"I think they would have finally gone far enough to see a serious consumer backlash."
If you consider that the difference between SD and HD isnt that obvious to the average ordinary viewing circumstances (see the earlier article on 1080p), and if they simply display upscaled SD instead of HD content if the key is revoked, I suspect that most consumers wouldnt even notice.
Of course, as most DVDrips arent even SD quality, I'm not exactly sure how they imagine degrading to SD is going to prevent any random copying anyway.
"DVD had stronger DRM then VHS. almost no one cared."
When DVD finally took off here I dont think you could find a player that actually wasnt region free. And as half the DVD's available were other regions, you'd certainly find every salesperson and every consumer review saying that you should make sure you get a region free player.
"People do not tend to try to copy their DVDs"
Until they get a media center of some kind. In which case physical media becomes a pita that you dont want to deal with.
HD media simply doesnt have any major compelling qualities over the current format. Heck, I dont even bother keeping DVD's in full quality on the mythserver; much as I'd want to I cant say I notice the difference between full quality DVD and a good 1200 kbit xvid encode with a moving picture on a 32" TV from six feet away, so why bother with a format that gives me little but a bunch of extra pixels I dont have the visual acuity to see anyway (unless I pause the picture and put my face to the screen, which isnt exactly how I usually watch TV).
Maybe it'll become interesting when they release those high definition cybernetic eye implants. Until then, the offerings on the table get a big and heartfelt meh.
"In one facility, I sent out 6to4 packets to the anycast address (192.88.99.1) and no packets came back."
That's quite painful. I havent seen that problem myself, altho I've noticed that my own 6to4 packets actually travel to a different ISP to reach the anycast address. Shouldnt the anycast address automatically route like any other address, IE, your ISP has to actually actively _block_ the route updates to prevent your packets from reaching a 6to4 gateway?
"And tunnels? To where?"
Sixxs or other v6 tunnel broker? There are quite a few around.
"But you still need support for this on the NAT box, right?"
Sortof, but not quite. You could probably forward all protocol 41 (6to4) packets to an internal machine (say, if you've got a linux server or something) running radvd and route all your v6 traffic through that. That would make it possible without support on the NAT box, but I wouldnt exactly call it elegant.
Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?
on
IPv6 Tested in Space
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"Neither of my ISPs (work or home) supports it"
You dont need their support. Use 6to4. Or a tunnel.
"NONE of my routers support it"
You dont need them to. Use 6to4.
"A lot of applications I run don't support it."
Some do tho. It's wonderful to be able to ssh and scp directly into the boxes you have behind a NAT gateway without having to resort to two-stage jumps.
"Dealing with it on apache would be a PITA, wouldn't it?"
No.
"who wants to deal with IPv6 when dotted quads are easier to memorize?"
There's this new development called DNS you know...
"Just wrench the class A"
Mmm, like that's going to happen...
Meanwhile I sit here on a bazillion addresses, merit of having one single v4 address. Get with the times, it's not like IPv6 is rocket science anymore.
"Thirty years experience in buying, stealing, licensing or otherwise acquiring"
And that's mostly the reason they're perceived as dead these days. Their legal issues didnt kill them, but it did end up setting some limits to how far they could go and not have to pay more than it was worth.
Before that they got away with stealing, threatening, coercing, 'cutting off air supplys', without anyone doing anything about it. About as scary as a violent criminal unhindered and ignored by the law (or who was the law) in your neighbourhood.
Now they're the convict out on parole with several governments watching and waiting on him to sneeze the wrong way to haul him back for another ten year stint.
"Until there is at least some precedent for it, that argument won't fly."
Best argument would probably come from the defrauded party, ie, the phone carrier or ISP. Their customer records certainly hold value and tricking their employees into inappropriately divulging sensitive information and violating privacy policies can certainly be considered harm.
Mmm, I'd disagree. Copyright violation is in essence breaking a government mandated monopoly and has nothing to do with 'theft'.
Pretexting on the other hand is just a fancier and slightly more specialized word for lying. Much like fraud.
While I agree that calling a spade a spade is usually a good thing, in this case the essence of the word is very similar (unlike in the monopoly/'theft' case). As the primary purpose of using 'pretexting' as a word is to justify lying or fraud without actually calling it such (due to the negative connotations inherent in those words), reverting its spelling to 'fraud' may actually be appropriate.
