Although there are more script kiddies, I still think international hackers are the biggest threat to the government. All script kiddies can do is deface a few websites and cause a some wanton destruction.
However, spies could hack into the government to gain access to classified information, which is far worse. For example, imagine the Taliban finding out the next place to be bombed and evacuating in advance, rendering the bombings ineffective. That is much worse than a little data loss. Script kiddies wouldn't know what to do with classified information.
It compiles it just fine. Of course C++ is not an exact superset of C, so all compilers have a compile-time option of some sort specifying whether the program is C or C++ (usually just the file extension).
Re:I'd have a hard time taking this book seriously
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 1
Oh please, not everything has to be a work of high art that enriches the soul and elevates the mind. Scott Adams' goal is to make people laugh and he's extremely good at it. There's nothing wrong with helping people have fun, even if it serves no higher purpose.
Agreed. I read the first 150 pages or so of Atlas Shrugged (couldn't make it any further) and it ranks among the most horrifically bad prose I've ever seen from a published author. I imagine her philosophical ideas must be of great interest to some people, or else no editor would ever have let such unadulterated garbage sully their printing press. I only wish she had put them into easy-to-swallow essay form instead of in a pile of rambling fiction.
Oh yeah, that was his name! I've been puzzling for the past few weeks over who was the author of a great novel I read a decade ago (The Thief of Time I think it was called). Thanks:).
TIs are surprisingly hackable too. One of my friends wrote a winamp plugin that lets him select mp3s from a playlist on his TI-83 (he hasn't released it yet, though; too many bugs). If you search a little, lots of pages are devoted to cool things you can do with them.
I disagree. We're perfectly right to criticize the keycard scheme. In speculative fiction, there is a crucial difference between things that make sense but are outside current technology (e.g. warp drive, magic doors) and things that are blatantly self-contradictory. The former is necessary to any fantasy; the latter shatters the suspension of disbelief and is a narrative fallacy.
For example, the keycard scheme, and the magical alien-killing virus in Independence Day were self-contradictory. Even with all the magic in the world it's mathematically illogical to have millions of numbers with 6 digits. And the virus in Independence Day contradicted a basic premise of the film: that it took place in our 1990s Earth, with our computers. Our computers are clearly incapable of communicating with alien systems, let alone infecting them, so that part of a film resulted in a logical contradiction. Which is why everyone found it so painful.
However, the magic doors are perfectly reasonable and make sense, if you accept as a basic premise of the film that
It's not taking place in our universe, so the rules can be different
In the film's universe, one of the basic rules is the existence of magic doors leading to other dimensions
Temporarily accepting these new laws of nature is what is known as suspension of disbelief. So the magic doors are only bothersome to the overly literal-minded, who are unable to step out into another universe for a moment; these are the people that hate all SF, accusing it of being "unrealistic". But the keycard numbers are annoying to everyone, because any universe conceivable by humans must follow the laws of logic; they are a premise that cannot be eliminated.
I agree that C++ is certainly a painfully complex language, but I don't agree that it became that way because of overzealousness to add features for every little thing.
If you look at the current state of the language, I see few features you could remove without compromising its fundamental goals of being C-compatible and object-oriented. References and operator overloading are the only ones that come to mind.
IMHO, Java is simpler than C++ only because of all the C baggage that was removed. Its removal of const and multiple inheritance did not make the language simpler, only more foolproof (multiple inheritance does have a frustrating tendency to unexpectedly blow up in your face, but it's no more difficult to understand than interfaces). And nobody who has ever used templates argues that C++ would be better without them (mmm, templates). I think it's really the legacy baggage of C++, and the need to have "two languages in one" that made it such a mess.
Anyway, complexity is certainly a major problem for C++, as its target audience is large team projects. But as for Perl, I think extra features don't harm its niche of small to medium-sized projects where maintainance isn't a major issue. And unlike other languages, it doesn't need to be mastered completely to be made effective use of, since there is more than one way to do it.
I learned enough Perl to write useful scripts in a weekend. Its huge number of features actually made things easier, because I was able to easily apply my knowledge of C and awk (which didn't help me at all when I learned Lisp, for example). I don't see Perl's death on the horizon (C++ isn't becoming unpopular anytime soon, either).
