OK, I've had enough of this garbage. Time for a reality check.

In the real world, where everything that is done requires work, and possibly depletion of resources, there always IS a price that can be put, on anything.

We might not like that fact, and it might not be all touchy-feely friendly, but that's how it is. Effort is required to get useful things done, effort requires work, and usually resources, and thus it costs you (or someone else). Money isn't very equitably distributed, but the various forms of it are what the entire world uses to trade for time, energy, and resources.

But I'm really peeved by the completely BS second part of your point:

Fair enough, a statement of the reality that some people sometimes face. You might never face it yourself (be lucky enough to live in a rich country), but most people do from time to time. It's a horrible situation to be in, and I've been there myself more than once.

However, this sentence is simply your opinion of how you think other people are thinking, and is impossible to logically derive from the previous sentence. What a pathetic, sensationalist red herring. You should be ashamed of yourself. Do you have any proof at all that your second sentence describes the thought processes of the majority of people in the world? Because let me tell you, "you deserve to die" is a very hard indictment of someone - and the vast majority of people that I've ever known do not think in that way.

Also, the following is also wrong:

No, they don't. I want your statement to be right, for the world to be like that. But it is not. You don't have the right to life, you merely have the right to fight for your own life. There is no universe-granted right to live. Civilization of humanity has brought us the understanding, and in some cases ability, to try and create and defend a "right to live" through a thousand different constructs such as government, welfare, centralised planning, universal healthcare (for some), and so on. But the natural world in general does NOT provide that, and civilization's attempts to overcome that fact will never succeed completely. We just don't have the mastery of our environment to do so. If the modern world allows you the chance to avoid certain medical problems, treat others, and generally extend your life compared to no care and assistance at all, then good. But that's a privilege of living in a rich, modern society, and not some sort of "I inherently deserve this" right.

And second, 50 emails a day, each with 4 recipients, where none of those recipients are repeated? That's a bit of a stretch isn't it?

Just to clear up this one point - O365 counts *all* recipients towards the limit, not unique recipients.

That's not quite true - the reason that RIM's network went down certainly was completely explainable, but RIM just didn't deign to explain it. I find that difference important, and it's another reason to avoid all things Blackberry for me.

Whoa. That guy is the bloke *I* want around when the crap hits the fan.

You make me wonder who'd win if he battled a honey badger.

No, a developer who hates having to handle Apple's bizarrely modified, quite screwed up version of UNIX.

While not denying the possibility, I think it's a bit of a tangent to ascribe the diet aspect of colonising influence (for want of a better word) to resultant depression amongst indigenous people.

One thing you inevitably get along with a western-style diet, is a western-style social civilization. I'd be far more likely to ascribe a psychological effect on native people to the recently imported changed psychological & social structure than on something off in the outfield, like the diet that comes with it.

Surely a changed local psychology is more likely to affect the local's psychological state than something dietary? Call me a fan of Occam.

As a fellow Aussie,

The ABC impartial? As in, not biased towards or away from the views of one particular (political) party?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Oh man, that was a good one. It had been a dreary day until you came along. Thanks!nl

Ouch... that method fails as soon as you have hotfixes installed that aren't included on the install disk. I'm assuming, of course, that the rootkit infects/affects one or more files that have been hotfixed since the OS was installed from CD.

The only way around is to add known good copies of all new hotfixed files, as they're added to your OS, to a read-only medium (like a CD-R).

Not fun!

Yep, same problem here. I have a firstname@domain.com address, and I get multiple daily messages from people who enter addresses wrongly, people who give addresses wrongly, all the usual suspects. Tried for a few weeks to reply nicely to them all, but now I can't be bothered. My life is too short, and my time too limited, to clean up other people's mistakes like that.

The only ones I sort out manually nowadays are those that either:
a) relate to things I actually want my *own* account on (this happened with people registering for LinkedIn, amongst other things, with my address)
b) things that are really quite important - one poor bloke had a huuuuuuge tract of information, business and personal, entered into an account on some site... and accidentally put my address in as the contact. I spent the time contacting him, and sorting it out, because he had a lot of business he might have lost.

But the rest? The receipts for apartment rent (from the UK)? The innumerable misdirected resumes? The order confirmations? The random "hey, how are ya" messages? The possibly-important "here is the powerpoint presentation for this morning's meeting" attachments? The people who sign up for Apple IDs with my e-mail address? Sorry, just because you made this my problem by typing an address in wrong doesn't mean I have time to fix your problems for you. Straight into the bit bucket, baby... another donation to /dev/null.

I'm a bit off topic, but things like those you just mentioned remind me (and amaze me) again how *cheap* food is in the U.S. Your milk for $3.59 per gallon is far less than what an Aussie in Melbourne pays - $3 per 2 litres for branded milk (equivalent to $5.70 per gallon.)

And at the moment US$1.00 = AU$1.07, too. There's something to be said for economy of scale!

In some places, with some providers, perhaps. But it's not that bad everywhere: in Melbourne, I pay $60 per month for a cable connection (about 10 to 14 mbps) with 50 gb peak and 70 gb off-peak. And that's with Optus, certainly not the best or cheapest ISP.

Where are your numbers from?

Bugger! I stand corrected... thanks :)

Nope, he was pretty close. Your figure is way out - there's no way a gallon of fuel put into a cargo ship would move 1 ton 500 miles (or the inverse).

Witness the largest (and possibly most efficient) marine engine in the world:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer_RTA96-C

Fuel consumption is listed as 3.80 litres per second, or 1 gallon per second (3600 gallons/hour). That's a hell of a lot of fuel, and far off your 1 gallon = 1 ton moved 500 miles.

Cargo ships use fairly insane amounts of fuel, compared to how much we consumer-types are used to putting in our cars or even trucks.

Are you serious?

Are you really serious?

Do you honestly believe that any point that's more complex than a one line description doesn't deserve to exist?

I defy you to explain the point of quantum mechanics in one sentence. Or why we should/shouldn't (your choice) allow doctors to refuse to perform risky operations on people who continue risk-increasing habits. Or why electric power generation should/shouldn't (your choice) be managed by selling power on a market. *Without* assuming a massive amount of prior reading done by whoever you're speaking to.

Ideas that can't be expressed in one sentence are even worth bothering with? A super ignorant version of TL;DR? Absolutely priceless... are you sure you want to be posting here? Perhaps you should go over and post on Yahoo! Answers for a bit, instead. Some of us here like to explore slightly more complicated issues, because life is actually quite interesting once you get a proper attention span.

And yes, my tone is harsh, because this sort of attitude is a poor one. I find it depressing.

To me, this is the point. He has a right to be a dick. It's music he has written, and under the law he has control over who copies it. He is trying to stop people - by asking, not DRMing - from copying his work, without his permission, which is what he has, under the law.

His personal justifications or thought processes -

- are his own, too, and your belief in the correctness, legitimacy, or defensibility of those personal justifications has no affect on his right to control, under the law, how his music is copied.

I agree with the composer entirely in this case. If this young girl doesn't want to follow the rules, set by the composer as is his right under the law, then she can go and write the music she wants to perform herself. What's stopping her? Just that immature attitude toward the law that she has?

[And if she doesn't like the law, then she can do something about that too - study law, and work to have the laws changed. Welcome to what's called "civilization", with all its processes and structures... it's the main reason you exist today. Without it the world population wouldn't be what it is, and you wouldn't have been born, by a massive likelihood.]