If it has anything to do with Marxism, it's because we are currently living in a situation where capitalism looks a lot like Marxism, so it's hard to say one is better than the other.
Capitalism only makes sense if you have free markets. Without free markets, private ownership of industry is virtually indistinguishable the king or the state owning industry. Capitalism==feudalism==communism. All of the usual virtues that we normally talk about in the context of economic success (hard work, intelligence, inspiration, etc) have little bearing on the situation. What really matters is whether or not you recognized those values as worthless and saw what really matters: gaming the system though inheritance, bribery, theft, clan/party-membership or whatever. And of course, the main reason to game the system, is to prevent a free market from emerging!
Look at some of the things that you hate the most. See any monopolies? See any byzantine legal frameworks? See any immortal business owners? Any chance, that even if you were a genius badass motherfucker, you would be able to enter into competition with the established players?
So of course who-owns-it is irrelevant and it's hard to get excited about capitalism, because all the advantages that would have arisen under Adam Smith's vision, are denied to everyone anyway. It's already centrally planned so why would you care whether the planners are a group of VCs, or a king's court, or the Soviet central committee? Corruption makes them all look the same to anyone coming from a free market perspective.
Now granted, not the entire economy is like that, but a lot of it is, and especially some of its most visible parts. You're reading this thanks to your ISP, for example, and if you're American, you know that ISPs have *cough* transcended free markets. And many people are reading this on a computer where it's against the law to modify how they're reading it, and maybe it's illegal to maintain the hardware too. Anti-free-market forces and mechanisms are so ubiquitous that many people barely even notice them anymore (and don't normally describe their intent as "prevent a free market from happening"), but your don't fail to notice how much so many things suck by law. As long as you don't honestly ask yourself "Is this really capitalism?" (in the sense that someone 250 years ago would recognize) then it's easy to conclude: capitalism sucks.
Not to mention that the wealth of a nation lies in the general public.
It does not. Half the world' wealth is held by the top 1% of individuals
I think his point might be that the wealth you're referring to, is not part of the wealth of the nation.
e.g. Let's say you magically doubled the wealth of America's top 1%. Would America's wealth have increased, or would it remain the same? Would the nation then be able to afford to do things that it previously could not afford?
There's a weird notion: those people aren't really part of the country, because their successes and failures don't translate to (or facilitate) anyone else's successes or failures. The whole "rising tide lifts all boats" thing fails to apply to them.
The ideal solution would be to to add hearing-aids to the required "minimum coverage" for health insurance policies.
I can't think of a worse word than "ideal" there. You have totally ignored the cost, and yet here we were, complaining about the cost. As an ideal solution: fail.
If it's 10x overpriced and you pay for it with insurance premiums instead of getting the cost down, then you still paid 10x. Fuck that!
If you want to keep using insurance for this kind of non-sudden-catostrophe stuff, fine (that's a whole other topic, and we can have that argument another day) but don't apply insurance until after you have put competitive forces to bear on the vendors/providers. If the patient isn't going to be shopping around, then have the insurance company ruthlessly shopping around like a Wal-Mart purchasing agent, but FFS have someone be shopping around, making vendors willing to undercut each other by a percentage in order to make the sale. The entire medical industry needs to become like that, and anyone in there who isn't going through all the same stresses the rest of us in other industries are going though, is an opportunity for squeezin'.
Do they have money for lobbyists? Then you're paying them too much.
The last thing you should give them, is insurance. (I'm not saying you can't give it to them, but please please have it be last. Don't give them free government handouts-for-nothing until after you have negotiated the handout amount down. At least yell "get a job, hippie!" at them a few times before you pay them.) If you get this wrong, then we're all still going to be looking to consumer electronics companies instead, in order to address the cost. Cost cost cost. That's a key concept here, ok? Cost! Don't forget the cost!
Interesting that this is also a president who gets quite a bit of popularity and forgiveness by not enforcing interstate marijuana laws. Laws that Congress can't be bothered to repeal in spite of The People obviously wanting them gone.
