Humans get a dopamine boostfrom being outraged and feeling morally superior.

I bet it's good to know you are better than all those people.

Well there is this thing in legal theory called "standing".

It's a good thing we don't need standing to express ourselves in public.

[International agreements], exactly, is what gives.

OK, but aren't such agreements usually limited to those specific terms which signatories agree to incorporate into local law?

Do these agreements instead create a situation where US copyright holders can sue in the United States without regard to what the law says in the defendant's place of residence?

How does a US federal court gain jurisdiction over a company located in Panama?

A ruling prior to this settlement held that Hotfile could be subject to vicarious liability for failing to comply with the DMCA (they allegedly ignored a bunch of DMCA takedown requests and failed to shut down a bunch of accounts despite repeat infringements), but the DMCA is US law, not Panama law. Unless copyright is somehow a special case (due to, say, international agreements), I fail to see why Hotfile should be subject to US copyright law anymore than US companies should be subject to Chinese or Iranian censorship laws.

What gives?

"The passwords ... are valid for only a brief time window each day, they said."

How does that work?

Something's rotten in the state of Texas.

"In the real world if I walked into a jewelry store and stole a $3,000 Rolex and offered the owner $100 for the watch, I would be guilty of shoplifting."

Thank you, Captain Obvious, for letting us know that if you stole a watch you'd be guilty of shoplifting.

"If you want a dedicated connection with a 1:1 contention ratio you're going to have to pony up more than $50/mo."

There's a difference between the natural degradation of signal due to demand and the intentional throttling of bandwidth according to content, IP address, or protocol. The problem is not contention, but neutrality.

No rational person would claim the coffee shop has to provide more than 300 gallons of coffee to a single customer.

No rational person would think a person can drink 300 gallons of coffee in a single visit. However much a person might drink outside your silly imaginary world, however, the coffee shop damn well better deliver.

"With the ISP I work for currently, 0.1% of our customers cost us 50% of the bandwidth. It isn't right that a few punks think they can try to destroy service for everyone else with what looks like an attack."

It isn't right to advertise high speeds only to cripple people's connections for making full use of the advertised bandwidth. If you can't deliver on what you promise, stick to promising 28.8 kbps and see how that works out for you.

Google not in France Not obligated to do shit for the Frogs Court orders, Just ignore them.

Google does have a French subsidiary, which places them under French jurisdiction. A bigger problem is the fact that Google has been ordered to block the images worldwide. Whether France has the authority to do that or not, I have no idea.

"Anyway we can go back to 2001 or so with the design?"

Here you go. There's also 1998?

"And we now have a thriving competitive market for phone packages and internet packages at very affordable prices compared to American, Australia and numerous other countries"

Your prices are affordable compared to America, but American phone companies and ISPs are also private. Could it be profitability has more to do with management than with private ownership?

"There aren't 'routes' when it comes to post, and if we want someone to be able to receive post when they live in the middle of nowhere then we either need to allow companies to charge them a fortune or we need to subsidise it in some way."

Then subsidize it.

"The cost to use the service has increased above inflation, which is why Royal Mail is finally profitable."

Government entities don't need to be profitable, and most of them aren't. Taxpayers are not shareholders.

"Your logical fallacy is [appeal to authority]."

No, it isn't. The message was in reply to ackthpt dismissing the article based on its publisher, without regard to content. An appeal to the author's expertise is perfectly legitimate in that context.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

"A good proxy server is going to allow your system administrators to decrypt your SSL connection. The proxy feature works for SSL but not before exposing all of the information in your connection to the administrators. So using an external proxy and SSL is not going to provide any security."

This is true, but only if your employer has or otherwise gains access to your computer's certificate store and installs a root certificate whose private key is known by the proxy. The proxy can then sign fake SSL certificates which it uses to decrypt, capture and re-encrypt the connection.