does it really state that people want to use DRM to copy music at home, but can't quite figure out how to use it?
I think he's just saying that people want to use their music, and some of them will quickly turn to pirated sources as soon as they run into an obstacle. If your DRM allows all legal uses and only hinders people violating the copyright (fairytale land, I know), then your honest users won't even know it's there. Of course, this assumes that the point of DRM is to hinder piracy.
I'm gainfully employed and I make decent money. But I value my money, and more importantly I value my time. So when I pay for music, I want to be able to play it whenever and wherever I see fit. Yeah, the RIAA can argue about what rights I do and do not have, but the bottom line is if I can't get the music onto my iPod I'm going to be pissed. If I have to install some program of dubious origin to play a CD on my PC I'm going to be pissed. If I put a CD into my car stereo and it doesn't play like every other freaking CD I've purchased in the past 15 years, I'm going to be pissed. And then I'm going to download it guilt-free because I've already paid for it. And then I'm going to wonder why the hell I'm paying these assclowns if in the end I'm going to wind up getting a better customer experience from some random P2P pirate who doesn't want my money and won't waste my time.
Good DRM imposes minimal burdens on legitmate users. The problem is, the RIAA will never implement good DRM because they don't want it as a piracy reduction mechanism, they want it as a revenue enhancement mechanism.
Back during the run-up towards the war I was having a discussion with a friend of mine (he was and still is strongly in favor of the war in Iraq). His question was "Well if he doesn't have weapons, why is he kicking out the inspectors?" The theory that he wanted uncertainty as a deterrent wasn't convincing to him or me. I had my own theory.
We'd been working under the assumption that Hussein was lying and that he was just really good at evading the inspectors. But, I said, what if he was telling the truth and his weapons programs really were dismantled? He can get access to the same news reports that we get, he knows what Bush et alia are claiming about his WMD program, except he knows whether all of his WMD programs have been dismantled, he knows whether there a nuclear progam, and he knows whether he's been cooperating with Al Queada. This means he knows the extent to which all of this "evidence" is either exaggerated, fabricated, or based on inaccurate interpretation of data. So if he hears Bush claiming something that he knows to be false now he knows that Bush wants to go to war, regardless of whether there's any real justification.
So if the president has already decided to go to war, then pushing inspections can't be about finding WMDs. From Saddam's standpoint, by submitting to even more inspections he'd just be giving the U.S. more intelligence that would assist in target when the war inevitably started. By hyping up the evidence of WMD, Bush effectively removed any incentive Hussein might have had to cooperate.
Perhaps I'm not being clear. Your original post decries the "obvious bias of Slashdot editors against conservative values." I see no support for this premise. You have not presented conservative values. You have come to the forum with attacks and accusations. And, much like conservatives, liberals will defend themselves when attacked. This should not be surprising. Aroudn here defense can be performed with written rebuttals, or it can be done with mod points.
You yourself have said that "you don;t see conservatives trying to push thier agenda at Slashdot." How can the moderators be showing bias against conservative values if they never see them?
Are you new here? Yes, Slashdot is biased, but your assessment is innacurate.
I'd like to note that you take time to sling insults at Dan Rather and accuse the DNC of violating campaign laws, but you make no mention of any of the conservative values against which you claim Slashdot is so biased.
I'm a liberal. I'm open to being educated about the conservative values of which you speak. But I rarely see conservatives speak of them here. But I do see a lot of attacks hurled against the left.
Now if you were to claim that attacks on liberals are quickly modded down while attacks against conservatives are allowed to stand, then I'd have to agree with you.
I'm one of those paranoid people who decided that the US Census Bureau didn't need to know my race. I declined to answer that particular question.
Several friends of mine have accused me of being paranoid. They'll say something like "Why bother hiding that? It's something that anybody can tell just by looking at you!"
And I'll say, "Yeah, I guess you're right. It's not like the U.S. government has ever used the census lists to go out and round up racial minorities. Oh, wait! Yes it has!"
