Strictly speaking, it's not so much that they don't believe in fair use as that they're concerned about things that aren't fair use, e.g. sharing it with your friends. They're not so crazy about many of your fair use rights, either, like time shifting, but they don't have nearly as much a leg to stand on there; Betamax is pretty clear on that.
Come up with a technology that allows your fair use rights but forbids (or at least heavily discourages) non-fair use, and you'll have an easier time forcing the networks to accept it. (That's what Apple has done with iTunes).
Meantime, since file downloaders seem willing to use every means at their disposal to view the content, legal and illegal, you're going to have to expect them to push as much into the "illegal" category as possible, to have a hope of retaining their rights.
(Just for reference, the traditional response to this line of reasoning is "I don't give a damn about their rights," and they feel the same way, so there we are, right where we are.)
And, often, faster than hand-optimized code you would write today. If you can keep track of pipeline stalls and how many FPU and how many integer units are in use at any given instruction, you're a better man than I am.
But it was neat being able to rewrite CP/M from absolutely nothing at all.
I gather that the Dell Optiplex line is designed for that. They make models with limited configuration options precisely so that you can have a better idea of what's inside. But they don't, to my knowledge, have any software designed to track the changes over time or ensure that somebody hasn't added a forbidden video card/hard drive/game controller/etc.
Many, many people seem to think that the iPod has a superior interface to other players. And you'll note that iPod is far outselling all other players.
I don't know why other companies aren't producing an identical interface, or God forbid putting in some thought into a superior one. But if it's the patent protection that's keeping Apple's interface out of other companies' hands, you betcha Apple will lose money without it.
In this case the victim is Microsoft because they run Hotmail, which received (and had to wade through) beaucoup spam from this asshole. If you had a Hotmail account, I suppose you could be entitled to some of this, but since you paid zilch for it in the first place you get zilch out of this.
If you run your own mail server, you may be entitled to sue the guy yourself. Good luck on that.
The CAN-SPAM law specfically restricts these sorts of lawsuits to ISPs, but I'm not certain of the details. Either way it's probably best to let a large corporation conduct this sort of lawsuit, because it'll cost you a fortune to sue the guy for the relatively small sums you'll get. It's unfortunately to have your right to sue removed, but in this case it's probably not worth your effort anyway.
Presumably as compared to other entertainment alternatives. It depends a lot on how many movies you want to watch per month. You need to rent more than one disk a week to make it comparable to dropping by the video store (depending on how close they are, how much you mind returning movies, etc.)
But if you instead spent $60 on a video game and then spent three months playing it, you break even. Or you can buy several books. Hell, going outside is free.
You're right that Slashdotters often have a strange notion of "value". For example, many declared $.99 per song from iTMS too much based on absolutely no market data. Sure, they'd RATHER pay less, but that's kind of a no-brainer. At least in the iTMS case, people seem to be reasonably content for a buck a song. The question is, how elastic is your entertainment dollar?
Me, I get around 80 disks a year from Netflix, which would cost $300 at the video store compared to $240 from Netflix. A good savings, but not inordinate. It means I get to see stuff I wouldn't take a chance on otherwise; I wouldn't spend even $240 at Blockbuster if I had to take some of those risks.
That's pretty insightful: products succeed because they make things easier, and the more you restrict what they do the more likely it is that they can do one thing more easily and effectively. Finding the sweet spot is the challenge.
This is true, but as long as there's even a single app that MUST run directly on the OS, you'll need to have it. And if you have it, those things that run better locally will continue to run locally.
So even stuff that you could run with Ajax, you probably won't. Yeah, you can replace your mail client entirely with Ajax, but if you want to customize it at all, you can download anything you like, because the OS is already there.
And since one of those apps is word processing, which is perhaps the most important app after email and web browsing, I think Windows Vista has nothing in particular to fear from Ajax. Sure, there are a variety of reasons why Windows is losing market share (less expensive Macs, improved Linux UIs), and apps like GMail are certainly helpful, but I'm not using gmail precisely because I like my Thunderbird. (The fact that I could run Thunderbird on an OS I choose is a better reason to lose Windows.)
