..errrm, then work at work?... I don't think this policy means you can't come in. It just means you don't have to come in. For lots of people 'the office' is the best place to get work done, and I don't think the policy should prevent you from being productive.
There is a value to meetings - at least, some of them
TFSummary does say core hours of 10-2. Only in the most beaurocratic environments do people spend more than half their day in meetings... besides, this might just (a) cut out useless meetings as people start only attending useful meetings, and (b) shorten meetings to a useful length. Any meeting longer than one hour needs to be broken into multiple shorter meetings anyways: people lose focus after less than one hour.
I'm not good on the phone
This is going to be a bigger problem, and in a growing global enviornment it will become more normal to have to interact more often with people nowhere near you... perhaps at-desk video conference/meetings will grow? I don't know, but I agree: I use e-mail over phone, and if possible face-to-face over phone. Phone is probably my last choice in communication, but sometimes there is just no choice.
It's a paper-based voting system that allows you to verify that your vote was cast but doesn't allow you to prove how you voted.
In general terms you vote twice for guy you want, and once for the guy you don't want, leaving your guy +1 over the other. You then are allowed to take a copy (at random) of one the three ballots to walk out with. It has a serial number that is no way related to the other ballots. You use the serial number to check that at least 1/3 of your vote was cast correctly at some later date by checking a bullitin board.
After that it's just a probability game - it wouldn't take that many people to check before it became highly probable that if there was a problem it would be noted.
Your honor I'm willing to plead guilty in exchange for the penalty of "a stern talking-to from Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman" which is apparently the penalty that Mr. Bronfman believes is appropriate for this offence.
It's 2006, we shouldn't have any trouble parsing natural language
1. In generic terms the most common problem I see is loosely defined stuff. (example: I can't stand languages that let you declare variables on the fly and don't enforce types. Maintaining and debugging this kind of sh!t is brutal and imho just pure laziness on the part of the programmers that author it.)
2. We humans can't parse our own languages with any degree of certainty (that's why we pay lawyers so much money and still end up at war with one another)
These two points make me very wary of any kind of "natural-language" system for general purpose computing. (I'm not saying it can't have very purpose in very narrow scopes, like dialing a phone for example).
A physical greenback hardly qualifies as a "stable tangible asset." How many Euros will a USD net me tomorrow? How about the day after? In July it was 0.8 USD, but right now it's closer to 0.75. A dollar merely represents a particular value, but as with many other things fiscal, that value is quite fluid.
On a happy note, the Fed will accept this greenback as payment for taxes. as many +5 funny's point out earlier in this discussion these people (might) be willing to pay using in-game currency...to make the fluctuations of US$ vs Euros a relevant point the IRS would have to send you a tax bill listing choice of currency and an acceptable number of those other currencies.
So I guess the point is that a physical greenback does qualify as a "stable tangible asset" relative to your tax bill, which is of course the point of the discussion.
So who makes up the rules as to what is "Fair"? Seems pretty arbitrary to me. Hell, it seems completely immoral to me, actually: A company becomes so incredibly successful that most of their competitors go under, so that success is attacked by the very government that is supposed to protect private property. Fucking twisted, if you ask me.
well, that's a pretty glossy version of events: MS is a convicted monoplist, guilty of anti-competative behaviour. The guvs job is to ensure a level playing field, because competition is good for the consumer and economy. So any penalty imposed is as both punishment for transgressions as well as a warning to others not to misbehave.
It's especially important for the government to step in and re-introduce competition in an arena where they have mucked-up competition in the first place (copyright grants a legal monopoly!) so when this gets over-leveraged the consumer loses...and the government *must* step in to try and restore competition.
One reason for the fire's duration was the lack of national standards in fire-fighting equipment. Although fire engines from nearby cities (such as Philadelphia and Washington, as well as units from New York City, Wilmington, and Atlantic City) responded, many were useless because their hose couplings failed to fit Baltimore hydrants. As a result, the fire burned over 30 hours, destroying 1,526 buildings spanning 70 city blocks.
Organisations like http://www.w3.org/ who publish open standards are important because it ensures that we're not stuck with a monoculture. This isn't about 'who sets the standards' so much as once a standard is set that more than one party is allowed to play. So there's two problems:
Microsoft not playing by everyone else's standards hurts interoperability which hurts competition and leaves the computing world open to the problems of a mono-culture that gets basically wiped out by a single virus.