In 2000, the Census Bureau released an official apology for their part in assisting the government to round up thousands of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. During World War II, the bureau released its statistical data to the FBI so that the FBI could target particular cities and neighborhoods for persons whose only crime was being of Japanese descent.
But those were different times, right? America's changed a lot, and we've learned from that and it could never happen again.
Oh wait, it's already happening again. (from the same article)
Recently the Census Bureau gave the Department of Homeland Security specially tabulated population statistics on Arab Americans in response to a request from the Customs and Border Protection division. This statistical information includes data on the number of people of Arab descent that live in a particular ZIP code, the names of cities with more than 1,000 Arab American residents and ZIP code level breakdowns of Arab American inhabitants sorted by their country of origin.
But hey, I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to worry about, right?
If a company who had simply practiced standard bastardy I'd give some credit here, but MS don't earn any points from me with this.
Attack open source as un-American
Attack open source as being bad for the economy
Attack open source as a threat to national security
????
Release project as open source
While I won't demand that MS go on an open sourcing orgy before they get my forgiveness, I'm not tossing any laurels their way until they fill in the missing step.
Yeah, I just wish I had those kinds of problems when I was younger. "Oh my God, it was terrible. They came out of nowhere. Hundreds upon hundreds of tech-savvy teenage girls surrounding me, screaming their adoration. Please, give me a moment, I can't talk right now..."
Remember when royalty had to worry about things like assassinations, popular uprisings, and military coups?
One word: liability
It's not just about how you feel about it, it's how your clients feel as well.
There's always the danger that one of your employees is going do something evil. But hiring a known black hat makes you highly vulnerable. What happens when your competitor is giving a presentation to a potential client and says, "Yeah, those guys at FooCorp hired the guy who wrote that virus that took down GreatBigWebSite.com. I wouldn't trust that guy with my customer data, would you? Do you really want to do business with a company the rewards criminal behavior?" What percent of your potential business would you lose?
The D-VHS's biggest failing, though, was that it couldn't record in HD from most digital video recorders, thanks to JVC's spectacularly stupid decision to leave out the three most common high-def video inputs in favor of a digital FireWire connector with built-in copy-control circuitry; only a handful of other devices support this.
IANAL, etc...
But it seems like it would be a fairly clearcut case to claim that these takedown notices do not constitute a legitimate notice that the ISP is hosting copyrighted material.
This may or may not apply under Australian law, but my understanding is that the reason these things work under American law is that ISPs are classified as "common carriers." So they don't have to monitor their systems for copyrighted material, but in order to maintain common carrier status and not be liable for infringement they have to respond promptly when a copyright holder informs them of a violation. If there can be no reasonable level of certainty that a takedown notice actually refers to copyrighted material because the MPAA isn't actually checking for accuracy, then the MPAA is effectively imposing the burden of monitoring the network for infringements on the ISPs. As common carriers, they shouldn't have to do this.
MPAA: "The ISP was duly notified of infringing material..."
ISP: "No we weren't. We've gotten hundreds of these emails. Nobody at the MPAA actually looks at them, why should we?"
Judge: "So who at the MPAA informed them of infringement?"
MPAA: "..."
I don't see how it's a fine line between dumping and fixing. They seem to be polar opposites. As I understand it:
Fixing: I get together with my competitors and we all agree to sell products at a certain price. Since we're no longer competing against each other, we can negate the downward pressure on prices (and thus profits) that usually results from a competitive market.
Dumping: If I happen to have a bunch of money, instead of cooperating with my competitors, I try to kill them off. I price my products below the cost to make them, ensuring that nobody can run a sustainable business in the market. Since I have a bunch of money, I can last longer than my competitors. Once they die off or move on, I have a monopoly and can jack up prices far above what a competitive market would support.
We all lose if these companies can't stabilize, but we all win if the companies that can't manage their freaking inventory die off and make room for companies that actually read their history and learn from it. Collusion won't end the boom/bust cycle. It'll just ensure that the consumer gets screwed on prices regardless of whether there's a shortage or a surplus.
