I have two remarks here. They're basically unrelated.
The first is this: I admire the way you participated in the process in this case. You educated yourself, formed an opinion, and communicated that opinion to your representatives. Good for you.
The second is this: you know who's to blame for the failure of this bill? The pro-gun lobby. That's right: not Feinstein, not the gun-control advocates. The pro-gun lobby is to blame here.
Take a perfectly good bill. Attach an amendment to it that goes a little bit farther than you'd want to go in a perfect world. What happens? The bill dies, dead dead dead, because some people were unwilling to compromise.
Guess what, folks? Compromise is the highest of all political virtues. The correct course of action here was for the gun lobby to say, "You know, a 10-round limit on magazines is not totally unacceptable. Let's start negotiating until we reach a point of consensus."
Didn't happen. Instead, the cry went out across the land: vote NO!
Damn shame.
(Line-item veto is the WRONG answer. It effectively puts legislative power in the hands of the president. The right answer is to let our representatives know that we want them to reach reasoned compromises, not to throw babies out in pails full of bathwater.)
When you say "Blank is a blank company," the idea you're trying to get across is that Blank makes its money by doing blank. All companies do things that do not directly lead them to profitability; that doesn't mean those things are key parts of the company's business plan.
Apple is a hardware company, because it makes money by selling hardware. Apple does not make money by selling software. (Check out their annual report if you don't believe me.)
Only in America will people say you are a failure for not making ENOUGH of a profit.
Get off of Mom's couch and go take a business class sometime. Because at the moment you're spouting off like a freakin' moron.
The idea of write-once-compile-anywhere is a pipedream. We've all known this since the early 1990's when we saw the failure of projects like Java AWT.
If you use a cross-platform GUI framework, you're going to produce substandard applications. That's pretty much the end of that.
So the user interface will have to be native for each target platform. That's fine. If you use the model-view-controller paradigm, the largest fraction of your application code can remain unchanged across platforms; only the view, the UI, needs to change.
Don't forget, however, Carbon is simply a stepping-stone API.
That's where you're wrong. Carbon is a full-fledged operating environment on Mac OS X, just like three out of the other four.
What are the other four, you ask? Well, we have Cocoa, of course, and Java. Then we have BSD; that's how programs like PostgreSQL can run with very little modification. Finally, the four environment, the red-headed stepchild, is Classic.
Four out of five of those environments are equal peers. Classic is meant to be a stepping-stone; nobody should be developing new Classic applications these days.
Carbon, however, will never be deployed on other platforms. It's a horrible, messy kludge composed of about 15 years of Macintosh API evolution plus the necessary changes to make it work on OS X.
Erm. Have you ever done any Carbon programming? Yes, it's inelegant compared to Cocoa, but so's everything else. Carbon is actually very clean. The kludgey stuff was in the classic Mac OS Toolbox API, and that's what got stripped out when Apple created Carbon.
Do you realize, for example, that the Mac OS Toolbox API was originally a Pascal API? You wanna talk about old-school.
I think that the titles cost way too much and I wonder if they really need to cost that much to recover R&D.
Of course not. If the goal is simply to recover development costs, all software is grossly overpriced. For that matter, with a few notable exceptions, so's pretty much everything else.
Let me introduce you to my little friend, the profit motive.
If you want to engage in a commercial venture, like coming up with the next big video game, you're going to need money. Lots of it. Millions of dollars, certainly; possibly tens of millions.
Where does that money come from? Your own pocket? Well, if you're lucky, sure. But most of the time it comes from investors. Investors are people who have money and who want more. If you have some money and you want to make more money, you've got a lot of options. You can buy and sell commodities or stocks. Or you can go to Vegas and bet on black. But lots of people believe that you get a better return--better odds, that is--by putting your money into an investment instead.
Now, which investment are you more likely to show an interest in? The one whose business plan calls for selling the product for the lowest price possible to recoup costs? Or the one that calls for a nice, healthy profit margin?
Yeah. The profit-y one.
That's how things happen. That's why CD's don't cost a nickel, and that's why video games cost $49.95.