"I'm not sure how many pages you'd have to not print"
About three or four 500 page manuals or reference works (print or purchase them). Ten cents per page isnt uncommon for printing, and a monitor can be had around $150-$200.
A second monitor pays for itself fairly fast once you start figuring the cost benefits of going paperless.
"I don't know how anyone wrote software back in the days before dual high resolution screens."
There was no internet so all documentation was on dead trees, and all the mail as well.
If you need to demonstrate the point, set up a script to automatically print all your mail and simply print and/or request all documentation in book form.
Cheap land tends to have neither cheap connections nor easily accessible energy. There's a reason why it's cheap.
Really tho, I'll betcha the portable datacenter fad will last 'til the first datacenter theft ring starts up. I mean, sure, you can chain them down but considering the guys taking datacenters on would probably be the same kind of guys that take armoured transports on they'd just bring some big-ass construction equipment along and demolish any anchoring. They could get it and be out of there before anyone could stop them.
With a physical datacenter structure they would have a problem getting through the doors before armed police would be present. So you'd end up either putting your portable datacenters in a datacenter, or paying as much as the cost for the datacenter in extra security.
For military it makes sense as they've got the guards already and they have an interest in portability for portabilitys sake. For a corporation they'd probably be better off simply building a datacenter. Concrete slab buildings arent that expensive and most corporations simply arent going to be moving their datacenters around on a weekly or even yearly basis (in fact, it'd probably take several years to even plan a move.)
"...but the core of an OS is NOT the graphical fluff."
I seem to remember a certain company arguing that a web browser was an intrinsic part of the OS.
You and I may agree on what is and isnt a part of the OS, but face it, Microsoft has made their bed and basically said that the OS is whatever they ship.
That this might confuse consumers is squarely their own fault.
To skimp even more, one could take a look at linux based/capable NAS and/or DSL router devices (Linksys WRT54GL or NSLU2, for example). They're cheaper and probably use even less power than an Epia, and can manage many low processing always-on tasks.
"I find it very unlikely that there will *never* be a virtual currency traded..."
If the currency is unregulated; ie, no scarcity and unlimited printing, it's essentially a pyramid scheme. It wont be redeemed, and whoever is stuck with the assets in the end have the value of what they can sell the screenshot of their balance for...
If the currency is regulated, ie, central bank, regulated rates, fixed availability based on incoming and outgoing goods, funds and services, sure, but then it's a real actual currency, perhaps without a country, but nevertheless. Of course, that would entail everything from 'border' controls to trade negotiations, so I'm not sure how palatable that would really be.
In the end, a 'virtual' currency will never be traded on an actual real market (of course, whole countries have fallen for pyramid hoaxes before, so it might very well get temporarily traded on a bamboozled market until it collapses). A virtual currency might make it to 'real currency' status. But then it wouldnt be that much fun, would it... imagine answering outsourced IBM support calls to earn your income in WoW...
"a breeder reactor isn't something two mujahideen can slap together"
Oh, true, you need at least a teenager, an antique clock and a backyard toolshed.
Breeding aint that hard. Controlled, safe breeding is harder, but I suspect the chapter on nuclear safety may have fallen out of the brains of those with an inclination to try it.
Considering the US uses uranium for ammunition I suspect you might not end up with a net gain.
Yes, it's depleted, but it's prefectly servicable fuel in a breeder reactor. A potential which rather makes me wonder how smart it is to spread it around in enemy territory.
Through everything from sat-channels to mobile phones (there's a good 'killer app' for 3rd generation phone networks). Mobile data penetration is constantly rising, and mp3 players with FM broadcast capabilities are cheap (if you want to utilize the car stereo).
The lure of actually getting music you like, as opposed to music many people can stand (least common denominator) is huge once you start using such functions.
"I think it's the advertising that stymies people."
And the advertising is needed because of the other guys advertising. They pay payola so if you want to get on the radio, you pay payola. Monopoly protected markets end up that way; as there is noone else who can sell an equivalent cheaper product if you overspend on marketing, you end up with a market where a lot of the revenue is spent combating eachothers advertising efforts.
