Actually, it's pretty clever. Make up something lame, call it "exclusive", and sell it to people with more money than brains. It reminds me of some company that made fancy, massively-overpriced cellphones to sell to rich people (with sapphire mechanisms in the buttons, no less) back when the iPhone v1 was revolutionizing smartphones.

This thing doesn't have to become a giant commercial success, it just has to make a bunch of money before the owners bail out and it collapses.

>The answer to this will be 'No'. The obvious way Apple is going is to change the audio output jack to the headphone to something proprietary like Lightning.

So what? At some point, the signal has to be converted to analog so that it can drive transducers and produce listenable sound. Anyone with a soldering iron can tap into the signal at that point and record it with very good quality.

> I don't remember the what the video tech is called, but newer DVD players and TVs won't display videos that have a specific watermark embedded in it. That DRM hasn't been cracked yet. In theory DRM is impossible, but in reality they only need to stay ahead of the hackers. That's not too difficult.

It's not that easy either. Basically it's an arms race between the two interests. The media interests have money on their side (which can be used to hire engineers to come up with difficult-to-crack schemes), whereas the crackers have on their side the fact that a crack only needs to be found once, and then distributed via the internet, and then the whole scheme is useless. However, the crackers have limited resources and interest, so they only bother if it's really worth their time. So any DRM that hasn't been cracked yet can likely be attributed to it not being worthwhile enough to bother with. Playing DVDs on Linux was seen as worthwhile enough because 1) it wasn't too hard to crack and 2) DVDs were (and still are) by far the dominant method of recording/viewing movies. Yes, streaming video has made a big dent, but not that much; there's still tons of stuff not available on Netflix instant play. And Blu-Rays were supposed to supercede DVDs, but in reality that hasn't happened.

There's plenty of protection schemes that haven't been cracked, but many times that's because no one really cares enough to bother with it. Some proprietary music format that only U2 uses, on one kind of player, will probably be ignored by crackers.

>I remember the days when I would put one radio recording a cassette tape in front of another radio playing a cassette tape and whalla - instant duplicate. No it may not be the same thing as a digitally equivalent copy of an mp3, but it certainly could be pirated.

Yes, but that sounds like crap. However, it is possible to get very, very good copies using analog recording: even if Apple somehow made it ridiculously difficult to make digital copies of U2 music and made it so it would only play on an iPhone/iPad, are they going to eliminate the analog headphone jack too? It's easy to copy music by plugging a cable from a headphone jack into a line-in jack on another computer. Even if they eliminate the headphone jack and make you buy digitally-connected headphones which use encryption, at some point there's a DAC and an amplifier to play the analog sound into your ears, so anyone handy with electronics could tap into the amplifier output.

However, all of this is bound for failure: what kind of moron would buy a song that can only be played on one device? Apple does not completely control the music market, and there's a lot more Android phones sold now than iPhones. Any proprietary Apple scheme won't work on Android.

Yes, but Dre is a respected musician, so his opinion is given far greater weight than some yahoo on Slashdot who has no musical credentials whatsoever.

There's no place any more for cultural protectionism.

Canadian content laws combined with tax incentives are what created and sustains hollywood north, a significant film and TV production industry within Canada that would otherwise not exist, that generates jobs and incomes in Canada.

Kill the laws, and you kill an industry. How does Canada win that way exactly?

Protecting Canadian content is far more than just protecting Canadian "culture", its a very real protection of a whole industry that pretty clearly and objectively benefits the country overall.

. Is forcing someone's finger onto their iPhone's sensor forcing them to reveal information under duress?

It would be no different then forcing a suspect to provide fingerprints or dna samples. They'd need a warrant for it, but they could absolutely do it.

I agree if they just forced you without a warrant, that you'd probably get it all ruled inadmissible.

Can you substantiate this? Every time somebody has said this to me and they've gone into specifics, it's been bullshit.

You know, it's good that you come to me instead of the morons you've been talking to you, because I can definitely substantiate this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04...

http://arstechnica.com/busines...

See, the reason "Silicon Valley" (meaning the tech industry) is allowed to play this game is because they're willing to let the NSA upskirt your private information and communications. And since they've already got their hand up your dress, they're going to cop a little feel for themselves, you know? So the US Government is happy, the corporations get to make a shitload of money from your private information and communications, and they get to keep playing their little tax game.

If you had a government worth a damn (like during the trust-busting era), they wouldn't allow companies like Apple to perpetrate their little willful fraud.