Optical kerning is, as I understand it, a new auto-kerning algorithm in InDesign 3. Rather than kerning based on metrics, it kerns based on actual letter-forms, producing much more pleasing results. I use optical kerning for all type above about 12 points, within reason. It is apparently quite CPU-intensive, because InDesign really slows to a crawl when you turn on optical kerning for an entire page of body type.
Between optical kerning for display type and optical margin alignment for justified body type, InDesign 3 just kicks typographic ass.
Alot of people have animosity towards Adobe, myself included over various issues, but there is one thing that Adobe has that nobody else can hold a candle to: Photoshop.
Also Illustrator, InDesign, and a little thing called the Adobe Type Library.
Photoshop is a wonder, yes, but it's not the only horse in Adobe's barn. Hell, in my opinion it's not even the best one. InDesign 3 takes that accolade. (Optical kerning: hellooooo, nurse.)
Then you won't have any difficulty naming a single situation where it is illegal.
Reverse engineering of a content access control mechanism for any purpose other than interoperability is unlawful.
Pandering to the self-interest of a faceless corporation is stupid.
What's a faceless corporation? Every corporation is made up of individuals, individuals who work hard every day to provide for themselves and their families. The idea that you're not hurting anybody when you hurt a company is just silly.
Using your paid-for equipment and your paid-for data as you see fit, in accordance with the laws of the land, is not stupid.
It's stupid to, as the old saying goes, cut off your nose to spite your face. It's stupid to secure short-term gains at the cost of greater long-term gains. It's stupid to piss off companies who produce products you want to use by actively trying to undermine their business model. It's then doubly stupid to whine about how nobody's supporting your platform of choice afterwards.
Don't be an ass.
Hey, you started it, man. Try mulling over the notion that there might be smart people out there who think you're wrong on this. Try absorbing just the tiniest seed of doubt. Try considering for just a fraction of second that you might actually be mistaken.
For god's sake, consider for just a moment that you might be mistaken.
Reverse engineering is sometimes illegal. And reverse engineering things that you want for your platform when the people who produced them do not want them reverse-engineered is just stupid. It's shooting yourself in the foot.
How did the RIAA manage to convince all these people that "reverse engineering" and "fair play" is wrong?
Yes, that's it. It's all a result of the RIAA/MPAA/corporate media evil propaganda machine. It's simply inconceivable that somebody might actually hold an opinion on this matter that is contrary to yours.
There is a 30 second sample available for free for every single song available from the iTunes Music Store.
For many tracks, the previews are significantly longer than 30 seconds. At least some classical tracks and spoken-word tracks have previews that are as long as 90 seconds.
There's only one way for music commerce to be available to Linux users. It's a two-step process.
1. There must be a significant number of Linux users. There aren't. The various roadblocks associated with this are left for another discussion.
2. Linux users must restrain themselves. If the vendors see Linux users as a hostile environment, they're not going to ship their products on that platform, no matter what the market mass is. That means no reverse engineering, no hacking, no "just to see if I could," no "it's fair use, dammit!" No more moving projects off-shore to try to hide their obvious criminal nature. (If you want the law changed, lobby Congress.)
Isn't making unlimited CDs and running it on many computers part of "ease of use"?
No. What I meant is blindingly clear from context.
If iTunes was the only way to get the network seeded with Britney then your argument might be valid
You neglected to consider the fact that you can get the Britney Spears single for 99 in about ten seconds of searching and two minutes of downloading via iTunes. The resulting product will be (1) what you were looking for, (2) complete, and (3) of the expected quality.
This is not true of Kazaa or whatever. That's why iTunes succeeds even the face of Kazaa.
In this case it stops Apple selling tracks to users like me, who have MP3 players that aren't iPod.
I guarantee you, without a doubt in my mind, that you wouldn't buy your music from iTunes under any circumstances. Of this I have do doubt.
The option of writing out a CDR and ripping it back into MP3 is so overly complicated and time consuming
It's two clicks, and about five minutes.
The "DRM DOESN'T WORK" guy seemed to be pointing to the basic flaw of DRM, sooner or later you have to decrypt the data and it only takes 1 person to seed a piracy network with an unprotected copy.
