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I really hope you were joking, but just in case and for anyone else out there wondering who RMS is, see here

In that case, if you use MySQL as a datastore in your application, you will need to buy a "commercial" licence, in order to avoid having to GPL your own software.

And what's so bad about GPLing your own software? There are business models other than that based on restricting copying and redistribution. For instance, Sun is distributing programs as free software and making money on hardware and support. A developer of Free enterprise automation (CRM, ERP) software, which in the proprietary world costs in the five or six figures per installation, could charge for labor during the inevitable process of customizing the software to fit a given company's existing processes.

And speaking of process, given what I know about MySQL, it'd be easy to make a client that operates in a separate process through a pipe: SQL in, tab-separated out, making two mere-aggregated programs whose licenses do not interfere.

In that case, if you use MySQL as a datastore in your application, you will need to buy a "commercial" licence, in order to avoid having to GPL your own software.

And what's so bad about GPLing your own software? There are business models other than that based on restricting copying and redistribution. For instance, Sun is distributing programs as free software and making money on hardware and support. A developer of Free enterprise automation (CRM, ERP) software, which in the proprietary world costs in the five or six figures per installation, could charge for labor during the inevitable process of customizing the software to fit a given company's existing processes.

And speaking of process, given what I know about MySQL, it'd be easy to make a client that operates in a separate process through a pipe: SQL in, tab-separated out, making two mere-aggregated programs whose licenses do not interfere.

ATI and NVidia are famous for being the two worst companies to buy from. Some links:

• The Linux Doomsday scenario
• The "Everbody loves Eric Raymond" cartoon strip it inspired ;-) - featuring ATI
• Stallman makes an example of NVidia in the GNU 20th anniversary essay

A lot of good could be done by "us" (whatever that means) getting behind a promoting Gnu Radio. Gnu Radio turns the whole DAC/ADC issue into a freedom of speech issue, muscling a constitutional issue over the law, and buying "us" time to make software defeat the technical mechanisms.

I've written about it on my weblog.

By promoting Gnu Radio "we" get to highlight the neccesity of freedom of communication, the benefits it could bring in disasters, etc. It would be a welcome distraction from the usual piracy debates.

This stupid-ass law would also outlaw all high-speed analog to digital convertors as well. GNU Radio has demonstrated HDTV reception off broadcast radio using such hardware. Why are we allowing our legislators to even consider laws which regulate computers to protect media? The computer industry is WAY larger than the media industry. Hell, computer games alone have greater revenue than movies.
-russ

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

> otherwise you can't communicate with anyone else who's in the DRM chain ...
> At the very least, it requires knowledge of private encryption keys

These displays will work normally until and unless they meet media that demands extra assurances. If you don't plan on getting such media, as far as I heard this whole DRM thing will not trouble you.

It also allows anyone with the know-how to bypass the DRM on a single piece of licensed content and re-release it without the DRM. Thereafter, anyone using p2p sharing will just download the re-released, non-DRM version, and it will be appropriately non-flagged as if it were a piece of independent content. Voila, the DRM chain is broken.

> This probably won't be a free service

I hate what is happening with the laws and media lockup as much as anyone, but this is just FUD.

Don't be silly. When you put words in his mouth, it's easy to hear something stupid. Here's from the source: we believe in freedom of speech [...] We ask people to call the system 'GNU/Linux'"

"ask"

Perhaps I am missing the distinction here. Isn't there "Free Software" that is closed source?

You should listen to some of his speeches, he's very convincing if you're not fixated on appearance.

a discussion on the outlawing of free software

What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned. RMS

The CPUs that come in today's toys and appliances are able to be adapted to do almost anything. Brute force and minimal hardware can be made to do things that yesterday took dedicated processors and million man-hours of programming to do.

Look at today's software radio that can tune literally any channel and/or use any type of encoding scheme. Put that up against a radio station that is sending out DRM tagged audio.

Same thing with video. I have one of the old Timex (Microsoft) data watches - a 1 bit video (bar code) reader on it. The first pictures from Mars were done with similar hardware - 1 pixel camera with rotating mirror to build up a picture over time.

