Then why don't you take the Tivo code and roll your own box?
Why should the hardware gaurantee your ability to run modified code on that hardware?
When you buy a Tivo, you buy hardware and software that accomplishes a task, with software having been developed from freely available sources. The hardware is not so developed and there is no license granted for the user to access that hardware. The way I see it, Tivo has fullfilled its obligations under the GPL by releasing its modified code. I don't understand why the software license should have any influence on the how the hardware operates.
Why is so-called "tivoization" bad? If the code is released, are the requirements of the GPL not fullfilled?
Can anyone provide a solid rationale for preventing tivoization other than "because I want to access my tivo via ssh"?
Why file this under "Your Rights Online"? The rights rights guranteed in the constitution, are, in general, protections of an individual against government action. There is no first ammendment issue in this case, as the governemtn is not bringing action against the individual.
I don't believe that htis can be considered as a miscarriage of justice, but rather one individual's poor defense against another. Salahi's blog takes every opportunity to question the integrity of Kaplan and his reporting, and is solely dedicated to this one individual. It is reasonable to assume this blog was created for the singular purpose of disparaging Kaplan, with no other viable content.
How any of this has to do with anyone's right is a mystery to me.
Of course, I am trolling, but Stallman's stance against so-called "tivoization" is a slippery slope and ought not succeed. He does not want an entity to be allowed to utilize GPL code on a system that will refuse to run a modified version. That is ludicrous. The software and the hardware shouldn't be linked like that.
Tivo makes their code available, which is all they ought be required to do. And whether HARDWARE that is not "open" runs modified code shouldn't be RMS' concern, as, in Tivo's case, their code is available for free
So, on one hand, you have Linux vendors making pacts with Microsoft that will wind up having God knows what effects, and then you have the King of the Nutjobs, Richard Stallman, trying to stamp out your freedom to do anything but release free software(God forbid I create a closed, embedded system, even though I released the code to the wild).
So is the whole thing falling apart, or is Linus' valiant stand in opposition to GPLv3 the only thing that will keep the community going? I would guess not, because I would imagine that GPLv4 would include provision that would not allow a system built on GPLv2 code to even comminucate with anything written under GPLv4.
I'm biased as Opera is my favorite browser,...I also don't use Opera because I am addicted to several Google products (such as Calendar) that don't work properly under Opera...some features of Firefox that allow me to make it behave even more like Opera.
So, Opera is your favorite browser, except that you don't use it because other tools are better?
Steve Jobs, who is much more influential and important in this debate has already chimed in with his opinion.
Whether his motive was pure is irrelevant to the fact that Jobs has begun moving the industry away from DRM, so why is the opinion of somebody else who has little stake in it worth noting now?
How does this qualify under anyone's rights online? This is a case of interaction between two private parties, one of whom is bound by an acceptable use policy put forth by the other party. Regardless of whether MySpace correctly identified the party in question, it is their wont to take any action they believe necessary on their site. This is not at all about a government organization seeking sanction against an individual and by passing due process.
I like to see shows end in a timely manner. 'Galactica' as a series needs to have an end point, that is intrinsic to its main story. With an ending in sight, the writers can deliver a quality final season and satisfactorily resolve story arcs. Plus, it is in danger of running past the point of being good(Lost), and nobody wants that.
I am a huge fan of the Montana state legislature right. To unanimously pass that kind of legislation says two things :
1. They are for their constituents interests on this one. 2. They are standing up for State's rights and not handing over ever more power to the federal government.
Kudos to you Montana. As Stephen Colbert migh say, You've got balls!
So the labels, at least EMI, see the plummetting sales of CD's without a concurrent uptick in revenue from online sales and think "we should do something". Steve Jobs thinks "hey, I can squeeze a bit more revenue out of iTMS AND totally hose my competition AND deal with those pesky socialist French leftist coward Europeans ath the same time. Great!"
It's a great move for Jobs. It costs almost nothing, is a huge PR boost, and you can expect that revenues(not profits) from iTMS will rise.