Yeah, so true. When I moved to a new apartment and had a DSL installed, I had horrible packet loss problems. I'm not sure what the cause was but they were clearly not on my end. The packet loss was so bad that the Windows PPPoE client supplied with the DSL didn't manage to connect at all; I could only get it working with a Linux client. I made the mistake of mentioning this to a tech support person and at that point it was impossible to get another word in, as though having once booted into Linux had forever ruined my chances of getting the modem to work.
After three or so failed calls I got really pissed and threatened to change service if the lower-tier tech didn't tell someone who knew what they were doing about the packet loss. Fortunately, a few days later the problem was fixed.
Wow, I had never thought of it that way before. For once a comment that really is insightful:).
However, by most standards, Win95 was vastly superior to dos. Whereas Linux is at best (and many/most people disagree with even this) somewhat superior to Windows, especially XP which nullifies Linux's trump card of never crashing. Linux will have to get a whole lot better for your analogy to hold.
Oh please. It's arguable whether DOS is an operating system at all, let alone a good one. Perhaps it was the best that could be done with the hardware of the early 1980s; but it hardly improved over the years and continued up 'till version 7 to lack basic features that were present in the earliest Unices.
For starters, basic functions of an operating system are to multitask, provide memory protection, and provide an uncircumventable layer of abstraction between applications and hardware. DOS did none of these things. Applications had the computer all to their own, and could even remove DOS from memory if they so wished. DOS did very little; it was in a sense nothing more than a glorified interrupt handler with a shell.
And these interrupts are not even any good. The FAT filesystem used by DOS, aside from its obvious deficiencies like lack of support for long filenames, is incredibly slow and wasteful. If you browse through the FAT code in Linux you'll see it's full of pejorative comments (of the sort "I hate doing this, but FAT is brain-dead"). The drive letter system (C:, D:) is ugly and inflexible compared to the Unix system, and it's sad that we're stuck with it to this day. And the memory management... well, to be fair, this was mostly the hardware's fault, but if you've ever done any DOS programming you know it's a royal pain.
The command prompt supports a half-assed version of piping that isn't well-supported by applications, has a limit of (I think) 256 characters per command, and does not even expand wildcards. A friend who was working with DOS batch files was telling me how most of his time was spent circumventing the limitations of the command prompt, sometimes even writing C programs for obvious, simple things (e.g. an "xargs" equivalent).
I used to be nostalgic about the good ol' DOS days but since then I've come to realize how terrible it really was. Bye DOS, and good riddance:).
You're right, that guy is pretty funny. But I think he's just a creative troll. I can't imagine someone being convinced that his little app (is that Javascript?) will take over the world. He is just parodying loud-mouthed AI fools like Kurzweil.
And to be slightly on topic, I don't know much about Rebol but I love the name "Carl Sassenrath". It conjures up the image of a bearded genius scientist type:).
The last time I used Word a drive filled during a save operation and left me with just a mutilated copy of the original file. (I will not use it again.)
Something similar but worse once happened to me. I was editing something with Word while browsing the web; not doing anything out of the ordinary. I saved the file and logged off for the day. When I tried to open it again, Word refused, claiming the file format was incorrect.
I looked into the.doc with a hex editor and found that some HTML source had somehow found its way into the.doc! I was using win95, so I guess this can be chalked up to buggy filesystem code. The weirdest and most frustrating bug I've ever seen. I didn't manage to recover any of my work.
The proposed document is here. The proposals of interest are in section 4.2. Obviously, I think anyone should read them (instead of relying on the EFF's hysteria) before sending in a protest letter.
This isn't a draft law, yet; it only puts up for discussion some ideas that could eventually be made into laws. I have to agree with the EFF that they are disturbing, and will be sending a letter stating my opposition. I'd say now is the best time to object, before they gather any inertia.
You probably could learn it yourself, with appropriate books, and enough time, but nowhere near as fast as if you have a professor and a class full of other students to help you.
I disagree. In my experience it is in fact much faster to learn something by yourself. How often do you actually ask someone for help? The only time I remember asking for help because I genuinely didn't understand the material was in the electronics course I had last semester, and that was because the course notes were very poor. When the information is in high-quality textbook form, I find I never need any assistance. The advantages of studying entirely by yourself are much greater: you can study at your own pace and don't have to waste time in inefficient classes. All classes, to some extent, spend too much time on topics you find easy and skim over those you find difficult. I often skipped physics classes -- to study physics!
I would argue that the purpose of teachers is not to communicate information but merely to put pressure on students to study. Most people would never learn anything in academic fields unless someone forced them to, and that's exactly what the school environment is for. I don't take courses on things that are sufficiently interesting that I can and do learn about them on my own (e.g. philosophy), but rather on topics that I hate but want to learn about anyway (math).
