No, after it reached a basic functionality I sort of lost interest in putting on the finishing touches. It sounds like there's interest for it, though, so one of these days I'll dig up my old box and put it on sourceforge or something.
In Batman's case, it's because they were all criminally insane, and therefore couldn't be tried as criminals, executed, or put into a normal prison.
What's unrealistic about Batman (from a social psychology perspective, not from a physics perspective) is that the super-villains never really tore into each other, the way major gangs and crime syndicates do. In fact, they worked together far more often than they warred with each other.
You think SciAm is bad, try actually reading Popular Science. It's all science-fiction military technology.
Part of the problem is actually that the mainstream news has gotten much better science reporting, so the gap between the NYT or Newsweek and SciAm has gotten to be quite narrow. It's still not as good as SciAm used to be, but most major newspapers have, if not a legitimate 'science person' on staff, easily-accessible consultants who can help break things down for them. Once you add in Wikipedia and the open-access research movement, the niche the magazine used to occupy is almost entirely gone.
I once ran into Bruce in ladies garment store (he likes to cross-dress, and so do I). I took out my laptop and asked him if he could crack it. I hadn't even finished opening the lid when he told me that there was a bug in my.bashrc file, either on line 57 or on 92, depending on which one I actually meant.
I stole his wallet while he was trying on a strapless evening gown, though.
Thermonuclear ground-zero encryption is unnecessary, you just need good a good Brownian crypto device.
On a serious note, there's also steganography. I wrote up a tool that works like shred(1), except instead of DoD-compliant type over-writes, it uses blocks of harmless text from Project Gutenberg. Theoretically it's weaker than a 35-pass algorithm, but the advantage is that it's now much harder to retrieve the original data, since it's much harder to tell apart.
I really want to do something that would get my computer seized by the NSA so I can laugh while imagining them trying to find the data they're looking for. "Aha! I've found some unencrypted text... it says, 'Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, â" though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, â" the cant of criticism is the most tormenting...' Never mind, it's just some crap again...."
Anyone know how to get in touch with Osama bin Laden?
The solution isn't to kill the web, it's to stop using it. You don't like it, you don't use it, then whether or not the government shoots people for posting stuff is irrelevant for you.
You can choose Linux, or Free- or NetBSD, but build a custom kernel that only includes drivers that you're going to use. See if there's any code you can leave out. Ditch all the binaries you don't need, and make sure your rc scripts are skinned down to the bone. No swap space, and a single-partition disk, that's read-only if you can do it.
In general, modern software that's been stripped down will have as good or better performance than old software, especially when it comes to things like bugs.
No, the idea is that people are seriously considering alternatives (or dual-booting additions) to Windows. That could help Linux in the long run.
But what the summary (I didn't RTFA) doesn't say is that, in order to get there, Apple had to go on a sustained, serious P.R. blitz and have a couple of hot trendy toys for people to buy. You can laugh at Ellen Feiss, complain about the Mac vs. PC ads, bitch about media coverage of Apple events, but the point is, it takes ALL THAT just to get to where they are now. They're marketing like Budweiser, but they get the results of Coors.
In that sense, the prospects for Linux on the desktop are rather bleak.
The reason is that Mac software works completely differently. The POSIX syscalls are the same, but almost everything in between is completely different. Not like Toyota-Ferrari, different, we're talking Schwinn-Ferrari different.
The Win32 API that Wine implements is a C API, so a clean version can be written from scratch by anyone who knows C and takes the time to do it. Lots of potential users there.
The Cocoa APIs of Mac OS X are written in Objective-C, a language which few people know. They are more expansive than the Win32 API, and since they are object-oriented the specification is quite a bit more complex.
There is a Free sort-of-implementation called GNUStep, which actually conforms to the earlier OPENSTEP specification, plus their own add-ons. The GNUStep people now make tracking changes to Cocoa a priority, so there is source compatibility, and there is something called Renaissance which allows users to create use a single file for user interface design.
However, I don't think GNUStep is binary compatible, even if it's built on top of Darwin and running on identical hardware. But if it's binary compatibility you want, the GNUStep codebase is the best place to start (just watch out for lawyers).
An interesting note, even though the two are binary compatible, because NeXT/OPEN/GNUStep/Cocoa applications are actually directories of multiple files, it's theoretically possible to have one single build that could handle either API, on a variety of architectures.
No left leaning anarchist in America calls themselves libertarian.
