Come on, this is ridiculous. Every half-competent IT staffer in the country understands the value in free products ranging from IE to gcc.
That's not quite the same. First, a web browser isn't as complex as an office suite. Second, vendors earn money when people use their browser (because it is linked to the vendor's web portal). Third, people do pay money to Microsoft for their Windows licenses.
With StarOffice, the situation is quite different: it's more complex, Sun doesn't profit when people use the product, and if you're installing it on a Windows desktop, you usually haven't yet paid any money to Sun.
gcc cannot really be compared to an office application: the "costs of user training" argument doesn't apply, since C and C++ are standards. Source code is exchanged with other companies less often, and even if it is, the file formats are not incompatible, so the "stick to the standard formats" argument also doesn't apply. Also note that gcc is not developed by a commercial entity, so the question of how they earn money with the product is easily answered with "they don't want to." Sun on the other hand is a commercial company, so wondering how they'll profit from StarOffice is a very valid question.
BTW, regarding gcc's competition to commercial compilers, it should be noted that gcc is available for Windows as well, but many people still purchase Visual C++ or other commercial compilers.
I think companies should be required to clearly mark crippled products as such. The average customer expects that when he buys a video recorder, he can use it to record any films he likes. If that's not possible, the recorder should be sold with an obvious label on the box that says "will not record some movies."
I know that some so-called liberals will scream about such requirements being overregulation, but they are not. Free markets are all about being able to chose the product you like best. How can you make a purchase descision if you don't know all the facts?
In Germany, many lawyers argue that if you purchase a music CD and it doesn't play in your computer, you have the right to return it, unless you knew about the restriction before. Interestingly enough, many new CDs (mostly the mainstream chart music) now carry a label that says "will NOT play on PC/Mac," and are not labeled "compact disc digital audio" any more. I haven't purchased any of them yet, and will avoid doing so as long as possible.
I heard MacOS X has some wacky 'services' thing similar to cut-and-paste that involves passing mime-ified data around between apps. ANybody know details on this?
But OS X doesn't run an X Window System by default.
What would be interesting to know is if cut & paste on OS X also works between X applications using different toolkits and between X applications and Aqua applications when you run a rootless X server in parallel to the Aqua desktop. If that does work, than Apple's system might indeed be interesting for Linux as well.
And if you man grep you'll see the -C switch, which you can then do:
grep -C2 DocumentRoot MyFile.xml
<DocumentRoot> /some/path
</DocumentRoot>
Yes, but how does that help me if I want to process the data filtered by grep in a script which expects a single line as input? Anyway, several other posters have pointed out the existence of grep-like tools for XML, so I think I should take a look at those before I continue to claim that using XML config files makes scripted maintanance harder.
I would think that is rather easy, use some kind of XML and you're already halfway there.
No no no. XML is not the magic solution to all problems in communication, data storage and usability. Using XML does have many advantages for some applications, like communicating over the internet, but I don't see how
<DocumentRoot>/some/path
</DocumentRoot>
is so much more usable than
DocumentRoot/some/path
The only thing XML will do if widely used for configuration files is make maintaining them harder for those who'd like to do that by using shell scripts or simple text editors. As a very basic example, using XML makes configuration files harder to grep. The above example might also be written like this:
<DocumentRoot> /some/path
</DocumentRoot>
This is completely legal XML, but if you
grep DocumentRoot this file, you'll get the following result:
It's even more scary for me. I live in Germany, where digital signature are treated almost equally to normal signatures in many areas (the laws are based on European legislation, so other European Union member countries should have similar laws). Digital signatures aren't widely used yet, but I think you'll agree that such laws have lots of potential uses.
I am, however, very worried about legally binding signatures being subject to patent issues. Signatures are commonly used to sign contracts of high legal importance, where at least one party wants to have written proof of the contract. Having digital signatures convered by patents will make free software implementations more difficult or even impossible, and the idea that signing a contract will be possible only in ways that the signees don't completely undestand and cannot fully control (because the implementation is proprietary) certainly doesn't sound like a good idea for a democracy.
No. The XML encoding might be simple, but the semantics of the various applications of XML get increasingly complex.
E.g. take a look at the XML Schema standard. Take a look at the RDF standard. Take a look at XML Formatting Objects. I agree with the original poster, the web standards are getting more and more complex, but on the other hand, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing -- the standards are still available publicly, and anyone is free to use them (well, except for the patent issues). If the W3C simply stopped creating new, more complex standards, other companies would do that, potentially creating standards that are much less open.
