You're completely ignoring the possibility that a gadget could enhance your interaction with other people? It must, somehow by definition, get in the way?

Thanks for the response. Finding people like you once in a while is the reason I still browse slashdot. Very interesting stuff.

I do very casual reading on such topics, the stuff generally meant for the layman. Since you appear to be much more knowledgeable, maybe you can answer this for me: any chance this could be a signal from evaporating primordial black holes? What kind of signal do we expect to see for those? Other than not finding a supernova in the direction of the burst, that is.

So I guess you don't live in the United States. I am really concerned about protecting these rights, which you seem to want to constrict.

There is no expectation of privacy in public spaces and private locations are free to ban video and photography just like they've always been, if they don't want it. I don't see what the big deal is.

Dude, seriously? If you had given It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as an example, I'd understand, but How I Met Your Mother is way cleaner than Arrested.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of Arrested, How I Met Your Mother, and Sunny. I'm also completely with you on the "no laugh track" thing, I seriously dislike that. I'm just really confused about your vulgarity and shock value comments. I mean, Tobias' character is entirely based on vulgar jokes. I mean, we're talking about a guy that has a card that says "analrapist", for a mixture of analyst and therapist. We had multiple episodes where the joke was that Oscar was walking around near buster with an erect penis, trying to pretend he wasn't banging his mother. None of this stuff bothers me, but I'm really curious about what it is that you find in How I Met Your Mother that triggers your vulgarity meter while Arrested doesn't.

When I took a graduate-level multi-agent systems course at my university, the language we used to implement algorithms we were finding in current research paper on the topic was netlogo. You can do a lot more than draw pretty pictures, and the language is used fairly heavily in certain research fields.

People don't have a right to get paid in the profession they choose. If you can't survive as an independent artist the right choice is to say that you should go find a different profession, not force everybody else to pretend they can't make perfect copies of digital things.

That said, artists do find ways to introduce real scarcity to the supply. I paid $30 for a comic book that costs $3 because it was autographed by the artist. Just another copy isn't worth as much to me as one with the signature.

Right. The GP is arguing that for products with finite supply, the grocery store model works. For products with infinite supply, the only valid model is the commissioning of work. You're saying you don't want to assume the risk for commissioning work, and so you're trying to shoehorn the infinite supply product into the business model of finite supply products. Which as far as I'm concerned is fine as long as you understand there when you do that, you create additional problems which don't exist with the real finite supply products, like piracy. People can copy bits of your software in a way they can't copy bread.

The problem with The Homer isn't that it's designed by an user. It was a failure in management. If the company hadn't bet everything they had into one design, Herb could have weathered the failure and moved on. And failures are going to come regardless of who designs the thing. For some reason people tend to think Apple makes good designs, but even they've had their share of failures. The Lisa, the Newton, the Cube, etc.

You've just gotta learn from the failures and improve on the next project. Domes and La Cucaracha horns? Nobody wanted that. Huge cupholders? Those are a hit in real cars. See what customers say, keep the things that worked, drop or improve what didn't.

Warp factors in Star Trek are not linear. The actual scales very a bit, and they're not always consistent between episodes and given distances + ETA, but if you take a look at the TNG section, warp 1 is the speed of light, but warp 2 is the 10x the speed of light, warp 3 is roughly 39x the speed of light, and by the time you get to warp 9 we're talking 1,516x the speed of light. So, with Star Trek, the scientific advisors to the writers know that.

You shouldn't know,and you're supposed to treat them like the bad guys. Isn't that the entire point? How else are they going to know you're prepared against a real attack?

