Purchases from the iTunes Music Store are available only in the United States and are not available in any other location. You agree not to use or attempt to use the service from outside of the available territory. Apple may use technologies to verify such compliance.
All this is saying is that you may not use the iTunes service outside the US. This is likely not of their own choice, but because of agreements with the record labels that restrict them to distribution in the US.
What about indie musicians that want their music to be available overseas. Or overseas musicians that want fans in their native country to have access to the online music.
This looks like yet another case of the RIAA putting a stranglehold on something to the exclusion of all others.
Of course, the recent article here on/. on Disney movies online basically show that it is the same thing for movies.
11. NON-UNITED STATES RESIDENTS. The Services are available only to customers located in the United States of America, excluding its territories. If you are outside of the United States of America, kindly refrain from using the Services. Movielink makes no representation that the Services and any content or products offered on the Services and their copyrights, trademarks, patents, and licensing arrangements, are appropriate or available for use in locations other than in the United States of America.
I'm a streaming media developer who has worked with Windows Media DRM...
What would be interesting to know is if the files are in someway crippled so that they won't play under Linux with something like Xine or MPlayer using the native win32 codecs. Not that I particularly care about the movies themselves (I have boycotted Disney for most of my life), it is more technical curiousity.
What is to prevent you from setting your computer clock forward to 2025 then downloading the movie to extend the 30 day period? Ethics.
Not ethics. Technology. The time stamp probably comes from the download server, and each time you open the file it checks with the download server (I would imagine) or another server of Disney's choosing.
The systems, in which voters are given computer-chip-bearing smart cards to operate the machines, could be tricked by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment, said Adam Stubblefield, a co-author of the paper.
"With what we found, practically anyone in the country -- from a teenager on up -- could produce these smart cards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like," Mr. Stubblefield said.
DirecTV to Johnny teenager: "Here is a letter. We know you were going to pirate our signal with that smart card programmer you just bought. See, we have the purchase records right here. Settle with us for $3500 and turn over the card programmer or we will sue you."
Johnny Teenager to DirecTV: "Uh, I don't even own your equipment. Come on guys, really. I turn 18 early next year and I can vote in the next election, I was just going to commit election fraud."
DirecTVr: "We don't believe you. We are going to sue."
Johnny: "How about this. I will vote straight Republican and cast multiple votes for anyone supporting extended copyrights, mandatory DRM, or a stronger DMCA."
There are lots of things which can be classified as "I want" such as
"I want the right to vote for representation"
"I want the ability to get married to someone of a different race or culture"
"I want my child to live in a place where he can worship the religon he wants to"
OK. I had to let al my mods in this discussion be undone, but you are way off base. The list you propse were all cases of equality.
Take voting. The white guy was allowed to vote, but the black guy that lived two blocks away, worked in the same factory, payed the same taxes and followed the same laws, was not allowed to vote.
The RIAA basically says, "no copying our copyrighted works." This is equality, it's across the board. The don't say, "OK residents of RI, NY, CA, WA, OR, and WY can pirate, everyone else must not." Or, "user of Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris can pirate, but Windows users are not allowed."
Not trying to troll here, but I think that saying SCO is responsible for even 2% of the kernel source is quite charitable. I don't see how they could have contributed that much.
The problem seems to be that the image is the size of the disk so reinstallation of Windows, once Linux is already installed, will overwrite all partitions. It's just a complete disk image on the DVD. One workaround is to do the Windows installation, install Linux, use something like g4u to create a copy of your disk.
I hate to double post this message (I already posted it once further up in the discussion), but I hate to see people think that the recovery CD will totally toast your Linux install. Here is my experience again:
That is not entirely correct. If you put your Linux install far enough back on the disk it will still be there. The Toshiba recovery program only makes the filesystem, it does not destructively format the disk, so only the first couple of gigs get overwritten. I sort of stumbled onto this little gem with my Toshiba last year. I had bought WindowsXP (please no flames, this was before I heard about Linux), formatted the drive, split it to two 10 BB partitions and installed XP. Several months later I learned of Linux and installed it on the second disk.