As the competition of the internet takes away the other guys advertising budget, and the flatter channels like social networking sites and personalized 'radio' channels take over, the relevance of the advertising effort decreases. You can still spend your revenue on advertising, but overspend and the only thing that will get you is less profit. The useful model for the work 'labels' do today changes into getting the band onto music services and social sites. A days work, and work for hire (a bit ironic, considering it wasnt that many years ago the labels wanted to make artists and composers part of it work for hire).
End result; a lot more of the total revenue of music sales goes to making music rather than marketing it. The revenue will be far more widely spread and over a longer piece of the long tail, we get a more varied and richer music culture and we all win.
I'll third that no. And add that the X kills Y discussion is inane. Phone with mp3 player kills mp3 player? Might as well say mp3 player with phone kills phones. (And really, I'm far more impressed with the capabilities of my mp3 player, which is actually good at what it's supposed to do, than I am with my craptacular phone which is barely useful for talking to people with and appears to be mostly intended as a billing instrument for shady ringtone deals, crappy toys and overcharged low quality multimedia services).
The _real_ killer 'device' would be an advancement in body area networking so I could have a central storage unit in my pocket, a display on my wrist and a variation of camera, phone and various other useful attachments (again, that are actually good at what they do) with me when I need them. Heck, with the right programming I might want to have multiple 'phone' devices that could switch data and voice traffic over whatever carrier was best/cheapest for the moment. Single-purpose devices that are good at what they do, rather than several devices that all replicate functionality like input, output and storage, costing more to manufacture and drawing more power and still end up more or less sucking at most of what they do.
"Any number of other commodities would lose all their value if suddenly they had no use to people anymore"
No, commodities would lose all their cost if they suddenly became non-scarce. Which is the whole point of the economy; to make things non-scarce.
Virtual property is inherently non-scarce. There are no natural limitations to its production, only an artificial construct. It's like monopoly money; you can pretend it has value, but as you (or Linden labs) can print up a bazillion if you want to, there is no actual scarcity (or heavily regulated scarcity as with a real currency).
I agree with the GP. There's a choice to be made here; either disallow monetary exchange for virtual property, or the actual content of virtual worlds needs to be regulated (as per usual currency exchange between countries). Allowing uncontrolled cross-border exchange to intermingle to any large extent with the real economy is tantamount to handing out minting rights to the companies running the virtual worlds; it will pollute the real world economy with game world economic effects, ranging from value crashes to inflation.
"For the vast majority of that fifteen thousand years"
Actually, the oldest instruments are around 40000 years old, contemporaries of cave art. And considering the ease with which one can make instruments out of commonly found materials, I'd find it astonishing if people didnt play around with making things like reed pipes or drums far earlier than that.
"Music for pleasure didn't become decently commonplace"
Betcha music for pleasure was decently commonplace for as long as people have been bored. Or consuming fermented beverages. In fact, I'll betcha it became decently commonplace the day after the first mother discovered singing would calm her baby.
As for the topics, it most likely was about the same things music has always been about. Whatever is on the mind of the performer or composer.
The prevalence of religious music in the western cultural heritage from the last several thousand years is easily ascribable to the church actually writing things down; I doubt they found lullabyes or rowdy drinking songs deserving of note. In fact, taking their usual method of operation into account, they probably did what they could to stamp out any non-religious music.
Samba seems like they'll be moving and even Sun has sounded positive. Most anyone who's made an informed decision to use the GPLv2 is likely to move as v3 is merely a continuation of the exact same policy, updated to handle new issues.
The linux kernel is an exception; not particularly surprising as Linus has never been particularly aligned with the FSF ideas (witness the former choice of a non-free versioning system...).
Novell is free to fork. But that'd basically mean they'd be maintaining on a one-way street; anything they update on v2 forks can be adopted by v3 projects, while they could use nothing of the v3 licensed code.
In a way Novell and MS has done the FSF a favour by pointing out this particular loophole before GPLv3 was released.
"but also convincing the mouth-breathing public and complacent doctors why their way is better."
Damn. I wish there was, like, an international network where everyone could get connected. And then on that network we could have, like, collaborative sites where people could rate various medicines for various symptoms, and where doctors could get real-time updates of reported findings.
Getting something like that would probably be as unlikely as getting an encyclopedia for free...
