Back in 1997, I found a website that had the Mission Impossible Theme in mp3 and I downloaded that and Winamp 0.5 or something on a high school computer. I used to run the comp labs so it was a computer in a teacher's office that had speakers. Next was That Thing You Do from that Tom Hanks movie followed by the first 8 seconds of Robert Miles - Children. The problem of course was i started playing Children as it downloaded and just minimized the window, turned off the monitor - Winamp was on repeat. I came back to find an annoyed head of computer's dept teacher (with a headache) yelling "how the hell do you turn it off?". At least I was right in saying that mp3 technology would revolutionize music on computers.
and it's not that bad. He's a little less self righteous when in class. It's obvious that certain things he does is for attention. I had a unique experience in that on the first day of class i had with me, not even 2 hours later, my ex got me tickets to a Toronto Film Festival movie and it just so happened to be Cyberman and lo and behold, Mann walks down the aisle decked out in some old hardware he was laughing at in class. It was pretty blatant that he wore the larger headwear to garner more attention or someone affiliated with the film asked him to. It was actually amusing when some "movie appreciaters" who wanted to hear themselves talk more than actually ask questions questioned him after the movie. He shut a couple of them up quickly and left a few dumbfounded cause it sounded like they expected very few multisyllabic words from a "Tech Geek". There was at the very least one who had no question at all but wanted to state something obvious about the movie.
Mann's a little hypocritical. He despised Red Hat yet Eyetap used to be a Red Hat mirror (and a big pipe hog for this reason according to some U of T network admins). He used to state that some of the propietary closed code in Red Hat was poisonous with his analogy: "Which of the following would you eat? Pure food, pure poison, or some food mixed with poison." Needless to say, he exhtoled Debian for our labs (that was our first cheesy assignment, installing Debian on a 386/486).
Mann is kinda scary to walk into in the halls though. It always feels like he's not quite there when he takes off the glasses. He seems disoriented and I've seen him sometimes grab the walls to walk properly. I'm sure he's dependent on that system more than a lot of us could imagine. I think in the movie or in class he stated that they all have Runner's bodies or the health associated with that due to the increase in temperature caused by the machine on his hip. He has a book on how he makes his mini-computers on eyetap somewhere - it is of use if you want to build your own (hard part is the power source). His philosophies and actions are easier to swallow with a grain of salt.
All of this is nicely animated in Tree House of Horrors V Act 2: Time and Punishment. Homer goes back into time and his seemingly minute changes have large impact on the future he returns to.
As to another reply to the parent post, "Causality implies a concious action.", I wonder why a conscious action is a requirement for a proposed chaotic universe? Kicking a rock my caught seismic activity to occur if it resonates properly on a fault line for all we know.
Quotes like this "Creative people should be compensated for the use and exploitation of their music" irk me so. Replace music with the word software and I'm more likely to see why authors should get compensated, but oddly it's the music industry that is protected wholeheartedly by the law. In the software industry, if someone pirates your software, it generally is an exact duplicate of the purchaseable item (minus the copy-right protection and adding in some advertising). In the music industry, if someone distributes a lossy version of your song (for the most part, it's the labels song) or recorded off the radio (difference between this and taping shows on your VCR and sending it to others is what?) you have to pay - and not only pay for the indiscretion, but also for the potential indiscretion thanks to CD-r levies.
Where is the equality in that? Why is the music industry so favoured? You haven't seen ISP's fined for the transferral of illegal software; up until two years ago, my ISP used to have a mirror of alt.binaries.warez among its other newsgroups!
For that matter, what constitutes use? How much of the file must be copied to be considered an illegal use? Almost all OS's will copy a file and then delete it to safely move a file from one partition to another - does this situation insinuate 2 copyright violations?
Most of these cases seem to be that of "guilt without evidence". A filename does not an illegal download make, nor a hash value a confirmation.
