OK, I'm currently using a proxy server inside China. IP 218.28.135.196:8080
Tried others too, with following results:
61.233.144.194:80 www.freetibet.org works. Surprise. An attempt to access www.tibet.com (The Official Webpage of Tibet's Government in Exile). Result: connection reset. After this, a reset connection after attempting to connect _any_ page. Must be a temporary ban.
202.103.252.86:3128 More careful this time; attempt www.cnn.com first. It works. www.bbc.co.uk works, as does www.freetibet.org. www.tibet.com. Whoops, connection reset again, regardless of the proxy. And ban again.
And now this final attempt. CNN works. Hit reply on Slashdot. Works. Type "taiwan independence" to Safari's Google search box and hit return. Got a reply from MS ISA proxy server that "host not available". Attempt CNN. Still works. Try that tibet.com again with predictable results: Connection reset. Have to turn proxy off before hitting submit on Slashdot.
So the Great Firewall is there. And Chinese authorities definitely do not like Tibet's Government in Exile.
Sheesh. Apple's shipment status tells me that they have shipped a new iPod mini to me via TNT today. But Google does not search TNT tracking ID's. And for some reason even TNT's own webpage is unable to find it.
It's different here in Finland than in the States -- if stuff is bundled (like Windows is), it is bundled, and nothing will change that: You can freely refuse to accept the bundled stuff, but that does not make you eligible to any kind of refund. Shrink-wrapped licenses that are not really signed won't apply anyway (which also means that you're free to resell OEM stuff etc.).
And for sure there is demand for laptops sans Windows; perhaps you can't get a Fujitsu laptop or other branded laptop, but just go to verkkokauppa.com, for example, choose to customise your own laptop, and you'll save 133.90 € when you choose a "without OS" option instead of XP Pro. That option is, in fact, the default one.
I got my Mac with Jaguar, and found that the Panther upgrade was worthwhile. Unlike with Windows, the OS X update resulted in a faster machine.
Upgrades can still include nasty surprises, though. I have a 12" PowerBook, bought in May 2003. That 1st generation of 12" PBooks runs rather hot, and Apple was critised of that from the beginning. I was already aware of that fact before I bought my machine, however, but it was not any problem for me (it is all about comfort, nothing is actually overheating), so I purchased it anyway.
When releasing OS 10.3.2 Apple made it to be a problem for me -- not the heat, but the noise. Along with it shipped a new version of AppleADM103.kext, which remarkably lowered the system temperature where the fan of the machine spins up. Now I was pissed; this all happened without any warning and the box became noisy as hell as the fan ran almost constantly, while previously it had started up only now and then. I felt like the machine was no longer the same I had paid for, but some badly engineered noisy box instead.
There was a solution, though: Downgrading the said kext to version shipped with 10.3.0. To this day this has worked well, but now I'm afraid what I should do with Tiger. The main Darwin version number has probably changed along with it, so I'm not sure if my downgrade hack would work anymore. Otherwise I'd like to upgrade.
Does anyone on Slashdot have any suggestions what I should do with this problem?
But what about all possible privacy and security issues? I mean, we're dealing with personal medical data here, and the sentence "A second level would involve a home sensor network, including for example a PC wirelessly receiving this information." was already enough to get me somewhat alarmed, thinking about all the possible viruses, troijans and such that would most likely have infected this said (most likely Windows) PC. Second, the sentence "Finally, this home network would be able to alert an hospital network if needed." also made me nervous, when thinking of any system sending my medical data anywhere, unless it already has my explicit consent for that.
Now: How are all this issues solved, I'd like to ask?
Airport Extreme is just a MiniPCI slot using a rebadged card (maker unknown).
It has Broadcom's chipset, which you will soon realise if you attempt to use Linux in your Mac, as Broadcom is unfortunately one of those anti-OSS WLAN chip makers.
Now your error is that we don't know if it will be "too late" or that we have to "act now" It will be too late to take preventative measures but that doens't mean that the problem could not be corrected. or that we cannot take effective measures.
