That's the rationale? If so then it totally doesn't work. I have excellent karma and pretty much always have, but I still get -1 rated posts from time to time - without exception they are (a) modded as overrated, because it avoids metamod, (b) posts that go against the groupthink. Maybe I'm arguing a pro DRM position. Maybe I'm criticizing Apple. I've been meaning to join the Slashcode development lists and argue the case for scrapping overrated/underrated for ages - as far as I can see they are simply the lazy mans getout clause which lets them mod down posts with which they disagree without having to figure out a justification.
It's a solution for an edge case. I don't want a "live" performance of Lord of the Rings. I want the epic movies that took years of hard work to produce. If the pre-recorded film industry is wiped out by piracy and this lame "solution" is the replacement, I'm not going to be a happy camper.
Smith lived in a time when it was unimaginable to have a business so complex it'd take billions of dollars (or pounds sterling) and many years to reach a competitive state - he predated the railways. I guess the closest equivalent would have been the canal companies, but they were just getting started at the time IIRC
Then one manufacturer comes along who doesn't and starts vacumning up marketshare.
You're forgetting about cost of entry. If the top 3 x86 chip vendors started colluding, the market wouldn't respond because the costs involved in designing and manufacturing a fast x86 chip are stupendous. Intel/AMD/etc would damn near have to withdraw their products from the market to stimulate competition and it'd still take years for the newly founded company to catch up.
Markets aren't perfect at all, that's why they're regulated in the first place...
That subscriber base is a guaranteed revenue stream that you can use to hunt down more stuff that your subscribers want.
I don't get it. Why would anybody subscribe to your service when they can get the music for free off the internet? Just for the notification service? Why would it be competitive with all the other ways you can discover music, like themed radio stations?
Basically, I don't see how you can have a business model that involves selling things to people who are happy to take them for free, if there's another way (despite it being illegal). Either you have to move to selling physical things that can't be copied, like concert tickets, or you need to find a sugar daddy to feed your hobby, or you need to do it in your spare time (if you have enough).
Not least because the whole 'flying saucer' and 'greys' crap only appeared in the US during the early cold war, with greys not being named till later.
When an entire cultures view of extra-terrestrial life changes as quickly as we went from green-tentacled-martians to greys, isn't that an argument for it being real?
You can spin that both ways though. Maybe if they were forced to pay for the music they listen to, cell phones would seem less attractive vs music. If you have only limited money, that's exactly when piracy becomes the most tempting and of course they'll have their cake and eat it too.
I've heard quite a bit of random Asian music, whether it's sent by friends, in Asian films or on random peoples myspace pages. It's always the same - some syrupy pop with some girl singing over it. Maybe I'm just not used to it and it all sounds the same for the same reason Asian faces look the same to Westerners, but I would never describe the Asian music scene as "diverse". If you aren't into ballads what has Asia got to offer you? I'd agree with the parent poster that the Asian music scene is a product of rampant piracy - it targets pop stars who have personal looks/charisma to draw a crowd, and little else.
I dunno. That's a pretty common sentiment. But I have two problems with it:
Clearly some people like this music. It gets bought, it gets downloaded.
Taste is so subjective;) I don't like a lot of 70s/80s music but I'd never claim it was bad because I don't care for the guitar.
Not everybody listens to bands. I listen to a lot of electronic music. My parents think these are manufactured pseudo-bands. These groups often don't "do" concerts or tours or the other solutions usually given for the music biz
I've not been "brainwashed" into thinking unions are evil. Up until a few years ago I had no real experience of unions and no opinion on them. I knew they existed and that they provoked a variety of feelings, that's as far as it went.
In the final year of university I had my first experience of unions. The two main academic unions decided they were going to merge, and the resultant petty power struggles turned into a penis contest, which turned into a call for "strike" action.
So they decided they deserved a 25% pay rise. This number came from looking at the amount of new money about to enter the system thanks to tripling of the student fees, money which was supposed to pay for expansion of the system through new facilities, new staff, refurbishment of falling-down dorm blocks and so on, and then multiplying it by two. They claimed this would be required to bring their pay up to the levels found in the rest of the public sector. The source of this idea turned out to be some bogus statistics invented by the unions themselves a long time ago, where they compared the pay of newly minted lecturers to senior police chiefs and other such nonsense.
How exactly do academics get leverage over their bosses, they wondered. Threatening to quit unless they get a raise? Striking? Hmmm, no, these things sound like hard work. They might not get paid at the end of the month! Far better to fuck over the students by refusing to mark their exams, and using their graduations as hostages.
