So he cloned Bell Labs down to some pretty specific details. Big deal.

It's time to stop buying these game consoles that cannot be hacked and these DVD's they don't want us to watch.

I have resisted setting up the DVD player since we moved (4 months ago) because the restrictions placed on me (Macrovision!) by the manufacturer inconveniences me. If I could buy a DVD without previews that I could have playing within 10 seconds of loading into the drive, I might be interested in spending money, but it just annoys me and I would rather not support an industry that treats their customers this way.

I have no trouble looking at laser printer output and telling the difference between 600dpi and 1200dpi. The problem isn't that it's pointless for human vision, it's that many people have uncorrected or inadequately corrected bad vision, and the rest just don't pay attention. Consider seeing an optometrist.

True. But that's not what's happening here. What Apple is doing is using meaningless jargon to take advantage of their customers' technical ignorance. I don't actually have a problem with that in this case, since that ignorance is largely self-inflicted, but it's not customer service in any meaningful sense.

I just paid $80 to change a rim on my truck because it was rusty and leaking. ($40 for the rim from a junk yard, $40 to mount and balance). 35 years old, 25% failure rate. Not too bad.

My truck is old-school. New, problematic, overly complicated technology is unwelcome. This new technology sounds new, overly complicated, and problematic.

I just wish there was an AM station to listen to on the way to work...

I read the original article elsewhere: The man was divorcing his wife, he didn't know how to download anything himself and had terminated his ISP subscription just after the 2nd "strike".

I think this is an excellent case to demonstrate the idiocy of this law.

Since the new government was already critical and was planning to evaluate the law and maybe revert it, this is a good first case. It should help to get rid of it.

But as we know, money corrupts everything. Don't count on common sense and good will once "shareholder value" plays a role. You could even get sued (by your shareholders) if you apply common sense.

The only direct solution is a big change to the patent system.

Indirect solutions include a change to our economic system (e.g. replacing our form of capitalism with something else or at least evolving it rapidly into something better).

Matter of principle: Advertisement is, by definition, subjective. I want objective information and decide upon pros and cons of products myself, or otherwise listen to recommendations of trusted sources.

Therefore, advertisement is a waste of resources. Time and money spent creating and consuming advertisements has a low value for society, it is almost wasted.

The worst thing is that the consumers are the ones paying for this misleading "information" themselves: you may think you get things for free (apps, television) paid by advertisement. But the cost of advertisement is part of the product prices, i.e. paid by yourself.

I think it is perverse to pay for misinformation (through higher product prices); a part of this money is then used to give away things for free or at a discount (every medium that contains ads).

Even if you are not using the stuff you get "for free", you still pay the advertisement tax in all product prices. Which is pretty awful if you think about it.

That's funny because... my new commute is 2.4 km (yay!) and I do live in the Rockies (Cranbrook, BC).

Even though I have the option to bring a company vehicle home, I choose to either drive my own truck, or ride my bicycle. I've been pretty good at taking the bike to and from work. It's a fairly gentle ride home, but my biggest complaint is that my ride is directly south and every day last week there has been a strong wind blowing north while I'm riding home.

I can't think that I'll be riding much once the snow starts flying though.

When talking about java in a browser executing remote code: agree, avoid it if you can.

When talking about java as platform (like .net or other platforms) for server side applications, then dumping java because of this bug is a bit drastic.

It sounds to me like the music industry is bent on self-destruction, and this is something we should encourage. Let them price themselves out of existence. Once they're gone, maybe we can have some good music again.

I'll vote for the pirate party or extreme left until this stops.

Sooner or later pirate parties and other opponents of intellectual property rights (or at least these rights getting more and more strict) will come to power in Europe, and actions of this criminal industry will come back at them like a boomerang.

They'll regret sentences like these when copyrights will be abolished. Looking forward to that day.

Thanks! Up... er... Downgraded.

Not to single out Apple -- all of the major consumer tech vendors do the same thing to one degree or another -- but this is why I'm not terribly interested in their products. I am a technology enthusiast, and I do tweak settings and heavily customize my machines to suit me. As interfaces are dumbed down and the underlying feature sets are minimized, there's less and less use I have for the associated products. And to the extent that GNOME has followed suit, I find myself doing more and more at the command line because there's a real limit to what can be accomplished efficiently with a mouse or at all jabbing at a tablet with my fingers like a chimp in a lab.

But for the tendency of some major UI projects in the Open Source world to imitate corporate products, I wouldn't care. That tendency is frankly bizarre, since the average consumer doesn't care about any aspect of FOSS except free-as-in-beer, probably won't install any FOSS software anyway, and certainly won't ever crack open the hood. Meanwhile, skilled users who understand that a shallow learning curve also means a shallow power curve are increasingly out of luck.

...and then be blandly pleasant. Otherwise, just don't do it. What are they going to do, fire you?

I'm always amused at the naive goodwill that people extend to their employers. Most of us live in at-will states, without unions, and without any real workers' rights that can be exercised without spending more than they're worth retaining counsel. These are the people who can fire you at any time for any reason, but they want two weeks' warning if you leave on your own. Why give them extra freebies?

Look, forget the employer-employee bullshit. You are a vendor, selling a service. Your employer is a customer. As long as they're buying what you're selling at the best price you can get (which includes work conditions and perceived job security as well as pay and benefits), the customer is always right. As soon as they stop buying, or you find someone willing to pay more, then go attend to your new customer. The old customer wants to take more of your time for free? Politely decline. You're running a business -- you -- and the only point in giving something away free is if it leads to another sale.

Don't bother with work ethic or pride in your job at this point. Those are good concepts and they have their place, but that place is well before anyone starts talking about exit interviews. If you're leaving voluntarily, they treated you well, and you feel like extending the courtesy, sure. But even then, don't say anything that can be used against you later. It's just business, and that's how they see it. Go and do likewise.

Seriously? There was nothing more important or interesting going on than some nebbish mumbling about the importance of packaging? Even for Apple fanboyism, this reaches new depths. "The boxes sit on shelves serving as a constant reminder of the beauty within." I wish there was a more appropriate and genteel response to that than, "Get a life!", but there you are.