Hi Ben,
Nice articles, you missed the word 'fashionable' from my post
I dont think the idea that Arrhenius predictions are vaguely similar to the whole IPCC's gives me much confidence that we have progressed in the last 100 years.
So you admit that you pulled the 10 year figure out of your arse? Or would you prefer it if we forget about the nonsense you wrote previously while you add more of it in subsequent posts? I'd also note that you are putting a whole lot of faith in a TV documentary and this slashdot article while you are simultaneously ready to dismiss the entire IPCC without any real reason to do so. If you were half as sceptic towards the garbage you've cited as you are towards the IPCC we wouldn't have this argument, but it appears you have already decided you prefer if things continue the way they are. The flaw in your thinking is that things won't continue the way they are, and no matter how deep down the sand you stick your head we will see some rather drastic changes. Continued fossil fuel consumption is not sustainable and even if GW wasn't true we will start feeling the consequences of this rather soon (in some ways we already are ).
Right, have a look at the article about this story. Does it deal with physics? chemistry? Climate science? Meteorology ? Biology? No? So... who is surprised that despite this study ( which is ironically a bit sloppy ) having nothing to do with the key elements of climate science, global warming is the example people jump at. I mean for the love of god... The study deals only with a small subset of scientific research, goes on to conclude that most papers contain errors, slashdot translates this into "most research is wrong" and the parent takes the opportunity to have a jab at Global Warming, citing a documentary which is not only sloppy and known to be fraudulent, it is also non-scientific. I would try to form a decent conclusion based on this, but according to the spirit of this thread I will just say: People suck! The above post proves it!
Lets see how many flaws there is to the court cases...
Let us assume that the plaintiff claims that ip 64.233.183.104 has "made available" a torrent.
a)The plaintiff has no evidence that they have scanned ip 64.233.183.104. Indeed, they don't even have any evidence that they conducted an investigation at all. They may say that ip 64.233.183.104 was used, but they can't provide evidence for it.
b)An ip doesn't correspond to an individual, it corresponds to a client or server. The client or server in question may or may not be a single computer.
c)The network does not attempt to enforce that the sender IP is accurate. It is perfectly possible to transmit packets which contain incorrect IP information.
d)Even if one can link an IP to a computer, it does not tell you what program on the computer ( let alone what user ) sent it. It could be a p2p client operated by the user, but if the machine has been compromised by a hacker, worm, trojan or virus then it could be used by another person not even physically at the machine to send arbitrary information. E-mail spams are usually sent by botnets in this way because it hides the identity and origin of the spammers while simultaneously making it difficult to blacklist spammers based on IP. This is not just a theoretical possibility, there are various viruses and trojans out there that use an innocent victim's computer to carry out illegal activities.
e)Even if one can establish that the computer was under the users control, it does not identify the user, it identifies a computer. It does not establish who were using the computer.
f)There are various ways for a single IP to correspond to more than one computer. An open wireless router using NAT is a common example, but because WEP encryption is rather weak it is also fully possible for a third party to use a WEP encrypted router. While WPA-PSK is stronger, it is at least theoretically possible to compromise it. As an example, if the user has picked a weak pass phrase it could be vulnerable to dictionary attacks.
g)Even if one can establish that the user has "made available" a file it does not prove intent. Many p2p clients' default configuration is to share everything, and depending on experience the suer may not be aware his files are being shared.
h)Even if it can be proven that the user has intentionally made a file available this does not prove that it has in fact ever been downloaded by that user. At best it proves that it "could" have been downloaded.
I'm sure there are more problems with the RIAA's approach that I have forgotten or am not aware of, but that ought to be a start at debunking the ip = evidence nonsense. Oh, and btw, how many of you looked up the IP in the start of this post, or better yet, knew that it was Google without doing so? ; )
While manually editing the registry to get Vista to properly clear the DHCP broadcast just so you can connect to the net is the epitome of being user friendly for joe-average?
My dad and sister spent 3 hours trying to get Vista to detect their wireless network before giving up and used the cat5e cable instead. I installed Ubuntu on my machine and it worked out of the box... Yea... windows is easy on newbes, Linux is not... blah blah blah... bullshit. If a non-techie gets trouble with a windows driver or piece of hardware they will not have a much easier time than on Linux. The only difference is that this is less likely to occur on Windows because their large market share and abuse of monopoly has caused many vendors to not support Linux. Seriously, 99% of problems users will have with Ubuntu is down to one of two things, lack of drivers or proprietary file formats. Guess who is doing their very best to ensure that this situation continues? You think it is coincidence windows' new media sub system essentially prohibits open source drivers?