I have seen a lot of posts that boil down to acceptance just because it has happened before and will continue to happen. Sure, a lot of people have probably received some "unsavory" communications in past relating to something posted on USENET, a blog, or message board, but that doesn't make it right. The dissappointing thing that I find about a lot of message boards et. al. on the Internet is how terribly low the standard of discussion is. I won't claim that I've never used "colorful language", but I tend to do it in appropiate situations, around those known to me and I to them.
Why do we have to accept that people will result to lower forms of abuse rather than tactful, eloquent debate? The idea behind giving people free speach is that they will use it wisely, not that they will shout obscenities on a sidewalk. You wouldn't accept your neighbor shouting obscenties in the hallway, and you shouldn't accept it on a blog comment either.
What happens to these genes 10-20,000 generations out? That's the question that the GM industry can't really answer. Sure, the gene makes the mosquito immune to malaria, but what happens in a distant number of generatiosn through mutations and natural selection? Could this gene activate some unknown sequence down the line that allows the mosquito to become larger or even more fit, pushing out other species?
It doesn't matter how selectively you breed the gene marker, there is always the danger of some wild Atreides talent manifesting. Wasn't it Jeff Goldblum who said "nature always finds a way"?
If you consider the amount of time that it has taken Microsoft to reach a market cap of US$44 billion versus the time in which Google has gone to a market cap of US$10 billion, I'd say, on looks, Google is more bloated.
From the Apple site, it appears that the Nvidia option is not available anymore?
I can't say that I spend any time on those forums, but did they delete it because the post is about a product configuration that is no longer an option and is otherwise unhelpful?
You seriously expect people to believe that were arrested simply because of a bumper sticker?
That aside, you sound like exactly the kind of jackass that would provoke a police officer into arresting you by being nelligerent for absolutley no reason.
What's the real story?
Oh yeah, and I;ve never seen European police go unneccessarily ballistic.
Another sub-par science fiction show with absolutely no substance or reason to watch. I can't wait for the predicatble plot lines and the one-dimensional archetypes that will make up the dramatis personnae. LEt me guess, there will be an irritable, gung-ho, military-style commander, some kind of socially dysfunctional scientist with expertise in any and all disciplines as called for in the script, some kind strong, independant woman, and an alien.
I can't wait to choose my costume for the con where I'll be able to nitpick the cast on small issues with continuity because the plots are so thin I can't ignore them.
Why can't somebody come up with something more orignal than yet another spin-off from an already crappy show that is itself a spin-off of a crappy movie?
Why not another Star Trek? Oh wait, with some minor modifcations, Stargate is Star Trek.
I have long been intrigued by the community of people that protest at how the distribution "paradigm" has changed and that media companies ought to get on board. What intrigues me is that these same people have not realized, or refuse to acknowledge, that the usage "paradigm" has changed as well. In the past, controls on copying and distributing intellectual property built into the distribution media. Before taping, it was basically impossible to make copies of a record and distribute it.
Even with taping, the cost and effort in making a large scale effort at bootleg distribution was such that it was only a relatively small piece of the pie. In the digital age, the copying and distribution of copyrighted material, especially movies and music has become much more "economical". Starting with a single CD, there is an initial step of encoding that results in a slight loss of fidelity, but then the music can be distributed ad infinitum without further loss of fidelity and to a much greater market than taping or even copying CD's could have.
With the rise of the ability to redistribute content without royalty, the market has refused to police itself and reach a sensible medium. Those who argue that there should be no controls placed over their digital media fail to realize that those controls are not new, but they are now an artifice as opposed to a practical reality.
Until recently, the difficulties inherent in reproducing and widely distributing copyrighted material have made "piracy" a difficult, if impractical enterprise and has allowed for a reasonable copyright regime. In this new "paradigm", consumers must realize that copyright allows a creator to control the content for a period of time and if that "right" is not respected, copyright holders will seek any means of protection available. The concept of "fair use" shall only persist as long as consumers can be trusted in their uses.
The potential for abuse and its manifestations so far (i.e. Napster) are what are driving the current controls over digital media and until consumers can demonstrate their respect for the "copyright agreement", then the controls will remain. There is a new "paradigm" not only in distribution but in usage and the controls are now explicit rather than intrinsic and we are being asked to respect that.
