You can burn the DRM'd WMA files to an audio cd, and re-rip them to any thing you want. I really find no differences in the DRM schemes the iTMS is using and those set in place by napster or music match.
Not all of the WMA-based services have friendly DRM.
Apple's DRM is very simple: Upload to as many iPods as you want, play on up to 3 computers (which you can add and drop from your account), burn to as many CDs as you want (but no single playlist more than 10 times.)
The WMA-based services don't use the same DRM for every song. Some don't let you burn CDs. Some restrict the number of burns to an absolute number (like 3 or 5). Some don't let you add/drop computers (so you lose your songs when you get a new computer). Some expire if you don't maintain a paid subscription to the service.
If you're careful about the DRM associated with each song you download and don't download the ones that are more draconian, then yes, there won't be much of a difference. But if you aren't careful, the differences will come to bite you.
It's my understanding that the Beatles' management doesn't want their music sold over the internet. So you won't find it available for download from any legitimate site.
Your best bet here will be to (hopefully) find a "best of" compilation CD that has all the songs you want and rip it yourself.
What I need is a player that can hold 50 gigs of ogg
Ideally, I'd like to see a player that can read a DVD-R full of music files.
My music collection is about 25G (mostly 128K AAC files, ripped with iTunes.) At about 4.2G per DVD, I could burn the entire collection onto about 6 DVDs. It would be really cool to stick one into a player and shuffle play the contents. Or even cooler - put them all into a 6-disc car changer and shuffle-play the entire lot while driving.
Yes, I realize that 25G at 128K is almost 18 days worth. The point is not to listen to it all in one sitting, but to be able to shuffle play every song I own. I currently do this at home from my computer, and have come to like the results. (Although it can sometimes be disturbing when it shuffles from a folk song to heavy metal to new-age:-) )
I considered them for a while. I changed my mind when I found that their selection isn't all that great.
I browsed their catalog (which you can do without subscribing) to see what their selection is like. I wanted to purchase the songs that I have on vinyl and the stuff I recorded off of the radio back in the 80's. (I figure that purchased MP3s will sound better than what I'd get by digitizing them myself.)
Out of the approximately 250 songs on my list, emusic had less than 10 of them. Given their subscription price, it ended up being cheaper to just buy those songs on CD at a discount music store. (A few well-placed "hits of the 80's" compilation albums can cover a nice cross-section of my list.)
That expose looks pretty nifty. Of course, if you bought a PC laptop then you could get one with a 1400x1050 or 1600x1200 screen and have your windows tiled all of the time. This functionality is only necessary because Apple refuses to ship high-resolution LCDs for some perverse reason.
Not true. Not true in the least.
My Mac destkop runs at 1920x1440 and even with that much real estate, there are still plenty of overlapping windows. And sometimes it's a pain to locate the one you want without a feature like Expose'.
During a typical session, my desktop will have open:
AOL Instant Messenger (buddy list and a few chat windows)
iTunes
Mozilla (mail window and at least one browser window)
Emacs (at 80x90 - having all that vertical space is really useful!)
One or two Terminal windows
In addition to these (which are always open), I'll also have a few other apps that I'll quit after using them, including AppleWorks, iPhoto and Palm Desktop.
It is true that larger screens will allow you to space out the windows you have open. But it's also true that once you get used to having such a screen, you start opening more windows.
Panther Servers disk utility gives you that option in the graphical interface, whereas panther' disk utility doesn't. it is available on both, but on regular 10.3 you need to enable it via command line tools
Thanks. I haven't yet upgraded to Panther, so my information is all second-hand, and some of what I've read has turned out to be wrong.
You have the option of formatting your drive as case sensitive, if you really want to.
Personally, I'd recommend against it, unless you have a really good reason to choose otherwise. Most Mac apps assume case insensitivity. For instance Dantz has this knowledgebase article regarding Panther and Retrospect. Note the paragraph which reads:
Case-Sensitive HFS+ (Panther Server only)
* Panther Server's Disk Utility allows administrators to format disks with a new case-sensitive HFS Plus file system. Retrospect 5.1 does not recognize case-sensitive file names. If "file" and "FILE" exist in the same directory, only one will be backed up.
