Sorry to be the bearer of truth, but Gabe is a good marketer: he's talking out of both sides of his mouth - telling you what you want to hear, but meanwhile, Steam is DRM.
'Blaming BitTorrent for piracy is like blaming a freeway for drunk drivers, ' Jill Calcaterra, Cinedigm's chief marketing officer said.
I'd say BitTorrent is more like selling ruffies to the general public, and then complaining when the public blames the company for women getting ruffied and raped. It's obvious that they're aiding and abetting the rapists - all to make a few bucks. It's also obvious what people are going to use ruffies and BitTorrent for, if given the chance. BitTorrent is empowering pirates to screw over creators.
I have never heard of a credible biological reason to this, is there a "scientist" gene that is present in only men? I would find that hard to belive.
Obviously, there's no "scientist gene". But, it's not a simple dichotomy between "gene for x" versus "it's all socialization". We still haven't found the genes responsible for tallness (and I say "genes" because there's probably a variety of them). Additionally, I'd expect tallness to be based on hormones, as well (this is why males tend to be taller, on average, than women). It would be fallacious to say that men are taller because of some "tallness gene" that is only present in men. Yet, we can all agree that tallness is heritable and it would be laughable to say it's all socialization (even if height is based somewhat on how much nutrition you receive as a child). I could say the same thing about strength (men tend to be naturally stronger than women - and this is based on hormonal levels, not some "strength gene" that is present only in males). The way you ask the question is biased towards getting the answer you want.
I dunno, you seem perfectly comfortable with a bunch of undeserving white professionals who got there simply because they were born in first/second base thanks to past discrimination and they would not have made it at all, had they started from the dug out, like a kid from the ghetto.
You act like jobs are just given out to white people with no real consideration of whether they're capable or educated ("undeserving white professionals"). I don't know if you know this, but employers generally try to pick the best/most capable candidate. If we're going to base this purely on some "past discrimination" and want society to rectify past wrong by handing out jobs to the down and out, then I look forward to an incompetent workforce.
You are assuming that all the female candidates are of lower quality and that is why they don't get hired in the first place. That assumption is wrong. Sometimes they don't get hired because the person hiring them is biased against their gender (they won't fit in, might generate sexual harassment lawsuits etc.).
That's why it's useful to compare the gender ratios against the applicants for a job. It's not a perfect measure, by any means, though.
For example, only about 20% of the students studying computer science are women, which means you can't really expect more than 20% of the programmers to be women in the workforce; though historical rates also come into play here. I had read recently that about 27% of developer jobs are staffed by women, which almost seems to indicate a pro-woman bias.
There was a big storm a number of years back when some student in the admissions office noticed that minority students had lower test scores than white students. They ended up leaking a bunch of information showing that minority students had SAT scores that were, on average, several hundred points below the SAT scores of white students (of course, there's other factors to take into account in that case, for example, if no white students had test scores less than X, but minority students had test scores several hundred points below X. Averages can be deceiving since they can be skewed by a bunch of high performing white students.)
So, yeah, it is very possible for affirmative action to favor lower quality minorities over higher performing white candidates.
"2) Private stuff. ans to 2 is why? private is private and provided you use proper security on access controls all is hunky dory"
What do you mean by "proper security on access controls"? Do you mean encrypting individual files or folders depending on their contents (e.g. if you store your tax returns on your computer)? Out of convenience and avoiding the hassle of figuring out exactly which files I need to encrypt, I can just encrypt the whole thing and be done with it.
> "Do you use encryption for your hard drive(s)? What's your setup like and how manageable is it?"
I have two backup drives, placed in different locations so that, even if my house burns down, I still have the data. I encrypt my data. My data is not tied to a specific hard drive. It's just a bunch of files in a TrueCrypt container (either encrypting the whole drive or an encrypted file container). I can go in and access/move/delete/rename any files when I need to - from any computer the backup drive is attached to, as long as I have TrueCrypt running and have punched in the password.
"Backup images of the encrypted operating system can only be restored to the original hard drive (ie.: the drive that has failed)." What? That seems complicated if you lose your hard drive. Treat your encrypted backup as a bunch of files.
They said that if the US is about to start a nuclear war they reserve the right to make a pre-emptive strike, just like all nuclear armed countries do.
