You can't get pizzas delivered to your apartment because the landlord allows gangbangers to hang out around the entrance of the building and rob all the delivery guys. Should you threaten to sue the restaraunt employees who won't take your orders? Should you then send all the 12 year old boys in the neighborhood out to scribble nasty messages on the walls of all the pizza places that won't deliver to you?
TV Death ST.PAUL, Minn. Aug. 25, 1979 (AP) -- The parents of a 15-year-old boy who jumped 200 feet to his death from a bridge after Battlestar Galactica was canceled say the boy's whole life was wrapped up in the television space show.
"I hope we never ever see it on TV again, because it would just crush us," Dawn Seidel, the boy's stepmother, said Saturday.
Eddie Seidel Jr. was buried Friday. He committed suicide in the pre-dawn darkness Wednesday after telling police from his perch on the High Bridge railing that he was upset that Battlestar Galactica had been dropped by the ABC network.
"I talked about suing ABC or doing something," Mrs. Seidel said. "But my husband said to just leave things like they are and not make a big hassle out of it.
"I know it's not their fault because they had the program."
Like many a teen-age boy, Eddie was deeply absorbed with outer space subjects.
For Eddie, said Mrs. Seidel, it meant a roomful of posters, magazines, plastic models and other paraphernalia about Battlestar Galactica.
"They made a lot of money off him," she said. "He bought everything put on the market. He also took tape recordings of all the shows."
Eddie's world was wrapped up in the programs he viewed in his own bedroom, on a TV set he bought.
His father, Edward Seidel Sr., described Eddie as a sometimes brilliant boy who couldn't find enough in life to keep him interested.
The father said he learned about four years ago the boy had been sniffing gas with friends so he sent him to a psychiatrist.
"The psychiatrist said he was just kind of bored with life, that there was nothing here for him to excel in," said Seidel. "There was no real challenge here on this earth.
His stepmother said he got Bs and B-pluses in school, and an occasional A, but that he was mostly bored with classes.
Seidel said his son came home from his job as a supermarket stockboy about 5 p.m. Tuesday, apparently in good spirits.
The boy went to his room to watch television. The family did not see him the rest of the night. When his 19-year-old sister, Crystal, passed Eddie's door later that night, she found a note -- his last will and testament. He had gone off on his motorbike.
He told his parents in the note they'd find his body under the High Bridge, a half-mile, two-lane link between downtown St. Paul and the suburb of West St. Paul. The Seidels reached it about 10 minutes after Eddie had jumped and landed on ground beside the river.
Seidel said when Eddie learned last spring that Battlestar Galactica was being canceled, he contacted the ABC network to ask officials to keep it on. The last rerun of the program was shown Aug. 5.
"I really should have tried to get him into a gifted chldren type situation," Seidel said. "But it's too late to look back and say I should have."
He said he didn't realize what an influence a TV program could have on his son.
"I was never sure it did influence kids that bad, but now I'm convinced it does," he said.
All else the same, why is "isn't from Microsoft" on that list?
Perhaps a long history of making/buying/embrace-n-extending things that work wonderfully and are inexpensive then either switching them for or "upgrading" them into monstrosities that barely work and/or are very expensive?
Call it a hunch.
In my experience as merely a user, sshd appears to create a new key every time it is started. Your advice is like encouraging people to "never, never ignore those dire-sounding warnings that SnakeOil SoftFirewall pops up!"
Better advice is to accept the new key, but do an uptime and compare it to the date/time of your last login.
Shhhh! The correct term is "application specific optimization"!
In the past other companies have caved to GPL requirements with a bit of arm twisting. No 'Bad Things' happened then and I can't see why LinkSys would be any different.
Judging by that blog entry it doesn't sound like he had much of a plan here or like he was expecting this. Weren't WASTE and Gnutella just attempts to provoke AOL and get him out of his contract?
What exactly was he expecting? Even if he didn't have a plan, you'd think that after Gnutella was pulled he would know where he stood.
And you asked that question because...it might have been fun?
No, I think the point is that he asked that question because he was very intoxicated at the time.
Perhaps your response level was low not because of clueless users but because the lists actually work. The bounces were all going to spammer dropboxes or dead accounts on providers that binned them.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The word "censorship" strongly implies content filtering perpetrated by a government. Blackholes are not content based -- they operate much more on the "consent" level (either you have permission to send e-mail to me from the IP you're using or you don't -- what is in the message is irrelevant).
