What Fresh Idiocy Is This?

Today’s dose of “teh stoopid” comes to us cour­tesy of The Apple Blog in this won­der­ful gem of idiocy from Bob Rudis titled iTunes Store and Apple’s DRM Safe Haven In Jeopardy. I have nei­ther the time, nor the energy to prop­erly dis­ect this gem; but it breaks down like this. Apple recently com­mented that the rate hikes on dig­i­tal down­loads being pro­posed by the Copyright Royalty Board could make it shut down the iTunes Store. For those with ter­mi­nal brain dys­func­tion, this is what we call a “bluff.” Bob com­bines this fact with the fact that Walmart, that paragon of con­sumer activism recently shut down its wildly suc­cess­ful online music store; and in the process of doing so told it’s cus­tomers to pound sand.

From these two events, related tan­gen­tially at best, Bob then extrap­o­lates a dystopian future where Apple shut­ters iTunes and leaves its cus­tomers in the lurch. Of course, this leads us to Bob’s heroic cry to the com­mon man to rise up against the shack­les of FairPlay and ask, nay, demand that Apple vio­late their con­tracts with the music indus­try and remove FairPlay now.

It’s really too bad that Apple, in its usual secretive

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Not Everything Is a Consumer “Right”

Tucked amid the finan­cial doom and gloom this week was this annoy­ing tid­bit. Apparently some twat in Norway has decided to run his mouth some more about how Apple is required to make iTunes Store pur­chases inter­op­er­a­ble with their com­peti­tors’ prod­ucts…or else. I’m sorry, but this sort of shit enrages me. I am a advo­cate of con­sumer rights; but, once upon a time, “con­sumer rights” meant things like “your car doesn’t explode,” and “your food isn’t poi­son.” Not the cur­rent refrain of “wah, gimme what I want” that seems to be syn­ony­mous with the phrase now.

Here’s the facts for the sim­ple­tons out there who don’t get it. You have no right to demand that every thing that a cor­po­ra­tion sells you be pro­vided in any for­mat that strikes your fancy. If you don’t like iPods, then buy your music from any of the dozens of alter­nate sources and play it on what­ever the fuck you like.

And, in par­tic­u­lar to Bjoern Erik Thon, fuck you in your frost-bitten, enti­tle­tard ear.