Ever think this might be some sort of DRM feature designed to make streaming audio suck? This would after all crap all over things like Shoutcast, which is the sort of thing the record companies are going after; basic internet radio.
Could be a case of defective by design - I hope I'm wrong, but I fail to see any sane reason why the two systems would affect each other like this.
Because people are very difficult to part from their money for donations, even OSS people donating to OSS projects. It's human nature, we just don't like parting with the green. Something like this negates that factor, and also brings what would be fewer, smaller donations to more widespread organizations together into big lump sums directed at a few projects. Whether or not you consider that a good thing is down to you, but it can't be a bad thing for the organizations involved, or for Linux, to have a few of it's flagship projects (Blender is one of the premier examples of sophisticated, top-class software for Linux, and should get more mainstream/tech press) funded and focussed on improving still further.
If you have a pet project you want to keep donating to, this isn't going to stop you, and it isn't going to stop you from talking your friends into donating to your favourite OSS project. It might, however, garner a fair number of people who, for whatever reason, do not donate directly into helping support OSS, both in terms of payment and profile.
I mean, the disc, any format, is obsolete, and this just helps push downloading as the primary format. HD-DVDs are cheaper to manufacture? Downloads have no manufacturing cost.
Believe it or not, there are still lots of people who don't have an internet connection fast enough to download HD-quality content in a reasonable enough timespan to justify not going to a brick-and-mortar video store and buying the thing, and a sizeable minority in the US and the UK *do not have or use the internet at all*.
I realized I don't buy DVDs to watch them again. How many times can you watch one thing? I buy stuff when I like it enough that I want to hand to other people I think should watch it. And on occasion to kind of show support for something like a show that was cancelled.
Then I would venture that you are very much in the minority when it comes to [HD]DVD, CD, etc purchasing patterns. Most people buy DVDs because they want to watch what's on them themselves, not because they want to distribute it or show support. I go by the showing support thing too, on the basis that DVD sales show TV producers that there is a market for good TV and not just the latest series of Strictly Big Camp Brothers Dancing in the Ice Jungle, but most people don't think that far, they just want the DVD to watch.
Add those to the hoarders who love the credibility boost of having walls of DVD cases, or every episode of their favourite Star Trek series on HD-DVD, etc, and the disc is far from dead, and seperate physical storage will probably never die, even if it comes down to storing every Star Trek/Lost/House, MD episode ever on a cube of holographic glass.
As to my 'iconic image', I tend to dislike that part personally. I'm not a great public speaker, and I've avoided travelling for the last several years because I'm not very comfortable being seen as this iconic 'visionary'. I'm just an engineer, and I just happen to love doing what I do, and to work with other people in public.
This, people, is the key difference between Linux and Microsoft, and even Apple. Steves Ballmer and Jobs both want to be seen as visionaries, as all-knowing technological sages of our time. That isn't neccessarily a bad thing, as we've seen with the way Jobs has turned Apple around since he took over, but it does explain the difference between the philosophies of the groups: Apple and Microsoft take the approach of throwing new features in whenever they find them, so as to be seen as forward-thinking and 'next-gen', and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't - Spotlight being an example of something that does work (yeah, there had been desktop search before, but nothing quite that efficient and right-on-the-desktop in what can be called the 'Big 3' operating systems), and things like the are-they-in, are-they-out dropped features from Vista being an example of something that doesn't.
Linux, however, taking it's cues from Linus, approaches things from an engineering perspective. Visionary? That's all well and good, but will it run the risk of breaking? Yes? Then it's not going in. When you don't have a product to sell, it's a lot easier to base your development priorites on a more sound engineering base. Therein lies the difference; Jobs and Ballmer see themselves as visionaries, while Linus - who, whether he likes it or not, is the 'spiritual leader' of the Linux community - sees himself as 'just an engineer'. (Of course, the point could be made that Linus has the luxury of only being concerned with the kernel, where security and stability are the key things and form over function is rarely if ever required - do the likes likes of Mark Shuttleworth, Matthew Szulik, etc see themselves as engineers, or as visionaries?)
Because the whole point of the Mac, and the thing valued most by it's whole target market, is it's simplicity. The UNIX underbelly is supposed to stay hidden beneath the sleek brushed-metal lines. You don't get these patronising predicates in Windows articles involving the shell because the Windows shell is considerably less complex (read: powerful) than the UNIX shell that OS X has. To an unfamiliar user, that much power is scary.
