And you want cake (watch movie) and eat it too (not pay a cent).

Gee, those don't seem nearly as mutually exclusive as publication vs. exclusive rights. Heck, I see people doing that all the time trivially. Whereas I see a huge legal apparatus being swung into place in a vain and horribly destructive attempt to try to reverse the laws of nature to try to make publishing + exclusive rights a reality.

Did I force the artist to publish anything? I don't think so. That's the choice the artist has. Publish and be pirated, or don't publish and keep things to yourself.

I'm perfectly happy to find that only artists who are happy to work in an environment where they don't need control over my stuff and the ability to censor people in order to make money are the only artists who's stuff is available. In fact, I would be overjoyed if all the artists who want to tell me how to use my own stuff or control who's allowed to say things would just go away and stop creating things. Then the rest of us can figure out how to function in a reasonably sane world in peace.

Heck, I already find most newspaper comics too boring to read. And I don't notice that the authors of web comics are busily forming guilds to sue the heck out of everybody or shut down piece of the internet they don't like. Though a few have publicly outed people who repost their stuff without attribution and tarnished the reputations of the reposters. And I'm just fine with that too.

The artist has no 'right' to be compensate whenever something is copied after they've published it. After that it stops being their property. For artists who can't figure out how to live in that world, they can go away and I don't care.

And where did you get right to make use of his work without giving something in return to either him or society?

When he published it.

If I go pick up all the trash along a road, should I have the right to sue the city for the work I did without compensation? When did they get the right to have a clean street without contributing anything to me or society for having made it happen?

The story about not knowing about Python was actually fairly believable because it correlates well with the kinds of actions the company has taken and the other things the CEO said. So now it remains, how is it that his technical staff couldn't tell him the problem?

I mean, someone had to be told to actually put something at the domain. Someone had to make up the graphics. Someone had to publish the graphics on the site. I'm certain that some people in his staff were groaning and clutching their heads over what kind of problems this would cause them. How is it that none of them could come to him and tell him what the problem was?

I can only conclude that he makes it impossible for his staff to question his decisions. CEOs like that are awful to work under.

but you still in principle are not against taking the movie or novel that my brother put his heart, soul, and financial future into making and giving it away to anybody who wants it, because in your theory he has no particular right to the fruits of such labor because it's bits on a disk instead of, say, a piece of hardware like your the expensive computers and smartphones middle-class users use to view the content, right?

If that's how it is, then your brother shouldn't make the movie or novel. Your brother has no right to make a profit on this.

I'll consider this phone once CyanogenMod is available for it.

If TPB wins, the copyright maximalists end up with egg on their face over a law even they can't seem to follow. I will admit that the TPB winning this case is actually the worst outcome. Though the hay they can make while it's going on is almost worth it. I'm imagining the copyright maximalists are going to have some pretty interesting defenses.

But, if they lose, it's really clear that this is all about making sure the rules apply to the 'right' people. And it will done in a really public way that tells the people who vote that they don't count. And, of course, the people who vote still do count in Finland, and maybe they'll get off their collective behinds and do something about it.

Yes, the people complaining about the hypocrisy of TPB here are really missing the point. This isn't hypocrisy, it's high satire with the legal system playing the straight man. It's brilliant.

the fact that the media was far more opposed to such things on Bush's watch

I would agree. Though I don't feel it's so much left-leaning as Democrat supporting. I don't feel like the Democrats are really the left anymore. Just a different club with a different name that does mostly the same thing.

It's interesting who comes out to support which club when. Because then you can then often tell the people who are more interested in politics than policy.

Actually, the media bias is 'establishment'. And there's research to prove it. Establishment frequently errors on the side of government power, which is why there is sometimes a seeming left-leaning bias. But it's purely an accident of the fact that the left has been trying to use control over government for the past few decades to try to force people to act more like the left thinks they ought to. When the establishment that happens to be challenged is right-leaning (like the car culture of the US) then the media is seemingly right-leaning.

And this goes right along with your narrative of corporate bias. Large corporations are entities that have managed to make themselves part of the 'establishment' by playing the right political games. Some corporations get large without doing this, but until they do they will be subject to media attack.

There is also a loud and large lobby of pro-wind, pro-solar and pro-electric car types out there furiously personally attacking anyone daring to give a bad review to any electric car.

I would say the opposite. It seems that some people seem to have already decided that electric cars are a flop. And if they don't flop on cue, then it's the reviewers job to make them flop. The thing everybody seems to criticize about them is range. But it seems that this criticism is totally off base, and reviewers who want to highlight it need to make stuff up in order to do so.

It's the solution humans use in gesture-based communication. Eye contact. The computer needs an obvious eye, and the software needs to be able to tell when the user is looking at it. Bonus points if the eye can blink or move or otherwise express the computer's understanding of the gesture.

Well, that sounds nice. But the fact is, they don't assume liability. When someone uses a credit card fraudulently and the owner discovers this and refuses the charges the merchant gets hit with a chargeback. So no, they don't deserve the money they get.

Depends on my informal feeling about the 'risk level' of the machine. Some of them I do, but I also generally use an agent and don't type my key in unless I've explicitly run the program to load the key into the agent. In order to trojan that process, they have to break into my system. And if they succeed at that, I have far, far more to worry about than the compromised ssh keys.