My vote's with Microsoft, NEC and Toshiba. I'm basing this on the Sony's fairly consistent record of being a day late and a feature short to a new market because it was trying to protect its content business. Sony's vast movie library is going to be a hindrance to them actually making the best product they can.
Yes there is. When you have passion for your work, it shows. Back during the boom, when I was interviewing candidates (Oh, to be hiring again!) it was pretty easy to tell the guys who loved it from the opportunists. That's not to say we never hired any opportunists. But when you get two CS guys in the same room who both love it, they ID each other pretty quickly.
Look for the guy whose eyes light up when he talks about tech. Look for the guy who's well versed in a number of technologies that he's never had to use on the job. Look for the guy who makes time to work on open source projects.
I convinced my manager that the last bit was one of the best indicators. A guy who programmed in his spare time and gave the fruits of his labor to the world must really love what he does.
Yes, this is pure crap. But hey, providing decreased functionality in hardware in order to protect the content business has worked so well for Sony, right?
When I first read about plans for set-top boxes that enforced such limits I thought, "Why would I buy such a thing when there's Tivo?" I was considering building a PC-based PVR, but when I looked at the time and cost involved I thought "Why go through the trouble when I can just buy a Tivo?"
Now it seems that they're slowly but surely pressuring the PVR manufacturers to do their dirty work. Of course, this could ultimately kill the market, or at least leave it vulnerable to a a newcomer. For the first time in a long time, I'm looking at MythTV.
Here is my message to the industry: There is no legitimate reason a PVR shouldn't be able to do everything my 10-year old VCR can do. Hardware that I purchase and own should not conspire against me.
My understanding of the situation (someone please correct me if I err; spare the cluestick, spoil the child and all):
The P2P networks still standing have managed to avoid prosecution using the claim that they don't really own the networks. There's no centralized control, so they can't weed out copyright violations (or so they claim. The problem is if it's not your network then you can't really sue someone for messing with it; they can't have it both ways. I suppose the users could sue, but that's just asking for trouble.
Their latest tactic is actually very clever: buy the rights to a patent that covers methods used by your network client, then sue anyone who connects to the network using an unauthorized client for patent infringement. It's dirty as hell, but this is a dirty business. The patent is probably invalid, but the RIAA's goons will have to fight it in court.
I tried RealPlayer a few months ago, having avoided it like the plague for years. I waded through all of the menus and disabled everything that looked like "automatically update" or "load something at startup," but I still couldn't figure out how to keep the RealPlayer scheduler from loading at boot. ZoneAlarm complained when it tried to phone home. I'd delete the registry key that loaded it, but RealPlayer checked the registry each time it was run and replaced it if it was missing or modified (I tried leaving the key with a blank value, which fools some software that tries similar tricks (like the software that came with my TV tuner)). I eventually set the file as non-executable to keep it from running.
The solution: I switched to iTunes. Less than a month later I got an iPod as a birthday present. Never looked back.
Side note:
Back in the day, Real was so bad that when my company was considering formats for distributing audio, the salespeople lobbied against using RealAudio because they'd used RealPlayer at home and didn't want the company to be associated with the player's invasive behavior.
Someone's making a sound-alike station? Well duh!. When so many stations sound the same and have such a narrow scope, they become very easy to copy.
There's an simple solution to this: don't limit your radio station to a freaking playlist!. If all your DJs do is provide inane chatter while they shuffle around stuff from the same list of 100 songs, how long do you expect to maintain any sort of competitive advantage?
Oh, that's right, with ClearChannel dominating the airwaves, they didn't need to compete. That's how the industry let itself slide into this playlist dominated model to begin with. So now Microsoft can come along and say "Hey, we're just like $YOUR_LOCAL_RADIO_STATION, except we suck less!"
In my opinion, the difficulty of spelling a name with three vowels next to each other will be strike one against Tableau... if people can't remember how to spell it, they won't be able to find it the first/second/third/etc. time.
Not a problem. Their pals down the hall at Google have made sure that, no matter how badly you scramble those last three vowels, it'll always come back with "Did you mean: tableau?
Good thing they aren't supposed to be the next Yahoo!, or they'd be screwed right now.
