He put forward a theoretical barrier to evolution at the molecular scale (irreducible complexity), and then provided examples of it nature.
Perhaps this is the root of our differing opinions. What I saw him doing was showing that almost nothing is known about important mechanisms that control not only how organisms reproduce but why they work the way they do. Hardly small potatoes when scientists claim to "understand" evolution.
If Behe was trying to say "Look I've found proof evolution is wrong!", then yes, he's wrong and foolish, becuase evolution in it's modern form is not a disprovable theory. If instead he was trying to say "Look there are incredible gaping holes in evolution." Then he's absolutely correct. I got the feeling he was after the latter point, though perhaps slightly confused on this matter.
Behe's theory of irreducible complexity has been completely disproved
That's a good one!
Actually, I read Darwin's Black Box, and I don't seem to recall Behe putting forward any theories. Instead I saw him pointing out problems with classical and neo-Darwinism. Being able to account for one or two of the issues in no way accounts for all of them. Behe should need only one counter-example to disprove all of evolution, assuming evolution is a scientific theory of course.
I get the feeling Behe has been more swept under the rug than anything.
Rather, it makes more sense just to not think about it until there's some kind of basis for the belief, one way or another
"sense cannot be made it must be sensed." - Some King Missle song.
Actually, think about whatever you feel like. That's what you got grey stuff between your ears for. Just try to quit burning people at the stake, or ruining their reputation, or even just smacking them down hard cause you don't agree with their opinion.
Donuts on mars? How can I believe in donuts on a planet that doesn't exist? Matter what's that? Oh yeah, part of a helpful theory for predicting future perceptions. I guess I should keep some of these ideas around if they're useful...
TRUTH? You can have it!
it'll only start mattering to me when there's some substantial evidence one way or another
Everybody's biased. Don't let that stop you living your life.
Science is a method for determining the truth of propositions about existence
Wow! Here I thought science was all about improving my standard of living and making neat "dohickeys" for me to play with. That's the last time I vote to fund science. Truth about existence indeed!
How can a religion or worldview actually be testable? How we make sense of the world is up to each and every one of us. A religion certainly isn't *good* or *bad* based on its testability. Of course, science as a worldview may pose a problem. You see, untestable science is bad science. Try throwing out the selection criteria currently in vogue of using only "naturalistic" processes in theories if you don't think everyone is influenced by worldview.
After that little dustup with Copernicus
Actually, the real problem in Copernicus' time was that religion (the Roman Catholic Church) was trying to control science. This dustup merely showed the catholic church that science was not a monster profitably controlled.
ESP, psychic powers, and the such (i.e. superstition), CAN be tested by science, and routinely are tested and disproven by science.
ESP is not *disproveable*. There are an infinite number of theories that could be conceived incorporating it. Disproving them one at a time will never get rid of all of them. Good theories (and science) can be differentiated from bad using the criteria of simplicity, accuracy of prediction and reproducibility (among others). The lack of theories matching those criteria is why no one takes ESP seriously. The fact some people still look into these things seems perfectly reasonable to me.
That people believe in them is a matter of grave concern.
Believe that's a funny word. Belief is not something one person can decide for another, or "prove" to another. Belief is merely a matter of choice. Either conscious or unconscious. The need to control other's belief seems a greater matter of concern to me.
human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals(true/false).
If this were a question "science" was willing to ask on an empirical level, then it might be worth putting in a pole. Till then, this pole seems to be saying 53% of Americans have had bad philosophy shoved down their throat and accepted it. Of course, 53% is pretty close to even odds on a true/false question.
Click Yes and ignore. Anything else merely encourages this EULA foolishness. After all, even if they were legally binding, who's going to enforce them?
(I suppose I need to mention be careful what you install on your system for all those kazaa users out there.)
One of the primary arguments against DeCSS was that it provided no "useful" functionality other than decryption and ran on an already supported platform (Windows). Foolish as it may seem, courts don't seem to support the practice and learning that comes from such implementations. Since the mplayer stuff runs on an unsupported platform and provides a lot more functionality than DeCSS, it has a lot better chance of holding up in court.
The question is, which distribution wants to take that kind of legal risk?
Of course, no one is going to go after you for downloading or building mplayer, giants aren't very good at swatting flies. So it's only distribution that might get you into trouble.
