My favorite quote from this discussion has got to be in a message from William Crim:

There's a big Gnutella discussion going on at discuss.userland.com. And (unfortunately) under a seperate thread, a discussion on the ethical issues with Gnutella.

(Remember how they created DeCSS: They didn't crack the codes on DVDs, they reverse engineered a legal player platform.)

Oi. It had the usual lawyer I-want-the-technology-so-it-must-be-possible quote, too: "Gema, Germany's main music licensing group, said the verdict was a signal that Internet services need to introduce technologies to protect copyrights online." The sad part is a coherent conversation on this topic is virtually impossible... you can't communicate to a lawyer that something may well be impossible. After all, they can always produce developers claiming they can create something to satisfy the lawyers.

German court: AOL liable for music piracy: "In a ruling that could give the music industry a weapon against Internet piracy, a court said Wednesday that America Online is responsible when users swap bootleg music files on its service."

BTW, concrete damage to you is being done by this; while I'm fixing something that should not have been a problem, I'm not implementing favorites functionality in the Weblogs.com sidebar. Sure, in this case it may not damage you any if you don't use it, but it's the only concrete example I can give you.

I am annoyed.

Works fine in Mozilla. Guess what IE5 (not 5.5) does? It does not retrieve elements based on name, it looks for ID! But wait, there's already a function (IE-specific) that retrieves elements based on ID, which is document.all. Apparently, despite the hint given in the function name itself, Microsoft can't figure out what to retrieve elements based on.

I have to agree with them. I have been trying to implement the contraction-expansion this site does in IE on windows in Mozilla. I'm pretty sure now I can do it. But I want it to work in both, not just Mozilla! So I try to use the document.getElementsByName function. It should retrieve a list of elements in an HTML document that have a NAME="" attribute that matches the argument of the function.

The Web Standard Project has elaborated on their distaste for IE5.5.