Linux is a multi-user system, it's specifically designed to allow you to run pretty much any kind of software as a user that you might possible want.
True you can't write to the system directories, but you can sure as hell write to anywhere in the users home directory and cause anything you like to auto run when that user logs in. The only thing you can't do is open a port below 1024, but you don't need to use any of those ports unless you want to use default ports.
Want a zombie SMTP server, file server, web server, all fine and dandy, you just use non default ports, hell 8080 doesn't even require root access to start. You want to access someone's files, exploit their web browser, all fine.
Unless I'm drastically mistaken, "truth" is a positive defense. The plaintiff must prove that what you said was damaging, but you're the one who has to prove it's true. Otherwise you could make up all sorts of crap about anyone since it's almost impossible to prove a negative.
I'm not saying that the traditional news media aren't generally speaking left leaning, they are. I'm not saying that they haven't slid along way down the slippery slope into producing infotainment crap just like everyone else. I'm not even saying that it isn't highly appropriate that a news organization exist which is biased towards the conservative side of politics in order to provide balance, perhaps even multiple such organizations.
However, Fox is a breed apart. The degree of bias displayed on that station is disgusting and affront to both free speech and to the ideologies which Fox supposedly supports. Comparing NBC and Fox is a bit like comparing a moderate Christian with Richard Dawkins.
I'm by no means a huge fan of the US, I moved away and I'm not in any particular hurry to move back, but for god's sake.
No one sane still believes in manifest destiny, to be perfectly honest the primary purpose of manifest destiny in the first place was probably just to allow settlers to wipe out the natives without feeling overly guilty about it, and while other countries didn't have a name for it, former colonies all over the world can attest that pretty much every European power has had the same attitude at some point. The US is also, largely speaking rather isolationist in nature and would, for the most part, rather not deal with the rest of the world let alone meddle in it.
Most people are vacuous and amoral, which is why they consume all that crap everywhere in the world, Americans might produce it, but everyone else wants it. As for being only slightly aware of what's going outside your own borders, that's a universal trait. The only reason Europeans are remotely multicultural is that you can drive for an hour and see three different cultures, you're still totally hopeless when it comes down to understanding any culture you can't drive to just like everyone else in the world.
Most Americans don't want AFACT anymore than most Europeans do, media companies all over the world however(not just in the US) want them though and they're lobbying governments everywhere to pass them. If your government isn't representing you, vote in a new one.
Everyone is like this with "free" trade, they want trade to be free for their goods but not for others. The US is actually pretty good about not putting up too many protectionist tariffs.
Americans are somewhat crass in their "if it makes you money and you don't get caught you're good" attitude, but worship of capitalism is hardly unique to the US, nor is(or was) worship of Brittney Spears.
The UK was as bad or worse when it came to the whole GFC garbage, and globalization is a reality whether you like it or not, and the Greeks played plenty of asset tricks(even if they were helped in doing so by American companies).
US foreign policy is incredibly short sighted, and they do have a tendency to fall for the "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" line when they're trying to avoid their own casualties.
In the 2004 election, the one where Bush did best, voter turn out was around 60%, and only 64% of those people voted for Bush, so at his peak, only 38% of the American people voted for Bush(not even counting the people who aren't eligible to vote).
A lot of Europeans have a belief that because they know an awful lot about other Europeans that they're multicultural, even if they haven't a clue about anyone from further afield. They believe that because their film industries make depressing cultural movies that even their own people don't want to watch that they have a superior culture. They believe that they're not responsible for the things the ass hat who runs their country does because they didn't vote for him, but that all Americans voted for the ass hat who runs theirs.
The US has more than its fair share of failings, but at least they're fairly open and honest about them as opposed to pretending.
To be fair, AFAIK the US is actually the only country in the world which has the "if it's true it's not libel" defense.
In most places it not only has to be true, but it also has to be the public's business in the first place. So for example if you out a business rival and that damages his or her reputation, even if he or she actually is gay, then you still might be able to be sued for libel/slander because it wasn't anyone's business and you caused damage. On the other hand if you out someone who is campaigning against gay rights or something along those lines, you'd be fine because finding out that the raging homophobic twat is gay would be in the public interest.