I realized that XP was just God-awful slow and decided I wanted to restore the original WinMe (since I wasn't using it for anything other than a few old games) and give away the XP CD to someone who would actually use it. I hadn't tweaked my Linux install too much, so I was planning on reinstalling after restoring Windows. As I read the documentation for parted I noticed that there was a rescue command, so I booted to parted, printed the partition table and copied it down. I then restored windows, resized the C: drive back to the size I had it at before and then rescued my Linux partition. I mounted the Linux partition, and ran 'chroot/mnt/linux lilo' and I was good to go.
I don't know if this will still work with the newer recovery DVDs, but I don't see why it wouldn't.
If you have to reinstall Windows, it'll kill your existing Linux partition because it will overwrite the drive with its image.
That is not entirely correct. If you put your Linux install far enough back on the disk it will still be there. The Toshiba recovery program only makes the filesystem, it does not destructively format the disk, so only the first couple of gigs get overwritten. I sort of stumbled onto this little gem with my Toshiba last year. I had bought WindowsXP (please no flames, this was before I heard about Linux), formatted the drive, split it to two 10 BB partitions and installed XP. Several months later I learned of Linux and installed it on the second disk.
I realized that XP was just God-awful slow and decided I wanted to restore the original WinMe (since I wasn't using it for anything other than a few old games) and give away the XP CD to someone who would actually use it. I hadn't tweaked my Linux install too much, so I was planning on reinstalling after restoring Windows. As I read the documentation for parted I noticed that there was a rescue command, so I booted to parted, printed the partition table and copied it down. I then restored windows, resized the C: drive back to the size I had it at before and then rescued my Linux partition. I mounted the Linux partition, and ran 'chroot/mnt/linux lilo' and I was good to go.
I don't know if this will still work with the newer recovery DVDs, but I don't see why it wouldn't.
Sorry about that. Basically, set a desired gain (small) before you buy a stock, then sell at that gain. Don't try to hold out for more, and don't sell until you get the gain you were looking for. Wait until the stock drops again, lather, rinse, repeat.
For example. Stock X is currently trading at $5/share. I decide I want to make $1 per share and buy 10000 shares. As soon as it hits $6 I sell, whether its tomorrow or next year. If you sell and the stock goes all the way to $100/share, then it doesn't matter because you made your goal. The idea with this technique is consistency. "Slow and steady wins the race." The whole idea is based on the premise that the market goes in cycles, so YMMV
Then look at RH's support model they are like Sun they don't want to deal with the lower tier customers, they only want to deal with the large corporations.
That is really too bad. I read a fascinating book, several years ago, called "Wall Street Money Mahcine" by Wade Cook. The guy has apparently made a boatload of money in the stock market (the book was written before '95). He got the idea for his theories on investing while he was working as a cabbie in NYC.
Basically, he had a bunch of buddies who were also cabbies that would wait to hit the big fares (i.e., airport runs, or anyhting over $20). Cook figured out that the most significant part of the fare was the $1-whatever to start the meter. So, he went around taking as many short runs as he could. His goal each shift was to get as many trips as possible, regardless of length. Once, he got it down he was making somehting like 2x to 3x what his buddies made.
The moral of the story is that Red Hat should not underestimate the value of the consumers plunking down $100 for a Red Hat boxed OS with each new version. If they did it right, that initial purhcase would mean more to them than the recurring RHN subscriptions.
Oh yes, you can peek into the source code and they can't. But how many computer users actually care about the source code?
Oh yes, you can peek under the hood of your car. But how many drivers actually care that they can open the hood?
Answer: almost all of them. This is because you can buy your car and get it serviced by the dealer (if you want) or any local garage. Right now, when you buy commercial software you can only get repairs (bug fixes and new features) from the dealer. As the software industry becomes more service oriented, this will have to change.
... Or, any sort of weapon for that matter. The military, like most large institutions, has a need for office automation apps, e-mail, and the like. And for this, they use Windows and Office. Warfighting software on warfighting networks is proprietary and doesn't run on Wintel machines.
You must have been out of the service for a while. You are only partly correct about the non-wintel stuff. In the units I have been assigned to (recce) we have used lots of Sun, SGI, and other propritary stuff from Lockheed and some other vendors. But we have plenty of wintel running on warfighting networks all over the place, including sending intel reports, directing remote assets, and *GASP* actually navigating our recce assets. And believe me, it is unsettling knowing that the navigator is up front on a Gateway laptop with Win95 telling him where to fly.
