If the web does not have DRM then consumers can only use services like Netflix where Netflix deigns to create an app (plug-ins are on their way out).

But what is being proposed, is identical to that. Consumers will only be able to use services like Netflix where Netflix deigns to create an implementation of their proprietary EME plugin.

If DRM is a standardized part of the web then anyone with a standards compliant browser can access those services.

This is where the confusion lies. Nobody is suggesting making DRM itself a standardized part of the web; you're rooting for a side which isn't in the fight. They're talking about making a non-standard DRM component (something just as unportable as Flash and Silverlight, and subject to its ONE CREATOR'S whims) have standard API for the browser to use. This is a tiny little issue; Flash already used a defacto-standard API for the browser to inferface with. Such a defacto interface isn't maybe as good as a well-described one, so you could see this new API as a minor step forward, but it comes with the cost of legitimizing and endorsing something which is just completely ridiculous.

I want the choice to be able to stray beyond the dominant platforms and still use Netflix.

That is not being offered by this HTML5 compromise, and it won't get you closer to that. If Netflix, as the one and only party in the world who will have the closed trade secret to make the Netflix decrypter, should decide to ever see fit to allow the specific non-dominant platform that you're thinking of, to join the list of platforms they support by making a Netflix plugin for it, they're just as likely to decide to allow an app on that platform.

Allowing you to watch Netflix, is not something that is being standardized. That aspect would remain as closed as Flash's DRM. This is how all DRM must always be. The only way Netflix can ever be standardized such that you will be permitted to use it on a device of your choosing, is if they drop the DRM.

Or if they were to standardize the DRM itself, I suppose that would work. But they wouldn't want to do that, since the whole point of DRM is to keep people from implementing it! :-)

I don't like web pages. I'm running a galactic simulation in my terminal.

Maybe, if they get noticed. These obscure little companies can fly under the radar for quite a while, sometimes.

In the partisan difference of opinion between the two different positions, "television ought to be funny" and "television ought to not be funny" it's true that I generally try to re-enforce my existing, inflexible, I-will-never-take-opposition-seriously-or-open-my-mind-to-reason partisan view.

I actually do sometimes watch non-comedies, though. Hannibal isn't funny; it takes opposite side in the partisan debate. (I'm not sure I like this show, though. Coincidence?) GoT isn't funny; that's another one from the other side; radically different than Jon Stewart's take on TV. Mad Men usually isn't funny. You know what, though? Even among these exceptions, it seems like there's always a joke here 'n' there. Holy crap, dude, I wonder if you're right. Am I only being exposed to one side of the comedy debate? Is this why I stopped watching Jim Lehrer? Honestly, his show is the only one I can think of, where I can't remember anything funny ever happening. Even David Attenborough sometimes doesn't exactly joke, but shows something funny anyway.

And of course, if you're getting you news from nbc, cbs or abc along with cnn the information presented comes down to "some reporting or none at all."

Who? Aren't those TV stations from last century? I get my news from whoever news.google.com is linking to today.

BTW, I think Google is great and I need to buy their stock and the government is overregulating them and all of the court cases against them are unfair and all their competitors totally suck. But that's just a coincidence!

(But seriously: television news? Really? If ever I get news from TV, it's The Daily Show.mp4. I don't even watch Jim Lehrer anymore! Somehow the PVR's most recent 5 recordings always just sit there, unwatched, each one replaced a week later by a new one that I also don't spend the time to watch. I keep thinking, maybe some day I'll go back to watching TV news. Yep, I keep thinking that. And the years go by.)

Metal detectors also detect metal knives/box-cutters/scissors/skewers - not just guns.

Yes, and they also detect keys and coins.

It is possible to buy ceramic knives, although I believe the cooking knives have a metal slug in the handle to make them show up on metal detectors.

My point is that it's stupid to depend on people remembering, or forcing them, to add metal to things in order to show up. That's just telling the world how to circumvent the detection tech. Which means that if someone wants to go undetected, they'll be able to do it. If Congress is worried about ceramic knives, then they ought to be telling security people to work on detecting ceramic knives, instead of asking people to put metal slugs in them so that they'll become compatible with some obsolete tech.

