As a point of interest, statistically it seems to be about 96-98% can't. It depends on which study you look at. Of the more activity-specific ones I've read, the incidence of people whose driving performance was not significantly impaired while simultaneously carrying on a conversation with a remote party has been around 2-4%.

Some of the studies suggested that the same subjects also tend to exhibit their extraordinary ability to perform multiple simultaneous activities effectively in other contexts. Curiously, so far there seems little evidence of correlation between this ability and other factors we might expect to be relevant, such as other measures of intelligence.

If anyone here is a real psychologist with experience of the field, please feel free to chime in with more concrete data, as the above is just based on some personal research as an interested observer.

If you actually had lawyers in your family, and you had learned anything from them, you would know better than to claim things like "those are real numbers for a simple copyright case" without citing that case properly. You would also know that patents and copyright are completely different legal areas, and that "simple patent case" is pretty much an oxymoron.

Another thing that's easy is claiming your personal views are facts while not giving anything verifiable to back them up, but that also doesn't make a very convincing argument.

If your $275/hour lawyer can't resolve a simple copyright case without spending a year of near full-time work on it, your lawyer isn't worth $275/hour. The essential facts in the case are unlikely to be disputed, so the result is likely to depend on two fundamental questions of law, at least in the US: roughly speaking, can they escape via fair use, and can they escape via the DMCA safe harbor provisions? Even if you litigated it all the way, you should still be done in no more than a few hours of court time + preparation. The situation would be similar in Europe, e.g., considering fair dealing and the EUCD in the UK.

Obviously that might still not be worthwhile if you're talking about a minor case of infringement with little demonstrable actual damage, little expectation of other forms of damages, and a legal system where you wind up paying your own fees even if you win. That's why measures like the DMCA and EUCD provide for lighter weight takedown actions, and put anyone who counters at greater and more explicit risk if they choose to dispute the takedown and litigation follows.

But as you say, tough talk is easy. So is posting random numbers on Slashdot, but it doesn't make a very convincing argument.

(IANAL, if you get legal advice on the Internet you're crazy, etc.)

Not quite. The cost to REproduce has come down dramatically. The cost to PRODUCE works in the first place is higher than ever.

That is almost certainly due in part to celebrity stars and their demanding agents, at least in some creative industries. However, it is also because many of the works that are produced today have far greater production values than anything we produced as a society even a few years ago.

I think any case against copyright as a principle (as distinct from abusively distorted copyright in practice) needs to include a plausible alternative model that doesn't throw away all of those valuable works. So far, the most successful experiments in alternative business models have seen only isolated successes, and usually under highly favourable conditions that would not generalise.

It seems clear that they're doing it to us non-Americans even more. While that might be no immediate problem to US representatives who only have their own electorates to worry about, the damage to the US reputation abroad has already started. I imagine it will only get worse as people start to realise how much control and monitoring of the Internet and the wider technology industry one country has been allowed to have for so long. The catalyst for this might have been Snowden, and the fall guy might be the NSA, but no organisation could have achieved all of this alone.

The persistent trivialisation of the US spying abroad, even in public statements by very senior officials, is not going to do any favours for allied governments who are found to have been complicit in the whole deal or whose own questionable monitoring practices come to light, either. Angela Merkel could be in a lot of trouble, with Germany for obvious reasons being culturally more sensitive about this sort of thing than most. I'm a little surprised there hasn't been a more overt backlash against it here in the UK, particularly given the key role of The Guardian in recent disclosures, but I wonder how much of this is just the chilling effect at work and/or the media here taking a bit longer to realise that the tides of public opinion are shifting and playing their collective cards close to their chests after some rough arguments with government in recent years.

Ultimately the US government can defend that mass surveillance of foreign citizens as if it's somehow defending its people. Maybe in a few cases that is even true; after all, there obviously are some actually bad people in the world, and security services were formed for a reason, so it's important to keep a level head and not to lose context and perspective when debating these issues. However, I think we can all imagine what the same US officials would be calling it if the tables were turned, though I suppose they might flip between "cyber-terrorism" and "act of war" depending on the strength of the other party.

Only wimps use the NSA for backup. Real men just upload their important stuff on FTP and let the rest of the world mirror it. ;-)

A government must be limited in its powers at a constitutional level, because you never know who will be running the show in the future. Limits on things they can legally do that no-one else can are necessary, but they need to be beyond the power of the administration of the day to change without further consent or the protections are meaningless.

For the rest, in theory normal laws should suffice. The government itself should legislate to ensure that, for example, businesses must respect privacy to a reasonable extent, because telling a health insurance company that you've been having lots of discussions with people who have cancer lately could potentially have serious consequences too.

The catch here is that when politicians and lawyers are involved, the distinction between government and non-government authority and restrictions can get blurred, so I am increasingly of the view that basic rights must be protected at a constitutional level against anyone who might infringe them unjustly.

None of it matters anyway if your judicial system declines to enforce the law, of course, but at least this removes any ambiguity regarding whether those fundamental rights are legally protected.

Sure, but they make money from people, and for better or worse, voting with your wallet often proves to be more effective than voting for your representatives.