Interestingly, they say that this feature is only available on the server edition. Can anyone confirm or disprove this?
Microsoft is actively heading in that direction WinFS is essentially an integrated database of arbitrary indexed attributes related to file data. Even NTFS supports arbitrary numbers of forks in a file, which is a step up from HFS/+ 's 2 fork system.
HFS+ actually supports an arbitrary number of forks, even though there are only standard definitions for the resource and data forks.
Not too long ago, it was common to find anti-Mac zealots routinely criticize Apple for having a resource fork. They had a wide variety of disparaging remarks to make against the concept. I wonder if these same people will maintain that attibude when Microsoft starts providing the same thing. Somehow, I don't think they will.
Microsoft's file systems do as much metadata as UNIX does. On FAT (and I think FAT32) every file a timestamp and a set of attribute bits (directory, read-only, hidden, system and archive). On NTFS, each file gains two more timestamps (so you have create, modify and access) and security attributs.
Of course, neither Windows nor UNIX supports all the metadata that MacOS does - file type, file creator, icon position, user comments, memory partition sizes (for classic apps), etc.
If you refer to a file by an inode you are basically creating a hard link... A FileID is really more equivalent to a path, or rather used in place of a path with the advantage that the path can change and the fileID remains the same. Thus referring to a FileID is less fragile.
I think you're musunderstanding something.
A FileID is a persistent handle that refers to a file. It is only valid for a single disk volume. If a file is moved to a different volume, the ID changes.
In every respect that matters, it's functionally equivalent to an inode number.
The real question here is why nobody has made a UNIX API to open a file using a volume-ID of some kind (which may have to be defined) and the inode number. Using an API like this, UNIX apps could get the same functionality as Mac apps. Moving a filename around the directory tree would not affect a program's ability to open it.
Creating a hard link to the inode is unnecessary for an API like this. After all, the standard open() call already does all the requred work. It already has to convert a pathname into a volume/inode index as a part of its normal behavior.
I understand that a 300kbps reader is very slow, and is nowhere near the speed capability of CF. But that's still a lot less than USB's 12Mbps rate (about 1.5MB/s)
My point is simply that if the card reader's speed is under 12Mbps, then it won't matter if the interface is FireWire or USB.
If the reader's speed is faster, of course, then the choice of interface probably will make a difference.
Great! Let them try. This is the perfect way to eliminate SCO from existance once and for all.
Once the GPL is invalidated, all of that GPL code reverts to a default copyright status, owned by the authors of the code. These authors have the right to charge whatever they want for the code, and anybody who doesn't pay up is in violation of the copyright.
Applied to Linux, just about everybody will be in violation. But the copyright holders don't have to sue them all.
The copyright holders can choose to sue some of the infringers. Like SCO. Let's see what happens to them when people like Richard Stallman decide to set the licensing terms for Emacs and GCC at a billion dollars per copy and conveniently choose to only sue SCO for copyright violation.
Some may claim that this is selective enforcement, but we're talking copyright, not criminal law. Record companies don't lose their copyrights if they only sue a small fraction of the millions who are in posession of pirated music. By that same token, owners of formerly-GPL'ed software won't lose their copyrights if they only sue one violator of their SCO-mandated copyright.
SCO will say that GPLed code cannot be restricted by export controls
SCO will say a lot of things. Doesn't make them right about any of them.
The GPL doesn't say you must distribute software to anybody who wants it. The GPL says that if you distribute binaries to someone, then you must also make the source code available.
If I use and modify GPL code and keep the resulting product to myself, I am not violating anything. If I use and modify GPL code and distribute (with full sources, of course) only to people living in Idaho, and refuse to distribute it elsewhere, I am not violating anything.
I can even choose to charge a billion dollars for the product and I'm not in violation, as long as every paying customer gets a copy of the source code with it. (And those customers still have the right to give it away for free if they so desire.)
