Well the answer to that question is that somewhere along the line computers changed from being just something which can do non value added tasks, to being tools which can be add value to a task being performed by a human being(whose value may vary).
As with any other tool this means that it has to be somewhere you can get at it(on your desk) and that you need to know how to use it(ask anyone who has never used a hammer before to pound in a nail and see how many times they stuff it up).
Now you might argue that a computer is a lot harder to use than a hammer, but that's mostly because it's metaphorically a bit more like a toolbox. It has tools within it to perform specific tasks as opposed to doing only one task(historically this has had to do with cost, but as we see comodotized hardware prices this may change). When you have a toolbox full of tools, you not only need to know how to use the individual tools, you also need to know how to find them in the toolbox, how to properly and safely remove them from and return them to the toolbox, as well as how to perform any required maintainence to your toolbox.
In the same way in order to use your finance application(the tool), you need to know how to find it and run it as well as how to actually use it. Someone(not necessarily you) also needs to know how to put the tool where you can get it in the first place(install the software), clean the gunk out of the toolbox(maintain the PC) and to transfer all your tools from an old toolbox to a new toolbox when your old one falls apart, or you need one which can hold more tools.
Yes, but those people still have to eat, and if you want them to be able to work full time on making music, they have to be able to make money off music, that's the whole point of copyright in the first place.
I stand corrected about the wooden jets(I wasn't sure, just hadn't heard of any), but I still reckon that wood is an inappropriate material for something with the configuration of an x-wing(4 jets which have to be held in a certain configuration), particularly when they're launching it in a non aerodynamic manner.
This is true, but none of them were made of balsa wood, and none of them were trying to maintain the simultaneous trajectory of 4 disparate rocket engines. For that matter I can't think of a single jet engine powered wooden aircraft.
I disagree, I think music has a value, and that the vast majority of people would rather do the right thing and pay something than pirate.
The problem for the record industry is both finding that price, and recreating their image(should they choose to do so). Their profitability is dependent on finding a price point where people find that the product is convenient and valuable, and having something that people like. Their problem is that aside from general dislike of large corporations, they've proved themselves to be more greedy and unethical than most. This will probably lower the effective price of their product(doing the right thing for an entity you like has a higher value than doing the right thing for a bunch of greedy swine), but it doesn't remove the value entirely.
Society still enjoys music, and if you don't pay something for it people won't produce it, so finding a compromise between the old way and the total destruction of art as we know it is probably in everyone's best interest.
No, they're not teaching that anymore, because a lot of that stuff is either OS(and even sometimes OS version) or language specific.
I got my CS degree a few years back, and while I had to take a machine language course(MIPS RISC btw, not IA32) and could probably answer most of those questions(I'm not actually that sort of programmer), they weren't really a core part of the curriculum, and shouldn't be.
What you're looking for is an experienced C progammer, and if that's what you want find a local tech school that's churning them out. The knowledge you're asking for has nothing to do with being a good programmer and a lot to do with having a lot of experience with machine code and older C conventions.
Yes, but if you have to pay someone to make the modifications you want done, and then pay them to maintain those modifications and to port them whenever something they interface with randomly changes, then you've got cost, probably quite substantial cost. If you're going to pay a quite substantial cost for redevelopment, and you aren't going to make modifications yourself you may as well get a close source product and pay the company to make the modifications that you want them to make.
It doesn't matter what the courts do, how much you open the API, how much you break up Microsoft, how much you recommend that the industry needs competition because you can't create competition that doesn't exist. Apple doesn't want to compete in that space and neither does Linux.
Linux could be a major player in the Desktop OS market if they gave up choice, gave up control, and treated closed source vendors as valued members of the community. That isn't going to happen though, there is never going to be just one Linux distro, nor is there ever going to be just one Linux Desktop Environment. The community is never going to stabilize interfaces in order to allow proprietary hardware and software to work reliably 100% of the time on Linux. These things are not going to happen because they go against the values that make linux what it is today.
Mac isn't going to sell OSX for beige boxes, they aren't going to turn Macs into beige boxes. Whatever their reasons, Apple isn't going to compete either.
