Financials have all the fun! I know somebody who used to work (not in IT) in a large securities trading company. If people had a problem with any IT kit there, they would simply smash it up. He saw three people once that had a paper jam or something in a printer. They pushed it over, smashed it up with chairs, and then rang the help desk "Hi, the printer on our floor's not working."

Not to hijack the thread, but isn't this essentially the argument that the NRA make for the Second Amendment? I'm not American, so feel free to put me straight, but what is their argument against the fact that if (for example) the Occupy Wall Street people start shooting congressmen, that they would last about 3 seconds in the face of even a casual counter-attack by the US military?

I'm usually not patient enough to wait for that, so I take the bottle and whirl it around like Pete Townsend a few times. This forces the ketchup into the top of the bottle pretty quickly, and can then be poured out easily.

We used to use Bing, but their non-US maps are generally worse than Google's, who also localise them:

Compare:

http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=35.675977848368284~139.76959228515628&lvl=10&dir=0&sty=c&eo=1&where1=Tokyo%2C%20Japan&form=LMLTCC

with

http://g.co/maps/767nz

Don't read Japanese? No luck with Bing then.

So we switched.

"... some were willing to help while others required me to fax/mail death certificates and proof of executorship (which I didn't have yet)."

I should bloody well hope they wanted proof of executorship!

Why do so many people think that the problem of getting at a deceased relative's belongings is in any way a new phenomenon? People communicated before email was invented, they had secrets before PGP, and they most certainly used to die with a bunch of loose ends that needed sorting out.

You may WANT to get your hands on granny's Gmail account and grab her stuff as soon as possible, but the basic principle in law - that I am DAMN GLAD exists - is that only those people who have been granted the right to do so by due process should access these things.

FFS it's bad enough the erosion of privacy that's taken place since the net came in without potential criminals or idiots getting their hands on my passwords after I'm dead!

STOP THIS MADNESS!

"How about 8,000 rockets launched into Israel in the last 10 years?"

Israel, Palestine, they are both as bad as each other. For every Palestinian atrocity you can name, I can name an Israeli one. That game will lead you nowhere.

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=israeli+atrocites+against+Palatine&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gl=uk#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&client=ubuntu&hs=sXN&channel=fs&gl=uk&source=hp&q=israeli+atrocities+against+Palastine&pbx=1&oq=israeli+atrocities+against+Palastine&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=4447l6253l0l6880l9l6l0l2l2l0l413l1438l0.3.2.0.1l8l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=3dd5bec6e38bb980&biw=1901&bih=854

Sigh.

What's less pointless is looking at whether continued US support for Israel has contributed in large part to the growth of radical Islam and instability of the Middle East in general. Of course, the British started it, but that's no excuse.

OK. So apart from the very narrow exception of Fair Use (which doesn't properly exist outside the US very much), and maybe Moral Rights in places like France, contract trumps copyright.

In fact, can you name any significant victory of Fair Use over contract recently? The Estate of James Brown is pretty flush last I checked...

What are your problems?

Banking should be a service to industry that facilitates socially useful capital and equity, not be an industry in its own right. The social good derived from (say) derivatives shorting is vanishingly close to zero.

1) What shall we do about them?

(I think this has been articulated rather clearly by the movement to anyone wishing to ask). Re-introduce the Glass-Steagall Act, impose a transaction tax (eg 0.01%) on every trade of any kind performed on the stock markets, and re-balance shareholders' interests against equity build using suitable regulatory legislation.

So - what say you?

If students sign a contract with the school to say that both parties assign full rights to one another in works that they create, then it doesn't matter what copyright law says. Contract trumps copyright. That's how the music industry works, for one thing.

Would you be okay with your mother, wife, or daughter performing in a porn flick?

Wow. Are you sure you don't want to join the Taliban? The female members of your immediate family are not your property. You may not want them to appear in a porn flick, but if they want to then the should be free to do so.