This ruling aims to alleviate problems like this by preventing Microsoft from deliberately causing them.
Btw, if my mom can use Ubuntu anybody can. I'm talking about a woman who has failed to learn how to start a VHS cassette despite her family having had a VCR for 15 years.
With that said, solar PV *works* and works well, and is affordable now if you extrapolate probable electricity costs for a coupla decades into the future.
It works if you ignore that it has a poor energy/dollar ratio as compared to a wind turbine. Even if you ignore all other short comings of solar photovoltaic cells, you still won't get away from this simple fact. Wind power is cheaper. MUCH cheaper. Of course, on life cycle costs modern nuclear power plants are cheaper still, but I suspect you don't like those or won't believe me, so I'm using wind power instead. It doesn't really matter, the conclusion is still the same.
There is one advantage to solar however, and it is why you use it on satellites and other remote installations. It requires very little maintenance, no refuelling, and it is extremely portable. In most applications a battery will prove to be more suitable, but in certain niche applications where recharging or refuelling is impractical ( as it is on a satellite or Mars probe ) solar cells are popular.
For laptops I'd rate it as simply stupid. A simple conservation of energy calculation against incoming insulation and the capacity of a Li-ion battery should make this obvious. Maybe if you are studying the ecology of a remote pacific Island or something, but for normal consumers it is just a waste of cash.
Have a look at the page for Chernobyl. The same old... Pictures of children with diseases that are not related to radiation. A huge focus on Uranium and Plutonium, despite these metals being far less of a concern than the fission products and minor actinides. They mention deaths from Thyroid cancer, which is caused by Iodine-131 (half-life of 8 days). Somehow I suspect that not much of this will be left more than 30 years latter... Then there is this lovely quote:
Skin lesions, respiratory ailments, infertility and birth defects were the norm for years following the accident.
Really? I don't think the word "norm" means what they think it means...
I'm not trying to say the Chernobyl accident wasn't a very bad accident or that the area isn't heavily polluted. It just gets a bit tiresome to see the same mistakes over and over again. For a list which focuses on the polluted status of various regions you would have expected to see he studies that have been done on how birds have been hard hit by the contamination, instead you get pictures of mentally handicapped children being abandoned, which is of course more a consequence of the failure to provide care for them than it is a result of the accident.
There are problems in the Chernobyl area, but this article fails quite badly at describing them.
Since multicast keeps getting mentioned and as I imagine there are a few who are too lazy to Wikipedia it. Here is the gist of it:
IP Multicast is a technique for many-to-many communication over an IP infrastructure. It scales to a larger receiver population by not requiring prior knowledge of who or how many receivers there are. Multicast utilizes network infrastructure efficiently by requiring the source to send a packet only once, even if it needs to be delivered to a large number of receivers. The nodes in the network take care of replicating the packet to reach multiple receivers only where necessary.
I bet you this guy didn't quite expect that his name would be linked by one of the Internet's most busy web-pages, and not in a good way...
I mean seriously, slashdot will accidentally DDoS news agencies due to the large number of visitors. Companies pay small fortunes for that kind of attention... They have now managed to get worldwide bad publicity TWICE due to this laptop. The words "the most expensive $94 Orbitz will ever make" springs to mind. For those of you who don't know what I mean, here's the link: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=orbitz_blows
Richard Dawkins is about as rational as any of the hoplophobes at the VPC. Anyone who professes to be an atheist has voided any claim at rationality, period. It requires just as much, if not more, blind faith as any actual religion.
Yet somehow I have this inkling that he is more trustworthy on scientific matters than you are... I can't for the life of me understand why...
If the source is open, it still doesn't matter if most people don't understand what the source code means. Once a Linux distribution has a large enough user base, people will stick with what they know. If the repository is manipulated by ne'er-do-wells to ill ends, even if the nerds catch it, the average user still has to know enough to switch to a better distribution. Will the average user ever care that much? Doubtful.
So... you are assuming the users are knowledgeable enough to install Ubuntu, but too ignorant to know how to switch to, say, Debian ? I mean come on... That argument might work when you deal with the most retarded windows users that don't know Ubuntu exists, but are you seriously suggesting the number of Ubuntu users who would switch to another distro in a heartbeat if canonical tried to do something like this is insignificant? Seriously, doing something like this would be commercially suicidal an OSS vendor.
