Welp, guess it's back to cherrypicking the best tracks off Kazaa. Which of course maintains the "integrity" of the work (viz: sound quality) infinitely better.
When are these people going to realize the magnitude of the competition they're facing? Hello? Free, easy, fast, ubiquitous--you aren't really in a position to bargain with today's P2P networks...
In other news, exposure to electromagnetic radiation has been linked to brain cancer. There's some sort of diminshing returns argument to be made here, but I spent too long frying my brain with the Savant-o-Matic(TM), and now it just won't come to me.
You have two consoles before you. On the left, the blue console. It has a full catalog of DRM-restricted songs made by many major record labels. You are not allowed to burn those songs, listen to the in your car or portably, and each downloaded song costs one U.S. dollar. If your hard drive crashes and takes your licenses with it, you've lost rights to all the songs you once had, and you must buy them again. Downloads are quick and easy.
One the right, the red console: a vibrant P2P network teeming with shares. It has perhaps 50% of the musical selection blue, but with the added benefit of hundreds of terabytes worth of movies, software, images, and, well, above all, porn. All content is free, based on open standards, and unrestricted. Downloads are quick for popular media, but can take days or even weeks for hard-to-find items.
Which would you choose?
C'mon, be honest. That the latter exists right now and the former isn't even close to is beside the point. Human nature being what it is, blue has almost no chance of ever succeding while red is right there by its side.
Grousing about rejected submissions is, I know, verboten. But seriously, I miss the old/. days when the site had no lawyers and lots of balls. The editors these days seem to have a stuck "Boring" key or something, A better title (e.g. mine) would have been:
CNBC rewards Rosen's failure, incompetence by making her rich
Now that's a title that says something. I had some witty line the body about the Peter Principle. It was all good.
Ick.. how absurd. Horrible umpires, fans booing bad calls, batters flipping out over what they thought was ball four... are all part of what makes baseball, baseball. Fans of professional tennis will note that this silly obsession with so-called "digital" accuracy has already come and gone on the ATP, where that annoying "beep" machine that called service faults has been (thank God) decomissioned, thanks in no small part to the on-air fumings of one John McEnroe. I hope they will do the same with baseball. What'll they think of next, some machine to neutralize the smell of the ballpark?:)
...huge volume of self sacrifice for family, country and religion that's gone on throughout the centuries.
And you're equating that with... writing C code. Riiight. Forgive me for being incredulous.
You ignore the thrust of Rand's argument, which is that basing one's actions on pure altruism--be you an individual person or a nation-state--is a deceptive and ultimately unsustainable existence. It can be done for some period of time, or in an isolated instance. But not forever, lest all come tumbling down.
In the case of open source software development I don't think that things could be any clearer. Try, just try, to imagine any one of the hundreds of vast and wonderfully complex OSS projects out there (Apache, Emacs, Linux, Sendmail, XFree, to name a few) coming into being without a deeply personal and intellectual attachment to it on the part of its authors. There's no way--you might be able to slog through a couple hard days of coding, or some minor project, by telling yourself the world will be better off with your work. But said projects aren't minor. They're immense. What keeps them coming back to the screen, pounding the keyboard, plugging away, day after day, is just simply not some distal committment to another's well-being. It's the intellectual pleasure that they derive from coding. And that, alas, is selfishness.
Time to brush up on your Ayn Rand and your ESR. Most open-source developers (including me) couldn't care less about "the benefit of everyone on earth", "the common good", or any of those other throwaway commie bromides. We're doing it to "scratch an itch"--either we want some software that doesn't currently exist, and the fastest way to make it exist is to fire up a project and harness the collborative power of the Internet; or we're intellectually attracted to some or another project that our day job doesn't let us touch on. Assuming we even code for a day job. It has way less to do with altruism than you make it sound. Humans are selfish.
By many accounts, we've never had it harder--the slump in the 80's primarily hit blue-collar workers.
Then go get a blue collar job. The very fact that you have a computer, Internet access, and are a Slashdot reader probably places you somewhere north of the 95th percentile of material wealth in this world. Trust me--things could be much worse.
*sigh* Sometimes I think the elitists are right in that most people don't get it.
And most of the time I think the rest of the world is right in that Slashdot readers are the densest, most pathetically humorless bunch of sods on the planet. It was a joke. Funny, he haw, laugh chuckle, ya' know?
