We made history today. This day will be remebered as the day when Europe dodged the bullet.
Few more years, and all technological progres will grind down to a full stop here in the US and we technologically clueful people will all have to go look for jobs elsewhere. Pereferably a place where we will not be sued for infringing on trivial patents...
First they will extend it, patent it then they will make sure that IE and Office throw security warning when viewing non extended RSS. Since they have the market share they can pull it off and make it seem that standard RSS is somehow broken.
Then, you can either roll a feed that will apear to be broken in IE, Outlook et all or you will have to pay Microsoft a licensing fee / sign your soul away into shared code slavery...
That is of course if we let them... There is a small chance that RSS is already to popular for them to pull it off. MS would need all the major news providers to jump on the bandwagon with this really fast...
Heh. Ours is called Velocity:) Funny thing - the log in page includes a 800x600 image background which takes forever to load:P
What baffles me is that the same guys who produced that run a linux on their email server. Why didn't we go for LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP) for this project is beyond me. But hey - I'm not the decision maker around here:(
Well.. TCO is not a real quantifiable metric - it is just a marketing ploy used to somehow convince people that the expensive proprietary software is somehow cheaper than the free software.
I would love to drop MS Office but we are so hopelessly locked in it's not even funny. Out clients use Word+Excell only templates, we use proprietary worpaper software which requires Excell and Access... And our users fear change. Several people threw tantrum fits just because we recently switched Dialup providers for the field employees and the had to *gasp* download and install new dialer software.
Switching them to another email client would essentlially mean that no work would get done for weeks while we spent 3+ hours on the phone with each field employee listening to their angry moans, and training them to use new software... Sigh...
I tell you - TCO is bullshit. Very often using MS products makes you spend more money than you otherwise would.
In this case, you have your employee connect to your mail server over ssl, usually port 589. Require SMTP auth. Require SSL
Been there, done that. I had to drop this because 90% of my employees use Outlook 2002. And SSL support is broken in Office XP. You need to install office service pack 3 or 4 to actually have it working. That of course is a 20+ MB download, which requires you to have a Office CD on you. My users usually have laptops, and they work in the field where they often only have dialup access. And we don't give them Office CD's - laptops get serviced in the office.
Needless to say, once we switched SSL on no one could send out emails anymore, we had to send every single person a copy of Office XP cd, and istruct them how to do the upgrade.
And that's just the tip of the icebearg. Most of my users use Norton Antivirus which by default scans outgoing emails. It does it by proxying them. So if you have outgoing email scanning enabled, you won't be able to send emails with Outlook with SSL enabled - it's as simple as that.
Consequently, we decided to drop the whole SSL idea. It was just to much hassle for our technologically challanged employees.
This would be more or less what I told them... And the bosses just shruged and wandered away muttering something about "those damn IT people and their toys":P
I have converted quite a few people to Firefox... However some people simply refuse to even look at something different than IE because this is what they have learned to use (with some great pains along the way apparently) and they are affraid of change...
Some companies simply do not care about this. I'll give you an example:
My company has a web based time tracking system where you enter your hours. It is the most horrible piece of garbage I have seen in my life! It requires ActiveX to display stupid menus which could have been done in javascript, and the layout is nested frames. If you view that thing in antything but IE you get empty frames all over the place - half of the content is somewhere off screen and you can't navigate the site at all
When I brought it to their attention they had three questions:
What is that firething you talk about?
Who uses it except you and the other computer nerds?
Why should we care if it works fine for all of us except you Mr. "I'm to good to use IE"?
Needles to say I work with technically retaded people - but they make the decissions, not me...
This is kindof scary if you think about it... I mean, what is stopping them from just going around and buying all Linux friendly companies? They have the money to do this, no?
Next Slashdot Headline: Microsoft takes over Novel and drops support for SUSE... Ack!
We might never know, but the fact that the company was strong Unix/Linux support could have been one of the prime reasons why MS wanted it in the first place.
To destroy your enemy, you first cut off his vital supply lines. MS is simply throwing it's weight around to make adoption of Linux (or for that matter any other platform) that much harder at the corporate level.
GASP! Oh no! Wait... Oh, yea - that's right: Who cares!? In soviet russia support drops you (or some such)!
