Yes, I do realize that. Doesn't change the fact that people, many in fact, were buying music from them when it was DRMed.

What corporation, that doesn't have an IT department run by complete fucktards, buys their employees Sony Vaios?

Your strong vision means jack shit if none of the players like it and stop playing your game.

The comment I was replying to was about content being able to be revoked from you on a whim which can be done with both the Steam store and iTunes it had nothing to do with longevity after the service dies.

You mean like how no one uses the iTunes store or Steam?

Except that a good number of the big industry players have their hands some how involved in the patent pool of H.264. If you think they are going to ditch H.264 for some no-name free codec then you are living in a dream world. http://www.mpegla.com/avc/avc-licensors.cfm

Except if that were really all that compelling to the commercial users of MPEG standards they would have come up with something like this on their own. To companies like Apple, Sony, Paramount, etc who are some of the biggest users of these standards the royalty fees are mere pittance to them. If none of these bigger players are going to switch to Theora (and pretty much none of them will) it has no viability.

Actually I would think that the typical couple of thousand dollars that are lost in the first year on your car is far worse than the 75 cents loss of value on a bus pass.

I didn't say you should. I have to wonder if you even read my post. Here I will post it again:

Notice how I specifically said it shouldn't be cross-subsidized (paid for by other parts of the government's budget) and it should be supported only through customer subscriptions. Which in turn means that it should only be run in the case of it being able to be a self-supporting business. So in light of what I actually said, I'm not sure what you are railing against in my post as I never once stated that anyone should have to pay for anyone else's internet service. I also have no clue from what orifice that you pulled out the nonsense where you try to claim that I was saying someone should pay for my (or anyone else's) house and car.

Well of course there is no 100% guarantee, but it sure is a hell of a lot higher than if there was no service at all!

Sorry, but no. Longhorn was always the just the codename for the early versions of Vista prior to it being rebranded Vista in 2005.

Welcome to last year. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2008/08/nokia-helps-port-firefox-to-qt.ars

Then you haven't apparently been following much of the aftermath of UAC because most users are apparently just clicking allow blindly without caring.

And visible light starts at around 660 THz which is a 275000 fold jump from 2.4 GHz. Oh my god we better start panicking!

Actually most users don't bother to read the warning and just click through. The problem is that no matter how many warnings the OS throws up, the average user will still run programs they shouldn't.