I'm sick of hearing kids whine about DRM.
The minute the first song or movie was converted to a format you could download, you should have known that some company would find a way to interrupt your enjoyment of it. You live in an accelerated culture. And it's not getting better. Expect that after 2009 everything you've ever downloaded will evaporate. Or worse, still take up space on your hard drives, but be inaccessible. Or turn into Barry Manilow tunes.
This is Moore's law applied to the digital world:
Your perceived ownership of a thing will reduce by one-half every 2 years. The distance between usefulness and obsolescence expands or shrinks based on popularity. More popular items will need replacement faster as market saturation peaks sooner. Hence, books will always be around.
So you've never heard of planned obsolescence? Did you think you could use this crap forever?! Oh, look how convenient this is, that I can download everything! Convenience has been a trap since the 1920's. Convenience sucks.
Prepare for obsolescence. I have five DVD players in unopened boxes. I have a record player and a collection of record albums. I have a zombie Adolphe Menjou and zombie Irene Dunne in my garage to act out scences from my favorite films for me. Yeah, I dug them up and zombified them, so I won't even need DVDs in the future. And I'm converting all my albums and mp3s to eunuch. I got an authentic eunuch who memorizes all my songs and sings them to me on demand; he accepts all ID3 tags and has shuffle and repeat. He eats too much, but there's always a trade off.
Soon the only permanent thing we will have is printed text on paper. And what do we call it when you bind those pages between two covers? Kids? Anyone?