Is anyone suprised by this? We all know that MS is afraid of the growing Linux market share and they will do anything to turn away potential customers. You want Anti-Virus support from us - buy our OS! Oh, you planned to buy that Linux serve - tough noogies - no support for you!
Since I'm running Debian and Flash is not installed I was refreshing the page for like 5 minutes (while reading slashdot in the other tab) before I realized that the top of the page was simply made out of interlaced flash animations which would not load. I had to scroll down 3/4 of the page to actually see anything remotely readable.
So let me guess - in 50 years everyone will be having a T3 line or some fiberoptic monstrocity so people wont even bother with HTML and make pages entirely in flash? You know - so that you can't adblock or greasemonkey out the advertisments? Yeah, right...
On the other hand, with the way things are going now it's not so far fetched as it might sound. By that I of course mean the abandonment of HTML for something flash like - not the T3 in every house. Imagine this this - in 50 years we will have to watch a full screen, un-skipable comercial in order to get to slashdot - and then another one to read the comments. That's what I call progress!
Also yeah, the first 3 Dune books were good - the rest of them sucked
With all due respect, you sir are an idiot. I fail to see your logic here. So, in your opinion giant sandworms, prescience, gholas, face dancers and leto bonding with sandtrout are much more plausible things than brainwashing via intense sexual experiences???
No - the 3 last books have just about the same amount of Science Fiction elements - just slightly different themes to it. I don't see why the concept of honored matres sexual binding would be so much less belivable than the trigger-conditioning of Idaho ghola from Dune Messiah (which you claim was better). No - please don't even compare Herbert's writing to Lucas' recent work!
What you missed from these books is probably that they were very deap socio-political commentary that was in there. Among other things he showed that no political power is permanent - even the Tyrrant Leto had to go. Even the Honored Mattres could not hold into power. Political systems come and go - yet human kind adapts and prevails. The only way to rule is to divorce yourself from politics... And there is much more there.
Some of the more memorable Dune quotes come from the 3 last books. I would recommend re-reading these books again. You are not a true Herbert fan untill you read all 6:)
As for the prequels - they are in a totally different weight category. Much simpler language, much less insight, much less philosophical. I think if you want to compare SW prequels to something your best choice would probably be the Dune prequels.
Excuse me, but what exactly is this Linux Gaming you speak of? Tux Racer and Frozen Bubble? Yet another Nethack clone?
Sigh... Sorry, but we really need to at least match the quality of the comercial games relesed within like the last 2-3 years to even compete out there. Either that or make the commercial companies interested in developing for Linux.
People want to play the newest flashy games in which you shoot stuff and blow up things. And they want finished, shiny products - not a game that never seems to get finished. To little of good quality modern games are out there.
So untill I can grab a game box of the store shelf with the newest commercial hit and install in on my linux box, I will still keep a fairly juiced up windows box in the corner for gaming purposes.
It actually is a preaty nice distinction - I use my Debian for school, work and anything serious, and that ugly winXP for playing games and occassionaly running some stupid windows only crap that I might need...
I'm really getting tired of hearing people throwing around the same old phrases without even thinking about them. I only ask that you consider what you are saying before you yell "crime against nature".
After all, are we not part of this "nature" thing? We are product of natural evolution just as a dog or a chimp is! We share about 90% of our genetic code (add or take a few percent) with monkeys! How does this 10% of genetic difference make us so damn different from any other animal on the face of the earth?
We are just a little bit more adaptable than the rest of the animals but that's about it. We can fill out any and all avaliable ecological niches and actively create our own if we need to. We can shape our environment to suit our needs.
Pack of wolves change their environment too - they mark their territory, they controll the population of their pray within that area and they chase off any intruders. We are a little better because we can put up a fence, and shoot the bunnies with a gun, and ram the dear with our SUV - but the principle is the same.
When you take a shit - is that unnatural? How about when you kill a chicken to make chicken soup? Are you unnatural when you milk a cow? When you breed dogs? Everything we do is natural, because we are part of nature! But as soon as you do something like genetic modification - oh no! You are creating abdominations, you are playing God, etc...
I think the fact that we are able to do these things is a clear indications that they are part of nature - of our human nature. Our evolution made us natural tinkerers - we take things, mold them and shape them so that they serve us better. That is exactly what we are supposed to do. How can you claim that one of the most basic features of our developed brain is unnatural?
Who are you to pass judgment on what is natural and what is not? How do you know that this is not something that we were destined to do?
