No, the worst possible thing already happened, thats the content of the letter.

A slight exaggeration perhaps, but it's beside the point. It's not a competition of who can be more wrong; the fact of the matter is that it's possible for two parties to be in the wrong. And in principle, how wrong one party is should not affect how wrong the other party is.

Think about all those legal penalties for spying, warrantless searches, torture, and all those other illegal methods for obtaining potentially valuable information. Not only do we punish people who use them, we refuse to acknowledge, in court, the information obtained using them. Why? Because if we did, then people would continue to do them, regardless of the penalties. It's not enough to say, "Whoops, my bad, but at least you caught the serial kiddie-fiddler due to my illegal search!", and walk out scot-free. Regardless of how useful the information exposed, we know that the methods to obtain said information are evil, and we do our best to ensure they don't happen, even if it means ignoring valuable information. Basically, as far as the courts' are concerned, the ends never justify the means.

(Now, I don't mean to suggest we should ignore what Snowden turned up, just that we shouldn't allow the magnitude of NSA's crimes to blind us to the issue of whether Snowden himself has done wrong or not.)

Only when "propaganda spin-meisters" are crowing away to all who will still listen.

So, your reason for ignoring this part of the debate is because the other side are smelly poopy-faces? These may not be your exact words, but it's certainly the gist that I take from it.

It is not a debate when discourse limited and narrowed to concentrate on the messenger rather than the much more important message.

If you re-read my post, you'll see that I was not even remotely suggesting this. There's nuance here. No, the debate is not entirely the way you want it. No, by debating all of the issues raised, that does not mean we only debate the ones you don't want to. It does not mean we are deflecting the real issues, just addressing the other ones that you don't want to address, which is fine, because the "other side" doesn't necessarily want to address the issues you want to address. That's why you address them all.

Seriously modders, shame on you! I would think directly discussing the topic "The Death of Nuance" would be illuminating enough to stop you modding such dreck up, at least on this story!

What do you think this is, a site for techies?

What you're describing is the use of implicit meaning in language in order to convince people of a point. Such a technique is known as rhetoric, and it's been around roughly as long as language itself.

I disagree. A large part of the debate is about Snowden's conduct; whether it's right to share state secrets, given what the NSA is doing. Note that this is an issue not entirely dependent on whether the NSA is justified in their actions or not.

Focus in the message that is by far the important thing.

The message is extremely important, yes, but so is his conduct. That's what half the debate is about. He may be the mailman, but if he's opening the mail and delivering it deliberately to the wrong hands, the message itself is not the only relevant factor.

I wanted to dislike this movie

That's an odd attitude with which to approach a movie.

Actually come to think about it, I do have one concern, which is the problems it could create with third party upgrades. Something to keep an eye on, I guess.

This isn't like software where you're not shipping some bits, or even if you ship them and selectively enable or disable. These are physically manufactured components. The parts have to be physically manufactured and installed.

This reminds me of the furore there is every time a game company releases day 1 DLC, sometimes included on the physical media no less (Bioshock 2, IIRC). In the latter case, this is pretty much directly analogous.

Look, you have to remember that, in a capitalist system, the question of physical presence is hardly the point: they charge a price, you decide if it's fair. If the cost of the base model is inflated, compared to the competition, due to the extra hardware, then just buy the competition instead. If the price is comparable, then how exactly is it skin off your nose if they include disabled extras?

TFS takes the right attitude, IMHO. What I see here is a convenient and instantaneous way to deliver extras, with very low time and money costs, if it is indeed feasible. I don't see what there is to dislike.

I think one of the takeaways from the survey may be that formal intellectual property protection isn't always valuable to most businesses, even though intangible things like reputation may be very valuable.

You do realise that trademark protection exists with or without registration, right? Registration confers additional rights to your trademark, but even without registration, other businesses are not permitted to imitate you.