I like to believe that a more intelligent race would see that working toward general happiness is an end in itself.
I've only recently started studying ethics in detail, but it seems to me that the core of all ethical systems has almost nothing to do with intelligence. The problem is that you can't make a direct logical inference from a descriptive statement ("the table is red") to a normative statement ("the table should be painted"). So whenever we decide to do anything at all, we have to base our actions on principles that aren't drawn from empirical observation and therefore do not stem from rational thought (though rationality can be used to extend and enrich these fundamental principles). In other words, ethics is based on human intuition.
A race of computers would have the same problem: no matter how smart they are, they can't make normative statements out of thin air. They would also have to rely on "intuition"; in their case, the core goals and values instilled into them by their programmers. If someone programs them (or they somehow evolve) to feel intuitively that murdering and enslaving humans is the right thing to do, they will wield all their intelligence to accomplish this "good", and once they are finished, they will be satisfied that they did the morally correct action.
Just like you and me feel instant moral revulsion at the thought of, say, setting a child on fire and watching him burn, such a robot might feel moral revulsion at the thought of not doing so. Logic only allows you to go from basic statements to higher-level ones; it can't create completely new ones. So even if the fundamental axioms the robot lives its life by are evil from our point of view, no amount of intelligence can change that.
Are there concepts that can be expressed in one (human) language, but not another?
AFAIK, not in practice. It is always possible to introduce new words into a language when it becomes necessary. An African tribe might not have a word for "snow", but if they saw any, they would quickly invent one (or loan it from another language).
As I recall, modern linguistics says that all natural language grammars follow the same meta-grammar. In other words, natural language grammars are all similar in fundamental ways, and can be used to express the same links between concepts. From my experience with Japanese, I know it's always possible to translate a Japanese sentence to English (provided the phrase doesn't contain any aspects of Japanese culture that English has no word for); there'll be some loss of nuance, but the core meaning can be transmitted. Imho, though languages have different nuances that reflect the culture of their speakers, no language results in fundamentally superior "productivity" at any task, once the proper vocabulary has been learned.
No, you're not at fault, the other poster is. Webster sez:
Main Entry: pronounce
Pronunciation: pr&-'naun(t)s
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): pronounced; pronouncing ...
transitive senses
1 : to declare officially or ceremoniously <the minister pronounced them husband and wife> 2 : to declare authoritatively or as an opinion <doctors pronounced him fit to resume duties>
20 years? Come on. That's how long the gaming industry has existed! Are you suggesting that the current crop of games is not innovative, even compared to no games at all?
There were dozens of genres of games invented in the past 20 years: side-scrollers, space shooters, RPGs, first-person shooters, third-person shooters, platformers, puzzle games, adventure games, turn-based strategy, real-time strategy, business simulators, dating simulators, flight simulators, and so on. There are more genres than I can count! You're saying that none of this is innovative? IMHO, the gaming industry has been amazingly prolific, especially considering the short span of time in which it has existed.
On the other hand, free software programmers have consistently proven that they are completely incapable of creating a decent game. All free software projects aiming to create a complete, commercial-quality game have been dismal failures. The only free games of note, such as Counterstrike, are those built on top of existing commercial engines. The OSS development model is good for some applications, but games are definitely not one of them.
And "threw a truly spectacular console together"? Cluestick: manufacturing hardware requires capital. Free software, by definition, will never produce hardware. So save your GPL rhetoric for a topic where it's appropriate.
The pacing is excellent, the storytelling incredible, and it looks like it won't disappoint with its last episodes, unlike Evangelion.
I won't comment on Key, since I never watched any. But if you found Eva's ending disappointing, have you seen End of Evangelion? It's basically a 2-hour-long replacement for the much-maligned 2 final episodes.
I think it's the best part of the series. Asuka's final battle has to be seen to be believed. Heart-wrenching violence and tragedy against a backdrop of soothing classical music. Incredibly powerful emotional effect. It left me in a state of shock. If you're an Eva fan, you're really missing out if you haven't seen the film.
The last time I checked, drunk driving is against the law, whereas pretending to kill animated people on your computer/game system is not.
I don't disagree that his analogy is poor, but for other reasons than that one is against the law and the other isn't. IMHO, when discussing ethics, the law shouldn't be taken into consideration. All it represents is the current consensus about morality in the society we live in, and doesn't correspond to absolute right and wrong (or your personal sense of right and wrong, if you are a relativist). If we lived in a hypothetical society where murder is legal, would that make it moral?