The rest of the situation is actually not all that different though. Going to court is rather expensive for anyone, and if it's not immensely easy to prove the truth of what you said, you're likely to be bankrupt in the states by the time you're done anyway. You can of course get court costs awarded both in the US and the UK, but AFAIK there generally has to be some degree of bad faith for that to happen.
Alright, you're technically right on the price. If you have absolutely no windows servers whatsoever, adding one is hideously expensive(CALs and whatnot), adding an extra one is actually very cheap, it also uses a lot less resources.
It's also true that at the extreme upper end there is just absolutely no alternative to Oracle, as has been the case for the last 20 years or so. That extreme upper end however is shrinking with every release of SQL Server.
So Microsoft continues to battle against products trying which are competing directly with it's core revenue streams(Windows and Office)? What a shock.
SQL Server is gaining ground on Oracle at a rather dramatic rate, it's cheaper, works just as well in most cases, and Microsoft is a hell of a lot less evil than Oracle. MySQL sucks and always has, it's not remotely viable for anything even remotely resembling a large data set and pretty much no vendor anywhere supports it. Postgres is quite good, but has almost no market penetration.
IIS isn't as good as Apache, but IIS plus.NET is far better and easier to work with than any JEE container I've ever used. As static web pages become less and less of the volume of the web, Apache's superiority is greatly diminshed.
As for the rest of it, if you're going to be working in a VM environment, then letting anything touch the bare metal that doesn't have to is pretty much crazy. Microsoft supports all their products on VMs so why wouldn't you virtualize them?
On the one hand, the documents have a certain credibility on their own due to being believable and appearing authentic. This isn't a huge amount of credibility, but it can sell a story.
More importantly, if the documents were fake, we wouldn't have top officials from the pentagon coming out and saying he's putting innocent lives in danger. Ironically the vast majority of the credibility for this site comes from the people whose documents are being leaked.
Well, I personally always thought that if we'd tread a little more softly instead of trying to find someone to go to war with about 9/11 we might have avoided the whole thing, though I understood how we got into the war once we'd gotten to that point.
Why we did our usual proxy fighting using the so called "Northern Alliance" who were really a bunch of opium growing warlords who weren't really all that much better than the Taliban they were replacing I don't really know. I would have thought that the whole Osama/Sadaam thing would have taught us that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
I'm even more surprised that anyone is shocked that after supporting the expansion of a bunch of warlords and then installing a corrupt puppet(who we lost the strings for) didn't result in economic and governmental stability. Or for that matter why we keep insisting that we want people to have democracy and then trying over and over again until we get democratic results we like.
Steam is tolerable because it offers you something in exchange for the lack of control given you by DRM.
Log into Steam, and you can download and play any game you've purchased or activated. You can do it on as many computers as you like, as many times as you like, from pretty much anywhere in the world where you can get internet. You get the downsides of the license instead of a purchase(like needing an internet connection to play it), but you get the upsides as well. It's a problem if Steam goes off line and they don't provide a work around, but there's some fairness in the system.
That's generally where a lot of companies go wrong, they want to have the best of both worlds for themselves(all the rights, none of the responsibilities), which doesn't go over well with their customers and encourages them to behave the same way(all the game, none of the cost). The idea that if you break a CD you're stuffed or at least substantially out of pocket, but that you can't give that CD to someone else is the problem.
Micro-transactions are probably the right solution. The problem is that micro-transactions don't actually exist, because banks take so much of a micro transaction that it's not worth it. This means they either have to price the new content too high, or you need to buy blocks of points which are far more than you need.
Back in the old days, $US20-30 was the price of a full expansion with a totally new story that generally was at least half the length of the original story(sometimes more), new printed manuals and all sorts of fun stuff like that.
Now they want to sell us a five minute story line and a couple of new models in exchange for $US3-5. That's not value for money, the campaign is probably more likely to be worth between 50 cents and a dollar, and would probably be more profitable at that level(due to more people buying it) than it is at the higher price. Unfortunately they can't sell them at that price.
