Actually, Grooveshark operates rather differently. Grooveshark works on the premise that artists (or the labels representing them) have a choice: 1. sign a contract with them for pennies, which is still better than.. 2. don't, see if we care. At the same time, the contract under 1 may or may not actually be honored on the part of Grooveshark ( pending court case: EMI Entertainment World Inc v. Escape Media Group Inc, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, No. 650013/2012 ).

I'm sure they operate technically alike, but judges/juries tend not to care too much about the technical details and err on the side of the spirit of the law when there's a big ol' grey area between letter and spirit.

No, if I were to be holier-than-thou I wouldn't be working toward the abolition of copyright (see comments from waaaaaaaay long ago, but they still hold. Copyright needs to go.)

I'm also not saying it's not hypocritical. Of course it's hypocritical. On the other hand, there's a difference between, and let's roll with your example here, the politician shagging a mistress once, getting caught, admitting it to their constituents, typically going into family counselling and all that.. and the politician calling for a press conference, saying "yeah, I shagged my mistress so what? Hell, she's giving me a bj right now" (cue camera pan to reveal mistress on knees behind the mike stand).. and not just once, but continually.

It doesn't make the singular infringement less bad, and certainly does little to repair damages done to their credibility as a champion for family values - but the latter scenario should have even the most devout of campaigners thinking he should pack up.

As for the straw man that you allege is just mine: I assure you, it's not, it's called sarcasm. Tell me you've never seen the comments that make that jump in logic ( unless those were all mine, too, of course ;) )

Absolutely not. My brilliant logic(?) says nothing about the act itself, but only about how it was handled once discovered/pointed out. It was still handled badly, mind you, but at least it wasn't handled in a "yeah? so what? screw you." fashion.

If the copyright holders wish to go after this bunch, I say more power to them - and I should hope that Canipre would do a mea culpa to the full legal extent (though I doubt they will).

Yeahhh that would be why I picked that title ;)

And then they posted the complaint about it on their website and publicly ridiculed the copyright holders while leaving the material up, after moving it to a different server, citing that they're not actually hosting the files so the copyright holders should complain with whoever owns random-server-in-the-Seychelles, right?

Oh. They removed the images. Well, crap.

Still, hypocrits! Clearly they condone piracy and I feel justified in downloading Tears of Steel through TPB just now!

YouTube has licensing. The vast majority of songs, especially new ones, are released onto YouTube by the record labels themselves, free for everyone to enjoy unless you happen to live in a country with its own brand of insanity (GEMA in German, for example) or they have a branch in your country and they agreed that that branch would have to upload it instead. Keep in mind that record labels have flooded YouTube with DMCA requests before after negotiations broke down and they removed their videos;
http://news.slashdot.org/story/08/12/21/1710249/warner-music-pulls-videos-off-youtube

Perhaps a bit more timely, remember the story of a Windows Phone app, by Microsoft, which allowed users to download the videos, strips ads, and allows users to view videos on devices that the uploader has specified they shouldn't be viewable on?
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/13/05/11/0041224/microsoft-youtube-app-strips-ads-adds-download

Well, Google wants that app yanked right the beep now.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4334030/google-demands-microsoft-remove-youtube-windows-phone-app

"Unfortunately, by blocking advertising and allowing downloads of videos, your application cuts off a valuable ongoing revenue source for creators, and causes harm to the thriving content ecosystem on YouTube,"

YouTube themselves aren't fond of people 'grabbing' things, and their legal department could probably do without the legitimate DMCA takedown requests in addition to the not-so-legitimate ones if for whatever reason the record labels didn't renew any agreements and went back to filing those instead. The current audio recognition stuff would probably be bumped up to just keep even more of the record labels' material from being uploaded in the first place, and there'd be little reason to having to block YouTube.

As it is, though, most people I know don't even 'grab' things from YouTube, let alone trying to find them on a 'pirate' website (even though it's not that hard) - they just look up the song on their phone and listen to it streaming from YouTube directly.. and that's just the ones who haven't gone with Spotify yet / buy the tracks on iTunes or Amazon or 7digital or, etc.

And the problem with that would be... what? I understand you wouldn't want a middle man, it just makes things complicated, drives up prices, etc. etc.

