Agraham999 writes:
"MiskatonicU, your arguement is weak...and now...wrong. They did not fix the feature...they removed it. You talk about how geeky you are...I think you'd realize the difference."

Sometimes fixing a difference between the documentation and the application entails removing unintended functionality. However, now that you point out that the documentation contradicts itself, I withdraw the part about this being a fix of a misfeature. It sounds like the dev team wrestled with whether or not to include out-of-the-subnet browsing, and ended up including it before retracting it.

That said, it doesn't matter what their intent is. Maybe they meant to maliciously taunt you. Nothing they did actually changed your rights or abilities to listen to music anywhere you want. This thread has included several free and trivially set up ways to listen to your desktop music anywhere in the world, and even set up a public site perfect for pirating if that's what turns you on.

All that changed is that a couple of confused people, who mistakenly believed that a multi-million dollar ad campaign produced by a giant publicly held multinational corporation really meant that that corporation was their close personal friend who shared all their intimate political beliefs and couldn't wait to go to the rally with them and shout political slogans at The Man, became slightly less confused.

Folks, the 1984 commercial was made by an ad agency. Everyone you see is wearing carefully applied makeup. The cameras they used cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The director, Ridley Scott, eventually abandoned whatever principles he held and directed Black Hawk Down in enthusiastic cooperation with the US military. Chiat/Day, the agency responsible for the carefully crafted populist message, went on to represent, among other clients, the brazenly corrupt and generally evil International Olympic Committee.

There are no positive human-centered righteous corporations. Ben & Jerry's, you say? Bought by gigantic faceless Eurocombine Unilever, no longer even remotely socially responsible except for marketing purposes. Cascadian Farms? "In December 1999, Small Planet Foods was purchased by General Mills, affording us the opportunity to bring our products to even more people around the world."

I actually don't call myself a geek. Only people who read Jon Katz's "columns" on purpose call themselves geeks. I call myself a hacker. And what hackers know is generally as follows. First, no corporation is your friend, no matter how much they claim to be. Your only hope is, that as with Apple tends to be the case, they might be less evil than others. Second, if you want something, you must do it yourself. Whining at Apple and bringing excrement into the equation is not only going to do nothing, it's going to reduce their goodwill towards you.