Great job, UBIsoft. Just as the software industry finally regained some footing in the battle against copying, you go and aim the bazooka at your (and the industry's) foot.

You're supposed to jump first before firing the rocket.

Cracked version of Visual Studio? There's no protection on it anyway. Besides, everyone that downloads it from MSDN has the same key baked into the installer anyway.

To be even fairer, the ISPs and AFACT already have a procedure in place to do this. AFACT agreed to it and choose to blissfully ignore it in favour of asking the ISP to illegally do their dirty work.

AFACT can stop abusing the legal system and fuck off. They have a procedure that allows them to inform an ISP of an infringement via a magistrate, the ISP will happily comply with the request and send the agreed details to the respective law enforcement agency. The fact that AFACT have sent 0 of these requests since they were introduced almost 10 years ago proves they really don't give a shit about the ISP, or due process.

An ISP is NOT a judicial body. Infringement Notices are not legal documents and AFACT is not Law Enforcement.

Next stop, having DVD-Recorders and VCRs removed from the shelves of your local super store.
The funnier next step would be. Sony Vs. Sony. i.e. Sony (The Movie arm) Vs Sony (the tech arm that makes DVD recorders and provides the software to copy DVDs).

All the process provides is a means for AFACT to get the ISP to "make note" of the time/date/IP/User so that if/when the police need the information, the ISP already has the data waiting. AFACT will never get that data directly.

I think they're a great ISP but I can't really understand the policy of not passing infringement notices from AFACT to its customers even if they're not legally required to do so.

iiNet did what any good ISP should do. They forwarded each and every letter to the WA Police for proper consideration. They don't even need to do that.

AFACT already have helped put legislation in place (with the cooperation of the ISPs and the Federal government) to allow a magistrate to request that an ISP retain certain details of the infringement so that when the Police go to investigate the matter, the ISP has retained what they need to answer the Police.

The number of requests made to magistrates since this process was developed in consultation with ISPs and AFACT? Zero. And they're bleating about iiNet not doing enough when they have never followed the process they campaigned for.

Is Dolphin retarded too? I'm looking at my Windows 7 "winsxs" folder in KDE's Dolphin and it says it's 5.5 GB.

Yes because it's also counting the hard links.

For example, since they fixed the "additional instances could not be launched" issue, you can no longer share the daily heroic quest with your group while inside the zone.
We only get that issue on the Oceanic Realms because the world servers are set to AEST and the instance servers are set to PST so, for the majority of the day due to a 15 odd hour time difference, the daily quest outside the instance is actually different from the one inside the instance. This is due to the fact that you cannot share the daily with someone else if it's not the "current" daily according to that instance. People normally run out of the instance, share the quest, then run back in if someone forgot to pick it up.

But I do want to make the point: Dumb people get what they deserve (point 2), and dumb organizations who instigate other organization that are much smarter than themselves also get what they deserve. I think "pie in the face" in an understatement in this instance.

I believe you left out the program's point of going on about the dumb guy. The point being that for someone who doesn't read /. and is not a technical person, this stuff happens a lot and they wouldn't have a clue that it was even remotely possible. I don't remember who said it on the program but they mentioned that companies sell truckloads of computers to the general populace. Those truckloads end up with a home broadband connection with (most likely) rudimentary security and *ZERO* training or information on the dangers of having access to the Internet. The Australian Government spends craploads on advertising for being healthy and such but spends zero on advertising about being safe online and the dangers that are out there and how to remain vigilant.

I have the highest respect for AFP and the Australia Police Service.

The AFP are doing a fantastic job considering the almost vertical hill they have to battle up. I've never heard of the Australia Police Service though. Who are they?

Add a folder to your library, wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing.

You must be using a different iTunes to the rest of us. I've been using it for over 5 years and it's never done that for me. There is an option for it to "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" but that's unchecked by default.

Nah. MS have that acronym already for their intranet update services.

The license agreement for Visual Studio .NET specifically forbids you from developing a product that significantly duplicates the features of Microsoft Access.

Then again, there is nothing stopping Microsoft from taking the best programs developed for their OS and using it themselves, with the significant exception that they gave that right up long ago in the interest of getting more developers for the platform. Same with Apple.

Blizzard have given you a game and wilfully developed an API for said game so that addon authors can do stuff that Blizzard hadn't thought of. Some addons have been banned and Blizzard have made changes to the API to prevent in-game character automation (think Glider but in-game). These are the rules that addon authors live by. Despite the fact that the Lua source code to your addon is freely visible and only mentions WoW API functions, the addon author is still using Blizzard's IP and trying to charge for it. Unless Blizzard have confered those rights to the addon authors (and I haven't seen any license agreement that says they do), you are using their IP and the addon authors do not have the right to profit from it.