For about 1000 bucks, I can get merely 985 CDs (at a bargain price of 15 bucks a pop). If Hillary is reading this, she's probably blowing an aneurysm...
We'll just assume your fingers slipped and that you really really meant to type "67" instead of "985". Either that, or you actually can cop 985 CD's for a grand because your local store's selling their overstock titles for $1.02. If that's what an Elvis Costello oldie goes for these days -- no wonder he's whining!
That's a very apt comparison. Verisign has gone from being a monopoly (as Network Solutions) to having a lot of cheaper competition, just like Ma Bell. And similarly, it finds that it can't hack it in the real world, and is resorting to underhanded techniques like this.
The shareware paradigm has two essential features:
1) The executable file is freely distributable ("share") and
2) The author asks to receive payment for extended use of his creation ("ware")
There are other subcategories, such as nagware, crippleware, but they still fit under the shareware umbrella (BTW, Windows fails condition 1, and Linux fails condition 2).
if it is hampered in any way in which you must pay to get the fully-functional version, it is a commercial demo.
It's offensive that so many people these days seem to be freeloading off the good will and generosity of the shareware community
Commercial demos most typically are not freely distributable, but only available on the companies website (and these days, tend to require submission of demographic/professional information)
The reason why time-limited shareware wasn't popular before the rise of the World Wide Web is that it could've taken a long time in the old days for an author to be sent the check, cash it, and get around to mailing out a non-crippled floppy. And in those days, since most people didn't have email, registration codes were less popular. But still, crippled shareware was common. I just found in my closet an issue of INFO (an Amiga/Commodore magazine) from 1989 which contains a blurb about a program called Fungraph. It says, in part, "if you want to make your own demos, or print out any of the graphics within the program, you must purchase the shareware version." I'm sure someone out there with a few back issues of Creative Computing or COMPUTE! could find some much older crippleware in the back pages.
In other words, if I publish my electronic book in an unprotected, freely-distributable form, would I then be breaking some proposed law? No; you'd just be wasting your time because no device legally on sale would be able to read it
Two words: Mod chips.
In an SCCCA future, they'd be more common than bootleg rum in Prohibition.
DVD-RAM discs cannot be read by anything except a DVD-RAM drive,
I agree with the bulk of your comment, but in fairness, Panasonic does make a real nifty portable DVD Player that plays ordinary DVDs, DVD-RAMs, and MP3 encoded CD-RWs, and they also manufacture cartridgeless DVD-RAM discs that, once recorded, are playable in some standalone home DVD-Video devices, and readable in some computer DVD-ROM players.
Furthermore, I believe you are factually incorrect in stating that DVD+RW can't "legally" be called DVD. The DVD+RW Alliance seem to do so with impunity on their site. What is true is that their format is not licensed by the "DVD Forum" nor can it use their logo. But, big deal. The Alliance has its own logo which is just as pretty, and it seems to me that they are a fairly reliable manufacturing bunch. And who's the DVD Forum, anyway? Just another, larger group of companies. Interestingly, it would appear that all the members of the DVD+RW Alliance are also members of the DVD Forum, although not vice-versa, of course. Anyway, these two formats will duke it out on their respective merits and the marketing savvy of their proponents, and not on whether some licensing agency nobody cares about issues a logo. (I mean, DVD-RAM, how the hell does that get to be called DVD-anything? It's not even the same recording material as a regular DVD. I'll be nice and not discuss the "RAM" portion of the name. Let's just say Panasonic's been trying to mainstream this product line for many years and I wish them the best of luck.)
And as for confusion, how confused can people be? If slashdotters can wrap their heads around SIMM, DIMM, SODIMM, SDRAM, RDRAM, HTML, XML, XHTML, MathML, XSL, and so on, what's so hard about researching a couple of recordable DVD formats?
Of course, it's all a moot issue. Recordable blue-laser discs will be out in a couple of years and by that time, these two formats will have caught on about as much as the Sony HiFD and Imation LS120 did.
Piracy will continue unabated in foreign countries.
And not only that, but technological development will continue unabated in those foreign countries which do not force their scientists and engineers to march to the beat of movie and record studio heads.
Not so funny, considering that the President of the Grammies, Michael Greene, actually called.mp3 swapping a life-or-death matter at last night's Grammy Award presentation. Seriously.
The problem isn't the PC makers, it's the software makers, Microsoft, Real, etc., who have all come to the conclusion that in a world of strong copy prevention, they have the possibility of literally locking up the market. And for sure there will be no room for "Free as in speech" software.