Wrong. If it happening because of us, then we don't know for certain how much we can slow it down anymore. There you are right. But corrected? Sure as hell we cannot just turn the knob back when it has already happened; this would require some weird method to effectively make the environment significantly colder (several degrees for the glaciers to reform). How do you think that could be done?
Second, we would likely have developed lots of new high technology stuff along the way, creating many entirely new businesses. These businesses and the value they would have added to the economies of the countries that would have developed them wouldn't be going away.
This is another assumption. It's possible. Of course it's also possible that Mobile and Exxon will corener this market as soon as it looks like it could materialize and nothing will change.
Extremely unlikely. Do you really think that U.S. or any other western country would like to jump back to dependence of non-renewable and mostly imported oil, when it once would have made the turn to renewables? When the transition would have been made, Exxon and the like would probably already be firmly in hydrogen distribution business or something similar (hint: at least Shell is already experimenting with that quite a lot).
Overall, hydrogen seems to be already coming as a new energy distribution method that will reduce local pollution in the future; it is its production methods that currently suck from global warming point of view, as they're still mostly based on burning of fossil fuels.
Can you buy a bow and arrows in Europe? How bout daggers or swords? These are also items whose primary purpose is killing living things. Should those be outlawed?
No -- I didn't propose totally outlawing anything, not even firearms. I just proposed having stricter control over them.
My point here is that weapon control is not a black and white issue. It's a line that must be drawn somewhere, saying some weapons are ok, others are not.
Exactly. But the U.S. discussion about the matter seems to be like it would be a 1-bit issue. See, when it is a constitutional right, it cannot be limited as long as the person not under some sort of punishment and is declared mentally capable of managing his/her own life. What I tried to say is that bearing arms should be a privilege -- like it is elsewhere in the world -- not a right. I didn't actually propose outlawing anything. But if it'd be a privilege, people would need to get a license before getting any firearms. And to get a license, you'd probably need to show that you know how to handle and to store weapons safely, and that you're not known to be mentally incapable of posessing them.
Writing an anti-SUV argument wasn't actually my intention, but it seems it you took it as such. I used SUVs as an example, because they are usually heavier than "ordinary" cars, thus consuming more fuel, and thus having larger CO2 emissions, so converting a SUV to use an energy source that does not emit CO2 would be more beneficial than converting an average car, and SUVs are undeniably popular in the U.S. But same would apply to other cars.
Besides, when the term SUV is used in negative context, it is usually to refer to vechiles, which are not real off-road cars like Jeeps and Land Rovers, and are almost invariably used on solid roads. Since the introduction of SUVs the difference between them and truly off-road capable vechiles has naturally become rather blurred, but if you compare Land Rover Defender or Mercedes Benz G to BMW X5 or Volvo XC 90, you will know what I mean.
What comes to F1 and the likes -- their social example is potentially rather bad, but from CO2-emissions point of view they are insignificant marginal stuff.
I would wager that the vehicles heading into China aren't equipped with the emission controls mandated elsewhere in the world.
1) Emission regulations are usually only about truly polluting emissions, which can be handled using catalytic converters. CO2 emissions, OTOH, are not polluting anything but are still contributing to global warming.
2) If someone actually knows he can clarify this, but I'd be rather surprised if new cars imported to China would not actually have catalytic converters, even if they are not actually mandatory. And I'd guess even Chinese authorities are not that stupid that they would not require them already, given the general pollution of Chinese cities. They are not rocket science, after all.
What comes to the first issue: it is U.S. internal politics, so I don't worry about it that much. If the Americans want to let any nutjob out there to have guns, it is their problem, as long as it happens within their borders, i.e. they are only killing each other.
Not that I wouldn't find it insane, though. The pro-firearms people always say that "guns don't kill people, people do" as their main defense. But same applies to cars, and still driving a car is not a constitutional right, but a special privilege granted only for those, who have obtained a driver's license. And yet killing living things -- including, but not limited to humans -- is the primary function guns are actually designed for, but this is definitely not the case with cars.
