...if you have someone who does bad things with your copyright..., and you don't try to have them shut down (or to pay you a licensing fee), then you weaken your case for any issues that might come up in the future.
I keep hearing/reading this as an argument for this kind of absurd protectionism. It's based on the idea that a company establishes precedent by ignoring a copyright violation. But by enforcing copyright in a clearly inappropriate situation does not a company also demonstrate that it is a poor steward of its "IP"? Agreements or regulations imposed by such a company should therefore have less weight, and be more open to re-interpretation or re-evaluation by a court.
My "payment" for this was that the lecturer bought me a pint of beer and a pizza for lunch the day of the lectures to be held. It was entirely unofficial, and was treated as me being his student assistant and volunteer, so it was shoehorned into complying with regulations.
A pint and a pizza are dirt cheap wages for someone to prepare and (frequently) deliver the lectures. If the teacher was indeed a "top notch" anything then he should've learned the material they needed to teach the course. I've taught several courses for which i was initially unprepared---it's important to look things up and acquire any missing knowledge. Passing on one's own ignorance of a subject because one cannot be bothered to do a decent job shows a complete lack of respect for those trying to learn.
Yeah, I'm going to have a microwave generator going in my car, aiming the the windshield, just to warm it up.
Don't be silly. It'll just use the ambient microwave radiation we're pouring out now for communications. I'm more worried that with the windshield absorbing all the microwaves my coffee will no longer stay warm in the car.
I don't see anything horrible about this except for the "under God" part, but that wasn't a part of the original pledge anyway. Besides, for more than a few it might serve as a reminder of the principles the country is supposed to adhere to.
Indeed; it reminds people that they're living in a dictatorship, run by an unaccountable, distant despot who ignores their interests for his own.
you don't have to worry about incompatible library versions, dependencies, non-standard drivers, or any of a littany of other issues.
That's half the compability issue. How do you ensure the user has compatible pc hardware? And you still have support issues for the bugs in and updates to your supported drivers, which are now all your problem...
It would make A LOT of sense to release a game on a livecd/dvd.
Will the user's aim, mp3players, irc & other things people often run while pc gaming port themselves over?
the guy is young...10 years in the field say that it's the guy's first "real" job.
If you insist on only having working for people who are senior to you in terms of age & experience you will have a long and unhappy job search. In companies of any significant size some of your managers, executives, co-workers will be much younger. This will be more and more true the older you get.
Frankly, your attitude will probably kill your job chances much more than your interviewer's sense of threat due to your qualifications/age. Why would anyone want to hire someone who looks down on them purely because they are younger?
The choice is the only thing you get to decide. Deal with it.
Here's a test for you. Declare that on your property you don't have to pay taxes. When the tax collector comes by offer him or her your two choices. Post back and let us know how it went when you get out of prison.
Why has our society fallen to the point that it is always the victims fault?
It's a grey scale obviously. People don't choose to get robbed or murdered, but if you choose to walk across a busy highway then yes, it's your fault when you get hit by a car. If you choose to allow random people to write on your website then yes, it's at least partially your fault.
I get between three and five entries comments every day from online poker spamers.
So, let me get this straight: you allow random, unknown people to post things on a website you control, and now you're complaining because spam is showing up?
There's a lot of spam on the net; whatever you open up to anonymous public access will be a target for spam. This has been true at least since the late 1980's when usenet started to down in spam, and it has only grown. Perhaps you should've looked into how this whole "internet" thing is working before starting to use it.
They do their comments in HTML, and add H1 tags to the entire thing. Each comment consists of about 50 links ranging from online poker to places to buy viagra.
You've just described 4 pretty good, distinct bases for a spam-detection heuristic. Why aren't you implementing it instead of just complaining?
Please indicate to me which of those B's is worse than the corresponding A?
You forgot to take into account the fact that the interest you earned on saving that tax money is itself taxable, so your real savings aren't quite as large as you show.
But more importantly, your B scenarios run the risk of requiring you to send tax installments (at least in some provinces in Canada, not sure if all, and don't know about the US): if in the previous year your tax payable is more than $X (eg X=1500) then you have pay the estimated difference in installments at various points in the current year, or interest/penalties are charged on any outstanding balance at tax time.
There might still be an optimal point in there where you withhold the minimum one year, and then ignore the installment requests the next couple of years and withhold $(X-1) less than is payable to clean out the installment requirement so you can repeat the cycle again, but the savings aren't large enough for most people to make this worth the trouble.
