The first half of my point was a non-infringing site shouldn't go down at all. Even if the site is down for an hour, that is an hour the site owner was unjustly denied free speech and services they paid for. However, if the Hosting service/ISP was being paraniod (and you would be paranoid too if you were threatend by a huge lawsuit which could take down your business), they may require the affidavit be sent by snail mail. The site could be down for days. How is this not a problem? Maybe you have a crap site which doesn't matter to you, but there are plenty of people who have sites which are very important to them. Some of which the webmaster is dependent for a living.
The second point was: who says the ISP will put the site back up? For whatever reason they may fear legal trouble or harassment from the organization who filed the complaint. They may turn out to be theiving scumbags and use this as an excuse to keep the money without providing the rest of the service or fine the webmaster. Look in some hosting agreements. These types of clauses are common (and somewhat necessary because of abuse).
You call yourself a real/. reader? HA! Real/. readers custom code their own audio codecs and triple encrypt them. Only they are able to listen to their audio files! Let's see the RIAA stormtroopers steal my song "moncyb-In Soviet Russia-the Natasha chronicles.mecommieformat"!
Funny, everything I've read about the DMCA says the ISP is required to take down the site first (otherwise risk a lawsuit), and if the customer didn't violate copyright, they are supposed to sign an affidavit saying they didn't, then the ISP may put the site back up if they are so inclined.
Far different than what you said, and a big pain in the ass for the victim--if the ISP doesn't want to risk being sued, the site will be down for a while.
Yeah, but ln and cp do not need PAM or NSS or libc, so why use them?
You could share a.o file between them, and then it's the same thing as statically linking them in the first place.
Indeed, but then you are not statically linking in the entire libc system, which is the problem. I'm not against linking a bunch of.o files together, I just don't see the point in cramming tonnes of libc functions into a binary which doesn't need them and ends up more bloated as a result.
Why? Do programs such as cp, ln, and touch really need libc? Why make something the size of a small paperback book connected to four huge wheels when you can just carry it around in your pocket?
Better to work to make libc smaller, or restructure it so that small utilities only drag in what they absolutely need.
So you are saying rewrite libc? Is this not reinventing the wheel? Not that it is a bad idea, but how is it different?
Yes, these programs don't work on non-IA32 systems, but if someone needs to save space or wants more speed and they have an IA32 system, why not use them? The same thing could be done in C, thus preserving portability...
What about the innocent people? Do you feel it is acceptable for the RIAA to spam the internet with tonnes of DMCA complaints, knowing full well a significant amount of these are false and may lead to the loss of internet access and business of innocent people?
Their bots cast a wide net. Any file which has a word containing the same word as a RIAA member's song or artist name has a significant risk of getting a DMCA complaint. How is this fair? How can this be considered acceptable? You don't see retail store owners walking around to apartment complexes and telling the landlord "I think the people in apartment X shoplifted in my store, kick them out" and by law the landlord would have comply. That would be nonsense, yet the RIAA is doing the exact same sort of thing on the internet.
What about free speech? What about costs and profit loss of these innocent victims of the DMCA? What about those people who are now stalked by whackos because the DMCA force their ISP to give out their home address? Sending a false legal complaint is just as bad, if not worse, than infringing copyright.
Along the same lines: Why should people like me who don't violate copyright laws have to pay "royalites" on CD burners and blank CDs? I don't go around demanding a "royalty" from innocent people to compensate for crimes committed against me. Do you believe all knives should be charged a "royalty" paid to stabbing victims? We all know people who own knives are murders. Nice people use forks to cut their meat.
How about some utils which are written in assembly and are not dependent upon other libs? They're faster and smaller. You may want to look at LinuxAssembly.org's asm utils. They say it works for FreeBSD and other BSDs, though I haven't tested this myself (yet). When I tried them in Linux a few years ago, they weren't quite complete, but being small and independent has its advantages. When it's complete (maybe it is now?), I imagine these programs will be the choice for those who want to save disk space or speed up their system. Such a project would work in C. If it was in C, it would probably get more developers on board too...
It's good that they are trying to save disk space, but why don't they just rewrite them so they don't use libc? Linux assembly.org is working on such a project, though it doesn't have to be in assembly. I've done some work using direct syscalls in Linux with C (look at/usr/include/asm--start with unistd.h). I haven't looked at FreeBSD in this way yet, but I think it can be done. At the very least, simple utilities like cp and ln could be written this way. Save disk space and be staticly linked--good all the way around.
