The consumerist.com has an article up about the DRM scheme for Gears of War. DRM is bad enough to begin with. But when you add a poor implementation of it on top of the existing DRM, you have a perfect storm of stupidity.

It turns out that the Gears of War DRM storm of stupidity means the game won't play at all after 1/28/2009. My suggestion is that everyone just break federal law and crack the DRM so you can play a game you legally purchased. I doubt anyone is going to get upset about a 3 year old game. 

DRM is so ridiculous. What a horrible burden on our society. I hope the media and game companies figure this out before they manage to turn us all into federal law breakers just to be able to watch video, listen to music, read books, use software, or even just play a frakkin' game. 

Apple has announced that all of the EMI "digital" song catalog (I take this to mean not all of EMI's songs but just the ones that are available digitally) will not be made available without DRM. This is a big deal. Finally, Steve Jobs has come through on his comments. Of course this momentous occasion does not come without expense or more value. These songs will cost $.30 more. However, they will also come as 256k AAC files that are much higher quality that what was available before. I'm sure some of the audiophiles out there won't be happy until they get them as FLAC files. My guess is that those people are buying CD's still anyways though.