Last time a guy said that he had the right to search my bag, I said "I am a police officer, and I am off-duty. There is no law giving you the right to search my bag. I do, altough, have a S&W .38 police special in my bag and if I unzip my bag, I _will_ take it off and shoot you three times in the chest, and I'll write in my report that you tried to rob my gun; do you want to try?" answer: "no, sir, have a nice movie".

Your post is intelligent, well-tought, well-written, and your argument is consistent and relevant to the discussion at hand. Obviously, you are facing being banned by /. :-D

Down here in Brasil, there is an interesting card game called Truco ("trick me"/"triple up" portmanteau in Portuguese) -- every college student in my State plays it :-D One of the most interesting rules is: "you can cheat as long as nobody catches you in the act". The financial market is based exactly on the same rule.

Books and even DVDs cannot be "do-not-rent" if you BUY them. It's the "first sale doctrine" -- you bought it, it's yours! You can lend, rent and sell them, at your hearts will.

Why do you categorize TV executives as "humanity" ?

Yeah, if anyone "said" (wrote) anything, it was Plato :-D
Sócrates invented the blind heel pass :-P

I dunno, because it's executing on your computer?

That is exactly his point -- and the fact that these limitations can be worked around.

Who tought of that name anyway? Yeah, we have a planet, let's call it "dust", or "dirt". Yuck. We can call it Vulcan (because it has a lot of vulcans, you know, and it had even more so times before) or "The Blue Jewel", or "Water drop", but no, we called it "Dirt".

You mean, besides from the fact that if you install it, your system will crawl to a halt?

No, au contraire. The following policy _will_ guarantee that users will act like adult human beings:

mount -o noexec

use one of these when nobody else is watching. Problem solved.

In the old days, when we liked to have an onion in our belts, because it was fashionable than, the Z-80 processor that drove our computer was the same that drove the video, i.e., took the bytes from the video memory and generated the corresponding image in the CRT. So, if you crashed the processor very badly, and it stopped responding to video interrupts, then your image generator could go "out". If it was connected to an RF generator (which was also fashionable at the day), it could turn that off also, and then, sshskhskhkshshskhsk no RF on channel 3/4, snow snow snow noise noise noise.

Where I live there are no software patents.
Sane, isn't it? ;-)