Unless national security laws prohibit distribution of sources to places where binary distributions are permitted, there is no conflict with the GPL.
Isn't it interesting how an article on a substance-scanner ends up producing over 300 off-topic messages all debating whether drugs should be legalized or not.
Am I the only one who realizes that this tech can be used with a wider database of substances to scan for things like Anthrax and other biotoxins that are already being sent to people in government offices?
I don't think a one-minute-per-item scan rate (what the article says they should be able to acheieve) is bad if the system is installed in the Senate's mail room, or other places that are likely targets for a bioweapon-laced letter. Of course, the process will have to be greatly sped up if anyone expects to use it on a wide scale (like in post offices.)
The question that I have is whether this will fog photographic film or damage magnetic media? If it does, then it can't be used for scanning mail.
the only way you are going to run DOS Apps on AMD64 is to either boot to 32-bit mode or install a full emulator
This may explain why Microsoft bought a large chunk of Connectix and is now developing their own version of Virtual PC. The same tech that allows Mac and Windows users to boot multiple x86 operating systems can be used to allow AMD64 users to run 16-bit apps. What better way to provide legacy DOS support than by bundling a legacy x86 emulator into the OS?
Take the liner notes out of the CD's and put the discs in a cd binder... The only downside is having to realphabetize occassionally as the collection expands
Even better. Get CD binder pages and put them in an ordinary 3-ring binder. This way, you can insert new pages as your collection grows. This is much more convenient than leaving blank pages in the middle or reshuffling them all as you get new stuff.
At first I was kind of pissed about what they did, but what is it really hurting?
For web pages, I couldn't care less. If I mistype a URL and get a search page instead of an error page, it's no big deal.
The problem is that this change doesn't just affect web pages. It affects every program that does a DNS lookup - which is almost everything.
This is not acceptable. If I mistype an address when sending mail, I want to get an immediate error back. I don't want a Verisign server to receive the message. And I don't want my mail server to keep on re-sending the message for five days (which is what will happen if they don't have a mail server at that address.)
If I use a spam filter that blocks mail that has bogus return addresses, it is now useless, because all addresses will now resolve as valid.
By making this change, Verisign has seriously crippled the usefulness of the internet.
How much do you think such an emulator would cost, even if it existed?
A tool for web developers to test their pages against all known Mac browsers would have to be expensive. Some developer would have to carefully work out, and emulate, each browser's bugs. And they'd have to keep a big database of these bugs, and update it as each new revision comes out. After all version 1.1 of a browser may render differently from version 1.2 or 2.0, etc.
This is going to be difficult program to develop, which will be sold only to a limited audience, and it will need constant updates. I can't see a program like this selling for less than several hundred dollars, plus ongoing maintenance contracts.
And this assumes the program will be perfect. If it doesn't emulate everything perfectly, you will still get support calls from users reporting problems that you can't reproduce.
Now compare this to the price of just buying a Mac. The base-mdel eMac has a starting price of $800. If you are willing to buy a discontinued model (new, used or refurbushed), you can get one for even less. And now you will be able to actually run all those browsers instead of relying on a third-party approximation of what he thinks those browsers do.
I then, to prove a point, revoke your right to speak as I don't want to hear it anymore.
Go right ahead. Add him to the "Foes" page of your SlashDot account and configure it to mod all his articles down to -1. Voila, you don't have to hear it anymore.
This forum is a perfect agument against you - anybody can speak, and you can choose to block anybody you don't want to listen to.
nobody likes spam, sure, but this whole scene is really about encouraging the government to regulate communication.
No. It's about making thieves pay for what they steal.
When a junk-mailer sends you an ad in the mail, he pays the postage. When a telemarketer calls you (as much as you may hate it) he pays for the call.
When a spammer sends you junk mail, he doesn't pay for it. He is routing the mail through unwilling third-parties (which has been ruled as criminal trespass in several court cases). He is making your ISP pay the cost to download and store that mail, and is making you pay (in time) to download the message in order to delete it.
