned him, and now over 4 months later he's still sitting in jail for a silly comment on a Facebook page. This is not only "overreaction", it's practically Guantanamo, Texas.
What if someone on slashdot cut and pasted the quote into a post but forgot to use quotation marks? There is no reason to think the kid was any more serious about carrying out the act than that poster would have been, and just as much "proof". Should the then be imprisoned for 4 months without a trial?
Wha? My comment was a simple answer to your simple question:
Q: "Please tell me how Firefox will ship a patent laden and proprietary DRM plugins?" A: "Why does it need to ship with them? Firefox doesn't ship with Flash, but it can be installed as a plugin."
You seem to want to get into a philosophical argument about the W3C and EME, while I was just stating a fact that answered your question. I'm sure there are plenty of other threads on this post with people who would love to debate it, though:)
I agree the prices are too high, and I would love to see some 'a la carte system for broadcast channels (or better live streaming for things like sports broadcasts, which is one of the big things keeping cable/sat alive). For most TV shows on-demand is a better model for the consumer. Unfortunately due to the costs of production most *new* shows will never show up next day on cheap services like Netflix - they want to make their broadcast, DVD/BD, etc sales before going out on the commodity streaming services.
But regardless of those points, the argument that "if the cost was low enough" doesn't really fly as a justification for whether someone should pirate content or not. You can hate the companies that produce or provide entertainment for charging more than you'd like to consume it, but in the end it's *luxury entertainment*, not basic living essentials, so moral arguments about unfair pricing really don't make sense.
But that's completely irrelevant to your point, since, like with the Flash plugin, Firefox would not be shipping any proprietary code.
No one said it was "better" than Flash or not proprietary in itself, just that it would not need to ship with Firefox. You asked a question, and were given the correct answer...
Well, first, Firefox would only implement the framework/interface for ECE, not the DRM itself. And the DRM implementation for Firefox likely wouldn't get approved unless it used some sort of hardware based DRM/decryption (like exists in Intel Sandybridge, for example) - especially for HD content (the studios have somewhat relaxed their security requirements for SD by now...)
Well, I don't have as much issue with FairPlay DRM only working on Apple devices (it's their software, if they don't want to license it that's their right, as horrible as it is for consumers). My issue with Apple is that they make it a pain to use any *other* DRM on their devices.
More specifically:
1) the only way for app developers to use DRM on an iOS device is write an app (not stream via Safari from a website, as it's not "secure" enough for studios). 2) the only way to (profitably) sell content on an iOS device is via a web site (selling in an app would incur a 30% share, which automatically makes it impossible to compete with iTunes.
So that leaves competing services (Amazon for books and movies, Vudu, Cinemanow and others for movies, etc) with a model where they have to sell content on a web page and play it back in an app, providing a suboptimal experience for the user (which is just fine with Apple, of course).
I don't really want to get into a discussion of the ethics of DRM, but on a purely functional level there are definitely examples of DRM doing what it was intended to do - prevent casual use of a paid service without paying for it.
A big one would be cable and satellite broadcast. Do you really think if they broadcast all of their premium channels unencrypted and open to everyone, most people would just keep paying on the honor system?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that was my other thought... I haven't seen many lamp posts on golf courses.
Though after reading it again the best part about his post is the only logical analogy one could actually interpret (after fixing typos) IS in fact that Javascript = golf and hacked = lightning, and that both are "bad ideas".
Other bad ideas in the same vein: driving. flying. cycling. hell, walking. cooking. eating. In general, living - there is a fairly good chance by living something will eventually get you...
Actually, there is some evidence that your personality is shaped by your interaction to external stimuli.
*Shaped* by a *longer term* process, sure, but your "personality" isn't by definition (and this definition is purely a construct of the field of psychology anyway, there is no inherent physical/biological structure that is a "personality" of course) changed just because you are cranky since haven't eaten in a few hours.
All I was saying is the OP has his definitions confused. Personality is (roughly defined as) the semi-predictable *pattern* of how one responds to these situations, not individual responses themselves.
I know my "personality" changes a bit when I'm hungry, tired, in physical pain, aroused
No, your "personality" doesn't change in response to these stimuli - the definition of personality IS an individual's response patterns to these. You are thinking of "mood".