Think about it. Even if you are religious the "unnatural" argument does not make sense. Perhaps that divine being you mention so eagerly is not opposed to genetic modification at all? Can you really say with 100% certainity your god didn't create you for that specific reason? Maybe humankind is here on earth for the sole reason of speeding up natural evolution via genetic engeneering? How do you know this is not the case?
Sigh... This is just an example of how arogant we are as a species. We think so highly of ourselves that we no longer consider ourselves to be part of nature. We are the living gods who hold the fate of the world in our hands...
I say this is bullshit. The only difference between you and your dog is that you can wipe your own ass more efficiently after you take a dump. That's about it. Oh, and you can also make outrageous claims about your superiority over animals.
We are animals for god's sake! Get it straight people! Sure - we are the smartest ones on the planet, gut geezz. We are not THAT great.
All this morality and human dignity crap is just garbage made up by bunch of bible beating idiots who have their heads up their asses so far that they wont even admit that we are descended from the apes. So let's just cut the crap, do our thing. Let's stop artificially inflating our ego's with empty, false ideas such as humand dignity, and unnatural conduct.
Ok, so you patent the algorithm. Let's say I use your algo, improve on it and make a closed source application and sell it cheeper than you. Now how do you prove that I stole your algorithm if my code is closed? Now you can sue me and demand to see my code, but you can be preaty sure I will fight like hell to avoid that.
And did I really did infringe upon your patent if I gleemed at your algorithm and then developed the software myself using different language, different platform and different techniques? And if I improved upon it and lets say made it run in O(n) when yours was O(n^2), isn't that kindoff like making my own algorithm anyway?
Patenting algorithm, while seemingly logical is dumb because it would be really tough to prove that someone infringed your patent.
Unless of course you make your patent vague as hell - for example: "Using graphical pattern recognition techniques for facial recognition and storing the pattern maps in a database". But if you patent that, then you bassically claim than anyone working on facial recognition software is infringig (because they are likely to do some pattern recognition, and database backend).
If you make it to specific (like algorithm or implementation details) - it will be really hard to prove anything in the land of closed source. If you make it to broad, you bassically do what the altnet guys do - making a ridiculus patent which will be dropped in the court after it is scrutinized by a team of experts.
Software patents are dumb - period.
While the news:// bug seems to be preaty serious, please note that it has been fixed in the newest versions of the software. So this is mostly just a back-version issue which wont affect the new users, and those who updated their software.
It needs to be fixed, but it is not the "OMFG we are all screwed - let's switch to IE NOW!" situation". The remaining two vounerabilities don't seem that bad. The solution for the long url problem should be merly cosmetic - just put a scrollbar there and you're done (maybe add a function call which will parse url and escape funky characters to prevent spoofing - if one is not there already - but I think Moz always had that working as it should as opposed to IE team).
File storage thing seems to simply be a design problem which is not unique to Mozilla. Moz products store temp files in the default temp directory for the system. BFD! So does almost every piece of software out there which has to deal with lots of temp files. And we are not talking about browser cashe - that is stored in yur home. These are temp files for plugins and 3rd party viewers...
I'm actually not sure if that problem is actually a mozilla bug or unintended xpdf side effect...
So I would say 1 vounerability, one possible spoofing riskk and one possible mild privacy related concern. Not bad compared to all the unpatched IE issues
Yup... Lets just throw away a very usefull technology just because a bunch of rich pricks in the *AA groups want to cling to an archaic, outdated copyright/distributiin business model. I mean it's not like technological progress and software innovation is important.
Oh, and take a look who is sponsorring this bill - our old friend, and official RIAA puppet, senator Orrin Hatch. It figures. Oh well, Hatch is back with a new ridiculus bill - been there, done that. Nothing to see here, move along...
All kidding aside though - could this kind of thing affect free software projects such as Bit Torrent or Emule?
Slashdot Mirror
We made history today. This day will be remebered as the day when Europe dodged the bullet. Few more years, and all technological progres will grind down to a full stop here in the US and we technologically clueful people will all have to go look for jobs elsewhere. Pereferably a place where we will not be sued for infringing on trivial patents...
First they will extend it, patent it then they will make sure that IE and Office throw security warning when viewing non extended RSS. Since they have the market share they can pull it off and make it seem that standard RSS is somehow broken.
