Any application though can delete your My Documents folder in Windows. However many applications can mess up your Windows install too. Therefore even when Linux can have the home directory erased, Windows has that and more.
For your seeing more OS-X machines, I think part of it could be the popularity of OS-X is way more then OS-9 ever was, and yes Unix sometimes is tempting to mess around with mostly with the strange names for files (fstab anyone?) that although are nice on a command line look obscure when looking at it in a GUI. But then again, I don't know your situation but if it is computer repair, part of it could be the Windows users who are so used to coming in for repairs switching to Macs and lacking the Mac or Unix skills to fix problems.
Yes, most people don't look at the code, however it is nice that you COULD look at the code if something seems off on a new update or such. One of the reasons I won't use Opera for any extended period is when I think about how much information passes through my web browser how do I know that it really is safe? However, it is nice to know that other people can look over the code and that you can too, plus, who is going to try to hide spyware in a GPL'd product?
That is true, however when you consider that Apple has much much more then just Macs with iPods, iTunes and just about anything else you can add a lowercase "i" to. Also, because Apple is into both hardware/software even though their marketshare may not increase much, they still get more profits anytime that a Mac user who has a machine that is too old wants to run the newest version of OS-X and spends about $1K to buy a new one and those that do have a machine new enough spend the ~$100 for the newer version. It also though, is in a monopoly position, in open competition a business with 10% marketshare would easily go bankrupt however they are still #2 in the (home) computer industry in operating systems. But really, Mac needs to maintain a #2 or #3 spot or else they have suddenly become "the man" and all the Mac-Rebels who want to rebel at the dominate industry (and there are plenty of them) would go somewhere else. Apple has enough cash to last them a long time with loyal customers, huge marketshare in the digital audio player business and online downloads.
1. Privileges, an ordinary user can't mess up the entire system. Unless the user is *really* stupid, they are not root and therefore do not have Write privileges on system-critical files. So even if you ran "rm -rf/" as a normal user, you would only lose the files you had access to and not break the system.
2. Most software is installed through a repository. Now, I realize that Mac does not by default (although there are projects to port apt-get and the like to it) but most distros of Linux have a way of installing via the repository.
3. Most first-party OS-X software is at least partly open-source including the key components of the OS such as the Kernel, Browser rendering engine, and some of the other utilities. This adds a layer of protection to prevent programming errors from not being noticed as anyone can look at the code and submit fixes to it. In addition, this adds security by having parts of Safari being looked at to prevent such flaws as drive-by-downloads which were a major problem of IE and a reason many Windows users got infected by malware.
While it is true that if someone really wanted to mess up OS-X or were just plain stupid they could. However, the chances of Unix breaking from normal usage are far far smaller then those of Windows.
The thing though is, in a Unix-like system (like Linux) or a Unix system (like OS-X) the person logging in does not have root capabilities (or at least shouldn't) and thus keeps the possibility of attack low. In addition, Linux (OS-X can be configured to) have a centralized repository where most users download their programs that the source has been scanned for presence of malicious code (OS-X's version is called Fink I believe) this is one of the main reasons there is little malware for Linux, OS-X though, being mixed free/proprietary (more or less BSD with a nice GUI) software, doesn't have this and instead most applications are downloaded binaries, I am not sure whether or not they can be installed without root privileges (I know apt-get on Linux requires it, but I think ordinary programs can still be executed without root privileges, just not in the directory of system-wide binaries) this keeps the risk of data deletion down because the most it can do (deletion-wise) is delete the/home directory (the Unix equivalent to My Documents on Windows). As for the polymorphic spyware, if it was executed by a normal user (not root) the most it would (or should) have access to is the/home directory, keeping the risk of it going very many places down because most people check their home directory and unless it was hidden (not sure how the default file manager in OS-X handles them) it would be very very easy to figure out that you didn't create that file. For zipping up your documents with a password, that could be done, however assuming that either A) the password is the same B) the generator creating it is the same and if it was encrypted, it would be trivial to brute-force the password, figure out the algorithm then release a patch that fixes it. Overall, Unix systems are very hard to crack given that all the patches are installed, as one person said: To break Linux (or Unix) you need to work at it, to break Windows all you need to do is work on it.
Everything can get viruses that can run code on them. This includes the PSP, Linux, BeOS, the DS, ETC. However it is true that Linux/Unix have a much, much lower risk of malware then Windows.
I happen to disagree with you on a lot of it (well mostly all of it) so I will post my reasons why...