The thing I don't understand about all these controversial security measures, whether it's monitoring communications or intrusive airport security procedures or detention without trial or whatever else, is that governments and supportive media always seem quick to tell us that most people do want the claimed security benefits and are willing to accept the unpleasantness as a result even if a small minority of civil liberties campaigners object, yet apparently the people whose bottom line is riding on most of the population actually taking that sort of tolerant position don't seem very willing to bank on it.

If you really believe that, you have an extremely narrow perspective on computer history, though judging by some of the other comments in this discussion you're certainly not alone.

Please see my earlier post for some other examples of exceptionally impressive community achievements, including another computer-related one that surely has at least as big a claim to be the top of the list as the Linux kernel.

The LKML is certainly a forum where smart people discuss sometimes tricky issues relating to an important piece of software. I don't think anyone is suggesting otherwise. However, the idea that it is special in that respect or that Linux is exceptional as a software project is bizarre. Do you not realise that there are other software projects, some of which are much bigger, longer-lasting and/or more widely used than Linux? Do you not think that everyone working on those projects also engages in thoughtful discussions and wants to produce software of very high quality? Of course they do, and many of them manage to do it without having prominent figures in their community repeatedly lose their cool in public.

To each their own. Personally, I'd rather have good Linux kernel developers develop code for the Linux kernel.

Also, your implication that anyone who doesn't want to work in an unpleasant environment is mentally unstable is obvious hyperbole.

And again, your hyperbole is unfounded. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind.

Linux is a relatively large software project. There are plenty of other relatively large software projects, written by plenty of other smart people who also care about stability and quality.

In what way, exactly? Systems that include Linux surely have a collective value on that scale, but that value wouldn't disappear if someone made a small mistake in a kernel commit, or if Linus retired tomorrow.

You are giving me some perspective, by comparing a programme that develops one relatively large piece of software to a programme that puts humans in space? Physician, heal thyself!

Are you suggesting that he's just an ordinary poster on the list, with no special authority compared to kernel contributors and no special status as a leader that newcomers might look to?

I wonder how many n00bs never get that far, because they see how the leader of the community treats others and decide to go do something else instead. Maybe Linus does personally know the recipients of his infamous rants, but on a high-profile public forum not everyone watching might realise that.

If you walked into an office for a job interview, and the first thing you saw was some management type openly berating a subordinate, what tone would that set before you even started the discussion you were there for? Some conversations are best held privately, as much for the benefit of the community as for the participants themselves.

Then wish them well and send them on their way.

I find your implied association between smart people who get useful things done and rude people who can't act like adults unlikely. I know plenty of smart people, and the overwhelming majority of them would prefer to work with others in civilised fashion. Sure, when people are passionate about something then occasionally someone might cross the line, but then they apologise and everyone carries on.

I know plenty of blustery people as well, and a lot of them bluster to cover the fact that they aren't nearly as smart or valuable as they would like everyone else to believe. As with any bad apple, the best management decision for the project as a whole is usually to fire such people at the earliest opportunity rather than let them contaminate things any further or dig in any deeper.

Sometimes doing that will hurt in the short term, but no-one is irreplaceable. Once the bad ones are out of the way you can get on with bringing in other smart people to replace them. That can now include all the smart people you couldn't bring in before because they had no interest in working in a hostile environment and, being smart, they had plenty of other choices.

FWIW, I'm in the UK, in an area where the power supply is less than brilliant. We don't get many complete outages, but moderate surges and brown-outs seem to be happening all the time if the behaviour of a UPS is to be believed.

The working life of our electronic devices was surprisingly short across the board for the first few years after we moved here, with many formerly reliable devices all failing within a couple of years of the move, including (coincidentally or otherwise) multiple consumer-grade broadband routers. In contrast, in the years since installing a UPS for all the serious gear and at least basic surge protectors for everything else that plugs into a wall socket, we've seen almost no surprising failures of that kind.

Of course we don't know for sure whether it was really the dubious power supply that was responsible, and as other posters have mentioned there are several alternative explanations that would also make sense. But given how many things we saw fail within the window where the power supply was bad, and how few failed before and afterwards, the odds of the power supply being a factor seem quite high in our case.

To be fair, if you were debating with someone who writes applications that really do need the very top levels of performance, and you claimed that optimising trouble-spots would be sufficient to achieve that, then you were ignorant. For most software, being within a factor of 2 or 3 of hand-optimised low-level code is easily sufficient, and a bit of work with the profiler to identify the most serious flaws will go a long way. The rules change when you shift from that kind of performance standard to needing the very top levels, because then the emphasis on speed permeates everything.

Yes, that sounds unpleasantly familiar. It seems that these days a small business can't rely on any major vendor for a complete range of good quality, compatible gear. :-(

Maybe the likes of Cisco and HP are worth it if you have 24/7 IT teams running dedicated servers room full of equipment and measure the cost of downtime per second. For those guys, the high-end gear and management facilities and expensive support contracts might justify the cost.

For the rest of us, it feels like the best strategy now is to build heterogeneous IT systems and networks. Look for recommendations of individual devices, often from smaller and more specialised manufacturers, that do one job well. Anecdotally, I've found that in recent years these boxes tend to be pretty good at supporting the major standards, so if you buy best-in-class for each device you need then compatibility doesn't seem to be a major issue as much as maybe it used to be. And if anything does go wrong or you do need help with some awkward configuration, you have more than a snowball's chance in hell of speaking to someone who can help without coughing up most of this month's revenues for a support contract.