I have no doubt that this would is going to be hell on the defendant. We need video, showing just how much the RIAA has done to completely destroy the life of a human being. How about we hook that together with some pictures of the RIAA execs' fancy cars, and their lawyers' cars, houses, etc. How about some choice quotes from the above.
Get it made, and get it on youtube, facebook, myspace, and whatever else. Make it as "viral" as possible, and spread it around. End it with "this is what you pay for when you buy music from the RIAA (and follow with a list of RIAA member companies, as well a link to an info site." Start a donation campaign for this woman, and get the fucking word out about what these companies truly stand for. Maybe some choice clips from the MediaSentry correspondence. Make it truthful, but hard-hitting. Bitching on slashdot isn't enough. Maybe we won't buy RIAA music, but that's not enough. We're geeks, not lawyers, so do what we're best at and make use of technology. Spread the message, make people listen, and make people act.
How about predicting the future? The magic 8-ball has been predicting "Outlook not so good" since inception. Obviously it foresaw many of the issues that came to be with that horrible pretender to an email client.
I'm in a distance relationship (yeah yeah, cue the lame jokes about slashdotters not having relationships. Oh, and yes we've met in person I just haven't yet found work in her area to move permanently). Both my GF and I have subscriptions to the skype PC->phone service, which means that we can call each other so long as one of us is near a PC. When we're both at home, we just use skype-to-skype since the audio quality is better (in fact, often better than phone-to-phone).
Since I bought into mine last year during the special, I think it was all of $15CAD to subscribe. Given the amount I use the service and the savings I've made on long-distance calling cards, as well as cellphone bills (free incoming, yay) I'd say that it's been a very worthwhile investment. I'm hoping they'll have another special offer around New Years for the same price, but if it were twice that it would still be a deal for me.
In line with other tools for geeks in relationships over distance, those interested might want to check out goodies like SNES9x (you can play old-school SNES games together), and VLC (with a good enough connection/PC, you can broadcast a movie over the 'net so you can watch shows together). It's not quite the same as being together and snuggling, but so far it's helped our relationship keep in touch and thus survive until I can find work and move to Toronto [shameless plug]Hire me[/shameless plug]
I don't know about elsewhere, but here (BC, Canada) it's always been the landlord's responsibility to do a move-in and move-out walk-through and note damage, having the tenant sign off on it. Back when I was renting, I had one or two try to pull B.S. on me and I just asked to see the pre-move-in inspection. In one case there was none (I was fine), in another it was lost (I was fine), and in the last they found it and it did note that the damage existed.
Of course, some landlords just try to screw tenants over because they know people won't bother to invest the time/money in fighting it. My favorite was the landlady who gave me a printed contract, and it was on some weirdass paper (or maybe it was the ink) that went 90% blank when I pulled it out several months later. So it's sometimes even a good idea to duplicate your copy of the contract.
Now I own, and I rent to a "roomate" (which saves me from being an official "landlord" and having to deal with giving two months notice to kick out bad renters... like the one girl who came up with "I can't pay next month's rent" two weeks after moving in). I take pictures of the room and sometimes the house beforehand. If you do that, sometimes it's not even a bad idea to print them out (photo printer) on a single sheet and have it signed, or have the photos themselves signed by both parties on the rear and put in a safe place.
"If we cut the copper John we never have to worry about losing our job!"
Doubtable. More likely, it was "if we cut the copper, we can attach it to the fiber and use it to pull the new links through." It falls pretty well within the old adage of not attributing to malicious intent what can be explained by simple laziness.
Well, their website doesn't offer free Mp3's, but their music was once quite available on the late mp3.com (before the remake), and they've got a myspace page (yeah, it's myspace... but still) with music and videos etc. The cool thing, though, is that they send you a free (yes free, including shipping) disc if send a request through their website. I remember sending through the request last year and then forgetting about it, only to be very pleasantly surprised when a demo disk (I think it had somewhere between 5 and 7 songs, which is decent) arrived.
They're a good band, so I recommend checking them out on their website. Don't be cheap though, if you get the demo disc and really like it - try and hit a tour (if you're a European or in the area) or buy a CD.
Nope, I've had this issue crop up on various systems of mine, none of which had ATI video cards (all NVidia with the accelerated proprietary driver). However, to be fair I haven't plugged at Blender in about the last half-year, so I'm not sure if the issue is current or not on NVidia cards.