So that's exactly what they did. The unions, and their sheep-like members (which were by no means all of the academic staff, incidentally), bullshitted their way through the summer in a blatant display of greed and disdain for their customers - the students themselves.
University management wasn't much better. Instead of telling the academics to go fuck themselves, they continued to pay their employees despite those same employees not doing the work they were contracted to do. When a few maverick universities tried to stop their pay (after all, that's what happens in a strike), the academics kicked up a fuss and management backed down.
Eventually they got a 12% pay rise (totally unacceptable of course), which used up all of the new money gained from the fee increases. So now the universities are the same as they always were, with dilapidated facilities and over-crowded lectures, except it's 3 times as expensive as before. And they are still riddled with lazy, arrogant and incompetent staff.
I'm sure there have been good and effective unions in the past, with real axes to grind, really bad management and which managed to achieve real good - but the fact that nobody was surprised by this incompetence implies to me that those times are long gone.
You can fix that simply by reregistering the ownership of the video with somebody else. Same as if you sell somebody your car, you have to update the license plate registration so if somebody uses it as a getaway car it doesn't point the finger at you.
Why would the general public care? Firstly, outside of the Slashdot RDF, most people don't seem to care about DRM. They bought DVDs before CSS was cracked, they buy songs from iTunes, and so on.
Secondly, the only legitimate reason for the "general public" to be annoyed by protection technologies is if it interferes with their fair use rights under law. Uploading shit to P2P networks is not a part of those rights, but it's what this is designed to discourage. So there can be no legitimate reason for annoyance. If you are annoyed the only logical conclusion I can come to is that you like being able to rip people off without being caught, and don't want to see that come to an end.
Coal-To-Liquids (CTL) via the Fischer-Tropsch process not only emits huge amounts of CO2 but only produces small amounts very low quality crude. If OPEC decides to "screw the US" (a very unlikely scenario, more likely, they'll just start running out of the stuff) then even with a massively competent military-style deployment of CTL, prices would still skyrocket. So, I wouldn't rely on it too much if I were you. It will undoubtably help ease the pain though - morphine style.
Java isn't the problem, lazy academics who don't like coding, aren't any good at it themselves and would much rather be teaching their pet research area are the problem. My school had a good reputation, it was in the tier below Oxford and Cambridge - where all the Oxbridge rejects went, basically. This course did not teach memory allocation, not even in the C++ "course" (I use the term loosely). They'd much rather set assignments in Java because it means they can teach as little programming as possible, and instead can focus entirely on teaching whatever small part of CS it is that turns them on.
Because they hire people just like them, this leads to:
Students that don't understand programming. Not even basic stuff like memory allocation. Knowledge of even Java is weak and flaky
Repeating the same material over and over (I believe predicate logic was repeated 3 times in my course), because they don't talk to each other about what is being taught.
Being given assignments that are way over the students heads, like creating advanced 3D graphics demos when they don't understand basic stuff like recursion or build systems. This regularly led to something like 25-30% of all assignment submissions being impossible to compile. Of those that did compile, many didn't run correctly. The academics couldn't afford to fail 30%+ of the class for every programming assignment, people would start to ask questions, so instead they'd simply send the work back and delay marking everybody elses until enough people had figured out how to write code that worked outside of their own environment. Hence, these people got longer deadlines and more time to improve things than the people who did it right in the first place.
Because so many people couldn't code worth a damn (not their fault!), the "programming" assignments tended to become writing assignments. For instance, one assignment I got was something like implement 3 pathfinding algorithms through a graph (I don't remember the exact task) and make sure you describe your algorithms. So I submitted some code with tons of comments describing the 3 algorithms as I went along, in full English. I got 10% for that assignment. Other people who submitted only 1 working algorithm and a Word document that described the 3 they would have implemented got more like 70%. When I went to the lecturer (who also ran the department) and quizzed him about this, he said "Why did you put your descriptions in the code? I don't have time to read students code".
At the end they decided they wanted more money, so refused to mark our exams until they got a 20% pay rise.
At the time I assumed I'd somehow landed in this swamp of incompetence through sheer bad luck, but afterwards my friends from other universities and I would all compare notes - and we all had similarly bad experiences. It seems that - at least in the UK where there are no equivalents to MIT or Stanford - university education is largely worthless. The net result was a lot of students who not only couldn't code but didn't really understand computer science either because they'd never applied it to anything. And of course most jobs in the industry are for software engineers and not computer scientists, valuable though those last set are.
