It has about 60 codecs from unidentified sources with no particular attention to licensing that I can see. This package is often used as a workaround for Linux's generally poor support for video playback.
Actually, Ubuntu can do a pretty good job with most things with just the gstreamer plugins.
This "workaround" however, is quite often used as a workaround for WINDOWS generally poor OOTB media handling. Of course, Windows has other, even more "special" packages similar to this one - like that wonderful and friendly K-Lite codec pack.
So far as other companies looking the other way on "my infringement" - of what? What large companies? And how would they find out?
So Redhat contributes a lot of open source code... whoopee. Great for them. So does Novell, right? And IBM?
But I have no need for Suse either - not because it sucks, but because it throws a buncha stuff in the pot I don't want and it still uses that ass of a package system, RPM. And I have no need for an IBM - because I don't need a freaking mainframe in my house, I just need a single user desktop that works. And pointing out how Ubuntu does this well in ways those others mentioned sucks makes my post flamebait?
Jeesus, I didn't realize I was posting at mac.slashdot.org - or that a stupid package manager was such holy ground. I guess that explains why such a piece of shit packager is still in such widespread use, though... god forbid Redhat use a package system they didn't "invent"... or that actually works.
I guess this will just get me modded right through the floor then when I point out that half the fucking time I spent running Mandrake was spent hunting down RPMs that would actually work, trying to find information on why they didnt when they were supposed to, and how to fix my system when one of those RPMs that was supposed to work - didn't - but tried to anyway. The saddest irony of all is even when I went with Suse and had a problem getting tvtime to work (er, make that ANY tv app) and was fully prepared to shell out 25 bucks for a support call, I still couldn't find anyone who could make the damn thing work.
I guess that doesn't count though since I wasn't trying to configure FTP or mysql or some other gee-whiz piece of "infrastructure" software. And there are so many people running that stuff from their desktops and all... and who the hell wants to watch tv or a movie or play mp3s, right?
Yes, but maybe, just maybe, you'll get some form of support except packages update?
And probably - just likely - you'll need that support line to find someone to help sort out the breakage from the last updates via the STOOPID^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlovely RPM package manager.
Redhat might have something to offer server jockeys, but I've seen nothing it offers the desktop that hasn't already been done better - having now to face an uphile climb against all those existing Ubuntu installs.
Everyone I know who uses Ubuntu does so not because it's linux, but because it's ubuntu. Canonical has done a great job of building a community that is loyal in a way the corporate geeks at Redhat could never muster.
Ok maybe that's not entirely true - radio was important in the 50's and 60s. It might even have been important through the 70's and 80s. But where do you find "innovation" on the radio today?
Television isn't going away, the spectrum is just evolving. Radio could go away today and the only people it would really affect are christian shutins and right wing talk radio fanatics.
This is THE SUN we're talking about. How do we even know Sir Elton said these things? Or said all of them? We don't.
I like lots of Elton's old stuff; I've owned several copies fo Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and can't consider my hard drive operational without that particular collection of FLACs onboard. But even if he said these things I don't see that somehow making these statements any more a reflection of the reality.
Look, I'm almost 45 and I hear LOTS of new music I think is truly great. Yeay Yeah Yeahs, Smashing Pumpkins, Mumyi Troll, Linda, Bjork, Outkast - hell, from what I see there hasn't been a better time for music in this country since the early punk era of the late 1970s.
I have a hard time believing Elton John has never heard any of this stuff, or believes it all to be so much squat. Or maybe he's just sitting home listening to old Billy Joel albums and singing his own stuff at the piano. Or maybe he, too, is as clueless as those others who still think "radio is the most important tool for disseminating musical innovation..."
I seriously don't understand why there's this association of liking/using windows and being some kind of computer moron...
Ummm... maybe because so many posts like yours prove it so?