Again, that's not saying that it is acceptable to deliberately release a crippled game(and if you have a cohesive story arc from which you excise a significant portion it's crippled), but if you want to add stuff to an already completed game with an adequate price point and an easy way of doing the purchase, that's not at all unreasonable. It's not really a way of combating piracy though, more a way of increasing revenue.
All PAE actually does is allow each individual process to have a 4 GB of RAM limit(well 2 in actuality on a 32 bit system), it doesn't really solve the RAM issue as you still can't actually utilize extra RAM effectively(a process which needs more than 4 GB of ram is still stuffed), it's a rather nasty kludge to make it work, and it has performance issues.
Given that with the exception of drivers you can install 32 bit software on 64 bit with zero problems, and that the 64 bit versions of Vista and 7 are as good or better than the 32 bit versions, the only reason to buy 32 bit is if you have a very specific hardware requirement or because you're an idiot. Why should Microsoft stuff a rather nasty kludge which can affect performance and stability into a system you deliberately chose knowing the inherent limitations?
You can't buy XP after the first Service Pack for Windows 7 comes out. No new XP licenses period for anyone. Need a new staff member, welcome to a mixed environment.
Small nitpick, the pope is only infallible when he speaks ex cathedra (from the chair). When he does this, for all intents and purposes, he speaks with the voice of god and is infallible, the rest of the time, as I understand it, he's just a human being giving his own opinions.
Generally speaking, the popes aren't stupid, and they know the kind of binds being infallible(and therefor inflexible) gets you into and so they are infallible fairly rarely.
Lord Steve on the other hand is infallible all the time and suffers the relevant consequences.
To try and make a point about people evaluating the cost of particular actions(like prosecuting credit card fraud) and occasionally choosing an option which is cheaper for them but worse for everyone else, which is bad, and then try to compare it to companies being realistic about their ability to deliver. Then you throw in a dig towards the US.
You can't ever guarantee 100% of anything. No matter how many people you employ in your call center there's always a call rate which will overwhelm it. No matter how good a disinfectant is it won't kill 100% of germs. Companies who try to achieve impossible goals(100% is impossible, you probably couldn't even promise that 100% of calls wouldn't be answered) go out of business and no one wins.
I'm not arguing that the way credit card companies deal with fraud is bad for everyone, including over the long term the credit card companies, but the rest of your examples don't match that behavior, nor is this behavior specifically American. Lord knows there are problems with US business practices, but given that credit cards(and for that matter a lot of banking) is a risk vs rewards analysis business, you can't really be surprised that banks all over the world do the same thing. The nature of their work makes them see things this way.
It's not really so much about either of those things. Microsoft still makes the best products in quite a number of areas and still makes a crap load of money.
Part of it is the fact that after going through so much trouble to get people using Windows from the cradle to the grave in one form or another it's not working. They've spent an awful lot of money on projects they probably don't really care about trying to reach this goal. It's got to be incredibly frustrating for them.
The other part of it is really the risk that they'll miss the next big thing. The vast majority of "hip young developers" aren't particularly important the ideas they have for their startup aren't good ideas and they haven't the knowledge or experience to accomplish much of anything. Of the few remaining, most of them will fail in their startups because they don't know how to run a business or due to bad luck. However, the one or two who are left might end up creating the next big thing and either compete directly with Microsoft or not use their products(see google for an example).
You have a personal preference for single hard drives(which is wrong), and you use that to form your judgement of SSDs. It's not going to be cheaper per GB for SSDs any time soon, platter density on HDDs is still going up and it's not tremendously likely to stop any time soon.
On the other hand HDD access speeds haven't increased dramatically since 10k rpm drives were introduced to the consumer market which was about 10 years ago. They've played around with cache, and the data transfer abilities off the drive itself have gone up quite a bit(SATA3 is astronomically fast), but the reason why your big expensive computer boots up slower than the one you had 15 years ago is because your hard drive is just as slow as the one you had back then and you're loading more.
