This is COMPLETELY wrong.

1. There is no copyright infringement in downloading a file.

Yes, there is. Making a copy, any copy, without permission is copyright infringement except for limited exceptions allowed by law such as fair use.

2. Files are. They just are. They are not "pirated files."

You're splitting hairs. That's like saying there are only cars, not stolen cars.

3. MAKING INFRINGING CONTENT AVAILABLE TO OTHERS is what is considered copyright infringement/distribution

Nope. It's just more worthwhile for content owners to go after those who are distributing. Both are against US law.

Just for fun, I did a quick googling. Here's a guy who claims to have defended people accused of downloading copyrighted content. Note that none of his proposed legal defenses is "it's legal to download copyrighted files."

http://thompsonhall.com/copyri...

It's pretty obvious to see why - the most effective form of rehabilitation would take seconds and put the perpetrator back on the streets within the day.

Ok, I'll bite. What is that, exactly? To use my frequent example (because it's been happening around here lately), you're a drug addict who breaks into houses and steals electronics. You get caught, go to court, and we do what that causes you to stop breaking into houses...?

Society is so used to prison sentences lasting months/years that it's an entirely alien concept.

Yeah, I do agree to a point. It blows my mind that minor crimes can get you 30-90 days in jail. If you're part of modern society or an income earner in a family, that's devastating. For people who are likely to re-offend, I think the rest of society deserves time away from them. The not hypothetical guy in my example was caught with stolen stuff from numerous houses in his house. Maybe you have a magic pill to keep him from doing it again, but my money says within months of releasing him, he'll be breaking someone's door and making off with a few $k in electronics.

So maybe turning prisons into hospitals would be a better idea. If someone is so seriously messed up that they'd kill a family for no reason, they clearly have something wrong with their heads and need help, not put in a hole and forgotten about.

Again, in some cases, I agree. If you're sick or damaged in some way that results in you being a danger to everyone else, I don't want to harm you, I just want to protect the rest of us from you. If that means giving you a magic pill, fine, let's do it. I don't think that's always the case. In fact, I think that's often not the case. If I'm wrong, I'd be delighted to be shown so and will enthusiastically champion giving out those magic pills.

Rehabilitate or GTFO.

That's remarkably easy to say. Show us how. I think it would be wonderful if we could catch a criminal and with a minimum of unpleasantness, turn them into a productive non-criminal. It doesn't seem to be that simple.

Why don't you cite some? You're making an extraordinary claim that goes against the common experience of almost everyone.

Personally, I'm not going to go read those links because merely from the headlines I can tell that the subject is prisons being run badly, not whether or not punishment works. That a thing can be done badly is not at all the same as a thing not working. Give me something that's at least plausibly related to your claim and I'll read it.

As I also posted elsewhere, people tend to get this wrong and look at the people behind bars when asking if punishment is a deterrent. Fail. Selection bias. You are testing the people who weren't sufficiently deterred. Consider everyone, and you'll find a lot of people who won't risk a crime because they don't want to be punished. Hell, I don't speed much, not because I think there's some moral imperative that I not speed, but because getting my insurance rates jacked up and having to go to court is unpleasant. I'm deterred by that comparatively mild punishment. I would absolutely drive faster when I thought it was safe if there was no negative consequence to doing it. You can be darn sure that even if I lacked the moral belief that robbing someone's house is wrong, I wouldn't risk a few years of my life for whatever material gain I'd get by doing it.

I really like that talk, and considered building one for my sometimes mosquito-ey back yard. Unfortunately, the laser bit is a problem. It's actually quite powerful. The DIY versions use a surplus tank laser rangefinder which is very not eye-safe. Blinding the neighbors or the dogs seems like a bad idea. There are "eye safe" lasers, but that just means you dump all the energy into the cornea, not the retina. I don't know if that would hurt, injure, or cause long term damage. Also, buying one of them of sufficient power is $XXXX. I thought perhaps of aiming it only such that it always hits the ground inside my yard, but then some shiny bit of metal ends up in my yard and I have the blinding the neighbors problem again.

In short, cool idea with lots of problems. I'd still love to have one.

Right. Github is located in a civilized country that also has unions and employment law. Unions aren't active in every company, and not active in most for that matter. Gender discrimination and harassment is illegal pretty much everywhere if not everywhere in the US. IANAL and I'm not going to go check all of the jurisdictions to confirm.

Everyone who has an opinion about unions seems to have a strong one. My own was formed at my first job where I made around $4/hour and got 1.5x overtime over 40 hours. The union guys got a lot more than that, though in fairness they were experienced and I was a kid, so "more" was quite reasonable. They got overtime and double overtime (3x base rate, or what they called "golden time") if they worked something like > 12 hours in a day, which happened from time to time. None of that really bothered me. Obviously, they just negotiated from a stronger position.

