but I'm in the US on an H1B, you insensitive clod!

And quickly. Before the mug melts...

"Ask me about Loom"

Ah, but that's because Marko Ramius was actually Lithuanian by birth. Everyone knows that the Lithuanians were the Scots of the USSR.

Star Wars Episode 7: Sith My Dad Says

Parent poster is less insightful than (s)he thinks (s)he is. However, I appreciate them taking the time to present the argument, so I'll take the time to try to provide a reasoned rebuttal.

Yes, the content companies are still going to continue to try to push DRM on the world, but that doesn't mean that it's:

(a) not fundamentally a broken design (see the many, many arguments elsewhere on the web as to why DRM is fundamentally a "security by obscurity" approach, possibly modulo uber-draconian TPM approaches),

(b) something that needs to be inflicted on *everyone* at the web infrastructure level &

(c) something to be passively accepted as inevitable.

If a large subset of web users want to watch DRM-encumbered "Gossip Girl" streams, they're free to use something like Flash or Silverlight that's added on top of HTML specifically for that purpose. Right now, as an end-user, I can choose to use or not use such things, but I don't want this baked into the HTML standard itself.

If someone comes up with a proprietary, protected media delivery system that's actually good enough in terms of performance to work for the general consumer crowd, then fine. If it's more stuttery rubbish like we have now, then so be it: it clearly doesn't cut the mustard anyway. Note that I type this as someone who only last night ran into exactly the problems mentioned here: the preceding ad on the website would play, but the video I wanted to watch wouldn't.

Stuffing everyone into the same DRM straitjacket at the HTML level just makes no sense from the user's point of view (but plenty of financial sense for the media companies, who can then impose restrictions on *everyone* at once, even if they have no interest whatsoever in GenericMediaCorp's output). Personally, in such a world, I'd probably just use two browsers anyway: one that doesn't support the DRM extensions for most of the stuff I want to actually do, & one that does, just for watching the occasional DRMed video. So it's functionally equivalent anyway, in that I have the Silverlight plugin installed, but I think I've only used it three times in as many years.

So yes: "please use other applications as necessary" *is* the better answer, as it at least allows users to vote with (the electronic equivalent of) their feet. The most obvious example of this is that the drop in Flash video popularity in the last few years can't be entirely unrelated to its exclusion from iOS devices, for example. A fragmented market for DRM on the web is a *good* thing for end users.

Agreed. Al Jazeera is already available as one of the free OTA digital channels in many places in Europe - this should not be seen as a big deal.

It's my understanding that many of its journalists have been trained in the West, and/or with Western news organizations such as the BBC. The BBC produced a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Al Jazeera a few years ago, & the staff definitely came across as modern, professional journalists to a fault. In one instance, the real-time translator stayed at his post even while his family were in an area of heavy fighting and he was unable to determine if they had been injured.

Having watched it myself, as a white, non-Muslim Westerner with no connections or affiliations at all to the Middle East, I have generally found their news coverage to be more content-rich and less opinion-piece-filled than many of the major US news networks. if nothing else, their service is mercifully free of the obnoxious Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck "talking head" types that are unfortunately so common on the US networks.

Mod parent up.

Same here. My folks have a (pre-Intel!) Mac Mini which still works well for them with OS X 10.5, & my parents were both much more keen on that than their old Windows machine.

However, I got my mother an iPad during this last year, and she totally loves it. She still uses the Mac for paying bills online & other more involved stuff, but otherwise, it's the tablet all the way.

The user support calls from my parents (which were already fairly rare with the Mac Mini) are now almost completely a thing of the past. I actually had the first one in months today, & the solution basically boiled down to my asking "Have you tried turning it off & on again?". And this was only something I needed to talk her through because the tablet had been so reliable previously that she hadn't actually realized there was a way to totally power it down, as opposed to just putting it into sleep mode.

Perhaps you're referring to Minitel?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

Well, in all fairness, "Men In Black" does have some fairly quotable lines.

Or whom, y'know, had their cable & internet service taken out by a falling tree...

Nokia's N-series mini tablets (& N900 phone) offered a hidden-but-documented "red pill/blue pill" option, so that knowledgeable users could effectively choose to switch off the consumer failsafes & tinker, secure in the knowledge that if they broke stuff while experimenting, they were on their own:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Red_Pill_mode

This gave the benefits of both a safe, supported "appliance" experience for Muggles, & a hackable (in the old-school sense) environment for the techie types. I think it's a shame that this didn't become standard practice for tablets & smartphones.

These days, to do the "red pill" kind of thing, one usually has to resort to Jailbreaking/rooting gear via exploits, & I think the world as a whole is generally poorer for it. Sadly, even the Nokia of today is not the Nokia of old. I still yearn for a manufacturer/customer relationship that's collaborative, rather than confrontational.

Caveat: like many others, I did eventually succumb & buy a couple of Apple mobile devices (phone, iPad) a few years ago in order to benefit from the much more stable ecosystem (I was already using their truly excellent laptops at that point, & Android was still very rough), so it could certainly be argued that I eventually voted with the herd (rather than the Hurd, har har). However, I only bought them after I definitely knew I could Jailbreak them, and I won't run any version of iOS that I can't (added bonus: no Apple Maps fiasco experience for me).