Now I don't personally have an SSD(getting something that's not shit here in Australia is difficult, the Intel drives just aren't for sale where I live), but I most certainly see how getting my frequently used applications loading in a fraction of the time could be very beneficial, even if I'd still need a second drive to store all the stuff where access speed isn't a problem(video and audio only need to read slightly faster than you can play the media which, even in HD, isn't really all that fast).
Unfortunately no, she's not, or this probably wouldn't have happened as she would likely not have sued. She was however alive in 1981 when they lifted the notes.
Realistically though, this hasn't exactly been a win for either party. The judge believes they plagiarized the notes(which is fairly obvious when you listen to both works), but he's only ordered them to pay 5% of future profits and royalties back to 2002. While this song is still played, one would presume the vast majority of the revenue it has or ever will generate was generated prior to that date.
This was always a bit of a funny case since their lead singer is a minister in the current government(he's not actually named in the suit presumably he didn't have righting credits so he's got no financial interest).
The RealID chat feature uses your real name too, which would be fine(after all you're only supposed to be setting that feature up for people you actually know and trust), but in addition to exposing your real name to the person you trust, it also exposes it to everyone they trust, which is a whole different kettle of fish.
What they've really needed to do all along was to set up posting in the forums/cross game chat via your account name(which is an e-mail address now), as opposed to character names(which is what causes all the stupid trolling), but they've gotten everyone so paranoid about their account details being used for account theft that it's just gotten ludicrous.
There are different sort of takeovers, and they benefit different sorts of people.
For instance, when Microsoft bought FAST and incorporated the search into Sharepoint they made their sharepoint customers happy, however at the same time they ceased all development on the Unix and Linux versions. This merger obviously provided benefits to people, but not necessarily to the customers of the small entity.
As another example, when Oracle bought Sun, service went down hill rather dramatically and costs went up, on the other hand the alternative for Sun was likely bankruptcy so while as a Sun client you are worse off under Oracle compared to how Sun was, you're dramatically better off than you would have been under how Sun would have been.
Then there are win win instances like Google buying YouTube, YouTube is better resourced and still running, Google has a media distribution outlet.
Sometimes you get lose lose situations where a large company buys a small company to kill their product, which means the small companies existing customers screwed and the large companies customers don't get the benefits that increased competition might have brought to them.
Generally speaking of course the people who benefit from any merger are the people who own the companies involved. The people who own the buyer get rid of competition or gain a valuable asset, and the people doing the selling become stinking rich(or at least don't go broke), which is of course the reason sales are made in the first place.
Some copying is permitted by fair use, copying the entire work is not. However, libraries are generally public buildings and so are immune from the ludicrous requirements to proactively enforce other peoples copyrights so they generally don't do anything if you violate those rights.
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Bullshit.
Linux is a multi-user system, it's specifically designed to allow you to run pretty much any kind of software as a user that you might possible want.
True you can't write to the system directories, but you can sure as hell write to anywhere in the users home directory and cause anything you like to auto run when that user logs in. The only thing you can't do is open a port below 1024, but you don't need to use any of those ports unless you want to use default ports.
Want a zombie SMTP server, file server, web server, all fine and dandy, you just use non default ports, hell 8080 doesn't even require root access to start. You want to access someone's files, exploit their web browser, all fine.
Unless I'm drastically mistaken, "truth" is a positive defense. The plaintiff must prove that what you said was damaging, but you're the one who has to prove it's true. Otherwise you could make up all sorts of crap about anyone since it's almost impossible to prove a negative.
I'm not saying that the traditional news media aren't generally speaking left leaning, they are. I'm not saying that they haven't slid along way down the slippery slope into producing infotainment crap just like everyone else. I'm not even saying that it isn't highly appropriate that a news organization exist which is biased towards the conservative side of politics in order to provide balance, perhaps even multiple such organizations.
However, Fox is a breed apart. The degree of bias displayed on that station is disgusting and affront to both free speech and to the ideologies which Fox supposedly supports. Comparing NBC and Fox is a bit like comparing a moderate Christian with Richard Dawkins.