Maybe an even simpler definition would be just to look at the term "transplant" - ie. whichever part is literally being moved to a new location during the procedure (assuming as you say in most cases the smaller part is "transplanted" since the surgical team would rather move a 10lb head than a ~150lb body).
Wow, seriously? A pump that has an average lifespan of 80+ years, is able to adapt over time to varying long term loads and almost immediately to short term loads 2-3x the average, contains its own distributed timing mechanism and in many cases is capable of self healing. Yeah, that's a terrible piece of work, it is...
I'm pretty sure health gains received from burning all of the unhealthy surplus calories the majority of sedentary people consume and drastically improving their cardiovascular health could practically offset the entire expenditure on gasoline. (factoid: in the US in 2011 $500B was spent on gasoline, and $3T on healthcare).
That's a pointless question, since there will always be a bootstrap cost. But it just takes an initial investment in current resources to bootstrap the use of the next to power itself.
Or for a Slashdot analogy - the first C compiler was written in assembly, but after that you could just use it to compile itself, and compiler development got a LOT more efficient.
I'm still trying to figure out what it would look like to be struck by lighting while playing golf... maybe a lamp post could fall on him? Or someone threw a flashlight out of an airplane?
Well, if you want to solve the problem with technology, I can think of solutions that would be a lot more fun! I'd go for an usher with night vision goggles and a switchboard seating chart in an overhead booth allowing him to apply a mild shock to the seat of anyone he sees using a cell phone.
Don't disagree with some of your complaints, but they are nothing new, and the same complaints people have had for decades. And CLEARLY they do not in fact significantly dissuade people from going to the theater, as 2012 was the biggest box office gross in history, and 2013 is on par to match or exceed it. Yes, SHITLOADS of people still "go to the movies", to the tune of almost $11B in ticket revenue last year...
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/
Seriously! And really, even if you let your kid/dog run across my lawn on their leash on a nightly walk, I can live with that. But when you let that kid/dog shit on said lawn and don't pick it up don't be offended when said shit is sitting on your front step the next morning. And don't try to deny it afterwards, HD night vision cameras are cheap and plentiful these days. All hypothetical, of course...
Umm, "rudeness" by definition is "practicing a different set of values."
That's a bit of a cop out. There are plenty of examples of "rudeness" that are pretty much universally acknowledged (in which case you could probably just call them "selfishness" or "self-absorbtion"). But even if not universal, the VAST majority of the time the "rude" person was not some recent transplant to a social situation and clearly knew the local "values", they just didn't care...
What would be better is the *reverse* - a soundproof glass enclosed room at a premium price where people can smoke, talk, and be on their cell phones all they want while the rest of the theater gets to watch a movie in peace.
Or maybe the mainstream theaters could just just get some balls and do what Alamo Drafthouse did...
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/texas-movie-theater-makes-example-psa-texting-audience-170925090.html
And you're not just going to pop out at lunch to hit up that new trendy lunch kiosk or the funky clothing store.
Which is something about 1% of the engineers I have met have any interest in doing at lunch on a workday. Did you RTFA? *Tech Reign*...
Or after work catch a play in a small off-off-Broadway type show that you are intrigued by, that perhaps your coworker is in.
Saw my coworker in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum a few years ago at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts, actually. I've also gone to a few local premieres of PDI/Dreamworks and Pixar movies via friends who worked on them. And though I live a bit outside of SF now I have been to a bunch of plays and concerts there, of course. Ever hear of the Fillmore?
Nor pop out for your own audition, or to record a voiceover, or to meet your girlfriend/boyfriend (or both!) the dancer at the studio.
And something about 0.01% of the engineers I have met have any interesting in doing...
Or join a group run training for a marathon.
Now that's just silly, group runs are everywhere around here.
I've worked in office parks that were technology hubs in the overall New York Metro but in New Jersey, in the Greater Boston Metro on the Route 128 Corridor, but half-hour or more away, in some cases in another state (eg the failed/killed DEC's real-estate in NH taken over by BigGreenPyramidFinancialCo). In North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, but thus not in Raleigh nor Durham city centers or urban village areas themselves
Ah, I see, you are one of the NYC snobs, where "anything more than 10 miles from Manhattan is the boonies" and can't imagine that anyone could possibly enjoy nature more than wall-to-wall buildings, constant noise pollution, and a dull glow in the sky every night.