Look, IP is a very legitmate thing. One ought to be able to control how his ideas are used unless he expressly gives up that right. Without this idea, corporations could crawl though places like MySpace and Friendster or everything on blogspot.com and look for images to use in their marketing.
And don't for an instance believe that this can't/or won't happen. It will and it is. Imagine how little content will be on free sites because there is no copyright protection. It is no more proper for a marketing agency to use my photographs in their ad campaign without my permission than it is for me to do the same with their material.
There used to be a civilized attitude in society that you just didn't rip people off. Now we need to send people to jail in order to barely make a point that these things aren't OK.
It is amazing what little respect that the GEEK community has for the property of others. Heck, if it were possible to produce CPU's and motherboards at home, most/. folks would probably steal the designs of Intel rather than make their own.
The current attitude of "if it can be copied, it is free" reminds me of being a college student and having almost anything that wasn't nailed down someplace wind up in my sticky fingers. Better yet, it reminds of Homer's assertion that anything with a toothpick in it is free.
I imagine that the/. crowd is so against IP law because they don't actually create anything worthwhile themselves and have no appreciation for it. it is equally disturbing that the/. crowd has to cheer on criminals like this guy or Kevin Mitnick even when most of the community probably work in a lucrative field and come from relatively proveleged backgrounds. It is sad really. Stop selectively applying your morals and go out and pay for something other than your WoW subscription and Bawls and be sensible about the way the real world works.
I find it interesting that the/. editors decided to remove the links because the Mozilla folks asked them to. From the note, it seems that the reasons all boil down to "here's a bunch of reasons we are making up as to why you should post links to the publicly available sites to which we posted the stuff".
How are the mirrors going to have any less traffic today? I wonder that if Microsoft or some other comapny "released" something a day early, would/. be so ready to remove the links because Steve Ballmer politely asked?
Then again, that's what makes/. more of a fanboi site and news aggregator than an actual news site.
A lot of these situations are, in part, the making of the fair users. Fox has no leg to stand on if the using the footage is fair. there was no intent to include, and the piece was in no way related to the copy righted material, it was incidental to the environment. If more people would stand up and refuse to pay for fair use, then many of these problems would go away.
It is astonishing that anybody could think that the centuries of libel laws are irrelavant. It is simply not permissible to libel or slander someone out of spite. People think that just because of the volume of communications on the Internet that everything ought to be free because, hey, it's not as if all of a person's customers are going to read a few blog comments about a specific person. Unless they use Google.
It is one thing to state an opinion that you THINK someone is incompetent or that the services she rendered were poor, or even that you wouldn't recommend that anybody engage with this person. However, calling someone a con-artist, criminal, or thief crosses a line.
I mean, if I felt that Tim Spengler ripped me off when he supposedly "refinished" my floors, I couldn't go out and say to everone "Tim Spengler is a bloody thief! He stole my money and swindled my through his con!" A more appropriate reaction would be to follow whatever legal recourse there was and word any comments appropriately, like "I feel as though Tim Spengler ripped me off. He promised, in writing, that the job would be done in 3 days, did not show up on time, did not complete work on the last day, and has left me with floors that are only half finished. Before you hire this man, I would strongly recommend that you check his references, because he certainly was no good for me."
Do you see the difference.
My apologies to any real Tim Spenglers, I just grabbed htat name out of a hat. Except for you, Tim Spengler!
There are a lot of arguments about how bad DRM is and why it is stupid and how it restricts one's fair use.
The arguments lack one perspective, that the purchase of music from iTunes, et. al., comes with certain conditions. There is no fundamental right to purchase anything free of conditions, so when music companies and online retailers decide that they will offer music that is ensconced in DRM, that is a business and marketing decision that they make, assuming that people will forgo some freedoms in order to have the convienience.
The sort of "active" protest over DRM that is represented by tools to strip the DRM merely confirms that the market for the music exists and offers no reason for the music companies to move away from DRM. A better protest would be to boycott the entire DRM scheme altogether and only seek music from outlets that provide it free of DRM.
