I spend most of my time watching various media in which a certain, diverse minority of the human population, are screaming about how if we don't fundamentally change our entire attitude and way of life, we are literally not going to survive.

It is becoming extremely difficult for me to emotionally tolerate that, when in contrast to it, the sort of thing we're seeing here continues to happen.

No matter what disasters we see, the majority just keep soaking up lolcats on YouTube; utterly oblivious. Nothing seems to be able to wake the sheep. Nothing at all.

Easily made, easily broken.

I think as it's been said, the real goal here is to terrorise the general public into compliance, by randomly crucifying a single individual every so often.

Unfortunately, such tactics tend to work. Most of the p2p networks I've been able to access have generally declined in usage/content in response. The great irony is that, although such laws are impossible to uniformly enforce, the intense paranoia that is generated by sporadic enforcement, is actually more effective.

Although you know that it's probably only one out of every thousand people who will end up in court, you really don't want to be that one. So ultimately, everyone loses, on the basis of fear that is largely hypothetical.

There is no one...literally no one alive, who is indefinitely immune to the corrupting influence of the suits.

The suits seduced John Carmack. They got to Will Wright. They persuaded James Cameron to give us the TL;DR version of Avatar. Ask some people, and they'll tell you that the reason why Britney Spears cracked up in the end, was because she couldn't stand the pressure from the suits. Now they've corrupted the founders of the Pirate Bay, something I thought could never happen.

One way or another, the suits sink their demonic claws into everyone, in the end.

One day, they'll even come for you.

For me, the enshrinement of reciprocity paranoia, has probably always been the single worst thing about the GPL.

The entire attitude is fear-based. There is an assumption that you have to use antisocial behaviour in order to force people to reciprocate, and that FOSS software in general will cease to exist if you don't.

FOSS software doesn't exist because of reciprocity paranoia, and never has. FOSS software exists because people have problems, enjoy writing software, and therefore enjoy writing software to solve said problems.

The authoritarian leftist GNU/cultists need, as always, to very forcibly be told to shut up. Their rhetoric and toxicity will only accomplish the same thing it ever has; driving people away from Linux and FOSS software who might otherwise meaningfully contribute, if it wasn't for their behaviour.

I'm not using FOSS UNIX at all at this point. I would be using FreeBSD, but I have a 64 bit machine now, and the amd64 port was still a little shaky when I tried it.

Linux, however, I gave up on ages ago. The community is the single worst part about it. For reasons exactly like this one, Linux's userbase simply are not worth the pain of dealing with.

...isn't actually the bean counting suits, who want to subvert everything in the name of profit. We already know they exist. They're like a force of nature; we might wish they weren't there at all, but it's difficult to be angry with them. They're just following their own nature.

The really tragic thing, however, is all the little people who insist, adamantly and repeatedly, over and over, that what the suits want is somehow positive or beneficial. It's the Good Germans who really murder everything; not the corporations themselves, not capitalism. It's the individuals working 16 hours a day in a four foot cubicle who would defend Capitalism with their dying breath, but who should know better, because of the fact that what the suits want does not benefit said little people, and never will; it will only make their lives worse.

Although it's been said that you have nothing to lose but your chains, that's never going to happen...because the simple fact is that the majority like their chains far too much.

Even though the open source community is about giving back as much as it is taking, I'm just going to take. I'm a human leech with self-serving beliefs and an inability to empathize with content creators who are trying to make a living.

Whether or not I agree with you here, depends on what you're advocating. If you want individual artists to get paid for what they do, I have no argument. If you think I should be giving the *AA themselves money, on the other hand, we're likely to have a problem. ;)

I don't believe John Carmack should be paid for his work. I'm going to sit on my ass while he spends years coding the next advanced 3D engine from id Software. When their game comes out, I'm going to pirate it without giving a second thought about paying John Carmack for his work.

Mr Carmack and his distinguished colleagues became economically capable of buying themselves sports cars close to 20 years ago, now. I'm sure he'd appreciate your concerns, but although I don't have his balance sheet in front of me, I'm equally certain that Mr Carmack would tell you that he's scratching along at least reasonably nicely, thank you. ;)

For the record, however, even despite him already being wealthy at this point, I don't have any resistance to giving him a reasonable amount of money for his work, and given my own situation, "reasonable," is defined at anywhere up to $100 AUD per unit, although it would most likely only be *one* unit that I would buy at a time, of course. A man of Mr Carmack's intelligence, in my mind deserves to be doing well economically.

I also recently paid Notch for Minecraft, and I did so before I'd played the game personally at all; having only seen it on my brother's machine. I have nothing whatsoever against ground level Capitalism; I only wish for it to be truly ground level. I want to dispense with the middleman. Let the *AA go the way of the dinosaur, and let Mr Carmack press his own CDs, and I will be more than happy to pay him for them; moreso than I am now, because that way, I could be confident that the entirety of the purchase price would be going where I intended it to; into his pocket directly, and not into those of suits.