There are plenty that do. They tend to be out-numbered by the right-wingers, but they exist. The quasi-sollipsistic outdoorsmen are one example.
I know, I am a hippie anarcho-syndicalist, although I believe free markets can be efficient mechanisms for wealth creation if they are regulated to account for market failure modes such as externalities, imbalance of information, and natural monopoly, and if everyone can start from a relatively level playing field.
In that case there's no possibility for comparative advantage, and consequently no benefit from free markets.
Big L libertarians are the only real libertarians, everyone else would do well to avoid the word like the plague. The big L guys are the ones who coined the phrase. Let them keep it.
That is incorrect, it was coined to refer to people who believed in metaphysical free will, contra necessitarianism. As a political philosophy, it posits free will as the first and most natural right of man, ahead even of things like property.
Anarchist and anarchism are perfectly respectable words with a much longer history. It is only because of propaganda against anarchists as crazy bomb throwing anti government terrorists that people became afraid to use it.
Proudhon was a proto-Marxist state socialist, Kropotkin supported the assassination of the Czar, and Czolgosz actually was an assassin. Sorry for getting the wrong idea.
People who call themselves libertarians get no respect from me because they would obviously rather have their names associated with the likes of Bob Barr.
So, you judge people based on what political party they belong to, rather than on the content of the character or work that they do? That doesn't sound very anarcho-syndicalist, it sounds factional to me.
Barr only had 51% on the final ballot, and many said they'd rather write in Ron Paul or not vote at all than vote for him.
They deny their true heritage as anarchists and know little to nothing about historical Anarchists such as Trotsky and Proudhon.
See above, kthnx.
So, do you specialize in giving 'stuff you already know' lessons?
Fortunately for you, I specialize in 'stuff you apparently didn't know' lessons.
There is a policy, or at least a strong convention, in place for Linux that bug fix commits should explain in a fairly detailed fashion what was the bug was and/or how it was fixed. However, most of the security fixes are vague and general.
Someone pointed this out, and first Linus said there was no "policy." Someone pointed out that, in fact, there was. Then Linus said that wasn't the point, the issue was that he didn't want script kiddies to be able to find potential exploits easily. So someone pointed out that this means that individuals and distros can't tell whether a given bugfix is urgent or not, and Linus replied that the question whether a bug is related to security or not is difficult to answer. Just to make sure that everyone knew he was trolling hard, he flamed OpenBSD for having a better security record than Linux.
It boggles my mind, the extent to which Linus is able to spew the most outrageous bullshit and Linux nutriders will buy it. He's an excellent programmer and deserving of his reputation, but the cult of hero worship that surrounds him drags down the whole community of Linux users (and by extension, Free Software in general).
But yet, somehow, imprisoning a kid who performed a few technical exploits without malicious intent at the request of a few bad apples, just out of curiosity about the problem--and the joy of having someone finally taking an interest in him for something he did--that's a step forward for justice?
Don't look at him as being let off easy, he's being taken in by the police as an cybercrime intern, so he can learn about what is legal or ethical to do with computers, and not least so someone in authority can keep an eye on him. The police will get a bit of work out of him, to be sure, but this is New Zealand: sheepnapping is more of an economic threat than cybercrime.
No, the problem with Libertarians is that there are two kinds of them. (NB the following contains generalizations, which represent the author's experience and do not express a law of nature. YMMV)
The first kind are the pro-business/anarcho-capitalist ("right-leaning") Libertarians. These are people who, at the extreme, believe that police forces and roads should be privatized, and in the more usual moderate forms support business interests over particular rights and interests, such as environmentalism.
The second kind are the hippie/anarcho-syndicalist ("left-leaning") Libertarians. These are the people who, at the extreme, believe that people will self-organize into collectives where there is no wealth and exchange is generalized, and in the more usual moderate forms support the protection of particular rights and interests over business (they may or may not believe in the validity of free-market economic theory).
A good way to show the contrast is that while both sorts are in favor of legalizing cannabis, right-leaning libertarians would still allow businesses to not hire people who used it when not working, but left-leaning ones would establish the "right" to get high. If Libertarians ever actually took power, there would be a bloodbath over who got to direct the establishment of their utopia.
