Oh man, you should see the slick animations on that botnet control software. You get Expose-like instant view of all your zombies, nice bouncing animations when your zombies are attacking, and you don't get all those lame dialog boxes and wizard-type interfaces seen in similar Windows software (OK, it instead quits unexpectedly at frequent inopportune moments). With the free high-quality developer tools and APIs Apple gives you with their OS, creating a certified lickable headline-grabbing trojan couldn't be easier. Mac OS X - the most advanced OS for malware developers.
And of course, I'm assuming that code is still in use today, five code revisions and four OS versions later... and that undocumented API is still working somehow. Gotta love MS's spaghetti code tendencies, mixed with severe paranoia about deprecating ANYTHING.
What about movies and TV shows? What about storing in Lossless quality? Shot that argument down... Cue references to "640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates misquote.
And a color display, which would totally kill its battery life. Browsing the web in monochrome with a somewhat laggy e-ink display would be... interesting.
That's disingenuous. At least mention the "official" reason stated for the omission of Flash, which is for performance / power usage considerations and Apple trying to get something more functional than Flash Lite out of Adobe. Besides, flash apps are hardly a substitute for native software, anymore than AJAX web apps are, and those are fully supported, including new support for offline use and data storage, which empowers web apps and goes against your argument that Flash was left out for control reasons. If it was a case of wanting to maintain control, it's directed at not wanting to be dependent on Adobe, not at limiting end users.
Click-through license clauses governing the usage of items purchased at a store are unenforceable in California, a few other states, due to a conflict with the First Sale Doctrine, as well as in Europe, and most of the rest of the developed world that protects consumer property rights. This is true for any items purchased in an informal setting such as a brick-and-mortar store where the contractual limitations of the license are not presented to the purchaser, including DVDs and CDs. For items purchased through a service like iTunes, the click-through license is probably enforceable, and breaking the license is illegal FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE AGREED TO IT AND ARE BOUND BY IT. Anyone else can take a crack at breaking the DRM on iTunes files, and they're not breaking any contract, although the person(s) who supplied them with their copies of copy-protected content to use to generate the crack is in violation of their contract with Apple.
So it's a murky legal situation. On the one hand, we have DVDs, which are DRM'd, but they're available for purchase in regular retail settings and the user is never presented a contractual agreement during usage, and so any usage-restricting license that may be included with them are unenforceable. For services which do present a license before use, such as iTunes, those that make use of the service are bound by any arbitrary usage limitations the distributor cares to put in their license.
All it takes is a single day when the latest version of iTunes DRM has been cracked for you to export your entire content library to standard format DRM-free. Then, you don't care about when they update iTunes again, as you just ditch all the protected content and use the DRM-free copies. Only if you keep purchasing DRM'd content after they update their scheme to close the last exploit, after you're aware of the usage limitations involved, are you still going to be stuck with DRM'd content. At that point, it's difficult to have any sympathy for you if you find yourself unable to access your content in the manner you desire. Personally, I just don't buy content with DRM that I can't easily and conveniently crack.
There's no easy-to-use/access app store for WinMo, with considerable technical skill required to find and install software, and so much less software gets sold, forcing developers to charge more per unit to make up for this.
Mac OS X Server runs a host of services, particularly for managing Mac OS X clients, that you won't find on any other OS, so there are reasons to get a Xserve in particular; web serving just is not one of them.
Come out to the west coast for a while sometime. Marijuana is very much a part of mainstream culture in several parts of this country, and people already take the drug to very unhealthy/unproductive levels, only outnumbered by those who consume it responsibly. What we're doing now has approximately zero effect on keeping a lid on the substance, and the only real consequence of the current prohibition is that a vast, vast underground economy, one that dwarfs large sectors of legitimate agriculture in many states, is allowed to grow and prosper, at the expense of the government's ability to tax and regulate this trade. Even for harder substances, criminalization is hardly an intelligent way to deal with most of these cases of abuse, when medical intervention would be so much more appropriate than tossing someone in jail. The current drug policy in the US is completely indefensible, and is only allowed to continue due to the political sensitivity surrounding the issue, thanks to propaganda campaigns that were able to find a sizable target of gullible people in this country. Still, marijuana is very much a part of mainstream culture in many parts of the US, and trying to fight it with laws only serves to call the value of law enforcement into question. If you were looking for a way to alienate a large portion of the population from the law, then the War on Drugs is a tremendous success.