If I am going to pay for media, I want to be able to go to the individual website of a specific author, order through said website, and know that the money I am paying for the purchase I am making, will go to that author. I am less confident of that with the *AA being in the way, than I would be according to that model.

EULAs and copyright licenses are wrong, yet the GPL is good. Piracy isn't theft, yet GPL violations are referred to as "stolen GPL code." I accept all of these double-standards because it serves me. I pretend not to notice when someone points out that the GPL relies on copyright law, and if I want to get rid of copyright, my beloved open source code will no longer be protected by the GPL.

GNU/cultists might have this perspective, but I can assure you that I do not. Everything I write is under the BSD license. If I'm going to write FOSS, I don't believe in going half way.

Piracy is theft, if it deprives an author of income. *Copying* itself is not theft at all. Piracy and copying are two different things. Let me explain.

If I pay Mr Carmack for one of his games, in my own mind at least, I'm not paying him for a copy of that. I'm paying him for his labour; and for the fact that I realise that his brain is a unique resource. Said brain requires glucose in order to continue functioning, (he probably also enjoys killing off some of its' redundancy with alcohol as well, periodically, as do many of us) which is derived from a number of secondary substances, all of which cost money. If his work creates something of value for me, I consider it ethical to give him a source of value in return. Trade is an extremely fundamental concept; it's as old as humanity itself.

That then means, that as far as I'm concerned, once I've paid for the game, I should be able to create backups. (Copying; I make backup copies of just about everything else I want to keep, long term, and a game is no different. I admit to also having a fairly archaic mental model of economic transactions; in my own head, if I pay for something, I figure that should mean that it is mine...or that at the very least, I'm going to have the right to do the same things with it, that I would do with all of my other data)

It doesn't, however, mean that I'm going to hand out copies of it to other people who haven't paid Carmack for it themselves. I saw Minecaft on my brother's computer, and was able to evaluate it that way. I was sufficiently confident that it would be a game that I would like to play, that I paid for it immediately, and I have not attempted to pirate it in any form since.

I don't care, because I'm too busy concerning myself with what I want for free, not about the consequences.

I agree with you on this point. Sadly, I suspect it sums up the attitude of Stallman's core demographic (the archetypical semi-literate, rabid, anarcho-communist 14 year old from the Eastern Bloc) almost perfectly.

Making money is wrong, even though Slashdot displays ads, and it cost me money to buy the computer I'm using to pirate stuff.

I'd be much happier with Capitalism as a process, as mentioned, if I was able to deal with the people who produce what I want to buy directly, rather than having to suffer the tyranny of the suits. I suspect that this is the problem of most Slashdot users as well, if they were really honest. That which is worth having, is worth paying for; but the suits do artists no more good than they do us.

Let us get rid of the suits, and the individual artists can have money straight from us, and they will be able to lower their prices as a result.

Yes, but this is the problem. In contemporary society, the judge is the final authority. In other words, it doesn't matter if a judge is insane; what they say goes, regardless.

Something I'm getting very tired of seeing, is chronically unintelligent, narrow minded people, using pseudo-rational arguments to promote their own bigotry.

Want to know what the one consistent element of such arguments always is? That less should exist. Fewer Linux distributions, fewer political parties, fewer languages, fewer national cultures, fewer different kinds of food.

"Make everything as uniform and as close to entirely monocultural as possible, so that I never feel forced to try to utilise the 45 measly IQ points that I have; and above all, keep freedom in any form as far away from me as possible. More than any other single thing in existence, I'm terrified of that, because I don't want to have to take any responsibility at all, for what I choose, or what I do, or how I think, or who I am."

Here's a clue. It is not going to hurt you in the slightest, if someone else wants to download the Geocities archive. If you do not want it yourself, do not download it. It's very simple. You don't want the Geocities archive yourself; that's fine. I however might want it, and I don't see why my ability to choose whether or not I get it, should be compromised by the fact that you don't want it yourself.

Stop trying to enforce your own rules with regards to other people's behaviour. Make your own choices, and let me make mine.

Wrong. If this was true, Linux, the BSDs, and especially small projects such as Menuet would have no chance of being able to function, at the hardware level. Not all of the hardware drivers these operating systems use are binary; the majority aren't.

I could have just modded you down at the moment, but I don't do that to people I disagree with.

Watch them also handcuff you to a chair, and throw you in solitary while they do it.

You won't be laughing by the end of that experience; and the law won't change.

Laws will start changing when and only when the public don't spend the majority of their time purely in front of TV, and whatever small amount of it is left, defending the government or police to anyone who would dare criticise their actions.

Until that happens, nothing will change.