I do not say this as a criticism, but if one needs to be persuaded that an ID card is a bad idea then it is probably impossible to persuade one that an ID card is a bad idea.
Here is my huge issue. I do not believe that the state should have the right to demand that I cary a piece of plastic to prove who I am. If I am happily going about my public life obeying the law and participating in a civil society then the state should fuck off and leave me alone to my quiet enjoyment. The premise that one should have an ID card to prove who one is is an anathema to _my_ concept of the purpose of the state, which is to serve us, the citizens.
Now, if I need to intereact with the services of the state then the state (ie us) is right to ask me to prove that I am entitled. They do not need me to prove who I am.
Here is the proof.
A system that allocates "entitlement tokens" for the various services that the state provides and that system ties each authentication token to the authorised users public/private key so that when it comes time to use the service the service provider can authenticate the token against the bearer and yet the state could not track my usage of services without my paermission since it would require my keys in order to collate my services and yet the accounting at "central office" is still in balance and measurable.
Just goes to show how critical Debian is to the whole shebang. I do so love to see people who whine about Debians defects complete and utter failure to realise that without all the "defective" work that the Debian team do they would have to use freakin RedHat!!
Clearly this is not a helpful example to help understand the first creatures to leave the water for the land since there would have been nothing on the land for them to "arch up and pin down" in the first place. Still and interesting behaviour but it is slightly "cart before horse" in term os anything particularly probabtive.
Despite the cliche, it seems that Duke Nukem has become the "Jarndice and Jarndice" of the modern age, reflecting on the evils of software development rather than those of the Chancery division. In all seriousness DN3D was such a pathetic story it would be funny.
I wont be surprised if they make more money from the book about what not to do with a game/generic development project than they do from the software itself.
Hmmmm, let me see... A small (but not trivial) sector of the community with too few resources to achieve something that many of them need, that the majority of society takes for granted and without which they are inreasing disenfranchised from the good life. Things that they probably have a right to access in a "modern" society. Sounds like a classic job for "The State".
Given than the the Free Software would be accessible for all future members of the state it is a classical "good" spend of State Funds for prosperity. The argument is strengthed by the idea that we are all made better off by the quiality of life of our most vulnerable (probably not the right word) members of society.
Man I am so out of touch "with the kids". I cannot imagine anything less entertaining than playing an online game where paying someone to accumulate items for me makes sense.
In my day, role playing was all about the journey. Mind you, then there was no such thing as "online" so like I say, I'm soooo out of touch.
Labour unions are not inherently wrong. However, and it is a fundamental however, practices such as "union only" sites, secondary boycotts, cross site organisations, intimidation, branch stacking and a criminal lack of democratic responsibility are facets of the labour movement that make them abhorrent to many libertarians.
I was actually wondering, could it be the case that we might not even be able to understand and explain some phonemena simply because our brain power is not adequate.
Absolutely. To detect something one must have a tool of finer resolution than the thing itself. By corollary to understand something must one have a tool that has a "finer" resolution? I believe that one cannot understand things like entanglement with a lump of tissue (ones brain) that does not itself have the capacity to make use of entanglement (or the like) itself. As such there are things that are beyond the resolution of our reasoning organ.
What is kind of exciting is the idea that we might build a machine that is not so limited to harvest the impact of these incomprehensible quantum events. Much like we have build machines to exceed the mechanical limits of our physical bodies (cars, cranes, planes etc). It will be weird though when we start to rely on machines that are using results that the machines cannot explain to us because our brains are inadequate.
Whilst I agree wholeheartedly that the polician in question is acting in the interests of his constituency as a whole, I have always wondered whether those special interests decrying this excellent initiative actually believe that the idea is bad or whether they are just looking after their own interests. I know several examples of people who did terrible things but in their view they were doing good.
You sound like exactly one of those people who would get outrageously offended about me.
On the contrary, I draw no offence from this one way or the other, just that when most people cant remember a name its not becaue it is inherently hard but because they dont try
Yeah, what you have is "Couldn'tgivashitaboutyou"itis:-) Seriously though, I have/had the same issue and the real reason we can't remember peoples names is because we never really cared enough about that person to bother remembering. I am not having a go at you, but it sounds a lot like what many people have. The faces are easy because we are so deeply wired to remember them. But the name thing requires conscious effort and you probably aren't bothering.