Oh, and as for the DS, we're talking about something that is not used for content creation, thus a dependence on extremely simplified interfaces impractical for advanced tasks, and it all breaks down when you scale up to a desktop workstation, where text input is critical, and where the lack of tactile feedback will make such a setup uncompetitive. Until we have a surface that can reliably change its shape to give tactile feedback to different input interfaces, feeling like a keyboard in keyboard mode, a smooth surface for tablet interface use, like buttons, knobs and dials in a media playback interface, and like boobies in your fancy interactive porn game, we probably won't see the keyboard get replaced anytime soon for most productivity work.
That's simply because it's too tiring for your arms to write on a surface at eye level, perpendicular to the ground. Optimized handwriting surfaces are at a 20-30 degree angle, at about shoulder height for an optimal compromise between shoulder and neck strain, however still forcing you to take numerous breaks to stretch out, and are much more strenuous for your neck than a proper modern ergonomic computing setup, with a monitor at eye level, and input devices below shoulder height that you rarely have to look at. If we're going to give up the current ergonomic setup, it would be in order to bring us closer to the optimal position for human comfort, which is reclined at about a 140 degree angle, which I only see happening once we have head-mounted displays that draw the image directly on your retina, and input devices that combine pre-speech neural signal recognition for text input with some type of pre-motor-movement signal recognition for analog motion input. We don't go backwards in ergonomic comfort level (at least not beyond brief market experiments like current touch-screen laptops and desktops), only forward. Being that there is a total lack of killer applications for that type of form factor worthy of putting up with the painful ergonomics, I'd say it's only a matter of time before it's abandoned entirely for productivity PCs not in the tablet form factor.
What you do with that information is up to you. The point he was making is that agent Lawless is a public figure, with publicly available contact information, and so he has exposed himself to public criticism for his own actions. Just because he might be perfectly justified following orders and doing his job does not remove him from responsibility for his actions in the public eye. Part of living in a society means being subject to the whims of that society should you behave offensively. I personally take offense at what agent Lawless is doing, as a reflection of my disdain for an effort on the part of his employer to dig up dirt in order to paint Tamm's actions with a brush of sociopathic motivation. Therefore, I do hope he does get harassed and intimidated by other incensed individuals, in order to make it more difficult for him to do his job, and to demonstrate significant public sentiment opposed to his employer's agenda.
To argue that a public figure responsible for executing government policy, no matter how trivial, should be protected from the social repercussions of their actions is ridiculous in an open society. If policymakers and policy agents are shielded from criticism of their behavior, then the opportunity for redress become much more remote, and the actions taken become increasingly brazen and unacceptable to common dignity. So by all means, give the guy a call or write him a letter and let him know what you think about what he's doing. If enough people do it, it might just be enough to make policymakers realize that they do not operate in a vacuum.
I'd argue that the typical/. moderator's position on copyright infringement is more consistent with social benefit than that of the copyright holders, who have attempted to keep our culture under lock and key for increasingly obscene lengths of time, while attempting to fight the tendencies of people to share culture with each other. A profit incentive is great and all, but let's not forget the original intent of copyright law, to maximize creation of art and culture, and eventually have it enter the public domain where everyone can benefit from it.
As for the morality of persecuting gays and women, I'm sure those that argue for such ideas meet with more resistance in online forums than in the case of some hate-spewing imam, where social pressure might encourage one to keep their head down. The anonymity of the internet allows people the freedom to question ideas that might conflict with their personal inclination or upbringing. As cultures meet online, ones that encourage barbarism like the stoning of women are at a significant disadvantage, as they are burdened with the alienation of large portions of their own society, women and gays in this case. Moral or not, you're inevitably pissing off a lot of people who find themselves holding the short end of the morality stick. A more inclusive ideology is at an obvious advantage, even if it might conflict with that of traditional power brokers in their society. As young people are increasingly raised on the internet all over the world, inevitable exposure to ideas like equality, the power of enticement over coercion and the value of meritocracy can't help but take new roots where they might not have previously.
I won't argue that there is no hatred being promoted online (that would be insane), but merely that there is increased resistance to it as regular people are free to express themselves without fear of pissing off some psychopath, and that given a shift to information distribution governed by popular support rather than centralized control, the opportunity for large segments of the population (like women and gays) to effect change in their societies increases dramatically. As those countries' citizens start getting their information from more socially driven sites, traditional power holders will rapidly evolve their discussion to a more inclusive one, or fade away to irrelevance. It's the mechanism of broad-based social control over information distribution which combats sociopathic ideology, not merely access to the network in general.