I dunno. It's kind of sad you think that. I am far less stressed and put in fewer hours now that I work full time than I ever did during my time in the education system. Certainly, my job is stroll through a grassy meadow compared to university and most of high school, in which I was working all day and then typically until 9-10pm at night as well. I remember that one of the nicest things about going from education into a job was that for the first time since I was a kid I had weekends and evenings to myself, with NO HOMEWORK to do:)
Dispite being easy enough for a retarded monkey to do, math homework took a couple hours to complete each night just from sheer volume
But I guess the same was not true of English homework, judging by your spelling of despite.
It seems like school taught you many things, but how to avoid being an ingratiating smartass was not one of them. Here's a hint - whilst you may have found maths easy, others in your class didn't, and needed the practice. You might think you're smart because you find maths easy, but there are many shades and types of "smart", and generally I consider people who are, uh, academically gifted but interpersonally immature to be perhaps not so smart after all.
You're again lacking genericity. I can quite believe that amateurs can make very high quality music, I used to be an amateur musician myself (though I sucked at it) - but all the tools are there and it's cheap. Amateur music is something I hear pretty often. Amateur movies, not so much. With software you can get "amateur" (using the word to mean non-fulltime) products that are really quite good, like the Gimp or the Linux kernel, but it only works in a few cases - there has never been any open source competition to the 3D FPS games industry for instance. When people argue for what is effectively the downfall of copyright, they tend to ignore or forget about things outside of music. That's what annoys me.
This line of thinking is pretty dangerous because it implies that the problem can be "fixed" with a solution that might work for music, probably won't work for things like big-budget movies and certainly won't work for things that are incredibly expensive to produce and take huge full-time effort over many years, like search engines or new cancer drugs.
It is, in effect, the lazy mans solution. It isn't a generic solution yet we are faced with a generic problem. It's like saying we don't need copyright because musicians can just get paid beer money for playing live. Works for (some) musicians, doesn't work for directors.
And for what it's worth, I quite enjoyed Titanic. I quite enjoy a lot of very expensive movies and it annoys me that some people want an "amateur rules!" system which would preclude professional productions.
You can't show that, it's not even an argument. You can't support that line of thinking because there is no version of iTunes without DRM to compare to. Saying iTunes succeeded "in spite of" DRM is more wishful thinking than any kind of argument, it's sort of like climate change denial: "we can't affect the polar ice caps, that's silly! oh, we are? well it would have happened anyway".
The problem with DRM is it switches off peoples brains. The linked article is a great example. The guy writing it apparently doesn't understand economics at all, and compensates by throwing around buzzwords and reducing everything to absurdity. He goes on to make a series of obvious statements like "For a new business model to make sense, it needs to provide more value" and another series of meaningless ones like "value is not a scarce concept" (you can't have a non-scarce concept).
Finally, his argument (I use the term loosely) is invalidated by counter-example - DRM clearly does let you create 'new' business models because it lets you rent things that otherwise you'd have to buy. For instance you can get all-you-can-eat access to a large music library for as long as you pay a subscription. Whether these business models will succeed or not, I cannot say. I know people who subscribe to them and are happy with them. Nonetheless it's impossible to argue that this is not a business model enabled by DRM - if your access did not expire then it'd be equivalent to giving away huge amounts of content for free.
His other article is a waste of time too. He says:
They don't believe that the free market can function with a lack of scarcity. It's understandable why that could make some uncomfortable -- but, it's a fundamental misunderstanding based on this desire to force scarcity where there is none, just so economics can continue to be the study of scarcity
Economics is a study of scarcity, that's pretty much its definition. He implies a market can function without scarcity but doesn't elaborate on how that would work, instead simply claiming the unbelievers are "uncomfortable" due to a "fundamental misunderstanding". But we already know what happens when something becomes non-scarce - it's price drops to zero, as can be seen by logging onto any big filesharing network.
Basically, he claims there's an economic solution to non-scarcity of information that doesn't involve DRM. I've been looking for such a theory for some time, and never found one. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and he presents none.