I'm by no means a huge fan of the US, I moved away and I'm not in any particular hurry to move back, but for god's sake.
A lot of Europeans have a belief that because they know an awful lot about other Europeans that they're multicultural, even if they haven't a clue about anyone from further afield. They believe that because their film industries make depressing cultural movies that even their own people don't want to watch that they have a superior culture. They believe that they're not responsible for the things the ass hat who runs their country does because they didn't vote for him, but that all Americans voted for the ass hat who runs theirs.
The US has more than its fair share of failings, but at least they're fairly open and honest about them as opposed to pretending.
To be fair, AFAIK the US is actually the only country in the world which has the "if it's true it's not libel" defense.
In most places it not only has to be true, but it also has to be the public's business in the first place. So for example if you out a business rival and that damages his or her reputation, even if he or she actually is gay, then you still might be able to be sued for libel/slander because it wasn't anyone's business and you caused damage. On the other hand if you out someone who is campaigning against gay rights or something along those lines, you'd be fine because finding out that the raging homophobic twat is gay would be in the public interest.
The rest of the situation is actually not all that different though. Going to court is rather expensive for anyone, and if it's not immensely easy to prove the truth of what you said, you're likely to be bankrupt in the states by the time you're done anyway. You can of course get court costs awarded both in the US and the UK, but AFAIK there generally has to be some degree of bad faith for that to happen.
Alright, you're technically right on the price. If you have absolutely no windows servers whatsoever, adding one is hideously expensive(CALs and whatnot), adding an extra one is actually very cheap, it also uses a lot less resources.
It's also true that at the extreme upper end there is just absolutely no alternative to Oracle, as has been the case for the last 20 years or so. That extreme upper end however is shrinking with every release of SQL Server.
Try the 4.0 beta, it's getting pretty close.
And if that's how you ran Linux, Microsoft wouldn't care.
So Microsoft continues to battle against products trying which are competing directly with it's core revenue streams(Windows and Office)? What a shock.
SQL Server is gaining ground on Oracle at a rather dramatic rate, it's cheaper, works just as well in most cases, and Microsoft is a hell of a lot less evil than Oracle. MySQL sucks and always has, it's not remotely viable for anything even remotely resembling a large data set and pretty much no vendor anywhere supports it. Postgres is quite good, but has almost no market penetration.
IIS isn't as good as Apache, but IIS plus .NET is far better and easier to work with than any JEE container I've ever used. As static web pages become less and less of the volume of the web, Apache's superiority is greatly diminshed.
As for the rest of it, if you're going to be working in a VM environment, then letting anything touch the bare metal that doesn't have to is pretty much crazy. Microsoft supports all their products on VMs so why wouldn't you virtualize them?
Well it's sort of a two part deal.
On the one hand, the documents have a certain credibility on their own due to being believable and appearing authentic. This isn't a huge amount of credibility, but it can sell a story.
More importantly, if the documents were fake, we wouldn't have top officials from the pentagon coming out and saying he's putting innocent lives in danger. Ironically the vast majority of the credibility for this site comes from the people whose documents are being leaked.
Well, I personally always thought that if we'd tread a little more softly instead of trying to find someone to go to war with about 9/11 we might have avoided the whole thing, though I understood how we got into the war once we'd gotten to that point.
Why we did our usual proxy fighting using the so called "Northern Alliance" who were really a bunch of opium growing warlords who weren't really all that much better than the Taliban they were replacing I don't really know. I would have thought that the whole Osama/Sadaam thing would have taught us that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
I'm even more surprised that anyone is shocked that after supporting the expansion of a bunch of warlords and then installing a corrupt puppet(who we lost the strings for) didn't result in economic and governmental stability. Or for that matter why we keep insisting that we want people to have democracy and then trying over and over again until we get democratic results we like.
Steam is tolerable because it offers you something in exchange for the lack of control given you by DRM.