Except in the current situation he's screwed five times as much as he's paying for the 80% largely wasted resources going into the pharmaceuticals. Patents are not free, and altho they are more 'indirect', the cost is just as real.
"Also realize that since drugs are used internationally"
Which a) they are already today, b) take a wild guess why obesity, diabetes and similar diseases are high on the list of research on the multinationals; you pay for it, you get research aimed at your population, and c) if R&D funding came directly rather than indirectly, you could attach strings qualifying where the R&D should be done.
Oh, and ironically, I've heard pro-EU-Patent holders argue that the EU needs stronger protection for pharmaceuticals as it's lost its edge. An edge gained while the EU pharma industry was largely government run...
"At the end of the day, it's a problem of game theory."
No it isnt. It's a problem of economics; how do we maximize the use we gain from the resources we spend. Free market competetive economies have tended to be far more effective; introducing monopolies merely reduces the competetive pressure, decreases efficiency and shifts investment towards unrequired sectors like marketing and administrative waste.
There's a multitude of ways to set up systems that encourage investment in R&D. Granting monopolies happens to be among the worst. If you want to apply game theory, construct a system that will create favourable outcomes for all the desired current players in the system; with 80% margins to play with, it aint that hard.
If you know what you're looking for you can find the Dell N series.
Sometimes they are slightly cheaper than their Windows counterpart, other times if you look carefully you might see things like smaller disk by default, CD instead of DVD, then when you configure them you'll note they lack the same offers and savings that their exact same windows counterpart enjoy. In the end, when I've tried it, several times the machine without Windows ended up more expensive than the same one with. Which makes the exercise rather annoying (and raises a nagging suspicion that you're still paying for Windows and they're just not telling you about it...).
If they added 'FreeDOS', 'Linux', or 'No OS' to the 'Operating System' choice option the whole deal would be quite a lot more obvious and available. If that's what they're actually interested in.
Oh, yeah, and I have no idea wether it's just a webpage or if it's actually possible to get an N series machine delivered. If the journalists cant find a salesperson that knows about it, well...
Slashdot Mirror
"I think they would have finally gone far enough to see a serious consumer backlash."
If you consider that the difference between SD and HD isnt that obvious to the average ordinary viewing circumstances (see the earlier article on 1080p), and if they simply display upscaled SD instead of HD content if the key is revoked, I suspect that most consumers wouldnt even notice.
Of course, as most DVDrips arent even SD quality, I'm not exactly sure how they imagine degrading to SD is going to prevent any random copying anyway.
"DVD had stronger DRM then VHS. almost no one cared."
When DVD finally took off here I dont think you could find a player that actually wasnt region free. And as half the DVD's available were other regions, you'd certainly find every salesperson and every consumer review saying that you should make sure you get a region free player.
"People do not tend to try to copy their DVDs"
Until they get a media center of some kind. In which case physical media becomes a pita that you dont want to deal with.
HD media simply doesnt have any major compelling qualities over the current format. Heck, I dont even bother keeping DVD's in full quality on the mythserver; much as I'd want to I cant say I notice the difference between full quality DVD and a good 1200 kbit xvid encode with a moving picture on a 32" TV from six feet away, so why bother with a format that gives me little but a bunch of extra pixels I dont have the visual acuity to see anyway (unless I pause the picture and put my face to the screen, which isnt exactly how I usually watch TV).
Maybe it'll become interesting when they release those high definition cybernetic eye implants. Until then, the offerings on the table get a big and heartfelt meh.
"In one facility, I sent out 6to4 packets to the anycast address (192.88.99.1) and no packets came back."
That's quite painful. I havent seen that problem myself, altho I've noticed that my own 6to4 packets actually travel to a different ISP to reach the anycast address. Shouldnt the anycast address automatically route like any other address, IE, your ISP has to actually actively _block_ the route updates to prevent your packets from reaching a 6to4 gateway?
"And tunnels? To where?"
Sixxs or other v6 tunnel broker? There are quite a few around.
"But you still need support for this on the NAT box, right?"
Sortof, but not quite. You could probably forward all protocol 41 (6to4) packets to an internal machine (say, if you've got a linux server or something) running radvd and route all your v6 traffic through that. That would make it possible without support on the NAT box, but I wouldnt exactly call it elegant.