For a government that professes to be so concerned with religion, you'd think they'd have a better grasp of the forbidden fruit phenomenon. Can anyone remember the last time something got banned where the immediate effect wasn't to greatly increase popular interest and desire for said product? RIAA sues Napster, the next day there appears a frontpage story in every newspaper in America about this great new service that lets people download music gratis. End result: 50 million new users for Napster. CD-R tax in Canada and everyone buys a thousand, just in case. Considering I could FTP a really good, 3 SVCD Centropy Telesync over to some friend in Egypt this instant, one wonders precisely how many seconds it will take before this silly "ban" is circumvented and kids are burning copies for the whole neighborhood.
Bollucks. We all saw that little jut-out they were standing on inside Mt. Doom in the FotR intro. It was, what, maybe ten feet long by four feet wide? A little trip of the foot, a little nudge of the elbow, voila, no more Isildur, and they ring goes down with him. If a wimpy manila envelope is enough to thwart Gandalf's ringlust at Bag End, then I daresay Elrond could have summoned up the willpower to chuck some dude off a cliff.
There's some joke waiting to be made here about the no-handed man who calls tech support because the only two letters he can get his keyboard to make are "eraswc3" and "ulk;;89u".
At this time there are actually no illegal channels
Haha.. with time, my young Paduan learner. Give these things time. The coopting of new internet protocols for piracy is as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun.
they realized they were too late in jumping on the Internet bandwagon, they admitted it and started development on a browser to compete with Netscape.
You can be damned sure that if Netscape had a stranglehold on the desktop OS market in the mid 90s, I would be writing this post on some incantation of Mozilla right now and not IE 6. MS's eventual triumph in the browser wars had nothing to do with its capacity to innovate and really not even that much to do with it's ability to play catch-up, which it isn't even that good at. I mean, anyone with half a brain will tell you that feature-, speed-, and stability-wise, Mozilla 1.4b rocks anything that MS has ever created, and this after years of Netscape, Inc.'s atrophy and braindeath, to boot. So basically, their ability to bundle and integrate the browser and OS saved their butts from a "war" that by all means they should have lost, and not their introduction a superior, albeit late-to-market, product.
The bedrock of MS's business model has always been the fact that, no matter how much they fuck up in other sectors, at the end of the day they still own the OS market. You mentioned the WordPerfect/Lotus episode, which is another good example of this. WP is arguably superior to Word to this day. How did MS extricate themselves from this particular snaggle? Why, code hooks into the OS to improve performance, of course.
I have a hard time seeing how that dubious technique is going to save them this time. What are they going to do, bundle their operating system with their operating system?:) Make Windows perform better by integrating it with Windows? Once the foundation of their business model begins to erode, the emperor has no more clothes. This is a scenario that, until Linux, they haven't really been faced with before, and it's going to obligate them to take a long, hard look at the very core of their corporate philosophy, culture and business model. Institutional momentum being what it is at one of the world's largest companies, I pray with renewed hope these days for the eventual death and destruction of MS:)
"...mathematicians designate any theorem as 'trivial' once a proof has been obtained--no matter how difficult the theorem was to prove in the first place. There are therefore exactly two types of true mathematical propositions: trivial ones, and those which have not yet been proven."
Sooo true at my school. Just recently I was told that a rigorous proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra--the subject of a semester-long analysis course in many universities--could be realized in a "couple of afternoons" by a bright, motivated student. It has been observed in the math building that certain (blessed) profs with extremely lopsided brain mass ratios can actually be seen listing leftwards as they walk down the hallway.
P.S. Cantor didn't contradict that there was no largest integer; rather, he supposed that Z, N, R, etc. were infinite and then proceeded to show that |R| has to be greater than |Z| e.g. some infinities are larger than others.
