This is not a popular opinion so I am going to be downvoted for pointing this out, but the second definition of steal (at least according to dictionary.com, so apply what worth you will to that) is:

"2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment."

So, at least according to that definition, steal can be applied to cases of copyright infringement.

Other examples of the word steal being used without anything actually being physically taken from its owner:
"The player on first is about to steal 2nd."
"That actor sure stole the show."

Personally, I find the pedantry over the word steal in regards to copyright infringement to not contribute meaningfully to the discussion in anyway especially considering that the loaded nature of the word is not in regards to whether the owner was deprived of something, but more in regards to the ethical nature of the activity. The word steal in this context conveys illicit behaviour, and so one could argue that it begs the question when you believe that copyright infringement is not actually illicit (or should not be illicit).

The tool is not open source, and it is not entirely free of restrictions either (cannot commercialize created videos if they include any Valve assets). This is not a jab at the tool though, it appears to be a wonderful tool from what is a generally wonderful company.

Although it would be nice if Valve would allow their assets to be used in commercial videos (say you wanted to make a cutscene for an indie game), but it is understandable for them to restrict this. You can still use the tool to make such a scene, it would just have to only use your own assets.

Checked GoDaddy whois, and the domain was registered using their Domains by Proxy service to hide the registrant. This seems to imply that Domains By Proxy was hacked / socially engineered in order to compromise the account. Worse, it appears that this was accomplished by someone with little to no computer or hacking experience.

The article does not go into detail about how the hack was actually accomplished, other than mentioning it was via a reset email. I am curious what this actually means for the security of domain names registered on GoDaddy using Domains By Proxy. Are they truly that easy to hack?

I tend to register all of my domains using the proxy service simply to avoid spam in my inbox.

Thank you for clarifying that. I did mean the Store / app market (as being an online service from which Apple generates revenue it is the most comparable to the Google search service on Android), unfortunately I just tend to lump the iTunes software and online component into just iTunes.

Whether Google has a monopoly on web search is irrelevant to the issue raised in the article. The present accusations concern their use of Android to drive search, not vice-versa. For that to be illegal / anti-competitive in the US, they would have to have a monopoly on smart phones (it is illegal to use the influence of a monopoly to drive other products, however, it is not illegal to use other products to push your monopoly).

Obligatory Apple comparison: shouldn't the iphone only working with iTunes be similarly anti-competitive?

I maintain that your position is naive. While I am no fan of how copyright is used by various entities (MPAA, RIAA, etc) and the specifics of the legal implementation (duration, erosion of fair use, etc), I at least can recognize the value it actually creates.

Take the movie or music industries for example (since you already brought them up). The multi multi million dollar budget movies that are produced are only created because of the environment that exists due to copyright. Without those protections, theatres and stores could legally display or sell these titles without having to pay any money to the content creators. No store that paid any money to the creators could compete since their margins would be worse. The end result is that no large budget (or even small budget) titles would be created.

Now, before you say that free titles could / would be created to replace all of these, look at the facts. People can create free titles now and make them copyright free, but they tend not to. Further than that, the overwhelming titles that are downloaded (movie or music) are the ones produced under the copyright exists model. These titles would simply not exist in a copyright free society, and that is the value that copyright creates.

As for your comments concerning currency, it still is an artificial economic construct (which you do not seem to deny?). So I take it that you are backing away or at the very least refining your initial statement opposed to ALL artificial economic constructs (so you only oppose those which you personally believe to not have value)?

Lastly, concerning patents related to the medical field, I am not going to dig up your previous posts as you direct unless your arguments in favor of such are substantially better than the ones you have made here so far.

Currency is an artificial economic construct, so should we allow counterfeiting as well? What about IP laws that are responsible for medical advances (or do you posit that we would have the same advances without these laws)?

Your position is naive, regardless of how much we all may like to pirate.

The somewhat easy answer (well, not really easy), is for countries such as the US to ban the import of goods made in countries (or even by companies) not up to a specific environmental standard.

Enforcement would be extremely difficult, to impossible, but it would prevent most of the large scale environmental problems (a large factory could not pollute egregiously since they would be noticed and caught). Small scale skirting of the regulations would continue and be mostly impossible to stop (but what you could get away with would likely decrease year after year as the major offenders cleaned up their acts and the non-compliant ones stuck out more and more).

When I first read your "car" analogy, I thought, where the hell is the car? But then I thought, how did you get to the restaurant in the first place? *BAM*, you drove. So there is an implied car. Very sneaky.

I think this is the first example of an implied car analogy. Maybe you should patent that or something.

There is a field of use restriction on the TCK tools preventing other certified Java implementations from being used in a mobile environment. Ostensibly this would be done because there is money to be made by charging for mobile implementations.

To add to the above, I believe the specific disagreements were in regards to licensing clauses of the TCK preventing the use of certified Java implementations in a mobile environment.

The particular licensing restrictions were not in compliance with the Java Community Process rules, but that unfortunately has not resulted in the license being changed. The entire fight seems to be directed specifically at Google, and Harmony is a casualty of the battle Oracle is waging (possibly at the behest of Steve Jobs who was a purported close friend of Larry Ellison).

The study cited has several biases in favor of the scripted languages that are acknowledge by the author in the references of your supplied link.

Primarily:
- The non-scripted languages (C, C++, Java) were tested under formal conditions in 1997 / 1998 (Java 1.1 I assume), the script programmers wrote their programs at home and self reported their times (and in most cases spent several days thinking about the problem before starting work, time which was not included).
- The script programmers were told that the programmer effort and elegance of their solution was a criterion, the non-script programmers were only told that the program would be judged based on its correctness (accuracy).
- The script programmers had immediate access to a hint (to resolve a misread requirement) which was only available to non-script programmers after they failed an acceptance test.
- The non-script group would have a cost deducted from them each time their program failed an acceptance test, whereas the script group had access to the final acceptance test data.

Overall, the comparison between the languages does not seem fair, or at least not the comparisons of the scripted and non-scripted languages.

We don't measure distance in seconds. But if we do measure the distance travelled at the speed of light in 60 billionths of a second, then we end up with something like 18 meters.

I am reasonably sure that we can measure distances on the earth more precisely than 18m.

The speed of light has been measured many times, and this experiment is not going to change the value of c (this experiment is not measuring c more accurately in as much as it is coming up with a different value for it). If c was different than we think it is, then GPS would not currently work.

So it would seem there is either a new discovery, or a systematic error with their measurements (which could indeed be the distance, or their clocks, or the length of a wire, or who knows).

I think in practice that the people perpetuating the man in the middle attacks will now just have to man in the middle two connections, instead of just one.

Unless the EFF has some magic special way of getting this data reported to them that isn't also susceptible to MITM attacks.

Which is probably balanced by the pro-Apple contingent who will always root for Apple even if they are bbq'ing and eating the starving people in third world countries.