I guess that's because another thing The People obviously want, is selective enforcement of laws. Someone doing no significant harm? Laws, schmaws. Someone piss you off? Now we have laws!
C'mon, everyone: you know this really is the American way. This isn't even something that Rs and Ds disagree about, as far as I see. Country folk and urbanites are on the same page too here, I think. Blacks and whites? Rich vs poor? We all agree.
Well, To be an advocate for the devil.. Now, what I disagree with in this case is two private companies arranging a punishment based on someone's illegal activities.
I'm confused. It sounds like you are totally opposed to what they're doing, and calling them out on their absurd bullshit. This is like saying, "Hey, people are flaming Trump for being a piece of shit and an embarrassment to America, but to play devil's advocate, he is a piece of shit and an embarrassment to America."
You need to practice more at this devil's advocate thing. It is a damn fun thing to do, but you're got to do it right, or else it doesn't work at all.
I remember in House of Cards, the president wasn't allowed to use his game console. (Well, he could have it, but it wasn't about to be given any sort of network access.) But that was a TV show, and here's real life: where basically the same thing (iPhone) is allowed.
TV takes things too seriously. If real life, government is all "meh, whatever."
I heard there was a case where someone else was suspected of a crime, the cops went crying to a judge, and the judge gave them permission to Break and Enter the suspect's house!
Seriously, if there's a problem here, it's that when you talk directly to another person on the Internet, a layperson wouldn't normally think that this would leave many records on third parties' machines.
#0 BUT: they should be aware that it might leave records, though, even if just dumb (application-unaware) packet logs, maybe. It's a risk, at least.
#1 BUT: this is Skype, not direct communication. I think most people know that Skype is kind of weird/fucked-up/corporate-agenda-oriented.
#2 BUT: so much NAT! Even Skype aside, a lot of people don't directly connect to each other and instead use some kind of intermediate server, e.g. XMPP. If you're using someone else's server instead of your own, you might not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
If you're counting on Apple to keep your digital information safe..
Hold it right there. How could someone possibly ever formulate such a strategy?
Real-life news that a third party (e.g. Apple) is going to be coerced into giving you up, shouldn't have an effect on anything, because you already asked yourself, "what if?"
C'mon, every one of us already knows there is only one party in the universe who can protect your data: you.
From the users' point of view, this entire article is how FUCKING AWESOME Shine is. Previously, I had never heard of Shine, but here, Yahoo and Google are screaming that Shine is the best thing ever.
"some basic feeling of responsibility really is reduced when we are coerced into doing something."
If you lower the intensity a few orders of magnitude, isn't this obvious and doesn't it hit many programmers pretty close to home?
I've never murdered anyone, but I have done plenty of things I thought were dumb or "bad" simply because "that's how the boss wants it." And HELL YES I feel less responsible. I really do. Don't you?
Do you think the power utility ought to audit everyone to determine whether or not their business (well, not just business, but their use of electricity) is speculative, then I can see how your position makes sense and doesn't single you out as a Very Special Person.
OTOH if you start backpedalling and claim that you don't want the power utility to adjudicate whether or not you are a speculative user, then you just outed yourself as a Very Special Person.
The secrecy is how we know that the government has made a significant effort to try to determine its legality, and they determined it to be illegal. Whether or not they're correct that it's illegal: that's tricky, but they think it's illegal.
I wish there were some mechanism for bringing these suspected criminals to justice. I don't mean punishment; I mean trials. Prosecute one of them for violating FCC rules or for computer misuse/fraud in doing their MitM attacks, and make them show how they got a get-out-of-jail-free pass (because without the pass, it'd be a pretty airtight case if you or I were doing what they're doing).
The evidence consists of the observations which inspired them to make the computer model.
They already had the evidence; they just didn't know what it was evidence of. And then once the model predicted stuff like Sedna's orbit, they then had even more evidence: Sedna-and-friends. So that was an additional complex of evidence, for which they previously didn't know what it was evidence of.