Like so many others you're deliberately misreading the sense of what she said. It's obvious that she means "How would Steve Jobs feel if his companies work was not protected?", ie, there was no legal enforcement of patent protections for software. And say what you like about Apple but Jobs protects his companies 'creative works' very strongly, both through patent enforcement and by tying MacOS X to a hardware purchase. It's a perfectly reasonable point to make - either Jobs believes copyright needs to be enforced mechanically because the police/courts can't do a good job, in which case he should be pro-DRM, or he doesn't, in which case they should stop requiring licensing of their patents and OS X should not try and verify it's running on a Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the rationale? If so then it totally doesn't work. I have excellent karma and pretty much always have, but I still get -1 rated posts from time to time - without exception they are (a) modded as overrated, because it avoids metamod, (b) posts that go against the groupthink. Maybe I'm arguing a pro DRM position. Maybe I'm criticizing Apple. I've been meaning to join the Slashcode development lists and argue the case for scrapping overrated/underrated for ages - as far as I can see they are simply the lazy mans getout clause which lets them mod down posts with which they disagree without having to figure out a justification.
AACS contains traitor-tracing algorithms that allow you to locate the device key from a decrypted video, or released title key.
You're thinking of the Laffer Curve, and it's been mostly discredited in the economics world AFAIK
It's a solution for an edge case. I don't want a "live" performance of Lord of the Rings. I want the epic movies that took years of hard work to produce. If the pre-recorded film industry is wiped out by piracy and this lame "solution" is the replacement, I'm not going to be a happy camper.
That's ridiculous. If GTK vs Qt were the only fragmented APIs in the Linux space you might have a point, but that's far from true.
Smith lived in a time when it was unimaginable to have a business so complex it'd take billions of dollars (or pounds sterling) and many years to reach a competitive state - he predated the railways. I guess the closest equivalent would have been the canal companies, but they were just getting started at the time IIRC
You're forgetting about cost of entry. If the top 3 x86 chip vendors started colluding, the market wouldn't respond because the costs involved in designing and manufacturing a fast x86 chip are stupendous. Intel/AMD/etc would damn near have to withdraw their products from the market to stimulate competition and it'd still take years for the newly founded company to catch up.
Markets aren't perfect at all, that's why they're regulated in the first place ...
I don't get it. Why would anybody subscribe to your service when they can get the music for free off the internet? Just for the notification service? Why would it be competitive with all the other ways you can discover music, like themed radio stations?
Basically, I don't see how you can have a business model that involves selling things to people who are happy to take them for free, if there's another way (despite it being illegal). Either you have to move to selling physical things that can't be copied, like concert tickets, or you need to find a sugar daddy to feed your hobby, or you need to do it in your spare time (if you have enough).
When an entire cultures view of extra-terrestrial life changes as quickly as we went from green-tentacled-martians to greys, isn't that an argument for it being real?
You can spin that both ways though. Maybe if they were forced to pay for the music they listen to, cell phones would seem less attractive vs music. If you have only limited money, that's exactly when piracy becomes the most tempting and of course they'll have their cake and eat it too.
I've heard quite a bit of random Asian music, whether it's sent by friends, in Asian films or on random peoples myspace pages. It's always the same - some syrupy pop with some girl singing over it. Maybe I'm just not used to it and it all sounds the same for the same reason Asian faces look the same to Westerners, but I would never describe the Asian music scene as "diverse". If you aren't into ballads what has Asia got to offer you? I'd agree with the parent poster that the Asian music scene is a product of rampant piracy - it targets pop stars who have personal looks/charisma to draw a crowd, and little else.
I've not been "brainwashed" into thinking unions are evil. Up until a few years ago I had no real experience of unions and no opinion on them. I knew they existed and that they provoked a variety of feelings, that's as far as it went.
In the final year of university I had my first experience of unions. The two main academic unions decided they were going to merge, and the resultant petty power struggles turned into a penis contest, which turned into a call for "strike" action.
So they decided they deserved a 25% pay rise. This number came from looking at the amount of new money about to enter the system thanks to tripling of the student fees, money which was supposed to pay for expansion of the system through new facilities, new staff, refurbishment of falling-down dorm blocks and so on, and then multiplying it by two. They claimed this would be required to bring their pay up to the levels found in the rest of the public sector. The source of this idea turned out to be some bogus statistics invented by the unions themselves a long time ago, where they compared the pay of newly minted lecturers to senior police chiefs and other such nonsense.
How exactly do academics get leverage over their bosses, they wondered. Threatening to quit unless they get a raise? Striking? Hmmm, no, these things sound like hard work. They might not get paid at the end of the month! Far better to fuck over the students by refusing to mark their exams, and using their graduations as hostages.