Today's fast chips (and you don't have to purchase a hobbled one from Intel or AMD - you can build your own with GPL VHDL code) can be used to create any camera you want.

All it takes is one person to do it and the rest of the world will know how.

"gee Mr. government man - I was just experimenting" :)

[ Amendment IV ]
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Want to read my stuff? Go ahead and crack it - no warrant necessary.

Get the rabbit installed on a machine behind your firewall
==> http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Faster than freenet
==> http://www.i2p.net/
Encrypt Jabber
==> http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Jabber/jabberd.html
Onion Routing
==> http://tor.eff.org/
Emerging Network To Reduce Orwellian Potency Yield
==> http://entropy.stop1984.com/
Free Internet telephony
==> http://skype.com/
GNU-ified P2p
==> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/


DO NOT DENY yourself about 2 hours @ InfoAnarchy.org
OMG! ==> http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag e
LearnLearnLearnLearn ==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography

=================EMAIL ENCRYPTION===============
GPG (Free PGP)
==> http://gnupg.org/
Integrated with Thunderbird
==> http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
Mutt can't be beat as a mailreader and integrates GPG wonderfully.
==> http://mutt.blackfish.org.uk/
==> http://www.mutt.org/links.html
==> http://wiki.mutt.org/index.cgi?UserPages

!!! Please do not immediately send newly created keys to the keyservers (as many HOWTOs instruct new users to). They are already overflowing with "test keys" and other people's experiments from over the years THAT HAVE NO EXPIRATION and will never be deleted. These keys are "orphans" and most will never be used. As keyservers sync together, and most keys are never deleted once submitted - GET YOUR KEY SETUP CORRECTLY AND HAVE PRACTICE WITH IT BEFORE SENDING IT OFF TO THE KEYSERVERS!!! Otherwise storage requirements will continue to grow and using these in the future will become more difficult FOR ALL. Please, if you are just starting out with PGP or GPG or GnuPG or anything similar (the last two are in fact the same thing) use manual key distribution to begin (ascii armor your public key with


$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org

and copy and paste it into an email body or attach it to an email


$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org > myPubKey.txt

to gain practice with GPG before uploading your key. This way if you need to create another you won't have uploaded your mistakes. Many choices need to be made and it's worth getting things right before "going public" with your new digital ID. Experiment with yourself and a few different email accounts or with some friends first.)

SET AN EXPIRATION OF 2-5 YEARS OR SO AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR PREFERENCES THE WAY YOU LIKE THEM BEFORE SENDING TO A KEYSERVER! Better yet is to HOST YOUR

That's also true of emacs; almost all features are already there. My point was that if perchance a desired feature isn't already implemented, then it's normally pretty easy to do so for oneself. Now, reading the manual is necessary, but that shouldn't really be an issue.

And you really oughtn't put vi and emacs in the same sentence. One is a text editor; the other is something rather more.

As for playing music in the IDE, emacs already has this: EMMS is the emacs multimedia system. The version I have is less than 5K lines of code (including whitespace & comments--it's just the output of wc -l), which includes several non-essential bits; the core is less than 2KLOC.

This seems to be a leadership problem: There is a huge well-known bug in Firefox 1.5, the CPU and memory hogging bug. Developers refuse to fix it, even though anyone can demonstrate the bug easily. Apparently there is some kind of social problem. Maybe no one has the authority to deal with a major bug. It seems to be the kind of problem that can exist when a programming team is led by someone with no technical knowledge.

This bug has been reported to Bugzilla, and is very easy to reproduce (see below), but Firefox developers have marked it invalid because there is not enough specific information! The bug has existed in Firefox for more than 2 years, and several people report that it is worse in Firefox 1.5. Firefox's Bugzilla does not allow direct links from Slashdot, so copy and paste Bugzilla URLs into a new tab. Remove the space:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131 456
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222 660

See comments #48 and #49 of bug 222660 for an example of the symptoms under Windows XP. A typical Windows Task Manager screen shot attached to comment #49 shows the "I/O Other Bytes" increasing by 20K/second with no program activity. At that point, the bug was not yet showing the worst symptoms.

