"If you have no English skills, the probability of a screw-up is very high."
There's hardly a need to go to such complicated explanations. It's enough that the instructions are tedious, and that the 'right' way to do it is more time consuming than the 'fast' way to do it. Combine time consuming work with tight schedules and penalties for failing deadlines, and guess what you get...
To paraphrase on of the engineers in the linked article; if the engineers on the project actually thought epoxied bolts are installed as per the instruction they live in a different reality.
"the probability of a screw-up is very high."
The probability of a screw up is _always_ very high. Things break. That's why it's a good engineering practice to design for graceful modes of failure.
Tsk. Unless you actually study history you'll never learn from it, nor understand what is happening around you. There were actually understandable, altho perhaps misguided, reasons the west supported Saddam against Iran; Iraqs secular rule being the foremost of them. The fact that the west has now more or less handed the theocrats a whole new country and ally speaks volumes.
With the idiots running the show it doesnt matter how much you spend on the military; the application of force you can accomplish serves not the american people, but whoever tricks the administration.
With the expectation that you will be judged by the totality and the context of your actions.
With enough data, if you _pick and choose_, you can create a circumstantial case, insinuate, change appearances, and more or less make up whatever suits your preference.
You make the assumption that God will be Fair.
I guarantee you, however, someone going after you for being a political opponent wont be.
Lets just take the words in your comment and play with them a bit, and see what a quick pick comes up with.
"I'm a communist. I work for the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cuba. I'm observing the kindergarten every minute of every day."
Ouch. Just your own words rearranged a bit, and that really makes you sound like someone that should be monitored closely, if not actually locked up at once. Wont somebody think of the children.
Now imagine the case that could be constructed against you at whim with unlimited data available.
Us authors already did decide what we wanted when we put the source under the GPL and future revisions. The updates fix loopholes in the existing license, created by changing technology, they dont really add anything new.
When I put stuff under the GPL, I do so with the clear intent that anyone can use, change and distribute the code, provided they forward the exact same rights and freedoms or more to the next recipient. If they have a way to get around that reciprocity, then that's a bug in the license I expect to get fixed.
"He's a strange bird"
He is indeed a strange bird, but if anything, he's consistent. Pigs will fly before RMS and the FSF changes, which is the entire reason I accept the 'or further revisions' part of the GPL.
I think you missed the whole point of whose freedom is protected in the GPL.
"If they apply drm to anything I write"
If they want to apply DRM to anything I write, then they can damn well write the code themselves (or join the anti-IP fight). The GPL aint a free lunch, it's a guarantee of the freedoms for the recipients of the works and derivative works.
The application of DRM further creates a free rider problem where companies releasing under GPL risk finding themselves at a disadvantage versus those who dont; suddenly it's a one-way street.
"this would cost them extra"
Enough extra to make it unprofitable, or to give the open competition an advantage on price, a difference that is only going to grow in the future.
"Let the free market handle it."
Oh, please. The whole IP industry is nothing like a free market. The GPL restores free market competition for a small segment, but the business is full of protectionists trying to find ways to cheat even that.
Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. The legal issues surrounding these things do not merely affect the specific thing you can stop supporting; their prevalence in society means they exact a heavy toll on the economy and development as a whole. The loss of economic efficiency might not be immediately apparent, but compare heavily protected versus competetive economies over a longer time; the resource loss permeats the economy, eventually affecting every sector, including sectors in which you do have a stake.
"Like it or lump it, these people aren't being mugged of their rights, they have to willingly sign them away"
Oh, bull, the entire structure of IP legislation is aimed squarely at protecting publishers from competition. Those 'rights' are monopoly protection laws that in themselves create the market failure. The effect being, the rights creating the media concentration which effectively marginalizes any non-signer.
The artists are effectively mugged of their right to compete on a fair market; the inequality of resources are an effect of legislation, not an inherent nature in the market.
Apparently, blind people also experience deja vu, which makes the theory unlikely.
I dont quite see the need to go to complicated explanations for deja vu; the human brain is one huge neural network, false positives and random matches should be expected. Without a certain fuzziness in temporal recognition, we'd be unable to ever recognize any repetetive event as every repeat would cause slightly differing levels of synaptic activation, depending on the totality of sensory input and internal state.
The amazing thing is rather that it functions as well as it does, minimizing both false positives and negatives, although perhaps erring a bit more on the negative side for the average person.
