Please, stop those mantras "copying is not depriving the other of its copy, etc, etc". We're talking about not paying for something you must, and something that cost a lot of money to produce (movies, videogames). Period. Stallman's phylosophical nuances do not apply.

Mind you, I'm as "pirate" as average you, but people here costantly trying to *defend* it, I can't tolerate. And I'm a big fan of free software and Stallman's doctrine (a little less of himself), but I see lot of people trying to read it as the bible, and especially trying to extend it to totally unrelated fields.

Well, "thief" sounds worse... I'll stick with "pirate".

In Italy we had a civil plane shot down in 1980 (look for "Ustica"), the most likely reason being it was mistaken for a lybian military plane, in the not-openly-declared USA-Lybia war. It was not even officially a dangerous zone, but Italy happened to be in the middle of that shit. You know what? In 2014 we still have no "official" truth, and I'm afraid that will be the same here.

Yes, apart that I still have to undertand what those "portals" were, other than a so-called "web site".

I feel for what you and your wife suffered, by how can you conceive "charges against the employer" as well? As someone already said, law is there to be respected, police is there to punish the criminals, and an employer is not a sheriff. I would not have been surprised if the employer had reported charges against you as well, for falsely being accused of being a criminal himself.

In the article it's stated that it started working in 2008. Is a supercomputer's life so short, given the huge investment it surely needed to be built?

I was thinking, today that could be easily done by the GPU in the video card, even cheaper, integrated ones. Considering that audio con be output digitally through HDMI, maybe for some setups the analog circuitry does not even belong to the computer anymore.

Is it even possible to physically overwrite sectors in a flash memory embedded on the device board? Is a software enough, or are there hardware drivers sitting between you and the physical sectors? For example, SD cards perform automatic remapping of sectors to not write too often on the same ones. Raw flashes should be more direct, but I'm not sure of the whole hardware chain in a system-on-chip.

Some theoretical models seem to work by admitting that there are extra dimensions hidden to our senses, like superstring theory (it has something like 11 dimensions). Very extreme, but some observed results can actually be derived by their equations. Nothing is to be discarded as too odd, I guess.

Sorry, as a non-american It always sounds strange to me that they're still called "Sheriff", it reminds me of western movies every time! Do they make duels when facing a criminal?

Yeah, nice argument: "I'm right, so stop talking". Classic Slashdot, usually rewarded with good karma.

No, Mr. "+2 whatever I write", he's not been thinking about that for longer than I've been alive, and yes, I read much of what he wrote.

Just for your information.

But isn't paying the cinema ticket or the TV tax a form of DRM? The fact that he can see a movie does not give him the right, for example, to record it with a camera while he's at the cinema in order to watch it again later. You accept such a restriction, or you're free to not go to the cinema.

And the fact that a closed plug-in can take control of your computer, that's another matter, I think good engineering can mitigate those risks.

I'd like to know if RMS watches movies or TV series from time to time, I mean "commercial" movies and TV series. Maybe sometimes he watches TV, or goes to cinema, and everyone of those actions means: firming a contract between him and the corporation who made the movie, in order to watch it at the conditions written by said corporation, who, by the way, spent a lot of money to made such movie.

Or does he watch community-made movies only?

Stop watching non-free movies or TV series. After all, we're not talking about DRMed food or clothes. But you don't want to live without them, isn't it? Here it's not firefox who wants DRM, it's people, and they are acting as a tool for their users' needs.