Also, the law is subject to change at any time. In the future, killing animated people _could_ be illegal if it was judged a psychological danger (and the poster you replied to seemed to be advocating a move in this direction). Would that then suddenly make it wrong, just because the government decided it is?
If I misinterpreted the intent of your post and you weren't implying that law=morals, never mind:). But then what was your point? I wouldn't stop doing something ethically acceptable just because it's against the law.
I find the whole concept of refusing to use superior software because of hate for the company that produced it is rather silly, but if you're going to detest one of those two companies, it should probably be RealNetworks.
And their player bombards you with ads and annoying popups (e.g. please register your personal information with us so we can send you Exciting Product Offerings). It feels like they care more about their corporate associates than the consumer.
Microsoft has also had bad business practices, but then again, they've had a lot more opportunity to. Real, OTOH, doesn't have as much influence, but has been as sleazy as it could. I shudder to think of what RealNetworks would do if it were in MS's position.
The chief spokes-monkey declared the official communications protocol of Ximian to be the Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite. He then screeched, beat his chest and threatened to pelt feces at users of inferior protocols like SMTP.
Slashdot Mirror
However, spies could hack into the government to gain access to classified information, which is far worse. For example, imagine the Taliban finding out the next place to be bombed and evacuating in advance, rendering the bombings ineffective. That is much worse than a little data loss. Script kiddies wouldn't know what to do with classified information.
It compiles it just fine. Of course C++ is not an exact superset of C, so all compilers have a compile-time option of some sort specifying whether the program is C or C++ (usually just the file extension).
Oh please, not everything has to be a work of high art that enriches the soul and elevates the mind. Scott Adams' goal is to make people laugh and he's extremely good at it. There's nothing wrong with helping people have fun, even if it serves no higher purpose.
Agreed. I read the first 150 pages or so of Atlas Shrugged (couldn't make it any further) and it ranks among the most horrifically bad prose I've ever seen from a published author. I imagine her philosophical ideas must be of great interest to some people, or else no editor would ever have let such unadulterated garbage sully their printing press. I only wish she had put them into easy-to-swallow essay form instead of in a pile of rambling fiction.
Oh yeah, that was his name! I've been puzzling for the past few weeks over who was the author of a great novel I read a decade ago (The Thief of Time I think it was called). Thanks :).
I'll concede that RPN is cool, though :).
For example, the keycard scheme, and the magical alien-killing virus in Independence Day were self-contradictory. Even with all the magic in the world it's mathematically illogical to have millions of numbers with 6 digits. And the virus in Independence Day contradicted a basic premise of the film: that it took place in our 1990s Earth, with our computers. Our computers are clearly incapable of communicating with alien systems, let alone infecting them, so that part of a film resulted in a logical contradiction. Which is why everyone found it so painful.
However, the magic doors are perfectly reasonable and make sense, if you accept as a basic premise of the film that
- It's not taking place in our universe, so the rules can be different
- In the film's universe, one of the basic rules is the existence of magic doors leading to other dimensions
Temporarily accepting these new laws of nature is what is known as suspension of disbelief. So the magic doors are only bothersome to the overly literal-minded, who are unable to step out into another universe for a moment; these are the people that hate all SF, accusing it of being "unrealistic". But the keycard numbers are annoying to everyone, because any universe conceivable by humans must follow the laws of logic; they are a premise that cannot be eliminated.If you look at the current state of the language, I see few features you could remove without compromising its fundamental goals of being C-compatible and object-oriented. References and operator overloading are the only ones that come to mind.
IMHO, Java is simpler than C++ only because of all the C baggage that was removed. Its removal of const and multiple inheritance did not make the language simpler, only more foolproof (multiple inheritance does have a frustrating tendency to unexpectedly blow up in your face, but it's no more difficult to understand than interfaces). And nobody who has ever used templates argues that C++ would be better without them (mmm, templates). I think it's really the legacy baggage of C++, and the need to have "two languages in one" that made it such a mess.
Anyway, complexity is certainly a major problem for C++, as its target audience is large team projects. But as for Perl, I think extra features don't harm its niche of small to medium-sized projects where maintainance isn't a major issue. And unlike other languages, it doesn't need to be mastered completely to be made effective use of, since there is more than one way to do it.