Will you still be able to get all of the CCR and Radiohead from other, non-DRM outlets? No, but if you want to make a point with a corporation, you need to do it by removing yourself from the market. The problem that I see is that many people want to have it both ways; they want all of the convience of an iTunes or Rhapsody, or similar, none of the DRM and want all of this without any real sacrifice.
A major problem today is the erroneous sense of entitlement that pervades so much. Too many people think that they are entitled to market for products that suits their needs and are willing to resort to unethical, if not blatantly criminal, activity to create that market. The truth is that the online music market will only change when providers are losing money because their markets have shrunk and they must retool the offering. AS long as people buy the DRM'ed music, that won't happen.
The whole question about wanting the player to "just work" on other distributions really brings up a question that the linux world has been avoiding for at least 10 years, and that is the question of why so many ideosyncratic distributions exist. What makes open source so powerful and effective has also made a mess of interoperability where Linux is concerned.
Why is that each distribution of Linux has to be so ideosyncratic that a body cannot produce a binary installation that "just works"? Why should that even be a question? Isn't this a stumbling block in terms of mainstream, desktop adoption of Linux? Sure, if you can./configure --put-this-there --this-is-there --look--for-this-here --my-init-scripts-are-here --use-this-and-not-that;make install everything yourself, you'll not be bothered by a lot of this. But suppose you are the mythical, mainstream Linux dekstop user who doesn't know wnaymore about Linux than it installed from the CD no problem. If you are looking for a piece of off the shelf software are you reall going to see something on the label akin to the following :
Even though you can really categorize most into a few base types, what is to gurantee that my Rhinestone Pantux will run something as easily as my Blue Sude Linux even though they are both based on RedHat?
Slashdot Mirror
Then why don't you take the Tivo code and roll your own box?
Why should the hardware gaurantee your ability to run modified code on that hardware?
When you buy a Tivo, you buy hardware and software that accomplishes a task, with software having been developed from freely available sources.
The hardware is not so developed and there is no license granted for the user to access that hardware. The way I see it, Tivo has fullfilled
its obligations under the GPL by releasing its modified code. I don't understand why the software license should have any influence on the how
the hardware operates.
Why is so-called "tivoization" bad? If the code is released, are the requirements of the GPL not fullfilled?
Can anyone provide a solid rationale for preventing tivoization other than "because I want to access my tivo via ssh"?
Why file this under "Your Rights Online"? The rights rights guranteed in the constitution, are, in general, protections
of an individual against government action. There is no first ammendment issue in this case, as the governemtn is
not bringing action against the individual.
I don't believe that htis can be considered as a miscarriage of justice, but rather one individual's poor defense against
another. Salahi's blog takes every opportunity to question the integrity of Kaplan and his reporting, and is solely dedicated
to this one individual. It is reasonable to assume this blog was created for the singular purpose of disparaging Kaplan, with
no other viable content.
How any of this has to do with anyone's right is a mystery to me.
Of course, I am trolling, but Stallman's stance against so-called "tivoization" is a slippery slope and ought not succeed. He does not want an entity to be allowed to utilize GPL code on a system that will refuse to run a modified version. That is ludicrous. The software and the hardware shouldn't be linked like that.
Tivo makes their code available, which is all they ought be required to do. And whether HARDWARE that is not "open" runs modified code shouldn't be RMS' concern, as, in Tivo's case, their code is available for free
So, on one hand, you have Linux vendors making pacts with Microsoft that will wind up having God knows what effects,
and then you have the King of the Nutjobs, Richard Stallman, trying to stamp out your freedom to do anything but
release free software(God forbid I create a closed, embedded system, even though I released the code to the wild).
So is the whole thing falling apart, or is Linus' valiant stand in opposition to GPLv3 the only thing that will keep
the community going? I would guess not, because I would imagine that GPLv4 would include provision that
would not allow a system built on GPLv2 code to even comminucate with anything written under GPLv4.