And MS generally has closed standards (word doc anyone?), meaning they are the only ones who can make a product that meets the standard. MS is free to publish/maintain any __open__ standard they wish and some segment of the computing world will follow their lead. In the absence of this, organisations like w3c, asni etc will form standards and people will follow their lead.
MS is all about embrace, extend and extinguish: that's not helping create interoperable products.
No, he's telling you you can *pay* for the rental using visa without showing ID.
The rental itself may or may not require the showing of ID but is unrelated to the payment.
In other words, if you pay for the car rental in cash and don't provide a credit card in any way shape or form (good luck with that) then they would still demand ID - specifically a driver's license.
I spend more time working on the parts of the problem that are interesting to me and less time massaging a date into a format that Oracle likes.
non-strictness is a MS problem, not a feature.
The last thing I want is for the database to 'guess' at what I meant, like Word does when 'guessing' how I want my document formatted, and stubbornly refusing to let me correct it:(
Allowing software to 'guess' when you should be specifiying is a quick way to introduce fun and unpredictable errors into your system.
Often times it's not the 'enterprise' that's demanding a commercial RDBMS: It's the off-the-shelf application that demands db2, oracle or ms-sql...no mysql or postgres in the list of 'vendor approved' databases.
And even though you think it *should* work (sql is sql, right?...heheh), note that lots of these apps query the system catalog, which means they _need_ to know how the catalog can be queried, which means you need to pick a support DB.
If my-sql and postgres spend time getting included as an 'option' for commercial products then perhaps even if they don't get picked the first time, it would increase their mind-share and make them an option next time...
The Symantec.com store says it's seventy bucks... this windows thing isn't getting any cheaper.
As many others have pointed out it's not just the initial $45-$250 WinLicense that's more than the free 'nix - every single additional 'feature' requires yet another proprietary piece of pay-code.
I don't think citing success with a copyright-free model more than a century ago is really good evidence. In fact, most of the paper has a tendancy to,... , give examples of intellectual works produced in the past when/where copyrights (or patents) didn't exist.
well, I think that for today it's important to at least debunk the monopolists lie about creation only existing with copyright -- but since it's basically impossible to find any countries left where these protections have been granted we can really only look to the past to see how it worked. What they then spend a lot of time on is determining whether or not we've had *increased* publications and innovations and they come to the conclusion that we have not in fact increased.
rather than describe realistic ways in which a modern market would work sans copyright
What you called "alternative business models will be granted by the fairy that speaks to me in my dreams" is really just a competative market. I don't think we need to try and come up with solutions: that smells of a planned/command economy. Remove the protections and millions of clever people will hammer away at the problem until it's resolved. By competition. Not by monopoly protection.
But if you or I had to guess, I think we could agree that in a market where everyone is selling the exact same thing (no more monopolies), that sans people getting an edge on competitors through inovations on the medium of the book itself, margins become razor thin.
hmmm... but I don't know that I agree. It definately sounds logical. But the facts don't seem to agree. The bit about the 9/11 Commission Report (also from Chap.2) seems to provide some pretty compelling evidence that having a first-mover advantage means that the margins for the initial publisher are worth them paying the author...
And lastly, I thought of another pro-copyright example. Computer games I think (at least no MMORPG style ones) are a perfect example in this digital age because without copyright, I guarantee that that industry would go under. Or at least have a hell of a time of it.
I don't think you can guarantee that. In fact, if we could bet on it, I'd take you up on it.
The key element in a non-copyright world is that you don't recreate from scratch: you build on what came before. What that means in the games-world is that it would also expand like Linux: one person writes a bit, and another adds to it. Games would evolve from one another.
So this means that no company/person needs make 100% of the effort (and therefore absorb 100% of the cost and have to recoup that). Dozens, hundreds and thousands of individuals would make incremental changes and sell their version. Even a few copies sold pays back the small effort.
Intellectual monopoly creates a smaller quantity of larger pools of wealth and makes new entry into a market difficult and decreases consumer choice.
Competition (no monopoly) creates many smaller pools of wealth as each company needs to innovate in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
I hope I've made at least a convincing argument that we should be suspicious of claims that there should be no copyright. It seems appealing because everyone hates price gouging corporations keeping them from something that the marginal cost of reproducing is essentially nil, but I think less protection, and not no protection, is the answer.
hmmm, and here I was hoping I could convince you that we don't need any copyright at all;)
I could accept a decerase in copyright term, since I don't think I'll get what I want: no copyright at all.
