Hang on...they're thinking it's bad that people no longer look at you funny when you ask them what browser they use? They're lamenting the good old days when people put the entire e-mail in the subject line? They miss the lucrative position of explaining to someone that no, they can't just have root access? Explaining that the backup isn't supposed to be the only copy?

This is a problem?

I saw it and immediately though Hitchhiker's Guide (the version from the movie). How long do you think it'll be before someone programs one for it, probably based off of Wikipedia?

You're drawing the line, there, though? You're saying that the line which makes the picture "artificial" is when Photoshop's come in? Personally, I don't think most people spend most of their time oiled up, bent over and spread, so a picture of someone in a contrived pose with specific lighting and makeup is just as artificial as a person airbrushed. The trick isn't having a label telling people that "these pictures have been modified", it's to make it general knowledge that all magazine photos are in some way modified, just like how most semi-intelligent people realize that food pictures are mostly fake.

Oh I agree that it's like Pascal's wager, but that's more of a bad thing than you'd think. Granted, I've never raised a kid so I don't know how difficult any of this is, but the Pascal's wager logic is just weird.

Yes, Pascal's wager is a decent justification for being religious but it proposes a pretty terrible way to get into a spiritual life, as a way of basically covering your ass in case God exists. It's basically the tattoo on the ass of the "Archbishop" in Johnny English: "Jesus is coming - look busy." Sure, you end up with a lot of people going to church, but they're going 'just in case,' rather than honestly believing that God is someone who should be praised. It's a lousy excuse for showing up to mass, and you'd probably be better off concentrating on being a decent, moral, secular person than faking that you believe in God, however well you manage to halfway convince yourself.

Same thing with this watch. I mean a protection "just in case" your child gets abducted sounds great, but it's also a lousy excuse for not teaching your child to think about what they're doing when a stranger in a van offers them candy, or , or just in general. Sure, you end up with a lot of parents feeling safe about their children, but it's because they trust some strange device they're paying a monthly fee for, not because they trust their actual child, and which would you rather trust, some company called Lok8r, or your own offspring?

Plus, there's plenty of technical reasons why this is a terrible idea. Ignoring the very real possibility for someone other than you to track your kid, you're saying you can't think of a way for someone to get the watch off without "forcibly removing" it in the ways they've come up with? I can, and they're more horrifying than a simple abduction.

Personally, I'm curious to see what happens when the results become...tampered...

Look at the name, they called it exactly what it was. Digital Rights Management: a system by which the rights of a user to in any way use a digital signal are managed. Whether that signal's passing from DVD player to screen, torrent file to hard drive, .avi on a CD to your college roommate, or NAS in the basement to the laptop propped up on your knees in bed; the RIAA has made it very clear that they want to (and, to a degree, have been able to) control the way the set of bits representing a work of art, that they feel they own, is used. DRM has never been about stopping pirates because that would be too limiting of a concept. Why put all this effort into stopping pirates when they can stop other small nuisances that *IAAs have probably never quite liked - things like lending DVDs to neighbours,

This hit the nail right on the head. Users feel they have the right to do what they want with what they consider "their property," whether it's that DVD they shelled out 30 bucks for, or the .avi of a free, independant movie they legally torrented from an animation studio. For some reason, organizations representing the industry (not the artists them selves) feel that in the digital age, our concept of property has to change in order for art to continue to be produced. Any rational person would beg to differ.

The worst part is that this doesn't even "close the analog hole" in any way. Sure, it stops one portion of it - recording/viewing media through component cable - but that's putting a band-aid on a chest wound. The real analog hole is the fact that, in the end, the screen is being displayed visually - it's just photons. We happen to have a method of captuing photons spread across a period of time, the video camera. Sure, it'll look crappy at first, but people will get better at normalizing the colours or finding different capture methods, and, as has been seen before, users will adapt to the worse quality format because it's the one that's not fleecing them.

Personally, I'm keeping my older equipment until stores eventually realize that trying to redefine the legel definition of property outisde of the court system turns more customers away than pirates it keeps at bay - which, last time I checked, was virtually nil.

A good place to start is by explaining to them what a magnetic field line is.

Seeing as how Adobe Photoshop is among the most pirated programs, I'm curious to know how hard not having formal support is really hitting many of the users. Of course, most professionals wouldn't pirate software (of course), and probably have it legally paid for and supported, but a lot of people don't use Adobe support and seem to get along just fine.

I'm not so sure. I doubt the vast majority of people who believe Internet Explorer to be the internet noticed that there was some kind of takeover. YouTube owns web video in most people's minds, yes, but it was difficult to tell anything happened even for those who did know what was going on. Even now, the bottom of the page says "© 2009 YouTube, LLC." Either way, I'm waiting for the day when YouTube uses the tag for displaying media and I can finally forget about FLV forever. Long time coming.

There's a lot of reasons Javascript (and other client-side scripting languages) are limited in the ways you described, most are for security & privacy reasons (and yet things still get through).

Give them a FriendDA?

This wouldn't be rated "Funny" if the mod knew just how sad and true this is. Even if the copies are available, the general feeling is you have to sneak around if you want to use a library to learn course material from.

Not if the program of study you're looking for isn't available at other schools, or the body which regulates the profession you're looking to enter (which also legally controls the use of the title of your profession) requires successful completion of a degree in an "accredited institution of learning," where accredited means is on a list that they maintain. That narrows your choices somewhat; add in the fact that moving to another school outside of your country includes the cost of moving, living away from home, and the fees required for international school (and don't forget a student visa!), and you've got yourself quite the bill. Which is on top of your already-mounting student debt.

Additionally, the notion of "transferring" between most schools is laughable, at best. It's difficult enough to transfer within your school without losing all or most of your credits (and consequentially, tens of thousands of dollars of your money); doing so between schools is pretty much a huge pain in the ass.

Not that I'm complaining about the system - I don't know much about it, let alone have enough experience within it to judge it - but it's not as simple to use a less expensive school.

It's just one more step to open source! I'll start holding my breath now!

I'd say the sharing of ideas doesn't seem like it has much to do with Wikipedia, it's just trying to explain what everything is for the uninformed. Sharing ideas is for places like YouTube, where people *do* share them...every idea that comes into their head, no matter how inane.

Honestly, after reading TFA, it seems like this is a Flying Spaghetti Monster or Church of the SubGenius kind of case. The whole thing exists to throw a problem into sharp relief...it's not an "Art Project" so much as a method of arguing, trying to rally support for an issue by calling their side of the arugument something normally protected, like Art or a Religion. I'm all for what they're arguing, but I really don't know why they act all surprised when someone calls their bluff or tries to dismiss the tactic.