One of the 'tricks' of abusers in abusive relationships is to 'play nice' when people are watching. The abused either comes across looking like an "ignorant paranoid asshole" or is forced to 'play along'.

Microsoft's behaviour in a number of arenas has been abusive. When there has been substantial evidence of a change in culture and direction away from these methods, then you can start accusing people of being "whiny bitches". Until then, an animated happy birthday hardly cuts it.

Control.

While I think a lot of the anti-piracy stance of the media groups is still driven by the assumption that piracy hurts sales, demonising pirates has turned into a great way to justify a kind of balkanisation of the market.

Regional restrictions allow them to sell the same product at the price that the local market will bear without diluting the higher markets with product sold in the lower.

Encryption and laws against circumventing it that are supposed to stop piracy also act to stop you buying one copy of something and then transcoding it to the form most useful to you.

Ultimately, the cost of distribution for purely digital material is drastically smaller than for physical items, but media companies are still claiming costs for breakages associated with LPs in the CD age. If they can blame 'pirates' then they don't have to let competition drive the price of a digital copy down to reflect the reduced cost of distribution.

It's oddly long-sighted of them. They have a monopoly and are fighting to keep it that way. This isn't about short term profit. It's about keeping control of the entire profit-making industry.

The joint.

He's likely to be more relaxed and less prone to road rage, competitiveness or getting caught up in someone else's issues.

If the journey is likely to be a longer one, not having the driver start to get 'jittery' from nicotine withdrawal is also a major plus.

Next question?

I have heard this argument, in various forms, many times.

Let's posit your idealised government with idealised economics. Let's also posit a perfectly efficient distribution method, let's move most cities off the arable land they sit on and into less 'useful' regions. Now we can support an even greater population.

Which we will proceed to reach and then attempt to exceed as we have done every other time the constraints on food have been lifted.

Until we consciously and deliberately manage our populations, then we are going to keep seeing 'food crises'. Increasing the food supply, food distribution or even quality of food is not going to change that.

Don't get me wrong, I tend towards the socialist end of the spectrum politically and philosophically, but if you _really_ want to solve the food crises, activate for increased levels of education (this has a high correlation with lowered birth rates) and against social and cultural mores that put a premium on multiple children and/or reject contraception.

IIRC The Thesselonians had taken the first letter from Paul to mean that the end-of-the-world / second-coming was going to happen any day. They quit working and demanded that they be supported by fellow Christians in the name of charity. This second letter speaks directly against exactly the behaviour that HiLJ is engaging in with his "I am owed ...".

His theme that earning money, owning property etc. is sinful echoes one of the classic heresies of the middle ages as exemplified by the Franciscans claim that both Christ and the Apostles owned nothing. Interestingly, while they claimed that as a consequence of Christ's poverty neither they nor the Church should own property nor accept money for anything but essentials, they never went so far as HiLJ who claims _all_ earnings are wrong. Please note, even this more moderate position than the one HiLJ demands we adhere to was declared not just wrong, but heretical.

I'm sorry, HiLJ. This is wrong. Your argument is based on false premises and some distorted and selective readings of the Bible. I understand that you have had a rough time of things. I appreciate that you have had bad employment experiences. You seem to have reacted to what you perceive as unfair treatment by deciding that _all_ unpleasant dealings are persecution - blinding yourself to being able to see the role you played and continue to play in perpetuating the pattern of these interactions. In the nearly five years I have been reading your blog you have presented as someone who is incapable of personal objectivity.

Here, I've logged in to post so you can't use the "I don't read AC posts" excuse. I'm not attacking _you_ but rather the 'arguments' you present.

I will be interested in seeing his response to this. I can think of one possible doctrinal argument against this - I wonder how thorough HiLJ's Catholicism is. Most of the time he comes across as someone who has taken the seeds of some fairly basic 'every Sunday' type religion and then quote mined the bible to support his position as being variously a) without sin, b) deserving of living off the the sweat of other people's brow, c) being denied his rights etc.

... and if you already have the games listed? Not only is there no compensation, but the re-sale value of those games just plummeted (in the event that you would consider selling the originals and using the downloadable version).

Bravo, Sony. Well played. You managed to piss in my pocket and tell me it was raining.

No, but a respect for human life and an awareness of the enormity of taking it is. It helps people recognise that it wasn't petty revenge; that it was the sober deliberation of reasonable and civilised people who had explored and exhausted other possibilities.

That may well be your experience, here's mine ...

Last night I watched The Good, The Bad and the Ugly with someone who had never seen it before. It's about the fourth or fifth time I have seen the movie - often with different audiences. I know the story, so I got to sit back and appreciate the cinematography and the acting; to recall previous viewings and compare my reactions then to now and to talk about it with the person who had not seen it before.

Yesterday a colleague asked if anyone had a copy of King Fu Panda. I downloaded a copy, liked it and so bought the DVD. It was this that I loaned to him. I like being able to swap a disc with friends who don't have a media player or PC hooked up to their TV.

The same person who hadn't seen The Good ... also hasn't seen The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai ... I saw it on rental VHS years ago, downloaded a copy some time after that and have, since, picked up a copy on DVD. I expect that I'll be watching that, again, in the near future.

So perhaps you don't re-watch movies. I certainly do. Perhaps you don't buy a copy of something that you downloaded. I do - to re-watch; to have a copy in a format that is more widely usable by friends; to have it in a higher quality format (this is particularly true for animation, where part of what I am interested in is seeing the detail).

I'm not saying your usage is erroneous. In some contexts it does make sense. This just isn't one of them. When you use language, you need to be sensitive to context, you can't just blinding plug in whatever definition suits you.

Unless you're in politics, of course...

Google vs. the goverment. What's the difference? Precious little. Trusting your privacy to Google is like mailing your private files to the FBI. American or Iranian, it's all goverment. Wake up and guard your privacy. What little you have left.

Never ask any question here that essentially asks: "Am I shit because I use Windows?". You will always get plenty of "yes"'s here.

Fortunately, being a geek has nothing to do with what Slashdotters think of you.

It totally saw this coming. Or weirdly remembered this post.

Yes, but let me remind you that software that breaks after updates is still better than software that is broken from the beginning.

You are running a software built by said commercial 3rd-party company. They don't need that server in the middle to see all of those things.

So there's no increase in capability if they are malicious. There is an increase in risk if they are incompetent - and do something like cache requests/responses containing that data.