You must have missed the other story a few years ago, which made it all the way to the Supreme Court, that basically said the cops can arrest you for anything. It was about some lady and her kids who did not have their seat-belts on. SCOTUS ruled it was fine. See the full story here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atwater_v._City_of_Lago_Vista

So your argument about 'just' getting a ticket does not hold.

And why are people really mad at him/her.... ;-)

The problem is the never ending copyrights. Had copyrights not been extended, retroactively, the original term of 14 years, plus one extension of 14 years. Which would mean if this was done in 1977, when he started selling them in 2002, it would have been fine. If you can't make you money back in 28 years, you are doing something wrong, and too bad.

0.12 was about the time I became aware of it. But at the time I had a 286 and was in college. It took a while, but luckily I had enough saved up from my Co-Op job that I put together a 486DX/33 system with 4M, and 120M HD for about $1000. Don't remember the first version I used, but I definitely remember the SLS Linux (SLS stood for Soft Landing Software, if I remember correctly). I partition the harddrive 60M for DOS/Windows and 50M for Linux and 10M for /home. I would bring packs of floppies into the computer lab and use the Sun workstations to download the each new version of SLS Linux. I remember waiting for a LONG time before support for X was added to Linux.

I have 20 in just my collection of old Heathkit H89s. I have 10 of them, each has a Z80 for the computer portion, and a Z80 for the terminal portion. Then for my 2 Heathkit H8s, 1 - H11, and 4 H100s (each also have 2 processors an 8-bit and 16-bit). So that is 31, not counting spare boards and loose Z80s (probably at least another 10). Then there are the PCs, that I never turn on but still have a Dell Pentium 90, a Dual processor PentiumPro 180, a dual processor Pentium II - 333, athlon 2200+, 2 laptops. Finally, the current PCs, including a MacBook Pro, Asus Laptop, Sony laptop, HP laptop, Intel Pentium D 805 linux box, Intel Pentium 6950 linux box, 2 gaming desktops with Intel Core i5s. So just in computers, I'm estimating at about 50.

Instead of posting the address, just do a nslookup and/or a traceroute to the IP. That should give some more additional information to track it down. You might have the ISP and other information to go on.

In the U.S., having this exception doesn't really help. In the U.S. nothing new will EVER fall into the public domain. Every time anything comes close, the government passes another 20 year retro-active extension so Disney can keep making money, and making sure NOTHING NEW WILL EVER FALL INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. Until something is done about retroactive laws, and the payoff of politicians by big corporations, things will not change.

First part about the labor laws, seems like a valid complaint. But the second part, about 'fair share of the profits'. Where does that come from? As an employee, you are getting paid for the work you are doing not any profit that is made. If you want to get a share of the profits, you need to be a share holder. Some companies do offer 'profit-sharing', but that definitely not the norm.

300%!!!... nope.. $36 down to $12 is a 66% drop. a 300% drop would imply that you would OWE $72 for each share....

Netgear had the same problem. It was probably about 4-5 years ago, they had a nice router that ran Linux and had a USB port for supporting a harddrive. I saw that Netgear provide the source, I emailed their open source person, and he was providing the things I ask for. I ended up picking up the router during one of Fry's sales and thought I was all set to build my own firmware. I attempted to build the new firmware, everything completed successfully, but I couldn't find the firmware to install. I emailed netgear again, the response was along the lines of: "Oh no, you can't build the firmware image, we don't give out that tool, and also our html pages are copyrighted, so you couldn't put that in the firmware anyway." As others have stated, this is what TIVO did and why GPL v3 was created. With GPL v2, it would be a much harder fight to win, and again it would need to be the copyright holders of the software, who need to file suit, not the customer.