Any petition website without a parallel anti-petition, allowing those who have heard about the petition but want to express their voice against the motion is a sham anyway. Without it, petitions are basically north korean elections.

This is no different than those petitions demanding some "human right" to check in luggage at no additional cost. it's a pathetic populist grab that ignores the fact that market forces exist. by limiting the ability of companies to offer (or not) locked/unlocked baggage included/baggage extra you're basically damning the mobile market to the "low cost" of actually-quite-expensive Southwest vs the actually low cost of RyanAir....

oh, and before all of you pipe in saying how mobiles are cheap in europe because you can jump from operator to operator - yes, this is true. however, this shouldn't mean that in principle a company shouldn't be able to offer a "locked to them" plan at a choice that you are free to accept or not based on the value of their proposition and that furthermore you should be obligated to stick to it.

The "writ large" subtext of the headline is that "somebody or somebodies in defense procurement is an idiot."

Not so fast there.

1. there are coordination costs and possibly size/weight penalties associated with installation of additional equipment.
2. the act of installing additional equipment and sharing the necessary protocols is itself a security weak spot.
3. it is hard to imagine where the two aircraft would be operating together and need direct ship to ship communications...
4. especially as they always have the ability to communicte indirectly via AWACS, etc.
5. and if they were in the air together, it is highly unlikely that whatever they'd transmit would be anything except other than a short time period thing that would be useless and impossible for an enemy to make use of (such as coordination information during an air-to-air engagement)

so let's be clear, smitty - what you are basically arguing is for FURTHER gilding the defense lilly and spending what will ultimately amount fo at least one human life's worth of effort to engineer this potential security hole for some highly unlikely engagement.

sorry, but no.

I have no doubt that things go on. I simply am saying that the person who posted the original story about the $30m (USD?) contract and the parking space and the french lawyers coming to america somehow and the same person who ordered, bought, and returned the stuff being the same person who visits the factory and writes like a 14 year old is full of crap and that this particular story is utter nonsense or cobbled together from a similar story that he heard some adult say in a different situation.

I'd like to know where in the USA you found a visit to the doctor for $50.

Folks, this story obviously never happened. People who have the power to both order and return 30m in equipment don't write like 14 year olds and there are plenty of other hints / discrepancies in this story as well.

should i bring out morbo who will yell at you that LAW DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY?

law does not work by your idiotic mechanistic application of rigid principles, so your slippery slope arguments are null and void, even if logically sound in some computer programmer sort of way.

honestly this is "law and policy 101" stuff. your argument is tired and deeply, deeply wanting.

government or private company?

will you at least get your argument straight? the difference matters, since presumably an argument AGAINST a private company doing this can be seen as an argument FOR government doing it, and vice versa.

the vast vast vast vast vast vast majority of copyright infringed materials are of recent vintage, making your argument both self defeating and a naked attempt at muddling the issue with some sideshow.

yes, copyright should be limited, but marginal effects on steamboat willie really are not central to the issue.

patents are a short 20 years or so and the resulting inventions have bought incalculable benefit to the world. virtually every pharmaceutical you have ever heard of AND NONE YOU HAVEN'T have been developed because of the profit motive that the patent system allows for.

> IP cases costs me my tax money and bring me zero benefit.

I'm so glad that you and everybody that you know have never been treated by any medication that has been developed by a profit motive possible primarly due to profit motive, or that you have never used any device brought to market because of the profit motive that patents allow for and also that you have never watched any entertainment that was generated as a profit making venture, again, due to copyright.

when you get back from gilligan's island, let us know.

thanks for contributing.

Thanks for the response. However, I'm sorry, but your argument is very wanting.

You are saying, quite literally, "because private companies should not be able to spy on internet traffic, internet traffic cannot be policed, and therefore all uses of the internet should be left alone." This is almost scandalous in its willful torpidity.

your argument effectively makes it impossible for law enforcement to engage in any meaningful oversight of everything from child pornography to bank fraud. "but" you'll say, "these are crimes, and copyright is a civil affair." except that it isn't.. or rather, what you will find yourself arguing for is for the government to be more actively involved in prosecuting copyright infringers- is this really what you want?

if piracy (i use this term as shorthand for unfettered, ahem, 'sharing') results in increased sales, then tell me why rightsholders are so against it? I find your claim about the spanish movie industry to be "flourishing" to be comedy, as anybody who can google the words "Spanish film industry subsidies" can quickly see.

I fully agree that civil liberties are important. however, they don't exist in a vacuum--for example, the reason that sweden is sweden and not somalia with regards to weapons is that swedish weapons laws are balanced. I suggest you have a read of the excellent (but dated) book "rights talk" which goes into this in some detail. while i understand that you try to frame this issue int terms of "big evil hollywood with its billions in profit" because that attracts teenagers to your cause, let's look more realistically on what's going on in sweden - the recent case and the court ruling against you vis a vis a small publisher of audiobooks is telling. http://edri.org/bonnier or are you going to tell me that the swedish audiobook firm was gaining business by having its work expropriated? how many examples, excactly, do you need of the chilling effects of piracy, companies that have gone bankrupt because of piracy, and BROAD academic studies comparing rates of innovation to IP protection (the "pro-piracy" people invariably make small focused studies to pick out statistical anomalies - like your spanish film claim which is not actually true) before you admit that really what you are after is power?

Umm.

1. I made clear that my 'wackjob conspiracy theory' was tongue in cheek.
2. your 'chain' argument is nonsense. see my response to 'RaceProUK'

law and policy does not work by slippery slope reasoning or by rigid application of principles, old testament style. until you understand this "law and policy for beginners" fact, you simply do not engage the discussion meaningfully.

for as long as there has been law, a key tenet has been that intent matters. this is the difference between murder and and a regrettable accident.

your applying of a mechanistic rule "link, therefore guilty or innocent" is naive and excludes that intelligent people can judiciously come to a reasonable understanding of what the intent of any given action is.

and this is the problem on slashdot - you think that law and policy is a series of mechanistic rules - like computer code. but it's not and it shouldn't be for any number of good reasons, not the least of which is that it simply won't work.

but you know - mark me a 'troll' - go on - call any reasoned disagreement as 'flamebait.' i've been on slashdot long enough to know the drill.

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?

i kind of have always suspected that you guys are actually funded by the big studios. as ridiculous as this sounds, they have the power to go after individual users in civilized countries in a way that small producers don't. voila - startups begone. of course, this is not a serious suspicion, but the pirate party continues, in my mind anyway, to be an incoherent joke with no real politics other than "well, we are kind of against things and we'll get popular support by basically promising free stuff to young people." --- all this in a country with a nearly perfect press freedom index (reporters without borders), almost no corruption (transparency international) and extremely equitable incomes (gini coefficient).

in other words, you're a party of affluenza.