In the world of Desktop Operating Systems, Microsoft is the Else. If Linux isn't right for you, and OSX isn't right for you, you get Windows, and right now there are an awful lot of people who fit into the else, and I don't see any way to incorporate those people into Linux or Apple without giving up most of what makes those systems great in the first place.
Meh, I'm a nerd, and I use linux on a daily basis and open source software wherever possible and practical both in my work and personal life, but I still think that RMS is an extremist. Logically speaking he is an extremist, the view he holds on software freedom doesn't hold any place for non free software and so is therefor the extreme of that view. You don't have to believe the solution to your problem is in shooting everyone who doesn't agree with you to be an extremist.
You'd actually be much better off using your DHCP server to asign static IP's to specific hosts and not allowing it any free pool. It's still not totally secure(MAC spoofing etc), but it's a lot more secure than hoping no one will be able to find an unallocated IP address and work out what your DNS servers are. Not to mention that it's a heck of a lot easier to update your network configuration if you do it that way(yeah you have to add every new workstation to your DHCP server, but you had to do equivilant work anyway and if you change any of your backend server configs or have to rebuild a machine you save a lot of effort).
Your comment on resale value is interesting. If you can create an infinite amount of something for zero cost, then you have an infinite supply. According to the founding principles of our supposed free market, infinite supply met with anything but infinite demand(which isn't possible since there are and always will be a finite amount of people) creates an overall value of zero. You can't steal something with a zero value.
The whole point of copyright is to give value to something which has no value by allowing for the control of distribution. By controlling distribution you create a finite supply and the math changes and gives you a value. Copyright modifies the free market in order to give an artificial value to a zero value product.
So now the question is why? And the answer is very simple because it's actually written into the constitution.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts . Now you can make all sorts of arguments of what exactly useful Arts are(and whether music is one), but the meaning is pretty clear. Copyright exists in order to encourage scientists and artists to spend their time doing science and art instead of doing other things. The founding fathers believed that having people do this sort of thing had value and so they created an artificial value for their ideas.
The thing is they did not provide for the suppression and control of ideas for essentially unlimited periods. Nor did they provide for the right of non creators to profit from the actions of creators. I firmly believe that if the framers of the constitution saw the modern music industry and the current expiration period of copyrights they would be appalled.
I'm as much a fan of the "thin edge of the wedge" argument as anyone, but this is sort of pushing it.
It's a bit more like McDonalds not serving you a big mac unless you can prove your cholesterol isn't too high. This particular manager(who is in trouble more because he cost the company potential sales than anything else) believes, probably quite correctly, that video games can be a contributing factor to bad grades(more time spent gaming == less time avaialable to study). He also believes that as a purveyor of said product he has a duty to limit that contributing factor. It's a reasonable assumption to say that spending more time on your studies will improve your grades, at least up to a point.
He's being punished not because he's violating the rights of his customers to have video games(they don't have any), he's being punished because he's violating the most important right in the United States, the right of a large corporation to make the highest possible profits.
That said, when the next range of law suits come from people claiming that playing video games instead of studying ruined their lives you'll see this sort of policy nation wide.
TBH NBC shareholders should have been revolting when NBC spent an entire year filling thursday nights(the nights NBC totally owned) without nothing but episodes of a show that was going to finish at the end of that year(this was "Friends" for those who can't remember 3 years ago). Or before that when NBC played the time-slot shuffle with every new show they brought out so that no one knew when anything was actually on(except of course friends) and shows that were doing reaosnably well ended up with no ratings and cancelled. Everything they've done since just made life worse.
For all intents and purposes NBC was seinfeld, friends, fraser and maybe will and grace. Guess what none of those shows run anymore.
E-mail is not different than regular mail at work, you just don't own your work e-mail account, and since the e-mail is send to the account and not strictly speaking to a person, they own the e-mail that's sitting inside it. Your work can't look at your private e-mail account because they don't own it(nor can anyone else for that matter without a warrant), they probably can't even look at your slashdot post(nor do most organizations actually have the technical facilities to do this), they can look at the fact that you made the http request to do so, just as they can look and see that you used their phone system to call number x for y minutes at time z.