"Neither of my ISPs (work or home) supports it"
You dont need their support. Use 6to4. Or a tunnel.
"NONE of my routers support it"
You dont need them to. Use 6to4.
"A lot of applications I run don't support it."
Some do tho. It's wonderful to be able to ssh and scp directly into the boxes you have behind a NAT gateway without having to resort to two-stage jumps.
"Dealing with it on apache would be a PITA, wouldn't it?"
No.
"who wants to deal with IPv6 when dotted quads are easier to memorize?"
There's this new development called DNS you know...
"Just wrench the class A"
Mmm, like that's going to happen...
Meanwhile I sit here on a bazillion addresses, merit of having one single v4 address. Get with the times, it's not like IPv6 is rocket science anymore.
"Thirty years experience in buying, stealing, licensing or otherwise acquiring"
And that's mostly the reason they're perceived as dead these days. Their legal issues didnt kill them, but it did end up setting some limits to how far they could go and not have to pay more than it was worth.
Before that they got away with stealing, threatening, coercing, 'cutting off air supplys', without anyone doing anything about it. About as scary as a violent criminal unhindered and ignored by the law (or who was the law) in your neighbourhood.
Now they're the convict out on parole with several governments watching and waiting on him to sneeze the wrong way to haul him back for another ten year stint.
"Until there is at least some precedent for it, that argument won't fly."
Best argument would probably come from the defrauded party, ie, the phone carrier or ISP. Their customer records certainly hold value and tricking their employees into inappropriately divulging sensitive information and violating privacy policies can certainly be considered harm.
Mmm, I'd disagree. Copyright violation is in essence breaking a government mandated monopoly and has nothing to do with 'theft'.
Pretexting on the other hand is just a fancier and slightly more specialized word for lying. Much like fraud.
While I agree that calling a spade a spade is usually a good thing, in this case the essence of the word is very similar (unlike in the monopoly/'theft' case). As the primary purpose of using 'pretexting' as a word is to justify lying or fraud without actually calling it such (due to the negative connotations inherent in those words), reverting its spelling to 'fraud' may actually be appropriate.
"I'm not sure how many pages you'd have to not print"
About three or four 500 page manuals or reference works (print or purchase them). Ten cents per page isnt uncommon for printing, and a monitor can be had around $150-$200.
A second monitor pays for itself fairly fast once you start figuring the cost benefits of going paperless.
"I don't know how anyone wrote software back in the days before dual high resolution screens."
There was no internet so all documentation was on dead trees, and all the mail as well.
If you need to demonstrate the point, set up a script to automatically print all your mail and simply print and/or request all documentation in book form.
Cheap land tends to have neither cheap connections nor easily accessible energy. There's a reason why it's cheap.
Really tho, I'll betcha the portable datacenter fad will last 'til the first datacenter theft ring starts up. I mean, sure, you can chain them down but considering the guys taking datacenters on would probably be the same kind of guys that take armoured transports on they'd just bring some big-ass construction equipment along and demolish any anchoring. They could get it and be out of there before anyone could stop them.
With a physical datacenter structure they would have a problem getting through the doors before armed police would be present. So you'd end up either putting your portable datacenters in a datacenter, or paying as much as the cost for the datacenter in extra security.
For military it makes sense as they've got the guards already and they have an interest in portability for portabilitys sake. For a corporation they'd probably be better off simply building a datacenter. Concrete slab buildings arent that expensive and most corporations simply arent going to be moving their datacenters around on a weekly or even yearly basis (in fact, it'd probably take several years to even plan a move.)
"...but the core of an OS is NOT the graphical fluff."
I seem to remember a certain company arguing that a web browser was an intrinsic part of the OS.
You and I may agree on what is and isnt a part of the OS, but face it, Microsoft has made their bed and basically said that the OS is whatever they ship.
That this might confuse consumers is squarely their own fault.
"One small Via Epia 700mhz"
To skimp even more, one could take a look at linux based/capable NAS and/or DSL router devices (Linksys WRT54GL or NSLU2, for example). They're cheaper and probably use even less power than an Epia, and can manage many low processing always-on tasks.
"I find it very unlikely that there will *never* be a virtual currency traded..."
