No, I do not agree with that defeatism. They have not won. In fact, their cause is a losing cause. And they know it. Secrecy and treaties tried as attempts to bypass legislatures are not signs of power, they're signs of weakness. Enforcement is utterly impractical. No organization has the power to force everyone to obey copyright. It only works somewhat because people are willing to obey it, thinking that doing so helps artists.

What can we do? If we do nothing, they lose. The only way copyright cartels can win is if we help them win. Don't help them. That's all you and everyone else has to do. Don't buy DVDs or CDs, or devices that play them. Don't buy devices that enforce DRM. If you want to help, we can do a bit more than that. Use your public library, and not corporate bookstores (*cough* Amazon *cough*). Help crowdfund art projects. Tell your schools to use open, libre textbooks. Tell the library and politicians you want libraries and schools to have digital options for everything, as soon as possible.

Copyright infringement is not stealing! It should never have been criminalized. It should not even be a civil violation, or thought immoral or wrong. Sharing is a public good, and as such should be encouraged. Yes, encouraged. The government should never have tried to regulate sharing. Restricting copying was a terrible way to raise revenue for any purpose, and as for the stated purpose of enabling producers to profit and thereby encouraging more production, it is failing miserably. Instead, copyright and patent law are frequently misused to censor and suppress the very arts and sciences it was supposed to encourage.

The real greedy scum in this show are the RIAA and MPAA members. Many people, and apparently you too, have swallowed their line of reasoning. They are nothing more than slimy monopolists. They squelch most art to keep the rest small enough for them to manage it all themselves. They own it, or they bury it. In doing so, they hold us all back. Who knows what scientific advances we would have now-- cures for cancer, solutions for famines, and so much more, if they had not created this climate of denial of knowledge.

Want to be careful about criminalizing an action. Governments are all too likely to seize upon that as a revenue opportunity. If the rules are themselves bad or counterproductive, breaking them may be to everyone's benefit, and the only way to get the government to see that a particular change is necessary.

Especially in software engineering, which is notorious for being difficult to estimate, customers are always paranoid that they are getting a bad deal, and often compensate by making excessive demands. They will try to put the screws to you, threatening to take their business elsewhere if you resist their extreme demands. You have to finesse that kind of pressure. Not an outright, flat no, but counterproposals that won't break your company. I've seen more than one business fail because they didn't push back hard enough. Sometimes the customer got what they wanted, at far too low a price and then the vendor folds, and sometimes they didn't because the vendor folded before delivery.

This problem is harder to avoid than it might appear. in one case, the company was screwed by their own employees, that, to be fair, they had put in a bad position. The employees were told that if the company didn't win the contract, they would all be laid off. So what happened? The employees did anything they had to, to win the contract. They lowballed their own company. They severely underestimated the effort and work required, coming up with a plan that called for the job to be finished in just 6 weeks, with another 6 weeks margin of error. Even the customer was doubtful that the work could be done that fast, but the deal was so good, from their point of view, that they accepted. Why management approved it, I'm not sure. Desperation maybe? They blew right past the 3 month mark of course. A deathmarch was nowhere near enough to compensate. After 8 months, they managed to deliver one working part, just enough so that the customer grudgingly decided not to sue them. The customer had little appreciation or sympathy for the vendor's plight. The rest of the work was abandoned. The company lost a lot of money on the deal. One bad deal wasn't fatal, but they made several other bad deals, and those were enough to kill them.

To add to the parent, austerity helps the rich and hurts the poor. How? By driving inflation so far into the dirt that we have deflation. Deflation makes debt more burdensome. If you have debt, and your income gets cut thanks to deflation, it's now harder to pay off your debt. Your material assets also go down in value, so selling to pay off your debt isn't as effective. You may be underwater, your house now worth less than the amount you still owe on the mortgage, and it may be impossible to pay off your debt. Meanwhile, piles of money are worth even more. And it becomes a better idea to sit on piles of money, rather than invest it in business ventures. Trickle down economics is completely backwards. Give the rich more money, through tax breaks and austerity, and they won't respond by creating more jobs. Instead they'll hoard. You have to have some inflation to keep the economy moving. Just how much inflation is the question, but 2% is thought to be too low.

