Thanks, I had not seen that. The take away is a combination of standing/sitting/moving is your best option.

+1 for Aeron, but also consider trying a standing desk with your new chair. It did wonders for my back and it is healthier for you. You can't quickly go from sitting all day to standing all day, but after a month or two, I was barely using my chair. Now there are days that I only sit during meetings & lunch.

(I'm standing as I type this)

I tried a nice floor mat and for some reason found it made it harder to work, so your mileage may vary. I'm now mat-free but I wear comfortable shoes.

I also recommend doing a test run with boxes before your shell out for the full desk or attachment. I find I stand for 30-50% of the day on average, sometimes 100%, some times 0%.

Height of the desk makes a big difference - you want something that works for you both standing and sitting. I'm on the taller side and use the varidesk.com pro 36. My monitor is on a stand and still slightly shorter than ideal. My shorter colleagues fare better with the ergotron, which can adjust to a lower keyboard height when sitting.

Yes, I remember the "I'm not going to buy any music right now because nothing is compatible" stage well. My media experience with respect to music & movies sounds like yours. I don't buy movies anymore, but I still buy music. Mostly I use services such as spotify and netflix.

> I can't think of any precedent saying that having relatively painless DRM has resulted in better media access.

Netflix? Kindle books? Steam? Almost everyone I know uses the first two, and most don't even know there's DRM. However, if the DRM wasn't there, the studios/publishers would not have made their content available.

It's clear the studios are much more tech savvy then the music companies were, and much less likely to make the same DRM-free decision. I just don't see it happening (at least, not any in the next 5-10 years). It seems like the studios are still trying to prop up physical with UltraViolet (their attempt at DRM interoperability) rather than learning from the music industry's mistakes. They still have a chance to make it work, but it's certainly not there yet. If it fails, they are more likely to further fragment and do multiple, incompatible things rather than go DRM-free.

> The standard is a standardised API to an external encryption plugin.

Section 6 of the draft lays out a baseline called simple encryption: "This ensures that there is a common baseline level of protection that is guaranteed to be supported in all user agents, including those that are entirely open source. Thus, content providers that need only basic protection can build simple applications that will work on all platforms without needing to work with any content protection providers."

I get what you are saying, though - how successful this is will depend on what happens on the content decryption module side, and whether people opt to use the simple encryption option or not. No one is being forced to use this. Best case scenario, things become interoperable. Worst case, it's no different than today, because the Adobe analogy you use is exactly what we have with our various plug-ins and external apps.

> The web is no longer an open medium designed to be usable by anyone with any browser.

I don't understand how this changes anything. Aren't there already plug-ins and even HTML5/Javascript/CSS features that are browser or platform specific? If this gets adopted, will there be more or less content available in-browser? Most media services want to maximize their addressable user base, not minimize it, so interoperability is in their interest.

As far as this being a corner case, maybe you have not seen the recent numbers on internet traffic (yes I know internet != web, but this is what people are doing). See: http://allthingsd.com/20130514/netflix-still-eats-a-third-of-the-web-every-night-amazon-hbo-and-hulu-trail-behind/

I think this is a reasonable application of the 80/20 rule: as media consumption becomes the 80%, browsers want to continue playing a central role, and that will be made easier by this.

Yes, I know I will be flamed for this, but I think the thing that is getting lost in the conversation is that we've all be using DRM for years, and the point of this is to increase interoperability. How many of us have netflix or amazon movie streaming? Buy kindle books? Use steam? Even the books downloadable from my library use some form of protection. Most people don't care, because those protections don't impact our typical usage patterns. But all of these services live in their own separate worlds, because they are not interoperable. Adding support for a common protection standard doesn't suddenly make it possible to encrypt movies or harder to download images on the net because that already exists today (and has for years)! The point is to end the balkanization of media players and let everything work in your vanilla browser. That sounds good to me.

I have had contact with Manu Sporny, and his portrait doesn't look like him. You can google him to see for yourself. Of course, I imagine this kind of tech will only get better...

Doesn't putting it in the public domain accomplish that? You could just include that as a comment in your code when you post?