I am a foreign student currently studying abroad in Europe, meaning that probably I represent one of easy*'s biggest demographics. I (and all my friends) almost always fly easyJet to travel, we rent easyCar to drive to France or Andorra, and we check our e-mail abroad at easyInternetCafe. easy is the real thing--it's cheap as hell, especially if you book really early. On the other hand the "customer experience" leaves a lot to be desired. For example, in an effort to cut costs even further, easyInternetCafe literally fired all their employees except for about 15 at the home office. No actual easyInternetCafe employees, work in the easyInternetCafes. Which is at once dumbfounding and frustrating. If your computer crashes or the machine eats your money when you try to buy time, well, you're fucked. No recourse. Lots of the computers are broken, people leave their trash laying around, there are always wierdos looking at really sick, graphic porn, and worse, the cafes are unsafe. Twice now I have seen people brazenly mugged, in broad daylight, in nearly packed easyInternetCafes. Similar experiences on easyJet; they farmed out the personnel contract (at least here in Spain) to some company named EuroHandling, whose ticket agents are assholes and unwilling to help you out in any way, especially if you arrive after 40 minutes before departure time. So I'm a little skeptical of easyCinema, even though I'd probably give it a whirl if it came to a town near me. But sentences like "All we ask is that you don't leave any litter behind" sounds like a sweet way of saying, "we're not paying for janitors, please don't trash our theaters." Personally, I'll gladly pay the extra 2 to avoid sitting on someone else's half-eaten nachos, but hey, that's me.
Damn! If only there existed some sort of device that would copy a DVD in less than 48 hours, a so-called 'DVD-copier'. May thee rot in the depths of technological hell, Flexplay Corporation and your cursed, foolproof technology.
"If you support fair use, how can you justify draconian laws like the DMCA that are headed to destroy that?"
It's a good question because there's no cracks that weasel words can get out of.
That's not a good question, it's a horrible question. You've loaded it in such a way that anyone who tries to respond directly must first assume your premise, which happens to be at the very center of the debate itself. I personally agree with what you've said, but there's no way in hell the producers of the show would ever choose it. I say all this as a council to other readers who are submitting questions: please drop the dogma, or the questions we want answered are never going to get aired.
IANASC (...security consultant), but ISTR that many firms in the WTC were foolish enough to have the "backup" systems...in the other tower.
Scold them all you want with the benefit 20/20 hindsight, but I'm guessing that if someone told you on Sep. 10 that this scheme was unsecure because both towers were going to be levelled, you would have laughed him out of the room. Just like everyone else in the world.
Umm, hate to break it to you, but RIAA is primarily a meatspace organization consisting of lawyers who sue people. You and all your cybergladiator rockstar hax0r friends, feel free to rake riaa.org and their scant other online assets over the coals. Get real... "pandora," on them. Just don't forget that at the end of the day, you are a lowly computer scientist munching on your microwave burrito and making idle threats on Slashdot, while they a small army of lawyers backed by the full faith and credit of five, billion dollar multinationals. This battle will be played out in the legal arena, and status quo being what it is, it's theirs to lose.
"Way to go, RIAA. Sue and threaten the public, your customers. I think I'll go and download," one posting on Yahoo said.'
This "zinger" has been seized upon by many posters here, but few have noted the fundamental idiocy underlying it: at the point where you are offering (and, by extension, downloading) music on Kazaa, eDonkey, etc., you're not really a "customer" anymore, are you? If I go down to the Best Buy and steal CDs, I pass from being a customer to being a shoplifter. Since I never had any intention of buying from them in the first place, they don't have any problem throwing me in jail. I don't see how the logic is any different on-line.
Ahem. dL/dt is the instantaneous rate of change, not net, whatever that is. So you could figure out how many new Linux installations are being completed for any single, infinitisemal timeslice. Not too useful, but thankfully Newton gave us the ability to integrate too. And the polarity of the third derivative doesn't tell us anything about that of the second, only that it's shrinking.
A little more to the point: there's $8.5 trillion in actual, tangible dollars in the world. U.S. GDP is %28 of the world's GDP. This is a super-duper rough (gravelly, even), back-of-the-envelope calculation, but you might say, then, that there's about $30-$40 trillion worth of real wealth in the world. My point being: RIAA is suing for something like twice the money in the world. `Nuf said.
Ahh, nothing like the truth-told-here aura of a "plain and simple" (runner up: "in fact") to hide your argument from logical scrutiny. In fact (huh huh), right-thinking people define "plain" theft as an act that actually deprives someone of the stolen good. Digital piracy is neither plain nor simple because it fails to produce that result. If you don't think that complicates the situation in almost everyone's mind, ask yourself why going down to the Gap and lifting the summer line would get me thrown in jail, while to date there has been no major legislative action aimed at the 30+ million P2P users (99.999% engaging in piracy) in America. Clearly, it's because the issue's not so cut-and-dried as the author wants you to believe. I'm not defending piracy as right--IP protection is crucial to the well-functioning of any advanced society--but nor is it "as wrong" as meatspace theft. Especially if, like me, you're out there pirating music only to separate out the Britney-and-Justin crap from stuff actually worth buying. I don't feel bad about doing this because I delete the latter and buy the former. I ask you, is that wrong? Is that "plain-and-simple stealing"? Bullshit. Spare me the record company party line, I could get it here if I really cared.
