So, what's your plan in the much more likely event that the LEO sticks your child in the same cell as that psycho because they consider him a terrorist after reading his tweets, blogs and IM's?

See, if it's just the insane guy you have a chance. If it's the government, you're going to join the suspect list for complaining. Heck, we've already heard here that you're of the opinion that doing whatever it takes to get him back is ok, so maybe you're planning violence.

If fighting terrorism involves violating people's rights I suspect we're going to breed a lot more terrorists.

It was about 150 cases in Sweden registered this far compared to estimates of about less than a dozen lives saved (to be fair, some estimates claim 40-60 lives saved over two years; it depends on the mortality rates in the non-vaccinating countries you compare with).

We can argue the definition of 'many' as in many saved or many hurt in this case, the incidence of either is small compared to the numbers vaccinated. Which is really the whole problem; when the mortality rates are as low as with the swine flu, even a low incidence of nasty side effects will tip the balance from vaccination being a great idea to doing more harm than good. Weigh in the economic cost of the program and the possible lives that could have been saved with other use of the resources and you end up deep in the red.

Either way the point I'm making is that while vaccinations are often a good idea it's not as clear cut as to say they're always the right choice. Further, without the ability to make epidemiological studies on control groups it's not easy to catch rare effects like this (which in this case really stood out as the incidence was ten times the normal and there were huge immediate control groups available). Dismissing concerns out of hand increases both the risk that more untested vaccines will be deployed with insufficient care and the risk that rare effects that are visible only on aggregated data will be missed.

I can say that I've personally foregone about $3500 of Sony purchases over the last five years where their products were the best option in the price range I was looking at (projector, console, etc), entirely due to Sony's vile behaviour, and I've probably influenced several others to avoid them in some instances.

It may not be a large dent. But then again, Sony has not exactly been performing that well, which may very well be partly attributable to their piss poor reputation.

Here's one link http://www.thl.fi/en_US/web/en/pressrelease?id=26352 or just search for pandemrix and narcolepsy. Sweden and Finland who performed mass vaccinations have seen more than a hundred cases of narcolepsy strongly linked to the vaccinations. This can be compared to estimates of number of lives saved due to the mass vaccinations being less than a dozen.

The mechanism by which narcolepsy happens from the vaccine is as yet not fully determined, but apparently this form looks like it might be immune mediated and tightly linked to a genetic risk factor.

I used to agree with that, but the recent example with swine flu vaccinations and the strong indications that they're causing many narcolepsy cases suggest that the medical profession can't be trusted to make the best choice either.

By the time the vaccines were getting widely deployed in response to the 'pandemic' it was quite obvious that the flu in question was less deadly than even an ordinary seasonal flu, yet some countries went ahead with mass vaccinations anyway. With the result that many kids most likely got their lives ruined while potentially saving a fraction as many lives (comparisons between mass-vaccination countries vs target group vaccination countries show miniscule differences in mortality rates).

Due to the corruptive nature of copyright I regard it as unethical to give any money to the industry. While I support independent productions, I regard anything that starves the corrupting agencies of funding as a positive thing; intellectual monopoly laws have to go, the rent seeking that damages freedom of speech and free markets follows naturally by the nature of the laws.

Of course there are other ways to ensure extra funding for creative endeavours that don't have the built-in flaws of the monopoly systems.

But until then, depriving the industry of money is one of the better ways to reduce their ability to buy legislation.

No. The easiest way to demonstrate why is to examine what happens to the copies when copyright expires. There is no transfer of property at that point. The copies are and have always been the property of their respective possessor.

The monopoly right is more like a taxation right on the act of copying.

Calling it 'property' and trying to think about it as 'property' inevitably muddies your thinking. Which was the whole point of trying to call it 'property' in the first place.

There's a greasemonkey script that blocks the 'like' plug-ins. It's a Good Thing.

Culture has always been created for free and most culture today is created with little reasonable expectation of profit. If the only thing you have to express is 'I want money', chances are the loss of that piece of culture isn't exactly that much of a loss. Culture will survive and thrive as long as there are people with something to say and with infinite replication and mingling there is and will always be a vast oversupply of such expressions.

If you have a boss paying your pay check he's paying to tell you what to code. If he doesn't want to pay for it he doesn't get to direct your activities. Get another job and if you enjoy coding, code on your own time and release it or not.