No, it's a reasonable assumption given the actual Unix writer demographics and given the somewhat non-descript first name. Or is it that whenever you hear the word "nurse", you immediately and involuntarily imagine a guy in 50% of the cases because you're perfectly gender-balanced and oh-so-detached from reality?

Oh, come on. This is a network protocol. Sure, protocols *can* have flaws, but it's a very long stretch from being forced to run an unknown binary. Just implement it on your own if you're paranoid enough.

Educated people, such as doctors or statisticians, have a term for this: "low specificity". It basically means you can't take a single symptom as a reason to throw somebody in jail/prescibe a treatment until you also have other symptoms to back your hypothesis up.

I do the same thing and they keep calling. I figure it's worthwhile, though. If everyone just wasted 5 minutes of the real person's time, the scam would be so unprofitable that they'd have to stop.

The music industry spent around a decade refusing to sell music online unless it was wrapped in DRM, and they saw falling sales or stagnant growth. Recently the music industry gave up the DRM crusade and started allowing MP3 and other non-DRM music sales. And guess what? They started seeing better growth. Oh, some of them still pull out the bullshit line claiming "sales are declining", but the unstated details making that a bald LIE is that "physical disk sales are down" while digital sales are up resulting in total sales being up. Not to mention that concert revenue and other secondary revenue streams are up.

The claim that dropping DRM will result in fewer movies being made is ideological and based on a wildly simplistic view of the issue. It's impossible to predict any exact outcomes, but one thing is certain. Any change (in one direction or the other), will only be MARGINAL. Some percentage increase or decrease. And you know what? The number of movies and TV shows and other content being produced each year is already vastly more than any person can physically view. Hollywood alone shovels out just about one and a half movies per day. Plus of course domestic non-Hollywood production and the vast number of movies produced abroad. Hell, Bollywood puts out three movies per day. Obviously India must be utilizing far more DRM than we do (tag: sarcasm, for the sarcasm impaired).

*IF* you're right that abandoning DRM would result in fewer movies being made.... and that's a big if.... it merely means a marginal decrease, and that marginal decrease would strike movies that were only marginal to produce in the first place. Any dregs shaken out at the bottom would reduce the competition (and thereby shore up the profits) of all the better movies.

The demands for DRM are pig-shearing.
Plenty of squealing, not much wool.

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True, but your vision is still far too short.
If this sort of DRM starts getting broadly deployed in browsers then some ordinary websites that despise hate ad-blockers (aka "thieves") will go through whatever radical contortions are necessary to only present their content through this system. The results will be a vile ugly and only borderline-functional as a webpage, but they will do it. And once some websites start doing it, there will be enormous pressure to "fix" the system so that those broken websites work better... and enormous pressure to make it easier for other websites to be able to use it too without turning their sites into broken dysfunctional messes.

Once you become dedicated to the expectation that web browsers can and do implement this sort of DRM system, the only rational path is to keep fixing "problems" "limitations" and "flaws" in the system until it works easily cleanly and completely for all web content.

Either this system is going to die, or it's going to adapt to the point that any common website concerned about "content theft" or ad-blockers can easily DRM the entire pages and entire websites with little more than clicking a few standard server options.

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Sounds like the technological equivalent of the human body => sounds about right!

Gzip of what? Chromosome-at-once? Isn't that the wrong way of traversing the data set, if you're aiming for actual compression? More to the point, gzip, if I'm not mistaken, is good for data with 8-bit boundaries. What if the data gets stored in base-4, six bits per triplet/codon? Finally, talking about string algorithms, I'd have thought that the best way of compressing the stuff would involve mapping the extant alleles and storing only references to them in the individual genomes.

But genetic data isn't particle physics data. It makes perfect sense to roll out a custom "big data" (whatever that crap means) solution because of the very nature of the data stored (at the very least, you will want DNA-specific compression algorithms because there's huge redundancy in the data spread horizontally across the sequenced individuals).

They are obviously promoting PIRACY, because paying the copyright-holder's requested price (possibly zero) to converse in one region while you're in a different region is blatantly THEFT.
Theft theft theft theft stealing theft theft theft burglary theft theft theft larceny theft theft rape theft.

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Hell Yeah! The administration is eroding our rights!

I'd never buy one of those hippy treehugger electro-dud cars anyway, but it's the Last Damn Straw when Obama starts making state laws in four random states telling me I'd have to buy one from a dealership rather than the manufacturer!

Ship that commie muslim foreigner anti-christ Barack Hussein Obama back to hell where he belongs, before he can finish his agenda turning our children gay!

Warning for the mentally retarded: This post was packaged in a facility that processes satire and mockery.

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Of course the federal government can tell states they can't have their blue laws. Such are continuously being struck down by the courts. County courts, state courts, and of course federal courts. Although the outcome of any given case is pretty much a crap-shoot. An appalling number of courts concoct or approve laughable sham "secular purpose" excuses to keep them on the books. For example one such ruling declares "While Sunday was originally a day of religious observance, the passage of time has converted it into a secular day for many citizens and has freed it from its exclusively religious origins... The cities have valid secular reasons for prohibiting the sale of beer on Sunday, including enhancing the safety of the travelling public, promoting domestic tranquility, shielding children from the effects of drinking, and accommodating the reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends". The court is pretty well admitting that the law was flagrantly unconstitutional and invalid when the legislature established it, and is engaging in wildly creative post-hoc rationalizations trying to hang a token "current day" secular purpose on it in a highly motivated effort to avoid striking down a law that was never validly created in the first place. Note that NONE of the listed rationalizations is even remotely a reason to ban beer sales on any particular day of the week, except for the last one regarding "reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends". Any late night drinking rolls at midnight into drinking and early-morning drunkenness of the next day, and a substantial portion of any purchases are destined for next-day consumption. Approximately half of any effect of restricting sales will actually show up on the following day. The only way to take seriously a purpose of "accommodating the reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends" (i.e. Saturday and Sunday) would be a ban on Saturday sales.

I have a relatively high opinion of the courts in general, but the level of flagrant Judicial dishonesty that often flies about in defense of Blue Laws is quite appalling.

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