How are you finding it for compatibility with current hardware/software? I just replaced my grandparents PC with a new one (Linux, and if that fails, the XP partition is still hiding there too) and it used to be Win2k... so perhaps I might go back to that if either of the current OS's doesn't pan out for them.
Mine (HP iPaq) usually starts a lot faster than that... if you're counting the time from the reset switch to when it asks for my password/thumbprint. 30 seconds sounds awfully long for a PDA, see cellphones (not counting the time to connect to a nearby tower).
They do when in use, but if you were just using your PC to - say - play music (not at all uncommon), then your video can be blank (or at least not using much power from the card), and likewise if you have a power-saving-friendly CPU those can be clocked down as well. Have power-saving also turn off the LCD backlight (is there a manual way to force this in 'nix through ACPI, btw?) and the hard drive might be the bigger drain.
Of course, how often one plays Mp3's on batteries is up to debate, but thinking beyond computers (and hopefully beyond the PCI-e interface), having high-capacity, high-reliability storage in a solid-state form for PC's will drive the overall price of the tech down, and hopefully make it cheaper for non-PC devices too: music servers, NAS drives, TIVO, flash-based media players, and/or other such things.
I wonder how it does for generating and handling heat... since that's always been one of the bigger hard-drive killers that I've seen with high-use systems. I have a buddy who, despite having massive cooling, regularly replaces drives in the RAID array of his high-usage servers because the combination of heat + mechanical wear kills the drives. Less mechanical parts is good in my book.
I think that your viewpoint comes though, as "a decent lawyer" (as in "decent human being") whereas for the other variety it seems to be a combination of massive power trip combined with the fact that they're likely getting paid megabucks (for the moment) whether or not the have a case.
So, my guess would be that it's perhaps not very good lawyering, but still profitable. Kinda like the SCO case (*somebody* made money off it).
It's one of the reasons I went into technology rather than law, despite a strong interest in both (to be a tech lawyer sounds grand though)... you seem to get the choice of either being a tick-like parasite or a flyswatter, and the parasites tend to come in groups and with a stronger backing.
That being said, keep up the good fight! I think pretty much everyone here is rooting for you.
How many poor laptops out there that are forced to use ndiswrapper to deal with those annoying broadcomm based chips? I know I'm one of them, and unfortunately my hardware (HP pavillion zd7000) locks me to the vendor-allowed chipsets and thus gets really pissy if I put a decent card like an Intel IPW2200 in here.
Look up my webpage and use the link there to mail me with the description of your chip. (you can do an "lspci" to find out).
The only one I've found to be a bit annoying lately as far as your standard with-board fare are some of the Intel HD Audio chips (82801G or 82810G, something like that) , and I just managed to get that working tonight. While I have this nagging suspicion you might have a similar chipset (it's fairly common), I might be able to help with others as well.
I'm not sure exactly what this references, but if it's anything like my experience (hp laptop with mobile chipset based on R200) it was the sinking reality that - if ATI windows drivers were bad - ATI linux drivers were *really* bad.
However, there's been a fairly noticeable improvement in ATI drivers since the AMD merger, which might coincide nicely with the fact that I noticed AMD posting linux-development jobs when I was checking various job boards. Overally, the trinity isn't bad. Intel is good at providing specs and getting nice drivers out there (and card performance is doing better in the i9xx series), NVidia has generally been decent for drivers, and ATI is not too bad either now. You can grouse that they're not open-source, and yes in some cases buggy, but over time I've seen a lot of improvement in this area.
The problem is that - for many root-running processes - running chroot has often been recommended as a security practice. This has often been the recommendation of the daemon authors, in the documentation, as a way to improve security.
I think that this was once (or may currently be) the case with bind and various MTA's. Standard practice for many daemons now is to start as root and fork as another non-privileged user, but not every daemon has this option.
Yes, you just have to look at the markets where Apple is dominating (overhyped media-related products). They've had more than their share of heavy-handed behavior in regards to these, so why would anyone expect it to be different if OSX suddenly overtook Windows as the market leader?
Perhaps somebody could name some big companies that haven't caved in upon themselves. Google seems to be fast deteriorating, IBM used to be worse than MS, HP now has new management but we can only hope that they're not half as evil as the previous...
The only way consumers get ahead in the marketplace is through:
a) Competition / Choice
b) Community (and usually in the form of community backlash)
Personally, I'd be happy if Microsoft was diminished, and put in their place, but not killed off entirely. There are good things about the company, and a little humility combined with a Damocles sword of consequence might be better than simply replacing them with another company this is or grows to be as bad or worse. In regards to Open Source, yes projects can be forked etc, but sneaky/bad things can still happen. What would happen if Sun pulled open-office, and how long would it take for somebody to pick up the project?
