I reckon the symbolism of the "victory" can really only go one of three ways:

a) It symbolises that they are completely powerless, but being petty-minded bureaucratic idiots they behave like toddlers and throw a pointless tantrum when they've worked out they won't get their way.

b) It symbolises that they just don't understand how digital information works. This despite having spent the last 10 years making a copy of the whole of the internet. Maybe they're printing it out in hard copy, so they can store it safely, but the dot matrix printer can't keep up, so there's a bit of a backlog of data."

c) Both of the above.

So one of those classic UK government "victories", like Dunkirk.

I reckon the symbolism of the "victory" can really go one of three ways:

a) It symbolises that they are completely powerless, but being petty-minded bureaucratic idiots they behave like toddlers throwing a pointless tantrum when they've worked out they're won't get their way.

b) It symbolises that they just don't understand how digital information works. This despite having spent the last 10 years making a copy of the whole of the internet. Maybe they're printing it out in hard copy, so they can store it safely, but the dot matrix printer can't keep up, so there's a bit of a backlog."

c) Both of the above.

Yes one of those classic British victories, like Dunkirk.

It's not a Finnish Ship. It's being finished in Finland for the Russian Ministry of Transport, and is being classed by the Russian Maritime Register of Shipping. The hull was actually built in Kaliningrad's Yantar Shipyard, then shipped in bits to Arctech in Helsinki for completion. Arctech itself is joint venture between Russia's United Shipbuilding Corp and STXFinland.

It's function is billed as being "an icebreaking multipurpose emergency rescue vessel". So I guess it's more about rescuing non-icebreaker ships that are trapped (which should be thinner ice or else they wouldn't have got there), so it shouldn't need to get through thick ice.

For example, the Grand Aniva LNG carrier is KM Ice2 class, so it's no icebreaker, but it can go unaided through fragmented ice, or with an icebreaker's help through ice up to 0.55m thick.

It might not end up in the Europe end at all, but out in Vladivostok. I've seen a few icebreakers docked there.

Guns and drugs trafficking. See Iran-Contra, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Mexico, Air America, etc etc.

...Or the dietary and sexual proscriptions and general calls to psychotic craziness that most sensible believers ignore.

It's popular because it's very comforting to believe that your 4-year-old daughter died for a reason. That there was some purpose to it, it was part of a grand ineffable scheme. That she lives on in a nicer place now, and one day you'll get to see her again.

It's comforting to know that someone is watching over you and loves you unconditionally when it seems no one else does.

It's comforting to know that even when you die, it won't be over.

Of course, this doesn't make religion any less untrue. But then again, the placebo effect in medicine points out the blind faith in a non-existant cure works wonders on over 20% of people.

Indeed. Especially today. I should imagine the smell would be distressing for his co-workers, for starters.

See also the Monty Python sketch about Carl French's new film starring Marilyn Monroe.
"We had her lying on beds, lying on floors, falling out of cupboards, scaring the children..."

Price is really the crux of it. Price it more cheaply and more people will buy it rather than pirate it. It really is that simple. All the other anti-piracy methods are merely delaying tactics. Piracy will always happen, regardless of the protection.

The problem is finding the balance of price to sales that you're comfortable with. Digital stuff is weird in that the "startup cost" of the very very first copy is stupendous, but all subsequent copies cost mere cents to produce. So selling something for $100 bucks to 10 people (and have 1,000 people pirate it), is nowhere near as profitable as selling it for $10 to 1,000 people (and have 10 people pirate it).

A real life example:

In the 1990s in Hong Kong, the VCD black market was huge. Legit VCDs went for HK$150-350 (US$20-45), recent movies being at the top end. Organised crime cartels sold them for HK$100 (US$13) for four movies, in temporary shops (they'd stay open til busted, usually about 2-3 months) making enough profit to run the risks of imprisonment, fines etc. No legislation or customs task forces could even make a dent. Shops that were shutdown would reopen either close by or in the same shop within a week or two.

Eventually, they finally found a way to put an end to the piracy: the legit VCD makers started charging HK$35-80 (US$5-10) per movie. Overnight, the pirates disappeared. Even though they were still charging more than the pirate outlets, people preferred the legit copy.

As a footnote, amusingly enough, the movie industry didn't take the lesson on board and tried the same overpricing the product foolishness with DVDs and more recently with BluRay. By then internet-based piracy had gone mainstream, offering not only really cheap movies, but far more choice and convenience. The triads didn't bother nearly as much (or at all in the case of BluRay), because the money wasn't there, so organised piracy was much less of a problem. Instead individual piracy took hold. This time it's the legit DVD/BluRay sellers that are closing down, killed off by the movie companies' refusal to accept the reality of the market: people aren't willing to pay that much for movies.

ID's most significant failing is that it DELIBERATELY DOES NOT SPECIFY any intelligent designer, and is therefore not only not falsifiable, it's so meaningless as a "hypothesis" in the first place that it doesn't really even warrant the nomenclature in the first place. All it posits is "life is just so complicated, something even cleverer must have done all this, life can't have just happened".

The reason it doesn't specify an intelligent designer is of course purely political and utterly disingenuous for it —if the majority of people who want to push intelligent design as a hypothesis actually put their cards on the table and posited their favoured specific brand of intelligent designer (to whit, one JHVH), it would not be able to be taught in US public schools due to restrictions on the separation of superstition and state.

And even if it could, said JHVH is subject to exactly the same ID problem —"JHVH is just so complicated something cleverer must have done all this, JHVH can't have just happened", to infinite regress.

Now many will try to point out that ID doesn't necessarily posit JHVH —but that's because it is framed in a deliberately vague and disingenuous way by the JHVH supporters to obfuscate the whole affair. So that exobiogenesis etc people will sign up to it to obscure the real point of it. It's why the hypothesis is non falsifiable — there's absolutely no agent specified, ergo no real hypothesis, to falsify. It also makes no real attempt to explain why life can't have "just happened", and indeed most proponents are comfortable in asserting that said JHVH definitely did just happened, despite the rather hypocritical contradiction to their supposedly closely held ID tenet that amazingly complicated things can't just happen.

So ID is deliberately designed to make no actual hypothesis for fear of invalidating itself from being taught for political reasons, and it hopes that no one will notice it is a paradox that leads to infinite regress. All it's really aimed at doing is getting bible studies to be taught as having equivalence to science. Which is frankly preposterous.

If they really want to teach an actual extant controversy involving JHVH they should start from here: christianity is a minority superstition in a sea of thousands of equally valid superstitions. Discuss.

Intelligent design is really a self-referential infinite regression.

The argument being that because life is so complex it can't have just happened and therefore must have been designed by a higher intelligence, by its own logic then forces the proponent to assume that anything that can design life must be so complex that it, in turn, can't have just happened and therefore must must have been designed by a higher intelligence, which of course would be so complex that it would have had to have been designed by a higher intelligence.... etc. etc. ad infinitum.

It's turtles, turtles, turtles all the way down... (to quote another scientific *ahem* "controversy" they'll no doubt soon be teaching in Missouri).