Nonsense. There are plenty of countries that have stated that they will not pursue a first nuclear strike. There are a variety of positions taken by nuclear-armed nations: no first strike, strike only in the event of a nuclear strike by someone else or conventional invasion, etc.
As of October 2008, China,[1] India[2] and North Korea[3] have publicly declared their commitment to no first use of nuclear weapons.
NATO has repeatedly rejected calls for adopting NFU [No First Use] policy,[4] arguing that preemptive nuclear strike is a key option.[citation needed] In 1993, Russia dropped a pledge given by the former Soviet Union not to use nuclear weapons first.[5] In 2000, a Russian military doctrine stated that Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons "in response to a large-scale conventional aggression".
There's lots of reasons that people should be getting paid for their work. For example, if our music, movie, and software industries are supposed to be built on the backs of volunteer labor on our 'off hours from work', you will find that: there is a general lack of professionalism (because people don't have the time to get really good at their craft), that there will be a chronic lack of volunteers (how many awesome open-source games are there again?), and it means society is getting something for nothing while creators are not getting adequately compensated for their work (which is unfair and an unsustainable system when one group does all the work, but another group gets all the benefits). We're not the sacrificial lambs of the 21st century - creating great stuff for the world, while getting virtually nothing in return. If you believe this, then I suggest you work at your job this year and give every single penny to charity. Then you can come lecture us about working for free for the benefit of humanity. (Oh, but we'll tell you you're not "working for free" - when you hand us our order at McDonalds, I'll reward you with **recognition**! Whoop! Whoop! How can you possibly refuse that offer?)
So, basically, he's taken the "Swiss Bank Account" model that allows tyrants, dictators, and thieves to keep their money hidden and applied it to uploading illegal content. One major problem with KimDotcom's new model is the fact that Megaupload used to allow users to search for content (read: mostly copyrighted, illegally uploaded content). The search functionality is broken with the new model because your average user can't know the encryption key. This means most users will ignore megaupload and they will suffer from a lack of users. (Because, let's face it: the real reason Megaupload was *ever* popular was as a conduit for piracy. Kim Dotcom knows this, which is what his new move is about: enabling the piracy that makes his site popular, but trying to evade legal liability.)
Of course, this is exactly what the oppressive governments of the world (and those who oppress by claiming they're "liberating" others), have been looking for to shut down the Tor network.
If, by "oppressive governments", you mean places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or China, I don't think they're looking for excuses to shutdown Tor. They've always seen it as the enemy, and just make it illegal by fiat. They have zero need for excuses to shutdown Tor.
I also thought it was interesting that the copyright section didn't really have anything particularly damning to say about it. They're saying that copyright keeps getting extended by companies like Disney due to lobbying, but I was waiting for them to explain how damaging that actually is to society (like they did with the rest of their items). Here's the worst thing they said: "Rather than create an incentive to innovate and develop new characters, the present system has created the perverse situation where it makes more sense for Big Content to make campaign contributions to extend protection for their old work." Oh, ok - the damage of long copyrights isn't that old works are extended; it's that Disney has a disincentive to create new stuff. But, it's pretty clear that Disney *has* been creating new characters, so that sentence was a bit of hyperbole. To name a few off the top of my head:
The summary at the end of the article didn't include anything about copyright - "Netflix. Uber. Airbnb. Tesla. Fisker. Most economies would kill to have a set of innovators such as these. And yet at every turn, these companies are running headlong into regulation (or lack thereof) that seems designed to benefit incumbents..." Seems that even the article-writer had a hard time finding the "big damage" caused by long copyright.
I'm not arguing for long copyrights, by the way. It would be nice to have shorter copyrights - if for no other reason than to give free access to a lot of old stuff, and it seems excessive to allow companies to continue making money off of 50 year-old works. I just think it's interesting that the Slashdot summary and much of the Slashdot readership focuses on long copyrights as some horrible thing (perhaps to delegitimize copyright in general, and therefore, legitimize piracy). The damage of long copyright and the outrage it creates on Slashdot just seem disproportional, that's all.
To be fair, the whole reason the PromoBay was created was to divide-and-conquer the artists. You think the PirateBay is actually on the side of the creators? Nonsense. They're doing the equivalent of a company trying to bust up a union - it's a divide-and-conquer strategy. You might think that it's the PirateBay vs the Big, Bad Music/Movie Companies, but it's actually the PirateBay vs Digital-Media creators. The big, bad companies are just one of the victims - the creators will also be the victims of the PirateBay.