The huge memory use, and 94% CPU use or more with no activity, normally occur after opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs, as happens when researching something on the internet over a period of hours or days. The bug symptoms are worse after putting the computer on standby or after hibernating. My experience has been that the memory and CPU hogging always occur together, so they appear to be the same bug. However, the CPU hogging symptom takes longer to appear. If the computer has perhaps 256 Megabytes of memory, the most obvious symptom at the beginning is hard disk thrashing.

You can demonstrate the memory use problem quickly by loading and closing the following large web page into multiple Firefox tabs a few times:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html. To see the memory and CPU percentage used in Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab.This demonstrates one aspect of the bug, but is not representative of big occuring in normal use, since that web page is huge.

Maybe the only solution is for a developer who knows the code to reproduce the problem and see what causes it. It is not clear to me why they are unwilling to do so. This bug seems especially interesting to me. It is likely that fixing this bug will fix other issues. It is likely that fixing this bug will make it easier to work on the Firefox code.

The bug has often been reported on Slashdot. Here are a few examples:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169676&cid=141 43632
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62501
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62671
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 66613

I posted the bug numbered 222660 in Bugzilla. It is interesting to note that apparently no developer has bothered to read the entire bug report and take the time to understand it. For 2 1/2 years, developers have been saying things like this: 1) Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly version. 2) Yes, this bug exists, but it isn't important. 3) No one has posted a TalkBack report. (If they read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too.) 4) I

When it had ads it was already free in the sense of cost.
One problem then, and now, is that it is proprietary, so _they_ choose whether stuff like ads is acceptable or not.
I care about freedom in software, not about cost.
I agree that "free" is a term too wide to describe software.
I mean "free software" in the sense of "freedom" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html . It is about more things that cost. It's more about giving the users the right to use it in any way he wants.

One of the things that i think might have been a key to Ubuntu's success is the very fact that they didn't ship with the various multimedia libraries necessary. Yes it's all true that it installs easily on almost any hardware, and yes the chocolate coloured theme is quite pleasant. But i think there was a real magic trick to leaving out mp3's and avi's.

let me put it this way: you get a fresh clean install and there's nothing at all to configure or fuss with. seems great but you can't play mp3's. hunh? it's a small thing, you can figure it out. so you go and do a little search at Ubuntu and they explain that it's not free. you're a newbie to linux and you don't understand how it's different here than on your windows box. so you drift over to GNU and do a little reading. maybe you learn about free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-speech.

then you go back to the friendly forums and find a nice step by step on how to add in extra repositories. wow, all this stuff is free, and hey look how much there is in the Universe, and then in the Multiverse. yoiks! this linux thing is amazing. and it's not so tough.

and i think that might be the whole point. someone waltzing into a full distro with everything in the world (even a program that will time how long your tea steeps) is a lot more intimidating than most of us really think. and of course the exact same goes for a distro that you're compiling from scratch. if there is any single thing i think Ubuntu has going for it, it is that it gives you everything a complete OS really needs to have (office, web, photos) but somehow sneaks in just a small lesson here and there about what the linux world is really about. if your parents can read a help menu (and the Breezy Badger help is one of the best i've ever read) they can figure out those little things that will eventually convert them to being true penguin lovers for life

Emacs does syntax highlighting and supports way more programming languages than anything else.

Damnit, it's not "flamebait" - it's a LEGITIMATE QUESTION: How do you get IP and profits from a system dominated by THIS??

You mean like Lisa and Dan?

I really really wish more web designers would think about specifying fonts for non-Windows boxes as well, what with the web being a cross-platform medium and all. This article in particular would have been a great place to talk about this. Linux has got a great set of fonts in the Bitstream Vera family which are becoming the default on many distros, and yet I haven't seen many sites except those of open source projects use them (AUCTeX uses Vera Sans to good effect). And I'm sure Mac users have tons of beautiful fonts installed by default -- Apple doesn't settle for cheap typography -- but does anyone else know about them? Code Style has a font survey of common fonts on Windows, Macs and Unix, but its relevance is doubtful since the results are being aggregated since 2001!