Let's say you drop an apple out of a tree. It falls. You don't know why. Then someone notices that most of the apples eventually fall, and they run a sim where, if you hypothesize this weird (yet amazingly simple) force that makes things fall, you get consequences a whole lot like what people have observed. (Then someone realizes: "hey, this force should work on peaches too! It predicts peaches will fall." And then everyone is is "OMG, peaches do fall! We didn't understand those either, but here you are, giving us a really great hypothesis for all our observational evidence!") The sim isn't evidence of gravity, and yet it points to all these apples-falling as being evidence of the existence of gravity.
Same here. The sim isn't the evidence; it's the thing that helps you understand what the evidence means. It's a tool that was used for formulating the evidence-backed hypothesis, so that once you put your hypothesis out there, and people say "wtf? where's your evidence?" then you throw all your sim's inputs in their faces and say "there's the evidence! All that stuff you people have been seeing! My hypothesis finally made sense of the evidence for you."
I briefly looked at routebuilder.org and, as far as I can tell, it uses Google Maps itself, not some "wrapped" replacement of it. It just seems to tell you how long some segments are, which appear to all be drawn using the API.
I admit that I am probably missing something but at first appearance, there isn't anything here which violates Google Maps TOS.
This makes me wonder if most things that use Google Maps, may be unwittingly and obscurely violating the ToS in some way that only lawyers, but no developers, would ever understand.
Does anyone understand what, exactly, Google is saying the violation is?
Before you "but the children", give me the percentage of terrorist activities or even bombings where someone gave warning.
I can't give you a lot of digits of precision, but here's the number I came up with: more than 0%. The warning is the terrorism. You don't have to murder anyone to be a terrorist (though it sure helps).
How to be a terrorist: Do something scary, preferably targeting a society of cowards. Did you scare people into overreacting? Yes: mission accomplished, you're a good terrorist. No: You're a bad terrorist, so don't quit your engineering day job.
They probably didn't scare any students ("yay, day off!") but the parents were hit. As for how successful it was, I'll wait for the media to tell me. Everyone, please remember to FREAK OUT, so that we can guarantee a repeat of this cheap tactic. I know I can count on Republican candidates to join the terrorists on this, but let's all please try to remember to include the progressives too: kids need more days off like this! All that pot isn't going to smoke itself!
Meh, we're really talking about emotionally manipulating voters, not rationally setting policy. The focus group said terrorism is scarier than drunk drivers, and when they explained their fears, numbers weren't mentioned.
Hillary is someone whom the country would be better without, but at least she doesn't score double-irony points with stuff like this:
"I know this community. I know this industry. I know these people. I will engage them."
Only Fiorina could get people laughing so hysterically with so few words. Even Trump has never said anything quite that shocking yet. This is like if Hillary were to sincerely brag about how faithful her husband has been.
Then what non-ridiculous method of conditional access to video would be acceptable to the companies that fund production of feature films.
Obviously it's hard to say whether or not increasing profits would be acceptable to everyone who funds production. There will be outliers so I shouldn't arrogantly claim that they are all intended to be legitimate profit-seeking businesses.
Nevertheless, you'd think that for the common case (production companies that are trying to get the most money), something like "standard mkv or mp4 files served by HTTP or maybe HTTPS" would be a nearly perfect solution. (I think HTTPS is usually the best way to go, but for large media files it probably makes more sense to be as cache-friendly as possible.) Those are proven techs that already have a wide variety of existing implementations, and can be relatively easily re-implemented if someone has a new idea for an innovative player.
What's the downside of that?
Is the downside that it doesn't give service providers enough of a vertical market, so they can't as easily discourage customers from using multiple providers? That's the only reason I can think of, for using proprietary stuff: if I had a convenient unified user interface that showed content available on Netflix and their competitors (e.g. HBO) then I might shop at Netflix less often. Competition is bad.
But that's just Netflix's point of view; it's not the point of view of a profit-seeking production company or a viewer. Producers and consumers should be on the same page when it comes to making things easier to buy and use. It's just the middlemen who see advantages to putting up barriers and.. *cough*.. adding value. So I think we should ignore Netflix's agenda and concentrate on the production companies, just as you suggested.