[Java's] not noticeably more Solaris-based than win32-based or anything else-based.
Actually, it is biased slightly in the lower level implementation design constraints, although you're right that for most people it's not noticeable. Java (bytecode) uses big-endian encodings however, and IIRC the (strict) floating point specs are more Sun-friendly.
Re:don't have TiVo... Yet
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This puzzles me....are there really THAT many people out there that pay the monthly fee, rather than the one time lifetime sub. fee? I figure the one time chunk of money into the whole price.
Lifetime subscriptions, as yours is about to attest, are really min(my lifetime, company lifetime).
People go through this with every new fad and new technology/service. Health clubs used to all have "lifetime memberships", but at least in my area that became highly regulated many years ago because so many people thought it was a much better deal than paying per month, but then got burned when the companies went out of business 2 months later.
I don't like subscriptions either, but "lifetime" subscriptions are not the best (for the consumer) alternative. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I believe the courts ruled that making digital backups is legal for the consumer as long as they own a legit copy of the original (and keep it).
So...i can make a backup, but it's only legal to own the backup as long as i have the original...? I guess someone might interpret a non-functioning original as a 'copy of the original' and so the backup would become useful (and still legal) if the original is damaged to a small extent, but if i completely lose or destroy my original in some way i'm not technically allowed to have my backup? That doesn't make sense----surely a central purpose of a backup is to replace the original if the original is missing...
This statement sounds very tinfoil hattish to me....For example, I usually record the incoming IP address of everyone who logs into a system
Your examples are dominated by instances of keeping information on others, not yourself. It's easy to see the (potential) advantage of having more info available to you, the information consumer. It's a lot less fun when you're the subject of the data gathering and someone else is making judgements based on it.
Imagine if your work computer reported the time from your last log in each time you accessed the system. So, you come in Monday morning and the system warns that you logged in during the weekend. Most workers would take something like this seriously as it implies someone was stealing their identity
That does sound nice [nb: the login scripts for command-line unix consoles have typically done this for many years]. The problem isn't in the intended, to-my-advantage use of information. The problem comes about because once the information exists someone else will probably eventually get it. So, if you don't care whether someone publishes that info for all to see then it's not a problem, but if perchance you feel that it could ever be used or construed in any negative way then merely gathering that info should be a concern. Keep in mind that info that you don't consider important or sensitive now may become so in the future.
I can personally attest to the fact that 99% of CPU heavy tasks do not make use of SMP
Would you ever want to run more than one of these at the same time? Or for that fact run any application at the same as one of these CPU-intensive apps? If so you could still see a real-time benefit.
There is also continuing research in automatic parallelization, so even your legacy single threaded apps can take advantage of some of that extra cpu. For the most part the speedups attained this way are quite modest, but even if it doesn't reach linear speedup it can still result in some improvement.
AMD is there with 64-bit, but what does that really buy you? More memory address space? How many people at home really want over 4 GB of RAM
I've seen this naive opinion just too often to let another utterance of it escape unchallenged.
64-bit does indeed offer more address space, which is an advantage to those needing more now/soon. But it has more important advantages; with a large, empty address space you can encode permissions, types and other info in pointers. You can pack or aggregate instructions/data. You can more easily/directly share an address space with everyone getting a large portion, or support novel/faster memory layouts by dividing the space into areas with different access permissions in the context of reasonable memory access strides. 32-bit constraints on such techniques make them less generally useful or excessively constrained, but in 64-bit (and above) they could become much more effective. Think of the ways people are proposing to use ipv6 addresses [though there are a few more orders of magnitude difference there] versus the ways people currently use ipv4---an increase in address space can be used for more than just more addresses.
It may require some imagination to exploit it well, but it could have a much larger impact than you (and many others) think.
What's wrong with this case is that it's an example of a judge ruling for a religion (the atheists), and not because there was anything wrong with the stickers. They neither promoted nor condemned any religion--or lack thereof. They only questioned a scientific principle.
Let's put this another way. Suppose the science-literate majority insisted that stickers be placed on bibles stating that the concept of a diety or "god" was an unproven and unprovable theory that is not supported by any observable phenomenon, and readers should attempt to keep an open mind with respect to the validity of the writings within. Would the religious be content with that? It's just a statement of fact, neither promoting nor denegrating any particular religion or religious practice.
