Are you saying that pirating only happens amongst the middle class? Have you been to any non rich/Western country?

Pirating is exceptionally common amongst the poor as it's a cheap way to get some form of entertainment. You'll see plenty of market stalls selling counterfeit DVDs at very low prices, and that can then be played back on cheap media players. None of it required broadband or a fancy computer to use.

Hmm, what method of searching Google were you using that included your "original query" of "crony democracy" as part of the URL that you linked? Seems like it could be a worrying way of accidentally leaking more information than intended.

Why do you feel they're any more capable of carrying out their threats? Surely as soon as they get into the face-to-face circumstance that is required to execute the murder (or heck, even deal with the hitman) the passiveness would win out? Can you think of any internet celebs (like Lennart would be) who have had a lot of death threats from random angry posters actually have one become a murder?

If people are going to be cowards throwing death threats across the Internet, they're unlikely to suddenly discover the "courage" to go kill someone in real life.

Bundling stuff for free isn't anti-competitive. Bundling stuff that's nominally free but acts as leverage is anti-competitive.

Including IE meant that IE became a platform that web developers targetted. A platform that was only available on systems that Microsoft decided it would be, and so they used their existing platform of Windows to make IE the new de facto platform.

Putting in something like Windows Photo Viewer isn't anti-competitive because it's not being used to leverage something else. If on the other hand, it included some spiffy new format like Windows Amazing Photo Format that was only available on Windows devices, and MS started pushing that to become the new standard that they control... that's becoming anti-competitive again. If in 10 years all cameras recorded in only the Windows Amazing Photo Format, you're going to struggle to switch to another operating system if you want to still be able to access your photos.

This is why I don't see Ubuntu including as many other applications as it likes in the package as being anti-competitive. None of them are able to force you to stay on the Ubuntu treadmill forever, whereas choosing IE 10-years back resulted in most of the web being targetted at IE, and if one wanted to switch OSes it became much harder if you still wanted to be able to access all of your sites.

As the original poster mentioned I can't see how they'd be able to use this anti-virus tool to leverage anything else? Could they corner the market on viruses? Maybe, but they already have that.

The fraud is that they claim there's a particular real-estate CEO called X who believes Y about the Galaxy Tab, and in the way it's presented it's not unreasonable for someone to believe that that person actually exists. With movies there's a clear expectation going in that it's fiction.

However, if you go and make up fake reviews about your own movies such as calling them "another winner" and attributing them to non-existant movie critics, then that's also fraud.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4741259.stm

Go to http://geohot.com/ the link is on the front page.

.. and matched.

Perhaps then we shouldn't take a ton of mulberry leaves with us into space, and instead take something we can digest?

This is not about teaching people to become obsessed wealth gatherers. This is about teaching them how it works so that they don't screwed over by the people who are obsessed with wealth gathering. The more you understand about economics, the better the position you're in for understanding your own worth in the system. I think it should also be extended further so that people have a greater understanding of the link between their time and the money earned, so they're fully aware that when they piss away their money on rubbish consumer goods, they're paying for it in their own time and reducing their ability to actually achieve their important real life goals.

And while I agree that the scientists, doctors, builders, plumbers etc are important as well, the Soviet Union had very skilled people as well, yet the quality of life of their citizens was poor. That comes down to economics, which is fundamentally the way in which peoples working time is distributed.

You're always going to see this pissing match between who's most important out of the "people who do stuff so we can all actually survive", the "people who push the envelope forward", and the "people who glue the system together". We've got to make sure that all these roles are understood and respected.

Ideally it may be a "damned poor state of affairs" but for thousands of years people and governments have been snooping on other people to either gain an advantage or just for some tasty gossip. It's not some sudden failure in collective human kind, it's just what the majority would do in this situation if they got the power.

Technology may have made it easier to do this and given us a sense of outrage over "lowly sysadmins" having access to this sensitive data, but then I see the exact same thing being done by the government in their position of trust. Except they can pass retroactive immunity for it.