It takes a fairly major mind shift when you first meet people, but once done, it is really easy. I am not saying that you will never forget a name but quite apart from all the "memory techniques" that you can read about, all I am saying is by simply trying to remember the name it will make a huge difference. For me my limit is about 8, I can get introduced to 8 people and with a tiny effort should be able to remember them all for a while (weeks) even longer if I actually go and talk to them all in the next hour or so.
Comments suck. In the vast majority of circumstances, the only effect that a comment can have is detrimental. That is, it is wrong, saying one thing when the code does another. That situation is V Bad.
The only time one should comment is when you do something in the code that is obtuse, and by that I don't mean complicated I mean counter intuitive. If you have to do something weird (usually for performance, in my experience) then tell the reader that it was deliberate otherwise they will "fix" your optimisation out of the way.
People are that are talking about "code that should be self documenting" are essentially right. I have seen some pretty hoopy code in my time but every time I have cursed a lack of comments I have come to retract the curse when I thought about how disgusting the english (my native language) would need to be to describe what was going on.
And there my friend is the real reason why generic comments suck; human languages have a much wider scope for interpretation than code. Comments that are crystal to one person are opaque to another but the code _never_ lies. So let the code tell its story and only augment it when it looks like the code is being dumb/wrong and yet it is not.
Interesting idea. However with most true utilities the model is "standing charge" + "usage charges". Sometimes the standing charge includes a basic amount of usage but that is dependent on the model. This is a reasonable cost or a utility because there is a basic cost of the infrastructure (how much this is may be debatable) and the unit costs of the material shipped through the infrastructure is determined by the market (or government edict). The producers sell their inputs to the "grid" and consumers buy it. Hmmmmm....
Imagine that model with TV! The producers of say "The Sopranos" charge the Grid 5 million bucks to pump out an episode a week, first let loose at say 9pm Tuesdays and the grid charges all those that watch it a buck and change through their "meter". Once the beast is loose it gets P2Ped to death and nobody has to pay again. Man the possibilities here are way coool. you could have a "voting" or "patronage" system whereby punters could fund the programs they like through the "box" and still watch whatever the other punters have managed to "fund" without having to pay extra.
I would much rather _not_ give this stuff to the CDC (nor the airlines for that matter) but rather have them use the natural channel of broadcast to notify people of this stuff. FRont page of less than a dozen news papers and a few fifteen second slots on Sunday night baseball and the hallmark channel should do just fine. It would cost less and if it really is a pandemic it would get the info out to everyone (making people who knew someone that was just in a chicken farm in Hong Kong as incentivised as the guy who was there to make them known to the disease police)
How about some facts for that argument on the efficacy of nationalised health care. The numbers are kinda scary.
(disclaimer I'm an Austrlian living in the UK) Here's the thing, Health care is pretty much an actuarial issue with a strong public policy rider. You can work out how much healthcare your society needs as a function of age, nutrition, diet, lifestyle etc of the population, the specific individuals that require that service fall into two clases, those that, by the very nature of their lot in life need more care (the poor probably require more interaction with the service for a wide variety of reasons from nutrition, nature of work, "lifestyle choices") and those who happen to be unlucky enough to need the service, hit by a car, cancer, nasty staf. infection, both present justifcation for why the service is a public good, they did not choose to be where they are and the unsubsidised payment for the service would be unfair when the price had to be borne by the society as a whole anyway, why not let society as a whole pay for it.
The arguments about efficiency are there to be made (and disagreed with) but in my view it is only a technical failing that stops a nationalised health care system from being more efficient than a series of private institutions that must replicate a wide variety of the same services. This is different from other industries because of the nature of healthcare and the "base level" or "capacity" issue highlighted above.
FFS, this has got to be one of the "nerdiest" things I have ever heard of. A CD-ROM of baby howtos!!! Do a quick survey of the (non-tech) people you meet today, tell them about this thing and tally their responses "Nerdy/Geeky", "Not Geeky/Not Nerdy". I bet you one whole of your American Dollars that Nerdy/Geeky wins out by a loooooooong way.
Amen. Why people just won't open a freakin' port instead of trying to drive 1,000 angels through port 80 (or 443) I will never understand. Push, even polling, is a beautiful thing if the client can just send you back a little bit of meaningful context in a lightweight way.
So, ideally you've got a model in which some attributes of items are kept in key-value pair tables. This isn't wonderful for a lot of reasons - but it does give the application owner the ability to define new kinds of attributes that were unforseen by the dba. And, if done well, he can even define (in the database) rules for when some of these attributes are required, what their domain is, what their type is, what their default is, etc. These "dynamic attributes" would give the user the ability to create whatever new columns they want to describe the entity "book".
