The case was mentioned in "spørretimen" ("question hour") in the Norwegian parliament.
For the Norwegian speaking, read this. Search for DVD.
Here is a quick translation.
Erik Solheim (SV): This question is for the Minister of Culture.
When a 16 year old on a small farm in Vestfold is capable of breaking the codes that the big international industry has made to protect DVD-records, then I believe that most people would consider that it is the big international industry that has a problem.
I have a very unpleasant feeling that Økokrim has too much time on their hands (don't have enough to do) when they involve themselves in a case like this.
I am ofcourse not asking the minister of culture or the ministry to overrule Økokrim, but I would like for the minister of culture to tell the parliament if she is going to initiate a review of the laws related to Internet and modern entertainment industry, to see if the laws that ensure freedom of speech and democracy are strong enough, and to see if the current application of these laws is sufficient in this context.
Until now, the Internet has been very democratic, but the forces that want to put the Internet under strong commercial control and traditional power structures are strong, and this has to be avoided.
Minister Åslaug Marie Haga:
...important case...,
I am unable to comment on this spesific case as it is being investigated by the police at this point.
This is generally an important area, which we are currently looking at. And not only in Norway, but also in the EU-system. Work is going on in the European Union to develop a directive that covers how we are going to handle "opphavsrett" (IP ownership, etc) in the information (digital) society.
....have to balance the needs of IP ownership on one side, and the public on the other side.....this is international work that we are following closely...
Erik Solheim:
We all acknowledge that IP ownership has to be maintained, and that this is a central problem (large, important area).
But there are three other areas (matters of concern) that are equally important:
The democratic problem - how to make the technology available and usable for the largest number of people.
It is in the interest of the consumers to avoid unneccesary monopolies in the new markets (areas) of information technology.
It is also a 3rd world problem - to ensure that this technology is made available to countries outside the core markets of the large industry.
These concerns have to be considered very important when we determine how much IP should be protected [in the digital world].
I would like to know when the minister is able to return to the parliament with more information concerning these matters.....
Åslaug Marie Haga:
The area of democracy, publicity (public access?) and availability is one of the conflict areas in the EU directive that is presently under development... there are elements that we think will limit public access, the directive is currently protecting the IP owners too much, at the expense of the public. Our task is to find a balance....
I find it natural to address the parliament again concerning these matters when the directive has been hashed out more in the EU system.......
EFF has offered to cover the legal expenses in the case of a lawsuit. EFN (eff's sister organization in norway, www.efn.no) has also offered to cover an eventual fine.
So here's a free software idea: an industrial-strength portable (yes, that includes Windows98/NT) hardware/GUI/OS/net abstraction library, which looks the same from the application programmer's standpoint no matter where you use it (like an OS compability wrapper).
Sitting hard on OEMs with low per lisence price on windows if they only ship windows on their computers, or requiring them to pay the windows tax for each computer shipped regardless of OS installed.
Forcing proprietary protocols even more than they do today.
Why are the accelerated 3D drivers for Matrox cards, ATI cards, and Voodoo cards open source then?
Even though Matrox was the first to provide usable register information on their 3D hardware, there are still some things missing. Especially the hot part of the G400 - the WARP engine. So even though the 3D hardware manufacturers have gone from "no way in hell" to "ok, here is some register information", they are still afraid of documenting the parts of their hardware that give them that competitive edge. And since Nvidia is king of the hill for the moment, with T&L and all, they are obviously more tight-lipped than the others.
There was a discussion about this on the Utah-GLX dev-list lately.
The article does not mention anything about which license this is going to be released under, weither it is going to be based on Xfree 4/DRI/Mesa or if they are going to roll their own implementation.
Since it looks like crystal ball time, here's my take on it:
Nvidia wants to sell hardware. Rolling their own could be expensive, especially considering that the Linux market is a lot smaller than the current Windows market where the volume would justify the cost. The GeForce is currently the performance leader in the consumer 3D market (which is kind of hot these days:)), so they might be wary of allowing their competitors access to the driver source.
VA wants to sell preinstalled servers and desktops. This deal will allow them to offer low/mid-range CAD/3D graphics workstations. With closed drivers, they could gain an edge compared to the other Linux hardware companies out there. It is however questionable if the volume is big enough to justify the development cost, and if it is worth the risk of pissing off the open source community by using a proprietary 3D implementation.
