You're right, the penalties should not overlap. However, I was specifically referring to the GP's statement:

This is not the case at all.

I've never used it, but Perfect Browser would appear to be such an application. Yes, it still uses WebKit to actually render webpages, and as such it only replaces Safari's 'chrome', but it's still a browser.

Apple's done some pretty questionable things in the past, but I don't see how having a non-removable battery in the iPhone is abusive. Preventing third-party developers from 'duplicating existing functionality' on the phone, on the other hand...

It's not reasonable to compare the minimum penalties for rape and murder to the maximum penalties for copyright infringement. In the vast majority of cases, 'sharing songs' will not result in any penalty. Regardless of how strongly you might disagree with the potential consequences of breaking copyright law, it's disingenuous to imply that society penalizes copyright infringement more severely than rape and murder.

I'm a law student, and this is why I still take notes by hand. Granted, most people use laptops, but not all of us do.

if you really want to be technical, the 'media' is the disc itself -- removable in the case of an optical or floppy drive, fixed inside the drive in the case of a hard drive

Uh, why exactly was the GP's English incorrect? I'd say your wording is easier to read, but the original wasn't wrong IMO.

I stopped using my iPod Classic when I got an iPhone -- I find the touchscreen interface much easier to navigate. No more having to go into the settings menu to change things like shuffle/repeat options, and the artists/albums/songs options are consistently in the same place (using a Classic, you had to navigate to them using the wheel and then click). The click wheel was pretty good, but personally I think the touch screen is a lot better. I'm curious as to why you find it so difficult to use.

Hold on, you realise compression (as in the loudness war) is different to compression (as in mp3), right? It sounds like you might be conflating the two.

I'll believe it when you can consistently pick the 320kbps mp3 in an ABX test.

You need a large number of users out there using clients which support DHT and PEX first. DHT was available a long time before it was really particularly useful.

In fact, Torrent already has this feature: if you look at the 'Peers' tab, it'll try to work out what country each peer comes from and display an appropriate flag just to the left of the IP. All that's needed is an option to allow the user to prioritize connections to peers from the same country.

Could you source that quote? It sounds interesting.

Because most people haven't heard of FLAC, and even if they had heard of it, they wouldn't know how to use it. Also, very few of the tools that people actually use for ripping CDs and playing back audio (WMP, iTunes, iPods, etc.) support FLAC, and mp3/aac/wma is simply 'good enough'.

Do you have any evidence for that? Linguistic change occurs in every natural language, and it always has. I see no reason to assert that improved literacy would reduce linguistic change. In fact, it seems to me that it is increased literacy that has caused the problems we have with English spelling today -- the written record has remained somewhat constant despite substantial changes in pronunciation, leaving us with words like 'knight' which sound nothing like what you'd expect.

Most linguists these days accept that linguistic change is unavoidable, so I'm not really sure how you've been modded +5 informative. (I'm not a linguist, but I am a linguistics major.)