"Leonard Martin" wrote in message
...
In article .com,
"Chris" wrote:

[snip]

Chris


Well, how nice for you that you function in a world where $75 for a
manual is small change! There are lots of us hobbyists out here who
like
to experiment with electronics but who might find that to be their
"mad"
money for a month. Somehow, as one of them, I'm not convinced by your
"all us well-off businessmen should be good t each other" argument.

This kind of stuff is part of a trend that's been going on, to my
amazement, for a couple of decades now. It might be summed up as
"Business is more important than anything. The market is God.
Whatever's
good for either is great, and the devil take the rest!" Under this
regime each new enormity perpetrated by some business, like this one
by
Aligent (or the copyright extension that business got away with a
while
ago) first causes a bit of squirming on the part of the victims, but
then other virtuous souls remind them of the three divine maxims set
out
above, and everyone then naturally knuckles under.

How did a once-free, and in fact instinctively rebellious, people come
to this?

It seems that to maintain civility, some loss of freedom seems to be
necessary. Like with spam and email. Taking away the ability to spam
anonymously brings complaints from those who say that will also take
away the freedom to email anonymously. Yeah, it seems so. If you want
to remain anonymous by wearing a ski mask, it'd probably make a lot of
difference on how you're treated when you walk into a 7-11.

Leonard

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