This is the reason junk faxes are illegal. The sender doesn't pay for the paper and toner that his ad is consuming.
If the spammers were paying the costs of the spam, then you'd have a point. But they aren't.
The Constitution grants you the right to speak. It doesn't grant you the right to steal other people's property in order to be heard.
Uhh, guess where they're getting their lists of names to sue? The police bust sellers of illegal descrambling equipment and DTV goes along and gets copies of receipts.
That's proof you bought a card programmer, not proof that you used it to steal DirecTV broadcasts.
There's a difference, even if DirecTV's legal department wants to pretend there isn't.
If it stands up in court, it just measn that a) Apple has to facilitate a free transfer function...
Interesting, from a technical standpoint.
The way I understand it, Apple's DRM ties the song to your Apple-ID account. When you authorize computers for playback, you tie those computers to the account. The act of de-authorizing a computer and authorizing a new computer involve a network connection to Apple's servers to make it all happen. When you play the song, the account in the computer is matched against the account in the song file (which will probably involve decryption at various levels, to prevent cheating.)
The big question is if each song downloaded is authorized with a unique key or if all songs purchased from a single account are authorized by the same key.
If it's the former, then transfer is easy. Revoke the per-song key from the original owner and issue a key for the new owner's account (he'd probably have to download the song from Apple's server, not from the previous owner, since the previous owner's file will have the revoked key in it.)
If it's the latter (as I suspect), then you're looking at something significanly more complicated (unless you want to transfer the entire Apple-ID account - which most people will be unwilling to do.)
What we're ultimately looking for is a way to re-key a file. If you have the original owner's account info and the new owner's account info, you can theoretically decryppt/de-key from one account and re-encrypt/re-key with the new owner's account. But Apple will never release such a program, since it would be easy to hack it such that the re-key part never happens - effectively removing the DRM. (And if public-key encryption is used, then you'd have to use the key that's kept secret in Apple's servers, which they definitely won't want to release.) It might be possible to do this if the file moves through Apple's server, and the re-keying happens remotely, but now you're getting Apple's servers and bandwidth involved - which means it won't be free.
But if you do it that way, there's no way to prove that the original owner didn't keep a backup copy that didn't get re-keyed.
In other words, I don't think transfer is really practical unless Apple is using unique per-download keys that can be revoked without revoking the entire account. And so far, I haven't heard of any such capability.
Does anyone know if robocode works right with this new version?
I don't know about robocode (never played it), but I have found that another Java game (Word Whomp) has incredible difference in performance between browsers. On Mozilla, it is unplayable. On Safari, it is nearly perfect. As far as I can tell, both use the same Apple-provided Java plugin.
If you haven't already done so, try several different browsers with your game and see if any perform better than others.
If you default on a loan enough, you'll get a letter from the collection agency along with a subpoena, you can either pay up or go to court. In a legal sense, this isn't much different.
It's tremendously different. A collection agency has proof that you defaulted on a loan.
DirecTV has no proof that any of these people have committed any crime. No matter what they'd like to claim in press releases, purchase of a SmartCard programmer is not proof that you are stealing DirecTV broadcasts.
They are threatening expensive legal action without any proof of wrondoing, and they are demanding money to make the threats go away. Sounds like a clear cut case of racketeering and extortion.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all of the WMA-based services have friendly DRM.
Apple's DRM is very simple: Upload to as many iPods as you want, play on up to 3 computers (which you can add and drop from your account), burn to as many CDs as you want (but no single playlist more than 10 times.)
The WMA-based services don't use the same DRM for every song. Some don't let you burn CDs. Some restrict the number of burns to an absolute number (like 3 or 5). Some don't let you add/drop computers (so you lose your songs when you get a new computer). Some expire if you don't maintain a paid subscription to the service.
If you're careful about the DRM associated with each song you download and don't download the ones that are more draconian, then yes, there won't be much of a difference. But if you aren't careful, the differences will come to bite you.
It's my understanding that the Beatles' management doesn't want their music sold over the internet. So you won't find it available for download from any legitimate site.