Will the industry introduce new annoying concepts which will keep me from making my backup copy?
Absolutely. It seems clear to me that Blu-Ray is not intended to benefit the consumer. The plan is to phase in these new disks with superior copy-prevention technology, then to phase out the old vanilla DVDs. Digital Rights Management with some kind of secure path will make unauthorized copying much more difficult. Also, expect certain disk ID ranges to require explicit permission sent from the content owner before temporarily allowing themselves to be played, in effect, a resurrection of the old (non-winky) Divx concept. Gear up for battle.
merely "survival of those who are most likely to survive" which is a tautology
It's true that it's a tautology. It's not true that it's "mere." You could say that e=mc^2 is a tautology, but in discovering the equality, Einstein began a revolution in physics. Darwin's insight had a similar impact in the biological sciences.
Some people have had problems like this while using Norton Firewall. If you have that installed, you may want to check about how to pass referrer info to the website.
The whole point of the theory of evolution is that it describes an inevitable one-way process, like entropy. Due to random errors in DNA replication, mutations are produced all the time. Some of those mutations are more suited for the environment they are in, some of them are less suited. The mutations which are more suited tend to out-produce the others (natural selection), and over time, evolution occurs. The genius of Darwin was in recognizing that the ones who survive, by definition, are the fittest, and vice-versa.
Are selective processes still at work today? Yes, of course. So what if 20-20 vision is no longer a fitness trait? It used to be that having gills made us more fit for our environment, some hundreds of millions of years ago. Now it's not longer to our advantage to have gills, nor to have perfect vision. Our environment continues to change, and so must we. Perhaps we now live in an environment where it is more important to be able to play dirty pool than to be able to swim in a dirty pool. Maybe we're evolving into a nation of smooth-talking baby-daddies. More seriously, there are other elements in our changing environment that people are evolving in concert with. It seems increasingly common for people to develop diseases like asthma and bizarre autoimmune disorders which may be related to synthetic chemicals in our environment. Those unfortunates who can't live in a plastic, super-medicated society are dying out -- but the rest of us are evolving into Homo Artificialis, if you will.
Also, a disease like AIDS which is cutting great swaths of death through the developing world will inevitably lead to populations which are largely resistant to its modus operandi. (In fact, some Europeans already are immune to HIV, a genetic gift conferred upon them by surviving the Black Death, scientists surmise.)
The evolution happening now may not seem "higher" on some kind of eugenic scale, but nature works in its own way. Alligators survive but the dinosaurs are long gone. And we all know that after every mammal has perished, bacteria will still remain, deep within the crevices of the Earth, adapting.
Who's gonna pay for music when you can just listen to it on the radio, or, heaven forbid, record it off the radio?!?!
That's like saying, "Who's gonna pay for moviews when you can just watch them on TV, or record them? People even pay to rent movies that they have to give back in a couple of days after only watching ONCE.
Frankly, I would be very happy to pay $15/month for a service which:
1)Allowed me unlimited streaming on demand for all major labels and a large number of independents, incl. foreign, obscure, and demo versions.
2)Allowed me to log in from any computer so I could access my account at a friend's house (Just as I could currently bring my CDs to a friend's house.)
3)Allowed me unlimited temporary downloads. They could expire in a week...long enough for me to get a good listen on a portable device or on my PC when I didn't have the available bandwidth for streaming. However. downloaded songs should automatically renew themselves when I'm signed on to my account, so I wouldn't have to keep downloading the same favorite songs over and over again. I'd have no desire to burn CDs to "keep" mp3s because any song I wanted to hear would be instantly streamable, more easily located then trying to find a particular song in a stack of CDRs.
4)The service ought to suggest songs that I might like to listen to, based on my prior downloads.
With a service like that, there would be no need for me to play conventional CDs at all. I could listen to any song I wanted to at any time. It would be my own private, commercial-free radio station. Yes, I would gladly pay $15/mo. for that kind of service, and I think many other people would too. All the music you ever wanted, a mouse-click away. Just like audiogalaxy, but legal.
I agree. It seems to me it would be much more unambiguous to simply state "metric megabytes" for the power of ten, and "long megabytes" for the power of two. No new words to learn, and the definition is crystal clear -- if a HD manufacturer advertises "80 metric GB," you know exactly what you're getting.
In addition, since "80 long GB" sounds like you're getting more (and in fact, you ARE getting more) it might encourage HD makers to switch over to the same measure that RAM makers use, and thereby end all this confusion once and for all.