And my point, which you still don't seem to be getting, is that DRM makes piracy inconvenient, and therefore it serves its purpose. It's easier for you to go to iTunes and get what you want than it is for you to pirate it. Therefore DRM does work.
The only novel thing iTunes brought to the market was considerably weakened DRM not more tracks than the competition.
Ease of use and brand recognition. iTunes' predecessors failed because they were obscure and difficult to use.
The DRM on iTunes has no effect on the unprotected DRM experience on Kazaa.
The fact that iTunes tracks have DRM makes it inconvenient for people to pirate them. It's easier to just buy them than it is to pirate them.
Without DRM I can play the iTunes tracks on my MP3 player, with DRM I can't, only iPod and CD players. So of course its worth more to me without the DRM than with.
But apparently the difference in value is (1) insignificant, or (2) not at all universal, because iTunes has succeeded. DRM, therefore, is not an impediment to success in the marketplace, as the "DRM DOESN'T WORK" guy seemed to think it was.
It wasn't the wide selection of records that caused iTunes to succeed, many other online services had bigger catalogues
On store--Buy Music--said they had a larger catalog, but it turned out they actually didn't. They were counting music they had not properly acquired the rights to sell.
The Kazaa copy has no DRM.
It's very difficult to find via Kazaa what you can get easily and quickly via iTunes. For example, it's virtually impossible to find a whole album via Kazaa; with iTunes, it's a one-click thing. There's no quality-control on Kazaa. It's incredibly easy to find tracks that are incomplete, mis-tagged, poorly encoded, or all three.
DRM reduces the perceived value of the music
Nonsense. If that were universally true, iTunes would not have succeeded to the degree that is has.
Some people think that individual ownership of private property should be abolished, too. Some people think that people should be thrown in jail for thinking the wrong things.
The fact that some people hold an opinion doesn't automatically lend that opinion credibility or credence. An opinion can be held, even widely held, and still be just plain stupid.
The second is downloading, where consumers want to see a movie (probably poor quality) before plunking down $20 to buy the DVD. The one that costs the industry money is the first, not the second.
WHAT? You can't possibly be serious, can you?
Look, we have to frame this discussion in terms of consumption. That's what we're talking about here: the consumption of music and movies and TV shows and whatnot. That's what's being sold: the act of consumption itself.
Imagine you run a restaurant. Every night at 9:00, a dozen teenagers come into your restaurant and order off the menu. They eat the food, then run out on the check.
Interpretation #1: These kids are stealing. They consumed the product and didn't pay for it. Lock the little bastards up.
Interpretation #2: They just wanted to taste the food before plunking $50 down for the meal. They didn't hurt anybody.
One of these interpretations is sane and reasonable, and the other is not.
The act of consuming a piece of digitized entertainment--a song, or a movie, or whatever--without paying for it is stealing, and it is against the law.
These are facts, not "dogma." Teaching kids these facts is education, not "indoctrination."
The success of the program isn't measured in how many kids failed to learn from it. The success is measured in how many kids did learn from it.
Drug use in America's high schools is at an all-time low.
You can even legally swap material, as long as it's not for commercial gain, said Seltzer. ''People tape movies on their VCRs and swap it with friends without getting arrested for piracy," she said.
Yeah, about that. That's not actually true. The second part is, I mean: people do pirate movies without getting arrested for it. But the first part is false. Just because you're not getting hauled off in leg-irons doesn't mean it's not against the law.
What's the diff in having 3 friends that swap movies off HBO or 3 Billion friends swapping some AC/DC albums?
The "diff," obviously, is a matter of degrees. Society can stand a little bit of unlawful activity. Too much of it, however, results in the collapse of the law.
It's the same as asking what the "diff" is between having a small infection under a fingernail and a massive, systemic case of sepsis overwhelming your entire body. It's all the same bacteria, right? What's the big deal?
iTunes is going strong--but would it be going any less strong if they had, by some magical miracle, convinced the RIAA to go with non-DRM protected AAC files?
Yes. Because they would not have the selection of music they have today. Many music copyright holders will not release their works digitally without some kind of technological protection.
