Hong Kong's ultimate fate might be different from it's past but for a long time it's been very free. It's pretty much autonomous in all things except foreign relations and the military.

Should be able to but sadly cannot. I'm sorry you're a criminal my friend.

I am taunting you!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin Not funny. It's pretty plausible you could get off.

Maybe he's matching that up with the 1% of his household power consumption going to power his computer and wifi.

I'm so sick of smart phone companies today blindly copying apple and other best selling phones without innovating at all. When I look at my smart phone I see so much room for improvement that nobody is trying to capitalize on. The two biggest examples I can think of is the lack of a phone that can be used all day, or a phone with a real camera lens on it. Both are easily doable with today's technology but nobody will pull the trigger, mostly because they think it will be too bulky. Guess what, the iPhone was huge when it came out and nobody cared. The S3 is huge but they still refused to add any girth to it so they could compete on thickness because that is what apple is doing. It's so stupid.

We have the internet now. Free speech is file sharing. As long as we can keep that the **AA can never control us.

Find me a good smart phone with a two day battery life. How about one with a real lens on it's camera. Just because a lot of companies are trying to produce the same phone doesn't mean the market is full. It more likely means that huge companies won't take risk and just want to chase the most secure revenue stream.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity#Solar_power

You could also argue that people that will pirate have already been priced out. If your're making 80k the difference between free, 12 and 20 isn't that big. However if you're making 25k the difference between free, 12, and 20 is huge. Mostly people are just paying for convenience and organization now. That's why iTunes has been such a success even though it competes directly with free.

What would have been nice was if the advert had women talking about cool and interesting things they'd done with science. Science is usually a means to end I.E. solves a problem or provides understanding. Lab work is the grunt part. Nobody shows off programming with sexy videos of people typing away on their IDE, they show of the results like fancy web pages and cool applications. That is how you generate interest. This director should get in contact with Maybelline...

It is a little simplistic. I think in the case of slavery you would have to consider all parties harmed and decide which is worst, duh slaves.

I think we probably have pretty similar views on intellectual property. In my view people should have copyrights and patents for the amount of time will encourage the creation of the most 'valuable' (not measured in dollars but enjoyment-happiness) works. We can probably agree that amount of time isn't zero.

You are zeroing in on trade offs in harm which for most things there are. People do have to decide what is fair which is why there are laws and guidelines for shooting violent criminals and such. I was just trying to point out that often times in history there are cases when the majority was wrong about what's right and that we also need to balance respecting minorities rights. Here is a good website on the issue I'm trying to get at.

Democracy is great and all but it doesn't define what is "wrong".There are many examples of tyranny of the majority where a majority group passes laws that hurt a minority group often for no reason.

I'm going to go out on a limb here an say that an action is "wrong" because it harms someone else. So if an action is harming another party than we can try to pass a law to make it illegal.

In the case of piracy the musician is clearly harmed monetarily but agreeing on what to do about it is much harder. I don't think you should be able to mangle my property(drm) because I could steal your music.

Wrong, because of huge distribution costs media companies have had a monopoly on what consumers can buy. The internet is changing that giving power and options to the consumer. There is currently no way to buy Game of Thrones except by subscribing to HBO and it one of the most torrented series ever. Now that consumers have a choice between cable, a myriad of online services, and piracy media companies will be forced price competitively. That might cause revenue to fall for them but then maybe they'll produce less garbage that no one wants to buy in the first place.

These would be cool. I'm still not sure about the interface though. I don't really want to dictate my interactions and I doubt head nods would be less annoying.