You need a proportional representation system. They usually tend to form more (useful) parties, they garner far higher voting percentage, and the ruling party or coalition represents far higher percentage of the voters (typically, at least 35-50% of the eligible voters, as compared to for example the US senate, where the leading side represents only 17% of the eligible voter base).
A proportional system is also far more of a PITA to corrupt and manipulate, as the dynamics make the politicians far more dependent on voters, as compared to financial, publicistic and party-internal factional support endemic to two-party winner-takes-all systems.
Unfortunately, I dont quite see anyone stepping up to 'liberate' the US in the near future, nor do I see any particular interest from the plutocrats to fundamentally change the system, so, meh and good luck.
Unfortunately, it wont work. Single-winner first past post systems are inherently flawed in the manner so exceedingly well demonstrated by the US. You end up with two parties, and then the two parties get taken over and/or corrupted by special interest controlling groups. Should a third party ever get closer to real power, they'll get taken over too.
Proportional representation systems are far less susceptible; the ease of forming new parties and gaining actual representation if the old parties are unresponsive creates a strong incentive for participation, and makes it much more expensive and unreliable to manipulate the system. As you also tend to get a higher voter turnout, the combination leads to a far better representation of the voter base; government coalitions in PR systems often represent at least 40-50% of the voter base, compared to, for example, the US senate in which the leading side currently is elected by less than 20 percent of the eligeble voters.
As the fingerprints will be trivially copied they add little or no security. You'd be more secure with a common magstripe card plus password system. The magstripe, at least, can only be skimmed when you use the card, while your biometrics are often 'skimmable' at any given moment.
The only actual advantage a biometric tag adds to the setup is that you wont forget it at home, but then again, that's rather irrelevant from a security aspect.
Of course, magstripe readers dont offer as much 'job security' to the scammers of the biometrics business, which appears to be the kind of security they're most concerned with.
"If enough people do the same, probably record companies will have to change their minds."
We've already seen what record companies do; they say people arent buying because of 'piracy', and promptly bribe and/or trick politicians into enacting some law intended to give them money anyway.
"But it's utterly their right to sell music they own,"
Bullshit. They have exclusive legal monopolies on the reproduction of certain data because it suited the English royalty four centuries ago to have monopolist sockpuppets doing their censorship for them in exchange for protection from competition.
It's time to get over that now. Intellectual monopolies are a hinderance to the free market, damaging to the economy, disasterous for the flow of information and the evolution of culture and science, and are rapidly proving themselves to be dangerous to democracy and they need to go. Now.
"Clearly, singing a song out loud should require induce a fee."
Hate to break it to you, but it already does.
In a lot of places, cover bands have to pay license fees. The fact that you're getting away with singing in the shower is probably just 'cause they dont have microphones and inspectors there.
Reading the reply in question, yes, there definitely is a lot of complaining going on.
However, it hardly shows the Nature study to be particularly false; mostly I see Britannica complaining about Nature being unfair, and/or expecting too much of an encyclopedia.
I mean, comments like "we are not a botanical encyclopedia, and dont pretend to be"? That's an excuse, not a valid objection. And, in the case of an Britannica Vs. Wikipedia accuracy evaluation, a completely irrelevant excuse; the same standards of consideration would apply to both.
"If I spend 3 billion dollars to map NYC to within a meter for a game"
If you spend 3 billion dollars to map NYC for a game, I really hope you lose every cent of it, and learn a lesson.
There is no advantage for society as a whole in encouraging waste like that, those 3 billion dollars worth of work would be more or less a loss to the economy as a whole. If you couldn't recoup the money, then _GOOD_. Maybe that'll keep others from trying the same thing.
One really wishes that a whole lot of people would get the fundamental principles of capitalism. You dont _deserve_ a profit for making an investment. You get a chance at making a profit off an investment if you are more efficient than the competition, which means the economy as a whole becomes more efficient. That notedly precludes wasting money on things that are not likely to become profitable without government help; this is not a bug, it's a feature, that steers productive employment of capital into the most useful and desireable avenues of production.
"Since this is also its voice number, it's easy to remember and convenient."
It is, however, a pita to handle, compared to 6to4 which does essentially the same thing, but in a standardized manner. There you have the IPV4 address as the IPV4 internet prefix and the rest of the address as IPV6 direct adressing of devices behind the IPV4 address.
"but they couldn't get it down to the cost of producing porn."
Sure they could. Most bands start out with production costs close to zero, and digital technology has dropped the resources down to where you dont need more than a laptop to make high-quality music.
