"...How many times does this have to happen...do people have some inability to know who and what they are dealing with?"

I believe the saying goes, "A fool is born every minute."

"Just because they point to something as their justification does not mean it actually justifies said behavior."

I thought this is exactly what government does and legislation that has passed approval in 2 of the 3 branches, a.k.a. laws, are the thing they point to. Unless a law is amended or repealed altogether then it actually DOES justify the behavior when manipulated against your perceived interpretation.

I missed the part of this particular conversation where "..."pass by reference"...make it impossible to pass NULL..." and the use of typecast are the mechanism for proving the original assertion incorrect; the semantics of passing by reference instead of passing by pointer.

As an aside those are C-style typecast and use none of the C++ typecast semantics specifically made ass ugly in order to expose potentially dangerous characteristics.

"In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg." - Bjarne Stroustrup

I suppose this is a solid example of why this quote exist.

I believe the point your are making can be succinctly made by Bush:

"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."

"First off, it only costs $1(us) at most to manufacture and ship a CD. Probably more like $0.50 or less, perhaps even $0.25. So they are likely making $11 to $11.75 for each CD after the physical costs of creating and moving them. "

Most insightful comment because we can completely ignore the production cost of producing the actual content that is the master copy to be created in mass. Obviously it does not factor into the equation. I suppose it is the same as producing a microchip for pennies even though the first one subsidizes the endeavor.

I am not defending the record industry however I am challenging that your opening statement was sufficient in me disregarding the rest or your opinion without reading further.

"I also don't work for a mega corporation that has entire brigades of lawyers to get paid to look at these very things. Google apparently didn't understand what it meant nor had any of the many lawyers who get paid to look at these types of things actually look at it."

I disagree. In fact, given the original language, I would say lawyers did examine it and did what lawyers do best in the best interest of their client. Think along the lines of "much easier to give something up than take something away" during litigation. Might as well claim the world up front rather than after the fact, no?

I agree that it's hit or miss. My install took an extra 45 minutes, because I was using a KVM cable, and Ubuntu couldn't figure out the monitor specs, so it defaulted the resolution. Once I got that worked out, I got the real KVM working, so now I can run virtual systems on the kernel. So, I have Ubuntu with Windows XP running virtual (the only reason for XP is Visual Studio, because sometimes I need to compile stuff for Windows). All in all, it's a good system, but I may need to duel boot to do graphics work for Windows systems. No virtual OpenGL support.