Also, it might be a dev-oriented article, but at the end of the day, once you've *made* your app, you have to tell your [average] users how to get your app onto *their* iPhone, so at some point in the chain of usage the average Mac user will have to deal with the command line, something they are not used to doing. We all might be 'fairly comfortable with sh' on/., but is your grandmother? (not that the average grandmother is going to go about wanting custom apps on her iPhone, but you get the idea - average users aren't nearly as 'comfortable with sh' as you think they should be, and telling them to 'get over it' is a great way to alienate your userbase.
are the #1 issue in this and every election ever held. Seriously, after the mistakes made in the last two elections, people should be making *extra damn sure* they pick the right candidate for them, on every issue or at least as many issues as possible. A good President would not let his personal beliefs on evolution affect his judgement on what is best for the nation as a whole, and we should be spending our time working out which candidates would make good Presidents, not organizing a creationist witch-hunt based around the flawed concept that anyone who harbours a different idea than us about how the world came into being cannot possibly correct or intelligent in any other area.
Notice that Tony Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown, have managed to drive us in the UK into spiralling youth crime, rising pensioner poverty and far-reaching general disaffection without so much of an inkling of creationism, and if you think that the #1 problem with Bush's presidency has been his particular set of religious beliefs you must have some very odd priorities, as I really wouldn't put spiralling trade deficit and an unending 4-year quagmire in Iraq down to anything to do with how old Dubya thinks the world is and whether or not he thinks Jesus fought with dinosaurs.
Heh, gimme a break, it's 2 in the morning here, I was only trying to clumsily shoehorn an AOL gag into being somewhat on-topic. It's a lot harder than it looks; I tell you, I've a whole new respect for the good people of bash.org
AOL EXECUTIVES BROKE INTO MY HOUSE AND SODOMISED MY CAT UNTIL I PIRATED BILLY RAY CYRUS!!!
OMFG!! SERIOUSLY!!! - Tell me, Have we really sunk this low?
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
they go and remind geeks everywhere that they are living proof that there should be a licence to use the internet. If you are incapable of preventing yourself from illegally downloading copyrighted material (whatever the RIAA do or don't do, and whether that's moral or not is irrelevant, whether we like it or not illegally downloading copyrighted material is illegal in the current climate), you really shouldn't be allowed near a computer because you're a danger to yourself.
That's the real damage that DRM is doing - it's creating a huge DIS-incentive for being creative.
You don't think that's exactly what they want? Think about how much the big film studios, big record companies, etc would love to crush 'grass roots' productions now that the software is 'good enough' to compete with their million-dollar products? If DRM can 'accidentally' stop people producing hi-def content on their own computers, that's a stick the big media companies can use to beat their drum a little harder - "we have hi-def content, don't watch that amateurish standard-def stuff, they're living in the past!".
Stifling innovation is what they want, it means they are the only ones that can make money. The previous generation of technology was 'good enough' for home studio use (yes, XP was), and they didn't like that, so the solution is to cripple Vista.
But none of those are as effective at severe, permanent and indiscriminant damage than this, and who likes to cause severe, permanent and indiscriminant damage to lots of people? That's right, genius, terrorists. I don't know about you, but I like to think the average guy on the street isn't evil enough to do such a thing.
I cannot overstate this, this is not a fart in a bottle.
For it to be defamation of character what the RIAA is showing would have to be false. This guy really did have porn on his computer, so showing people that he does is not defamation of character, because it's true. Invasion of privacy yes, and probably a lot of other things, but not defamation of character.
DX are keeping open graphics drivers away from Linux? RMS oughtta suit up in some spandex and lay the smack down on them in the ring!
Oh, *Direct*X - my bad.
UAC were involved in the making of Vista? Holy shit, how long before demons start spewing forth from the temporal gateway manifesting inside my CRT?
Someone call the Doomguy!
Planes, rockets and modern cars kill people if they fail in unpredictable ways, the worst that can happen if a PC crashes is you lose a couple of hours' work. Computer systems where there is anything hugely important at stake tend to run embedded systems that are held to a far higher standard of quality.
It doesn't excuse companies for writing sloppy software, but it's the reason we accept a failure rate we wouldn't accept in anything where people might die as a result - if, God forbid, you ever get seriously ill, I sincerely doubt your life support machine would be running Windows.