Of course, production costs arent ever going to drop as long as the protective monopoly legislation remains in place; take a look at any monopolist and you'll find they can give you a flood of reasons why their services are so expensive to produce, and another flood of reasons why they need even more protection to afford to produce more. Costs always grow to eat all available capital; that's the essense of why competition is essential to the free market, and why anti-competetive legislation like copyright and patents damage the economy far more than their purported advantages.
You are entirely correct. Selling games and selling DVD's and anything else is a clear cut case of the first sale doctrine. You own the particular copy _including_ the content, you can do what you want with it, and when the copyright expires you can even copy it or refrain from copying it, or show it to audiences in your own cinema, or base your own derivative works off it, or anything you like.
Copyright is a specific temporary restriction in your property rights, when those restrictions lapse, then every aspect of that property is yours.
Actually, like most such strategies, North Korean nuclear strategy is most likely to revolve around not having to actually fire such weapons; if you at any point need to actually launch, you've already lost, they can only be used to make the enemy and the rest of the world lose too.
Taken to the natural conclusion, see the Dr Strangelove version of Doomsday Machine. No precision needed at all, and you dont even need a trebuchet.
"at what point do you feel like someone should possibly take a look at that?"
At what point do you feel Canada should possibly take a real look and ask for UN support?
"perhaps arrest someone if they are really planning something?"
Perhaps Canada should invade, just in case?
Do you get the point? Words are just words, they are insufficient to determine intent and capability. They are a dime a dozen, and you'll find a million posers and braggarts and no real threats if you look for them. Monitor and believe enough and you'll drown in an avalanche of irrelevant data where the threats you see are in your head, while the real threats can play you like an instrument simply by feeding you designed information.
Words merit response planning, as they can reveal weaknesses in your protection that you hadnt thought of, and as such you can use them to become safer. But you hardly need specific monitoring for that; heck, read a book to get the ideas, or listen to the braggarts in the open, if you lack imagination and your own security analysts.
But only physical action merits actual response with real reprecussions. If the US gathers troops on the border, Canada should probably act. If you obtain real evidence of people obtaining explosives etc, you should probably act.
Unfortunately, it's hard to find the real threats; and the trap is the mistaken belief and comfort one tends to find in flighty information. One _wants_ to believe that if only one knows enough, one can be safe. If only.
"What you don't understand is that money and business both drive..."
What you dont understand is that competition drives business.
Without competition, we'd be sitting at our 3270 terminals to the Compuserve/IBM mainframe of the world and paying $10 per minute for access.
The internet, cheap computers, much software and music, etc, has it's roots _despite_ intellectual monopolies. Almost _everything_ in your list took off and became cheap and plentiful because it was _not_ protected.
"Some of the copyright laws need to be changed, but they still need to be in place."
Yes, you'd have found me in that corner a decade ago. Evidence has since convinced me otherwise, in particular, the through study of the advances you mention. If we need a specific incentive for creativity, we should pay for it outright; monopoly control damages the market and flow of creativity far too much.
"If this isn't a free market, I don't know what is."
While the situation is better for software than for many other areas of destructive IP legislation, that's mostly due to the nature of software as interchangable and modularized and thus partly cross-competetive. But while that ameliorates the damage caused by monopoly rights in the pricing and resource allocation aspects, it does not reach anywhere near the unprotected (do note, this does not mean 'unpaid') best solution equilibrium.
"This sounds more like some guys mouthing off rather than a real threat."
No shit. If blather in a chatroom qualifies as a threat, what do the US military contigency plans qualify as? Evidence that the US military is poised to invade Canada?
Gather enough information and apply your imagination to it, and you can find evidence of anything anywhere. Cut the words out of a lexicon and have a paranoid lunatic rearrange them and it's not surprising if you get a sinister message. That doesnt mean we'll be served particularly well by employing the asylum as threat assessors.
But hey, nobody ever got fired for foiling an imaginary threat.
"Migration only takes a few seconds once that's done.."
An interesting way to accomplish file-based fast migration is to nfs mount an area on the target server, then use md (in the virtual machine) to place a mirror there. Then you have no need for the lengthy copy, you already have a synced up online copy there.
Not saying it's good, just saying it works (and a useful alternative if you dont have a better shared storage):).
Slashdot Mirror
"If you have no English skills, the probability of a screw-up is very high."
There's hardly a need to go to such complicated explanations. It's enough that the instructions are tedious, and that the 'right' way to do it is more time consuming than the 'fast' way to do it. Combine time consuming work with tight schedules and penalties for failing deadlines, and guess what you get...