If a production company comes back and says "no, DRM-free standard files over a standard protocol is unacceptable" then we should ask them just what the hell their agenda is, if making money isn't it. We tend to think they are trying to make money, so all our proposed solutions (e.g. stop using DRM so that you can sell more copies to more people) are geared toward that. If their agenda is something more obscure, then either we should find out what it is, or just let it go and stop worrying about it. Maybe pirating videos instead of paying Netflix for them, is compatible with everyone's non-profit agenda so we're all getting worked up over a non-problem. (But then what's the copyright for?!)
My guess is that the above paragraph is totally off on a tangent, and the majority actually do want money (and want as much as they can get, where more is better), so switching to standards and losing DRM is going to be the best answer for them.
OMG, this idea is brilliant. Why yes, I could use some easy money at taxpayers' expense. I would like to subscribe to your metal detector manufacturer newsletter. And your reseller newsletter. And the maintenance contract one too, please. Oh, and I think the bored staff who stand around the machines should be forced to unionize.
People talk about gun-free zones with contempt, but we need to start thinking of them as a yet-unfulfilled opportunity. Please, everyone, let this San Bernardino thing be the 9/11 to help kickstart the next security theater industry expansion. We can be the visionary grifters sucking the life out of the public in exchange for absolutely nothing of value. Chant with me: "gun-free zones! enforce them! enforce them! gun-free zones! enforce them! enforce them!"
Netflix has had many years to remove their dependency on proprietary player software so that it would no longer require closed players. As some of the stuff transitions from not-user-maintainable to completely-unmaintained, that'll just be another reason for people to remember that media requires standards. It's ridiculous that in 2015 someone is selling a video service where you can't just use whatever player you want to.
"Cord cutting" right now is something Netflix can cheer, but as expectations continue to rise and unless Netflix modernizes, all the reasons that people upgraded to Netflix, may become reasons that they upgrade from Netflix. And right here, you're looking at one of them. Netflix smells pretty "cabley" here.
Slashdot Mirror
If it has anything to do with Marxism, it's because we are currently living in a situation where capitalism looks a lot like Marxism, so it's hard to say one is better than the other.
Capitalism only makes sense if you have free markets. Without free markets, private ownership of industry is virtually indistinguishable the king or the state owning industry. Capitalism==feudalism==communism. All of the usual virtues that we normally talk about in the context of economic success (hard work, intelligence, inspiration, etc) have little bearing on the situation. What really matters is whether or not you recognized those values as worthless and saw what really matters: gaming the system though inheritance, bribery, theft, clan/party-membership or whatever. And of course, the main reason to game the system, is to prevent a free market from emerging!
Look at some of the things that you hate the most. See any monopolies? See any byzantine legal frameworks? See any immortal business owners? Any chance, that even if you were a genius badass motherfucker, you would be able to enter into competition with the established players?
So of course who-owns-it is irrelevant and it's hard to get excited about capitalism, because all the advantages that would have arisen under Adam Smith's vision, are denied to everyone anyway. It's already centrally planned so why would you care whether the planners are a group of VCs, or a king's court, or the Soviet central committee? Corruption makes them all look the same to anyone coming from a free market perspective.
Now granted, not the entire economy is like that, but a lot of it is, and especially some of its most visible parts. You're reading this thanks to your ISP, for example, and if you're American, you know that ISPs have *cough* transcended free markets. And many people are reading this on a computer where it's against the law to modify how they're reading it, and maybe it's illegal to maintain the hardware too. Anti-free-market forces and mechanisms are so ubiquitous that many people barely even notice them anymore (and don't normally describe their intent as "prevent a free market from happening"), but your don't fail to notice how much so many things suck by law. As long as you don't honestly ask yourself "Is this really capitalism?" (in the sense that someone 250 years ago would recognize) then it's easy to conclude: capitalism sucks.
