As many have pointed out, skillset is a factor. Five years ago, just about anyone who could say "NetBIOS" could get a job in Windows; Now you have to have an MCSE just to be a deskhopper in a Fortune 500 Company.
There are still few enough experienced *Nix geeks running around that I get three to five 'hits' per month from Monster. The market has changed enough that I'm sitting tight where I'm at because (IMO) this position has more 'job security' than the opportunities I encounter (Right now it's illegal for a foreign national to do parts of my job), but the fact remains that they are there.
I live in a place where there is a moderate tech industry, and I've seen 40 "displaced" Unix techies ranging from junior admin to Senior Systems Engineer placed in just six months. I've seen most of those positions show up on Monster (in my email box via the Monster Agent).
In short, it wouldn't surprise me if someone whose resume was all Windows customer support or client support had trouble getting hits from Monster - there are just too many guys chasing the few positions that are open, and lots of them are Engineer level talent.
Clearly they do not lie in making the punishment fit the crime.
My point, exactly.
However I assume that you don't read Terry Pratchett,...
Actually, I've read quite a bit by Mr. Pratchett, but I understand that he writes in the sci-fi/fantasy genre, not the legislative government genre...:)
... he causes the M25 to resemble the ancient symbol "Odegra". As a result of this millions of people are forced to suffer daily torment and frustration, which then then take out on their colleagues/pet/whatever incurring a small amount of corruption of their soul. This is then contrasted with a "traditional" demon who will spend years working on the corruption of a single priest.
Ok... relevance? This is all very important in the world that Pratchett creates in his book, but I'm not sure that it's any kind of valid metaphor for "the real world". Spam is a matter of irritation (convenience/lack thereof) and money (cost of bandwidth, storage, lost time, etc). Not 'soulular corruption', per se.
So, yes, twenty years and a big fine does seem excessive when you set it against the penalty for shooting someone in the head. But when you divide 20 years by the millions, or more likely billions, of moments of angst the spammer created, they are really getting off quite lightly.
We're talking about a situation where the sum of the parts is less than the whole. Significantly so. It all translates into convenience and money. What is the value of a human life? How can 'spamming' every deserve a more draconian punishment than murder, and pretend that there is any justice or relevance in the system that so apportions punishment?
A monetary punishment is reasonable, in that spam is (now, and should remain) a civil matter, rather than a criminal one... Say, 50% of the revenue generated by a spam campaign determined to be illegal under civil code? I can get behind those kinds of punishments. But to even make spamming criminal is to trivialize the real, painful, and ubiquitous crimes that occur in our daily life.
"Perhaps my address is on the wrong lists, but what spam are you thinking of that might save the life of one little child?"
I made no such assertion. I was comparing the significance of spam to "Real life"... the inappropriate priorities.
"You're assuming that our efforts to stop spammers somehow takes away from efforts to stop bigger societal problems."
No, I'm not making any such assumption. I'm merely pointing out that inconveniencing even a billion people is not as significant as the murder of one human being. My post was in response to sincere propositions that we give spammers 20 years, big fines, and no parole. It just seems to me that our priorities are significantly warped when we place the significance of inconvenience (spam) as equal or superior to human life.
Good grief, people. I'm reading through the comments on this article and hear lots of people (jokingly, I hope) advocating anything from lynching to immolation for spammers. Then I hear many advocating (apparently quite seriously) 20 year jail terms with big fines behind them - "There, that will stop those damn spammers."
Stop and think a minute, people. Where are our priorities? On the evening news last night, I heard a man convicted of killing a two year old by punching her with his fist (seven times!) sentenced to five years. Five years. The two men who beat my brother in law to death got fifteen years apiece. You can sometimes get a total sentence of seven years (with time off for good behavior) when you roll up and shoot someone you don't know in the head.
Spam is annoying, and undoubtedly a drain on resources, and a problem to be addressed - but I promise you that I would accept a thousand spam emails per day if it would save the life of one little child.
There's a lot of crying about the Free Software Community 'doing silly stuff like this' when 'linux should be striding forward'... I think these people have missed the current environment.
The place that Linux is making inroads right now is as an enterprise server platform. The licensing of XFree86 won't significantly affect that progress until Linux becomes a real threat on the desktop. So there is still some real time to sort out the licensing issues.