Community, and concepts such as open-source (or better, friendly source) are a good thing, but competition and consequence are still the best for promoting good behavior IMHO.
It depends on where you shop, but many of the staff at the local computer shops recommend XP. Probably because Vista Basic doesn't give you much that XP doesn't (not even Aero, so no fancy eyecandy), and it's a whole lot hungrier on resources making it appear to buyers that they bought a sucky computer.
The smaller local shops give you the option of XP or Vista Basic. When you ask, they still recommend XP. Big manufacturers like Dell have pushed back towards shipping with XP as well, because when it runs like crap it reflects poorly on them. Many large corporations (buyers) are also avoiding Vista like the plague, and in many cases likewise for other nasty products (Office 2007 which is by default incompatible with previous office versions)
So it's not just ask-a-friend... a lot of people out there are avoiding Vista or recommending against it, and quite a few of those are some pretty big sellers/buyers.
But chances are they also have lots of monitoring (local and remote) systems that would send a message out to external person(s) in the event that something unusual/bad started happening.
I like Vonage because their service lets me use a non-local number. In this case, I live on one side of the country, while my gf is on the outer. Since I've been scoping jobs in her area, it's nice to have a number that's local to that area for interested employers to call.
I didn't say that a degree wasn't a benefit, just that it's not as important as it used to be in comparison the experience, and even that depends on the industry (some areas require more experience, some prefer more education). For example, you're more likely to get a job as a Linux sysadmin (which I'm assuming might interest a certain number of those on slashdot) through experience. Unfortunately, that often means that you get the experience by taking a lower-paying sysadmin job... but then again low-paying is sometimes better than shelling out lots of time/cash (with a low concurrent earning) on a degree and especially if it involves going into debt.
In terms of promotions, I definitely agree that a degree can be important. You'll have much less chance at a management or supervisory-level job without one. Another big thing is finding employment internationally. As your local employment history/background becomes harder to check, that piece of paper becomes more important.
So again, it depends on the job. My personal recommendation, after watching many friends get their degrees and struggle just as much as diploma students finding a decent job, would be to get the diploma (preferable one that involves a co-op or work program). Then, get a job, and don't be too picky for the first while. If it pays the bills for the first year, it's good. But at the same time, keep looking and don't get locked into a routine or, even worse, a contract. Once you've got an education and experience, you can get a better job. After that, you might want to consider upgrading your education again, for example getting a degree by correspondence. A nice thing about seeking education while employed is that many employers will help pay for it... a much better deal than landing in a job with 3-6 years of university debt to pay off.
Indeed. This company was also informed months ago by a user that had requested the code, unfortunately with no result. After discussing the GPL issues, Monsoon's rep basically started accusing the users' of illegally decompiling their source (in order to find the violation) and EULA violation etc etc. When told that there was no EULA if you download the source, he basically said "OK, well then we'll stick one in the download, or embed it in the binary so that you can't get around it." This shows that they had very little interest in showing the code, as their attitude towards their GPL obligations at the time was basically "we'll get to it, sometime, and we're not telling you when." Here's a bit of Monsoon's commentary in the forums pre-lawsuit:
Seems to me that some of you have just come out blatantly admitting you are reverse engineering the firmware - or trying to. How should we handle this?
I had posted the an article up on slashdot at around the time the forum debates were taking place, but unfortunately it never made it past the firehose (and I assume that is has now disappeared since it was rejected). However, the same rep was involved in a debate with me, and was spouting the same BS. His question was "well, what is the opinion of slashdot on breaking the EULA and reverse-engineering our code." I answer that it would really depend on the context, particularly whether the code should have been visible in the first place, and that the use of strings does not qualify as reverse-engineering. He continued to insist that "having reverse-engineered stuff in the past, I know what I'm talking about, so it's just your opinion that strings doesn't count." etc etc
All in all, their attitude - or at least of this rep - has been an offensive defensiveness (aka justify their actions by attacking those of others). I'm hoping that along with having the issues settled he now has an understanding of how the GPL works, but I'm sure he'll probably continue along with the mistaken assumption that his company was never in the wrong, and that this whole thing is the fault of those darn free-software people.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no doubt that this would is going to be hell on the defendant. We need video, showing just how much the RIAA has done to completely destroy the life of a human being. How about we hook that together with some pictures of the RIAA execs' fancy cars, and their lawyers' cars, houses, etc. How about some choice quotes from the above.