So that's exactly what they did. The unions, and their sheep-like members (which were by no means all of the academic staff, incidentally), bullshitted their way through the summer in a blatant display of greed and disdain for their customers - the students themselves.
University management wasn't much better. Instead of telling the academics to go fuck themselves, they continued to pay their employees despite those same employees not doing the work they were contracted to do. When a few maverick universities tried to stop their pay (after all, that's what happens in a strike), the academics kicked up a fuss and management backed down.
Eventually they got a 12% pay rise (totally unacceptable of course), which used up all of the new money gained from the fee increases. So now the universities are the same as they always were, with dilapidated facilities and over-crowded lectures, except it's 3 times as expensive as before. And they are still riddled with lazy, arrogant and incompetent staff.
I'm sure there have been good and effective unions in the past, with real axes to grind, really bad management and which managed to achieve real good - but the fact that nobody was surprised by this incompetence implies to me that those times are long gone.
You can fix that simply by reregistering the ownership of the video with somebody else. Same as if you sell somebody your car, you have to update the license plate registration so if somebody uses it as a getaway car it doesn't point the finger at you.
Why would the general public care? Firstly, outside of the Slashdot RDF, most people don't seem to care about DRM. They bought DVDs before CSS was cracked, they buy songs from iTunes, and so on.
Secondly, the only legitimate reason for the "general public" to be annoyed by protection technologies is if it interferes with their fair use rights under law. Uploading shit to P2P networks is not a part of those rights, but it's what this is designed to discourage. So there can be no legitimate reason for annoyance. If you are annoyed the only logical conclusion I can come to is that you like being able to rip people off without being caught, and don't want to see that come to an end.
Coal-To-Liquids (CTL) via the Fischer-Tropsch process not only emits huge amounts of CO2 but only produces small amounts very low quality crude. If OPEC decides to "screw the US" (a very unlikely scenario, more likely, they'll just start running out of the stuff) then even with a massively competent military-style deployment of CTL, prices would still skyrocket. So, I wouldn't rely on it too much if I were you. It will undoubtably help ease the pain though - morphine style.
Java isn't the problem, lazy academics who don't like coding, aren't any good at it themselves and would much rather be teaching their pet research area are the problem. My school had a good reputation, it was in the tier below Oxford and Cambridge - where all the Oxbridge rejects went, basically. This course did not teach memory allocation, not even in the C++ "course" (I use the term loosely). They'd much rather set assignments in Java because it means they can teach as little programming as possible, and instead can focus entirely on teaching whatever small part of CS it is that turns them on.
Because they hire people just like them, this leads to:
Students that don't understand programming. Not even basic stuff like memory allocation. Knowledge of even Java is weak and flaky
Repeating the same material over and over (I believe predicate logic was repeated 3 times in my course), because they don't talk to each other about what is being taught.
Being given assignments that are way over the students heads, like creating advanced 3D graphics demos when they don't understand basic stuff like recursion or build systems. This regularly led to something like 25-30% of all assignment submissions being impossible to compile. Of those that did compile, many didn't run correctly. The academics couldn't afford to fail 30%+ of the class for every programming assignment, people would start to ask questions, so instead they'd simply send the work back and delay marking everybody elses until enough people had figured out how to write code that worked outside of their own environment. Hence, these people got longer deadlines and more time to improve things than the people who did it right in the first place.
Because so many people couldn't code worth a damn (not their fault!), the "programming" assignments tended to become writing assignments. For instance, one assignment I got was something like implement 3 pathfinding algorithms through a graph (I don't remember the exact task) and make sure you describe your algorithms. So I submitted some code with tons of comments describing the 3 algorithms as I went along, in full English. I got 10% for that assignment. Other people who submitted only 1 working algorithm and a Word document that described the 3 they would have implemented got more like 70%. When I went to the lecturer (who also ran the department) and quizzed him about this, he said "Why did you put your descriptions in the code? I don't have time to read students code".
At the time I assumed I'd somehow landed in this swamp of incompetence through sheer bad luck, but afterwards my friends from other universities and I would all compare notes - and we all had similarly bad experiences. It seems that - at least in the UK where there are no equivalents to MIT or Stanford - university education is largely worthless. The net result was a lot of students who not only couldn't code but didn't really understand computer science either because they'd never applied it to anything. And of course most jobs in the industry are for software engineers and not computer scientists, valuable though those last set are.