Log into Steam, and you can download and play any game you've purchased or activated. You can do it on as many computers as you like, as many times as you like, from pretty much anywhere in the world where you can get internet. You get the downsides of the license instead of a purchase(like needing an internet connection to play it), but you get the upsides as well. It's a problem if Steam goes off line and they don't provide a work around, but there's some fairness in the system.
That's generally where a lot of companies go wrong, they want to have the best of both worlds for themselves(all the rights, none of the responsibilities), which doesn't go over well with their customers and encourages them to behave the same way(all the game, none of the cost). The idea that if you break a CD you're stuffed or at least substantially out of pocket, but that you can't give that CD to someone else is the problem.
Micro-transactions are probably the right solution. The problem is that micro-transactions don't actually exist, because banks take so much of a micro transaction that it's not worth it. This means they either have to price the new content too high, or you need to buy blocks of points which are far more than you need.
Back in the old days, $US20-30 was the price of a full expansion with a totally new story that generally was at least half the length of the original story(sometimes more), new printed manuals and all sorts of fun stuff like that.
Now they want to sell us a five minute story line and a couple of new models in exchange for $US3-5. That's not value for money, the campaign is probably more likely to be worth between 50 cents and a dollar, and would probably be more profitable at that level(due to more people buying it) than it is at the higher price. Unfortunately they can't sell them at that price.
Again, that's not saying that it is acceptable to deliberately release a crippled game(and if you have a cohesive story arc from which you excise a significant portion it's crippled), but if you want to add stuff to an already completed game with an adequate price point and an easy way of doing the purchase, that's not at all unreasonable. It's not really a way of combating piracy though, more a way of increasing revenue.
All PAE actually does is allow each individual process to have a 4 GB of RAM limit(well 2 in actuality on a 32 bit system), it doesn't really solve the RAM issue as you still can't actually utilize extra RAM effectively(a process which needs more than 4 GB of ram is still stuffed), it's a rather nasty kludge to make it work, and it has performance issues.
Given that with the exception of drivers you can install 32 bit software on 64 bit with zero problems, and that the 64 bit versions of Vista and 7 are as good or better than the 32 bit versions, the only reason to buy 32 bit is if you have a very specific hardware requirement or because you're an idiot. Why should Microsoft stuff a rather nasty kludge which can affect performance and stability into a system you deliberately chose knowing the inherent limitations?
You can't buy XP after the first Service Pack for Windows 7 comes out. No new XP licenses period for anyone. Need a new staff member, welcome to a mixed environment.
Small nitpick, the pope is only infallible when he speaks ex cathedra (from the chair). When he does this, for all intents and purposes, he speaks with the voice of god and is infallible, the rest of the time, as I understand it, he's just a human being giving his own opinions.
Generally speaking, the popes aren't stupid, and they know the kind of binds being infallible(and therefor inflexible) gets you into and so they are infallible fairly rarely.
Lord Steve on the other hand is infallible all the time and suffers the relevant consequences.
Come on. That's totally pathetic.
To try and make a point about people evaluating the cost of particular actions(like prosecuting credit card fraud) and occasionally choosing an option which is cheaper for them but worse for everyone else, which is bad, and then try to compare it to companies being realistic about their ability to deliver. Then you throw in a dig towards the US.
You can't ever guarantee 100% of anything. No matter how many people you employ in your call center there's always a call rate which will overwhelm it. No matter how good a disinfectant is it won't kill 100% of germs. Companies who try to achieve impossible goals(100% is impossible, you probably couldn't even promise that 100% of calls wouldn't be answered) go out of business and no one wins.
I'm not arguing that the way credit card companies deal with fraud is bad for everyone, including over the long term the credit card companies, but the rest of your examples don't match that behavior, nor is this behavior specifically American. Lord knows there are problems with US business practices, but given that credit cards(and for that matter a lot of banking) is a risk vs rewards analysis business, you can't really be surprised that banks all over the world do the same thing. The nature of their work makes them see things this way.
It's not really so much about either of those things. Microsoft still makes the best products in quite a number of areas and still makes a crap load of money.
