My dad - yes yes he does NOT live in China - has an even stronger opinion than I have. He firmly believes that people are getting paid by the US government to bash the Chinese government. When the Chinese government does something, everybody yells 'OMG those communist bastards are 3v1l!!!'. But when the US government does something, almost nobody says a word.
Are you insane? I mean are you seriously Insane? NOBODY says a world about the US government doing anything? When we do something RIGHT the entire world media is on our ass. There is probably no nation in the world whose ever action, decision, and official statement is examined under an intense microscope and criticized as diligently and consistantly as the United States. NOTHING that this nation says or does escapes criticism. Nobody says a word about the actions of US.
Wow. Just.... wow. Turn on a TV for 5 minutes. SOMEBODY will be there to talk about something the US is doing.
My books never have battery problems. I don't have to turn them off when planes are taking off and landing. I can loan them (and borrow them from) friends without onerous DRM hassles. They don't require a reader that marries me to a format or playback device. And frankly I read computer screens all day at work, I don't want to go home and do it.
Ok, I've got a Radeon 9800 Pro card that I got with my machine about 4 years ago. The machine itself is a P4 running at or near (perhaps slightly over) 3 GHz with 1 GB of RAM. Warcraft CRAWLS for me. At best, in the overworld, I get 20-30fps. I was looking to spec out a new machine and discovered that what I bought 4 years ago isn't that far behind what you get today in terms of processors and RAM, so I'm wondering if that uber Radeon 9800 Pro card is significantly less haus that what typical 3d gamers have these days. And, if so, could I expect a significant performance boost by simply swapping out my GFX card? And, if so, which one should I get? Presume I'd prefer to spend no more than $400.
The only thing that's worse for civil rights than a Republican government is a Democratic one. For all the failings of Republicans, I find Democrats are far more often found running around like little busybodies trying to protect everybody from themselves. So we either get Jesus shoved up our butts or well-intentioned hand-wringers trying to stop us from running with scissors. I'm honestly not sure which is worse.
Rep. Mike Ferguson, a New Jersey Republican, said his bill--which would enforce a so-called "broadcast flag" for digital and satellite audio receivers--was necessary to protect the music industry from the threat of piracy.
Necessary? I don't think it's necessary. It'll help, but at what cost to the consumer? And not the Slashdot freeloaders, the honest people who don't pirate anything. Actually, that would include most of Slashdot, none of us ever pirate, we just try before we buy. That's right, isn't it? I'm new here, I don't know the official way we dress up our excuses yet.
"With exciting new digital audio devices on the market today and more on the horizon, Congress needs to streamline the deployment of digital services and protect the intellectual property rights of creators," said Ferguson, who is a member of the House of Representatives' Internet subcommittee. Rep. Mary Bono, a California Republican, is one of the four other co-sponsors.
Well, she's absolutely right here on one count. Congress does need to protect the intellectual property rights of creators, because they are currently under massive assault in a legal system that is a decade behind the technology that it regulates. However, as a Republican, Ms. Bono ought to understand that regulating business is rarely the answer to these problems. Or, in this case, regulating consumers. Even worse. What happened to small government staying out of our lives, Ms. Bono? I'm among those that put the Republicans in power during the Clinton administration and you and your ilk have gradually betrayed our trust. Further, it is also the job of Congress to ensure that our rights as consumers are protected, and for all his enthusiasm, I don't think Darth Nader is up to the job. For one, he's not in the legislature. You are, Ms. Bono.
That's because a federal appeals court last year unceremoniously rejected a similar set of regulations from the FCC, saying the agency did not have authority to mandate a broadcast flag for digital video.
Further proof that over a long enough trajectory the legal system almost always gets it right.
At a breakfast roundtable with reporters on Thursday, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said some sort of legislation is necessary to prevent Americans from saving high-quality music from digital broadcasts, assembling a "personal music library" of their own, and redistributing "recorded songs over the Internet or on removable media."
We already have legislation that forbids this. They don't want legislation, they want mandated hardware controls to enforce it. I have no objections to streamlining the law to get it caught up with technology and limit the impact of piracy on the RIAA's bottom line. I do have a serious problem with legal mandates that enforce technological limits on legal behavior.
