Very little in life is truly binary.

TIL you can buy something outright and resell it, and you're "cheating out" the previous owner.

Unless something has changed, the article is wrong. iOS 7-compatible devices will automaticaly download the update when connected to Wifi, the update will take around 3GB of space or so on the device, and worst of all it's the only way to recover that space on a jailed device is to install the update, but it doesn't actually install automatically from what I understand.

+4? Really, Slashdot? This AC obviously didn't read the article, and neither did anyone who modded them up.

I'm not shitting on streaming subscriptions. I actually like the idea of it, it's basically the modern-day video store, except instead of physically going to the video store (or having them mail you discs), you pay a subscription and can access anything you want. But it's up front with the fact that it's a subscription and you lose access to everything if you no longer pay.

The problem with digital downloads in a non-streaming fashion is that people treat them like purchases, both consumers and copyright holders. "Buy it today on the XStation Wii eShop!" If it's being sold as a purchase and not as a rental, there are supposed to be certain rights that digital downloads bypass.

The fact that it even happened should be a warning flag to stay the hell away from digital downloads as the primary means of acquiring entertainment.

It's not so bad when it's media that you can get physically in another form (like Nintendo's Virtual Console versus the original carts). However, when you start seeing media sold only as a digital download (which already happens sometimes), then you're at the mercy of the copyright holder. Do you really trust the copyright cartel, long-term, to let you have access to their stuff without paying and paying and paying?

You're not buying the goods, you're renting them. You're always at the whim of the copyright owner with regards to your continued access to the work you paid for.

Mark my words, when physical media is gone, they'll stop selling media to you indefinitely, but charge you for the same content on a recurring basis. Not like Netflix where you're paying for access to stream any number of works, but you'll pay per month (or per access) for a single work.

Plus, with everything so locked down and controlled by the copyright owners, much more media will be lost to time due to the inability to move it between systems freely. Almost 30 years later, you can still acquire and play the original Super Mario Bros on an authentic NES, without getting the okay from Nintendo to do so. When digital downloads are the only method to acquire media, then you can forget about buying used copies 30, 40, 50 years later. By the time copyright actually lapses and you can legally do something about it, it'll be too late as all the original hardware will likely be either destroyed or non-functional.

That's sort of the inherent nature of emulation. Next thing we know, you'll be complaining that it takes a fairly beefy machine to accurately emulate the C64.

I fail to see how the contents of my nearly-abandoned blog are relevant to this discussion.

Unless you intended to respond with an ad hominem attack instead of actually debating, that is.

Because not everyone who is charged with a crime is actually guilty, and (at least in theory) we generally feel that it's better to let 100 guilty parties go free than convict a single innocent person.

Yeah, like cash that is stored outside of a bank, in a safe place, has no risk of government seizure...

Funny, because I can think of several good uses for tech like Glass. If you can't, you need to think outside the box.

That's not what Glass is, though. If you think it is, you need to do some more research.

Glass is very much tech - it may not be, at this moment, the revolutionary tech that some people think it is, but it's tech.

For example, Glass (or tech like it, I understand people's hesitation for such a product from Google) has the potential to remove doubt from situations that are "he said, she said", by being an impartial observer. If everyone was wearing HMDs with cameras, maybe people might think twice about being assholes, knowing that they might get called out on it. It wouldn't be some kind of tech panacea - nothing ever will be, IMO - but it has legitimate uses.

Remember kids, technology isn't good or bad, it's what people do with it.

So many Luddites on a technology-centered site.