Your best bet here will be to (hopefully) find a "best of" compilation CD that has all the songs you want and rip it yourself.
Ideally, I'd like to see a player that can read a DVD-R full of music files.
My music collection is about 25G (mostly 128K AAC files, ripped with iTunes.) At about 4.2G per DVD, I could burn the entire collection onto about 6 DVDs. It would be really cool to stick one into a player and shuffle play the contents. Or even cooler - put them all into a 6-disc car changer and shuffle-play the entire lot while driving.
Yes, I realize that 25G at 128K is almost 18 days worth. The point is not to listen to it all in one sitting, but to be able to shuffle play every song I own. I currently do this at home from my computer, and have come to like the results. (Although it can sometimes be disturbing when it shuffles from a folk song to heavy metal to new-age :-) )
I considered them for a while. I changed my mind when I found that their selection isn't all that great.
I browsed their catalog (which you can do without subscribing) to see what their selection is like. I wanted to purchase the songs that I have on vinyl and the stuff I recorded off of the radio back in the 80's. (I figure that purchased MP3s will sound better than what I'd get by digitizing them myself.)
Out of the approximately 250 songs on my list, emusic had less than 10 of them. Given their subscription price, it ended up being cheaper to just buy those songs on CD at a discount music store. (A few well-placed "hits of the 80's" compilation albums can cover a nice cross-section of my list.)
Not true. Not true in the least.
My Mac destkop runs at 1920x1440 and even with that much real estate, there are still plenty of overlapping windows. And sometimes it's a pain to locate the one you want without a feature like Expose'.
During a typical session, my desktop will have open:
- AOL Instant Messenger (buddy list and a few chat windows)
- iTunes
- Mozilla (mail window and at least one browser window)
- Emacs (at 80x90 - having all that vertical space is really useful!)
- One or two Terminal windows
In addition to these (which are always open), I'll also have a few other apps that I'll quit after using them, including AppleWorks, iPhoto and Palm Desktop.It is true that larger screens will allow you to space out the windows you have open. But it's also true that once you get used to having such a screen, you start opening more windows.
Thanks. I haven't yet upgraded to Panther, so my information is all second-hand, and some of what I've read has turned out to be wrong.
YEEEEEeeeeeeess....
You have the option of formatting your drive as case sensitive, if you really want to.
Personally, I'd recommend against it, unless you have a really good reason to choose otherwise. Most Mac apps assume case insensitivity. For instance Dantz has this knowledgebase article regarding Panther and Retrospect. Note the paragraph which reads:
Interestingly, they say that this feature is only available on the server edition. Can anyone confirm or disprove this?
HFS+ actually supports an arbitrary number of forks, even though there are only standard definitions for the resource and data forks.
Not too long ago, it was common to find anti-Mac zealots routinely criticize Apple for having a resource fork. They had a wide variety of disparaging remarks to make against the concept. I wonder if these same people will maintain that attibude when Microsoft starts providing the same thing. Somehow, I don't think they will.
Microsoft's file systems do as much metadata as UNIX does. On FAT (and I think FAT32) every file a timestamp and a set of attribute bits (directory, read-only, hidden, system and archive). On NTFS, each file gains two more timestamps (so you have create, modify and access) and security attributs.
Of course, neither Windows nor UNIX supports all the metadata that MacOS does - file type, file creator, icon position, user comments, memory partition sizes (for classic apps), etc.
I think you're musunderstanding something.
A FileID is a persistent handle that refers to a file. It is only valid for a single disk volume. If a file is moved to a different volume, the ID changes.
In every respect that matters, it's functionally equivalent to an inode number.
The real question here is why nobody has made a UNIX API to open a file using a volume-ID of some kind (which may have to be defined) and the inode number. Using an API like this, UNIX apps could get the same functionality as Mac apps. Moving a filename around the directory tree would not affect a program's ability to open it.
Creating a hard link to the inode is unnecessary for an API like this. After all, the standard open() call already does all the requred work. It already has to convert a pathname into a volume/inode index as a part of its normal behavior.