My way of avoiding viruses, isn't to mail all@* something like "if you send me a virus, please pad it with whatever numbers will make its checksum become 0xDEAFBEEF." You'd laugh at me if I did that, but that's analogous to what we're talking about here.

Open data, huh? Will this include some actual facts about Benghazi, or does Obama plan on continuing to cover that up?

They publish it right here: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/countrytemplate_ly.html. What coverup? Do you have any verbs, or just a place name? FWIW, Wikipedia's page is much better, but that's to be expected.

How about Fast and Furious? Will we finally learn how much of a role Obama played in that?

Unlike whatever unsubstantiated 911-truther new-age-shakra-measuring black-cat-fearing fantasy you have about Benghazi, F&F was a real scandal where the government was objectively working against its own people. I seriously doubt the president is going to want to talk about that much.

Or how about opening up the data on how much the FBI knew about the Tsarnaevs ahead of time?

Meh. Unlike F&F (active malice toward the people) that was the usual mere incompetence at worst and I'm not even sure it was that. What's there to know? How is that going to be interesting to anyone?

But if they're plastic, then shouldn't they not set off metal detectors? If someone's looking for metal, a plastic gun is irrelevant. That seems perfectly ok, unless .. oh no. Oh no. Oh please, god no. Please don't tell me people are trying to use metal detectors as gun detectors. No! OMG! Is this why they keep asking me to take my keys out of my pocket at the airport?! Holy shit, you mean they weren't really interested in my keys, and they were fucking with ME all along, over something that had nothing to do with me, since I never carry a gun?

That's sarcasm but also there's truth in it. At some point, someone got the bright idea that guns were always metal, so metal detectors seemed like a way to detect guns. And that was an ok hack. I don't blame anymore for that. But when gun tech moved on, and they started legislating that the old hack still had to work, that was stupid. All that does is create an expense for good guys (have to add un-needed metal to gun) and won't detecct an actual bad guy (since he has no reason to add metal to his gun). This is just more evidence that Congress shouldn't ever try to legislate tech, since they always get it wrong.

When metal detectors became obsolete as weapons detectors, we should have accepted and acknowleged it, not pretended they still worked and passed laws that everyone is required to join in on the illusion. Acknowledging it would have encouraged people to come up with better ideas and maybe made things safer. Instead, we got ... this bullshit: security theater where someone can literally be found guilty of a crime for not acting the part.

physical media inherently requires that the media be broadly compatible with a wide range of products by multiple companies, because the mere existence of the physical media necessitates that compatibility.

Ah, so you've never bought a Sony product (audio recorder or camera). I didn't realize there were people like you out there, and it gives me hope. Keep up the good pattern, for it has given you an idealism that I, for one, find very fresh and exciting. ;-)

On to your real point...

Actually, by digital content, I meant "non-gratis digital downloads and streaming", though I'll readily admit that DRM does make the problem worse. .. With digital downloads, all of those barriers that previously kept content providers honest no longer matter. Up until the point at which consumer backlash kicks in, there's nothing preventing having a hundred different competing devices, none of which can read content created for any of the others.

DRM doesn't make the problem worse ; it makes the problem, as it's the main proprietary component which makes interoperability difficult (and illegal, thanks to DMCA). Without the DRM, you could replace those hundred competing devices or software components, with one which you have forced to work with all the hundred different "standards." Or you'd have filters/converters that, say, take Netflix content and converts it to something your Amazon-spec player can handle (or vice-versa). Even your narrowly-defined "digital content" definition ultimately has its problems really because of DRM and the proprietary format (the two are closely realted). It's not because it's digital or because it was a non-gratis digital download.

Please, have a look at this example: https://buy.louisck.net/purchase/live-at-the-beacon-theater. What you'll see is something that fits your definition of non-gratis digital download in every way. I'll admit you can't use it as a frisbee, but really, it doesn't threaten to increase the proliferation of players. It's not going to result in another wall-wart or yet another weird app that you have to install. Whatever player already you have, will very likely work with what he's selling. A thousand other content creators, none of them working together or united by a single store which forces a technical constraint upon them, could do that and it would all just work. Digital content is not a problem; it's a good thing and solves more problems than it creates. Just keep away from the proprietary stuff.