I was under the impression that the answer was a pretty resounding "no". Some things have to be done locally. We had the same discussion about Java, which at least was a general-purpose programming language.
I've been wearing my stylish tin-foil hat to keep the mind-control rays OUT. Fortunately, this flexible and fashionable garment also serves to keep RF identifiers IN.
And if they decide to plant the chip in a more sensitive place, my tin-foil cup has been protecting my precious bodily fluids for years.
(Yes, I know that RFIDs respond to outside RF, not generate it themselves. The gag is funnier my way. Relax.)
There's a serious lack of actual data in the articles, but my suspicion is that by putting glow-in-the-dark stuff on the inside of the tube it benefits from all the extra UV that you get inside the tube.
A fluorescent lamp glows by discharging electricity into a gas which then gives off UV. The phosphorescent coating inside the tube takes the UV and turns it into light.
The glow-in-the-dark strips also respond to UV light, but in a way that stores and releases the energy later. You could just put up strips, but only a tiny percentage of the UV light from the tubes would hit them; the rest would leak out into the room. (And they're designed to give off as little UV as possible, since it's unhealthy and wasteful; you want it as visible light.)
So by effectively putting the UV strips inside the tube, you charge them up when the light is on. You'd have to cover the walls with UV strips to get the same effect outside the lamp.
For everyday people? Probably not. Not in your home, at least, where you probably want it dark when you turn off the lights. But in office buildings, these could be a nice alternative to the emergency lights that are required in most places. No extra wiring; you just fit fancy bulbs into the existing fluorescent fixtures.
That won't help, unless you're planning to tell the customer that he can't exchange defective merchandise. This sort of fraud occurs after the box is opened.
The real solution is to train your employees to recognize your stuff. Easy for a watch company; harder for Wal-Mart, which has low-paid employees and many, many brands that constantly shift. RFID is almost certainly overkill here.
Auction sites have reputation systems precisely to decrease the amount of this sort of fraud. It doesn't eliminate it, since there are various ways of circumventing it, but as with every auction purchase reputation helps ensure that you get what you paid for.
If the thief were willing to empty the card before sending it on, he probably just wouldn't bother sending the card at all. But he'll develop a bad reputation right quick.
Then its up to the auction company to try to decrease the amount of reputation fraud.
It's actually kind of nice that you can use an auction to convert something from a gift card to cash. Gift cards are restricted cash, and people get them all the time as, well, gifts. If you don't want them it's nice to be able to cash them out. Auction sites do that, with a bit of friction.
The problem is that it's hard to come up with a "little" more control. Either your whitelisting editors, or you're not. All of the usual "this approach to combating spam won't work because..." tick boxes apply, for precisely the same reason.
Freedom and accountability are inversely correlated, and there's no way to gain a little accountability without losing infinite amounts of freedom when your freedom is currently unlimited. Any loss of privacy is a total loss of privacy.
If one allows the bible to be taught in schools, it tends to establish a state religion. It's unfair to teach the Christian origin myth without teaching the Buddhist origin myth and the Shoshone origin myth and all of the others.
Even if the Genesis of the bible turned out to be the literal, objective truth, teaching it from the Bible as such is encouraging people to believe more than just the creation part, but all the rest of the bits that they believe in, especially morality.
I really hate the sort of slippery-slope, camel's-nose argument I'm making here. I'm actually perfectly content with teaching Intelligent Design:
"Here are some problems with evolutionary theory. Here's why scientists believe that they can be solved. On the other hand, some people want to end the discussion with 'somebody did it and we're not saying who.'"
That's fine with me. I shouldn't even care that it will be taken to mean that there's serious evidence against evolution (there isn't) or that they'll further use it to say, "See, the scientists are wrong, therefore our religion must be right." But it does bother me, and the slippery slope argument is the main reason.