A car isn't a terribly friendly environment. It gets ridiculously hot, stuff gets tossed about, CDs wind up on the floor. Do whenever I'd get a new CD, the first thing I'd do is burn a copy for my car.
Now that I have an iPod, it's not an issue. Rather than burning every new CD, I rip it into iTunes. This is even better, since now I have 3 copies: the iPod, my PC, and the original CDs.
Of course I feel I have to comment on the cognac glasses... When I buy the cognac glasses, I own them, period. If I want to fill them with Coors Light instead of cognac, I can. If I want to use them at a dinner party, I can. If I want to use them in a restaurant to serve cognac the public for profit, I can. I don't have to consult the vendor or pay additional fees for this. Whoever sold me the glasses doesn't give a rat's ass what I do, he got his money for making the glass and that's all he cares about.
Imagine if a maker of glassware said, "We don't like the fact that people are buying cognac glasses and filling them with wine. This is cutting into our revenues for wine glasses. So we've put a special coating on the cognac glasses that will make anything besides cognac taste bitter. We call it our Beverage Rights Management system."
This is how things are done in the post-boom IT hiring world. You see, it works like this:
Skillset requirements list = What we want you to do plus some buzzwords some manager read in a magazine that are supposed to be "hot" right now. Example: "Must have 3+ years experience with ASP, J2EE, MSSQL, Oracle, IIS, Apache and Photoshop."
Position title = What we're willing to pay you. Example: "Seeking intern with the following skills..."
Personally, I prefer Eros. Much like iocaine powder, it's odorless, colorless, and flavorless. These are all positive traits for a lubricant. Very much unlike iocaine powder, it will not instantly kill whoever ingests it. This is also a positive trait for a lubricant.
The "one lock" method has been used repeatedly by the content industry. Think Macrovision and CSS. It has the disadvantage you stated (crack one, crack 'em all) but has the advantage of providing consistency and influence over people who make content players.
If there are six big content providers each with their own system, and one of their DRM systems screws up on one the players, the manufacturer of the player will say "The DRM is screwy and we don't support it. Bitch at the content provider." If there are six big providers who all use the same system, and it doesn't work on one player, then the player is broken and it will be "fixed" to work with the DRM.
Remember, DRM isn't about stopping piracy. It's about controlling how the everyday user consumes content and allowing the content providers to build a revenue structure as they see fit without having to worry about users circumventing it through things like (time|space|format) shifting.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one who chuckled upon seeing the file name "wang_pnas.pdf"? TGIF
I can think of a few possible reasons:
does it really state that people want to use DRM to copy music at home, but can't quite figure out how to use it?
I think he's just saying that people want to use their music, and some of them will quickly turn to pirated sources as soon as they run into an obstacle. If your DRM allows all legal uses and only hinders people violating the copyright (fairytale land, I know), then your honest users won't even know it's there. Of course, this assumes that the point of DRM is to hinder piracy.
I'm gainfully employed and I make decent money. But I value my money, and more importantly I value my time. So when I pay for music, I want to be able to play it whenever and wherever I see fit. Yeah, the RIAA can argue about what rights I do and do not have, but the bottom line is if I can't get the music onto my iPod I'm going to be pissed. If I have to install some program of dubious origin to play a CD on my PC I'm going to be pissed. If I put a CD into my car stereo and it doesn't play like every other freaking CD I've purchased in the past 15 years, I'm going to be pissed. And then I'm going to download it guilt-free because I've already paid for it. And then I'm going to wonder why the hell I'm paying these assclowns if in the end I'm going to wind up getting a better customer experience from some random P2P pirate who doesn't want my money and won't waste my time.
Good DRM imposes minimal burdens on legitmate users. The problem is, the RIAA will never implement good DRM because they don't want it as a piracy reduction mechanism, they want it as a revenue enhancement mechanism.
Back during the run-up towards the war I was having a discussion with a friend of mine (he was and still is strongly in favor of the war in Iraq). His question was "Well if he doesn't have weapons, why is he kicking out the inspectors?" The theory that he wanted uncertainty as a deterrent wasn't convincing to him or me. I had my own theory.