And to all the people screaming that websites shouldn't specify fonts at all, well, come on, really. Typography is an important part of design, especially in a text-heavy medium like the web, and the right font can go a long way in making text more readable and conveying a particular style or mood at the same time. Try typesetting your resume in Trebuchet MS sometime, or a happy birthday card in Baskerville. Just because it can be abused (is there anything that can't?) doesn't mean it's no good. Seriously, that sounds as reactionary as any extremist conservative. Besides, you can always disable "Allow pages to choose their own fonts" in your browser's preferences. Oh, and why not disable colours, backgrounds, CSS and everything else while you're at it? You never know when some dumb web designer might make the site unusable because of bad colours or poor layouts. Even better... just switch to Lynx, set your preferred terminal font and colours, and you're good to go!

"And screen works even better!"

>> I really do hate the virtual machine implementation.

Give GCJ a look. It's a front-end to GCC that produces machine code from java source. It may not produce code that runs as fast as a hotspot VM, but it does a reasonable job and you don't have the start-up cost of a VM. GCJ can be built so that it cross-compiles too.

If you're interested in ditching SWING, consider SWT the presentation underpinnings of the Eclipse ide.

Apologies for posting full text - finally found a link:

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/know.your.sysadmin.ht ml

For my part, I'd like to have an emacs rewritten in a modified Common Lisp. But that's just me. But elisp really isn't all that unlispy. It's not like Scheme, but Scheme has its own issues, and is hardly the end-all, be-all of Lisps.

That's OK. It's mutual.

If I wanted a bloated editor I'd be using Microsoft Word to edit my text files.

As I write this, Emacs is occupying 1.17% of my available memory. I've only got 30 files open at this instant, so that may be artificially low.

When I want to edit a text file vi is infinitely easier [for me],

I fixed that for you.

virtually universal on UNIX platforms,

Likewise Emacs.

and has a tiny memory footprint.

Launching vim takes 4888KB of resident memory (per "top") on my system. Emacs (in console mode) takes 9700KB. Although it's nearly twice as big, it amounts to an extra 1/218th of the 1024MB of memory in my desktop.

Happy to clear up your misperceptions!

Richard Stallman correctly predicted this was going to happen as a result of of DRM, also known as Digital Restrictions Management, Treacherous Computing, or Handcuffware. To quote from his essay "Can you trust your computer?":

...There are plans to use the same facility for email and documents--resulting in email that disappears in two weeks, or documents that can only be read on the computers in one company.

Imagine if you get an email from your boss telling you to do something that you think is risky; a month later, when it backfires, you can't use the email to show that the decision was not yours. "Getting it in writing" doesn't protect you when the order is written in disappearing ink.

Imagine if you get an email from your boss stating a policy that is illegal or morally outrageous, such as to shred your company's audit documents, or to allow a dangerous threat to your country to move forward unchecked. Today you can send this to a reporter and expose the activity. With treacherous computing, the reporter won't be able to read the document; her computer will refuse to obey her. Treacherous computing becomes a paradise for corruption...

but, but, ed is the standard editor, dammit!

The lack of strong Bidi editor (yes, I do use gedit), hurts advancing the use of free Hebrew-supported software. For Emacs addict users (like me), it is difficult to document in Hebrew usage examples, or write simple notes in order to encourage the use of general free software by Hebrew speaking people.

Well, duh! Every version of emacs comes complete with this handy antinews. Simply follow these steps to get back where you came from. Should be a piece of cake.

RMS invented GNU.

Ultimately, I'm not sure that invented is the correct term. Created, wrote, initiated, started -- maybe. But not invented.

And certainly, RMS did not write all the GNU software, though he's certainly written a lot of it.

When the father of GPL / FSF can complain, it just invalidates your argument.

RMS should be familiar with the GPL and it's `no warranty' clauses. Even RMS isn't entitled to any sort of warranty with his GPL covered software, and he should know full well that if he wants something done with it, the only sure-fire way to do it is to do it himself. The grandparent post seems right-on to me.