Therefore, even without taking the step of registration, there is still formal intellectual property protection, which the GP is correct in saying that businesses that trade on their reputation rely on. If a business wasn't able to have exclusivity over the name tied to their reputation, such a reputation would be very difficult to foster in the first place. It's easy to take things like the concept of a business's reputation for granted when we are so used to the idea of a trademark.

Grades are about quality control, if that's what you mean. Some students simply don't know the material that we teach them, and it would be unfair, stupid, and reckless to testify otherwise.

(I know it's not what you mean, but you're clearly an idiot, so I don't really care.)

If you can not get that out of a meeting, fire the participants.

I think my boss would be angry if I fired him. :-(

sI4shd0rk's response cuts through the BS but you've chosen to ignore it

I chose to ignore it, because it's a bad point, made without any substantiation. I don't see why a person making a good point, making sure to carefully justify what they're saying, needs to answer to every person who asserts nonsense without evidence (hint: they don't).

So I can infer that you're more interested in semantic arguments than arguing the central point.

You may infer whatever you like, but look at this from my perspective: I have a an anonymous coward, responding multiple times to my various posts, trying to argue against me primarily by dishonest means which are (lamentably) traditionally quite effective. You've nitpicked at my argument, from a couple of angles, missing the point each time, choosing to take an ultimately irrelevant part of my comments, make it look wrong, and hope that people will also miss the central point, or believe it to be wrong by association. You've also, in I think all of your replies, tried to personally insult me, and tried to paint me as someone who is not worth replying to (but you charitably do anyway, so that others don't have to). Maybe it's deliberate, or maybe it's just for yourself, to ease your own insecurity of failing to address the point, over and over again. Either way, you and I both know that it works, and I, at least, know that it's a reprehensible tactic to take in a debate. That's why I'm replying to you. (That's just about all the summary that a "curious third party" needs for our particular debate.)

Having said that, you've now actually decided to reply to the actual point. Good work. It's about time.

Entitlement isn't just "if the law says you get it, then you're entitled to it". There is a human rights aspect to entitlement too - you can be entitled to something without it being legally protected, like the right to share information. You can be legally granted things to which other people are entitled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement

I love how you link to a wikipedia page that spends the first couple of paragraphs contradicting you:

"An entitlement is a guarantee of access to something, such as to Social Security, Medicare or welfare benefits, based on established rights or by legislation."

You claim that entitlement cannot be decided purely on what's law. I'm happy enough to roll with that assumption. I would like to counter by asserting that, if the law guarantees you something, that no-one else is entitled to in any other sense, then you have entitlement to it. Would you at least agree with that? (It's difficult to make arguments for this assertion, because since we're not taking "entitlement" to mean its well-defined legal meaning, there's not much I can do other than simply make sure we're referring to the same concept.) Well, if this is indeed the case, then in order to claim that, in spite of the law saying completely the opposite, artists have no entitlement to copyright, you would need to find someone else who is entitled to copying artistic works more than the artist. So, the burden of proof currently rests on you (or sl4shd0rk). I don't believe such a person exists. Prove me wrong.

Appropriately-named TheVelvetFlamebait

Thank you?

If you had spent as much time trying to understand his point as you did "fixing" it, you'd realize that he was referring to copyright and patents.

I thought of that, but people don't have entitlement to patents. They have to be vetted and approved by government bodies, and meet various criteria. It seemed more likely he was referring to copyrights, given that this was what the thread was about.

Besides, it doesn't affect the fundamental point here: if the law says you get it, then you're entitled to it. Perhaps you ought to try countering my point, or simply concede I have one and be done.

The US didn't join the Berne convention until 1988. The EU changed the duration in 1993.

In the US, there have been copyrights since colonial times. The point is, this is not a concept we are all just now getting used to. Practically every person in the west knows that, with a creative work, comes a copyright. Why shouldn't artists feel entitled to one?

With "all of us" I will have to assume that you are younger than 20 years old, or at most 25 with a view of the world that is limited to the US.

Well fuck, then I have no idea where I've lived my entire life! :-)