About the same reason why companies are investing in FOSS in general, I'd say - you make more money than you lose that way (or at least on average). If you have a goose that lays golden eggs, you feed and nurture and protect it so it will continue to lay those golden eggs.
You've got an interesting point there. Firefox and Opera aside, how (for example) are blind parents supposed to use this if you have to use Internet Exploiter to even access the site [1]? Isn't there a law that requires all state-run institutions at least (which should include most schools) to take measures to provide accessability for handicapped people?
1. I assume that most parents aren't computer-savvy enough to know about user agent strings and how to manipulate them.
Actually, the people involved in the 2001-09-11 terrorist attacks all had valid ID (driver's licenses and so on, that is; the sort of ID that you already have today). What makes anyone think they wouldn't get national ID cards, too?
The problem really is that once you actually find out that a suicide bomber means trouble, it's too late, because then he's already dead. The fact that you could find an ID card afterwards doesn't make a difference anymore.
So there's really no reason why you should feel safer just because the bad guys get ID cards, too.
Have you checked out TheOpenCD? That one contains a number of well-known and useful open-source applications for Windows; it should be easy to make (possibly customized) copies of that one to include with new computers, for example.
Most, if not all, Mozilla extensions use Javascript, so that's most likely what these changes are aimed at. I don't think you're supposed to use them on public webpages; if the Mozilla guys really care, then they'll also make sure that these extensions won't work in that case.
Maybe it's just me, but I think browser performance isn't much of a problem any more these days. Standards compliance, on the other hand, is, and I hope that this is the area where a new browser "war" might actually help out.
We all know that IE's standards compliance leaves a lot to be desired, but the Mozilla crew's product leaves a number of things to be desired, too. The Acid2 test may be one example, but there's also other things like MNG support and CSS-generated content where Gecko is still lacking, so hopefully, the people in charge will realize that if they want to replace IE as the standard browser, they shouldn't repeat the same mistakes of not caring about the finer details of the standards.
Yes, in the end, the customer will end up being right - but what does the customer actually want? Or, rather, what will the customer(s) care about?
Several people have already made the argument that the industry needs the consumers more than vice versa, and concluded that thus, the consumers will ultimately prevail and that the industry will not be able to blackmail consumers by threatening to take away shows.
However, there seem to be a fundamental flaw in that argument - namely, the fact that unlike the industry, "the consumers" are not a well-defined entity that acts in a controlled, coherent, or even informed manner. Most people on Slashdot seem to understand why the broadcast flag is bad for them and (actively) oppose it; however, the same is not true for the general population. There really are three problems here:
1) The general population probably does not know about things like the broadcast flag at all. It's true that a significant number of people *do* know about it, but I'd be quite surprised if they'd outnumber the people who don't.
2) Of those who do know about it (after, say, reading about it in a newspaper etc.), the majority does not really care about it, as long as they'll still be able to watch tv like they did before.
3) Of those who do care, the majority are not realy informed enough to be able to reject the MPAA's arguments of why the broadcast flag ultimately would be beneficial to consumers.
That does not mean I believe that the MPAA has already won and that the broadcast flag will come in one form or another without their being a public uproar (even a minor one); but I also am not automatically confident that the general public will prevail, even though it clearly is more powerful than the MPAA.
As Terry Pratchett said, "...pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to make progress." But unfortunately, that also means that a comparatively small dedicated group that *does* pull together can exert more influence than they should be able to.
Lynx has had vulnerabilities in the past, too - this one, for example. The only *really* safe way to browse is probably to use telnet, but I'm not sure you can even call that "browsing" anymore.
Wow, almost *half* of the movies are made outside of the USA? Wow! That's really amazing, considering that only about 96% of the world's population live outside the USA! This really should shut up any critics who say the list (or any list that Time magazine comes up with, for that matter) is US-centric.
Actually, it does, simply because the GPL does not say anything about patents at all - remember that copyright and patents are two *very* distinct things.
One might argue that the GPL's prohibition of "further restrictions" applies to patents, so maybe you can't take a piece of GPL'ed software and add code to it that you have a patent on (assuming that you release the new version at all, of course), but IANAL, and it's wholly unclear to me ATM whether that really would be true or not.
But outside of that, there's nothing in the GPL that deals with patents (unless I overlooked something important, of course, but that goes without saying).
Well, what do you expect from a website that calls Linux "the L-word"? The whole site seems pretty unprofessional, if you ask me, so I'm not really surprised they're making a big fuss about nothing.