To drive home the ending to Matrix Revolutions again, the Wachowski brothers have influenced Peter Jackson to alter the ending to RotK. -Aragorn and Sauron fight it on in the rain while millions of Sauron eyes watch intently and rarely blink; the battle peaks with Aragorn seemingly beaten and lying on his back, stands up and hugs Sauron - peace breaks out throughout the land. -Frodo plays the part of an Oracle and Sam his trusty bodyguard... oh wait, nm. -Gollum is programmed by the "The One True Ring Matrix" to bring balance to the force...
my poor Netscape 4.8 on the school lab computers (default Browser for CS students at U of T) have immense problems rendering the new "retooled" page. Maybe they should cookie the retooled version versus the old version so those who can't appreciate it still have an option while still allowing bandwidth savings for those who can.
For this spoof, i'd have chosen the 2.4 kernel code to display in the Matrix... if the worlds were flipped, i'd have the Matrix represented as.NET code and I'd have put Miguel de Icaza as Neo. Paul Allen could guest star as the Architect and Linus as the Oracle.
Am I unjustly concerned that Microsoft could see this as a great oppurtunity to squash Linux on the desktop? Redhat continues with Fedora but closes down Desktop support in a year. This leaves a hole in desktop linux. Now imagine if Microsoft bought out Novell/Suse and swallowed the IP, disbanded Suse and reallocated the brains. There would go another large Linux Desktop player. What remains at that point? TurboLinux in the far east and Mandrake and Gentoo? Slackware, though great, is in a decline (sorry Patrick).
Add that to SCO and lessening Linux Desktop adoption (i'm sure companies are wearisome adopting Linux on the Desktop until it's clear that they don't have to transition back to Windows anytime soon).
Suse seemed to be one of the really strong common desktop distros... I'd hate to see it go.
Next project will be hooking up DDR to Honda's ASIMO over a net connection so you can dance with someone remotely... hopefully no one gets trampled by it (approx 43kg).
Re:Dispelling the Myth of Wireless Security
on
Wireless Hacks
·
· Score: 1
When I first got my wireless card, I intended solely to use it at school where they had wireless networks, but when I plugged into my laptop at home (a condo), I picked up a signal. Someone across the street in a neighbouring condo has a wireless lan. I was curious as to how security minded people were when installing a WLAN. I noticed both no admin password on the compaq router and some open windows shares had no passwords. More importantly, I found out I had downloaded more surfing the net wirelessly than they had in the last week. Imagine if I lived in a country where you had fewer and fewer rights and the RIAA could get me for music sharing? I could simply download of this person's WLAN and the RIAA would sue them.
[Now off on a political tangent] Welcome to America. We have a terrorist problem so please leave your jacket and your rights at the door... I remember a land built on wars, citizens rights and stolen land. The only thing that changed is the citizens stopped caring.
With specific reference to OpenGL, games are written in many paths based on the acceleration available on various graphics cards exposed through vendor specific and ARB approved extensions to GL. Drivers optimizations are written both to speed up GL calls and all sorts of other common calculations as well as speed up games by cutting corners. Corners to cut often include what assumptions certain games makes. If a game or game engine makes an assumption such as a static camera, a lot of variable dependencies can be chucked out the window (PTP: pardon the pun) and an "optimization" is born. I would find it hard to believe that a GFX 5800 Ultra would ship with anything less than 75% of the optimal general driver (i.e. nothing game specific or context specific) -- so me thinks the new Detonator 50 has some nice "halflife2.exe" code:P
Oh, and mentioning DirectX before OpenGL in the same breath might mean you like serializing items in a list in alphabetical order... oh no!