Do. Not. Trust. Digital. Content.

s/Digital/Proprietary Formatted/

Digital was never a problem, and was maybe the best thing to ever happen for interoperability. I bet your 25 year old music CDs still work great, and the fact they're digital, is probably why you don't ever actually spin the discs to listen to their music anymore. ;-) Don't be dissin' digital content; let's be clear what the real problem is.

Except once you think about it, you don't actually know anyone who bought a Kindle for themself, do you? Kindles are the ultimate thoughtless "gift." Like a turd, but with less feeling.

Why do you want the government to be your water company? They just put flourine in your water, to keep you re-electing communists.

It's not the electrical engineers; it's the software guys. The scenario isn't that an attacker shorts something out; it's that he tricks machines into thinking there's a higher risk of shorting something out (or conceivably: brownouts from overuse).

You can build an electric grid as reliably as you want, but if my software doesn't believe you, and decides to draw lower power when it mistakenly thinks others are drawing more power than they really are, then my software can be DoSed.

You just fired the wrong guy. But thanks for protecting my job. Maybe this union idea isn't as stupid and unethical as I thought it was. ;-)

When I RTFAed, the impression I got is that the charging stations cooperate with one another and trust one another. That is, one charging station can influence the behavior of others. Furthermore it's supposedly relatively easy to get a charging station's signing key and then impersonate that charging station. That is, I can say I'm a nearby charging station who si charging 100 cars right now, and thereby persuade other charging systems that right now isn't a good time for them to charge their cars, or charge them slowly. DoS, via lying about a resource being scarcer than it really is.

The ease of impersonation is not really an EV issue, but rather a defect in how these particlar EV charging systems work. The machines are not well-protected.

The reason the impersonation matters (why the cooperation and trust happens in the first place) is where the EV-specific tech comes in. Gas pumps scale better than electricity "pumps," because they're buffered by gas stations' storage tanks. If ten gas stations are all working at the same time, it doesn't put extra pressure on the gas-delivery tankers, the way that ten charging stations working at the same time, puts pressure on the shared electricity system.

This is not EV FUD; no implications were made that EV should be avoided. It's a call to people to protect their EV chargers, make the keys harder to get, or have chargers deal with the trust issues different, or buffer the energy at night so they don't need to cooperate with one another, etc.

If there's FUD, it's against certain manufacturers.

US companies are looking for any reason to disqualify US candidates to justify their greed, I mean need for "importing non-local, lower-waged talent".

Even if I were to accept that at face value, my point is: WTF does it have to do with a browser test? A browser test is going to filter out the same fraction of US applicants as non-US applicants.

Suppose I'm an employer in your fantasy bearded-Spock universe, with an agenda of hiring non-US workers. 5 US workers apply for my position, and 5 Indians. I want to hire the Indians and I'll use any excuse I can think of, to justify it. So I say, "Aha, let's look at the browsers they used. People who use IE on Windows, Safari on Mac OS, or Firefox on Ubuntu 12.04, I'll just cross off the list of applicants because they're dumber-than-average for not installing a different browser." Are you saying this is going to change my resulting pool to have more Indian applicants than US applicants?

I would understand you argument, if the "test" involved (ok, I'm about to reach into my jar of stereotypes and make an ass of myself, but this is the Internet so let's just do it) ruling out people who don't like spicy food. Then I'd have 2 US applicants and 4 Indian applicants. A spicy food test works for my anti-US agenda. But how the fuck do browsers help my agenda?

Show me the stats, where non-US people are more likely to install Chromium on their Ubuntu system than Americans are, or that they'll install Firefox on their Windows more than Americans do, etc. Because that's what you're saying, right? If that's not what you're saying, then explain how the bullshit test does help their secret agenda of not hiring US applicants, because I don't get it.

To me, your conspiracy theory doesn't make sense even within your paranoid reality. It's like a 9/11 truther going on about how we know the US government blew up WTC and the evidence is .. OS/2, man, OS/2!