Get it made, and get it on youtube, facebook, myspace, and whatever else. Make it as "viral" as possible, and spread it around. End it with "this is what you pay for when you buy music from the RIAA (and follow with a list of RIAA member companies, as well a link to an info site." Start a donation campaign for this woman, and get the fucking word out about what these companies truly stand for. Maybe some choice clips from the MediaSentry correspondence. Make it truthful, but hard-hitting. Bitching on slashdot isn't enough. Maybe we won't buy RIAA music, but that's not enough. We're geeks, not lawyers, so do what we're best at and make use of technology. Spread the message, make people listen, and make people act.
How about predicting the future? The magic 8-ball has been predicting "Outlook not so good" since inception. Obviously it foresaw many of the issues that came to be with that horrible pretender to an email client.
I'm in a distance relationship (yeah yeah, cue the lame jokes about slashdotters not having relationships. Oh, and yes we've met in person I just haven't yet found work in her area to move permanently). Both my GF and I have subscriptions to the skype PC->phone service, which means that we can call each other so long as one of us is near a PC. When we're both at home, we just use skype-to-skype since the audio quality is better (in fact, often better than phone-to-phone).
Since I bought into mine last year during the special, I think it was all of $15CAD to subscribe. Given the amount I use the service and the savings I've made on long-distance calling cards, as well as cellphone bills (free incoming, yay) I'd say that it's been a very worthwhile investment. I'm hoping they'll have another special offer around New Years for the same price, but if it were twice that it would still be a deal for me.
In line with other tools for geeks in relationships over distance, those interested might want to check out goodies like SNES9x (you can play old-school SNES games together), and VLC (with a good enough connection/PC, you can broadcast a movie over the 'net so you can watch shows together). It's not quite the same as being together and snuggling, but so far it's helped our relationship keep in touch and thus survive until I can find work and move to Toronto [shameless plug]Hire me[/shameless plug]
I don't know about elsewhere, but here (BC, Canada) it's always been the landlord's responsibility to do a move-in and move-out walk-through and note damage, having the tenant sign off on it. Back when I was renting, I had one or two try to pull B.S. on me and I just asked to see the pre-move-in inspection. In one case there was none (I was fine), in another it was lost (I was fine), and in the last they found it and it did note that the damage existed.
Of course, some landlords just try to screw tenants over because they know people won't bother to invest the time/money in fighting it. My favorite was the landlady who gave me a printed contract, and it was on some weirdass paper (or maybe it was the ink) that went 90% blank when I pulled it out several months later. So it's sometimes even a good idea to duplicate your copy of the contract.
Now I own, and I rent to a "roomate" (which saves me from being an official "landlord" and having to deal with giving two months notice to kick out bad renters... like the one girl who came up with "I can't pay next month's rent" two weeks after moving in). I take pictures of the room and sometimes the house beforehand. If you do that, sometimes it's not even a bad idea to print them out (photo printer) on a single sheet and have it signed, or have the photos themselves signed by both parties on the rear and put in a safe place.
"If we cut the copper John we never have to worry about losing our job!"
Doubtable. More likely, it was "if we cut the copper, we can attach it to the fiber and use it to pull the new links through." It falls pretty well within the old adage of not attributing to malicious intent what can be explained by simple laziness.
Well, their website doesn't offer free Mp3's, but their music was once quite available on the late mp3.com (before the remake), and they've got a myspace page (yeah, it's myspace... but still) with music and videos etc. The cool thing, though, is that they send you a free (yes free, including shipping) disc if send a request through their website. I remember sending through the request last year and then forgetting about it, only to be very pleasantly surprised when a demo disk (I think it had somewhere between 5 and 7 songs, which is decent) arrived.
They're a good band, so I recommend checking them out on their website. Don't be cheap though, if you get the demo disc and really like it - try and hit a tour (if you're a European or in the area) or buy a CD.
Nope, I've had this issue crop up on various systems of mine, none of which had ATI video cards (all NVidia with the accelerated proprietary driver). However, to be fair I haven't plugged at Blender in about the last half-year, so I'm not sure if the issue is current or not on NVidia cards.
What chipset? If it's another broadcomm then NDISwrapper should still do the job...
How are you finding it for compatibility with current hardware/software? I just replaced my grandparents PC with a new one (Linux, and if that fails, the XP partition is still hiding there too) and it used to be Win2k... so perhaps I might go back to that if either of the current OS's doesn't pan out for them.
