I agree that attacking small fishermen is not the nicest thing. And I'd much rather there were programmes to help fishermen transition to different jobs, like transforming poachers into foresters generally yields great results (such as in central Africa).
That being said, you could use the same argument for fishermen overfishing tuna in the Mediterranean and driving it to extinction. One by one they are just “small fishermen trying to make a living”, on a larger scale (and what with the commercial interests fuelling them), they are a direct menace to the survival of a species. (One can argue about how species live and disappear, but that's another question altogether, and as a general rule, conservation and not fucking with ecosystems is a good rule).

Now, if the boats your refer too are whalers, they have got to be of a large size, and it's unlikely that they are just small fishermen enterprises.

Justification of means is, anyway, always a complex thing. If you consider the harm being done to be far worse than the casual bystander, the means you will find justified will also be more extreme.

As far as I can tell, Sea Shepherd's sinking of ships has never resulted in injuries, and never happened with people on them. If you have evidence to the contrary, I'd be interested.

I find it very hard to condone harming sentient beings to defend ideas, but the destruction of property doesn't seem like an unbearable tactic.
Most social movements have involved some degree of sabotaging, and not to call a sympathy card here, but the French Résistance resorted to sabotage extensively.
I agree that ends don't justify means, but these means (non harming destruction of property) can be justified by a/ the greater good (loosely defined, and always highly subjective and arguable) and b/ enforcing international laws (by breaking others, which is where it gets interesting).

I fail to see how anything in your comment is related or answers my previous comment.
Also, I think your grossly exaggerating, but maybe you're simply not used to the concept of “civil society” and activism.

Lastly, saying SSCS are cowards is amusing, given they engage in direct action and walk the talk, contrary to many environmentalist NGOs.

Right, and GNU/Linux is a communist operating system.
FUD.

I don't see how hunting whales in a whale sanctuary is part of a sustainable fishing strategy.

Also, could you elaborate on how “their mode of operation is () destroying lives”?

Said this way, this is mostly FUD.

SSCS have never been convicted in court, to the best of my knowledge.
Even though they have sunk a good number of ships, including some of the Norwegian fleet a while back.

They have thrown rancid butter acid on illegal shipping vessels' decks as stink bombs. We're not talking fluoridicric acid here.
Look out for the “they threw acid at us” spin, the Japanese whaling industry is in an public image war with Sea Shepherd.

“Just doing their jobs” is probably the best bit though.

In other news, Sea Shepherd are a conservation group, they defend all marine species, including Tuna (for which they have been doing a major Mediterranean campaign). You should check the width of their action before pointing out “boo, there are other fish species endangered, so you get no points for protecting one and not all of them!”.

Interesting that while TFA is about clever use of technology in a space where it's not obvious, most slashdotters seem more interested in bashing the group of people using this technology for not following their (very traditional and anthropocentric) view of life. Nice.

I believe Watson left Greenpeace because they were softening up. Different interpretations?

The Japanese have massive factory ships dedicated to cutting up and conditioning whales, and according to Wikipedia: “The efficiency of these ships and the predation they carried out on whales contributed greatly to the animal's precipitous decline.”
These are, supposedly, research vessels. You have to appreciate the hypocrisy.

Also, Sea Shepherd vessels *are* vegan, to the best of my knowledge.

And SSCS also have a PGP key to send them encrypted email, c'mon, /. should approve of them.

I'm trying to figure out if you're trolling, or just have never considered the ethics of hunting and killing other sentient species for pleasure.

You may not realise this, but whaling is actually against international regulations. Sea Shepherd simply enforce the ban in International waters, given no one else does. They also protect and defend many other marine species.

It's called conservation.

Overfishing and fucked up fishing practices are incredibly common place, it's good we have some people trying to prevent it.

Even better! Thanks to our convenient, safe and secure process, the private key will be calculated from your public key and sent back to you via email for you to store on your new computer!

Excuse me, are you a lawyer to state so explicitely that downloading content you have purchased a copy of is illegal?

Actually, the whole barcode thing is a red herring IMHO, it's an add-on to the main app.

It's an exagaration to state that Transdroid was designed with the purpose of downloading copyrighted material without the right-owners' consent in mind. It was designed to manage torrents on several torrent clients.

Extra functionality (as well as clients) was added down the road.

Why isn't anybody screaming about the RSS function that enables to subscribe to feeds to automatically download then?

Pulling Transdroid is abusive, IMHO.

We all know bit torrent can be used for downloading Game of Thrones, pr0n, Microsoft COFEE or GNU/Linux distros... why would Google remove what is considered a "neutral" app all of a sudden?

The "it encourages to download copyrighted material through screenshots" argument does sound pretty week to me.

And anyway, what about the whole "it's pretty clear by now given the studies that downloading is not responsible for the downfall of civilisation as we know it and modern culture and is in fact quite beneficial for everyone involved considering the big picture" part?
A cue for someone else's rant?

By the way, you know which market still has Transdroid and plenty other nice FOSSÂapps? http://f-droid.org/repository

Thanks, I did not know that.

It's kind of silly to use an inferior codec for downloaded songs (and one that requires royalty fees at that) but I guess it's due to most people having portable music players that can read about 3 formats, Vorbis not being one of them.