As stated in the article, the whole controversy is also generating sales for the lesser-known "Strobo" book that was allegedly plagiarized. That can't be a bad thing. http://www.amazon.de/Axolotl-Roadkill-Helene-Hegemann/dp/3550087926/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266012743&sr=8-1 Still waiting for copyright enforcement advocates to realize that copyright infringement isn't always a bad thing.

The scandal is generating sales. If there was no scandal, if she had got away with it, the original copyright holder would not be profiting at all, while the plagiariser raked it in.

The difficulty arises if images are shown to provoke and promote illegal behaviour. Although this logic is not used directly in cases of child-porn (although I'd be interested to see studies that found a causal link) , it is used in certain situations regarding terrorism and other criminal acts.

Should society and the government have the authority to ban videos and literature detailing weapon manufacture and security-breaking techniques?

I wouldn't call them unique to the internet. Paper journalists bemoaned the TV news as a bite-size summary of real news, and then as a torrent of summary when 24-hour news networks rolled around.

In fact, weren't there plenty of people complaining about the growth of first the printing press and then mass-production novels and comic strips? Writers of all stripes seem to have a notion of the 'sanctity of information'... or at least the authority of their opinion.

What I meant by 'intelligently planned' was something custom-designed to fit with what you already had and what you needed. The stuff like Yakult is a basic mixture that can replace whatever balance you already had.

There is no shortage of domestic cattle, but elephants are endangered because humans want to use and eat them yet make little effort to preserve them in quantity.

I hate to play pedant, but that's a poor analogy. Cattle have been bred to mature quickly; meanwhile the never-fully domesticated Elephants of Africa and India rival humans for their long maturation and gestation periods.

Microbes, on the other hand, are easy to breed in quantity once you have established their optimal developmental environment. Once we work out what we have inside and around us and what we need, we could conceivably tailor our anti-biotic intake based on our inherited and environmental differences.

'Intelligently planned' biotic yoghurt supplements may be the next big thing in preventative health care.
/IANA Micro-biologist

I'd happily argue for lighter and proportional prison sentences for a variety of reasons; from prison populations to rehabilitation and education. Just not when I'm fired up after reading about a hypocritical incestuous rapist. Screw his vile guts. Like many people who are socially liberal, I admit my bias towards forgiving the 'victims of society', the poor, mentally disturbed and undereducated. That people given a good break in life still behave abominably is deeply depressing.

I've often seen newspaper articles printing a tinyurl (or similar) link rather than linking to obscure, very long web addresses.
It's a hell of a lot easier to type in a short series of numbers and letters than to accurately enter something like: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8400962.stm

I was intrigued by your comment about Indianapolis.
If anyone else is interested, a little searching (google: police street brawl Indianapolis) turned up http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pshell/gammage/testimonies/indianapolis.html as a summary.

There is competition in the form of skill, and there is competition in terms of strategy and concentration. With many games a peak of 'skill' is achievable; but the best competitive players will spend time developing new strategies to defeat their opponents' strategies. This is what happens in games like Street Fighter, Starcraft and Chess:
The meta-game BECOMES the game.

If the regime controls the media well enough, any problems or threats can be described as American-sponsered.

And if any change does occur, it'd not stop sympathetic conspiracists from blaming the downfall of an Islamic state on whoever they damn well wish: The US, the UK, or a sinister cabal of Zionists.

Of course, this is discounting the major problem the anti-government Iranian students are facing; that those they oppose were revolutionary students once, ruthless ones at that, and know a few of the tricks.