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• "... Except my daughters, of course. Pure as the driven snow, both of 'em."
  
  I'm going to quote George Carlin here:
  
  "I have a son in public school who hasn't shot any of his classmates yet. But he does sell drugs to your honor student, plus he knocked up your daughter!"
  
  (On a slightly more topical note, I have to agree - the case must have been incredibly weak if a simple Facebook update is enough to invalidate it.) In reply to: "Facebook status update saves man from jail"

  November 12, 2009

  0 replies

• Ah, but it is a legitimate use, O bearer of the serpentine name - legitimate as in "substantial non-infringing".
  
  But of course that doesn't matter to you, O venomous lackwit. After all, I don't own the copyright to (insert piece of F/OS software and/or media here), therefore I shouldn't distribute it, even if the creator has explicitly said to go ahead and do so.
  
  No method of distribution is "more legitimate" than another, thou of the toxic nature. All methods are equally legitimate in concept. It is the uses to which the methods are put that causes the problems, especially given the perversion of copyright that has occurred in the past few decades.
  
  After all, if Joe Blow the cocaine dealer were to ship his Bolivian marching-powder from New York City to Albany in a General Motors truck by way of the New York State Thruway, the cops wouldn't go after General Motors for making the truck he used, because trucks can just as easily carry legitimate cargoes (such as cases of Sprite or pallets of TVs) as illicit ones.
  
  Nor would they try to dismantle the NYS Department of Transportation (which maintains the Thruway) simply because he drove his truckful of cocaine up to Albany on the Thruway. They're just there to keep the roads in good repair.
  
  Except . . . that's what's happening here. All you need to do is substitute computers for trucks, data for the cargo they carry, and BitTorrent for the NYSDOT/interstate highway system. In reply to: "Swedish court orders shutdown of The Pirate Bay"

  August 27, 2009

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• You forgot "remixed" and "mashed up". In reply to: "Swedish court orders shutdown of The Pirate Bay"

  August 25, 2009

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• Oh, so people who use BitTorrent to help distribute Linux distros or episodes of Patrolling with Sean Kennedy have no right to do so, even though the one is free/open-source software and the other is a video series that the creators WANT distributed freely by any available means?
  
  I call BS on that, viper396 - and I also call your name appropriate, because you sure act like a snake. ;) In reply to: "Swedish court orders shutdown of The Pirate Bay"

  August 25, 2009

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• I can tell you where it ends - with the non-evolving dying off to make room for the evolving.
  
  To paraphrase Charles Darwin: "It is not the richest, or the most powerful who survive - it is those best suited to their environment."
  
  You see, the real problem isn't what's happening now regarding file sharing. The problem is what happened back in the days of the original Napster, when the entertainment industry first found out about file sharing.
  
  Had they chosen to use Napster to their advantage (for example, inking a deal with them whereby people paid a monthly subscription to use the service - a fee which would be split between Napster's founders and the entertainment industry), they wouldn't be in the situation they are now, where they have to spend billions of dollars in legal fees to recover . . . what? A few million a year in punitive damages, if my research is accurate.
  
  Granted, with services like Rhapsody, iTunes, and AmazonMP3, the entertainment industry has begun to change - but I have the feeling that it's too little, too late.
  
  The best analogy I can come up with is to compare the entertainment industry's tactics to those used by the U.S. military: great for fighting an enemy that's in plain sight and easy to track, but not so good when you're dealing with people who tend to stay out of sight (and thus hard to track).
  
  So they shut down one file-sharing service. Fine, people pick another one.
  
  Or they start burning CDs/DVDs, or loading up flash drives, or recording the music onto audiocassettes, or trading files through IM/IRC/email/(insert protocol here) . . . and those are just the methods that pass the "grandma test" (i.e., they're easy enough to do that even someone's grandmother could do it).
  
  In the end, the entertainment industry is going to have to adapt or die - and since they seem incredibly reluctant to adapt, they're likely going to die. In reply to: "File sharers hold vigil for Pirate Bay"

  August 25, 2009

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• What I want to know is, when will they deal with the IM spammers?
  
  I swear, I get five or six spims a day advertising this sex-hookup site, and I'm kinda peeved about it - BECAUSE I'M NOT INTERESTED. In reply to: "Report: Spam reduced following Pricewert shutdown"

  June 10, 2009

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• Michicael: Thanks for the heads-up on that - now I know not to give my money to Roadrunner ;) In reply to: "BBC buys, uses botnet to show dangers to PCs"

  March 13, 2009

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• One small problem with that, techno777. It's called the "single flaw" premise.
  
  You see, in order for protection of any kind - be it physical security (e.g., the defenses of a military base), electronic (e.g., firewalls/antimalware programs), or copy protection - the defender has to be perfect and constantly monitoring whatever he's supposed to be protecting.
  
  An attacker, however, only needs to find a single flaw (be it an inattentive guard, a malfunctioning camera, or an undiscovered bug in the software) in order to perform a successful attack.
  
  And when it comes to the world of copy protection, there are people who actively LOOK for these flaws.
  
  Some of them do it for perfectly legal reasons (like creating backups of their movies/music/games/etc. - or, if they're working for a copy-protection company, so they can fix the flaws in the next version of their software).
  
  Some do it because they're active in file-sharing communities (some of which are legal - like friends sharing music amongst themselves on mix tapes/discs - and some of which aren't.)
  
  And then there are some who do it just because they like the challenge - "Hey, look, such-and-such a company said their copy-protection stuff is uncrackable! Bet'cha ten bucks I can break it wide open by the end of the day/week/month/etc!"
  
  Long story short: with all the people looking for flaws in copy protection - many of whom don't work for copy-protection companies - it's inevitable that, no matter how advanced your copy protection is, it will eventually be cracked. In reply to: "Music exec blasts infringers during Pirate Bay trial"

  February 27, 2009

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• oldguytoo, you obviously have no idea what you're talking about.
  
  Let me put it to you like this:
  
  Let's say you have a massive transportation system - composed of railroads, highways, streets, boulevards, and back roads - that connects a whole bunch of communities.
  
  Let us also say that there are companies that specialize in taking goods and information from one community to another using this transportation system.
  
  Let us also say that someone discovers that one of the companies has some employees and/or customers who are using the company's vehicles to transport illegal goods - it could be stolen computers, counterfeit money, narcotics, weapons, whatever - from one place to another, using the transportation system above.
  
  Would you honestly expect the government to shut down that company just because of the behavior of certain employees and/or customers?
  
  The CORRECT answer would be NO - not unless the company turned out to be a front for other criminal activities as well. You'd arrest the people involved, put them on trial and give them the appropriate punishments.
  
  But you'd rather go for the complete-shutdown route, right? Because that's what you're advocating with regard to BitTorrent.
  
  You see, the Internet is a transportation system, and BitTorrent is just a means of transporting stuff across the Internet.
  
  Sure, people can use BitTorrent to copy music and movies - just as people can use moving companies to transport narcotics and the like - but it's also got legal uses, such as distributing free and open-source software and media (such as the Linux operating system or the Creative Commons-licensed show "Patrolling with Sean Kennedy") - just as people can use the same companies to move their posessions from one house to another, or to a self-storage facility. In reply to: "Music exec blasts infringers during Pirate Bay trial"

  February 26, 2009

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• What about naming your kid Bobby Tables?
  
  . . . And by that I mean <i>Robert'); drop table students;--</i> In reply to: "Top 25 'most dangerous' coding errors revealed"

  January 15, 2009

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