WCIA 2 time champ, too. We all understand the mergers are about extending monopolies and gaining power, the better to gouge consumers.

And what will be done about it? Nothing, as usual. Our national government will even help the poor things gouge us harder. Give them lots of infrastructure, redefine broadband to include even slower speeds, and keep squashing competition from local governments because it's unfair that they should have to compete against a government.

Oh, and Net Neutrality? Just a bargaining chip. Worth a few hundred sinecures.

I've heard snakes are the reason people see short grass as beautiful. There isn't anything intrinsically prettier about shortness. Lakes create far more snake habitat than tall grass, but somehow it's okay to have lots of man made lakes, to insure a stable water supply. Then there's the Smokey Bear angle-- short grass doesn't provide as much fuel for fires.

"Weed" is another of those overused terms. What is a weed? If plant nurseries had their way, every native plant would be considered a weed. More profitable for them if you have to constantly buy "weed" killer and replacement plants.

Trying to stop erosion. Not much sunlight gets past the trees and the neighbors' wooden fences, and the grass was barely hanging on. Then another neighbor added another fence which had the unfortunate effect of blocking what little sunlight still got through. He moved away shortly after, but the damage his little improvement did remains. Most of the grass died. What's left grows in clumps, with large areas of bare dirt between.

I know what's going on with the yard. I don't need the city horning in with their dumb rules. Why don't they make that neighbor tear that fence down? "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Nah, this isn't about going to war against citizens. It's about allowing some idiot to use security as an excuse to buy toys. Could be some kind of kickback involved. Someone's nephew needs a job, perhaps.

Everything can be cast in terms of security. Just this week we received a reprimand for letting the grass get too high, and it invoked safety as a reason why everyone should have to mow the grass often. Here are some excerpts from the letter:

"The City ... takes great pride in the health, safety, welfare, and appearance of our community.... Every individual property owner's maintenance contributes to the overall positive appearance of their neighborhood...." The letter states that a Community Image Officer noticed that the property is in violation of the ordinance that states a person may not allow weeds or grass more than twelve (12") tall to accumulate. It concludes with this: "With your help, we can keep our community clean and safe."

We certainly can't allow grass to grow dangerously high!

If a law is so easy to casually disregard, and violating it provides a clear benefit to the violators and the harm it causes is theoretical, that's a sign the law itself is bad. Eating at Burger King should not be thought such a harm to McDonalds that it should be outlawed.

We ought to have digital public libraries by now. Such a thing is a clear benefit to society. Searchable works of art! No more archaic card catalogs. No more denying a patron because all the copies are currently checked out. No more losses from patrons being careless with the physical media and damaging it. Far less storage space needed, space which can be used to hold more works, or repurposed. No more late fees and returns. No more having to physically travel to the library, twice, spending time and most likely gas. Did you see the article some days ago about streaming saving society lots of money compared to fooling around with DVDs? We could have all of this, now, if not for copyright law.

Everyone should be willing to practice civil disobedience of bad laws. Be like Rosa Parks and don't meekly go along with racist seating arrangements. If US citizens are no longer willing to do that, maybe we ought to petition the British Monarchy to let us back in the fold, and we'll all issue a national apology to George III.

Are you the kind of asshole who runs around your neighborhood and rats out all your neighbors who don't mow often enough? Maybe you ought to add listening for loud music to your activities, so you can file a noise complaint too, and try to identify the songs while you're at it so you can go running to your pals in the MAFIAA to complain that because you overheard a copyrighted song, their rights were infringed. Even better if you have to trespass to get close enough to identify the songs.

File sharing IS a legitimate activity. In many cases the user doesn't know the copyright status. Shouldn't have to know. But even if it is copyrighted by someone else, and the user knows that and does not have their permission, so what? Last I heard, you can still trade books among your friends, and check out works from the public library. If this activity is illegal, that is reason to change the law, not blow the public's money on futile and damaging policing efforts. Copyright law is against the public interest, and needs drastic reform or abolishment.

Not having to do or help with policing is a basic right. The 4th Amendment has a bit to say on the subject of searches. The police can't just search your home, they have to have probable cause and a warrant. Equally, you shouldn't have to search your own home. The 3rd Amendment might even be applicable. You can't be forced to house a soldier in your home. Seems like you shouldn't have to allow a digital cop program on your servers either. A business based on file storage should not have to bear the burden of checking the copyright status of all the files stored on its servers. Cloud vendors don't have to do that, why should Megaupload?