To paraphrase on of the engineers in the linked article; if the engineers on the project actually thought epoxied bolts are installed as per the instruction they live in a different reality.
"the probability of a screw-up is very high."
The probability of a screw up is _always_ very high. Things break. That's why it's a good engineering practice to design for graceful modes of failure.
Tsk. Unless you actually study history you'll never learn from it, nor understand what is happening around you. There were actually understandable, altho perhaps misguided, reasons the west supported Saddam against Iran; Iraqs secular rule being the foremost of them. The fact that the west has now more or less handed the theocrats a whole new country and ally speaks volumes.
With the idiots running the show it doesnt matter how much you spend on the military; the application of force you can accomplish serves not the american people, but whoever tricks the administration.
"I will be called to account for my actions."
With the expectation that you will be judged by the totality and the context of your actions.
With enough data, if you _pick and choose_, you can create a circumstantial case, insinuate, change appearances, and more or less make up whatever suits your preference.
You make the assumption that God will be Fair.
I guarantee you, however, someone going after you for being a political opponent wont be.
Lets just take the words in your comment and play with them a bit, and see what a quick pick comes up with.
"I'm a communist. I work for the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cuba. I'm observing the kindergarten every minute of every day."
Ouch. Just your own words rearranged a bit, and that really makes you sound like someone that should be monitored closely, if not actually locked up at once. Wont somebody think of the children.
Now imagine the case that could be constructed against you at whim with unlimited data available.
"Let us authors decide whether we want it."
Us authors already did decide what we wanted when we put the source under the GPL and future revisions. The updates fix loopholes in the existing license, created by changing technology, they dont really add anything new.
When I put stuff under the GPL, I do so with the clear intent that anyone can use, change and distribute the code, provided they forward the exact same rights and freedoms or more to the next recipient. If they have a way to get around that reciprocity, then that's a bug in the license I expect to get fixed.
"He's a strange bird"
He is indeed a strange bird, but if anything, he's consistent. Pigs will fly before RMS and the FSF changes, which is the entire reason I accept the 'or further revisions' part of the GPL.
"I think you missed the whole point of freedom"
I think you missed the whole point of whose freedom is protected in the GPL.
"If they apply drm to anything I write"
If they want to apply DRM to anything I write, then they can damn well write the code themselves (or join the anti-IP fight). The GPL aint a free lunch, it's a guarantee of the freedoms for the recipients of the works and derivative works.
The application of DRM further creates a free rider problem where companies releasing under GPL risk finding themselves at a disadvantage versus those who dont; suddenly it's a one-way street.
"this would cost them extra"
Enough extra to make it unprofitable, or to give the open competition an advantage on price, a difference that is only going to grow in the future.
"Let the free market handle it."
Oh, please. The whole IP industry is nothing like a free market. The GPL restores free market competition for a small segment, but the business is full of protectionists trying to find ways to cheat even that.
"There are also a contingent of cowardly, rabid theocrats who are inflicting mayhem on any large crowd of people"
Just to keep you from getting confused; you do realize that the US removed the secular bunch from power and replaced them with the theocrats, right?
"I have no stake, whatsoever"
Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. The legal issues surrounding these things do not merely affect the specific thing you can stop supporting; their prevalence in society means they exact a heavy toll on the economy and development as a whole. The loss of economic efficiency might not be immediately apparent, but compare heavily protected versus competetive economies over a longer time; the resource loss permeats the economy, eventually affecting every sector, including sectors in which you do have a stake.
"Like it or lump it, these people aren't being mugged of their rights, they have to willingly sign them away"
Oh, bull, the entire structure of IP legislation is aimed squarely at protecting publishers from competition. Those 'rights' are monopoly protection laws that in themselves create the market failure. The effect being, the rights creating the media concentration which effectively marginalizes any non-signer.
The artists are effectively mugged of their right to compete on a fair market; the inequality of resources are an effect of legislation, not an inherent nature in the market.
Apparently, blind people also experience deja vu, which makes the theory unlikely.
I dont quite see the need to go to complicated explanations for deja vu; the human brain is one huge neural network, false positives and random matches should be expected. Without a certain fuzziness in temporal recognition, we'd be unable to ever recognize any repetetive event as every repeat would cause slightly differing levels of synaptic activation, depending on the totality of sensory input and internal state.
The amazing thing is rather that it functions as well as it does, minimizing both false positives and negatives, although perhaps erring a bit more on the negative side for the average person.
