I agree. However, there is really no reason to trust other developers of non-free software. Only free software shifts the power from the developer to the user so there is a balance. With non-free software, you never know what you get and from experience we know we get a lot of hidden non-features. With free software this is still possible, but it is less likely and we, the users, can do something about any problem we discover.

I agree with your statement that there is a difference between morality and legality. But legality without morality is not oppression.

Legality is the state in which people have to do what is right because they would face a penalty otherwise (in order to combine everyone's personal freedom). Morality goes further than that because morality does not just look at people's actions but also at people's motivation, their thinking, etc. Legality can be enforced by a state, morality cannot because no one can actually make someone else think a certain way. (I can prevent them from saying what they think, but their inner convictions cannot be controlled by anyone.) There are of course actual states that try to regulate the morality of their citizens but such attempts are futile. That is why actual laws can never be based on morality.

That said, actual laws need to comply with legality and since morality demands the same things as legality (plus things regarding motivation etc.), laws that are in accordance with legality are also in accordance with morality (but do not cover all areas that morality does).

So that means legality and morality are two mostly independent systems and while I would rather live in a moral world, I have to (and can) deal with the fact that I live in a world with people who are not completely moral and since morality cannot be enforced, I have to settle for legality (which is enough most of the time because it guarantees my freedom).

I totally agree with you in respect to copyright being unjustifiably used against society, though.

If that was the case, cumulative voting would be bad, yes. But it doesn't work that way. What cumulative voting is, it gives everyone more votes to distribute among candidates. So everyone's vote is basically split into fractions, but everyone's ballot has the same weight overall. So if I (and everyone else) got 10 votes, I might chose to give 3 (respectively 3/10 of my vote) votes to candidate A, 2 (2/10) to candidate C, D, and J and 1 (1/10) vote to candidate X. This way, I can show that I like candidate A the most, but I'm also ok with candidates C, D, J, and X, but not with everyone else on the ballot.

I really don't get it. I have watched a couple of games so far and even though my hearing is good, I didn't feel like there was an unusual high level of noise in those games. The commentator is obviously always louder than the background noise because the station creates the audio mix that way. And for the sound of the vuvuzelas: It's an unusual sound, but at least on TV doesn't seem to be any louder than other noisemakers spectators often use. It seems to me that using horns and other noisemakers have been a part of soccer games for quite some time and the vuvuzelas, traditional or not, are just another instance of a noisemaker. They might be louder in the stadium, but on TV, they don't bother me at all.

I totally agree that the first two are bad moderation. With the latter two though, I can see how someone could see them as flamebait. They are short and provocative and since you didn't add another sentence or two describing why you see things that way, it looks a lot like flamebait.

I've been following your comments for quite some time, so I wouldn't have rated them flamebait, but if I had to meta-moderate and couldn't see the author or if I hadn't been following your comments, I might rate the latter two the same way.

Having read many of your comments and journal entries, I agree that all of them are bad moderation, but with the last two, I don't see any abuse, just bad moderation (which might have happened due to the lack of knowing your other comments).

But I was trying to explain that it was avoidable and DRM "fucked itself up again". I don't disagree with you; I think we just have a different understanding of the term "licensing issues".

There are two different reasons for licensing issues: One are merely technical reasons (the system is somehow broken). The other one is that the system legitimately refuses to work, for example because someone didn't pay the licensing fee. The poster I replied to suggested that the theater or the DRM service had not paid for the license and I was trying to argue that this was not the case, but that the system itself was/is broken.

So what I did was restrict the term "licensing issue" to the meaning "the system is working correctly, but it cannot play the movie because we do not have the right to show it". Maybe this usage is too narrow. Sorry about that! I hope I could clarify what I meant.

No, it is not a licensing problem. I read the German article and it clearly states that everyone paid, but the company providing the final keys (it is a process with several stages) could not produce the correct key. It was due to technical difficulties, not licensing issues.

Here is my non-Google translation of the important part that explains what went wrong technically (sorry for the slightly unidiomatic English; I tried to stay as close to the original as possible so that the text would not become my interpretation of the original):
Apparently, the DRM-keys for the film files were the cause of the problem. The distributor of 20th Century Fox sends the JPEG2000-encoded and AES-128-encrypted movies on external hard drives via courier. After that, the data (in the case of Avatar 150 GByte) needs to be copied to the theater server. Each digital projector/server combination generates a different certificate and transmits it to the DRM service in charge. The DRM service creates an individual key for each movie and sends it back to the theater. The key is always only valid for one copy of the film as well as one projector and can be limited to specific time periods and times of day.

Yesterday (Wednesday), the transmission of the correct keys for the 3D screenings did apparently not work in several cases, though. Theater technicians tried for several hours to decrypt the gigantic pile of data, but apparently the service responsible for the digital distribution of the film, Deluxe, could not provide valid keys yesterday.

Sure. But since this thing only measures an increase or decrease in brainwave activity, it cannot be explained by a simple "We are all different.". That's why the fact caught my interest in the first place.