For the president, I don't think that he is in too much control, I do think though that in a mixed president/congress situation where the president is republican and the congress is democrat or vice-versa, not much will get done positive and the president will keep vetoing until they can get the majority needed to overturn it, and it goes on and on. The president sure has a lot of influence, but very little power on the real side of things.
As for the second amendment thing, if anything we need less control over firearms. First, there are very few accidents involving firearms when you consider the amount of them. Secondly, some children can get access to guns sure, however some can get access to knives and other objects that can be used to hurt or kill someone. Also, if "when not in use the gun should be locked up" becomes law, that takes out any possibility of guns being used in self-defense. A criminal who would go out and kill someone isn't going to be worried about breaking a law of say stealing a gun, or not registering it, or whatever else people come up with.
I agree that elections need better methods and more records to trace them. In an age where E-voting machines are likely less locked down then some in-store-demos, we need accountability.
Government provided health insurance will make both our taxes to increase and quality of service to go down. Unlike in software, people aren't going to go through 5 years of school just to be a volunteer doctor. Even though health insurance should be affordable, every time the government tries to do something they always, always, always, mess up big time, just look at welfare for an example.
Higher education is important yes, however just look at pubic schools, general they do poorer then private schools because there is no competition, if we were to do this in universities, that would be even worse. Not to mention we don't need more government propaganda.
I don't think that evolution needs to be stressed too strongly. It is a theory, yes but it has several un-plugged holes. The best way for schools to deal with it is to have open debate about it and not just teach it as either pure fact or pure fiction. Kids need to learn to think for themselves and create their own values.
There are quite a few differences between your analogy and the real thing. It is not impossible to remove the stock CD player and replace it with a higher-quality player and still have the car work properly. If you remove IE from Windows it causes problems according to MS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Internet_Explorer and so it is nearly imposable to remove it. Your car analogy is more like a Linux distribution, you can take just about anything out and replace it and it will still be a vehicle, (probably a car, but if you want to add wings to it and a jet engine and make it a plane, go ahead) but Windows and IE is more like they put the CD player, steering wheel cover, seats, and just about everything else onto the engine making it impossible to remove one component without damaging the engine. Also, unlike in the car business, just about 90% of computers run Windows, so would a company that makes car CD players have a right to complain when 90% of their business is now not available? Yes, they would.
There though is a difference in bundling and integrating. Firefox is bundled in Ubuntu, a quick apt-get remove firefox solves the problem, Konqueror is bundled in KDE I can remove Konqueror with a simple apt-get remove konqueror, although that disables some features of KDE, most programs can still be launched. IE though can't be removed by any normal methods from the OS, and that is one of the primary concerns because even if you do use a third-party browser (Opera, Firefox) you still have the flaws of IE still on your machine. In a car, if you really want to you can replace an air conditioner with another one (even though there really is no need too) but IE you can't. Even though I never have been a Sun customer I am 99% sure that Netscape can be totally removed and a different web browser loaded on with no problem, with IE you can't do that.
I don't hate WINE, but too many times companies rely on the FOSS communities to make drivers and such while not giving support to people running Linux. WINE is not a bad project, I myself run and recomend it, but sometimes you have to say enough and make a company make a cross-platform product (or at least not blocking third-parties) to work on all 3 major platforms, Windows, Linux and OS-X.
But thats still Windows... Even if it ran in WINE it would still be Windows only. Just say no to Netflix if you want the Mac/Linux platform to be supported.
Actually, the Wii aside, most hardware is sold at a loss (or at cost) to try to get people to buy games. That is why PS3s are used in large clusters, they are cheap and powerful.
Music though, is the most cited example due to the technical reasons for it. In most encodings, a single song is around 4 MB. A DVD on the other hand can be 4 GB + and a Blu-Ray disk around 50 GB. Even a simple 700 MB CD still takes around an hour to download on a DSL connection. For video games, emulation isn't perfect and most people would rather play it with real controllers at a TV than with a keyboard on a monitor any day, if "piracy" hurt video games then why has Nintendo made $30 million in around 2 years with the virtual console http://www.vc-reviews.com/news/203/vc-earns-over-$30-million-so-far.php ??? The only way that emulation beats real games is portability and that is a natural consequence with there actually being competition in the game industry unlike the computer/music industries and very few open formats. As for art, it is a physical form and even though you could print out a high-res picture of the Mona Lisa and frame it, it doesn't compare to either having a print of it or owning the actual thing. Sculptures are the same way. As for literature they have managed to find a way to make money much as the Music/Movie industries will to make money when copies are freely available. In a library I can get almost any book, take it home, do just about whatever I want with it then take it back after a month all for free. And *obviously* that hasn't hurt literature at all. Most musicians that don't have contracts selling their music to *insert company here* usually make music for the joy of making music, many of them even have music you can download on their MySpace or band website. When they sell CDs, it doesn't come with DRM to try to restrict you or break your computer. So no, laws allowing P2P networks to operate the way they are legaly won't hurt anything much.
