MY GOD MAN!!! Do you realize what you're doing? DO you? What kind of HONEY BITCH TOOL have you become? Have you no shame? None at all?

Look at you. Look at yourself. Look at what you've BECOME. Your job is writing code to BREAK PEOPLE'S COMPUTERS if they dare to put a CELINE DION CD into their disk drive. Is this what you always wanted? Is this what you went to school for? Is this what we've all -- all of us, every other hacker and programmer and geek and computer person -- is this what we've all helped you to do?

Do you really think that you don't OWE us anything? That you don't owe anybody anything? That what really matters is that you get some of Celine Dion's FILTHY CANADIAN LUCRE? Hell, man, I'll pay you out of my OWN POCKET to quit your job right now. What kind of job is that? What kind of man, or woman, are you?

I know you didn't start off like this. I know that you're like me, that you're like all of us. That you love these things called computers, that your fingers itch when you're away from them, that your whole essence pours out of your fingertips into the keyboard when you make that system DO YOUR MAGIC. It's incredible, it's power, it's a tradition that goes back centuries, and it's flowing through you right now, right this very second.

And you're BETRAYING it. You're standing on the shoulders of giants and SHITTING on them. For something you believe in? For something you're PROUD OF? Or for the dollars of Sony Megacorp and the opportunity that that brings?

Who the HELL are you? What the FUCK has gotten into you? Just in case you didn't notice, this recession is OVER, and there are a JILLION jobs out there for you to take. Jobs that make people's lives easier, jobs that OPEN DOORS onto a new plateau of human awareness that the people we owe our livelihoods to only DREAMED of. Jobs that could make this world a PARADISE instead of the shitty money-grubbing craphole it's been since the dawn of time.

And instead you choose to take a job fucking up people's IMACS. For NO GOOD REASON.

It's really not too late. You can stop RIGHT NOW, you can get up and walk out the door and turn your back on the forces of REACTION and of GREED and of SMALL-MINDED CONSERVATIVE ASSHOLISM that say that the most important thing in the world is keeping some tweaked housewife in South Dakota from sharing a goddamn CELINE DION TRACK with her mom or friend or neighbor. You can stop. You can do it. YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS.

For the sake of everyone who ever helped you with your homework. For the sake of everyone who answered your plaintive and ignorant plea for help on Usenet or some mailing-list. For the sake of every person everywhere who wrote a driver or an app or a goddamn EXAMPLE PROGRAM to show you how to make these machines sing like angels under your hands. Pay us back. Stop this crap. Stop this humiliating bullshit and stop being a tool of The Man.

[UPDATE: This article originally linked to a Knowledge Base item at apple.com covering the wilful breakage of Imacs by Sony engineers. Seems that that article has gone missing. Searches for "Celine Dion" or "copy-protected CD" on the Apple site come up empty, too. I guess maybe the problem went away on its own, hmmm? I THINK NOT. This is bad juju. Anyways, I redirected to an article in UK's Mac user about the deal. -Mr. Bad]

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paco@pigdog.org