The problem I have with this kind of logic is that phrase "who is a citizen of your society". What the hell does that matter as far as compassion goes? Some kids in Africa are starving, and you have more than you need, why is that?

And why is it *any* different?

The only coherent answers I've ever gotten devolve to racism and/or tribalism.

The difference here is that (at least theoretically) you can turn it off.

None of this means anything unless you know the relative priorities assigned to these tasks.

If there are 1000 agents assigned to missing persons, and they reduced that to 995 by having those 5 people work on copyright, it's nonsense to say that they prioritize copyright over missing people. Missing people are still a much much larger priority than copyright in that case.

Only if they have more resources working on copyright enforcement than missing persons would it make any sense at all to say they're prioritizing the former over the latter.

Look at it this way, they must have a top priority (though it's possible there might be ties)... unless they have every single person at the FBI working on that top priority, this fallacious reasoning would deduce that the top priority is lower than the next highest priority. That's clearly nonsense.

This was true in the early days of the internet, but these days the amount of money pumped into building the infrastructure by private parties *far* exceeds any money the government has every put into it. Generally they even have done it using easements they already had for other reasons, so even that's not a particularly good argument.

Still, this whole thing is dumb. ISPs should be clamoring for the inherent protection from liability they would get by *not* discriminating by content the data that traverses their network. You control it, you're (at least partially) liable for it. Period.

All of these legal tricks strike me as incredibly unnecessary and vastly more complicated than they need to be.

It is prima facie obvious that if ISPs control the data that goes over their pipes in *any way* based on the content then they are at least partially liable for the content of that data, and should be exposed to lawsuits over it.

They seem to want to get all the benefits of being a common carrier without suffering any of the logically necessary consequences of that.

We shouldn't *need* to enact net neutrality. The ISPs should be rushing to insist on it. You just have to lay out the liability in a form everyone can understand.

Am I the only one that misread the headline and expected to see an announcement that Rolls Royce had won a bid to build a Mars rover for the first time?

Real books don't work the way this particular gesture does. Drawing your finger down the right edge of a book doesn't cause a bunch of pages to flip over to the other side progressively, nor do the pages become transparent.

There may be (probably is?) prior art for this invention, but books are not it.

There's little practical limit (though "infinite" is a gross exaggeration, given physical storage requirements) on replicating data. So "data" qua "data" is nearly an infinite resource.

There is, however, a strictly limited amount of *new* data. Whether we like to think it or not, the "newness" of data has value. Once it is copied infinitely, or has existed for long enough, its value (both as a producer and consumer) is essentially zero.

Every copy made of data reduces the "newness" component of the value of that data roughly proportional to the number of copies existing.

Ok, sure *originally*, but that's a bit like saying that NASA can put conditions on people's ability to buy and drink Tang.

Only a *tiny* fraction of the internet is government funded, created or even researched any more. If they want to prohibit India from visiting .gov sites, more power to them.

And also, BTW, it's a software patent.

Yet *another* reason to install AdBlock... reduced propaganda!

The difference between those scenarios is that in the yelling through the window case, the actual activity was observed from school grounds, and the student was proximate to school grounds. The disruption occurred on school grounds and therefore is reasonable excuse for suspension.

In this case, the people reading the profile were not on school grounds at the time, nor was the student when doing that action. Additionally, the notion that the authority of the principal and teachers must remain unquestioned is a dangerous one that is the root cause of many problems in the world today. It's *disruption of the school environment* that needs to be controlled.

Even if I bought this, which I don't, it doesn't apply in any of the situations we're examining here. The incidents mentioned in the article were all about *surreptitiously* recording the police and using it later. Obviously if a trained observer doesn't notice the camera, it's not going to have the effects described here.

Ummm... Corporatism is the exact *opposite* of fascism. It's even more insidiously bad, but it's not just another word for the same thing.

In fascism, the government takes control of the operations of corporations for the benefit of the state, while nominally leaving the ownership of those businesses in private hands.

In corporatism, the corporations take control of the operations of the government for the benefit of the corporations, while nominally leaving ownership of the government in the hands of the people.

I have to read between the lines a little, because as usual we don't have a link to the *actual* study, just some journalist's warped view of it, but, that said...

Non-addicts can *exceed* baseline using caffeine, but addicts cannot. I don't think this study measured the length of time addicts and/or non-addicts can remain at or above baseline, but the notion that non-addicts would outperform on this metric is a reasonable hypothesis to take from the study. Of course, it needs to be extensively tested (I'll get back to you on that after my coffee break).

The conclusion is that it is best to use caffeine in moderation and on an as-needed basis rather than chronically.