Okay, we'll stipulate Mac IE is free, but Mac IE isn't the same beasty as Windows IE. Particularly, it isn't vulnerable to this bug we're discussing. So it's off the table. And arguing from association that Win IE is free because its Mac counterpart is free is like arguing that WordPerfect for Windows must be free because Corel gives away WP Linux.
And the fact that you can "uninstall" IE says nothing about whether it's free or not. I can uninstall Solitaire, Calculator, and all my Windows help files too. They're not free though, they're bundled in the cost of the OS.
And even if IE were free, that wouldn't magically absolve MS of all responsibility toward its product. Let's say Blockbuster lends you one of their free rental "Public Service" VHS tapes, and it completely FUBARs your very expensive VCR. Let's compound that by saying that Blockbuster's known for years that the batch from which the tape came from that they gave you was defective. You go back to Blockbuster, and they say, "It was free, now leave us alone." That's okay with you?
Does anyone else find it odd that all verions of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 are supported by Microsoft longer than Win95?
Somewhere down the page in the linked article, there's an explanation. In essense, MS claims they can't manufacture any more Win95 disks because it contains a version of Java(TM) which they're no longer allowed to manufacture.
does anyone remember the book "Charly"? Don't know who wrote it
That's because it wasn't called "Charly," it was called "Flowers For Algernon," by Daniel Keyes. It was subsequently made into a movie called Charly. To be fair, I believe there was a limited edition of the book published with the name of the movie.
I suppose that the novel might be a "dark horse" entrant in the 50-years-from-now question. I don't remember it being of any particular greatness in terms of writing quality (perhaps someone can correct me), but the plot ranks as a great high concept story which has been used over and over again since.
Putting Marquez on the same level as Tolkien is just silly
In terms of literary quality, I'd agree with you of course. But in terms of influence, I would compare the two because Márquez could be said to be the one of the primary influences upon modern magic realism (along with Borges, how'd I leave him out before?) and Tolkien has to be considered the father of modern fantasy. Now, I think there is a question of whether any modern fantasy can be said to transcend genre and stand on its own merit as literature. I've heard Gene Wolfe's name bandied about quite a bit, although I confess I've never read any of his stuff. Some might add LeGuin. Any other candidates?
I'd like to see some authors that no-one else has yet mentioned.
I'll start off with the following:
Zadie Smith : White Teeth. I predict this will be required reading in high school by the year 2020. If you haven't checked it out yet, I strongly urge you to do so.
Haruki Murakami : Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World . Really, just about any of his novels would suffice. This particular one is a blowing mixture of magic realism and science fiction.
Gabriel García Márquez : 100 Years of Solitude. He practically invented
magic realism. Other than Tolkien, he's probably the most influential writer of the past fifty years.
Kazuo Ishiguro : The remains of the day. His writing is so precise, so exquisite, so flawless, I don't believe there has been an English-language novelist to compare. I actually prefer his The Unconsoled, but I don't think it has the same aura of classicism.
Stanislaw Lem : Memoirs found in a bathtub. I think this will stand the test of time as his most "excellent" book, even though gems like The Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress are undoubtedly greater crowd-pleasers.
But modification is one of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner.
People keep saying this, but it is obviously not true. If you buy a magazine, it's legal to clip out the coupons, or draw a moustache on Tatjana Simic, or write notes in the margins. It's even legal to resell a textbook after you have underlined large portions of it in various colors. What is not legal is to modify something and then redistribute it as the original or as your own work. Since apps like Proxomitron only modify the code for your own use, it is unclear how anyone can claim they violate copyright.
You think you were worried about Identity Theft before??? Imagine if someone were to get hold of your one and only Universal Number/PIN. You might as well not exist at that point.
It seems clear to me that Larry Ellison is still smarting from his failed attempt to best Bill Gates in the "World's Richest Guy" competition. So now he's attempting to one-up Bill's whole Passport/Hailstorm initiative by being the gatekeeper for a much more pervasive system than Microsoft's MSN/Hotmail.
The idea of evolution as an upwards struggle is a common fallacy. Evolution doesn't necessarily involve "improvement" as evaluated by human values. It just involves change which adapts an organism to its environment. For example, housecats (Felis catus) are evolved from larger wild cats, and the evidence seems to be that their progenitors were more intelligent. However, the domestic cat is tremendously more sucessful as a species because it has insinuated themselves into a modern human-infested environment in a way that bobcats and ocelots are unable to. Similarly, the modern human, having to operate the mind-numbing Windows, probably requires less intelligence than our immediate CLI-using forebears and so evolution proceeds apace.