Blackholes are not perpetrated by the government (except within its own offices or in particularly oppressive countries such as China). Blackholes are almost universally applied voluntarily.
Now compare this to a much more useful tool to the red fascist tyrant: Web filtering software. I don't know if China imposes an e-mail blackhole list on its people, but I'm damn sure they use web filtering software.
Blackhole lists make a particularly poor tool for suppressing dissidents anyway. What are you going to do? Stop them from getting e-mail from the New York Times? What if the newspaper changes the IP and domain name of its mail server without taking time out to notify you? Well, at that point some meddling do-gooder busts out of the air vents you stupidly had built large enough for someone to crawl through and holds you hostage while setting your doomsday device to self-destruct.
That sounds like this spam sent by Empire Towers which is run by this guy who is pictured appearing as a panelist at the FTC Spam Forum. Note that he's a convicted felon.
I try very hard to ignore spam content because the fact is that the real problem is lack of consent. Unfortunately sometimes the depths spammers sink to are just sickening. Between this and the (pre-looting) spams from Artmarket/Artprice about how terrible the war in Iraq would be for the art market and how you could reduce your risk as an investor in this market by buying their blah blah blah...
At least with child pornography there are laws that sometimes are actually enforced. There are people in prisons waiting to cut the offender's balls off and flush them down the toilet. Cowles and those art fuckers will never really be held accountable for their sick exploitation. They'll just keep slipping through the cracks.
Guess they're pulling out all the stops on the marketing as they realize what a weak movie they have. I remember when it was announced that Cameron would have nothing to do with the film because of the producer's insistance on this stupid, stupid script.
So what you're advocating is that we burn the village to save it.
Newsflash: Terrorists still have free and unfettered access to software people are pretty sure is exceptionally secure. OpenBSD development will by no means cease or even slow down much simply because the gubmint has stopped funding it.
Despite what you read in Tom Clancy novels, terrorists have no need for secure software or even computers to carry out their plans. In fact, if I were a terrorist I would probably intentionally avoid computers because they introduce too many unnecessary points of failure. What if your suicide bomber doesn't get the go code because his e-mail provider goes down or blocks your message as spam? Much more reliable to drop a letter in the mail or give him a phone call.
The WTC was destroyed by such high tech items as box cutters and flying manuals. You might also say that lax airline security was to blame.
Every time I watch the news, I see another story about all the wonderful things NASA is doing in outer space. I know, I know, it's all supposed to be very impressive and exciting. But to be honest, it just boils my blood. I mean, the federal government can put a man on the moon, but it can't build a killer robot police force to hunt down and execute all the spammers? What kind of priorities do we have in this country?
Just the other day, there was a big article on the Security Supersite about how the internet might have to be rebuilt to save our children from pornographic spam. And then I read in USA Today how the government is spending $40 billion on outer-space surveillance satellites. Couldn't they put some of that satellite money to better use by constructing space-based laser cannons in geocentric orbit above all the ISPs to make sure our children are safe?
And for a fraction of what NASA spends on all that Mars rover monkey business, I could have a radio-wave-controlled stun gun that would finally stop anyone I thought might be spamming from ever thinking about looking at me wrong again.
It is painfully obvious that the government has the money and resources to build a high-energy force field around every single American, yet it doesn't. I mean, when I'm chasing after spammers with my stun gun it's darn near impossible to ensure my personal safety. Are a few measly cameras in the corners of the Foodland really going to deter an angry man who looks sort of like Alan Ralsky? What about my laptop? The pictures on my screen saver of little Kevin and Annie are irreplaceable! (I'm only going to be a grandmother once, you know! Unless, of course, the government finally gets on the ball with those cryogenic pods.)
And that Hubble telescope, there's a real beaut. Who needs to know if there's life out in space trillions of light years away, anyway? As long as the spacemen don't start sending me special business deals, making me wonder when they will deposit the gold bars in my savings account like that nice man Chavez from Boca Raton, I don't care who they are! If only NASA had aimed that telescope at Boca Raton instead of Pluto, you can bet I'd know what Chavez had for breakfast this morning.
It's shameful the way the internet has been allowed to degenerate, what with unsecure servers and protocols strewn everywhere. Just thinking about all the millions spent on that Mir station gets me in a dither when I check my e-mail and see donkey porn everywhere, with no donkey-porn-sensitive sunglasses to save my poor eyes.