The problem with intellectual monopoly protection is that they need to be protected. (If they don't, then we don't nee
Then I guess you didn't make it to chapter two of my suggested readings:
People find it hard to wrap their head around the concept
that ideas can be rewarded without a copyright or patent. Without a
copyright, how will the author of a novel get paid? Consider the
facts.
Start with English authors selling books in the United States
in the nineteenth century. "During the nineteenth century anyone
was free in the United States to reprint a foreign publication"
without making any payment to the author, besides purchasing a
legally sold copy of the book. This was a fact that greatly upset
Charles Dickens whose works, along with those of many other
English authors, were widely distributed in the U.S., and yet American publishers found it profitable to make
arrangements with English authors. Evidence before the
1876-8 Commission shows that English authors sometimes
received more from the sale of their books by American
publishers, where they had no copyright, than from their
royalties in [England] where they did have copyright. In short without copyright, authors
still get paid, sometime more than with it.
Please... please.... Please! do some actual reading on a subject before you start to call alternate ideas stupid.
I think you are confused on what copyright protects.
No, I'm not confused. I do, however, think you've bought into the monopolists sales pitch.
No body (sic) has (to my knowledge) suggested that the works of da Vinci or Picasso were dependant on copyright - copyright didn't exist and somehow art was made.
I think that that is the point. Art was made in the absence of copyright, and is therefore unnecessary to cause creation of art.
Copyright protects commercial art.
wtf is "commerical art"? Art is something that an artist makes. So I *hope* you just mean that commercial art is something that an artist profits from. If so, then let it be noted that copyright is unnecessary for this to occur. If it's some kind of thing that can simply be made in a factory - we just pay for more units like shoes or iPods - then we can stop talking because you don't understand art or artists.
Beyond that though, you are simply wrong. Copyright doesn't protect artists: they require no protection because they *make* the art.
Copyright protects the publisher, who has nothing but marketing skills and (hopefully) some money to give to the artist - and it must be (on average and by definition) less money then they will get from the buyer.
The point of copyright for the public good is that society has found out (despite your opinion) that when art can be profitable, a lot more of it is made, and that this is worth it to society even if we must now pay for it.
Unprovable, despite the sales pitch. Society has found out nothing: it's been very succesfully marketed to.
And no where did I say that art must be free-as-in-beer. In fact, I've talked extensively about alternate compensation models in this thread. I do believe that artists must be compensated. I just also believe that not only is copyright not the only model, it's not even a good model.
Earlier posters are correct in saying the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of personal profitability,
Yup. And imho, any model that concentrates wealth the way that copyright does will eventually become corrupt the way that our current system has. It is one of the chief reasons that I'm against copyright. And it's not much of a pendulum... I see no reason for it to swing back, other than people speaking out and voting on the subject: the companies (publishers) involved see no reason to cut their profits... no business ever does. (and I'm not saying they should)
but please consider that (for example) none of the movies or tv you watch would exist without rights over the material.
Again, prove it. You can't. You simply please need to stop spewing the riaa/mpaa party line and do some critical thinking and reading on this subject.
Movies and television would exist without copyright: at *most* what you can say is that we *might* not have $200-million dollar movies like King Kong... so what? I have nothing against this movie, but we could just as easily ask: "What's wrong with the current system that it doesn't support $500-million movies?" Why stop there? We obviously need a system that supports billion-dollar budgets!
It's pure nonesense. There's no requirement for making movies based on a certain budget: and if there ever is, I feel quite confident that a compensation model will be created that allows this to happen. Without copyright.
Before GNU/Linux, there is no way that people would have believed you could get paid to write something that's given away for free... how's that figure into your equation?
Art composed by people who will create it regardless of whether said creation requires they live in poverty constitutes only a small portion of all modern art, and it's ignorant to pretend otherwise.
I was refering to the 'trial'... I think copyright can (and should be) removed, but it just can't be turned off overnite. There needs to be a plan or timetable to revoking the rights to allow for the economy to make the adjustments that will come with a new non-copyright based system. This takes time, and renders a test-period rather difficult. Also, if people know it's a test, there will be those that work to ensure the test fails...
