[Windows Phone 7 General] Spike15:
Ouch, my bull**** alarm just went off.

I just have a quick question, do you actually apply your own rational thought (do you experience rational thought?) to things Steve Jobs says, or do you eat it up as if it's the word of God?

iTunes' draconian methods aren't helping to stem music piracy. Nothing can do that...nothing. There's no DRM scheme that's going to stop people who want to pirate music from doing so. All these feeble attempts do is inconvenience the customer. It's the same with any DRM scheme. All you do by limiting legitimate customers in this way (limitations which the pirates -- by definition -- do not experience) is encourage piracy, because suddenly you have pirates that have a better experience with their ill-gotten gains which were free, than the legitimate customers have with the product they acquired legitimately and at expense.

So Apple is law now?

It's not the responsibility of a company to ensure that their clients comply with the law in using their products. It's the responsibility of the company to provide a product which pleases the customer.

Are guns sold with devices which prevent you from shooting people? Are knives sold with mechanisms which prevent you from stabbing people? Are paperclips sold with built-in safeguards that prevent them from being transformed into make-shift lockpicks?

No.

The only reason Apple is doing what they're doing, is to control their userbase, shaping their users into habits and patterns which are more beneficial and produce more profit for Apple.

That's fascist.

Taking what I say out-of-context, and then applying your own [terrible] attempt at logic to it, doesn't make your point-of-view look any better.

Surprise asshole, I don't live in that ass of a country called "United States of America". Where I live I can download all the music I want and there are supreme court rulings that protect me from the consequences.

Your DMCA bull**** doesn't mean anything to me.

Wow, how did this turn into some deep statement about my beliefs about my actions affecting or not affecting the people around me?

I thought it was a statement about my belief that I should be free from artificial and subversive limitations placed on products by manufacturers.

You should really take this to an Apple forum, where there are fellow idiots who lap up Steve Jobs' bull****.

Here we -- or at least I -- have minds of our own, so while you're under the effect of Apple's reality distortion field, we -- or at least I -- will be laughing at you.

This is exactly what happens when a corporation is "unleashed" from accountability to its customers.

Microsoft -- for the most part -- distributes software that big business and government agencies are going to be big consumers of. Big business and government agencies:

A. Have an interest in security and reliability

B. Hire professionals

Therefore, any hidden "kill switches" like this one will immediately be rejected, and that's why such "kill switches" (other than initial activation) are absent from Microsoft products.

However, once Microsoft moves into the "consumer" area of the market, they know that they're dealing with ignoramuses, people who may care about their freedoms et cetera in the context of software, but who are too ignorant to come to realizations about it.

Therefore, now that they're free from the repurcussions of large businesses and government agencies rejecting them and moving to other platforms -- such as Linux -- they add all sorts of draconian methods to control their users.

This is natural for the corporation, because corporations exist to make profit, and are only curtailed by the government and their consumers...

...and consumers nowadays have lost the meaning of what it means to be a consumer, and through your collective will force companies to be ethical, and therefore you have companies employing deplorable profit-generating practices, because people refuse to hold them accountable by denying them their business.

You can sit around calling Apple and/or Microsoft "evil" all day, but it's untrue. They're just performing their natural function and taking that function as far as the controlling elements will allow them. The controlling elements -- in this instance, the consumer -- are the ones to blame for not curtailing this behaviour. Instead you have dumbshits like Eagle Steve actually defending it.