These people don't need punishing, they need educating. I find the whole "fuck em, it's their fault" attitude to be very childish.
Is that not precisely what I said? Laziness.
I feel like I'm debating with a tired Hallmark card. Yes, high road and all that. We get it.
Just as you misplaced the malice quote (you were a little too eager to play that one), now you're on about punishment: Who said anything about punishment? Saying "Don't hotlink, but we're giving you 30 days grace" is not remotely "punishment". That you portray it as such is, honestly, outrageous.
No. You can't both understand the word "laziness" and attribute that to the explanations I provided.
"I feel like I'm debating with a tired Hallmark card. Yes, high road and all that. We get it."
I feel like I'm debating with somebody who is very intolerant.
"Just as you misplaced the malice quote (you were a little too eager to play that one)"
I did not misplace it, and I stand by the statement, and exactly how I used and formatted it.
"now you're on about punishment: Who said anything about punishment? Saying "Don't hotlink, but we're giving you 30 days grace" is not remotely "punishment". That you portray it as such is, honestly, outrageous."
You're easily angered aren't you. As I said, it would be trivial to contact them directly and tell them about the problem, and not doing so when it would be so easy giving the reason that they should have known better in the first place is a clear kind of punishment yes.
I'm not continuing this discussion with you. I have more fun things to do with my New Years Eve than debate with an angry troll.
I'm not done because I've debated with this ridiculous tactic enough to see it for what it is.
Copy-pasting code that you don't understand is pretty much the definition of laziness.
And just to be clear, it's "trivial" for jQuery to do this, in your mind, because you're not the one having to do it. Probably thousands of tiny sites that are doing this (I doubt it's any big numbers sites), each requiring you to go through the whois process to find a webmaster. Not as trivial as you proclaim.
Disagree. Copy-pasting code that you don't understand is how most people learn how to code on the web. It's how I learned.
Most junior web developers do not understand everything that goes on in the web stack. They piece together the ability to run a functioning website by putting together bits of knowledge they pick up along the way. Some of this knowledge comes from reputable sources, like the jQuery documentation. Some of it comes from sources that may, albeit wrongly, recommend hotlinking, such as friends or Experts-Exchange.
When you're new to a subject, and there are that many unknowns, and you don't have a great mentor, it's hard to know exactly which parts are important to understand thoroughly, and which can be attributed to "magic" for the moment. Most people learn to program for the web because they need to get a project online, which means they are more focused on getting something working, rather than trying to grok every bit of the stack. I would bet that the vast majority of people that hotlink jQuery fall firmly into this category. It's not that they don't want to learn how not to hotlink, or are too busy or too lazy to learn, it's that they don't know that this is something they need to learn.
And that, sir, is definitively ignorance, not laziness. To be precise, it's ignorance of the fact that they are ignorant.
PS: Don't take disagreement personally, and don't call the person you're disagreeing with a "Hallmark card". It makes you look like a troll.
How does one exit an argument with somebody who is behaving so irrationally, without getting accused of all that bullshit?
I guarantee that some people are using the wrong URLs because they received bad advice
Didn't doublecheck the advice: lazy.
or copied from code they shouldn't have
Lazy coding.
were simply told by somebody that they could link to the version on jquery.com, so did.
See #1.
Copying code is "lazy coding"? There isn't a programmer alive who hasn't done this.
So these people are guilty of being alive and being programmers? Yeah, lets break their websites! That'll teach them!
This is the wrong attitude. The professional attitude is to at least try to resolve your problems without fucking other people over.