Day: October 22, 2012

Outlawed by Amazon DRM

Outlawed by Amazon DRM:

This is becoming my hobby horse, but it bears repeating: this is the real “walled garden” effect we need to worry about. What I need to have and keep open are my data formats. I don’t need the source code for the applications that I run; I don’t need warm fuzzies from the thought that I can swap out my operating system for Ubuntu “Rabid Ratel.” Those are ways that those of sufficient nerd studliness can keep their data open, but for 99% of humanity they’re not practical ways. Open or even de facto standards like RTF, MP3, MP4 and EPUB—when kept free from DRM—are what we need to be strongly advocating for. The music industry has mostly given up on DRM; it’s time for the publishing and video industries to follow their lead. (You’d think that merely knowing the RIAA was, in any way, more progressive than you are would be enough to shame you into action, but sadly not.) Some DRM is worse than others—Apple’s tends to be better at staying out of your way than most and, as far as I know, wouldn’t let Apple do what Amazon did here even if they wanted to—but fundamentally, you need to be able to control your own data, even if that control makes the people who sold you that data twitchy.

[Here’s the original problem Outlawed by Amazon DRM. I thought only Google was this bad at this.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Friendship

It will last for years, include bad jokes, dark humor, pre-dawn meetings in parking lots, post-dusk rides back into parking lots, pain, sweating, suffering, freezing, whining, complaining, smiling, laughing, getting lost, headwinds, and talking about how fun it all was later.

And that’s just for starters…

Enjoying the Ride: Weighing In

Enjoying the Ride: Weighing In:

And how about these half-assed confessions? “I only took EPO a few times and never consistently”, “Johan made me do it”, “Lance is a big, scary, 150 lb bully”, “I took PEDs but I didn’t inhale” (I paraphrase). It all smells to me. Self-preservation is the name of the game. There was nothing altruistic in these half-truth confessions. Tell me Hincapie, Vande Velde, Danielson, Zabriskie, and Leipheimer: if you chose to cheat and lie through your Postal years and then continue to lie a further 6 years later, why should we believe you when you say that you’ve been racing clean since 2005/2006 (or that you weren’t cheating before your Postal days)? I have a really hard time believing that. I hope it’s true but if the risk of being caught continued to be low and the lure of results, money, and adulation continued to be high, it would have to be quite the sudden alignment of their respective moral compasses. Okay, so say that everyone one of the confessors stopped taking PEDs in 2006 as they claim, what about the residual effects of drugs? Their level of training and racing on PEDs was so much higher than what they could achieve sans that the benefits of that could last for years, right? There are no studies about this that I know of but I have to believe that the Grand Tours, training, etc. that they did on the juice had to be beneficial to the body for years to come. Not to mention the confidence and other mental aspects gained while riding/racing better than you’re capable of naturally. In all, it seems like a pretty sweet deal for these guys.

[There’s always another side.]