The problem with global warming instead just seems to be that when people are not absolutely sure that global warming happens and that CO2 emissions caused by humans are actually contributing to it, they are willing to do nothing, as they feel that the preventative measures are too expensive to take without certainty of their necessity and effectiveness.
Unfortunately, this viewpoint is just as shortsighted as quarter-year capitalism -- and like that, it seems to be most common in the U.S. The problem is that these people do not realise two facts about the measures that should be taken to stop the expected global warning.
1) That if the humans have, in fact, contributing to global warming, as is assumed, the preventative measures must be taken now to be effective. If we postpone this until we have the bulletproof evidence, then it means that large-scale global warming is already happening, and it will be too late to take any preventative measures; we would have no option left but to deal with the conseqences, and we already know that that would become helluva lot more expensive than any preventative measures as the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica would melt in large scale, raising the sea level several metres and the extreme weather systems would become even much more common than they are now. Over time, it would probably cost a lot of human lives, too.
2) That if we take the preventative measures, and we'll find out later that we could have never done anything to stop the global warming, or that it wasn't actually even happening in first place, the technology we had developed wouldn't still be in vain; first of all, we wouldn't be dependent of oil anymore, which problem would need to be solved anyway, as oil is not really renewable energy source.
Second, we would likely have developed lots of new high technology stuff along the way, creating many entirely new businesses. These businesses and the value they would have added to the economies of the countries that would have developed them wouldn't be going away.
Car is a good analogy again, as Americans love their SUVs; consider, that in future SUVs would all be using fuel cells. Now, to avoid CO2 emissions, the hydrogen used in those must not be produced using fossil fuels. Nuclear is a good option, of course, but fission is not renewable either, and then we'd yet have to deal with all the waste, which still seems to be somewhat problematic. So how about if U.S. would just invest so much money to fusion research (still pocket money comparing to the war in Iraq), that it would become the leading provider of fusion technology in the world, for example? An entirely possible scenario. Lots of extra research among renewables would not be bad idea either. The way to turn all this into good business will be there, if political will is.
Oh, but you could still use that for your advantage. I bet the folks at IBM would love to sell you that Novell or RH setup -- naturally along with their own services & support contract -- and voilà, what was bought was from IBM, you got Linux, and nobody got fired. Assuming that that old rule still applies, of course...
FYI: It is perfectly reasonable to have home servers on a real-world DMZ, if you actually live on one; there are other DMZs in the world than just the one around the Korean demarcation line, although it is probably best known. See Åland, for example.
Actually, when CmdrTaco originally made his statement, he probably meant WiFi. So it is probably still not wireless in a sense that you could actually sync your music wirelessly (bluetooth is way too slow for that purpose).
Incidentally, I'm saying that DRM is unworkable because there will always be the analog loophole, even if really got watermarking systems are developed.
Yeah, but I didn't even meant it to stop determined people. The fact is just that most people who are used to CD ripping - that is, insert CD, click "import" in iTunes and pop, three minutes later your songs are ready to be shared - will find analog recording so labouring that they simply won't bother doing it for P2P only. Commercial pirates are still going to record or get some sophisticated software to remove the watermark directly, but as they're doing it in volumes and for profit, you can still go after them by traditional means.
Ordinary P2P users simply wouldn't bother anymore, as if the songs would be only watermarked but not restricted. You could still play them with every single gadget you ever have, and drop copies to your friends that you know you can trust not to share them in the net. BUT if you'd share them with everyone, you'd need to do the time-consuming process of re-recording, which most people would find so complicated operation that they simply wouldn't bother, or otherwise the songs would instantly get tracked back to you.
See, it's a bit like speed limits on highways: if you're speeding +10 km/h or less, you know that the police most likely won't bother; but if you drive +20 km/h instead, you know that you now have a good chance to get ticketed. And if you're driving +40, your license must be pretty cheap to you.
Watermarking would be like a bit like this; you would have fair use, but openly sharing in P2P would get you busted. This would be acceptable by most people. Real DRM is not acceptable, because people will feel that they've been played fool when they find out that the usage is restricted.
