There are many distributors of media online. Not lots, but enough of them that there's real competition (though of course if iTMS gets too big that'll change in a hurry). The place where anti-competitive practices occur is not at the distributor level, but rather at the producer level. DRM strains the market in a number of ways, but at the end of the day media is still a competitive market, with or without excessive DRM. Rather, as we've seen in other situations, it is the media producers who break free trade. Remove DRM from the equation and there'd still be many of the same problems we see today, only with copyright law being used in the place of DRM, which is a whole different can of worms.
Many end users don't see this as a limitation. As they see it, it's basically a different format: they accept it as fact that you can't play a VHS on a DVD player; why shouldn't they accept that you can't play this music (that says it's only compatible with certain software) on a different machine?
Of course the situation becomes tricky when it doesn't inform the user. But in that case, it's not a bad technology, just a bad product.
I think that's not going to work with an average user. "It plays when I press play and stops when I press stop, doesn't it?" This trait alone makes it superior to television.
Yes, I'm aware that there's more to getting to choose when and how to use it than that. However, that doesn't make a world of difference to a person who only wants to use the media in the manner suggested by the distributor.
So, then, the issue is not so much about protecting the consumers as it is for creating a fairer and more transparent market? And informing the consumers is a means to that end?
In my experience, your normal user (i.e. not Slashdot readers, i.e. 99% of people, i.e. people who can't be made to foam at the mouth over anything tech-related, i.e. people with normal priorities) cares about one thing: does it work the way they expect it to?
If a person buys a song off of iTMS, then their expectation is that they'll be able to play it on their iPod and in iTunes. For this reason, it would be pointless to "educate" the user about the DRM - because they don't care that they can't use it with non-iPod, non-iTunes modes of playback. It's about as likely to get them to care about DRM as it is to get them to care that they can't play VHS tapes in a DVD player.
In general, people aren't stupid - even if they don't understand computers, they can still understand basic consumer skills. If a vendor of DRM'd software explains what the terms of the DRM are, and the user pays for it anyway, then it means that the user has no problem with buying a limited product. A DRM'd file is not a broken file, however much the Slashdot crowd may disagree. The file does exactly what it says it would do. The user doesn't care about being able to convert it to a different format, doesn't care about being able to send it to a different computer, doesn't care about what happens to the file when it goes into the public domain. The user has no problem accepting files that you can't do these things to, because the user never wanted to do any of those things anyway, and the user was never led to believe that any of these things would be possible. The user is not being cheated, any more than you'd be cheated if you had bought a copy of a single-player game, and was shocked to discover that it does not feature a multiplayer mode.
So, we can clearly see that the point of this exercise is not to convince average users that DRM is Evil and that the vendors of DRM'd software are trying to cheat them. This raises the next question: what is the purpose of "educating" non-tech users about DRM? Is it just for the purpose of creating market forces that will enable us to buy non-DRM'd music (even if it costs more)? Is it an attempt to create a grass-roots resistance against the encroachment on technology rights by whatever government-controlling conspiracy it's popular to believe in this week, who no doubt want to make unlicensed software of any variety illegal? I'm not seeing it, here.
Of course there's documents and the same old portable apps everyone else is listing, but those aren't much fun. I've got SimCity 2000, X-Com, and The Incredible Machine 3 on there, for starts, plus Scummvm and Frotz for my Lucasarts and Infocom adventure fix. And of course there's the basic preloaded Windows games, just in case you're going somewhere they've been removed. Throw in a couple Roguelikes, those few old Windows Entertainment Pack games that work on 32-bit systems, and finally put Cave Story in for good measure.
Wasn't there more differences between the two versions of Twilight Princess than just the control scheme? I remember hearing that only the Wii version would support a widescreen aspect ratio. I was considering getting the Wii version just for that, but if it requires you to use a control scheme other than the one for which the game was designed, then I'll have to wait and see....
I first looked into EV Nova because people said it was basically EVE, only offline. The warring factions can be pretty much avoided - if you want to ignore them, they have the same basic function as random griefers.
The combat is real-time, yes, and there's fewer ships, but I actually find the AI to be rather fair.
Also, unless you have it set to easy mode or the equivalent, death is indeed permanent, and you start off at the bottom of the rung. So, uh, it's not what you think.