Big companies care about profits, not controlling you (as much as your conspiratorial mind might like you to believe). You say that Napster helped music companies. Oh really? Napster was released midway through 1999, so most people didn't have Napster in 1999, but it was building momentum. Do you know the peak year for music sales? Well, it was going up through the 1990s, and peaked in 1999. It's been a steady downhill ever since. The average consumer in 2009 in the US spent 30% as much money buying music as they did in 1999. It's a bloodbath in the music industry. If piracy helped the music industries, we'd be seeing record-breaking sales numbers, not the lowest sales numbers in 50 years.
http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000/music-industry.jpg
The *stated* point of DRM is to keep people from pirating your software. The actual purpose of DRM is to maintain control over the user, thus using it to prevent used games sales, format shifting, playing on unauthorized devices, etc.
What a delightful little conspiracy theory, designed to give pirates a feeling of superiority because they've busted out of the evil intentions of evil corporations. You know what the most effective DRM on the market is? The PS3 DRM. It was broken once (four years after the game console's release) and then they patched it. Even GeoHot (the only person to have cracked it) says the PS3, after the update, can't be cracked (at least not with the amount of effort he's put into it). Does the PS3 DRM stop used game sales? Nope. Format shifting and unauthorized devices are kind of a moot point since the software isn't going to run on other devices anyway.
Since copying digital media is trivial, it's significantly different than copying, say, designs for a building. You know what else civilization requires? An economic model. There's a reason communism doesn't work - it has a crappy economic model. Copyright is the working model for digital media that allows creators to get paid for their work. Your philosophy ignores the fact that people must work to create digital products, and large amounts of work typically don't get done unless there's an economic incentive to do so. (Even your open-source Linux is done mostly by for-profit companies who see it as selfishly useful to modify the source. That model doesn't work for games since companies have zero incentive to spend a bunch of money modifying/creating games.) Basically, you've got a hippy mentality about how the world works and you could use a big lesson on economics.
Was this report written by the same people who scream that "correlation does not equal causation" when we point out that US per-capita music sales revenue has dropped by 70% in the last 10 years (to the lowest point anytime in the last 50 years) - during the exact period when piracy was on the rise?
Is this only a temporary effect, though? I could imagine that your mind creates an association between the size of the food you see and the amount of fullness you feel, but if you start changing your visual perception, I could imagine that this visual/feeling-of-fullness connection could be changed. If true, then you'd reduce your consumption for a short period of time (maybe weeks or months), but then your perception would change, you'd begin eating normally (despite the larger appearance of food), and if you stop using the glasses, maybe you'd continue eating larger portions until your mind re-adjusted itself in the reverse direction.
(A slightly bizarre effect would be that you'd become dependent on the glasses to maintain your weight. If you stop using the glasses, you'd go through a short-phase of gaining weight again.)
Initially, it's seemed bizarre to get stopped for a "large watch", but can we at least have a picture? I mean, was his watch as big as the clock "flava flav" wore around his neck? The video also says the watched looked suspicious with wires coming out of it, so it was obviously improvised.
Seems like something that can be tested. You could either: (A) find a society which doesn't have cities or agriculture and see how intelligent they are (which seems odd, since if they haven't developed cities or agriculture, it sounds like a mark against them - though there are environmental reasons they might not have done so) - for example, the Khoisan in South Africa (i.e. the original natives of South Africa before Central-African people and European people moved in; admittedly, the Koisan probably didn't have too many evolutionary forces for competitive genetic mutations, since food is abundant in their native environment), (B) use artificial insemination to create a person with the genetics of ancient times (which would probably be seen as unethical, though if the mother agrees, it probably shouldn't be unethical). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan
What nonsense. Companies have to judiciously enforce laws. Ready to have your mind blown? Here you go: whenever you walk into a store, that store can throw you out for trespassing. It's well within their legal rights to kick you out for trespassing. What? Are you going to tell me that this is "clearly a broken system" that we all need to disobey? The fact of the matter is that businesses should allow you on their property so that they can sell products - afterall, you aren't going to buy shit from BestBuy or Barnes&Noble if you get kicked out for being on their property. A stupid company will kick you out of their store simply for being "on their property", but the fact that it's within their legal rights to do so doesn't make it a stupid law that we all need to disobey in order to get it repealed.
