Could the TSA's own advances in screening have killed off the company's business model?

Clearly, the gubmint should step in and stop the TSA from getting efficient, frail business models need to be protected, right?

it was something like 2 images in a sizable pr0n-pile of otherwise vanilla erotica

And remember, next time you hear a case about someone being charged with having 1000 CP images on their computer, that probably means that they found a single 40 second video clip of CP. Apparently they consider every video frame to be its own "image" and the charges and penalties are based on the number of images.

Lets presume each of the 24 songs in question (of the 1702 songs being shared by that IP) is available on itunes with a price of 99 cents. Lets also presume that statutory damages were actually limited to the revenue lost by the company (which they apparently aren't). And finally that the 24 songs were each 5MB and the cable modem had an upload speed of 256kbps.

For the 24 songs in question to incur $80,000 in damages each, therefore, they would have had to be downloaded a total of 1939394 times, for 9696970MB of downloads. This would, at 256kbps, take 3507 days (about 9 and a half years). Kazaa had only existed for about three years at the point of infringement. Also, for that matter, that ignores the remaining 1678 songs.

Going the other direction, if all 1702 songs were saturating the upload speed of the modem for the history of Kazaa (call it 3 years even to make things easier) you'd have been able to upload 1009152MB, or about 201830 songs, divided evenly over all 1702 songs that's about 118 times each. At 99 cents each that's $2803.68 in statutory damages.

I disagree. The purpose of the law and the statement in the constitution are to protect the rightful owners of the copyright. The way the particular laws are written hinges on presumptions of an earlier time, that violations of copyright of the scale we're seeing today would not be something individuals exchanging copyrighted materials would be able to achieve. Therefore, the implementation of the laws is intended to stifle mass copyright infringement. They haven't caught up to the way individuals are infringing today.

The punishment is meant not to recover just lost revenue but to be punitive. According to http://www.researchcopyright.com/article-penalties-for-copyright-infringement.php the copyright holder can request triple damages.

Still, the punitive punishment should make sense. Charge the retail value of the song for damages plus treble that to be punitive, and now you're all the way up to $4 per song downloaded from your system.

The law is written so that people printing and distributing media for a profit lose their shirts. As in, for outfits counterfeiting tens of thousands of books or CDs at a time. Sharing 24 songs that each get downloaded around a hundred times is a far smaller offense, and shouldn't be fined the same way.

Then again, I also believe that any media distributed with DRM should be treated as not copyrighted, because the manufacturer has chosen to protect their product via a method other than copyright. If the product has DRM it cannot be expected to become free of that at an arbitrary point in the future, and since the "limited times" clause is not met the protection clause should not apply at all. Which means that any DVD protected by CSS or any music file distributed with DRM should be protected only by trade secret and contract law that govern distribution of the copy protection.

But what if I had been a terrorist, fully aware of the knife?

You're buying into the security theater paradigm. Before 9/11, hijackings were kidnapping and ransom situations in the US. If you wanted to survive, you kept a low profile and didn't rock the boat, and odds were everything would be fine. Out of 200 people they might kill one or two, so your odds of being that one were low enough that resistance was not a good idea. 9/11 changed all that. Now the possibility that everyone might be killed is very very real, so terrorists are likely to see an overwhelming resistance if all they could get on board were knives or possibly even a couple small firearms.

I honestly think that a modest knife, say 3" or less, presents no substantial hijack threat.

And how do you call someone who tells you "I don't care whether there are any gods or not, because I don't have a need to believe in a deity"? Isn't this atheism, too?

An atheist actively believes there are no gods. An agnostic believes that, in essence, whether or not there is a god is not knowable or testable, and is therefore merely a point of theological discussion with no useful result. Your posited person would probably fall into nontheism. Personally, I'm an apathetic agnostic most of the time.

A business partner did this, and a month later he had $6k of bogus charges on his credit card.

That's what third party escrow is for. Never give out your credit card info to a private party like that, and use a trusted escrow source so you can confirm the transfer actually occurred before they see any money.

Does that mean that to get a clear view we need space crafts beyond the boundry?

Not necessarily, we just need glasses. Knowing our observations are being altered by what is in effect a lens is the first step. Once we know the actual shape and properties of that lens we can mathematically apply alterations to our observations to correct for the distortion and end up with representations of our galaxy, other galaxies, and the background photons and radiation of the universe with much more accuracy than ever before.

Of course, stationing observatories beyond the field would be the best option, much like observatories like Hubble that are outside our atmosphere are better than ground-based telescopes. It is possible that not everything is actually making it through this lens, so even applying corrections won't yield a 100% perfect picture.

If it were my friend, I'd be happy to. If they mentioned it to me before going off and just doing it and then mentioning it in passing a few months later.

You're again presuming the consumer has the slightest clue. The salesperson might well give them the cost of fixing their current computer with the services they want to try and sell them, without the consumer fully comprehending what the costs entail. This is not at all unusual. In the end, the consumer will have two computers and probably ask a friend how to get their old files over, since they don't actually care about most of the files on their old box. I've had to deal with this myself on more than one occasion. Relatives that bought new computers because their old ones didn't work well any more and they need help getting their 'my documents' and 'desktop' folders moved over and that's pretty much it.

Haha what!? You build up an entire argument based on the fact that his only choice is to actually buy another PC and then shit on your own face in the end? Why!? Of course he should pay someone to fix it, if it's a perfectly functioning PC with a missing hard drive, why wouldn't he!? You're weird man.

Because this friend knows so little about computers that they're going to end up asking the Geek Squad, or a similar outfit, to do it for them. They're going to need their hard drive swapped out ($100 for the part, $50 for the labor), data mirrored ($160), they'll probably get convinced they need their operating system reinstalled ($130), primary office suite reinstalled ($50), and antivirus software ($30). Of course, all these numbers are presuming they still hold the disks and license keys the various software started with. At a cost of $520 for a machine that's probably at least 2 years old, they might notice in the store that they could just get a brand new system for less than that.

Which means we seem to have even less data that it at first appeared. 110MW means something, but we have no idea what. My best guess is that they either need 110MW to run as many trains as they want on all tracks (4 tracks could probably support 10 trains with switching), OR they need 110MWH per train per day.

I'm not saying don't make the train electric, just that generating the electricity with thermal solar is more efficient than solar panels in this application.

Oh noes! And the architectural drawings are so much less pretty!