Favorite read this year is REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson. Looking forward to many books, but probably the Genesis of Shannara series by Terry Brooks would be at the top.

But, he might not be the one we need right now.

The Soviet Union under Stalin provides a counter-example to this assertion. Also, where does your concept of evil come from?

Full disclosure: I am a born-again Christian. I don't think that means some of the things some people think that means.

Out of curiosity, does anybody know where this meme (assuming it is actually a meme and not just a single comment people keep reposting) came from? I did a little googling but wasn't able to find much other than a lot of uses of it in slashdot posts.

It's different because you can generally do more damage, and more quickly, with an object designed to hurt people than with a tie, a tray table, or a pencil.

I foresee a new oil mining industry developing consisting entirely of companies trying to mine these oil bubbles out of the gulf. It could lead to some pretty innovative tech.

Throw them in the coop.

In the former, the record company may have been deprived of some of the money you would have spent if you had actually bought the music legally (whether a CD in Wal-Mart or iTunes, etc.).

Actually, this is an interesting matter. If hypothetically you always bought physical CDs and never used iTunes, then given that large stores buying lots of CDs has some overflow (e.g. Wal-Mart can't know exactly how many people will buy some album, and so will end up with extras in stock) then you could argue that if you were to instead download an album for free, you actually weren't depriving the record company of any money (since all you've done is cause one more album to sit on Wal-Mart's shelves rather than leave Wal-Mart's shelves, and Wal-Mart has already paid Warner when it bought the CDs in bulk). However, in that case you're depriving Wal-Mart of money (by not buying the CD, and by causing it to sit on a shelf, which apparently costs some money), though it would be tough to argue that that money is rightfully Wal-Mart's. Nevertheless, you have clearly violated copyright.

On the other hand, if you always bought music on iTunes, then in this case since your money goes to Apple and then royalties from that automatically go to the record companies (full disclosure: I do not have certainty that this is how it actually works, but this is how I think it works), then you are in fact depriving the record company of money it should rightfully get.

Yes, but Warner owns the right to copy the music (fair use excepted). By copying the music herself, Jammie deprived Warner of its rights, as well as money which is rightfully Warner's. The fact that Warner is a large corporation and probably has "way too much money" and probably Does Evil does not legitimize doing wrong against it.

I agree, the damages in both cases should be comparable, and the solution is not increasing the damages from a theft of a physical CD.

No, he's not. He said:

not,

The first raises the question, the second makes a blanket statement. Whether the question is valid or not is up for debate, but it is not like in this article Eric Schmidt has said he's going to start taking steps to curb users' privacy beyond complying with legal requirements, nor has he said that privacy is immoral.

Click on the drop-down menu button to the left of the search box (which contains the Google icon if Google is currently your chosen search provider). Pick you desired other search provider, or click "Manage Search Engines" to do more complex stuff, and you're done. This is in Firefox 3.5.4

But what decides where the line is? If this theory is true, why didn't we get hung up before the discovery of the electron?

Because reusing existing spinning disc technology means saving a little money now and not improving on the future, whereas making a whole new, probably much better technology means expending more money now in order to save money in the future.

Also, cars have a much more standardized interface than software/OSes. In general, someone who's driven a Buick for the first 10 years of their driving life doesn't worry about stepping into a Mazda and not being able to find the controls, beyond something like a one minute quick scan to see that pretty much all the controls they expect are there, and in mostly the same places. Software, on the other hand, doesn't even dream of being that standardized.

Neither does most junk food.

It's my experience that open source upgrades don't utterly bork things between versions, nearly as much as Windows does. You just keep your system up-to-date, pay attention to your distro's news bulletins, and things go alright.

Then again, I am an IT professional with only about 3.5 years of experience. Perhaps my elders can chime in with more experience.