Mine (HP iPaq) usually starts a lot faster than that... if you're counting the time from the reset switch to when it asks for my password/thumbprint. 30 seconds sounds awfully long for a PDA, see cellphones (not counting the time to connect to a nearby tower).
They do when in use, but if you were just using your PC to - say - play music (not at all uncommon), then your video can be blank (or at least not using much power from the card), and likewise if you have a power-saving-friendly CPU those can be clocked down as well. Have power-saving also turn off the LCD backlight (is there a manual way to force this in 'nix through ACPI, btw?) and the hard drive might be the bigger drain.
Of course, how often one plays Mp3's on batteries is up to debate, but thinking beyond computers (and hopefully beyond the PCI-e interface), having high-capacity, high-reliability storage in a solid-state form for PC's will drive the overall price of the tech down, and hopefully make it cheaper for non-PC devices too: music servers, NAS drives, TIVO, flash-based media players, and/or other such things.
I wonder how it does for generating and handling heat... since that's always been one of the bigger hard-drive killers that I've seen with high-use systems. I have a buddy who, despite having massive cooling, regularly replaces drives in the RAID array of his high-usage servers because the combination of heat + mechanical wear kills the drives. Less mechanical parts is good in my book.
I think that your viewpoint comes though, as "a decent lawyer" (as in "decent human being") whereas for the other variety it seems to be a combination of massive power trip combined with the fact that they're likely getting paid megabucks (for the moment) whether or not the have a case.
So, my guess would be that it's perhaps not very good lawyering, but still profitable. Kinda like the SCO case (*somebody* made money off it).
It's one of the reasons I went into technology rather than law, despite a strong interest in both (to be a tech lawyer sounds grand though)... you seem to get the choice of either being a tick-like parasite or a flyswatter, and the parasites tend to come in groups and with a stronger backing.
That being said, keep up the good fight! I think pretty much everyone here is rooting for you.
How many poor laptops out there that are forced to use ndiswrapper to deal with those annoying broadcomm based chips? I know I'm one of them, and unfortunately my hardware (HP pavillion zd7000) locks me to the vendor-allowed chipsets and thus gets really pissy if I put a decent card like an Intel IPW2200 in here.
Look up my webpage and use the link there to mail me with the description of your chip. (you can do an "lspci" to find out).
The only one I've found to be a bit annoying lately as far as your standard with-board fare are some of the Intel HD Audio chips (82801G or 82810G, something like that) , and I just managed to get that working tonight. While I have this nagging suspicion you might have a similar chipset (it's fairly common), I might be able to help with others as well.
I'm not sure exactly what this references, but if it's anything like my experience (hp laptop with mobile chipset based on R200) it was the sinking reality that - if ATI windows drivers were bad - ATI linux drivers were *really* bad.
However, there's been a fairly noticeable improvement in ATI drivers since the AMD merger, which might coincide nicely with the fact that I noticed AMD posting linux-development jobs when I was checking various job boards. Overally, the trinity isn't bad. Intel is good at providing specs and getting nice drivers out there (and card performance is doing better in the i9xx series), NVidia has generally been decent for drivers, and ATI is not too bad either now. You can grouse that they're not open-source, and yes in some cases buggy, but over time I've seen a lot of improvement in this area.
The problem is that - for many root-running processes - running chroot has often been recommended as a security practice. This has often been the recommendation of the daemon authors, in the documentation, as a way to improve security.
I think that this was once (or may currently be) the case with bind and various MTA's. Standard practice for many daemons now is to start as root and fork as another non-privileged user, but not every daemon has this option.
It's the linux users that run stuff on Wine, after all :-)
Yes, you just have to look at the markets where Apple is dominating (overhyped media-related products). They've had more than their share of heavy-handed behavior in regards to these, so why would anyone expect it to be different if OSX suddenly overtook Windows as the market leader?
Perhaps somebody could name some big companies that haven't caved in upon themselves. Google seems to be fast deteriorating, IBM used to be worse than MS, HP now has new management but we can only hope that they're not half as evil as the previous...
The only way consumers get ahead in the marketplace is through:
a) Competition / Choice
b) Community (and usually in the form of community backlash)
Personally, I'd be happy if Microsoft was diminished, and put in their place, but not killed off entirely. There are good things about the company, and a little humility combined with a Damocles sword of consequence might be better than simply replacing them with another company this is or grows to be as bad or worse. In regards to Open Source, yes projects can be forked etc, but sneaky/bad things can still happen. What would happen if Sun pulled open-office, and how long would it take for somebody to pick up the project?
