Why would prices need to rise - they make tens of billions of dollars in profits each year, split between a few family members. Take the pay raises out of those pockets. A tiny amount of their personal dad-given profits would fuel the rebirth of the middle class. The Walton clan would be able to buy only one personal luxury liner a year per descendant, rather than two each; the country would survive that horror, I think.

The US doesn't have a productivity problem. It has a greed problem. We've tens of millions of newly impoverished citizens because clever boy and girls have figured out how to absorb nearly all the profits that used to be paid to the middle class. The only trickle-down we see is the stream being directed onto people's heads by a few thousand Ayn Rand worshipers.

This isn't the result of incompetence - rather the result of trying to racing to finish the thing before any more opposition builds up that may stop the project. Wile E. Coyote trying to run on air, knowing it's impossible, but trying to get to the cliff before gravity notices the flagrant violation.

When that monster is done - and it seems that they are turning it on *right now*, this week - human history is done as we understand it. We will all behave as though someone is watching and recording us, because they will be.

Scientology is going to *love* this - one stop shopping for all its spying needs. The NSA just last week asked permission for private corporations to access their new trove of data, Because Terrorism. The Unification Church and Scientology will be first in line with front corporations to drink deep of this wonderful new integrated terrorism enabling center - terrorism because bad guys like Scientology will be able to terrorize people with fresh, holistic super-knowledge not only of who they are, what they say, what they read and where they've been, but also of everyone their enemies ever talk to, email, walk next to, text or write to. That center isn't about just metadata, it's the *actual phone conversations* that will be recorded. Don't ever piss off the powerful, 'cause they can nail you and anyone who ever contacts you until you give up. Blackmail, extortion, we-know-where-you-kids-are... anything. And the coolest part is that it will all be secret! Persecutors with behind stage access to the NSA superboxes and analytic tools won't even be logged in any real sense. Political opposition, nullified, instantly. The possibilities for our brave new world owners are limitless.

'm pretty sure i posted a JE on that point, but i can't seem to find it just now.

I post just to get thoughts out. Comments are an added benefit.

If not for that, i'd never post. :)

Such a net I've dreamed of for years - say TV channels new made available to the public as wifi is permitted now, with mesh networks run by individuals, interference mitigated by new methodologies and software, encrypted and onion-routed to hell and back, and no choke points taken over by the DEA, NSA, CIA and FBI. Dream on, because none of those things will be permitted, authorities citing the four legs of the security state's foundations: child porn, terrorism, copyright violation, and national security.

As the pieces fall in place for a new internet, they will be forbidden by law, outright sale to owners, or failing that, kicking in the door and shooting your dogs and dragging your stuff away. This is about power, in one form or another. The internet is a fulcrum of power, and people who love power have moved in to stay. It's a certain personality type that wants to control what other people do (never themselves, of course - they are never the ones under surveillance).

Face it -- we're all in jail now.

Some healthcare electronic records systems still distribute CDs to patient that require .net to use. When patients complain, they are told to find a MS Windows PC. True.

DRMed music on ipods is easily transported to any other player or hard drive, isn't it? If you view the track in question on iTunes using the option to view the file in the Finder, it is displayed as an mp3 file, isn't it? You can copy that anywhere, no? Apple gave us a backdoor to DRM since day one of iTunes. I've used that method to copy podcasts around various platforms. The DRM doesn't travel with the mp3 file.

Freedom is so silly, when money is on the line. I commend you for your honestly. I'd have spent twelve paragraphs arguing that people believe as you do, so you've saved me a lot of time.

Pity copyright, as it was meant to be, is dead. Now we have eternal ownership. And a security state that seems to have as a major purpose the enforcement of that eternal ownership of anything published past 1929 or so. And so now: absolute surveillance and prison terms - for the crimes of watching TV, reading books and listening to sounds.

Major problem, semantics is. We keep using the word "copyright" when the meaning of the word has been changed, still imbuing it with the respect we had for the older concept (limited rights for a set duration to benefit the creator, and then released to the public forever), instead of treating the new meaning (eternal ownership enforced by a surveillance state, violations punished with harsh financial confiscation combined with federal prison terms) with the derision and opposition it now deserves. We are trying to point at the newly red-colored tree while still crying, "Look at the green tree!" Impossible to have a sane argument about the situation, sadly, when the words to describe what we argue about have been so expertly, intentionally, ruined.

"If you believe that Copyright should be able to exist on media and that authors and/or distributors should be able to charge for the video/audio, and you believe that technological protection measures may have some impact to reduce non-paid use of such media, and you believe that it is in the interest of consumers to have standards for these sort of things, then you may view EME as a good thing."

The internet isn't "media" - it's an open-source communications protocol. DRM is closed source. If you make a part of the protocol secret, it is no longer the internet - it is cable TV.

Open source is an absolute. Like being pregnant, you are either one of two states. You can't be a little bit pregnant. If you let commercial "cable TV" in the door to control the internet - and that is all this is, metaphotically - the internet no longer belongs to you. It belongs to businessmen who want to charge for access.

The entertainment companies should never have been able to hijack copyright and destroy the concept - eternal copyright isn't copyright, it's a takeover of man's history on earth. Cable TV companies should never have been permitted to hijack the internet. The owners of the pipes should never have been permitted to sell the water in the pipes, the basic, horrible error of our age.

To implement DRM means to destroy our privacy, our freedom, because to implement copyright protection as they require it to be mandates surveillance on a scale undreamed of by any tyrant, and worse, the surveillance will be conducted by private individuals who barely recognize government oversight, much less see themselves under it.

The internet must be free, private, and under no industry or government control. Else, tyranny, no matter how mercantile the motives.

Note also that the record companies now pay artists even *less* under their new internet regime. "Pay the artist" is not their mantra. The want money and power over other people.

I feel similarly.

I won't touch FB though.