"Well you're just wrong about that. Chewbacca is a wookie." (I didn't say the thing you claim I'm "wrong about" either)

There is a mistake going on in the debate -- when someone tries to turn it into a scientific argument, which sounds very noble, what they are also doing is suggesting that the scientific conclusion should be the policy conclusion as a matter of course. If it's the best theory at the time, that's what we should go with. Unfortunately that is often a seriously bad idea as science and policy have very different risk profiles. If you try your scientific theory out and it is wrong, you revise the theory and move on. If you try your scientific theory out in a safety-critical environment, it is wrong, and everyone dies, you don't. This is why, for instance, pharmaceuticals have to jump through many hoops to prove their safety long after they have proved their efficacy (ie, long after they have become the best available scientific theory of their effect) and long after they have been shown to be theoretically safe. What we certainly do not want is policy being coerced by arguments that "there is no empirical evidence that it would cause (plausible catastrophic problem X)" which sounds rhetorically like it means "we've experimentally determined it wouldn't" but actually just means "nobody ran a decent enough experiment to find out it would".

Sorry to use you as a data point, but half the issue is in public policy debates (which are the very definition of politics), "science" becomes a very slippery term. When someone wants to argue for something, the goalposts widen and almost anything is science (usually together with rallying cries of how great science is -- "science gave us the toaster, television, put a man on the moon. ..." -- quietly drafting the engineers, product designers, anything vaguely technical as being "science"). But when someone wants to argue against something, the goalposts narrow and we insist on journal publications, and which journal ("of course not the Journal of Field I Think is Flawed").

Fundamentally, these debates put the cart before the horse. Slashdotters and others like to insist that "if it's science, policy should follow it" -- ie that science has a right to have more impact. In academia (currently the home of science) however, impact is a metric not a right. Whether your science has impact is a measure of its value and you have no automatic right to people listening to you whatsoever, regardless of where you are published.

They were trying to work on a product like that, but they just couldn't get it polished.

But the start menu was introduced in Windows 95. (To never ending jokes about "to shut down, press the 'Start' button and...")

Really, for "exactly the same reason"? I have to say I'm scratching my head to find why the sorts of clauses the New Zealand Police and the FBI would look to to support their action apply to every user of MegaUpload:

Search and Surveillance Bill 2009 108 (j) (i): "Every search power authorises the person exercising it to use any reasonable measures to create a forensic copy of any material in such a computer system or other data storage device."
Copyright Act 1994 66 (1): "Where the doing of a particular act is specifically authorised by an enactment, the doing of that act does not infringe copyright, unless the enactment provides otherwise."
etc.

But I liked the dramatic sentiment!

IANAL, so hopefully someone will correct me, but for a while I've had a nagging worry that the GPL relies on a very fuzzy notion of what constitutes a "derived work", and that things like Maven might have already punched a gaping hole in it a while ago, even for GPLv3.

Say you write a program including a GPL library. One could argue that (a) the compiled program as a whole is "a derived work", or (b) even the uncompiled code you wrote is a "derived work" as some of it was influenced by the design of the library. This judgment seems to knock (b) out of the water, as APIs are not copyrightable now. But even before, if you write your part first it's clearly not derived, and you then write a connector shim to the API, then it's hard to argue any part of your source-code other than the shim was derived. So (a), the compiled whole application is the derived work, looks like being the main argument.

But here's the thing. Maven and other build systems mean that you can get a compiled derived work onto thousands of customers' machines without ever distributing (or even in GPLv3 terms "propagating") the library, or the compiled derived work, yourself. The customer just gets your code (not the library) from you, together with a build script. Maven or some other little builder on the customer's machine then handily troops off, gets the libraries from Maven central repository or wherever, and ties them together. The GPL explicitly allows building the library in whatever code you like in a private copy -- and that is just what Maven at your customers' behest has done. So does that mean the derived work ends up running "privately" on a hypothetically large number of people's machines, without ever being propagated in the language of the license?

I wonder if it could be argued that a lot of the Java open source world effectively relies on this. Projects provide the source for their own parts, but not necessarily of the GPL libraries they use. Maven build files contain an identifier (organisation, artifact, version) to each library to fetch. But this build file does not necessarily state which repository (the URL) Maven will find each library on when it does its search (or whether that repository will contain a source bundle as well as a compiled bundle of that library). Whereas the GPL asks "provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source" (emphasis added). It could be argued that people aren't being diligent about fulfilling that clause. But is a legally acceptable response to the accusation "you're not supplying clear directions saying where to find the corresponding source" to say simply "That's ok, because we're not propagating that library or a derived work of it at all -- their project published it, you fetched it, and your own machine produced the derived work"?