You need a proportional representation system. They usually tend to form more (useful) parties, they garner far higher voting percentage, and the ruling party or coalition represents far higher percentage of the voters (typically, at least 35-50% of the eligible voters, as compared to for example the US senate, where the leading side represents only 17% of the eligible voter base).
A proportional system is also far more of a PITA to corrupt and manipulate, as the dynamics make the politicians far more dependent on voters, as compared to financial, publicistic and party-internal factional support endemic to two-party winner-takes-all systems.
Unfortunately, I dont quite see anyone stepping up to 'liberate' the US in the near future, nor do I see any particular interest from the plutocrats to fundamentally change the system, so, meh and good luck.
"Then we need a massive campaign.."
Unfortunately, it wont work. Single-winner first past post systems are inherently flawed in the manner so exceedingly well demonstrated by the US. You end up with two parties, and then the two parties get taken over and/or corrupted by special interest controlling groups. Should a third party ever get closer to real power, they'll get taken over too.
Proportional representation systems are far less susceptible; the ease of forming new parties and gaining actual representation if the old parties are unresponsive creates a strong incentive for participation, and makes it much more expensive and unreliable to manipulate the system. As you also tend to get a higher voter turnout, the combination leads to a far better representation of the voter base; government coalitions in PR systems often represent at least 40-50% of the voter base, compared to, for example, the US senate in which the leading side currently is elected by less than 20 percent of the eligeble voters.
As the fingerprints will be trivially copied they add little or no security. You'd be more secure with a common magstripe card plus password system. The magstripe, at least, can only be skimmed when you use the card, while your biometrics are often 'skimmable' at any given moment.
The only actual advantage a biometric tag adds to the setup is that you wont forget it at home, but then again, that's rather irrelevant from a security aspect.
Of course, magstripe readers dont offer as much 'job security' to the scammers of the biometrics business, which appears to be the kind of security they're most concerned with.
"If enough people do the same, probably record companies will have to change their minds."
We've already seen what record companies do; they say people arent buying because of 'piracy', and promptly bribe and/or trick politicians into enacting some law intended to give them money anyway.
"But it's utterly their right to sell music they own,"
Bullshit. They have exclusive legal monopolies on the reproduction of certain data because it suited the English royalty four centuries ago to have monopolist sockpuppets doing their censorship for them in exchange for protection from competition.
It's time to get over that now. Intellectual monopolies are a hinderance to the free market, damaging to the economy, disasterous for the flow of information and the evolution of culture and science, and are rapidly proving themselves to be dangerous to democracy and they need to go. Now.
"Clearly, singing a song out loud should require induce a fee."
Hate to break it to you, but it already does.
In a lot of places, cover bands have to pay license fees. The fact that you're getting away with singing in the shower is probably just 'cause they dont have microphones and inspectors there.
Expect that to be rectified in the near future.
Reading the reply in question, yes, there definitely is a lot of complaining going on.
However, it hardly shows the Nature study to be particularly false; mostly I see Britannica complaining about Nature being unfair, and/or expecting too much of an encyclopedia.
I mean, comments like "we are not a botanical encyclopedia, and dont pretend to be"? That's an excuse, not a valid objection. And, in the case of an Britannica Vs. Wikipedia accuracy evaluation, a completely irrelevant excuse; the same standards of consideration would apply to both.
"If I spend 3 billion dollars to map NYC to within a meter for a game"
If you spend 3 billion dollars to map NYC for a game, I really hope you lose every cent of it, and learn a lesson.
There is no advantage for society as a whole in encouraging waste like that, those 3 billion dollars worth of work would be more or less a loss to the economy as a whole. If you couldn't recoup the money, then _GOOD_. Maybe that'll keep others from trying the same thing.
One really wishes that a whole lot of people would get the fundamental principles of capitalism. You dont _deserve_ a profit for making an investment. You get a chance at making a profit off an investment if you are more efficient than the competition, which means the economy as a whole becomes more efficient. That notedly precludes wasting money on things that are not likely to become profitable without government help; this is not a bug, it's a feature, that steers productive employment of capital into the most useful and desireable avenues of production.
"Since this is also its voice number, it's easy to remember and convenient."
It is, however, a pita to handle, compared to 6to4 which does essentially the same thing, but in a standardized manner. There you have the IPV4 address as the IPV4 internet prefix and the rest of the address as IPV6 direct adressing of devices behind the IPV4 address.
"but they couldn't get it down to the cost of producing porn."