There's actually now a third type of big-L Libertarian (i.e., members of the organized Libertarian Party), and those I call the Bob Barr Libertarians (after their leader and candidate for president). They aren't really libertarians at all, but Anti-Federalists who got sick of the Republican Party. Barr doesn't actually believe in personal freedom, he just believes in taking power away from Washington and giving it to the various states (which most libertarians agree with, but only as a means to an end). Barr has stated that he doesn't think gays should have the right to marry, or that drugs should be legalized, or that women should be able to get abortions, but he wants states to be the ones to outlaw them instead of the Federal government.
Maybe Viacom (and anyone else) want to be able to decide where their work shows and how much money it makes.
The customers decide how much money they make. If the premium they charge over free, user-generated content is too high, they don't make any money.
Unless, of course, they pull a record cartel move, where they get the government to put a tax (which is then paid to the archaic content distributors) on computers, net connections, or web services.
Waaaaay Off-topic, but Woz in that pic (on the right) looks like a bearded version of Justing Long, of "I'm a Mac" fame. Who wants to start the bastard-child rumors?
I think Obama was counting on the bill getting struck down. If he's right, his long-term popularity loss will be minimal once the whole thing blows over, and he'll have helped his image as serious about national security.
Frankly, I think the better move would have been to schedule his trip to Iraq earlier and used the "out of town" excuse, maybe even hold a press conference there to steal some of the bill's thunder. But then, I'm no political consultant.
I think the plan is to force out the directors, get them to hire new executives, and then act *shocked* when the SEC blocks the buyout. MS keeps its cash, Y! has been crippled beyond competition, investors lose.
I'm not sure if I should hate MS for this latest bout of evil, or love them for trying to pull a fast one on Icahn.
Buy some previous editions of textbooks. For less than the price of one new textbook, you can probably get a whole undergraduate course of learning, as long as you read a lot.
But, make sure any books you buy have answers to problem sets in the back. I learned that lesson the hard way.
It can do a lot of things, actually. One use, as you've noted, is to serve as what amounts to a source of free R&D.
But there are a lot of other things that can come out of this, too:
People who want more advanced search features (like regex support) can write it themselves instead of pestering Yahoo.
Better support for foreign language search.
Since a lot of websites still roll their own site search functionality and do it badly, use Yahoo as a replacement.
More flexible 'Safe Search' access control.
etc...
I think it's a great idea. It might open them up to some serious copyright challenges, but if it doesn't (or, preferably, if those challenges get tossed aside), it would be great to see all the search portals do something like this.
I prefer 'piracy'. The group ethics of freebooters during the golden age of sail is identical with the ethics of digital encryption-circumventors and copyright-ignorers.
To understand, you have to realize that sailing in the 17th century was a miserable occupation, especially with the Royal Navy. The hours were wicked, the breaks short, and the work back-breaking. Officers (who were paid about 10 times what you were) were rewarded for treating you harshly. Rations were insignificant and insufficient (the practice of giving lime juice to sailors didn't start until the 19th century, so scurvy likely). You could even be forcibly press-ganged into serving on a ship, if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As a pirate, however, there were many more men on a ship, meaning less work and more free time for all. Food and fresh water were easier to come by, since you didn't have to make long trans-oceanic voyages, so nutrition was better and servings more filling.
The captain still earned more booty that the rest of the crew, but only by a factor of three or four, as shares of treasure were distributed proportionately. And speaking of captains, they were elected by acclaim, rather than imposed by remote authorities from the Admiralty.
The characterization of pirates as bloodthirsty is mostly a historical relic inserted by the authorities to frighten children and to discourage sailors from becoming buccaneers. A few were psychopathic, it's true, but the punishment they meted out as victors was no worse than what they would have faced themselves at home. All the talk of bargains with the Devil or Death was a metaphor for the pirates exchange: they earned freedom and sovereignty, but had to pay for it with a price on their heads.
In many cases the pirates proved better men than their opponents. Jean LaFitte fought alongside the Americans in the War of 1812, Capts. Morgan and Kidd plundered vessels in the name of the Crown, and Great Peter fought at sea to protect Friesland from its belligerent neighbors.
The parallels to modern-day software/content piracy should be obvious. They believe in freedom, rather than monopolistic autocracy; they risk severe punishment; they advocate sharing the fruits of their labor; they are generally nicer people than most of their adversaries (game designers tend to be the best of the lot, but when it comes to music, movies, books, etc. the contrast is much more clear).
Slashdot Mirror
No, after it reached a basic functionality I sort of lost interest in putting on the finishing touches. It sounds like there's interest for it, though, so one of these days I'll dig up my old box and put it on sourceforge or something.