Though really, if you read his actual post, it doesn't sound so unreasonable. And really, he only seems to be talking about a two week period, and it is December -- lots of people take vacations around this time, and may not actually be cranking away at emacs. He's simply asking for help, which lots of maintainers of projects do from time to time.

In any event, the /. summary talks about lots of new things in emacs -- cygwin support, MacOS X support, mouse wheel support. Obviously the work involved in all of these was completed long ago, because I already have emacs 21 on my cygwin installs, I recall having emacs on my MacOS X box, and if I fire up emacs on my Linux box right now, the mouse wheel works just fine.

Ahh, here's why the mouse wheel works --

% cat ~/.emacs
...
; mouse wheel support
(defun up-slightly () (interactive) (scroll-up 5))
(defun down-slightly () (interactive) (scroll-down 5))
(global-set-key [mouse-4] 'down-slightly)
(global-set-key [mouse-5] 'up-slightly)

To a large extent, I use emacs because it is the only editor I have worked with that offers the comprehensive support for LaTeX that I need. The AucTeX environment has an absolutely amazing grasp of how the LaTeX process works and what support structures are required to speed development with extensive keyboard support. Of course, once you start using Emacs you start realising that it is really nice to be able to transpose characters, change case, transpose lines, have a working kill ring and amazing code editing support.

I have not found an editor that does as much to help me get my code on the screen in such an unobtrusive way. Because each major mode is not just a set of highlighting and indenting rules, but indeed a little customised editor, you get thousands of hours worth of tweaking for indenting code, adding helpful hints, language-specific doodads (the FORTRAN mode has special support for moving blocks and locating variables), etc, all with very little cost in terms of screen real estate. And did I mention good keyboard support? And the fact that the editor and keybindings stay the same in Windows, Linux and Mac OS X -- I'l take that above 'interface guidelines' any day[1].

I think the high integration of a good programming language (emacs lisp is quite good at doing what it does) also makes all of these things easier and more natural to develop, as a set of handy scripts easily transitions into a major mode.

I am constantly plagued by the idea that someone, somewhere is doing something more efficiently than I am, so I experiment with editors constantly. I have tried more than I can remember. If you have a good recommendation, reply on this thread, but for me the question has always come back to 'why _not_ emacs?'.

[1] I also think that interface guidelines are heavily weighted toward the inexperienced user -- emacs has a high learning curve, but like many professional tools, it pays back once you have learned to use it. Many people (like me) find it clunky to have to wade through seven levels of menus to find a feature when I could have just used M-x obscure-feature-name.

Well, I'd like to see another editor with which I can read mail, news, rss-feeds or which builts wikis or which has superior LaTeX support. And this are only my needs.

Which UI guidelines? Text editor UI guidelines? Care to provide a link?

I don't know about Emacs, but XEmacs fits nicely into Windows' GUI. Better than both on Linux.

I think I'll stick to my Windows editor if that's where Linux editors have got to so far...

The whistleblower statues that somehow still result in people being told to release conclusions contrary to their evidence for drugs that later prove to be fatal, or people masking their identity because they know they'll likely lose their job to someone who will remain quiet about shutting down gas refineries and tightening the supply of gas, or being demoted and taken out of the supervisory position that allowed her to see potential fraud and abuse in no-bid contracts worth billions?

A citizen's duty is not to obey the law, so much as it is to do what's ethically defensible. The FSF has some sage advice for you here: "The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.".

Or GNU's, http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html. I haven't heard it in years and I still cringe just thinking about it.

There is no such thing as intellectual property. There are copyrights and patents which are handled far differently from each other. RMS discusses this far better than I ever could.

It has become fashionable to describe copyright, patents, and trademarks as "intellectual property". This fashion did not arise by accident--the term systematically distorts and confuses these issues, and its use was and is promoted by those who gain from this confusion. Anyone wishing to think clearly about any of these laws would do well to reject the term.

...all you need is a good comb :)

MIPS is patented.