According to note at the bottom of the article, the results for Windows Server 2003 came from a previous test (I didn't bother to try and search for it, asthey didn't provide a direct link). It would seem that the comparison would be more valid if the tests were all done at the same time, or at least on the same hardware and have some statement to that effect.
I'm not trying to knock on the test, but just pointing out that even smal changes in hardware components or settings can make a big difference.
Otherwise, it looks like a good and thourough test.
Maybe when it has Photoshop, Shake, Final Cut, Illustrator, Quark, Acrobat, etc...
How about GIMP, CinePaint, Blender, the various LaTeX environments, GhostScript, OpenOffice.org, etc.
Until then OS X has nothing to fear on the desktop.
Looks like it's time to get worried.
Server side is completely different though. I run almost all Linux servers (one windows server and one sun server) but OS X kicks the shit out of Gnome/KDE/Enlightenment/etc... It's consistant, reliable and fast. Not to mention the coolest laptops around.
The various window managers are very quickly gaining in consistency, but otherwise I agree with you there
These are taxpayer dollars we're talking about. Shouldn't they be spent on something where the user is completely free to modify
You mean the way the user is able to modify MS Windows, MS Office, Oracle DB, Adobe Acrobat, IIS, and all the other software that government purchases with taxpayer dollars. Methinks you have lost perspective.
The solution is acutally quite simple. If you don't want your work to fall under the GPL, don't base it on GPL software. How hard is that? Just do it all yourself and you can license however you want.
I mean, if you want to use Windows applications, just install the Windows that came free with your computer. For the cost of Win4Lin or Wine, you can get a whole nother hard drive to dedicate to Windows, and it will be fully compatible.
Are you trolling on purpose or are you just ignorant? First, Windows is not free. The cost is built in to the machine, so you pay for it one way or another. Second, I am not willing to waste 3 to 8 minutes every single time I need to bring up IE (to verify a page I am developing renders half way correct) or some other such thing, so I run IE and a couple of other windows apps (games that were given to me by a friend) in WINE.
On a related note, how come there are no Linux emulators for Windows? Is it because Windows has better alternatives to any Linux program, or is there some sort of GPL patent issue?
OK, here you are showing just plain ignorance. There are machine emulators out there. Have you ever hear of Bochs or VMWare? Both of them are available for windows and Linux (and some other OSes) and both will emulate a machine well enough to run windows, linux, and some other OSes. Those just happen to be the two I know of the top of my head without searching, I'm sure there are others.
SPI is a non-profit organization which was founded to help organizations
develop and distribute open hardware and software. We encourage programmers
to use any license that allows for the free modification,
redistribution and use of software, and hardware developers to distribute
documentation that will allow device drivers to be written for their product.
Then do what I do. Refuse to use their service. My bank didn't allow me to use Mozilla on Linux, bye bye bank....
<snip>
Don't cave in. All over the world there is one thing people understand. Money.
I agree with you in principle. But, this the U.S. government, not a bank. It's my payroll, not an account. Believe me, I understand money, especially mine. At least for now, I can still get my pay statement in the mail, but what happens when they stop mailing them out (like when they went to exclusively direct deposit)?
At least I recently talked to a supervisor in the tech support shop (I managed to a get phone number to them) who seems to be more helpful than that twit of a tech who responded to my first email.
I have stopped telling safari to use the IE "user agent" because of this. I want people to know that I use something that isn't Microsoft and sooner or later this is going to make a difference. Especially with the fact that M$ has officially dropped their IE for OS X.
Boy would I love to join you there. Unfortunately there are still some websites that flat out refuse to load into anything other than IE, most notably the website where I access my payroll information to verify I was paid correctly). I emailed tech support and their reply was, "we only support IE in Windows, get partition magic and install windows on your computer." It's a tough fight righ now.
The only solution is to make it unprofitable. I suggest planting whatever program Sen. Hatch plans on using for destroying computers into all the adware on the internet, I'm guessing the people who download that are the same people who actually buy stuff from spam.
Ahh.... No. I help lots of my friends unfsck their computers from things like adware and viruses, and I have noticed that the majority of people who end up with adware on their computers (all intelligent college students) end up with it for two reasons 1) they use MSIE and 2) they fail to understand that IE's design makes it so that the simple act of visiting a website will make you subject to viruses, drive-by downloads, adware, and many other goodies that take advantage of IE's "extensible interface."
