I love "real" books, but I also have a Kobo Touch.....the Kobo whilst it requires charging can hold 100's of books while the paper one is just one book. That is the advantage.

Ubuntu + VirtualBox, 3 years solid.

About 70% of my work still requires WinXP, but every now and then another bit of SW is available for linux. Wine is great for a bunch of stuff also...there are options if you want to contemplate them. Also VM's make upgrading very easy.

Ok so sending this guy to prison for years at $40k / yr is better use of taxpayers money then confiscating all his gear and selling it and giving him a big fine (which he wouldn't pay anyway). Maybe forcing him to get a job to pay for food etc...

But send him to jail and after being in jail for X years, he wont be employable. Likely he is close to unemployable now. He will probably go back to a life of crime, which may well be worse then selling pirated materials.

I know this has been said on /. many times over but equating the piracy to theft of a physical thing just fails the definition of theft. Theft is the unlawful taking of something from somewhere, in the process depriving someone / group / business the use of that thing. From Wikipedia: "In common usage, theft is the taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it"
In piracy no one is deprived of anything, describing this guy as a career pirate is probably correct. Since he has one prior regarding selling pirated music. Piracy is a petty crime at best, punishment should reflect the harm done to society / individuals because of the crime.

I see little actual harm being done here, using the argument "if the punishment is so light then everybody would do it" is invalid. When the punishment is so light it becomes a moral choice, piracy is easy and the likelihood of being caught is very low, thus if you don't pirate it is because you have chosen not to the law is not really a deterrent here. This guy was doing it on a commercial scale and thus should have a harsher punishment but jail time is far in excess of the harm being done.

Agreed but getting 15 years for selling pirated material is retarded.....in fact getting any jail time is just wrong. Confiscate all his shit and smack him with a big fine. Will it stop him doing it, probably not but there have to be better uses for that prison cell.

As the above post points out this is more time then the average rape sentence.... and no matter how you play it piracy (not the type on the high seas) is NOT worse then rape. Or for that matter a bunch of other violent crimes which have sentences are around the same duration.

I agree with what you say except I envision the follow scenario:
Doctor: Ok Mrs 6Pack where did Joe store his medical records and what was the decryption key?
Mary 6Pack: Oh he gave those to his momma in city on other side of country and what is a decryption key?
Doctor: Well we can get a copy from the archive, but we really are going to need that password!

DRM is a bad thing and should not be used with something as important as medical records.

Encryption however should be used, it should be using open standards. An encrypted text file or similar is far more secure then a DRM encumbered file, how many DRM schemes are there that have been broken?

It should also be easy to move from one encryption standard to the next by simply: decrypt file -> encrypt using new standard.

As someone who works with this stuff all the time, I feel I can say this with some degree of authority, if you connect your SCADA / PLC system DIRECTLY to a internet connected PC. You should be drawn and quartered / keel hauled for pure stupidity.

I have access to some of my customers sites remotely, all of them are through secure VPN then either RDP from the secure connection or in one case through citrix to the computer in question. If their IT dept can't sort out VPN security that is another issue entirely.

When it comes to industrial gear stability is #1, #2, #3 and #4 on the list of priorities, and #5 is physical security, most plants that I have worked at are fenced and require you to go through a gate house of some sort before you can enter site, this is not because they are doing some super secrete work it is for liability issues, if some retard sneaks onto the site and gets an arm ripped off because they put their hand in some bit of plant, the fines and paperwork would be hideous.

Most computers on industrial sites will be running unpatched XP SP2, but it is ok because there should not be any internet connection to these machines. USB's should also be limited to trusted ones for backups.

Ok rant over.....I could go on....