Sounds like the perfect investment plan to me - As long as they create a snapshot, if it all goes badly they can just push the right button and go again.
Why is the bottom panel on my desktop missing about 20% of the time? I have to log out and log back in. Usually it comes back, sometimes it takes 2 logins.
OK I haven't encountered this problem as I've got my Gnome configured to use just one bar, but I've got a Hebrew date applet that seems to confuse the hell out of the panel and I frequently lose the clock off the right hand side of the screen, so I can't help with this one but I can sympathise. Try running 'killall gnome-panel' from a terminal and see if that brings it back, if it does then it's probably an issue with your resolution or screen position. If not, try just 'gnome-panel', if that works, it's just crashing for some unknown reason. Either way, it's quicker than logging in and out again every time.
Why is the application built into Ubuntu to play music named "Movie Player"?
Contrary to what other people are saying, double-clicking an.mp3 in Gnome *does* launch movie player, which seems a little odd, but I guess it makes sense if you're just looking to listen to one track. It should be renamed 'Media Player' to avoid confusion, but in it's defence, it's the same as the default behaviour on Windows (Windows Media Player) so it's maybe just copying what people migrating over would expect. Rhythmbox comes preinstalled, though, so add your music into that, or install Banshee.
Why do I just get a black square when playing a movie with Movie Player? If I move the window I see the movie playing, but the black box comes back as soon as I drop the window.
This is the 2nd issue in 3 that has been concerned with graphical issues - what graphics card are you using, and what screen resolution? Check your graphics card is fully supported and you have the latest drivers.
Why, when I explicity specify I want 2 workspace, does the second workspace disappear and I'm left with one for half of my logins? Even when I do get 2 the second one has no panels at all 75% of the time.
Again, I can't help much with this issue, as I run with only one workspace, but it sounds like it's related to the 2nd issue you raised about the panel. Again, try killall gnome-panel and see if that helps, but your Gnome install sounds hosed to me - you might be looking at a reinstall of the whole WM.
Why can't I Add/Remove certain software from Add/Remove? Why does it even show up on the list with a checkbox if all it is going to is tell me to run Synaptic?
This one is definately a bug and it's been pissing me off today as well. Ubuntu needs to settle on one GUI for package management and stick to it, as Add/Remove just seems to tread on Synaptic's toes all the time. Make one default and make it do everything, Ubuntu, preferably Add/Remove as it has a better interface than Synaptic. There really is no point having two apps that do *exactly* the same thing, where the one hidden in the settings stops the one with a great big button in the Applications menu doing what it's supposed to do.
Why is the Software Update notification so annoying? I know Linux generally makes poor use of screen space, but why is the popup so huge? Why isn't it transparent like every other popup on a modern desktop?
It is overly large, but it's easily dismissed and just another case of Ubuntu copying the worst parts of the Windows user experience. They could at least make the font smaller (incidentally, make your fonts smaller by going to System > Preferences > Font and turning them down to a 9 or a 10 - saves an awful lot of screen space if you're on a low resolution. Making the panels narrower works wonders too). Also, Windows notification bubbles arent transparent either, but at least they're smaller.
Say I unpack an archive to the desktop and it specifies a directory structure for the files. How come the folder icon is hidden underneath the icon for a drive I mounted a few minutes before?
Perhaps he could give me a single concrete example of something that I can do with 'enabled' media that I could not do with the same media with the DRM/DCE removed.
Buy it from a legal establishment.
Welcome to the world of cartels: If they all do it, you, the lowly consumer, has no choice but to go along with it.
You still shouldn't be allowed to distribute the content freely - much as a good portion of the/. userbase thinks "information wants to be free", companies are still perfectly within their rights to sue people for illegally distributing their material - at least with this method it would be the original uploaders getting punished, rather than downloaders or reuploaders who just leave the files in their shared directory and forget about them - the only people that would get sued would be people who consciously and deliberately upload copyrighted material.
Personally I feel that watermarking would be the perfect solution for all parties involved.
acifism, indifference, and apathy towards these issues will lead our people to worse things then miscegenation, homosexuality, and complete moral decay of society
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Ever think this might be some sort of DRM feature designed to make streaming audio suck? This would after all crap all over things like Shoutcast, which is the sort of thing the record companies are going after; basic internet radio.
Could be a case of defective by design - I hope I'm wrong, but I fail to see any sane reason why the two systems would affect each other like this.