This usually results in me educating them on 1) the dangers of clicking "yes" on any dialog box without actually reading it, 2) enabling ActiveX and JScript by default, and 3) the virtues of using a well designed browser. I then remove the adware, install Mozilla, show them how to turn off software downloads and popup windows and they are quite happy.
I can honestly say that not one single person I have helped out such a predicament would actually buy anything from spam. As a matter of fact, they are usually pretty good at spotting spam, they just don't know how to get rid of it (i.e., filter it before it gets to them).
Your claim that artists are being cheated out of their revenue is more of a popular myth than anything else. The vast majority of musicians are dying to get contracts with record companies.
Of course they are dying to get contracts with RIAA comapnies. The RIAA controls the talent, the means of production, and all the distribution channels (to speak of). They have no other choice than to make a deal with the devil. At least it looks as though this is starting to change with more indie networks cropping up to provide actual quality music (as opposed to the cookie-cutter crap the RIAA releases).
Slashdot Mirror
All this is saying is that you may not use the iTunes service outside the US. This is likely not of their own choice, but because of agreements with the record labels that restrict them to distribution in the US.
What about indie musicians that want their music to be available overseas. Or overseas musicians that want fans in their native country to have access to the online music.
This looks like yet another case of the RIAA putting a stranglehold on something to the exclusion of all others.
Of course, the recent article here on /. on Disney movies online basically show that it is the same thing for movies.
From the Movielink website's terms of service:
I'm a streaming media developer who has worked with Windows Media DRM...
What would be interesting to know is if the files are in someway crippled so that they won't play under Linux with something like Xine or MPlayer using the native win32 codecs. Not that I particularly care about the movies themselves (I have boycotted Disney for most of my life), it is more technical curiousity.
What is to prevent you from setting your computer clock forward to 2025 then downloading the movie to extend the 30 day period? Ethics.
Not ethics. Technology. The time stamp probably comes from the download server, and each time you open the file it checks with the download server (I would imagine) or another server of Disney's choosing.
The systems, in which voters are given computer-chip-bearing smart cards to operate the machines, could be tricked by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment, said Adam Stubblefield, a co-author of the paper.
"With what we found, practically anyone in the country -- from a teenager on up -- could produce these smart cards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like," Mr. Stubblefield said.
DirecTV to Johnny teenager: "Here is a letter. We know you were going to pirate our signal with that smart card programmer you just bought. See, we have the purchase records right here. Settle with us for $3500 and turn over the card programmer or we will sue you."
Johnny Teenager to DirecTV: "Uh, I don't even own your equipment. Come on guys, really. I turn 18 early next year and I can vote in the next election, I was just going to commit election fraud."
DirecTVr: "We don't believe you. We are going to sue."
Johnny: "How about this. I will vote straight Republican and cast multiple votes for anyone supporting extended copyrights, mandatory DRM, or a stronger DMCA."
DirecTV: "We think your terms are acceptable."
There are lots of things which can be classified as "I want" such as
"I want the right to vote for representation"
"I want the ability to get married to someone of a different race or culture"
"I want my child to live in a place where he can worship the religon he wants to"
OK. I had to let al my mods in this discussion be undone, but you are way off base. The list you propse were all cases of equality.
Take voting. The white guy was allowed to vote, but the black guy that lived two blocks away, worked in the same factory, payed the same taxes and followed the same laws, was not allowed to vote.
The RIAA basically says, "no copying our copyrighted works." This is equality, it's across the board. The don't say, "OK residents of RI, NY, CA, WA, OR, and WY can pirate, everyone else must not." Or, "user of Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris can pirate, but Windows users are not allowed."
Sadly, you have confused the issue.
They don't own the other 98% of the kernel source
Not trying to troll here, but I think that saying SCO is responsible for even 2% of the kernel source is quite charitable. I don't see how they could have contributed that much.
The problem seems to be that the image is the size of the disk so reinstallation of Windows, once Linux is already installed, will overwrite all partitions. It's just a complete disk image on the DVD. One workaround is to do the Windows installation, install Linux, use something like g4u to create a copy of your disk.