Of course, we're quite a ways from that minimum. For one thing, passing laws meant to prevent crime(DMCA) is light years from simply enforcing those laws. Further, governments have always had to defend against basic atrocities like murder and what not before defending mere property. This is because humans have a heirarchy of needs that they will fulfill whether it is convenient or not. When corporations begin to ignore all in search of profit, they are no longer in line with the government or the corporate world in general. Most businesspersons would agree they must have a nice world to live in for their money to be worthwhile. In fact, many feel bettering the world around them is a Good Thing.
Lest we all forget, the fortune 500 is not the entire corporate world, in fact many many more people are employed outside than inside that particular group. The fact powerful absolutely limiting tools are more effective to very large companies than others is why monopolies (intellectual or otherwise) rarely have a positive net effect. It is also why monopolies, especially those without stringent limits, are rarely a good capitalistic tool.
In college I used to spend a lot of time in hack mode, in fact most of my skill at programming comes from nearly a whole summer in "hack mode".
Of course, concentration has never been a problem for me. A pulse, a slightly interesting problem, and a lack of horrible jarring motion (on off days) was all it took me to get into the zone. Hell, getting me out of it has always been the problem. 10 minutes after fire alarms, the RA would have to come in and peel me from the keyboard...
But since I've started working, my time in hack mode has gone down down down. In the last 12 months, I've probably spent a grand total of 3 8 hour days in "hack-mode". Time spent writing the core of some UDP packet driver. Interesting problems? I'd give my eye teeth for just about any problem that requires even a breath of hack mode to finish!!
I don't know what you guys are working on, but I sure wonder who's doing all your scut work. Documentation, build files, organization, testing, requirements analysis, coding all but the core pieces that might pose original problems.
I grew up in the age of the Alien saga and grunge. No love of corporations there!
As for capitalism? How is intellectual property a capitalistic tool? I'd figure government getting involved and creating monopolies of any kind (even copyright/patent) would be the opposite of capitalism.
Newsflash: the JVM uses Win32 behind the scenes to get things done. It IS the API for the OS, after all. Its not like the JVM uses the BIOS for file IO, is it?
Wow, that makes it so amazing that Java runs on Linux and solaris. I never knew it used Wine.
When I write an application, I can write reliability and security in regardless of how well the OS is put together. However, doing this takes a lot of effort, and many developers get lazy or foolish or both. Sun (with Java) certainly seemed to do a good job.
Murky Issues: You're right some of those issues are murky and the jury isn't all in. However, based on the feature set they're after and the security model they are following, I simply don't think they can do it. Not in this iteration at least.
It's not like Sun wouldnt wanna have Sparcs on every desktop running Java(tm) applications everywhere.
Actually, they'd like all software running on Sparcs, but they'd rather have them managed at a central location while all lusers get is a terminal.
P.S. - Way to make me pay for silly off the cuff remarks!!
They have done pretty well. Course last I checked it still wasn't perfect.
The win32's are pretty strait forward, *really* is a lot bigger problem today when installing software from say Real Networks. I guess I'm assuming a lot here about the kind of world Bill (or others) would like to live in (where software licenses are enforced). If reverse engineering were against the law, you wouldn't be able to do things like decompile, dissasemble or even benchmark. (read the MSSQLServer license lately?)
If they use, and profit, from government-sponsored software, the public is going to be getting a return on their investment from those taxes
My economics seem to differ from yours. You seem to think the economy is centered around the government, what goes into and comes out of government is important. By contrast, I feel the economy is centered around my wallet, what goes into and comes out of my wallet is important.
In this case I pay taxes, and the government sponsors TCP. I then pay for TCP software sponsored by the government and part of that money goes back to the government and more of it goes to some corporation.
I fail to see how having my money shared between the government and some corporation is better than me just keeping the money in the first place. Of course, I'm obviously doing something wrong considering I sweat and toil for the money I get to try and live on.
1) a "computer" costs $2500, this being because he considers only OEM or laptops to be "computers". To him it ain't a PC if I can build it myself and skip the OS.
2) Windows XP costs $100. This because of course everyone will be getting upgrade versions, since they *all* have an old copy of windows.
In a twisted sort of light, it makes sense. Of course, in reality he's dreaming. It's more like $500 for a PC and there are still more non users than users out there. Course, if his OEM licenses cost $20 a pop, maybe 4% is accurate...