SGI is currently investing heavy in Linux. It seems like their plan is to gradually phase out IRIX on their low and medium-end desktops and servers, and maybe even on their high-end hardware once they have ported down the needed features from IRIX. They have one huge problem, though. By doing this they might be perceived as "just another Linux hardware vendor". Since their core market is in 3D workstations and servers, they might want to run the proprietary line on at least the 3D drivers/infrastructure to give their products a competitive edge. This does not fit well with them donating GLX and funding/helping Precision Insight with the 3D elements of XFree 4, though.
My guess is that this is going to be Mesa/GLX/DRI based. That does not guarantee source code. All that software is under X/BSD/MIT style license, so they could choose to make it binary only.
In Norway, it is legal to reverse engineer for the purpose of interoperability - no matter what the EULA claims.
I actually hope that they try to prosecute here in Norway, because it would be quite funny to see the lawyers thrown out of the courthouse. It would also generate a lot of bad PR, and hopefully, more public awareness about this and similar issues.
NoteToMalda: I think SlashDot needs a FAQ section, or perhaps something like a summary on ongoing developments/stories.
Regular consumer DVD players won't allow you to read the part of the disc containing the key used to encrypt the disk unless you do a authentcation handshake with it (part of CSS).
IF you are able to get your hands on a player without this security measure, or do a hardware/firmware mod to disable this protection, then you are able to get a bit-by-bit copy.
Then there is the issue of burning this copy on a double-layer DVD. I'm not 100% on this, but I believe that blank DVD disks available to consumers are pre-burnt at the location where the keys are. It is either that, or writers available on the consumer market won't allow you to write to that area without a proper CSS handshake.
perhapse the courts would require the DVD manufacturers to write drivers for non Windows operating systems.
The court can't. Only the DVD CA and the defendants are part of this trial. The court can not force remedies on an impartial 3rd party.
This is exactly the same as saying that the DOJ would force OEMs to offer at least one non-MS operating system preloaded on their computers.
The court is probably (hopefully) going to rule that this was legal reverse-engineering and dismiss the case.
The interesting part, though, is that this case could give some presedence(sp?) on the areas of:
- Validity of shrink-wrap End User Lisence Agreements. (Anyone know of any legal rulings about the legal validity of an EULA? That is - which claims in an EULA are valid and which are not.) - Linking to other websites. - Reverse engineering. - The right to fair use of digital content.
Being certified does not mean that you have to be clueless. I know several MCSEs and (M)CNEs that are very clued. All of them, however, have been working in the business for many years and all of them have in-depth experience in 2+ operating systems.
On the other hand, it is true that you can read yourself to an MCSE and still be unable to handle, or even start to debug, a real-world problem.
UDP and TCP are different protocols sitting on top of IP.
TCP is session based. You have overhead in setting up and tearing down sessions, but it does error correction and packet ordering/acknowledge automatically.
UDP is shoot-and-pray. No checking for lost packets and if you transfer more than one datagram of data the receiving program has to reorder the packets. Much less overhead than TCP, though.
However, does he, or anyone else for that matter, think this will "pressure Microsoft" to modify their implementation?
If he had said something like that 2, or even 1, year ago I would have laughed too. We are living on Internet^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hLinux time, though.
Why do you think MS got W98SE out the door so soon after the release of W98? They felt the "pressure" of people jumping on the Linux bandwagon to get ipmasquerade. They were in such a hurry to do this that they went out and bought NAT2000 instead of developing it in house.
3D/online gaming is going to be a big hit on Linux during the next year. Within 6 months, we'll have a fast and stable OpenGL environment and good drivers for most or all consumer 3D accellerators. If Linux can run those games better than Windows (i.e. so much better that it is mentioned in game reviews in game magazines), you can bet your ass that MS will feel pressure.
MS is going to copy anything that is better in Linux to try to minimize the number of people going to Linux because of missing features in Windows.
..which is only a temporary solution until the bot writers check for these things.
The result is an arms race between bots and servers trying to detect them. Which can be fun for a while, until you suddenly discover that you use more time adding protection hacks to your server than you use playing the game.
It is a lot better to do a redesign that limits the knowledge of the client. But, as has already been explained, that would be hard to do for Quake without killing performance.