You have to fight more creatively than that. As others have noted, many authorities cynically use situations like this to "generate" revenue. They've set the system up to make it difficult to fight and change. Going through whatever process they set up is not likely to have any effect.

I tried their system on a red light camera ticket. Had my evidence that their yellow was too short and requested a hearing. The hearing was a total kangaroo trial. My evidence was ignored. It was picture number one showing that the light was red before the car crossed the painted line, and picture number two showing the red light and the car in the intersection. Verdict: guilty. End of discussion. That the light in picture number one would have been yellow if it had been set to the correct time was not considered. The judge advised me that I could go on to municipal court and raise that question there, where it would be considered. Well, maybe. But I was through with them. What would happen next if I went on? The muni court would rule against me and tell me I could appeal?

They've also cunningly set their shakedown price at a low enough level that it's not worth fighting. The ticket was "only" $75. I fought anyway, but lost of course. Also, to dodge around the requirement that the accused gets to confront the accuser, they made this an offense against a city ordinance, not a traffic violation. So you don't get screwed by your auto insurance company seizing on this as an excuse to consider you a more dangerous driver, and raising your rates. This dodges around another problem, which is that they have nothing to show who was actually driving the car. They simply fine the owner, never mind who was driving.

There's a flip side to this weaseling out of those legal requirements. The simplest way to fight is to refuse to pay. Their power to compel payment is much more limited. They can't put a black mark on your record and have the state stop you from renewing your driver's license or car license, because it's not a traffic violation.

So, what to do? I can't vote against the politicians who set this all up, as I don't live in that city. I can however boycott businesses in that city, and I do. It's not just pure revenge, it's also prudence. I don't risk any more tickets if I never drive there.

In a similar vein, I fight against the MAFIAA creatively. One can pirate, of course, and millions do. But what I did was dig into the backgrounds of the people they use in their battles to terrorize ordinary citizens. Specifically, their expert witnesses. In one case, the witness was affiliated with a university, and was using their name. I inquired of that university's provost whether they approved of this activity by their employee. Turned out, they didn't even know about it. And when they found out thanks to me telling them about it, they definitely didn't like it. Haven't heard a peep out of that expert witness since.

How can you tell if they "ripped off" the technology, or they thought of the idea on their own because it really isn't that hard and shouldn't have been awarded a patent? If they can rip off the technology that easily, then maybe it was too obvious to deserve a patent? Your first mover advantage isn't any help because the idea is too easy to utilize? It doesn't take years of preparation and training? Then it shouldn't have been patented.

But that's all beside the point. We shouldn't grant monopolies on ideas at all. It results in these ridiculous and expensive fights that does no one (except lawyers) any good. We should have a much more permissive system, not the punitive, restricitve, wrong headed system we have now. The system should recognize that ideas aren't as special and unique as some people like to imagine, stop encouraging people to cling to ideas like they're gold, stop making the stakes so high and pushing them to fight each other to determine who wins it all. This is science and progress, not championship boxing, and not racketeering.

Piracy is a more important issue than most people realize. This isn't about just an obsolete business model of financing art via sales of copies, this is nothing less than the biggest thing that sets us apart from all other animals. We can talk to each other like no other animals can. Thousands of years ago, we figured out how to write. We used to have only drawings, paintings, and sculptures to communicate visual information, and nothing but memory for audio, now we have cameras, recorders, and more. But talking and writing and all these other methods are useless if we can't use it to communicate and share ideas and information with each other. Communication is absolutely necessary for civilization to exist. These slimy media owners want nothing less than to impose and collect a tax upon all communication.

He most certainly is a political prisoner.

I agreee, and don't see Relativity as reason why FTL travel cannot happen. The idea that FTL violates causality is based on an extrapolation of Relativity.

Suppose you are holding a flashlight. You accelerate. No matter how fast you go, the light from your flashlight still seems to you to move away from yourself at light speed. You can be going nearly lightspeed, let's say 1000 kph slower than light, relative to other observers, and they will see the light from your flashlight moving only a little faster than you, and certainly not away from you at lightspeed. To them, it will appear to be moving at lightspeed relative to them, and you will appear to be moving at slightly less than lightspeed. Yet even as the observer sees the light from your flashlight moving away from you only 1000 kph faster than you, you see the light from your flashlight moving away from yourself at lightspeed. This inconsistency is resolved by time. You experience time more slowly than the observer. Your experience of time is slowed so that both you and the observer see the light from your flashlight moving at lightspeed.