This is pretty much the model I have in mind when thinking about this issue. What would be cool would be a RDBMS that still allowed me to build high performance indexes on these "key pair" tables. That would be moderately tricky.
Article: (Retail XBox Price) - (Cost of Parts) = less than 0 Poster: (Wholesale XBox Price [which is less that Retail]) - (Cost of Parts) = even more less than 0
Your point about wholesale cost of parts is irrelevant as far as the original posters point goes.
I think that all the folk saying that "XML is bad for databases" are dismissing it far to quickly. Let us think about the general case of "marked up" data being included in a database.
First, is there a difference between doing this in a relational database versus another kind (say object DB). Perhaps so, but I wish to focus on RDBMS since it is the one that is on topic here and the one that seems so counterintuitve.
Marked up data (XML, HTML, perhaps even SGML) consists of field values _and_ the schema of the fields themselves (even if not always the base data type). Whilst it may be necessary to have the grammar to be certain about the full domain of the *ML there is enough in the marked up data to construct a record from the input data. Think about it, this means that each record arriving at the database contains some information about the schema of the record as well as the data itself.
A database that took this *ML and integrated it natively would, in my world allow the user to create tables with an indeterminate number of fields that could vary from record to record whilst still allowing normal RDBMS functionality.
The complexity of such an implementation would be high, particularly within the context of a database that still has good indexing, table management and performance. Foreign keys would be an intriguing challenge. There is nothing about the problem that is inherently unsolvable but performance would be a real challenge.
I don't think that this functionality is a category killer. But I can imagine why some people love the idea. Lots of people would like to be able to define records in their RDBMS that have arbitrary fields that the designer of the schema did not know about when the database was built. SQL does not cope with this scenario at all. However in my view correct normalisation solves most of these issues and makes the need for native XML unnecessary. Perhaps it would have been easier for IBM to ship DB2 with a copy of McGovern and Date.
I was top of my class (well there and there abouts) and identified as an under achiever when ten years old. In these circumstances I was offered a place at an "opportunity school" which was designed to provide a more challenging educational environment for a couple of years before going to, perhaps, an equally selective high school (high school takes one up to matriculation at age 17 or 18 in Australia). I turned down the place, I would have to leave my friends, travel further to school, etc etc. My parents left the decision in my hands, I have never really asked why, I guess since my results were still excellent they weren't too worried. Anyway, my path through high school got me into whatever course I wanted at University, had scholarships been necessary (University education is essentially free in Australia, even though small tuition fees applied even back then when I studied!!) I am sure I could have made one on an academic basis.
But my point is this, I had a great time growing up. I got to discover what it was like to be a child, got hassled a bit at school for being studious and more than a little awkward, got smashed on the rugby pitch, smashed a few people likewise, worked out that I was no athelete, discovered the benfits and perils of the whole boy/girl/man/woman things, did some hard, non-intellectual, work and made friends that I still have 25 years later. I think that kids are kids for a short enough time that "guiding" them into different high achievement streams actually serves very little purpose (selective grouping within their peers probably has its place in making the teachers job easier). Most people I know (myself included) have no real idea what really interests them until they are in their twenties and, even for a mathematician, at that age there are a few good years of productivity left in most of them. But I think that participating in the normal social stream (even if one is screwed a little by it at the time) makes a better adult, and someone better able to contribute later on.
Those that are going to change the world are going to change it regardless of whether they get exposed to the "good oil" five or ten years earlier than they do in the normal course of things. History is littered with smart people whose contribution shines regardless of the point at which they start and I think that our society is better for letting kids be kids rather than driving them to excel because it is "their potential".
I have been boycotting DVD for the past three years or so. I found myself objecting to the way the DVD industry was screwing with me and the direction that the screwing was heading (regional encoding, DeCSS, obscene pricing), so I decided that if I was going to complain about the treatment then I probably shouldn't be funding them via the very means in question. So I stopped buying them. In answer to your question about "one person, one dollar, one vote" versus "telling others", I think it is both I recognise that I can realistically do no momre than vote with my one dollar but I am more than happy to tell people why I don't DVD anymore.
Not so. The OP business model is similar (if not identical) to one called "Custody" and it is used all the time for lots of different markets but in particular for the finance (securities) industry. I think that the model would be legal under existing law (US, UK and Europe) and Sony's definition of "posession" would have to be broad enough to include the custodian model in order for it to be legal in any sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not say this as a criticism, but if one needs to be persuaded that an ID card is a bad idea then it is probably impossible to persuade one that an ID card is a bad idea.
