General Computing.
What pisses me off about the music piracy/blow up the computer thing is this -- the REAL goal of the RIAA is to create a permanent "tax" on media. What they want is for Joe Consumer to pay a few dollars every time he buys blank media. Then, when the media isn't as popular any more (due to high speed interconnects and dropping non-volatile storage) they'll go for a tax on the devices themselves. They're the milkmen of our age -- they once had a role but technology has largely made the record companies irrelevent. Any competent band can record in a home studio for a few thousand bucks, now. You can do the whole thing on just about any PC. Record companies don''t serve artists -- they screw artists.
For this society is supposed to pay them a tax, in perpetuity, as they grow progressively more irrelevent?
The RIAA is hiding all this under the guise of copyright and IP. It's BS. They're advocating a huge attack on general computation to attain their ends.
For the non-technical, consider this: The RIAA does NOT want you to have the ability to do any computation that you please on your general purposes computation device. In fact, they do not want you to have a general purpose computation device. In the past (and currently) you can take your computer and program it to do anything that you want. It is capable of performing any transformation of information from one form to another. The RIAA wants to disable this capability. They want to make it extraordinarily difficult to perform certain transformations. Naturally, most real techies can get around it, but for the average person it will be impossible.
It's funny, but there are parallels between gun laws and the information that ricochets inside a computer. The constitution says that I have a right to speak, I have a right to carry a gun. Do I have a constitutional right to TRANSFORM information as I please? To conduct any analysis I please? To use any method I please?
RIAA and IP grabbers WILL try to push DRM (digital rights management) into the hardware. They're already trying. Keep in mind that the phase that follows this, if they succeed, is that your computer will MONITOR your use of this material and report it back to...well, whoever. Creepy.
Yes, it's somewhat obscure and technical. But you should be scared.
11:16:26 PM 
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