How would you feel if I published an old pdf from you without asking or informing you?
It depends on my business model. If I was trying to sell copies of my pdf (because it's a book or something), then I'd be unhappy. If the pdf wasn't the thing I was selling, but hardware was the thing I was selling, then I really wouldn't care. If Toshiba is giving away free copies of the pdf on their website (and not as part of an ad-based revenue model), then I wouldn't expect them to get too concerned about other websites giving it away for free, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to be the bearer of truth, but Gabe is a good marketer: he's talking out of both sides of his mouth - telling you what you want to hear, but meanwhile, Steam is DRM.
I'd say BitTorrent is more like selling ruffies to the general public, and then complaining when the public blames the company for women getting ruffied and raped. It's obvious that they're aiding and abetting the rapists - all to make a few bucks. It's also obvious what people are going to use ruffies and BitTorrent for, if given the chance. BitTorrent is empowering pirates to screw over creators.
Obviously, there's no "scientist gene". But, it's not a simple dichotomy between "gene for x" versus "it's all socialization". We still haven't found the genes responsible for tallness (and I say "genes" because there's probably a variety of them). Additionally, I'd expect tallness to be based on hormones, as well (this is why males tend to be taller, on average, than women). It would be fallacious to say that men are taller because of some "tallness gene" that is only present in men. Yet, we can all agree that tallness is heritable and it would be laughable to say it's all socialization (even if height is based somewhat on how much nutrition you receive as a child). I could say the same thing about strength (men tend to be naturally stronger than women - and this is based on hormonal levels, not some "strength gene" that is present only in males). The way you ask the question is biased towards getting the answer you want.
You act like jobs are just given out to white people with no real consideration of whether they're capable or educated ("undeserving white professionals"). I don't know if you know this, but employers generally try to pick the best/most capable candidate. If we're going to base this purely on some "past discrimination" and want society to rectify past wrong by handing out jobs to the down and out, then I look forward to an incompetent workforce.
That's why it's useful to compare the gender ratios against the applicants for a job. It's not a perfect measure, by any means, though.
For example, only about 20% of the students studying computer science are women, which means you can't really expect more than 20% of the programmers to be women in the workforce; though historical rates also come into play here. I had read recently that about 27% of developer jobs are staffed by women, which almost seems to indicate a pro-woman bias.
There was a big storm a number of years back when some student in the admissions office noticed that minority students had lower test scores than white students. They ended up leaking a bunch of information showing that minority students had SAT scores that were, on average, several hundred points below the SAT scores of white students (of course, there's other factors to take into account in that case, for example, if no white students had test scores less than X, but minority students had test scores several hundred points below X. Averages can be deceiving since they can be skewed by a bunch of high performing white students.)
So, yeah, it is very possible for affirmative action to favor lower quality minorities over higher performing white candidates.
What do you mean by "proper security on access controls"? Do you mean encrypting individual files or folders depending on their contents (e.g. if you store your tax returns on your computer)? Out of convenience and avoiding the hassle of figuring out exactly which files I need to encrypt, I can just encrypt the whole thing and be done with it.
> "Do you use encryption for your hard drive(s)? What's your setup like and how manageable is it?"
I have two backup drives, placed in different locations so that, even if my house burns down, I still have the data. I encrypt my data. My data is not tied to a specific hard drive. It's just a bunch of files in a TrueCrypt container (either encrypting the whole drive or an encrypted file container). I can go in and access/move/delete/rename any files when I need to - from any computer the backup drive is attached to, as long as I have TrueCrypt running and have punched in the password.
"Backup images of the encrypted operating system can only be restored to the original hard drive (ie.: the drive that has failed)." What? That seems complicated if you lose your hard drive. Treat your encrypted backup as a bunch of files.
I'm guessing we'll see the rise of the "pay x cents to continue reading this article" model.
Nonsense. There are plenty of countries that have stated that they will not pursue a first nuclear strike. There are a variety of positions taken by nuclear-armed nations: no first strike, strike only in the event of a nuclear strike by someone else or conventional invasion, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use
Is this a joke?