For video games it fixes itself. Emulation is not perfect and even when it is, there's still nothing like using the original controller in front of the television, that's why Nintendo's Virtual Console has taken off the way it has. As for in this generation, the sheer volume of data (a 50 gig blu-ray disk) isn't going to be easy to download, burn then put into a PS3. Not to mention how hard modchips are to get at say retail stores and most flash-carts for the DS that are readily available lack the extra RAM to make running commercial games (and some homebrew) hard if not impossible. About the only way emulation beats the original is portability, and even then they are mostly older games that either are not making the license holder much money, or they are hard to get games that are old still not making them money and eliminating the possibility of it being released on the Wii. Its the same way with film, even though you *can* get the movie 4 hours after it comes out online, it is generally lower-quality and takes forever to download compared to going to the theater.
If our copyright was sane, we wouldn't have this problem, alas its not and with the RIAA suing people for just thinking that they might have distributed a song, we can never be too careful. Sure the pirate party are extremes, but in a world of extreme copyright we need just the extreme anti-copyright before we can get any change back to a happy middle ground.
only seems logical that serving copyrighted files you dont own to the entire world should be illegal also.
You mean that right now it is about serving copyrighted files to the world with little evidence that it took place. If this becomes precedent it will become standard to have almost no evidence. It has always started out small with these things. Think back 4-5 years ago when Richard Stallman and others spoke out about DRM and trusted computing, everyone laughed at them and ignored it, till it came true. It is always the radicals that will point towards the right direction, today it may be this case, but what about tomorrow?
Its not about just this case, its about whether or not someone can sue you without having much proof. If the RIAA had it's way, all your searches on Google would be tracked and if you even typed in *insert song here* download regardless if you clicked the links or even downloaded it you would be instantly deemed a "pirate" and get charged an absolute absurd amount of money for it. Attacks on our freedoms always happen slowly... first the idea of "intellectual property" then software patents then before we know it we have the DMCA and the RIAA is charging single mothers over 100,000 dollars for 12 songs. If we don't stand up for our rights and support the "little guy", before we know it our freedom has vanished.
No its worse they let people take them home without much restriction and then they can photocopy them. Or worse yet share them with their friends. Or even worse they can convert them to PDFs and distribute them electronically!!! Libraries are evil, if they don't shut down soon all the authors are going to lose their job and be poor and no one is going to write anymore!!!
But the record companies want us to believe that unauthorized copying == stealing, so no it is a valid point. It is just that we have been fighting such an uphill battle that few people stop to consider that the entire method we have been using is wrong and needs reformed.
Why should it be illegal? Its opening up huge new legal opportunities for the government to decide to mess up again with technology. Hasn't anyone realized that whenever the government tries to do something involving technology it is us, the citizen that always, always, always loses? The DMCA, is just one example, and there are many others. Whats next, being thrown in jail for googleing a band name, or a software product because you were "looking for files to download"? Either you are a troll or can't look at the past and draw a conclusion. We need less copyright law and less law in general when it comes to technology, if the government stays out of the way problems solve themselves otherwise, expect to fight very very hard for the few freedoms we have left.
It is a good thing in that it is showing the true colors of the RIAA. Even though he might lose the case, its a battle lost but we could win the war. The more people realize that the RIAA is trying to attack us doing the simple act of ripping CDs to MP3s, Joe Sixpack might actually give a second thought if he really wants/needs to spend the $15 to get a new CD. It also could help when a senator/representative finds out that this is what the RIAA has been doing all along and those who actually knew about technology were right, they could take down the DMCA and other atrocious laws. This also might make bands less likely to join a record company that's part of the RIAA (because they are music listeners too) and also start labels breaking away from the RIAA because people won't buy DRMed songs and they don't believe that "piracy" is the same as ripping MP3s. If anything, this should give more evidence into persuading people that the RIAA truly is opposing our freedoms.
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When was the last time companies thought about the customer? Just look at DRM, Sony Rootkits, WGA, Etc.
Any application though can delete your My Documents folder in Windows. However many applications can mess up your Windows install too. Therefore even when Linux can have the home directory erased, Windows has that and more.