Do you really believe that the people pushing those stickers just wanted to point out the difference between theory and fact? It seems grossly obvious to me (and clearly many others) that this is religious message with a religious motivation. That the judge saw through this thinly veiled attempt to push a religious agenda is heartening, and is why we have human beings decide whether something is legal or not rather than using computers.
If everyone was told the fastest route, eventually more traffic would come there until everything was at an equilibrium... but maybe that would be considered ideal by some...
It is ideal in a global sense. But don't worry about reaching equilibrium, that's not likely to happen if the status of other independent-packet routing problems are any indication. As well as general network stability issues, it would be naive to think that all cars will be treated equally in such a scheme. A priority system based on need and payment would mean faster routes are not available to all, and may even mean that it creates traffic jams in some areas to empty out other areas for higher priority traffic.
How is swapping bar codes to get a lower price any different than "accidentally" entering a higher price for a particular barcode into the database?
Aristotle described the core of the distinction long ago: intention. If you as a customer swap barcodes in a store your goal is clearly (usually) to sneak a higher price item for a lower price. You are misrepresenting the transaction to get take advantage of someone/thing else. If some retailer makes an error in pricing they are not necessarily intentionally misrepresenting the transaction; they are still acting in "good faith."
Of course some retailers have intentionally done database/bar-code tricks to the disadvantage of consumers, and that would be theft (i vaguely recall at least one court case a few years ago though i don't remember the retailer or specifics and google isn't helping).
Since there are only 6,446,131,400 people in the world the scheme cannot continue longer than 14 months.
Actually, the situation is not quite as simple as your mathematical reduction of it suggests. For one, each person may want more than 1 ipod, so there is no absolute limit on the number wanting to participate. Secondly, there is no clear rule about signing up for the required services, cancelling, and signing up again. Thus there is no mathematical limit on the required currency.
To have a hard limit they really should've specified that the people you want to sign up must never have already signed up for the same service from the same company in the past. Otherwise the only real limit is when the value of the referent to the company is reduced to the point where the number of required referents to merit an ipod is excessive, and either no one feels it's worthwhile to participate anymore, or companies find the administrative costs for managing the few who do exceed the value.
I know many people who have 10-25GB of music they have downloaded illegally and don't listen to...
I am not suprised in the least. Back in the BBS days, i knew people who accumulated just gobs and gobs of copyrighted software. Did they need a DB server, CAD program, etc? No, never used, never installed. Near as i could figure out, beyond an inate need/desire to aggregate and accumulate there were a few main reasons people wanted all that code.
One's social status was somewhat based on the volume of stuff one had to trade. Peer recognition and group behaviour are pretty strong motivators, regardless of practical/logical concerns.
Packrat behaviour was in fact enforced to a certain degree in that many BBSs started requiring people to upload in proportion to their downloading, so a very large library of stuff was useful currency for acquiring other stuff you really did want
There was a perception that the software had real value. If an item costs a lot of money then surely i'd be unwise to not take a free copy when available right? Even if i can't use it, maybe i'll need it someday, or someone i know will need it...? Sadly, obsolescence and changing-fashions makes that a spurious argument.
This is in fact why i've personally had a dim view of software, and now music/video copy protection---it's largely a response to a non-problem. Most of the people cracking and trading cracked programs were doing it for reasons other than actually wanting that particular piece of software; they never ran it, they don't need it, it was just a convenient, fungible item. I expect the same is true of music; the vast majority of downloaded music is never listened to, and number of sales actually lost by such behaviour is not critical.
Even if this tech becomes cheap and wide-spread, there's just no replacing the touch-sensation inherent with using mechanical input devices.
Just because your brain activity is forming the input doesn't mean a secondary device couldn't provide tactile feedback, e.g., a wrist band that tightens or loosens slightly as you move a cursor around, and/or briefly pokes you each time you select something...
Public opinion has turned against the RIAA and MPAA because they're now known for suing children and little old ladies.
Yet people still buy their music and their movies.
Clear Channel has bad enough vibe out there that they are operating under the names of the companies they bought out just to hide their identity since many people no longer want to go to Clear Channel events.
Yet people still listen to their radio stations.
...it'll cause a lot of negative opinion against Microsoft. Apple will start collecting more fans...
Sadly, the evidence is just not there. There's already a great deal of negative opinion about MS, at least among geeks, and yet they're doing fine.
Anything that Microsoft does againt the users of Linux will certainly make them look even more evil in the public's eye than ever before.