There isn't any reason that the same person who reverse engineered the sound card couldn't have written an OS/2 driver. This whole argument is bugus.
While technically this may be true, which system do you think such people would most likely use? A closed one where they will probably have to buy books, register with a site to get specs (possibly with an NDA), and won't be able to send in bugfixes/feature enhancements to the core system...or an open system where they have the source and quite possibly lots of documentation for free--no registration, no NDAs. My bet would be on the open system.
When they make a product they need to make it as cheaply as possible to maximize profit while protecting their investment. If they have the resources to make 1 driver then they will make a driver for the product with the largest market share.
I understand that. It's also cheaper to have other people write your drivers for free. That was my point.
Then open the driver source/HW doc's you say.. The only problem with this is that often times what makes one vendors product better than another vendors product is something in the driver package.
This may be true with winmodem crap (where the software does all the work), but not 3d video cards. The core is run by a complex processor specialized for rendering 3d images. It has to be more difficult than designing the main CPU, and the methods to use Intel's CPU are open, yet they have only one serious competitor--AMD. Why do you think that is? Because it is very difficult to create a fast, stable processing chip.
A GPU may be more specialized, but it also needs to process tonnes of operands in parallel while doing complex calculations on each one individually. What is in the driver would only reveal the tip of the iceburg. Saying a competitor could reverse engineer the chip from an open driver is laughable. If the card didn't have a GPU and their product was a 3d software driver, then what you said would be true, but it isn't.
You may want to look around. The project you describe probably already exists. The only one like this I can think if is PicoGUI, however I'm not sure if it has all the features you described.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a terminal window that actually knew the difference between a canvas and a text widget on the server side and acted appropriately?
How I understand it, X does this because it was made for a server/terminal model--the server running X clients, and cheaper terminals running the X "server". Expecting the terminal to use more processing power would mean either more expensive terminals or poor performance. Why else would X have been designed this way? X was created long ago when the mainframes ran the code and ruled the world.
It sounds like you don't want X at all. I believe there are several projects which work similar to what you describe. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is PicoGUI. Maybe I just don't know enough about the X protocol, but it seems to me it would be easier to start over, and it appears some have done so. If you're serious about wanting those features in a display server, then you may want to start using/working on one of these projects and help evangelize it.
I don't have enough problems with X to see the point in switching yet. Though I do recognize it as archaic and understand why one of these projects may be better. If I had the time and patience, I'd probably try to help out, but I don't...maybe you will fare better. I suppose it'd be time better spent than on something like Xouvert. Not to knock the guy who started the project--Xouvert will most likely be useful. The only problem is getting the video card manufacturer's support for "rogue" systems...
This problem has nothing to do with "Free" operating systems. It's about vendor support. You'd have just as much trouble (if not more) getting your card to work with OS/2, Be, a Mac, or whatever if the vendor doesn't support the system.
I used OS/2 for a while, but my sound card didn't work because the vendor only made Windows drivers, yet it worked in Linux because some guy (or a few guys) had soundcards with the same chipset, so they figured it out and wrote a driver. In a closed system, if you don't have vendor support, then you're sunk. In an open system, at least you'll have a chance.
In fact, if the drivers were open sourced ior the vendor supplied interface specs, they'd probably work better and have more support. The vendors are selling hardware, not the drivers, so there isn't a reason to keep this information secret. They say competitors would steal their designs, but I don't believe it. The hardest part is the internals of the chips--you don't get that from drivers and interface specs.
Yeah, sure companies cloned the SoundBlaster design, but a sound card is just a fancy D/A and A/D converter. Not much to it, and they were just cloning the interface because in DOS, there is no such thing as a driver. Eventually there would have been some sort of standard because only stupid people will pay megabucks for a sound card when a $20 card will fill all their needs. This won't work with a 3D video card. They are too complex. Sure, there are discount 3d card manufacturers, but interface specs won't help them at all.
Who cares if they say "virii" or "viruses" or "vereouses" as long as everyone can understand what they say. Mod this guy down. He likes to troll. Look here (Taliban post), or here (trying to upset the Mac folks), here (have a browser check input to prevent buffer overflows on the server? Script kiddies will own your ass!). What idiot mods up a grammar nazi post anyway?
Brightest of the pack??? I stopped using MS products because they were the most shoddy, buggy, poorly designed pieces of crap I have ever seen outside of script kiddie shareware. If their programmers are the "brightest of the pack," then their management must be on crack to be directing them so poorly. MS is a screwed up company. I dealt with their crappy products for nearly a decade, so no one can tell me differently. Their security problems are just the tip of the iceberg. From their DOS print string function which used a dollar sign for termination[1] to Windows which would automaticly change settings to the wrong values because they think their three lines of code knows better than the user.
