No, a chop chop receives the stolen cars (acting as an accomplice of the thief), disassembles them, and then sells the parts.

That part in parentheses is important: if the shop simply bought cars from whoever brought them in and then parted them out, that's a legitimate business.

Of course, cars are a little bit of a bad example because transferring ownership requires registering the title and whatnot. Let's talk about cellphones instead, since they don't: are those automated kiosks in the mall that let you trade in old cellphones illegal? After all, somebody could steal a cellphone and then turn it in at the kiosk. Does that make the kiosk owner a huge criminal?

You cannot conclude that "cameras cause accidents" when a far more plausible explanation is "shorter yellow light durations cause accidents".

Sure you can! You just have to add the additional claim "cameras cause shorter yellow light duration" and then apply the transitive property.

He was dealing with cash and bitcoin. Nothing else. So which one of those do you claim is illegal?

The person on the other side of the transaction might have been dealing with illegal goods, but that isn't and shouldn't be any of his business. Otherwise, you could make the exact same argument to persecute anyone who, for example, buys a car from somebody on Craigslist who then uses the cash to buy drugs.

Now all we need is for Anonymous to hack Sony again, replace Sony.com with The Pirate Bay, and put up a torrent of the movie. Then the lulz will be complete.

Nah, that's no good -- we can't have Sony actually do something good; it'd be too out of character.

No, what really needs to happen is that Anonymous should hack Sony a second time, replace the Sony.com website with a copy of The Pirate Bay, and release a torrent of the movie there.

But to not show it because some third-world dictator pitched a fit is a different thing. That truly offends me. We should be showing it precisely because it pisses him off.

Exactly. But since the theaters dun goofed and Sony compounded their incompetence with a double-helping of cowardice, we need to compensate. Clearly, what needs to happen now is for Anonymous to hack Sony again and release the movie to Bittorrent.

Is stealing from the Public Domain by turning copyright into some sort of perpetual entitlement morally justifiable? Not really. In the end, someone is going around the rules of society for personal gain.

FTFY.

Since the experimental design involved artificially aging [only] the skin by exposing the mice to tanning, they probably don't know yet.

We could also fix it by simply making a rule that "malfunctioning" camera + complaint of misconduct = bullet between the cop's eyes.

Renewables have the problem of portability. Some like wind and hydro electric needs to be located in the proper areas where they can get a reliable energy from. Others like solar do not offer 24/7 support. Batteries do not have the energy density that we get out of fossil fuel, and takes much longer to recharge.

That's why the real future of portable fuel is synthetic fuel (preferably from carbon sequestration or renewable sources, not coal).

After the rocket program had been canceled, it was expected that the tower would be useless when it was completed four years later. Lo and behold, now that it's completed it is indeed useless.

Stop signs are not effective for traffic calming.

Yes and no.

It's more related to the time period in which those neighborhoods were built, and how they were built. Grid street patterns were normal before WWII, along with smaller houses (Victorians, Craftsman bungalows, etc.). "Subdivisions" didn't become common until the postwar era, when sprawling ranch houses with two-car garages and big yards were popular.

Not coincidentally, those postwar subdivisions were also getting built at the same time as the civil rights movement: at the time, black people were "blockbusting" in those grid-street neighborhoods, while the white people were moving out to the curved/cul-de-sac subdivisons to get away from them. In fact, the restricted number of subdivision entrances/exits, along with the higher housing prices (enforced in the zoning code by minimum lot sizes, which forced lower-density development) were, in part, tools to keep out those perceived to be undesirable.

I know a "50 something" retired guy whose hobby is archiving pirated music. He claims to have "more than 250,000 albums" on HDD's. Sounds impossible but maybe he means "songs".

Assuming 3 MB per song (in MP3 format) and 10 songs per album, on average, 250,000 albums would take up only about 7.5 TB. That's not too far-fetched: the whole thing could even fit on one disk!