In Batman's case, it's because they were all criminally insane, and therefore couldn't be tried as criminals, executed, or put into a normal prison.
What's unrealistic about Batman (from a social psychology perspective, not from a physics perspective) is that the super-villains never really tore into each other, the way major gangs and crime syndicates do. In fact, they worked together far more often than they warred with each other.
You think SciAm is bad, try actually reading Popular Science. It's all science-fiction military technology.
Part of the problem is actually that the mainstream news has gotten much better science reporting, so the gap between the NYT or Newsweek and SciAm has gotten to be quite narrow. It's still not as good as SciAm used to be, but most major newspapers have, if not a legitimate 'science person' on staff, easily-accessible consultants who can help break things down for them. Once you add in Wikipedia and the open-access research movement, the niche the magazine used to occupy is almost entirely gone.
I once ran into Bruce in ladies garment store (he likes to cross-dress, and so do I). I took out my laptop and asked him if he could crack it. I hadn't even finished opening the lid when he told me that there was a bug in my .bashrc file, either on line 57 or on 92, depending on which one I actually meant.
I stole his wallet while he was trying on a strapless evening gown, though.
Thermonuclear ground-zero encryption is unnecessary, you just need good a good Brownian crypto device.
On a serious note, there's also steganography. I wrote up a tool that works like shred(1), except instead of DoD-compliant type over-writes, it uses blocks of harmless text from Project Gutenberg. Theoretically it's weaker than a 35-pass algorithm, but the advantage is that it's now much harder to retrieve the original data, since it's much harder to tell apart.
I really want to do something that would get my computer seized by the NSA so I can laugh while imagining them trying to find the data they're looking for. "Aha! I've found some unencrypted text... it says, 'Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, â" though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, â" the cant of criticism is the most tormenting...' Never mind, it's just some crap again...."
Anyone know how to get in touch with Osama bin Laden?
The solution isn't to kill the web, it's to stop using it. You don't like it, you don't use it, then whether or not the government shoots people for posting stuff is irrelevant for you.
You can choose Linux, or Free- or NetBSD, but build a custom kernel that only includes drivers that you're going to use. See if there's any code you can leave out. Ditch all the binaries you don't need, and make sure your rc scripts are skinned down to the bone. No swap space, and a single-partition disk, that's read-only if you can do it.
In general, modern software that's been stripped down will have as good or better performance than old software, especially when it comes to things like bugs.
No, the idea is that people are seriously considering alternatives (or dual-booting additions) to Windows. That could help Linux in the long run.
But what the summary (I didn't RTFA) doesn't say is that, in order to get there, Apple had to go on a sustained, serious P.R. blitz and have a couple of hot trendy toys for people to buy. You can laugh at Ellen Feiss, complain about the Mac vs. PC ads, bitch about media coverage of Apple events, but the point is, it takes ALL THAT just to get to where they are now. They're marketing like Budweiser, but they get the results of Coors.
In that sense, the prospects for Linux on the desktop are rather bleak.
The reason is that Mac software works completely differently. The POSIX syscalls are the same, but almost everything in between is completely different. Not like Toyota-Ferrari, different, we're talking Schwinn-Ferrari different.
The Win32 API that Wine implements is a C API, so a clean version can be written from scratch by anyone who knows C and takes the time to do it. Lots of potential users there.
The Cocoa APIs of Mac OS X are written in Objective-C, a language which few people know. They are more expansive than the Win32 API, and since they are object-oriented the specification is quite a bit more complex.
There is a Free sort-of-implementation called GNUStep, which actually conforms to the earlier OPENSTEP specification, plus their own add-ons. The GNUStep people now make tracking changes to Cocoa a priority, so there is source compatibility, and there is something called Renaissance which allows users to create use a single file for user interface design.
However, I don't think GNUStep is binary compatible, even if it's built on top of Darwin and running on identical hardware. But if it's binary compatibility you want, the GNUStep codebase is the best place to start (just watch out for lawyers).
An interesting note, even though the two are binary compatible, because NeXT/OPEN/GNUStep/Cocoa applications are actually directories of multiple files, it's theoretically possible to have one single build that could handle either API, on a variety of architectures.
No left leaning anarchist in America calls themselves libertarian.
There are plenty that do. They tend to be out-numbered by the right-wingers, but they exist. The quasi-sollipsistic outdoorsmen are one example.