Slashdot Mirror
We'll just assume your fingers slipped and that you really really meant to type "67" instead of "985". Either that, or you actually can cop 985 CD's for a grand because your local store's selling their overstock titles for $1.02. If that's what an Elvis Costello oldie goes for these days -- no wonder he's whining!
That's a very apt comparison. Verisign has gone from being a monopoly (as Network Solutions) to having a lot of cheaper competition, just like Ma Bell. And similarly, it finds that it can't hack it in the real world, and is resorting to underhanded techniques like this.
The shareware paradigm has two essential features:
1) The executable file is freely distributable ("share") and
2) The author asks to receive payment for extended use of his creation ("ware")
There are other subcategories, such as nagware, crippleware, but they still fit under the shareware umbrella (BTW, Windows fails condition 1, and Linux fails condition 2).
if it is hampered in any way in which you must pay to get the fully-functional version, it is a commercial demo.
It's offensive that so many people these days seem to be freeloading off the good will and generosity of the shareware community
Commercial demos most typically are not freely distributable, but only available on the companies website (and these days, tend to require submission of demographic/professional information)
The reason why time-limited shareware wasn't popular before the rise of the World Wide Web is that it could've taken a long time in the old days for an author to be sent the check, cash it, and get around to mailing out a non-crippled floppy. And in those days, since most people didn't have email, registration codes were less popular. But still, crippled shareware was common. I just found in my closet an issue of INFO (an Amiga/Commodore magazine) from 1989 which contains a blurb about a program called Fungraph. It says, in part, "if you want to make your own demos, or print out any of the graphics within the program, you must purchase the shareware version." I'm sure someone out there with a few back issues of Creative Computing or COMPUTE! could find some much older crippleware in the back pages.
In other words, if I publish my electronic book in an unprotected, freely-distributable form, would I then be breaking some proposed law?
No; you'd just be wasting your time because no device legally on sale would be able to read it
Two words: Mod chips.
In an SCCCA future, they'd be more common than bootleg rum in Prohibition.
DVD-RAM discs cannot be read by anything except a DVD-RAM drive,
I agree with the bulk of your comment, but in fairness, Panasonic does make a real nifty portable DVD Player that plays ordinary DVDs, DVD-RAMs, and MP3 encoded CD-RWs, and they also manufacture cartridgeless DVD-RAM discs that, once recorded, are playable in some standalone home DVD-Video devices, and readable in some computer DVD-ROM players.
From your "FAQ," it appears that you have some kind of bias against the DVD+RW Alliance, who it should be noted, consists of Dell, Hewlett-Packard Company, MCC/Verbatim, Philips Electronics, Ricoh Company Ltd., Sony Corporation, Thomson multimedia and Yamaha Corporation. It's not some cobbled together group of fly-by-night companies.
Furthermore, I believe you are factually incorrect in stating that DVD+RW can't "legally" be called DVD. The DVD+RW Alliance seem to do so with impunity on their site. What is true is that their format is not licensed by the "DVD Forum" nor can it use their logo. But, big deal. The Alliance has its own logo which is just as pretty, and it seems to me that they are a fairly reliable manufacturing bunch. And who's the DVD Forum, anyway? Just another, larger group of companies. Interestingly, it would appear that all the members of the DVD+RW Alliance are also members of the DVD Forum, although not vice-versa, of course. Anyway, these two formats will duke it out on their respective merits and the marketing savvy of their proponents, and not on whether some licensing agency nobody cares about issues a logo. (I mean, DVD-RAM, how the hell does that get to be called DVD-anything? It's not even the same recording material as a regular DVD. I'll be nice and not discuss the "RAM" portion of the name. Let's just say Panasonic's been trying to mainstream this product line for many years and I wish them the best of luck.)
And as for confusion, how confused can people be? If slashdotters can wrap their heads around SIMM, DIMM, SODIMM, SDRAM, RDRAM, HTML, XML, XHTML, MathML, XSL, and so on, what's so hard about researching a couple of recordable DVD formats?
Of course, it's all a moot issue. Recordable blue-laser discs will be out in a couple of years and by that time, these two formats will have caught on about as much as the Sony HiFD and Imation LS120 did.
Piracy will continue unabated in foreign countries.
And not only that, but technological development will continue unabated in those foreign countries which do not force their scientists and engineers to march to the beat of movie and record studio heads.
