yeah right. piracy is always about getting shit for free. we are all a bunch of cheap bastards who steal things, end of discussion.

pirated copies are always a superior product because you can do whatever you want with them. the media market has failed consistently to deliver a product that is on par with that which is available on bit torrent. i never have to worry if a file will play in my media player. i never have to worry that i can't make a CD or DVD. i never have to worry that my backup copies will not work if they don't talk to the mothership on a regular basis. i never have to worry that my new laptop will take me over the arbitrary number of computers that are permitted to play/watch/listen to a given file.

also, pirated copies are more plentiful. i have torrented stuff that isn't available in a store, on itunes, or anywhere else. how in the world are you going to digitize everything that was ever made and make it easily searchable and quickly downloaded? there is no way a company could do that profitably even if the licensing and permissions problem was handled. it has to be done by volunteers who to donate time, bandwidth, and indexing effort because that is the only way that works.

I find it a bit ironic you trust pirates of all people to deliver you a product free of root kits and trojans.

you're goddamn right i trust pirates more than media conglomerates. piracy is a meritocracy. only the good stuff gets seeded and the bad stuff dies on the vine. viruses, rootkits, spam, and other bullshit just fades into oblivion because no one will seed it. there is plenty of transparency in piracy (just read the comments for the torrent before you download it) and there is no transparency at all with media corporations.

also, piracy has more longevity than anything else. how many people bought yahoo music and got screwed with yahoo shut down it's DRM servers? MS did the same thing. what happens when amazon pulls the plug on it's ebooks or apple terminates your itunes authorizations? on the piracy side, shutting down sites and services only makes the system more fault tolerant. the only way to be sure that your media files will always be available is to pirate them.

so you can waste your breath railing away against piracy, but it cannot be stopped. you can declare it wrong, or call it stealing, or say it funds terrorism or whatever but stopping it is impossible. all the DRM in the world can't stop it. all the laws in the world can't put an end to it. unless you are willing to go house to house and shoot people, there is no way to prevent it.

I always disliked the car analogy, because as you stated, cars have a single use.

yes the car does one thing, and it's had years to perfect doing it. any engineer will tell you that if you design a machine to do several things at once, it will be far more prone to malfunction and harder to maintain than a single purpose machine. this is not to say that the PC is a flawed design; it's to say that "mainstream users" don't understand that the PC is a machine with no clearly defined function or purpose and that it should be treated as such.

if i built a factory to make anything on a moment's notice, using the manufacturing equivalent of lego blocks, conventional wisdom would say that i had lost my mind. yet that is what the PC does... either with windows, or mac os, or linux. it does "anything" by using software, the computing equivalent of lego blocks.

though as Ubuntu touts the phrase "it just works" is that not the idea?

nothing "just works". compared to earlier v windows doesn't, macs don't, nothing does. it's up there with "the check is in the mail" and "i won't cum in your mouth" as some of the greatest lies ever told to unwitting suckers. we all know this because we all know computers, but for some reason linux gets held to a higher standard because it requires "ordinary" people to learn something new instead of tolerating something that's been wrong for years. some how, learning how to edit a text file or type a command in a window is heinous compared to removing (or pating someone to remove) spyware and viruses, or buying additional software to make your machine useful.

and when i say "edit a text file" or "type a command in a window" i really mean, "use google to find what you need and copy and paste it in the appropriate place" it's most heinous, egregious even. why would i do something so onerous when i can just reinstall windows every 6 months, or manually navigate the morass that is the windows registry, or just buy another suite of tools to protect me from the security flaws inherent in the first suite of tools i bought?

does more progress need to be made in linux? absolutely. but the unwashed computing masses need to step up and learn a thing or two as well. they need to learn that the "accepted way" of doing things is no longer acceptable, and that there are worse things in the world than the command line, like treacherous computing, loss of privacy, and data corruption from system failures.