I know, I am a hippie anarcho-syndicalist, although I believe free markets can be efficient mechanisms for wealth creation if they are regulated to account for market failure modes such as externalities, imbalance of information, and natural monopoly, and if everyone can start from a relatively level playing field.
In that case there's no possibility for comparative advantage, and consequently no benefit from free markets.
Big L libertarians are the only real libertarians, everyone else would do well to avoid the word like the plague. The big L guys are the ones who coined the phrase. Let them keep it.
That is incorrect, it was coined to refer to people who believed in metaphysical free will, contra necessitarianism. As a political philosophy, it posits free will as the first and most natural right of man, ahead even of things like property.
Anarchist and anarchism are perfectly respectable words with a much longer history. It is only because of propaganda against anarchists as crazy bomb throwing anti government terrorists that people became afraid to use it.
Proudhon was a proto-Marxist state socialist, Kropotkin supported the assassination of the Czar, and Czolgosz actually was an assassin. Sorry for getting the wrong idea.
People who call themselves libertarians get no respect from me because they would obviously rather have their names associated with the likes of Bob Barr.
So, you judge people based on what political party they belong to, rather than on the content of the character or work that they do? That doesn't sound very anarcho-syndicalist, it sounds factional to me.
Barr only had 51% on the final ballot, and many said they'd rather write in Ron Paul or not vote at all than vote for him.
They deny their true heritage as anarchists and know little to nothing about historical Anarchists such as Trotsky and Proudhon.
See above, kthnx.
So, do you specialize in giving 'stuff you already know' lessons?
Fortunately for you, I specialize in 'stuff you apparently didn't know' lessons.
What Linus IS doing trolling. Plain and simple.
There is a policy, or at least a strong convention, in place for Linux that bug fix commits should explain in a fairly detailed fashion what was the bug was and/or how it was fixed. However, most of the security fixes are vague and general.
Someone pointed this out, and first Linus said there was no "policy." Someone pointed out that, in fact, there was. Then Linus said that wasn't the point, the issue was that he didn't want script kiddies to be able to find potential exploits easily. So someone pointed out that this means that individuals and distros can't tell whether a given bugfix is urgent or not, and Linus replied that the question whether a bug is related to security or not is difficult to answer. Just to make sure that everyone knew he was trolling hard, he flamed OpenBSD for having a better security record than Linux.
It boggles my mind, the extent to which Linus is able to spew the most outrageous bullshit and Linux nutriders will buy it. He's an excellent programmer and deserving of his reputation, but the cult of hero worship that surrounds him drags down the whole community of Linux users (and by extension, Free Software in general).
But yet, somehow, imprisoning a kid who performed a few technical exploits without malicious intent at the request of a few bad apples, just out of curiosity about the problem--and the joy of having someone finally taking an interest in him for something he did--that's a step forward for justice?
Don't look at him as being let off easy, he's being taken in by the police as an cybercrime intern, so he can learn about what is legal or ethical to do with computers, and not least so someone in authority can keep an eye on him. The police will get a bit of work out of him, to be sure, but this is New Zealand: sheepnapping is more of an economic threat than cybercrime.
No, the problem with Libertarians is that there are two kinds of them. (NB the following contains generalizations, which represent the author's experience and do not express a law of nature. YMMV)
The first kind are the pro-business/anarcho-capitalist ("right-leaning") Libertarians. These are people who, at the extreme, believe that police forces and roads should be privatized, and in the more usual moderate forms support business interests over particular rights and interests, such as environmentalism.
The second kind are the hippie/anarcho-syndicalist ("left-leaning") Libertarians. These are the people who, at the extreme, believe that people will self-organize into collectives where there is no wealth and exchange is generalized, and in the more usual moderate forms support the protection of particular rights and interests over business (they may or may not believe in the validity of free-market economic theory).
A good way to show the contrast is that while both sorts are in favor of legalizing cannabis, right-leaning libertarians would still allow businesses to not hire people who used it when not working, but left-leaning ones would establish the "right" to get high. If Libertarians ever actually took power, there would be a bloodbath over who got to direct the establishment of their utopia.
There's actually now a third type of big-L Libertarian (i.e., members of the organized Libertarian Party), and those I call the Bob Barr Libertarians (after their leader and candidate for president). They aren't really libertarians at all, but Anti-Federalists who got sick of the Republican Party. Barr doesn't actually believe in personal freedom, he just believes in taking power away from Washington and giving it to the various states (which most libertarians agree with, but only as a means to an end). Barr has stated that he doesn't think gays should have the right to marry, or that drugs should be legalized, or that women should be able to get abortions, but he wants states to be the ones to outlaw them instead of the Federal government.