Devices like the Sirius S50, the RIAA worries, can record satellite radio broadcasts but aren't required to include digital rights management limitations.
Nor should they be. Sirius bought broadcast rights from ASCAP or whoever broadcast rights group does digital radio, just like everybody else does. The industry has its money from Sirius et al. The only barrier to mass copyright infringement is unreadable devices. As Roger Ebert pointed out long ago, anybody who is a hair above marginally technically competant can create high-quality reproductions of almost any playable media using cheap technology, and store the output in any formot. Onto p2p it goes. The broadcast flag is a big expensive pain in the ass that will not address the problem to their satisfaction, and they'll be back demanding MORE legislation in 5 years when their E/P ratio is too high. The broadcast flag is the first step on a long road of incremenetal freedom reduction that winds gradually out of sight into uncharted territory. Actually, it's not so uncharted. We know wha
If this guy is right (and I'm not suggesting he is or is not), OSS may have a bumpy road ahead. The OSS community on balance is at best vaguely unreceptive to "big business," and on a typical day around here, openly hateful and hostile against it. I don't see "big business" feeling especially compelled to embrace the pseudosocialists that populate OSS communities. We, on balance, hate everything that has to do with successful private enterprise, especially when those enterprises feel threatened and begin to abuse their resources. We hate big oil. We hate Wal*Mart. We hate big pharma. We hate Microsoft. We hate anybody that expects us to pay for CDs or DVDs. Name a successful international business model. We hate it, sometimes with good cause, just as often with no cause but social inertia.
We have one thing going for us. Businesses hate their IT departments. They hate having CIOs, they hate the multimillion dollar budgets just to keep some aging technology around that upper management privately believes is completely unnecessary. They ran their business computer systems in 1995 with 8 guys, now they need 200. They hate IT. And if we can come along and say, "this'll do the job for 9% cheaper," you just might get "big business" to sign on.
Because college professors are anti-corporate socialists. This guy wants free intelligence on American business technology that he can exploit to conduct mass sabotage during summer break. Duh. Don't you watch Fox? I do!
This is wrong. Whistle-blowers status is to protect individuals who divulge information vital to the welfare of the people in which the people have an overriding interest. In many cases they are reporting on government corruption and cannot be expected to trust other elements of the government. It is important that they can provide their information to law enforcement and the public via any channel, public or private.
Go read the whistleblower statutes. You're incorrect. Insightful, but incorrect.
behavior in others.
And if this tax applies to ALL CDRs, rather than just the music CDRs that nobody buys in America...how does a Canadian citizen dispute the tax on something they've never used (assuming of course they don't burn music to CDs?
You don't. I don't get food stamps, a welfare check, my kids don't go to public schools (I don't have any), but I pay taxes that go into these programs. My real estate tax goes straight to the school district. I don't use that service.
The majority of my taxes go towards causes, programs, or institutions whose services I neither need nor want, and a handful to which I have serious ethical and/or moral objections. But there's no recourse. If I say all of this and want my taxes lowered or changed so I can keep more of my own money, I'm called greedy. When somebody else wants my money for some purpose, they're just needy.
And politicians arrange the transfer. Welcome aboard, Canada!
The "whistleblower" status is for people who know that something dirty and wrong is going on and turn over their evidence to internal agencies of the government to deal with it. A whistleblower takes his knowledge and does not go public with it. This guy mailed this stuff to the newspapers, that's why he's in trouble. Had he contacted any one of a dozen agencies to handle the complaint, he'd be in no legal trouble. The whisteblower law would protect him. THat's why all these "leakers" are landing in hot water. WE learned from Watergate that if you go public with something incriminating, you become a hero to the media. So now people leak all kinds of shit trying to be the next "Deep Throat." Well, that's not why we have whistleblower laws. The whistleblower law is to protect a consciencious objector to an unlawful government practice. In this case, a company working on the government dole breaking the law. If the guy wanted legal protection to busing Diebold on their shitball hardware, there's a legal recourse to do so. He didn't use it. He leaked to the goddam newspaper. That's exactly the opposite of what you're supposed to do. He's geetting what he deserves. Now, if only Diebold can be held to the same standard.