In a word: no, it's not worth the price. If looking at the keyboard is what keeps you from being able to type faster than you currently do, then you can achieve the same effect by just (for example) putting stickers on your current keyboard; but most likely, it isn't, anyway, at least not if you really are an übergeek. Switch to a Dvorak layout if you really want to be able to type faster.:)
(Incidentally, that might be the one thing that this kind of keyboard is good for: you can easily switch between different keyboard layouts without anyone (you or other users) getting confused by the fact that the keys don't match the keycaps anymore. But again, there's no reason to pay 80 bucks for that.)
Re:We need to teach programming earlier and better
on
Johnny Can So Program
·
· Score: 1
Well, that's just why I do use braces - readability. They make it immediately clear what forms a block and what doesn't. One might argue that whitespace does the same thing, but I personally feel it's too volatile really. There is a reason why more or less all programming languages use braces (or keywords, or some other explicit construct) to mark blocks, rather than relying on whitespace.
And with regard to ugliness... if *that* is the only thing you can find to complain about, then Perl must be a pretty good language indeed.:) And actually, FWIW, even though I don't think that Perl looks uglier than other languages, I think it is worth pointing out that much of the (perceived) ugliness stems from the fact that Perl also tries to apply what could be called a sort of Huffman coding to the language itself - it should be possible to express common idioms in a short and concise way, or at least that's more desirable than saving the concise expressions for things you rarely do at all.
I mean... sure, something like ($escaped = $string) =~ s/\\/\\\\/g; may look intimidating when you're not familiar with the language, and it may not be immediately obvious to a novice what's going on there, but the same goes for (say) while(*t++ = *s++);, too, doesn't it? When you learn a language, you usually get past the "novice" stage pretty quickly - so why should the language be artificially limited just so that novices may need two hours less to learn it? A language's expressiveness determines its usefulness, and if you limit the former, you are also going to limit the latter. Turing completeness looks nice on paper, but in the real world, there's much more important things - or why do you think we're having compilers with literally millions of lines of code instead of just programming everything in Brainf*ck?:)
As for the "too easy" part, that's really rubbish, too. There is no such thing as *too* easy, and claiming that limiting what you can/can't do in a language is only going to discipline the programmer (which many people seem to do) is wrong. What do you think is more bug-prone? A one-liner in Perl or a 20-liner in C that has to go to lengths to reproduce the same behaviour that can easily be had in Perl? None of us is perfect, and no level of discipline, experience or caffeine can make sure that we always know exactly what we're doing, that we have all corner-cases in mind constantly and all that. The fact that it's easy to write even relatively complex programs in Perl is *good*. A car may have more controls and take a bit longer to learn how to handle than a bicycle, but wouldn't you agree that in the end, a car is more useful/powerful/versatile than a bike?
(Speaking of caffeine, I haven't had any today yet, so take this whole thing with a grain of salt. I also don't mean to diss Python in particular; I don't like it, but that's really just my own opinion, and if someone else uses it or finds that it fits their own development model better than other languages, that's fine, too. But for some reason, it seems (maybe wrongly so) that it's the Python folks in particular who always ridicule Perl, and I think that's wholly unjustified.)
I know that terms like "sie" and "hir" are probably less known on/. than in other groups where gender discrimination is considered a more important issue that must be tackled.
Actually, if you want to be gender-neutral, you should just use "they", "their" and so on. "Sie" (or "shi"), "hir" and so on are sometimes used as pronouns for intersexuals, so using them as gender-neutral pronouns just causes even more confusion - and unnecessary confusion, for that matter, since using "they" for that purpose is common and understood pretty much everwhere.
Our brains themselves provide an existence proof that it is possible for a machine to contain human-level intelligence and consciousness, since the brain is just a very complex biological machine.
Well, I'd say that *that* is a question that's the subject of an ongoing debate, at the very least. ^_~ But even if you actually could "download" all the information contained in the brain... what would you do with it? Data is essentially worthless if you have no way of interpreting it, but even if you do, things aren't always as easy as they might seem at first glance.
It's like with DNA - the fact that you do have the complete DNA sequence of, say, a sheep does not mean that you can build an actual sheep which does have this exact DNA. You need quite a bit of equipment for that, and I think the most important component is usually overlooked: you actually need another sheep, which leads to a kind of chicken-and-egg problem really.
In other words, even if you were able to save all the electric impulses, the proteins, and the way the cells are wired, it still would be a wholly non-trivial task to build an actual brain to match those specifications - or, for that matter, an artificial equivalent.
