Thanks for the cutesy "fixing" what I wrote, but you're wrong; non-DRM books are coming, from Amazon, and fairly soon. I think chances are good that DRM will be removed from books I've already purchased, but I wouldn't bet my life on it, or much care if it didn't happen.

The current model for ebooks works well enough for me that I'm willing to use it, while I look for the next move toward a better model, and jump to it. If you want to stand on principle and not buy DRM'ed books, of course that's your right. I need jump through no flaming hoops to get enormous advantage over paper books.

One thing about non-DRM music, though - Apple made publishers drop DRM? You're kidding, right? Corporate-whore Apple? No. Apple would still happily sell DRM'ed music if the customers didn't demand otherwise. Remember, Apple's whole business model is based on locking people into proprietary hardware/software cycles.

And as far as I know, the iTunes store STILL only offers 256K-bit AAC format files, which is bullshit.

I buy my music DRM-free from Amazon, in 320 k-bit variable MP3 format, so I don't have to choose between being locked into Apple software, or doing my own conversion to some more open format (and damaging the quality in the process).

Sarbanes Oxley separation of roles requirements have been interpreted to mean that developers should not also be admins.

There is one problem I don't think you see. The way a cell phone works is that it communicates with a cell tower, that cell tower uses phone lines at some point to route your call. If everything goes to a VOIP based phone system and the power goes out, there is a pretty good chance you will lose your cell phone as well. Currently this doesn't happen because the phone lines carry their own power, so the ones hooked into your cell tower are still up. With a VOIP network, when the power goes out, so does your cell phone.

House cats have vocal cords that are sophisticated enough to produce real language.

Mimicking a few sounds != producing real language. I don't see many books written by mynah birds.

My son occasionally hums odd bits of classical music (as do I). I don't call either of us a composer.

So use the hardware, but disable the cellular connection so they can't mess with your stuff. Or modify the OS like the Nook hackers have been doing I suppose. Then just don't buy the DRMed stuff, or buy it for the "license" and download a clean copy. While probably not legal, it's at least ethical as you are paying for the content. For real protection, keep your original, non DRM copies on an offline media with MD5 or better checksums so you can tell if something has been tampered with. Or sign them with your own certificate.

IMO, this "license" crap needs to be sorted out. Either I own the physical copy, which doesn't really make sense with digital copies, or I own a license to use the content and which particular file I use doesn't really matter. Of course, I'm also one of the "extremists" that think that Copyright is a trade and must be ABLE to expire, so DRM should be mutually exclusive with legal Copyright protection. You can have technology protect your stuff, or you can have legal protection for your stuff, not both.

Of course, I also think that Copyright for something created in my lifetime should expire in my lifetime, the horror.

I have a large cranial capacity (hat size: 8 1/8) and I'm over 6 feet tall. I'm sure that my ancestors interbred with the Boskop, leading to me, a mentally AND physically superior humanoid! I began to make plans to rule the world, if not the known universe. But my wife pointed out that the simplest explanation is often the best and that I'm probably just a big fathead. Rats!

What, you want people to perform a song and dance for it? Sell it at subsidized rates?

Really, Coward, how much conscience does it take to say "Gee, we've been to the moon, we've sent probes into deep space, we've remotely explored Mars, let's maybe see what we can learn by not having kids starve to death."

Maybe quadrotriticale would be a better foodstuff, but rice is pretty ubiquitous at the moment.

Let me start out by saying that I agree with you. And it's a good argument - it gets the emotional parts of the issue right out in the open. However, I see some things here that are going to be used, effectively, as a counter argument:

1. How many books do you own that you can pass on to your children? How old are those books?
2. Have you ever had a book destroyed through wearing out, getting destroyed by dog, fire, water, etc.?
3. Have you ever lost a book, had it borrowed or stolen?

I'm sure you can all see how these questions erode the argument. And the counter argument, pushing the statistical likelihood of a book being lost or destroyed before passing it on, versus the DRM getting screwed up - it's not very powerful. No one knows the real answer to that question - but people think they do - and so the argument loses those who already have an opinion.

Just some thoughts.

Typically the only time I've cited either is when I encountered a professor who really wanted the works cited to be a roadmap. For those professors, If I looked at an encyclopedia article and used sources cited in it, I included the article as a tertiary source. Same for Wikipedia.

I much preferred to find sources directly in journals, but for really obscure topics it can be helpful to start with an existing article that provides a nice list of sources.

he city is that much closer to transportation that can handle heavy loads, like tons of grain, or pickled herring, or whatever.

Not much point in being able to handle stuff that doesn't grow there or isn't caught there.

(I picked up a nasty pedantic habit in college from a professor, so sorry I just have to throw this in :)

Bandwidth is the capacity of a communications channel and is measured in Hz and Mhz. kbit/s and Mbit/s are data rates, not bandwidth.