If the currency is unregulated; ie, no scarcity and unlimited printing, it's essentially a pyramid scheme. It wont be redeemed, and whoever is stuck with the assets in the end have the value of what they can sell the screenshot of their balance for...
If the currency is regulated, ie, central bank, regulated rates, fixed availability based on incoming and outgoing goods, funds and services, sure, but then it's a real actual currency, perhaps without a country, but nevertheless. Of course, that would entail everything from 'border' controls to trade negotiations, so I'm not sure how palatable that would really be.
In the end, a 'virtual' currency will never be traded on an actual real market (of course, whole countries have fallen for pyramid hoaxes before, so it might very well get temporarily traded on a bamboozled market until it collapses). A virtual currency might make it to 'real currency' status. But then it wouldnt be that much fun, would it... imagine answering outsourced IBM support calls to earn your income in WoW...
"a breeder reactor isn't something two mujahideen can slap together"
Oh, true, you need at least a teenager, an antique clock and a backyard toolshed.
Breeding aint that hard. Controlled, safe breeding is harder, but I suspect the chapter on nuclear safety may have fallen out of the brains of those with an inclination to try it.
Considering the US uses uranium for ammunition I suspect you might not end up with a net gain.
Yes, it's depleted, but it's prefectly servicable fuel in a breeder reactor. A potential which rather makes me wonder how smart it is to spread it around in enemy territory.
Through everything from sat-channels to mobile phones (there's a good 'killer app' for 3rd generation phone networks). Mobile data penetration is constantly rising, and mp3 players with FM broadcast capabilities are cheap (if you want to utilize the car stereo).
The lure of actually getting music you like, as opposed to music many people can stand (least common denominator) is huge once you start using such functions.
"I think it's the advertising that stymies people."
And the advertising is needed because of the other guys advertising. They pay payola so if you want to get on the radio, you pay payola. Monopoly protected markets end up that way; as there is noone else who can sell an equivalent cheaper product if you overspend on marketing, you end up with a market where a lot of the revenue is spent combating eachothers advertising efforts.
As the competition of the internet takes away the other guys advertising budget, and the flatter channels like social networking sites and personalized 'radio' channels take over, the relevance of the advertising effort decreases. You can still spend your revenue on advertising, but overspend and the only thing that will get you is less profit. The useful model for the work 'labels' do today changes into getting the band onto music services and social sites. A days work, and work for hire (a bit ironic, considering it wasnt that many years ago the labels wanted to make artists and composers part of it work for hire).
End result; a lot more of the total revenue of music sales goes to making music rather than marketing it. The revenue will be far more widely spread and over a longer piece of the long tail, we get a more varied and richer music culture and we all win.
Well, except the labels.
I'll third that no. And add that the X kills Y discussion is inane. Phone with mp3 player kills mp3 player? Might as well say mp3 player with phone kills phones. (And really, I'm far more impressed with the capabilities of my mp3 player, which is actually good at what it's supposed to do, than I am with my craptacular phone which is barely useful for talking to people with and appears to be mostly intended as a billing instrument for shady ringtone deals, crappy toys and overcharged low quality multimedia services).
The _real_ killer 'device' would be an advancement in body area networking so I could have a central storage unit in my pocket, a display on my wrist and a variation of camera, phone and various other useful attachments (again, that are actually good at what they do) with me when I need them. Heck, with the right programming I might want to have multiple 'phone' devices that could switch data and voice traffic over whatever carrier was best/cheapest for the moment. Single-purpose devices that are good at what they do, rather than several devices that all replicate functionality like input, output and storage, costing more to manufacture and drawing more power and still end up more or less sucking at most of what they do.
"Any number of other commodities would lose all their value if suddenly they had no use to people anymore"
No, commodities would lose all their cost if they suddenly became non-scarce. Which is the whole point of the economy; to make things non-scarce.
Virtual property is inherently non-scarce. There are no natural limitations to its production, only an artificial construct. It's like monopoly money; you can pretend it has value, but as you (or Linden labs) can print up a bazillion if you want to, there is no actual scarcity (or heavily regulated scarcity as with a real currency).
