That's my favorite episode. :)

Much better analogy than the others.

The short version is that the word "piracy" has been used for unauthorized copying for hundreds of years, the long version is... well, Google it. :)

Well, in that case this should be pretty easy to fix for the spammers, assuming they care.

This is probably obvious, since no one is talking about it, but how is he taking over the email addresses? Surely the bots aren't registrering on his honeypot forums with the same password as is used for the e-mail they use to register.

True, but I wouldn't do that. If I start to watch a movie, I will finish watching it, no matter how bored I am, because for me the ending and the final impressions left by movie can change it into something that was definitely worth watching, even if it was two hours of boredom at the time.

So what does this mean? It probably just means that in a perfect world, there would be different ratings for "hated it, so I turned it off" and "finished watching it, hated it". Imagine an extreme example where a movie was rated like this:

95% of the viewers: Hated it, turned it off
5% of the viewers: Hated it, but finished watching it, eventually loved it

Assuming I also fall into one of those two categories, it obviously wouldn't be the first one, as I would always finish watching even a terrible movie. That means that I would end up in the group of people who eventually love the movie and would be really glad I sat through it.

However, these are probably the only ratings I can see:

95% of the viewers: Hated it
5% of the viewers: Loved it

So I probably wouldn't bother with that movie, because I would think I would be unlikely to love it when 95% hate it.

Alright, this is an extreme and contrived example, but my point is that you should be able to decide whether you want to see only reviews from people who finish watching the movie or everyone who's sat down to see it, even if they only watched the first 15 minutes. The first option would be for me, the last option would be for someone who still thinks an hour and a half is wasted if you're bored to death, even if it's the kind of ending you can't stop thinking about for the next two weeks.

Dicks being people? WTF does that mean?

It feels like I have seen hundreds of movies where a brilliant ending changed my impression of the movie from "huge waste of time" to "OMG, that was very clever, I'm going to be thinking about that for a long time!".

I have a six year old son myself and my friends on facebook are still, well, my friends. I believe that's why they call it "friends", not "people you kinda met once, but don't really know". I can honestly say that I don't have a single friend on facebook that I wouldn't trust with a key to my apartment, so I certainly don't mind any of them knowing if I'm going on vacation. Then again, I only have like 10 friends on facebook, including my closest family (mother, father and sister).

So is your English. :)

Wow, thanks for that, I remember reading those guidelines years ago, but have since forgotten all about them. I should probably read them again next time I get mod points. :)

To me Interesting is: "I hadn't thought of that, good point." and Insightful is: "Yeah, you nailed it, my thoughts exactly."

So I would personally mod this Insightful, not Interesting, but I guess we all have our own definitions for the moderation options. :)

Doesn't matter, that post will surely get modded up to the maximum as Insightful in no time.

My Norwegian is pretty bad and my English is even worse, but I'll attempt to translate the relevant parts, because I'm bored and someone might find it interesting:

Time after time a father of young children from Lillehammer logged onto the Internet to look at child porn. He has told the police he did this intentionally. He was driven by curiousity and excitement. Some of the pictures were of very young children. The pictures showed adults and children together or children alone engaged in sexual activities.

The police have documented that he looked at at least 110 pictures, because these were found stored in his browser cache. They managed to track him down, because he had used his credit card to pay in the porn store online. He even admits this. Yet, the court still found him not guilty.

The reason is a hole in the law: Only possession is illegal. Since he has only looked at the child porn, that isn't enough. He must have physically downloaded it to his computer. But since the browser does this automatically for all images you look at while surfing, legally this doesn't count.

A court ruling from the year 2000 determined that it is not a criminal possession to look at child porn without downloading it to your computer.

[A representative from] "Save the Children" says to the local paper that a new proposal now going to the justice department will be able to strengthen the legislation in this area. This could happen before 2011.

That is the geekiest comment I've ever read on slashdot. And that's obviously saying a lot. :)