Not so funny, considering that the President of the Grammies, Michael Greene, actually called .mp3 swapping a life-or-death matter at last night's Grammy Award presentation. Seriously.
The problem isn't the PC makers, it's the software makers, Microsoft, Real, etc., who have all come to the conclusion that in a world of strong copy prevention, they have the possibility of literally locking up the market. And for sure there will be no room for "Free as in speech" software.
Will the industry introduce new annoying concepts which will keep me from making my backup copy?
Absolutely. It seems clear to me that Blu-Ray is not intended to benefit the consumer. The plan is to phase in these new disks with superior copy-prevention technology, then to phase out the old vanilla DVDs. Digital Rights Management with some kind of secure path will make unauthorized copying much more difficult. Also, expect certain disk ID ranges to require explicit permission sent from the content owner before temporarily allowing themselves to be played, in effect, a resurrection of the old (non-winky) Divx concept. Gear up for battle.
It's true that it's a tautology. It's not true that it's "mere." You could say that e=mc^2 is a tautology, but in discovering the equality, Einstein began a revolution in physics. Darwin's insight had a similar impact in the biological sciences.
Some people have had problems like this while using Norton Firewall. If you have that installed, you may want to check about how to pass referrer info to the website.
There is no such thing as "de-evolving."
The whole point of the theory of evolution is that it describes an inevitable one-way process, like entropy. Due to random errors in DNA replication, mutations are produced all the time. Some of those mutations are more suited for the environment they are in, some of them are less suited. The mutations which are more suited tend to out-produce the others (natural selection), and over time, evolution occurs. The genius of Darwin was in recognizing that the ones who survive, by definition, are the fittest, and vice-versa.
Are selective processes still at work today? Yes, of course. So what if 20-20 vision is no longer a fitness trait? It used to be that having gills made us more fit for our environment, some hundreds of millions of years ago. Now it's not longer to our advantage to have gills, nor to have perfect vision. Our environment continues to change, and so must we. Perhaps we now live in an environment where it is more important to be able to play dirty pool than to be able to swim in a dirty pool. Maybe we're evolving into a nation of smooth-talking baby-daddies. More seriously, there are other elements in our changing environment that people are evolving in concert with. It seems increasingly common for people to develop diseases like asthma and bizarre autoimmune disorders which may be related to synthetic chemicals in our environment. Those unfortunates who can't live in a plastic, super-medicated society are dying out -- but the rest of us are evolving into Homo Artificialis, if you will.
Also, a disease like AIDS which is cutting great swaths of death through the developing world will inevitably lead to populations which are largely resistant to its modus operandi. (In fact, some Europeans already are immune to HIV, a genetic gift conferred upon them by surviving the Black Death, scientists surmise.)
The evolution happening now may not seem "higher" on some kind of eugenic scale, but nature works in its own way. Alligators survive but the dinosaurs are long gone. And we all know that after every mammal has perished, bacteria will still remain, deep within the crevices of the Earth, adapting.
That's like saying, "Who's gonna pay for moviews when you can just watch them on TV, or record them? People even pay to rent movies that they have to give back in a couple of days after only watching ONCE.
Frankly, I would be very happy to pay $15/month for a service which: 1)Allowed me unlimited streaming on demand for all major labels and a large number of independents, incl. foreign, obscure, and demo versions. 2)Allowed me to log in from any computer so I could access my account at a friend's house (Just as I could currently bring my CDs to a friend's house.) 3)Allowed me unlimited temporary downloads. They could expire in a week...long enough for me to get a good listen on a portable device or on my PC when I didn't have the available bandwidth for streaming. However. downloaded songs should automatically renew themselves when I'm signed on to my account, so I wouldn't have to keep downloading the same favorite songs over and over again. I'd have no desire to burn CDs to "keep" mp3s because any song I wanted to hear would be instantly streamable, more easily located then trying to find a particular song in a stack of CDRs. 4)The service ought to suggest songs that I might like to listen to, based on my prior downloads.
With a service like that, there would be no need for me to play conventional CDs at all. I could listen to any song I wanted to at any time. It would be my own private, commercial-free radio station. Yes, I would gladly pay $15/mo. for that kind of service, and I think many other people would too. All the music you ever wanted, a mouse-click away. Just like audiogalaxy, but legal.
I agree. It seems to me it would be much more unambiguous to simply state "metric megabytes" for the power of ten, and "long megabytes" for the power of two. No new words to learn, and the definition is crystal clear -- if a HD manufacturer advertises "80 metric GB," you know exactly what you're getting.
