Love the HP-41C comment. True.

Note though that NASA has graduated to using modern tech rather than designing their own hardened 15-year-old versions of all technology. The amazing thing is this is an iPod and not a $15,000 hardened clone from 1989.

You're right, the US Government certainly does this already.

But smaller governments without the same sized budget may be unable to do so. And now they can.

Likewise, it would be a cinch to license this tech and set up an information agency that private eyes could subscribe to. Then your psycho ex (or jealous spouse) could pay some scuzzy PI to stalk you.

Hummm.... I wonder who it will license this technology to?

Private investigators? Government agencies? Stalk-an-ex inc?

Legally, Apple's in the clear. Their end-user agreement specifies that ringtones are a separate purchase and that iTunes downloads are not to be used as ringtones.

As the rights owners, they are free to constrain your use of the music as they see fit, even if under fair use it would normally be okay for you to ignore them.

Fair use itself is a fuzzy boundary, so when you "sign" an agreement not to do something that would otherwise be considered fair use, you've lost that ability.

Why does Apple take all this trouble? Because it's obvious from the previously established market that people are willing to pay $2 for a ringtone, and $1 for a song. So they'd be stupid not to.

Not only would it start a pissing war with Sony as mentioned above, and force Microsoft to recant.

The Xbox is pretty much an embarrassment to Microsoft right now. It loses money, it generates huge support issues, and it's getting its ass kicked by 20-to-1 by Nintendo in Japan.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070803.wgtwiisony03/BNStory/Technology/home

Apparently the terrorists not only hate our freedoms, they hate our innovation, our love of new things, and our entrepreneurial spirit.

And apparently they've cowed the whole lot of us.

I agree, the Americans are gone as a world force. Not because of the terrorists, but because the Americans have reacted to the terrorists with genuine terror. They now think like a bunch of wussies and have stopped doing cool things if they're afraid one or two people will get killed.

If this is what happened to Brave America, the terrorists have indeed won.

Someone call Cory Doctorow. The man seems to be a fount of alternate, DRM-free business models for music. Check out his first 2 or 3 novels.

One possible reason for the "leasing" comment:

You may think you own your iTunes track, but you don't. You own the right to play it on a limited number of computers, in a particular format.

That still applies even after you burn it on a CD.

So when the number of computers runs out (because you change computers a few times), or the format becomes obsolete (use a lot of WordPerfect files these days?), your track is unplayable.

My CD's from 1981 still play, but you won't be playing these tracks in 25 years, guaranteed.

Nobody seems to have commented on the note that it's Hard Drive based instead of flash, like an iPod.

4GB is perfectly possible to accomplish without a hard drive, and gives longer battery life, smaller size, no moving parts, and no chance of a disk crash.

So the iPod is just going to have all those advantages. It seems a bit late in the game to me to be introducing a 4gb hard-drive player. Why bother?