Among my roles at work is web development. I keep a whiteboard here that says, "COMMIT TO STABLE SOFTWARE!" and it has two sections: "DAYS SINCE AN IE CRASH" and "LIFETIME RECORD." Sort of like those signs at factories that say, "198 days without an accident." Anyway, the "DAYS SINCE AN IE CRASH" is currently 1. The lifetime record is 2.
But it is much closer--about 440 million light-years away--than others. And it lasted about 33 minutes. Most GRBs are billions of light-years away and last less than a second or just a few seconds."
Does this mean the event happened 440 million years ago and we're just now detecting it because information about it has finally arrived? The physics of spacetime have always puzzled me.
In other words, outsourcing has actually helped our economy and provided new employment opportunities for the displaced, just like almost every respectable economist has said it would, just like it has always done over the years. Yes, perhaps Paul Krugman disagrees, but I said "respectable" economist, which immediately disqualifies him.
Hydrogen fuel cells won't get us unhooked from oil. Among the various easy ways to acquire hydrogen is from petroleum. Why do you think Bush is so gung-ho for it?
The neat thing about Latin is that I have no idea what the words mean but it's easy to puzzle out your statement because the Latin words strongly resemble English terms.
Saluto? Salute? Welcome?
Dominos? Dominion? Masters?
Nostros? Actually my SPanish background helps here, being as it's a Romance language. "Neustros." "We/our".
Novos? Again, Spanish helps. "Neuvos" is the plural of "new". And grammaticos is obvious.
A little English vocabulary and light understanding of one Romance language and you can damn near read Latin.
Sys tray pollution is the #1 reason I wipe Winboxes when I get them. My machine right now has like 3 things in the sys tray and it's mostly stuff I want running. I keep less than 10 icons on my desk top. My quicklaunch bar has 4 or 5 things on it (Desktop, PuTTy, WinAmp, and Thunderbird). I absolutely HATE it when software puts itself in those places or even doesn't bother asking if I want a shortcut on the desktop.
Then I go to my parents' house where their machine has 592,356 icons on the desktop and so much memory-resident garbage that the machine takes four minutes to load IE. I'm amazed their hard disk hasn't been worn down to threads by the constantly virtual memory swapping it must endure.
Seems to be what most Windows programs do. Right down to putting their Apps in a nice folder with the company's name. As if I cared what the company is.
That does drive me nuts. The machine comes with a "games" folder, why aren't other "games" products installed there by default?
Oddly enough, I recently downloaded the new version of Quicktime and was annoyed when I found I got iTunes as well (being as I don't have an iPod), I think I have had to uninstall iTunes twice now on my PC, I didn't ask to install it once.
That's exactly the nature of my complaint. What component of iTunes is necessary for the Quicktime player to operate, I ask you? Nothing. And if any API or service IS necessary, it can be installed without polluting my machine with software I have no intention of ever using. Shame the other respondant to my post couldn't puzzle that bit of logic out.
So when you want to play video on an Apple platform they use their video API? That DOES sound pretty sinister.
That's not my beef. I use a Windows machine.
Now, I understand that QuickTime is going to come with iTunes (now) because iTunes can play videos (now). What I DO object to is that QuickTime is installed in my system tray EVERY TIME and added to my quick launch menu EVERY TIME and the player software is installed EVERY TIME. Installing core services vital to running iTunes is fine. I think I ought to have the option to NOT have that feature (video playback), just like I don't understand why MS Outlook _HAS_ to have MS Messager around to function properly. But I can live with the fact that the QuickTime API is necessary for a basic iTunes install. I do not accept that it's important to install the QuickTime player, try to make it my default media playback device, and shove it into my desktop environment. I don't get iTunes upgrades anymore because I'm tired of having to go open the QuickTime thing in my sys tray and click the "Do not show in sys tray" icon. I know that's a stupid reason, but I'm just sick of it.