Because "the differences between right and wrong" taught to children too often turns into telling ME what's right and wrong. There are some things we agree on, and some things we don't, and the things we don't are usually none of their concern.
Live and let live is fine with me. But it only works if we both play that game.
Spam IS speech. The problem with spam is that it's way, way too much speech; blocking the intersection, as you say. The goal of the CAN-SPAM act was to try to remove the obnoxious parts of spam without eliminating the speech aspects.
Under CAN-SPAM, you "can spam". You can say anything you like. But you have to be polite and add a few extra things, like a valid email address (no spoofing) and a tag if it's adult content.
They're trying to have it both ways. Saying "you can't send this email" opens up questions about whether a particular email you wish to send is illegal speech. So they try to keep the definition of "speech" as open as possbible, to make speech as free as possible. But you can easily filter it out, as long as they're in compliance with the law.
Those who don't comply with the law, which is most of them, are a whole separate issue.
It also leaves open the fact that they're still clogging networks, but the compliant spammers won't really be the problem. It'll be the spew-bots. That comes under a whole separate law against hacking.
The whole idea of the CAN-SPAM act is to make it easier to filter spam. That's how they get around the potential free-speech issues: you're free to speak, and I'm free to filter it.
The CAN-SPAM act is way of acknowledging that some speakers are obnoxious, and will not desist from speaking if you're not interested. So rather than eliminating the right to speak, you're just required to tag your speech and not to lie about who it's coming from. (You're also required to tag it if it's adult material.) If you don't do that, THEN we can infringe on your right to speak by arresting you.
So the act is well named: it says you CAN SPAM, but I can filter it out. They get around the whole free-speech issue by making it easier for me to ignore your speech if I want to.
Some would say that they have no right to send you the packets at all, but that's a harder case to make so this is a stopgap measure that has many, but not all, of the effects you want. The remaining problems have less to do with the holes in the CAN-SPAM act (i.e. that they're still sending you unwanted bits and using unwanted network traffic) than with the spammers who don't comply. The domestic ones need to be arrested, and the international ones... well, that's going to require some more ingenuity.
I doubt that this process is significantly increasing the number of dogs out there. It's too hard, and too complex. If you want to worry about this you'd be much better off giving money to the local "neuter and spay" foundation rather than campaigning against cloning.
This exists primarily to preserve lines you particularly care about, either as a breed or of a beloved pet. But 99.9999% of people will stick to the "going to the pound" theory of buying a dog (or buying one, or getting a puppy from a friend.)
The article itself is Slashdotted, so I'm going to infer from the website that it comes from (americanrightsatwork.com) that the problem may be in TFA, and the summarizer may have just been reflecting their mischaracterization.
Which is annoying. If you want to fight for the rights of the American worker, you do yourself and them a disservice by protesting and mischaracterizing every ruling that doesn't go your way. It makes it that much harder for me to actually hear you when actual abuses occur.
(And yeah, it's also pretty annoying that neither the submitter nor the Slashdot editors did the same research you did. But Slashdot readers are pretty good at debunking bogus articles, whereas if the web site is wrong in their article, where on the web site will you read the counter-argument?)
Sure you get the copyright. You just usually turn around and sell it to a large corporation in exchange for them publishing it. If you want the copyrights for yourself, by all means keep it, and publish it yourself. You just don't get the resources of a mega-worldwide-super-uber-dooper bit ass company to publicize it to get anybody to care.
It sounds like you did a good job of explaining both sides of the story.
He immediately wanted to know why they couldn't distribute music using a DRM scheme that allowed exactly your existing "Fair Use" rights
And I think that's the way they're going. This is, more or less, what Apple's iTMS allows. Now, that is asking him to compromise some of his rights, in that he can't immediately play the AACs on his iRiver, for example. But he can back them up and even share them with his friends, playably, using Apple's sharing features.
The RIAA's business model IS obsolete, but that's precisely it: they're going to change their business model. They feel that they can't make maximal profit by selling you totally un-DRMed CDs, and so they're going to go out of that business.