I agree with the GP. There's a choice to be made here; either disallow monetary exchange for virtual property, or the actual content of virtual worlds needs to be regulated (as per usual currency exchange between countries). Allowing uncontrolled cross-border exchange to intermingle to any large extent with the real economy is tantamount to handing out minting rights to the companies running the virtual worlds; it will pollute the real world economy with game world economic effects, ranging from value crashes to inflation.
"For the vast majority of that fifteen thousand years"
Actually, the oldest instruments are around 40000 years old, contemporaries of cave art. And considering the ease with which one can make instruments out of commonly found materials, I'd find it astonishing if people didnt play around with making things like reed pipes or drums far earlier than that.
"Music for pleasure didn't become decently commonplace"
Betcha music for pleasure was decently commonplace for as long as people have been bored. Or consuming fermented beverages. In fact, I'll betcha it became decently commonplace the day after the first mother discovered singing would calm her baby.
As for the topics, it most likely was about the same things music has always been about. Whatever is on the mind of the performer or composer.
The prevalence of religious music in the western cultural heritage from the last several thousand years is easily ascribable to the church actually writing things down; I doubt they found lullabyes or rowdy drinking songs deserving of note. In fact, taking their usual method of operation into account, they probably did what they could to stamp out any non-religious music.
"Why am I starting to get the feeling"
Because you're not looking close enough?
Samba seems like they'll be moving and even Sun has sounded positive. Most anyone who's made an informed decision to use the GPLv2 is likely to move as v3 is merely a continuation of the exact same policy, updated to handle new issues.
The linux kernel is an exception; not particularly surprising as Linus has never been particularly aligned with the FSF ideas (witness the former choice of a non-free versioning system...).
Novell is free to fork. But that'd basically mean they'd be maintaining on a one-way street; anything they update on v2 forks can be adopted by v3 projects, while they could use nothing of the v3 licensed code.
In a way Novell and MS has done the FSF a favour by pointing out this particular loophole before GPLv3 was released.
"but also convincing the mouth-breathing public and complacent doctors why their way is better."
Damn. I wish there was, like, an international network where everyone could get connected. And then on that network we could have, like, collaborative sites where people could rate various medicines for various symptoms, and where doctors could get real-time updates of reported findings.
Getting something like that would probably be as unlikely as getting an encyclopedia for free...
"Seems like the US taxpayer gets screwed"
Except in the current situation he's screwed five times as much as he's paying for the 80% largely wasted resources going into the pharmaceuticals. Patents are not free, and altho they are more 'indirect', the cost is just as real.
"Also realize that since drugs are used internationally"
Which a) they are already today, b) take a wild guess why obesity, diabetes and similar diseases are high on the list of research on the multinationals; you pay for it, you get research aimed at your population, and c) if R&D funding came directly rather than indirectly, you could attach strings qualifying where the R&D should be done.
Oh, and ironically, I've heard pro-EU-Patent holders argue that the EU needs stronger protection for pharmaceuticals as it's lost its edge. An edge gained while the EU pharma industry was largely government run...
"At the end of the day, it's a problem of game theory."
No it isnt. It's a problem of economics; how do we maximize the use we gain from the resources we spend. Free market competetive economies have tended to be far more effective; introducing monopolies merely reduces the competetive pressure, decreases efficiency and shifts investment towards unrequired sectors like marketing and administrative waste.
There's a multitude of ways to set up systems that encourage investment in R&D. Granting monopolies happens to be among the worst. If you want to apply game theory, construct a system that will create favourable outcomes for all the desired current players in the system; with 80% margins to play with, it aint that hard.
If you know what you're looking for you can find the Dell N series.
Sometimes they are slightly cheaper than their Windows counterpart, other times if you look carefully you might see things like smaller disk by default, CD instead of DVD, then when you configure them you'll note they lack the same offers and savings that their exact same windows counterpart enjoy. In the end, when I've tried it, several times the machine without Windows ended up more expensive than the same one with. Which makes the exercise rather annoying (and raises a nagging suspicion that you're still paying for Windows and they're just not telling you about it...).
If they added 'FreeDOS', 'Linux', or 'No OS' to the 'Operating System' choice option the whole deal would be quite a lot more obvious and available. If that's what they're actually interested in.
Oh, yeah, and I have no idea wether it's just a webpage or if it's actually possible to get an N series machine delivered. If the journalists cant find a salesperson that knows about it, well...