[1] Yeah, you heard right a printable character, so if anyone needed to print a string with a dollar sign in the middle, they would have to print the first half of the string, output a dollar sign with a different function, and print the second half of the string. No wonder most programmers used the BIOS functions or direct access to the video card for display. They'd do it even where DOS would've been more appropriate. Don't even get me started about the bugs in the console functions. These are simple things any inbred script kiddie could do. They had years to work on them, yet DOS still had problems.
Which one? I think there were several, though I don't recall any of them affecting me--they all seemed to be cause by obscure stuff or in experimental drivers. The one specific incident I remember was a problem with ext3 not writing all the data on umount. If you synced before unmounting, you didn't lose data. I know Slackware puts a sync in the shutdown script, so I bet most Slackware users running ext3 didn't see the problem except when manually umounting filesystems. Ext3 was rather new then (still is), and I elected not to use it. In fact, I still go with ext2.
The only problem I've ever had with ext2 was when I pulled out a floppy while it was writing. Hosed the disk pretty bad. I used minixfs for floppies from then on. I suppose it happened because ext2 is optimized for speed, not data recovery. If you want that, then go with FreeBSD's soft update and disable disk write caching.
Maybe I haven't experienced problems with Linux because I just haven't encountered the brunt of Linux bugs, or maybe it's because I stay away from most experimental code and new features. Though I don't think Linux has nearly as many problems as MS flunkies try to make it out. My primary reason for migrating from MS to Linux was all the stupid problems with MS software--especially their OS, and the fact Linux had almost no problems. No matter what I did, Windows would crash at least a couple times a day. Linux almost never crashes, and when it does, I have been able to trace it down to either a hardware problem or a massive misconfiguration on my part.
Grumble. Grumble. Doesn't anyone on/. have an imagination? The file names could be things like "man_packs_fudge.zip" or "man_on_the_pacific.exe" or "pack_them_rabbits_man.rpm". You don't have to use "warezPacMan.zip" as a filename to set off these bots.
Oh, and saying "Pac Man sucks!!" is an opinion and free speech. Those who abuse the court system may try to sue a person over it and cost them lawyer fees, but it is their right to say if they hate Pac Man or not!
Yeah, but the honeypot doesn't have to have filenames like "warez-PacMan.zip", it could have names like "man_packs_fudge.zip" and "christinas_binary_utilities_stripped.tgz" all with legitimate data in them. If done right, the honeypot wouldn't even look like a honeypot.
This is a lot worse than just scaring Joe Blow. When they send these letters to Joe Blow's ISP or hosting service, Joe Blow may lose his account, or at the very least, his site will be down until he can get the problem resolved.
Just imagine if you have a small business on the internet, and you happen to sell a product called "Man on the Pacific" and the filename is man_on_pacific.html. You could lose a lot of money if the ESA sent a DMCA complaint, your hosting dropped you site, they reqest you sign a affidavit saying you didn't violate Pac Man's copyright (like they are supposed to under the DMCA), and it took a few hours (or even days) before you could assure the hosting company there wasn't a problem. The hosting service may even just drop you because they're afraid of legal action.
This is pure crap and shows how the DMCA hurts legitimate interests while does little or nothing to stop copyright infringment. The people who infringe copyrights will just move on to another ISP/hoster and consider it "the cost of doing business."
You are on crack. Did you even read the fucking letter? Did you even read what cshields2 (the user who submitted the story) wrote? They both say the filename was INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip and the shitheads at ESA claimed it was Pac Man!!!!!!! If I have a file at my site named my_friend_christina_stripped_down_on_new_years.jpg or jason_arrested_for_grand_theft_auto.zip or christina_binaries_stripped.tgz, I am not misrepresenting what my file contains, nor am I violating the copyrights of the people who own the video game "Grand Theft Auto" or Christina Auglera's song "Stripped".
I've have the exact opposite experience. I've bought plenty of mice, and the only ones I had problems with were MS and Logitech. The Logitech one was dead before I even used it. Yeah, I did have a non-MS, non-Logitech cheap $10 mouse (Keysonic I think) die after a year, but I considered that resonable.
It's strange though. In my experience, it seems the cheaper brand mice seem to be more durable than the more expensive ones. Some of them may not glide as smoothly, and may be more likely to collect gunk on the rollers, but they don't seem to have as many problems. I'm using a cheapo generic optical mouse, and aside from the scroll wheel doubling as the third button, I think it's great.