They really should rewrite all that video stuff custom for each app. Same with this Cocoa thing -- what's with that? Almost every app uses it no matter what it's function! That's the one they're REALLY trying to shove down your throat!
If they installed the Cocoa development environment, IDE, and tried to have it replace my MSVC++ stuff as my default "application development" software, your stupid analogy might hold.
iTunes on Windows is a bit of a weird case. Apple wanted to keep their interface, and probably didn't want to hire a bunch of Windows programmers, so they used the one API they have ported to Windows... Quicktime.
Which makes perfect sense. See above. Installing core services: fine. Install a bunch of bloat? Evil. When any other business does shit like this, even the oft-fellated Google Wooglie Woo, we raise holy hell here.
This whole "iPod was deisgned to sell Macs" business was a fantasy created by press and analysts who attribute that guess to Apple as if it were their sole intent. So we'll just ignore that the iPod is one of the most successful consumer products ever, and at the same time say it failed at some imaginary goal and purpose that there is no solid proof Apple ever created it for.
If there is any specific technology that Apple tries to push out with its products, it's QuickTime. Want iTunes? You get QuickTime. And they make SURE YOU KNOW IT. Editing movies with iMovie? Quicktime quicktime quicktime quicktime YAY quicktime! Now, I haven't used iMovie in a few years so maybe it's different now, I dunno. Apple seems to be completely aware that OS X is unlikely to usurp Windows. If anybody does, it'll be Unix, Linux, BSD, and their ilk on the server side. Wintel is on the consumer desktop to stay for the immediate and at least medium-term future, and Apple's best bet is to make their machines behave as much like a Winbox from the UI perspective as possible (in the sense of what is intuitive to a Windows user - like context-sensitive right-click pop-up menus), and play as nice and easily with Winnets as possible. They know that, and they're abandoning things that make this difficult, like one-button mice.
But leveraging the iPod to sell Macs? I seriously doubt it. They do try to shove QuickTime down your throat, though.
To play devil's advocate, the "scientific community" has believed a lot of things that made perfect sense when one analyzed the available data using the available technology, and no matter how we advanced, no matter what else we learned, we found out that what we previously thought we knew was almost always wrong or, at best partially correct but incomplete.
I am unwilling at this point to agree with all of the following: (1) global warming is happening (2) its causes are anthropomorphic (3) the recommended mitigations will stop or slow it (4) the recommended mitigations are necessary for the survival of the species, directly or indirectly. The research is compelling but it's incomplete. I actually think the president is right in his stance that more research and funding is necessary before we can wisely take corrective action. Sadly, his own administration appears to be hellbent on sabotaging or slanting exactly that effort. *checks watch* Two more years for a change of leadership. I think ol' mudda earth will hold out that long. There are plenty of clearly man-made civilization-threatening problems facing us that are more immediate and more solvable. As far as environmental sciences go, our action is best directed towards improving the lives of people for whose ails we already have proven solutions. Clean water, innoculations, and the like. Our research should continue as it has been, preferably with less hand-wringing by the left and less meddling and manipulation by the right.
Piracy is and a problem and it is a major hassle for them, and it is causing them to lose money through mass copyright infringement. Further, their point here is not that it isn't "fair use", they're not even discussing fair use, they are talking about exceptions to the DMCA. The DMCA is additional legislation that criminalizes (among other things) the circumvention of copy protection. Fair Use is a case-by-case doctrine in which copyright privileges may be legally ignored for specific purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you insane? I mean are you seriously Insane? NOBODY says a world about the US government doing anything? When we do something RIGHT the entire world media is on our ass. There is probably no nation in the world whose ever action, decision, and official statement is examined under an intense microscope and criticized as diligently and consistantly as the United States. NOTHING that this nation says or does escapes criticism. Nobody says a word about the actions of US.
Wow. Just .... wow. Turn on a TV for 5 minutes. SOMEBODY will be there to talk about something the US is doing.
My books never have battery problems. I don't have to turn them off when planes are taking off and landing. I can loan them (and borrow them from) friends without onerous DRM hassles. They don't require a reader that marries me to a format or playback device. And frankly I read computer screens all day at work, I don't want to go home and do it.
