Don't blame the tools for the ethics of the users. If you cheat on copyrights, don't. If you know someone who does, tell them what you think. Turn them in if you feel the need. (In the case of MS, I wouldn't particularly. Wolves eat dogs.) But don't surrender or turn in your freedoms to buy a mess of secure pottage.

People use phones to set up bank jobs, drug deals, and corporate takeovers. They use cars to run over cats and kidnap children. They use candy to get the kids in the cars. Banning ships to stop piracy might have worked, but we'd live in a different world. Banning phones -- which is to say, allowing only the powerful to have them, the way they have their whores, drugs, and lawyers -- would have made most of your world impossible.

Tchnologies like BitTorrent are your ace in the hole as your freedoms disappear and your governments turn the screws on to control your lives. Read Wm. Gibson. That may not be where we're going, but freedom of information is crucial to survival. The fax machine put Tiananamen Square in the international forum, the Internet took down the USSR, and blogs will pull the theocons out of their positions of power. The PTB have no more chance of stopping this than they do of stopping cockroaches. The Lord of the Flies is Lucifer, lightbearer and morning star, folks.

M

Message edited on: 09/06/2005 08:53