As for the internet taking preference over the "real world", the real world is being built on the internet. The world of today is as dependent on the internet as much of the 20th century was on the telephone and television. The internet is the reality of present and future human interaction. As the internet becomes increasingly pervasive with mobile devices and ubiquitous network coverage, its relevance in our society has become paramount, to the point where the fabric of our society is dependent on the network. There is no going backwards, only further down the rabbit hole.
Maybe the fact that they lack the maliciousness of Hitler might have something to do with it... No one tried to make an argument against the fact that ideology can spread very quickly and potentially unexpectedly on the internet, but instead that sociopathic ideology is disfavored on the internet. Comparing Obama or Paul to Hitler, and then to cults of personality, is quite a stretch given their public service and total lack of overtly socially extremist views. The only difference between the rise of Bill Clinton to prominence in his party from relative obscurity in the primaries to that of Obama is that we're seeing a shift in power towards appeal to populism rather than to entrenched power brokers like party officials, centralized media owners and large campaign fund donors. Not that the support of the latter is any less crucial than previously, but simply that it is no longer enough to buy traditional media coverage when popular sentiment becomes so apparent on the internet. It's becoming harder and harder to dress up a turd sandwich into someone people feel like lending their support to, especially as our exposure to these candidates becomes much deeper, governed more by the information's popular appeal than by their political campaigns' access to media outlets. That support has become significantly more crucial as information distribution is decentralized to the populace.
Fortunately, the internet counters this empowerment of sociopaths by increasing the opportunity for exposure to different ideas, and by applying social pressure to the particular information that gets spread widely.
People have always been able to isolate themselves with like-minded kin, in the forms of cults/religions, and in the education/brainwashing of their own children to raise people with similar ideology. If anything, a vulnerable individual participating in an online community is much less isolated than one participating in an actual cult, allowing them access to a wide range of information sources which will inevitably conflict with any ideology too far removed from common social norms. As a group tries to expand itself through online recruitment, they must ultimately advertise their ideology on more general interest sites, where they will have to compete with arguments from people with more socially acceptable views.
In any online forum where individuals interact, there is always a pressure to conform to social norms (in the sense of avoiding sociopathic tendencies that negatively impact other individuals, not necessarily any kind of moral judgment on socially acceptable behavior, the latter of which is widely open for discussion). On Slashdot, for example, any antisocial commentary is immediately moderated down to invisible comment purgatory (for those with default viewing prefs). The same holds true in most other forums as well, even in the case of those forums without peer moderation, as antisocial behavior is repudiated and/or ignored (if they don't get themselves banned). The pressure to avoid sociopathic ideology is very real, and almost completely ubiquitous on the web.
The way information spreads on the internet today is that individuals are determining which information appeals to them, and either passing it on directly to their social connections, or flagging it of interest on social news sites. Inevitably, information that is socially positive will spread much more readily than sociopathic information, which simply dies a quiet death of irrelevance. Most people outside of an ideologically homogenous group will simply not spread antisocial information, making it quickly fade away with counterarguments and resistance once one tries to spread it beyond that group. The fact that information fed to people on the internet must go through a populist filter to be widespread means that sociopathic ideology hardly stands a chance at mass-appeal. Increasingly, only a secular humanist agenda has any chance of making it to the mainstream through internet information distribution. There will always be small groups of gullible or brainwashed outliers, but they will always be just that, and popular sentiment will inevitably be against them. In the context of the article, in reference to an entire society adopting a sociopathic ideology, I would argue that the decentralized nature of information distribution on the internet, dependent on populist appeal, is absolutely a very strong check against widespread antisocial ideology.
There's probably a significant number who live out in the sticks, who don't even have the option of broadband internet, and who would be terribly inconvenienced by having to download updates over the internet. That number is significant enough to create a terrible PR situation for the format as a whole, as large numbers of people complain that their several thousand dollar investment in home entertainment is effectively inoperable as new releases keep refusing to play. If the update isn't pushed on the new release discs themselves, then it's dead from the start.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh man, you should see the slick animations on that botnet control software. You get Expose-like instant view of all your zombies, nice bouncing animations when your zombies are attacking, and you don't get all those lame dialog boxes and wizard-type interfaces seen in similar Windows software (OK, it instead quits unexpectedly at frequent inopportune moments). With the free high-quality developer tools and APIs Apple gives you with their OS, creating a certified lickable headline-grabbing trojan couldn't be easier. Mac OS X - the most advanced OS for malware developers.