I had two identical Seagate 2.0 gigs and when i was transferring data from my old 540mb, my friend insisted we just stack the drives on the floor instead of all the work of mounting them or even sticking a antistatic bag between them. *pop* The result was one of the drives shocking the other drive. Digital board had a nice smoke plume from one side. A couple of resets later, it was obvious that the drive was dead. We replaced the digital board from one with the other to get the data and then tossed the broken one. My friend knew that would work because the drives were identical (and from the same batch in Malaysia apparently) and he had done it before. The time he had done it before, his brand new drive was flakey within the first week so he went back to the store and they said they wouldn't take it back even though it was a day 7 that it broke and he couldn't get in till day 8 of a 7-day no questions asked replacement. He just bought another brand new drive and replaced the board with the defective one. Went back to the store to a different clerk and returned the "new" drive with no questions asked.
Actually, their recruitment literature is very specific in stating that they don't offer RIM Jobs. The free pen they gave out said it all: "RIM Careers". It's good to see marketing accounting for sexual innuendo.
I hope not too many companies buy into this "monorail".
What I find the worst in this whole scenario is their price jump in October, 2003. It's like you can buy now and avoid paying double, but oh, we may be proven wrong and incapable of protecting "our" IP so at that point, you just gave us free money and I'm off to Ogdenville. There's gotta be something legally wrong with that scenario. I find it akin to voluntarily giving yourself up to the police for a crime and getting a shorter sentence with the option that in reality there was no crime committed and you screwed yourself for no reason. BUT this is on a larger scale with lotsa companies.
Not to demean the business world, but if they aren't truly paying attention to any and all of their e-mail (lack of it looking like spam) then they should expect much worse to happen. There are many individuals who have C++ as a first language followed by a distant second, english. Whether the e-mail starts with "Dear Sir/Madam..." or "Pimp this...", if it's addressing possibly any security circumvention, it should be taken equally seriously. As you can see, I've taken the parent's post seriously though most English teachers would have blown up: "was", "it is", "did not", "English", "Script k!66!3$".
These poor guys will be the next to be blown up when 120,000 troops jump them on their way to work. Seriously though, reading their demands, they are very close to blackmail. Microsoft took the same position that the US took in "Air Force One": We will not bargain with terrorists. Sure, they didn't blow anything up or there isn't some ISO you can burn and stick in the XBOX and poof, no security, but they did hold a list of demands that most corporations would have a hard time filling. Video Game Console manufacturers make money on software game title sells (as opposed to losing money on hardware).
"For the exchange, we were requesting but not demanding the following: - Complete access to all documentation (chipsets, video etc.) to assist in developing a better Linux for the XBox. - A signed Linux loader. - Protection from Microsoft or support if any organisation/government attempted to prosecute members of our team. - Refunding of the cost occured during the agreement period."
Since they requested the following, they were turned down on all accounts. I sincerely hope their lawyers are good enough to stave off microsoft's (who will be working on july 4th all day i'm sure). I also hope this is a first step to sticking in and loading a bootable Suse or Mandrake install CD.
I'm running 8.2. Downloaded almost 5.4 gigs off of the mirror (no ISO's means i'm forced to do this in case my net connection goes down and is less taxing to download the files multiple times for multiple machines). Very impressed that it mounted a windows share and installed from there. I wasn't sure what directory structure i needed to point the share to but i picked it up. Install went well and fast. My firewall script based on iptables that worked on redhat 8/9, slackware 8/9, and mandrake 8 failed. Ended up using YaST2 firewall setup and that worked like a charm. I tried as I might to add an ftp or http source from various Suse ftps, it wouldn't let me (inst_nosrc_media) or something similar. Maybe it's me not reading instructions but I'd rather have it go out and find a bunch of mirrors and let me add them instead of not suggesting anything. Same thing happened when installing to laptop. It keeps assuming that all packages will be on my windows share (i wasn't going to download all the src packages as well cause that would have make the installation mirror way more than 5.4 gig). Everything else went rather smooth (installing app A, server B...). What I can't figure out currently is what is required to get TV out working under it (there seems to be no inherent controls) and I'm sure i need to get the right vid card driver separate from the one it assumed it was - Slackware on the other hand worked out of the box with the TV out. As I see it, there a whole bunch of conformation issues in regards to the end user experience. Take for example TV out functionality in Windows provided by most companies is a tab in the display properties advanced page. Standardizing certain components to insert into an equivalent Suse page (whether it's just a widget that runs a commandline app to control the card) would allow for a more pleasant expected experience. It's good to see Konqueror still crashes tho. With all that, I still like it and it will remain on my machine.... until something new rolls along.