And, let's be serious, writing HTML code with a plain text editor is not exactly democratic technology anyway.
At the time at which GIF became standard, the licensing issues were not known, so it appeared to be an open standard.
Oh, and there are a whole lot more more people using MP3 than Ogg.
MP3 might be a closed standard, but at least no license fees are to be paid for distributing players (as far as I know, they're only required for encoders) or content.
Also note that, similar to GIF, when MP3 took off, encoders were developed without paying license fees as well. The license fees were not requested before MP3 already was popular, and even then, there was a lot of discussion about whether this would stop MP3. But there was no free alternative ready at that time.
Oh, and uh - Isn't Flash a pretty darn closed standard?
No, it's not. It's documented similar to PDF. Besides, I wouldn't exactly call Flash an internet standard, it's more a marketing and salespeople standard;-)
What about that Windows thing? I think it has a pretty wide installed user base. Doesn't it? Not to mention Internet Explorer.
The original poster didn't claim that all implementations of the standards were free, but that the standards themselves were. IP, HTTP, HTML etc. are all open standards. The fact that they're implemented by proprietary products like Windows or Internet Explorer doesn't make the standards less open.
Re:The answer to being slashdotted..
on
Linux on the iMac G4
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's called The Slash Hole, and has been done before. Though I can currently reach imaclinux.net. They either used something different, or they've already changed their settings back to normal.
Books in libraries are available with an openly specified protocol, in a public place, for anyone to access. They even provide photocopiers.
So, you're claiming that even though we now have new technologies available (like being able to view the books stored in different libraries while not even physically walking into any of them), we should still limit our use of those technologies to what has been possible before?
If I go and photocopy the latest John Grisham novel and put it in my library, you bet I'm risking trouble.
And on the internet, you're even risking trouble if you point people to the library where they can read it.
[...] To get the security problems for Linux, he adds all security announcements from each of the major distributions - completely ignoring that most of those announcements are for the same bug. [...]
I can't connect to WinInformant, but if you look at the numbers available at SecurityFocus, you'll see that they did not simply add up the numbers. Linux is listet with 96 aggregated vulnerabilities for 2001, while e.g. Red Hat has 54, Debian got 28, and Mandrake got 36. There are more Linux distributions listed, but these numbers allone show that your claim is wrong (unless WinInformant has different numbers).
You'll also see that Red Hat had 54 vulnerabilities while Windows 2000 had only 42.
However, I'd still agree that the WinInformant article is badly researched (but please note that, as stated above, I've not read it, I only know the part that Slashdot quoted). The article claims that Windows is more secure "according to the reputable NTBugTraq," however, SecurityFocus does not make any claim concerning the security of either Windows or Linux, they just make the numbers available as a statistic. In other words, WinInformant doesn't have any source for their claims, they just found some more or less interesting numbers and made up a story.
Why would that be a problem? Right now, take a look at e.g. Grub (the GNU boot loader), which can read several different file systems and load the appropriate files for booting. There's nothing that would stop Grub from understanding MS's database storage format and retrieving the appropriate records for booting. MS's own bootloader can probably do the trick, so why can't Grub? (Yes, this assumes that MS documents the storage format. I hope they will.)
Concerning other boot media, like floppys or CDs, there's nothing that will stop you from continuing ot use an ordinary file system on those.
What about the way MS keeps things hidden from you? Try this in XP: make a directory. Put 1 file in it called "testme" with no file extension. Open the file and type in the word "apple". Now do a search for all files containing the word apple in that directory. Windows won't find it.
I suppose Windows has a problem with the missing file extension here. Maybe they search all files that match "*.*" (which are less files than all that match "*"). Also note that you can still open and read the file, but the search feature won't do so, so this is not related to the filesystem, but a bug in the search feature.
What happens when you do something with a file that the relational database can't handle?
There is nothing I can think of that you can do with a file and cannot do with a filesystem implemented on top of a database.
If you saw someone walking around your house and trying the doors and windows, you'd call the police right away, wouldn't you?
Yeah, but my house is private, I don't want anyone to get in there (unless invited).
On the other hand, when you put a server onto the internet, you usually want others to connect to it. And you can't really blame anyone for asking you what kind of services you provide. Having a server is more like having a shop. It's not illegal to look at what products a shop offers, even though that might be in preparation for shoplifting.