And it sure would cut down on those ill-mannered spammers who keep on spamming despite the ISP's strict anti-spam terms of service if their computers were destroyed by spam-sensitive cybernetic space bees. I only have time to write so many complaints, you know!
If I can't demand killer robot police, then the least I can expect is a laser-powered servo-motored patrol-bot for my yard. How else will I know if it's a that Ralsky look-alike's lawyer trying to serve me court documents or just a raccoon rustling around out there late at night? I understand that in Sweden, every citizen is guaranteed a patrol-bot. But here in the world's richest nation, we go without! The sheer wastefulness of our government makes me sick!
I used to be a big supporter of both of my local hobby stores until recently. The manager of one of them has instructed his clerks to use high-pressure sales tactics on everyone who walks in the door. So whenever you go in now you get "MAY I HELP YOU?!" and when you say "No thanks, I'm just looking" the clerk proceeds to follow you around the store while yammering about whatever product your eye falls on for more than a half second. God forbid you pick anything up and look at it -- they'll be pressing armfulls of similar (but more expensive) products on you in an instant. Used car dealers are Best Buy employees compared to these guys.
They're just desperate for business, right? If that were the case you would think they wouldn't fuck up a comic book pull list with only a couple of titles on it, wouldn't you? Then try to charge you the "back issue" price for the comics they forgot to pull? Comics that are less than a month old? No, what we're seeing is desperation based on incompetence.
Listen up hobby store managers: "Just looking" doesn't mean "I'm buying all my stuff on the internet". Furthermore, even people who do browse your store then buy on the internet may change their mind at some point and decide to start buying from you again -- unless of course they haven't been driven off by your shitty attitude.
The last good film I rooted for was the Aronofsky/Miller Batman project that would have brought the excellent "Year One" story arc to theaters everywhere.
It was aborted by Warner execs at the last minute because they realized they would rather have Aronofsky make some crummy flick involving Scarecrow that continued where Batman & Robin left off. When Aronofsky wisely refused they ditched him for Christopher Nolan.
Since then Nolan has managed to talk his way out of the Scarecrow script and into a script which Andrew Kevin Walker will be writing.
Now I don't believe the director of Memento and the writer of Se7en will do wrong by Batman, but just imagine the kind of film that the director of Pi and the best Batman writer ever could have come up with.
The universe is not so poor, but people who talk to each other through fax machines might be. And these are the people who would shape the future of general computing with DRM.
William Gibson communicated entirely without the internet. Much of his communication was taken care of via fax until 1996 or so.
I don't think paranoia is the state of mind we're seeing in Hollywood. Paranoia would have ensured that these boards remained a secret (or at least a perpetually unconfirmed rumor) with lots of NDAs and stratification to keep all the juicy details from this article locked up. There would certainly be no exec in Vegas talking about how it "might be immoral or slightly illegal".
The author hits it right on the head when he uses the terms "herd mentality" and "cartel".
Why do you remind me of the guards in the "Tenchu" games who happily eat poisoned rice they find lying on the ground?
Enjoy your "free" unlicensed promotional copies -- until the BSA comes in one day and tells you what a shame it would be if a nice store like yours were audited and found to be running unlicensed software. Of course (they'll say) you could just buy some licenses at the standard price now and maybe avoid a lot of unpleasantness in the future.
If you don't want to buy any licenses though that's fine. They'll just make you an offer you can't refuse.
Except for the fact that MS would have a very hard time proving any malfeasance on the part of the consumer.
What if he needed some dough and tried to sell his "$119 value" software on eBay? Somehow I don't think a print-out of an email from some MS flunkie would quite cut the mustard as a "license substitute".
Slashdot Mirror
"But what if the robots united and rebelled??"
"Phase 5: An army of highly intelligent apes move in and quell the robot insurrection."
"But what if the apes are pacifists??"
You can't get pizzas delivered to your apartment because the landlord allows gangbangers to hang out around the entrance of the building and rob all the delivery guys. Should you threaten to sue the restaraunt employees who won't take your orders? Should you then send all the 12 year old boys in the neighborhood out to scribble nasty messages on the walls of all the pizza places that won't deliver to you?
Where exactly do you think this will get you?
TV Death
ST.PAUL, Minn. Aug. 25, 1979 (AP) -- The parents of a 15-year-old boy who jumped 200 feet to his death from a bridge after Battlestar Galactica was canceled say the boy's whole life was wrapped up in the television space show.