Will some people move too slowly and fail to get out or adapt? sure, but if we give opportunity to change then I can agree with your sentiment of tough sh!~t... remember that there are a lot of people employed by the current machine, and it will take some time for the new model to mature and employ those same people. An orderly transition is required to minimize the economic damage that will be done to 'innocent' bystanders...
I have no objection to trying a period of no copyrights as an experiment.
Copyright can't be turned on and off at a whim... there's a whole infrastructure around the current system, and it would be damaging to people's lives to suddenly turn it off.
That said, I think that the 'experiment' exists: the GPL. And it works.
I'm worried about what would happen to definitive works like encyclopedias and medical journals, though
Lots of that stuff is written by academics... being published is pretty much required to be a professor. I don't expect that to change.
An important point when discussing all this is that a non-copyright world looks very little like the current one. All the systems, compensation models and development models are based around copyright. I have no reason to believe that the development and compensation models for a non-copyright model will be the same.
I use GNU/Linux as an example and contrast with Windows development. I wrote a lenghty comment previously and I'm not re-typing it here:)
What's important to remember is that the models will change with the change of law, so comparing some of this stuff is sorta irrelevent.
The question should be "How do we encourage the production of art?"
The question is, why do people think that humans need any kind of incentive to create art? We've been creating art since we scratched Borg & the Wildebeast onto our cave wall, and since music was just a drumbeat in the jungle. Must we pass laws to encourage breathing or eating?
Copyright is one approach, and has actually done a decent job.
The only thing we can demonstrably state about copyright is that it has moved large chunks of wealth into a small number of hands. We simply can't truly deterimine whether or not copyright has had a positive impact on the creation of works.
While some may point to the vast quantities of works created the past century in the USA as proof that copyright works, I'll respond with two points:
Copyright is a coupl'a hundred years old. It is really only in the last 50-100 yrs that there has been an explosion in the publication of works.
I suggest as an alternate theory that the creation of works is tied directly to available leisure time (both as creator and consumer), and at no time in history have more people had more leisure time than the USA in the same last 50-100yrs.
Provable? nope, but it's at least as plausable as the copyright theory... more plausable in my opinion.
Lastly, what those that are proponents of copyright never talk about is the damage that it does - I've read estimates that some 70% of all published music is unavailable for purchase. It's locked away under copyright, and the 'owner' doesn't feel that it's profitable to release it. So anyone who looks at the shear quantity published, without taking into account the works that copyright renders *unavailable* is being dishonest...
It's the RIAA/MPAA et al that have everyone believing that copyright is necessary to us... when in reality it is necessary only in terms of ensuring their profits.
Which raises the question of what the qualifications for a judge should be.
We certainly can't expect them to be absolute experts on every subject: that's why there's expert witnesses.
While (as the article said) any 12-yr old knows the request is bogus, it really just means that the judge believed the expert witness of the defense at least as much as the expert who submitted TFA, or at least sufficiently that the judge didn't want to worry that the defense would be able to use this as an easy appeal if they lost.
and you can play your itunes files on any itunes player, and your zune files on any zune player...
Your statement is incomplete: and you can play your itunes files on any three itunes players, and your zune files on any zune player...so long as I comply with whatever zune's restrictions are....and when it breaks I need to comply with whatever their restrictions are, and eventually that will be: tough sh*t, buy it again. They are tying the media to the player, and no tape-player, cd-player or record player would cause you to lose your collection.
Thanks for TOTALLY missing the point.... and I think you know it AC.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a paper-based voting system that allows you to verify that your vote was cast but doesn't allow you to prove how you voted.
In general terms you vote twice for guy you want, and once for the guy you don't want, leaving your guy +1 over the other. You then are allowed to take a copy (at random) of one the three ballots to walk out with. It has a serial number that is no way related to the other ballots. You use the serial number to check that at least 1/3 of your vote was cast correctly at some later date by checking a bullitin board.
After that it's just a probability game - it wouldn't take that many people to check before it became highly probable that if there was a problem it would be noted.
Your honor I'm willing to plead guilty in exchange for the penalty of "a stern talking-to from Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman" which is apparently the penalty that Mr. Bronfman believes is appropriate for this offence.