Its a pity we can't see what these paracites earn. I bet they earn more than us sysadmins:( Why hide what this scum thinks its worth.
dev-salaries-18june2007.xls
Sergio A. Alvarez 2,916.67 $70,000.00 Linus Aranha 2,708.33 $65,000.00 Dylan C Douglas 2,916.67 $70,000.00 Benjamin Ebert 3,541.67 $85,000.00 Norman T Heath 4,791.67 $115,000.08 Sujay S. Jaju 2,708.33 $65,000.00 Andrew H. Kim 2,291.67 $55,000.00 Ivan Y Kwok 4,166.67 $100,000.00 Jed Z. Levin 2,291.67 $55,000.00 Gerald E. Rode 2,291.67 $55,000.00 Sheetalkumar Shah 2,708.33 $65,000.00 Nainesh N. Solanki 2,708.33 $65,000.00 Daeyoung Song 2,375.00 $57,000.00 Jeffrey W. Wang 2,375.00 $57,000.00
Ok, normally I don't like the DMCA, but PLEASE , come on Media Defender, do DMCA this. Pretty please, with sugar on the top... you know you want to... I mean you have to beat your own incompetence somehow...
Seriously, why doesn't every wireless product out there just encrypt its damn signal. It's not as if it is particularly hard to implement and easy to set up an intuitive interface. Joe-shmoe won't understand how to do it? Nonsense, make an automated set-up interface that works over USB , standardise it, and let everyone else implement it as well. That way customers only need to learn how to do it once, and then it should be the same for every product they install. But nooooooooo we can't have any of that. We have to make our own proprietary interfaces, prohibit anyone else from using them, thus resulting in 3 million different products, with customers not being bothered to learn many different interfaces just to use their hardware, and thus you end up having everyone run unsecured networks.
The way it ought to work is when you get a new device you bind it to your home router through a one-click wired interface. Now, just like magic your router can transparently assign keys to every other device you own and afterwards they can all communicate with one another using the router's certificate for authentication. User don't have to know about WEP, WPA, SSL or whatnot, they just plug their webcam into the router's wired interface hit the "bind new device" button and after that it will "just work" with every other device which has been given the router's certificate ( yes, even if the router is shut down afterwards ).
Now, how many people want to bet there will be a bunch of vendors who will oppose this being implemented as an open standard, thus defeating the entire scheme? Me? Cynical? Naaaaaaa...
I appreciate some users make heavy use of graphics software and/or games etc, but for regular office use I am willing to bet that 90% of people have an absolute overkill of a system. I'm using a 1.6 ghz Pentium 4 with 640 MB of ram ( oblig: it should be enough for everybody ; ) , and currently about 258 of that is used ( when accounting for buffers and cache ) to run my desktop environment and most of the software I ever use. Essentially, I expect that in perhaps 2-3 years time I might actually consider to upgrade it along with the screen, and then I will probably just find someone about to replace their "old" core 2 duo. So in summary I want to praise Xfce for saving me a decent bunch of cash in terms of lower hardware requirements. It may not have the smallest footprint there is, but it is impressive what it manages to do with the low amount of resources it does use.
Up until XP windows used the BSD networking stack. Google runs on BSD servers. The BSD code, or a fork thereof, is used on a majority of servers. Most routers run kernels based on the BSD code. Most DHCP clients are based on... well you get the idea. I mean seriously... BSD => Microsoft, that is quite a typo...
similar to how the meter has been redefined ("delineated," actually) to be equal to some exact number of wavelengths of a certain kind of coherent radiation.
These days the definition of the meter is that the speed of light in vacuum is 299,792,458m/s , exactly. The meter is defined as whatever length gives exactly this value for the speed of light.
I am surprised that they are not using more fundamental standards, like the mass of a hydrogen atom. After all, too many things can happen to a chunk of metal - evaporation, oxidation, radioactive decay.
Considerable work is going into creating an atomic definition of the kilogram, the problem is that so far nobody has actually been able to measure atomic weights with high enough accuracy to actually beat the old definition. The problem mainly arises because there are so many atoms in a kilogram. You basically need to estimate the number of atoms in a Kg which is no easy task. 1 gram of hydrogen contains about 6*10^23 atoms, which is a rather huge number, making it tricky to get an accurate enough figure. So essentially, the answer to your question is that, no, at the moment the prototype is the most accurate way to define a Kg. If you can create a device with better accuracy you are probably in for a Nobel price.
Is it fair to assume it will be turned of by default on Xubuntu? Doesn't make much sense to enable shiny desktop effects on a distro designed to be compatible with older hardware...