Of course the destination and duration of your phone call isn't actually protected from the government, only the contents.
The monitoring for the most part also came after liability as opposed to before. That's not to say that the occaisional admin wasn't snooping before, but most of the court cases determining the right to monitor happened because the business needed evidence for a legal case.
The $1 a song $10/cd price has never been a sensible one. I haven't been in the US for a couple of years now, but last time I was there you could walk into a Best Buy and buy a brand new actual cd for between ten and twelve dollars. That album usually has between 10 and 12 tracks.
This basically means that if you want most of an album from iTunes, that you're paying the same price as a CD(which was too much to begin with) for a DRM encumbered lower quality format. I don't know which genius came up with that one, but in an era where the price of CD's is considered too high, charging the same or even close to the same for something which costs them less and gives you less was always a daft idea.
TBH the price point for music is probably closer to one of the prices quoted by Rick Rubin in his NYT interview(not the first price, the second one) $3-5 dollars a month for access to any song you want to listen to on any device you want to listen to it on. I'd pay that, so would most people, hell if the quality was decent, I could live with that being taken out of my salary directly as a tax.
$3-5 dollars/month across even the adult population of the United States would provide enough money to give the artists quite a reasonable living and even keep a few thousand scum sucking record executives living reasonable life styles.
Maybe it wouldn't pay the salaries hollywood stars expect, but other solutions for tv and video are available. Most folks don't really mind unobtrusive advertising(note to folks out there doing web ads, if you didn't pop up windows all over the place trying to get people's attention then a lot fewer folks would use flash/ad blocker and you wouldn't have to worry about the end of advertising on the internet).
Actually, there's not really a conflict here. Telephone and Internal e-mail are two totally different things.
Your company doesn't have the right to read your e-mail because it passes through their system or because you're doing it on work time, they have that right because they own the account and/or computer where it's sitting. Your work e-mail account doesn't belong to you, and your work PC doesn't belong to you, nor do the backups of those systems. Assuming they've notified you appropriately regarding policy, your employer can look at anything sitting on your work PC, and anything sitting in the mailbox they own, or on backups of either of those two locations. That does't give them the right to read the data you send to an external e-mail system, or to look at an account you have in another location without a warrant.
The telephone, for the most part, doesn't work the same way. The telephone call itself may use company owned equipment, but it isn't sitting in an area the company owns(you might find you have no real right to privacy of voicemails on a company owned voicemail system, but you'll rarely find you don't have privacy for your phone calls).
I've seen this problem with legal documents before, not usually with other kinds of documents at least so long as I've got enough RAM, but long legal documents are a problem.
That said I've found that opening them in Office 2003 and resaving them usually fixes the problem(if you're stuck using Microsoft Office in a support role I thoroughy recommend getting yourself a copy of 2003, it fixes most of the common data corrupts of XP.
They need to give the source to anyone they distribute to(assuming the program is actually GPL) who asks. If they distribute free to everyone, then anyone who asks for it has to be given the source, that's the whole point of the license.
If they distribute it to their customers only and one of their customers gives it to you, then you can ask the customer for the source and they have to provide it to you.
If they've release a piece of software under the GPL then they have to do this(they can close future versions of the product and stop distributing the gpl'd versions, but as far as I can determine you can't ungpl something you've already distributed as gpl). They also have to do this if any of the software they've modified or linked to is GPL(exceptions for lesser GPL).
That said, I can't find anywhere on their website where they actually say they're GPL, only that they're open source, so if the license for plink ssh and myvnc is a BSD license they could probably claim to be releasing the product under a BSD license now and simply not give you the source.
Neither the right of first sale or the autopackager issue are related to fair use. Whether they're morally correct, or even legally correct is really rather immaterial.
Autopackager seems(as far as I can work out from the generally biased information I've found) to be an issue of distribution rights as opposed to usage rights. Anyone is free to use Microsoft patches, they aren't allowed to set yourself up as a software mirror for them. This is a copyright issue, but it isn't as far as I can see an issue of fair use.