"I hope we never ever see it on TV again, because it would just crush us," Dawn Seidel, the boy's stepmother, said Saturday.
Eddie Seidel Jr. was buried Friday. He committed suicide in the pre-dawn darkness Wednesday after telling police from his perch on the High Bridge railing that he was upset that Battlestar Galactica had been dropped by the ABC network.
"I talked about suing ABC or doing something," Mrs. Seidel said. "But my husband said to just leave things like they are and not make a big hassle out of it.
"I know it's not their fault because they had the program."
Like many a teen-age boy, Eddie was deeply absorbed with outer space subjects.
For Eddie, said Mrs. Seidel, it meant a roomful of posters, magazines, plastic models and other paraphernalia about Battlestar Galactica.
"They made a lot of money off him," she said. "He bought everything put on the market. He also took tape recordings of all the shows."
Eddie's world was wrapped up in the programs he viewed in his own bedroom, on a TV set he bought.
His father, Edward Seidel Sr., described Eddie as a sometimes brilliant boy who couldn't find enough in life to keep him interested.
The father said he learned about four years ago the boy had been sniffing gas with friends so he sent him to a psychiatrist.
"The psychiatrist said he was just kind of bored with life, that there was nothing here for him to excel in," said Seidel. "There was no real challenge here on this earth.
His stepmother said he got Bs and B-pluses in school, and an occasional A, but that he was mostly bored with classes.
Seidel said his son came home from his job as a supermarket stockboy about 5 p.m. Tuesday, apparently in good spirits.
The boy went to his room to watch television. The family did not see him the rest of the night. When his 19-year-old sister, Crystal, passed Eddie's door later that night, she found a note -- his last will and testament. He had gone off on his motorbike.
He told his parents in the note they'd find his body under the High Bridge, a half-mile, two-lane link between downtown St. Paul and the suburb of West St. Paul. The Seidels reached it about 10 minutes after Eddie had jumped and landed on ground beside the river.
Seidel said when Eddie learned last spring that Battlestar Galactica was being canceled, he contacted the ABC network to ask officials to keep it on. The last rerun of the program was shown Aug. 5.
"I really should have tried to get him into a gifted chldren type situation," Seidel said. "But it's too late to look back and say I should have."
He said he didn't realize what an influence a TV program could have on his son.
"I was never sure it did influence kids that bad, but now I'm convinced it does," he said.
Windows 1.0
All else the same, why is "isn't from Microsoft" on that list?
Perhaps a long history of making/buying/embrace-n-extending things that work wonderfully and are inexpensive then either switching them for or "upgrading" them into monstrosities that barely work and/or are very expensive? Call it a hunch.
Can you suggest a fanless PSU? Specifically an AT model with wattage suitable for a Pentium 60.
In my experience as merely a user, sshd appears to create a new key every time it is started. Your advice is like encouraging people to "never, never ignore those dire-sounding warnings that SnakeOil SoftFirewall pops up!"
Better advice is to accept the new key, but do an uptime and compare it to the date/time of your last login.
Because I find it endlessly amusing, I will now shamelessly steal from SA:
"We're confident that DNF will be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, game of 1998. And this confidence is not misplaced." - Scott Miller, 1997
"Duke Nukem Forever is a 1999 game and we think that timeframe matches very well with what we have planned for the game." - George Broussard, 1998
"Trust us, Duke Nukem Forever will rock when it comes out next year." - Joe Siegler, 1999
"When it's done in 2001." - 2000 Christmas card
"DNF will come out before Unreal 2." - George Broussard, 2001
"If DNF is not out in 2001, something's very wrong." - George Broussard, 2001
"DNF will come out before Doom 3." - George Broussard, 2002
Shhhh! The correct term is "application specific optimization"!
In the past other companies have caved to GPL requirements with a bit of arm twisting. No 'Bad Things' happened then and I can't see why LinkSys would be any different.
Judging by that blog entry it doesn't sound like he had much of a plan here or like he was expecting this. Weren't WASTE and Gnutella just attempts to provoke AOL and get him out of his contract?
What exactly was he expecting? Even if he didn't have a plan, you'd think that after Gnutella was pulled he would know where he stood.
And you asked that question because...it might have been fun? No, I think the point is that he asked that question because he was very intoxicated at the time.
Perhaps your response level was low not because of clueless users but because the lists actually work. The bounces were all going to spammer dropboxes or dead accounts on providers that binned them.
SPEWS also happens to be the most effective blackhole. Funny how it's also the one that spammers are most opposed to.