Clones of it need to skip some instructions, LWL and SWL.

http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/mips/ove rview

People tried to add support for a cloned Mips chip to GCC, but the patch was rejected on the grounds that "it wasn't a Mips part"

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-11/msg00371.html

Mind you if these architectures weren't protected by patents, the companies that invented them would be driven out of business by cloners in China and so on.

Well, I certainly won't claim that I am absolutely right. However, from the GPL FAQ:

If I distribute GPL'd software for a fee, am I required to also make it available to the public without a charge?

No. However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public.

That seems pretty clear, but I couldn't have told you that from reading the actual license.

Nevertheless, you can't legally mix GPL code with BSD code because the GPL requires that all code be GPL.

According to GNU's licence list, you can mix GPL code with code licensed under a "GPL-compatible" licence. One of which is the "Modified BSD" licence. The original BSD licence, however, has the advertising clause, and it is that which renders it GPL-incompatible.

"4. c) ... You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work ..."

1. ... provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice ...

You might want to take a look at GNU Classpath: http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/

According to http://www.kaffe.org/~stuart/japi/htmlout/h-jdk14- classpath.html, it's about ~97% complete with respect to the standard JDK spec (version 1.4).

Big things like OpenOffice.org run just fine on the Free Java stack as well: http://peter.ramshacklestudios.com/images/openoffi ce.org-free-java-stack.png

I agree with what you say, except:

Protecting intellectual property is good.

Even if applied "properly," I question the validity of the assumption that ideas can be "owned." The term itself is misleading and two major branches of intellectual property (copyright and patents) are based on highly dubious assumptions.

The arguments are extensive, and others have framed them far better than I can. Consider reading "Information Liberation" by Brian Martin (available online, of course), in particular Chapter 3: Against Intellectual Property (also available in PDF). There are many others interesting texts on the subject.

In short, I think a fairly compelling case can be made for "intellectual property" being, at it's core, a rather "bad" thing.

post here a translation of the FS song in Macedonian

          Join us now and share the software;
          You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
          x2

          Hoarders may get piles of money,
          That is true, hackers, that is true.
          But they cannot help their neighbors;
          That's not good, hackers, that's not good.

          When we have enough free software
          At our call, hackers, at our call,
          We'll throw out those dirty licenses
          Ever more, hackers, ever more.

          Join us now and share the software;
          You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
          x2

Why is everyone talking about IP as though it is even a real concept? It is an attempt to lump four seperate areas of law together (property, trademark, copyright and patent). This page: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml covers the misnomer quite well.

You dont need any special hardware to print barcodes. An old Laserjet, or a new $19.95 Lexmark special from Circuit Shitty will do the job.

You dont need any special software to print barcodes. There is plenty of both free (as in Freeware) and Free (as in Free Software) programs that can generate barcode images, both UPC and a handful of others.

The Sony-BMG copy prevention threads should teach modern-day /. readers that asking the proprietor what they do with the information they gather is not enough freedom for the user. According to freedom-to-tinker.com, Sony lied about their software saying they didn't track information on the user's usage, then they admitted they did and said this was okay because they didn't do anything with the information that they collected. Sony-BMG and First4Internet's uninstaller doesn't actually uninstall the software that people don't want to run when they put certain music CDs into their Microsoft Windows computers.

It doesn't really matter what the proprietor says the software does because you have no permission to verify their statement, change the software to suit your needs, or distribute the improved software. There are technological and legal restrictions to prohibit all of this. Better to realize that all computer users deserve software freedom, and that all proprietary software, regardless of ostensible purpose, is untrustworthy.

I'd be a lot more accepting of the whole notion of IP rights if our fearless leaders would publically state the laws importance and need to their consitituents. Without some rational for why we should be doing this I'm left to conclude that its just to make rich people richer.
And what about extending ideas? They're locking up our common culture - I still can't legally link to a copy of steamboat willy (Micky Mouse precursor) for the readers in the US can I? Could this mean that in some future dystopia everyone will have to pay simply to participate? Sorry Bob, I can't talk to you about last nights episode of Friends as you don't have a license....
Damnit.