We live in an age in which it is more important to entertain than to inform.

Do you think this is different than in any other age?

Actually, yes, I do. It is different. Before the mainstream news media became centralized and under the control of a handful of conglomerates, it was different. The differences in television news in particular are striking; look at newscasts from 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 and the descent into infotainment is quite clear.

What a sad commentary on the state of the nation.

I have no real issue buying a wii and an xbox; but I'm not going to carry around multiple phones.

You seem to be saying that it's not really a matter of whether there's a monopoly or not; your primary interest is in being able to buy whatever apps you want for your phone. At the same time you are not so interested in being able to buy whatever games you want for your game console.

Is Microsoft exercising a legally recognizable monopoly when it limits what games can be developed for XBox? Is Sony exercising a legal monopoly when it does the same for PlayStation? Is every hardware vendor that restricts software development on its platform exercising a legal monopoly?

The point isn't to be accurate; it's to be engaging. We live in an age in which it is more important to entertain than to inform. Look at all the hack prognosticators in the business and technology press who make a living making predictions – most of them are wildly off the mark but nobody cares enough to go back and call them on their failures.

You seem to be saying that Apple's store is a monopoly, and that Android will prevail. Those seem to be contradictory statements.

As for the mobile phone market being a repeat of the PC market, I don't think that's likely. Apple may not continue to dominate, but I have a hard time seeing Android dominating, because while Microsoft could erect high barriers to entry in the form of Office and hardware licensing arrangement, Google has no such leverage with Android.

You don't have to have dominant market share in order to obtain high profits and long term growth. Just look at Apple's performance in the PC sector.

Mobile app stores: BlackBerry App World, Google Android App Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog, and Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Android App Market has over 30k apps and is growing rapidly.

Mobile operating systems: Blackberry, Android, Symbian, Palm, Windows Phone. By some measures Android has already overtaken iOS in marketshare.

Mobile hardware OEMs: Nokia, LG, Samsung, HTC, RIM, Motorola. Apple is well behind the leaders in global volume of mobile hardware sales.

So if we're talking about smartphone operating systems, Apple does not have a monopoly. Nor does it have a monopoly in mobile hardware. Finally, it doesn't have a monopoly on mobile application app stores.

Apple controls on its own app store, in the same way that Amazon controls its online store, or Microsoft controls the XBox Live Marketplace. You can call it a monopoly if you like, but there the fact that Apple decides not to allow some apps in its store does not curtail consumer choice at a level that comes even remotely close to being a monopoly.

brought about by bribery

So the bottom line is that you feel current copyright law can only be the result of bribery? I agree that current copyright law has significant problems, but the fact that Big Media has a powerful lobby does not mean bribery is necessarily involved. You can accuse me of being naive, but we are talking about the law, and the law does not support accusations that are without proof.

"You can't quote to refute a work."

Where did you get that idea? Comment and Criticism is at the heart of Fair Use Doctrine.

As for the most effective means of refutation, line by line or paragraph-by-paragraph refutation of a work of any length might be effective in the abstract, but I doubt most people would read it. In practice it is more effective to create a general framework of critique, and use selective quotes to drive your point home. This is likely why there hasn't been a hue and cry about the stifling inability in our culture to engage in argument.

I also don't understand why you put law in quotes. It is law, whether you understand it or not.

It's absurd that Brett's comment was modded down to 0 and flagged as a troll. He wasn't making ad hominem attacks, nor was he goading other Slashdotters. Just because you don't believe in someone's argument doesn't mean they're trolling. Poor moderation.

You can't "police" terrorism, and we didn't declare war on everyone who disagreed with us. I get the point you're trying to make, but talk about hyperbole.

You can make law enforcement and the rule of law your primary means of fighting terrorism, rather than leading with the military and supporting that with extra-legal activity. The two are vastly different approaches.

I take your point about hyperbole. We obviously didn't declare war on everyone who disagreed with us. But we also needlessly turned plenty of sympathetic friends into wary neutrals or opponents very quickly, by painting this as a war of good v. evil, rather than a fight to extinguish a few nationless pirates.

The primary value of catching the "perpetrators" is deterrence for others.

The primary value is stopping further activity by the perpetrators. The secondary value is deterring others. By treating this as a war, we have not only failed to take out the perpetrators (remember that guy, what's his name.. oh yes, I remember now: Osama bin Laden), we have recruited many thousands of fighters for al-Qaeda and related groups. When you engage in police activity, you target the perpetrator. When you invade two countries and engage in military operations in several others, you turn people who would otherwise be bystanders into combatants.

Putting terrorists in jail will not deter those in the future - they are already willing to die for their cause, no threat of punishment will prevent them from going ahead.

What cause? Initially they had a small cause. Now we have made it a much larger one. As for threat of punishment as a deterrent, you are assuming that all terrorists are suicide bombers, which is definitely not the case. Suicide bombers make up a third of the people who engage in terrorist acts across the globe.

So the idea that you are going to identify the "criminals" and put them in jail/execute them presumes that you will just take the hit, no matter the cost, and deal with the aftermath. That's why the "policing" concept has utterly failed.

You seem to be basing your entire argument on the belief that police activity does not deter criminal activity. That is simply untrue. It also presumes that the alternative the US has used, engaging the enemy with primarily military means, somehow is a more effective deterrent, when study after study has shown that it has turned many otherwise politically ambivalent people into combatants.

Further, you state that policing has failed. The United States hasn't even tried that approach.

It all started on 9/11, when instead of reacting to the attacks as a matter for coordinated worldwide policing, we elevated those fuckers to the same status as a nation-state and decided to declare war on anyone and everyone who didn't instantly get in line behind us. We stoked our own fear to an insane degree, and it's already boomeranged back on us in so many ways. This is just one more self-inflicted wound in a long line of idiotic mistakes we've made over the last nine years.

Apple pushed for DRM-free music purchases after it had abused the hell out of their position in the online music store business.

You do remember the bit about the record companies fighting tooth and nail over both pricing and DRM, right? It's fashionable to say Apple had some sort of stranglehold over the music industry from the moment it delivered iTunes 1.0, but that's wildly off the mark.

Jobs will announce that The Internet will now be referred to as iTunes.

Because before the iPhone, everyone else was already selling touchscreen smartphones with massive app stores, developers were cashing in on the huge new app market, and people around the world were ditching their feature phones for smartphones.