If you look far enough down the line, nothing is "ethical". Fair trade coffee means farmers aren't growing food to feed their own starving communities, organic means we need to use more land and cut down more forests. The local farmers at the market drive trucks filled with oil from the middle east and use the money you spend to buy African blood diamonds for their wives. If you want to be ethical, the best thing to do is to stop buying so much stuff in the first place. No you don't need a new phone every year and you will probably do just fine without a 70 inch television, and that car probably can last another year or two.

Actually GPS is very simple. We've been using similar technology for hundreds of years to navigate ships. The only difference between using a GPS device and a sextant is that we have a much more accurate clock, and the reference objects in space are in a much better location. A sextant can get the location down to 400m if on land, or around 2.8 km when at sea (due to the movement of the waves.

I'm not sure whether or not they can decline. I think not. However, the proper procedure for a takedown notice states that the person requesting the takedown must submit

5. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is alleged to be infringed.

So while I'm sure that there are some false positives, there are some people that would submit things which weren't actually infringements, I think most people would think twice against submitting a takedown notice to Google that they knew was for non-infringing content. Google might send lawyers after them. Take down requests for non-infringing content may work to scare away the little guys, but I'm pretty sure Google ignores quite a few requests that don't follow proper procedures or that obviously aren't copyright violations.

I'm not the parent poster, but I would have to say it's a little bit of both. I'm willing to pay for new music, but not at the rate it's being produced and the price being asked. There's way too much music coming out for me to even keep track of, and at the current price for music ($10 an album) I can only really justify buying an album every few months, and even then, only when it's something really good. If the album was cheaper (like $2) I might be inclined to buy more albums, because I'm getting more music for less money. In the '70s people didn't have a whole lot of entertainment choices, so people bought lots of music. Now we have a lot of new things that we spend money on. Cable TV, video games, cell phone bills, internet bills. All this stuff costs money, which means we have less money to spend on music. That and the ability to get music for free (even if you just count legitimate services) means that people won't be willing to spend so much money on music anymore. Personally, I'm a big fan of subscription services like Netflix and RDIO. Pay a small monthly fee and you get access to a huge library. I end up spending less, and still get access to a huge amount of content.

This is basically what breakfast and lunch programmes are about at schools. Ensuring that kids get at least 2 good meals in them during the day so they aren't hungry and can pay attention at school. Maybe it could be extended to provide a meal before they leave school as well. Of course, they'd have to start offering good healthy food for it to have really great benefits instead of sugar coated cereal in chocolate milk for breakfast, with a burger and fries for lunch.

You're just saying that because I get your sense of humor.

So your post is now at "0", up from "-1"?

I'm grad.

And may I say that I don't want you to be at the bottom of the ocean, either, at least until it's your time :)

Right. Now it remains to be seen whether the Judge is going to call Verizon in on the carpet. If I were the Judge, I surely would be doing that, but I haven't seen any hint of that in the Court's orders.

So far.

None of the procedures you described are applicable in this court.

Well, you certainly could try to publish stuff anonymously, but it was a lot riskier back then. Most people didn't have a printing press in their basement. You had to deliver the material to the printing press owner and hope that he didn't sell you out to the authorities. You could even send some lackey to deliver the letter, but they could rat you out as well. You still had to be willing to stand behind what you had said. Sure there were "anonymous" letters, but if the guy running the printing press didn't like your message, he didn't have to print them. And he was putting his ass on the line. Who's to say that someone against the message wouldn't go and destroy the press. It's only recently that people have been able to publish something for the whole world to see with pretty much no trail. It's possible to do it on the internet, but very difficult to do it right. Even organizations like Wikileaks who pride themselves on letting whistle blowers get their message out anonymously have had their anonymous tipsters revealed.

We always wandered the town unsupervised. Sure we got into a little bit of trouble, but it was a lot better than the current state, where children never go outside, and we have massive problems with obesity. I think it's kind of sad that the baseball fields in my area never get used except for little league games. We used to always play baseball, hockey, football, whatever. Go knock on the doors the doors of every kind in the neighborhood until you had enough people to play, and start a game. Online isn't any different. You just have to teach your kids how to deal with people causing problems. On the internet, it's so easy. If you don't like what someone else is saying, just go somewhere else.