Current situation is more like all the highway patrols would've been eliminated, and full-blown DRM would be like the speed limits would be enforced by GPS tracking. Neither is truly acceptable.
The labels definitely are not mentally there. Downloadable music still has this huge little bump on its way called DRM, and because CD is the only cat around that has been able to get out of the bag without DRM-wrapping, it will stay around for a looong time.
RIAA etc. just won't allow any sort of new formats (be it a disc like SACD/DVD-A or downloadable like AAC/MP3/OGG/WMA or FLAC) to get into widespread distribution (except by illegal means) without being wrapped in DRM. But as RedBook or even anything close enough to it - that is, to work in most players - makes adding any truly effective DRM impossible, and CDs already are in widespread distribution, they will stay around.
Lack of DRM and relatively high quality without lossy compression mean easy convertability, and thus the people who need that will still demand CDs, despite their higher prices comparing to services like iTMS.
Unfortunately, the labels are not mentally even there. And there are quite a lot of people who just will tolerate actual usage restrictions. So there we are again - CDs just will stay around. For a long time.
I can't wait until we can ride SpaceShipThree across the Atlantic in 20 minutes!
...and imagine still wasting one hour travelling to the air/spaceport, three ours in check-in and security lanes, half an hour on the other end to get your luggage back, and yet one hour travelling off the port.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'm currently using a proxy server inside China.
IP 218.28.135.196:8080
Tried others too, with following results:
61.233.144.194:80
www.freetibet.org works. Surprise.
An attempt to access www.tibet.com (The Official Webpage of Tibet's Government in Exile). Result: connection reset. After this, a reset connection after attempting to connect _any_ page. Must be a temporary ban.
202.103.252.86:3128
More careful this time; attempt www.cnn.com first. It works.
www.bbc.co.uk works, as does www.freetibet.org.
www.tibet.com. Whoops, connection reset again, regardless of the proxy. And ban again.
And now this final attempt. CNN works. Hit reply on Slashdot. Works. Type "taiwan independence" to Safari's Google search box and hit return. Got a reply from MS ISA proxy server that "host not available". Attempt CNN. Still works. Try that tibet.com again with predictable results: Connection reset. Have to turn proxy off before hitting submit on Slashdot.
So the Great Firewall is there. And Chinese authorities definitely do not like Tibet's Government in Exile.
Sheesh. Apple's shipment status tells me that they have shipped a new iPod mini to me via TNT today. But Google does not search TNT tracking ID's. And for some reason even TNT's own webpage is unable to find it.
It's a long time to wait...
leaving the only choice to be to take out the battery when you're on a lappy
This is bullshit. Just press ctrl+command+power to reset a laptop.
It's different here in Finland than in the States -- if stuff is bundled (like Windows is), it is bundled, and nothing will change that: You can freely refuse to accept the bundled stuff, but that does not make you eligible to any kind of refund. Shrink-wrapped licenses that are not really signed won't apply anyway (which also means that you're free to resell OEM stuff etc.).
And for sure there is demand for laptops sans Windows; perhaps you can't get a Fujitsu laptop or other branded laptop, but just go to verkkokauppa.com, for example, choose to customise your own laptop, and you'll save 133.90 € when you choose a "without OS" option instead of XP Pro. That option is, in fact, the default one.
Posted by Cliff on Fri April 01, 0:01 (EET, aka UTC + 3 (DST))
Um, this "getting respect" thing must be the first of April fool jokes today?
Does this mean that even uninstalling Acrobat itself won't remove the said toolbar?
If does, then I understand whining about it. Not otherwise.
...and I've stated the reason before.
Why it has to be so hard to implement this kind of basic functionality? There are at least three bugs in Camino's Bugzilla that are related to this.
I got my Mac with Jaguar, and found that the Panther upgrade was worthwhile. Unlike with Windows, the OS X update resulted in a faster machine.