Yeah, its nice to install a piece of hardware and have it "just work" - that's one reason windows fails so often. If you've never had to deal with a modem, sound card, video card or network card that wouldn't install properly then you haven't been mucking with computers very long at all. The fact "everything" comes with windows drivers doesn't mean it will actually install properly, only that hardware makers know they have to appear to provide support for windows. The driver problem isn't because "windows is easier" or even more complete, it's just because vendors are lazy and secretive and largely don't want their own customers to be able to use the hardware they've purchased in any way except exactly how the vendor sees it.
And the number of user space programs that require you to "recompile the kernel" to complete an install are so few and far between as to be pretty much insignificant. Are you confusing the act of upgrading an existing installation with the initial act of installing software?
You use Solaris for coding... what? Java server applets?
I used to run mandrake. It was my distro of coice before ubuntu, and when ubuntu 5.10 or whatever it was hit I gladly left mandrake in the dust. RPM packages are a pain in the ass, and mandrake had this habit of "upgrading" disk encryption tools from release to release that ended up leaving me having to completely redo my encrypted partitions.
But what really did it was the support tools. I tried mandrake, suse, redhat and fedora and ubuntu had the easiest to use support tools. Mandrake's support forums absolutely sucked ass, and the only alternative was to list a request for paid support in their "geek squad." I actually resorted to this once and STILL didn't get an answer.
I rarely use the support forums now, but when I have an issue its usually easy to find help via google. There's this thing called "critical mass" beyond which the money doesnt matter anymore so much as the simple fact "everyone uses it."
If we had 10 million people (or even 6.5% of them) murdered in this country there would be a civil uprising - what little government was left (that could allow so many murders) would surely be overthrown by force.
Crime has been rising since shrub came to the whitehouse, but we're still talking maybe 20,000 killings a year - not even a percent of the population.
No, it's actually more like you took your car in for some work and the mechanic, while he was wiating for the air conditioning pump to pull a recharge vacuum, occupied himself by thumbing through the stack of magazines you left laying on the back seat.
Jefferson bought a ton of adjoining land from a country that had already claimed it. How the hell do you make the leap from that to us invading iraq, or even abducting banana republic leaders from small central american nations?
Jefferson did not have a history of repeatedly and offensively circumventing the constitution in the name of his rich buddies. In just the last 6 years how many times has our leadership acted in a way that, a century ago, would likely have had them charged with tyranny and facing a firing squad?
Dude, the stuff you just wrote is sadly typical of the blatherings of modern day americans who, it seems, have been completely misinformed as to the ideals held by those founders of this great nation.
NOT sticking our noses into forgeign domestic affairs is exactly the ideal held when the Constitution was penned. It's the only policy consistent with our domestic ideals of the time. That we have forgotten this on both fronts is exactly why we've not won a land war in nearly a century and everyone is pissed off at us.
Because you can "opt out" and tell the RIAA to go screw themselves if you like. And, in the example of Magnatune (and sites like them) this can be included right in the agreement - ie if you release a work to Magnatune you tick a box and they automatically handle the "opt out" notification to the RIAA.
Or, better, still, we get some sensible laws just as soon as someone takes the time to challenge this ridiculous law in federal court. It is, after all, a violation of copyright in that it allows the RIAA to essentially claim rights on your behalf that you may not want claimed... actually, it's little different than the Google "opt out" program the copyright statists are being so pissy over. Of course this essentially means exactly what I initially said will be the scenario because the RIAA is never going to go after a station that provably plays only "independant" material of the sort mentioned - because the last thing they want is such a precarious law to actually be tested.
Dude, there is no truth. Every fact is shaped by perception, and every perception is ultimately made from the pov of the person doing it. A comittee might agree on a collection of "facts" as they all see them (God's name is Allah, the world is flat, jews are responsible for economic oppression of gentiles) but that neither ensures the "facts" are accurate nor impartial.
A journalist's job is to report events, honestly and as he or she sees them, to his or her audience. That's all any can do.
You can get satellite service anywhere. Small dish on your rooftop, $249 investment and about 60 bucks a month and you got high speed service. It aint unlimited but you can still download in an 8 hour period more than you could grab in a week of dialup.
