DRM is about removing your ability to use your computer in certain ways, including ways that violate your fifth amendment rights.

DRM is software on your computer that you can't remove, can't inspect, can't trust, that deletes your shit and rats you out to the police if they think you're wrong. It might also give away all of your personal information to the bad guys because the people writing that DRM are just as stupid as any other programmer (Google the Sony BMG Rootkit scandal; especially the bits about all the security holes, if you've got a short memory).

People don't understand this. If you described DRM like a police-supplied GPS put in your car that faxes you a ticket whenever you go one mile-per-hour over, or like a camera in your skull that gives away all your secrets, people would understand how evil DRM is. I would hope that even you would be compelled to admit DRM is evil.

Note, I don't accept any other part of your statement; that it is inevitable, or unavoidable, and etc. It's plain to see that you're wrong: Amazon sells mp3s without DRM and the world didn't come to an end. This is auxiliary to the main point about the morality of DRM.

I think you've got this exactly backwards. I think Content providers know full well there's a game of chicken here and they're scared shitless. That's why they are poisoning the well asking seemingly innocuous questions like "how will we deliver our video if you don't help us protect our rights?" They know they will fold and offer DRM-free delivery when DRM is impossible- Amazon already sells me DRM-free music, and Justin Bieber is still making great music. I see no reason to believe Netflix won't similarly capitulate.

What we also really need is for people to understand that not only children play video games.

Yes, but the value in sites like /. is *EDITING*. They should filter shit like this so their s/n ratio is high, and thus their feed is valuable. This will bring subscribers and thus attention and thus ad impressions. At present, slashdot posts 90% crap found on other sites 4-9 days ago, and 7% crap like this and 3% interesting stuff, mostly hard-science stuff I'd find if I was still in school or in a non-CS/Real-Science job.

I don't know where you come from, but the typical users I encounter manage to put all what you listed on their desktop.

They tend to absolutely resist to learn more then the minimal basics, no matter how easy or accessible you make the UI.

Guess it's the 7 things rule: people can remember about 7 things at once / put them in context. Everything else is logical abstraction and training, and most users are not capable of the first and very reluctant to the second.

Go do volunteer basic computer literacy session for your local senior center. Don't try to convert them to linux or get them using Firefox or anything dumb like that. Just ask what their problems are, and how you can help. You will quickly understand how broken and unintuitive computer software is.

I don't think this will, but there's a much more compelling reason: Office Web Apps, which is mostly HTML/JS, with a few Silverlight bits (and even those have HTML/JS fallback). I've tried them now that they're in limited beta, and they work noticeably faster in Chrome and even Firefox than they do in IE8 - and Chrome/Firefox version isn't missing any features, either, so it's plainly better. I have no doubts that relevant teams in Microsoft are well aware of this, and understand how embarrassing it is, so I'd imagine there's a lot of pressure on IE team now to significantly improve performance - specially for JS - in the next release. Now that they have acceptable level of standard conformance (CSS 2.1 is finally fully supported, thank God), focusing on performance is the next logical step.

Ideally, that is true, but most users ARE used to MS style software, and packages like open office are very similar to word in their GUI at least. When software looks similar on the surface, but behaves differently, it confuses users. On the other hand, I disagree with the assertion that in general users see differences as faults. Some are though, and the big faults can easily dissuade users from even making a change.

I haven't actually used open office for a while, but a few years ago I TA'd an intro computer course for non-computer students. It's was typical easy-ish course (word, excel, basic HTML/CSS, some basic command line/ftp stuff in windows and linux), but we crammed in some harder stuff (some lectures on binary addressing, ram, caching) and we make them do some more obscure stuff in word (styles, sections, captions, table generation, cross referencing etc.) As part of one of the assignments, the prof asked them to check out open office and try one or two of the things we covered for Word and write a couple of paragraphs on them. There was a general agreement that the way OO handled captions was vastly superior to word, they were split on features like styles and somewhat indifferent to most of the regular word-processing features (most of which are basically identical). BUT, the first time my lab started up OO, there was a general sort of confusion because when the class double clicked the icon as instructed, they were greeted with a giant, blank grey screen. Once I told them they needed to go to the tiny menu in the corner and select to create a new word-processing document they were fine, but if they were on their own how many would have downloaded OO, seen the blank screen and through "hmmm...nothing opened...looks broken" and then promptly deleted it? Probably most. The article is correct - Linux and most of the mature OSS projects have very solid internals, they just need some non-developers to look at them to polish the externals up a bit.

When you think high tech, well networked states, you don't tend to think of there.

You evidently don't know how big the Moon is, or how much momentum is in its orbit around the Earth. Indeed, the Moon doesn't quite orbit the Earth, but rather the Moon and the Earth orbit one another around a center quite a ways away from the Earth's center. Or you just don't know how much energy can be produced by a nuke plant - a very tiny amount compared to what's needed to push the Moon out of orbit into the Earth in any appreciable amount of time.

But if you want to keep carrying on about some fact free paranoia, that's your business. Lunacy, but your business.

There is a difference between observing users and listening to users. The way to do usability testing is to watch lots of users work with the product and pay attention to the most common problems they have, but not necessarily to listen to what they say. If they say "I don't understand feature X", then fine. If they say "You know what would make this better, you should add feature Y", then you should probably ignore them. Users know what they hate, and they sometimes know what they don't understand, but they hardly every know how to design good software.

TFA is absolutely correct that the developer should watch and stay quiet during the process. (If you've ever been a developer in this situation, you know how incredibly painful and incredibly useful it is.) But the goal of the testing process isn't for the user to give you solutions, it is for the user to shine a spotlight on the problems. Once the problems are clearly understood, the developers (and designers) have to go back to work to figure out solutions.

T-Mobile eventually intentionally put a stop to unsigned clients

Rubbish. I don't know what you're doing wrong, but I use an AT&T-branded Blackberry 8310 with my T-mobile account. T-mobile doesn't have a 8310, so I can assure you that T-mobile not only allows "unsigned clients" (whatever the fuck that means; unlocked? different vendor-id?), but their telephone support helped me do it.

Is it running windows?