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The first half of my point was a non-infringing site shouldn't go down at all. Even if the site is down for an hour, that is an hour the site owner was unjustly denied free speech and services they paid for. However, if the Hosting service/ISP was being paraniod (and you would be paranoid too if you were threatend by a huge lawsuit which could take down your business), they may require the affidavit be sent by snail mail. The site could be down for days. How is this not a problem? Maybe you have a crap site which doesn't matter to you, but there are plenty of people who have sites which are very important to them. Some of which the webmaster is dependent for a living.
The second point was: who says the ISP will put the site back up? For whatever reason they may fear legal trouble or harassment from the organization who filed the complaint. They may turn out to be theiving scumbags and use this as an excuse to keep the money without providing the rest of the service or fine the webmaster. Look in some hosting agreements. These types of clauses are common (and somewhat necessary because of abuse).
You call yourself a real /. reader? HA! Real /. readers custom code their own audio codecs and triple encrypt them. Only they are able to listen to their audio files! Let's see the RIAA stormtroopers steal my song "moncyb-In Soviet Russia-the Natasha chronicles.mecommieformat"!
Funny, everything I've read about the DMCA says the ISP is required to take down the site first (otherwise risk a lawsuit), and if the customer didn't violate copyright, they are supposed to sign an affidavit saying they didn't, then the ISP may put the site back up if they are so inclined.
Far different than what you said, and a big pain in the ass for the victim--if the ISP doesn't want to risk being sued, the site will be down for a while.
Yeah, but ln and cp do not need PAM or NSS or libc, so why use them?
Indeed, but then you are not statically linking in the entire libc system, which is the problem. I'm not against linking a bunch of .o files together, I just don't see the point in cramming tonnes of libc functions into a binary which doesn't need them and ends up more bloated as a result.
Why? Do programs such as cp, ln, and touch really need libc? Why make something the size of a small paperback book connected to four huge wheels when you can just carry it around in your pocket?
So you are saying rewrite libc? Is this not reinventing the wheel? Not that it is a bad idea, but how is it different?
Why thank you. I'm glad I have your permission now. I just might do that--I already have ls, sleep, touch, uname done. ;-)
Yes, these programs don't work on non-IA32 systems, but if someone needs to save space or wants more speed and they have an IA32 system, why not use them? The same thing could be done in C, thus preserving portability...
What about the innocent people? Do you feel it is acceptable for the RIAA to spam the internet with tonnes of DMCA complaints, knowing full well a significant amount of these are false and may lead to the loss of internet access and business of innocent people?
Their bots cast a wide net. Any file which has a word containing the same word as a RIAA member's song or artist name has a significant risk of getting a DMCA complaint. How is this fair? How can this be considered acceptable? You don't see retail store owners walking around to apartment complexes and telling the landlord "I think the people in apartment X shoplifted in my store, kick them out" and by law the landlord would have comply. That would be nonsense, yet the RIAA is doing the exact same sort of thing on the internet.
What about free speech? What about costs and profit loss of these innocent victims of the DMCA? What about those people who are now stalked by whackos because the DMCA force their ISP to give out their home address? Sending a false legal complaint is just as bad, if not worse, than infringing copyright.
Along the same lines: Why should people like me who don't violate copyright laws have to pay "royalites" on CD burners and blank CDs? I don't go around demanding a "royalty" from innocent people to compensate for crimes committed against me. Do you believe all knives should be charged a "royalty" paid to stabbing victims? We all know people who own knives are murders. Nice people use forks to cut their meat.
How about some utils which are written in assembly and are not dependent upon other libs? They're faster and smaller. You may want to look at LinuxAssembly.org's asm utils. They say it works for FreeBSD and other BSDs, though I haven't tested this myself (yet). When I tried them in Linux a few years ago, they weren't quite complete, but being small and independent has its advantages. When it's complete (maybe it is now?), I imagine these programs will be the choice for those who want to save disk space or speed up their system. Such a project would work in C. If it was in C, it would probably get more developers on board too...
It's good that they are trying to save disk space, but why don't they just rewrite them so they don't use libc? Linux assembly.org is working on such a project, though it doesn't have to be in assembly. I've done some work using direct syscalls in Linux with C (look at /usr/include/asm--start with unistd.h). I haven't looked at FreeBSD in this way yet, but I think it can be done. At the very least, simple utilities like cp and ln could be written this way. Save disk space and be staticly linked--good all the way around.