And what's more, that still wouldn't be enough. A brain is not a self-contained organ; it adjusts to the rest of the body. The signals delivered by one person's eyes might be quite different from those delivered by another person's - there simply is no standard interface, like there usually is in the computer world.
And then, even if you also overcome those obstacles, it's *still* not clear whether you'd actually get a human - as I said above, that is an open question that's been debated for a long time without any progress.
Out of curiosity, where did those "90%" come from? Do you actually have any data that indicates that the vast majority BitTorrent users use it for copyright infringement instead of, say, grabbing the latest Debian ISOs, or did you just pull some numbers out of your ass that sounded good to you?
Ah, thought so. Maybe next time, you should be a bit more careful - even on Slashdot, where most statements are usually taken with at least a grain of salt, anyway.:)
The big difference between Google and BitTorrent (the company, that is, not the protocol) is literally that, though - a BIG difference. Google has several thousand employees; BitTorrent has five, from what I gather. In other words, if Google was sued, then there'd actually be a long trial of several years in which both sides spend enormous amounts of money on their respective groups of lawyers, and it certainly would not be clear that the ruling would be in favour of the *AA, to say the least. With BitTorrent, it's quite different.
Not that I necessarily think that it's likely that there will be a lawsuit, but I don't think you can compare BT to Google really. In an ideal world, you'd be correct, but we're really very, VERY far away from that.
Actually, you have more choices than that - you can also say "I don't give a flying fuck about whether the *AA's copyrights are infringed using BitTorrent or not - *I* only use it for non-infringing things, and that's all that matters to me".
Which, I might add, I think is what the majority of BitTorrent users do. Where do those claims that the vast majority of BitTorrent usage is for illegal (depending on where you are etc.) activities come from, anyway? I can see why the *AA wants everyone to believe that that's the case, but I am not convinced at all that there are more people downloading the latest Star Wars movie on BitTorrent than there are people downloading, say, Debian Linux.
Of course, maybe there are. But it may just as well be that there are not, and the burden of proof really is on the one making the statement.
Yes, because all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves and what-not) have all been sued already - and *successfully* sued, too, for that matter.
You do have an interesting point, but just what *does* make you think that a search engine is certain to get sued? The personal impression that I have so far is that the RIAA/MPAA/... are mostly targeting people who they will not actually HAVE to sue because those people know they will not be able to afford a lawsuit no matter what the outcome - people like grandmothers, college student, 10-year olds and the like. (1) It's as good as an actual lawsuit won for the purpose of deterring someone who wonders whether they should try to download the latest hollywood release, but they don't have to prove anything - not even that there actually was any crime committed.
Of course, sometimes, it may seem (or be) a better overall option (from the *AA perspective) to go after a more high-level target instead, which is why Grokster has been sued, for example. But in those cases, it always seems to be a central point of the *AA that the technology in question either was designed specifically for the purpose of copyright infringement or that it's not actually used for anything else (and that the company sued thus indirectly makes money off of copyright infringement). In the case of BitTorrent, that probably wouldn't work, as it was designed for other things and definitely *is* being used for them, too. (Look up "SNIU" some time.)
1. (On a side note, why is it that in the self-proclaimed "land of the free", you cannot even fight a frivolous lawsuit when you're poor?)
In his book "The Age of Spritual Machines", Ray Kurzweil makes a reasonably convincing argument that I will, thanks to Moore's Law.
Ray points out that even if Moore's Law runs out of steam with regard to MOSFET technology, that there is good reason to believe that it will apply equally well to new technologies, since the known laws of physics still have "lots of room at the bottom" (as observed by Richard Feynman). He shows that Moore's law actually extrapolates fairly accurately all the way back to late 19th century mechanical calculators.
Your opinion may be different, but I don't find that argument to be all that convincing. If I jump from the 100th floor of a skyscraper, then I (probably) won't die from crashing onto the sidewalk for a (short) while at least, but to extrapolate from that that the same thing will not happen in the future either would be ridiculous.
Now, I'm not saying that I necessarily have the opinion that those services you refer to won't be available to you within your lifetime, but I do specifically disagree with the statement that the argument itself is reasonably convincing. The reason why this kind of extrapolation sometimes does make sense is that even though the future is not crystal clear, you still are able to say that it's reasonable to assume that the current trends *will* continue in one form or another.