Bittorrent needs another layer, so anyone can download a file which has a list of available torrents which all have the same file.... until of course that file get's slashdotted.
I concur with your scenario. I wonder if 3DS Max Studio and that line of products would have been as popular is it was if it wasn't for people pirating it. It was one of those apps that looked like it was pirated a helluva lot and which had a barrier of entry into animation due to its hefty price tag ($4000 USD awhile back). Only a few people buy this software for personal use and i'm sure a lot of production houses and game companies have multiple licenses and render licenses. I'm also sure if they sold the product at $100, they would sell more copies but not make the same amount of money and would definitely have a higher tech support cost. Though software piracy is a bad thing, there are up sides that places like the BSA will never admit to. Heck, if Microsoft gave away its operating systems like Apple does (yeah, i know its comparing Apple's to x86's), then there would be less piracy:)
What of software that is released in the free software market? Wouldn't increased free software usage also decrease the overall percentage? Oh wait, I'm sure they didn't bother checking free software usage so they can keep piracy percentages at a relatively similar number to before the inception and mass utilization of free software. When someone downloads an average linux distribution, how many packages of free software do they get? That's certainly got to be adding to the numbers and decreasing the overall true number of piracy (i.e. pirated copies of software/all copies of software used). I'm sure they consider the usage of single-license software on more than one machine pirating, so this falls under "all copies of software used".
Slashdot Mirror
I hope they have audio gear on that expensive digital camera just in case that rock says "Owww! Stop grinding me!"
Back in 1997, I found a website that had the Mission Impossible Theme in mp3 and I downloaded that and Winamp 0.5 or something on a high school computer. I used to run the comp labs so it was a computer in a teacher's office that had speakers. Next was That Thing You Do from that Tom Hanks movie followed by the first 8 seconds of Robert Miles - Children. The problem of course was i started playing Children as it downloaded and just minimized the window, turned off the monitor - Winamp was on repeat. I came back to find an annoyed head of computer's dept teacher (with a headache) yelling "how the hell do you turn it off?". At least I was right in saying that mp3 technology would revolutionize music on computers.
and it's not that bad. He's a little less self righteous when in class. It's obvious that certain things he does is for attention. I had a unique experience in that on the first day of class i had with me, not even 2 hours later, my ex got me tickets to a Toronto Film Festival movie and it just so happened to be Cyberman and lo and behold, Mann walks down the aisle decked out in some old hardware he was laughing at in class. It was pretty blatant that he wore the larger headwear to garner more attention or someone affiliated with the film asked him to. It was actually amusing when some "movie appreciaters" who wanted to hear themselves talk more than actually ask questions questioned him after the movie. He shut a couple of them up quickly and left a few dumbfounded cause it sounded like they expected very few multisyllabic words from a "Tech Geek". There was at the very least one who had no question at all but wanted to state something obvious about the movie.
Mann's a little hypocritical. He despised Red Hat yet Eyetap used to be a Red Hat mirror (and a big pipe hog for this reason according to some U of T network admins). He used to state that some of the propietary closed code in Red Hat was poisonous with his analogy: "Which of the following would you eat? Pure food, pure poison, or some food mixed with poison." Needless to say, he exhtoled Debian for our labs (that was our first cheesy assignment, installing Debian on a 386/486).
Mann is kinda scary to walk into in the halls though. It always feels like he's not quite there when he takes off the glasses. He seems disoriented and I've seen him sometimes grab the walls to walk properly. I'm sure he's dependent on that system more than a lot of us could imagine. I think in the movie or in class he stated that they all have Runner's bodies or the health associated with that due to the increase in temperature caused by the machine on his hip.