I'm biased as Opera is my favorite browser,...I also don't use Opera because I am addicted to several Google products (such as Calendar) that don't work properly under Opera...some features of Firefox that allow me to make it behave even more like Opera. So, Opera is your favorite browser, except that you don't use it because other tools are better?
Steve Jobs, who is much more influential and important in this debate has already chimed in with his opinion.
Whether his motive was pure is irrelevant to the fact that Jobs has begun moving the industry away from DRM, so why is the opinion of somebody else who has little stake in it worth noting now?
How does this qualify under anyone's rights online? This is a case of interaction between two private parties, one of whom is bound by an acceptable use policy put forth by the other party. Regardless of whether MySpace correctly identified the party in question, it is their wont to take any action they believe necessary on their site. This is not at all about a government organization seeking sanction against an individual and by passing due process.
I like to see shows end in a timely manner. 'Galactica' as a series needs to have an end point, that is intrinsic to its main story. With an ending in sight, the writers can deliver a quality final season and satisfactorily resolve story arcs. Plus, it is in danger of running past the point of being good(Lost), and nobody wants that.
I am a huge fan of the Montana state legislature right. To unanimously pass that kind of legislation says two things :
1. They are for their constituents interests on this one.
2. They are standing up for State's rights and not handing over ever more power to the federal government.
Kudos to you Montana. As Stephen Colbert migh say, You've got balls!
So the labels, at least EMI, see the plummetting sales of CD's without a concurrent uptick in revenue from online sales and think "we should do something". Steve Jobs thinks "hey, I can squeeze a bit more revenue out of iTMS AND totally hose my competition AND deal with those pesky socialist French leftist coward Europeans ath the same time. Great!"
It's a great move for Jobs. It costs almost nothing, is a huge PR boost, and you can expect that revenues(not profits) from iTMS will rise.
I have seen a lot of posts that boil down to acceptance just because it has happened before and will continue to happen. Sure, a lot of people have probably received some "unsavory" communications in past relating to something posted on USENET, a blog, or message board, but that doesn't make it right. The dissappointing thing that I find about a lot of message boards et. al. on the Internet is how terribly low the standard of discussion is. I won't claim that I've never used "colorful language", but I tend to do it in appropiate situations, around those known to me and I to them.
Why do we have to accept that people will result to lower forms of abuse rather than tactful, eloquent debate? The idea behind giving people free speach is that they will use it wisely, not that they will shout obscenities on a sidewalk. You wouldn't accept your neighbor shouting obscenties in the hallway, and you shouldn't accept it on a blog comment either.
This reeks of those damnned dirty Bene Tleilax.
Take solace in the fact that your roommate's toothbrush is now used only to clean his teeth.
What happens to these genes 10-20,000 generations out? That's the question that the GM industry can't really answer. Sure, the gene makes the mosquito immune to malaria, but what happens in a distant number of generatiosn through mutations and natural selection? Could this gene activate some unknown sequence down the line that allows the mosquito to become larger or even more fit, pushing out other species?
It doesn't matter how selectively you breed the gene marker, there is always the danger of some wild Atreides talent manifesting. Wasn't it Jeff Goldblum who said "nature always finds a way"?
If you consider the amount of time that it has taken Microsoft to reach a market cap of US$44 billion versus the time in which Google has gone to a market cap of US$10 billion, I'd say, on looks, Google is more bloated.
From the Apple site, it appears that the Nvidia option is not available anymore?
I can't say that I spend any time on those forums, but did they delete it because the post is about a product configuration that is no longer an option and is otherwise unhelpful?
You seriously expect people to believe that were arrested simply because of a bumper sticker?
That aside, you sound like exactly the kind of jackass that would provoke a police officer into arresting you by being nelligerent for absolutley no reason.
What's the real story?
Oh yeah, and I;ve never seen European police go unneccessarily ballistic.
Another sub-par science fiction show with absolutely no substance or reason to watch. I can't wait for the predicatble plot lines and the one-dimensional archetypes that will make up the dramatis personnae. LEt me guess, there will be an irritable, gung-ho, military-style commander, some kind of socially dysfunctional scientist with expertise in any and all disciplines as called for in the script, some kind strong, independant woman, and an alien.