What bothered me was that they could spend a significant amount of that time just sitting on their butts and no one could do a thing about it. They had a "supervisor" who literally sat in a car all day long "supervising". Eventually, the company managed to get rid of that particular leech and just made one of the regular guys a shift lead or some such, and we got along just fine. The leech's parting words of advice to me were to find a job that paid a lot where I didn't have to do anything. In other words, do exactly what he had done. And then there's seniority. With a union, it doesn't matter if you're any good at your job or not, the only question is how long you've been there. Unions, in my experience, promote mediocrity. Oh, and then there's double dipping. Our work was primarily moving freight from one mode of transport to another. Typically from a ship to a train or truck. One of the enterprising union guys figured out how to sign up to work two ships at a time and only show up for one. He got paid for both. It was widely known that he was doing this, but no one could fire him for what amounted to blatant fraud. Maybe it's more precise to say it wasn't worth the fight with the union to get rid of the guy. Those instances of brazen exploitation turned me off unions.

Unions do have their place. When employers are abusing the workers, unions can back them off. Unions have enough power, though, that they can also screw over the employers AND the employees, and unchecked, they do.

Let me redirect you to your claim:

Even if frozen for a few seconds cell die.

Nope. At least not always. They also weren't cells in culture, they were ~1mm tissue blocks that had been removed from a live animal an hour or two before freezing.

I find the living cells in a 43,000 year old mammoth carcass pretty hard verging on impossible to believe, too. I'm just making the point that cells are more hardy than you might think.

IIRC, there's some evidence principle that if you should have records of a thing and I claim those records exonerate me, if you can't provide the records, then the court assumes they say what I claim they do. A principle like that would work well here. If you had or should have had camera footage of our interaction and I claim you punched me in the nose, if your recording is "lost" or your camera was "broken", then you punched me in the nose.

If ya don't like that, don't lose your recording and make sure your cameras work.

Mammoths don't travel at 500+ mph. Planes don't leave footprints or take great, big dumps on the ground to announce where they've been. Now, if they create a mammoth that can travel at 500 mph across water, I concede that yes, we may lose track of it.

I have personally frozen cells in a step-down freezer, then submerged them in liquid nitrogen for years, taken them back out, thawed them, implanted them, and had them grow. So...way.

Sure. Woolly mammoths are pretty big. One might even call them mammoth. If one gets out, it won't be that hard to find.

Besides, we shouldn't be talking about creating a population of these things yet. Lets create one and see how that goes. It's not like it's going to run off into the forest and sprout more.

No, but you also can't call the manufacturer and insist they unlock it for you. If they happen to offer that service, sure, you can use it, but the manufacturer might very reasonably require you to prove you have the legal authority to do so, which is pretty much what Apple is doing.

The inheritor is legally entitled to the data on that device (as they would to any other intellectual properties like writings, patents and works of art created by the deceased)

That may be true, but I don't see how you giving someone your iPad creates an obligation on the part of a 3rd party to help you read it. If you're going to give someone your iPad after you die, give them the password, too. Maybe dear old mum is quite happy for them to have the physical device, but didn't want her children pawing through her digital life. Who is Apple to decide that?

Jokes aside here, Apple is just being a dick, which is really what we can expect from Apple.

Quite possibly. Were I Apple, I'd want to help out, but I also wouldn't want to set the precedent that you can call me up and ask me to unlock someone else's device and I'll do it. Now if you give me solid legal cover, like, oh, say...a court order, then absolutely I can help you out.

Actually, that's not what I see. At that very same Home Depot, I paid for my stuff and saw the little notice pop up on the cashier's register "Would you like to pay for this with your Home Depot Charge Card?" Cashier said not a word about it and just dismissed the notice and saved me having to decline their annoying credit card offer. (No, I don't want another credit card, and I most certainly don't want a store credit card.) You might be right that most still have policies that call for doing this stuff, but a lot of drones have tired of it, and I appreciate it. Large companies may still push annoying practices, but if someone with a brain or conscience cuts them off before they reach me, I'll give them a pass for it.

Maybe it's regional, but the upsell is uncommon enough that I still notice it. I don't always object, either. I bought new homeowner's insurance and they wanted to sell me every other kind of insurance. I just told them "Here's what I'm paying now, if you can beat it, give me a quote." Didn't hear a word back from them.

If an employee didn't ask every customer about a cell phone AND a satellite dish they were fired. Even before that turnover was like a fast food place.

Funny, that's the kind of thing that makes me quit shopping at a store. Last time I set foot in an OfficeMax was when the manager walked away just shaking his head in dismay at what a stupid decision I made not to buy the extended warranty on a camcorder. I probably spent a decade not so much as walking into a Radio Shack after they actually refused to sell me a battery because I wouldn't tell them my phone number.

Just yesterday, I had somebody come up to me at Home Depot and tell me they were "giving back to homeowners" and did I own a home? Yep, sure do! What would I change about my kitchen? Well, I'm actually here for a deeper sink. Blahblahblah, they wanted to sell me cabinets. Hey, thanks for wasting my time lying about what you're doing. You're selling cabinets, not giving anyone anything. I won't quit doing to HD over that, but I will quit talking to your little sales weasels. I hate being rude to people who are just trying to make a buck, but don't waste my time with drivel like that.

Anyway, sorry for the minor derail. My point is that there's money to be made in just selling people what they need without a lot of annoying up/cross selling.