I don't think port scans are a good thing, as they're mostly done to prepare some sort of attack. However I am very opposed to making them illegal, because it would mean making the attempt to connect with a port that the admin didn't want you to connect with a criminal act. But how can you know (before trying to connect) if the admin would allow you to connect? An activity should never be a crime if before doing it you cannot know whether it will be legal or not.
Sysadmins are, of course, free to refuse connections form computers that portscan their systems. The real problem is not that they don't report portscans -- the real problem is that many admins don't even notice them! While it's not essential to notice port scans, it certainly is essential to protect your system from real attacks, and many admins don't even do that. This is where they are to blame.
See, if you want to keep something anonymous, you definitely shouldn't sign it.
Usually you sign something to give more legal weight to e.g. a contract. It's actually a very good idea to know the identity of whom you make business with, especially if it's a contract that you feel requires the extra legal trustworthyness that a signature gives to it.
Also note that you cannot comglomarate data simply by knowing a name. You can collect e.g. all the purchase data of your customers (if you have their names, e.g. in online or mail order business), but you can also do that without a digital signature. Digital signatures don't give you access to all data the person has ever signed, only to the things he or she has signed and sent to you. But those documents you also have when they're signed on paper.
I'm not saying this is a non-issue -- digital signatures definitely make tracking easier. But in this case, I'd say the advantages by far outweigh the dangers.
Ever hear someone who develops the HP-UX or AIX kernel blast of a bunch of half baked political rants? i don't think so...
Yes, if you work with them, probably. I'd guess they sometimes chat about politics in their offices just like anyone else is doing.
The office of Linux kernel hackers is the internet. So, when Alan chats with his co-workers, everyone on the net can see that. This doesn't mean he's arrogant or feels like a mighty political figure or something. This impression is created only by the free software world's tabloid press (i.e. Slashdot). It's not like Alan asked for this story to appear on Slashdot, did he?
I know almost nothing about this sort of thing, but is it possible that RH can just say no?
That depends on who you call Red Hat. The management? No, they cannot prevent that (unless they still own more than 50% of the company), they can only try to convince the shareholders to not sell to Red Hat. But even if the management opposes the takeover, the shareholdes are free to sell anyway (that's what is usually called a hostile takeover).
If with Red Hat you're referring to their shareholders (i.e. the owners of the company) they can certainly prevent a buyout by simply not selling. But the current stock price is like, uh, ~$10? And I suspect there are some shareholders who've purchased at a higher price, so if AOL Time Warner makes a good offer (like $20), I'd doubt too many shareholders would decide against taking the money. Especially large, corporate investors from the non-Linux world certainly won't.
I don't believe that they have actually lost $4 billion, because not everyone buys copies, but even if 1% of those people would have bought copies they would have lost $40 million.
There's no way Adobe actually lost $40 million. They might have increased their income by $40M had the product not been pirated, but you lose money only if you spend more than you earn.
It's not that the software industry isn't profitable due to piracy (well, I don't know about China, but they keep telling the same lies about all other markets). However, it looks like the software and media industry is free to lie to you and claim to have losses they never actually had. Note that if you do the same thing with profits, it's a criminal act.
The conclusion is that it is really nonsense to compile _everything_ from source.
You're confusing abstraction with optimization. Abstraction makes sure that you do not have to recompile all your applications, and, in fact, not even the kernel.
Optimization includes making use of the latest features and optimizing for a certain architecture (e.g. Pentium vs. AMD). This usually doesn't make sense if you're shipping precompiled binaries, and abstraction makes sure it's not required. But that doesn't mean optimization shouldn't happen.
Free Software is about having the software configuration you want. Why not extend that to having it tuned for your hardware?
However, I don't believe the overall speed of your average system would increase that much if all binaries had been cpu-optimized
You don't think a Pentium 4 optimized or Athlon optimized executable is much more performant than a generic 486 executable? Besides, even if it's just a 10% increase in speed, why not? You get it for free (well, maybe the installation takes longer due to the compile time, but that's a one-time effort).
Of course, you cannot force anyone to publish the source code they've written. Just like you can't force anyone to tell the world about the inventions they've made. But, if you don't tell about your inventions, you don't get a patent either. The same principle ought to apply to software -- if you want the monopoly that copyright grants to you, you'll have to publish the source code.
The code is your property, but copyright law artificially increases its value, and I think the public should get something in return.