Re:First "Moderators on Crack" Post
on
V2OS under GPL
·
· Score: 1
Remember that at one point IBM was considered by most to be a monopoly but was not broken up. And now we have Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and Linux! unseating them -- all through the marketplace
Holy shit. How about a tiny history lesson for you.
The DOJ was investigating IBM for many years. During those years the IBM management became very wary of doing anything that could be considered as anticompetitive. This gave other companies a real chance in the marketplace.
Consider this - the only reason that IBM allowed MicroSoft to get rich on their behalf was that they didn't dare to kill off MS while the DOJ was watching.
No matter what the judge says, Microsoft does not have a pure monopoly in the desktop OS. Obviously there are people using OS's other than Windows on their desktops. This is "voting with your dollars". And this means my dollars do not go to "just one place".
Did you even bother to read the document? It contains many examples that shows that MS have excerted monopoly-like pressures on OEMs and ISVs. To be a monopoly, or near-monopoly is not illegal. There are however restrictions to what you can legaly do with that monopoly power.
How about reading a book about economics. Especially one that explains which safeguards are necessary in a free marketplace to make sure that there is healthy competition.
With different resolutions/bpp per screen. I miss that one. I'm not sure if it can be added cleanly to XFree. Would love it, though.
Assigns
I use to call them "named $PATHs" when I try to explain them to the Unixphiles. I don't ever expect to see it retrofitted in Linux, though.:(
Catalog files
I'm sure the GNOME and KDE guys will come up with a proper internationalization standard if they haven't already.
Datatypes
Both KDE and GNOME is adding this in some way.
Oh. And how could you forget to mention AREXX?! An easy to use scripting language with IPC support, and most "modern" Amiga applications supported it. You'll probably get a somewhat equivalent in Linux when applications start to expose their functions through CORBA.
However, any new aggressive architecture requires a lot of compiler work. To make your new applications fly, you would want to compile them using the native processors compilers.
Not always. It all depends on where the bottlenecks are in the current state of technology.
If the native IS is very wordy and the bottleneck is between CPU and RAM, you would get better performance by using a CISCy IS.
"By submitting Content to epinions.com: (a) you automatically grant to epinons.com (or warrant that the Content owner has granted to epinions.com), a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to use, modify, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, publish, adapt, create derivative works of, distribute, transfer, or sell any such Content, for any purpose whatsoever, including, without limitation, a commercial purpose, without any compensation to you; and (ii) you agree that you will not publish, submit, or display such Content to or on any other web-site or on-line service (except your own personal web-site) without epinions.com's prior written consent."
I think this is going to piss QNX off bigtime. From what I understand, they've spent considerable effort the last year to expand QNX to offer a base for the new Amiga OS.
I'm a long time Amiga user, and remember the old days when nothing available on the desktop could get close to the features of the os and the hardware. The Amiga has always been a multimedia machine, and I feel that QNX would be a better kernel for an os like that. Realtime. Low footprint. Linux still has a way to go in that area. It is a great general server os, not a realtime/multimedia os.
There are four reasons for going with Linux, though: - More drivers. - Potentially lower development cost. - Not dependant on a 3rd party for the core os. - "Buzzword compliant"
Not that I dislike that Linux is gaining more mindshare. But I feel that they are choosing the wrong tool for this particular job.
A good idea in theory. Unfortunately, however, at least a small minority of these people would just flame you back and go on as before. Yes, some of them would get the message and stop it, but my guess is that a lot of people that go in for that sort of stuff couldn't care less if you or I or every other person in the world thinks that what they did was wrong.
Very true. In the "old" days I noticed the same trend on IRC. Some people would just run around on channels and stir up a stink just for the joy of it. If we tried to tell them the error of their ways they just got worse - their intent was to piss people off, and us trying to convice them not to was taken by them as a proof that they had accomplished their goal.
I'm not saying that all flamers are like that, but some are. I don't know of any way that we as a community can do anything effectively to stop them giving Linux a bad name.
Slashdot Mirror
The case was mentioned in "spørretimen" ("question hour") in the Norwegian parliament.
...,
....this is international work that we are following closely...
....
.. there are elements that we think will limit public access, the directive is currently protecting the IP owners too much, at the expense of the public. Our task is to find a balance. ...
... ...
For the Norwegian speaking, read this. Search for DVD.
Here is a quick translation.
Erik Solheim (SV): This question is for the Minister of Culture.