Also, while many people seem sceptical about stability I guess we will just have to wait and see how well they handle the cases where 3D acceleration is a problem. I.e, will it be careful about enabling it if a proprietary driver is needed? How well will the crash handler manage to respond if it doesn't work etc... Under the assumption that it will gracefully disable itself when it notices problems it may not be too bad.
There are legitimate reasons to copy software ( use it at different machines, at different places, making backups etc.. ). If you allow that then it will be trivial for people to copy the software without permission, and if you don't allow it then you have restricted your users from doing something they normally would expect to be able to. The only way to get around this would be to have someone or something constantly monitor what users do with their software, and that would be a gross violation of privacy. Thus if you plan to respect your user's privacy you won't be able to have an effective copy prevention scheme. It really does boil down to that.
Solution? Rather than trying to make life hard for people who doesn't want to pay, add in some form of service or other cookie to advantage those who does, thus providing an incentive to go legit. If you're making a game, consider making it on-line multi player and charge people for using your servers. If you are making development software for business, include support or other goodies in the contract. Accept reality and adapt your business model.
Wikipedia -> Massive success Youtube -> Massive success GoogleTunes -> a question of time.
Now unlike video, music doesn't need gigs and gigs of storage space. Several thousand tracks fit easily on a standard drive, and even the most shitty dsl connection can stream it these days. You have at most a year or two before it happens, and when it does you are fucked. Really, just picture yourself directly competing for attention against the worlds biggest advertising agency. Sounds fun doesn't it? You can sue grannys and students... oh wait my bad... you can't. How do you plan to take on Google? There you go, start shitting your pants, you've been mortally wounded already. I bet you Google is just waiting to finish you off. See you in hell.
Slashdot Mirror
.. but whatever Zonk started smoking lately, I want some.
Right, have a look at the article about this story. Does it deal with physics? chemistry? Climate science? Meteorology ? Biology? No? So... who is surprised that despite this study ( which is ironically a bit sloppy ) having nothing to do with the key elements of climate science, global warming is the example people jump at. I mean for the love of god... The study deals only with a small subset of scientific research, goes on to conclude that most papers contain errors, slashdot translates this into "most research is wrong" and the parent takes the opportunity to have a jab at Global Warming, citing a documentary which is not only sloppy and known to be fraudulent, it is also non-scientific. I would try to form a decent conclusion based on this, but according to the spirit of this thread I will just say: People suck! The above post proves it!
Lets see how many flaws there is to the court cases...
Let us assume that the plaintiff claims that ip 64.233.183.104 has "made available" a torrent.
a)The plaintiff has no evidence that they have scanned ip 64.233.183.104. Indeed, they don't even have any evidence that they conducted an investigation at all. They may say that ip 64.233.183.104 was used, but they can't provide evidence for it.
b)An ip doesn't correspond to an individual, it corresponds to a client or server. The client or server in question may or may not be a single computer.
c)The network does not attempt to enforce that the sender IP is accurate. It is perfectly possible to transmit packets which contain incorrect IP information.
d)Even if one can link an IP to a computer, it does not tell you what program on the computer ( let alone what user ) sent it. It could be a p2p client operated by the user, but if the machine has been compromised by a hacker, worm, trojan or virus then it could be used by another person not even physically at the machine to send arbitrary information. E-mail spams are usually sent by botnets in this way because it hides the identity and origin of the spammers while simultaneously making it difficult to blacklist spammers based on IP. This is not just a theoretical possibility, there are various viruses and trojans out there that use an innocent victim's computer to carry out illegal activities.
e)Even if one can establish that the computer was under the users control, it does not identify the user, it identifies a computer. It does not establish who were using the computer.
f)There are various ways for a single IP to correspond to more than one computer. An open wireless router using NAT is a common example, but because WEP encryption is rather weak it is also fully possible for a third party to use a WEP encrypted router. While WPA-PSK is stronger, it is at least theoretically possible to compromise it. As an example, if the user has picked a weak pass phrase it could be vulnerable to dictionary attacks.
g)Even if one can establish that the user has "made available" a file it does not prove intent. Many p2p clients' default configuration is to share everything, and depending on experience the suer may not be aware his files are being shared.
h)Even if it can be proven that the user has intentionally made a file available this does not prove that it has in fact ever been downloaded by that user. At best it proves that it "could" have been downloaded.
I'm sure there are more problems with the RIAA's approach that I have forgotten or am not aware of, but that ought to be a start at debunking the ip = evidence nonsense. Oh, and btw, how many of you looked up the IP in the start of this post, or better yet, knew that it was Google without doing so? ; )
While manually editing the registry to get Vista to properly clear the DHCP broadcast just so you can connect to the net is the epitome of being user friendly for joe-average?