What gets me is in the same vein he talks about bringing down the cost of broadband. Who the heck can't afford $40/mo for DSL or cable? Your phone bill isn't any cheaper than that, in fact the typical cell phone plan starts at $40/mo and goes up! No one complains about cost there.
...GPL is bad in certain cases... For example, if the original code would require a lot of effort to turn it into something that was merchantable quality or if the code is of no use unless it is built into something bigger
So GPL can't be used by business eh? This would be because obviously reading and understanding the code, then rekeying it in so that it's slightly different would be waaay to much work for a company who wants to profit off of something they got for free...
Like the time he suggested building particle accelerators in space because there is lots of free vacum there...
Oh yeah, particle accelerators in space, what a terrible idea, cause obviously no ones going to be able to figure how to refine partial vacuum to complete vacuum, or avoid radiation. Only thing stupider would be putting a telescope in space...
As for GPL vs BSD, it's pretty obvious that GPL is for promoting free software and BSD is for widest adoption. Which one the government should use is up for debate, but there are some great reasons for widest adoption... (course they work even better against commercial software)
Really dumb things Gates has said(from the article): That's something that for a few percent of the price of the PC you can buy a commercial operating system, where all the work of testing it, supporting it, delivering it, is included for a few percent of that price of the PC. So, $200 for WinXP is 4% the price of a $500 PC. Great math there Bill.
As for the utility of source, I think it is overated. I would much prefer an API that is written well enough that I do not need to see the source to work out what is going on.
That's great, you use the API's, don't worry about the fact you've just tied yourself into only one vendor that can ever fix the API, or know what it *really* does...
Passport: It's a principal thing with me. When I go out and solicit some service on the web, I get to make a decision whether I want to step through a company's hoops in order to do business with them. In many cases I've found other vendors because I didn't like the hoops offered. In the MSDN case, I have the choice of finding another job, or jumping through the hoops. It's even worse, when I consider the hoops are likely to get a lot worse in the near term.
No solid interface: It's not the individual pieces that are a problem. It is general trends. In this case, we see Microsoft creating a virtual machine (not unlike Java) and basing as much future development on it as possible. However, different than Java, Microsoft will be using their win32 libraries behind the scenes to get much of the work done.
From what I've seen of Microsoft efforts in the past, I'd have to guess they aren't going to do a very good job of creating a good isolated "sandbox" to run untrusted or semitrusted code in. How can they if the "sandbox" is running win32 calls under the hood? So, the goal is to have code that can run anywhere and on any machine, or across several machines, but security (and reliability to some degree) is essentially left up to application developers. This leaves the field wide open for malicious (or just plain foolish) applications to cause all sorts of grief.
I'm not all that familiar with the C# and.NET implementation. Then again, how familiar is anyone, considering the source is closed. I look at the track record of the past. Tons of exploits in VBScript, very few in JavaScript, especially non-MS variants. Many macro and other exploits and bugs in the Office suite. In fact, Office (through outlook) is the largest carrier of computer viruses today.
I'm not saying it can't be done, or that Microsoft can't do it. But if Microsoft comes up with a secure reliable development environment with more features and integration than ever before, you'll be able to bowl me over with a toothpick.
If the owner NEVER copies the software, they have never been bound to a license terms
Actually, since copyright has always allowed a user of copyrighted material to make back ups and other copies for their own personal use. No license is required to do whatever with software anyway.
"Software Licensing", "Digital Rights Management" or whatever corporate america is trying to push into legislation is something entirely different than copyright, and quite frankly isn't law yet. However, it's getting closer every day.
The real problem arose in a room full of system integrator lawyers and content provider lawyers. You see it's illegal to make such copies on someone else's behalf. Which is exactly what a hard-drive, CD-Rom or operating system does in order to execute programs.
Slashdot Mirror
He put forward a theoretical barrier to evolution at the molecular scale (irreducible complexity), and then provided examples of it nature.
Perhaps this is the root of our differing opinions. What I saw him doing was showing that almost nothing is known about important mechanisms that control not only how organisms reproduce but why they work the way they do. Hardly small potatoes when scientists claim to "understand" evolution.
If Behe was trying to say "Look I've found proof evolution is wrong!", then yes, he's wrong and foolish, becuase evolution in it's modern form is not a disprovable theory. If instead he was trying to say "Look there are incredible gaping holes in evolution." Then he's absolutely correct. I got the feeling he was after the latter point, though perhaps slightly confused on this matter.
