The best argument on this, especially when talking to the religious right, is biblical.

Matthew 25:34-40.

And Jesus said, For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'

"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

"And Jesus said to the righteous, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

Seriously, even for an atheist like me, that's a powerful argument.

Here, here, to your point #3.

The vast majority of prisoners will eventually be released someday.

Not to mention that the "cage experience" is probably exactly what you don't want for people with uncorrected violent tendencies.

Here's a fun fact in this debate - murderers have amongst the lowest recidivism rates. Think about it - you murder your husband/wife 'cause you caught them in bed with your best friend, or you kill your business partner over a dispute. What are the odds you'll be in that situation again?

Did you see the bit about how the (at the time) governor of Michigan decided to, after seeing some of the results of the innocence project, commute the sentences of EVERYONE sentenced to death to life instead?

I was watching a documentary about the innocence project, and I just remember thinking how satisfying it must be for that particular governor. It's like all the things everybody dreams of doing when they're working a job and gave their 2 weeks notice.

"Yeah, I'm not running again, so I'm gonna do what I want. What the fuck are you guys gonna do, _NOT_ vote for me?"

Don't get me wrong, I think, given the error rate for convictions, this was an entirely noble thing to do. But I just imagine a guy, who spent his whole career doing what he thinks will play well with the voters, saying "fuck y'all, I'm retiring, I'm gonna do what I want, and it's the right thing to do!"

So. Very. Satisfying.

Stephen J. Gould said something about how any evidence that suggests nurture over nature, could usually be used just as well to suggest a nature over nurture.

It turns out that nature vs nurture is a false dichotomy. For example, there have been genes identified in rats that are ONLY turned on by specific maternal behaviors.

So genes matter, but environment is at least as important. Without the environment that "turns on" a gene, nothing happens.

OK, I don't have any experience with _only_ cutting my caloric intake, but I _do_ know that in 3 months of running for an hour (say, 4 miles, I'm slow) at a time 3X+/week, it had virtually zero effect on my waistline/% body fat, but after doing that for about 3 or 4 months, I changed my diet, and the fat _melted_ off, or so it seemed.

My sister and her fiancee are both personal trainers/fitness instructors. Some observations they've shared with me:

1) 200 or 300 calories an hour, um, that's not really exercise, in the sense that you wanna define "exercise" in the context of weight loss. That's a rate of exercise that you'd recommend for someone who is very, very, overweight, the sort where you're worried that having them hit a heart rate > 120 might not be safe. This is not the majority of people 50 or 60 years old.

200-300 calories an hour, um, that's not even breaking a sweat for a lot of people. Call me old-fashioned, but I think if I'm not breaking a sweat, I don't really call it exercise.

2) The math on this shows nothing surprising. Estimate 2000 calories net gain/loss over a timeframe of weeks per pound of fat gained/lost.

So you wanna call burning 200 calories your "workout"? OK, no problem. But with no changes to diet, and assuming someone is eating basically their "revenue neutral", no loss, no gain, amount of calories per day, well, if you exercise 5X a week, you're going to lose a pound every 2 weeks.

So a really anemic, unsatisfying rate of weight loss is what you get if you do a teeny, tiny, bit of exercise that barely breaks a sweat and don't change your eating habits. Film at 11.

3) My sister has a client that I met, once, then didn't see for a year or 2. She had lost at least 100 lbs. So I asked my sister "aren't there some people that are still fat, even if they exercise and eat properly?" and she told me, not that she'd seen. She told me the number of clients she'd had who had decent eating habits in the 2000-3000 cal/day range, who exercise 3X/week (that is, vigorous, 500 cal/hour, think running intensity level) for an hour or more at a time, who started out overweight and stayed just as overweight was exactly zero. She hasn't even ever _heard of_ another fitness instructor who had someone like that.

