nyan

Tim Hortons is a private company, isn't a necessity, and doesn't have any shortage of qualified workers. Would you consider it more reasonable if we offered med school students the choice of the currently heavily-subsidized fee structure in return for public service after graduation, or paying the full unsubsidized cost of their educations in return for not doing public service?

Maybe you should post a new article about copyright reform if that's the topic you want to discuss, rather than trying to drag it into a discussion on a different topic. This one's about false advertising of digital leases as purchases, which they are not even by the definition applied to physical copies.

There are two different types of ownership here, and you're conflating them.

One is the ownership of a digital copy on the same terms as a physical copy. That allows you to resell your copy, lend it to a friend, move it to a different device, retain the use of it even if the seller no longer exists . . . stuff that falls under the first-sale doctrine and other actions that are generally accepted as "okay" and reasonable. That's what's being called out here as not existing for most digital copies.

The other is the ownership of the copyright and permissions to reproduce additional copies. However, that isn't what most people expect to get when they're purchasing a copy of a media work, regardless of whether it's digital or physical. How IP in general and copyright in particular is handled does really need an overhaul, but that isn't a problem specific to the digital world—it's equally applicable to print books, oil paintings, and vinyl records.

And to be honest, I'd prefer to see "lease" lose its meaning than "buy" go the same way, because apparently we can't have both.

For some things, you can get non-DRM downloadable files, and those you do own. They're very much the minority, though, and mostly limited to smaller, less-popular shops where they do exist.

I would very much like a law that says that streaming services and DRM'd downloads are required to use words like "rent" or "lease", never "buy" or any synonym thereof.

Hard to say. I get the impression he's, if not exactly starting to burn out, then at least getting pretty tired. He has one of the largest (second-largest?) and least-accessible ridings in Ontario, and apparently just getting from Point A to Point B is starting to wear him down.

So essentially the same business plan as 95% of all tech startups of the past quarter-century.

I want to move to a timeline where this is part of a bad movie plot, not part of the news.

I would say that all issues can be traced back to letting people sell stuff on what was designed as a government/educational communications system. We keep on adding patches trying to smother commercially-motivated bad actors who were not an expected part of the original design, but it's not really much different from playing whack-a-mole.

(I didn't read the article, but I imagine it's Yet Another Idea for some kind of patch, and probably not a very good one, because most of them aren't.)

Don't get hung up on the details, because they change over time. When I was in school, that line was "in all thy sons command" (I'm fine with them replacing it to be less sexist, but don't ask me to sing the new version from memory!)

Go further back, and "from far and wide" drops out, if I recall correctly.

Have they ever been seen in the same place at the same time?

Eh, it's not that bad. Lacking depth and sometimes a bit ridiculous, but it isn't offensive, the plots are easy to follow even if they're less than brilliant, and the characterization is consistent. Mediocre, mildly amusing brain candy that I'll probably have forgotten about altogether by this time next year.

I'm probably going to stick with it to the end unless it manages to crash and burn in a highly spectacular manner by doing something revolting. So far, it's just made side excursions into the silly, like delivering a "dramatic" monologue inside a burning building. I can handle that.

A snake doing the limbo could not go lower than these people at this point.