I can't wait to choose my costume for the con where I'll be able to nitpick the cast on small issues with continuity because the plots are so thin I can't ignore them.
Why can't somebody come up with something more orignal than yet another spin-off from an already crappy show that is itself a spin-off of a crappy movie?
Why not another Star Trek? Oh wait, with some minor modifcations, Stargate is Star Trek.
DRM is no more inherently evil than p2p networks.
I have long been intrigued by the community of people that protest at how the distribution "paradigm" has changed and that media companies ought to get on board. What intrigues me is that these same people have not realized, or refuse to acknowledge, that the usage "paradigm" has changed as well. In the past, controls on copying and distributing intellectual property built into the distribution media. Before taping, it was basically impossible to make copies of a record and distribute it.
Even with taping, the cost and effort in making a large scale effort at bootleg distribution was such that it was only a relatively small piece of the pie. In the digital age, the copying and distribution of copyrighted material, especially movies and music has become much more "economical". Starting with a single CD, there is an initial step of encoding that results in a slight loss of fidelity, but then the music can be distributed ad infinitum without further loss of fidelity and to a much greater market than taping or even copying CD's could have.
With the rise of the ability to redistribute content without royalty, the market has refused to police itself and reach a sensible medium. Those who argue that there should be no controls placed over their digital media fail to realize that those controls are not new, but they are now an artifice as opposed to a practical reality.
Until recently, the difficulties inherent in reproducing and widely distributing copyrighted material have made "piracy" a difficult, if impractical enterprise and has allowed for a reasonable copyright regime. In this new "paradigm", consumers must realize that copyright allows a creator to control the content for a period of time and if that "right" is not respected, copyright holders will seek any means of protection available. The concept of "fair use" shall only persist as long as consumers can be trusted in their uses.
The potential for abuse and its manifestations so far (i.e. Napster) are what are driving the current controls over digital media and until consumers can demonstrate their respect for the "copyright agreement", then the controls will remain. There is a new "paradigm" not only in distribution but in usage and the controls are now explicit rather than intrinsic and we are being asked to respect that.
Look, IP is a very legitmate thing. One ought to be able to control how his ideas are used unless he expressly gives up that right. Without this idea, corporations could crawl though places like MySpace and Friendster or everything on blogspot.com and look for images to use in their marketing.
/. folks would probably steal the designs of Intel rather than make their own.
/. crowd is so against IP law because they don't actually create anything worthwhile themselves and have no appreciation for it. it is equally disturbing that the /. crowd has to cheer on criminals like this guy or Kevin Mitnick even when most of the community probably work in a lucrative field and come from relatively proveleged backgrounds. It is sad really. Stop selectively applying your morals and go out and pay for something other than your WoW subscription and Bawls and be sensible about the way the real world works.
And don't for an instance believe that this can't/or won't happen. It will and it is. Imagine how little content will be on free sites because there is no copyright protection. It is no more proper for a marketing agency to use my photographs in their ad campaign without my permission than it is for me to do the same with their material.
There used to be a civilized attitude in society that you just didn't rip people off. Now we need to send people to jail in order to barely make a point that these things aren't OK.
It is amazing what little respect that the GEEK community has for the property of others. Heck, if it were possible to produce CPU's and motherboards at home, most
The current attitude of "if it can be copied, it is free" reminds me of being a college student and having almost anything that wasn't nailed down someplace wind up in my sticky fingers. Better yet, it reminds of Homer's assertion that anything with a toothpick in it is free.
I imagine that the
I find it interesting that the /. editors decided to remove the links because the Mozilla folks asked them to. From the note, it seems that the reasons all boil down to "here's a bunch of reasons we are making up as to why you should post links to the publicly available sites to which we posted the stuff".
/. be so ready to remove the links because Steve Ballmer politely asked?
/. more of a fanboi site and news aggregator than an actual news site.
