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.

A lot of technical terms in computing are really technical terms used in other fields that we've borrowed. I suspect that a lot of translators aren't familiar with those other fields, so they don't know what the corresponding words are in their own language. What word would a Polish photographer use if they were talking about cropping a photo, and is it the same word that a Polish gardener would use if they were cropping a hedge?

Within the Creation movement, nobody with any idea what they were talking about has ever disputed that evolution does occur. They do not believe that all life evolved from a single common ancestor, but they do believe that all life evolved from whatever Noah was able to fit on the Ark some 4,000 years ago.

You are absolutely correct that Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory, and has no place in a science class. ID is a philosophy that says "this couldn't have happened without supernatural intervention," but it offers no testable alternative. By definition, anything supernatural falls outside the realm of empirical science, which deals only with the natural world. There is no way to test God, because God can simply choose not to participate in your test.

However, before there was ID there was Creation Science, which begins with the premise that the Bible is an accurate (though incomplete) historical account of how the universe and everything in it came to be. If you start from that hypothesis, there's all sorts of testing that can be done. You can propose a theory to explain some aspect of the world around you which is consistent with the Bible, test to see if your theory holds water, and change your theory when the evidence proves it false. In some cases you can even make predictions based on your theory, and find out later if your predictions came true. And the great thing is, it doesn't matter if the Bible is actually true or not - even if your hypothesis was based on a fantasy, the results are still based on observation.

So, does that belong in a science class? I think it's at least worth a mention.

Yes. This. This is what we should worry about. Going from "those [Godless commie baby-killers]/[uneducated religious warmongers] are trying to destroy America and we need to take it back" to "we need to take it back by force" isn't that much of a stretch.

The solution, of course, is learning how to agree to disagree, but that doesn't sell ads.