What's so crazy is that we really do have a lot of work to do. We have crumbling infrastructure that's been neglected for years thanks to relentless budget slashing. We also have a big problem with Climate Change. The work is not getting done. In times like these, workers are dirt cheap, but even now employers still want wages pushed further down, and refuse to let the government compete for workers. It's nuts. We may have to see some more bridge collapses, like in Minneapolis, to get some attitudes changed. If the elite aren't careful, we will have riots, like what happened in Greece.

Jeez, again? Do you want the list? There's reason for the hate. Big corporations have shown, time and time again, that they are not to be trusted. When a company like Microsoft rolls out "Trusted Computing" and it turns out that it does the opposite of what the product is named, and they try to pass it off as actually enhancing trust in a roundabout way, they show how insulting, stupid, and treacherous they really are. Same story with Windows Genuine Advantage. They keep trying to conflate security for us with security for them against pirates which somehow includes everyone. By their lights, we're all guilty of piracy. Microsoft still sponsors the Business Software Alliance. And that's hardly the only dirty crap they've pulled. What about file format lock in? Bribing and threatening members of standards bodies to ram through their OOXML garbage? The Microsoft Tax? Embrace, extend, extinguish?

Microsoft thinks we are so stupid that all of us swallow that? I don't like the constant demands to prove that I am not a pirate, or the implication that all copying and downloading is probably piracy and is bad and immoral. The whole intellectual property narrative they pitch is warped and wrong, but there's no convincing them of that. We made them one of the richest companies in history, and the founder Bill Gates into the richest person in the world, but that's not good enough for them, no sir! In spite of all the wealth we've paid them, they've worked themselves into a fury, feeling all wronged over the "theft" they believe they constantly suffer from those dirty pirates. Do I need to keep looking over my shoulder, to check if the BSA is coming for me today? Innocent until proven guilty, unless you're a Windows user, then it's the other way around. The only reason many people continue to do business with a company with such a bad attitude is force. Many feel that they still have to use MS Office. But love MS? No.

Any place could be linked to child porn. Poles are often used to hold signs, for rewards for missing dogs, lawn mowing services and that sort of thing. If someone posts some kind of solicitation for child porn on a pole, is the city that owns the pole somehow liable or responsible? Of course not. If the city also puts signs up on the pole, advertising their services, does that change things? No. Why should it be any different for a web site? So it's not useful to drag child porn into the discussion. That's like saying water is wet. And applying a double standard. Person A got wet, and it's no big deal, but person B also got wet, and on the Internet, oooo!

Better is to compare the Pirate Bay to a dating site which runs ads. The site is profiting off of love, showing ads to people who are trying to find a date. Nothing immoral about that. But imagine that the dating site is trying to operate under a very prudish public and government who doubts the morality of their activities, accusing them of enabling prostitution, and constantly threatening not to go after prostitution only, but to shut the whole thing down under the thought that it's all prostitution anyway. Law enforcers are egged on by powerful interests that aren't interested in justice, but rather are interested in eliminating competition any way they can. Dirty pool.

But they are also spreading a political message, saying that they see nothing wrong with prostitution. There's nothing wrong with that either. We do have freedom of speech. If the users of the site turn towards prostitution or are already mostly prostitutes and "Johns", does that somehow change the morality? No! To shut down the site is about the same as tearing out a pole because someone advertised sexual services on it. Ripping out the pole is not going to stop anything, solve any problem, or convince anyone of the error of their ways. There are other poles. They can't all be torn out, and even if they could, people could use walls instead. Also, tearing out poles is damaging. Innocent 3rd parties, perhaps trying to find their lost doggies, will be harmed.

The Pirate Bay should be left alone. They didn't do anything wrong. We know very well that they are being made into scapegoats for what their users do. Why don't authorities go after the users, as they ought since those are the people who are actually guilty of violating the law as it stands currently? They've tried, and managed to torture a few victims, make examples of them, rather like the Inquisition used to do. But they've seen that they simply can't do it. They would have to charge half the world with piracy. If they can't scare people away from copyright infringement, or convince people it's immoral, no force available to the law can stop it. No technical measure can stop it either. They are trying very hard now to save face, refusing to admit that they can't stop it, refusing to talk about it, and still hoping that somehow the public will come around to their viewpoint. It won't happen. They are definitely refusing to admit that they are actually the ones in error. And that the law will have to change. The Inquisition discredited itself centuries ago. It was a stupid idea from the start, trying to frighten and bully people into being better Christians according to their narrow definition of what it meant to be a good Christian, which excluded Protestants. Today, Protestants enjoy the same rights and protections as Catholics, and the Inquisition is properly seen as at best a tragic mistake and at worst a vehicle for sadists and torturers to have a little fun. Now here we are, repeating that mistake but this time with copyright law.