If you live in the continental US, there ARE alternatives. You may not like them, but the do exist.
The population down here is pretty well divided. My best friend is pretty much a racist, but he's up front about it - as opposed to the mess you get up north where people are rude, think nothing of lieing about the most trivial matters and seem to me, on the average, to be far more racist than down here. I have many cousins from up there, a few friends left over from my youth (I was born in ann arbor) and I can count on one hand the number among them who AREN'T racists - mostly of the most hateful variety - on one hand.
I've dated many black women. It's never been a problem except when I lived in LA. Even people in shopping malls would give us stares and mutterings under their breath. My cousin by marriage who is from south central insists he will never go back to LA, what he calls the most racist place he's ever lived.
Amazing, isn't it, how communities in the "racist south" of Alabama and Georgia are attracting so very many middle class black folk? "Stupid niggers" must just be too ignorant to know better, huh?
I just love it when yankees (converted or otherwise) go around spewing hatred toward southerners as if we were a homogenous "breed" of redneck, gun toting hillbillies. Bigots? When are you bleeding heart "liberal elites" going to wake up and smell the irony?
BTW I'm an admin and I work from home. That's right: I make what you yankees do and my expenses are almost nothing. So far as constitutional rights... seems to me its the northerners who incessantly demand to tell the rest of us what's right and wrong. Seems the notion of state's rights is lost on anyone north of the mason-dixon line.
Move to a country home in the deep south and get DSL. I live 7 miles from a town with a population of about 1000 people, a mile off the highway on a dirt road and I have 3Mbit dsl service that's pretty darn reliable. How someone can live in the city and not have dsl or high speed wireless service available amazes me. Heck, you should at least be able to get cheap fractional T1. If no one else has decent service and you live in a populated area stick up a wifi gateway and offer it yourself. If the cable service really does suck that bad it shouldn't be hard at all to find customers to help defray the cost of that shared T1.
No, I got that part too - but the test is wholly inconclusive if for no other reason than they only used headphones. I dont know about you but my entire music collection is on my pc and it's not just so i can fileserve to a portable player.
AAC isnt as heay handed as mp3 in many regards but I definitely can tell the diff with anything below 256kbps and nearly always I can tell the diff between 256kbps vbr (which is usually better than cbr) and lossless flac... and that's just on my "desktop system" which is a cheap wal-mart integrated dvd player and amp with some remarkably nice speakers given its $100 price tag - in my car (which also is not at all high end) the difference is even more clear.
Either way I read it, I see nothing that makes sense in their conclusion. If the files are easier to transcode then they NEED to be higher quality simply because there is greater expectation people will do so.
You are making an incorrect assumption as well as a bad comparison. Adding crc info to a file MAY take away bandwidth from the encode, but adding DRM of the type apple does this is not likely because the DRM would seem to be added on the fly AFTER the encode process (just as it is added to JPEG images from sites that employ watermarking - which, BTW, DOES degrade image quality as well as increasing filesize).
But this is not a simple watermark - though the DRM info is unique to each user, it's not at all reasonable to assume they are doing a full on the fly encode for each user as opposed to simply adding the drm info as a "wrapper" to an already existing AAC rip of the track.
These people couldn't even draw a reasonable conclusion employing logic, I fail to see how they could conduct a reliable test...
To our subjects' ears, there wasn't a tremendous distinction between the tracks encoded at 128Kb/s and those encoded at 256Kb/s. None of them were absolutely sure about their choices with either set of earphones, even after an average of five back-to-back A/B listening tests. That tells us the value in the Apple's and EMI's more expensive tracks lies solely in the fact that they're free of DRM restrictions.
Does this remind anyone else of the old story about the frog?
Scientist makes frog hop, frog jump four feet. Cuts one leg off, frog hops three feet. Researcher notes removing one leg makes the frog hop one foo less. Cuts another off, notes the frog hopes only 2 feet. Cuts another off, notes frog can hop only one foot when it has one leg. Cuts off remaining leg and when nothing he can do will incite he frog to hop, puts in notes "removing all legs from frog makes it deaf."