The extrapolation is that to go faster than light, an object would have to experience time going backwards so that light still appears to move away at light speed. Experiencing time going backwards violates causality, causing all kinds of time travel paradoxes.

Why shouldn't it be possible to travel faster than light and not violate causality, not have to travel backwards in time? An object could go faster than light and still not arrive before it left. Maybe FTL can't be done with rocket motors, even hypothetical super rockets that don't have fuel problems, but warp drive could do it. Seems to me more likely that Relativity is not a complete explanation of the universe than that FTL travel is impossible.

I'm not so sure. Torrent sites merely link to material that may or may not be mostly copyrighted; they do not host it themselves.

Possibly even here, they would be declared innocent. But the law may have clauses that declare activities like merely linking, or not responding to takedown requests in a timely fashion, are infringing, and they'd be found guilty. Or the legal system may feel pressured to find them guilty even if the law doesn't have any such clauses. Hard to guess how a court case would turn out.

As to views on copyright, I too have at least one complication I haven't worked out, which is that copyleft depends on copyright. I would like to see copyright abolished. Patents too. But I like copyleft, and would like some means of keeping that viable. I think the intent of copyleft can be preserved through other means, and we can repeal copyright law. Then we could at last have our digital public library. As to how artists would make a living without copyright, I think there are sufficient other ways that they could be fairly compensated, even better than they are now under our current very poor system.

You are talking like a law and order person who never questions whether copyright is good, fair, and balanced. You just jumped right to an examination of whether torrentz.eu aids others to infringe on copyrights as if its beyond question that that's Bad, and declared that its so obvious that torrentz.eu does so that anyone who tries to argue otherwise is being stupid, and that there's no doubt torrent sites are Guilty Guilty Guilty.

Of course they link to pirated material! But is that so bad, really? It's actually the opposite. The right to share knowledge is fundamental to our civilization, and we should not allow some private interests to buffalo us into accepting a false equivalence between property rights for material things and copyright law. Every time someone asserts that copying is stealing, that's what they do. Piracy is good. The real crime is the suppression of our rights, and the criminals are not torrentz.eu operators or even users, but this police force and their real masters who seem to prefer to remain in the shadows.

Evidently these masters don't like the glare of publicity, and the most probable reason for that dislike is that they know the public would strongly disapprove of their conduct and motives. From what I've read elsewhere in these threads, this City of London Police is a weird little police force more answerable to corporations than the public. Well now they've done it. They've called international attention upon themselves. They've clothed themselves as police, as guardians of law and order, and it's not at all clear that they should be allowed to continue to do so. I should not be too surprised to see talk of reining in this "police" force and forcing them back under the rock from which they crawled. And if they won't back down, then they will be changed, perhaps disbanded.

Publishers, especially Elsevier, deserve a good kicking. They've profited by screwing authors and customers. They've done all in their power to hold back progress, for the sake of their antiquated and extremely inefficient business model. They've crossed the line repeatedly, suing customers, clinging hard to bad logic (copying = stealing, DRM is good and it works). and spewing propaganda based on it.

Authors, whom one might expect to be just a little wiser, a little more in touch with reality, have, with a few notable exceptions, fallen for publisher bull. It's hard to be sympathetic to the struggling authors who insist that their customers stick with dead trees or wear DRM chains because that's the only way they can think to make the system work so they can earn a living. Telling fans that not wearing DRM chains is somehow unfair to authors is a fast way to lose them. That's logic from the same murky depths of religious dogma that says because the Bible is the Word of God, and it says God created the World and everything in it in 7 days, so therefore evolution is false. I talked with a number of authors at a GenCon, and found a mix of denial, despair, and anger over their imagined plight. I was quite disappointed with Nebula Award winning author Ursula LeGuin when she complained about Cory Doctorow over a usage issue. Many of her works are very liberal, and to see that apparently old age has turned her into not just a conservative on this issue, but a wrong-headed one, is sad. Good authors are supposed to be progressive thinkers, supposed to challenge our dogma, our assumptions, and help us take the tints off the glasses through which we all view the world.

Speaking of fantasies, how about the flying car? Some people still play with jetpacks. The problem is not just energy, but that controlled flight takes a lot more brains than was appreciated. And our mechanical prowess has never been up to the delicacy required to build light enough wings that flap well enough to actually achieve flight, so we've had to compromise with fixed wing designs.

As to wrong science, one idea from the 19th century was "calorie", a fluid that moved heat. Wikipedia has a nice list of wrong ideas in science that gained some popularity and acceptance.