Here is my huge issue. I do not believe that the state should have the right to demand that I cary a piece of plastic to prove who I am. If I am happily going about my public life obeying the law and participating in a civil society then the state should fuck off and leave me alone to my quiet enjoyment. The premise that one should have an ID card to prove who one is is an anathema to _my_ concept of the purpose of the state, which is to serve us, the citizens.
Now, if I need to intereact with the services of the state then the state (ie us) is right to ask me to prove that I am entitled. They do not need me to prove who I am.
Here is the proof.
A system that allocates "entitlement tokens" for the various services that the state provides and that system ties each authentication token to the authorised users public/private key so that when it comes time to use the service the service provider can authenticate the token against the bearer and yet the state could not track my usage of services without my paermission since it would require my keys in order to collate my services and yet the accounting at "central office" is still in balance and measurable.
Whats this MSN I keep seeing everyone talk about in this thread?
Just goes to show how critical Debian is to the whole shebang. I do so love to see people who whine about Debians defects complete and utter failure to realise that without all the "defective" work that the Debian team do they would have to use freakin RedHat!!
Clearly this is not a helpful example to help understand the first creatures to leave the water for the land since there would have been nothing on the land for them to "arch up and pin down" in the first place. Still and interesting behaviour but it is slightly "cart before horse" in term os anything particularly probabtive.
Despite the cliche, it seems that Duke Nukem has become the "Jarndice and Jarndice" of the modern age, reflecting on the evils of software development rather than those of the Chancery division. In all seriousness DN3D was such a pathetic story it would be funny.
I wont be surprised if they make more money from the book about what not to do with a game/generic development project than they do from the software itself.
Hmmmm, let me see... A small (but not trivial) sector of the community with too few resources to achieve something that many of them need, that the majority of society takes for granted and without which they are inreasing disenfranchised from the good life. Things that they probably have a right to access in a "modern" society. Sounds like a classic job for "The State".
Given than the the Free Software would be accessible for all future members of the state it is a classical "good" spend of State Funds for prosperity. The argument is strengthed by the idea that we are all made better off by the quiality of life of our most vulnerable (probably not the right word) members of society.
Man I am so out of touch "with the kids". I cannot imagine anything less entertaining than playing an online game where paying someone to accumulate items for me makes sense.
In my day, role playing was all about the journey. Mind you, then there was no such thing as "online" so like I say, I'm soooo out of touch.
Labour unions are not inherently wrong. However, and it is a fundamental however, practices such as "union only" sites, secondary boycotts, cross site organisations, intimidation, branch stacking and a criminal lack of democratic responsibility are facets of the labour movement that make them abhorrent to many libertarians.
I was actually wondering, could it be the case that we might not even be able to understand and explain some phonemena simply because our brain power is not adequate.
Absolutely. To detect something one must have a tool of finer resolution than the thing itself. By corollary to understand something must one have a tool that has a "finer" resolution? I believe that one cannot understand things like entanglement with a lump of tissue (ones brain) that does not itself have the capacity to make use of entanglement (or the like) itself. As such there are things that are beyond the resolution of our reasoning organ.
What is kind of exciting is the idea that we might build a machine that is not so limited to harvest the impact of these incomprehensible quantum events. Much like we have build machines to exceed the mechanical limits of our physical bodies (cars, cranes, planes etc). It will be weird though when we start to rely on machines that are using results that the machines cannot explain to us because our brains are inadequate.
Whilst I agree wholeheartedly that the polician in question is acting in the interests of his constituency as a whole, I have always wondered whether those special interests decrying this excellent initiative actually believe that the idea is bad or whether they are just looking after their own interests. I know several examples of people who did terrible things but in their view they were doing good.
You sound like exactly one of those people who would get outrageously offended about me.
On the contrary, I draw no offence from this one way or the other, just that when most people cant remember a name its not becaue it is inherently hard but because they dont try
Yeah, what you have is "Couldn'tgivashitaboutyou"itis :-) Seriously though, I have/had the same issue and the real reason we can't remember peoples names is because we never really cared enough about that person to bother remembering. I am not having a go at you, but it sounds a lot like what many people have. The faces are easy because we are so deeply wired to remember them. But the name thing requires conscious effort and you probably aren't bothering.