First sale is again not a fair use right, but merely a legal gray area as to whether software is a license or a product(mostly caused by the fact that most software distributors want to have the best of both worlds and sell it like a product and restrict it like a license).
So whether you think that Microsoft doing other things is evil or legal it isn't hypocritical for them to do so and at the same time support fair use. It's a bit like a mugger campaigning against drunk driving, mugging might not be moral or legal, but it's not drunk driving. Since it's not hypocritical there is no irony.
Your mostly right, in the sense that having the files is like putting them up on a web page, except about the ignorance not being a defense. Ignorance of the law is not a legal defense, however it's sometimes possible to use the fact that you were ignorant that you were doing something as a defense. Ie. to keep up the car anaologies so famous on slashdot, you use the fact that you didn't know that speeding was illegal as a defense, however if you can prove a fault in your speedometer you might be able to use the fact that you were ignorant of your actual speed as a defence. In the same way a user could use the fact that they were ignorant of the fact that Kazaa shared files as a defense against such a charge if they could prove their ignorance(though it's difficult to prove that you didn't know a file sharing app shared files).
It's not about the issue of capacity to wear out a drive in a year, it's about the fact that no one actually writes that much data. 40GB of HD writes is a fairly big amount, particularly if you have atime disabled in your file system(and a flash system will inevitably have this as the case).
In the United States(the country in which this case is happening), truth is a legally defined defense against libel and slander, that is to say if you can prove that it's true then you aren't guilty of either of those crimes.
Whether you agree with that is rather immaterial to this case. Personally I do, but that's neither here nor there.
Some apps are just like that, I use Gentoo. Mostly because I haven't found anything else I can stand(might try Ubuntu if I can find the time) and I can get it to do most of it's compiling when I'm at work so it's not really all that inconvenient, and I've noticed performance improvements for compiled code even on other distros. Some packages you just need to compile yourself. WINE is like that, I remember a few years back on FC1 running the same game(fallout 2) in the binary WINE and in one I compiled myself, and in the binary version the game was just about unplayable whereas the compiled version was smooth as silk. I was still a linux newbie back then so I didn't do anything funny with the compilations or configurations, just default stuff.
I'm not certain exactly why this is the case, but for some reason it seems to make a lot more of a difference for the code that is the most unpleasant to compile(ie projects which involve large monolithic packages as opposed to smaller components(wine, openoffice, etc).
For one, if she didn't install or knowingly use the software it's questionable whether she's responsible.
Second Kazaa as it once existed tended to at least attempt(if you didn't actively tell it not to, which if she didn't install it she didn't get a chance to choose) to share pretty much every music file on your PC. If she had a legitimate music file on her PC Kazaa would have attempted to share it with the outside world leading to infringement. This was always bad design in every program tham implemented it(it's alright in a media player, but not in a file sharing utility, it'd be like having apache automatically make all your documents available.
Thirdly the RIAA is presumably alleging that they sent warning e-mails to this girl or her parents, and the girl and/or her parents are apparently alleging that they didn't get them. The suit against the ISP means that the ISP will be required to prove whether those e-mails got through or not and wether they ever got to them in the first place. If they did block them then there's a case there, if they didn't arrive then the RIAA loses their "she knew it was wrong and kept going" angle and look more like vultures going after a little girl who didn't know what she was doing.
Her suit about the ISP blocking the files is of course bollocks and should and likely will be tossed out(presuming that the ISP wasn't offering some sort of parental filtering service at cost in which case there's a case there too).
It's not actually a phoney key. It works perfectly, presuming you use the discs provided by the OEM manufacturer in question. At least that's the case with Optiplex Dell boxes I used to work with(last year).
This is of course presuming your OEM manufacturer actually provides you with a propery windows disc of course, and you still can't use it with a disc from another source, but they're not phoney keys either.
Slashdot Mirror
As with any other tool this means that it has to be somewhere you can get at it(on your desk) and that you need to know how to use it(ask anyone who has never used a hammer before to pound in a nail and see how many times they stuff it up).
