Posts by biswas

Indian dealers are squealers over Microsoft piracy raids

The borg requires you continue to service it........

Wow, loads of replies and some warm flames. Thanks for the interesting comments, and no thanks to the idiot who made the comments about my wife/girlfriend and thereby devised a new debating fallacy lower and cruder than the ad-hominem attack. Shame on you.

To answer some of the the real points.

Andrew, the smiling food delivery guys and little old pensioners who are working for MS are in a position rather analogous to that of hostages or kidnap victims. The hostage-taker might say somthing like "give us $10,000 per day and we will feed the hostage, otherwise she will starve" but the 99.99 of the money will go to fund the hostage takers evil, and not to feed their victims. BTW, Who says the system has worked well for me ? Even if it had (which is very debatable) the wider issue is wether it ,serves the greater good, which i think it does not.

Maytee, You are contradictory. You said "If an individual wants/needs something he/she buys it" O.K. And then you declared that you are a linux user. Errr ? What ? As an aside, I tend to believe that all our earthly wants/needs are provided for us by the beneficence of the flying spaghetti monster (may his name be blessed) and the fact that this beneficence is stolen near source for sale by profit seekers is a reflection of our fallen state.

Jan. Whoever said I was doing the sculpture for money ?

Steve, Thanks for an intelligent post but I must respectfully disagree with your conclusion. If M$ truly wanted to restrict access to its products to the payer-minority, then I think they they would have done it. It is a technically feasible task. I truly believe that if M$ managed to restrict use of their software to payers they would be a struggling minor player in the software world within 3 or 4 years. Even supposing they really do hate piracy and supposing that it really is just too damn difficult to stamp it out, does anyone really believe M$ would remain dominant if their mindshare was reduced to only the payer-minority ? They should be careful what they wish for.

Finally, they have too much already money. People shouldn't give them any more.

Copying is not stealing.....

.....because the originator DOES NOT LOOSE ANYTHING. If I make a patio, or a sculpture and you copy, then I still have my patio or my sculpture, I have not lost by your copying of it.

The microsoft argument is that "because you are not giving us your money, you are stealing from us" Lets try that argument now, Jeremy. I claim the right to the word "the". I have used it often enough, maybe hundreds of times in a day. So it is mine, dammit. You have used it in your post too so I think you should pay me to use it. You have not paid me so therefore you are a thief. Huh ?

Also, Microsoft clearly ALLOW piracy to keep market share. If it is possible to make an ATM work securely, it is possible to make an OS that only works for verified payers. Suppose MS do that. Then the non-payer *majority* can't use windows so they learn linux of neccecity. MS will then have lost majority user-market share and so the majority will be experienced linux users instead who can help everyone else to migrate. Windows would become the new mac, expensive and only of special interest with a pitiful market share.