Upgrades can still include nasty surprises, though. I have a 12" PowerBook, bought in May 2003. That 1st generation of 12" PBooks runs rather hot, and Apple was critised of that from the beginning. I was already aware of that fact before I bought my machine, however, but it was not any problem for me (it is all about comfort, nothing is actually overheating), so I purchased it anyway.
When releasing OS 10.3.2 Apple made it to be a problem for me -- not the heat, but the noise. Along with it shipped a new version of AppleADM103.kext, which remarkably lowered the system temperature where the fan of the machine spins up. Now I was pissed; this all happened without any warning and the box became noisy as hell as the fan ran almost constantly, while previously it had started up only now and then. I felt like the machine was no longer the same I had paid for, but some badly engineered noisy box instead.
There was a solution, though: Downgrading the said kext to version shipped with 10.3.0. To this day this has worked well, but now I'm afraid what I should do with Tiger. The main Darwin version number has probably changed along with it, so I'm not sure if my downgrade hack would work anymore. Otherwise I'd like to upgrade.
Does anyone on Slashdot have any suggestions what I should do with this problem?
OK, you're just joking.
But what about all possible privacy and security issues? I mean, we're dealing with personal medical data here, and the sentence "A second level would involve a home sensor network, including for example a PC wirelessly receiving this information." was already enough to get me somewhat alarmed, thinking about all the possible viruses, troijans and such that would most likely have infected this said (most likely Windows) PC. Second, the sentence "Finally, this home network would be able to alert an hospital network if needed." also made me nervous, when thinking of any system sending my medical data anywhere, unless it already has my explicit consent for that.
Now: How are all this issues solved, I'd like to ask?
Airport Extreme is just a MiniPCI slot using a rebadged card (maker unknown).
It has Broadcom's chipset, which you will soon realise if you attempt to use Linux in your Mac, as Broadcom is unfortunately one of those anti-OSS WLAN chip makers.
There'a a lot of raw nerves these days.
Oh. I understand. My apologies for being disdainful.
Anyway, China adopted Euro 1 emission standards in 1999, so catalytic converters are manatory.
Well, that's what I thought. Good to know.
Wrong. If it happening because of us, then we don't know for certain how much we can slow it down anymore. There you are right. But corrected? Sure as hell we cannot just turn the knob back when it has already happened; this would require some weird method to effectively make the environment significantly colder (several degrees for the glaciers to reform). How do you think that could be done?
This is another assumption. It's possible. Of course it's also possible that Mobile and Exxon will corener this market as soon as it looks like it could materialize and nothing will change.
Extremely unlikely. Do you really think that U.S. or any other western country would like to jump back to dependence of non-renewable and mostly imported oil, when it once would have made the turn to renewables? When the transition would have been made, Exxon and the like would probably already be firmly in hydrogen distribution business or something similar (hint: at least Shell is already experimenting with that quite a lot).
Overall, hydrogen seems to be already coming as a new energy distribution method that will reduce local pollution in the future; it is its production methods that currently suck from global warming point of view, as they're still mostly based on burning of fossil fuels.
Can you buy a bow and arrows in Europe? How bout daggers or swords? These are also items whose primary purpose is killing living things. Should those be outlawed?
No -- I didn't propose totally outlawing anything, not even firearms. I just proposed having stricter control over them.
My point here is that weapon control is not a black and white issue. It's a line that must be drawn somewhere, saying some weapons are ok, others are not.
Exactly. But the U.S. discussion about the matter seems to be like it would be a 1-bit issue. See, when it is a constitutional right, it cannot be limited as long as the person not under some sort of punishment and is declared mentally capable of managing his/her own life. What I tried to say is that bearing arms should be a privilege -- like it is elsewhere in the world -- not a right. I didn't actually propose outlawing anything. But if it'd be a privilege, people would need to get a license before getting any firearms. And to get a license, you'd probably need to show that you know how to handle and to store weapons safely, and that you're not known to be mentally incapable of posessing them.