Four things to say on this one -

1. It looks like essentially the same result that's been repeated over and over again since the 1990s. Technology-enhanced learning papers from a host of universities have been occasionally reporting gains of up to about 1.1 standard deviation over classroom teaching alonefor a couple of decades.

2. Beating university lectures is an extraordinarily low bar. We've known since the 1980s that non-interactive teaching, as typically happens in lectures and used to happen in high school classrooms too, is rubbish. See Bloom's "Two Sigma Problem" paper for extensive details (from high school classroom studies), and how simple things like "setting homework" can give a gain (actually marking the homework gives another gain; teaching students where they went wrong in the homework yet another gain! Wow, who'd have thunk it! What a surprise that a computer doing some of those things that we found 30 years ago provided a gain ... provide a gain over doing nothing). There is a more difficult challenge of matching human tutoring -- the intensive small group teaching by experts that routinely beats classroom teaching by two standard deviations but is much more expensive to do.

3. Unfortunately for the field, a lot of mixed-mode experiments are flawed because the groups can't practically be isolated properly, and there's usually very little way of knowing how much of the learning is due to what part of the technology. It varies from case to case, but one of the common problems (from an experimental, not a learning, point of view) is that students are pretty much required to subvert your system -- no student is ever told "you mustn't find some other way of learning this". So, even if some part of the teaching is crap, if the system has given the students a clearer indication of what's going to be on the test, students will find another way of learning how to answer the test (ask their friends in the other stream, read a worked answer to last year's exam, Google...). That means there's often a hidden variable of whether setting computer practice tests is making the students better at the guessing game of knowing what's going to be on the real test. In some ways that'd actually be fine (yay, our students are doing better), but not if it means they neglect any learning that isn't on the computerised test (Joe can calculate eigenfactors til the cows come home; he just can't do anything else and has no clue when it's useful to do that)

4. It's also important to note these are not machine-only learning methods. There's been plenty of lionisation of entirely online teaching, but the subtle truth is that universities have never thought it's just knowing the material that matters. Which is why they don't mind giving away all the material for free. After all, you've been able to go to the library and get the material for free for a few centuries now, but not that many people choose the Good Will Hunting route for their education. It turns out there's value to the soft skills you develop from being stuck in with a bunch of bright kids and (hopefully) bright faculty and put through the academic rigmarole, and to the credibility of having come out successfully at the other end. Or if you want to be really cynical about it, it turns out that employers also value some of the less glorious things that universities teach you:
* Being able to navigate ridiculously over-complex bureaucracies and still get things done
* Being able to learn what you need and accomplish what you've been required to do even when faced with setbacks such as the unintelligible academic gibbering away at the front of the class being actually pretty useless at teaching
* Being able to manage your workload even when every damn subject lands a 40-page assignment on your plate in the same week of semester
etc

I expect it to become much more relevant going forward -- a great answer to the "why are they making a tablet OS for desktops" complaint. Kinect allows a hand-gestural interface without the cost of a massive touch screen, and without the arm-ache of reaching out horizontally all day (even if we lay big touch screens down like draughting tables, the top of the page where most application's UI controls currently reside becomes the furthest and highest point to reach).

(Besides, who doesn't fancy at least playing with a "Minority Report" UI?)

I don't think he is exaggerating.

In 2005, MG Rover (a much much smaller car firm) went bankrupt in the UK. Yup the parts got sold off in order to make money -- but not in the same country. The car making machinery was bought by two Chinese car firms, put on a ship and taken to China. The staff at not just Rover, but also the (previously profitable) companies in the East Midlands supply chain (that lost their main customer) lost their jobs. The UK treasury went from receiving tax income from thousands of staff to paying benefits for thousands of unemployed former staff (many of whom were still unemployed five years later), at large cost to the treasury. The economic capacity of the also UK was also dented -- the lack of manufacturing capacity is a current area of massive concern to the UK government as it is very difficult to re-bootstrap a manufacturing industry once the supply chain and all the associated support services and skills that manufacturing needs have gone. Skilled workers became unskilled workers because the industry they are skilled in evaporated. Five years later, a very small amount of manufacturing has started to return to Longbridge (where the MG Rover factory was), but it would be a very long and arduous process to bring manufacturing back to where it was before -- we're talking decades. MG Rover was small -- Longbridge is only a suburb of Birmingham -- but if that had happened to GM, Detroit could easily have been economically devastated for twenty years or more, if it ever recovered.

It's very easy to conceive of a situation in which the cost of a bankruptcy to the national treasury is much more expensive alone (through lost tax receipts and increased benefit output) than propping up a company, even before economic capacity considerations.