My dad and sister spent 3 hours trying to get Vista to detect their wireless network before giving up and used the cat5e cable instead. I installed Ubuntu on my machine and it worked out of the box... Yea... windows is easy on newbes, Linux is not... blah blah blah... bullshit. If a non-techie gets trouble with a windows driver or piece of hardware they will not have a much easier time than on Linux. The only difference is that this is less likely to occur on Windows because their large market share and abuse of monopoly has caused many vendors to not support Linux. Seriously, 99% of problems users will have with Ubuntu is down to one of two things, lack of drivers or proprietary file formats. Guess who is doing their very best to ensure that this situation continues? You think it is coincidence windows' new media sub system essentially prohibits open source drivers?
This ruling aims to alleviate problems like this by preventing Microsoft from deliberately causing them.
Btw, if my mom can use Ubuntu anybody can. I'm talking about a woman who has failed to learn how to start a VHS cassette despite her family having had a VCR for 15 years.
It works if you ignore that it has a poor energy/dollar ratio as compared to a wind turbine. Even if you ignore all other short comings of solar photovoltaic cells, you still won't get away from this simple fact. Wind power is cheaper. MUCH cheaper. Of course, on life cycle costs modern nuclear power plants are cheaper still, but I suspect you don't like those or won't believe me, so I'm using wind power instead. It doesn't really matter, the conclusion is still the same.
There is one advantage to solar however, and it is why you use it on satellites and other remote installations. It requires very little maintenance, no refuelling, and it is extremely portable. In most applications a battery will prove to be more suitable, but in certain niche applications where recharging or refuelling is impractical ( as it is on a satellite or Mars probe ) solar cells are popular.
For laptops I'd rate it as simply stupid. A simple conservation of energy calculation against incoming insulation and the capacity of a Li-ion battery should make this obvious. Maybe if you are studying the ecology of a remote pacific Island or something, but for normal consumers it is just a waste of cash.
Really? I don't think the word "norm" means what they think it means...
I'm not trying to say the Chernobyl accident wasn't a very bad accident or that the area isn't heavily polluted. It just gets a bit tiresome to see the same mistakes over and over again. For a list which focuses on the polluted status of various regions you would have expected to see he studies that have been done on how birds have been hard hit by the contamination, instead you get pictures of mentally handicapped children being abandoned, which is of course more a consequence of the failure to provide care for them than it is a result of the accident.
There are problems in the Chernobyl area, but this article fails quite badly at describing them.
I bet you this guy didn't quite expect that his name would be linked by one of the Internet's most busy web-pages, and not in a good way... I mean seriously, slashdot will accidentally DDoS news agencies due to the large number of visitors. Companies pay small fortunes for that kind of attention... They have now managed to get worldwide bad publicity TWICE due to this laptop. The words "the most expensive $94 Orbitz will ever make" springs to mind. For those of you who don't know what I mean, here's the link: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=orbitz_blows
dev-salaries-18june2007.xls
Sergio A. Alvarez 2,916.67 $70,000.00
Linus Aranha 2,708.33 $65,000.00
Dylan C Douglas 2,916.67 $70,000.00
Benjamin Ebert 3,541.67 $85,000.00
Norman T Heath 4,791.67 $115,000.08
Sujay S. Jaju 2,708.33 $65,000.00
Andrew H. Kim 2,291.67 $55,000.00
Ivan Y Kwok 4,166.67 $100,000.00
Jed Z. Levin 2,291.67 $55,000.00
Gerald E. Rode 2,291.67 $55,000.00
Sheetalkumar Shah 2,708.33 $65,000.00
Nainesh N. Solanki 2,708.33 $65,000.00
Daeyoung Song 2,375.00 $57,000.00
Jeffrey W. Wang 2,375.00 $57,000.00
You were saying?
From: Randy Saaf .edu filtering
.edu IP addresses on p2p have gone down.
.edu filtering
Sent: Wed 11-Apr-07 21:24
To: Jay Mairs; Ben Grodsky; Ty Heath; Ivan Kwok; Ben Ebert
Subject: Fw:
Team
Universal is curiouse if we have any historical data over the last 3 months that show whether
They want to see if their lawsuits are getting students to stop using p2p (take a moment to laugh to yourself).
Let me know if anyone has any ideas.
