Since the beginning of this debate, twenty years ago when we were all still using 1.44MB floppy disks, I have been firmly in the "thou shalt not copy" camp. I never, ever pirated software or music. Occasionally I copied MP3s from a friend, then re-bought them if I ended up listening to them more than once or twice. And I still felt guilty.

Last month was my change of heart.

I was trying to Do The Right Thing, and download Terry Pratchett's Discworld audiobooks using iTunes. Each audiobook costs $20, but I was willing to pay it. I splurged and bought the first three. The download of the third one failed, and there is no way to resume it (in order to get the rest of the audiobook, I only received the first 42 minutes), because of Audible.com's license restrictions. I'm facing an hour on the phone with iTunes tech support.

But even THAT was acceptable. Until I found out, the hard way, that my audiobooks can't be listened to on my other iOS devices. I can listen to them on the iPhone I purchased them on, but not on my iPad (same iTunes) account or my sons' iPads (same iTunes). WTF?

So I decided that Audible.com and iTunes have colluded to defraud the consumer. And I got gypped $60 before I figured it out. I therefore conclude that I am free of my moral obligation to pay them for the content they control. And suddenly, the world, and this whole piracy conversation, looks very different to me.

You ask us to become single-issue voters. I consider other problems to be far more grave -- specifically: restoring the adversarial relationship between the SEC and the companies it regulates, and putting teeth into laws against white-collar crime. I'm a long-time libertarian who, thanks to this recession and its causes, has only recently become so cynical about human nature that I consider these reforms to be important.

In fact I think they are so important that if we don't follow through, the gloriously productive pattern of our society will be wrecked.

Yes I agree that copyright reform is important too... but if I write more than one letter to my congresspeople per quarter, or threaten to vote against them over more than one or two issues, they will just tune me out.

Depends on your definition of 'omit'. At this point in my career, I find that I have finite energy for any given task / bug / refactoring crusade, and it is far better to spend that energy renaming things (for clarity), and preening the whitespace, than on writing comments that nobody reads because everyone knows that code comments are misleadingly outdated.

That said, I think we both agree with the GP post that comments are needed when the reader will need information about why the code does what it does. I presently do a lot of work bugfixing code that was cranked out by our company's low-priced Indian counterparts, and sometimes I would kill for even one sentence of explanation, with which I can proceed to fix up all the variable and function names.

You can also spread your application out into layers. From your request I assume you will be collecting and/or publish sensitive data. It may be possible to divide that process into sections, and spread the seconds over three different machines, with custom-written interfaces between them. That way, when (not if, but when) your world-facing server gets pwned, the pwners will probably be unable to immediately pull anything useful out of the second section (on the second machine), since it isn't using any ordinary method (e.g. HTTP on port 80) to publish data. This arrangement, like a bank vault, is not perfect defense, but it does give you more time to notice the breach and react.

Yep, a clever choice of alias.

According to TFA, the Cutwail guy's real name is supposedly Dmitry Sergeyvich Nechvolod, phone number +7-916-4444474.

You're half right. Serious wine people are routinely unable to distinguish $8/bottle wine from $800/bottle wine in double-blind tests.

Yeah yeah, I know that part of the wine/stereo experience is knowing that the thing cost a grand... but luckily for me, my brain is sufficiently well-programmed that I do not enjoy that sort of experience.

They may have supposed the war would be short, but the desired effects of the war were (presumably) long-term. I don't know all of the goals, and neither do you, since we don't have access to the classified information that would give a full understanding of the situation. Single facts can greatly change our evaluation of a decision.

I do know that the publicly available facts are misleadingly deficient; my husband was there.

In any case, we can be certain that the warhawks' goals included: Iran, its simmering civil war, its oil, and its planned oil bourse; Iraq, its simmering civil war, its oil, and its pipelines; Afghanistan; Kuwait; OPEC; Israel; al Qaida; Syria; the black market in military hardware; the US, its unemployment rate (re: enlistment), its economy, and its recently sallied reputation as somebody you don't want to mess with; and all the unknown unknowns. There are so many variables, so many political figures, and so much non-public information, you just sound like a child when you assert that the deciders were "stupid and flat out wrong".

Yep, I'm moving too. Looks like HostGator is a good choice for where to move. I'm looking forward to my "Cancel my accounts, I think your organization is evil" phone call to GoDaddy, those are always fun.

If you conclude that your opponents are "crazy" or "evil", you *probably* don't understand their time horizon.

In fact it usually does. I'm a subversive libertarian, but I readily admit that most behaviors that garner disapproval -- shoplifting, profanity, physical intimidation, dangerous driving, theft, vandalism, cheating, tresspassing -- do in fact deserve it, in the sense that our society is more efficient at producing safety, comfort, and pleasure without such behaviors occurring.

Absolutely. Me too. My .sig used to say something like "Privacy allows you to behave morally, when those around you would judge you by an irrational moral code." But it is nevertheless the case that MOST gauche behaviors really are destructive to all concerned.

Well sure. We're social creatures, and so we look to our fellow tribesmen for cues on what behavior is acceptable. Having others cheating gives us a sense of permission to do likewise.

Add to this the fact that online interactions do not carry the normal risk of disapproving looks, shame attacks, and damaging the reputation of one's name. Such things are vital in maintaining a society's integrity, and they are almost completely missing online.

Alas, such programs are based on three assumptions, all incorrect:

• people prefer truth over cognitive consonance
• parents want their children's beliefs to be true
• parents want their children to be smarter and live better than they are

So naturally the program was cancelled.

When I realized this about our society, I pulled my kids out of school and now we homeschool.

Fascinating. The youtube video is now marked 'private'.

I'm hardly surprised to learn that the OWS leaders are no more honest than those they want us to hate.

And in the end, it's all about money. OWS's fundamental and unstated goal, of which all stated goals are outgrowths, is "We want more financial equality in our society." And their opponents obviously represent the opposite side. In no case it is obvious that our society's current level of financial equality is wrong. It is somewhere between feudalism (zero equality) and socialism (total equality), hopefully in the area where the incentives are right.

The problem with this simplification is that it is rarely obvious that one's belief is incorrect.

Certainly, we may encounter a piece of data or an anecdote that appears to contradict our belief... but the new bit of information is rarely the whole story, especially these days when we are only ever told half the story. (The whole story is rarely sensational, whereas half the story makes the subject's decisions seem unwise or "it's just crazy".) When I hear that someone clings to their belief even in the face of a new piece of data, I consider it as likely as not that the believer is simply being appropriately cynical, living as he does in a world of venal liars.

As well, there is a time horizon issue. What we call "beliefs" are often really general principles that predict long-term outcomes. These principles often produce short-term damages, which are then thrown in the believer's face as evidence that his principles are wrong. But that's usually just a disagreement over time horizons. Just look at the arguments for and against the Iraq occupation.

The atmosphere is the problem with cannon-style launches as Bull proposed. The higher up you can position the muzzle of your launcher, the less muzzle velocity you need, and therefore the less energy you need, and the less accelleration the payload must endure, and the less heat the projectile must resist. So an island at sea level is the very worst place to position your laucher (save perhaps for Death Valley).

Inside a mountain in the Himalayas or Rockies would be a far better choice, with the muzzle emerging at the peak which is already halfway out of the atmosphere (and completely out of the dense, dusty, insect-filled, and humid part of the atmosphere).

The launch accelleration is a more serious constraint than probably any other aspect of the project.