541–550 of 565 posts
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On Linux nowadays, but last time I was on macOS with iTunes I has an album of Australian folk rock that still had DRM, were still an old bitrate, and not upgradeable to "Plus" (yes, the thing from 2007) or DRM-free.
IIRC, Plus was DRM-free.
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IIRC, Plus was DRM-free.
Yeah, was so long ago I couldn't remember if they were separate or not.
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On the topic of artificial scarcity, once food becomes quickly and easily synthesisable on consumer premises, does anyone think that will not be incredibly heavily gate-kept by roles similar, or even identical, to copyright as it is now?
We already do that. Regional appellations limit what food can be called. It's not champagne if it's not from a specific part of France.
People get around it by producing Fauxpaign under various other names.
I had expected it to work like Apple's App Store, where as far as I can tell you can generally still download apps you've purchased (although older apps often do not work with newer devices and/or iOS versions.)
Since then I've moved to PDFs or Kindle. If Amazon pulls the same trick I may have to rethink my strategy.
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Lemon laws only apply to cars sold with warranties. Wealthier people are more likely to buy new cars, or used cars with warranties. Poor people are relatively much more likely to buy cheaper used cars without warranties. Rich people also buy more cars over their lives, increasing their chances of coming across a lemon. Therefore, lemon laws are relatively more beneficial for wealthier people.
I get what you're saying, but if a construction worker buys a new Ford F150 that is constantly breaking, that is a much bigger problem to him than if a wealthy person buys a Range Rover as a 3rd vehicle for Tahoe runs and that vehicle has some recurring check engine lights. Unless we're calling construction workers buying F150s with 72 month loans wealthy these days.
Copyright, as it exists in the 21st century, is a scam. It does not protect the artists, the creative works, or the little guy. It is a product of decades' worth of lobbying by very rich and powerful organizations and megacorps. I'm not against the idea of a copyright. An artist has the right to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and creative works do have value. However, the original idea of copyright has been bent, b…
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What do you think a reasonable form of copyright law would look like?
A decade or two tops. That is enough time to monetize your work. Then, you get out of the way and let others benefit from your work just as you benefited from the works of so many others who came before you. You're still free to keep creating new things.
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> It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the interest of the buyer. It doesn't seem like that. It is like that. Welcome to modern tech, where the management, perception, control and tactical destruction of real value is the only place left to eek out a profit margin. We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make t…
If binning of CPUs were disallowed, it would result in even more e-waste because any imperfect chips would have to be tossed out instead of sold with fewer cores enabled. Bad example.
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Steam is the only online games store that has given me any levels of comfort that I'll still be able to get access to my games after 10 years. Even then, I'm still not 100% confident that I'll be able to access everything in 25 years time. I have no reason the believe that Sony and Microsoft won't shut them down like they already have done with the PS3 store.
Do you think eventually Windows will drop 32-bit support like Mac OS X did? What will that mean for a lot of those games?
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> DVDs were regionally locked as well To be fair, those of us who tend to complain about these things also raised hell about DVDs back then. Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers. It was such a relief when the restrictions were hacked away (was it that an encryption key got leaked? I don't remember the details).
Overall I think geo-locking was bad, but I wouldn't go this far: > Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers. Depends a little on the consumers, really. Region-locking enabled them to sell cheaper copies in lower-wealth areas, the same way that movie ticket prices were lower. Without geo-locking, pricing strategy gets much more complicated, but it's a fair guess that consumers in regions 3-6 (that is, t…
You are missing the most likely option: they would have "pirated" those movies. So again, the geo-locking is not realy for the good of the consumer but to ensure every last bit of profit can be extracted.
Meanwhile, the main thing selling things cheaper to designated poor reason does is keep those regions from demanding fair payment for their work thus making them no longer poor regions that can be exploited.