Then, you can either roll a feed that will apear to be broken in IE, Outlook et all or you will have to pay Microsoft a licensing fee / sign your soul away into shared code slavery...
That is of course if we let them... There is a small chance that RSS is already to popular for them to pull it off. MS would need all the major news providers to jump on the bandwagon with this really fast...
For one I welcome our new bionic overlords :P
Heh. Ours is called Velocity :) Funny thing - the log in page includes a 800x600 image background which takes forever to load :P
What baffles me is that the same guys who produced that run a linux on their email server. Why didn't we go for LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP) for this project is beyond me. But hey - I'm not the decision maker around here :(
Tell us again how that set-up lowers your TCO?
Well.. TCO is not a real quantifiable metric - it is just a marketing ploy used to somehow convince people that the expensive proprietary software is somehow cheaper than the free software.
I would love to drop MS Office but we are so hopelessly locked in it's not even funny. Out clients use Word+Excell only templates, we use proprietary worpaper software which requires Excell and Access... And our users fear change. Several people threw tantrum fits just because we recently switched Dialup providers for the field employees and the had to *gasp* download and install new dialer software.
Switching them to another email client would essentlially mean that no work would get done for weeks while we spent 3+ hours on the phone with each field employee listening to their angry moans, and training them to use new software... Sigh...
I tell you - TCO is bullshit. Very often using MS products makes you spend more money than you otherwise would.
Actually no. It's a custom made application which was written for us long before I ever started working there...
Sad part is that even though it is a piece of crap, we still pay big bucks for hosting and maintenance of that thing every month :(
In this case, you have your employee connect to your mail server over ssl, usually port 589. Require SMTP auth. Require SSL
Been there, done that. I had to drop this because 90% of my employees use Outlook 2002. And SSL support is broken in Office XP. You need to install office service pack 3 or 4 to actually have it working. That of course is a 20+ MB download, which requires you to have a Office CD on you. My users usually have laptops, and they work in the field where they often only have dialup access. And we don't give them Office CD's - laptops get serviced in the office.
Needless to say, once we switched SSL on no one could send out emails anymore, we had to send every single person a copy of Office XP cd, and istruct them how to do the upgrade.
And that's just the tip of the icebearg. Most of my users use Norton Antivirus which by default scans outgoing emails. It does it by proxying them. So if you have outgoing email scanning enabled, you won't be able to send emails with Outlook with SSL enabled - it's as simple as that.
Consequently, we decided to drop the whole SSL idea. It was just to much hassle for our technologically challanged employees.
LART!!! hehe - Good idea, I will apply this! :D
This would be more or less what I told them... And the bosses just shruged and wandered away muttering something about "those damn IT people and their toys" :P
I have converted quite a few people to Firefox... However some people simply refuse to even look at something different than IE because this is what they have learned to use (with some great pains along the way apparently) and they are affraid of change...
Some companies simply do not care about this. I'll give you an example:
My company has a web based time tracking system where you enter your hours. It is the most horrible piece of garbage I have seen in my life! It requires ActiveX to display stupid menus which could have been done in javascript, and the layout is nested frames. If you view that thing in antything but IE you get empty frames all over the place - half of the content is somewhere off screen and you can't navigate the site at all
When I brought it to their attention they had three questions:
Needles to say I work with technically retaded people - but they make the decissions, not me...
This is probably because the lazy webmasters do not feel like learning the standards, or don't get paid enough to actually care.
Or they don't have enough technical know how to fix the page they made in FrontPage.
Are you kidding - 2020 is a very optimistic date! First they have to release Longorn and that's scheduled for like the end of this century...
Darknet sounds at times like it could have been written by a team of Slashdotters. That's a pretty mean thing to say.
In other words the book is full of "in soviet russia", "imagine a beoulf cluster of" and "??? 3. Profit" jokes?
So, where is the torrent for the book download?
Seriously though - why isn't this book released under creative commons?
First pos... Damn! You are fast Trip Master! ;)
This is kindof scary if you think about it... I mean, what is stopping them from just going around and buying all Linux friendly companies? They have the money to do this, no?
Next Slashdot Headline: Microsoft takes over Novel and drops support for SUSE... Ack!
It's not odd - it's evil.
We might never know, but the fact that the company was strong Unix/Linux support could have been one of the prime reasons why MS wanted it in the first place.