Attack Different.
I can tell from your post that you want the HP Mediasmart server.
And of course, I'm assuming that code is still in use today, five code revisions and four OS versions later... and that undocumented API is still working somehow. Gotta love MS's spaghetti code tendencies, mixed with severe paranoia about deprecating ANYTHING.
What about movies and TV shows? What about storing in Lossless quality? Shot that argument down... Cue references to "640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates misquote.
Full-featured web browsing was one of the requirements, so no.
And a color display, which would totally kill its battery life. Browsing the web in monochrome with a somewhat laggy e-ink display would be... interesting.
That's disingenuous. At least mention the "official" reason stated for the omission of Flash, which is for performance / power usage considerations and Apple trying to get something more functional than Flash Lite out of Adobe. Besides, flash apps are hardly a substitute for native software, anymore than AJAX web apps are, and those are fully supported, including new support for offline use and data storage, which empowers web apps and goes against your argument that Flash was left out for control reasons. If it was a case of wanting to maintain control, it's directed at not wanting to be dependent on Adobe, not at limiting end users.
Click-through license clauses governing the usage of items purchased at a store are unenforceable in California, a few other states, due to a conflict with the First Sale Doctrine, as well as in Europe, and most of the rest of the developed world that protects consumer property rights. This is true for any items purchased in an informal setting such as a brick-and-mortar store where the contractual limitations of the license are not presented to the purchaser, including DVDs and CDs. For items purchased through a service like iTunes, the click-through license is probably enforceable, and breaking the license is illegal FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE AGREED TO IT AND ARE BOUND BY IT. Anyone else can take a crack at breaking the DRM on iTunes files, and they're not breaking any contract, although the person(s) who supplied them with their copies of copy-protected content to use to generate the crack is in violation of their contract with Apple.
So it's a murky legal situation. On the one hand, we have DVDs, which are DRM'd, but they're available for purchase in regular retail settings and the user is never presented a contractual agreement during usage, and so any usage-restricting license that may be included with them are unenforceable. For services which do present a license before use, such as iTunes, those that make use of the service are bound by any arbitrary usage limitations the distributor cares to put in their license.
All it takes is a single day when the latest version of iTunes DRM has been cracked for you to export your entire content library to standard format DRM-free. Then, you don't care about when they update iTunes again, as you just ditch all the protected content and use the DRM-free copies. Only if you keep purchasing DRM'd content after they update their scheme to close the last exploit, after you're aware of the usage limitations involved, are you still going to be stuck with DRM'd content. At that point, it's difficult to have any sympathy for you if you find yourself unable to access your content in the manner you desire. Personally, I just don't buy content with DRM that I can't easily and conveniently crack.
If by "schtick" you mean a working formula for currently the best show on television, then yes, yes they are.
There's no easy-to-use/access app store for WinMo, with considerable technical skill required to find and install software, and so much less software gets sold, forcing developers to charge more per unit to make up for this.
Chrome uses a different in-house Javascript engine called "V8", though...
Mac OS X Server runs a host of services, particularly for managing Mac OS X clients, that you won't find on any other OS, so there are reasons to get a Xserve in particular; web serving just is not one of them.
Come out to the west coast for a while sometime. Marijuana is very much a part of mainstream culture in several parts of this country, and people already take the drug to very unhealthy/unproductive levels, only outnumbered by those who consume it responsibly. What we're doing now has approximately zero effect on keeping a lid on the substance, and the only real consequence of the current prohibition is that a vast, vast underground economy, one that dwarfs large sectors of legitimate agriculture in many states, is allowed to grow and prosper, at the expense of the government's ability to tax and regulate this trade. Even for harder substances, criminalization is hardly an intelligent way to deal with most of these cases of abuse, when medical intervention would be so much more appropriate than tossing someone in jail. The current drug policy in the US is completely indefensible, and is only allowed to continue due to the political sensitivity surrounding the issue, thanks to propaganda campaigns that were able to find a sizable target of gullible people in this country. Still, marijuana is very much a part of mainstream culture in many parts of the US, and trying to fight it with laws only serves to call the value of law enforcement into question. If you were looking for a way to alienate a large portion of the population from the law, then the War on Drugs is a tremendous success.