I'm not the person you're directly replying to, but since this all stems from people misunderstanding my point, I figured I'd clarify:

When I asked, "did you really just compare copyright infringement to rape," I didn't miss the point he was trying to make about blaming the victim. I also didn't mean to go the route of, "You said rape! It's too heinous a crime to be compared to anything, so you've just lost the argument!" My point is that the level of blame to the person committing the act is vastly different. If I stay logged in to my e-mail account when I leave my computer and a friend comes in, notices it, and starts reading it, I'm going to say, "dude, not cool." He'll say, "well, you just left it open, I saw it, and it made me curious." It doesn't make him right and I'm not to blame for the fact that he chose to read something that wasn't meant for him. That said, the "crime" isn't a big deal and I'm not seriously hurt by it. So even though it's not my fault that other people can't control themselves, the easiest way to prevent them from infringing on my privacy is to log out of my e-mail account.

Similarly, I don't think it's HBO's fault that people choose to pirate their show. That said, they can steps to encourage more people to go the legal route. This is why the comparison to rape was inappropriate. I think it's perfectly alright to tolerate some copyright infringement, in fact, I think it's the way to go in a simple cost-benefit analysis. It's not alright to tolerate violent crimes, even if it could lead to statistically significant lower amounts of it overall. With copyright infringement the victim gets to say, "you know, if the amount of pirating is below a certain threshold, it's actually beneficial for us from a marketing perspective." You're not going to see any rape victims say, "you know, I was only raped once. That wasn't so bad."

That may be true, but if you're trying to have a successful business plan, do you really think it's a good idea to have one which depends on changing human nature?

Maybe you don't think these people are "entitled to being entertained by the work of other people who spend millions of dollars." It doesn't really matter does it? They think they are, and they have the means to achieve their goals, whether you like it or not. So you have one of two choices...spend lots of money trying to make it more difficult for these guys to get what they want, or give them most of what they want, lowering the number of people who choose to go the pirating route. As long as you gain more by doing the latter than you spend by doing the former, that's the way you should go. Simple cost-benefit analysis.

Did you really just compare copyright infringement to rape?

If you must use a human sexual behavior as an analogy, it's more like dealing with teenage sexual activity. You can argue they shouldn't be engaging in it, and you're probably correct in that they're not ready. That said, if you tell them that abstinence is the way to go, you're fighting against human nature, and you're going to fail. Instead, if you teach them the concepts behind safe sex, you let them have what you want and you minimize the dangers of pregnancy of STDs. There will still be those who will engage in unsafe sex, and there will always be those guys who will pirate no matter what because what they want is the free part. However, you haven't proposed an alternate solution that does a better job.

I'm not a gun owner, but there are three counter-points I need to make:

First, those gun-owners that would vote "shoot them" would all most likely call the police as well, if it's at all possible for them to do so. It's not an either/or situation, so the question is biased. They just find themselves in a situation where their life is danger and happen to have a weapon with which they can protect themselves.

Second, the part that saddens you is that some people are willing to defend themselves instead of being helpless? The part that saddens me in your scenario is that there are people who think, "I'm going to break into that home and take property that doesn't belong to me. If anyone is at home when I do so, I'm ok with violently subduing them." Depending on the burglar, violently subdue may be as simple as tying people out, but it could include beating them, killing them, or raping people for fun. The fact that this is still a problem in our society is the part that saddens me.

Finally, not every person with a gun would consider it an option. I can see myself buying a gun in the future, because I've been to the range with friends and find shooting targets to be a fun enough activity. That said, I'm as non-violent as they come. I'm not convinced that even if it came down to my life or an assailant's that I'd have the balls to kill another human being. As a result, if I ever do end up buying a gun, it wouldn't be a home defense option, the gun would stay locked in the gun safe if my house got broken into. That's because I know that at the very least I'd hesitate at shooting somebody else, which is enough to get me killed. If the burglar has a gun and sees me armed, he'll shoot me while I'm indecisive. If the burglar doesn't have a gun and sees me hesitating, he might get it away from me, and now I've just armed the guy. It's entirely possible to be a complete pacifist and still in favor of gun rights. I find it consistent with the view that, for example, you shouldn't ban or block the bit-torrent protocol because it's heavily used for pirating material: the technology is neutral, it's what people choose to do it with it that is an issue. Especially when you consider that the vast majority of gun owners in the US have never used their guns to hurt another human being.