"I wonder how this could ever be implemented in FOSS"

Ask the W3C how they are going to pull of DRM in FOSS. Different problems but they have a lot of issues in common and neither will solve enough of them.

Abrams didn't like Star Trek, he never got it and even said so - he liked Star Wars. He managed to even blow up a whole planet with a super large ship and I was waiting for some kind of "Kirk, I'm your father" moment... He'd have used light sabers in his sword fighting scene except that wouldn't have gotten permission from Lucas.

The movie was not Star Trek and despite being a Trek fan, I was not suckered into the typical remake formula that even the most poorly made movies use today. Cameos and geeky back references don't fool me. I guess I'm not much of a Trekkie because I'm not so emotionally desperate that I shutdown my brain at a Spock cameo. Hell, Disney could put Spock into the next Star Wars movie and bill it as both a Trek film and Star Wars film and I bet people would buy it! Sheep.

There are actual recorded interviews with Gene Roddenberry about how Trek was never "dark" and "edgy" and that completely missed the point of it; he had to fight to keep it away from people trying to drag it into that direction. It had the 60's moon landing optimism about the future and how we could aspire to evolve beyond such things; he primarily used aliens to illustrate those things. Today's modern anti-heroes have no place in the world he created. Like religion, the qualities that bring people in are often forgotten and the dogma takes over; having the superficial Trek branding doesn't define what is Star Trek. I wonder why anybody bothers to study or think at deeper levels on literature, because apparently not even the authors do; anymore. I dare not imagine how Candide, ou l'Optimisme would turn out as a movie.

Yes, the last Trek movies sucked because they don't care once they make money and know they can sucker people back for a few sequels - then they bring in somebody to try something drastic so they can continue to beat a dead horse... as if the "franchise" was worn out when in fact it is 100% the studio's fault every time. They make their money because people will settle for back references with a bland thoughtless dream-like state of mind (which is why huge plot holes are commonplace; once you suspend all reasoning... see the "How it should have ended" series) All this stuff is making people more stupid while wasting their time. Entertainment doesn't have to lower your IQ.

In video games, this would be like making a Mario themed FPS. It wouldn't be a Mario game.
In OS, this is like Linux running the Qvwm window manager.
In cars, this is like calling a motorcycle a school bus after painting it yellow and adding stop sign.
In politics, this would be Romney - ah, making him Democrat or Republican... he wouldn't really be either.

Classic science fiction:
Jerks ignore the expert scientists, causing big disasters and at the climax it's all resolved by finally utilizing science... Often by some dumb jock / pretty boy that is wise enough to listen to the science and save the day. The jerks are usually put in their place as well. Sadly, in the real world it plays out similarly but the jerks get rich and the story is boring slow and drawn out - so nobody watches.

Educated guesses by EXPERTS are the best thing we can possibly have and when they agree so highly it should be followed. Hindsight is 20/20 but the ACTUAL scientific proof won't come until AFTERWARDS... when it is too late. Science can't predict the future; it can only test the past!

EXPERTS make the best educated guesses mankind has at any moment in time - their error rate after the fact is irrelevant, the best you have beforehand are the people who make the best guesses based upon known FACT. not beliefs/dogma/opinions.

So many problems come down to simplistic metrics that fail to be representative. From modern MBAs to society thinking in similar ways. Income level does not represent quality of life and while many people will agree with that, most will actually not believe it in their actions...

There are jobs that pay huge amounts that are valued which require less intelligence, skill, and effort than McDonalds! (some congressmen come to mind...)

The "market" will continue to push human resources to the brink. We already resort to near slave labor in order to compete against the machines; in some cases even that can't compete with the machines- we have factories that only have a few workers to watch over the robots which replaced 100s. It has been happening already for a long long time. Sure, people find other jobs but not everybody does... the population rises and the jobs do not rise at the same rates; we can do more with less workers and eventually you have more than you need (market saturation) and not enough consumers able to consume it all. We've delayed this problem by creating a consumer culture that promotes profitable addictions to perpetuate the system. That solution was a bandaid because resources are getting low and is already not enough to allow most people to live like wasteful consumers. We don't have enough Earths for that already and we have 1.5 billion in poverty, that's about 1/7 of the world... the vast majority being unable to change their situation, not lazy or deserving of their lot in life. (not everybody in the slum can luck out and if they could, there would be huge resource issues to curb it.)