When a 16 year old on a small farm in Vestfold is capable of breaking the codes that the big international industry has made to protect DVD-records, then I believe that most people would consider that it is the big international industry that has a problem.
I have a very unpleasant feeling that Økokrim has too much time on their hands (don't have enough to do) when they involve themselves in a case like this.
I am ofcourse not asking the minister of culture or the ministry to overrule Økokrim, but I would like for the minister of culture to tell the parliament if she is going to initiate a review of the laws related to Internet and modern entertainment industry, to see if the laws that ensure freedom of speech and democracy are strong enough, and to see if the current application of these laws is sufficient in this context.
Until now, the Internet has been very democratic, but the forces that want to put the Internet under
strong commercial control and traditional power structures are strong, and this has to be avoided.
Minister Åslaug Marie Haga:
...important case
I am unable to comment on this spesific case as it is being investigated by the police at this point.
This is generally an important area, which we are currently looking at. And not only in Norway, but also in the EU-system. Work is going on in the European Union to develop a directive that covers how we are going to handle "opphavsrett" (IP ownership, etc) in the information (digital)
society.
....have to balance the needs of IP ownership on one side, and the public on the other side.
Erik Solheim:
We all acknowledge that IP ownership has to be maintained, and that this is a central problem (large, important area).
But there are three other areas (matters of concern) that are equally important:
The democratic problem - how to make the technology available and usable for the largest
number of people.
It is in the interest of the consumers to avoid unneccesary monopolies in the new markets (areas) of information technology.
It is also a 3rd world problem - to ensure that this technology is made available to countries outside the core markets of the large industry.
These concerns have to be considered very important when we determine how much IP should be protected [in the digital world].
I would like to know when the minister is able to return to the parliament with more information concerning these matters.
Åslaug Marie Haga:
The area of democracy, publicity (public access?) and availability is one of the conflict areas in the EU directive that is presently under development.
I find it natural to address the parliament again concerning these matters when the directive has been hashed out more in the EU system.
EFF has offered to cover the legal expenses in the case of a lawsuit. EFN (eff's sister organization in norway, www.efn.no) has also offered to cover an eventual fine.
So here's a free software idea: an industrial-strength portable (yes, that includes Windows98/NT) hardware/GUI/OS/net abstraction library, which looks the same from the application programmer's standpoint no matter where you use it (like an OS compability wrapper).
;-p
It's called "Java".
Linux is free! How can Microsoft stop it?
Oh, lots of ways.
Sitting hard on OEMs with low per lisence price on windows if they only ship windows on their computers, or requiring them to pay the windows tax for each computer shipped regardless of OS installed.
Forcing proprietary protocols even more than they do today.
etc..
Why are the accelerated 3D drivers for Matrox cards, ATI cards, and Voodoo cards open source then?
Even though Matrox was the first to provide usable register information on their 3D hardware, there are still some things missing. Especially the hot part of the G400 - the WARP engine. So even though the 3D hardware manufacturers have gone from "no way in hell" to "ok, here is some register information", they are still afraid of documenting the parts of their hardware that give them that competitive edge. And since Nvidia is king of the hill for the moment, with T&L and all, they are obviously more tight-lipped than the others.
There was a discussion about this on the Utah-GLX dev-list lately.
Start of thread
Most interesting post
The article does not mention anything about which license this is going to be released under, weither it is going to be based on Xfree 4/DRI/Mesa or if they are going to roll their own implementation.
:)), so they might be wary of allowing their competitors access to the driver source.
Since it looks like crystal ball time, here's my take on it:
Nvidia wants to sell hardware. Rolling their own could be expensive, especially considering that the Linux market is a lot smaller than the current Windows market where the volume would justify the cost. The GeForce is currently the performance leader in the consumer 3D market (which is kind of hot these days
VA wants to sell preinstalled servers and desktops. This deal will allow them to offer low/mid-range CAD/3D graphics workstations. With closed drivers, they could gain an edge compared to the other Linux hardware companies out there. It is however questionable if the volume is big enough to justify the development cost, and if it is worth the risk of pissing off the open source community by using a proprietary 3D implementation.
SGI is currently investing heavy in Linux. It seems like their plan is to gradually phase out IRIX on their low and medium-end desktops and servers, and maybe even on their high-end hardware once they have ported down the needed features from IRIX. They have one huge problem, though. By doing this they might be perceived as "just another Linux hardware vendor". Since their core market is in 3D workstations and servers, they might want to run the proprietary line on at least the 3D drivers/infrastructure to give their products a competitive edge. This does not fit well with them donating GLX and funding/helping Precision Insight with the 3D elements of XFree 4, though.