He has a book on how he makes his mini-computers on eyetap somewhere - it is of use if you want to build your own (hard part is the power source). His philosophies and actions are easier to swallow with a grain of salt.
All of this is nicely animated in Tree House of Horrors V Act 2: Time and Punishment. Homer goes back into time and his seemingly minute changes have large impact on the future he returns to.
As to another reply to the parent post, "Causality implies a concious action.", I wonder why a conscious action is a requirement for a proposed chaotic universe? Kicking a rock my caught seismic activity to occur if it resonates properly on a fault line for all we know.
Quotes like this "Creative people should be compensated for the use and exploitation of their music" irk me so. Replace music with the word software and I'm more likely to see why authors should get compensated, but oddly it's the music industry that is protected wholeheartedly by the law. In the software industry, if someone pirates your software, it generally is an exact duplicate of the purchaseable item (minus the copy-right protection and adding in some advertising). In the music industry, if someone distributes a lossy version of your song (for the most part, it's the labels song) or recorded off the radio (difference between this and taping shows on your VCR and sending it to others is what?) you have to pay - and not only pay for the indiscretion, but also for the potential indiscretion thanks to CD-r levies.
Where is the equality in that? Why is the music industry so favoured? You haven't seen ISP's fined for the transferral of illegal software; up until two years ago, my ISP used to have a mirror of alt.binaries.warez among its other newsgroups!
For that matter, what constitutes use? How much of the file must be copied to be considered an illegal use? Almost all OS's will copy a file and then delete it to safely move a file from one partition to another - does this situation insinuate 2 copyright violations?
Most of these cases seem to be that of "guilt without evidence". A filename does not an illegal download make, nor a hash value a confirmation.
You do all that and there'll be like 5% of the comments that we have now! Eliminate first posts, and that will drop a bit more.
To drive home the ending to Matrix Revolutions again, the Wachowski brothers have influenced Peter Jackson to alter the ending to RotK.
-Aragorn and Sauron fight it on in the rain while millions of Sauron eyes watch intently and rarely blink; the battle peaks with Aragorn seemingly beaten and lying on his back, stands up and hugs Sauron - peace breaks out throughout the land.
-Frodo plays the part of an Oracle and Sam his trusty bodyguard... oh wait, nm.
-Gollum is programmed by the "The One True Ring Matrix" to bring balance to the force...
oh, I'm getting too confused
my poor Netscape 4.8 on the school lab computers (default Browser for CS students at U of T) have immense problems rendering the new "retooled" page. Maybe they should cookie the retooled version versus the old version so those who can't appreciate it still have an option while still allowing bandwidth savings for those who can.
For this spoof, i'd have chosen the 2.4 kernel code to display in the Matrix... if the worlds were flipped, i'd have the Matrix represented as .NET code and I'd have put Miguel de Icaza as Neo. Paul Allen could guest star as the Architect and Linus as the Oracle.
Let's just hope that wasn't a suppository!
In the Microsoft/Borg case, it would be "Who do you want to assimilate today?"
Hmm... is this *software boutique* anything like EB?
Am I unjustly concerned that Microsoft could see this as a great oppurtunity to squash Linux on the desktop? Redhat continues with Fedora but closes down Desktop support in a year. This leaves a hole in desktop linux. Now imagine if Microsoft bought out Novell/Suse and swallowed the IP, disbanded Suse and reallocated the brains. There would go another large Linux Desktop player. What remains at that point? TurboLinux in the far east and Mandrake and Gentoo? Slackware, though great, is in a decline (sorry Patrick).
Add that to SCO and lessening Linux Desktop adoption (i'm sure companies are wearisome adopting Linux on the Desktop until it's clear that they don't have to transition back to Windows anytime soon).
Suse seemed to be one of the really strong common desktop distros... I'd hate to see it go.