Community, and concepts such as open-source (or better, friendly source) are a good thing, but competition and consequence are still the best for promoting good behavior IMHO.
It depends on where you shop, but many of the staff at the local computer shops recommend XP. Probably because Vista Basic doesn't give you much that XP doesn't (not even Aero, so no fancy eyecandy), and it's a whole lot hungrier on resources making it appear to buyers that they bought a sucky computer.
The smaller local shops give you the option of XP or Vista Basic. When you ask, they still recommend XP. Big manufacturers like Dell have pushed back towards shipping with XP as well, because when it runs like crap it reflects poorly on them. Many large corporations (buyers) are also avoiding Vista like the plague, and in many cases likewise for other nasty products (Office 2007 which is by default incompatible with previous office versions)
So it's not just ask-a-friend... a lot of people out there are avoiding Vista or recommending against it, and quite a few of those are some pretty big sellers/buyers.
But chances are they also have lots of monitoring (local and remote) systems that would send a message out to external person(s) in the event that something unusual/bad started happening.
Don't they allow home-schooling in the US?
I like Vonage because their service lets me use a non-local number. In this case, I live on one side of the country, while my gf is on the outer. Since I've been scoping jobs in her area, it's nice to have a number that's local to that area for interested employers to call.
How about they provide non-DRM mp3 downloads so people can dump their collections before their lost, rather than making more lossy copies?
I didn't say that a degree wasn't a benefit, just that it's not as important as it used to be in comparison the experience, and even that depends on the industry (some areas require more experience, some prefer more education). For example, you're more likely to get a job as a Linux sysadmin (which I'm assuming might interest a certain number of those on slashdot) through experience. Unfortunately, that often means that you get the experience by taking a lower-paying sysadmin job... but then again low-paying is sometimes better than shelling out lots of time/cash (with a low concurrent earning) on a degree and especially if it involves going into debt.
In terms of promotions, I definitely agree that a degree can be important. You'll have much less chance at a management or supervisory-level job without one. Another big thing is finding employment internationally. As your local employment history/background becomes harder to check, that piece of paper becomes more important.
So again, it depends on the job. My personal recommendation, after watching many friends get their degrees and struggle just as much as diploma students finding a decent job, would be to get the diploma (preferable one that involves a co-op or work program). Then, get a job, and don't be too picky for the first while. If it pays the bills for the first year, it's good. But at the same time, keep looking and don't get locked into a routine or, even worse, a contract. Once you've got an education and experience, you can get a better job. After that, you might want to consider upgrading your education again, for example getting a degree by correspondence. A nice thing about seeking education while employed is that many employers will help pay for it... a much better deal than landing in a job with 3-6 years of university debt to pay off.
Indeed. This company was also informed months ago by a user that had requested the code, unfortunately with no result. After discussing the GPL issues, Monsoon's rep basically started accusing the users' of illegally decompiling their source (in order to find the violation) and EULA violation etc etc. When told that there was no EULA if you download the source, he basically said "OK, well then we'll stick one in the download, or embed it in the binary so that you can't get around it." This shows that they had very little interest in showing the code, as their attitude towards their GPL obligations at the time was basically "we'll get to it, sometime, and we're not telling you when." Here's a bit of Monsoon's commentary in the forums pre-lawsuit:
Seems to me that some of you have just come out blatantly admitting you are reverse engineering the firmware - or trying to. How should we handle this?
I had posted the an article up on slashdot at around the time the forum debates were taking place, but unfortunately it never made it past the firehose (and I assume that is has now disappeared since it was rejected). However, the same rep was involved in a debate with me, and was spouting the same BS. His question was "well, what is the opinion of slashdot on breaking the EULA and reverse-engineering our code." I answer that it would really depend on the context, particularly whether the code should have been visible in the first place, and that the use of strings does not qualify as reverse-engineering. He continued to insist that "having reverse-engineered stuff in the past, I know what I'm talking about, so it's just your opinion that strings doesn't count." etc etc
All in all, their attitude - or at least of this rep - has been an offensive defensiveness (aka justify their actions by attacking those of others). I'm hoping that along with having the issues settled he now has an understanding of how the GPL works, but I'm sure he'll probably continue along with the mistaken assumption that his company was never in the wrong, and that this whole thing is the fault of those darn free-software people.