The DRM makes absoilutely no difference. In fact, I'd wager a DRM wrapped CD would still sound like a CD and a DRM wrapped 256kbps aac would still sound (and measure) exactly like an unprotected one. The difference in sound should have absolutely nothing to do with the absence or presence of DRM except under the most demanding (ie one of those uber high end systems with a golden ear where the most minute fluctuations in power supply coupling can aler the most minutely revealed parts of the sound... and probably not even then in a double blind abx).
DRM is simply a container, not a codec technology... but of course that doesn't suit the "cold, dead hands" anti DRM agenda so in fashion - so let's just make a completely insane conclusion and hope no one notices...
And THAT is the problem - reactionary responses from one issue to the next, never mind if they are based on logic or reason. The media hypes the most titillating stories to the point of makign the "problem" appear far worse than it is, society reacts like a herd of blathering sheep and politicians, afraid to lead with logic and reason that they may be removed from their lofty posts, bow down to their blatherings.
"At one point" society has felt disgusted about many things that are none of society's business.
This is why it's called the tyranny of the majority, my friend.
Not defending spammers (or baby rapists), but essentially calling any laws just and reasonable simply because "society put them there" is anathema to liberty. We were warned fo this hundreds of years ago, but the truth is that whole "logic and reason" thing really gets in the way of absolute government and corporate control, so few opportunities exist today to be reminded of such...
...a catholic isn't going to commit genocide because he/she knows that there will be a reckoning one day.
Without going godwin on you and pointing out the germany's participation in genocide was led by a populist appealing, at least in part, to the religious bent of the citizenry I'll just stick my nose in and interject...
"Aha! But NO one expects the Spanish inquisition!"
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It has about 60 codecs from unidentified sources with no particular attention to licensing that I can see. This package is often used as a workaround for Linux's generally poor support for video playback.
Actually, Ubuntu can do a pretty good job with most things with just the gstreamer plugins.
This "workaround" however, is quite often used as a workaround for WINDOWS generally poor OOTB media handling. Of course, Windows has other, even more "special" packages similar to this one - like that wonderful and friendly K-Lite codec pack.
So far as other companies looking the other way on "my infringement" - of what? What large companies? And how would they find out?
Duh. It's not about use, it's about distribution.
So Redhat contributes a lot of open source code... whoopee. Great for them. So does Novell, right? And IBM?
But I have no need for Suse either - not because it sucks, but because it throws a buncha stuff in the pot I don't want and it still uses that ass of a package system, RPM. And I have no need for an IBM - because I don't need a freaking mainframe in my house, I just need a single user desktop that works. And pointing out how Ubuntu does this well in ways those others mentioned sucks makes my post flamebait?
Jeesus, I didn't realize I was posting at mac.slashdot.org - or that a stupid package manager was such holy ground. I guess that explains why such a piece of shit packager is still in such widespread use, though... god forbid Redhat use a package system they didn't "invent"... or that actually works.
I guess this will just get me modded right through the floor then when I point out that half the fucking time I spent running Mandrake was spent hunting down RPMs that would actually work, trying to find information on why they didnt when they were supposed to, and how to fix my system when one of those RPMs that was supposed to work - didn't - but tried to anyway. The saddest irony of all is even when I went with Suse and had a problem getting tvtime to work (er, make that ANY tv app) and was fully prepared to shell out 25 bucks for a support call, I still couldn't find anyone who could make the damn thing work.
I guess that doesn't count though since I wasn't trying to configure FTP or mysql or some other gee-whiz piece of "infrastructure" software. And there are so many people running that stuff from their desktops and all... and who the hell wants to watch tv or a movie or play mp3s, right?
Yes, but maybe, just maybe, you'll get some form of support except packages update?
And probably - just likely - you'll need that support line to find someone to help sort out the breakage from the last updates via the STOOPID^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlovely RPM package manager.