Because people are very difficult to part from their money for donations, even OSS people donating to OSS projects. It's human nature, we just don't like parting with the green. Something like this negates that factor, and also brings what would be fewer, smaller donations to more widespread organizations together into big lump sums directed at a few projects. Whether or not you consider that a good thing is down to you, but it can't be a bad thing for the organizations involved, or for Linux, to have a few of it's flagship projects (Blender is one of the premier examples of sophisticated, top-class software for Linux, and should get more mainstream/tech press) funded and focussed on improving still further.
If you have a pet project you want to keep donating to, this isn't going to stop you, and it isn't going to stop you from talking your friends into donating to your favourite OSS project. It might, however, garner a fair number of people who, for whatever reason, do not donate directly into helping support OSS, both in terms of payment and profile.
I mean, the disc, any format, is obsolete, and this just helps push downloading as the primary format. HD-DVDs are cheaper to manufacture? Downloads have no manufacturing cost.
/Lost/House, MD episode ever on a cube of holographic glass.
Believe it or not, there are still lots of people who don't have an internet connection fast enough to download HD-quality content in a reasonable enough timespan to justify not going to a brick-and-mortar video store and buying the thing, and a sizeable minority in the US and the UK *do not have or use the internet at all*.
I realized I don't buy DVDs to watch them again. How many times can you watch one thing? I buy stuff when I like it enough that I want to hand to other people I think should watch it. And on occasion to kind of show support for something like a show that was cancelled.
Then I would venture that you are very much in the minority when it comes to [HD]DVD, CD, etc purchasing patterns. Most people buy DVDs because they want to watch what's on them themselves, not because they want to distribute it or show support. I go by the showing support thing too, on the basis that DVD sales show TV producers that there is a market for good TV and not just the latest series of Strictly Big Camp Brothers Dancing in the Ice Jungle, but most people don't think that far, they just want the DVD to watch.
Add those to the hoarders who love the credibility boost of having walls of DVD cases, or every episode of their favourite Star Trek series on HD-DVD, etc, and the disc is far from dead, and seperate physical storage will probably never die, even if it comes down to storing every Star Trek
As to my 'iconic image', I tend to dislike that part personally. I'm not a great public speaker, and I've avoided travelling for the last several years because I'm not very comfortable being seen as this iconic 'visionary'. I'm just an engineer, and I just happen to love doing what I do, and to work with other people in public.
This, people, is the key difference between Linux and Microsoft, and even Apple. Steves Ballmer and Jobs both want to be seen as visionaries, as all-knowing technological sages of our time. That isn't neccessarily a bad thing, as we've seen with the way Jobs has turned Apple around since he took over, but it does explain the difference between the philosophies of the groups: Apple and Microsoft take the approach of throwing new features in whenever they find them, so as to be seen as forward-thinking and 'next-gen', and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't - Spotlight being an example of something that does work (yeah, there had been desktop search before, but nothing quite that efficient and right-on-the-desktop in what can be called the 'Big 3' operating systems), and things like the are-they-in, are-they-out dropped features from Vista being an example of something that doesn't.
Linux, however, taking it's cues from Linus, approaches things from an engineering perspective. Visionary? That's all well and good, but will it run the risk of breaking? Yes? Then it's not going in. When you don't have a product to sell, it's a lot easier to base your development priorites on a more sound engineering base. Therein lies the difference; Jobs and Ballmer see themselves as visionaries, while Linus - who, whether he likes it or not, is the 'spiritual leader' of the Linux community - sees himself as 'just an engineer'. (Of course, the point could be made that Linus has the luxury of only being concerned with the kernel, where security and stability are the key things and form over function is rarely if ever required - do the likes likes of Mark Shuttleworth, Matthew Szulik, etc see themselves as engineers, or as visionaries?)
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."
Because the whole point of the Mac, and the thing valued most by it's whole target market, is it's simplicity. The UNIX underbelly is supposed to stay hidden beneath the sleek brushed-metal lines. You don't get these patronising predicates in Windows articles involving the shell because the Windows shell is considerably less complex (read: powerful) than the UNIX shell that OS X has. To an unfamiliar user, that much power is scary.
/., but is your grandmother? (not that the average grandmother is going to go about wanting custom apps on her iPhone, but you get the idea - average users aren't nearly as 'comfortable with sh' as you think they should be, and telling them to 'get over it' is a great way to alienate your userbase.