While technically this may be true, which system do you think such people would most likely use? A closed one where they will probably have to buy books, register with a site to get specs (possibly with an NDA), and won't be able to send in bugfixes/feature enhancements to the core system...or an open system where they have the source and quite possibly lots of documentation for free--no registration, no NDAs. My bet would be on the open system.
I understand that. It's also cheaper to have other people write your drivers for free. That was my point.
This may be true with winmodem crap (where the software does all the work), but not 3d video cards. The core is run by a complex processor specialized for rendering 3d images. It has to be more difficult than designing the main CPU, and the methods to use Intel's CPU are open, yet they have only one serious competitor--AMD. Why do you think that is? Because it is very difficult to create a fast, stable processing chip.
A GPU may be more specialized, but it also needs to process tonnes of operands in parallel while doing complex calculations on each one individually. What is in the driver would only reveal the tip of the iceburg. Saying a competitor could reverse engineer the chip from an open driver is laughable. If the card didn't have a GPU and their product was a 3d software driver, then what you said would be true, but it isn't.
You may want to look around. The project you describe probably already exists. The only one like this I can think if is PicoGUI, however I'm not sure if it has all the features you described.
How I understand it, X does this because it was made for a server/terminal model--the server running X clients, and cheaper terminals running the X "server". Expecting the terminal to use more processing power would mean either more expensive terminals or poor performance. Why else would X have been designed this way? X was created long ago when the mainframes ran the code and ruled the world.
It sounds like you don't want X at all. I believe there are several projects which work similar to what you describe. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is PicoGUI. Maybe I just don't know enough about the X protocol, but it seems to me it would be easier to start over, and it appears some have done so. If you're serious about wanting those features in a display server, then you may want to start using/working on one of these projects and help evangelize it.
I don't have enough problems with X to see the point in switching yet. Though I do recognize it as archaic and understand why one of these projects may be better. If I had the time and patience, I'd probably try to help out, but I don't...maybe you will fare better. I suppose it'd be time better spent than on something like Xouvert. Not to knock the guy who started the project--Xouvert will most likely be useful. The only problem is getting the video card manufacturer's support for "rogue" systems...
This problem has nothing to do with "Free" operating systems. It's about vendor support. You'd have just as much trouble (if not more) getting your card to work with OS/2, Be, a Mac, or whatever if the vendor doesn't support the system.
I used OS/2 for a while, but my sound card didn't work because the vendor only made Windows drivers, yet it worked in Linux because some guy (or a few guys) had soundcards with the same chipset, so they figured it out and wrote a driver. In a closed system, if you don't have vendor support, then you're sunk. In an open system, at least you'll have a chance.
In fact, if the drivers were open sourced ior the vendor supplied interface specs, they'd probably work better and have more support. The vendors are selling hardware, not the drivers, so there isn't a reason to keep this information secret. They say competitors would steal their designs, but I don't believe it. The hardest part is the internals of the chips--you don't get that from drivers and interface specs.
Yeah, sure companies cloned the SoundBlaster design, but a sound card is just a fancy D/A and A/D converter. Not much to it, and they were just cloning the interface because in DOS, there is no such thing as a driver. Eventually there would have been some sort of standard because only stupid people will pay megabucks for a sound card when a $20 card will fill all their needs. This won't work with a 3D video card. They are too complex. Sure, there are discount 3d card manufacturers, but interface specs won't help them at all.
Who cares if they say "virii" or "viruses" or "vereouses" as long as everyone can understand what they say. Mod this guy down. He likes to troll. Look here (Taliban post), or here (trying to upset the Mac folks), here (have a browser check input to prevent buffer overflows on the server? Script kiddies will own your ass!). What idiot mods up a grammar nazi post anyway?
Microsoft BSA utility which scans your computer? Methinks Pharmboy will get a visit from the stormtroopers tomorrow. ;-)
Stormtrooper via megaphone says: "Alright everyone. Hands off the computers. This is a license audit!"
Brightest of the pack??? I stopped using MS products because they were the most shoddy, buggy, poorly designed pieces of crap I have ever seen outside of script kiddie shareware. If their programmers are the "brightest of the pack," then their management must be on crack to be directing them so poorly. MS is a screwed up company. I dealt with their crappy products for nearly a decade, so no one can tell me differently. Their security problems are just the tip of the iceberg. From their DOS print string function which used a dollar sign for termination[1] to Windows which would automaticly change settings to the wrong values because they think their three lines of code knows better than the user.