4) One problem my sister identified in a lot of clients, especially people who are hitting the gym for the first time in their life in their 30s or later and never played any sports, is they don't want to do a level of exercise intensity that they find "uncomfortable". Anybody who's ever done anything even remotely athletic in their life will know the truth of "no pain, no gain", but there are some people who don't want to endure the "pain" part of that equation. Those people have a lot of trouble losing weight, and often feel that "it just never works for me", and only when they get one-on-one training with a fitness instructor (or go to the gym with a fit friend) that anybody has ever pointed out "you're doing it wrong".

And, ok, profoundly unscientific, but at least in my own personal experience, I'm amazed at how much exercise I can do, and how much I can improve my fitness level (by whatever measure you like) and have zero or next-to-zero effect on my waistline, and by how significant effects on my waist that I _do_ see, with what seems like a pretty small change in diet. Like, as in, switch from coke to coke zero, and changing morning "coffee plus donut" to "just coffee".

"That is clear, you're correct. What is unclear is whether there is a middle ground. It is entirely possible that even with penny DVD's people will still take it illegitimately. It doesn't take a huge imagination to see where that would wind up leading."

Yes, that's true. But I can get water from my tap at a price too small for me to conveniently measure, it's effectively free. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to make a profit selling bottled water.

OK, but the argument being made by people who talk about marginal production cost approaching zero aren't (ok, not all of them anyway) asking for stuff to be free - what I want is, the reduction in marginal cost of production to be reflected in the price I pay, for movies or tv or music.

Take movies, the worst offender IMO. Movie theater tickets have doubled in price in the last ooh, what? 15 years or so?

What people are suggesting is, if it costs 20 bucks to buy a DVD of "Terminator - Salvation" in a store, that a digital copy, with it's marginal cost of production, should be available for a fraction of that price.

The content owners want to do what every other corporation has done with new tech that brings down production costs - they want to realize all the benefits of new tech, but they want to keep the price structure of a pre-internet, bandwidth-scarce, world.

This is all really complicated, and difficult. We can have a lot of meaningful debate on where the price points should be. But a digital copy of something should be a fraction of the physical version, and that's something that every content owner is not only fighting, they're pretending the argument doesn't even exist.

I know you're joking, and this is off-topic, but your line of "depends on how hard you hit them" reminds me of something Bruce Schnier said about security policies - someone asked him, what's the best way to get users to follow our security policy?

He replied "Easy. Just fire someone, loudly and publicly, for violating security policy."

But as we all know, that virtually never happens, right? He pointed out that employees, when they violate security policies, are just rationally evaluating risks. There's the risk of "not getting their work done" vs "almost zero chance of negative consequences for breaking the rules".

So maybe it's not that "the most difficult thing to change is end-user behavior", more accurate thing to say would be "the most difficult thing to do is get users to change their behavior, in ways that make it harder to for them to get their work done, by asking them, when they don't understand why it's important."

Copyright is about legal technicalities and competing economic interests. There is nothing "moral" or "ethical" about the issue, full stop.

There is no "natural right" to a monopoly on reproduction of a creative work the way that there's a "natural" right to freedom of speech or something.

As Jefferson said, (sorry if I mangle the quote) "he who lights his taper at my candle enriches himself while taking nothing from me."

If you wanna talk about ethics around IP, the only questions that make sense to be framed as "ethical" are all on the side of the anti-copyright zealots. Things like "is it ethical for person A to restrict person B's freedom of speech" or "is it ethical to prohibit people from accessing life-saving drugs unless they give me money first?"

Those who wanna argue in favor of the status quo on copyright seem to be unable to come up with anything like a rational argument, so they've resorted to emotional appeals and attempts to make people feel guilty. But it's just not a moral or ethical issue, it's just a question of competing economic interests.

Let me highly recommend getting the big after-market battery on the G1.

A G1 only fits in the pocket of a suit jacket or something, which for me is maybe 10 days a year, so I'm carrying it in a belt-clip holder anyway. So who cares if the phone is thicker as a result?