For your seeing more OS-X machines, I think part of it could be the popularity of OS-X is way more then OS-9 ever was, and yes Unix sometimes is tempting to mess around with mostly with the strange names for files (fstab anyone?) that although are nice on a command line look obscure when looking at it in a GUI. But then again, I don't know your situation but if it is computer repair, part of it could be the Windows users who are so used to coming in for repairs switching to Macs and lacking the Mac or Unix skills to fix problems.
Yes, most people don't look at the code, however it is nice that you COULD look at the code if something seems off on a new update or such. One of the reasons I won't use Opera for any extended period is when I think about how much information passes through my web browser how do I know that it really is safe? However, it is nice to know that other people can look over the code and that you can too, plus, who is going to try to hide spyware in a GPL'd product?
That is true, however when you consider that Apple has much much more then just Macs with iPods, iTunes and just about anything else you can add a lowercase "i" to. Also, because Apple is into both hardware/software even though their marketshare may not increase much, they still get more profits anytime that a Mac user who has a machine that is too old wants to run the newest version of OS-X and spends about $1K to buy a new one and those that do have a machine new enough spend the ~$100 for the newer version. It also though, is in a monopoly position, in open competition a business with 10% marketshare would easily go bankrupt however they are still #2 in the (home) computer industry in operating systems. But really, Mac needs to maintain a #2 or #3 spot or else they have suddenly become "the man" and all the Mac-Rebels who want to rebel at the dominate industry (and there are plenty of them) would go somewhere else. Apple has enough cash to last them a long time with loyal customers, huge marketshare in the digital audio player business and online downloads.
No, it has a couple of advantages.
/" as a normal user, you would only lose the files you had access to and not break the system.
1. Privileges, an ordinary user can't mess up the entire system. Unless the user is *really* stupid, they are not root and therefore do not have Write privileges on system-critical files. So even if you ran "rm -rf
2. Most software is installed through a repository. Now, I realize that Mac does not by default (although there are projects to port apt-get and the like to it) but most distros of Linux have a way of installing via the repository.
3. Most first-party OS-X software is at least partly open-source including the key components of the OS such as the Kernel, Browser rendering engine, and some of the other utilities. This adds a layer of protection to prevent programming errors from not being noticed as anyone can look at the code and submit fixes to it. In addition, this adds security by having parts of Safari being looked at to prevent such flaws as drive-by-downloads which were a major problem of IE and a reason many Windows users got infected by malware.
While it is true that if someone really wanted to mess up OS-X or were just plain stupid they could. However, the chances of Unix breaking from normal usage are far far smaller then those of Windows.
The thing though is, in a Unix-like system (like Linux) or a Unix system (like OS-X) the person logging in does not have root capabilities (or at least shouldn't) and thus keeps the possibility of attack low. In addition, Linux (OS-X can be configured to) have a centralized repository where most users download their programs that the source has been scanned for presence of malicious code (OS-X's version is called Fink I believe) this is one of the main reasons there is little malware for Linux, OS-X though, being mixed free/proprietary (more or less BSD with a nice GUI) software, doesn't have this and instead most applications are downloaded binaries, I am not sure whether or not they can be installed without root privileges (I know apt-get on Linux requires it, but I think ordinary programs can still be executed without root privileges, just not in the directory of system-wide binaries) this keeps the risk of data deletion down because the most it can do (deletion-wise) is delete the /home directory (the Unix equivalent to My Documents on Windows). As for the polymorphic spyware, if it was executed by a normal user (not root) the most it would (or should) have access to is the /home directory, keeping the risk of it going very many places down because most people check their home directory and unless it was hidden (not sure how the default file manager in OS-X handles them) it would be very very easy to figure out that you didn't create that file. For zipping up your documents with a password, that could be done, however assuming that either A) the password is the same B) the generator creating it is the same and if it was encrypted, it would be trivial to brute-force the password, figure out the algorithm then release a patch that fixes it. Overall, Unix systems are very hard to crack given that all the patches are installed, as one person said: To break Linux (or Unix) you need to work at it, to break Windows all you need to do is work on it.
Everything can get viruses that can run code on them. This includes the PSP, Linux, BeOS, the DS, ETC. However it is true that Linux/Unix have a much, much lower risk of malware then Windows.
A BIOS rootkit? Do those actually exist, when the BIOS doesn't do much on Linux, is that possible?
Actually, there are a lot of stupid criminals out there....