Writing an anti-SUV argument wasn't actually my intention, but it seems it you took it as such. I used SUVs as an example, because they are usually heavier than "ordinary" cars, thus consuming more fuel, and thus having larger CO2 emissions, so converting a SUV to use an energy source that does not emit CO2 would be more beneficial than converting an average car, and SUVs are undeniably popular in the U.S. But same would apply to other cars.
Besides, when the term SUV is used in negative context, it is usually to refer to vechiles, which are not real off-road cars like Jeeps and Land Rovers, and are almost invariably used on solid roads. Since the introduction of SUVs the difference between them and truly off-road capable vechiles has naturally become rather blurred, but if you compare Land Rover Defender or Mercedes Benz G to BMW X5 or Volvo XC 90, you will know what I mean.
What comes to F1 and the likes -- their social example is potentially rather bad, but from CO2-emissions point of view they are insignificant marginal stuff.
I would wager that the vehicles heading into China aren't equipped with the emission controls mandated elsewhere in the world.
1) Emission regulations are usually only about truly polluting emissions, which can be handled using catalytic converters. CO2 emissions, OTOH, are not polluting anything but are still contributing to global warming.
2) If someone actually knows he can clarify this, but I'd be rather surprised if new cars imported to China would not actually have catalytic converters, even if they are not actually mandatory. And I'd guess even Chinese authorities are not that stupid that they would not require them already, given the general pollution of Chinese cities. They are not rocket science, after all.
I am not American but European.
What comes to the first issue: it is U.S. internal politics, so I don't worry about it that much. If the Americans want to let any nutjob out there to have guns, it is their problem, as long as it happens within their borders, i.e. they are only killing each other.
Not that I wouldn't find it insane, though. The pro-firearms people always say that "guns don't kill people, people do" as their main defense. But same applies to cars, and still driving a car is not a constitutional right, but a special privilege granted only for those, who have obtained a driver's license. And yet killing living things -- including, but not limited to humans -- is the primary function guns are actually designed for, but this is definitely not the case with cars.
The problem with global warming instead just seems to be that when people are not absolutely sure that global warming happens and that CO2 emissions caused by humans are actually contributing to it, they are willing to do nothing, as they feel that the preventative measures are too expensive to take without certainty of their necessity and effectiveness.
Unfortunately, this viewpoint is just as shortsighted as quarter-year capitalism -- and like that, it seems to be most common in the U.S. The problem is that these people do not realise two facts about the measures that should be taken to stop the expected global warning.
1) That if the humans have, in fact, contributing to global warming, as is assumed, the preventative measures must be taken now to be effective. If we postpone this until we have the bulletproof evidence, then it means that large-scale global warming is already happening, and it will be too late to take any preventative measures; we would have no option left but to deal with the conseqences, and we already know that that would become helluva lot more expensive than any preventative measures as the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica would melt in large scale, raising the sea level several metres and the extreme weather systems would become even much more common than they are now. Over time, it would probably cost a lot of human lives, too.
2) That if we take the preventative measures, and we'll find out later that we could have never done anything to stop the global warming, or that it wasn't actually even happening in first place, the technology we had developed wouldn't still be in vain; first of all, we wouldn't be dependent of oil anymore, which problem would need to be solved anyway, as oil is not really renewable energy source.
Second, we would likely have developed lots of new high technology stuff along the way, creating many entirely new businesses. These businesses and the value they would have added to the economies of the countries that would have developed them wouldn't be going away.
Car is a good analogy again, as Americans love their SUVs; consider, that in future SUVs would all be using fuel cells. Now, to avoid CO2 emissions, the hydrogen used in those must not be produced using fossil fuels. Nuclear is a good option, of course, but fission is not renewable either, and then we'd yet have to deal with all the waste, which still seems to be somewhat problematic. So how about if U.S. would just invest so much money to fusion research (still pocket money comparing to the war in Iraq), that it would become the leading provider of fusion technology in the world, for example? An entirely possible scenario. Lots of extra research among renewables would not be bad idea either. The way to turn all this into good business will be there, if political will is.