2. We humans can't parse our own languages with any degree of certainty (that's why we pay lawyers so much money and still end up at war with one another)
These two points make me very wary of any kind of "natural-language" system for general purpose computing. (I'm not saying it can't have very purpose in very narrow scopes, like dialing a phone for example).
So I guess the point is that a physical greenback does qualify as a "stable tangible asset" relative to your tax bill, which is of course the point of the discussion.
I get the first tag on this article, but what's "beta" got to do with RFID?
It's especially important for the government to step in and re-introduce competition in an arena where they have mucked-up competition in the first place (copyright grants a legal monopoly!) so when this gets over-leveraged the consumer loses...and the government *must* step in to try and restore competition.
Microsoft not playing by everyone else's standards hurts interoperability which hurts competition and leaves the computing world open to the problems of a mono-culture that gets basically wiped out by a single virus.
And MS generally has closed standards (word doc anyone?), meaning they are the only ones who can make a product that meets the standard. MS is free to publish/maintain any __open__ standard they wish and some segment of the computing world will follow their lead. In the absence of this, organisations like w3c, asni etc will form standards and people will follow their lead.
MS is all about embrace, extend and extinguish: that's not helping create interoperable products.
No, he's telling you you can *pay* for the rental using visa without showing ID.
The rental itself may or may not require the showing of ID but is unrelated to the payment.
In other words, if you pay for the car rental in cash and don't provide a credit card in any way shape or form (good luck with that) then they would still demand ID - specifically a driver's license.
The last thing I want is for the database to 'guess' at what I meant, like Word does when 'guessing' how I want my document formatted, and stubbornly refusing to let me correct it :(
Allowing software to 'guess' when you should be specifiying is a quick way to introduce fun and unpredictable errors into your system.
And even though you think it *should* work (sql is sql, right?...heheh), note that lots of these apps query the system catalog, which means they _need_ to know how the catalog can be queried, which means you need to pick a support DB.
If my-sql and postgres spend time getting included as an 'option' for commercial products then perhaps even if they don't get picked the first time, it would increase their mind-share and make them an option next time...
As many others have pointed out it's not just the initial $45-$250 WinLicense that's more than the free 'nix - every single additional 'feature' requires yet another proprietary piece of pay-code.
itsatrap!
no worries :)
well, I think that for today it's important to at least debunk the monopolists lie about creation only existing with copyright -- but since it's basically impossible to find any countries left where these protections have been granted we can really only look to the past to see how it worked. What they then spend a lot of time on is determining whether or not we've had *increased* publications and innovations and they come to the conclusion that we have not in fact increased.
What you called "alternative business models will be granted by the fairy that speaks to me in my dreams" is really just a competative market. I don't think we need to try and come up with solutions: that smells of a planned/command economy. Remove the protections and millions of clever people will hammer away at the problem until it's resolved. By competition. Not by monopoly protection.
hmmm ... but I don't know that I agree. It definately sounds logical. But the facts don't seem to agree. The bit about the 9/11 Commission Report (also from Chap.2) seems to provide some pretty compelling evidence that having a first-mover advantage means that the margins for the initial publisher are worth them paying the author...
I don't think you can guarantee that. In fact, if we could bet on it, I'd take you up on it.
The key element in a non-copyright world is that you don't recreate from scratch: you build on what came before. What that means in the games-world is that it would also expand like Linux: one person writes a bit, and another adds to it. Games would evolve from one another.
So this means that no company/person needs make 100% of the effort (and therefore absorb 100% of the cost and have to recoup that). Dozens, hundreds and thousands of individuals would make incremental changes and sell their version. Even a few copies sold pays back the small effort.
Intellectual monopoly creates a smaller quantity of larger pools of wealth and makes new entry into a market difficult and decreases consumer choice.
Competition (no monopoly) creates many smaller pools of wealth as each company needs to innovate in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
hmmm, and here I was hoping I could convince you that we don't need any copyright at all ;)
I could accept a decerase in copyright term, since I don't think I'll get what I want: no copyright at all.
The problem with intellectual monopoly protection is that they need to be protected. (If they don't, then we don't nee
Please ... please .... Please! do some actual reading on a subject before you start to call alternate ideas stupid.
itsatrap!
No, I'm not confused. I do, however, think you've bought into the monopolists sales pitch.