Redhat might have something to offer server jockeys, but I've seen nothing it offers the desktop that hasn't already been done better - having now to face an uphile climb against all those existing Ubuntu installs.
Everyone I know who uses Ubuntu does so not because it's linux, but because it's ubuntu. Canonical has done a great job of building a community that is loyal in a way the corporate geeks at Redhat could never muster.
Ok maybe that's not entirely true - radio was important in the 50's and 60s. It might even have been important through the 70's and 80s. But where do you find "innovation" on the radio today?
Television isn't going away, the spectrum is just evolving. Radio could go away today and the only people it would really affect are christian shutins and right wing talk radio fanatics.
This is THE SUN we're talking about. How do we even know Sir Elton said these things? Or said all of them? We don't.
I like lots of Elton's old stuff; I've owned several copies fo Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and can't consider my hard drive operational without that particular collection of FLACs onboard. But even if he said these things I don't see that somehow making these statements any more a reflection of the reality.
Look, I'm almost 45 and I hear LOTS of new music I think is truly great. Yeay Yeah Yeahs, Smashing Pumpkins, Mumyi Troll, Linda, Bjork, Outkast - hell, from what I see there hasn't been a better time for music in this country since the early punk era of the late 1970s.
I have a hard time believing Elton John has never heard any of this stuff, or believes it all to be so much squat. Or maybe he's just sitting home listening to old Billy Joel albums and singing his own stuff at the piano. Or maybe he, too, is as clueless as those others who still think "radio is the most important tool for disseminating musical innovation..."
Aren't we already?
I seriously don't understand why there's this association of liking/using windows and being some kind of computer moron...
Ummm... maybe because so many posts like yours prove it so?
Yeah, its nice to install a piece of hardware and have it "just work" - that's one reason windows fails so often. If you've never had to deal with a modem, sound card, video card or network card that wouldn't install properly then you haven't been mucking with computers very long at all. The fact "everything" comes with windows drivers doesn't mean it will actually install properly, only that hardware makers know they have to appear to provide support for windows. The driver problem isn't because "windows is easier" or even more complete, it's just because vendors are lazy and secretive and largely don't want their own customers to be able to use the hardware they've purchased in any way except exactly how the vendor sees it.
And the number of user space programs that require you to "recompile the kernel" to complete an install are so few and far between as to be pretty much insignificant. Are you confusing the act of upgrading an existing installation with the initial act of installing software?
You use Solaris for coding... what? Java server applets?
I used to run mandrake. It was my distro of coice before ubuntu, and when ubuntu 5.10 or whatever it was hit I gladly left mandrake in the dust. RPM packages are a pain in the ass, and mandrake had this habit of "upgrading" disk encryption tools from release to release that ended up leaving me having to completely redo my encrypted partitions.
But what really did it was the support tools. I tried mandrake, suse, redhat and fedora and ubuntu had the easiest to use support tools. Mandrake's support forums absolutely sucked ass, and the only alternative was to list a request for paid support in their "geek squad." I actually resorted to this once and STILL didn't get an answer.
I rarely use the support forums now, but when I have an issue its usually easy to find help via google. There's this thing called "critical mass" beyond which the money doesnt matter anymore so much as the simple fact "everyone uses it."
If we had 10 million people (or even 6.5% of them) murdered in this country there would be a civil uprising - what little government was left (that could allow so many murders) would surely be overthrown by force. Crime has been rising since shrub came to the whitehouse, but we're still talking maybe 20,000 killings a year - not even a percent of the population.
No, it's actually more like you took your car in for some work and the mechanic, while he was wiating for the air conditioning pump to pull a recharge vacuum, occupied himself by thumbing through the stack of magazines you left laying on the back seat.
Jefferson bought a ton of adjoining land from a country that had already claimed it. How the hell do you make the leap from that to us invading iraq, or even abducting banana republic leaders from small central american nations?