I learned enough Perl to write useful scripts in a weekend. Its huge number of features actually made things easier, because I was able to easily apply my knowledge of C and awk (which didn't help me at all when I learned Lisp, for example). I don't see Perl's death on the horizon (C++ isn't becoming unpopular anytime soon, either).
After three or so failed calls I got really pissed and threatened to change service if the lower-tier tech didn't tell someone who knew what they were doing about the packet loss. Fortunately, a few days later the problem was fixed.
However, by most standards, Win95 was vastly superior to dos. Whereas Linux is at best (and many/most people disagree with even this) somewhat superior to Windows, especially XP which nullifies Linux's trump card of never crashing. Linux will have to get a whole lot better for your analogy to hold.
For starters, basic functions of an operating system are to multitask, provide memory protection, and provide an uncircumventable layer of abstraction between applications and hardware. DOS did none of these things. Applications had the computer all to their own, and could even remove DOS from memory if they so wished. DOS did very little; it was in a sense nothing more than a glorified interrupt handler with a shell.
And these interrupts are not even any good. The FAT filesystem used by DOS, aside from its obvious deficiencies like lack of support for long filenames, is incredibly slow and wasteful. If you browse through the FAT code in Linux you'll see it's full of pejorative comments (of the sort "I hate doing this, but FAT is brain-dead"). The drive letter system (C:, D:) is ugly and inflexible compared to the Unix system, and it's sad that we're stuck with it to this day. And the memory management ... well, to be fair, this was mostly the hardware's fault, but if you've ever done any DOS programming you know it's a royal pain.
The command prompt supports a half-assed version of piping that isn't well-supported by applications, has a limit of (I think) 256 characters per command, and does not even expand wildcards. A friend who was working with DOS batch files was telling me how most of his time was spent circumventing the limitations of the command prompt, sometimes even writing C programs for obvious, simple things (e.g. an "xargs" equivalent).
I used to be nostalgic about the good ol' DOS days but since then I've come to realize how terrible it really was. Bye DOS, and good riddance :).
And to be slightly on topic, I don't know much about Rebol but I love the name "Carl Sassenrath". It conjures up the image of a bearded genius scientist type :).
Something similar but worse once happened to me. I was editing something with Word while browsing the web; not doing anything out of the ordinary. I saved the file and logged off for the day. When I tried to open it again, Word refused, claiming the file format was incorrect.
I looked into the .doc with a hex editor and found that some HTML source had somehow found its way into the .doc! I was using win95, so I guess this can be chalked up to buggy filesystem code. The weirdest and most frustrating bug I've ever seen. I didn't manage to recover any of my work.
This isn't a draft law, yet; it only puts up for discussion some ideas that could eventually be made into laws. I have to agree with the EFF that they are disturbing, and will be sending a letter stating my opposition. I'd say now is the best time to object, before they gather any inertia.
I disagree. In my experience it is in fact much faster to learn something by yourself. How often do you actually ask someone for help? The only time I remember asking for help because I genuinely didn't understand the material was in the electronics course I had last semester, and that was because the course notes were very poor. When the information is in high-quality textbook form, I find I never need any assistance. The advantages of studying entirely by yourself are much greater: you can study at your own pace and don't have to waste time in inefficient classes. All classes, to some extent, spend too much time on topics you find easy and skim over those you find difficult. I often skipped physics classes -- to study physics!
I would argue that the purpose of teachers is not to communicate information but merely to put pressure on students to study. Most people would never learn anything in academic fields unless someone forced them to, and that's exactly what the school environment is for. I don't take courses on things that are sufficiently interesting that I can and do learn about them on my own (e.g. philosophy), but rather on topics that I hate but want to learn about anyway (math).
Bah, Eliza already passed the Turing test :).
I've only recently started studying ethics in detail, but it seems to me that the core of all ethical systems has almost nothing to do with intelligence. The problem is that you can't make a direct logical inference from a descriptive statement ("the table is red") to a normative statement ("the table should be painted"). So whenever we decide to do anything at all, we have to base our actions on principles that aren't drawn from empirical observation and therefore do not stem from rational thought (though rationality can be used to extend and enrich these fundamental principles). In other words, ethics is based on human intuition.
A race of computers would have the same problem: no matter how smart they are, they can't make normative statements out of thin air. They would also have to rely on "intuition"; in their case, the core goals and values instilled into them by their programmers. If someone programs them (or they somehow evolve) to feel intuitively that murdering and enslaving humans is the right thing to do, they will wield all their intelligence to accomplish this "good", and once they are finished, they will be satisfied that they did the morally correct action.