The majority of MS users probably don't even know what linux is, and even if it was explained to them by some geek friend at some point, they just don't care, at least not enough to do anything about it.
Slashdot Mirror
...if you have someone who does bad things with your copyright ..., and you don't try to have them shut down (or to pay you a licensing fee), then you weaken your case for any issues that might come up in the future.
I keep hearing/reading this as an argument for this kind of absurd protectionism. It's based on the idea that a company establishes precedent by ignoring a copyright violation. But by enforcing copyright in a clearly inappropriate situation does not a company also demonstrate that it is a poor steward of its "IP"? Agreements or regulations imposed by such a company should therefore have less weight, and be more open to re-interpretation or re-evaluation by a court.
My "payment" for this was that the lecturer bought me a pint of beer and a pizza for lunch the day of the lectures to be held. It was entirely unofficial, and was treated as me being his student assistant and volunteer, so it was shoehorned into complying with regulations.
A pint and a pizza are dirt cheap wages for someone to prepare and (frequently) deliver the lectures. If the teacher was indeed a "top notch" anything then he should've learned the material they needed to teach the course. I've taught several courses for which i was initially unprepared---it's important to look things up and acquire any missing knowledge. Passing on one's own ignorance of a subject because one cannot be bothered to do a decent job shows a complete lack of respect for those trying to learn.
Yeah, I'm going to have a microwave generator going in my car, aiming the the windshield, just to warm it up.
Don't be silly. It'll just use the ambient microwave radiation we're pouring out now for communications. I'm more worried that with the windshield absorbing all the microwaves my coffee will no longer stay warm in the car.
You forgot:
5) naive investors who buy stock based on fashionable phrases, like 'open source' in company statements.
Number 5s - probably lots of them; allows existing shareholders to bail with reduced loss.
I don't see anything horrible about this except for the "under God" part, but that wasn't a part of the original pledge anyway. Besides, for more than a few it might serve as a reminder of the principles the country is supposed to adhere to.
Indeed; it reminds people that they're living in a dictatorship, run by an unaccountable, distant despot who ignores their interests for his own.
you don't have to worry about incompatible library versions, dependencies, non-standard drivers, or any of a littany of other issues.
That's half the compability issue. How do you ensure the user has compatible pc hardware? And you still have support issues for the bugs in and updates to your supported drivers, which are now all your problem...
It would make A LOT of sense to release a game on a livecd/dvd.
Will the user's aim, mp3players, irc & other things people often run while pc gaming port themselves over?
the guy is young...10 years in the field say that it's the guy's first "real" job.
If you insist on only having working for people who are senior to you in terms of age & experience you will have a long and unhappy job search. In companies of any significant size some of your managers, executives, co-workers will be much younger. This will be more and more true the older you get.
Frankly, your attitude will probably kill your job chances much more than your interviewer's sense of threat due to your qualifications/age. Why would anyone want to hire someone who looks down on them purely because they are younger?
The choice is the only thing you get to decide. Deal with it.
Here's a test for you. Declare that on your property you don't have to pay taxes. When the tax collector comes by offer him or her your two choices. Post back and let us know how it went when you get out of prison.
Why has our society fallen to the point that it is always the victims fault?
It's a grey scale obviously. People don't choose to get robbed or murdered, but if you choose to walk across a busy highway then yes, it's your fault when you get hit by a car. If you choose to allow random people to write on your website then yes, it's at least partially your fault.
I get between three and five entries comments every day from online poker spamers.
So, let me get this straight: you allow random, unknown people to post things on a website you control, and now you're complaining because spam is showing up?
There's a lot of spam on the net; whatever you open up to anonymous public access will be a target for spam. This has been true at least since the late 1980's when usenet started to down in spam, and it has only grown. Perhaps you should've looked into how this whole "internet" thing is working before starting to use it.
They do their comments in HTML, and add H1 tags to the entire thing. Each comment consists of about 50 links ranging from online poker to places to buy viagra.
You've just described 4 pretty good, distinct bases for a spam-detection heuristic. Why aren't you implementing it instead of just complaining?
Please indicate to me which of those B's is worse than the corresponding A?
You forgot to take into account the fact that the interest you earned on saving that tax money is itself taxable, so your real savings aren't quite as large as you show.