Jefferson did not have a history of repeatedly and offensively circumventing the constitution in the name of his rich buddies. In just the last 6 years how many times has our leadership acted in a way that, a century ago, would likely have had them charged with tyranny and facing a firing squad?
Like the writings of Jefferson and Franklin...
Dude, the stuff you just wrote is sadly typical of the blatherings of modern day americans who, it seems, have been completely misinformed as to the ideals held by those founders of this great nation.
NOT sticking our noses into forgeign domestic affairs is exactly the ideal held when the Constitution was penned. It's the only policy consistent with our domestic ideals of the time. That we have forgotten this on both fronts is exactly why we've not won a land war in nearly a century and everyone is pissed off at us.
One comment and it's already dead - and not a cache link to be seen. Oh well, tune in tomorrow...
Because you can "opt out" and tell the RIAA to go screw themselves if you like. And, in the example of Magnatune (and sites like them) this can be included right in the agreement - ie if you release a work to Magnatune you tick a box and they automatically handle the "opt out" notification to the RIAA.
Or, better, still, we get some sensible laws just as soon as someone takes the time to challenge this ridiculous law in federal court. It is, after all, a violation of copyright in that it allows the RIAA to essentially claim rights on your behalf that you may not want claimed... actually, it's little different than the Google "opt out" program the copyright statists are being so pissy over. Of course this essentially means exactly what I initially said will be the scenario because the RIAA is never going to go after a station that provably plays only "independant" material of the sort mentioned - because the last thing they want is such a precarious law to actually be tested.
Magnatune and other *truly* indie publishers go on business as usual.
The RIAA doesn't need another 500 "internet stations." This might be the biggest non-event since the breakup of the Smiths.
Dude, there is no truth. Every fact is shaped by perception, and every perception is ultimately made from the pov of the person doing it. A comittee might agree on a collection of "facts" as they all see them (God's name is Allah, the world is flat, jews are responsible for economic oppression of gentiles) but that neither ensures the "facts" are accurate nor impartial.
A journalist's job is to report events, honestly and as he or she sees them, to his or her audience. That's all any can do.
You can get satellite service anywhere. Small dish on your rooftop, $249 investment and about 60 bucks a month and you got high speed service. It aint unlimited but you can still download in an 8 hour period more than you could grab in a week of dialup.
If you live in the continental US, there ARE alternatives. You may not like them, but the do exist.
The population down here is pretty well divided. My best friend is pretty much a racist, but he's up front about it - as opposed to the mess you get up north where people are rude, think nothing of lieing about the most trivial matters and seem to me, on the average, to be far more racist than down here. I have many cousins from up there, a few friends left over from my youth (I was born in ann arbor) and I can count on one hand the number among them who AREN'T racists - mostly of the most hateful variety - on one hand.
I've dated many black women. It's never been a problem except when I lived in LA. Even people in shopping malls would give us stares and mutterings under their breath. My cousin by marriage who is from south central insists he will never go back to LA, what he calls the most racist place he's ever lived.
Amazing, isn't it, how communities in the "racist south" of Alabama and Georgia are attracting so very many middle class black folk? "Stupid niggers" must just be too ignorant to know better, huh?
I just love it when yankees (converted or otherwise) go around spewing hatred toward southerners as if we were a homogenous "breed" of redneck, gun toting hillbillies. Bigots? When are you bleeding heart "liberal elites" going to wake up and smell the irony?
BTW I'm an admin and I work from home. That's right: I make what you yankees do and my expenses are almost nothing. So far as constitutional rights... seems to me its the northerners who incessantly demand to tell the rest of us what's right and wrong. Seems the notion of state's rights is lost on anyone north of the mason-dixon line.
Move to a country home in the deep south and get DSL. I live 7 miles from a town with a population of about 1000 people, a mile off the highway on a dirt road and I have 3Mbit dsl service that's pretty darn reliable. How someone can live in the city and not have dsl or high speed wireless service available amazes me. Heck, you should at least be able to get cheap fractional T1. If no one else has decent service and you live in a populated area stick up a wifi gateway and offer it yourself. If the cable service really does suck that bad it shouldn't be hard at all to find customers to help defray the cost of that shared T1.