It takes a fairly major mind shift when you first meet people, but once done, it is really easy. I am not saying that you will never forget a name but quite apart from all the "memory techniques" that you can read about, all I am saying is by simply trying to remember the name it will make a huge difference. For me my limit is about 8, I can get introduced to 8 people and with a tiny effort should be able to remember them all for a while (weeks) even longer if I actually go and talk to them all in the next hour or so.
By trying to first post or trolling in a "this is real AI" story on Slasdot
Comments suck. In the vast majority of circumstances, the only effect that a comment can have is detrimental. That is, it is wrong, saying one thing when the code does another. That situation is V Bad.
The only time one should comment is when you do something in the code that is obtuse, and by that I don't mean complicated I mean counter intuitive. If you have to do something weird (usually for performance, in my experience) then tell the reader that it was deliberate otherwise they will "fix" your optimisation out of the way.
People are that are talking about "code that should be self documenting" are essentially right. I have seen some pretty hoopy code in my time but every time I have cursed a lack of comments I have come to retract the curse when I thought about how disgusting the english (my native language) would need to be to describe what was going on.
And there my friend is the real reason why generic comments suck; human languages have a much wider scope for interpretation than code. Comments that are crystal to one person are opaque to another but the code _never_ lies. So let the code tell its story and only augment it when it looks like the code is being dumb/wrong and yet it is not.
Interesting idea. However with most true utilities the model is "standing charge" + "usage charges". Sometimes the standing charge includes a basic amount of usage but that is dependent on the model. This is a reasonable cost or a utility because there is a basic cost of the infrastructure (how much this is may be debatable) and the unit costs of the material shipped through the infrastructure is determined by the market (or government edict). The producers sell their inputs to the "grid" and consumers buy it. Hmmmmm....
Imagine that model with TV! The producers of say "The Sopranos" charge the Grid 5 million bucks to pump out an episode a week, first let loose at say 9pm Tuesdays and the grid charges all those that watch it a buck and change through their "meter". Once the beast is loose it gets P2Ped to death and nobody has to pay again. Man the possibilities here are way coool. you could have a "voting" or "patronage" system whereby punters could fund the programs they like through the "box" and still watch whatever the other punters have managed to "fund" without having to pay extra.
Nice!!
I would much rather _not_ give this stuff to the CDC (nor the airlines for that matter) but rather have them use the natural channel of broadcast to notify people of this stuff. FRont page of less than a dozen news papers and a few fifteen second slots on Sunday night baseball and the hallmark channel should do just fine. It would cost less and if it really is a pandemic it would get the info out to everyone (making people who knew someone that was just in a chicken farm in Hong Kong as incentivised as the guy who was there to make them known to the disease police)
How about some facts for that argument on the efficacy of nationalised health care. The numbers are kinda scary.
(disclaimer I'm an Austrlian living in the UK) Here's the thing, Health care is pretty much an actuarial issue with a strong public policy rider. You can work out how much healthcare your society needs as a function of age, nutrition, diet, lifestyle etc of the population, the specific individuals that require that service fall into two clases, those that, by the very nature of their lot in life need more care (the poor probably require more interaction with the service for a wide variety of reasons from nutrition, nature of work, "lifestyle choices") and those who happen to be unlucky enough to need the service, hit by a car, cancer, nasty staf. infection, both present justifcation for why the service is a public good, they did not choose to be where they are and the unsubsidised payment for the service would be unfair when the price had to be borne by the society as a whole anyway, why not let society as a whole pay for it.
The arguments about efficiency are there to be made (and disagreed with) but in my view it is only a technical failing that stops a nationalised health care system from being more efficient than a series of private institutions that must replicate a wide variety of the same services. This is different from other industries because of the nature of healthcare and the "base level" or "capacity" issue highlighted above.
FFS, this has got to be one of the "nerdiest" things I have ever heard of. A CD-ROM of baby howtos!!! Do a quick survey of the (non-tech) people you meet today, tell them about this thing and tally their responses "Nerdy/Geeky", "Not Geeky/Not Nerdy". I bet you one whole of your American Dollars that Nerdy/Geeky wins out by a loooooooong way.
Amen. Why people just won't open a freakin' port instead of trying to drive 1,000 angels through port 80 (or 443) I will never understand. Push, even polling, is a beautiful thing if the client can just send you back a little bit of meaningful context in a lightweight way.
So, ideally you've got a model in which some attributes of items are kept in key-value pair tables. This isn't wonderful for a lot of reasons - but it does give the application owner the ability to define new kinds of attributes that were unforseen by the dba. And, if done well, he can even define (in the database) rules for when some of these attributes are required, what their domain is, what their type is, what their default is, etc. These "dynamic attributes" would give the user the ability to create whatever new columns they want to describe the entity "book".
