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That's not good enough. The Start menu has to return
No, it doesn't. Microsoft doesn't have to do anything. Haven't you figured that out yet?
I believe his implication was that the Start menu has to return in order for people to want to buy it. Microsoft isn't required to do what customers want, and... customers are not required to remain customers.
The problem then becomes the fact that it gives incentive for device prices to remain artificially high. If the device is higher priced, companies make more money. It justifies warranty purchases (also at higher prices) in many minds due to how expensive the device is.
The solution to this problem is more competition.
Now in the case of Apple specifically I'll give them a certain level of a pass on this because they are well known for honoring their warranties very consistently. Everyone else...not so much.
Agreed. I've had a consistently positive experience with Apple's repair services, although I suppose it's not ideal that I've needed it on the majority of Apple products that I've owned.
Rather than focusing on DRM itself, let's turn things back around and focus on why we have DRM in the first place.
There is a demand for rented content. A movie that I want to watch once, but have no desire to keep. A book I want to read once, but don't plan to read again. I song I want to hear when I'm in the mood to listen to music, but don't want to own. Not everyone wants these things - you might not want these things - but a lot of people do, including me. I also want to own things, but for now let's focus on the things I don't. I might be willing to pay $15 to buy my own copy of a movie, but I only want to pay a tenth of that to rent it.
It used to be that you could go to a video rental place and rent a movie on VHS. It was possible to copy them, but most people didn't own the necessary equipment (a second VCR), there was a loss of quality in the copying process, and the blank media cost about as much as the rental. Similar issues with copying a show of the TV or a song off the radio (minus the part about the second VCR).
In the digital era, data can be copied perfectly with no loss of quality and the media to store it on is cheap.
As a consumer, I want the option to rent a movie for $1.50 or buy it for $15. Content providers want to offer me this choice. How would you suggest that this should work?
What kind of pedantic choice of interpretation is that?
Internet-pedantry, where either 1) pedantry is misapplied because the word in question does not have a single, precise definition to be pedantic over, and both the the original and the "pedant's" "pedantic" correction are correct or 2) pedantry is possible because the word does have a precise technical definition, but the "pedant" has no idea what that is and is wrong while the original usage was correct.
15,000 watts per kilo of aluminum made in electricity
For how long are 15,000 watts expended? Power usage isn't meaningful in this context. Need a duration to get energy.
Ahh, maybe that was it - not that it's difficult to do, just that it requires a $50 app to do it.
And if the DRM offends you so much, remove it. Honestly for a Slashdot user to complain about something so easy to strip is rather silly.
Last time I looked into it, removing DRM from FairPlay DRM'd videos without loss of quality sounded non-trivial. Do you have an easy way to do it?
Then you should have switched ISP. By paying an ISP that didn't deal with spam, you were part of the problem, so your inconvenience leaves me cold.
No no, It's a fair point. Sometimes switching ISPs isn't that simple, and the user has no way to know an ISP's reputation as a spam source before signing up with them.
But (to the GP) do you really mean ISP or email hosting provider? If you're relaying through your hosting provider but the mail is being rejected because your ISP is blacklisted, then somebody is doing something wrong (I do not condone using Spamhaus in this way). If you meant to say your email hosting provider is blacklisted, well, that's a problem.
What about the idea that Spamhaus, by being a blacklist, is denying service to all sorts of websites itself? Why is a DDOS attack that much different from what they do every day?
I mean, sure, they block a lot of spam, but what about all the times someone's domain gets blacklisted and it's not spam? And yeah, I realize domain admins opt in to use their blacklists.
I don't think you really understand what you're talking about. First of all, Spamhaus isn't denying service to web sites; they're listing IP addresses of known spam sources. Mail administrators use the list to block email - not web sites - from those IPs. Spamhaus is just one of many such services, but Spamhaus happens to be the best. Why is that? Exactly because they keep the false positives to a minimum. What you're talking about theoretically COULD happen, and certainly does happen with other blacklists, but the reason we mail admins use the Spamhaus SBL-XBL lists instead of the other blacklists is because we DON'T see legitimate servers getting blocked. Believe me, if we were blocking legitimate mail, our users would complain. It's not happening.
It still does not change the fact it's a denial of service, coming from a self-appointed body that is in no better position to judge what is and is not spam than anyone else.
They are in a better position. I don't know how they do it, I don't know how they got into that position, but they've managed to pull it off.
A real common tactic with political campaigns is to sign up for the opponents mailing list on an AOL account, wait for them to send you an email, then complain you are receiving spam. AOL turns around and gets that domain blacklisted. Then it takes time and resources to resolve the issue.
I just don't see much of a difference.
The difference is that while this happens all the time with AOL's internal blacklist, Spamhaus doesn't work this way.
Let's say I want to run a public DNS recursive server, that is, I want to allow anyone to issue a handful of queries for any arbitrary DNS records, and in addition to just serving up my own, I want to also service requests for whatever arbitrary thing they requested. Is there an easy way to rate limit these queries based on source IP address, to prevent abuse of this service I've chosen to offer?
How should one set that up?
Isn't there some kind of braille encoding on US bills like on canadian money?
Not currently. They're starting to talk about it. Check again in five years.
The opportunity for "wrong" is that you can be biased to choose one expert or priest over another. You're likely to make this choice based on, to some extent, what the guy next to you thinks.
I choose the concesus. I never choose "one" expert unless I'm sure that expert is representing the concensus opinion of many scientists. If there's large segments with varying opinions, usually indicating a lack of data to explain which is more correct, then I remain agnostic. If there's one expert who disagrees with everyone else, I am leery of that expert's opinion, even if it's exactly what I want to hear.
If that expert turns out to be right, then that will eventually be reflected by the rest of the scientific community as the evidence becomes more and more convincing. As has happened over and over again.
Could this still mean I pick the wrong group of experts? Yeah.
Is that anything like a priesthood? No. That comparison is just stupid.
There are probably literally a handfull of people who actually have opinions formed on science. They're sitting in universities looking at models run on supercomputers. Everybody else is using these people as priests, even if they didn't ask to be priests.
And for those of us who want to form our opinions based on science, but aren't climatologists, looking to the people who are and actually do study and understand climate science and asking them is wrong... how exactly?
For any other non-controversial field of science, this wouldn't be controversial either. Nobody says we're treating particle physicists like "priests" when we go with their best working picture of the microscopic universe with the understanding that this picture may change. How is that like a priest?
And for the record, while I do take what the climatologists say as a provisional truth, I would be delighted if they came out one day and said they were wrong all this time and it turns out there's nothing to worry about. So far, so bad.
I can't answer that, but I know YouTube never intended itself to be, didn't want to be, and took pro-active steps to deal with that situation.
Well, minus the one Youtube founder who was deliberately posting copyrighted material without permission to drive traffic early on.
Though the others did take pro-active steps by making him stop so on the whole, your statement is true.
Of course you stopped reading. Just like you stopped looking at reality as soon as it stopped conforming to your pre-conceived ideology. And of course you call trumping reality with ideology "intelligence". Even though this viewpoint has been tried and found woefully lacking. But that was only in reality!
I wish I was perceptive enough to see that reality is wrong when it contradicts what's in your head.
Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense. -- e.e. cummings