Look closer. Those are CDs they're selling, not MP3 downloads.
Apple's main competition in music distribution is P2P piracy, so yes.
All other content still has DRM. This is just for music. Continue to avoid video purchases on iTunes like the plague.
Oh, and as for the DS, we're talking about something that is not used for content creation, thus a dependence on extremely simplified interfaces impractical for advanced tasks, and it all breaks down when you scale up to a desktop workstation, where text input is critical, and where the lack of tactile feedback will make such a setup uncompetitive. Until we have a surface that can reliably change its shape to give tactile feedback to different input interfaces, feeling like a keyboard in keyboard mode, a smooth surface for tablet interface use, like buttons, knobs and dials in a media playback interface, and like boobies in your fancy interactive porn game, we probably won't see the keyboard get replaced anytime soon for most productivity work.
That's simply because it's too tiring for your arms to write on a surface at eye level, perpendicular to the ground. Optimized handwriting surfaces are at a 20-30 degree angle, at about shoulder height for an optimal compromise between shoulder and neck strain, however still forcing you to take numerous breaks to stretch out, and are much more strenuous for your neck than a proper modern ergonomic computing setup, with a monitor at eye level, and input devices below shoulder height that you rarely have to look at. If we're going to give up the current ergonomic setup, it would be in order to bring us closer to the optimal position for human comfort, which is reclined at about a 140 degree angle, which I only see happening once we have head-mounted displays that draw the image directly on your retina, and input devices that combine pre-speech neural signal recognition for text input with some type of pre-motor-movement signal recognition for analog motion input. We don't go backwards in ergonomic comfort level (at least not beyond brief market experiments like current touch-screen laptops and desktops), only forward. Being that there is a total lack of killer applications for that type of form factor worthy of putting up with the painful ergonomics, I'd say it's only a matter of time before it's abandoned entirely for productivity PCs not in the tablet form factor.
What you do with that information is up to you. The point he was making is that agent Lawless is a public figure, with publicly available contact information, and so he has exposed himself to public criticism for his own actions. Just because he might be perfectly justified following orders and doing his job does not remove him from responsibility for his actions in the public eye. Part of living in a society means being subject to the whims of that society should you behave offensively. I personally take offense at what agent Lawless is doing, as a reflection of my disdain for an effort on the part of his employer to dig up dirt in order to paint Tamm's actions with a brush of sociopathic motivation. Therefore, I do hope he does get harassed and intimidated by other incensed individuals, in order to make it more difficult for him to do his job, and to demonstrate significant public sentiment opposed to his employer's agenda.
To argue that a public figure responsible for executing government policy, no matter how trivial, should be protected from the social repercussions of their actions is ridiculous in an open society. If policymakers and policy agents are shielded from criticism of their behavior, then the opportunity for redress become much more remote, and the actions taken become increasingly brazen and unacceptable to common dignity. So by all means, give the guy a call or write him a letter and let him know what you think about what he's doing. If enough people do it, it might just be enough to make policymakers realize that they do not operate in a vacuum.
I'd argue that the typical /. moderator's position on copyright infringement is more consistent with social benefit than that of the copyright holders, who have attempted to keep our culture under lock and key for increasingly obscene lengths of time, while attempting to fight the tendencies of people to share culture with each other. A profit incentive is great and all, but let's not forget the original intent of copyright law, to maximize creation of art and culture, and eventually have it enter the public domain where everyone can benefit from it.
As for the morality of persecuting gays and women, I'm sure those that argue for such ideas meet with more resistance in online forums than in the case of some hate-spewing imam, where social pressure might encourage one to keep their head down. The anonymity of the internet allows people the freedom to question ideas that might conflict with their personal inclination or upbringing. As cultures meet online, ones that encourage barbarism like the stoning of women are at a significant disadvantage, as they are burdened with the alienation of large portions of their own society, women and gays in this case. Moral or not, you're inevitably pissing off a lot of people who find themselves holding the short end of the morality stick. A more inclusive ideology is at an obvious advantage, even if it might conflict with that of traditional power brokers in their society. As young people are increasingly raised on the internet all over the world, inevitable exposure to ideas like equality, the power of enticement over coercion and the value of meritocracy can't help but take new roots where they might not have previously.