Also, it might be a dev-oriented article, but at the end of the day, once you've *made* your app, you have to tell your [average] users how to get your app onto *their* iPhone, so at some point in the chain of usage the average Mac user will have to deal with the command line, something they are not used to doing. We all might be 'fairly comfortable with sh' on
are the #1 issue in this and every election ever held. Seriously, after the mistakes made in the last two elections, people should be making *extra damn sure* they pick the right candidate for them, on every issue or at least as many issues as possible. A good President would not let his personal beliefs on evolution affect his judgement on what is best for the nation as a whole, and we should be spending our time working out which candidates would make good Presidents, not organizing a creationist witch-hunt based around the flawed concept that anyone who harbours a different idea than us about how the world came into being cannot possibly correct or intelligent in any other area.
Notice that Tony Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown, have managed to drive us in the UK into spiralling youth crime, rising pensioner poverty and far-reaching general disaffection without so much of an inkling of creationism, and if you think that the #1 problem with Bush's presidency has been his particular set of religious beliefs you must have some very odd priorities, as I really wouldn't put spiralling trade deficit and an unending 4-year quagmire in Iraq down to anything to do with how old Dubya thinks the world is and whether or not he thinks Jesus fought with dinosaurs.
Heh, gimme a break, it's 2 in the morning here, I was only trying to clumsily shoehorn an AOL gag into being somewhat on-topic.
It's a lot harder than it looks; I tell you, I've a whole new respect for the good people of bash.org
AOL EXECUTIVES BROKE INTO MY HOUSE AND SODOMISED MY CAT UNTIL I PIRATED BILLY RAY CYRUS!!! OMFG!! SERIOUSLY!!! - Tell me, Have we really sunk this low?
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
they go and remind geeks everywhere that they are living proof that there should be a licence to use the internet. If you are incapable of preventing yourself from illegally downloading copyrighted material (whatever the RIAA do or don't do, and whether that's moral or not is irrelevant, whether we like it or not illegally downloading copyrighted material is illegal in the current climate), you really shouldn't be allowed near a computer because you're a danger to yourself.
That's the real damage that DRM is doing - it's creating a huge DIS-incentive for being creative.
You don't think that's exactly what they want? Think about how much the big film studios, big record companies, etc would love to crush 'grass roots' productions now that the software is 'good enough' to compete with their million-dollar products? If DRM can 'accidentally' stop people producing hi-def content on their own computers, that's a stick the big media companies can use to beat their drum a little harder - "we have hi-def content, don't watch that amateurish standard-def stuff, they're living in the past!".
Stifling innovation is what they want, it means they are the only ones that can make money. The previous generation of technology was 'good enough' for home studio use (yes, XP was), and they didn't like that, so the solution is to cripple Vista.
How can a republic be the best form of government if the universe, heaven, and hell are a monarchy?
Because humans are fallible, God - if you believe in Him - is not.
But none of those are as effective at severe, permanent and indiscriminant damage than this, and who likes to cause severe, permanent and indiscriminant damage to lots of people? That's right, genius, terrorists. I don't know about you, but I like to think the average guy on the street isn't evil enough to do such a thing.
I cannot overstate this, this is not a fart in a bottle.
For it to be defamation of character what the RIAA is showing would have to be false. This guy really did have porn on his computer, so showing people that he does is not defamation of character, because it's true. Invasion of privacy yes, and probably a lot of other things, but not defamation of character.
DX are keeping open graphics drivers away from Linux? RMS oughtta suit up in some spandex and lay the smack down on them in the ring! Oh, *Direct*X - my bad.
For even greater security, I use telnet and mentally parse the source.
If only, just once, they'd said, "Gazpacho soup is served cold!" I could've been an admiral by now!
UAC were involved in the making of Vista? Holy shit, how long before demons start spewing forth from the temporal gateway manifesting inside my CRT? Someone call the Doomguy!
Planes, rockets and modern cars kill people if they fail in unpredictable ways, the worst that can happen if a PC crashes is you lose a couple of hours' work. Computer systems where there is anything hugely important at stake tend to run embedded systems that are held to a far higher standard of quality.
It doesn't excuse companies for writing sloppy software, but it's the reason we accept a failure rate we wouldn't accept in anything where people might die as a result - if, God forbid, you ever get seriously ill, I sincerely doubt your life support machine would be running Windows.