I think that that is the point. Art was made in the absence of copyright, and is therefore unnecessary to cause creation of art.
wtf is "commerical art"? Art is something that an artist makes. So I *hope* you just mean that commercial art is something that an artist profits from. If so, then let it be noted that copyright is unnecessary for this to occur. If it's some kind of thing that can simply be made in a factory - we just pay for more units like shoes or iPods - then we can stop talking because you don't understand art or artists.
Beyond that though, you are simply wrong. Copyright doesn't protect artists: they require no protection because they *make* the art.
Copyright protects the publisher, who has nothing but marketing skills and (hopefully) some money to give to the artist - and it must be (on average and by definition) less money then they will get from the buyer.
Unprovable, despite the sales pitch. Society has found out nothing: it's been very succesfully marketed to.
And no where did I say that art must be free-as-in-beer. In fact, I've talked extensively about alternate compensation models in this thread. I do believe that artists must be compensated. I just also believe that not only is copyright not the only model, it's not even a good model.
Yup. And imho, any model that concentrates wealth the way that copyright does will eventually become corrupt the way that our current system has. It is one of the chief reasons that I'm against copyright. And it's not much of a pendulum ... I see no reason for it to swing back, other than people speaking out and voting on the subject: the companies (publishers) involved see no reason to cut their profits... no business ever does. (and I'm not saying they should)
Again, prove it. You can't. You simply please need to stop spewing the riaa/mpaa party line and do some critical thinking and reading on this subject.
Movies and television would exist without copyright: at *most* what you can say is that we *might* not have $200-million dollar movies like King Kong ... so what? I have nothing against this movie, but we could just as easily ask: "What's wrong with the current system that it doesn't support $500-million movies?" Why stop there? We obviously need a system that supports billion-dollar budgets!
It's pure nonesense. There's no requirement for making movies based on a certain budget: and if there ever is, I feel quite confident that a compensation model will be created that allows this to happen. Without copyright.
Before GNU/Linux, there is no way that people would have believed you could get paid to write something that's given away for free... how's that figure into your equation?
Wrong.
The bulk of artists are *still* p
Will some people move too slowly and fail to get out or adapt? sure, but if we give opportunity to change then I can agree with your sentiment of tough sh!~t... remember that there are a lot of people employed by the current machine, and it will take some time for the new model to mature and employ those same people. An orderly transition is required to minimize the economic damage that will be done to 'innocent' bystanders...
That said, I think that the 'experiment' exists: the GPL. And it works. Lots of that stuff is written by academics
An important point when discussing all this is that a non-copyright world looks very little like the current one. All the systems, compensation models and development models are based around copyright. I have no reason to believe that the development and compensation models for a non-copyright model will be the same.
I use GNU/Linux as an example and contrast with Windows development. I wrote a lenghty comment previously and I'm not re-typing it here :)
What's important to remember is that the models will change with the change of law, so comparing some of this stuff is sorta irrelevent.
While some may point to the vast quantities of works created the past century in the USA as proof that copyright works, I'll respond with two points:
- Copyright is a coupl'a hundred years old. It is really only in the last 50-100 yrs that there has been an explosion in the publication of works.
- I suggest as an alternate theory that the creation of works is tied directly to available leisure time (both as creator and consumer), and at no time in history have more people had more leisure time than the USA in the same last 50-100yrs.
Provable? nope, but it's at least as plausable as the copyright theoryLastly, what those that are proponents of copyright never talk about is the damage that it does - I've read estimates that some 70% of all published music is unavailable for purchase. It's locked away under copyright, and the 'owner' doesn't feel that it's profitable to release it. So anyone who looks at the shear quantity published, without taking into account the works that copyright renders *unavailable* is being dishonest... ... when in reality it is necessary only in terms of ensuring their profits.
It's the RIAA/MPAA et al that have everyone believing that copyright is necessary to us
We certainly can't expect them to be absolute experts on every subject: that's why there's expert witnesses.
While (as the article said) any 12-yr old knows the request is bogus, it really just means that the judge believed the expert witness of the defense at least as much as the expert who submitted TFA, or at least sufficiently that the judge didn't want to worry that the defense would be able to use this as an easy appeal if they lost.
and you can play your itunes files on any three itunes players, and your zune files on any zune player...so long as I comply with whatever zune's restrictions are.
Thanks for TOTALLY missing the point.... and I think you know it AC.