That depends on who is publishing the respective CD.

Cool

Ripping of IV so that some people can keep their jobs, reminds me of our communist regime. Even today, we have to pay some exotic taxes and crap, so they can keep bankrupt businesses going. Around here, they put HUGE taxes on computer hardware import, so on the other hand, the govornment can distrib...

If you can't hack a box ... you can run it over with your car?
I always thought hackers use public transportation.

What linux distro are you using?
This question is more OS specific.

Looks interesting ... but what has racing to do with hacking ?

From a legal point of view, if company A, owns company B, and company B is bankrupt, that doesn't enforce company A to pay off company B's debts.

A good rule of thumb :

Whatever you sign, make sure it's valid one year the most, and can be cancelled with a written notice within 30 days before it expires, or automaticly extended by an additional year otherwise.

It's a good and fair clause for any contract.

Most software developers (IV included) use a 3rd party merchant account, offered by companies with high reputation whic process millions of transactions on a daily basis, in a very secure environment.

As Stewsburntmonkey said, it's safer then paying at a local business

One of the reasons I never signed exclusive contracts.

Gamedevelopers make games.
Businessmen make money.
It all boils down to this.

Can't IV simply cancel their agreement?

warez kiddies suck.

They could at least put a warning sign :

"Leaving this button pressed for more then 10 seconds, can cause an explosion."

Who put the brits on the middle of the map? :-/

In 2D/3D "flat space", the distance between 2 points is defined as :

dist(x,y) = |x - y| - this would apply for our flat world.
But, there are space for which your formula above applies.

Think of the distance between 2 points on a sphere for example. It's NOT a straight line.