That ring a bell?

What these laws do is add friction to the cost of reproducing information.  Means of duplicating information have been around for a long time: manual copying, photocopiers, cassette tapes, VCR tapes, etc.  However, all of these non-digital means of copying had a friction that was natural to the medium that retarded the market in copies to the point that a content industry could continue to exist.

With the digital era, that natural friction disappeared.  More to the point, it became quite possible to make money off the copying of other people’s content (c.f. Napster, Megaupload, etc.)  The copyright enforcement laws (which are different from the copyright extension laws) are an attempt to re-introduce friction into the digital copying era such that there is a consumer (as opposed to moral) argument for actually recompensing the content creators and distributors for their efforts.

As well, these laws (as well as the ridiculous suits against pirates) have one additional purpose.  They attempt (semi-successfully) to induce a sense that there is a moral impropriety to copying content without permission. 

(For those who claim it doesn’t work, I’ll give the example of drunk driving laws, which when they were first properly enforced caused quite a bit of outrage when decent citizens where given *criminal* records for following a fairly commonly accepted social practice.  However, over the decades, the citizenry gradually did accept that anything that was punished this harshly by law must be morally wrong (or at least iffy), and after a long while, drunk driving is generally considered a moral wrong.)

So, in the end, I don’t think we’ll see either side achieve “victory”.  Too much will be lost if either side “wins”.

Your analogy about automatic transmission isn’t a bad one – the important part is you can still (legally) buy a standard transmission and it doesn’t look like it’s about to disappear.

I take a prescription that costs about $40 a day , and in countries where it’s an over the counter drug , it would cost about 20 cents.

If I had the time and didn’t have the insurance it would be cheaper to fly to France than walk to my Brooklyn pharmacy for a refill.

Things (ALL things) should be sold with their schematics. Does not have to be in paper form in the manual, but at least a downloadable PDF would be helpful. I would also certainly not complain if compilable source-codes for the firmware were available too. Just imagine all the sorts of possible hacks – without the slightest bit inconveniencing the “regular users” whom nobody forces to download and read the specs. And imagine the ability to figure out that the given device is a piece o’ crap by looking at its schematics before it is bought.

Good Speech.

Thankfully, there’s really no reason to use NeoOffice anymore.

You could, but depending on your carrier, they may enable a data plan without your permission.

Annoying, since it’s entirely possible to use the things on a wifi network, courtesy wifi is available darn near everywhere, and carriers like it that way since wireless bandwidth is at a premium.

You’re right; it’s not an analogy.  A better analogy would be if you bought a Toyota, and if you wanted to put an aftermarket car radio, you either had to have it done at the Toyota dealership, or have a certification to be a Toyota mechanic to buy the screwdriver for the Toyota-head screws.

Oh, right, I can’t. Well, I could, but I doubt it would do you any good.

I don’t WANT a future where I have to store my data on Google or Microsoft’s cloud, and have to interact with it on a locked-down tablet.

“That’s basically like sloppy writing and letting the reader fix the mistake and stumble across badly edited text.”

In the future, we might not even have the option–or right–to fix it ourselves in VLC.  That’s a problem.

There are also “piggyback ECUs”, which modify signals from the various sensors and trick the car’s ECU to behave as the owner/operator desires.
http://forums.superstreetonline.com/70/1010816/ecu-tuning-electronics/engine-tuning-standalone-ecu-vs-piggy-back-ecu-eng/index.html

Various OBD/OBD2 interfaces and the corresponding software for using them are also available on the market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics

The methods change, but the car-hacking stays.

For example sorbitol is commonly sold as a sugar substitute. That does not preclude its use with potassium nitrate as a popular solid rocket propellant, aka “rocket candy”.

Why for example all digital cameras do not come with some script language interpreter like the CHDK is for Canon ones? Even better, an access to low-level hardware functions would allow relatively easy repurpose of the devices into lab-grade imaging/dataprocessing equipment, e.g. for low-cost medical imaging. Even just a serial console with basic commands could be enough for some such cases. And many many other “non-general purpose devices” are crippled by design in similar ways. The hardware is there, the software misses a few functions, and there is no way to put them in. MADDENING.