Now, the next time somebody tells you about Apple and the government playing footsie to protect Apple's tax advantage, I hope you won't continue to say it's bullshit.

Same here. Which anti-trust laws? Be specific.

Same here. Now when somebody asks you "Which anti-trust laws is Apple violating?" you'll be able to tell them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

http://www.jstor.org/discover/...

See, the problem is "vertical integration". You can't control both the product, the store that sells the product, the insurance that covers the product, the consumables (media) that plays on the product and on and on down the distribution chain. Even making both the hardware and the software is arguably a violation of anti-trust. But when you start to also own the only store that sells software for the product and have a vested interest in every bit of software that runs on the product you've crossed so many lines that Apple should have been broken up into several companies long ago. Same with Microsoft and many others. They're not just over the line, they're WAY over the line. The technical term is an oligopoly. They are anti-competitive and they destroy entire markets. Oligopolies are what happen in fascist countries.

I hope you appreciate the time and energy I spend disabusing you of your notion that "it's bullshit". And I hope you enjoyed edification as much as I enjoyed providing it.

Herding Cats - Hurd and Catz. LULZ.

they'd need to get every ISP and VPN provider in the country to block access to it,

You make that sound hard.

If they block it from about 5 companies that'll cover most of the countries reasonable choices, and most of the remainder are just resellers of bandwidth from the big ones.

And blocking VPN providers? Why bother? Only a small fraction will bother using one. Just because people -can- get around it, doesn't mean most of them will bother trying.

Meanwhile the cable and dsl providers would probably jump for joy at at a government ordered netflix ban. It eliminates a significant competitor, and a huge source of bandwidth usage all in one fell swoop, and if anyone complains its the governments fault.

So no, your full of it, if you think netflix can just 'laugh in their faces'. It would be pretty easy for Canada to toss them out if they wanted to. Blocking access at the cross-border links, and seizing any netflix equipment in the country. I'm not in favor of any such draconian action, don't for a second think it isn't both possible and easy.

then continued on happily taking credit card payments and sending traffic to Canada.

Given they have to license content separately specifically to send it to Canada this would not make the slightest bit of sense. The ONLY content they can turn a 'blind eye' to, would be Canadian's paying from a US address/US card and funnelling traffic through a VPN. And they can only do THAT as long as its not a big enough issue to get them in trouble with the rights owners -- who will start demanding netflix blacklist VPN providers etc.

It's not Netflix fault that Canada doesn't produce any noteworthy cultural exports. Lots of other good stuff, sure, but TV and movies not so much.

Two words: "Hollywoord North" I mean seriously, Canada may not produce much worthwhile truly independent content but its been very successful at using Canadian content requirements coupled with tax incentives to create a pretty substantial tv/movie production industry where one would otherwise not exist, creating jobs, and funneling some money into Canada in the process.

That's DOCTOR Who, to you, Sir!
 

Logic is a binary function. Something is in a logical set - or it is not. Being illogical is not a synonym for being mistaken. Degrees of precision are irrelevant for set inclusion. Fuzzy logic is not logic.

BTW: It is illogical to conclude that a Tomato in NOT a vegetable, simply because it belongs to a taxonomical subclass, "fruit". It as if I were to say your testicle is not animal.

On the other hand, there are plenty of LCD monitors thrown away even though a $25 CFL and 10 minutes could have it up and running if you could get the right CFL.

And don't forget that the time to go get a new whatever isn't free either. Some problems can be fixed in less time than it takes to buy a new one if it's reasonably made to be repaired.

The problem is devices that WOULD be significantly cheaper to repair if parts were more easily (and reasonably) available and if the things weren't designed to be harder to repair.

Often the repair hostile design isn't in any way cheaper to manufacture.

Bingo. The president is not a king.

I mean seriously read the freaking constitution people, or the wikipedia article about it. The powers of the president interms of actually DOING things is pretty light.

pardons and receive ambassadors are about all he can really do at will

veto bills (but can be overridden by congress)

make political appointments (subject to congress/senate approving them)

commander in cheif of the armed forces -- but even this is heavily restricted by congress, and something like closing a base isn't something he can do with the stroke of a pen.

etc... its really FAR more important who is in congress than who sits in the whitehouse. The only difference being that the president is one person so he makes a good figure head, while congress and the senate are shifting blobs of largely faceless politicos who despite being actually responsible for everything take almost no responsibility for their actions.