We'd been working under the assumption that Hussein was lying and that he was just really good at evading the inspectors. But, I said, what if he was telling the truth and his weapons programs really were dismantled? He can get access to the same news reports that we get, he knows what Bush et alia are claiming about his WMD program, except he knows whether all of his WMD programs have been dismantled, he knows whether there a nuclear progam, and he knows whether he's been cooperating with Al Queada. This means he knows the extent to which all of this "evidence" is either exaggerated, fabricated, or based on inaccurate interpretation of data. So if he hears Bush claiming something that he knows to be false now he knows that Bush wants to go to war, regardless of whether there's any real justification.
So if the president has already decided to go to war, then pushing inspections can't be about finding WMDs. From Saddam's standpoint, by submitting to even more inspections he'd just be giving the U.S. more intelligence that would assist in target when the war inevitably started. By hyping up the evidence of WMD, Bush effectively removed any incentive Hussein might have had to cooperate.
Perhaps I'm not being clear. Your original post decries the "obvious bias of Slashdot editors against conservative values." I see no support for this premise. You have not presented conservative values. You have come to the forum with attacks and accusations. And, much like conservatives, liberals will defend themselves when attacked. This should not be surprising. Aroudn here defense can be performed with written rebuttals, or it can be done with mod points.
You yourself have said that "you don;t see conservatives trying to push thier agenda at Slashdot." How can the moderators be showing bias against conservative values if they never see them?
Are you new here? Yes, Slashdot is biased, but your assessment is innacurate.
I'd like to note that you take time to sling insults at Dan Rather and accuse the DNC of violating campaign laws, but you make no mention of any of the conservative values against which you claim Slashdot is so biased.
I'm a liberal. I'm open to being educated about the conservative values of which you speak. But I rarely see conservatives speak of them here. But I do see a lot of attacks hurled against the left.
Now if you were to claim that attacks on liberals are quickly modded down while attacks against conservatives are allowed to stand, then I'd have to agree with you.
Several friends of mine have accused me of being paranoid. They'll say something like "Why bother hiding that? It's something that anybody can tell just by looking at you!"
And I'll say, "Yeah, I guess you're right. It's not like the U.S. government has ever used the census lists to go out and round up racial minorities. Oh, wait! Yes it has! " But those were different times, right? America's changed a lot, and we've learned from that and it could never happen again.
Oh wait, it's already happening again. (from the same article) But hey, I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to worry about, right?
- Attack open source as un-American
- Attack open source as being bad for the economy
- Attack open source as a threat to national security
- ????
- Release project as open source
While I won't demand that MS go on an open sourcing orgy before they get my forgiveness, I'm not tossing any laurels their way until they fill in the missing step.Yeah, I just wish I had those kinds of problems when I was younger. "Oh my God, it was terrible. They came out of nowhere. Hundreds upon hundreds of tech-savvy teenage girls surrounding me, screaming their adoration. Please, give me a moment, I can't talk right now..."
Remember when royalty had to worry about things like assassinations, popular uprisings, and military coups?
One word: liability
It's not just about how you feel about it, it's how your clients feel as well.
There's always the danger that one of your employees is going do something evil. But hiring a known black hat makes you highly vulnerable. What happens when your competitor is giving a presentation to a potential client and says, "Yeah, those guys at FooCorp hired the guy who wrote that virus that took down GreatBigWebSite.com. I wouldn't trust that guy with my customer data, would you? Do you really want to do business with a company the rewards criminal behavior?" What percent of your potential business would you lose?
IANAL, etc...
But it seems like it would be a fairly clearcut case to claim that these takedown notices do not constitute a legitimate notice that the ISP is hosting copyrighted material.
This may or may not apply under Australian law, but my understanding is that the reason these things work under American law is that ISPs are classified as "common carriers." So they don't have to monitor their systems for copyrighted material, but in order to maintain common carrier status and not be liable for infringement they have to respond promptly when a copyright holder informs them of a violation. If there can be no reasonable level of certainty that a takedown notice actually refers to copyrighted material because the MPAA isn't actually checking for accuracy, then the MPAA is effectively imposing the burden of monitoring the network for infringements on the ISPs. As common carriers, they shouldn't have to do this.