I'm happy to see that Slashdot changes is rhetorics from "copyright protection" to the somewhat preferable "copy protection." However, that term is still completely inaccurate. "Copy protection" does not protect copies. It does not protect your right to make a copy. It does, in fact, not protect anything at all (except the greed of the media industry).
Some of the more accurate terms that you might prefer to use are "copy prevention" (that's what those technologies actually try to do) or "usage control" (that's the effect of copy prevention, e.g. your choice of playback devices is limited). To describe a media that is crippled by usage control technology, you can use something like "restricted use media."
If you think these terms are too political, think about how political the terminology used by the media industry is. The only reason why "copyright protection" doesn't sound completely laughable to you is that you've heard it so often.
Slashdot Mirror
So what? A chess board also doesn't prevent you from moving the pawns sideways.
That's not quite the same. First, a web browser isn't as complex as an office suite. Second, vendors earn money when people use their browser (because it is linked to the vendor's web portal). Third, people do pay money to Microsoft for their Windows licenses.
With StarOffice, the situation is quite different: it's more complex, Sun doesn't profit when people use the product, and if you're installing it on a Windows desktop, you usually haven't yet paid any money to Sun.
gcc cannot really be compared to an office application: the "costs of user training" argument doesn't apply, since C and C++ are standards. Source code is exchanged with other companies less often, and even if it is, the file formats are not incompatible, so the "stick to the standard formats" argument also doesn't apply. Also note that gcc is not developed by a commercial entity, so the question of how they earn money with the product is easily answered with "they don't want to." Sun on the other hand is a commercial company, so wondering how they'll profit from StarOffice is a very valid question.
BTW, regarding gcc's competition to commercial compilers, it should be noted that gcc is available for Windows as well, but many people still purchase Visual C++ or other commercial compilers.
I think companies should be required to clearly mark crippled products as such. The average customer expects that when he buys a video recorder, he can use it to record any films he likes. If that's not possible, the recorder should be sold with an obvious label on the box that says "will not record some movies."
I know that some so-called liberals will scream about such requirements being overregulation, but they are not. Free markets are all about being able to chose the product you like best. How can you make a purchase descision if you don't know all the facts?
In Germany, many lawyers argue that if you purchase a music CD and it doesn't play in your computer, you have the right to return it, unless you knew about the restriction before. Interestingly enough, many new CDs (mostly the mainstream chart music) now carry a label that says "will NOT play on PC/Mac," and are not labeled "compact disc digital audio" any more. I haven't purchased any of them yet, and will avoid doing so as long as possible.
But OS X doesn't run an X Window System by default.
What would be interesting to know is if cut & paste on OS X also works between X applications using different toolkits and between X applications and Aqua applications when you run a rootless X server in parallel to the Aqua desktop. If that does work, than Apple's system might indeed be interesting for Linux as well.
Yes, but how does that help me if I want to process the data filtered by grep in a script which expects a single line as input? Anyway, several other posters have pointed out the existence of grep-like tools for XML, so I think I should take a look at those before I continue to claim that using XML config files makes scripted maintanance harder.
No no no. XML is not the magic solution to all problems in communication, data storage and usability. Using XML does have many advantages for some applications, like communicating over the internet, but I don't see how
<DocumentRoot> /some/path
</DocumentRoot>
is so much more usable than
DocumentRoot /some/path
The only thing XML will do if widely used for configuration files is make maintaining them harder for those who'd like to do that by using shell scripts or simple text editors. As a very basic example, using XML makes configuration files harder to grep. The above example might also be written like this:
<DocumentRoot>
/some/path
</DocumentRoot>
This is completely legal XML, but if you grep DocumentRoot this file, you'll get the following result:
<DocumentRoot>
</DocumentRoot>
which is probably not what you wanted.
It's even more scary for me. I live in Germany, where digital signature are treated almost equally to normal signatures in many areas (the laws are based on European legislation, so other European Union member countries should have similar laws). Digital signatures aren't widely used yet, but I think you'll agree that such laws have lots of potential uses.
I am, however, very worried about legally binding signatures being subject to patent issues. Signatures are commonly used to sign contracts of high legal importance, where at least one party wants to have written proof of the contract. Having digital signatures convered by patents will make free software implementations more difficult or even impossible, and the idea that signing a contract will be possible only in ways that the signees don't completely undestand and cannot fully control (because the implementation is proprietary) certainly doesn't sound like a good idea for a democracy.
No. The XML encoding might be simple, but the semantics of the various applications of XML get increasingly complex.
