Um, ok then . . . carry on with your DDoS, I guess. Cause, yeah, that'll show 'em.

No, that was a congratulatory comment. I complete agree with what you said.

Well, let's see. We just got done with a well-constructed, well-reasoned, well-executed protest against SOPA and PIPA, and we killed those bills dead as a *direct result*. When was the last time a DDoS did *anything* other than harden the resolve of the party being attacked? How do they think the MPAA et al will react? "Oh my goodness, some script kiddies are DDoSing our web site. Quick, release the MegaUpload people from jail and turn their servers back on! It's our only hope!"

My kingdom for a mod point. Great post!

Putting those FTL neutrinos to work, eh? Good job on the time-to-market, guys!

In that case our legal system will simply have to move away from the idea that prison is a punishment for wrongdoing to the idea that prison is a holding place for defectives. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if you *chose* to murder that person, or if your brain chemistry led you inexorably to murder that person and there was nothing you could do about it. The fact is that we don't want to let people with a propensity for murdering people run around loose in society, so either way you need to be removed from society.

In fact, in the absence of the idea of free will, it makes a lot of sense to not have graduated prison sentences (punishment fitting the crime) at all and just go to a system of one-strike-and-you're-put-away-for-life. If you're demonstrably defective and your brain chemistry can't allow you to behave in a socially acceptable way, then you need to be locked up. And if you're defective then there's really no sense in ever letting you out again, is there? It's not like a a prison sentence is going to teach you not to mis-behave; your initial defense was that you had no choice about your actions in the first place.

Of course, what we're actually *likely* to get in real life is the worst parts of both philosophies - the idea that only people who made free-will choices to be evil can be punished/penalized/incarcerated, but no one is capable of free-will choices (we're all at the mercy of our chemical makeup), therefore no action is ever taken to deter or prevent anti-social behavior.

Spoken like someone who doesn't live downwind of a coal-fired power plant.

I'll tell you how much clean air I've got: roughly 142 billion cubic miles of atmosphere on our planet, depending on your definition of "clean" and assuming you're willing to push the definition of "atmosphere" all the way up to 620 miles. You put the current value of the entirety of Earth's atmosphere at $1.4 billion dollars? And you figure your children will value the entire atmosphere at $1.4 million dollars?

Of course talking about the atmosphere in terms of volume is a little strange because the density varies so much. Say we want to talk about *useful* atmosphere up to about 50,000 feet or so (I'm feeling generous). In that case I've got about 1 billion cubic miles to sell you, which you value at $10 million dollars right now or at $10 thousand dollars (!) in the future.

Yeah, that's the thing about stuff like "clean air": it seems like it's infinite and free . . . until it's not and it's gone. Then it costs a hell of a lot more fix it than it would have to save it in the first place.

I agree that things like subsidies aren't straightforward, and no, I'm not excited about wealth transfers either. But our fossil-fuel energy sources have *huge* problems with externalized costs that aren't being paid by the people consuming the energy, and that's a problem that needs to be addressed in one way or another.

Yes, air quality is generally better now than it was 50 years ago (in first-world countries, anyway), but that didn't happen magically or accidentally. That happened almost entirely due to the sort of government regulations and policies that conservatives and libertarians deride (not to make assumptions about your political leanings). It sure as hell didn't happen out of the goodness of any corporation's heart - pollution is an external cost, remember?

This isn't diamond in any sense that we usualy think of it. Yes, it's carbon atoms, and yes, they're "crystallized", but the core of a white dwarf is composed mostly of electron-degnerate matter where all of the electrons have been disassociated from their parent atoms and all the nuclei clump together, floating in a sea of electrons. This stuff has a density of roughly 1000 kilograms (2,200 lbs) per cubic centimeter. I imagine it would *catastrophically* decompress if you could teleport a chunk of it back to earth. It's not diamond.

Except that if you're skeptical of the government on this one, then a picture of a corpse won't help your skepticism one little bit, or at least it shouldn't. Thanks to Photoshop, the days of photos being reliable evidence are long gone. Really, anyone who seriously suspects that the government just made up the whole story to look good will be satisfied by nothing less than the opportunity to do their own DNA tests on the body, which according to the government isn't possible.

Ultimately, the proof will be if OBL shows up alive and well in the future or not. If he's not dead, I'm sure he'll be more than willing to announce the fact. If he doesn't pull a Mark Twain then he's obviously indisposed somewhere and in that case Occam's Razor kind of leads us to believe that it went down more or less the way the government says it did, rather than looking for crazy conspiracy theories.

I think you didn't read the article carefully enough. The point is that that the developer surrenders essentially all control over their own pricing when they put something in the Amazon store. Amazon can just unilaterally tell you, "Oh, by the way, we're giving away your app this month. Don't like it? Tough." Now, yes, Amazon still has to give you a little bit of money in that case, but the definition of "a little bit" is pretty darn small: 20% of the list price, where the list price *must* be the lowest price you've ever sold your content at, ever, anywhere.

The point isn't that Amazon might engage in volume-based pricing strategies. Yes, times are changing and old retailing strategies don't always work. The point is that when you put your app in the Amazon store you surrender any ability to make your own decisions about your pricing strategy. Instead you hand your pricing strategy to another party who has very different goals than you do and will likely choose a pricing strategy that will optimize for their goals, not for your goals. If you're ok with that, then fine. But be aware of what's going to happen.