My point is simply that if the card reader's speed is under 12Mbps, then it won't matter if the interface is FireWire or USB.
If the reader's speed is faster, of course, then the choice of interface probably will make a difference.
Once the GPL is invalidated, all of that GPL code reverts to a default copyright status, owned by the authors of the code. These authors have the right to charge whatever they want for the code, and anybody who doesn't pay up is in violation of the copyright.
Applied to Linux, just about everybody will be in violation. But the copyright holders don't have to sue them all.
The copyright holders can choose to sue some of the infringers. Like SCO. Let's see what happens to them when people like Richard Stallman decide to set the licensing terms for Emacs and GCC at a billion dollars per copy and conveniently choose to only sue SCO for copyright violation.
Some may claim that this is selective enforcement, but we're talking copyright, not criminal law. Record companies don't lose their copyrights if they only sue a small fraction of the millions who are in posession of pirated music. By that same token, owners of formerly-GPL'ed software won't lose their copyrights if they only sue one violator of their SCO-mandated copyright.
SCO will say a lot of things. Doesn't make them right about any of them.
The GPL doesn't say you must distribute software to anybody who wants it. The GPL says that if you distribute binaries to someone, then you must also make the source code available.
If I use and modify GPL code and keep the resulting product to myself, I am not violating anything. If I use and modify GPL code and distribute (with full sources, of course) only to people living in Idaho, and refuse to distribute it elsewhere, I am not violating anything.
I can even choose to charge a billion dollars for the product and I'm not in violation, as long as every paying customer gets a copy of the source code with it. (And those customers still have the right to give it away for free if they so desire.)
Unless national security laws prohibit distribution of sources to places where binary distributions are permitted, there is no conflict with the GPL.
But does it matter for a flash card reader?
If the speed of reading/writing CF cards is slower than 12Mbps, then a FW reader will be just as slow as a USB reader.
Am I the only one who realizes that this tech can be used with a wider database of substances to scan for things like Anthrax and other biotoxins that are already being sent to people in government offices?
I don't think a one-minute-per-item scan rate (what the article says they should be able to acheieve) is bad if the system is installed in the Senate's mail room, or other places that are likely targets for a bioweapon-laced letter. Of course, the process will have to be greatly sped up if anyone expects to use it on a wide scale (like in post offices.)
The question that I have is whether this will fog photographic film or damage magnetic media? If it does, then it can't be used for scanning mail.
This may explain why Microsoft bought a large chunk of Connectix and is now developing their own version of Virtual PC. The same tech that allows Mac and Windows users to boot multiple x86 operating systems can be used to allow AMD64 users to run 16-bit apps. What better way to provide legacy DOS support than by bundling a legacy x86 emulator into the OS?
Even better. Get CD binder pages and put them in an ordinary 3-ring binder. This way, you can insert new pages as your collection grows. This is much more convenient than leaving blank pages in the middle or reshuffling them all as you get new stuff.
For web pages, I couldn't care less. If I mistype a URL and get a search page instead of an error page, it's no big deal.
The problem is that this change doesn't just affect web pages. It affects every program that does a DNS lookup - which is almost everything.
This is not acceptable. If I mistype an address when sending mail, I want to get an immediate error back. I don't want a Verisign server to receive the message. And I don't want my mail server to keep on re-sending the message for five days (which is what will happen if they don't have a mail server at that address.)
If I use a spam filter that blocks mail that has bogus return addresses, it is now useless, because all addresses will now resolve as valid.
By making this change, Verisign has seriously crippled the usefulness of the internet.
A tool for web developers to test their pages against all known Mac browsers would have to be expensive. Some developer would have to carefully work out, and emulate, each browser's bugs. And they'd have to keep a big database of these bugs, and update it as each new revision comes out. After all version 1.1 of a browser may render differently from version 1.2 or 2.0, etc.
This is going to be difficult program to develop, which will be sold only to a limited audience, and it will need constant updates. I can't see a program like this selling for less than several hundred dollars, plus ongoing maintenance contracts.