At the same time, the people who argue that the government should focus on crazy people buying guns clearly have no idea if 'the buddy he has known since childhood' doesn't have a few crazy ideas about what to do with a gun, a gun his buddy since childhood has been so happy to provide.

Can't really have both.

Why does this sound like the "we don't need background checks at gun shows, we need better help for the mentally unstable" argument?

You're right that there's people now who have 10 drinks and decide to go driving anyway, and this will do nothing to stop them.
You're also right that there's people now who are perfectly sober and still can't seem to find their turn signal.
And yes, there's people who have 1, maybe 2 drinks, who would not get a DWI now, but would under a lower level, while there has been no ascertainment of their actual ability of operating a vehicle; some will be fine, others will fall over if asked to stand on one leg. The former will whine and moan about it on facebook/twitter, the latter deserve the DWI in the first place.

But then there's the people who have 1, maybe 2 drinks, and would chance it under an 0.08% law, but not under an 0.05% law.
One may argue that they're just after the DWI, that it'll be a cash cow, that it goes against freedom and justice and the american way or whatever and that this last group is just a byproduct. But it's not one that should be ignored for the sake of those who think that they're the special ones who are fine.

Of course, if you can think of a reasonable impairment test that can be administered quickly and accurately that doesn't rely on BAC, I'd happily support any effort to have that test replace the BAC tests.

most users i've seen can't be bothered to take this "inconvenient" step to secure their accounts

I wonder why you used the double quotes there. Are you suggesting it is not inconvenient?

Assume it's a dongle. Go check your mail at work, on the road, while in a completely different country - whoops, left the dongle in the car, at home, in the other set of pants.

Note that the above is even just the dongle - who uses just a dongle? You'll also need a password for the dongle, lest the attacker actually has your dongle which would make this pointless. No, not a password, a key card. Now where did you put that key card again?
( Thankfully you don't need a dongle to access the dongle. )

Okay, dongles are archaic, just use cellphones and SMS. What's that? You pay for incoming SMS and you have no credit? The battery's dead? You swapped out the SIM card because there's no way you're going to pay the international roaming costs while abroad? Or maybe you just let it in the car again, at home, or in the other pair of pants.

It's okay, you say, Google also offers a list of 10 one-time-use codes that you can use in case of that rare circumstance in which your phone is not available. Of course, you'll have to keep that list somewhere. On your pho.. oh, duh. Print it out and put it in your wallet? No, no.. bad idea. Oh! I know! Put it online at lastpass. Of course, you'd better not have hooked that up to Google Authenticator as you'd be going in circles.

Sure, there's a laziness factor involved as well - after all, most people will be ticking the box telling Google to 'remember' that computer for 30 days even if the do enable two-factor authentication because they don't want to enter the authentication code every. single. time. And, sure, there's more/better solutions for the potential problems which most people quite frankly won't even run into anyway (can always tell them to don't be so stupid as to forget (to charge) their cellphone etc.etc.).
But suggesting it's not inconvenient - be that as 'inconvenient' as having to whip out your cellphone and reading off a code or as 'inconvenient' as not having your phone on you and the list of 10 codes being nowhere to be found - won't help endear people to its use.

The only question people should ask themselves is whether this inconvenience is worse than the inconvenience, or even direct harm, that can potentially result from not using it.

As someone who uses The GIMP extensively and Photoshop occasionally.. "uhm. no."

The GIMP is not even close to Photoshop yet. That's not to say it isn't a perfectly capable tool for what most people do, but then 'most people' would be fine with Elements, or Lightroom, or Instagram. Graphics professionals will have to weigh their individual demands and see whether The GIMP or one of the many plugins/scripts fills those demands in an acceptable manner.

Just as an example of what I mean by the latter, and I know it's a limited use case but this applies to so many things, content-aware rescaling.
In Photoshop you activate the tool and just scale the layer through the typical scaling interface (e.g. drag edges), and the result is shown instantaneously if your machine can handle it.
Now let's do it with The GIMP. First off, The GIMP doesn't have this feature. You'll have to grab the Liquid Rescale plugin. The main interface offers some great control, but if you just want to rescale the layer the Interactive mode sounds more promising. Except that all it does is update the layer every time you let go of the up/down control / enter a number into the fields while scaling from a fixed pivot (top left corner) While much better than going through the main plugin interface (where you have to commit, then undo if not to your liking, etc.), it's a far cry from essentially the scale tool using a different algorithm for its scaling - who knows, maybe that's on the feature list for a future version, it would certainly be a sensible place to put it.

