Remember every time copyright industries thought they had finally shut down The Pirate Bay? Yeah, just popped up again. Them not serving time because they aren't in Sweden? Not a perfect analogy but close enough for me!

Anyone who has half-a-background in virology would have had this stroke of inspiration by now. So what has been accomplished with this ban? Well, lot's of attention has now been brought on the matter to alert the quarter-brained ones.

Getting appreciable public attention? Priceless (no /. doesn't count).

You missed the part where a cop wrote it and being digital there is no way to ascertain any metrics on the information. It's not like the 1's and 0's had fingerprints on them or their ink matched a pen stuck up your butt.

Damn you, you beat me to it!

Wait until the tourist board for the "Leaning Tower of Pisa" get a hold of this!.

Um, because in practice it's never a you, but rather: always a corporate mouthpiece? That's just the general practice however - there's a minute percentage that bucks the trend.

I'm serious, why is it even legal for politicians to accept any kinds of money outside of their salary?! If that one thing was done - illegal to accept any outside money - then I'd optimistically predict that politics wouldn't be the sh*t-hole it is today.

You are too narrow-sighted. The creation of copyrighted material takes resources outside of information technology. Inside of information technology the replication cost is practically zero. However, to create the information in the first place requires resources from the wider world. Once resources in the wider world also have near-zero costs then you can copy everything freely without being a parasite to another.

In Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists it really shows how much things were different way back in 1974 - or one year after I was born. When I was growing up - in the heyday of the Commodore 64 - piracy wasn't even questioned one iota. Everyone did it, you pooled together $5 each from your circle of friends, bought a game, and promptly pirated it for everyone and drew a lot to see who would get the original. Back then DRM-cracking-copy-programs were legal and the hypocrisy of the times is that they would copy everything but themselves. You had to use a different copy program to copy a copy program for your circle of friends.

Now, it's different. We're slowly being taught that information is analogous to physical property. I'm coming around to it. I no longer pirate any software at all. If it wasn't for gaming I'd be 100% free software. I have a ways to go yet before I'm fully compliant but it's coming. Free software at it's core also depends on copyright, the protections afforded to commercial software are what also enables FOSS. If you're FOSS evangelizing you automatically should be a supporter of copyright.

Music, books, software: they are all different facets of the same thing. If someone wants to give their effort away - FOSS - then that is their right and it needs to be respected. If someone want's to charge for it it is the exact same right. You don't need it that bad if you don't want to comply with the license to acquire some information - go make it yourself and release it if you want under your own terms.

The sad fact is that it doesn't matter if there's a resource for politicians to get sound information from to make decisions. With the structure of today's congress/senate what you need are actually lobbyists - lot's of them and bribes, err, campaign donations too!

Look at what happened to Microsoft: they didn't lobby enough and found themselves on the wrong-end of an antitrust suit. Now they lobby enough that that's not a problem anymore.

In Arch (from AUR) I have "gnome-shell-extension-icontopbar" installed which does exactly that. My "system-tray" icons are always visible and on the top-right of the screen on the top-bar!

How long can he keep it up and what about long-term compatibility with GNOME 3 apps? Eventually I'm sure their "lineage" will drift far enough apart that you're either pulling in multiple families of libraries that do the same thing or you get GNOME 4 apps that don't work on Cinnamon 4 and vice-versa.

Anyway, I'm typing this on Arch Linux 64-bit with GNOME 3.2.1 and a few (needed!) shell extensions. I find it fine and I thought I would be a GNOME 3 hater but I'm actually not.

I don't even bother to moderate anymore. I read the comments at -1 because that is the only way to combat moderator abuse. It happens too often that you see a completely worthwhile comment moderated -1. Slashdot's game has been fixed. I blame the "Friend/Foe" system: that let's you instantly know whether to mod up/down if you were so inclined.

Source: HAL: Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.