I happen to disagree with you on a lot of it (well mostly all of it) so I will post my reasons why...
For the president, I don't think that he is in too much control, I do think though that in a mixed president/congress situation where the president is republican and the congress is democrat or vice-versa, not much will get done positive and the president will keep vetoing until they can get the majority needed to overturn it, and it goes on and on. The president sure has a lot of influence, but very little power on the real side of things.
As for the second amendment thing, if anything we need less control over firearms. First, there are very few accidents involving firearms when you consider the amount of them. Secondly, some children can get access to guns sure, however some can get access to knives and other objects that can be used to hurt or kill someone. Also, if "when not in use the gun should be locked up" becomes law, that takes out any possibility of guns being used in self-defense. A criminal who would go out and kill someone isn't going to be worried about breaking a law of say stealing a gun, or not registering it, or whatever else people come up with.
I agree that elections need better methods and more records to trace them. In an age where E-voting machines are likely less locked down then some in-store-demos, we need accountability.
Government provided health insurance will make both our taxes to increase and quality of service to go down. Unlike in software, people aren't going to go through 5 years of school just to be a volunteer doctor. Even though health insurance should be affordable, every time the government tries to do something they always, always, always, mess up big time, just look at welfare for an example.
Higher education is important yes, however just look at pubic schools, general they do poorer then private schools because there is no competition, if we were to do this in universities, that would be even worse. Not to mention we don't need more government propaganda.
I don't think that evolution needs to be stressed too strongly. It is a theory, yes but it has several un-plugged holes. The best way for schools to deal with it is to have open debate about it and not just teach it as either pure fact or pure fiction. Kids need to learn to think for themselves and create their own values.
There are quite a few differences between your analogy and the real thing. It is not impossible to remove the stock CD player and replace it with a higher-quality player and still have the car work properly. If you remove IE from Windows it causes problems according to MS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Internet_Explorer and so it is nearly imposable to remove it. Your car analogy is more like a Linux distribution, you can take just about anything out and replace it and it will still be a vehicle, (probably a car, but if you want to add wings to it and a jet engine and make it a plane, go ahead) but Windows and IE is more like they put the CD player, steering wheel cover, seats, and just about everything else onto the engine making it impossible to remove one component without damaging the engine. Also, unlike in the car business, just about 90% of computers run Windows, so would a company that makes car CD players have a right to complain when 90% of their business is now not available? Yes, they would.
There though is a difference in bundling and integrating. Firefox is bundled in Ubuntu, a quick apt-get remove firefox solves the problem, Konqueror is bundled in KDE I can remove Konqueror with a simple apt-get remove konqueror, although that disables some features of KDE, most programs can still be launched. IE though can't be removed by any normal methods from the OS, and that is one of the primary concerns because even if you do use a third-party browser (Opera, Firefox) you still have the flaws of IE still on your machine. In a car, if you really want to you can replace an air conditioner with another one (even though there really is no need too) but IE you can't. Even though I never have been a Sun customer I am 99% sure that Netscape can be totally removed and a different web browser loaded on with no problem, with IE you can't do that.
I don't hate WINE, but too many times companies rely on the FOSS communities to make drivers and such while not giving support to people running Linux. WINE is not a bad project, I myself run and recomend it, but sometimes you have to say enough and make a company make a cross-platform product (or at least not blocking third-parties) to work on all 3 major platforms, Windows, Linux and OS-X.
But thats still Windows... Even if it ran in WINE it would still be Windows only. Just say no to Netflix if you want the Mac/Linux platform to be supported.
Actually, the Wii aside, most hardware is sold at a loss (or at cost) to try to get people to buy games. That is why PS3s are used in large clusters, they are cheap and powerful.
Music though, is the most cited example due to the technical reasons for it. In most encodings, a single song is around 4 MB. A DVD on the other hand can be 4 GB + and a Blu-Ray disk around 50 GB. Even a simple 700 MB CD still takes around an hour to download on a DSL connection. For video games, emulation isn't perfect and most people would rather play it with real controllers at a TV than with a keyboard on a monitor any day, if "piracy" hurt video games then why has Nintendo made $30 million in around 2 years with the virtual console http://www.vc-reviews.com/news/203/vc-earns-over-$30-million-so-far.php ??? The only way that emulation beats real games is portability and that is a natural consequence with there actually being competition in the game industry unlike the computer/music industries and very few open formats. As for art, it is a physical form and even though you could print out a high-res picture of the Mona Lisa and frame it, it doesn't compare to either having a print of it or owning the actual thing. Sculptures are the same way. As for literature they have managed to find a way to make money much as the Music/Movie industries will to make money when copies are freely available. In a library I can get almost any book, take it home, do just about whatever I want with it then take it back after a month all for free. And *obviously* that hasn't hurt literature at all. Most musicians that don't have contracts selling their music to *insert company here* usually make music for the joy of making music, many of them even have music you can download on their MySpace or band website. When they sell CDs, it doesn't come with DRM to try to restrict you or break your computer. So no, laws allowing P2P networks to operate the way they are legaly won't hurt anything much.