And this assumes the program will be perfect. If it doesn't emulate everything perfectly, you will still get support calls from users reporting problems that you can't reproduce.
Now compare this to the price of just buying a Mac. The base-mdel eMac has a starting price of $800. If you are willing to buy a discontinued model (new, used or refurbushed), you can get one for even less. And now you will be able to actually run all those browsers instead of relying on a third-party approximation of what he thinks those browsers do.
Go right ahead. Add him to the "Foes" page of your SlashDot account and configure it to mod all his articles down to -1. Voila, you don't have to hear it anymore.
This forum is a perfect agument against you - anybody can speak, and you can choose to block anybody you don't want to listen to.
No. It's about making thieves pay for what they steal.
When a junk-mailer sends you an ad in the mail, he pays the postage. When a telemarketer calls you (as much as you may hate it) he pays for the call.
When a spammer sends you junk mail, he doesn't pay for it. He is routing the mail through unwilling third-parties (which has been ruled as criminal trespass in several court cases). He is making your ISP pay the cost to download and store that mail, and is making you pay (in time) to download the message in order to delete it.
This is the reason junk faxes are illegal. The sender doesn't pay for the paper and toner that his ad is consuming.
If the spammers were paying the costs of the spam, then you'd have a point. But they aren't.
The Constitution grants you the right to speak. It doesn't grant you the right to steal other people's property in order to be heard.
That's proof you bought a card programmer, not proof that you used it to steal DirecTV broadcasts.
There's a difference, even if DirecTV's legal department wants to pretend there isn't.
Interesting, from a technical standpoint.
The way I understand it, Apple's DRM ties the song to your Apple-ID account. When you authorize computers for playback, you tie those computers to the account. The act of de-authorizing a computer and authorizing a new computer involve a network connection to Apple's servers to make it all happen. When you play the song, the account in the computer is matched against the account in the song file (which will probably involve decryption at various levels, to prevent cheating.)
The big question is if each song downloaded is authorized with a unique key or if all songs purchased from a single account are authorized by the same key.
If it's the former, then transfer is easy. Revoke the per-song key from the original owner and issue a key for the new owner's account (he'd probably have to download the song from Apple's server, not from the previous owner, since the previous owner's file will have the revoked key in it.)
If it's the latter (as I suspect), then you're looking at something significanly more complicated (unless you want to transfer the entire Apple-ID account - which most people will be unwilling to do.)
What we're ultimately looking for is a way to re-key a file. If you have the original owner's account info and the new owner's account info, you can theoretically decryppt/de-key from one account and re-encrypt/re-key with the new owner's account. But Apple will never release such a program, since it would be easy to hack it such that the re-key part never happens - effectively removing the DRM. (And if public-key encryption is used, then you'd have to use the key that's kept secret in Apple's servers, which they definitely won't want to release.) It might be possible to do this if the file moves through Apple's server, and the re-keying happens remotely, but now you're getting Apple's servers and bandwidth involved - which means it won't be free.
But if you do it that way, there's no way to prove that the original owner didn't keep a backup copy that didn't get re-keyed.
In other words, I don't think transfer is really practical unless Apple is using unique per-download keys that can be revoked without revoking the entire account. And so far, I haven't heard of any such capability.
I don't know about robocode (never played it), but I have found that another Java game (Word Whomp) has incredible difference in performance between browsers. On Mozilla, it is unplayable. On Safari, it is nearly perfect. As far as I can tell, both use the same Apple-provided Java plugin.
If you haven't already done so, try several different browsers with your game and see if any perform better than others.
It's tremendously different. A collection agency has proof that you defaulted on a loan.
DirecTV has no proof that any of these people have committed any crime. No matter what they'd like to claim in press releases, purchase of a SmartCard programmer is not proof that you are stealing DirecTV broadcasts.
They are threatening expensive legal action without any proof of wrondoing, and they are demanding money to make the threats go away. Sounds like a clear cut case of racketeering and extortion.