To destroy your enemy, you first cut off his vital supply lines. MS is simply throwing it's weight around to make adoption of Linux (or for that matter any other platform) that much harder at the corporate level.
GASP! Oh no! Wait... Oh, yea - that's right: Who cares!? In soviet russia support drops you (or some such)!
Is anyone suprised by this? We all know that MS is afraid of the growing Linux market share and they will do anything to turn away potential customers. You want Anti-Virus support from us - buy our OS! Oh, you planned to buy that Linux serve - tough noogies - no support for you!
I tell you - this is all part of a grad plan:
Come on - it's so simple it can't fail!
Since I'm running Debian and Flash is not installed I was refreshing the page for like 5 minutes (while reading slashdot in the other tab) before I realized that the top of the page was simply made out of interlaced flash animations which would not load. I had to scroll down 3/4 of the page to actually see anything remotely readable.
So let me guess - in 50 years everyone will be having a T3 line or some fiberoptic monstrocity so people wont even bother with HTML and make pages entirely in flash? You know - so that you can't adblock or greasemonkey out the advertisments? Yeah, right...
On the other hand, with the way things are going now it's not so far fetched as it might sound. By that I of course mean the abandonment of HTML for something flash like - not the T3 in every house. Imagine this this - in 50 years we will have to watch a full screen, un-skipable comercial in order to get to slashdot - and then another one to read the comments. That's what I call progress!
With all due respect, you sir are an idiot. I fail to see your logic here. So, in your opinion giant sandworms, prescience, gholas, face dancers and leto bonding with sandtrout are much more plausible things than brainwashing via intense sexual experiences???
No - the 3 last books have just about the same amount of Science Fiction elements - just slightly different themes to it. I don't see why the concept of honored matres sexual binding would be so much less belivable than the trigger-conditioning of Idaho ghola from Dune Messiah (which you claim was better). No - please don't even compare Herbert's writing to Lucas' recent work!
What you missed from these books is probably that they were very deap socio-political commentary that was in there. Among other things he showed that no political power is permanent - even the Tyrrant Leto had to go. Even the Honored Mattres could not hold into power. Political systems come and go - yet human kind adapts and prevails. The only way to rule is to divorce yourself from politics... And there is much more there.
Some of the more memorable Dune quotes come from the 3 last books. I would recommend re-reading these books again. You are not a true Herbert fan untill you read all 6 :)
As for the prequels - they are in a totally different weight category. Much simpler language, much less insight, much less philosophical. I think if you want to compare SW prequels to something your best choice would probably be the Dune prequels.
Excuse me, but what exactly is this Linux Gaming you speak of? Tux Racer and Frozen Bubble? Yet another Nethack clone?
Sigh... Sorry, but we really need to at least match the quality of the comercial games relesed within like the last 2-3 years to even compete out there. Either that or make the commercial companies interested in developing for Linux.
People want to play the newest flashy games in which you shoot stuff and blow up things. And they want finished, shiny products - not a game that never seems to get finished. To little of good quality modern games are out there.
So untill I can grab a game box of the store shelf with the newest commercial hit and install in on my linux box, I will still keep a fairly juiced up windows box in the corner for gaming purposes.
It actually is a preaty nice distinction - I use my Debian for school, work and anything serious, and that ugly winXP for playing games and occassionaly running some stupid windows only crap that I might need...
I'm really getting tired of hearing people throwing around the same old phrases without even thinking about them. I only ask that you consider what you are saying before you yell "crime against nature".
After all, are we not part of this "nature" thing? We are product of natural evolution just as a dog or a chimp is! We share about 90% of our genetic code (add or take a few percent) with monkeys! How does this 10% of genetic difference make us so damn different from any other animal on the face of the earth?
We are just a little bit more adaptable than the rest of the animals but that's about it. We can fill out any and all avaliable ecological niches and actively create our own if we need to. We can shape our environment to suit our needs.
Pack of wolves change their environment too - they mark their territory, they controll the population of their pray within that area and they chase off any intruders. We are a little better because we can put up a fence, and shoot the bunnies with a gun, and ram the dear with our SUV - but the principle is the same.
When you take a shit - is that unnatural? How about when you kill a chicken to make chicken soup? Are you unnatural when you milk a cow? When you breed dogs? Everything we do is natural, because we are part of nature! But as soon as you do something like genetic modification - oh no! You are creating abdominations, you are playing God, etc...