When one begins a software revolution based upon political and philosophical standings, how can differences about such things be 'inconsequential' or 'irrelevant'? The differences can and will be sorted out, one way or another, as many others have discovered.
In the end, like censorship, things like this will be 'interpreted as damage and routed around' by the Free Software Community.
Yeah, gentoo can certainly be a PITA unless you're very familiar with it - and of course, the way you get familiar with it is fighting with it for a while.:) I loved Slack, 'way back in the day, and I'm certain there's nothing wrong with it now. I'm a distro junkie, and will probably be making the trip 'round to Slack again before too long; Gentoo is just where I'm at now. I build from the 1.4 reference platform binaries, and then do an emerge -u world once I get everything the way I want it... That's how I avoid the network headaches.
Oh, I didn't mean Slackware had lost that feeling; was just saying that, being a distro junkie, Gentoo gave me that feeling - reminding me of Slack in the olden days. Haven't really tried Slack since RH 5.2, so I wouldn't begin to pretend I could make an informed comment on current Slackishness!
I started with Slack, years ago, then switched to RH when I started doing commercial Linux stuff (at approximately 5.2, around the libc5/6 controversy time); now I use Gentoo on my workstations, because it kinda brings back that old Slackware ("The distribution with attitude") feeling; it's the distro for ubergeeks or distro weenies that either like to get their hands dirty on the internals, or people who like to say they like to get their hands dirty on the internals.
I will tell you what; if you set up Gentoo a few times, you'll truly understand the Linux boot process and associated configuration.
I think this is absolutely wonderful. I can't wait until M$ or someone patents the mouse - maybe apple; 'Til someone patents the 'banner ad'; til someone patents the scrollbar, the mouse arrow, and the GUI Button.
Perhaps - just perhaps - if all of this happens, someone might just start to realize just how ridiculous this whole IP Charlie Foxtrot is.
"You also have to consider that elephant brains while larger actually are a smaller percentage of total body weight than human brains."
This would seem to contradict your earlier suggestion that 'brain size in terms of computational circuits' should be part of the measure, and in fact contradicts this part:
Brain size (in terms of mass) does not have everything to do with intelligence,
Since we're not really certain what part of our brain houses our 'intelligence', it's difficult for me to accept the common assertion that the Elephant/Dolphin (insert animal here) brain is 'mostly' used for auditory processing. Since 'intelligence' is widely (not universally) considered an 'emergent characteristic', it's impossible to say that those 'circuits' dedicated to 'auditory processing' might not also give rise to an 'emergent identity or intelligence'.
From reading the review, I assumed that the differentiation was individualization of groups; i.e., a given group of chimpanzees has characteristic behaviors, and another group has a different set of characteristic behaviors; this would tend to indicate learned behaviors as a tribal imperative, or rudimentary culture - as distinguished from instinct. In fact, if these differences in common behaviors didn't exist, we would chalk up most special behaviors as instinctive, no?
Anyone can file suit against anyone at any time for any reason, and he said he didn't have the time or money to be involved in a lawsuit, even a winning one.
Lots of cantankerous responses to the article, claiming variously that it's wrong, wishful thinking, whatever...
The problem with the Internet as an advertising medium is that it works backwards from the mass media. We're used to having ads thrown in our face, and that's the only paradigm that MegaCorps are capable of dealing with right now. Fortunately, there are many tech savvy thinking individuals who are more than happy to build ad blocking infrastructures that render bulk advertising moot.
Right now an internet presence is not necessarily a profit center, but a lack of one can certainly cost you money - more and more middle class (and up) people are turning to the internet first for information about what product they will buy or service they will use.
In the end, the internet presents the nightmare of true value comparison; the advertising that it's ideal for is comparison research; backwards from the current model which resembles a firehose, this becomes "on demand" advertising.
I research nearly every major purchase on the internet prior to spending money. It has saved me a lot of money, in the long run; whatever product I am considering, I can usually find posts somewhere on the web from someone who has one, and is either really happy, or really unhappy about that fact.
Someone mentioned QOS and bandwidth hogs vs backbone bandwidth - network bandwidth will increase until there are essentially no bottlenecks. It's a fact. Eventually, our network connection will exceed our local bus speed now. QOS is a stopgap measure to shoehorn technologies onto the 'Net before it's grown to accomodate them.
The only alternative at this point is to start a new internet, completely seperate from the existing network. Maybe the spammers and advertisers could be kept at bay for another decade or so.
