I had airport security find a Leatherman, with a nice 4-inch blade, that I'd accidentally left in my backpack. Pretty good, right?

Except that I'd lost it a year earlier and had traveled cross-country half a dozen times since then. With the same backpack. And - unless aliens found the Leatherman and jammed it in my backpack for me - the same Leatherman inside.

I was not impressed. (Though at least I found my Leatherman.)

Nobody owes anybody anything. Some choose to donate out of their own free will. Others don't. The freely-chosen donations of one person do not, in any way, imply that another person should be required to "give" in order to "match up".

If you disagree, then, well, my mom gave me a really nice roasting pan for Christmas. To match a small part of her generosity, I'll be expecting a measuring cup set from you.

My mom has been trying to start a new museum lately. One of the big projects is to set up Internet-based donations. Naturally, every state has its own laws on how donations to non-profits work. Non-profits have to be registered separately in every state (technically there is a "standard form", but the states who take it all require extra documentation as well) and tax reporting is just a gargantuan enormous burden. Too complicated for any small non-profit to ever manage.

As a result, there are companies that specialize in doing this for you. They take a small slice of the donations (something like 2%) and in exchange they manage all of the annoying reporting and legal issues involved.

It turns out that they're good at it. So good, in fact, that the Red Cross uses them because they find it cheaper and more reliable.

I see no reason whatsoever that a similar business couldn't form for internet sales tax. And, in fact, I find it almost inevitable that such a business will form once it becomes an issue. So, as for how much it will cost, and how difficult it will be to manage: well, about 2% of your revenue, if the non-profit area is any indication.

Plus the taxes that you now have to pay, of course.

If "goofing off with friends" is getting me a contract with Hollywood based on my "costs", I'd sure as hell better put a realistic price on that. Otherwise the lawyers show up a year later and ask me to please itemize my $300 costs and explain why this new film is costing so much more.

(answer: because suddenly my friends don't have time to subsidize my new film with their acting.)

I'm assuming Hollywood is not being idiotic about this and is taking that all into account, but, still, I'm curious exactly how much time it really did take and what kind of costs really were involved.

As awesome as that video is - and it is pretty damn awesome, let there be no mistake about that - I suspect that it only cost $300 if he's considering the time of himself and his friends to be worth zero. (I'm assuming the group scenes were the result of getting a bunch of buddies together.)

I'd be interested to know how many hours of his own time were spent on that.

However, it is pretty awesome and the mere fact that he can do stuff like that with his limited resources is a sign that he may well deserve that money.

This isn't related to your question exactly, but I've found magnesium supplements help (i.e. completely get rid of) my admittedly minor tinnitus. If you're not trying them, it may be worth it - I went to two specialists and neither of them mentioned it, then happened to run across a reference online and decided to give it a try.

Y'know, I remember when I was going online in my early teen years. I remember chatting with people online about all manner of things. Yeah, I went into a few cybersex chatrooms for the thrill of it, I hung out in adult discussion channels.

I learned from it.

I talked to 25-year-olds and 35-year-olds about philosophy. I spectated on public cybersex, and learned things about human behavior and desire. I watched people wiser and smarter than I was make good decisions after good decision, then fuck up, do something stupid, and recover from it.

Humanity learns from its elders. That is the way it has always been. The older ones teach the younger ones, the younger ones mull over what they've been taught and improve it, the younger ones become the older ones, the cycle continues. Why are we trying to break this? Children today are kept in the dark more than in any point in history - should we lock them in a small steel box, isolated from human interaction, until they're 18 and magically an adult?

I was emotionally mature early. Everyone I talked to said so. They said that at 16, I was wiser and smarter than a lot of their peers. And now I look back on who I was then and realize I knew nothing, but, indeed, I was still far ahead of the curve. Today, I give out advice to people, just like I was given advice to back then, and I know for a fact I've helped the lives of many people, I've given them a philosophical kickstart and pushed their lives onto good tracks.

And in twenty years, they'll be doing the same thing as I did, only even better because they'll have started from a better position, thanks to my efforts.

These recommendations are actively dangerous to the progression of humanity.

But did anyone else read that as "but [the government] still will search for ways to fight Internet privacy"?

On the other hand, I moved into my current apartment - with crummy power to the point that the UPS freaks out daily (for a second or two) - and immediately started going through incandescents like water. Perhaps twelve bulbs, and I was replacing one per week.

Eventually I blew two hundred bucks on good-quality CFLs. I've had exactly one bulb fail since.

From what I've been able to tell, CFLs are by no means immune to the you-get-what-you-pay-for syndrome. They're just more expensive to start with, so people skimp on them more, and get crummy CFLs, and the CFLs die rapidly. Buy good ones: they're worth it.

The grandparent post is ignoring the relative in favor of the absolute, but you are ignoring the absolute in favor of the relative. It's important to keep both of them in mind. Yes, LEDs have pollution issues. Yes, they are much better than CFLs.

Both of those points are valid and worth considering.

Depends. I'm imagining just sending the chemical formulas across. It wouldn't be all that hard to come up with a lingua franca for chemistry - it's not like hydrogen behaves differently on Alpha Centauri or anything.

Pin down the chemistry basics, get the essential formulas, then send "oh yeah and also titanium plus these chemicals equals this other set of chemicals, add electricity and you get this, then separate and you get this". At that point it's just down to an engineering challenge to figure out that "separate" means "in a centrifuge at 2000 degrees", and in the meantime we'll be trying to pin down more words just in case our scientists can't get it across.

The goal isn't to transmit the exact right words, it's to transmit enough of the core breakthroughs that the science teams on either side can reconstruct whatever's left.

Of course we'll probably burn a few weeks trying to figure out why it isn't working before they think to mention that oh yeah their atmosphere is 22% sulfur, that might be important now that you mention it

On the other hand, it also only takes one civilization to construct self-replicating peacekeepers that could defend the galaxy at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And if those self-replicating terminators already exist, well, we're fucked as it is, so we may as well get it over with quickly.

I actually wouldn't be surprised if we are the first, or at least, the first with a good shot at reaching an interstellar society within our galaxy, simply based on the fact that any species that goes interstellar will probably expand at nearly the speed of light after doing so. The mere fact that our earth hasn't been colonized yet indicates that there may not be any interstellar species within our light cone.

Useless, perhaps, but not technically impossible.

The entire Wikipedia section on the production of titanium is a little under 4 kilobytes, which would take a bit over an hour to transmit at those rates. Imagine an alien species has a new ultra-efficient titanium refining process - would you wait a day to get the summary of it downloaded for your scientists? I sure as hell would.

The two-hundred-year transmission lag to go a hundred lightyears is a far bigger issue than the bandwidth.

Why the hell not?

User confusion, really. Users are fragile and easily puzzled creatures. Every link you put on your website is a link the user can frantically flail onto and accidentally click. Then you end up with people on your forum asking why the OS isn't working. After all, they burned the file right onto the CD!

In the case of a beta OS meant to be run inside a VM, yeah, user competence is probably not a huge issue. In the case of an OS which is trying to be a mass-market OS, you want it to be as easy as humanly possible, and adding a torrent link to the homepage does not make things any easier.

Because people are making money off it.

Because the people violating that copyright are invariably the same people campaigning for the death penalty for other copyright violations.

There are other, less obvious rteasons. But in summary, there are a lot of differences between the two situations, assuming you're comparing this and the mp3 issue.