In addition, since "80 long GB" sounds like you're getting more (and in fact, you ARE getting more) it might encourage HD makers to switch over to the same measure that RAM makers use, and thereby end all this confusion once and for all.
Okay, we'll stipulate Mac IE is free, but Mac IE isn't the same beasty as Windows IE. Particularly, it isn't vulnerable to this bug we're discussing. So it's off the table. And arguing from association that Win IE is free because its Mac counterpart is free is like arguing that WordPerfect for Windows must be free because Corel gives away WP Linux.
And the fact that you can "uninstall" IE says nothing about whether it's free or not. I can uninstall Solitaire, Calculator, and all my Windows help files too. They're not free though, they're bundled in the cost of the OS.
And even if IE were free, that wouldn't magically absolve MS of all responsibility toward its product. Let's say Blockbuster lends you one of their free rental "Public Service" VHS tapes, and it completely FUBARs your very expensive VCR. Let's compound that by saying that Blockbuster's known for years that the batch from which the tape came from that they gave you was defective. You go back to Blockbuster, and they say, "It was free, now leave us alone." That's okay with you?
Somewhere down the page in the linked article, there's an explanation. In essense, MS claims they can't manufacture any more Win95 disks because it contains a version of Java(TM) which they're no longer allowed to manufacture.
That's because it wasn't called "Charly," it was called "Flowers For Algernon," by Daniel Keyes. It was subsequently made into a movie called Charly. To be fair, I believe there was a limited edition of the book published with the name of the movie.
I suppose that the novel might be a "dark horse" entrant in the 50-years-from-now question. I don't remember it being of any particular greatness in terms of writing quality (perhaps someone can correct me), but the plot ranks as a great high concept story which has been used over and over again since.
In terms of literary quality, I'd agree with you of course. But in terms of influence, I would compare the two because Márquez could be said to be the one of the primary influences upon modern magic realism (along with Borges, how'd I leave him out before?) and Tolkien has to be considered the father of modern fantasy. Now, I think there is a question of whether any modern fantasy can be said to transcend genre and stand on its own merit as literature. I've heard Gene Wolfe's name bandied about quite a bit, although I confess I've never read any of his stuff. Some might add LeGuin. Any other candidates?
I'll start off with the following:
Zadie Smith : White Teeth. I predict this will be required reading in high school by the year 2020. If you haven't checked it out yet, I strongly urge you to do so.
Haruki Murakami : Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World . Really, just about any of his novels would suffice. This particular one is a blowing mixture of magic realism and science fiction.
Gabriel García Márquez : 100 Years of Solitude. He practically invented magic realism. Other than Tolkien, he's probably the most influential writer of the past fifty years.
Kazuo Ishiguro : The remains of the day. His writing is so precise, so exquisite, so flawless, I don't believe there has been an English-language novelist to compare. I actually prefer his The Unconsoled, but I don't think it has the same aura of classicism.
Stanislaw Lem : Memoirs found in a bathtub. I think this will stand the test of time as his most "excellent" book, even though gems like The Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress are undoubtedly greater crowd-pleasers.
People keep saying this, but it is obviously not true. If you buy a magazine, it's legal to clip out the coupons, or draw a moustache on Tatjana Simic, or write notes in the margins. It's even legal to resell a textbook after you have underlined large portions of it in various colors. What is not legal is to modify something and then redistribute it as the original or as your own work. Since apps like Proxomitron only modify the code for your own use, it is unclear how anyone can claim they violate copyright.
You think you were worried about Identity Theft before??? Imagine if someone were to get hold of your one and only Universal Number/PIN. You might as well not exist at that point.
It seems clear to me that Larry Ellison is still smarting from his failed attempt to best Bill Gates in the "World's Richest Guy" competition. So now he's attempting to one-up Bill's whole Passport/Hailstorm initiative by being the gatekeeper for a much more pervasive system than Microsoft's MSN/Hotmail.
Please???
The idea of evolution as an upwards struggle is a common fallacy. Evolution doesn't necessarily involve "improvement" as evaluated by human values. It just involves change which adapts an organism to its environment. For example, housecats (Felis catus) are evolved from larger wild cats, and the evidence seems to be that their progenitors were more intelligent. However, the domestic cat is tremendously more sucessful as a species because it has insinuated themselves into a modern human-infested environment in a way that bobcats and ocelots are unable to. Similarly, the modern human, having to operate the mind-numbing Windows, probably requires less intelligence than our immediate CLI-using forebears and so evolution proceeds apace.