The new business model is selling heavily DRM'ed music, exactly as Apple does. I can't say if it's a good model or not. Maybe there are enough who will say, "I'm never buying DRMed music," and they'll actually go out of business in the new model, too. Personally, I'm guessing not, since many people are content with the basic rights Apple allows. It strikes many people as fair, though that's partly because the CD hole allows them an out.
(Though there's a serious format war coming up as publishers choose up sides with DRM models. Apple has the lead, but people will be reluctant to lock themselves into the iPod on a large scale, so an alternative will spring up (perhaps from Apple themselves). Or perhaps Apple will open the format up enough to allow other manufacturers.)
What will happen to your Fair Use rights then? I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say. It's possible that they'll say that they're selling you the bits, not the music; you may back up and share the bits, but not the music. It doesn't give you the right to play it on your iRiver, any more than you get the right to run Photoshop on your Mac when you buy it for your PC. But that's a complete guess; I'm totally unversed in the legal theory.
The Russians are running it, but only on an interim basis. NASA was supposed to be contributing, and the Russians are running it expecting NASA to come back. If NASA can't, different arrangements will have to be made to ensure the long-term future of the station.
NASA could, for example, send the money they were going to spend on Shuttle missions over to the Russians (at a significant cost savings, I suspect), but that would be a huge blow to the national ego. If Congress doesn't approve it, and NASA can't get to the ISS, and the Russians don't wish to fund it themselves, there may be no choice but to de-orbit.
You are correct: the falling debris is only a tiny part of what's wrong with the current design, and not the most important one despite being the culprit in a disaster.
But it is the most obvious question people are going to ask whenever you talk about a new craft, precisely because it's the problem they know. The experts are talking about entirely different problems in meetings behind NASA's doors, but the PR department has the extremely difficult job of selling tens of billions of dollars per year to the American people.
So they talk it up in precisely the terms that people want: "It won't have the same problems that the last one did."
Slashdot Mirror
Strictly speaking, it's not so much that they don't believe in fair use as that they're concerned about things that aren't fair use, e.g. sharing it with your friends. They're not so crazy about many of your fair use rights, either, like time shifting, but they don't have nearly as much a leg to stand on there; Betamax is pretty clear on that.
Come up with a technology that allows your fair use rights but forbids (or at least heavily discourages) non-fair use, and you'll have an easier time forcing the networks to accept it. (That's what Apple has done with iTunes).
Meantime, since file downloaders seem willing to use every means at their disposal to view the content, legal and illegal, you're going to have to expect them to push as much into the "illegal" category as possible, to have a hope of retaining their rights.
(Just for reference, the traditional response to this line of reasoning is "I don't give a damn about their rights," and they feel the same way, so there we are, right where we are.)
And, often, faster than hand-optimized code you would write today. If you can keep track of pipeline stalls and how many FPU and how many integer units are in use at any given instruction, you're a better man than I am.
But it was neat being able to rewrite CP/M from absolutely nothing at all.
I gather that the Dell Optiplex line is designed for that. They make models with limited configuration options precisely so that you can have a better idea of what's inside. But they don't, to my knowledge, have any software designed to track the changes over time or ensure that somebody hasn't added a forbidden video card/hard drive/game controller/etc.
Yeah, I also remember when they had a 4.77 MHz processeor and no pipeline.
And guess what? Those days SUCKED.
Many, many people seem to think that the iPod has a superior interface to other players. And you'll note that iPod is far outselling all other players.
I don't know why other companies aren't producing an identical interface, or God forbid putting in some thought into a superior one. But if it's the patent protection that's keeping Apple's interface out of other companies' hands, you betcha Apple will lose money without it.
In this case the victim is Microsoft because they run Hotmail, which received (and had to wade through) beaucoup spam from this asshole. If you had a Hotmail account, I suppose you could be entitled to some of this, but since you paid zilch for it in the first place you get zilch out of this.
If you run your own mail server, you may be entitled to sue the guy yourself. Good luck on that.
