Andrew Sullivan asks an interesting question as to why gays want to marry considering they have been politically and socially excluded for their sexuality. He takes a conservative view that it the gay community's desire for conservative values.
As someone who is going through a dragged out divorce which is still not settled despite being fourteen months since the separation I can honestly say I will get married again. My partner asked me this morning why I would want to given the hassles the divorce has put me through.
It is probably for the same reason the gay community does. Marriage is a universally recognized social convention that is a public declaration of love, commitment and devotion to your partner. It has transcended the religious and political basis for it simply because it so recognized as a convention.
If another more powerful convention came by which people could declare and re-affirm their love for each other then I imagine marriage would become a minority ceremony only practiced by certain denominations. But there isn't, so marriage is it.
Like I said, I am sure I will get married again. The divorce process, while emotionally difficult, has not left me with burnt fingers. It is still a good institution by which to publicly announce and affirm your love and devotion to your partner. (reply)
Via Arstechnica, Yahoo has closed down its music service and now the keys to the music as part of that product are lost. People cannot play the music they leased - rather than purchased I guess - from Yahoo. It is a good argument against DRM and subscribing to any DRM service or product.
I do use iTunes and occasionally buy songs from it. They are covered by DRM or digital rights management known as Fairplay. The only real way I have control over the songs is to burn them to a music CD and then re-import. A hopelessly manual and laborious process - and consequently a sufficient deterrent against me doing it.
The iTunes DRM has some really weird restrictions on it too; from the wiki article:
The track may be copied to any number of iPod portable music players. The track may be played on up to five authorized computers simultaneously. (Apple stores this information on their servers) A particular playlist within iTunes containing a FairPlay-encrypted track can be copied to a CD only up to seven times (originally ten times) before the playlist must be changed. The track may be copied to a standard Audio CD any number of times.For the most part I have few enough songs that I have bought from iTunes that it isn't a big deal if I lose them all. The music that I really like is still purchased on CD or integrated from other people's music collections. One issue that it did raise was when I got divorced recently. Normally physical music collections are easily and quickly divided up. But with DRM music who gets to keep the authorized computers and accounts? As it turned out I got a new iTunes account because it was not my email that we used. But the songs we had purchased stayed authorized on my ex-wifes Macbook. Not mine. Fortunately the music collection was small enough that it did not become a property issue, but I suspect if DRM hangs around and someone has a non-trivial iTunes music collection in the thousands of dollars a judge somewhere will be making a judgement on how the DRM'd files are split. It may not be to Apple's liking either. (more)