But more importantly, your B scenarios run the risk of requiring you to send tax installments (at least in some provinces in Canada, not sure if all, and don't know about the US): if in the previous year your tax payable is more than $X (eg X=1500) then you have pay the estimated difference in installments at various points in the current year, or interest/penalties are charged on any outstanding balance at tax time.
There might still be an optimal point in there where you withhold the minimum one year, and then ignore the installment requests the next couple of years and withhold $(X-1) less than is payable to clean out the installment requirement so you can repeat the cycle again, but the savings aren't large enough for most people to make this worth the trouble.
[Java's] not noticeably more Solaris-based than win32-based or anything else-based.
Actually, it is biased slightly in the lower level implementation design constraints, although you're right that for most people it's not noticeable. Java (bytecode) uses big-endian encodings however, and IIRC the (strict) floating point specs are more Sun-friendly.
This puzzles me....are there really THAT many people out there that pay the monthly fee, rather than the one time lifetime sub. fee? I figure the one time chunk of money into the whole price.
Lifetime subscriptions, as yours is about to attest, are really min(my lifetime, company lifetime).
People go through this with every new fad and new technology/service. Health clubs used to all have "lifetime memberships", but at least in my area that became highly regulated many years ago because so many people thought it was a much better deal than paying per month, but then got burned when the companies went out of business 2 months later.
I don't like subscriptions either, but "lifetime" subscriptions are not the best (for the consumer) alternative. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
You'd have performance, consumption AND price; what keeps you from using it instead of a 6502 other than nostalgia value?
...
An enormous existing investment. That includes employee knowledge, tools, techniques, inventory, related components, purchasing deals,
I believe the courts ruled that making digital backups is legal for the consumer as long as they own a legit copy of the original (and keep it).
So...i can make a backup, but it's only legal to own the backup as long as i have the original...? I guess someone might interpret a non-functioning original as a 'copy of the original' and so the backup would become useful (and still legal) if the original is damaged to a small extent, but if i completely lose or destroy my original in some way i'm not technically allowed to have my backup? That doesn't make sense----surely a central purpose of a backup is to replace the original if the original is missing...
This statement sounds very tinfoil hattish to me....For example, I usually record the incoming IP address of everyone who logs into a system
Your examples are dominated by instances of keeping information on others, not yourself. It's easy to see the (potential) advantage of having more info available to you, the information consumer. It's a lot less fun when you're the subject of the data gathering and someone else is making judgements based on it.
Imagine if your work computer reported the time from your last log in each time you accessed the system. So, you come in Monday morning and the system warns that you logged in during the weekend. Most workers would take something like this seriously as it implies someone was stealing their identity
That does sound nice [nb: the login scripts for command-line unix consoles have typically done this for many years]. The problem isn't in the intended, to-my-advantage use of information. The problem comes about because once the information exists someone else will probably eventually get it. So, if you don't care whether someone publishes that info for all to see then it's not a problem, but if perchance you feel that it could ever be used or construed in any negative way then merely gathering that info should be a concern. Keep in mind that info that you don't consider important or sensitive now may become so in the future.
I can personally attest to the fact that 99% of CPU heavy tasks do not make use of SMP
Would you ever want to run more than one of these at the same time? Or for that fact run any application at the same as one of these CPU-intensive apps? If so you could still see a real-time benefit.
There is also continuing research in automatic parallelization, so even your legacy single threaded apps can take advantage of some of that extra cpu. For the most part the speedups attained this way are quite modest, but even if it doesn't reach linear speedup it can still result in some improvement.
AMD is there with 64-bit, but what does that really buy you? More memory address space? How many people at home really want over 4 GB of RAM
I've seen this naive opinion just too often to let another utterance of it escape unchallenged.
64-bit does indeed offer more address space, which is an advantage to those needing more now/soon. But it has more important advantages; with a large, empty address space you can encode permissions, types and other info in pointers. You can pack or aggregate instructions/data. You can more easily/directly share an address space with everyone getting a large portion, or support novel/faster memory layouts by dividing the space into areas with different access permissions in the context of reasonable memory access strides. 32-bit constraints on such techniques make them less generally useful or excessively constrained, but in 64-bit (and above) they could become much more effective. Think of the ways people are proposing to use ipv6 addresses [though there are a few more orders of magnitude difference there] versus the ways people currently use ipv4---an increase in address space can be used for more than just more addresses.
It may require some imagination to exploit it well, but it could have a much larger impact than you (and many others) think.