Now you might argue that a computer is a lot harder to use than a hammer, but that's mostly because it's metaphorically a bit more like a toolbox. It has tools within it to perform specific tasks as opposed to doing only one task(historically this has had to do with cost, but as we see comodotized hardware prices this may change). When you have a toolbox full of tools, you not only need to know how to use the individual tools, you also need to know how to find them in the toolbox, how to properly and safely remove them from and return them to the toolbox, as well as how to perform any required maintainence to your toolbox.
In the same way in order to use your finance application(the tool), you need to know how to find it and run it as well as how to actually use it. Someone(not necessarily you) also needs to know how to put the tool where you can get it in the first place(install the software), clean the gunk out of the toolbox(maintain the PC) and to transfer all your tools from an old toolbox to a new toolbox when your old one falls apart, or you need one which can hold more tools.
Yes, but those people still have to eat, and if you want them to be able to work full time on making music, they have to be able to make money off music, that's the whole point of copyright in the first place.
I stand corrected about the wooden jets(I wasn't sure, just hadn't heard of any), but I still reckon that wood is an inappropriate material for something with the configuration of an x-wing(4 jets which have to be held in a certain configuration), particularly when they're launching it in a non aerodynamic manner.
This is true, but none of them were made of balsa wood, and none of them were trying to maintain the simultaneous trajectory of 4 disparate rocket engines. For that matter I can't think of a single jet engine powered wooden aircraft.
The problem for the record industry is both finding that price, and recreating their image(should they choose to do so). Their profitability is dependent on finding a price point where people find that the product is convenient and valuable, and having something that people like. Their problem is that aside from general dislike of large corporations, they've proved themselves to be more greedy and unethical than most. This will probably lower the effective price of their product(doing the right thing for an entity you like has a higher value than doing the right thing for a bunch of greedy swine), but it doesn't remove the value entirely.
Society still enjoys music, and if you don't pay something for it people won't produce it, so finding a compromise between the old way and the total destruction of art as we know it is probably in everyone's best interest.
I got my CS degree a few years back, and while I had to take a machine language course(MIPS RISC btw, not IA32) and could probably answer most of those questions(I'm not actually that sort of programmer), they weren't really a core part of the curriculum, and shouldn't be.
What you're looking for is an experienced C progammer, and if that's what you want find a local tech school that's churning them out. The knowledge you're asking for has nothing to do with being a good programmer and a lot to do with having a lot of experience with machine code and older C conventions.
Yes, but if you have to pay someone to make the modifications you want done, and then pay them to maintain those modifications and to port them whenever something they interface with randomly changes, then you've got cost, probably quite substantial cost. If you're going to pay a quite substantial cost for redevelopment, and you aren't going to make modifications yourself you may as well get a close source product and pay the company to make the modifications that you want them to make.
Linux could be a major player in the Desktop OS market if they gave up choice, gave up control, and treated closed source vendors as valued members of the community. That isn't going to happen though, there is never going to be just one Linux distro, nor is there ever going to be just one Linux Desktop Environment. The community is never going to stabilize interfaces in order to allow proprietary hardware and software to work reliably 100% of the time on Linux. These things are not going to happen because they go against the values that make linux what it is today.
Mac isn't going to sell OSX for beige boxes, they aren't going to turn Macs into beige boxes. Whatever their reasons, Apple isn't going to compete either.
In the world of Desktop Operating Systems, Microsoft is the Else. If Linux isn't right for you, and OSX isn't right for you, you get Windows, and right now there are an awful lot of people who fit into the else, and I don't see any way to incorporate those people into Linux or Apple without giving up most of what makes those systems great in the first place.
Meh, I'm a nerd, and I use linux on a daily basis and open source software wherever possible and practical both in my work and personal life, but I still think that RMS is an extremist. Logically speaking he is an extremist, the view he holds on software freedom doesn't hold any place for non free software and so is therefor the extreme of that view. You don't have to believe the solution to your problem is in shooting everyone who doesn't agree with you to be an extremist.