But if you draw the game theory table for this yo quickly realize that blocking communication between them is the dominant strategy. Especially for the market leader.
Only if 1) there is significant advantage (in this case, monetary) from possessing users, and 2) it's a zero sum game. Simply because that is the current strategy, the only monetary benefit to IM is as a value add (I don't know anywone who's paying for IM specifically, do you?), and that value add would become more valuable (paradoxically) if it had fewer limitations.
And, as long as there is no easy interoperation, it's not a zero sum game, because many, many users will run more than one IM simultaneously (and at the same time, too.)
LOL! No, my first computer experience wasn't with M$ stuff. My dad was a mainframe technician in 1966, and we built our first computer from chips (with a wire wrap tool, if anyone remembers that stuff) and discrete components (based on the 8080A) in the early '70s. Later came an Altair. It wasn't until '86 that I had a PC compatible machine - an 8086 Business Partner with a 10 MB Hdd, 1MB ram (640k + expanded, IIRC), a monochrome VGA card (!), and a - wait for it - 1200 baud modem that I got from my dad. Of course there was only one BBS in town with a 1200 baud line then.
Bill, I think, is a business man, and maybe a manager; call him a social engineer, and I'll buy it. But to put him in the same group with Dennis Ritchie and Linux Torvalds? I just don't buy it.
Having been in the IT space for some time, administering both NT/2k/XP based networks and *Nix networks, this comes as no great shock to me. FUD from Redmond notwithstanding, *nix is a win for server applications, hands down.
'Objective Studies' aside, there is little comparison in performance, ease of maintenance, etc. The answer I've begun giving the Windows Admins here at work (who are fighting for server installs - a losing battle in this age of dropping budgets and 'increased efficiencies') is this: Go and administer an enterprise level *nix network for five years, then come back to me and we'll compare notes. (Yes, I did my time as an MS Admin, MCSE+I and all that crap, back when NT was going to save the world)
IMHO, the only reason M$ still has any of the server space at all is 'time to market' considerations, and the overall lower level of expertise. Back when I was a Windows admin, I used to say: "The biggest problem with Windows is that Microsoft designed it so that any idiot could set it up - and most of them do."
Any given network is only as stable/secure as its administrator, it's true, but remember that the ideal case stability of the platform represents a hard limit, no matter how competent the admin. Anybody wanna bet their job on 5 9s from NT?
I just don't see this as a big motivator to the US economy. The 'savings' of outsourcing are mostly in the form of taxes not paid to the government (by the time the infrastructure - ie, Stateside project manager, Stateside liason, overseas liason, overseas management, and programmers, the actual salary savings is fairly small). Also, the profits of this reduced cost simply are not going to be realized in reduced cost of the product, but in terms of lining the pockets of the major stockholders (I hope I'm wrong, but history would suggest differently).
The largest percentage of the outsourced jobs are high-paying; perhaps we'll eliminate a single 80k job and replace it with 4 20k jobs? Or does somebody think that American business is going to hire local techies to architect products and the humble outsource labor forces will selflessly implement the design?
I have nothing against India or the programmers that are taking advantage of the avarice of American companies in order to better themselves. I would do the same thing in their shoes.
I do, however, blame an American business culture where todays stock prices have become more important than the ultimate survivability or long-term health of the company. After all, on a long enough timeline, everyone's surviveability is zero, eh?
No, that's not correct. One must make certain axiomatic assumptions about the universe in order to gain knowledge; special creation is not one of those necessary assumptions.
The math doesn't require an explanation of things prior to 'the big bang' in order to be useful; Some models of the universe say that it's impossible to model events prior to that event.
I'll never understand the whole concept that an Eternal Creator is somehow inherently more reasonable to people than an Eternal Universe. All you're doing is moving the question up one level.
Of course, if the universe 'is' fifteen billion light years long, and the big bang was fifteen billion years ago, then it's expanding at approximately half the speed of light, right? Since the expansion is roughly spherical, it would need to have a radius (half it's 'length') to be expanding at the speed of light, or 30 light years in diameter.
This is assuming, of course, that the 'isness' of 15 billion years represents something besides cognitive abberations and qualia.:)
The problem with the establishment of Microsoft's DRM as a standard is that, sooner or later, those corporations who depend on IP for their income will succeed in lobbying congress to require mandatory DRM inclusion. If Microsoft's is the 'de-facto' standard, there is significant incentive to adopt it as a 'standard' rather than some open standard; Chances are that it will cost money and open software like cdrecord or Linux or *bsd will be in violation of the law.