Here, though, that's not the case really - Moore's law still seems to work, but it very well may be that just like the sidewalk that will inevitably cause the death of the suicide jumper, there are laws of physics (unknown to us as of yet or not) that *will* put a sudden stop to Moore's law, too. (Again, note that the emphasis is on "it MAY be", even though for a layperson like me, it seems like there definitely *will* be a stop when the Planck scale is hit, at least.)
Slashdot Mirror
About the same reason why companies are investing in FOSS in general, I'd say - you make more money than you lose that way (or at least on average). If you have a goose that lays golden eggs, you feed and nurture and protect it so it will continue to lay those golden eggs.
You've got an interesting point there. Firefox and Opera aside, how (for example) are blind parents supposed to use this if you have to use Internet Exploiter to even access the site [1]? Isn't there a law that requires all state-run institutions at least (which should include most schools) to take measures to provide accessability for handicapped people? 1. I assume that most parents aren't computer-savvy enough to know about user agent strings and how to manipulate them.
Actually, the people involved in the 2001-09-11 terrorist attacks all had valid ID (driver's licenses and so on, that is; the sort of ID that you already have today). What makes anyone think they wouldn't get national ID cards, too?
The problem really is that once you actually find out that a suicide bomber means trouble, it's too late, because then he's already dead. The fact that you could find an ID card afterwards doesn't make a difference anymore.
So there's really no reason why you should feel safer just because the bad guys get ID cards, too.
Have you checked out TheOpenCD? That one contains a number of well-known and useful open-source applications for Windows; it should be easy to make (possibly customized) copies of that one to include with new computers, for example.
Most, if not all, Mozilla extensions use Javascript, so that's most likely what these changes are aimed at. I don't think you're supposed to use them on public webpages; if the Mozilla guys really care, then they'll also make sure that these extensions won't work in that case.
Maybe it's just me, but I think browser performance isn't much of a problem any more these days. Standards compliance, on the other hand, is, and I hope that this is the area where a new browser "war" might actually help out.
We all know that IE's standards compliance leaves a lot to be desired, but the Mozilla crew's product leaves a number of things to be desired, too. The Acid2 test may be one example, but there's also other things like MNG support and CSS-generated content where Gecko is still lacking, so hopefully, the people in charge will realize that if they want to replace IE as the standard browser, they shouldn't repeat the same mistakes of not caring about the finer details of the standards.
Yes, in the end, the customer will end up being right - but what does the customer actually want? Or, rather, what will the customer(s) care about?
Several people have already made the argument that the industry needs the consumers more than vice versa, and concluded that thus, the consumers will ultimately prevail and that the industry will not be able to blackmail consumers by threatening to take away shows.
However, there seem to be a fundamental flaw in that argument - namely, the fact that unlike the industry, "the consumers" are not a well-defined entity that acts in a controlled, coherent, or even informed manner. Most people on Slashdot seem to understand why the broadcast flag is bad for them and (actively) oppose it; however, the same is not true for the general population. There really are three problems here:
1) The general population probably does not know about things like the broadcast flag at all. It's true that a significant number of people *do* know about it, but I'd be quite surprised if they'd outnumber the people who don't.
2) Of those who do know about it (after, say, reading about it in a newspaper etc.), the majority does not really care about it, as long as they'll still be able to watch tv like they did before.
3) Of those who do care, the majority are not realy informed enough to be able to reject the MPAA's arguments of why the broadcast flag ultimately would be beneficial to consumers.
That does not mean I believe that the MPAA has already won and that the broadcast flag will come in one form or another without their being a public uproar (even a minor one); but I also am not automatically confident that the general public will prevail, even though it clearly is more powerful than the MPAA.
As Terry Pratchett said, "...pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to make progress." But unfortunately, that also means that a comparatively small dedicated group that *does* pull together can exert more influence than they should be able to.
Touché. ^_~
Lynx has had vulnerabilities in the past, too - this one, for example. The only *really* safe way to browse is probably to use telnet, but I'm not sure you can even call that "browsing" anymore.
Wow, almost *half* of the movies are made outside of the USA? Wow! That's really amazing, considering that only about 96% of the world's population live outside the USA! This really should shut up any critics who say the list (or any list that Time magazine comes up with, for that matter) is US-centric.
German, yes.
"durchwachsen" means "marbled" or "streaky" when applied to meat, but can also be used figuratively, meaning "mixed", "so-so" etc.
Actually, it does, simply because the GPL does not say anything about patents at all - remember that copyright and patents are two *very* distinct things.