You'd actually be much better off using your DHCP server to asign static IP's to specific hosts and not allowing it any free pool. It's still not totally secure(MAC spoofing etc), but it's a lot more secure than hoping no one will be able to find an unallocated IP address and work out what your DNS servers are. Not to mention that it's a heck of a lot easier to update your network configuration if you do it that way(yeah you have to add every new workstation to your DHCP server, but you had to do equivilant work anyway and if you change any of your backend server configs or have to rebuild a machine you save a lot of effort).
The whole point of copyright is to give value to something which has no value by allowing for the control of distribution. By controlling distribution you create a finite supply and the math changes and gives you a value. Copyright modifies the free market in order to give an artificial value to a zero value product.
So now the question is why? And the answer is very simple because it's actually written into the constitution.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts . Now you can make all sorts of arguments of what exactly useful Arts are(and whether music is one), but the meaning is pretty clear. Copyright exists in order to encourage scientists and artists to spend their time doing science and art instead of doing other things. The founding fathers believed that having people do this sort of thing had value and so they created an artificial value for their ideas.The thing is they did not provide for the suppression and control of ideas for essentially unlimited periods. Nor did they provide for the right of non creators to profit from the actions of creators. I firmly believe that if the framers of the constitution saw the modern music industry and the current expiration period of copyrights they would be appalled.
It's a bit more like McDonalds not serving you a big mac unless you can prove your cholesterol isn't too high. This particular manager(who is in trouble more because he cost the company potential sales than anything else) believes, probably quite correctly, that video games can be a contributing factor to bad grades(more time spent gaming == less time avaialable to study). He also believes that as a purveyor of said product he has a duty to limit that contributing factor. It's a reasonable assumption to say that spending more time on your studies will improve your grades, at least up to a point.
He's being punished not because he's violating the rights of his customers to have video games(they don't have any), he's being punished because he's violating the most important right in the United States, the right of a large corporation to make the highest possible profits.
That said, when the next range of law suits come from people claiming that playing video games instead of studying ruined their lives you'll see this sort of policy nation wide.
For all intents and purposes NBC was seinfeld, friends, fraser and maybe will and grace. Guess what none of those shows run anymore.
Of course the destination and duration of your phone call isn't actually protected from the government, only the contents.
The monitoring for the most part also came after liability as opposed to before. That's not to say that the occaisional admin wasn't snooping before, but most of the court cases determining the right to monitor happened because the business needed evidence for a legal case.
This basically means that if you want most of an album from iTunes, that you're paying the same price as a CD(which was too much to begin with) for a DRM encumbered lower quality format. I don't know which genius came up with that one, but in an era where the price of CD's is considered too high, charging the same or even close to the same for something which costs them less and gives you less was always a daft idea.
TBH the price point for music is probably closer to one of the prices quoted by Rick Rubin in his NYT interview(not the first price, the second one) $3-5 dollars a month for access to any song you want to listen to on any device you want to listen to it on. I'd pay that, so would most people, hell if the quality was decent, I could live with that being taken out of my salary directly as a tax.
$3-5 dollars/month across even the adult population of the United States would provide enough money to give the artists quite a reasonable living and even keep a few thousand scum sucking record executives living reasonable life styles.
Maybe it wouldn't pay the salaries hollywood stars expect, but other solutions for tv and video are available. Most folks don't really mind unobtrusive advertising(note to folks out there doing web ads, if you didn't pop up windows all over the place trying to get people's attention then a lot fewer folks would use flash/ad blocker and you wouldn't have to worry about the end of advertising on the internet).
Your company doesn't have the right to read your e-mail because it passes through their system or because you're doing it on work time, they have that right because they own the account and/or computer where it's sitting. Your work e-mail account doesn't belong to you, and your work PC doesn't belong to you, nor do the backups of those systems. Assuming they've notified you appropriately regarding policy, your employer can look at anything sitting on your work PC, and anything sitting in the mailbox they own, or on backups of either of those two locations. That does't give them the right to read the data you send to an external e-mail system, or to look at an account you have in another location without a warrant.
