I wonder if they considered repeat downloads? As is, I download all my favorite movies and songs, then get a virus from all the downloads, have to format my harddrive... AGAIN... and then redownload them all over again. I think all of piracy might just be a couple of hundred people like me stuck in a nightmarish Download-Virus-Format loop.

I was referring to their corporate leadership, which I doubt has changed much over the years. Especially given their current state.

I used to work for Palm about 8 or 9 years ago. I was one of their higher level tech support agents and had direct contact with their software engineers. Their corporate people, like Mr Abott were a joke. The real programmers we all in Asia as well as all their hardware manufacturing. They just had a corporate staff in the US... they all had their heads so far up their butts that Palm was never going to go anywhere. They started the market, and could have come up with an iPhone/Blackberry like device years before anyone else did. That's what their customers were screaming for... that's what we kept telling them. But they wanted a more closed OS and had little interest in allowing any really interesting apps unless the developer was working in direct partnership with them. Their OS updates were, for the most part, not backwards compatible. Lots of software would work on one model but not another even though they had the same OS on them. It was all just silly. I'm really surprised it took this long for them to tank.

How much is Mars worth? Because that's what we're giving up. We are literally a couple of decades away from being able to put people on Mars. By giving up now, which is exactly what we are doing, we are basically giving the entire planet to whichever government decides it's worth the investment. And we all know that governments going to be China. Yea, there's a space treaty... but we all know whomever gets their first gets to decide the rules ahead of time for everyone else. Space exploration isn't profitable yet, and isn't going to be for a long time. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.

I'm in the industry and can tell you we are VERY weak. There are relatively simple meathods an attacker could take out nearly everything inside the US. Here's a pretty simple meathod: 1. Hack several PBX's (happens all the time. Most companies don't secure them at all) 2. compile a list of every Tech support number in the US. I happened to have such a list as do most people that work for ISPs. Customer calls you, the problem is someone elses, so you transfer them. It's good to have a list. 3. Setup the PBXs to ghost call your list of numbers repeatedly. It's really easy to setup and you can hit hundreds of numbers per minute. Filling up every support que of every company, basically crippling their support infrastructure. You could even easilly get a list of all their internal numbers to. Usually they are in convenient blocks like 555-555-0001 through 9999. Start hitting all their internals as well. Companies like Cisco, HP, Dell, AT&T, everything would be completely unable to recieve phone calls. 4. Start what ever attack you want. ISPs would be completely unable to respond.

Most ISPs are monopolys in their local exchanges, and where they are not there are usually less than 2 or 3 choices. So no, that won't work. Also, ALL ISPs want to get rid of the customers that torrent. Period. They want little old ladies to buy 10MB service and use it to check their email once a week. Everyone else is not profitable and they want nothing to do with them. So even if their is competition, the carrier would be happy to lose the customers that are eating up the most bandwidth. That wouldn't be a loss to them at all. And Techniques? There will be no such thing. If you are connecting to anything other than the customers that have paid for higher bandwidth, you get throtled. Our only hope is googles fiber and wireless networks, sadly. And I don't hold out much hope.

I still have a virtual boy... it's awesome. So :-p

I'd just run the software and set it to "Hendrix jamming with Clapton" and let it run till I was bored with it. No reason to buy music at all anymore.

having read an interview found right here on /. a few weeks ago I read that facebook NEVER deletes anything. So... yea...

This is all you need to know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy "The end product is often so diluted that it is indistinguishable from the dilutant (pure water, sugar or alcohol)."

This company is going to sink like a stone.

Say hello to the new boss... same as the old boss.

Lots of people that don't know what their talking about posting a lot of stuff in this thread. We live in a figurative vacuum. We have no idea what the rest of the solar system is like, much less the universe. To assume we have any idea what allows and disallows life to exist is just plain stupid. As far as we know, life is simply an extension of complex chemical reactions over time. Take any planet, asteroid, whatever... with continuous chemical reactions going on for long enough, eventually those reactions could end up turning into biological reactions. It may be that nearly every planet has some sort of life on it, it's just not something we expected to find. In any event, my point is, we have no idea. My guess is intelligence will be the same way, we'll start finding stuff that "might be" intelligent and we'll argue about that for 100 years as well.

I can't wait for all the hippies to start telling us this stuff causes cancer and crap. They'll ban it in Seattle, there will be protests to have restaurants put up signs if they use it, it's going to be hilarious.

Without a doubt, as soon as they make torrenting difficult, someones going to invent something better... I can't wait to try out whatever it is. There's nothing they can do to stop this short of shutting down the internet altogether.