What's wrong with this case is that it's an example of a judge ruling for a religion (the atheists), and not because there was anything wrong with the stickers. They neither promoted nor condemned any religion--or lack thereof. They only questioned a scientific principle.
Let's put this another way. Suppose the science-literate majority insisted that stickers be placed on bibles stating that the concept of a diety or "god" was an unproven and unprovable theory that is not supported by any observable phenomenon, and readers should attempt to keep an open mind with respect to the validity of the writings within. Would the religious be content with that? It's just a statement of fact, neither promoting nor denegrating any particular religion or religious practice.
Do you really believe that the people pushing those stickers just wanted to point out the difference between theory and fact? It seems grossly obvious to me (and clearly many others) that this is religious message with a religious motivation. That the judge saw through this thinly veiled attempt to push a religious agenda is heartening, and is why we have human beings decide whether something is legal or not rather than using computers.
If everyone was told the fastest route, eventually more traffic would come there until everything was at an equilibrium... but maybe that would be considered ideal by some...
It is ideal in a global sense. But don't worry about reaching equilibrium, that's not likely to happen if the status of other independent-packet routing problems are any indication. As well as general network stability issues, it would be naive to think that all cars will be treated equally in such a scheme. A priority system based on need and payment would mean faster routes are not available to all, and may even mean that it creates traffic jams in some areas to empty out other areas for higher priority traffic.
How is swapping bar codes to get a lower price any different than "accidentally" entering a higher price for a particular barcode into the database?
Aristotle described the core of the distinction long ago: intention. If you as a customer swap barcodes in a store your goal is clearly (usually) to sneak a higher price item for a lower price. You are misrepresenting the transaction to get take advantage of someone/thing else. If some retailer makes an error in pricing they are not necessarily intentionally misrepresenting the transaction; they are still acting in "good faith."
Of course some retailers have intentionally done database/bar-code tricks to the disadvantage of consumers, and that would be theft (i vaguely recall at least one court case a few years ago though i don't remember the retailer or specifics and google isn't helping).
Since there are only 6,446,131,400 people in the world the scheme cannot continue longer than 14 months.
Actually, the situation is not quite as simple as your mathematical reduction of it suggests. For one, each person may want more than 1 ipod, so there is no absolute limit on the number wanting to participate. Secondly, there is no clear rule about signing up for the required services, cancelling, and signing up again. Thus there is no mathematical limit on the required currency.
To have a hard limit they really should've specified that the people you want to sign up must never have already signed up for the same service from the same company in the past. Otherwise the only real limit is when the value of the referent to the company is reduced to the point where the number of required referents to merit an ipod is excessive, and either no one feels it's worthwhile to participate anymore, or companies find the administrative costs for managing the few who do exceed the value.
I am not suprised in the least. Back in the BBS days, i knew people who accumulated just gobs and gobs of copyrighted software. Did they need a DB server, CAD program, etc? No, never used, never installed. Near as i could figure out, beyond an inate need/desire to aggregate and accumulate there were a few main reasons people wanted all that code.
This is in fact why i've personally had a dim view of software, and now music/video copy protection---it's largely a response to a non-problem. Most of the people cracking and trading cracked programs were doing it for reasons other than actually wanting that particular piece of software; they never ran it, they don't need it, it was just a convenient, fungible item. I expect the same is true of music; the vast majority of downloaded music is never listened to, and number of sales actually lost by such behaviour is not critical.
Even if this tech becomes cheap and wide-spread, there's just no replacing the touch-sensation inherent with using mechanical input devices.
Just because your brain activity is forming the input doesn't mean a secondary device couldn't provide tactile feedback, e.g., a wrist band that tightens or loosens slightly as you move a cursor around, and/or briefly pokes you each time you select something...
Public opinion has turned against the RIAA and MPAA because they're now known for suing children and little old ladies.
...it'll cause a lot of negative opinion against Microsoft. Apple will start collecting more fans...
Yet people still buy their music and their movies.
Clear Channel has bad enough vibe out there that they are operating under the names of the companies they bought out just to hide their identity since many people no longer want to go to Clear Channel events.
Yet people still listen to their radio stations.
Sadly, the evidence is just not there. There's already a great deal of negative opinion about MS, at least among geeks, and yet they're doing fine.
Anything that Microsoft does againt the users of Linux will certainly make them look even more evil in the public's eye than ever before.
The majority of MS users probably don't even know what linux is, and even if it was explained to them by some geek friend at some point, they just don't care, at least not enough to do anything about it.