Since you asked the question in the first place, you obviously don't understand the issue. The laptop is not yours. Lets get that straight in your brain again: the laptop is *not* yours. It is a device given to you *only* for the purpose of doing your employed work. Consider it on lease only for work purposes. There will be a list of permitted activities and applications for work purposes and, perhaps, a limited number of personal use scenarios permitted. Separate, there will be a large number of activities / applications which will be specifically prohibited. What you are proposing doing is using *someone elses* property to do something which you will have signed a contract (your contract of employment) not to do. To do so would therefore make you in breach of contract and to do so knowingly means you are essentially dishonest. So it's not your right, nor is it your shit to do what you like with and you will have expressly signed a contract for money (your wages) not to do it. See? If you do see but you still think you should be entitled to do what you like with someone else's property against their permission when you've signed a contract saying you won't do it, then, yes, you absolutely deserve to be fired.

I think the OP is unlikely to be reporting on the web throttling capabilities of BP (British Petroleum as was) but more BT (British Telecom)?

Well it's because the title of the article is "How litigation only spurred on p2p file sharing" - the causative assertion is the basis of the article and what I (and others) are criticising it for.

You meant "It's not quite (no 's') as bad as (not and) your pedantic rant makes it out to be."

How's that for pedantry? :)

Just kidding before you get all red-misty. The point about making law matters because in fact the legislative *has* directly legislated in respect of file sharing and that's where this particular gun should be pointed not at the judiciary. The idea that the Supreme Court makes law is the sort of thing that gets set to high school students but has a clear answer (it doesn't) even if its precedents can, of course, have huge effect. It's a pundit type statement and it's plain wrong. The article suggests the courts made a "mistake" in the way they ruled if their intention was to block file sharing and that the litigation approach led to increases. Neither are made out and the basis of the suggestion that they'd even be in the business of doing that is simply wrong as explained. I qualified in 1996 as it happens.

I see what you mean about knowledge and control; it's poor english suggesting the *rules* of knowledge and control were coded out. Anyway, offering direct criticism of an article based on reasons (which you are free to disagree with) doesn't make you a troll, it makes you critical. The point is that while there was growth in file sharing, it argued that the approach to litigation directly led to that *growth* in file sharing. I found no argument in the article that showed that one led to the other and it is the very title of the article which stakes itself out as having established causation. I didn't see any evidence that linked the *growth* of file sharing to litigation approach. Who's to say it wouldn't have happened anyway?

The article reads like an undergraduate who wants to write a shit-kicking thesis and is really oooh excited about things but has entirely failed to do anything more than throw a few disjointed ideas in a bucket. It is peppered with lines that sound good but don't stand up to a couple of seconds examination: " So once the Napster litigation made P2P programmers aware of the rules about knowledge and control, they simply coded Napster's successors to eliminate them." I mean WHAT? Programmers coded out rules of "knowledge and control"???? No, the rules of law on knowledge and control exist independently in jurisprudence. How do you "code out" something that's entirely outwith software? Nonsense.

The author states "I would argue pre-P2P era law was based on a number of "physical world" assumptions." She goes to state that that makes sense because, well, it was pre-P2P. When you start any sentence with "I would argue that" (which is bad enough as it goes) and then point out in the next sentence that it's bleeding obvious, then it rather tends to underline you haven't made a point at all. Which is more than a small problem when you then go to make four non-points on the back of that about "the physical world" where, again, one sees no connection to the principal "argument" that litigation apparently "spurred on" file sharing. Ideas in a bucket.

And at the heart of it, the article offers no causative argument that litigation spurred on file sharing. At best it observes that file sharing increased in the era after litigation but it falls down entirely in showing any causation rather than correlation. There are other daft arguments about the Supreme Court making laws: it doesn't, de Tocqueville et al were rather insistent it couldn't; rather its interpretation of law clarifies the law already in place, which show the author is floundering on the subject matter.

So a number of ideas that sound like they were excitedly discussed in an undergraduate bar (and not at a terribly good college) and aren't worked through or even put into a single coherent narrative and which argues causation but offers no evidence of it.

Weak.

You have got to be kidding me. You seriously thing anyone on Slashdot has anything to teach the people of Egypt anything about how to stay cool in the heat, in a civilisation that has been running countless generations of agrarian workers out in the fields on the Nile delta for ten / twelve hour days for oooohh, over ('scuse me) FIVE THOUSAND (ahem) years and the millions of city dwellers who also make their livelihoods substantially outdoors? Either this is an epic troll or epically short of self-awareness.

Hang on, so a superseded, widely meh-rated / derided OS, is the key to web-filtering? As the saying goes, might as well buy a jumbo jet for the peanuts...

He didn't turn round to the camera, he was facing the camera ready to deliver his lines on a live link. And so a meteor appears behind him with his back turned. So frigging what? There's no miss and no mistake, just a bloke looking the other way as he must to do his job. And the clouds are clearly visible in the video as well. Non-article in extremis.

The term's not stupid; it's the usage of UFO = OMGZ ALIENZ!!!11 that's the problem as you point out but their stupidity doesn't make the term stupid. Unidenfied flying object - I rather like it's functional efficiency.