Yeah, this is a way to 'legally' do it but the BSA is more of a racket than that. You see, they don't just apply legal pressure. Their contracts make others in the same alliance refuse to deal with those that won't work with the BSA. So for example, Microsoft / Sony / etc will stop validating your hardware or software and Apple will blacklist your keys and so on. If the BSA was standing only on legal footing that would be one thing but right now these large corps are using it as leverage to get smaller ones who depend on them to play ball.

You're incorrect here. The EULA on all these games indicate that what you bought was a hunk of plastic, and you can do what you want with that (including melt it down), but the data that happens to be on it does not belong to you. You've merely been given a revocable license to copy it into ram in order to play it. It sounds unbelievable, I know, but read the small print. This is where we're at in the legal side of games now.

I'm guessing most of it is astroturfing. They are up against folks with a lot of money who find their image to be important, after all.

Getting really tired of hearing this. Nothing is finely tuned for life. As far as we know, it takes certain conditions for very complex life to form, but that simply means that complex life will only form in those conditions, and here we are. If there were no regions in this universe with the right conditions for complex life we would not be here.

Its okay. If that happens I'll switch away from them too. It hasn't happened yet, so I'll stick where I am.

I used Ubuntu for about a year and a half. When unity came out, I gave it a try, quit using Ubuntu entirely because of it. Now I use windows and kind of dislike it but whatever. At least everything worked for me without having to tweak anything. I do miss several really nice features, though. But not enough to want to return. Ubuntu had a decent mix of ease-of-maintenance and ease-of-use, and then they ditched the ease of use and added an app store.

Your rights are only worth anything if you have the means to actually defend them. In legal theory this is not the case, your rights are supposed to be intrinsic. But in actual reality, this is exactly the case, since money and power can exert pressure and pressure can remove your ability to fight back or (more likely) make the expenditure involved more than you are willing to expend. So yes, the right to fair use no longer exists practically. Your rights can be overridden by funding. You can be shut up by enough money.

They're not challenging consoles. They're becoming consoles. Locked-down hardware, closed internals, gatekeeper needing to sign software, set-top equipment... that's a console. Its not LIKE a console, it IS one.

me

So now that they've finally bloated it to the point that it looks like and slugs like one of the apps I'll never ever allow on my computer and absolutely hate the look and feel of (itunes), what good alternatives are there for someone who just wants to auto-download RSS-feed-driven podcast type videos automatically? Bonus points for not having a web browser or video player inside it. I have a web browser. I have a video player. Both are better than any embedded one could ever be.

Except that in the USA that kind of limitation has a very specific life-and-limb type of specification. "Harming the public order" etc is VERY nebulous and can be interpreted by those in power as anything which harms THEIR order.

To me, some of the design choices seem to be pretty poor - most specifically with the "Unified menu" thing. Now, I do like the idea of using the extra space along the top for the menu - that makes sense. Just look at firefox 4 with the menu collapsed into a button and the tabs along the top, for example. What doesn't make sense is that the close buttons and menus there appear even from non-maximized apps. This is copying apple without actual Human Interface Design justification. Its copying a bad decision for a bad reason. There's nothing wrong with folding the menus and close buttons into the top bar when the window is maximised, but when its floating those menus and close buttons need to follow the window around, like a mini top bar of its own. Otherwise it gets really confusing fast.

He didn't have them over a barrel. They had bottomless pockets and could keep him coming back to court every day for the rest of his life, and it wouldn't even make them flinch. This is how big money uses the legal system. He was backed into a corner by sheer weight of cash, and got a terrible one sided deal out of it.

But... but... but I just switched to ubuntu like, 8 months ago and its been the best desktop OS I ever used! But then again, I do have this habit of climbing onto sinking ships...

To be fair, I'd love to advocate linux to everyone I know, but e.g. the #1 reason they can't is that they use Photoshop, or Netflix, or Zune Marketplace, or whatever other flavor of application, so game over. The 'use gimp' argument is not even worth laughing at anymore. And the "use vmware" argument completely misses the point. And WINE just isn't good enough. And its not WINEs fault, really.

So yeah. Its not about the OS. Its about the applications. The number one barrier is not that the OS doesn't boot in 10 seconds. It's not the wallpaper. Its not the desktop usability. Its not the price. Its not driver compatibility (anymore). Its not network setup. Its not web browser. Its not the window style. Its not where the indicators are. Its not what edge of the screen the menus are on. Its not the presence or absence of a dock. Its applications (or lack thereof).
Until that changes, we'll get nowhere. Nobody mainstream cares about software freedom. Nobody mainstream cares about security. They only care that Netflix doesn't work and they can't sync their Zune, and Team Fortress 2 runs at 30 fps (or not at all) instead of 200fps.

Don't they know that in south africa its 50% off if you pay the police in cash when they stop you?