Next project will be hooking up DDR to Honda's ASIMO over a net connection so you can dance with someone remotely... hopefully no one gets trampled by it (approx 43kg).
When I first got my wireless card, I intended solely to use it at school where they had wireless networks, but when I plugged into my laptop at home (a condo), I picked up a signal. Someone across the street in a neighbouring condo has a wireless lan. I was curious as to how security minded people were when installing a WLAN. I noticed both no admin password on the compaq router and some open windows shares had no passwords. More importantly, I found out I had downloaded more surfing the net wirelessly than they had in the last week. Imagine if I lived in a country where you had fewer and fewer rights and the RIAA could get me for music sharing? I could simply download of this person's WLAN and the RIAA would sue them.
[Now off on a political tangent]
Welcome to America. We have a terrorist problem so please leave your jacket and your rights at the door...
I remember a land built on wars, citizens rights and stolen land. The only thing that changed is the citizens stopped caring.
With specific reference to OpenGL, games are written in many paths based on the acceleration available on various graphics cards exposed through vendor specific and ARB approved extensions to GL. Drivers optimizations are written both to speed up GL calls and all sorts of other common calculations as well as speed up games by cutting corners. Corners to cut often include what assumptions certain games makes. If a game or game engine makes an assumption such as a static camera, a lot of variable dependencies can be chucked out the window (PTP: pardon the pun) and an "optimization" is born. I would find it hard to believe that a GFX 5800 Ultra would ship with anything less than 75% of the optimal general driver (i.e. nothing game specific or context specific) -- so me thinks the new Detonator 50 has some nice "halflife2.exe" code :P
Oh, and mentioning DirectX before OpenGL in the same breath might mean you like serializing items in a list in alphabetical order... oh no!
I had two identical Seagate 2.0 gigs and when i was transferring data from my old 540mb, my friend insisted we just stack the drives on the floor instead of all the work of mounting them or even sticking a antistatic bag between them. *pop* The result was one of the drives shocking the other drive. Digital board had a nice smoke plume from one side. A couple of resets later, it was obvious that the drive was dead. We replaced the digital board from one with the other to get the data and then tossed the broken one. My friend knew that would work because the drives were identical (and from the same batch in Malaysia apparently) and he had done it before. The time he had done it before, his brand new drive was flakey within the first week so he went back to the store and they said they wouldn't take it back even though it was a day 7 that it broke and he couldn't get in till day 8 of a 7-day no questions asked replacement. He just bought another brand new drive and replaced the board with the defective one. Went back to the store to a different clerk and returned the "new" drive with no questions asked.
Actually, their recruitment literature is very specific in stating that they don't offer RIM Jobs. The free pen they gave out said it all: "RIM Careers". It's good to see marketing accounting for sexual innuendo.
I hope not too many companies buy into this "monorail".
What I find the worst in this whole scenario is their price jump in October, 2003. It's like you can buy now and avoid paying double, but oh, we may be proven wrong and incapable of protecting "our" IP so at that point, you just gave us free money and I'm off to Ogdenville. There's gotta be something legally wrong with that scenario. I find it akin to voluntarily giving yourself up to the police for a crime and getting a shorter sentence with the option that in reality there was no crime committed and you screwed yourself for no reason. BUT this is on a larger scale with lotsa companies.
Not to demean the business world, but if they aren't truly paying attention to any and all of their e-mail (lack of it looking like spam) then they should expect much worse to happen. There are many individuals who have C++ as a first language followed by a distant second, english. Whether the e-mail starts with "Dear Sir/Madam..." or "Pimp this...", if it's addressing possibly any security circumvention, it should be taken equally seriously. As you can see, I've taken the parent's post seriously though most English teachers would have blown up: "was", "it is", "did not", "English", "Script k!66!3$".
