I remember when all this was fields....

Yeah, I think you're right - we all want the newest games (music, video, movies, tv) the moment it comes out - but if you can discipline yourself to wait you can get it at a bargain price surprisingly soon.

I'm not so sure they didn't.... there's no DRM on their OS (no activation, no keys, no problem re-installing it on more than one Mac). Compare that to MS who practically accuse you of piracy before you run your first update.

The DRM they do have (in the Mac App store, iOS apps at least) is so low-key that most people don't even know it's there. I can buy an app once and install it on any and all iOS devices, again and again, with no concern at all. If it's a Mac app, I can install it on up to 5 Macs at once. Neither of these is likely to encourage me to go out and break the DRM, so it's serving its purpose of preventing me 'handing on' a copy to a friend.

The same with Movies, TV & Music - you can play them all back on all your devices, stream them to your friends' apple devices, everything short of hand over a copy. You can even burn a CD of your music with no DRM at all, if you like. I agree that it's more intrusive here, but because the limitations are reasonable (don't give it away, but you can do anything reasonable with it yourself) there's a much lower incentive to break the DRM.

Of course, this only holds true if you stay in the Apple ecosystem, but since most of their customers do - I bet most of them don't even know what DRM is, or why it's bad. I know I'm talking to Slashdot here, but remember we're not the typical users.

So in short, it's working for them, because of the decisions they made - customer comes first (as long as you stay in the walled garden) as opposed to trying to prevent each and every 'lost sale'.

You need an internet connection to download it anyhow, why not just install it right then?

At least Steam doesn't make you be online whenever you boot the game up.... like some DRM.

Or - and here's a radical thought - buy the game (so as to show support for the game you 'really need' to play) and then pirate it to get the 'critical feature' of being able to install it from your EM-shielded bunker? The makers get to eat, you get to add your perceived value, the pirate 'community' gets to show that actually they're NOT hurting sales, everyone wins.

Similar story with my 2009 Honda Civic - it's got a USB plug (actually a proprietary adaptor, but they provide a dongle to make it USB) for the iPod integration. No promises are made about iPhones, but my 3GS has worked perfectly so far. The Bluetooth works a treat too for making & receiving calls, ducks out the music properly and hasn't let me down (although the voice dialling is useless, it can't read the phone's address book properly, so I don't use it).

I plugged the lightning cable in and the iPhone 5 works just fine, as does anything else with a dock connector. If all else fails, there's an aux-in 3.5mm jack right next to it.

Now making about 50 percent more in Australia. Went from high five figures to low six. Living the American Dream(TM) in the southern hemisphere.

And before that we took single-sided 5.25" floppies, carefully removed the disc, cut some extra holes in the case, carefully replaced the disc and, if we were lucky, had a double-sided disc instead!

I remember the "fun" of installing Office from floppy in the 90's when it came on something like 44 discs.

aaaargh the nightmares.....................

The government of the time (and I'm not a fan of theirs) believed they did the best job for the taxpayer - they had a resource (bandwidth) and got a great price for it from the private sector. Do you blame the seller on eBay when all the other bidders push the price too high for you?

And of course, they botched the sale of all our gold reserves, but that's a whole different debate.

The operators bid high as the auction happened at the peak of the DotCom bubble, and the money was flowing nicely. Of course then the bubble burst, someone woke up and said 'you paid how much? we still have to buy all the hardware yet!' and they didn't invest as much in the infrastructure as they should have, so 3G took longer to show up than originally hoped. You can understand why they're not going to fall for that again...

There's a slightly angry summary on WikiPedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecoms_crash

You're out of your fucking mind if you think a Romney presidency wouldn't be worse than what we've got right now.

It would be an utter and complete horrorshow.

Has this ever, in the history of the United States, actually worked?

I'll spare you the research: no, it hasn't.

My theory is that the US Government was using the RIAA/MPAA as a proxy to get this rammed through.

Wow... are you being deliberately retarded or can you not help it?

Huh?

I missed the part where Kim Dotcom was uploading his own personal BluRay rips to MU.

I *remember* the part where his users did.

I don't give a shit how he made his money or whether or not you consider it "ill-gotten" simply because MU hosted some copyrighted material uploaded by users. It's an absurd contortion of logic and reason to say that he deserves none of his money because some of his users misbehaved.

$100m is the equivalent of one mid-tier movie budget. If you think Hollywood actually felt that tiny financial "hit", you're the one who's hopelessly naive.

#1 fails because there's no requirement, either written or implied, that a user's internet connection be secured.

#2 fails because common sense.