Do you really think that intel/apple/microsoft/sony/moster want a technology ecosystem in which everything works cheaply, robustly, and for a long time without replacement? Planned obsolescence has been a feature of the durable goods industries for a long time, otherwise there'd be no reason for you to spend any more money, ever.
Once the velocity of money slows, your economy tanks.
Sure, you could do this all over one fiber connection, but once you did, it would JUST WORK!
All of these key escrow schemes, I guarantee, will retain the "rights" of the content creators to force you to sit through the previews, warnings, and tedious menus each time you want to watch "your" content regardless of where you play it, every time you play it.
(I'm only posting this because I want it archived with this article.)
This reminds me of the paper "The Camel Has Two Humps," which details the author's theory that some people just aren't cut out for computer programming because they lack the ability to conceptualize in a machine-friendly manner.
This is a problem that is not best served by "dumbing down" computers to be useable by people who have no business programming them, in the same manner as television shows should not be dumbed down to be readily accessible to the visually-impaired.
Why is so little effort being spent making it easy for me to repair my own car with soft, clean, lego-like tools?
If you want to be a plumber, you have to be willing to occasionally shove your arm into a pile of s#it to solve a problem.
If you want to program computers, you have to be willing to occasionally shove your brain into a pile of mathematics to solve a problem.
I'll believe computer programming is "ready for the masses" when plumbing is "ready for the masses".
It's all about the tubes, people.
Today's low-bitrate MP3/AAC will be tomorrow's vinyl.
I firmly believe that you prefer what you're accustomed to hearing in the first place. Most kids today have grown up hearing nothing better than highly-compressed FM or low-bitrate MP3 music. They don't know anything better, and given the option of hearing better music, perhaps even uncompressed, with a much larger dynamic range and noise floor, they'll gravitate to what their ears and brain have been trained to appreciate.
Tomorrow's world will have "128Kbps MP3 Afficionado" publications extolling the virtues, "warmth", and "naturalness" of the low-bitrate MP3. And audiophiles will pay top-dollar for crippled hardware and overcompressed, undersampled music tracks.
Please do not destroy vital network apparatus.
I've told this story before on slashdot, but once--about 10 years ago--the shuttle flew over Austin, TX on descent to land in FL not long after sunset. We went outside to see the boiling plasma trail it left in the atmosphere, then went back inside to see it touch down 9 MINUTES LATER.
Fast, indeed.
Slackware Linux, pre-1.0 kernel, roughly 1992 (my memory is hazy)... I was using it to run Common LISP much more effectively than the unfortunate ones who were using the class-provided DOS-based version of LISP with horrible memory management limitations.
This let me solve larger problems in a much more friendly development environment (including basic X windows w/ TWM) than they could. It made my university days much more tolerable and productive, right up until I was forced to use OS/2 2.1, which I also fondly remember for no other reason than I could communicate with the actual developers via email and they'd respond about issues I was having writing device drivers.
Good times.
All your files have been destroyed (sorry). Paul.