The thing is, if you could just harvest your play histroy, you really would not neet Spotify as a middle man. Of course, it would be simpler if they were involved, but them not being involved could make this a generic service which would work with Spotify, RDIO, Grooveshark (actually, I think they already have some integration), etc..

Then again there are tons of practical issues with this, but I'm sure they could be solved.

I'd really want to see some Spotify - Flattr integration (and in that case, better Flattr adoption), so that you could voluntarily and automatically pay more to the artists you listen to. You can replace Flattr here with any "Automatically-share-a-monthly-fee-between-the-artists-you-listen-to System"

What's does basic Spotify cost? 5€ a month? Out of which maybe 1-2€ go to the artist? If I could direclty add 10€ per month to be spread directly to the artists I listen to as voluntary donations, I'd gladly do that. That would be 15€ a month for me, which I think is reasonable (~price of an album per month). If even 10% of spotify users would do this, it would roughly double the artist income. Even making small donations easy {~2€/month) could have a huge impact.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would gladly pay a bit more.

Sure, Nokia was not in the perfect shape. Symbian was getting old, but there was a migration strategy. Also Nokia still had 40% mobile phone marketshare IIRC, and Symbian was still pulling in TONS of money (there was a great writeup about this by an ex-Nokian a while back). Elop with his comments and strategies sent Nokia into a nosedive it never recovered from. From the outside at least, he pretty much singlehandedly took a "meh" situation and killed Nokia.

As for the emergency solution, Nokia had good (well decent at least) plans and roadmaps before Elop came. Elop made a totally horrible deal with the Windows *#%&, and the whole motivation of that deal is pretty obvious.

It's just incredible. I don't even blame Microsoft that much. What the hell was the Nokia board thinking? "Oh, this guy has run our company to the ground, he seems ok! Let's give him a few more years as CEO."

What would you have people do? "Yeah, they spy on every aspect of my life, next week they come and install the showercams, that's ok.."

Screw that. I'm from Europe, and I find these actions horribly offensive, I already moved away from skype and gmail (not /. yet though).

What I'd really like is for European countries to strongly step in here. And screw the US reply that "We will respond to the European concerns via official channels". Oh that makes me so happy, since this only affect politicians. I wish someone in Europe (sure, we're not all innocent either) would have the balls to reveal anything the US reveals to them. Then possibly start suing american companies for violations of European privacy law.

This whole thing is in no way ok, and as much as possible should be dragged out into daylight, and hopefully get enough outrage that there will be people thrown in jail for it.

But I'm sorry, you must be getting tired. I should stop.

We have a Win 8 laptop at home that nobody uses, since it's.. just horrible. Not bad, horrible.

I thought I'd install the preview "because it can't be worse, right?". I seem to underestimate Microsoft all the time.

I got far enough to log in again.
Silly old me goes "Ok, I'll just log in with the local account."
"Local account?" Windows asks. "Im not sure what you mean" it says.
"You know, the one I created so I wouldn't need some silly Microsoft online thingie" I say.
"Ah! now I know what you mean" Windows exclaims! "Don't worry, I've been upgraded. You can't get in to your own laptop without going through an online Microsoft account".
"You're kidding" I say. "I can't get on to the computer?"
"Nope!" Windows happily chimes.
KABLAM
"aargghh..." whines Windows
Reboot
"Good morning! What can I do for you today?" Ubuntu asks
"Could I log in and use the computer without getting horribly frustrated and angry?"
"But of course!"

The End

I think this completely depends on how long term, how stable and how production like this should be. I have played with OpenStack for a bit over a year now. It's in no way trivial to set up properly (I'm not sure I have :)) , and the documentation really doesn't cover all cases, there are bugs, and it takes a while to get familiar with OS (other than a trivian one node setup).

That said, if you want an open source free alternative, and have some time to put into this, I think OpenStack would be a good choise. You can easily isolate production HW from playground HW and only let students use the playground. It has LDAP integration which mostly works. The quantum component lets you play around with networks.

After it's up and running, I have mostly had positive feedback from anyone who has tried it.

I partly agree, but there are problems with just trusting DNSSEC.

In the current situation, to impersonate a SSL protected site you need to MITM in some way (e..g DNS spoofing), and get a valid certificate for the domain. So you have to at least attack two different security measures (even if MITM is simple for some entities).

If certificate info is published in DNSSEC you need to compromise only one place to achieve both MITM and add fake certificates. Sure it might be harder, but if this method was used, I bet that the attacks on DNS servers would go up a lot.

I have to agree with the GP. Calling CD's non-digital is stupid in any sense. It is a) factually incorrect, b) uses the wrong term for the wrong thing, c) confuses anybody who knows anything about the issue. If you want a name for decoupled from a physical medium, why not go for virtual music sales (which sadly would be ironically accurate too).

Or why not call it downloadable/streamable music or online music sales or whatever else? Even if nitpickers may argue that online music sales basically contains CDs ordered from e.g. Amazon, it's much clearer and more correct.

In addition to all the other posters qualms about this, I really wonder how this would work on the internet. How many brands are generally recognized around the world? Fine, you can do some localization, but still.

It seems that this will be either choosing between the logos of Coca Cola, Apple and Nike, or presenting me with an ad of the biggest, most famous mattress company in the whole US.

Now, while Finland has quite reasonable limitations for compensation (compared to the US), some of the cases have really had really unreasonable damages because the copyright holders demonstrated "how much revenue they have lost".

Piratebay should sue for lost income too, 5 million people, each could visit the site twice a day, and click on all banners. Then multiply that by days the site has been up, and that's a lot of ad revenue they have to pay back.

I don't thing that's even a question? Isn't intellectual property infriction pretty conclusively illegal without having to prove it

I disagee. They are calling out the hypocricy of the copyright group when they do the one thing they are agaist. It's like PETA having an annual moose hunt. In addition I think this calls into attention the state of currect copyright law. If the group claims it was a mistake, it clearly shows that even the "experts" have no clue how to stay withing the law.