Most jobs are meaningless already or ripe for automation that has yet to come. People like to say they are against something; however, when it comes to selfish personal decisions, the majority continues to do the wrong thing -- like how Americans love Walmart while complaining about outsourcing to China... What the collective *want* doesn't trump what they were raised to do. It does not matter if some can think for themselves; the threshold for harm is easily met.

The purpose of patents is to benefit society same with copyrite (spelling intentional) - to promote a small amount of legitimately deserving works we have to screw up the other 99% and ruin the industry? Free speech includes horrible speech, its the price one pays for the bad minority (and sometimes the bad stuff IS the most important... just as some of the most deserving patents may be the most important.)

We can no longer afford to cripple research, small business, and even the nation by this idiotic patent system ripe for abuse. Almost any system works just fine if nobody exploits the flaws. Our once useful system only worked because it wasn't being sufficiently abused.

Software should never have been patented; it is as useful and nearly as universal as MATH is today -- it is not just something that is so close to math some classify it as a kind of math, it is also AS USEFUL as math. Math is exempt for practical reasons and software is so similar it too should be exempt. Besides, math and software are quite complex and abstract - you really can't make judgements on it without a lot of education.... arguably, the modern levels of complexity in many professions are so much higher today (due to progress of mankind) that you can't make intelligent decisions on a large number of areas. The evaluation process must be updated to meet the specialization levels present in society - far far beyond what was imagined centuries ago. Trivial to an expert is going to be out of grasp of even an educated examiner.

For starters, educational uses should be completely EXEMPT. It is insane to have universities barred from or wasting money on passing some rite. Science progresses from shared effort not from competition and most the work happens outside the commercial sector. Where they do collaborate, in journals... that system is harming progress as well... Well funded public institutions shouldn't need to or be allowed to patent their research (like the patent everybody violates online except the big sites that PAY for linking external files in a hypertext document... which shouldn't have been approved in the 1st place...) Publishing has become a mindless metric for management which results in time wasting articles flooding the journals at increasing levels... As the problem space is settled it takes more to venture out into new territory - so why some universities require the same level as they did long ago does not make sense. There is so much "padding" going on and it is going to get worse.

Education levels have gone up around the world; in nations without our harmful practices the ability to surpass us grows each year. Not that this in itself is bad, but when all things become equal, our flaws are going to hold us back and it will become more evident to the ignorant and thick headed majority. With china unofficially ignoring things we do that slow down progress, they are making huge strides and not just in catching up with us- they are discovering and innovating at ever increasing levels. While people like myself wonder why I didn't skip science and become a stable low-stress janitor for similar wages... and do science as a hobby.

Depends on the COST to figure out the identity. DNA isn't cheap or quickly checked, you have to be worth it.

Scanning a DVD for the burner's serial number probably takes little effort depending on how widespread the tools are. I wasn't aware they burned that info--- they do? I know even CDs have manufacturer info on them but that didn't seem that useful. Then looking that up against a db containing them might also be easy but somehow I doubt the db contains that much info... probably more labor than a DNA check; blueray... that probably has your name burned into it. (sony made them)

Printing on paper? your inkjet is printing the printer's serial number onto the paper- I would think the feds would have that software and anybody with access probably can use it. tracking that down to you is probably much easier than DVDs but still involved.

Flash? well, buy a new one in cash and use it only once. make sure your OS isn't putting hidden files onto it... mount it in a virtual machine just to be safe. you could also find your OS's cache of UUIDs and delete it... but if they are accessing your computer to find if you ever mounted the drive you are in a bad situation already.

TOR might be great but one has to wonder -- the feds could be half the nodes and with enough of them they could detect you. they can use it themselves without concern about this but you on the other hand... could be unlucky. plus as some records have shown, they've found people by tracking when they show up in chat rooms and when they went on TOR matching... then you have all these horrible "cloud" apps today-- even your simple calculator app is connecting to the "cloud" today! all these apps doing "harmless" things in the background online is providing a signature of their own, if not giving out identifiers.