What is KinderStart anyway? I searched for it, and it seems that there are plenty of results completely unrelated to the plaintiff. Why wouldn't KinderStart be suing them? I find it rather implausible that Google would suppress a search engine that does not pose a real threat, given that the results for the similar pages link on a search for "Google" prominently displays so many of their strongest competitors.
And never mind that Google, being a private enterprise, can present its results any way it wants (assuming that the claims are accurate), so that there's no grounds for a lawsuit. This whole incident smells frivolous.
Part of it is that many vandals do lose interest in four days. Replacing every third word in the "Tony Blair" article with "fuck" sounds much less entertaining when you have to wait four days to do it. Another part of it is that it cuts down vandalism significantly. If a vandal has to wait four days just to get in one bad edit before being banned, it greatly reducess the amount of bad edits he can make.
but if he was as evil as many slashdotters would like to have it, why wouldn't he keep it all? Or spend the money to build an evil headquarter in an inactive volcano?
Because it's much more evil to build it in an active volcano - and more expensive, too.
How is this new? Representative governments are based on the notion that government is inherently beyond trust, and so it must be kept in line by the source of its power (and, accordingly, tried to solve the problem by making government's power come from the people). All congresses are enemies of the people; in an elected congress, however, the people are the more powerful ones.
The only way in which an elected congress can truly and successfully oppress its constituents is when when the constituents abandon the peaceful solutions that the electoral process creates - whether they abandon it due to apathy or due to buying too strongly into violent rhetoric.
Well when you cut off the rhetoric from the extreme sides of the argument, in my experience you find that this opposition is less a knee-jerk partisanhood and more a disagreement about the proper method of addressing the situation. You'll see democrats tending to prefer strong (perhaps excessively so) protective legislation, while republicans advocate market solutions or at least doing some more research (which is code for "not doing a damn thing"). (And of course there's merits to both viewpoints, which we don't want to get into here). Basically, though, you really only see the true distinction when you get away from the people who editorialize on the subject without really understanding the issue.
Those laws aren't on the books as of now - and in any case they have no more place being there than laws forbidding DRM. They're not the issue, here. Moreover, the only reason MS and Dell and Google control so much marketshare is because what they give the consumers is within the bounds of what they're willing to tolerate. Truly, highly restrictive DRM falls outside of this range, and you simply cannot sell what people don't want.
Slashdot Mirror
So, media vendors who use DRM don't make this clear enough?
A better analogy still might be renting a video. What's so evil about renting movies as opposed to buying them?
There are many distributors of media online. Not lots, but enough of them that there's real competition (though of course if iTMS gets too big that'll change in a hurry). The place where anti-competitive practices occur is not at the distributor level, but rather at the producer level. DRM strains the market in a number of ways, but at the end of the day media is still a competitive market, with or without excessive DRM. Rather, as we've seen in other situations, it is the media producers who break free trade. Remove DRM from the equation and there'd still be many of the same problems we see today, only with copyright law being used in the place of DRM, which is a whole different can of worms.
Many end users don't see this as a limitation. As they see it, it's basically a different format: they accept it as fact that you can't play a VHS on a DVD player; why shouldn't they accept that you can't play this music (that says it's only compatible with certain software) on a different machine?
Of course the situation becomes tricky when it doesn't inform the user. But in that case, it's not a bad technology, just a bad product.
I think that's not going to work with an average user. "It plays when I press play and stops when I press stop, doesn't it?" This trait alone makes it superior to television.
Yes, I'm aware that there's more to getting to choose when and how to use it than that. However, that doesn't make a world of difference to a person who only wants to use the media in the manner suggested by the distributor.
So, a private library.
What's so bad about private libraries? You usually have to pay something to get into those as well.
So, then, the issue is not so much about protecting the consumers as it is for creating a fairer and more transparent market? And informing the consumers is a means to that end?
If a person buys a song off of iTMS, then their expectation is that they'll be able to play it on their iPod and in iTunes. For this reason, it would be pointless to "educate" the user about the DRM - because they don't care that they can't use it with non-iPod, non-iTunes modes of playback. It's about as likely to get them to care about DRM as it is to get them to care that they can't play VHS tapes in a DVD player.