Furthermore, do you think the DRM they do have stops anybody who wants to from copying the music?
Yes. Because it's easier, faster, and more convenient to just buy the damn thing.
Years ago, I read a book by Stewart Brand about the MIT Media Lab. In it, Brand interviewed Nicholas Negroponte on many topics. One of the topics was what Negroponte called the "digital paperback."
Nobody bothers to pirate paperback books. You could; there's nothing at all stopping you. But nobody bothers, because it's easier, cheaper, and faster to just buy your own copy.
What we need, Negroponte opined, is a digital paperback. He expressed the opinion at the time that the CDROM would be the digital paperback; obviously he was mistaken about that, because unencrypted CDROMs are just too darned easy to duplicate.
The encrypted M4P file, on the other hand, is a digital paperback. Yes, you can strip it of its encryption and make copies of it using any number of tools, not the least convenient of which is simply converting it to AIFF and back with iTunes and a CD burner. But it's just easier to buy your own.
But DRM will never, short of a police state, prevent people from copying DRM'd stuff.
Of course it will. All you have to do is make it more convenient to buy the real thing than to pirate it. Those who would pirate for profit will continue to do so, of course; those people are thieves, and rotten to the core. Let the police deal with them. For the average consumer, all you have to do is make it more convenient to buy than to steal. As we've seen time and again, people will pay a small price for a great deal of convenience: i.e., the paperback.
Slashdot Mirror
I have two remarks here. They're basically unrelated.
The first is this: I admire the way you participated in the process in this case. You educated yourself, formed an opinion, and communicated that opinion to your representatives. Good for you.
The second is this: you know who's to blame for the failure of this bill? The pro-gun lobby. That's right: not Feinstein, not the gun-control advocates. The pro-gun lobby is to blame here.
Take a perfectly good bill. Attach an amendment to it that goes a little bit farther than you'd want to go in a perfect world. What happens? The bill dies, dead dead dead, because some people were unwilling to compromise.
Guess what, folks? Compromise is the highest of all political virtues. The correct course of action here was for the gun lobby to say, "You know, a 10-round limit on magazines is not totally unacceptable. Let's start negotiating until we reach a point of consensus."
Didn't happen. Instead, the cry went out across the land: vote NO!
Damn shame.
(Line-item veto is the WRONG answer. It effectively puts legislative power in the hands of the president. The right answer is to let our representatives know that we want them to reach reasoned compromises, not to throw babies out in pails full of bathwater.)
When you say "Blank is a blank company," the idea you're trying to get across is that Blank makes its money by doing blank. All companies do things that do not directly lead them to profitability; that doesn't mean those things are key parts of the company's business plan.
Apple is a hardware company, because it makes money by selling hardware. Apple does not make money by selling software. (Check out their annual report if you don't believe me.)
Only in America will people say you are a failure for not making ENOUGH of a profit.
Get off of Mom's couch and go take a business class sometime. Because at the moment you're spouting off like a freakin' moron.
The idea of write-once-compile-anywhere is a pipedream. We've all known this since the early 1990's when we saw the failure of projects like Java AWT.
If you use a cross-platform GUI framework, you're going to produce substandard applications. That's pretty much the end of that.
So the user interface will have to be native for each target platform. That's fine. If you use the model-view-controller paradigm, the largest fraction of your application code can remain unchanged across platforms; only the view, the UI, needs to change.
this should be windows like, checkboxes, textboxes, menu items... lickable guiness
I'm all for it. But... how do you get the beer to come out of the screen? Some kind of custom video driver?
With OS-X being basically BSD, Their wouldn't be much work to do
Every time a Slashdotter posts this, God kills a kitten.
With ObjC, you're stuck with that @interface and [object message] crap, no matter what.
Let me see if I understand you. You're saying that you dislike Objective C because... the @ character is unattractive to you? What?
Don't forget, however, Carbon is simply a stepping-stone API.
That's where you're wrong. Carbon is a full-fledged operating environment on Mac OS X, just like three out of the other four.
What are the other four, you ask? Well, we have Cocoa, of course, and Java. Then we have BSD; that's how programs like PostgreSQL can run with very little modification. Finally, the four environment, the red-headed stepchild, is Classic.