R
--- Original Message ---
From: Benjamin, David
To: Randy Saaf
Sent: Wed Apr 11 18:11:50 2007
Subject:
How are you doing with this?
Thanks
db
Ok, normally I don't like the DMCA, but PLEASE , come on Media Defender, do DMCA this. Pretty please, with sugar on the top... you know you want to... I mean you have to beat your own incompetence somehow...
Seriously, why doesn't every wireless product out there just encrypt its damn signal. It's not as if it is particularly hard to implement and easy to set up an intuitive interface. Joe-shmoe won't understand how to do it? Nonsense, make an automated set-up interface that works over USB , standardise it, and let everyone else implement it as well. That way customers only need to learn how to do it once, and then it should be the same for every product they install. But nooooooooo we can't have any of that. We have to make our own proprietary interfaces, prohibit anyone else from using them, thus resulting in 3 million different products, with customers not being bothered to learn many different interfaces just to use their hardware, and thus you end up having everyone run unsecured networks.
The way it ought to work is when you get a new device you bind it to your home router through a one-click wired interface. Now, just like magic your router can transparently assign keys to every other device you own and afterwards they can all communicate with one another using the router's certificate for authentication. User don't have to know about WEP, WPA, SSL or whatnot, they just plug their webcam into the router's wired interface hit the "bind new device" button and after that it will "just work" with every other device which has been given the router's certificate ( yes, even if the router is shut down afterwards ).
Now, how many people want to bet there will be a bunch of vendors who will oppose this being implemented as an open standard, thus defeating the entire scheme? Me? Cynical? Naaaaaaa...
So who will supply the wireless hardware for the frequencies you are bidding on?
I appreciate some users make heavy use of graphics software and/or games etc, but for regular office use I am willing to bet that 90% of people have an absolute overkill of a system. I'm using a 1.6 ghz Pentium 4 with 640 MB of ram ( oblig: it should be enough for everybody ; ) , and currently about 258 of that is used ( when accounting for buffers and cache ) to run my desktop environment and most of the software I ever use. Essentially, I expect that in perhaps 2-3 years time I might actually consider to upgrade it along with the screen, and then I will probably just find someone about to replace their "old" core 2 duo. So in summary I want to praise Xfce for saving me a decent bunch of cash in terms of lower hardware requirements. It may not have the smallest footprint there is, but it is impressive what it manages to do with the low amount of resources it does use.
Up until XP windows used the BSD networking stack. Google runs on BSD servers. The BSD code, or a fork thereof, is used on a majority of servers. Most routers run kernels based on the BSD code. Most DHCP clients are based on ... well you get the idea. I mean seriously... BSD => Microsoft, that is quite a typo...
Is it fair to assume it will be turned of by default on Xubuntu? Doesn't make much sense to enable shiny desktop effects on a distro designed to be compatible with older hardware...
Also, while many people seem sceptical about stability I guess we will just have to wait and see how well they handle the cases where 3D acceleration is a problem. I.e, will it be careful about enabling it if a proprietary driver is needed? How well will the crash handler manage to respond if it doesn't work etc... Under the assumption that it will gracefully disable itself when it notices problems it may not be too bad.
There are legitimate reasons to copy software ( use it at different machines, at different places, making backups etc.. ). If you allow that then it will be trivial for people to copy the software without permission, and if you don't allow it then you have restricted your users from doing something they normally would expect to be able to. The only way to get around this would be to have someone or something constantly monitor what users do with their software, and that would be a gross violation of privacy. Thus if you plan to respect your user's privacy you won't be able to have an effective copy prevention scheme. It really does boil down to that.
Solution? Rather than trying to make life hard for people who doesn't want to pay, add in some form of service or other cookie to advantage those who does, thus providing an incentive to go legit. If you're making a game, consider making it on-line multi player and charge people for using your servers. If you are making development software for business, include support or other goodies in the contract. Accept reality and adapt your business model.
Let me explain this to you in simple terms:
... oh wait my bad... you can't. How do you plan to take on Google? There you go, start shitting your pants, you've been mortally wounded already. I bet you Google is just waiting to finish you off. See you in hell.
Wikipedia -> Massive success
Youtube -> Massive success
GoogleTunes -> a question of time.
Now unlike video, music doesn't need gigs and gigs of storage space. Several thousand tracks fit easily on a standard drive, and even the most shitty dsl connection can stream it these days. You have at most a year or two before it happens, and when it does you are fucked. Really, just picture yourself directly competing for attention against the worlds biggest advertising agency. Sounds fun doesn't it? You can sue grannys and students