Ok, I've got a Radeon 9800 Pro card that I got with my machine about 4 years ago. The machine itself is a P4 running at or near (perhaps slightly over) 3 GHz with 1 GB of RAM. Warcraft CRAWLS for me. At best, in the overworld, I get 20-30fps. I was looking to spec out a new machine and discovered that what I bought 4 years ago isn't that far behind what you get today in terms of processors and RAM, so I'm wondering if that uber Radeon 9800 Pro card is significantly less haus that what typical 3d gamers have these days. And, if so, could I expect a significant performance boost by simply swapping out my GFX card? And, if so, which one should I get? Presume I'd prefer to spend no more than $400.
The only thing that's worse for civil rights than a Republican government is a Democratic one. For all the failings of Republicans, I find Democrats are far more often found running around like little busybodies trying to protect everybody from themselves. So we either get Jesus shoved up our butts or well-intentioned hand-wringers trying to stop us from running with scissors. I'm honestly not sure which is worse.
Necessary? I don't think it's necessary. It'll help, but at what cost to the consumer? And not the Slashdot freeloaders, the honest people who don't pirate anything. Actually, that would include most of Slashdot, none of us ever pirate, we just try before we buy. That's right, isn't it? I'm new here, I don't know the official way we dress up our excuses yet.
"With exciting new digital audio devices on the market today and more on the horizon, Congress needs to streamline the deployment of digital services and protect the intellectual property rights of creators," said Ferguson, who is a member of the House of Representatives' Internet subcommittee. Rep. Mary Bono, a California Republican, is one of the four other co-sponsors.
Well, she's absolutely right here on one count. Congress does need to protect the intellectual property rights of creators, because they are currently under massive assault in a legal system that is a decade behind the technology that it regulates. However, as a Republican, Ms. Bono ought to understand that regulating business is rarely the answer to these problems. Or, in this case, regulating consumers. Even worse. What happened to small government staying out of our lives, Ms. Bono? I'm among those that put the Republicans in power during the Clinton administration and you and your ilk have gradually betrayed our trust. Further, it is also the job of Congress to ensure that our rights as consumers are protected, and for all his enthusiasm, I don't think Darth Nader is up to the job. For one, he's not in the legislature. You are, Ms. Bono.
That's because a federal appeals court last year unceremoniously rejected a similar set of regulations from the FCC, saying the agency did not have authority to mandate a broadcast flag for digital video.
Further proof that over a long enough trajectory the legal system almost always gets it right.
At a breakfast roundtable with reporters on Thursday, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said some sort of legislation is necessary to prevent Americans from saving high-quality music from digital broadcasts, assembling a "personal music library" of their own, and redistributing "recorded songs over the Internet or on removable media."
We already have legislation that forbids this. They don't want legislation, they want mandated hardware controls to enforce it. I have no objections to streamlining the law to get it caught up with technology and limit the impact of piracy on the RIAA's bottom line. I do have a serious problem with legal mandates that enforce technological limits on legal behavior.
Devices like the Sirius S50, the RIAA worries, can record satellite radio broadcasts but aren't required to include digital rights management limitations.
Nor should they be. Sirius bought broadcast rights from ASCAP or whoever broadcast rights group does digital radio, just like everybody else does. The industry has its money from Sirius et al. The only barrier to mass copyright infringement is unreadable devices. As Roger Ebert pointed out long ago, anybody who is a hair above marginally technically competant can create high-quality reproductions of almost any playable media using cheap technology, and store the output in any formot. Onto p2p it goes. The broadcast flag is a big expensive pain in the ass that will not address the problem to their satisfaction, and they'll be back demanding MORE legislation in 5 years when their E/P ratio is too high. The broadcast flag is the first step on a long road of incremenetal freedom reduction that winds gradually out of sight into uncharted territory. Actually, it's not so uncharted. We know wha
We have one thing going for us. Businesses hate their IT departments. They hate having CIOs, they hate the multimillion dollar budgets just to keep some aging technology around that upper management privately believes is completely unnecessary. They ran their business computer systems in 1995 with 8 guys, now they need 200. They hate IT. And if we can come along and say, "this'll do the job for 9% cheaper," you just might get "big business" to sign on.