Slashdot Mirror
Welp, guess it's back to cherrypicking the best tracks off Kazaa. Which of course maintains the "integrity" of the work (viz: sound quality) infinitely better.
When are these people going to realize the magnitude of the competition they're facing? Hello? Free, easy, fast, ubiquitous--you aren't really in a position to bargain with today's P2P networks...
In other news, exposure to electromagnetic radiation has been linked to brain cancer. There's some sort of diminshing returns argument to be made here, but I spent too long frying my brain with the Savant-o-Matic(TM), and now it just won't come to me.
You have two consoles before you. On the left, the blue console. It has a full catalog of DRM-restricted songs made by many major record labels. You are not allowed to burn those songs, listen to the in your car or portably, and each downloaded song costs one U.S. dollar. If your hard drive crashes and takes your licenses with it, you've lost rights to all the songs you once had, and you must buy them again. Downloads are quick and easy.
One the right, the red console: a vibrant P2P network teeming with shares. It has perhaps 50% of the musical selection blue, but with the added benefit of hundreds of terabytes worth of movies, software, images, and, well, above all, porn. All content is free, based on open standards, and unrestricted. Downloads are quick for popular media, but can take days or even weeks for hard-to-find items.
Which would you choose?
C'mon, be honest. That the latter exists right now and the former isn't even close to is beside the point. Human nature being what it is, blue has almost no chance of ever succeding while red is right there by its side.
Grousing about rejected submissions is, I know, verboten. But seriously, I miss the old /. days when the site had no lawyers and lots of balls. The editors these days seem to have a stuck "Boring" key or something, A better title (e.g. mine) would have been:
:)
CNBC rewards Rosen's failure, incompetence by making her rich
Now that's a title that says something. I had some witty line the body about the Peter Principle. It was all good.
Pussies.
Ick.. how absurd. Horrible umpires, fans booing bad calls, batters flipping out over what they thought was ball four... are all part of what makes baseball, baseball. Fans of professional tennis will note that this silly obsession with so-called "digital" accuracy has already come and gone on the ATP, where that annoying "beep" machine that called service faults has been (thank God) decomissioned, thanks in no small part to the on-air fumings of one John McEnroe. I hope they will do the same with baseball. What'll they think of next, some machine to neutralize the smell of the ballpark? :)
...huge volume of self sacrifice for family, country and religion that's gone on throughout the centuries.
And you're equating that with... writing C code. Riiight. Forgive me for being incredulous.
You ignore the thrust of Rand's argument, which is that basing one's actions on pure altruism--be you an individual person or a nation-state--is a deceptive and ultimately unsustainable existence. It can be done for some period of time, or in an isolated instance. But not forever, lest all come tumbling down.
In the case of open source software development I don't think that things could be any clearer. Try, just try, to imagine any one of the hundreds of vast and wonderfully complex OSS projects out there (Apache, Emacs, Linux, Sendmail, XFree, to name a few) coming into being without a deeply personal and intellectual attachment to it on the part of its authors. There's no way--you might be able to slog through a couple hard days of coding, or some minor project, by telling yourself the world will be better off with your work. But said projects aren't minor. They're immense. What keeps them coming back to the screen, pounding the keyboard, plugging away, day after day, is just simply not some distal committment to another's well-being. It's the intellectual pleasure that they derive from coding. And that, alas, is selfishness.
Time to brush up on your Ayn Rand and your ESR. Most open-source developers (including me) couldn't care less about "the benefit of everyone on earth", "the common good", or any of those other throwaway commie bromides. We're doing it to "scratch an itch"--either we want some software that doesn't currently exist, and the fastest way to make it exist is to fire up a project and harness the collborative power of the Internet; or we're intellectually attracted to some or another project that our day job doesn't let us touch on. Assuming we even code for a day job. It has way less to do with altruism than you make it sound. Humans are selfish.
By many accounts, we've never had it harder--the slump in the 80's primarily hit blue-collar workers.
Then go get a blue collar job. The very fact that you have a computer, Internet access, and are a Slashdot reader probably places you somewhere north of the 95th percentile of material wealth in this world. Trust me--things could be much worse.