The CAN-SPAM law specfically restricts these sorts of lawsuits to ISPs, but I'm not certain of the details. Either way it's probably best to let a large corporation conduct this sort of lawsuit, because it'll cost you a fortune to sue the guy for the relatively small sums you'll get. It's unfortunately to have your right to sue removed, but in this case it's probably not worth your effort anyway.
As compared to what?
Presumably as compared to other entertainment alternatives. It depends a lot on how many movies you want to watch per month. You need to rent more than one disk a week to make it comparable to dropping by the video store (depending on how close they are, how much you mind returning movies, etc.)
But if you instead spent $60 on a video game and then spent three months playing it, you break even. Or you can buy several books. Hell, going outside is free.
You're right that Slashdotters often have a strange notion of "value". For example, many declared $.99 per song from iTMS too much based on absolutely no market data. Sure, they'd RATHER pay less, but that's kind of a no-brainer. At least in the iTMS case, people seem to be reasonably content for a buck a song. The question is, how elastic is your entertainment dollar?
Me, I get around 80 disks a year from Netflix, which would cost $300 at the video store compared to $240 from Netflix. A good savings, but not inordinate. It means I get to see stuff I wouldn't take a chance on otherwise; I wouldn't spend even $240 at Blockbuster if I had to take some of those risks.
That's pretty insightful: products succeed because they make things easier, and the more you restrict what they do the more likely it is that they can do one thing more easily and effectively. Finding the sweet spot is the challenge.
This is true, but as long as there's even a single app that MUST run directly on the OS, you'll need to have it. And if you have it, those things that run better locally will continue to run locally.
So even stuff that you could run with Ajax, you probably won't. Yeah, you can replace your mail client entirely with Ajax, but if you want to customize it at all, you can download anything you like, because the OS is already there.
And since one of those apps is word processing, which is perhaps the most important app after email and web browsing, I think Windows Vista has nothing in particular to fear from Ajax. Sure, there are a variety of reasons why Windows is losing market share (less expensive Macs, improved Linux UIs), and apps like GMail are certainly helpful, but I'm not using gmail precisely because I like my Thunderbird. (The fact that I could run Thunderbird on an OS I choose is a better reason to lose Windows.)
I was under the impression that the answer was a pretty resounding "no". Some things have to be done locally. We had the same discussion about Java, which at least was a general-purpose programming language.
I've been wearing my stylish tin-foil hat to keep the mind-control rays OUT. Fortunately, this flexible and fashionable garment also serves to keep RF identifiers IN.
And if they decide to plant the chip in a more sensitive place, my tin-foil cup has been protecting my precious bodily fluids for years.
(Yes, I know that RFIDs respond to outside RF, not generate it themselves. The gag is funnier my way. Relax.)
There's a serious lack of actual data in the articles, but my suspicion is that by putting glow-in-the-dark stuff on the inside of the tube it benefits from all the extra UV that you get inside the tube.
A fluorescent lamp glows by discharging electricity into a gas which then gives off UV. The phosphorescent coating inside the tube takes the UV and turns it into light.
The glow-in-the-dark strips also respond to UV light, but in a way that stores and releases the energy later. You could just put up strips, but only a tiny percentage of the UV light from the tubes would hit them; the rest would leak out into the room. (And they're designed to give off as little UV as possible, since it's unhealthy and wasteful; you want it as visible light.)
So by effectively putting the UV strips inside the tube, you charge them up when the light is on. You'd have to cover the walls with UV strips to get the same effect outside the lamp.
For everyday people? Probably not. Not in your home, at least, where you probably want it dark when you turn off the lights. But in office buildings, these could be a nice alternative to the emergency lights that are required in most places. No extra wiring; you just fit fancy bulbs into the existing fluorescent fixtures.
That won't help, unless you're planning to tell the customer that he can't exchange defective merchandise. This sort of fraud occurs after the box is opened.
The real solution is to train your employees to recognize your stuff. Easy for a watch company; harder for Wal-Mart, which has low-paid employees and many, many brands that constantly shift. RFID is almost certainly overkill here.