I hate to double post this message (I already posted it once further up in the discussion), but I hate to see people think that the recovery CD will totally toast your Linux install. Here is my experience again:
That is not entirely correct. If you put your Linux install far enough back on the disk it will still be there. The Toshiba recovery program only makes the filesystem, it does not destructively format the disk, so only the first couple of gigs get overwritten. I sort of stumbled onto this little gem with my Toshiba last year. I had bought WindowsXP (please no flames, this was before I heard about Linux), formatted the drive, split it to two 10 BB partitions and installed XP. Several months later I learned of Linux and installed it on the second disk.
I realized that XP was just God-awful slow and decided I wanted to restore the original WinMe (since I wasn't using it for anything other than a few old games) and give away the XP CD to someone who would actually use it. I hadn't tweaked my Linux install too much, so I was planning on reinstalling after restoring Windows. As I read the documentation for parted I noticed that there was a rescue command, so I booted to parted, printed the partition table and copied it down. I then restored windows, resized the C: drive back to the size I had it at before and then rescued my Linux partition. I mounted the Linux partition, and ran 'chroot /mnt/linux lilo' and I was good to go.
I don't know if this will still work with the newer recovery DVDs, but I don't see why it wouldn't.
If you have to reinstall Windows, it'll kill your existing Linux partition because it will overwrite the drive with its image.
That is not entirely correct. If you put your Linux install far enough back on the disk it will still be there. The Toshiba recovery program only makes the filesystem, it does not destructively format the disk, so only the first couple of gigs get overwritten. I sort of stumbled onto this little gem with my Toshiba last year. I had bought WindowsXP (please no flames, this was before I heard about Linux), formatted the drive, split it to two 10 BB partitions and installed XP. Several months later I learned of Linux and installed it on the second disk.
I realized that XP was just God-awful slow and decided I wanted to restore the original WinMe (since I wasn't using it for anything other than a few old games) and give away the XP CD to someone who would actually use it. I hadn't tweaked my Linux install too much, so I was planning on reinstalling after restoring Windows. As I read the documentation for parted I noticed that there was a rescue command, so I booted to parted, printed the partition table and copied it down. I then restored windows, resized the C: drive back to the size I had it at before and then rescued my Linux partition. I mounted the Linux partition, and ran 'chroot /mnt/linux lilo' and I was good to go.
I don't know if this will still work with the newer recovery DVDs, but I don't see why it wouldn't.
Sorry about that. Basically, set a desired gain (small) before you buy a stock, then sell at that gain. Don't try to hold out for more, and don't sell until you get the gain you were looking for. Wait until the stock drops again, lather, rinse, repeat.
For example. Stock X is currently trading at $5/share. I decide I want to make $1 per share and buy 10000 shares. As soon as it hits $6 I sell, whether its tomorrow or next year. If you sell and the stock goes all the way to $100/share, then it doesn't matter because you made your goal. The idea with this technique is consistency. "Slow and steady wins the race." The whole idea is based on the premise that the market goes in cycles, so YMMV
Then look at RH's support model they are like Sun they don't want to deal with the lower tier customers, they only want to deal with the large corporations.
That is really too bad. I read a fascinating book, several years ago, called "Wall Street Money Mahcine" by Wade Cook. The guy has apparently made a boatload of money in the stock market (the book was written before '95). He got the idea for his theories on investing while he was working as a cabbie in NYC.
Basically, he had a bunch of buddies who were also cabbies that would wait to hit the big fares (i.e., airport runs, or anyhting over $20). Cook figured out that the most significant part of the fare was the $1-whatever to start the meter. So, he went around taking as many short runs as he could. His goal each shift was to get as many trips as possible, regardless of length. Once, he got it down he was making somehting like 2x to 3x what his buddies made.
The moral of the story is that Red Hat should not underestimate the value of the consumers plunking down $100 for a Red Hat boxed OS with each new version. If they did it right, that initial purhcase would mean more to them than the recurring RHN subscriptions.
One billion (with a B) dollars
Canadain?
That would be like what, like US$ 150,000?
Oh yes, you can peek into the source code and they can't. But how many computer users actually care about the source code?
Oh yes, you can peek under the hood of your car. But how many drivers actually care that they can open the hood?
Answer: almost all of them. This is because you can buy your car and get it serviced by the dealer (if you want) or any local garage. Right now, when you buy commercial software you can only get repairs (bug fixes and new features) from the dealer. As the software industry becomes more service oriented, this will have to change.
