Bill? It's nice to see you posting on /. once in a while! Keep in touch man.

Couldn't you also say, "And that's all they do...for 30 minutes, after which they go back to playing World of Warcraft"?

#2 sounds a little more like this to me:

2. I bought a stereo for my car, when the car died I took the stereo with me.

The conclusion being that, the way things currently work, I would not be allowed to take my stereo with me.

That's a tax the company will use to write off, and then turn around and pass the cost off onto us.

You are a god!

Wouldn't the contents of the MP3 tag elements change the hash? If I make sure to run some batch MP3 tag editor against my files to add a comment "Ripped by me from my own personal CD collection", wouldn't that do it?

But you are missing on on the tried and true recycle... cycle.

It seems that a good 25% of any system's catalog consists of updated oldies.

Nintendo seems worse but I suspect that is because their catalog dates back much farther than Sony's or MS's.

From a different perspective...

A treaty is not a simple thing. I am sure you have heard the phrase about choosing your battles, i.e. fight battles you really want to win and lose the ones you don't care enough about because they will generally help you win those others. In that light, I am sure there is a lot of winning and losing in a treaty. So, no, treaties probably are not 100% enforced for a myriad of reasons.

While the poster's comments may be a bit off keel, I would say that Nintendo can fight its own battles. They are not a US company and they should not expect US tax dollars to fund their particular war on piracy.

I am an AT&T shareholder. There, I said it.

Do I have any rights to complain as a shareholder that I think this is bad for the shareholders?

Surely Microsoft must have some idea to include a music/media portal in Windows and/or media player so that users don't have to think about running something "scary" like iTunes or a browser in order to buy music.

How about XP fanboys? Or OSX fanboys? Or Windows Server 2008 fanboys? Or Windows for Workgroups fanboys? Or even, dare I say it, Windows ME fanboys?!

Honestly, I am most upset that I was forced to get Vista "for free" on my newest laptop and now I am stuck with it unless I want to pay even more M$ tax. Microsoft should do the world a favor and offer free upgrades to 7. Now *that* would shut a lot of people up.

And all without managed memory, automatic garbage collection, etc., imagine that! Seriously, I see so many devs (and M$, who has a product to sell) insisting that all that junk is what will save us. What they're doing is attempting to create a Fisher Price dev environment where you don't have to think anymore because they've done it all for you. What's going to happen to this world when GenC# programmers replace the old guard and they don't have the least clue about what is going on inside the computer that makes the magic happen?

Or spent on companies that are good old USA companies, with tax shelters in Ireland and 99% outsourcing? But hey, they're American companies!

Um, no, this has nothing to do with object oriented code; but the first part of your statement is spot on.