One might argue that the GPL's prohibition of "further restrictions" applies to patents, so maybe you can't take a piece of GPL'ed software and add code to it that you have a patent on (assuming that you release the new version at all, of course), but IANAL, and it's wholly unclear to me ATM whether that really would be true or not.
But outside of that, there's nothing in the GPL that deals with patents (unless I overlooked something important, of course, but that goes without saying).
Well, what do you expect from a website that calls Linux "the L-word"? The whole site seems pretty unprofessional, if you ask me, so I'm not really surprised they're making a big fuss about nothing.
In a word: no, it's not worth the price. If looking at the keyboard is what keeps you from being able to type faster than you currently do, then you can achieve the same effect by just (for example) putting stickers on your current keyboard; but most likely, it isn't, anyway, at least not if you really are an übergeek. Switch to a Dvorak layout if you really want to be able to type faster. :)
(Incidentally, that might be the one thing that this kind of keyboard is good for: you can easily switch between different keyboard layouts without anyone (you or other users) getting confused by the fact that the keys don't match the keycaps anymore. But again, there's no reason to pay 80 bucks for that.)
Well, that's just why I do use braces - readability. They make it immediately clear what forms a block and what doesn't. One might argue that whitespace does the same thing, but I personally feel it's too volatile really. There is a reason why more or less all programming languages use braces (or keywords, or some other explicit construct) to mark blocks, rather than relying on whitespace.
And with regard to ugliness... if *that* is the only thing you can find to complain about, then Perl must be a pretty good language indeed. :) And actually, FWIW, even though I don't think that Perl looks uglier than other languages, I think it is worth pointing out that much of the (perceived) ugliness stems from the fact that Perl also tries to apply what could be called a sort of Huffman coding to the language itself - it should be possible to express common idioms in a short and concise way, or at least that's more desirable than saving the concise expressions for things you rarely do at all.
I mean... sure, something like ($escaped = $string) =~ s/\\/\\\\/g; may look intimidating when you're not familiar with the language, and it may not be immediately obvious to a novice what's going on there, but the same goes for (say) while(*t++ = *s++);, too, doesn't it? When you learn a language, you usually get past the "novice" stage pretty quickly - so why should the language be artificially limited just so that novices may need two hours less to learn it? A language's expressiveness determines its usefulness, and if you limit the former, you are also going to limit the latter. Turing completeness looks nice on paper, but in the real world, there's much more important things - or why do you think we're having compilers with literally millions of lines of code instead of just programming everything in Brainf*ck? :)
As for the "too easy" part, that's really rubbish, too. There is no such thing as *too* easy, and claiming that limiting what you can/can't do in a language is only going to discipline the programmer (which many people seem to do) is wrong. What do you think is more bug-prone? A one-liner in Perl or a 20-liner in C that has to go to lengths to reproduce the same behaviour that can easily be had in Perl? None of us is perfect, and no level of discipline, experience or caffeine can make sure that we always know exactly what we're doing, that we have all corner-cases in mind constantly and all that. The fact that it's easy to write even relatively complex programs in Perl is *good*. A car may have more controls and take a bit longer to learn how to handle than a bicycle, but wouldn't you agree that in the end, a car is more useful/powerful/versatile than a bike?
(Speaking of caffeine, I haven't had any today yet, so take this whole thing with a grain of salt. I also don't mean to diss Python in particular; I don't like it, but that's really just my own opinion, and if someone else uses it or finds that it fits their own development model better than other languages, that's fine, too. But for some reason, it seems (maybe wrongly so) that it's the Python folks in particular who always ridicule Perl, and I think that's wholly unjustified.)
Actually, if you want to be gender-neutral, you should just use "they", "their" and so on. "Sie" (or "shi"), "hir" and so on are sometimes used as pronouns for intersexuals, so using them as gender-neutral pronouns just causes even more confusion - and unnecessary confusion, for that matter, since using "they" for that purpose is common and understood pretty much everwhere.
Having a market where people can actually afford their products?
Well, I'd say that *that* is a question that's the subject of an ongoing debate, at the very least. ^_~ But even if you actually could "download" all the information contained in the brain... what would you do with it? Data is essentially worthless if you have no way of interpreting it, but even if you do, things aren't always as easy as they might seem at first glance.
It's like with DNA - the fact that you do have the complete DNA sequence of, say, a sheep does not mean that you can build an actual sheep which does have this exact DNA. You need quite a bit of equipment for that, and I think the most important component is usually overlooked: you actually need another sheep, which leads to a kind of chicken-and-egg problem really.