Sounds like the perfect investment plan to me - As long as they create a snapshot, if it all goes badly they can just push the right button and go again.
Why is the bottom panel on my desktop missing about 20% of the time? I have to log out and log back in. Usually it comes back, sometimes it takes 2 logins.
.mp3 in Gnome *does* launch movie player, which seems a little odd, but I guess it makes sense if you're just looking to listen to one track. It should be renamed 'Media Player' to avoid confusion, but in it's defence, it's the same as the default behaviour on Windows (Windows Media Player) so it's maybe just copying what people migrating over would expect. Rhythmbox comes preinstalled, though, so add your music into that, or install Banshee.
OK I haven't encountered this problem as I've got my Gnome configured to use just one bar, but I've got a Hebrew date applet that seems to confuse the hell out of the panel and I frequently lose the clock off the right hand side of the screen, so I can't help with this one but I can sympathise. Try running 'killall gnome-panel' from a terminal and see if that brings it back, if it does then it's probably an issue with your resolution or screen position. If not, try just 'gnome-panel', if that works, it's just crashing for some unknown reason. Either way, it's quicker than logging in and out again every time.
Why is the application built into Ubuntu to play music named "Movie Player"?
Contrary to what other people are saying, double-clicking an
Why do I just get a black square when playing a movie with Movie Player? If I move the window I see the movie playing, but the black box comes back as soon as I drop the window.
This is the 2nd issue in 3 that has been concerned with graphical issues - what graphics card are you using, and what screen resolution? Check your graphics card is fully supported and you have the latest drivers.
Why, when I explicity specify I want 2 workspace, does the second workspace disappear and I'm left with one for half of my logins? Even when I do get 2 the second one has no panels at all 75% of the time.
Again, I can't help much with this issue, as I run with only one workspace, but it sounds like it's related to the 2nd issue you raised about the panel. Again, try killall gnome-panel and see if that helps, but your Gnome install sounds hosed to me - you might be looking at a reinstall of the whole WM.
Why can't I Add/Remove certain software from Add/Remove? Why does it even show up on the list with a checkbox if all it is going to is tell me to run Synaptic?
This one is definately a bug and it's been pissing me off today as well. Ubuntu needs to settle on one GUI for package management and stick to it, as Add/Remove just seems to tread on Synaptic's toes all the time. Make one default and make it do everything, Ubuntu, preferably Add/Remove as it has a better interface than Synaptic. There really is no point having two apps that do *exactly* the same thing, where the one hidden in the settings stops the one with a great big button in the Applications menu doing what it's supposed to do.
Why is the Software Update notification so annoying? I know Linux generally makes poor use of screen space, but why is the popup so huge? Why isn't it transparent like every other popup on a modern desktop?
It is overly large, but it's easily dismissed and just another case of Ubuntu copying the worst parts of the Windows user experience. They could at least make the font smaller (incidentally, make your fonts smaller by going to System > Preferences > Font and turning them down to a 9 or a 10 - saves an awful lot of screen space if you're on a low resolution. Making the panels narrower works wonders too). Also, Windows notification bubbles arent transparent either, but at least they're smaller.
Say I unpack an archive to the desktop and it specifies a directory structure for the files. How come the folder icon is hidden underneath the icon for a drive I mounted a few minutes before?
Right-click anywhere blank on your desk
Perhaps he could give me a single concrete example of something that I can do with 'enabled' media that I could not do with the same media with the DRM/DCE removed.
Buy it from a legal establishment.
Welcome to the world of cartels: If they all do it, you, the lowly consumer, has no choice but to go along with it.
This is a problem, why?
/. userbase thinks "information wants to be free", companies are still perfectly within their rights to sue people for illegally distributing their material - at least with this method it would be the original uploaders getting punished, rather than downloaders or reuploaders who just leave the files in their shared directory and forget about them - the only people that would get sued would be people who consciously and deliberately upload copyrighted material.
You still shouldn't be allowed to distribute the content freely - much as a good portion of the
Personally I feel that watermarking would be the perfect solution for all parties involved.
The old adage is, of course, that you don't have to be good at spelling to be a good programmer, just consistent in your errors.
acifism, indifference, and apathy towards these issues will lead our people to worse things then miscegenation, homosexuality, and complete moral decay of society
Mr Phelps? Is that you?