Yeah. It could literally make free software illegal in the US. Sound like fun?
I would have thought it obvious, however, that I was not referring to Disney as being in violation of the Sherman act, but Microsoft primarily, and Disney by association - in that they will be lobbying to make their choice the default choice of law.
Mandatory DRM will present a significant barrier to entry in any creative industry that touches on the electronic. There have already been discussions by Congress at which industry shills promoted mandatory DRM on products - i.e., as an independent musician with a website distribution model, I would be required by law to apply DRM to my music - at whatever the prevailing price might be - before i could distribute it electronically. Since I can't make Albums in my basement, I'd have to pay for the DRM product to 'protect' my content - even if I want to give it away.
I assure you that the Media's worst nightmare is a fad that swept children and young adults to a different distribution channel - like pay per song musician distribution sites that cut Sony and pals out of the picture entirely.
It's always refreshing to hear from ACs with an agenda...:)
No, I don't owe everything that I have to corporate interests. That's what the corporations want you to believe, but the fact is that people had stuff for a long time before corporations existed, and in some places people still have stuff without corporations.
I don't believe that business or a market economy is a bad thing; I believe that government's paternalism of corporations is a bad thing. I would not call a government 'successful' where
Not that business isn't critical to our standard of living, and our economic pre-eminence. I support entreprenuership (sp?) and the development of business; what I don't support is a situation where businesses are given windfall profits because they donate to the campaign funds of candidates desperate for re-election. Take the recent Medicare/Medicade prescription benefit bill, for instance. Give me one good reason for the bill to prohibit price negotiation - or at least a reason that makes more sense than the fact that the pharmaceutical industry donated $30,000,000 to the campaign funds of Washington last year.
The fact is that corporations need you to believe that you need them. Someone will always make stuff for you, I promise.
I should hope that you would understand the difference between "monopoly" and "attempt to monopolize". I didn't claim Disney was a monopoly - or Microsoft, for that matter. The word confuses the issue because a corporation does not have to be a 'monopoly' in order to violate the Sherman Act. That's the point I was making. It's restraint of trade that matters.
If you don't think that this is the first step in trying to establish Microsoft's DRM as the de-facto standard prior to governmental requirement of DRM in support of the media corporations lobbyists, you're looking at the world through some seriously rose-colored glasses, my friend.
Slashdot Mirror
There are still few enough experienced *Nix geeks running around that I get three to five 'hits' per month from Monster. The market has changed enough that I'm sitting tight where I'm at because (IMO) this position has more 'job security' than the opportunities I encounter (Right now it's illegal for a foreign national to do parts of my job), but the fact remains that they are there.
I live in a place where there is a moderate tech industry, and I've seen 40 "displaced" Unix techies ranging from junior admin to Senior Systems Engineer placed in just six months. I've seen most of those positions show up on Monster (in my email box via the Monster Agent).
In short, it wouldn't surprise me if someone whose resume was all Windows customer support or client support had trouble getting hits from Monster - there are just too many guys chasing the few positions that are open, and lots of them are Engineer level talent.
My point, exactly.
Actually, I've read quite a bit by Mr. Pratchett, but I understand that he writes in the sci-fi/fantasy genre, not the legislative government genre... :)
Ok... relevance? This is all very important in the world that Pratchett creates in his book, but I'm not sure that it's any kind of valid metaphor for "the real world". Spam is a matter of irritation (convenience/lack thereof) and money (cost of bandwidth, storage, lost time, etc). Not 'soulular corruption', per se.
We're talking about a situation where the sum of the parts is less than the whole. Significantly so. It all translates into convenience and money. What is the value of a human life? How can 'spamming' every deserve a more draconian punishment than murder, and pretend that there is any justice or relevance in the system that so apportions punishment?
A monetary punishment is reasonable, in that spam is (now, and should remain) a civil matter, rather than a criminal one... Say, 50% of the revenue generated by a spam campaign determined to be illegal under civil code? I can get behind those kinds of punishments. But to even make spamming criminal is to trivialize the real, painful, and ubiquitous crimes that occur in our daily life.
I made no such assertion. I was comparing the significance of spam to "Real life"... the inappropriate priorities.