Auction sites have reputation systems precisely to decrease the amount of this sort of fraud. It doesn't eliminate it, since there are various ways of circumventing it, but as with every auction purchase reputation helps ensure that you get what you paid for.
If the thief were willing to empty the card before sending it on, he probably just wouldn't bother sending the card at all. But he'll develop a bad reputation right quick.
Then its up to the auction company to try to decrease the amount of reputation fraud.
It's actually kind of nice that you can use an auction to convert something from a gift card to cash. Gift cards are restricted cash, and people get them all the time as, well, gifts. If you don't want them it's nice to be able to cash them out. Auction sites do that, with a bit of friction.
The problem is that it's hard to come up with a "little" more control. Either your whitelisting editors, or you're not. All of the usual "this approach to combating spam won't work because..." tick boxes apply, for precisely the same reason.
Freedom and accountability are inversely correlated, and there's no way to gain a little accountability without losing infinite amounts of freedom when your freedom is currently unlimited. Any loss of privacy is a total loss of privacy.
Especially since the pharmaceutical companies have a much better (and prior) claim to the name for using organisms to produce medicines.
If one allows the bible to be taught in schools, it tends to establish a state religion. It's unfair to teach the Christian origin myth without teaching the Buddhist origin myth and the Shoshone origin myth and all of the others.
Even if the Genesis of the bible turned out to be the literal, objective truth, teaching it from the Bible as such is encouraging people to believe more than just the creation part, but all the rest of the bits that they believe in, especially morality.
I really hate the sort of slippery-slope, camel's-nose argument I'm making here. I'm actually perfectly content with teaching Intelligent Design:
"Here are some problems with evolutionary theory. Here's why scientists believe that they can be solved. On the other hand, some people want to end the discussion with 'somebody did it and we're not saying who.'"
That's fine with me. I shouldn't even care that it will be taken to mean that there's serious evidence against evolution (there isn't) or that they'll further use it to say, "See, the scientists are wrong, therefore our religion must be right." But it does bother me, and the slippery slope argument is the main reason.
Because "the differences between right and wrong" taught to children too often turns into telling ME what's right and wrong. There are some things we agree on, and some things we don't, and the things we don't are usually none of their concern.
Live and let live is fine with me. But it only works if we both play that game.
Spam IS speech. The problem with spam is that it's way, way too much speech; blocking the intersection, as you say. The goal of the CAN-SPAM act was to try to remove the obnoxious parts of spam without eliminating the speech aspects.
Under CAN-SPAM, you "can spam". You can say anything you like. But you have to be polite and add a few extra things, like a valid email address (no spoofing) and a tag if it's adult content.
They're trying to have it both ways. Saying "you can't send this email" opens up questions about whether a particular email you wish to send is illegal speech. So they try to keep the definition of "speech" as open as possbible, to make speech as free as possible. But you can easily filter it out, as long as they're in compliance with the law.
Those who don't comply with the law, which is most of them, are a whole separate issue.
It also leaves open the fact that they're still clogging networks, but the compliant spammers won't really be the problem. It'll be the spew-bots. That comes under a whole separate law against hacking.
The whole idea of the CAN-SPAM act is to make it easier to filter spam. That's how they get around the potential free-speech issues: you're free to speak, and I'm free to filter it.
The CAN-SPAM act is way of acknowledging that some speakers are obnoxious, and will not desist from speaking if you're not interested. So rather than eliminating the right to speak, you're just required to tag your speech and not to lie about who it's coming from. (You're also required to tag it if it's adult material.) If you don't do that, THEN we can infringe on your right to speak by arresting you.
So the act is well named: it says you CAN SPAM, but I can filter it out. They get around the whole free-speech issue by making it easier for me to ignore your speech if I want to.
Some would say that they have no right to send you the packets at all, but that's a harder case to make so this is a stopgap measure that has many, but not all, of the effects you want. The remaining problems have less to do with the holes in the CAN-SPAM act (i.e. that they're still sending you unwanted bits and using unwanted network traffic) than with the spammers who don't comply. The domestic ones need to be arrested, and the international ones... well, that's going to require some more ingenuity.
