Jots and Tittles

I find it amusing that some people couldn't give a straight answer to the simplest of questions if their lives depended on it.  Sometimes it seems like there are some interviewees who, were I to ask them whether they were even alive, would not be able to answer simply "yes" but would have to give some convoluted string of meaningless words: "As I have not been able to ascertain up to this point a meaningful understanding of what it is to be alive, I can only speculate that I perceive the rain falling outside and therefore operate under the assumption that I have not yet ceased to breathe."  REALLY? You think you could cram a few more syllables in there that have nothing to do with the question I asked you?  That'd be great.  I think you could give me a bit more BS before you get down to not answering my question.  I really don't think that was your best effort.

This guy from Microsoft is one of them.

First of all, I can hardly believe that Microsoft is trying to revert to Digital Rights Management (or DRM), in England or anywhere else.  The basic point of DRM is to restrict one's use of legally purchased media (usually videos and music) and thereby control piracy.  The end result is often frustration: I purchased a couple of songs from Wal-Mart's website a few years ago and quickly regretted that decision because, thanks to DRM, I could not convert them into the proper format so I could put it on my iPod, which was the whole reason I bought them in the first place!  This is not an uncommon problem.  Many, many people who have purchased media protected by DRM have found that when they wanted to move thier media from one of their devices to another (say, from their computer to their mp3 player), they could not do so because of DRM restrictions.  Others have found that, when their computer crashed and they had to get a new one, they had to re-purchase all their media (even if they had backed it up) because they could not transfer it to a new device.  Understandably, this led to a general public dissatisfaction with DRM-restricted media and an increase in media piracy - perhaps it's illegal, but at least you can actually listen to the music you download illegally.  To be honest, I would not fault  a person like the young man who spent over $200 on baseball videos (and who, thanks to DRM, will never be able to view them again because the server from which the DRM receives permission to let those videos play is being shut down) for downloading them through other, less legal means.  He already paid for them once, after all, and through no fault of his own will lose the ability to watch them - even though he's not getting his money back.  I think he deserves to have the videos he paid for.  Nobody would argue with me if I said that Wal-Mart had come to reposess all the DVDs he'd ever bought from their stores, and I thought he had a right to keep them since he paid for them.  How is this different?

But I digress.  My point here is, this Hugh Griffiths guy never once actually answered the questions asked him.  Now, I know that I tend to be rather verbose when answering questions, but I flatter mysef that my verbosity is because I am actually giving a thoughtful answer to the question rather than simply saying words and hoping that nobody notices that they have nothing to do with the question asked.  And yet in this interview, the questionner continues to ask the same question in a variety of ways (namely: why would anyone in his right mind buy from MSN Mobile Music and deal with the DRM hassle when they could buy the same music elsewhere for cheaper and NOT deal with the DRM hassle?) and Mr. Griffiths continued to skirt the question and essentially make himself look like a fool.  Good work, Microsoft.  Out of curiousity, can ANYONE explain to me what the potential benefits of buying music from MSN Mobile would be?  Why on earth would I want to pay extra for music that I can't listen to when my phone breaks and I have to get a new one?  Especially when I can get it elsewhere for less money AND be able to transfer it to my computer so that when my phone breaks and I have to get a new one, I can transfer all that music that I already paid for onto my new phone and save even MORE money?  If there were some benefits that came with spending all that extra money I could perhaps justify it, but those would have to be some freaking amazing benefits to outweigh the drawbacks.

Honestly.  I think it's pretty obvious to everyone (except for Microsoft... but clearly they're clueless as to the workings of the average person's mind) that this isn't going to go over well, and that eventually one of two things will happen: MSN Mobile will drop the DRM nonsense and go another direction to justify insanely high prices, or MSN Mobile will drop the prices and keep the DRM, leading to its evental demise since no sane person will buy something with DRM knowing full well they'll have to buy it again when they switch phones.  Either way, I forsee the death of MSN Mobile in the not-to-distant future, and thank goodness for it.  May all DRM die the same death, the sooner the better.  The harder (and more expensive) you make it for people to enjoy their media legally, the more people you will push to piracy.  That strikes me as counter-productive.  Here's a radical thought: how about working WITH your customers to develop a mutually satisfactory system rather than employing this us-versus-them tactic which only serves to destroy customer relations?  It's pretty simple.  We want media that is inexpensive, easy to access and easy to back up.  And if we want to share that awesome new single we found with our friends, we should be able to do that, because that's free marketing and you should be BEGGING us to do that!

To be fair, there are places (such as iTunes and Amazon.com) which are offering DRM-free downloads of music (which is a big part of why MSN Mobile is going to fail spectacularly).  That's a step in the right direction.  I still think that the best solution is to work with torrent sites and other such popular pirating avenues to make media legally available through such mutual sharing sites, and make it as close to free as possible.  The internet isn't going away any time soon, and these people are going to have to adapt or become obsolete.  Music is going to be available to people for free through illegal means if it's not made available to people for free through legal means, and trying to persecute every thirteen-year-old in the world who downloads the latest big hit is simply not a viable option.  It's time to come up with another model.  Personally, I am in favor of the concert model in which artists receive their money from going on concert tours and other such sources, not from album sales.  To be quite fair, it's not like they will starve to death based on the loss of album sales.  They have far too much freaking money as it is.  They ought to be recording music for the love of music, not for the love of money, and if they can't seperate the two then they aren't mature enough to handle it anyway.