Sure they could. Most bands start out with production costs close to zero, and digital technology has dropped the resources down to where you dont need more than a laptop to make high-quality music.
Of course, production costs arent ever going to drop as long as the protective monopoly legislation remains in place; take a look at any monopolist and you'll find they can give you a flood of reasons why their services are so expensive to produce, and another flood of reasons why they need even more protection to afford to produce more. Costs always grow to eat all available capital; that's the essense of why competition is essential to the free market, and why anti-competetive legislation like copyright and patents damage the economy far more than their purported advantages.
You are entirely correct. Selling games and selling DVD's and anything else is a clear cut case of the first sale doctrine. You own the particular copy _including_ the content, you can do what you want with it, and when the copyright expires you can even copy it or refrain from copying it, or show it to audiences in your own cinema, or base your own derivative works off it, or anything you like.
Copyright is a specific temporary restriction in your property rights, when those restrictions lapse, then every aspect of that property is yours.
Obviously the answer is to not use any single source as a factual source for anything.
"North Korean nuclear strategy"
Actually, like most such strategies, North Korean nuclear strategy is most likely to revolve around not having to actually fire such weapons; if you at any point need to actually launch, you've already lost, they can only be used to make the enemy and the rest of the world lose too.
Taken to the natural conclusion, see the Dr Strangelove version of Doomsday Machine. No precision needed at all, and you dont even need a trebuchet.
"at what point do you feel like someone should possibly take a look at that?"
At what point do you feel Canada should possibly take a real look and ask for UN support?
"perhaps arrest someone if they are really planning something?"
Perhaps Canada should invade, just in case?
Do you get the point? Words are just words, they are insufficient to determine intent and capability. They are a dime a dozen, and you'll find a million posers and braggarts and no real threats if you look for them. Monitor and believe enough and you'll drown in an avalanche of irrelevant data where the threats you see are in your head, while the real threats can play you like an instrument simply by feeding you designed information.
Words merit response planning, as they can reveal weaknesses in your protection that you hadnt thought of, and as such you can use them to become safer. But you hardly need specific monitoring for that; heck, read a book to get the ideas, or listen to the braggarts in the open, if you lack imagination and your own security analysts.
But only physical action merits actual response with real reprecussions. If the US gathers troops on the border, Canada should probably act. If you obtain real evidence of people obtaining explosives etc, you should probably act.
Unfortunately, it's hard to find the real threats; and the trap is the mistaken belief and comfort one tends to find in flighty information. One _wants_ to believe that if only one knows enough, one can be safe. If only.
"What you don't understand is that money and business both drive..."
What you dont understand is that competition drives business.
Without competition, we'd be sitting at our 3270 terminals to the Compuserve/IBM mainframe of the world and paying $10 per minute for access.
The internet, cheap computers, much software and music, etc, has it's roots _despite_ intellectual monopolies. Almost _everything_ in your list took off and became cheap and plentiful because it was _not_ protected.
"Some of the copyright laws need to be changed, but they still need to be in place."
Yes, you'd have found me in that corner a decade ago. Evidence has since convinced me otherwise, in particular, the through study of the advances you mention. If we need a specific incentive for creativity, we should pay for it outright; monopoly control damages the market and flow of creativity far too much.
"If this isn't a free market, I don't know what is."
While the situation is better for software than for many other areas of destructive IP legislation, that's mostly due to the nature of software as interchangable and modularized and thus partly cross-competetive. But while that ameliorates the damage caused by monopoly rights in the pricing and resource allocation aspects, it does not reach anywhere near the unprotected (do note, this does not mean 'unpaid') best solution equilibrium.
"This sounds more like some guys mouthing off rather than a real threat."
No shit. If blather in a chatroom qualifies as a threat, what do the US military contigency plans qualify as? Evidence that the US military is poised to invade Canada?
Gather enough information and apply your imagination to it, and you can find evidence of anything anywhere. Cut the words out of a lexicon and have a paranoid lunatic rearrange them and it's not surprising if you get a sinister message. That doesnt mean we'll be served particularly well by employing the asylum as threat assessors.
But hey, nobody ever got fired for foiling an imaginary threat.
"Migration only takes a few seconds once that's done .."
:).
An interesting way to accomplish file-based fast migration is to nfs mount an area on the target server, then use md (in the virtual machine) to place a mirror there. Then you have no need for the lengthy copy, you already have a synced up online copy there.
Not saying it's good, just saying it works (and a useful alternative if you dont have a better shared storage)