I doubt that this process is significantly increasing the number of dogs out there. It's too hard, and too complex. If you want to worry about this you'd be much better off giving money to the local "neuter and spay" foundation rather than campaigning against cloning.
This exists primarily to preserve lines you particularly care about, either as a breed or of a beloved pet. But 99.9999% of people will stick to the "going to the pound" theory of buying a dog (or buying one, or getting a puppy from a friend.)
The article itself is Slashdotted, so I'm going to infer from the website that it comes from (americanrightsatwork.com) that the problem may be in TFA, and the summarizer may have just been reflecting their mischaracterization.
Which is annoying. If you want to fight for the rights of the American worker, you do yourself and them a disservice by protesting and mischaracterizing every ruling that doesn't go your way. It makes it that much harder for me to actually hear you when actual abuses occur.
(And yeah, it's also pretty annoying that neither the submitter nor the Slashdot editors did the same research you did. But Slashdot readers are pretty good at debunking bogus articles, whereas if the web site is wrong in their article, where on the web site will you read the counter-argument?)
Sure you get the copyright. You just usually turn around and sell it to a large corporation in exchange for them publishing it. If you want the copyrights for yourself, by all means keep it, and publish it yourself. You just don't get the resources of a mega-worldwide-super-uber-dooper bit ass company to publicize it to get anybody to care.
It sounds like you did a good job of explaining both sides of the story.
He immediately wanted to know why they couldn't distribute music using a DRM scheme that allowed exactly your existing "Fair Use" rights
And I think that's the way they're going. This is, more or less, what Apple's iTMS allows. Now, that is asking him to compromise some of his rights, in that he can't immediately play the AACs on his iRiver, for example. But he can back them up and even share them with his friends, playably, using Apple's sharing features.
The RIAA's business model IS obsolete, but that's precisely it: they're going to change their business model. They feel that they can't make maximal profit by selling you totally un-DRMed CDs, and so they're going to go out of that business.
The new business model is selling heavily DRM'ed music, exactly as Apple does. I can't say if it's a good model or not. Maybe there are enough who will say, "I'm never buying DRMed music," and they'll actually go out of business in the new model, too. Personally, I'm guessing not, since many people are content with the basic rights Apple allows. It strikes many people as fair, though that's partly because the CD hole allows them an out.
(Though there's a serious format war coming up as publishers choose up sides with DRM models. Apple has the lead, but people will be reluctant to lock themselves into the iPod on a large scale, so an alternative will spring up (perhaps from Apple themselves). Or perhaps Apple will open the format up enough to allow other manufacturers.)
What will happen to your Fair Use rights then? I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say. It's possible that they'll say that they're selling you the bits, not the music; you may back up and share the bits, but not the music. It doesn't give you the right to play it on your iRiver, any more than you get the right to run Photoshop on your Mac when you buy it for your PC. But that's a complete guess; I'm totally unversed in the legal theory.
The Russians are running it, but only on an interim basis. NASA was supposed to be contributing, and the Russians are running it expecting NASA to come back. If NASA can't, different arrangements will have to be made to ensure the long-term future of the station.
NASA could, for example, send the money they were going to spend on Shuttle missions over to the Russians (at a significant cost savings, I suspect), but that would be a huge blow to the national ego. If Congress doesn't approve it, and NASA can't get to the ISS, and the Russians don't wish to fund it themselves, there may be no choice but to de-orbit.
You are correct: the falling debris is only a tiny part of what's wrong with the current design, and not the most important one despite being the culprit in a disaster.
But it is the most obvious question people are going to ask whenever you talk about a new craft, precisely because it's the problem they know. The experts are talking about entirely different problems in meetings behind NASA's doors, but the PR department has the extremely difficult job of selling tens of billions of dollars per year to the American people.
So they talk it up in precisely the terms that people want: "It won't have the same problems that the last one did."