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.

I think you read too much into that exchange. A short while ago the Washington D.C. gun ban fell after having stood for over 3 decades. Why did it take so long? Because the pro-gun lobby was waiting for a case that was favorable to their cause. They didn't want to bring just any case - they wanted the "perfect" case where they could be certain of the outcome (i.e. SCOTUS sides with the gun owner).

The NRA was petrified about Heller and didn't want to go for it because they thought the risks were too great. It took a non-gun-owning lawyer to actually start the case, and the NRA tried to torpedo it. Of course they took credit for it after it passed.

The End Software Patents campaign has posted:

• an analysis of the implications for software patents
• A html version of the court transcript

DRM is broken by design, the user has to have a way of decrypting the content in order to view it, so the keys have to be given out...
All DRM will do is stop "casual piracy", that is people making copies for their friends, or recording to view later etc... The serious piracy groups who produce copies and sell them will quickly work out ways to bypass any protection being used. Go on thepiratebay, there is a lot of content available there which has been ripped from DRM encumbered sources, and the pirate versions are better because they have consumer-hostile things removed.

From what I've seen of UK schools now (which have changed since I left) many are giving all the children -- especially younger ones -- small whiteboards. The teacher says "OK, everyone write down the answer. Done? OK show me!" and gets feedback from every child.

>>>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."

Jaunty handled my 24" 16:9 iiyama just fine at its native resolution of 1920x1080. Upgraded to Karmic... it autodetected the native res fine, except that it's practically unusable. Screen is blank except, oddly enough, for the toolbars, which display fine. Email and gedit display when run, but nothing else does. I've looked for workarounds, none worked, ended up having to file a bug. Another guy with the same monitor and better Linux skills than I is just as stumped. Meanwhile I feel like I've gone back in time 15 years, because the only res that works properly on my monitor is the lower 16:9 at 1280x720. At 24" it reminds me of the pixellization on an old 800x600 res monitor. My eyes, my eyes...

That article is from 2007, and seems to lack many details surrounding this case. I googled up this timeline ( http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bush_administration_U.S._attorney_firings_controversy ) that seems largely comprised of dates, direct quotes and similar facts. I see a very different story here. For example:

On March 26, 2007, Monica Goodling, the senior counselor to Gonzales and Department of Justice liaison to the White House who was on an "indefinite leave of absence," refused to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Goodling threatened to invoke her Fifth Amendment rights to not incriminate herself

Your quote implies the fired attorneys were dismissed for wrongdoing, but the facts do not appear to support that supposition.

Electronics are going to be even more of a pain in the ass to service.

I can't see it being terribly reliable either.

Oh? Just your presupposition that God doesn't exist proves that God doesn't exist? Got it, thanks

Yes, just like his presupposition that pink unicorns don't exist. I don't understand why he just doesn't believe in whatever people tell him.

Yes, but that wasn't MS-DOS. MS-DOS did not exist until Microsoft contracted with IBM to supply the OS for IBM's new PC (which Microsoft already had a contract to supply a Basic and a C compiler for). Microsoft bought the rights to what would become MS-DOS off of another company that had developed it as QDOS.
So, what you were using was something completely unrelated (except for the fact that it came from the same company) to what would later be MS-DOS. What Bill Gates was pissed about was people ripping off his (and Paul Allen's) Basic compiler. The original posters were correct and you are incorrect.

Well, this is all linked to economy...

• Supersonic flight costs a lot more than subsonic
• Flights to the moon cost a lot of money and you don't make a penny out of it

This is obvious that progress alone does not drive decisions. Money does.

As for your flying car, you'll start seeing it when we have drivers who can safely drive on 3 dimensional roads, and for that, you have to be able to do it safely on 2 dimensional roads first, which can be far, far away...

I bet Thatcher was the devil and destroyed the economy too eh?

No, Labour screwed up badly last time and have done it again. Much as I dislike their moral standpoints, the Tories at least have some business sense and some sort of idea of privacy and individual rights, unlike the current lot.

The current labour party got there today by being the opposition after over a decade of rule by a single party. The Tories are about to do the same. This is because the largest part of the electorate is voting the way it (and it's daddy) always voted (tribalism), and those that do change their vote are lacking in both imagination and ability to change anything other than which one of the big two gets in. From next year you have a decade or so of Tory rule to look forward to. Try to enjoy it.

I'm betting they won't institute ID cards or fellate the next republican president in the way Blair did. That man was a national disgrace.

No, the government is the party in parliament with the most seats. And we elect the people in the seats. It's not a perfect system, but to compare it to Iran is dangerous and ignorant.

You too!?! Hurray, I'm not the only one. When I was a kid I could never understand the mystery behind that koan - it was only once I'd grown up a bit that I realized almost no one else can clap with one hand.

Great fun indeed with Zen types.