The irony of this comment is that it advocates abandoning precisely those checks and balances do protect the general public –namely the consistent and open practice of law, the right to a fair trial, and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

Dear God.

Is... is this a joke? A Gay leaked the files, therefore Gays should be banned from the military? Seriously? This is modded +5?

What is wrong with people. I am fucking sickened.

In what way does this differ from what Apple is currently doing? You have to be a bit careful when installing OS updates if your iPhone is jailbroken. That's all. When has Apple ever bricked someone's phone for "trying anything funny?" Never.

This is a crucial point. With complex codecs like H.264, there is no single standard of 'quality' even when encoding at a given bitrate. Different encoders can produce wildly different results, and as the parent says, x264 is the state of the art. (I believe CoreAVC is pretty great too, but much slower than x264, and only available on Mac OS X.)

Bingo.

You sir ought to look up the Lisbon Treaty and generally do a smidgeon of considering-whether-are-actually-the-case regarding this set of completely incorrect points.

Err... pardon?

I wish I had mod points. This is a spot-on refutation of the grand parent’s comically myopic view of what’s “ethical”

The distance from Earth to Mars varies between 3 and 22 light minutes.

Assuming the summary isn't completely wrong, this is an excellent idea. In the UK we are under severe threat of a draconian three-strikes law. This is without question due to the behind-the-scenes lobbying of the record and movie industries. And also, of course, the general attitude of compliance of the government towards those interests at the expense of the original, liberal copyright law that benefits culture and the public.

Convincing the ISPs that the filtering/monitoring requirements of the draconian-copyright brigade are worse than having to deal with P2P traffic may be the only hope.

Reference: TalkTalk will resist net piracy plans

This person has no place being [i]angry[/i] that his computer's graphics card couldn't be upgraded. That information is plain and available for all the world to see. He bought something and is now [i]fuming at the manufacturer[/i] that he didn't do basic research and buy something more appropriate to his needs?

Please. We have to take some responsibility for our own actions.

The other thing is that there's a reason we have phrases like "eat your own dogfood". The meat in dog-food is not being farmed specifically for that purpose. It largely consists of the parts of food animals that cannot be sold as meat for humans.

Overall the use of this meat as dogfood can have no net effect in carbon emissions, because the alternative is to put it in landfill, where it will be swiftly putrified, returning its carbon content to the atmosphere. When it gets eaten, a large percentage of the carbon is temporarily sequestered in the dog, but then gradually released as carbon dioxide, true. In both cases, there is also a fertilisation effect, whereby the nitrogen (and some carbon) in the meat will be fixed by producers in the ecosystem.

The net carbon emission is the same in either case.