And that's quite enough ranting from me for now.  I have a paper to get back to.  I just thought I'd take a nice break and vent.

Perhaps the next time I take a break I'll talk about my thoughts on Microsoft's approach to software and operating systems and suchlike.  That might be fun.  =D

-Jaya-

Bear with me.  This will be an angry rant.  Very, very angry.  And frustrated.  Angry and frustrated.  And hormonal.  Reader beware.  You have been warned.

So far, I am mostly enjoying my seminary classes.  They are a lot of work and there are some things that are confusing as heck, but for the most part I am learning a lot about God and already finding ways to apply it to my life, which is super cool.

BUT.  I should have known better, but I genuinely expected not to have to deal with the infiltration of politically correct speech in my seminary classes.  This is Fuller, for heaven's sake, and they're supposed to be conservative and level-headed.  And yet here I am, reading books which refuse to use pronouns for God (do you have ANY idea how ANNOYING that is? ...some of you do...) or which use B.C.E. and C.E. instead of B.C. and A.D. when talking about dates.  I could cry.

Granted, I'm a bit hypersensitive to the pronoun thing.  It was the first inkling that something was wrong at my home church, the place where Christianity fell apart at the seams in favor of a more manageable and liberal-friendly god whose main goal was not to offend anyone, except of course for those lousy conservatives.  We can offend them as much as we want because they are wrong anyway, and besides it's not like they have feelings that actually MATTER or anything.  But my main memory of that church, when things started to get wonky, was when Pastor Lynn insisted on using the most awkwardly-worded sentences since The Eye of Argon in order to avoid using masculine pronouns for God.  And now my Systematic Theology 1 teacher insists on using it as well.  It was bad enough that he stated that we would be graded down for not using gender-inclusive language in papers.  At the time, I didn't think he was referring to language about God.  Now, I'm not so sure.  But I still used masculine pronouns in reference to God in the paper I turned in for that class on Friday.  I will not destroy English grammar so that the liberals can feel better about themselves.  God has chosen to reveal himself in the Bible to us in almost exclusively masculine terms, and the few comparisons that involve God and something feminine are in the form of similes, not metaphors, which hold a much lesser degree of comparison.  HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO GO OVER THIS?  AARRGGHH.  It's not "Godself."  It's "HIMself."  "Godself" is not a word, and you sound like a freaking MORON when you say it.  It just makes you sound uneducated and naive.  And I refuse to do it!  I am willing to compromise and use gender-inclusive language when referring to humans.  I still maintain that most women are intelligent enough to discern when an author is using the gender-neutral "he" or the masculine "he" and that to suggest otherwise is an insult to her intelligence, but as that is a lesser concern than messing with God's self-revelation, I'll let it go.  But I refuse to talk about God in grammatically idiotic ways.  I have too high a respect for God and for the English language, in that order.

And then there's our readings for Isaiah.  I have long thought that the idiotic modern convention of substituting B.C.E. and C.E. for the traditional (and accurate, by the way) B.C. and A.D. was, well, idiotic, moronic, stupid, delusioned, ignorant, and overall rather dumb.  Who do they think they're fooling, anyway?  Call a spade a spade, people.  Nobody is going to rework our entire dating system in order to make it NOT centered around Christ, so you're stuck with this being 2008 (years after the death of Christ) whether you like it or not.  So, rather than try to change the way the entire world thinks about the progression of time, we're just going to muddy the waters a little bit and call the time after Jesus the "common era" and the time before Jesus the time "before common era."  Because nobody will be smart enough to figure out that we're still organizing our ENTIRE DATING SYSTEM around Jesus Christ.  Of course.  That's called DENIAL, boys and girls, and it's more than just a river in Egypt.  It's rather stupid.  What, do you think it's somehow less offensive to have the "arbitrary" division between common era and before-common-era (by the way, who the hell decided against the more logical pre-common era?  Doesn't that make tons more sense?) be Jesus Christ, rather than simply coming out and saying that, as part of our history, the people who ran things at the time when important decisions like how we were going to talk about time were made were Christians, and wanted to honor Jesus by organizing their dating system around his life?  I don't know, it seems to me like it doesn't get rid of the problem to change the name.  Just makes you look foolish.

But it's even worse when CHRISTIAN authors fall into this ludicrous trap.  Come ON, people.  Who do you think you're going to offend?  Presumably, we're all Christians, here - or at least that seems to be the audience you are addressing in your books.  But today, in ALL of my readings, every single one of them has used the B.C.E. and C.E. notation.  One says that he is "follow[ing] a common convention in biblical [sic] studies."  Why the HELL is that common?  In Biblical studies?  The one place where it still ought to be ok to stand up without shame and affirm that the dating system we know is created in honor of our Lord, Jesus Christ.  That sickens me.  Seriously.  That is beyond unacceptable.  This fear of offense is permeating everywhere, even our conservative churches!  I don't think many of you noticed this, but Jesus didn't exactly go around fearing that he was going to offend anyone - in fact, he offended a LOT of people! 

Thank God that the church in China is praying for us to be persecuted.  Thank God that their prayers are being answered.  We have become selfish and weak, and we can't even stand up for the most trivial of things, like pronouns and dating conventions.  How on earth can we then be expected to stand up for the important things, like the fact that Jesus Christ is the only way to eternal life? 

We're in serious trouble.

-Jaya-