Well, the whole point of plagiarism is that the author doesn't want to cite the source. Hell, you can blatantly rip off anything and be ethical if you're simply honest about doing it. There is a huge market for condensing complex arguments into a digest, after all, and that isn't plagiarism. It would be plagiarism if you condensed someone else's argument without giving the original author credit.

I think it is important to distinguish between the ethics of academic writing, which requires credit where credit is due, and rules governing high-school and college students. An essay that was nothing other than quotations from the NY Times, so long as the NY Times was credited, would be perfectly ethical but it might not comply with whatever rules the students were supposed to follow.

General Tagge: What of the Rebellion? If the Rebels have obtained a complete technical reading of [the Joint Strike Fighter], it is possible, however unlikely, they might find a weakness and exploit it.

Darth Vader: The plans you refer to will soon be back in our hands.

Admiral Motti: Any attack made by the Rebels against [the Joint Strike Fighter] would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they have obtained. [The Joint Strike Fighter] is now the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use it.

Flamebait, seriously? We had a whole debate about this last summer, and some members of Congress actually argued that the President has a Constitutional prerogative to use whatever intelligence gathering methods he wants as long as he has a plausible argument that we're "at war."

Note, that it doesn't particularly matter that the President argued he had Constitutional prerogative, presidents always assert that they have more power than they actually have. But Congress is supposed to be a branch of government competing with the President for power, they have incentives to check him instead of enable him.

So it isn't flamebait at all to note that warrants are questionable protection when it comes to surveillance activities.

We probably don't need an elaborate quantum theory to explain this behavior, but we might want to have it in order to predict behavior we haven't observed.

Wouldn't it be neat if we had a set of behavioral models that could predict how people would act in the aggregate for any arbitrary game?

Maybe that's not possible, but that shouldn't keep us from trying to do it.

Mod parent up. The EFF is grossly overstating their case here. The quotations in TFA are out of context.

Most posts on this topic have been along the lines of, "Maybe CAPTCHAs as they are implement now don't work, but here is a method that is trivial for people but hard for computers."

TFA's best argument, in my opinion, was that it is trivially inexpensive for a spammer to simply hire people to break CAPTCHAs. So, a method that doesn't annoy people but is hard for computers still won't work because the spammer will just use people. This is not a topic I know a lot about (not being a spammer I don't know what kind of revenue they generate) but would like to hear a response to this. Is the TFA off its gourd and better technology really will solve this problem? Or is gate-keeping for free services essentially pointless?

The first sale doctrine allows the owner of a copy to re-sell that copy. Selling used games is legal behavior.

While TFA doesn't say, creating a unique copy, just for that user, sounds a lot like not allowing re-sale. This is one of the most important functions of DRM. It keeps people from "sharing" their install media but also from selling their install media.

So from where I sit this system looks to be creating technological restrictions which exceed the legal restrictions on a copy's use.

That doesn't take market forces out of the equation. Supply is being controlled by the producer (as it always is), and demand is controlled by the consumer. If the price is too high, don't buy. If people don't buy, they go out of business. Market forces!

Full disclosure, I actually bought one of these spiderweb games. I had just played Fallout 2 and was looking for something similar gameplay wise. It was actually a disappointment.

But I think the grandparent's point isn't that piracy is good/bad/ugly or whatever. There is no judgment attached. It is simply a part of the current business landscape. For instance, maybe I hate the income tax. Maybe I think that there shouldn't be an income tax. But if I plan my business without accounting for income taxes I'm in for a world of hurt. And there are a bunch of things like that: employees want health insurance, customers want demos, you can't infringe on your competitors patents, etc. etc. The morality of these things are irrelevant. If you want to succeed you need to play on the field as it is, not as you want it to be.

While you might disagree with that, I don't think you can disprove it. When dealing with matters of morality I think you'll find it hard to establish yourself on any footing that could be considered proof.

I think this has two problems. First, there is no "Atheist account" of how the world formed. Atheists don't have a creation myth. In the same way that there is no "Atheist account" for how to cure cancer, or what the grand unifying theory of everything is, there is no "Atheist account" for how the universe formed. I'm an atheist and I'll gladly say, I don't know how the universe started. I don't know lots of things. My ignorance is no reason to postulate a god or gods, or aliens, or anything else.

Secondly, that the universe is constructed the way it is is nothing like surviving a barrage of bullets fired by a firing squad. I can test the average accuracy of firing squads. I can put up a target and yell, "Fire!" as many times as you like and see how often they hit it. A deviation from that average is measurable and consequently needs an explanation. But the physical constants of the universe aren't like that at all. We don't know how the universe started in the first place, or even what the physical constants are as physical phenomena. Obviously we can't start universes in laboratories and measure how often the strong force is x and how often its y and derive a probability function from that.

This is a variation of the watchmaker argument, so I'll use an analogy. Imagine that you're walking along a beach but instead of seeing a watch you see something really weird that you've never seen before. It's beautiful and intricate and you don't see any thing like it nearby. Would you suppose that it had an intelligent designer or that it had been made by natural processes? Trick question! You don't have enough evidence to make either supposition.

That the universe is constructed the way it is, without knowing anything about universe construction in general, tells us nothing.

While there might be a good reason to call Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the Constitution the "Copyright Clause" when talking about copyrights specifically, this clause of the constitution also authorizes patent law and perhaps other kinds of intellectual property that Congress hasn't been innovative enough to think of yet. We could call it the "Intellectual Property Clause" or the "Copyright and Patent Clause," but for my money I like "Progress Clause."

Steve, is that you?

Well, sure. But your opinion of global warming is going to influence how you go about solving those problems. Oil has a limited supply, but there is still quite a bit of it. Instead of phasing it out before it runs out, we might like to invest in politically stabilizing the oil pumping regions (I don't know, but there are arguments that this is what the Iraq war was supposed to do). Similarly, instead of phasing out coal we might like to make mining safer, and invest in "clean coal" which aims at much of the pollutants in burning coal, but not the GHGs.

Also, your opinion of global warming is going to influence whether you think global approaches to these problems are worthwhile. Mining coal is dangerous, but Americans probably don't care all that much how many people in China die in coal mines. Burning coal is dirty, but the brunt of the particulate emissions are in the immediate area of the coal fired power plant, again Americans don't care how much of this happens in China. On the other hand, if you think global warming is a problem then you'd like to figure out a way to get China to stop using coal.

While I respect your skepticism of the scientific press, I think this reasoning suffers from two flaws. First

Relying on the press to get your scientific information is going to be incomplete. The press reports particularly sensationalistic doom & gloom stuff, whereas most science goes out of its way to take a neutral tone. It is too much to ask a non-scientist to pay attention to the leading journals (I'm thinking of Science and Nature here), but we are also at a point in our history where science needs to inform our politics. This is obviously troublesome for democracy, and why I sympathize with your skepticism of science.

Second,

This reasoning is suspect because, aside from global warming effects, green house gas emissions aren't very harmful. It is relatively easy to see the pollutant effects of particulate emissions: they make things dirty and also hard to breathe. GHG emissions, on the other hand, are fairly clean and only have a mediated effect on human health (through climate change). Your strategy would have us fix only the easy to see problems even if there are more important environmental matters that require advanced scientific techniques to understand.