This is pretty much the model I have in mind when thinking about this issue. What would be cool would be a RDBMS that still allowed me to build high performance indexes on these "key pair" tables. That would be moderately tricky.
Actually;
Article: (Retail XBox Price) - (Cost of Parts) = less than 0
Poster: (Wholesale XBox Price [which is less that Retail]) - (Cost of Parts) = even more less than 0
Your point about wholesale cost of parts is irrelevant as far as the original posters point goes.
I think that all the folk saying that "XML is bad for databases" are dismissing it far to quickly. Let us think about the general case of "marked up" data being included in a database.
First, is there a difference between doing this in a relational database versus another kind (say object DB). Perhaps so, but I wish to focus on RDBMS since it is the one that is on topic here and the one that seems so counterintuitve.
Marked up data (XML, HTML, perhaps even SGML) consists of field values _and_ the schema of the fields themselves (even if not always the base data type). Whilst it may be necessary to have the grammar to be certain about the full domain of the *ML there is enough in the marked up data to construct a record from the input data. Think about it, this means that each record arriving at the database contains some information about the schema of the record as well as the data itself.
A database that took this *ML and integrated it natively would, in my world allow the user to create tables with an indeterminate number of fields that could vary from record to record whilst still allowing normal RDBMS functionality.
The complexity of such an implementation would be high, particularly within the context of a database that still has good indexing, table management and performance. Foreign keys would be an intriguing challenge. There is nothing about the problem that is inherently unsolvable but performance would be a real challenge.
I don't think that this functionality is a category killer. But I can imagine why some people love the idea. Lots of people would like to be able to define records in their RDBMS that have arbitrary fields that the designer of the schema did not know about when the database was built. SQL does not cope with this scenario at all. However in my view correct normalisation solves most of these issues and makes the need for native XML unnecessary. Perhaps it would have been easier for IBM to ship DB2 with a copy of McGovern and Date.
I was top of my class (well there and there abouts) and identified as an under achiever when ten years old. In these circumstances I was offered a place at an "opportunity school" which was designed to provide a more challenging educational environment for a couple of years before going to, perhaps, an equally selective high school (high school takes one up to matriculation at age 17 or 18 in Australia). I turned down the place, I would have to leave my friends, travel further to school, etc etc. My parents left the decision in my hands, I have never really asked why, I guess since my results were still excellent they weren't too worried. Anyway, my path through high school got me into whatever course I wanted at University, had scholarships been necessary (University education is essentially free in Australia, even though small tuition fees applied even back then when I studied!!) I am sure I could have made one on an academic basis.
But my point is this, I had a great time growing up. I got to discover what it was like to be a child, got hassled a bit at school for being studious and more than a little awkward, got smashed on the rugby pitch, smashed a few people likewise, worked out that I was no athelete, discovered the benfits and perils of the whole boy/girl/man/woman things, did some hard, non-intellectual, work and made friends that I still have 25 years later. I think that kids are kids for a short enough time that "guiding" them into different high achievement streams actually serves very little purpose (selective grouping within their peers probably has its place in making the teachers job easier). Most people I know (myself included) have no real idea what really interests them until they are in their twenties and, even for a mathematician, at that age there are a few good years of productivity left in most of them. But I think that participating in the normal social stream (even if one is screwed a little by it at the time) makes a better adult, and someone better able to contribute later on.
Those that are going to change the world are going to change it regardless of whether they get exposed to the "good oil" five or ten years earlier than they do in the normal course of things. History is littered with smart people whose contribution shines regardless of the point at which they start and I think that our society is better for letting kids be kids rather than driving them to excel because it is "their potential".
I have been boycotting DVD for the past three years or so. I found myself objecting to the way the DVD industry was screwing with me and the direction that the screwing was heading (regional encoding, DeCSS, obscene pricing), so I decided that if I was going to complain about the treatment then I probably shouldn't be funding them via the very means in question. So I stopped buying them. In answer to your question about "one person, one dollar, one vote" versus "telling others", I think it is both I recognise that I can realistically do no momre than vote with my one dollar but I am more than happy to tell people why I don't DVD anymore.
Not so. The OP business model is similar (if not identical) to one called "Custody" and it is used all the time for lots of different markets but in particular for the finance (securities) industry. I think that the model would be legal under existing law (US, UK and Europe) and Sony's definition of "posession" would have to be broad enough to include the custodian model in order for it to be legal in any sense.