MPAA: "The ISP was duly notified of infringing material..."
ISP: "No we weren't. We've gotten hundreds of these emails. Nobody at the MPAA actually looks at them, why should we?"
Judge: "So who at the MPAA informed them of infringement?"
MPAA: "..."
I don't see how it's a fine line between dumping and fixing. They seem to be polar opposites. As I understand it:
Fixing: I get together with my competitors and we all agree to sell products at a certain price. Since we're no longer competing against each other, we can negate the downward pressure on prices (and thus profits) that usually results from a competitive market.
Dumping: If I happen to have a bunch of money, instead of cooperating with my competitors, I try to kill them off. I price my products below the cost to make them, ensuring that nobody can run a sustainable business in the market. Since I have a bunch of money, I can last longer than my competitors. Once they die off or move on, I have a monopoly and can jack up prices far above what a competitive market would support.
We all lose if these companies can't stabilize, but we all win if the companies that can't manage their freaking inventory die off and make room for companies that actually read their history and learn from it. Collusion won't end the boom/bust cycle. It'll just ensure that the consumer gets screwed on prices regardless of whether there's a shortage or a surplus.
My vote's with Microsoft, NEC and Toshiba. I'm basing this on the Sony's fairly consistent record of being a day late and a feature short to a new market because it was trying to protect its content business. Sony's vast movie library is going to be a hindrance to them actually making the best product they can.
Yes there is. When you have passion for your work, it shows. Back during the boom, when I was interviewing candidates (Oh, to be hiring again!) it was pretty easy to tell the guys who loved it from the opportunists. That's not to say we never hired any opportunists. But when you get two CS guys in the same room who both love it, they ID each other pretty quickly.
Look for the guy whose eyes light up when he talks about tech. Look for the guy who's well versed in a number of technologies that he's never had to use on the job. Look for the guy who makes time to work on open source projects.
I convinced my manager that the last bit was one of the best indicators. A guy who programmed in his spare time and gave the fruits of his labor to the world must really love what he does.
Yes, this is pure crap. But hey, providing decreased functionality in hardware in order to protect the content business has worked so well for Sony, right?
When I first read about plans for set-top boxes that enforced such limits I thought, "Why would I buy such a thing when there's Tivo?" I was considering building a PC-based PVR, but when I looked at the time and cost involved I thought "Why go through the trouble when I can just buy a Tivo?"
Now it seems that they're slowly but surely pressuring the PVR manufacturers to do their dirty work. Of course, this could ultimately kill the market, or at least leave it vulnerable to a a newcomer. For the first time in a long time, I'm looking at MythTV.
Here is my message to the industry: There is no legitimate reason a PVR shouldn't be able to do everything my 10-year old VCR can do. Hardware that I purchase and own should not conspire against me.
My understanding of the situation (someone please correct me if I err; spare the cluestick, spoil the child and all): The P2P networks still standing have managed to avoid prosecution using the claim that they don't really own the networks. There's no centralized control, so they can't weed out copyright violations (or so they claim. The problem is if it's not your network then you can't really sue someone for messing with it; they can't have it both ways. I suppose the users could sue, but that's just asking for trouble.
Their latest tactic is actually very clever: buy the rights to a patent that covers methods used by your network client, then sue anyone who connects to the network using an unauthorized client for patent infringement. It's dirty as hell, but this is a dirty business. The patent is probably invalid, but the RIAA's goons will have to fight it in court.
I tried RealPlayer a few months ago, having avoided it like the plague for years. I waded through all of the menus and disabled everything that looked like "automatically update" or "load something at startup," but I still couldn't figure out how to keep the RealPlayer scheduler from loading at boot. ZoneAlarm complained when it tried to phone home. I'd delete the registry key that loaded it, but RealPlayer checked the registry each time it was run and replaced it if it was missing or modified (I tried leaving the key with a blank value, which fools some software that tries similar tricks (like the software that came with my TV tuner)). I eventually set the file as non-executable to keep it from running.