Behe's theory of irreducible complexity has been completely disproved
That's a good one!
Actually, I read Darwin's Black Box, and I don't seem to recall Behe putting forward any theories. Instead I saw him pointing out problems with classical and neo-Darwinism. Being able to account for one or two of the issues in no way accounts for all of them. Behe should need only one counter-example to disprove all of evolution, assuming evolution is a scientific theory of course.
I get the feeling Behe has been more swept under the rug than anything.
Unfortuneately, that's not the USA we live in...
Rather, it makes more sense just to not think about it until there's some kind of basis for the belief, one way or another
"sense cannot be made it must be sensed." - Some King Missle song.
Actually, think about whatever you feel like. That's what you got grey stuff between your ears for. Just try to quit burning people at the stake, or ruining their reputation, or even just smacking them down hard cause you don't agree with their opinion.
Donuts on mars? How can I believe in donuts on a planet that doesn't exist? Matter what's that? Oh yeah, part of a helpful theory for predicting future perceptions. I guess I should keep some of these ideas around if they're useful...
TRUTH? You can have it!
it'll only start mattering to me when there's some substantial evidence one way or another
Everybody's biased. Don't let that stop you living your life.
Science is a method for determining the truth of propositions about existence
Wow! Here I thought science was all about improving my standard of living and making neat "dohickeys" for me to play with. That's the last time I vote to fund science. Truth about existence indeed!
Religion cannot be tested by science.
How can a religion or worldview actually be testable? How we make sense of the world is up to each and every one of us. A religion certainly isn't *good* or *bad* based on its testability. Of course, science as a worldview may pose a problem. You see, untestable science is bad science. Try throwing out the selection criteria currently in vogue of using only "naturalistic" processes in theories if you don't think everyone is influenced by worldview.
After that little dustup with Copernicus
Actually, the real problem in Copernicus' time was that religion (the Roman Catholic Church) was trying to control science. This dustup merely showed the catholic church that science was not a monster profitably controlled.
ESP, psychic powers, and the such (i.e. superstition), CAN be tested by science, and routinely are tested and disproven by science.
ESP is not *disproveable*. There are an infinite number of theories that could be conceived incorporating it. Disproving them one at a time will never get rid of all of them. Good theories (and science) can be differentiated from bad using the criteria of simplicity, accuracy of prediction and reproducibility (among others). The lack of theories matching those criteria is why no one takes ESP seriously. The fact some people still look into these things seems perfectly reasonable to me.
That people believe in them is a matter of grave concern.
Believe that's a funny word. Belief is not something one person can decide for another, or "prove" to another. Belief is merely a matter of choice. Either conscious or unconscious. The need to control other's belief seems a greater matter of concern to me.
human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals(true/false).
If this were a question "science" was willing to ask on an empirical level, then it might be worth putting in a pole. Till then, this pole seems to be saying 53% of Americans have had bad philosophy shoved down their throat and accepted it. Of course, 53% is pretty close to even odds on a true/false question.
Do scientists ever learn?
Not about some things...
they don't mean anything!
Click Yes and ignore. Anything else merely encourages this EULA foolishness. After all, even if they were legally binding, who's going to enforce them?
(I suppose I need to mention be careful what you install on your system for all those kazaa users out there.)
One of the primary arguments against DeCSS was that it provided no "useful" functionality other than decryption and ran on an already supported platform (Windows). Foolish as it may seem, courts don't seem to support the practice and learning that comes from such implementations. Since the mplayer stuff runs on an unsupported platform and provides a lot more functionality than DeCSS, it has a lot better chance of holding up in court.
The question is, which distribution wants to take that kind of legal risk?
Of course, no one is going to go after you for downloading or building mplayer, giants aren't very good at swatting flies. So it's only distribution that might get you into trouble.
Excellent points.
Of course, we're quite a ways from that minimum. For one thing, passing laws meant to prevent crime(DMCA) is light years from simply enforcing those laws. Further, governments have always had to defend against basic atrocities like murder and what not before defending mere property. This is because humans have a heirarchy of needs that they will fulfill whether it is convenient or not. When corporations begin to ignore all in search of profit, they are no longer in line with the government or the corporate world in general. Most businesspersons would agree they must have a nice world to live in for their money to be worthwhile. In fact, many feel bettering the world around them is a Good Thing.