You must have been out of the service for a while. You are only partly correct about the non-wintel stuff. In the units I have been assigned to (recce) we have used lots of Sun, SGI, and other propritary stuff from Lockheed and some other vendors. But we have plenty of wintel running on warfighting networks all over the place, including sending intel reports, directing remote assets, and *GASP* actually navigating our recce assets. And believe me, it is unsettling knowing that the navigator is up front on a Gateway laptop with Win95 telling him where to fly.
They will range like so:
Insightful
Funny
Offtopic
Troll
Informative
Flamebait
I believe you have forgotten "Redundant" and "Intersting."
Now I would like 25% of all patent royalties you receive.
According to note at the bottom of the article, the results for Windows Server 2003 came from a previous test (I didn't bother to try and search for it, asthey didn't provide a direct link). It would seem that the comparison would be more valid if the tests were all done at the same time, or at least on the same hardware and have some statement to that effect.
I'm not trying to knock on the test, but just pointing out that even smal changes in hardware components or settings can make a big difference.
Otherwise, it looks like a good and thourough test.
Maybe when it has Photoshop, Shake, Final Cut, Illustrator, Quark, Acrobat, etc...
How about GIMP, CinePaint, Blender, the various LaTeX environments, GhostScript, OpenOffice.org, etc.
Until then OS X has nothing to fear on the desktop.
Looks like it's time to get worried.
Server side is completely different though. I run almost all Linux servers (one windows server and one sun server) but OS X kicks the shit out of Gnome/KDE/Enlightenment/etc... It's consistant, reliable and fast. Not to mention the coolest laptops around.
The various window managers are very quickly gaining in consistency, but otherwise I agree with you there
the Inca ... invented a form of binary code more than 500 years before the invention of the computer
Somehow I don't think SCO can claim the IP rights on this one...or can they?
These are taxpayer dollars we're talking about. Shouldn't they be spent on something where the user is completely free to modify
You mean the way the user is able to modify MS Windows, MS Office, Oracle DB, Adobe Acrobat, IIS, and all the other software that government purchases with taxpayer dollars. Methinks you have lost perspective.
The solution is acutally quite simple. If you don't want your work to fall under the GPL, don't base it on GPL software. How hard is that? Just do it all yourself and you can license however you want.
I mean, if you want to use Windows applications, just install the Windows that came free with your computer. For the cost of Win4Lin or Wine, you can get a whole nother hard drive to dedicate to Windows, and it will be fully compatible.
Are you trolling on purpose or are you just ignorant? First, Windows is not free. The cost is built in to the machine, so you pay for it one way or another. Second, I am not willing to waste 3 to 8 minutes every single time I need to bring up IE (to verify a page I am developing renders half way correct) or some other such thing, so I run IE and a couple of other windows apps (games that were given to me by a friend) in WINE.
On a related note, how come there are no Linux emulators for Windows? Is it because Windows has better alternatives to any Linux program, or is there some sort of GPL patent issue?
OK, here you are showing just plain ignorance. There are machine emulators out there. Have you ever hear of Bochs or VMWare? Both of them are available for windows and Linux (and some other OSes) and both will emulate a machine well enough to run windows, linux, and some other OSes. Those just happen to be the two I know of the top of my head without searching, I'm sure there are others.
There's hardly one big open-source organisation entitled to all the money.
What about Software in the Public Interest?
From the home page:
Looks like we have a winner!
Then do what I do. Refuse to use their service. My bank didn't allow me to use Mozilla on Linux, bye bye bank. ...
<snip>
Don't cave in. All over the world there is one thing people understand. Money.
I agree with you in principle. But, this the U.S. government, not a bank. It's my payroll, not an account. Believe me, I understand money, especially mine. At least for now, I can still get my pay statement in the mail, but what happens when they stop mailing them out (like when they went to exclusively direct deposit)?
At least I recently talked to a supervisor in the tech support shop (I managed to a get phone number to them) who seems to be more helpful than that twit of a tech who responded to my first email.
I have stopped telling safari to use the IE "user agent" because of this. I want people to know that I use something that isn't Microsoft and sooner or later this is going to make a difference. Especially with the fact that M$ has officially dropped their IE for OS X.
Boy would I love to join you there. Unfortunately there are still some websites that flat out refuse to load into anything other than IE, most notably the website where I access my payroll information to verify I was paid correctly). I emailed tech support and their reply was, "we only support IE in Windows, get partition magic and install windows on your computer." It's a tough fight righ now.