"You're assuming that our efforts to stop spammers somehow takes away from efforts to stop bigger societal problems."
No, I'm not making any such assumption. I'm merely pointing out that inconveniencing even a billion people is not as significant as the murder of one human being. My post was in response to sincere propositions that we give spammers 20 years, big fines, and no parole. It just seems to me that our priorities are significantly warped when we place the significance of inconvenience (spam) as equal or superior to human life.
Stop and think a minute, people. Where are our priorities? On the evening news last night, I heard a man convicted of killing a two year old by punching her with his fist (seven times!) sentenced to five years. Five years. The two men who beat my brother in law to death got fifteen years apiece. You can sometimes get a total sentence of seven years (with time off for good behavior) when you roll up and shoot someone you don't know in the head.
Spam is annoying, and undoubtedly a drain on resources, and a problem to be addressed - but I promise you that I would accept a thousand spam emails per day if it would save the life of one little child.
Where are our priorities?
The place that Linux is making inroads right now is as an enterprise server platform. The licensing of XFree86 won't significantly affect that progress until Linux becomes a real threat on the desktop. So there is still some real time to sort out the licensing issues.
When one begins a software revolution based upon political and philosophical standings, how can differences about such things be 'inconsequential' or 'irrelevant'? The differences can and will be sorted out, one way or another, as many others have discovered.
In the end, like censorship, things like this will be 'interpreted as damage and routed around' by the Free Software Community.
Yeah, gentoo can certainly be a PITA unless you're very familiar with it - and of course, the way you get familiar with it is fighting with it for a while. :) I loved Slack, 'way back in the day, and I'm certain there's nothing wrong with it now. I'm a distro junkie, and will probably be making the trip 'round to Slack again before too long; Gentoo is just where I'm at now. I build from the 1.4 reference platform binaries, and then do an emerge -u world once I get everything the way I want it... That's how I avoid the network headaches.
Oh, I didn't mean Slackware had lost that feeling; was just saying that, being a distro junkie, Gentoo gave me that feeling - reminding me of Slack in the olden days. Haven't really tried Slack since RH 5.2, so I wouldn't begin to pretend I could make an informed comment on current Slackishness!
I will tell you what; if you set up Gentoo a few times, you'll truly understand the Linux boot process and associated configuration.
Perhaps - just perhaps - if all of this happens, someone might just start to realize just how ridiculous this whole IP Charlie Foxtrot is.
This would seem to contradict your earlier suggestion that 'brain size in terms of computational circuits' should be part of the measure, and in fact contradicts this part:
Since we're not really certain what part of our brain houses our 'intelligence', it's difficult for me to accept the common assertion that the Elephant/Dolphin (insert animal here) brain is 'mostly' used for auditory processing. Since 'intelligence' is widely (not universally) considered an 'emergent characteristic', it's impossible to say that those 'circuits' dedicated to 'auditory processing' might not also give rise to an 'emergent identity or intelligence'.
Anyone can file suit against anyone at any time for any reason, and he said he didn't have the time or money to be involved in a lawsuit, even a winning one.
Good grief, professionals often make this assertion without 'medical evidence' to back up their claims.
The problem with the Internet as an advertising medium is that it works backwards from the mass media. We're used to having ads thrown in our face, and that's the only paradigm that MegaCorps are capable of dealing with right now. Fortunately, there are many tech savvy thinking individuals who are more than happy to build ad blocking infrastructures that render bulk advertising moot.
Right now an internet presence is not necessarily a profit center, but a lack of one can certainly cost you money - more and more middle class (and up) people are turning to the internet first for information about what product they will buy or service they will use.
In the end, the internet presents the nightmare of true value comparison; the advertising that it's ideal for is comparison research; backwards from the current model which resembles a firehose, this becomes "on demand" advertising.
I research nearly every major purchase on the internet prior to spending money. It has saved me a lot of money, in the long run; whatever product I am considering, I can usually find posts somewhere on the web from someone who has one, and is either really happy, or really unhappy about that fact.
Someone mentioned QOS and bandwidth hogs vs backbone bandwidth - network bandwidth will increase until there are essentially no bottlenecks. It's a fact. Eventually, our network connection will exceed our local bus speed now. QOS is a stopgap measure to shoehorn technologies onto the 'Net before it's grown to accomodate them.
LOL - It's not, although it is now international. It's actualy an 'inter network' or a network connecting networks, as is explained in the article.