No, I got that part too - but the test is wholly inconclusive if for no other reason than they only used headphones. I dont know about you but my entire music collection is on my pc and it's not just so i can fileserve to a portable player.
AAC isnt as heay handed as mp3 in many regards but I definitely can tell the diff with anything below 256kbps and nearly always I can tell the diff between 256kbps vbr (which is usually better than cbr) and lossless flac... and that's just on my "desktop system" which is a cheap wal-mart integrated dvd player and amp with some remarkably nice speakers given its $100 price tag - in my car (which also is not at all high end) the difference is even more clear.
Either way I read it, I see nothing that makes sense in their conclusion. If the files are easier to transcode then they NEED to be higher quality simply because there is greater expectation people will do so.
You are making an incorrect assumption as well as a bad comparison. Adding crc info to a file MAY take away bandwidth from the encode, but adding DRM of the type apple does this is not likely because the DRM would seem to be added on the fly AFTER the encode process (just as it is added to JPEG images from sites that employ watermarking - which, BTW, DOES degrade image quality as well as increasing filesize).
But this is not a simple watermark - though the DRM info is unique to each user, it's not at all reasonable to assume they are doing a full on the fly encode for each user as opposed to simply adding the drm info as a "wrapper" to an already existing AAC rip of the track.
These people couldn't even draw a reasonable conclusion employing logic, I fail to see how they could conduct a reliable test...
To our subjects' ears, there wasn't a tremendous distinction between the tracks encoded at 128Kb/s and those encoded at 256Kb/s. None of them were absolutely sure about their choices with either set of earphones, even after an average of five back-to-back A/B listening tests. That tells us the value in the Apple's and EMI's more expensive tracks lies solely in the fact that they're free of DRM restrictions.
Does this remind anyone else of the old story about the frog?
Scientist makes frog hop, frog jump four feet. Cuts one leg off, frog hops three feet. Researcher notes removing one leg makes the frog hop one foo less. Cuts another off, notes the frog hopes only 2 feet. Cuts another off, notes frog can hop only one foot when it has one leg. Cuts off remaining leg and when nothing he can do will incite he frog to hop, puts in notes "removing all legs from frog makes it deaf."
The DRM makes absoilutely no difference. In fact, I'd wager a DRM wrapped CD would still sound like a CD and a DRM wrapped 256kbps aac would still sound (and measure) exactly like an unprotected one. The difference in sound should have absolutely nothing to do with the absence or presence of DRM except under the most demanding (ie one of those uber high end systems with a golden ear where the most minute fluctuations in power supply coupling can aler the most minutely revealed parts of the sound... and probably not even then in a double blind abx).
DRM is simply a container, not a codec technology... but of course that doesn't suit the "cold, dead hands" anti DRM agenda so in fashion - so let's just make a completely insane conclusion and hope no one notices...
And THAT is the problem - reactionary responses from one issue to the next, never mind if they are based on logic or reason. The media hypes the most titillating stories to the point of makign the "problem" appear far worse than it is, society reacts like a herd of blathering sheep and politicians, afraid to lead with logic and reason that they may be removed from their lofty posts, bow down to their blatherings.
"At one point" society has felt disgusted about many things that are none of society's business.
This is why it's called the tyranny of the majority, my friend.
Not defending spammers (or baby rapists), but essentially calling any laws just and reasonable simply because "society put them there" is anathema to liberty. We were warned fo this hundreds of years ago, but the truth is that whole "logic and reason" thing really gets in the way of absolute government and corporate control, so few opportunities exist today to be reminded of such...
...a catholic isn't going to commit genocide because he/she knows that there will be a reckoning one day.
Without going godwin on you and pointing out the germany's participation in genocide was led by a populist appealing, at least in part, to the religious bent of the citizenry I'll just stick my nose in and interject...
"Aha! But NO one expects the Spanish inquisition!"