Why would any one not expect the laws of the country they're in to apply to them?

You travel, you look for a summary of the local laws and customs before you go; or you take your chance at either offending people that would otherwise help you, or getting thrown in jail or beheaded.

You get caught smuggling banned substances into Australia? Jail. Most anywhere in South-East Asia? Death. If you're unwilling to Google, call a travel hotline, or ask your government, you deserve everything you get.

If I'm writing a file called 'sensor data', I don't expect it to conflict with 'censor data' (homonym), 'detector data', or 'sensor recordings' (synonyms) - while the words are interchangeable when spoken, or equivalent in meaning, they are not the same words. The same is true of alternate writings for Japanese kanji, especially in names.

If it has a different writing, it is a different word; complete with its own (although possibly equivalent) entry in the dictionary.

Half-width katakana (JIS) are generally only used as phonetics on systems that don't support UTF- or another native language character encoding; and can be transparently re-coded to the full-width equivalent for storage or transmission in systems that do.

As for kanji, Japanese users expect written homonyms to be distinct (as do we) - although some application interfaces provide search by particle or phonetic (furigana by dictionary or metadata) I haven't seen it used a great deal (not that I necessarily would, even when I was living in Japan I still used English-language tech nearly exclusively). It's been attempted in more platform-wide situations, but I think it has the same sort of stigma as voice-recognition in English; the matches are just too fuzzy to be useful.

To clarify, NTFS (like HFS+) is case-preserving in filenames - filesystem drivers are given the leeway to match case-sensitively or not, so as to interact well with the expectations of the platform they are running on. Windows software expects case-insensitivity, so it gets it.

HFS+ at least has a filesystem flag that indicates names should be matched only by binary comparison (case-sensitive). When the case-sensitivity option started to appear in the version of Disk Utility on the install CD, not all bundled software had the right case in some hard-coded paths - so installing the OS on a case-sensitive (marked) file system would have a bunch of unusable core services.

I think this issue is now fixed, but the flag remains off by default as an ease-of-use feature for most OS X users.

I think the craziness of your wife is likely to be observation bias - people are crazy; significant exposure to any one of them will make them seem more crazy than average.

... or just move to a place with an extra bedroom when you start planning for your kids - it's not like you have to find a buyer. You don't need to own the new place either.

Whatever - if you think the difference between owning the building or just living in it is worth the price, pay it.

Somewhere to live for 20 years plus the difference between the mortgage payment amount for the value of the property and the rent amount times 20 years of interest accrued in your favour.

People taking loans over such long terms pay over 90% the value of the property in interest. i.e. even when they 'own' the house, they've paid twice it's market value after the bank has taken their slice.

If you have the discipline to save for what you buy, you can get a much, much better deal. Especially if you are willing to live 'below' your means (i.e. sharing your rent for a few years after you can afford a place of your own)

Any financial advisor worth their salt should tell you that the phrases popular in amateur advice like "rent money is dead money" and "would you rather pay for your own house or somebody else's" are sales lines used by people trying to make you give them your wage. If your financial advisor tells you these things, they likely either have no understanding of economics or are trying to get a slice of what you earn.

Except that you can't trust what they tell you so you have to do the expensive side anyway.

And agreeing to pay most of your income to your bank for 20 years is stupid.

Or, to more directly address your points - while they do own the content (a stance I agree with, as a small-company content producer myself), and can choose to release it under whatever terms they like; not all distributors of their content are legitimate, and those other distributors are pretty much 'mainstream'.

The pragmatic, business effect of this is that they have the choice of: competing with the other channels, ignoring them, or trying to shut them down.

Shutting them down seems to not be working - it doesn't seem to matter how many of their consumers they sue (yeah, yeah - no surprise here). It's certainly not an option we'd consider for our own purposes.

Ignoring them is the path we take with our iPhone games - people pirate them, we ignore it. We're happy for what little publicity we get for it, and if the pirates won't pay the $3 we ask there's not a whole lot we can do about it. We support every device we can already, they can legitimately sync it to all their iWhatevers. We can't get that money - trying to deny the pirates (yarr!) the use game would give no benefit to our bottom line.