How are the mirrors going to have any less traffic today? I wonder that if Microsoft or some other comapny "released" something a day early, would
Then again, that's what makes
A lot of these situations are, in part, the making of the fair users. Fox has no leg to stand on if the using the footage is fair. there was no intent to include, and the piece was in no way related to the copy righted material, it was incidental to the environment. If more people would stand up and refuse to pay for fair use, then many of these problems would go away.
It is astonishing that anybody could think that the centuries of libel laws are irrelavant. It is simply not permissible to libel or slander someone out of spite. People think that just because of the volume of communications on the Internet that everything ought to be free because, hey, it's not as if all of a person's customers are going to read a few blog comments about a specific person. Unless they use Google.
It is one thing to state an opinion that you THINK someone is incompetent or that the services she rendered were poor, or even that you wouldn't recommend that anybody engage with this person. However, calling someone a con-artist, criminal, or thief crosses a line.
I mean, if I felt that Tim Spengler ripped me off when he supposedly "refinished" my floors, I couldn't go out and say to everone "Tim Spengler is a bloody thief! He stole my money and swindled my through his con!" A more appropriate reaction would be to follow whatever legal recourse there was and word any comments appropriately, like "I feel as though Tim Spengler ripped me off. He promised, in writing, that the job would be done in 3 days, did not show up on time, did not complete work on the last day, and has left me with floors that are only half finished. Before you hire this man, I would strongly recommend that you check his references, because he certainly was no good for me."
Do you see the difference.
My apologies to any real Tim Spenglers, I just grabbed htat name out of a hat. Except for you, Tim Spengler!
There are a lot of arguments about how bad DRM is and why it is stupid and how it restricts one's fair use.
The arguments lack one perspective, that the purchase of music from iTunes, et. al., comes with certain conditions. There is no fundamental right to purchase anything free of conditions, so when music companies and online retailers decide that they will offer music that is ensconced in DRM, that is a business and marketing decision that they make, assuming that people will forgo some freedoms in order to have the convienience.
The sort of "active" protest over DRM that is represented by tools to strip the DRM merely confirms that the market for the music exists and offers no reason for the music companies to move away from DRM. A better protest would be to boycott the entire DRM scheme altogether and only seek music from outlets that provide it free of DRM.
Will you still be able to get all of the CCR and Radiohead from other, non-DRM outlets? No, but if you want to make a point with a corporation, you need to do it by removing yourself from the market. The problem that I see is that many people want to have it both ways; they want all of the convience of an iTunes or Rhapsody, or similar, none of the DRM and want all of this without any real sacrifice.
A major problem today is the erroneous sense of entitlement that pervades so much. Too many people think that they are entitled to market for products that suits their needs and are willing to resort to unethical, if not blatantly criminal, activity to create that market. The truth is that the online music market will only change when providers are losing money because their markets have shrunk and they must retool the offering. AS long as people buy the DRM'ed music, that won't happen.
The whole question about wanting the player to "just work" on other distributions really brings up a question that the linux world has been avoiding for at least 10 years, and that is the question of why so many ideosyncratic distributions exist. What makes open source so powerful and effective has also made a mess of interoperability where Linux is concerned.
./configure --put-this-there --this-is-there --look--for-this-here --my-init-scripts-are-here --use-this-and-not-that;make install everything yourself, you'll not be bothered by a lot of this. But suppose you are the mythical, mainstream Linux dekstop user who doesn't know wnaymore about Linux than it installed from the CD no problem. If you are looking for a piece of off the shelf software are you reall going to see something on the label akin to the following :
Why is that each distribution of Linux has to be so ideosyncratic that a body cannot produce a binary installation that "just works"? Why should that even be a question? Isn't this a stumbling block in terms of mainstream, desktop adoption of Linux? Sure, if you can
Compatible with RedHat Linux, SuSE, Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, Ubuntu,SlackHat Redbian, Mandrux, Unbonux, Seus, ZuSE, Debware, Mandhat, Slackdrake, Jesux, Paulux, Vitamin-C, and Bean Crock Enterprise
Even though you can really categorize most into a few base types, what is to gurantee that my Rhinestone Pantux will run something as easily as my Blue Sude Linux even though they are both based on RedHat?