My guess is that this is going to be Mesa/GLX/DRI based. That does not guarantee source code. All that software is under X/BSD/MIT style license, so they could choose to make it binary only.
In Norway, it is legal to reverse engineer for the purpose of interoperability - no matter what the EULA claims.
I actually hope that they try to prosecute here in Norway, because it would be quite funny to see the lawyers thrown out of the courthouse. It would also generate a lot of bad PR, and hopefully, more public awareness about this and similar issues.
NoteToMalda: I think SlashDot needs a FAQ section, or perhaps something like a summary on ongoing developments/stories.
Regular consumer DVD players won't allow you to read the part of the disc containing the key used to encrypt the disk unless you do a authentcation handshake with it (part of CSS).
IF you are able to get your hands on a player without this security measure, or do a hardware/firmware mod to disable this protection, then you are able to get a bit-by-bit copy.
Then there is the issue of burning this copy on a double-layer DVD. I'm not 100% on this, but I believe that blank DVD disks available to consumers are pre-burnt at the location where the keys are. It is either that, or writers available on the consumer market won't allow you to write to that area without a proper CSS handshake.
A mobile, confused sperm whale hoping that the earth is friendly? :)
perhapse the courts would require the DVD manufacturers to write drivers for non Windows operating systems.
The court can't. Only the DVD CA and the defendants are part of this trial. The court can not force remedies on an impartial 3rd party.
This is exactly the same as saying that the DOJ would force OEMs to offer at least one non-MS operating system preloaded on their computers.
The court is probably (hopefully) going to rule that this was legal reverse-engineering and dismiss the case.
The interesting part, though, is that this case could give some presedence(sp?) on the areas of:
- Validity of shrink-wrap End User Lisence Agreements. (Anyone know of any legal rulings about the legal validity of an EULA? That is - which claims in an EULA are valid and which are not.)
- Linking to other websites.
- Reverse engineering.
- The right to fair use of digital content.
Being certified does not mean that you have to be clueless. I know several MCSEs and (M)CNEs that are very clued. All of them, however, have been working in the business for many years and all of them have in-depth experience in 2+ operating systems.
On the other hand, it is true that you can read yourself to an MCSE and still be unable to handle, or even start to debug, a real-world problem.
Concepts, general Unix/GNU stuff, general Linux stuff (LSB++), and pick-atleast-one-distro details stuff.
UDP is a form of TCP/IP packet.
UDP and TCP are different protocols sitting on top of IP.
TCP is session based. You have overhead in setting up and tearing down sessions, but it does error correction and packet ordering/acknowledge automatically.
UDP is shoot-and-pray. No checking for lost packets and if you transfer more than one datagram of data the receiving program has to reorder the packets. Much less overhead than TCP, though.
However, does he, or anyone else for that matter, think this will "pressure Microsoft" to modify their implementation?
If he had said something like that 2, or even 1, year ago I would have laughed too. We are living on Internet^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hLinux time, though.
Why do you think MS got W98SE out the door so soon after the release of W98? They felt the "pressure" of people jumping on the Linux bandwagon to get ipmasquerade. They were in such a hurry to do this that they went out and bought NAT2000 instead of developing it in house.
3D/online gaming is going to be a big hit on Linux during the next year. Within 6 months, we'll have a fast and stable OpenGL environment and good drivers for most or all consumer 3D accellerators. If Linux can run those games better than Windows (i.e. so much better that it is mentioned in game reviews in game magazines), you can bet your ass that MS will feel pressure.
MS is going to copy anything that is better in Linux to try to minimize the number of people going to Linux because of missing features in Windows.
..which is only a temporary solution until the bot writers check for these things.
The result is an arms race between bots and servers trying to detect them. Which can be fun for a while, until you suddenly discover that you use more time adding protection hacks to your server than you use playing the game.
It is a lot better to do a redesign that limits the knowledge of the client. But, as has already been explained, that would be hard to do for Quake without killing performance.
Shouldn't that be "Mostly Harmless"? ;)
>>You forgot their chat client! that comic strip thing has to be one of
:)
>>the grandest contributions to mankind i have yet seen.