Because college professors are anti-corporate socialists. This guy wants free intelligence on American business technology that he can exploit to conduct mass sabotage during summer break. Duh. Don't you watch Fox? I do!
Go read the whistleblower statutes. You're incorrect. Insightful, but incorrect. behavior in others.
You don't. I don't get food stamps, a welfare check, my kids don't go to public schools (I don't have any), but I pay taxes that go into these programs. My real estate tax goes straight to the school district. I don't use that service.
The majority of my taxes go towards causes, programs, or institutions whose services I neither need nor want, and a handful to which I have serious ethical and/or moral objections. But there's no recourse. If I say all of this and want my taxes lowered or changed so I can keep more of my own money, I'm called greedy. When somebody else wants my money for some purpose, they're just needy.
And politicians arrange the transfer. Welcome aboard, Canada!
The "whistleblower" status is for people who know that something dirty and wrong is going on and turn over their evidence to internal agencies of the government to deal with it. A whistleblower takes his knowledge and does not go public with it. This guy mailed this stuff to the newspapers, that's why he's in trouble. Had he contacted any one of a dozen agencies to handle the complaint, he'd be in no legal trouble. The whisteblower law would protect him. THat's why all these "leakers" are landing in hot water. WE learned from Watergate that if you go public with something incriminating, you become a hero to the media. So now people leak all kinds of shit trying to be the next "Deep Throat." Well, that's not why we have whistleblower laws. The whistleblower law is to protect a consciencious objector to an unlawful government practice. In this case, a company working on the government dole breaking the law. If the guy wanted legal protection to busing Diebold on their shitball hardware, there's a legal recourse to do so. He didn't use it. He leaked to the goddam newspaper. That's exactly the opposite of what you're supposed to do. He's geetting what he deserves. Now, if only Diebold can be held to the same standard.
Among my roles at work is web development. I keep a whiteboard here that says, "COMMIT TO STABLE SOFTWARE!" and it has two sections: "DAYS SINCE AN IE CRASH" and "LIFETIME RECORD." Sort of like those signs at factories that say, "198 days without an accident." Anyway, the "DAYS SINCE AN IE CRASH" is currently 1. The lifetime record is 2.
No. The results of the election have been legally certified, and by the laws of this nation, Der Bushmeister won it.
This begs many questions, however.
1. Are these anomolies the leftovers of malicious tampering or explainable via innocent happenstance?
2. Regardless of the answer to #1, has digital voting solved anything?
Does this mean the event happened 440 million years ago and we're just now detecting it because information about it has finally arrived? The physics of spacetime have always puzzled me.
I agree completely. I hope you point this out the next time the global warming debate starts up here, people need to hear it.
In other words, outsourcing has actually helped our economy and provided new employment opportunities for the displaced, just like almost every respectable economist has said it would, just like it has always done over the years. Yes, perhaps Paul Krugman disagrees, but I said "respectable" economist, which immediately disqualifies him.
Hydrogen fuel cells won't get us unhooked from oil. Among the various easy ways to acquire hydrogen is from petroleum. Why do you think Bush is so gung-ho for it?
Saluto? Salute? Welcome?
Dominos? Dominion? Masters?
Nostros? Actually my SPanish background helps here, being as it's a Romance language. "Neustros." "We/our".
Novos? Again, Spanish helps. "Neuvos" is the plural of "new". And grammaticos is obvious.
A little English vocabulary and light understanding of one Romance language and you can damn near read Latin.
Most of Apple's customers don't live in the UK. Apple's license has and continues to hold up under law.
Then I go to my parents' house where their machine has 592,356 icons on the desktop and so much memory-resident garbage that the machine takes four minutes to load IE. I'm amazed their hard disk hasn't been worn down to threads by the constantly virtual memory swapping it must endure.
That does drive me nuts. The machine comes with a "games" folder, why aren't other "games" products installed there by default?