Four out of five of those environments are equal peers. Classic is meant to be a stepping-stone; nobody should be developing new Classic applications these days.
Carbon, however, will never be deployed on other platforms. It's a horrible, messy kludge composed of about 15 years of Macintosh API evolution plus the necessary changes to make it work on OS X.
Erm. Have you ever done any Carbon programming? Yes, it's inelegant compared to Cocoa, but so's everything else. Carbon is actually very clean. The kludgey stuff was in the classic Mac OS Toolbox API, and that's what got stripped out when Apple created Carbon.
Do you realize, for example, that the Mac OS Toolbox API was originally a Pascal API? You wanna talk about old-school.
I think that the titles cost way too much and I wonder if they really need to cost that much to recover R&D.
Of course not. If the goal is simply to recover development costs, all software is grossly overpriced. For that matter, with a few notable exceptions, so's pretty much everything else.
Let me introduce you to my little friend, the profit motive.
If you want to engage in a commercial venture, like coming up with the next big video game, you're going to need money. Lots of it. Millions of dollars, certainly; possibly tens of millions.
Where does that money come from? Your own pocket? Well, if you're lucky, sure. But most of the time it comes from investors. Investors are people who have money and who want more. If you have some money and you want to make more money, you've got a lot of options. You can buy and sell commodities or stocks. Or you can go to Vegas and bet on black. But lots of people believe that you get a better return--better odds, that is--by putting your money into an investment instead.
Now, which investment are you more likely to show an interest in? The one whose business plan calls for selling the product for the lowest price possible to recoup costs? Or the one that calls for a nice, healthy profit margin?
Yeah. The profit-y one.
That's how things happen. That's why CD's don't cost a nickel, and that's why video games cost $49.95.
Optical kerning is, as I understand it, a new auto-kerning algorithm in InDesign 3. Rather than kerning based on metrics, it kerns based on actual letter-forms, producing much more pleasing results. I use optical kerning for all type above about 12 points, within reason. It is apparently quite CPU-intensive, because InDesign really slows to a crawl when you turn on optical kerning for an entire page of body type.
Between optical kerning for display type and optical margin alignment for justified body type, InDesign 3 just kicks typographic ass.
Alot of people have animosity towards Adobe, myself included over various issues, but there is one thing that Adobe has that nobody else can hold a candle to: Photoshop.
Also Illustrator, InDesign, and a little thing called the Adobe Type Library.
Photoshop is a wonder, yes, but it's not the only horse in Adobe's barn. Hell, in my opinion it's not even the best one. InDesign 3 takes that accolade. (Optical kerning: hellooooo, nurse.)
Then you won't have any difficulty naming a single situation where it is illegal.
Reverse engineering of a content access control mechanism for any purpose other than interoperability is unlawful.
Pandering to the self-interest of a faceless corporation is stupid.
What's a faceless corporation? Every corporation is made up of individuals, individuals who work hard every day to provide for themselves and their families. The idea that you're not hurting anybody when you hurt a company is just silly.
Using your paid-for equipment and your paid-for data as you see fit, in accordance with the laws of the land, is not stupid.
It's stupid to, as the old saying goes, cut off your nose to spite your face. It's stupid to secure short-term gains at the cost of greater long-term gains. It's stupid to piss off companies who produce products you want to use by actively trying to undermine their business model. It's then doubly stupid to whine about how nobody's supporting your platform of choice afterwards.
Don't be an ass.
Hey, you started it, man. Try mulling over the notion that there might be smart people out there who think you're wrong on this. Try absorbing just the tiniest seed of doubt. Try considering for just a fraction of second that you might actually be mistaken.
For god's sake, consider for just a moment that you might be mistaken.
Reverse engineering is sometimes illegal. And reverse engineering things that you want for your platform when the people who produced them do not want them reverse-engineered is just stupid. It's shooting yourself in the foot.
How did the RIAA manage to convince all these people that "reverse engineering" and "fair play" is wrong?
Yes, that's it. It's all a result of the RIAA/MPAA/corporate media evil propaganda machine. It's simply inconceivable that somebody might actually hold an opinion on this matter that is contrary to yours.