*sigh* Sometimes I think the elitists are right in that most people don't get it.
And most of the time I think the rest of the world is right in that Slashdot readers are the densest, most pathetically humorless bunch of sods on the planet. It was a joke. Funny, he haw, laugh chuckle, ya' know?
For a government that professes to be so concerned with religion, you'd think they'd have a better grasp of the forbidden fruit phenomenon. Can anyone remember the last time something got banned where the immediate effect wasn't to greatly increase popular interest and desire for said product? RIAA sues Napster, the next day there appears a frontpage story in every newspaper in America about this great new service that lets people download music gratis. End result: 50 million new users for Napster. CD-R tax in Canada and everyone buys a thousand, just in case. Considering I could FTP a really good, 3 SVCD Centropy Telesync over to some friend in Egypt this instant, one wonders precisely how many seconds it will take before this silly "ban" is circumvented and kids are burning copies for the whole neighborhood.
Bollucks. We all saw that little jut-out they were standing on inside Mt. Doom in the FotR intro. It was, what, maybe ten feet long by four feet wide? A little trip of the foot, a little nudge of the elbow, voila, no more Isildur, and they ring goes down with him. If a wimpy manila envelope is enough to thwart Gandalf's ringlust at Bag End, then I daresay Elrond could have summoned up the willpower to chuck some dude off a cliff.
There's some joke waiting to be made here about the no-handed man who calls tech support because the only two letters he can get his keyboard to make are "eraswc3" and "ulk;;89u".
:)
Perhaps someone else will get that
At this time there are actually no illegal channels
Haha.. with time, my young Paduan learner. Give these things time. The coopting of new internet protocols for piracy is as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun.
they realized they were too late in jumping on the Internet bandwagon, they admitted it and started development on a browser to compete with Netscape.
:) Make Windows perform better by integrating it with Windows? Once the foundation of their business model begins to erode, the emperor has no more clothes. This is a scenario that, until Linux, they haven't really been faced with before, and it's going to obligate them to take a long, hard look at the very core of their corporate philosophy, culture and business model. Institutional momentum being what it is at one of the world's largest companies, I pray with renewed hope these days for the eventual death and destruction of MS :)
You can be damned sure that if Netscape had a stranglehold on the desktop OS market in the mid 90s, I would be writing this post on some incantation of Mozilla right now and not IE 6. MS's eventual triumph in the browser wars had nothing to do with its capacity to innovate and really not even that much to do with it's ability to play catch-up, which it isn't even that good at. I mean, anyone with half a brain will tell you that feature-, speed-, and stability-wise, Mozilla 1.4b rocks anything that MS has ever created, and this after years of Netscape, Inc.'s atrophy and braindeath, to boot. So basically, their ability to bundle and integrate the browser and OS saved their butts from a "war" that by all means they should have lost, and not their introduction a superior, albeit late-to-market, product.
The bedrock of MS's business model has always been the fact that, no matter how much they fuck up in other sectors, at the end of the day they still own the OS market. You mentioned the WordPerfect/Lotus episode, which is another good example of this. WP is arguably superior to Word to this day. How did MS extricate themselves from this particular snaggle? Why, code hooks into the OS to improve performance, of course.
I have a hard time seeing how that dubious technique is going to save them this time. What are they going to do, bundle their operating system with their operating system?
P.S. Cantor didn't contradict that there was no largest integer; rather, he supposed that Z, N, R, etc. were infinite and then proceeded to show that |R| has to be greater than |Z| e.g. some infinities are larger than others.
I am a foreign student currently studying abroad in Europe, meaning that probably I represent one of easy*'s biggest demographics. I (and all my friends) almost always fly easyJet to travel, we rent easyCar to drive to France or Andorra, and we check our e-mail abroad at easyInternetCafe. easy is the real thing--it's cheap as hell, especially if you book really early. On the other hand the "customer experience" leaves a lot to be desired. For example, in an effort to cut costs even further, easyInternetCafe literally fired all their employees except for about 15 at the home office. No actual easyInternetCafe employees, work in the easyInternetCafes. Which is at once dumbfounding and frustrating. If your computer crashes or the machine eats your money when you try to buy time, well, you're fucked. No recourse. Lots of the computers are broken, people leave their trash laying around, there are always wierdos looking at really sick, graphic porn, and worse, the cafes are unsafe. Twice now I have seen people brazenly mugged, in broad daylight, in nearly packed easyInternetCafes. Similar experiences on easyJet; they farmed out the personnel contract (at least here in Spain) to some company named EuroHandling, whose ticket agents are assholes and unwilling to help you out in any way, especially if you arrive after 40 minutes before departure time. So I'm a little skeptical of easyCinema, even though I'd probably give it a whirl if it came to a town near me. But sentences like "All we ask is that you don't leave any litter behind" sounds like a sweet way of saying, "we're not paying for janitors, please don't trash our theaters." Personally, I'll gladly pay the extra 2 to avoid sitting on someone else's half-eaten nachos, but hey, that's me.
