The value of something isn't tied to it's ease of duplication, at all. Property is not the only lens by which to view value. For example, property rights are not in play if I hire someone to clean my garage.

I don't know if you can. In the real world, duplicating objects is impossible. However, duplicating information in computers is essentially free. Therefore, I'm not sure that simulating the notion of "property rights" on a computer even makes sense. It certainly doesn't make sense if it costs DRM to achieve it.

The means by which they revoke permissions after the time limit must be transparent. DRM fails to meet this criteria.

Care to elaborate? I live in a Scandinavian country too and I'm curious about what's american-right-wing about our school system :)

Building a business model around time limits requires you to take rights away from the consumer. You can't justify online video "rentals" if they cannot be built transparently.

This seems to be a rather natural result of a two-party, winner-takes-it-all system, or rather an electoral system that favors such systems.

I know this isn't going to be liked here, but I want to say it anyway:

One of the eternal prides of the American people is their freedom of speech. You are comparatively free to incite whatever kind of racial/ethnic/religious hatred, and the beautiful theory is that enough good speech will nullify the effects of bad speech.

I say (and have said before) this only works precisely because you don't live in a democracy, but in a system where the actual ruling class have the power do not let the government to be swayed by such popular sentiments and moreover control the sentiments by controlling media. I believe it is fair to say that historically having such freedoms in actual democracies very much tends to lead to genocides and otherwise really bad results.

I'd say the killer feature is pure remote management. You don't need to physically manage your systems anymore.

I'm the opposite. I can't stand lacking the ability to dig in and change software when I don't like the way it works. It's rare that I actually do, but there's a huge freedom I get from knowing that when I need to extend the software, I can.

It's common for commercial software to not do what I want it to, either. I'd love to have a working amazon instant video client for my Android phone.

I think the alternative minimum tax kicks in at some point and imposes a (hefty) flat tax structure.

Crusade : Babylon 5 :: Frasier : Cheers

Babylon 5 ended at the finale of season 4. Not sure what you're talking about :)

I think you're confusing "other stories set in the same universe as the show Babylon 5" with "addendums to the story of the show Babylon 5"

Right, most programmers aren't that great; there's a bell curve. When you encounter a poor programmer who dooesn't have a degree, you might be inclined to think that's why. I'll see your anecdotes and raise you one: I once saw a guy with a PHD in comp sci write a single 10,000+ loc function.

At some point in your career, everyone is their own snowflake. I'm never going to compete against a candidate that is my equal in every other way but has a degree.

I'm fortunate to be a programmer, though, because it's one of the few industries that has woken up and seen what a worthless institution our higher education system has become.