You mean like this?
Only if 1) there is significant advantage (in this case, monetary) from possessing users, and 2) it's a zero sum game. Simply because that is the current strategy, the only monetary benefit to IM is as a value add (I don't know anywone who's paying for IM specifically, do you?), and that value add would become more valuable (paradoxically) if it had fewer limitations.
And, as long as there is no easy interoperation, it's not a zero sum game, because many, many users will run more than one IM simultaneously (and at the same time, too.)
Bill, I think, is a business man, and maybe a manager; call him a social engineer, and I'll buy it. But to put him in the same group with Dennis Ritchie and Linux Torvalds? I just don't buy it.
'Objective Studies' aside, there is little comparison in performance, ease of maintenance, etc. The answer I've begun giving the Windows Admins here at work (who are fighting for server installs - a losing battle in this age of dropping budgets and 'increased efficiencies') is this: Go and administer an enterprise level *nix network for five years, then come back to me and we'll compare notes. (Yes, I did my time as an MS Admin, MCSE+I and all that crap, back when NT was going to save the world)
IMHO, the only reason M$ still has any of the server space at all is 'time to market' considerations, and the overall lower level of expertise. Back when I was a Windows admin, I used to say: "The biggest problem with Windows is that Microsoft designed it so that any idiot could set it up - and most of them do."
Any given network is only as stable/secure as its administrator, it's true, but remember that the ideal case stability of the platform represents a hard limit, no matter how competent the admin. Anybody wanna bet their job on 5 9s from NT?
The largest percentage of the outsourced jobs are high-paying; perhaps we'll eliminate a single 80k job and replace it with 4 20k jobs? Or does somebody think that American business is going to hire local techies to architect products and the humble outsource labor forces will selflessly implement the design?
I have nothing against India or the programmers that are taking advantage of the avarice of American companies in order to better themselves. I would do the same thing in their shoes.
I do, however, blame an American business culture where todays stock prices have become more important than the ultimate survivability or long-term health of the company. After all, on a long enough timeline, everyone's surviveability is zero, eh?
The math doesn't require an explanation of things prior to 'the big bang' in order to be useful; Some models of the universe say that it's impossible to model events prior to that event.
I'll never understand the whole concept that an Eternal Creator is somehow inherently more reasonable to people than an Eternal Universe. All you're doing is moving the question up one level.
This is assuming, of course, that the 'isness' of 15 billion years represents something besides cognitive abberations and qualia. :)
Yeah. It could literally make free software illegal in the US. Sound like fun?
I would have thought it obvious, however, that I was not referring to Disney as being in violation of the Sherman act, but Microsoft primarily, and Disney by association - in that they will be lobbying to make their choice the default choice of law.
Mandatory DRM will present a significant barrier to entry in any creative industry that touches on the electronic. There have already been discussions by Congress at which industry shills promoted mandatory DRM on products - i.e., as an independent musician with a website distribution model, I would be required by law to apply DRM to my music - at whatever the prevailing price might be - before i could distribute it electronically. Since I can't make Albums in my basement, I'd have to pay for the DRM product to 'protect' my content - even if I want to give it away.
I assure you that the Media's worst nightmare is a fad that swept children and young adults to a different distribution channel - like pay per song musician distribution sites that cut Sony and pals out of the picture entirely.
No, I don't owe everything that I have to corporate interests. That's what the corporations want you to believe, but the fact is that people had stuff for a long time before corporations existed, and in some places people still have stuff without corporations.
I don't believe that business or a market economy is a bad thing; I believe that government's paternalism of corporations is a bad thing. I would not call a government 'successful' where Not that business isn't critical to our standard of living, and our economic pre-eminence. I support entreprenuership (sp?) and the development of business; what I don't support is a situation where businesses are given windfall profits because they donate to the campaign funds of candidates desperate for re-election. Take the recent Medicare/Medicade prescription benefit bill, for instance. Give me one good reason for the bill to prohibit price negotiation - or at least a reason that makes more sense than the fact that the pharmaceutical industry donated $30,000,000 to the campaign funds of Washington last year.
The fact is that corporations need you to believe that you need them. Someone will always make stuff for you, I promise.
If you don't think that this is the first step in trying to establish Microsoft's DRM as the de-facto standard prior to governmental requirement of DRM in support of the media corporations lobbyists, you're looking at the world through some seriously rose-colored glasses, my friend.