E.g. take a look at the XML Schema standard. Take a look at the RDF standard. Take a look at XML Formatting Objects. I agree with the original poster, the web standards are getting more and more complex, but on the other hand, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing -- the standards are still available publicly, and anyone is free to use them (well, except for the patent issues). If the W3C simply stopped creating new, more complex standards, other companies would do that, potentially creating standards that are much less open.
And, let's be serious, writing HTML code with a plain text editor is not exactly democratic technology anyway.
At the time at which GIF became standard, the licensing issues were not known, so it appeared to be an open standard.
MP3 might be a closed standard, but at least no license fees are to be paid for distributing players (as far as I know, they're only required for encoders) or content.
Also note that, similar to GIF, when MP3 took off, encoders were developed without paying license fees as well. The license fees were not requested before MP3 already was popular, and even then, there was a lot of discussion about whether this would stop MP3. But there was no free alternative ready at that time.
No, it's not. It's documented similar to PDF. Besides, I wouldn't exactly call Flash an internet standard, it's more a marketing and salespeople standard ;-)
The original poster didn't claim that all implementations of the standards were free, but that the standards themselves were. IP, HTTP, HTML etc. are all open standards. The fact that they're implemented by proprietary products like Windows or Internet Explorer doesn't make the standards less open.
It's called The Slash Hole, and has been done before. Though I can currently reach imaclinux.net. They either used something different, or they've already changed their settings back to normal.
So, you're claiming that even though we now have new technologies available (like being able to view the books stored in different libraries while not even physically walking into any of them), we should still limit our use of those technologies to what has been possible before?
And on the internet, you're even risking trouble if you point people to the library where they can read it.
I can't connect to WinInformant, but if you look at the numbers available at SecurityFocus, you'll see that they did not simply add up the numbers. Linux is listet with 96 aggregated vulnerabilities for 2001, while e.g. Red Hat has 54, Debian got 28, and Mandrake got 36. There are more Linux distributions listed, but these numbers allone show that your claim is wrong (unless WinInformant has different numbers).
You'll also see that Red Hat had 54 vulnerabilities while Windows 2000 had only 42.
However, I'd still agree that the WinInformant article is badly researched (but please note that, as stated above, I've not read it, I only know the part that Slashdot quoted). The article claims that Windows is more secure "according to the reputable NTBugTraq," however, SecurityFocus does not make any claim concerning the security of either Windows or Linux, they just make the numbers available as a statistic. In other words, WinInformant doesn't have any source for their claims, they just found some more or less interesting numbers and made up a story.
Stop, don't slashdot that poor server. Since July 14, 1998, they've only handled 52 hits, and counting (counting quite fast, actually).
And they're not the Securities and Exchange Commission but "La Société Informatique SEC [Service Enseignement Conception]"
Why would that be a problem? Right now, take a look at e.g. Grub (the GNU boot loader), which can read several different file systems and load the appropriate files for booting. There's nothing that would stop Grub from understanding MS's database storage format and retrieving the appropriate records for booting. MS's own bootloader can probably do the trick, so why can't Grub? (Yes, this assumes that MS documents the storage format. I hope they will.)
Concerning other boot media, like floppys or CDs, there's nothing that will stop you from continuing ot use an ordinary file system on those.
I suppose Windows has a problem with the missing file extension here. Maybe they search all files that match "*.*" (which are less files than all that match "*"). Also note that you can still open and read the file, but the search feature won't do so, so this is not related to the filesystem, but a bug in the search feature.
There is nothing I can think of that you can do with a file and cannot do with a filesystem implemented on top of a database.
Yeah, but my house is private, I don't want anyone to get in there (unless invited).
On the other hand, when you put a server onto the internet, you usually want others to connect to it. And you can't really blame anyone for asking you what kind of services you provide. Having a server is more like having a shop. It's not illegal to look at what products a shop offers, even though that might be in preparation for shoplifting.
I don't think port scans are a good thing, as they're mostly done to prepare some sort of attack. However I am very opposed to making them illegal, because it would mean making the attempt to connect with a port that the admin didn't want you to connect with a criminal act. But how can you know (before trying to connect) if the admin would allow you to connect? An activity should never be a crime if before doing it you cannot know whether it will be legal or not.
Sysadmins are, of course, free to refuse connections form computers that portscan their systems. The real problem is not that they don't report portscans -- the real problem is that many admins don't even notice them! While it's not essential to notice port scans, it certainly is essential to protect your system from real attacks, and many admins don't even do that. This is where they are to blame.