Maybe Viacom (and anyone else) want to be able to decide where their work shows and how much money it makes.
The customers decide how much money they make. If the premium they charge over free, user-generated content is too high, they don't make any money.
Unless, of course, they pull a record cartel move, where they get the government to put a tax (which is then paid to the archaic content distributors) on computers, net connections, or web services.
Waaaaay Off-topic, but Woz in that pic (on the right) looks like a bearded version of Justing Long, of "I'm a Mac" fame. Who wants to start the bastard-child rumors?
I think Obama was counting on the bill getting struck down. If he's right, his long-term popularity loss will be minimal once the whole thing blows over, and he'll have helped his image as serious about national security.
Frankly, I think the better move would have been to schedule his trip to Iraq earlier and used the "out of town" excuse, maybe even hold a press conference there to steal some of the bill's thunder. But then, I'm no political consultant.
I think the plan is to force out the directors, get them to hire new executives, and then act *shocked* when the SEC blocks the buyout. MS keeps its cash, Y! has been crippled beyond competition, investors lose.
I'm not sure if I should hate MS for this latest bout of evil, or love them for trying to pull a fast one on Icahn.
Somebody is buying into the hype.
Actually, I just didn't bother to RTFA and guessed as to what one could do, but good on you for reading it.
It's a bit disappointing that you can't do something like that, as it might get me using yahoo once in a while.
Buy some previous editions of textbooks. For less than the price of one new textbook, you can probably get a whole undergraduate course of learning, as long as you read a lot.
But, make sure any books you buy have answers to problem sets in the back. I learned that lesson the hard way.
"Maritime Terrorists"
Is this a joke, or not? You decide.
It can do a lot of things, actually. One use, as you've noted, is to serve as what amounts to a source of free R&D.
But there are a lot of other things that can come out of this, too:
I think it's a great idea. It might open them up to some serious copyright challenges, but if it doesn't (or, preferably, if those challenges get tossed aside), it would be great to see all the search portals do something like this.
I use GNUSTEP you insensitive clod!
No, it's like "comprehensive low-cost municipal public transit as a solution to drunk driving."
Incidentally, another idea whose time has come.
You can get a hex editor/debugger to add copy protection, share it on a free site, and then only tell people you like what the password is.
If you can convince people that yoursis the "real/complete" version, you win.
I prefer 'piracy'. The group ethics of freebooters during the golden age of sail is identical with the ethics of digital encryption-circumventors and copyright-ignorers.
To understand, you have to realize that sailing in the 17th century was a miserable occupation, especially with the Royal Navy. The hours were wicked, the breaks short, and the work back-breaking. Officers (who were paid about 10 times what you were) were rewarded for treating you harshly. Rations were insignificant and insufficient (the practice of giving lime juice to sailors didn't start until the 19th century, so scurvy likely). You could even be forcibly press-ganged into serving on a ship, if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As a pirate, however, there were many more men on a ship, meaning less work and more free time for all. Food and fresh water were easier to come by, since you didn't have to make long trans-oceanic voyages, so nutrition was better and servings more filling.
The captain still earned more booty that the rest of the crew, but only by a factor of three or four, as shares of treasure were distributed proportionately. And speaking of captains, they were elected by acclaim, rather than imposed by remote authorities from the Admiralty.
The characterization of pirates as bloodthirsty is mostly a historical relic inserted by the authorities to frighten children and to discourage sailors from becoming buccaneers. A few were psychopathic, it's true, but the punishment they meted out as victors was no worse than what they would have faced themselves at home. All the talk of bargains with the Devil or Death was a metaphor for the pirates exchange: they earned freedom and sovereignty, but had to pay for it with a price on their heads.
In many cases the pirates proved better men than their opponents. Jean LaFitte fought alongside the Americans in the War of 1812, Capts. Morgan and Kidd plundered vessels in the name of the Crown, and Great Peter fought at sea to protect Friesland from its belligerent neighbors.
The parallels to modern-day software/content piracy should be obvious. They believe in freedom, rather than monopolistic autocracy; they risk severe punishment; they advocate sharing the fruits of their labor; they are generally nicer people than most of their adversaries (game designers tend to be the best of the lot, but when it comes to music, movies, books, etc. the contrast is much more clear).