According to your logic, the option to pay Big Bucks to the vendor and signing a NDA is still an ability to run whatever I like – and the cost sticker pricingme out is just “quibbling about price”. 

Running own code on a device is not a payware privilege, it is an unalienable right. Giving up warranty is an acceptable cost.

I actually haven’t watched Cory’s keynote…
Disagreement I can stand, but I found many of his articles about this topic and privacy to be factually wrong, sloppily researched  and spun in a yellow-press manner. Therefore, I do not spend time on those anymore.

This is an incredible statement. Not only have you spent time on Cory’s post but you are the main poster on the comment thread.

You complain that Cory’s articles are sloppily researched but, by your own admission, have not even bothered to listen to what he has to say before disagreeing with it.

You also state that many of his articles are factually wrong and contain spin yet your posts contain numerous errors, all of which seem to favour a particular perspective.

Walled gardens do play all these contents. … Even that choppy one. … My texts can be reread …

Ok, so then I reread this:

This, by the way, is a pretty good example why walled gardens are getting more popular than the open wild.

You’re contradicting yourself.

Also, in the walled garden you’re pretty much stuck with the out-of-sync video.  Out in the wild, you’re free to use tools like VLC to correct the sync.

If anything, this video shows why open source is vital.

The things I mentioned were widely and complacently accepted until they were struck down by a very small determined group who were not willing to accept “the vast majority is happy with… blah blah blah” as a reason for inaction.  Instead, these small groups mounted successful long-term campaigns to change what the “vast majority” wanted.  The greatest example, of course, is slavery – (and I’ve already been castigated for bringing a huge social issue into a discussion of, er, …a huge social issue, so I may as well keep going).  The vast majority of humans were perfectly happy with the institution of slavery, they just didn’t want to be slaves themselves.  For most of human history a world without slaves has been nearly inconceivable, yet, today the people who still practice slavery are a backwards minority, and many otherwise enlightened people think (falsely) that slavery has actually been eliminated.

Cory is attempting to be one of those key voices, who through sheer damned persistence, cause change in “the vast majority” of people’s attitudes.  Blithely dismissing the changes he wishes to see as impossible or meaningless, because they do not coincide with the Mobbe’s current attitudes, is failing to see the whole point of what he’s doing.

I do in no way doubt that people do lose access to their accounts. “Free” services are especially prone to this, as their incentive to correct this is nil, as their business models usually do not allow good end-user support. Note that I don’t write “customer”, because free users aren’t customers.   Google – to pick up on your examples – has actually a quite good customer services, from what I hear of my colleagues who pay for these services. 

Yes, it sucks, if those services become unavailable. But only a cheapskate or an idiot – or an idiot cheapskate – would base his business on stuff like this, especially when he or she doesn’t keep a secondary backup.  

One can still be dependent on a single company.   Any developer who does just iOS stuff, for example, though I’ll note that it’s most of the time actually easy to stay within the prescribed rules.   Or when you are dealing exclusively with Trader’s Joe/ALDI  and manage to lose that contract. 

But otherwise, no, there haven’t been many instances of being “enslaved by bigCompany”, unless the “enslaved” were betting on a free ride.

Yes, many of the things mentioned here _could_ be done with cloud apps; this just wasn’t true in the past. Many things need low latency to work well. A great many things _are_ available remotely, some work better locally.

And then you have things that you can’t explain away: before word processors with input methods for complex characters on personal computers, printing a Japanese contract took a day, after that ten minutes. There just was no mainframe option, an no usable one could have been developed back in the day. Not untypical, as you claim.

Regarding “bloated licensing costs,” the reality in large enterprises is that they just get a general catch-all license from Microsoft that is based on the rough number of _users_ and doesn’t require them to account for individual copies. That’s a contract, subject to negotiation like all contracts. Like it or not, Microsoft provides solutions that work well and with minimal futzing around (and I used to be a hardcore Linux guy).

In closing, I’ll just say that in my experience most problems with PCs (only laptops in our case, by the thousands) are hardware problems; in which case you give the user a working identical laptop, swap the HDD and send the computer in if it’s something serious. Honestly, IT _can_ be managed so that users experience minimal problems. Failure to do so does not mean it’s impossible.