Yeah, for Slashdotters a PowerBook is probably the slickest thing they can ever imagine to have sex with. =)
"Nobody got fired for buying IBM"
Oh, but you could still use that for your advantage. I bet the folks at IBM would love to sell you that Novell or RH setup -- naturally along with their own services & support contract -- and voilà, what was bought was from IBM, you got Linux, and nobody got fired. Assuming that that old rule still applies, of course...
FYI: It is perfectly reasonable to have home servers on a real-world DMZ, if you actually live on one; there are other DMZs in the world than just the one around the Korean demarcation line, although it is probably best known. See Åland, for example.
i.e. one that keeps a stored image of places where I've been
You mean that it would be easier to find again those p0rn sites you've already visited?
Actually, when CmdrTaco originally made his statement, he probably meant WiFi. So it is probably still not wireless in a sense that you could actually sync your music wirelessly (bluetooth is way too slow for that purpose).
Incidentally, I'm saying that DRM is unworkable because there will always be the analog loophole, even if really got watermarking systems are developed.
Yeah, but I didn't even meant it to stop determined people. The fact is just that most people who are used to CD ripping - that is, insert CD, click "import" in iTunes and pop, three minutes later your songs are ready to be shared - will find analog recording so labouring that they simply won't bother doing it for P2P only. Commercial pirates are still going to record or get some sophisticated software to remove the watermark directly, but as they're doing it in volumes and for profit, you can still go after them by traditional means.
Ordinary P2P users simply wouldn't bother anymore, as if the songs would be only watermarked but not restricted. You could still play them with every single gadget you ever have, and drop copies to your friends that you know you can trust not to share them in the net. BUT if you'd share them with everyone, you'd need to do the time-consuming process of re-recording, which most people would find so complicated operation that they simply wouldn't bother, or otherwise the songs would instantly get tracked back to you.
See, it's a bit like speed limits on highways: if you're speeding +10 km/h or less, you know that the police most likely won't bother; but if you drive +20 km/h instead, you know that you now have a good chance to get ticketed. And if you're driving +40, your license must be pretty cheap to you.
Watermarking would be like a bit like this; you would have fair use, but openly sharing in P2P would get you busted. This would be acceptable by most people. Real DRM is not acceptable, because people will feel that they've been played fool when they find out that the usage is restricted.
Current situation is more like all the highway patrols would've been eliminated, and full-blown DRM would be like the speed limits would be enforced by GPS tracking. Neither is truly acceptable.
who just will tolerate actual usage restrictions.
Bad typo. I meant to say "will not tolerate".
The labels definitely are not mentally there. Downloadable music still has this huge little bump on its way called DRM, and because CD is the only cat around that has been able to get out of the bag without DRM-wrapping, it will stay around for a looong time.
RIAA etc. just won't allow any sort of new formats (be it a disc like SACD/DVD-A or downloadable like AAC/MP3/OGG/WMA or FLAC) to get into widespread distribution (except by illegal means) without being wrapped in DRM. But as RedBook or even anything close enough to it - that is, to work in most players - makes adding any truly effective DRM impossible, and CDs already are in widespread distribution, they will stay around.
Lack of DRM and relatively high quality without lossy compression mean easy convertability, and thus the people who need that will still demand CDs, despite their higher prices comparing to services like iTMS.
Working compromise for downloadables? A hard to remove unique waterstamp in every song downloaded legally, but no usage restrictions. This way all fair use rights would still be there, but if you put the song into the wild before © expires, you'd get cops behind your door. Definitely wouldn't stop professional pirates but would likely stop P2P freeriders.
Unfortunately, the labels are not mentally even there. And there are quite a lot of people who just will tolerate actual usage restrictions. So there we are again - CDs just will stay around. For a long time.
I can't wait until we can ride SpaceShipThree across the Atlantic in 20 minutes!
...and imagine still wasting one hour travelling to the air/spaceport, three ours in check-in and security lanes, half an hour on the other end to get your luggage back, and yet one hour travelling off the port.