Thank you for having the courage to stand up to the nutjobs who would demean your service.

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 solution to this problem is more competition.

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?

Ahh, maybe that was it - not that it's difficult to do, just that it requires a $50 app to do it.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

Not currently. They're starting to talk about it. Check again in five years.

The Librarian of Congress isn't a real librarian.

Read that comment again:

Emphasis added.

My kingdom for a mod point... Thanks for making this joke so I didn't have to.

No. In fact I'd never heard of it until now.

This, I think, is the root of the problem. If the guy who translated a gardening book used one word for "crop" and the guy who translated a photography book used a different word for "crop", then you lose the link between the concepts, and it's not clear that the guy localizing Gimp should be using one of those instead of making up his own.