I dunno. It's kind of sad you think that. I am far less stressed and put in fewer hours now that I work full time than I ever did during my time in the education system. Certainly, my job is stroll through a grassy meadow compared to university and most of high school, in which I was working all day and then typically until 9-10pm at night as well. I remember that one of the nicest things about going from education into a job was that for the first time since I was a kid I had weekends and evenings to myself, with NO HOMEWORK to do :)
But I guess the same was not true of English homework, judging by your spelling of despite.
It seems like school taught you many things, but how to avoid being an ingratiating smartass was not one of them. Here's a hint - whilst you may have found maths easy, others in your class didn't, and needed the practice. You might think you're smart because you find maths easy, but there are many shades and types of "smart", and generally I consider people who are, uh, academically gifted but interpersonally immature to be perhaps not so smart after all.
You're again lacking genericity. I can quite believe that amateurs can make very high quality music, I used to be an amateur musician myself (though I sucked at it) - but all the tools are there and it's cheap. Amateur music is something I hear pretty often. Amateur movies, not so much. With software you can get "amateur" (using the word to mean non-fulltime) products that are really quite good, like the Gimp or the Linux kernel, but it only works in a few cases - there has never been any open source competition to the 3D FPS games industry for instance. When people argue for what is effectively the downfall of copyright, they tend to ignore or forget about things outside of music. That's what annoys me.
This line of thinking is pretty dangerous because it implies that the problem can be "fixed" with a solution that might work for music, probably won't work for things like big-budget movies and certainly won't work for things that are incredibly expensive to produce and take huge full-time effort over many years, like search engines or new cancer drugs.
It is, in effect, the lazy mans solution. It isn't a generic solution yet we are faced with a generic problem. It's like saying we don't need copyright because musicians can just get paid beer money for playing live. Works for (some) musicians, doesn't work for directors.
And for what it's worth, I quite enjoyed Titanic. I quite enjoy a lot of very expensive movies and it annoys me that some people want an "amateur rules!" system which would preclude professional productions.
You can't show that, it's not even an argument. You can't support that line of thinking because there is no version of iTunes without DRM to compare to. Saying iTunes succeeded "in spite of" DRM is more wishful thinking than any kind of argument, it's sort of like climate change denial: "we can't affect the polar ice caps, that's silly! oh, we are? well it would have happened anyway".
The problem with DRM is it switches off peoples brains. The linked article is a great example. The guy writing it apparently doesn't understand economics at all, and compensates by throwing around buzzwords and reducing everything to absurdity. He goes on to make a series of obvious statements like "For a new business model to make sense, it needs to provide more value" and another series of meaningless ones like "value is not a scarce concept" (you can't have a non-scarce concept).
Finally, his argument (I use the term loosely) is invalidated by counter-example - DRM clearly does let you create 'new' business models because it lets you rent things that otherwise you'd have to buy. For instance you can get all-you-can-eat access to a large music library for as long as you pay a subscription. Whether these business models will succeed or not, I cannot say. I know people who subscribe to them and are happy with them. Nonetheless it's impossible to argue that this is not a business model enabled by DRM - if your access did not expire then it'd be equivalent to giving away huge amounts of content for free.
His other article is a waste of time too. He says:
Economics is a study of scarcity, that's pretty much its definition. He implies a market can function without scarcity but doesn't elaborate on how that would work, instead simply claiming the unbelievers are "uncomfortable" due to a "fundamental misunderstanding". But we already know what happens when something becomes non-scarce - it's price drops to zero, as can be seen by logging onto any big filesharing network.
Basically, he claims there's an economic solution to non-scarcity of information that doesn't involve DRM. I've been looking for such a theory for some time, and never found one. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and he presents none.
Like so many others you're deliberately misreading the sense of what she said. It's obvious that she means "How would Steve Jobs feel if his companies work was not protected?", ie, there was no legal enforcement of patent protections for software. And say what you like about Apple but Jobs protects his companies 'creative works' very strongly, both through patent enforcement and by tying MacOS X to a hardware purchase. It's a perfectly reasonable point to make - either Jobs believes copyright needs to be enforced mechanically because the police/courts can't do a good job, in which case he should be pro-DRM, or he doesn't, in which case they should stop requiring licensing of their patents and OS X should not try and verify it's running on a Mac.
The designers were paid using money that hadn't been earned yet, but was intended to come from sales of the cars.
The Daily Show is not crap