>Wasn't it also the first client to have the distiction of
>being banned on sight on nearly all of the IRC networks?
Yup. Standard procedure was kill-on-sight. The old versions of MS Chat (then called Comic Chat) had some nice exploitable bugs, though.
Remember that at one point IBM was considered by most to be a monopoly but was not broken up. And now we have Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and Linux! unseating them -- all through the marketplace
Holy shit. How about a tiny history lesson for you.
The DOJ was investigating IBM for many years. During those years the IBM management became very wary of doing anything that could be considered as anticompetitive. This gave other companies a real chance in the marketplace.
Consider this - the only reason that IBM allowed MicroSoft to get rich on their behalf was that they didn't dare to kill off MS while the DOJ was watching.
No matter what the judge says, Microsoft does not have a pure monopoly in the desktop OS. Obviously there are people using OS's other than Windows on their desktops. This is "voting with your dollars". And this means my dollars do not go to "just one place".
Did you even bother to read the document? It contains many examples that shows that MS have excerted monopoly-like pressures on OEMs and ISVs. To be a monopoly, or near-monopoly is not illegal. There are however restrictions to what you can legaly do with that monopoly power.
How about reading a book about economics. Especially one that explains which safeguards are necessary in a free marketplace to make sure that there is healthy competition.
Proper "screens"
With different resolutions/bpp per screen. I miss that one. I'm not sure if it can be added cleanly to XFree. Would love it, though.
Assigns
I use to call them "named $PATHs" when I try to explain them to the Unixphiles. I don't ever expect to see it retrofitted in Linux, though.
Catalog files
I'm sure the GNOME and KDE guys will come up with a proper internationalization standard if they haven't already.
Datatypes
Both KDE and GNOME is adding this in some way.
Oh. And how could you forget to mention AREXX?! An easy to use scripting language with IPC support, and most "modern" Amiga applications supported it. You'll probably get a somewhat equivalent in Linux when applications start to expose their functions through CORBA.
..and you can telnet to them om port 9000 and screw them up completely. :)
Actually, some of them do use ghostscript.
They're called "postscript compatible" so that the unwashed masses don't get confused.
However, any new aggressive architecture requires a lot of compiler work. To make your new applications fly, you would want to compile them using the native processors compilers.
Not always. It all depends on where the bottlenecks are in the current state of technology.
If the native IS is very wordy and the bottleneck is between CPU and RAM, you would get better performance by using a CISCy IS.
eopinions.com is a nice idea, but:
"By submitting Content to epinions.com: (a) you automatically grant to epinons.com (or warrant that the Content owner has granted to epinions.com), a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to use, modify, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, publish, adapt, create derivative works of, distribute, transfer, or sell any such Content, for any purpose whatsoever, including, without limitation, a commercial purpose, without any compensation to you; and (ii) you agree that you will not publish, submit, or display such Content to or on any other web-site or on-line service (except your own personal web-site) without epinions.com's prior written consent."
Ugh. Stay away.
I think this is going to piss QNX off bigtime. From what I understand, they've spent considerable effort the last year to expand QNX to offer a base for the new Amiga OS.
I'm a long time Amiga user, and remember the old days when nothing available on the desktop could get close to the features of the os and the hardware. The Amiga has always been a multimedia machine, and I feel that QNX would be a better kernel for an os like that. Realtime. Low footprint. Linux still has a way to go in that area. It is a great general server os, not a realtime/multimedia os.
There are four reasons for going with Linux, though:
- More drivers.
- Potentially lower development cost.
- Not dependant on a 3rd party for the core os.
- "Buzzword compliant"
Not that I dislike that Linux is gaining more mindshare. But I feel that they are choosing the wrong tool for this particular job.
A good idea in theory. Unfortunately, however, at least a small minority of these people would just flame you back and go on as before. Yes, some of them would get the message and stop it, but my guess is that a lot of people that go in for that sort of stuff couldn't care less if you or I or every other person in the world thinks that what they did was wrong.
Very true. In the "old" days I noticed the same trend on IRC. Some people would just run around on channels and stir up a stink just for the joy of it. If we tried to tell them the error of their ways they just got worse - their intent was to piss people off, and us trying to convice them not to was taken by them as a proof that they had accomplished their goal.
I'm not saying that all flamers are like that, but some are. I don't know of any way that we as a community can do anything effectively to stop them giving Linux a bad name.