Lest we all forget, the fortune 500 is not the entire corporate world, in fact many many more people are employed outside than inside that particular group. The fact powerful absolutely limiting tools are more effective to very large companies than others is why monopolies (intellectual or otherwise) rarely have a positive net effect. It is also why monopolies, especially those without stringent limits, are rarely a good capitalistic tool.
Damn, they're premadonna's. I should have guessed
After spending only 3 days in hack mode the last 12 months, I was hoping I was just in the wrong career or something. That's what you get for hoping!
Back to the read, read, read, fix wheel of despair for me!
In college I used to spend a lot of time in hack mode, in fact most of my skill at programming comes from nearly a whole summer in "hack mode".
Of course, concentration has never been a problem for me. A pulse, a slightly interesting problem, and a lack of horrible jarring motion (on off days) was all it took me to get into the zone. Hell, getting me out of it has always been the problem. 10 minutes after fire alarms, the RA would have to come in and peel me from the keyboard...
But since I've started working, my time in hack mode has gone down down down. In the last 12 months, I've probably spent a grand total of 3 8 hour days in "hack-mode". Time spent writing the core of some UDP packet driver. Interesting problems? I'd give my eye teeth for just about any problem that requires even a breath of hack mode to finish!!
I don't know what you guys are working on, but I sure wonder who's doing all your scut work. Documentation, build files, organization, testing, requirements analysis, coding all but the core pieces that might pose original problems.
capitalism? Corporate priviledge since birth?
I grew up in the age of the Alien saga and grunge. No love of corporations there!
As for capitalism? How is intellectual property a capitalistic tool? I'd figure government getting involved and creating monopolies of any kind (even copyright/patent) would be the opposite of capitalism.
Clueless? No.
Super Genius? No.
Lucky Bastard? Yes indeed!
Newsflash: the JVM uses Win32 behind the scenes to get things done. It IS the API for the OS, after all. Its not like the JVM uses the BIOS for file IO, is it?
Wow, that makes it so amazing that Java runs on Linux and solaris. I never knew it used Wine.
When I write an application, I can write reliability and security in regardless of how well the OS is put together. However, doing this takes a lot of effort, and many developers get lazy or foolish or both. Sun (with Java) certainly seemed to do a good job.
Murky Issues:
You're right some of those issues are murky and the jury isn't all in. However, based on the feature set they're after and the security model they are following, I simply don't think they can do it. Not in this iteration at least.
It's not like Sun wouldnt wanna have Sparcs on every desktop running Java(tm) applications everywhere.
Actually, they'd like all software running on Sparcs, but they'd rather have them managed at a central location while all lusers get is a terminal.
P.S. - Way to make me pay for silly off the cuff remarks!!
Wow you can get WinXP full (not upgrade) for $88!!
Sorry, but with upgrade, $88 just ain't the full price. Why, you can't even give away your old computer with no OS.
If his OEM price really is $20 (4% of $500) he just spilled one big cat... Just about as bad as the other error I'd say.
They have done pretty well. Course last I checked it still wasn't perfect.
The win32's are pretty strait forward, *really* is a lot bigger problem today when installing software from say Real Networks. I guess I'm assuming a lot here about the kind of world Bill (or others) would like to live in (where software licenses are enforced). If reverse engineering were against the law, you wouldn't be able to do things like decompile, dissasemble or even benchmark. (read the MSSQLServer license lately?)
That would qualify as a modification and be still be protected by the GPL.
If no two lines of code match, how you going to prove that?
PC vendors don't pay retail price for the OS they install on their machines.
And a retail PC doesn't come close to having all the software you need on it either. Try MS Office for $300 a pop... iceburg, meet tip.
I think I split a gut!
If they use, and profit, from government-sponsored software, the public is going to be getting a return on their investment from those taxes
My economics seem to differ from yours. You seem to think the economy is centered around the government, what goes into and comes out of government is important. By contrast, I feel the economy is centered around my wallet, what goes into and comes out of my wallet is important.
In this case I pay taxes, and the government sponsors TCP. I then pay for TCP software sponsored by the government and part of that money goes back to the government and more of it goes to some corporation.
I fail to see how having my money shared between the government and some corporation is better than me just keeping the money in the first place. Of course, I'm obviously doing something wrong considering I sweat and toil for the money I get to try and live on.
