It's fat, white actors all the way down, son.

Content is more important to you. To the companies providing the content, however, money made off your intake of the content is worth the sacrifice of screen real estate.

>consumer protection laws
Clearly you are not familiar with America.

Sooooooo...H.264 needs to be the standard because it's the standard? Your argument is kinda cyclical. IE6 used to be the ubiquitous. used to be acceptable to use. Why aren't they anymore? Because something better came along. Tech isn't good just because it's universally supported. It just makes it hard to transition away from.

Pretty much, as long as you could change the front-end to use some other VOIP protocol other than Skype. In fact, what I'd like to see is something like Pidgin for VOIP. Transparent support for many protocols. Then you can just have your contact list of friends and call them, regardless of what they use.

So....you're saying that the aircraft is going to be vulnerable to anti-aircraft missiles. Stop the presses.

Really. If the blimp can be built cheaper than an airplane/UAV, and cover loads more area, then it getting shot down would be unpleasant, but a loss less expensive than losing a plane, its fuel, its weapon payload, its pilot, and so on.

Although technically what you present as an average slashdotter's mindset is true, it's an oversimplification. Music piracy is condoned or at least given more leeway because it's largely the symptom of a bigger problem, that being copyright and DRM asshattery where a user who pays for music ends up unable to use it for whatever reason.

ID theft, though, is simply theft and exploitation of others for profit.

At least, that's how I see it.

I was getting into the whole suggestion, but halfway through, I realized something.

At least in America (I'm not very familiar with court systems around the world), there's the whole legal system of "innocent until proven guilty" and the fifth amendment and such. This means that even if you DO have an encryption program installed, until the prosecution can present sufficient evidence that you're storing child porn within some encrypted volume, you can't be asked to give up your password, or even charged with possession.

The futility of this guy's talk is, if you're NOT in a court system where you're innocent until proven guilty, whether it's some backwater third world nation or some secret prison camp in the U.S., whether or not you've got a super stealthy encryption tool, if the Bad Guys think you've got state secrets hidden on your laptop, they're gonna break your bones until you tell them where the secrets are hidden. All in all, it'll be futile. You're fucked whether or not you've got the secrets.

Amen. Nobody seems to understand that we (at least in America) live in a hugely capitalistic society, and that means that we as the consumer hold IMMENSE power. It's all well and good to buy an ipod and then write to Apple complaining about DRM, but that doesn't mean much, because they've got your money already.

Exercise your capitalistic rights to control the market.

tl;dr ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH

I have no problem with DRM until it stops me from being able to use my media legally as I see fit. If a DRM scheme somehow prevented me from giving a file to my friends, but let me listen to the song on my ipod, Sansa, or Zune as I wished, that'd be perfectly okay. I don't mind buying products/services/licenses. The DRM that is demonized is the DRM that preemptively treats you like a criminal and unfairly restricts your usage of a PRODUCT THAT YOU PAID FOR THE USAGE OF.

Your post makes it sound like DRM is bad. BAD DRM is bad. Whether or not it can be effectively implemented is another issue; I know you couldn't magically detect the difference between a new media player and a friend's thumb drive.

I'm not trying to be snippy or sarcastic here...um, what about Firefox has something to do specifically with Windows? As far as my experience goes, everything in Firefox is completely cross-platform.

"Back in my day, a phone was a phone and we didn't have any of you young hoodlums' fancy options. now get off my lawn!"

Hooray, you like simplicity. FUCKING GREAT FOR YOU. Buy a simple phone plan and a simple phone for yourself, and let those who DO want fancy options and features have them.

That reminds me of a quote from Sid Meier's Aplha Centauri by entrepreneur Nwabudike Morgan: "We are not a monopoly. Our product is simply so good that no one chooses to compete with us."

I'm not terribly concerned about Google, to be honest. I know they have a lot of my personal data. But they provide high quality products/services and don't treat me like shit. They're reliable and friendly and trustworthy. Microsoft, on the other hand, has always been shifty in one way or another, and their products have always seemed only partially baked and ready.

Benevolent dictators are okay when they're actually benevolent. So far, Google hasn't done anything to wrong me.

Meh. People are gonna pirate regardless, and no matter what DRM is invented, it will be cracked. There will always be content pirates. The best you can do is treat your LEGITIMATE customers well enough that they buy from you again and again and compensate for whatever losses you might take from pirates.