You touch on the perils of our unprecedented increase in our power to control our environment. We do all kinds of things not because they are a good idea, but out of instinctive prejudice. For instance, mowing the grass. One idea I have heard is that we like grass short because poisonous snakes can't hide in it. We couldn't do much to satisfy that prejudice before the advent of powered mowers, just took way too much labor. Now that we can mow quickly, we do so with a vengeance, to the detriment of biodiversity, the environment, and even our own health and well-being. We've even anointed a few species of grass, shrubs and trees as desirable, and call all other plants weeds. In many cities, it's even against the law to let the grass get too high. Crazy.

I thought of fireplaces as primarily entertainment devices, but I like your take on it better. So many people really like to watch the pretty flames. I confess I like it too, but not so much that I'm willing to work for it. Once again, we have gained the power to have far more fire than we need, and have let our love of fire lead us into unthinking wastefulness.

Light is another of our prejudices. We are not nocturnal. Darkness has become associated less with rest and sleep and more with crime and evil, and plain inconvenience. In our eternal drive for more security, we've done all in our power to banish darkness. Who's afraid of the dark? We are. We have streetlights everywhere. Keeps crime down, they say. Maybe we should not drive at night? What if it was the custom to not drive at all in the dark, and cars did not have headlights because they are not needed? Before artificial lighting, people didn't travel much at night. And now? We don't have to quit when the sun sets, we can keep working. We could do that before the incandescent light, with candles, but candles were inconvenient enough that we usually didn't. Now, it's so easy to stay up late. We don't give ourselves enough sleep, and we're finding out what that does to us. It could be one of the factors causing the obesity epidemic. One popular idea for the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire is lead poisoning. Lot of the emperors behaved in just plain crazy ways that could be explained by mental problems caused by lead poisoning. Doubtless most of the elite of Roman society suffered the same affliction. In the future, will America decline and fall because of sleep deprivation empowered by artificial lighting?

Even indoor climate control may not be pure, unadulterated goodness. I've read that it's actually healthier to swing a bit with the seasons. Don't try to force the house to be a constant 75F year round. Let it drop to 70F in the winter, and rise to 80F in the summer, or more.

So many of our modern conveniences have non-obvious dangers. Bisphenol A sure is convenient, but now we are more aware of problems with it. We would be wiser to fear those dangers more, and worry less about other dangers, particularly foolish ones like that gay marriage could somehow be a threat to the family.

That's what I want. These "smart" homes are the wrong kind of smart, when it means stuffing the house full of expensive gadgetry of little practical use. A house like that is designed to extract the maximum money from home buyers, by dazzling them with ostentatious "tech light" junk. It's not actually meant to be more liveable or something.

One luxury house built around 1880 that I looked over was full of hokey gadgetry that makes us all laugh today. A laundry room with a wood burning heater for the irons (sad irons) so the residents could have the wrinkles removed from their clothes the moment they were out of the wash! This house was built with gas lights, and that was later upgraded to incandescent lighting. Curiously, it had some silly centralized control. By the front door was a large panel of switches for turning on and off all the lights in the house. Does that sound sort of familiar, like maybe even "smart"? 19th century style "smart" home? Also in a room near the front door was a large clock that tracked phases of the moon and sunrise and sunset times. Today, there's an app for that, no need to waste valuable floor space on such a clunky apparatus.

As far as low hanging fruit goes, housing in the US is a target rich environment. There are so many stupidities in how homes are currently constructed. Yeah, LED lighting is good, but you know what? A skylight is even better. Also, so many people in the biz, including the buyers, are really stuck on antiquated and exremely inefficient construction methods. Don't have a brick layer work with tiny bricks, at the least use cinder blocks! Even better, just make entire walls off site, truck them in, and erect them. Can have the walls up in hours. That method works great for commercial buildings, why can't the same thing be done for residential? No reason at all, it's just inertia and custom. Also explains why we still have fireplaces everywhere. Ben Franklin complained about their inefficiency and wastefulness all the way back in the 18th century, and here we are today, still shoving those things into new homes! Then there's the roof. Why, why do people just have to have a complicated roofline? More expensive and less durable at the same time.

No, you don't get it. (A child porn comparison? Really? Weak, dude, really weak. Maybe you could try for a more accurate and less loaded analogy?)