For video games it fixes itself. Emulation is not perfect and even when it is, there's still nothing like using the original controller in front of the television, that's why Nintendo's Virtual Console has taken off the way it has. As for in this generation, the sheer volume of data (a 50 gig blu-ray disk) isn't going to be easy to download, burn then put into a PS3. Not to mention how hard modchips are to get at say retail stores and most flash-carts for the DS that are readily available lack the extra RAM to make running commercial games (and some homebrew) hard if not impossible. About the only way emulation beats the original is portability, and even then they are mostly older games that either are not making the license holder much money, or they are hard to get games that are old still not making them money and eliminating the possibility of it being released on the Wii. Its the same way with film, even though you *can* get the movie 4 hours after it comes out online, it is generally lower-quality and takes forever to download compared to going to the theater.
If our copyright was sane, we wouldn't have this problem, alas its not and with the RIAA suing people for just thinking that they might have distributed a song, we can never be too careful. Sure the pirate party are extremes, but in a world of extreme copyright we need just the extreme anti-copyright before we can get any change back to a happy middle ground.
only seems logical that serving copyrighted files you dont own to the entire world should be illegal also.
You mean that right now it is about serving copyrighted files to the world with little evidence that it took place. If this becomes precedent it will become standard to have almost no evidence. It has always started out small with these things. Think back 4-5 years ago when Richard Stallman and others spoke out about DRM and trusted computing, everyone laughed at them and ignored it, till it came true. It is always the radicals that will point towards the right direction, today it may be this case, but what about tomorrow?
Its not about just this case, its about whether or not someone can sue you without having much proof. If the RIAA had it's way, all your searches on Google would be tracked and if you even typed in *insert song here* download regardless if you clicked the links or even downloaded it you would be instantly deemed a "pirate" and get charged an absolute absurd amount of money for it. Attacks on our freedoms always happen slowly... first the idea of "intellectual property" then software patents then before we know it we have the DMCA and the RIAA is charging single mothers over 100,000 dollars for 12 songs. If we don't stand up for our rights and support the "little guy", before we know it our freedom has vanished.
No its worse they let people take them home without much restriction and then they can photocopy them. Or worse yet share them with their friends. Or even worse they can convert them to PDFs and distribute them electronically!!! Libraries are evil, if they don't shut down soon all the authors are going to lose their job and be poor and no one is going to write anymore!!!
But the record companies want us to believe that unauthorized copying == stealing, so no it is a valid point. It is just that we have been fighting such an uphill battle that few people stop to consider that the entire method we have been using is wrong and needs reformed.
Why should it be illegal? Its opening up huge new legal opportunities for the government to decide to mess up again with technology. Hasn't anyone realized that whenever the government tries to do something involving technology it is us, the citizen that always, always, always loses? The DMCA, is just one example, and there are many others. Whats next, being thrown in jail for googleing a band name, or a software product because you were "looking for files to download"? Either you are a troll or can't look at the past and draw a conclusion. We need less copyright law and less law in general when it comes to technology, if the government stays out of the way problems solve themselves otherwise, expect to fight very very hard for the few freedoms we have left.
It is a good thing in that it is showing the true colors of the RIAA. Even though he might lose the case, its a battle lost but we could win the war. The more people realize that the RIAA is trying to attack us doing the simple act of ripping CDs to MP3s, Joe Sixpack might actually give a second thought if he really wants/needs to spend the $15 to get a new CD. It also could help when a senator/representative finds out that this is what the RIAA has been doing all along and those who actually knew about technology were right, they could take down the DMCA and other atrocious laws. This also might make bands less likely to join a record company that's part of the RIAA (because they are music listeners too) and also start labels breaking away from the RIAA because people won't buy DRMed songs and they don't believe that "piracy" is the same as ripping MP3s. If anything, this should give more evidence into persuading people that the RIAA truly is opposing our freedoms.
It is GPL'd, It shouldn't be too hard to add.
The SNES version is 800 points as *most* SNES games are.