DRM, the fight against open standards, and my mother
(For the record: I tagged based on the conversation, not on what I wrote. I do need to tone down my tagging, though. :-P)
Home for Thanksgiving.
I just spent the last hour or so explaining things like Microsoft's market dominance ("No startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM." - Paul Graham), Microsoft's fight against Massachusett's move to open standards, the importance of the availability of radio spectra to the people, price-point schemes in the iTunes music store, DRM, DRM, DRM, and more DRM to my mother.
Needless to say, between my attempts to shovel in enough cursory backstory that I had enough shaky ground to stand on (otherwise known as explaining and dumbing-down for the non-technical), and the stuff I was talking about, I'm a little tired, and little ticked at the world, and the thousand and one ways big business tries to and often succeeds in taking away our rights. As my mother accurately pinpointed it with the constant mantra of our family: It's capitalism. How else do you explain an attempt to screw people for every single thing they're worth?
Home for Thanksgiving.
I just spent the last hour or so explaining things like Microsoft's market dominance ("No startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM." - Paul Graham), Microsoft's fight against Massachusett's move to open standards, the importance of the availability of radio spectra to the people, price-point schemes in the iTunes music store, DRM, DRM, DRM, and more DRM to my mother.
Needless to say, between my attempts to shovel in enough cursory backstory that I had enough shaky ground to stand on (otherwise known as explaining and dumbing-down for the non-technical), and the stuff I was talking about, I'm a little tired, and little ticked at the world, and the thousand and one ways big business tries to and often succeeds in taking away our rights. As my mother accurately pinpointed it with the constant mantra of our family: It's capitalism. How else do you explain an attempt to screw people for every single thing they're worth?