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Well, considering that journalistic ethics is an oxymoron, I'm not sure what you expected.

There's no technical reason they can't release expansions like that. That's the way the Oblivion Shivering Isles expansion disc works.

The main 'problem' with doing this is for achievement hounds. You only get a one-time additional 250 achievements points to distribute on expansions.

You say "Will i avoid the Gulfstream or Warren the Yacht because of the surcharge?" History says that you will avoid buying it in the US. Just such a tax was placed on yachts in 1990, and the net result was that the yacht-building industry in the US was almost destroyed. People just bought them overseas instead, or didn't buy them. So the tax was repealed in 1992, and it took years for the industry to recover.

Having said that, I would have zero problems if we were to switch to a flat tax, where you'd pay the same percentage of your income as I would. But that will never happen in this country - politicians like to do social engineering with tax laws too much.

It really depends - but there is one thing. If your site depends on ad revenues to stay up you better have them, because if you don't have comments I'm never going to the site itself, I'll just read it in the RSS feed.

Of course, if you don't have an RSS feed I'm not reading you anyways, and if you only have a partial one and you're not on my list already I'm extremely unlikely to add you.

The thing is, Mark, the NBA has a definite problem here. Because nobody I talked to today about this was surprised in the least. Surprised that he got caught, maybe. But it's been the perception among a lot of people that refs have been "controlling" the games due to their own biases or the league's desires for years.

I remember a series-deciding finals game after Jordan came back a few years ago, where he was the "hero", and was lauded. But my perception was exactly the opposite. In that game, if he'd been any other player and played the way he did, he'd have fouled out. Or if he'd been ref'd like any other player, as good as he was he'd have backed off. Either way it would have changed the game tremendously. Now, Jordan wasn't a dirty player by any means. But in an important playoff game, do you really believe that he wouldn't use the knowledge that barring eye-gougeing someone, he's not fouling out?

And honestly, there's not a huge step from 'treating the stars specially because that's what the league thinks its viewers want to see' to 'let's call a few fouls to manage the point spread or the over-under'. They're just different levels of the same dishonesty.

OK, so the safe harbor provisions appear to be:

(1) In general.— A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, if the service provider—

(A)
(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;
(ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or
(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;

(B) does not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity; and

(C) upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.

In thinking about it, I'd say viacom probably fails A(ii), since they obviously have someone who checks the stuff that's uploaded for porn.

They may also fail B. Because while the playback pages won't have any ads on them, the search listings do. So is ad revenue from when I search for a viacom property directly attributable to that property? I don't know, but I believe you certainly could argue that it is.

Hmm, reading further in the statute its clear that revenue from indexing infringing content definitely falls afoul of this. Those 3 sections are essentially repeated for indexing and searching sites.

This will be interesting. I think it's possible that the ad revenue on the search pages won't count, but think it's very unlikely that they survive the "is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent" test. I mean, when a movie's been split up into 10 minute chunks and uploaded, it's hard to argue that the infringing activity is nonapparent.

Sure. The entire channel is degraded while you're playing protected content if there are any insecure components in the chain. That's what I said. But that's not what the article said. It implied that the mere presence of protected material would cause the system to be degraded.

If you don't like this, don't play any protected material. It's that simple.

So what's the situation today? Basically nobody has a secure channel. I certainly don't. So no content provider that actually wants sales will set the flag requiring this, if the content is intended for PC consumption. Did you know that Windows Media has had the ability to require a secure audio path for several years? Nobody uses it.

Now, what's the situation, say, 5 years from now. Maybe it's the same. But maybe not, maybe at that point HDCP-enabled hardware (or comparable stuff) will have the market penetration to let people turn stuff on. What happens then? Well, at that point I probably _do_ have the hardware. And as long as I'm not trying to steal the content, guess what? I have no problems.

You're worried about Microsoft having the keys to your hardware. Guess what? If you run any form of Windows, they already do. Sure, you probably run linux. But if you run linux, you weren't going to load vista anyways. So, one again, there's no net change here.

There is a slight amount of real information in this article amid all the scare-mongering, but not much. The author seems to be postulating some circumstance where your system might be silently "infected" with protected content that would silently degrade all other content on the system. This is simply not so.

The requirements for DRM basically say that IF you're playing some protected content, the entire channel that the content passes through has to be secure, or it has to go down in quality or be blocked if the content provider wants it. That's it. What does this mean for games? Not a darn thing, because game content won't be protected with DRM.

Now, I _suppose_ that there might be some really contrived circumstances. Say, you're listening to some DRM'd mmusic while playing a game, or have a dual-monitor setup and are watching some protected content on one screen while playing on another. But those are fairly contrived.