The telephone, for the most part, doesn't work the same way. The telephone call itself may use company owned equipment, but it isn't sitting in an area the company owns(you might find you have no real right to privacy of voicemails on a company owned voicemail system, but you'll rarely find you don't have privacy for your phone calls).
That said I've found that opening them in Office 2003 and resaving them usually fixes the problem(if you're stuck using Microsoft Office in a support role I thoroughy recommend getting yourself a copy of 2003, it fixes most of the common data corrupts of XP.
If they distribute it to their customers only and one of their customers gives it to you, then you can ask the customer for the source and they have to provide it to you.
If they've release a piece of software under the GPL then they have to do this(they can close future versions of the product and stop distributing the gpl'd versions, but as far as I can determine you can't ungpl something you've already distributed as gpl). They also have to do this if any of the software they've modified or linked to is GPL(exceptions for lesser GPL).
That said, I can't find anywhere on their website where they actually say they're GPL, only that they're open source, so if the license for plink ssh and myvnc is a BSD license they could probably claim to be releasing the product under a BSD license now and simply not give you the source.
Autopackager seems(as far as I can work out from the generally biased information I've found) to be an issue of distribution rights as opposed to usage rights. Anyone is free to use Microsoft patches, they aren't allowed to set yourself up as a software mirror for them. This is a copyright issue, but it isn't as far as I can see an issue of fair use.
First sale is again not a fair use right, but merely a legal gray area as to whether software is a license or a product(mostly caused by the fact that most software distributors want to have the best of both worlds and sell it like a product and restrict it like a license).
So whether you think that Microsoft doing other things is evil or legal it isn't hypocritical for them to do so and at the same time support fair use. It's a bit like a mugger campaigning against drunk driving, mugging might not be moral or legal, but it's not drunk driving. Since it's not hypocritical there is no irony.
Your mostly right, in the sense that having the files is like putting them up on a web page, except about the ignorance not being a defense. Ignorance of the law is not a legal defense, however it's sometimes possible to use the fact that you were ignorant that you were doing something as a defense. Ie. to keep up the car anaologies so famous on slashdot, you use the fact that you didn't know that speeding was illegal as a defense, however if you can prove a fault in your speedometer you might be able to use the fact that you were ignorant of your actual speed as a defence. In the same way a user could use the fact that they were ignorant of the fact that Kazaa shared files as a defense against such a charge if they could prove their ignorance(though it's difficult to prove that you didn't know a file sharing app shared files).
It's not about the issue of capacity to wear out a drive in a year, it's about the fact that no one actually writes that much data. 40GB of HD writes is a fairly big amount, particularly if you have atime disabled in your file system(and a flash system will inevitably have this as the case).
Whether you agree with that is rather immaterial to this case. Personally I do, but that's neither here nor there.
I'm not certain exactly why this is the case, but for some reason it seems to make a lot more of a difference for the code that is the most unpleasant to compile(ie projects which involve large monolithic packages as opposed to smaller components(wine, openoffice, etc).
Second Kazaa as it once existed tended to at least attempt(if you didn't actively tell it not to, which if she didn't install it she didn't get a chance to choose) to share pretty much every music file on your PC. If she had a legitimate music file on her PC Kazaa would have attempted to share it with the outside world leading to infringement. This was always bad design in every program tham implemented it(it's alright in a media player, but not in a file sharing utility, it'd be like having apache automatically make all your documents available.
Thirdly the RIAA is presumably alleging that they sent warning e-mails to this girl or her parents, and the girl and/or her parents are apparently alleging that they didn't get them. The suit against the ISP means that the ISP will be required to prove whether those e-mails got through or not and wether they ever got to them in the first place. If they did block them then there's a case there, if they didn't arrive then the RIAA loses their "she knew it was wrong and kept going" angle and look more like vultures going after a little girl who didn't know what she was doing.
Her suit about the ISP blocking the files is of course bollocks and should and likely will be tossed out(presuming that the ISP wasn't offering some sort of parental filtering service at cost in which case there's a case there too).
This is of course presuming your OEM manufacturer actually provides you with a propery windows disc of course, and you still can't use it with a disc from another source, but they're not phoney keys either.