I think his point might be that the wealth you're referring to, is not part of the wealth of the nation.
e.g. Let's say you magically doubled the wealth of America's top 1%. Would America's wealth have increased, or would it remain the same? Would the nation then be able to afford to do things that it previously could not afford?
There's a weird notion: those people aren't really part of the country, because their successes and failures don't translate to (or facilitate) anyone else's successes or failures. The whole "rising tide lifts all boats" thing fails to apply to them.
Is it true?
I can't think of a worse word than "ideal" there. You have totally ignored the cost, and yet here we were, complaining about the cost. As an ideal solution: fail.
If it's 10x overpriced and you pay for it with insurance premiums instead of getting the cost down, then you still paid 10x. Fuck that!
If you want to keep using insurance for this kind of non-sudden-catostrophe stuff, fine (that's a whole other topic, and we can have that argument another day) but don't apply insurance until after you have put competitive forces to bear on the vendors/providers. If the patient isn't going to be shopping around, then have the insurance company ruthlessly shopping around like a Wal-Mart purchasing agent, but FFS have someone be shopping around, making vendors willing to undercut each other by a percentage in order to make the sale. The entire medical industry needs to become like that, and anyone in there who isn't going through all the same stresses the rest of us in other industries are going though, is an opportunity for squeezin'.
Do they have money for lobbyists? Then you're paying them too much.
The last thing you should give them, is insurance. (I'm not saying you can't give it to them, but please please have it be last. Don't give them free government handouts-for-nothing until after you have negotiated the handout amount down. At least yell "get a job, hippie!" at them a few times before you pay them.) If you get this wrong, then we're all still going to be looking to consumer electronics companies instead, in order to address the cost. Cost cost cost. That's a key concept here, ok? Cost! Don't forget the cost!
Interesting that this is also a president who gets quite a bit of popularity and forgiveness by not enforcing interstate marijuana laws. Laws that Congress can't be bothered to repeal in spite of The People obviously wanting them gone.
I guess that's because another thing The People obviously want, is selective enforcement of laws. Someone doing no significant harm? Laws, schmaws. Someone piss you off? Now we have laws!
C'mon, everyone: you know this really is the American way. This isn't even something that Rs and Ds disagree about, as far as I see. Country folk and urbanites are on the same page too here, I think. Blacks and whites? Rich vs poor? We all agree.
Laws are for opponents.
I'm confused. It sounds like you are totally opposed to what they're doing, and calling them out on their absurd bullshit. This is like saying, "Hey, people are flaming Trump for being a piece of shit and an embarrassment to America, but to play devil's advocate, he is a piece of shit and an embarrassment to America."
You need to practice more at this devil's advocate thing. It is a damn fun thing to do, but you're got to do it right, or else it doesn't work at all.
World amazed by new record.
"I never thought he would do it," said one spectator.
"I came here thinking I would win, and then this happened," said a contestant, followed by several expletives.
"You've gotta respect that," explained one of the judges.
"I agree. This is big important news," said a Slashdot editor.
I remember in House of Cards, the president wasn't allowed to use his game console. (Well, he could have it, but it wasn't about to be given any sort of network access.) But that was a TV show, and here's real life: where basically the same thing (iPhone) is allowed.
TV takes things too seriously. If real life, government is all "meh, whatever."
I heard there was a case where someone else was suspected of a crime, the cops went crying to a judge, and the judge gave them permission to Break and Enter the suspect's house!
Seriously, if there's a problem here, it's that when you talk directly to another person on the Internet, a layperson wouldn't normally think that this would leave many records on third parties' machines.
#0 BUT: they should be aware that it might leave records, though, even if just dumb (application-unaware) packet logs, maybe. It's a risk, at least.
#1 BUT: this is Skype, not direct communication. I think most people know that Skype is kind of weird/fucked-up/corporate-agenda-oriented.
#2 BUT: so much NAT! Even Skype aside, a lot of people don't directly connect to each other and instead use some kind of intermediate server, e.g. XMPP. If you're using someone else's server instead of your own, you might not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
"You're driving it wrong."