After a wikileak, foreign governments catching them, spies coming out -- the CIA wouldn't still admit somebody is a spy. Hell, they could reclassify something that was public and then refuse to acknowledge the obvious! That is how they work.

Now if the spy upset Bush... THEN it could then get officially acknowledged (and it would still not result in consequences.)

This hurts the state dept. not that anybody should have trusted them before and especially after wikileaks showed them for what many of us knew that they were. The CIA is using diplomats to do spying and corruption... the only thing perhaps new about this is that the CIA would be directly involved.

Sun made people feel safe putting their eggs all in 1 basket. Witness the result that many of us said was a foolish move.

C# may be a knock off and not have Oracle but then you have MS holding your eggs; and while MS might not act as badly as Oracle, they have a borg mentality that Oracle does not yet have with Java.

Do not build your business around closed languages. When C# becomes fortran the MS holdings company will still be extracting blood.

Oracle is secure (and just evil,) MS on the other hand has 1 real market success and 2 monopolies that people don't care about or even like. All 3 based on platforms that have a limited future at the scale they are presently. When MS gets more desperate... they already have taken the place of SCO instead of finding another shell corp to perform their legal extortion scheme.

While it is true there is a non-Oracle Java out there; it hardly replaces the official one and is still subject to their whims.

Bush Sr. did a few good things, probably by mistake. Even a broken clock...
It is right to praise that policy even if they guy may have been against it or an unwitting party to it. Jr on the other hand was trying to UNDO his father's decision and bring back tactical mini nukes etc.

They don't need our help; whole businesses have been formed around the lack of DRM from day 1. We can continue just fine without DRM just as we have for decades. Needing Apps or crippled apps in the form of browser plug-ins has been the norm for decades. It creates a hurdle for anybody implementing DRM; which promotes an open web.

This is the same BS we hear all the time... there would be no film, no plays, no music, no culture if we didn't have copyright - there would be no technology without patents... as if we came out of the caves, invented the wheel just centuries ago.

The Apps were/are at risk because of the migration TO the web and now a small fad of migration of web to mobile apps is seen as a huge deal? That is going on independent of DRM support! Besides many mobile apps are just app wrapped html apps anyhow.

The web will continue to be fine. Just as DRM hasn't worked and ends up hacked eventually - every time - doing it as an open standard by the w3c is even more foolish (unless the w3c wants some donation $.) With just 1 target for attackers to work against with multiple implementations and an open standard to refer to, it will not only be vastly more accessible to people thinking of cracking it than the past DRM schemes but it's standardization on the web will create a larger audience.

We evolve a sense of taste for a reason. Perhaps researchers should be using information like this as a starting point for further investigation of many things.

I move for a vote on the motion.

No. Learning new frameworks and languages ARE NOT an essential part of coding. It is the current state of the market and nothing more. It can be easily argued it is the reality of the career, but it is not necessary for programming itself. A lot of people do just find for decades in some tiny niche like FORTRAN and in fact those companies are desperately looking to replace the retiring people - it might cost them; however, they already decided that a rewrite is too risky and costly over just finding or even paying to train replacements.

Enjoying coding and enjoying reading documentation on rehashed ideas are two different things. You don't code today, you spend your time researching APIs and once you start to feel good with the APIs somebody wants you to start over with another buzzword.

Given the history of these contractors of doing rigged demos... Remember back to the rocket defense system where it came out they put tracking devices into the the rocket so all it had to do was fly towards the beacon in the target? After that huge PR nightmare one would think they would learn .... and usually it is not the right lesson (make it actually work) but to learn to do a better job of not getting caught.

Everybody forget the F-22? That was lockheed martin. So, does this laser work in the rain? wouldn't be surprised... they managed to sell Americans an F-22 that didn't mix with water... I could see how falling water could mess a laser beam... And if the scattered light blinded people (a mile around) that would not only be bad for the people it protects but would violate Geneva.

None of this matters-- They will sell a $billion+ of them if they work or not and we will buy it just to subsidize their company (hoping they make something better later - because our military is all about space weapons just waiting for when the politicians change their minds.)