I made my first alterations to a Wikipedia page today: I added (hopefully correct) references to the Mary’s Room page in the section about Dennett’s refuting the thought experiment.

Humor me if you would. I was thinking about selling music online. Apple’s music store proves at least one thing: that people are willing to buy music online. If you think about this, it is what both consumers and the recording industry would like: to be able to purchase music and to be able to make money from people purchasing music respectively.

Aside from one problem: the DRM Apple applies to all songs bought from the store. For the consumer this stops them doing all they might like to do with a track. From the point of view of the recording industry, it allows Apple to manipulate them in ways they don’t like because of the market share Apple has. So if the DRM doesn’t benefit the people who buy music, nor the people who create music, then who does it benefit?

Today, literally every time I stop a debugging session Visual Studio is going into that weird deadlocked-at-40%-processor state that it enjoys so much. Maybe there’s good ice cream there or something.

Anyway, it is irritating me hugely as I’m on a mammoth bug hunt at the moment… for the love of all things you hold sacred, fix your debugger Microsoft (though don’t debug it with itself, I would recommend, use a decent debugger!)

I have written a silly little throw away script that blacklists some words in comments. As most of the spam here so far seems pretty brain dead pasting it might work for a little bit. So, if you are trying to post and nothing appears, see if you have an obvious spammy word and remove it somehow.

I read John Gruber’s article about DRM — digital rights management — with interest. In it he looks at a record industry spokesperson’s quote and comes to the conclusion, rightly I believe, that the record industry wants there to be an interoperable standard for DRM because the record industry wants back control of music. This piece started me thinking about what the record industry should really be aiming for with an application of DRM.