Just like you and me feel instant moral revulsion at the thought of, say, setting a child on fire and watching him burn, such a robot might feel moral revulsion at the thought of not doing so. Logic only allows you to go from basic statements to higher-level ones; it can't create completely new ones. So even if the fundamental axioms the robot lives its life by are evil from our point of view, no amount of intelligence can change that.
AFAIK, not in practice. It is always possible to introduce new words into a language when it becomes necessary. An African tribe might not have a word for "snow", but if they saw any, they would quickly invent one (or loan it from another language).
As I recall, modern linguistics says that all natural language grammars follow the same meta-grammar. In other words, natural language grammars are all similar in fundamental ways, and can be used to express the same links between concepts. From my experience with Japanese, I know it's always possible to translate a Japanese sentence to English (provided the phrase doesn't contain any aspects of Japanese culture that English has no word for); there'll be some loss of nuance, but the core meaning can be transmitted. Imho, though languages have different nuances that reflect the culture of their speakers, no language results in fundamentally superior "productivity" at any task, once the proper vocabulary has been learned.
Main Entry: pronounce
...
Pronunciation: pr&-'naun(t)s
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): pronounced; pronouncing
transitive senses
1 : to declare officially or ceremoniously <the minister pronounced them husband and wife>
2 : to declare authoritatively or as an opinion <doctors pronounced him fit to resume duties>
You know perfectly well I was talking about the computer gaming industry :).
There were dozens of genres of games invented in the past 20 years: side-scrollers, space shooters, RPGs, first-person shooters, third-person shooters, platformers, puzzle games, adventure games, turn-based strategy, real-time strategy, business simulators, dating simulators, flight simulators, and so on. There are more genres than I can count! You're saying that none of this is innovative? IMHO, the gaming industry has been amazingly prolific, especially considering the short span of time in which it has existed.
On the other hand, free software programmers have consistently proven that they are completely incapable of creating a decent game. All free software projects aiming to create a complete, commercial-quality game have been dismal failures. The only free games of note, such as Counterstrike, are those built on top of existing commercial engines. The OSS development model is good for some applications, but games are definitely not one of them.
And "threw a truly spectacular console together"? Cluestick: manufacturing hardware requires capital. Free software, by definition, will never produce hardware. So save your GPL rhetoric for a topic where it's appropriate.
I won't comment on Key, since I never watched any. But if you found Eva's ending disappointing, have you seen End of Evangelion? It's basically a 2-hour-long replacement for the much-maligned 2 final episodes.
I think it's the best part of the series. Asuka's final battle has to be seen to be believed. Heart-wrenching violence and tragedy against a backdrop of soothing classical music. Incredibly powerful emotional effect. It left me in a state of shock. If you're an Eva fan, you're really missing out if you haven't seen the film.
I don't disagree that his analogy is poor, but for other reasons than that one is against the law and the other isn't. IMHO, when discussing ethics, the law shouldn't be taken into consideration. All it represents is the current consensus about morality in the society we live in, and doesn't correspond to absolute right and wrong (or your personal sense of right and wrong, if you are a relativist). If we lived in a hypothetical society where murder is legal, would that make it moral?
Also, the law is subject to change at any time. In the future, killing animated people _could_ be illegal if it was judged a psychological danger (and the poster you replied to seemed to be advocating a move in this direction). Would that then suddenly make it wrong, just because the government decided it is?
If I misinterpreted the intent of your post and you weren't implying that law=morals, never mind :). But then what was your point? I wouldn't stop doing something ethically acceptable just because it's against the law.
A search of RealNetworks on slashdot turns up a lot of articles on RealNetworks' violations of privacy. They also sued Streambox under the DMCA, for reverse engineering their file formats and circumventing their "protection against piracy".
And their player bombards you with ads and annoying popups (e.g. please register your personal information with us so we can send you Exciting Product Offerings). It feels like they care more about their corporate associates than the consumer.
Microsoft has also had bad business practices, but then again, they've had a lot more opportunity to. Real, OTOH, doesn't have as much influence, but has been as sleazy as it could. I shudder to think of what RealNetworks would do if it were in MS's position.
The chief spokes-monkey declared the official communications protocol of Ximian to be the Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite. He then screeched, beat his chest and threatened to pelt feces at users of inferior protocols like SMTP.