Good point on the math...
actually he probably gets his 4% from this:
1) a "computer" costs $2500, this being because he considers only OEM or laptops to be "computers". To him it ain't a PC if I can build it myself and skip the OS.
2) Windows XP costs $100. This because of course everyone will be getting upgrade versions, since they *all* have an old copy of windows.
In a twisted sort of light, it makes sense. Of course, in reality he's dreaming. It's more like $500 for a PC and there are still more non users than users out there. Course, if his OEM licenses cost $20 a pop, maybe 4% is accurate...
What gets me is in the same vein he talks about bringing down the cost of broadband. Who the heck can't afford $40/mo for DSL or cable? Your phone bill isn't any cheaper than that, in fact the typical cell phone plan starts at $40/mo and goes up! No one complains about cost there.
...GPL is bad in certain cases...
For example, if the original code would require a lot of effort to turn it into something that was merchantable quality or if the code is of no use unless it is built into something bigger
So GPL can't be used by business eh? This would be because obviously reading and understanding the code, then rekeying it in so that it's slightly different would be waaay to much work for a company who wants to profit off of something they got for free...
Like the time he suggested building particle accelerators in space because there is lots of free vacum there...
Oh yeah, particle accelerators in space, what a terrible idea, cause obviously no ones going to be able to figure how to refine partial vacuum to complete vacuum, or avoid radiation. Only thing stupider would be putting a telescope in space...
As for GPL vs BSD, it's pretty obvious that GPL is for promoting free software and BSD is for widest adoption. Which one the government should use is up for debate, but there are some great reasons for widest adoption... (course they work even better against commercial software)
Really dumb things Gates has said(from the article):
That's something that for a few percent of the price of the PC you can buy a commercial operating system, where all the work of testing it, supporting it, delivering it, is included for a few percent of that price of the PC.
So, $200 for WinXP is 4% the price of a $500 PC. Great math there Bill.
As for the utility of source, I think it is overated. I would much prefer an API that is written well enough that I do not need to see the source to work out what is going on.
That's great, you use the API's, don't worry about the fact you've just tied yourself into only one vendor that can ever fix the API, or know what it *really* does...
Passport:
.NET implementation. Then again, how familiar is anyone, considering the source is closed. I look at the track record of the past. Tons of exploits in VBScript, very few in JavaScript, especially non-MS variants. Many macro and other exploits and bugs in the Office suite. In fact, Office (through outlook) is the largest carrier of computer viruses today.
It's a principal thing with me. When I go out and solicit some service on the web, I get to make a decision whether I want to step through a company's hoops in order to do business with them. In many cases I've found other vendors because I didn't like the hoops offered. In the MSDN case, I have the choice of finding another job, or jumping through the hoops. It's even worse, when I consider the hoops are likely to get a lot worse in the near term.
No solid interface:
It's not the individual pieces that are a problem. It is general trends. In this case, we see Microsoft creating a virtual machine (not unlike Java) and basing as much future development on it as possible. However, different than Java, Microsoft will be using their win32 libraries behind the scenes to get much of the work done.
From what I've seen of Microsoft efforts in the past, I'd have to guess they aren't going to do a very good job of creating a good isolated "sandbox" to run untrusted or semitrusted code in. How can they if the "sandbox" is running win32 calls under the hood? So, the goal is to have code that can run anywhere and on any machine, or across several machines, but security (and reliability to some degree) is essentially left up to application developers. This leaves the field wide open for malicious (or just plain foolish) applications to cause all sorts of grief.
I'm not all that familiar with the C# and
I'm not saying it can't be done, or that Microsoft can't do it. But if Microsoft comes up with a secure reliable development environment with more features and integration than ever before, you'll be able to bowl me over with a toothpick.
If the owner NEVER copies the software, they have never been bound to a license terms
Actually, since copyright has always allowed a user of copyrighted material to make back ups and other copies for their own personal use. No license is required to do whatever with software anyway.
"Software Licensing", "Digital Rights Management" or whatever corporate america is trying to push into legislation is something entirely different than copyright, and quite frankly isn't law yet. However, it's getting closer every day.
It is.
The real problem arose in a room full of system integrator lawyers and content provider lawyers. You see it's illegal to make such copies on someone else's behalf. Which is exactly what a hard-drive, CD-Rom or operating system does in order to execute programs.
This was the root evil behind the DMCA.