[1] Yeah, you heard right a printable character, so if anyone needed to print a string with a dollar sign in the middle, they would have to print the first half of the string, output a dollar sign with a different function, and print the second half of the string. No wonder most programmers used the BIOS functions or direct access to the video card for display. They'd do it even where DOS would've been more appropriate. Don't even get me started about the bugs in the console functions. These are simple things any inbred script kiddie could do. They had years to work on them, yet DOS still had problems.
Which one? I think there were several, though I don't recall any of them affecting me--they all seemed to be cause by obscure stuff or in experimental drivers. The one specific incident I remember was a problem with ext3 not writing all the data on umount. If you synced before unmounting, you didn't lose data. I know Slackware puts a sync in the shutdown script, so I bet most Slackware users running ext3 didn't see the problem except when manually umounting filesystems. Ext3 was rather new then (still is), and I elected not to use it. In fact, I still go with ext2.
The only problem I've ever had with ext2 was when I pulled out a floppy while it was writing. Hosed the disk pretty bad. I used minixfs for floppies from then on. I suppose it happened because ext2 is optimized for speed, not data recovery. If you want that, then go with FreeBSD's soft update and disable disk write caching.
Maybe I haven't experienced problems with Linux because I just haven't encountered the brunt of Linux bugs, or maybe it's because I stay away from most experimental code and new features. Though I don't think Linux has nearly as many problems as MS flunkies try to make it out. My primary reason for migrating from MS to Linux was all the stupid problems with MS software--especially their OS, and the fact Linux had almost no problems. No matter what I did, Windows would crash at least a couple times a day. Linux almost never crashes, and when it does, I have been able to trace it down to either a hardware problem or a massive misconfiguration on my part.
Did anyone else look at the title and think it said: "Cows Identified by Rectal Imaging"???
Grumble. Grumble. Doesn't anyone on /. have an imagination? The file names could be things like "man_packs_fudge.zip" or "man_on_the_pacific.exe" or "pack_them_rabbits_man.rpm". You don't have to use "warezPacMan.zip" as a filename to set off these bots.
Oh, and saying "Pac Man sucks!!" is an opinion and free speech. Those who abuse the court system may try to sue a person over it and cost them lawyer fees, but it is their right to say if they hate Pac Man or not!
Yeah, but the honeypot doesn't have to have filenames like "warez-PacMan.zip", it could have names like "man_packs_fudge.zip" and "christinas_binary_utilities_stripped.tgz" all with legitimate data in them. If done right, the honeypot wouldn't even look like a honeypot.
This is a lot worse than just scaring Joe Blow. When they send these letters to Joe Blow's ISP or hosting service, Joe Blow may lose his account, or at the very least, his site will be down until he can get the problem resolved.
Just imagine if you have a small business on the internet, and you happen to sell a product called "Man on the Pacific" and the filename is man_on_pacific.html. You could lose a lot of money if the ESA sent a DMCA complaint, your hosting dropped you site, they reqest you sign a affidavit saying you didn't violate Pac Man's copyright (like they are supposed to under the DMCA), and it took a few hours (or even days) before you could assure the hosting company there wasn't a problem. The hosting service may even just drop you because they're afraid of legal action.
This is pure crap and shows how the DMCA hurts legitimate interests while does little or nothing to stop copyright infringment. The people who infringe copyrights will just move on to another ISP/hoster and consider it "the cost of doing business."
You are on crack. Did you even read the fucking letter? Did you even read what cshields2 (the user who submitted the story) wrote? They both say the filename was INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip and the shitheads at ESA claimed it was Pac Man!!!!!!! If I have a file at my site named my_friend_christina_stripped_down_on_new_years.jpg or jason_arrested_for_grand_theft_auto.zip or christina_binaries_stripped.tgz, I am not misrepresenting what my file contains, nor am I violating the copyrights of the people who own the video game "Grand Theft Auto" or Christina Auglera's song "Stripped".
I've have the exact opposite experience. I've bought plenty of mice, and the only ones I had problems with were MS and Logitech. The Logitech one was dead before I even used it. Yeah, I did have a non-MS, non-Logitech cheap $10 mouse (Keysonic I think) die after a year, but I considered that resonable.
It's strange though. In my experience, it seems the cheaper brand mice seem to be more durable than the more expensive ones. Some of them may not glide as smoothly, and may be more likely to collect gunk on the rollers, but they don't seem to have as many problems. I'm using a cheapo generic optical mouse, and aside from the scroll wheel doubling as the third button, I think it's great.