In other words, even if you were able to save all the electric impulses, the proteins, and the way the cells are wired, it still would be a wholly non-trivial task to build an actual brain to match those specifications - or, for that matter, an artificial equivalent.
And what's more, that still wouldn't be enough. A brain is not a self-contained organ; it adjusts to the rest of the body. The signals delivered by one person's eyes might be quite different from those delivered by another person's - there simply is no standard interface, like there usually is in the computer world.
And then, even if you also overcome those obstacles, it's *still* not clear whether you'd actually get a human - as I said above, that is an open question that's been debated for a long time without any progress.
We'll just have to wait and see. :)
Out of curiosity, where did those "90%" come from? Do you actually have any data that indicates that the vast majority BitTorrent users use it for copyright infringement instead of, say, grabbing the latest Debian ISOs, or did you just pull some numbers out of your ass that sounded good to you?
:)
Ah, thought so. Maybe next time, you should be a bit more careful - even on Slashdot, where most statements are usually taken with at least a grain of salt, anyway.
The big difference between Google and BitTorrent (the company, that is, not the protocol) is literally that, though - a BIG difference. Google has several thousand employees; BitTorrent has five, from what I gather. In other words, if Google was sued, then there'd actually be a long trial of several years in which both sides spend enormous amounts of money on their respective groups of lawyers, and it certainly would not be clear that the ruling would be in favour of the *AA, to say the least. With BitTorrent, it's quite different.
Not that I necessarily think that it's likely that there will be a lawsuit, but I don't think you can compare BT to Google really. In an ideal world, you'd be correct, but we're really very, VERY far away from that.
Actually, you have more choices than that - you can also say "I don't give a flying fuck about whether the *AA's copyrights are infringed using BitTorrent or not - *I* only use it for non-infringing things, and that's all that matters to me".
Which, I might add, I think is what the majority of BitTorrent users do. Where do those claims that the vast majority of BitTorrent usage is for illegal (depending on where you are etc.) activities come from, anyway? I can see why the *AA wants everyone to believe that that's the case, but I am not convinced at all that there are more people downloading the latest Star Wars movie on BitTorrent than there are people downloading, say, Debian Linux.
Of course, maybe there are. But it may just as well be that there are not, and the burden of proof really is on the one making the statement.
Yes, because all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves and what-not) have all been sued already - and *successfully* sued, too, for that matter.
You do have an interesting point, but just what *does* make you think that a search engine is certain to get sued? The personal impression that I have so far is that the RIAA/MPAA/... are mostly targeting people who they will not actually HAVE to sue because those people know they will not be able to afford a lawsuit no matter what the outcome - people like grandmothers, college student, 10-year olds and the like. (1) It's as good as an actual lawsuit won for the purpose of deterring someone who wonders whether they should try to download the latest hollywood release, but they don't have to prove anything - not even that there actually was any crime committed.
Of course, sometimes, it may seem (or be) a better overall option (from the *AA perspective) to go after a more high-level target instead, which is why Grokster has been sued, for example. But in those cases, it always seems to be a central point of the *AA that the technology in question either was designed specifically for the purpose of copyright infringement or that it's not actually used for anything else (and that the company sued thus indirectly makes money off of copyright infringement). In the case of BitTorrent, that probably wouldn't work, as it was designed for other things and definitely *is* being used for them, too. (Look up "SNIU" some time.)
1. (On a side note, why is it that in the self-proclaimed "land of the free", you cannot even fight a frivolous lawsuit when you're poor?)
Your opinion may be different, but I don't find that argument to be all that convincing. If I jump from the 100th floor of a skyscraper, then I (probably) won't die from crashing onto the sidewalk for a (short) while at least, but to extrapolate from that that the same thing will not happen in the future either would be ridiculous.
Now, I'm not saying that I necessarily have the opinion that those services you refer to won't be available to you within your lifetime, but I do specifically disagree with the statement that the argument itself is reasonably convincing. The reason why this kind of extrapolation sometimes does make sense is that even though the future is not crystal clear, you still are able to say that it's reasonable to assume that the current trends *will* continue in one form or another.
Here, though, that's not the case really - Moore's law still seems to work, but it very well may be that just like the sidewalk that will inevitably cause the death of the suicide jumper, there are laws of physics (unknown to us as of yet or not) that *will* put a sudden stop to Moore's law, too. (Again, note that the emphasis is on "it MAY be", even though for a layperson like me, it seems like there definitely *will* be a stop when the Planck scale is hit, at least.)
Repeat after me, kids: Correlation does not imply causality.