Part of it is the fact that after going through so much trouble to get people using Windows from the cradle to the grave in one form or another it's not working. They've spent an awful lot of money on projects they probably don't really care about trying to reach this goal. It's got to be incredibly frustrating for them.
The other part of it is really the risk that they'll miss the next big thing. The vast majority of "hip young developers" aren't particularly important the ideas they have for their startup aren't good ideas and they haven't the knowledge or experience to accomplish much of anything. Of the few remaining, most of them will fail in their startups because they don't know how to run a business or due to bad luck. However, the one or two who are left might end up creating the next big thing and either compete directly with Microsoft or not use their products(see google for an example).
You're right, brain death.
You have a personal preference for single hard drives(which is wrong), and you use that to form your judgement of SSDs. It's not going to be cheaper per GB for SSDs any time soon, platter density on HDDs is still going up and it's not tremendously likely to stop any time soon.
On the other hand HDD access speeds haven't increased dramatically since 10k rpm drives were introduced to the consumer market which was about 10 years ago. They've played around with cache, and the data transfer abilities off the drive itself have gone up quite a bit(SATA3 is astronomically fast), but the reason why your big expensive computer boots up slower than the one you had 15 years ago is because your hard drive is just as slow as the one you had back then and you're loading more.
Now I don't personally have an SSD(getting something that's not shit here in Australia is difficult, the Intel drives just aren't for sale where I live), but I most certainly see how getting my frequently used applications loading in a fraction of the time could be very beneficial, even if I'd still need a second drive to store all the stuff where access speed isn't a problem(video and audio only need to read slightly faster than you can play the media which, even in HD, isn't really all that fast).
Unfortunately no, she's not, or this probably wouldn't have happened as she would likely not have sued. She was however alive in 1981 when they lifted the notes.
Realistically though, this hasn't exactly been a win for either party. The judge believes they plagiarized the notes(which is fairly obvious when you listen to both works), but he's only ordered them to pay 5% of future profits and royalties back to 2002. While this song is still played, one would presume the vast majority of the revenue it has or ever will generate was generated prior to that date.
This was always a bit of a funny case since their lead singer is a minister in the current government(he's not actually named in the suit presumably he didn't have righting credits so he's got no financial interest).
The RealID chat feature uses your real name too, which would be fine(after all you're only supposed to be setting that feature up for people you actually know and trust), but in addition to exposing your real name to the person you trust, it also exposes it to everyone they trust, which is a whole different kettle of fish.
What they've really needed to do all along was to set up posting in the forums/cross game chat via your account name(which is an e-mail address now), as opposed to character names(which is what causes all the stupid trolling), but they've gotten everyone so paranoid about their account details being used for account theft that it's just gotten ludicrous.
There are different sort of takeovers, and they benefit different sorts of people.
For instance, when Microsoft bought FAST and incorporated the search into Sharepoint they made their sharepoint customers happy, however at the same time they ceased all development on the Unix and Linux versions. This merger obviously provided benefits to people, but not necessarily to the customers of the small entity.
As another example, when Oracle bought Sun, service went down hill rather dramatically and costs went up, on the other hand the alternative for Sun was likely bankruptcy so while as a Sun client you are worse off under Oracle compared to how Sun was, you're dramatically better off than you would have been under how Sun would have been.
Then there are win win instances like Google buying YouTube, YouTube is better resourced and still running, Google has a media distribution outlet.
Sometimes you get lose lose situations where a large company buys a small company to kill their product, which means the small companies existing customers screwed and the large companies customers don't get the benefits that increased competition might have brought to them.
Generally speaking of course the people who benefit from any merger are the people who own the companies involved. The people who own the buyer get rid of competition or gain a valuable asset, and the people doing the selling become stinking rich(or at least don't go broke), which is of course the reason sales are made in the first place.
Some copying is permitted by fair use, copying the entire work is not. However, libraries are generally public buildings and so are immune from the ludicrous requirements to proactively enforce other peoples copyrights so they generally don't do anything if you violate those rights.