I think the fact that we are able to do these things is a clear indications that they are part of nature - of our human nature. Our evolution made us natural tinkerers - we take things, mold them and shape them so that they serve us better. That is exactly what we are supposed to do. How can you claim that one of the most basic features of our developed brain is unnatural?
Who are you to pass judgment on what is natural and what is not? How do you know that this is not something that we were destined to do?
Think about it. Even if you are religious the "unnatural" argument does not make sense. Perhaps that divine being you mention so eagerly is not opposed to genetic modification at all? Can you really say with 100% certainity your god didn't create you for that specific reason? Maybe humankind is here on earth for the sole reason of speeding up natural evolution via genetic engeneering? How do you know this is not the case?
Sigh... This is just an example of how arogant we are as a species. We think so highly of ourselves that we no longer consider ourselves to be part of nature. We are the living gods who hold the fate of the world in our hands...
I say this is bullshit. The only difference between you and your dog is that you can wipe your own ass more efficiently after you take a dump. That's about it. Oh, and you can also make outrageous claims about your superiority over animals.
We are animals for god's sake! Get it straight people! Sure - we are the smartest ones on the planet, gut geezz. We are not THAT great.
All this morality and human dignity crap is just garbage made up by bunch of bible beating idiots who have their heads up their asses so far that they wont even admit that we are descended from the apes. So let's just cut the crap, do our thing. Let's stop artificially inflating our ego's with empty, false ideas such as humand dignity, and unnatural conduct.
Ok, so you patent the algorithm. Let's say I use your algo, improve on it and make a closed source application and sell it cheeper than you. Now how do you prove that I stole your algorithm if my code is closed? Now you can sue me and demand to see my code, but you can be preaty sure I will fight like hell to avoid that. And did I really did infringe upon your patent if I gleemed at your algorithm and then developed the software myself using different language, different platform and different techniques? And if I improved upon it and lets say made it run in O(n) when yours was O(n^2), isn't that kindoff like making my own algorithm anyway? Patenting algorithm, while seemingly logical is dumb because it would be really tough to prove that someone infringed your patent. Unless of course you make your patent vague as hell - for example: "Using graphical pattern recognition techniques for facial recognition and storing the pattern maps in a database". But if you patent that, then you bassically claim than anyone working on facial recognition software is infringig (because they are likely to do some pattern recognition, and database backend). If you make it to specific (like algorithm or implementation details) - it will be really hard to prove anything in the land of closed source. If you make it to broad, you bassically do what the altnet guys do - making a ridiculus patent which will be dropped in the court after it is scrutinized by a team of experts. Software patents are dumb - period.
While the news:// bug seems to be preaty serious, please note that it has been fixed in the newest versions of the software. So this is mostly just a back-version issue which wont affect the new users, and those who updated their software.
It needs to be fixed, but it is not the "OMFG we are all screwed - let's switch to IE NOW!" situation". The remaining two vounerabilities don't seem that bad. The solution for the long url problem should be merly cosmetic - just put a scrollbar there and you're done (maybe add a function call which will parse url and escape funky characters to prevent spoofing - if one is not there already - but I think Moz always had that working as it should as opposed to IE team).
File storage thing seems to simply be a design problem which is not unique to Mozilla. Moz products store temp files in the default temp directory for the system. BFD! So does almost every piece of software out there which has to deal with lots of temp files. And we are not talking about browser cashe - that is stored in yur home. These are temp files for plugins and 3rd party viewers...
I'm actually not sure if that problem is actually a mozilla bug or unintended xpdf side effect...
So I would say 1 vounerability, one possible spoofing riskk and one possible mild privacy related concern. Not bad compared to all the unpatched IE issues
Yup... Lets just throw away a very usefull technology just because a bunch of rich pricks in the *AA groups want to cling to an archaic, outdated copyright/distributiin business model. I mean it's not like technological progress and software innovation is important.
Oh, and take a look who is sponsorring this bill - our old friend, and official RIAA puppet, senator Orrin Hatch. It figures. Oh well, Hatch is back with a new ridiculus bill - been there, done that. Nothing to see here, move along...
All kidding aside though - could this kind of thing affect free software projects such as Bit Torrent or Emule?