solidarity
This WGA strike sucks, to be sure. If it goes on for more than three months (which is looking increasingly likely), pilot season won't happen, no new shows will be created, no new seasons will come back, and we'll be stuck with the dregs of reality TV for a full year. Yep, that means no last season of Battlestar Galactica, no new season of Lost, and no new episodes of The Office. It's no small thing, and not just because you'll be inconvenienced by marathons of Overweight Celebrity Chili Cook-Off Island or whatever the networks will throw up when they run out of new programming.
TV is not disappearing anytime soon, but clearly, it's going to be replaced by either the internet or some TV/internet hybrid. Like the music industry, the TV industry realizes that their tried-and-true business model is about to be useless, and it's lashing out in panic. Unlike the music industry, who stupidly attacked its fans, the TV industry is attacking its own creative source: writers. But the WGA wouldn't be striking if this wasn't important. We talked to both sides to get at the root of the trouble.
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MJF at ZDNet reports that Microsoft is slowly rolling out a new version of Windows Genuine Advantage for Windows XP Professional in the next few months that's going to change the way it nags about using pirated versions. Instead of the kill switch, which was in Vista, the XP versions that WGA decides are "non-genuine" will pop up a message that looks like the one above. On the one hand, this is annoying, but on the other hand, it's just nagware and not a kill switch. If you're smart enough to pirate XP, you're smart enough to figure out how to find a crack to disable this. [ZDnet]