See, if you want to keep something anonymous, you definitely shouldn't sign it.
Usually you sign something to give more legal weight to e.g. a contract. It's actually a very good idea to know the identity of whom you make business with, especially if it's a contract that you feel requires the extra legal trustworthyness that a signature gives to it.
Also note that you cannot comglomarate data simply by knowing a name. You can collect e.g. all the purchase data of your customers (if you have their names, e.g. in online or mail order business), but you can also do that without a digital signature. Digital signatures don't give you access to all data the person has ever signed, only to the things he or she has signed and sent to you. But those documents you also have when they're signed on paper.
I'm not saying this is a non-issue -- digital signatures definitely make tracking easier. But in this case, I'd say the advantages by far outweigh the dangers.
Yes, if you work with them, probably. I'd guess they sometimes chat about politics in their offices just like anyone else is doing.
The office of Linux kernel hackers is the internet. So, when Alan chats with his co-workers, everyone on the net can see that. This doesn't mean he's arrogant or feels like a mighty political figure or something. This impression is created only by the free software world's tabloid press (i.e. Slashdot). It's not like Alan asked for this story to appear on Slashdot, did he?
That depends on who you call Red Hat. The management? No, they cannot prevent that (unless they still own more than 50% of the company), they can only try to convince the shareholders to not sell to Red Hat. But even if the management opposes the takeover, the shareholdes are free to sell anyway (that's what is usually called a hostile takeover).
If with Red Hat you're referring to their shareholders (i.e. the owners of the company) they can certainly prevent a buyout by simply not selling. But the current stock price is like, uh, ~$10? And I suspect there are some shareholders who've purchased at a higher price, so if AOL Time Warner makes a good offer (like $20), I'd doubt too many shareholders would decide against taking the money. Especially large, corporate investors from the non-Linux world certainly won't.
There's no way Adobe actually lost $40 million. They might have increased their income by $40M had the product not been pirated, but you lose money only if you spend more than you earn.
It's not that the software industry isn't profitable due to piracy (well, I don't know about China, but they keep telling the same lies about all other markets). However, it looks like the software and media industry is free to lie to you and claim to have losses they never actually had. Note that if you do the same thing with profits, it's a criminal act.
You're confusing abstraction with optimization. Abstraction makes sure that you do not have to recompile all your applications, and, in fact, not even the kernel.
Optimization includes making use of the latest features and optimizing for a certain architecture (e.g. Pentium vs. AMD). This usually doesn't make sense if you're shipping precompiled binaries, and abstraction makes sure it's not required. But that doesn't mean optimization shouldn't happen.
Free Software is about having the software configuration you want. Why not extend that to having it tuned for your hardware?
You don't think a Pentium 4 optimized or Athlon optimized executable is much more performant than a generic 486 executable? Besides, even if it's just a 10% increase in speed, why not? You get it for free (well, maybe the installation takes longer due to the compile time, but that's a one-time effort).
Of course, you cannot force anyone to publish the source code they've written. Just like you can't force anyone to tell the world about the inventions they've made. But, if you don't tell about your inventions, you don't get a patent either. The same principle ought to apply to software -- if you want the monopoly that copyright grants to you, you'll have to publish the source code.
The code is your property, but copyright law artificially increases its value, and I think the public should get something in return.
I'm happy to see that Slashdot changes is rhetorics from "copyright protection" to the somewhat preferable "copy protection." However, that term is still completely inaccurate. "Copy protection" does not protect copies. It does not protect your right to make a copy. It does, in fact, not protect anything at all (except the greed of the media industry).
Some of the more accurate terms that you might prefer to use are "copy prevention" (that's what those technologies actually try to do) or "usage control" (that's the effect of copy prevention, e.g. your choice of playback devices is limited). To describe a media that is crippled by usage control technology, you can use something like "restricted use media."
If you think these terms are too political, think about how political the terminology used by the media industry is. The only reason why "copyright protection" doesn't sound completely laughable to you is that you've heard it so often.
<nitpick>
1,234,243,324,234 / (1,234,243,324,234 + 98,234,242,123) = 0.926277... != 0.99
</nitpick>
Or that he was smart enough to not send the mail from within the Microsoft network, but from his home machine.
I knew that, but the original poster wrote "5.500 DM" and "2,811 EUROS," i.e. he mixed the two conventions. That's why I asked.