That's exactly the nature of my complaint. What component of iTunes is necessary for the Quicktime player to operate, I ask you? Nothing. And if any API or service IS necessary, it can be installed without polluting my machine with software I have no intention of ever using. Shame the other respondant to my post couldn't puzzle that bit of logic out.
That's not my beef. I use a Windows machine.
Now, I understand that QuickTime is going to come with iTunes (now) because iTunes can play videos (now). What I DO object to is that QuickTime is installed in my system tray EVERY TIME and added to my quick launch menu EVERY TIME and the player software is installed EVERY TIME. Installing core services vital to running iTunes is fine. I think I ought to have the option to NOT have that feature (video playback), just like I don't understand why MS Outlook _HAS_ to have MS Messager around to function properly. But I can live with the fact that the QuickTime API is necessary for a basic iTunes install. I do not accept that it's important to install the QuickTime player, try to make it my default media playback device, and shove it into my desktop environment. I don't get iTunes upgrades anymore because I'm tired of having to go open the QuickTime thing in my sys tray and click the "Do not show in sys tray" icon. I know that's a stupid reason, but I'm just sick of it.
They really should rewrite all that video stuff custom for each app. Same with this Cocoa thing -- what's with that? Almost every app uses it no matter what it's function! That's the one they're REALLY trying to shove down your throat!
If they installed the Cocoa development environment, IDE, and tried to have it replace my MSVC++ stuff as my default "application development" software, your stupid analogy might hold.
iTunes on Windows is a bit of a weird case. Apple wanted to keep their interface, and probably didn't want to hire a bunch of Windows programmers, so they used the one API they have ported to Windows... Quicktime.
Which makes perfect sense. See above. Installing core services: fine. Install a bunch of bloat? Evil. When any other business does shit like this, even the oft-fellated Google Wooglie Woo, we raise holy hell here.
If there is any specific technology that Apple tries to push out with its products, it's QuickTime. Want iTunes? You get QuickTime. And they make SURE YOU KNOW IT. Editing movies with iMovie? Quicktime quicktime quicktime quicktime YAY quicktime! Now, I haven't used iMovie in a few years so maybe it's different now, I dunno. Apple seems to be completely aware that OS X is unlikely to usurp Windows. If anybody does, it'll be Unix, Linux, BSD, and their ilk on the server side. Wintel is on the consumer desktop to stay for the immediate and at least medium-term future, and Apple's best bet is to make their machines behave as much like a Winbox from the UI perspective as possible (in the sense of what is intuitive to a Windows user - like context-sensitive right-click pop-up menus), and play as nice and easily with Winnets as possible. They know that, and they're abandoning things that make this difficult, like one-button mice.
But leveraging the iPod to sell Macs? I seriously doubt it. They do try to shove QuickTime down your throat, though.
I am unwilling at this point to agree with all of the following: (1) global warming is happening (2) its causes are anthropomorphic (3) the recommended mitigations will stop or slow it (4) the recommended mitigations are necessary for the survival of the species, directly or indirectly. The research is compelling but it's incomplete. I actually think the president is right in his stance that more research and funding is necessary before we can wisely take corrective action. Sadly, his own administration appears to be hellbent on sabotaging or slanting exactly that effort. *checks watch* Two more years for a change of leadership. I think ol' mudda earth will hold out that long. There are plenty of clearly man-made civilization-threatening problems facing us that are more immediate and more solvable. As far as environmental sciences go, our action is best directed towards improving the lives of people for whose ails we already have proven solutions. Clean water, innoculations, and the like. Our research should continue as it has been, preferably with less hand-wringing by the left and less meddling and manipulation by the right.
Piracy is and a problem and it is a major hassle for them, and it is causing them to lose money through mass copyright infringement. Further, their point here is not that it isn't "fair use", they're not even discussing fair use, they are talking about exceptions to the DMCA. The DMCA is additional legislation that criminalizes (among other things) the circumvention of copy protection. Fair Use is a case-by-case doctrine in which copyright privileges may be legally ignored for specific purposes.