These poor guys will be the next to be blown up when 120,000 troops jump them on their way to work. Seriously though, reading their demands, they are very close to blackmail. Microsoft took the same position that the US took in "Air Force One": We will not bargain with terrorists. Sure, they didn't blow anything up or there isn't some ISO you can burn and stick in the XBOX and poof, no security, but they did hold a list of demands that most corporations would have a hard time filling. Video Game Console manufacturers make money on software game title sells (as opposed to losing money on hardware).
"For the exchange, we were requesting but not demanding the following:
- Complete access to all documentation (chipsets, video etc.) to assist in developing a better Linux for the XBox.
- A signed Linux loader.
- Protection from Microsoft or support if any organisation/government attempted to prosecute members of our team.
- Refunding of the cost occured during the agreement period."
Since they requested the following, they were turned down on all accounts. I sincerely hope their lawyers are good enough to stave off microsoft's (who will be working on july 4th all day i'm sure). I also hope this is a first step to sticking in and loading a bootable Suse or Mandrake install CD.
I'm running 8.2. Downloaded almost 5.4 gigs off of the mirror (no ISO's means i'm forced to do this in case my net connection goes down and is less taxing to download the files multiple times for multiple machines). Very impressed that it mounted a windows share and installed from there. I wasn't sure what directory structure i needed to point the share to but i picked it up. Install went well and fast. My firewall script based on iptables that worked on redhat 8/9, slackware 8/9, and mandrake 8 failed. Ended up using YaST2 firewall setup and that worked like a charm. I tried as I might to add an ftp or http source from various Suse ftps, it wouldn't let me (inst_nosrc_media) or something similar. Maybe it's me not reading instructions but I'd rather have it go out and find a bunch of mirrors and let me add them instead of not suggesting anything. Same thing happened when installing to laptop. It keeps assuming that all packages will be on my windows share (i wasn't going to download all the src packages as well cause that would have make the installation mirror way more than 5.4 gig). Everything else went rather smooth (installing app A, server B ...). What I can't figure out currently is what is required to get TV out working under it (there seems to be no inherent controls) and I'm sure i need to get the right vid card driver separate from the one it assumed it was - Slackware on the other hand worked out of the box with the TV out. As I see it, there a whole bunch of conformation issues in regards to the end user experience. Take for example TV out functionality in Windows provided by most companies is a tab in the display properties advanced page. Standardizing certain components to insert into an equivalent Suse page (whether it's just a widget that runs a commandline app to control the card) would allow for a more pleasant expected experience. It's good to see Konqueror still crashes tho. With all that, I still like it and it will remain on my machine.... until something new rolls along.
Bittorrent needs another layer, so anyone can download a file which has a list of available torrents which all have the same file.... until of course that file get's slashdotted.
Slashdot: Bandwidth's hated enemy.
I concur with your scenario. I wonder if 3DS Max Studio and that line of products would have been as popular is it was if it wasn't for people pirating it. It was one of those apps that looked like it was pirated a helluva lot and which had a barrier of entry into animation due to its hefty price tag ($4000 USD awhile back). Only a few people buy this software for personal use and i'm sure a lot of production houses and game companies have multiple licenses and render licenses. I'm also sure if they sold the product at $100, they would sell more copies but not make the same amount of money and would definitely have a higher tech support cost. Though software piracy is a bad thing, there are up sides that places like the BSA will never admit to. Heck, if Microsoft gave away its operating systems like Apple does (yeah, i know its comparing Apple's to x86's), then there would be less piracy :)
What of software that is released in the free software market? Wouldn't increased free software usage also decrease the overall percentage? Oh wait, I'm sure they didn't bother checking free software usage so they can keep piracy percentages at a relatively similar number to before the inception and mass utilization of free software. When someone downloads an average linux distribution, how many packages of free software do they get? That's certainly got to be adding to the numbers and decreasing the overall true number of piracy (i.e. pirated copies of software/all copies of software used). I'm sure they consider the usage of single-license software on more than one machine pirating, so this falls under "all copies of software used".