The only solution is to make it unprofitable. I suggest planting whatever program Sen. Hatch plans on using for destroying computers into all the adware on the internet, I'm guessing the people who download that are the same people who actually buy stuff from spam.
Ahh.... No. I help lots of my friends unfsck their computers from things like adware and viruses, and I have noticed that the majority of people who end up with adware on their computers (all intelligent college students) end up with it for two reasons 1) they use MSIE and 2) they fail to understand that IE's design makes it so that the simple act of visiting a website will make you subject to viruses, drive-by downloads, adware, and many other goodies that take advantage of IE's "extensible interface."
This usually results in me educating them on 1) the dangers of clicking "yes" on any dialog box without actually reading it, 2) enabling ActiveX and JScript by default, and 3) the virtues of using a well designed browser. I then remove the adware, install Mozilla, show them how to turn off software downloads and popup windows and they are quite happy.
I can honestly say that not one single person I have helped out such a predicament would actually buy anything from spam. As a matter of fact, they are usually pretty good at spotting spam, they just don't know how to get rid of it (i.e., filter it before it gets to them).
I would hardly call it myhthical.
(Hint: it is referenced 153 times in the Old Testament of the Bible: 2Sa5:7 1Ki8:1 2Ki19:21 2Ki19:31 1Ch11:5 2Ch5:2 Ps2:6 Ps9:11 Ps9:14 Ps14:7 Ps20:2 Ps48:2 Ps48:11 Ps48:12 Ps50:2 Ps51:18 Ps53:6 Ps69:35 Ps74:2 Ps76:2 Ps78:68 Ps84:7 Ps87:2 Ps87:5 Ps97:8 Ps99:2 Ps102:13 Ps102:16 Ps102:21 Ps110:2 Ps125:1 Ps126:1 Ps128:5 Ps129:5 Ps132:13 Ps133:3 Ps134:3 Ps135:21 Ps137:1 Ps137:3 Ps146:10 Ps147:12 Ps149:2 SoS3:11 Is1:8 Is1:27 Is2:3 Is3:16 Is3:17 Is4:3 Is4:4 Is4:5 Is8:18 Is10:12 Is10:24 Is10:32 Is12:6 Is14:32 Is16:1 Is18:7 Is24:23 Is28:16 Is29:8 Is30:19 Is31:4 Is31:9 Is33:5 Is33:14 Is33:20 Is34:8 Is35:10 Is37:22 Is37:32 Is40:9 Is41:27 Is46:13 Is49:14 Is51:3 Is51:11 Is51:16 Is52:1 Is52:2 Is52:7 Is52:8 Is59:20 Is60:14 Is61:3 Is62:1 Is62:11 Is64:10 Is66:8 Je3:14 Je4:6 Je4:31 Je6:2 Je6:23 Je8:19 Je9:19 Je14:19 Je26:18 Je30:17 Je31:6 Je31:12 Je50:5 Je50:28 Je51:10 Je51:24 Je51:35 Lam1:4 Lam1:6 Lam1:17 Lam2:1 Lam2:4 Lam2:6 Lam2:8 Lam2:10 Lam2:13 Lam2:18 Lam4:2 Lam4:11 Lam4:22 Lam5:11 Lam5:18 Jl2:1 Jl2:15 Jl2:23 Jl2:32 Jl3:16 Jl3:17 Jl3:21 Am1:2 Am6:1 Ob1:17 Ob1:21 Mi1:13 Mi3:10 Mi3:12 Mi4:2 Mi4:7 Mi4:8 Mi4:10 Mi4:11 Mi4:13 Zep3:14 Zep3:16 Zec1:14 Zec1:17 Zec2:7 Zec2:10 Zec8:2 Zec8:3 Zec9:9 Zec9:13)
Your claim that artists are being cheated out of their revenue is more of a popular myth than anything else. The vast majority of musicians are dying to get contracts with record companies.
Of course they are dying to get contracts with RIAA comapnies. The RIAA controls the talent, the means of production, and all the distribution channels (to speak of). They have no other choice than to make a deal with the devil. At least it looks as though this is starting to change with more indie networks cropping up to provide actual quality music (as opposed to the cookie-cutter crap the RIAA releases).