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It's true that there are some tentative similarities between seafaring theft and teenagers downloading files without permission. So your argument is not really incorrect.

But loose connections can be drawn between any two words. For instance, fast food restaurants often sell unhealthy food. Unhealthy food can reduce your life expectancy. So can suicide. So if I wanted to make an emotional argument I might call fast food restaurants "suicide bars".

But just because you can make such connections, doesn't mean you should do so. It's just a form of name-calling, and therefore childish and idiotic.

The word "piracy" wasn't chosen because it accurately described copyright infringement. It was coined by the Stationer's Company in the 17th century, which at the time had a government monopoly on producing printed works. They chose the word as a way of casting aspersions on their opponents, who were publishing without the government's permission. At that time, the connotations of the word "piracy" were far worse than the are today.

In more modern times, the same principle was used to compare VHS tapes to the Boston Strangler, and suggest that copyright infringement funds terrorism. It's pure hyperbole. A form of argumentum ad hominem. A way of appealing to people's emotions rather than rational thought. In other words, it's idiotic because it attempts to sway the beliefs of idiots.

Nowadays, real pirates are rather less numerous than they once were, so the term has lost much of its bite. When the content industries want to make an emotional argument, they tend to use words like "thief" instead. The word "pirate" has become almost purely descriptive.

The reason I still dislike this word is not so much that its original meaning has been twisted (that happens to words all the time), but because its indicative of distasteful tactics that are employed as much today as they were four centuries ago. It's name-calling by companies too stupid to adapt to marketplace changes.

Was your previous post meant to be sarcastic? If so, the humour was too subtle for me.

So your argument is that if you can find something in common between two words, even if in every other respect they are completely different, it is acceptable to substitute one word for the other.

Are you insinuating that kdawson would deliberately change a story title to be inflammatory and sensationalist!? Perhaps if kdawson had some sort of long history of trolling Slashdot with badly written articles I might be inclined to believe you!

Piracy is a term used to refer to copyright infringement, not theft.

It's idiotic because the use of violence to rob ships at sea, is rather different act than copying data without the author's permission.

No you don't. You're confusing security with authentication.

It's idiotic, but not a recent term. Unauthorized distribution of content was called "piracy" as far back as 1603.

Tor is a service for browsing anonymously, not securely. Security is handled by SSL.

Aside from a few edge cases, FF is generally faster than IE8, especially for sites that make heavy use of Javascript.

You seem to be assuming that just because some countries are getting richer, others must be getting poorer. Global wealth is not a constant.

But Stallman does not develop the Linux kernel; Linus Torvalds does. The lack of a stable ABI is not for religious reasons, but for technical ones.

The HTC Hero is pretty comparable, though. It's got a slightly less powerful processor, but it's slimmer and has a better touch screen, and like the N900 supports Flash video.

What would you propose I measure?

I've programmed in Java with a number of IDEs, and yes, the refactoring tools are extremely useful. But I also found that I didn't miss them much when I programmed in dynamic languages. It's my opinion that the very attributes that allow Java to be easily refactor, i.e. its restrictive and rigid syntax, are the very attributes that ensure you need to do a lot of refactoring work in the first place.

Secondly, even if we accept that being to easily rename things is an equally useful trait in any language, then I'm still not convinced that good refactoring tools are a cost that is worth Java's terrible syntax. At best, refactoring tools make hard things easier, but Java's syntax makes some solutions infeasible.

In other words, you're saying "In order to make naming easier, I'm going to make these classes of solution infeasible." In my view, this ain't a good trade-off.

I never said it was. My first example was an attempt to show that Clojure's syntax and basic data-structures support loose-coupling in a way that Java doesn't. My second example, the one you object to, was supposed to be an example of how Clojure's supporting libraries all tend to be loosely coupled.

I guess my example wasn't very clear. Here's the source-code of the read-lines function in question:

(defn read-lines [f]
  (let [read-line (fn this [#^BufferedReader rdr]
                    (lazy-seq
                    (if-let [line (.readLine rdr)]
                      (cons line (this rdr))
                      (.close rdr))))]
    (read-line (reader f))))

The read-lines function doesn't care what the type of its argument is, so long as it can create a reader from it.

The Java standard libraries don't do this because Java's type system isn't sophisticated enough to do this with any type safety. I guess you could use switch statements and casts, but it would be unusual to see such a design in Java, and counter to its culture.