There's lots of reasons that people should be getting paid for their work. For example, if our music, movie, and software industries are supposed to be built on the backs of volunteer labor on our 'off hours from work', you will find that: there is a general lack of professionalism (because people don't have the time to get really good at their craft), that there will be a chronic lack of volunteers (how many awesome open-source games are there again?), and it means society is getting something for nothing while creators are not getting adequately compensated for their work (which is unfair and an unsustainable system when one group does all the work, but another group gets all the benefits). We're not the sacrificial lambs of the 21st century - creating great stuff for the world, while getting virtually nothing in return. If you believe this, then I suggest you work at your job this year and give every single penny to charity. Then you can come lecture us about working for free for the benefit of humanity. (Oh, but we'll tell you you're not "working for free" - when you hand us our order at McDonalds, I'll reward you with **recognition**! Whoop! Whoop! How can you possibly refuse that offer?)
So, basically, he's taken the "Swiss Bank Account" model that allows tyrants, dictators, and thieves to keep their money hidden and applied it to uploading illegal content. One major problem with KimDotcom's new model is the fact that Megaupload used to allow users to search for content (read: mostly copyrighted, illegally uploaded content). The search functionality is broken with the new model because your average user can't know the encryption key. This means most users will ignore megaupload and they will suffer from a lack of users. (Because, let's face it: the real reason Megaupload was *ever* popular was as a conduit for piracy. Kim Dotcom knows this, which is what his new move is about: enabling the piracy that makes his site popular, but trying to evade legal liability.)
If, by "oppressive governments", you mean places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or China, I don't think they're looking for excuses to shutdown Tor. They've always seen it as the enemy, and just make it illegal by fiat. They have zero need for excuses to shutdown Tor.
I also thought it was interesting that the copyright section didn't really have anything particularly damning to say about it. They're saying that copyright keeps getting extended by companies like Disney due to lobbying, but I was waiting for them to explain how damaging that actually is to society (like they did with the rest of their items). Here's the worst thing they said: "Rather than create an incentive to innovate and develop new characters, the present system has created the perverse situation where it makes more sense for Big Content to make campaign contributions to extend protection for their old work." Oh, ok - the damage of long copyrights isn't that old works are extended; it's that Disney has a disincentive to create new stuff. But, it's pretty clear that Disney *has* been creating new characters, so that sentence was a bit of hyperbole. To name a few off the top of my head:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangled - "Tangled is a 2010 American computer animated musical fantasy-comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wreck-It_Ralph - "Wreck-It Ralph is a 2012 American 3D computer-animated family-comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(2012_film) - "Brave is a 2012 American computer-animated adventure fantasy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures." (Pixar is now owned by Disney)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_(1989_film) - "The Little Mermaid is a 1989 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_King - "The Lion King is a 1994 American animated musical drama film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_(1992_Disney_film) - "Aladdin is a 1992 American animated musical family film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation"
The summary at the end of the article didn't include anything about copyright - "Netflix. Uber. Airbnb. Tesla. Fisker. Most economies would kill to have a set of innovators such as these. And yet at every turn, these companies are running headlong into regulation (or lack thereof) that seems designed to benefit incumbents..." Seems that even the article-writer had a hard time finding the "big damage" caused by long copyright.
I'm not arguing for long copyrights, by the way. It would be nice to have shorter copyrights - if for no other reason than to give free access to a lot of old stuff, and it seems excessive to allow companies to continue making money off of 50 year-old works. I just think it's interesting that the Slashdot summary and much of the Slashdot readership focuses on long copyrights as some horrible thing (perhaps to delegitimize copyright in general, and therefore, legitimize piracy). The damage of long copyright and the outrage it creates on Slashdot just seem disproportional, that's all.
To be fair, the whole reason the PromoBay was created was to divide-and-conquer the artists. You think the PirateBay is actually on the side of the creators? Nonsense. They're doing the equivalent of a company trying to bust up a union - it's a divide-and-conquer strategy. You might think that it's the PirateBay vs the Big, Bad Music/Movie Companies, but it's actually the PirateBay vs Digital-Media creators. The big, bad companies are just one of the victims - the creators will also be the victims of the PirateBay.