I won't argue that there is no hatred being promoted online (that would be insane), but merely that there is increased resistance to it as regular people are free to express themselves without fear of pissing off some psychopath, and that given a shift to information distribution governed by popular support rather than centralized control, the opportunity for large segments of the population (like women and gays) to effect change in their societies increases dramatically. As those countries' citizens start getting their information from more socially driven sites, traditional power holders will rapidly evolve their discussion to a more inclusive one, or fade away to irrelevance. It's the mechanism of broad-based social control over information distribution which combats sociopathic ideology, not merely access to the network in general.
As for the internet taking preference over the "real world", the real world is being built on the internet. The world of today is as dependent on the internet as much of the 20th century was on the telephone and television. The internet is the reality of present and future human interaction. As the internet becomes increasingly pervasive with mobile devices and ubiquitous network coverage, its relevance in our society has become paramount, to the point where the fabric of our society is dependent on the network. There is no going backwards, only further down the rabbit hole.
Maybe the fact that they lack the maliciousness of Hitler might have something to do with it... No one tried to make an argument against the fact that ideology can spread very quickly and potentially unexpectedly on the internet, but instead that sociopathic ideology is disfavored on the internet. Comparing Obama or Paul to Hitler, and then to cults of personality, is quite a stretch given their public service and total lack of overtly socially extremist views. The only difference between the rise of Bill Clinton to prominence in his party from relative obscurity in the primaries to that of Obama is that we're seeing a shift in power towards appeal to populism rather than to entrenched power brokers like party officials, centralized media owners and large campaign fund donors. Not that the support of the latter is any less crucial than previously, but simply that it is no longer enough to buy traditional media coverage when popular sentiment becomes so apparent on the internet. It's becoming harder and harder to dress up a turd sandwich into someone people feel like lending their support to, especially as our exposure to these candidates becomes much deeper, governed more by the information's popular appeal than by their political campaigns' access to media outlets. That support has become significantly more crucial as information distribution is decentralized to the populace.
Fortunately, the internet counters this empowerment of sociopaths by increasing the opportunity for exposure to different ideas, and by applying social pressure to the particular information that gets spread widely.
People have always been able to isolate themselves with like-minded kin, in the forms of cults/religions, and in the education/brainwashing of their own children to raise people with similar ideology. If anything, a vulnerable individual participating in an online community is much less isolated than one participating in an actual cult, allowing them access to a wide range of information sources which will inevitably conflict with any ideology too far removed from common social norms. As a group tries to expand itself through online recruitment, they must ultimately advertise their ideology on more general interest sites, where they will have to compete with arguments from people with more socially acceptable views.
In any online forum where individuals interact, there is always a pressure to conform to social norms (in the sense of avoiding sociopathic tendencies that negatively impact other individuals, not necessarily any kind of moral judgment on socially acceptable behavior, the latter of which is widely open for discussion). On Slashdot, for example, any antisocial commentary is immediately moderated down to invisible comment purgatory (for those with default viewing prefs). The same holds true in most other forums as well, even in the case of those forums without peer moderation, as antisocial behavior is repudiated and/or ignored (if they don't get themselves banned). The pressure to avoid sociopathic ideology is very real, and almost completely ubiquitous on the web.
The way information spreads on the internet today is that individuals are determining which information appeals to them, and either passing it on directly to their social connections, or flagging it of interest on social news sites. Inevitably, information that is socially positive will spread much more readily than sociopathic information, which simply dies a quiet death of irrelevance. Most people outside of an ideologically homogenous group will simply not spread antisocial information, making it quickly fade away with counterarguments and resistance once one tries to spread it beyond that group. The fact that information fed to people on the internet must go through a populist filter to be widespread means that sociopathic ideology hardly stands a chance at mass-appeal. Increasingly, only a secular humanist agenda has any chance of making it to the mainstream through internet information distribution. There will always be small groups of gullible or brainwashed outliers, but they will always be just that, and popular sentiment will inevitably be against them. In the context of the article, in reference to an entire society adopting a sociopathic ideology, I would argue that the decentralized nature of information distribution on the internet, dependent on populist appeal, is absolutely a very strong check against widespread antisocial ideology.
There's probably a significant number who live out in the sticks, who don't even have the option of broadband internet, and who would be terribly inconvenienced by having to download updates over the internet. That number is significant enough to create a terrible PR situation for the format as a whole, as large numbers of people complain that their several thousand dollar investment in home entertainment is effectively inoperable as new releases keep refusing to play. If the update isn't pushed on the new release discs themselves, then it's dead from the start.