Hold it right there. How could someone possibly ever formulate such a strategy?
Real-life news that a third party (e.g. Apple) is going to be coerced into giving you up, shouldn't have an effect on anything, because you already asked yourself, "what if?"
C'mon, every one of us already knows there is only one party in the universe who can protect your data: you.
In a world where everyone is tagged, is there a downside to being tagged?
From the users' point of view, this entire article is how FUCKING AWESOME Shine is. Previously, I had never heard of Shine, but here, Yahoo and Google are screaming that Shine is the best thing ever.
Shine must have paid these whores a lot for that.
If you lower the intensity a few orders of magnitude, isn't this obvious and doesn't it hit many programmers pretty close to home?
I've never murdered anyone, but I have done plenty of things I thought were dumb or "bad" simply because "that's how the boss wants it." And HELL YES I feel less responsible. I really do. Don't you?
Do you think the power utility ought to audit everyone to determine whether or not their business (well, not just business, but their use of electricity) is speculative, then I can see how your position makes sense and doesn't single you out as a Very Special Person.
OTOH if you start backpedalling and claim that you don't want the power utility to adjudicate whether or not you are a speculative user, then you just outed yourself as a Very Special Person.
The secrecy is how we know that the government has made a significant effort to try to determine its legality, and they determined it to be illegal. Whether or not they're correct that it's illegal: that's tricky, but they think it's illegal.
I wish there were some mechanism for bringing these suspected criminals to justice. I don't mean punishment; I mean trials. Prosecute one of them for violating FCC rules or for computer misuse/fraud in doing their MitM attacks, and make them show how they got a get-out-of-jail-free pass (because without the pass, it'd be a pretty airtight case if you or I were doing what they're doing).
The evidence consists of the observations which inspired them to make the computer model.
They already had the evidence; they just didn't know what it was evidence of. And then once the model predicted stuff like Sedna's orbit, they then had even more evidence: Sedna-and-friends. So that was an additional complex of evidence, for which they previously didn't know what it was evidence of.
Let's say you drop an apple out of a tree. It falls. You don't know why. Then someone notices that most of the apples eventually fall, and they run a sim where, if you hypothesize this weird (yet amazingly simple) force that makes things fall, you get consequences a whole lot like what people have observed. (Then someone realizes: "hey, this force should work on peaches too! It predicts peaches will fall." And then everyone is is "OMG, peaches do fall! We didn't understand those either, but here you are, giving us a really great hypothesis for all our observational evidence!") The sim isn't evidence of gravity, and yet it points to all these apples-falling as being evidence of the existence of gravity.
Same here. The sim isn't the evidence; it's the thing that helps you understand what the evidence means. It's a tool that was used for formulating the evidence-backed hypothesis, so that once you put your hypothesis out there, and people say "wtf? where's your evidence?" then you throw all your sim's inputs in their faces and say "there's the evidence! All that stuff you people have been seeing! My hypothesis finally made sense of the evidence for you."
I briefly looked at routebuilder.org and, as far as I can tell, it uses Google Maps itself, not some "wrapped" replacement of it. It just seems to tell you how long some segments are, which appear to all be drawn using the API.
I admit that I am probably missing something but at first appearance, there isn't anything here which violates Google Maps TOS.
This makes me wonder if most things that use Google Maps, may be unwittingly and obscurely violating the ToS in some way that only lawyers, but no developers, would ever understand.
Does anyone understand what, exactly, Google is saying the violation is?
I want more of that guy in this world.
I can't give you a lot of digits of precision, but here's the number I came up with: more than 0%. The warning is the terrorism. You don't have to murder anyone to be a terrorist (though it sure helps).
How to be a terrorist: Do something scary, preferably targeting a society of cowards. Did you scare people into overreacting? Yes: mission accomplished, you're a good terrorist. No: You're a bad terrorist, so don't quit your engineering day job.