Big companies care about profits, not controlling you (as much as your conspiratorial mind might like you to believe). You say that Napster helped music companies. Oh really? Napster was released midway through 1999, so most people didn't have Napster in 1999, but it was building momentum. Do you know the peak year for music sales? Well, it was going up through the 1990s, and peaked in 1999. It's been a steady downhill ever since. The average consumer in 2009 in the US spent 30% as much money buying music as they did in 1999. It's a bloodbath in the music industry. If piracy helped the music industries, we'd be seeing record-breaking sales numbers, not the lowest sales numbers in 50 years.
http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000/music-industry.jpg
What a delightful little conspiracy theory, designed to give pirates a feeling of superiority because they've busted out of the evil intentions of evil corporations. You know what the most effective DRM on the market is? The PS3 DRM. It was broken once (four years after the game console's release) and then they patched it. Even GeoHot (the only person to have cracked it) says the PS3, after the update, can't be cracked (at least not with the amount of effort he's put into it). Does the PS3 DRM stop used game sales? Nope. Format shifting and unauthorized devices are kind of a moot point since the software isn't going to run on other devices anyway.
Since copying digital media is trivial, it's significantly different than copying, say, designs for a building. You know what else civilization requires? An economic model. There's a reason communism doesn't work - it has a crappy economic model. Copyright is the working model for digital media that allows creators to get paid for their work. Your philosophy ignores the fact that people must work to create digital products, and large amounts of work typically don't get done unless there's an economic incentive to do so. (Even your open-source Linux is done mostly by for-profit companies who see it as selfishly useful to modify the source. That model doesn't work for games since companies have zero incentive to spend a bunch of money modifying/creating games.) Basically, you've got a hippy mentality about how the world works and you could use a big lesson on economics.
Was this report written by the same people who scream that "correlation does not equal causation" when we point out that US per-capita music sales revenue has dropped by 70% in the last 10 years (to the lowest point anytime in the last 50 years) - during the exact period when piracy was on the rise?
Is this only a temporary effect, though? I could imagine that your mind creates an association between the size of the food you see and the amount of fullness you feel, but if you start changing your visual perception, I could imagine that this visual/feeling-of-fullness connection could be changed. If true, then you'd reduce your consumption for a short period of time (maybe weeks or months), but then your perception would change, you'd begin eating normally (despite the larger appearance of food), and if you stop using the glasses, maybe you'd continue eating larger portions until your mind re-adjusted itself in the reverse direction.
(A slightly bizarre effect would be that you'd become dependent on the glasses to maintain your weight. If you stop using the glasses, you'd go through a short-phase of gaining weight again.)
Initially, it's seemed bizarre to get stopped for a "large watch", but can we at least have a picture? I mean, was his watch as big as the clock "flava flav" wore around his neck? The video also says the watched looked suspicious with wires coming out of it, so it was obviously improvised.
Seems like something that can be tested. You could either: (A) find a society which doesn't have cities or agriculture and see how intelligent they are (which seems odd, since if they haven't developed cities or agriculture, it sounds like a mark against them - though there are environmental reasons they might not have done so) - for example, the Khoisan in South Africa (i.e. the original natives of South Africa before Central-African people and European people moved in; admittedly, the Koisan probably didn't have too many evolutionary forces for competitive genetic mutations, since food is abundant in their native environment), (B) use artificial insemination to create a person with the genetics of ancient times (which would probably be seen as unethical, though if the mother agrees, it probably shouldn't be unethical).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan
What nonsense. Companies have to judiciously enforce laws. Ready to have your mind blown? Here you go: whenever you walk into a store, that store can throw you out for trespassing. It's well within their legal rights to kick you out for trespassing. What? Are you going to tell me that this is "clearly a broken system" that we all need to disobey? The fact of the matter is that businesses should allow you on their property so that they can sell products - afterall, you aren't going to buy shit from BestBuy or Barnes&Noble if you get kicked out for being on their property. A stupid company will kick you out of their store simply for being "on their property", but the fact that it's within their legal rights to do so doesn't make it a stupid law that we all need to disobey in order to get it repealed.
How would you feel if I published an old pdf from you without asking or informing you?
It depends on my business model. If I was trying to sell copies of my pdf (because it's a book or something), then I'd be unhappy. If the pdf wasn't the thing I was selling, but hardware was the thing I was selling, then I really wouldn't care. If Toshiba is giving away free copies of the pdf on their website (and not as part of an ad-based revenue model), then I wouldn't expect them to get too concerned about other websites giving it away for free, too.
they want $78 to replace a laptop keyboard that probably costs $5 or less.
Laptop keyboards cost around $20-$30, BTW. I've had to replace mine.
https://www.google.com/search?q=laptop+keyboard
I think he's just trying to build up good press. He's still a big douche.