The Pirate Bay is helping the world see that copyright does not work. They aren't parasites, copyright is a bad business model. And, artists will not starve without copyright! There are other ways to earn a living from art.

The real parasites are the Big Media companies who stole works from the public domain by extending copyright again and again, despite that flying in the face of the public interest. They helped cause this backlash through their greed. Copyright might have hung on longer otherwise. Don't think for a moment that we have forgotten being forced to pay the Microsoft tax, and in the "no good deed goes unpunished" department, purchasing media like good citizens only to be rewarded by being forced to watch unskippable commercials at the start, and being told we can't format shift or time shift the media we bought, and even fed propaganda against used record stores and libraries! One of the worst offenses was Sony's CD with the rootkit. They're so damned arrogant that they think their precious copyrights are more valuable than their customers' data? Why aren't you complaining about them? Why do you pass over their far worse crimes and thefts in silence, while screaming about the supposed immoralities and thefts committed by perfectly ordinary citizens? Do you love Disney that much?

Most of all, these antiquated laws are harming us all. We should have had a real digital public library by now. Instead, the works availabe online are scattered, fragmentary, and mostly unsearchable. Good work is being overlooked and buried, for the sake of Mickey Mouse.

Regurgitated? If they made a superhero movie featuring Captain Copyright, I'd pirate it in a heartbeat!

Or, maybe, I'll watch it for free by checking it out from the library some day, if they have it and I'm that bored.

Kudos to you for doing a solar panel installation. I've been thinking of my own, but feel that it is still too expensive. I think it is still "big dumb engineering", though I understand solar has gotten much better in recent years. A 30 year or longer payback period is just too long for me. There is so much that can happen in 30 years: technological improvements and price drops, and you may move or die, or your house may be destroyed by fire, tornado, earthquake, flood, or termites.

What I mean by big dumb engineering is exemplified by the double pane windows. Save up to 50% on your heating and cooling costs, they say. How much to replace all the windows and glass doors? Why, only $10,000! I spend about $700 per year on heating and cooling, so the windows only save me $350 per year at best, which makes for about a 30 year payback period right there. I very much doubt I'd see a 50% cut in my heating and cooling costs anyway. A better solution is to put curtains on all the windows. Way, way cheaper, and looks nice too.

Anyway, I've read the first use of solar should be for hot water. There too, I've had no luck. One business quoted me an incredible price tag of $17,000 for their solar water heating system. They quickly rolled out discounts and tax rebates and the like, and got it down to $6000. Nope, still too expensive. I replaced the tank water heater with another tank water heater for $350 (it's nearly the lowest quality available, warrantied for only 6 years), hoping to buy more time for solar water heating to come down in price.

I've gone for much more modest improvements. Replaced incandescent lights with CFLs, and now LEDs. The 4 ft fluorescent tube has been improved from 40 watts to 32 watts and the diameter shrunk a little, and I upgraded to 2 of those when an old ballast went bad. There was this 80plus program to improve the efficiency of computer power supplies. My newest computers are small footprint and low energy, using only 30 watts maximum, and I set them up to sleep after 10 to 15 minutes of inactivity. Tube monitors and TVs are all gone, replaced with flat screens. Most of all, I've let the temperature swing more with the seasons, living with 83F in the summer, and 70F in the winter. I'd go even colder, but the rest of the family whines too much. All that has cut energy use by about 50%. Was using around 10,000 kWh per year, and now I'm at 5200 kWh.

Thank you. I want to add a simple statement:

Doing something always helps the economy.

To create jobs, it doesn't matter what we do something about, just that we do something. All these cries that doing something about Climate Change will cost jobs and hurt the economy are dead wrong.

I thought I could ignore politics and focus on engineering and science. No professional employee gets to do that. Try it and you will not be employed much longer. You have to CYA. If you don't, at some point, morons will make you the scapegoat for something, no matter how idiotic and harmful it would be. Or maybe they will target you because they view you as competing for a valuable job they'd rather hand to a relative or friend, and you look easy to take down. Even if firing you is the equivalent to the company of cutting off their right hand, they will do it. Being able to say "told you so" if they do it, and end up going out of business, is cold comfort indeed. On this matter of Climate Change, it will be even colder comfort if our civilization collapses because of it, thus proving even to the biggest deniers that we were right all along. They will still come up with reasons why the disaster is not their fault, and those reasons will likely include you.

Welcome to reality.