They probably didn't scare any students ("yay, day off!") but the parents were hit. As for how successful it was, I'll wait for the media to tell me. Everyone, please remember to FREAK OUT, so that we can guarantee a repeat of this cheap tactic. I know I can count on Republican candidates to join the terrorists on this, but let's all please try to remember to include the progressives too: kids need more days off like this! All that pot isn't going to smoke itself!
Meh, we're really talking about emotionally manipulating voters, not rationally setting policy. The focus group said terrorism is scarier than drunk drivers, and when they explained their fears, numbers weren't mentioned.
Hillary is someone whom the country would be better without, but at least she doesn't score double-irony points with stuff like this:
Only Fiorina could get people laughing so hysterically with so few words. Even Trump has never said anything quite that shocking yet. This is like if Hillary were to sincerely brag about how faithful her husband has been.
Obviously it's hard to say whether or not increasing profits would be acceptable to everyone who funds production. There will be outliers so I shouldn't arrogantly claim that they are all intended to be legitimate profit-seeking businesses.
Nevertheless, you'd think that for the common case (production companies that are trying to get the most money), something like "standard mkv or mp4 files served by HTTP or maybe HTTPS" would be a nearly perfect solution. (I think HTTPS is usually the best way to go, but for large media files it probably makes more sense to be as cache-friendly as possible.) Those are proven techs that already have a wide variety of existing implementations, and can be relatively easily re-implemented if someone has a new idea for an innovative player.
What's the downside of that?
Is the downside that it doesn't give service providers enough of a vertical market, so they can't as easily discourage customers from using multiple providers? That's the only reason I can think of, for using proprietary stuff: if I had a convenient unified user interface that showed content available on Netflix and their competitors (e.g. HBO) then I might shop at Netflix less often. Competition is bad.
But that's just Netflix's point of view; it's not the point of view of a profit-seeking production company or a viewer. Producers and consumers should be on the same page when it comes to making things easier to buy and use. It's just the middlemen who see advantages to putting up barriers and .. *cough* .. adding value. So I think we should ignore Netflix's agenda and concentrate on the production companies, just as you suggested.
If a production company comes back and says "no, DRM-free standard files over a standard protocol is unacceptable" then we should ask them just what the hell their agenda is, if making money isn't it. We tend to think they are trying to make money, so all our proposed solutions (e.g. stop using DRM so that you can sell more copies to more people) are geared toward that. If their agenda is something more obscure, then either we should find out what it is, or just let it go and stop worrying about it. Maybe pirating videos instead of paying Netflix for them, is compatible with everyone's non-profit agenda so we're all getting worked up over a non-problem. (But then what's the copyright for?!)
My guess is that the above paragraph is totally off on a tangent, and the majority actually do want money (and want as much as they can get, where more is better), so switching to standards and losing DRM is going to be the best answer for them.
OMG, this idea is brilliant. Why yes, I could use some easy money at taxpayers' expense. I would like to subscribe to your metal detector manufacturer newsletter. And your reseller newsletter. And the maintenance contract one too, please. Oh, and I think the bored staff who stand around the machines should be forced to unionize.
People talk about gun-free zones with contempt, but we need to start thinking of them as a yet-unfulfilled opportunity. Please, everyone, let this San Bernardino thing be the 9/11 to help kickstart the next security theater industry expansion. We can be the visionary grifters sucking the life out of the public in exchange for absolutely nothing of value. Chant with me: "gun-free zones! enforce them! enforce them! gun-free zones! enforce them! enforce them!"
I think the reasoning is, "I am an asshole so I need to act like one."
Wow. I had no idea.
Netflix has had many years to remove their dependency on proprietary player software so that it would no longer require closed players. As some of the stuff transitions from not-user-maintainable to completely-unmaintained, that'll just be another reason for people to remember that media requires standards. It's ridiculous that in 2015 someone is selling a video service where you can't just use whatever player you want to.
"Cord cutting" right now is something Netflix can cheer, but as expectations continue to rise and unless Netflix modernizes, all the reasons that people upgraded to Netflix, may become reasons that they upgrade from Netflix. And right here, you're looking at one of them. Netflix smells pretty "cabley" here.