The solution: I switched to iTunes. Less than a month later I got an iPod as a birthday present. Never looked back. Side note: Back in the day, Real was so bad that when my company was considering formats for distributing audio, the salespeople lobbied against using RealAudio because they'd used RealPlayer at home and didn't want the company to be associated with the player's invasive behavior.
Someone's making a sound-alike station? Well duh!. When so many stations sound the same and have such a narrow scope, they become very easy to copy.
There's an simple solution to this: don't limit your radio station to a freaking playlist!. If all your DJs do is provide inane chatter while they shuffle around stuff from the same list of 100 songs, how long do you expect to maintain any sort of competitive advantage?
Oh, that's right, with ClearChannel dominating the airwaves, they didn't need to compete. That's how the industry let itself slide into this playlist dominated model to begin with. So now Microsoft can come along and say "Hey, we're just like $YOUR_LOCAL_RADIO_STATION, except we suck less!"
Sigh. End Rant.
Pay me no mind, I was just being silly about the Tableau/Google connection.
In my opinion, the difficulty of spelling a name with three vowels next to each other will be strike one against Tableau... if people can't remember how to spell it, they won't be able to find it the first/second/third/etc. time.
Not a problem. Their pals down the hall at Google have made sure that, no matter how badly you scramble those last three vowels, it'll always come back with "Did you mean: tableau?
Good thing they aren't supposed to be the next Yahoo!, or they'd be screwed right now.
I used to.
A car isn't a terribly friendly environment. It gets ridiculously hot, stuff gets tossed about, CDs wind up on the floor. Do whenever I'd get a new CD, the first thing I'd do is burn a copy for my car.
Now that I have an iPod, it's not an issue. Rather than burning every new CD, I rip it into iTunes. This is even better, since now I have 3 copies: the iPod, my PC, and the original CDs.
Of course I feel I have to comment on the cognac glasses...
When I buy the cognac glasses, I own them, period. If I want to fill them with Coors Light instead of cognac, I can. If I want to use them at a dinner party, I can. If I want to use them in a restaurant to serve cognac the public for profit, I can. I don't have to consult the vendor or pay additional fees for this. Whoever sold me the glasses doesn't give a rat's ass what I do, he got his money for making the glass and that's all he cares about.
Imagine if a maker of glassware said, "We don't like the fact that people are buying cognac glasses and filling them with wine. This is cutting into our revenues for wine glasses. So we've put a special coating on the cognac glasses that will make anything besides cognac taste bitter. We call it our Beverage Rights Management system."
This is how things are done in the post-boom IT hiring world. You see, it works like this:
Skillset requirements list = What we want you to do plus some buzzwords some manager read in a magazine that are supposed to be "hot" right now. Example: "Must have 3+ years experience with ASP, J2EE, MSSQL, Oracle, IIS, Apache and Photoshop."
Position title = What we're willing to pay you. Example: "Seeking intern with the following skills..."
Personally, I prefer Eros. Much like iocaine powder, it's odorless, colorless, and flavorless. These are all positive traits for a lubricant. Very much unlike iocaine powder, it will not instantly kill whoever ingests it. This is also a positive trait for a lubricant.
The "one lock" method has been used repeatedly by the content industry. Think Macrovision and CSS. It has the disadvantage you stated (crack one, crack 'em all) but has the advantage of providing consistency and influence over people who make content players.
If there are six big content providers each with their own system, and one of their DRM systems screws up on one the players, the manufacturer of the player will say "The DRM is screwy and we don't support it. Bitch at the content provider." If there are six big providers who all use the same system, and it doesn't work on one player, then the player is broken and it will be "fixed" to work with the DRM.
Remember, DRM isn't about stopping piracy. It's about controlling how the everyday user consumes content and allowing the content providers to build a revenue structure as they see fit without having to worry about users circumventing it through things like (time|space|format) shifting.