Perhaps a bit less esoteric, adjust the canvas size, and let's say you want to add a 2mm border around the edges. First of all, you can't just say you want a 2mm border. You'll have to add 4mm to the width and height first, and then set the offset to 2mm on each axis. Great, keeps your brain accustomed to doing remedial math. So you do that and now go do it again. Notice how the unit dropdown is no longer set to mm? The reason for this is that the unit dropdowns always use the unit associated with the image (bottom left below canvas) rather than the last-used setting. Both have their merits, but % (percent) is not a unit for images, but is a common unit in the drop-downs. Similar things apply to e.g. the aspect lock button.

Some things a script-fu can address, but many things it cannot. Yes, it's open source, I can add the features (or pay somebody to add them) and with a lot of luck even get them accepted into the trunk (so I don't have to keep patching and compiling / paying somebody to do so). Can't really do that with Photoshop. But but for a long, long list of such features the fact is that with Photoshop, you don't have to to begin with.

There's plenty of reasons I dislike working with Photoshop - it's far from perfect and I like the direction The GIMP is going in - but there's many more subtle and yet aggravating things besides the ubiquitous CMYK and GUI layout arguments (two areas that are very, very low on my list - if I went into why, this comment would be even more rant-y.)

I agree that it's surprising that Chrome seems to fail even on simplistic things. However, Chrome doesn't really feel like the kind of browser that goes for that sort of thing either. Given a choice between MathML and rounded corners (just as an example), I can well imagine that the latter would be far more popular, find wide-spread adoption, and be able to differentiate Chrome from other browsers.

The fairly limited set of publishers/users that would find MathML something that they'd have an absolute need form, seem to be using things that drop in an image of the MathML instead; stumbled across some sites in the past, equation in an image that replaced a piece of text that described the equation. No idea what that site used, but here's an example:
http://dlippman.imathas.com/asciimathtex/AMT.html

I can well imagine that supporting MathML does not exactly have a very high priority. Desktop sharing in Google Hangouts, albeit via a plugin at this time, on the other hand..

Bending electronics is very simple, for broad definitins of bending and electronics.

See that flex cable inside your laptop? It bends, and technically it's electronics.

Okay, there's no components on it. So let's put some slightly more rigid bids on there, and populate those with components. It's still 'bendable' even if the parts where the components are do not bend.

The components themselves, of course, remain highly inflexible, but the smaller you can make them, the less of an issue this is for the overall flexibility of the system.

In the case of the 'camera' in the article, they're really, really, really tiny. But they also don't really have to bend - they're still on a rigid surface, just not a flat one (though at the scale in question, that's akin to arguing the ground you're walking on isn't flat because the entire Earth isn't.)

What they've created here is kind of a lytro/fisheye hybrid. Neat, but for general photography it would be much more interesting, short-term, if the sensor in the camera body could be curved, so that the lens and software don't have to try and correct for the flat surface quite so much, and make it affordable. Think 'curved film plane', but on both axes. There's been a flurry of patents on curved sensor designs in the past few years, so give it another decade or so?

To clarify, I didn't really mean that the tax evasion was also intentional.. 'popular' was not quite the word I was looking for.

To be honest, I'd be surprised if most people from such states even realize that their state requires them to report it - it's certainly rather easy to never even contemplate to even get to the point where one determines it to be too much work, or forget about it, or deliberately withhold it :)

Perhaps they'll make the exchanges report...exchanges.

Then exchanges will move offshore, and the governments will deem them illegal - kind of like gambling. So you'll have your BTC, but you'll have a hard time getting that turned into $CAD. 'Hard' being relative in the internet age, of course - it's not that hard to do online gambling in the U.S., and the Dutch tend to have zero problems accessing TPB despite ever-updating IP blocks.

To be honest, though, it isn't that much different from U.S. states in which you technically should report out-of-state purchases and pay taxes on it, and most people simply do not - then come complaining when the tax man finds out directly, or decides that places like Amazon should just collect the tax for them. I.e. complaining about what is essentially tax evasion.. it just happens to be a very popular form of tax evasion.

Some assholes are more equal than others.

Cheers,
Goatse