In general, people aren't stupid - even if they don't understand computers, they can still understand basic consumer skills. If a vendor of DRM'd software explains what the terms of the DRM are, and the user pays for it anyway, then it means that the user has no problem with buying a limited product. A DRM'd file is not a broken file, however much the Slashdot crowd may disagree. The file does exactly what it says it would do. The user doesn't care about being able to convert it to a different format, doesn't care about being able to send it to a different computer, doesn't care about what happens to the file when it goes into the public domain. The user has no problem accepting files that you can't do these things to, because the user never wanted to do any of those things anyway, and the user was never led to believe that any of these things would be possible. The user is not being cheated, any more than you'd be cheated if you had bought a copy of a single-player game, and was shocked to discover that it does not feature a multiplayer mode.
So, we can clearly see that the point of this exercise is not to convince average users that DRM is Evil and that the vendors of DRM'd software are trying to cheat them. This raises the next question: what is the purpose of "educating" non-tech users about DRM? Is it just for the purpose of creating market forces that will enable us to buy non-DRM'd music (even if it costs more)? Is it an attempt to create a grass-roots resistance against the encroachment on technology rights by whatever government-controlling conspiracy it's popular to believe in this week, who no doubt want to make unlicensed software of any variety illegal? I'm not seeing it, here.
Of course there's documents and the same old portable apps everyone else is listing, but those aren't much fun. I've got SimCity 2000, X-Com, and The Incredible Machine 3 on there, for starts, plus Scummvm and Frotz for my Lucasarts and Infocom adventure fix. And of course there's the basic preloaded Windows games, just in case you're going somewhere they've been removed. Throw in a couple Roguelikes, those few old Windows Entertainment Pack games that work on 32-bit systems, and finally put Cave Story in for good measure.
Wasn't there more differences between the two versions of Twilight Princess than just the control scheme? I remember hearing that only the Wii version would support a widescreen aspect ratio. I was considering getting the Wii version just for that, but if it requires you to use a control scheme other than the one for which the game was designed, then I'll have to wait and see....
I first looked into EV Nova because people said it was basically EVE, only offline. The warring factions can be pretty much avoided - if you want to ignore them, they have the same basic function as random griefers.
The combat is real-time, yes, and there's fewer ships, but I actually find the AI to be rather fair.
Also, unless you have it set to easy mode or the equivalent, death is indeed permanent, and you start off at the bottom of the rung. So, uh, it's not what you think.
Try EV Nova. It's basically one-player EVE Online.
Blizzard was never really known for innovating, but rather for refining other companies' innovations to the point of perfection.
Another, similar story is "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster.
I'm waiting for that modchip to be released. That or an exploit that doesn't involve owning GTA.
And never mind that Google, being a private enterprise, can present its results any way it wants (assuming that the claims are accurate), so that there's no grounds for a lawsuit. This whole incident smells frivolous.
Part of it is that many vandals do lose interest in four days. Replacing every third word in the "Tony Blair" article with "fuck" sounds much less entertaining when you have to wait four days to do it. Another part of it is that it cuts down vandalism significantly. If a vandal has to wait four days just to get in one bad edit before being banned, it greatly reducess the amount of bad edits he can make.
Because it's much more evil to build it in an active volcano - and more expensive, too.
The only way in which an elected congress can truly and successfully oppress its constituents is when when the constituents abandon the peaceful solutions that the electoral process creates - whether they abandon it due to apathy or due to buying too strongly into violent rhetoric.
Well when you cut off the rhetoric from the extreme sides of the argument, in my experience you find that this opposition is less a knee-jerk partisanhood and more a disagreement about the proper method of addressing the situation. You'll see democrats tending to prefer strong (perhaps excessively so) protective legislation, while republicans advocate market solutions or at least doing some more research (which is code for "not doing a damn thing"). (And of course there's merits to both viewpoints, which we don't want to get into here). Basically, though, you really only see the true distinction when you get away from the people who editorialize on the subject without really understanding the issue.
If there isn't enough for everybody, than nobody gets any, is that right? Well, let me be the first to welcome you to the real world.
I shouldn't have left it where somebody could step on it.
Now, if it was an act of malice, I'll have other means of protecting my property than resorting to backups. Insurance, legal representation.
And what, precisely, does the chip prevent me from doing? (Also: last time I checked, there were other CPU manufacturers)
Precisely - as long as we recognize that both voices are extreme.
Those laws aren't on the books as of now - and in any case they have no more place being there than laws forbidding DRM. They're not the issue, here. Moreover, the only reason MS and Dell and Google control so much marketshare is because what they give the consumers is within the bounds of what they're willing to tolerate. Truly, highly restrictive DRM falls outside of this range, and you simply cannot sell what people don't want.