Also, it actually makes typing on the keyboard much more comfortable.

The 1100 mAh battery is a real design flaw of the G1, but with the 2300 one I don't even worry about using wi-fi, keeping the brightness cranked, or whatever.

Yeah, once more, Israel never misses a chance to miss an opportunity.

Israel's bigger problem is, if they don't find a way to integrate with their regional neighbors, they're not long-term stable.

Israel currently has
1) unquestioned military superiority in the region
2) Nuclear monopoly in the region
3) (basically) unqualified support of the Americans.

Now, those three things are that way now, but will they be that way forever? I'm sure the Crusader kingdoms of the 12 century or so looked pretty stable, too. But eventually the crusaders had to go home.

Israel I'm sure would like to keep their nuclear monopoly, and yes they've said "if the rest of the world won't deal with Iran, then we will", but I'm not sure that they can _do_ anything about Iran's nuclear program. (Or alleged nuclear program, whatever)

It's not like when they hit the Iraqi nuclear site in the 80s, took it out with an air strike. All the Iranian nuke sites are either hardened, or underneath cities, or both.

Also, you attack Iran, they can close the Straight of Hormuz, and not even the full might of the Americans could prevent that. Anybody got a contingency plan for dealing with that?

Actually, that's true, but there's another side to it.

He was trying to buy stuff from Pakistan's AQ Kahn's network. When the Libyans figured out that Kahn had sold them "last year's model", i.e. stuff that would give him low-grade enrichment, or just didn't work very well.

So you're absolutely right, on Quadaffi saying "this nutter's _serious_!" was part of the motivation, but they basically traded intel on the nuclear smuggling ring for goodwill from the Americans.

Smart, really. Nuclear weapons, like chemical and biological ones, aren't really that useful, and they're expensive. The reason they've only ever been used _once_ in war isn't because the world's leaders are just such moral people who would Never Do That, but because dollar for dollar, nuclear and biological and chemical weapons just aren't that effective.

Their motives for wanting nukes, or at least the ability to produce nukes, if they really really had to, are pretty straightforward:

1) Prestige, and "my stuff is better than yours", the equivalent of "keeping up with the jones" only between nations;
2) To make sure nobody else will nuke them, AKA "credible deterrence";
3) To make sure they won't be invaded by a bigger power (USA, we're looking in _your_ direction).

Look, countries like Iran (and eventually Syria, and Venezuela, and Brazil, and a few others) no longer count on the attempts at international law of the past 60 years to guarantee their territorial sovereignty, so they're looking at the example of North Korea vs Iraq, and figuring out very quickly that the only way to be invasion-proof is to get nukes.

Never mind that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is starting to look, from the point of view of non-nuclear countries, like a system where there's one set of rules for the big guys and another set of rules for everybody else.

You can hardly expect countries like Iran to enthusiastically support that, eh?

Oooooh, the big bad scary Iran is coming for Israel!

Look, even if we take the statements of some of the more wacko members of the Iranian government at face value (which we shouldn't), um, if Jamaica declared that the USA was an illegitimate state and their intention to destroy it as a matter of public policy, would anyone care?

OK, Iran vs Israel isn't quite that big a difference in military power, but seriously guys, c'mon. Israel is what, the 4th or 5th most powerful nation in the world, militarily speaking? (Off the top of my head, they're less powerful than the USA, Russia, China, and...? They probably have as many or more nukes than Britain or France, right?)

Israel vs "the entire combined military forces of every arab country in the region" would still be no contest.

_One_ of Israel's regional neighbors, with whom they've never actually gone to war, maybe-sorta-kinda-possibly getting a handful of nukes, doesn't change that.

Israel's nukes are basically defensive anyway. It means that nobody, not even say, NATO, could invade them. It means that even if they lost conclusively in a conventional war, they have the nukes as a 'last resort' to end that kind of war. But I don't see the Israelis being defeated in a conventional war, by arab countries, um, this side of the heat death of the universe.