Also funny how antispews.ORG is selling e-mail services while SPEWS sells *nothing*.
they are certainly censorship
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The word "censorship" strongly implies content filtering perpetrated by a government. Blackholes are not content based -- they operate much more on the "consent" level (either you have permission to send e-mail to me from the IP you're using or you don't -- what is in the message is irrelevant).
Blackholes are not perpetrated by the government (except within its own offices or in particularly oppressive countries such as China). Blackholes are almost universally applied voluntarily.
Now compare this to a much more useful tool to the red fascist tyrant: Web filtering software. I don't know if China imposes an e-mail blackhole list on its people, but I'm damn sure they use web filtering software.
Blackhole lists make a particularly poor tool for suppressing dissidents anyway. What are you going to do? Stop them from getting e-mail from the New York Times? What if the newspaper changes the IP and domain name of its mail server without taking time out to notify you? Well, at that point some meddling do-gooder busts out of the air vents you stupidly had built large enough for someone to crawl through and holds you hostage while setting your doomsday device to self-destruct.
Doh!
That sounds like this spam sent by Empire Towers which is run by this guy who is pictured appearing as a panelist at the FTC Spam Forum. Note that he's a convicted felon.
I try very hard to ignore spam content because the fact is that the real problem is lack of consent. Unfortunately sometimes the depths spammers sink to are just sickening. Between this and the (pre-looting) spams from Artmarket/Artprice about how terrible the war in Iraq would be for the art market and how you could reduce your risk as an investor in this market by buying their blah blah blah...
At least with child pornography there are laws that sometimes are actually enforced. There are people in prisons waiting to cut the offender's balls off and flush them down the toilet. Cowles and those art fuckers will never really be held accountable for their sick exploitation. They'll just keep slipping through the cracks.
Yeah, same here.
Guess they're pulling out all the stops on the marketing as they realize what a weak movie they have. I remember when it was announced that Cameron would have nothing to do with the film because of the producer's insistance on this stupid, stupid script.
"Terminatrix" my ass.
Because Sigourney Weaver (and/or her manager) isn't stupid.
This movie has "bomb" written all over it. They couldn't even get the kid from T2 to return.
So what you're advocating is that we burn the village to save it.
Newsflash: Terrorists still have free and unfettered access to software people are pretty sure is exceptionally secure. OpenBSD development will by no means cease or even slow down much simply because the gubmint has stopped funding it.
Despite what you read in Tom Clancy novels, terrorists have no need for secure software or even computers to carry out their plans. In fact, if I were a terrorist I would probably intentionally avoid computers because they introduce too many unnecessary points of failure. What if your suicide bomber doesn't get the go code because his e-mail provider goes down or blocks your message as spam? Much more reliable to drop a letter in the mail or give him a phone call.
The WTC was destroyed by such high tech items as box cutters and flying manuals. You might also say that lax airline security was to blame.
So why is the government still funding airlines?
Every time I watch the news, I see another story about all the wonderful things NASA is doing in outer space. I know, I know, it's all supposed to be very impressive and exciting. But to be honest, it just boils my blood. I mean, the federal government can put a man on the moon, but it can't build a killer robot police force to hunt down and execute all the spammers? What kind of priorities do we have in this country?
Just the other day, there was a big article on the Security Supersite about how the internet might have to be rebuilt to save our children from pornographic spam. And then I read in USA Today how the government is spending $40 billion on outer-space surveillance satellites. Couldn't they put some of that satellite money to better use by constructing space-based laser cannons in geocentric orbit above all the ISPs to make sure our children are safe?
And for a fraction of what NASA spends on all that Mars rover monkey business, I could have a radio-wave-controlled stun gun that would finally stop anyone I thought might be spamming from ever thinking about looking at me wrong again.
It is painfully obvious that the government has the money and resources to build a high-energy force field around every single American, yet it doesn't. I mean, when I'm chasing after spammers with my stun gun it's darn near impossible to ensure my personal safety. Are a few measly cameras in the corners of the Foodland really going to deter an angry man who looks sort of like Alan Ralsky? What about my laptop? The pictures on my screen saver of little Kevin and Annie are irreplaceable! (I'm only going to be a grandmother once, you know! Unless, of course, the government finally gets on the ball with those cryogenic pods.)