Well, I don't see the Bay Area on that list, so I'm not sure why you are talking like you really know what life is like here. I have lived all over the Bay Area, from the city, to the "suburbs", to the hills with a 50-mile view from my back porch. For a few years I even lived in the northern Santa Cruz foothills and commuted 20 miles (which on 280 is about 20 minutes - probably less than many commutes on public transit in NY) into SF.
MANY people (me included) honestly don't want to live in the middle of a city, and it's absurd to pretend many of the "multii-talented multi-intelligenced people" can't think the same way. If you want to be in or around a world-class city, San Francisco is SO much more accessible than New York. No one here thinks "oh my god the city is 20 miles away I can't imagine going that far!" Plus you are 3 hours from world class skiing in Tahoe, 3 hours from Yosemite, an hour from Napa and Sonoma, 1/2 an hour from world class surfing, 1/2 hour from hiking though old growth Redwood/Giant Sequoia forests, probably the some of the best roads for cycling Skyline through the Santa Cruz Mountains, not to mention Monterrey, Big Sur, etc. And, sure, you need a car to get to most those, but who cares? That's kind of the point - to get OUT. I also love to drive cars, and there are some amazing twisty roads in the mountains as well as 2 world-class race tracks (Sears Point and Laguna Seca) within 2 hours where I can track my C2S.
I suppose Californians will never really understand New Yorkers and vice versa. Different lifestyles, but both can be equally valid and fulfilling, and there are PLENTY of people wanting one of the other to keep both regions thriving, as long (in both areas) people can continue to afford living there. I'm not knocking the NY or the city lifestyle, I know lots of people who love it, but I know many more who don't. And many of those who do have still decided to move out once they started raising a family - despite what the media wants you to think, for every 20 year old college dropout starting a company there are dozens of experienced senior engineers (who have done the urban lifestyle and are ready for something else) doing the same (or actually making that 20 year old's idea work).
Yes, it is incredibly boring, AND it is ridiculously expensive.
Expensive? Sometimes. Boring? Only if you are *complete* shut-in, in which case why are you complaining anyway!?
In the past month I have gone to the beach in Santa Cruz (quirky fun) and Half Moon Bay (awesome - heard of Mavericks? - and relatively remote - dog loved it), hiked Big Basin (prehistoric redwood forest, better than Muir Woods IMO) and Skyline Ridge (hard to describe the views), eaten in some awesome Indian and Thai restaurants as well as great dim sum and sushi, and made dinner almost entirely from vegetables in my backyard (tomatoes, peppers, artichokes, green onions, and arugula in a salad and oranges, strawberries, plums, and olallieberries for dessert/snacks).
Next month I'm planning on going up to Lake Tahoe (only a 3 hour drive in the summer - a bit more in the winter but also world class skiing) - but you could do Yosemite in the same drive time if you wanted. Have some friends coming in September, will probably go on a wine tour in Napa then.
And you know what? Most of those things didn't even cost much money (having a backyard, maybe, but you can get the same stuff year round at all of the local farmers' markets).
The "Silicon Valley Tech Reign" is not going to end any time soon. And why? Because in fact it IS fun to live in Silicon Valley. I moved out here from the midwest 20 years ago and have no interest in moving back - same can be said of every coworker of mine (I think maybe 1 of 20+ of them are from the Bay Area originally). It's the fucking Mediterranean climate with 6 figure starting engineering salaries. Yeah, I have to admit those not in the industry will have a harder time with the housing expenses - and that is a valid issue that needs to be addressed - but that's irrelevant to the "tech reign"...
Well, the whole thing is complicated by the fact that the HTML5 video tag is fairly basic, and to do decent streaming also requires some implementation that supports adaptive bitrate streaming. Apple does HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), MS solutions use MSS (Microsoft Smooth Streaming), but hopefully things start standardizing on MPEG-DASH. Currently many solutions implement it in Flash, possibly using StrobeMedia/OSMF. In the end there needs to be a decent implementation of adaptive streaming, which *could* be built in to the browser (but currently isn't except for Safari) or through a plugin (IE11 does this via WMF, which supports MSS "in the box" and others via 3rd party components).
