So, what's making my news today? Well for starters, there is the following article that has me quite perturbed.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12219

Now if you ask me, that is just completely wrong. Of course, my understanding of it is only based on the article's description, but throwing people who share files in jail is just a little extreme. However, as a programmer, I do know the importance of copyrights and how they affect my career as well, but then sometimes politicians go too far when trying to control something. There are certain things that will not go away. Piracy will not go away, both commercial and non-commercial. People will constantly be backing up stuff they own for one reason or another, and taking away that right is just fundamentally wrong. Unless you believe that an universal pay-per-play policy is profitable. And as things are going, that is where things will end up.

We will wake up one day and find that all the TV channels have nothing but commercials and you'd have to choose and pay for the "shows" that you want to watch. You order the show the time it airs, get charged for it, and will have no ability to record it, since by then PVRs, VCRs, and anything that you can hook up to a TV will probably not have the decryption codes to decode the broadcast. You turn on the radio and hear nothing but ads until you punch in your credit card number to pay for the broadcast. You turn on your computer and connect to the internet, but don't forget that you have to pay for content, so you'll be billed per website. You go to the music store to "buy" a CD which you'll be able to listen to, so 10 times, before it disintegrates. You might be laughing now, but this could very well be the future where everyone pays for everything in any form of entertainment. Hell, they'll probably have pay-per-read books with bought in internet and credit card swiper and electronic paper. But then I'm getting carried away.

In other news, we see that IBM seems to be behind Windows-64 and the Athlon 64, which is a good sign for my AMD stocks.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12236

Yes, the irony of one monopoly throwing muck at another......http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/33468.html.

In related headlines, it seems that Steve Jobs was right when he stated that Apple iTunes for Windows is the best windows app yet, since its been downloading a million times or so in the past 4 days. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/33485.html

- posted by Sai @ 11:53 AM