Back in the 90's, I had an accounting professor who did her whole class in PowerPoint. When I signed up and got the text books and I also needed to buy a packet of paper which had the whole semesters worth of PP slides with plenty of room to take notes. This way I never had to write down what was on the slides themselves, just my understanding of the material. And there was a lot of material.

True. In high school I had teachers who would either use the same overhead slides for years or worse, write the same notes on the board and never explain anything. Currently I'm in college and I'm taking a programming course where the prof reads each slide quickly and goes to the next within seconds. Worse, while she fortunately takes questions, she unfortunately neither knows nor cares about the material. Luckily I already know C

The only people who benefit from DRM are content providers.

Well, then, maybe all of the people who want content, and who are always complaining about the quality of content, should look for a way to get what they want without there being any content creators/providers who do what they do with any prospect of earning a living. If we can just dispense with this whole notion of creative professionals, and just settle for entertainment created by junior high school vampire romance fangurlz, Bon Jovi tribute bar bands, street mimes, and hippes who want everyone to have their vegan curry recipes (for free!) then everything would just settle down nicely. There's absolutely no need for people who work for years on recording or film projects. It's pointless to expect people to work off and on for a decade on a novel. Those people should never be able to sell their works, they should instead focus on t-shirt sales and readings in coffee houses, where they are compensated with a share of the barista's tip jar. After all, it's absurd for anyone to make a single penny the week after they've spent a year doing the actual work of creating something. All entertainment should be paid for in advance by fans. Selling your work, on your own terms, after you invest the time to create it: that's, like, totally fascism.

Here's an idea: just don't do business with DRM-centric content creators or the distribution networks/agents with whom they've chosen to do business. Give your business to people who want to give away their work for free. If that really is the way to earn a living as a creative person, then truth of that notion will be plain for all to see. Put your money (or the lack of spending it) where your mouth is. If having a say in how your creative work is reproduced strikes you as eeeevil, then you surely wouldn't want to enjoy entertainment or information produced by someone who embraces the idea anyway, right? Right? Because, you know, that would be intellectually dishonest.

egads!

>>>have found virtually no alternative suggestions to combating piracy than DRM.

Don't. Trust that if you offer a fair product at a reasonable price, then the consumers will buy it rather than copy it. It's the same model that worked with Non-copy protected cassettes back in the 80s and 90s.

Also: The article is about the BBC which is funded by the taxpayers. In my humble opinion, the taxpayers entitled to take the product free-of-charge since they already paid for it.

(goes back to drinking German beer)

"A woman on the radio talks about revolution, but it's already passed her by. I was alive and I waited for this. Right here, right now; there is no other place I want to be..... watching the world wake-up from history. ----- I saw the decade end, when it seemed the world could change at the blink of an eye. And if anything then there's your sign. I was alive and I waited, waited for this. I was alive and I waited for this. Watching the world wake up from history! Right here. Right now."

No, but they can do something far worse to you if they think you're card counting: require you to flat-bet. That eliminates everything you would potentially gain from card counting.

"Time Enough At Last" - Burgess Meredith's best Twilight Zone performance. He was also awesome in "Printer's Devil"

Maybe an FU to GPL fans but definitely NOT to free software.

WoW runs just fine on my Mac

I'm okay with that, as long as they get rid of everyone else on cable news too, especially Nancy Grace and Keith Olbermann (Note: In Olbermann's case, they can allow him to do only sports. I could live with that)