There is a 30 second sample available for free for every single song available from the iTunes Music Store.
For many tracks, the previews are significantly longer than 30 seconds. At least some classical tracks and spoken-word tracks have previews that are as long as 90 seconds.
There's only one way for music commerce to be available to Linux users. It's a two-step process.
1. There must be a significant number of Linux users. There aren't. The various roadblocks associated with this are left for another discussion.
2. Linux users must restrain themselves. If the vendors see Linux users as a hostile environment, they're not going to ship their products on that platform, no matter what the market mass is. That means no reverse engineering, no hacking, no "just to see if I could," no "it's fair use, dammit!" No more moving projects off-shore to try to hide their obvious criminal nature. (If you want the law changed, lobby Congress.)
Until both of these things happen, forget it.
It's not necessary to put the word "vet" in quotation marks. It's not slang or jargon. It means to examine carefully.
Um iTunes is not a success because of DRM. It's a success in SPITE of it.
iTunes could not exist were it not for DRM.
You can still pirate the audio [rather easily] yet that doesn't seem to be too rampant... hmm wonder why...
Because DRM makes it more convenient to buy it than to steal it.
Isn't making unlimited CDs and running it on many computers part of "ease of use"?
No. What I meant is blindingly clear from context.
If iTunes was the only way to get the network seeded with Britney then your argument might be valid
You neglected to consider the fact that you can get the Britney Spears single for 99 in about ten seconds of searching and two minutes of downloading via iTunes. The resulting product will be (1) what you were looking for, (2) complete, and (3) of the expected quality.
This is not true of Kazaa or whatever. That's why iTunes succeeds even the face of Kazaa.
In this case it stops Apple selling tracks to users like me, who have MP3 players that aren't iPod.
I guarantee you, without a doubt in my mind, that you wouldn't buy your music from iTunes under any circumstances. Of this I have do doubt.
The option of writing out a CDR and ripping it back into MP3 is so overly complicated and time consuming
It's two clicks, and about five minutes.
The "DRM DOESN'T WORK" guy seemed to be pointing to the basic flaw of DRM, sooner or later you have to decrypt the data and it only takes 1 person to seed a piracy network with an unprotected copy.
And my point, which you still don't seem to be getting, is that DRM makes piracy inconvenient, and therefore it serves its purpose. It's easier for you to go to iTunes and get what you want than it is for you to pirate it. Therefore DRM does work.
Let's host this program on Freenet, it is a project that make's the best use for what Freenet was made for.
Yes, great idea. Let's make sure that ideas like Freenet and the illegal piracy of music are inextricably linked in the mind of the public.
Dumbass.
The only novel thing iTunes brought to the market was considerably weakened DRM not more tracks than the competition.
Ease of use and brand recognition. iTunes' predecessors failed because they were obscure and difficult to use.
The DRM on iTunes has no effect on the unprotected DRM experience on Kazaa.
The fact that iTunes tracks have DRM makes it inconvenient for people to pirate them. It's easier to just buy them than it is to pirate them.
Without DRM I can play the iTunes tracks on my MP3 player, with DRM I can't, only iPod and CD players. So of course its worth more to me without the DRM than with.
But apparently the difference in value is (1) insignificant, or (2) not at all universal, because iTunes has succeeded. DRM, therefore, is not an impediment to success in the marketplace, as the "DRM DOESN'T WORK" guy seemed to think it was.
It wasn't the wide selection of records that caused iTunes to succeed, many other online services had bigger catalogues
On store--Buy Music--said they had a larger catalog, but it turned out they actually didn't. They were counting music they had not properly acquired the rights to sell.
The Kazaa copy has no DRM.
It's very difficult to find via Kazaa what you can get easily and quickly via iTunes. For example, it's virtually impossible to find a whole album via Kazaa; with iTunes, it's a one-click thing. There's no quality-control on Kazaa. It's incredibly easy to find tracks that are incomplete, mis-tagged, poorly encoded, or all three.
DRM reduces the perceived value of the music
Nonsense. If that were universally true, iTunes would not have succeeded to the degree that is has.