For MG Rover, it was never going to be possible for the UK government to rescue the company anyway (the IP on Rover's cars had already been sold to SAIC as part of a joint venture plan that the Chinese government then vetoed, leaving the company pretty much unrescuable as it no longer owned the rights to the cars it produced, and SAIC wanted to take that IP they now owned to China to found the "Roewe" brand. The UK government tried to negotiate a rescue with Nanjing Automotive, but it was never going to be possible with their competitor already owning all the IP and having a direct interest in the company being liquidated as they'd then own 100% of what they did with Rover's IP rather than the 70% that they had negotiated under the joint venture deal to get hold of the IP.) But the economic balance to the UK between the cost of MG Rover's losses versus the loss to tax receipts of the supply chain closing down (and the loss to economic capacity of the erosion of manufacturing) -- that's a much trickier equation.

No, it's quite different. Chalk and cheese. Right now, AdSense (the indexing of your data in order to sell advertising against it) is one of Google's "Services". Market analytics (selling aggregated data) might in future become another of Google's Services. Google Buzz was a Service ("Whoops, we thought broadcasting the identity of all your email contacts publicly over the Web without asking you first was a feature!") and a similar snafu could become a Service any time they choose. DropBox and the others appear (IANAL) only to ask for rights to offer the service (singular) -- the one you signed up for -- not an open invitation to use your data for anything they see fit afterwards.

This being, of course, why there is only Ford and GM, and Toyota are just dreaming if they think they can make any inroads into the big two, eh? Phones do not (despite the manufacturers' efforts) have much brand or platform loyalty beyond Apple. Chances are, most people's last five phones came from a variety manufacturers and probably ran different OSs. The platform vendors are of course keen to try to turn it into a tied-in ecosystem in which you can't change OS because you're locked in by all your apps and services, but right now most people don't have enough paid apps to be locked in and can access the services they actually feel an attachment to across all ecosystems. Microsoft's UI issues are not that "there's only room for two" but that at the moment there's an expectation of a grid of app icons and tiles are an unfamiliar format; MS is presumably expecting that to change when Windows 8 lands and makes it a familiar experience.

So the night before the election, some disgruntled staffers (hypothetically) invent allegations of one of the presidential candidates declaring that now he's got the election pretty much in the bag he'll just spend the four years writing his memoirs and lining up a lucrative corporate gig afterwards, and allegations of him doing unmentionable things with prostitutes during the campaign. They fake up enough witnesses, documents, and photos that they convince Fox News, CNN, CBS, and the others that it's real and the story is broadcast right before the election and only uncovered as a fake after the polls have closed. Are you sure there's no "urgent problem"? No case that the faked allegations should be a teensy bit illegal? Are you sure the hypothetical conspiring disgruntled staffers should be protected by free speech laws and unprosecutable for their actions?

Which just goes to show that if you credit an ancient Greek you can get modded insightful for any old rubbish.

Epicurus died in 270BC, some 300 years before you've credited this quote, and this contortion of his words it seems has its source in Charles Bufe's 1992 rather less academic "The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations" (I wonder whether he had an agenda in writing that one!) Epicurus's argument, worded rather differently, was not against God, but against the Aristotelean view of God. Which is why the above contortion can be seen to rather juvenilely treat "evil" as a a substance ("whence cometh evil") rather than as a choice.

Or to put it more bluntly -- on which feature of the universe do you wish to blame stabbings, if not the choice of the stabber: that metal can be sharpened; that it can be moved; that you have control over how you move your arm and hand?

Rather a lot of people. We have a high speed internet connection, and there is so much legally available content. TV station's catchup services like iView, Plus7, etc. Digital delivery of paid content, such as Steam. And then there's all the other uses such as Skype for video chat with family overseas, etc. I suspect we are a typical family for the country I live in. Not only is pirated content unnecessary, it sounds actually fairly inconvenient -- iView (a legitimate free streaming service) works on the device attached to my TV (a PlayStation) and I do not have to wait for a download to finish before I can start watching. Movies? Sure you could hunt around for a pirate copy on MegaUpload, or iTunes probably has it for a few dollars. Watch lots of movies, and Quickflix (that's on the PlayStation hooked up to the TV, so easier to watch on a bigger screen) is $15/month. (But frankly I've never found a need -- there are plenty of movies I haven't seen yet that go by at odd times on free-to-air, but PlayTV (PVR add-on for PlayStation) nicely legitimately records them for me so I've usually got a little stack of movies I haven't had time to watch yet sitting on the device that's already hooked up to the TV... though that doesn't rely on the internet at all).

Nope, media piracy really isn't such a big part of the attraction of broadband. I suspect it isn't for most customers. If I had a teenage son, it might be very attractive for him to go pirating new release movies and save a few bucks on cinema tickets, but to the person paying the broadband bill no piracy is not a significant part of the attraction.