And THAT just covers getting the bits to you. The other major parts (which make up "DRM") are key exchange (securely getting a key that can decrypt the stream) and decryption (using that key securely to get the unencrypted bits to the display in a way they can't be intercepted). Those parts would be handled by either the DRM component or the OS/HW modules the plugin uses.
AFAIK the Flash plugin leaves the HTTP download (or however the byte are delivered) up to the Flash Actionscript code and/or browser HTTP client, but does the key exchange and stream decryption in the plugin itself.
Gonna be hard to beat this one...
No, see, that's the whole POINT of the 1st Amendment - you ARE supposed to be able to say dumb statements like that, and it should only be able to be considered making a "terrorist threat" if there is even the most remote shred of evidence or proof it could have been serious. Given the police didn't even QUESTION the kid until a month after they imprisoned him it's pretty clear they didn't care about said proof.
Was the jail sentence an overreaction? Perhaps.
Perhaps?? It was't even a *sentence*. He hasn't even had a trial yet. According to the article the police didn't even question him for a MONTH after they arrested and imprisoned him, and now over 4 months later he's still sitting in jail for a silly comment on a Facebook page. This is not only "overreaction", it's practically Guantanamo, Texas.
What if someone on slashdot cut and pasted the quote into a post but forgot to use quotation marks? There is no reason to think the kid was any more serious about carrying out the act than that poster would have been, and just as much "proof". Should the then be imprisoned for 4 months without a trial?
Wha? My comment was a simple answer to your simple question:
Q: "Please tell me how Firefox will ship a patent laden and proprietary DRM plugins?"
A: "Why does it need to ship with them? Firefox doesn't ship with Flash, but it can be installed as a plugin."
You seem to want to get into a philosophical argument about the W3C and EME, while I was just stating a fact that answered your question. I'm sure there are plenty of other threads on this post with people who would love to debate it, though :)
I agree the prices are too high, and I would love to see some 'a la carte system for broadcast channels (or better live streaming for things like sports broadcasts, which is one of the big things keeping cable/sat alive). For most TV shows on-demand is a better model for the consumer. Unfortunately due to the costs of production most *new* shows will never show up next day on cheap services like Netflix - they want to make their broadcast, DVD/BD, etc sales before going out on the commodity streaming services.
But regardless of those points, the argument that "if the cost was low enough" doesn't really fly as a justification for whether someone should pirate content or not. You can hate the companies that produce or provide entertainment for charging more than you'd like to consume it, but in the end it's *luxury entertainment*, not basic living essentials, so moral arguments about unfair pricing really don't make sense.
But that's completely irrelevant to your point, since, like with the Flash plugin, Firefox would not be shipping any proprietary code.
No one said it was "better" than Flash or not proprietary in itself, just that it would not need to ship with Firefox. You asked a question, and were given the correct answer...
Well, first, Firefox would only implement the framework/interface for ECE, not the DRM itself. And the DRM implementation for Firefox likely wouldn't get approved unless it used some sort of hardware based DRM/decryption (like exists in Intel Sandybridge, for example) - especially for HD content (the studios have somewhat relaxed their security requirements for SD by now...)
Well, I don't have as much issue with FairPlay DRM only working on Apple devices (it's their software, if they don't want to license it that's their right, as horrible as it is for consumers). My issue with Apple is that they make it a pain to use any *other* DRM on their devices.
More specifically:
1) the only way for app developers to use DRM on an iOS device is write an app (not stream via Safari from a website, as it's not "secure" enough for studios).
2) the only way to (profitably) sell content on an iOS device is via a web site (selling in an app would incur a 30% share, which automatically makes it impossible to compete with iTunes.
So that leaves competing services (Amazon for books and movies, Vudu, Cinemanow and others for movies, etc) with a model where they have to sell content on a web page and play it back in an app, providing a suboptimal experience for the user (which is just fine with Apple, of course).
I don't really want to get into a discussion of the ethics of DRM, but on a purely functional level there are definitely examples of DRM doing what it was intended to do - prevent casual use of a paid service without paying for it.
A big one would be cable and satellite broadcast. Do you really think if they broadcast all of their premium channels unencrypted and open to everyone, most people would just keep paying on the honor system?