Competing is really the option I'm trying to promote here for the mainstream media producers. I think there are a lot of people like myself who would pay for more of their media content if the terms were more open. See my other post at this level for details.

Trying to clarify here; in the scenario I propose the desirable product is [their content] with [terms it's not available under].

While they can choose the terms they distribute the content under, the options they've made available aren't worth the price they ask.

I tried to avoid the ethics of pro-/anti-copyright, since there are too many wrong opinions on both sides, I mean only to assess the pragmatic commercialisation of infinitely reproducable media.

If the product [content + usage terms] is available free of charge, and they want to charge for [content] with [restricted usage], the logical price point is the value the consumer places on being on the legal side of copyright law for [content], minus the value to the consumer of the terms that are desirable but restricted or prevented.

For me, the sum of that equation continues to be negative for the content I want. My ability to watch from the couch *or* my desk, to have a movie night with friends without buying and downloading the same content all over, to watch new content within a reasonable time of everyone discussing it on the 'net (for stuff that is eventually licensed in Australia at all...), the convenience of tracking ongoing releases automatically, etc. are worth more to me than the notion of compliance with copyright law and the hollow hope that my money would go to those that made the content I enjoy.

If I could download the same non-DRM'd files the P2P groups release, but direct from the studio, I would. Obviously tens of thousands of people want those files every week - I can't be the only one that would pay a couple of bucks for it, can I?

In my experience, IPv4 address allocations in the wild are seldom geographically contiguous to a significant degree. I get a different first octet every time I reset my modem.

AFAICT, this is compounded by the common ISP model. In the DSL case for example, many buildings share a common exchange, but traffic from one (physical) neighbour to another (assuming that we're trying to minimise overall and edge traffic inflation by P2P networking) will traverse all the way to either the nearest ISP peering location (IGRP? it's been a while...) or some common carrier chosen by the conglomeration of both networks.

Well, durr.

The majority of P2P traffic is media content. When people want to consume media content on their own schedule, on whatever device they have, without having ads thrust in their face mid-program, they find a way.

For many, this way is bit torrent. For many others, it's iTunes/Netflix - often the difference in choice is the convenience or availability, sometimes it's the price. Some people will watch a few ads for cheaper content (I presume the Hulu vs. Netflix people?) - some will pay more for additional device convenience (I see this as the iTunes people).

Unfortunately, some entire markets have none of these options available; or with unreasonable compromises in the other criteria. In Australia, Hulu is blocked completely, Netflix plans are more expensive for less selection, and iTunes is more expensive still for less selection and often months behind US releases. All our Internet plans have limited monthly traffic quotas, and most major ISPs only partner with one (if any) of the above for un-metered content.

Hypothetically - say that I have money to spend on home entertainment. With P2P, I could pick a show I like from a list of RSS feeds and have every episode downloaded into a folder as its released, or scheduled for overnight (off-peak quota) download. Once I had the file, I could play it on the TV, PC, laptop, or iPod as easily as any of the commercial options (sans iTunes->iPod option, which would involve a HandBrake step). I could watch it as many times as I want. I could show it to my friends. I could download it again if I didn't want to use the drive space to keep it around.

Take my money - give me the product you have the way I want it, or I'll get it from somewhere else.

The claim that the allowable level is 'much' too high does not imply the position that any amount is harmful.

An object (i.e. head) adjacent to an omnidirectional transmitter (i.e. phone) will be exposed to up to half the transmitted energy.

The amount absorbed is well known. The amount of exposure that is likely to cause medically detectable symptoms is the variable in question.

A person any reasonable distance from a cell tower (not climbing it) will be exposed to less energy from the tower than from the phone they hold against their head.

My point was not to counter the GPs assertion that there would still be radiation; but to emphasise that there would be a dramatic reduction in local exposure.

The extrapolation that any exposure is harmful is curious indeed - we have been exposed to broad spectrum natural radiation since the inception of life. That the recommended 'safe' exposure levels are too high may be true - it is in fact the subject of the notably inconclusive study - but the banning of mobile devices in an area *will* reduce the amount of exposure in that area significantly - yes, the absolute reduction will depend on tower configuration, but in the settings described there will be 'much less' exposure, and somehow you ascertain this to be irrelevant?