Damn! If only there existed some sort of device that would copy a DVD in less than 48 hours, a so-called 'DVD-copier'. May thee rot in the depths of technological hell, Flexplay Corporation and your cursed, foolproof technology.
"If you support fair use, how can you justify draconian laws like the DMCA that are headed to destroy that?"
It's a good question because there's no cracks that weasel words can get out of.
That's not a good question, it's a horrible question. You've loaded it in such a way that anyone who tries to respond directly must first assume your premise, which happens to be at the very center of the debate itself. I personally agree with what you've said, but there's no way in hell the producers of the show would ever choose it. I say all this as a council to other readers who are submitting questions: please drop the dogma, or the questions we want answered are never going to get aired.
Scold them all you want with the benefit 20/20 hindsight, but I'm guessing that if someone told you on Sep. 10 that this scheme was unsecure because both towers were going to be levelled, you would have laughed him out of the room. Just like everyone else in the world.
Good God, that's actually interesting. Where's my friggin modpoints..
Umm, hate to break it to you, but RIAA is primarily a meatspace organization consisting of lawyers who sue people. You and all your cybergladiator rockstar hax0r friends, feel free to rake riaa.org and their scant other online assets over the coals. Get real... "pandora," on them. Just don't forget that at the end of the day, you are a lowly computer scientist munching on your microwave burrito and making idle threats on Slashdot, while they a small army of lawyers backed by the full faith and credit of five, billion dollar multinationals. This battle will be played out in the legal arena, and status quo being what it is, it's theirs to lose.
This "zinger" has been seized upon by many posters here, but few have noted the fundamental idiocy underlying it: at the point where you are offering (and, by extension, downloading) music on Kazaa, eDonkey, etc., you're not really a "customer" anymore, are you? If I go down to the Best Buy and steal CDs, I pass from being a customer to being a shoplifter. Since I never had any intention of buying from them in the first place, they don't have any problem throwing me in jail. I don't see how the logic is any different on-line.
Ahem. dL/dt is the instantaneous rate of change, not net, whatever that is. So you could figure out how many new Linux installations are being completed for any single, infinitisemal timeslice. Not too useful, but thankfully Newton gave us the ability to integrate too. And the polarity of the third derivative doesn't tell us anything about that of the second, only that it's shrinking.
A little more to the point: there's $8.5 trillion in actual, tangible dollars in the world. U.S. GDP is %28 of the world's GDP. This is a super-duper rough (gravelly, even), back-of-the-envelope calculation, but you might say, then, that there's about $30-$40 trillion worth of real wealth in the world. My point being: RIAA is suing for something like twice the money in the world. `Nuf said.
;)
(Isn't there a law against something like that?
Ahh, nothing like the truth-told-here aura of a "plain and simple" (runner up: "in fact") to hide your argument from logical scrutiny. In fact (huh huh), right-thinking people define "plain" theft as an act that actually deprives someone of the stolen good. Digital piracy is neither plain nor simple because it fails to produce that result. If you don't think that complicates the situation in almost everyone's mind, ask yourself why going down to the Gap and lifting the summer line would get me thrown in jail, while to date there has been no major legislative action aimed at the 30+ million P2P users (99.999% engaging in piracy) in America. Clearly, it's because the issue's not so cut-and-dried as the author wants you to believe. I'm not defending piracy as right--IP protection is crucial to the well-functioning of any advanced society--but nor is it "as wrong" as meatspace theft. Especially if, like me, you're out there pirating music only to separate out the Britney-and-Justin crap from stuff actually worth buying. I don't feel bad about doing this because I delete the latter and buy the former. I ask you, is that wrong? Is that "plain-and-simple stealing"? Bullshit. Spare me the record company party line, I could get it here if I really cared.