Some people think that individual ownership of private property should be abolished, too. Some people think that people should be thrown in jail for thinking the wrong things.
The fact that some people hold an opinion doesn't automatically lend that opinion credibility or credence. An opinion can be held, even widely held, and still be just plain stupid.
The second is downloading, where consumers want to see a movie (probably poor quality) before plunking down $20 to buy the DVD. The one that costs the industry money is the first, not the second.
WHAT? You can't possibly be serious, can you?
Look, we have to frame this discussion in terms of consumption. That's what we're talking about here: the consumption of music and movies and TV shows and whatnot. That's what's being sold: the act of consumption itself.
Imagine you run a restaurant. Every night at 9:00, a dozen teenagers come into your restaurant and order off the menu. They eat the food, then run out on the check.
Interpretation #1: These kids are stealing. They consumed the product and didn't pay for it. Lock the little bastards up.
Interpretation #2: They just wanted to taste the food before plunking $50 down for the meal. They didn't hurt anybody.
One of these interpretations is sane and reasonable, and the other is not.
The act of consuming a piece of digitized entertainment--a song, or a movie, or whatever--without paying for it is stealing, and it is against the law.
These are facts, not "dogma." Teaching kids these facts is education, not "indoctrination."
However, DARE has been an awesome failure.
The success of the program isn't measured in how many kids failed to learn from it. The success is measured in how many kids did learn from it.
Drug use in America's high schools is at an all-time low.
You can even legally swap material, as long as it's not for commercial gain, said Seltzer. ''People tape movies on their VCRs and swap it with friends without getting arrested for piracy," she said.
Yeah, about that. That's not actually true. The second part is, I mean: people do pirate movies without getting arrested for it. But the first part is false. Just because you're not getting hauled off in leg-irons doesn't mean it's not against the law.
What's the diff in having 3 friends that swap movies off HBO or 3 Billion friends swapping some AC/DC albums?
The "diff," obviously, is a matter of degrees. Society can stand a little bit of unlawful activity. Too much of it, however, results in the collapse of the law.
It's the same as asking what the "diff" is between having a small infection under a fingernail and a massive, systemic case of sepsis overwhelming your entire body. It's all the same bacteria, right? What's the big deal?
iTunes is going strong--but would it be going any less strong if they had, by some magical miracle, convinced the RIAA to go with non-DRM protected AAC files?
Yes. Because they would not have the selection of music they have today. Many music copyright holders will not release their works digitally without some kind of technological protection.
Furthermore, do you think the DRM they do have stops anybody who wants to from copying the music?
Yes. Because it's easier, faster, and more convenient to just buy the damn thing.
Years ago, I read a book by Stewart Brand about the MIT Media Lab. In it, Brand interviewed Nicholas Negroponte on many topics. One of the topics was what Negroponte called the "digital paperback."
Nobody bothers to pirate paperback books. You could; there's nothing at all stopping you. But nobody bothers, because it's easier, cheaper, and faster to just buy your own copy.
What we need, Negroponte opined, is a digital paperback. He expressed the opinion at the time that the CDROM would be the digital paperback; obviously he was mistaken about that, because unencrypted CDROMs are just too darned easy to duplicate.
The encrypted M4P file, on the other hand, is a digital paperback. Yes, you can strip it of its encryption and make copies of it using any number of tools, not the least convenient of which is simply converting it to AIFF and back with iTunes and a CD burner. But it's just easier to buy your own.
But DRM will never, short of a police state, prevent people from copying DRM'd stuff.
Of course it will. All you have to do is make it more convenient to buy the real thing than to pirate it. Those who would pirate for profit will continue to do so, of course; those people are thieves, and rotten to the core. Let the police deal with them. For the average consumer, all you have to do is make it more convenient to buy than to steal. As we've seen time and again, people will pay a small price for a great deal of convenience: i.e., the paperback.
STOP USING DRM!! IT'S FLAWED LOGIC THAT WON'T WORK!!!
More than a year on, iTunes is going strong. If anything, from the numbers it seems to be gaining momentum. Seems to me like it works just fine.