And that Hubble telescope, there's a real beaut. Who needs to know if there's life out in space trillions of light years away, anyway? As long as the spacemen don't start sending me special business deals, making me wonder when they will deposit the gold bars in my savings account like that nice man Chavez from Boca Raton, I don't care who they are! If only NASA had aimed that telescope at Boca Raton instead of Pluto, you can bet I'd know what Chavez had for breakfast this morning.
It's shameful the way the internet has been allowed to degenerate, what with unsecure servers and protocols strewn everywhere. Just thinking about all the millions spent on that Mir station gets me in a dither when I check my e-mail and see donkey porn everywhere, with no donkey-porn-sensitive sunglasses to save my poor eyes.
And it sure would cut down on those ill-mannered spammers who keep on spamming despite the ISP's strict anti-spam terms of service if their computers were destroyed by spam-sensitive cybernetic space bees. I only have time to write so many complaints, you know!
If I can't demand killer robot police, then the least I can expect is a laser-powered servo-motored patrol-bot for my yard. How else will I know if it's a that Ralsky look-alike's lawyer trying to serve me court documents or just a raccoon rustling around out there late at night? I understand that in Sweden, every citizen is guaranteed a patrol-bot. But here in the world's richest nation, we go without! The sheer wastefulness of our government makes me sick!
Keep in mind that when it comes to directing young actors George Lucas is not the man for the job.
Between this unfortunate trait and the awful dialog the actors had to work with it's no wonder so many lines and scenes fall flat in E1 and E2.
I used to be a big supporter of both of my local hobby stores until recently. The manager of one of them has instructed his clerks to use high-pressure sales tactics on everyone who walks in the door. So whenever you go in now you get "MAY I HELP YOU?!" and when you say "No thanks, I'm just looking" the clerk proceeds to follow you around the store while yammering about whatever product your eye falls on for more than a half second. God forbid you pick anything up and look at it -- they'll be pressing armfulls of similar (but more expensive) products on you in an instant. Used car dealers are Best Buy employees compared to these guys.
They're just desperate for business, right? If that were the case you would think they wouldn't fuck up a comic book pull list with only a couple of titles on it, wouldn't you? Then try to charge you the "back issue" price for the comics they forgot to pull? Comics that are less than a month old? No, what we're seeing is desperation based on incompetence.
Listen up hobby store managers: "Just looking" doesn't mean "I'm buying all my stuff on the internet". Furthermore, even people who do browse your store then buy on the internet may change their mind at some point and decide to start buying from you again -- unless of course they haven't been driven off by your shitty attitude.
The last good film I rooted for was the Aronofsky/Miller Batman project that would have brought the excellent "Year One" story arc to theaters everywhere.
It was aborted by Warner execs at the last minute because they realized they would rather have Aronofsky make some crummy flick involving Scarecrow that continued where Batman & Robin left off. When Aronofsky wisely refused they ditched him for Christopher Nolan.
Since then Nolan has managed to talk his way out of the Scarecrow script and into a script which Andrew Kevin Walker will be writing.
Now I don't believe the director of Memento and the writer of Se7en will do wrong by Batman, but just imagine the kind of film that the director of Pi and the best Batman writer ever could have come up with.
The universe is not so poor, but people who talk to each other through fax machines might be. And these are the people who would shape the future of general computing with DRM.
William Gibson communicated entirely without the internet. Much of his communication was taken care of via fax until 1996 or so.
I don't think paranoia is the state of mind we're seeing in Hollywood. Paranoia would have ensured that these boards remained a secret (or at least a perpetually unconfirmed rumor) with lots of NDAs and stratification to keep all the juicy details from this article locked up. There would certainly be no exec in Vegas talking about how it "might be immoral or slightly illegal".
The author hits it right on the head when he uses the terms "herd mentality" and "cartel".
Why do you remind me of the guards in the "Tenchu" games who happily eat poisoned rice they find lying on the ground?
Enjoy your "free" unlicensed promotional copies -- until the BSA comes in one day and tells you what a shame it would be if a nice store like yours were audited and found to be running unlicensed software. Of course (they'll say) you could just buy some licenses at the standard price now and maybe avoid a lot of unpleasantness in the future.
If you don't want to buy any licenses though that's fine. They'll just make you an offer you can't refuse.
Except for the fact that MS would have a very hard time proving any malfeasance on the part of the consumer.
What if he needed some dough and tried to sell his "$119 value" software on eBay? Somehow I don't think a print-out of an email from some MS flunkie would quite cut the mustard as a "license substitute".