Spending money does not entitle you to profit, I wish people would understand that. You could spend billions of dollars to research something useless. IP law gives creators the privilege of monopoly control, not the right. That privilege is meant as an encouragement to share what they've created instead of keeping it secret. When encouragement is no necessary that privilege does not make sense. People invent thing because the want to or need to. IP law doesn't encourage people to create things. What IP law is supposed to do is encourage people to share those things once they've created them rather than horde it for fear of being copied.

Technically, (and theses people seem to love technicalities), party poppers, snappers, and other harmless things are grounds for expulsion... And people think that parents who home-school their children are the crazy ones.

Some have argued that slavery is a factor of energy production. When the net energy production of the whole world drops below a certain threshold, that's when people start enslaving each other. Supposedly when energy is abundant and cheap, slavery won't be an issue.

heh the lawyer for Alcatel didn't even know which patent it was!

I hated and still hate wearing glasses. I wear contacts now. Glasses get dirty, sweaty, have blind spots, and generally suck. I don't love contacts, but until I can afford surgery I'll take them. Google glass wouldn't seem to have any of the problems I see with regular glasses. The seem to do what they were intended to do quite well. As soon as they are for sale I'm buying them.

I prefer my tactical man purse http://www.amazon.com/UTG-Multi-Functional-Tactical-Messenger-Black/dp/B002BJBIRW

>Which personal information have you stored about me What constitutes personal information? What distinguished personal information from public information?

Cygnus was the name of Dr. Hans Reinhardt's ship in the 1979 Disney movie 'The Black Hole'

And using the google authenticator plugin for 2 factor authentication.

I saw a device for a deaf person that translated sounds into larger vibrations in a belt. Maybe if you put an accelerometer in the conductor's baton and then wirelessly transmit that data to some type of haptic feedback device. This would give you a lot more information about what the conductor was doing than a simple beat measure would. I imagine a 2-D grid of sensations over your back that interpreted the batons movements would allow you to sense the baton being raised in anticipation of the down beat and so on. An array of pancake vibrators could be sewn into a vest or even applied with adhesive. Hooking up with a hackerspace local to you would probably be a good starting point.

Prove it to whom? Not to some one you are buying something from.

It is not reasonable to expect a vendor to know that cash he saw was elicit.

...put all your eggheads in one basket. Seems like your just begging for an attack.

I agree with you about the blum blog being worthwhile, and I agree with her on most of what she said. You pick the one nit I have with that post,

If that was all she did, she would have done nothing. She took their pic an posted it on twitter. That is a grievous offense in my book, much worse than simply not saying anything.

If they are so unsafe then they must have posted statistics about the number of reported laser related injuries/accidents. If not they can shaddap!

The short answer is yes, it is better to make it easier to "break the law" and "steal movies."

By "breaking the law" you are actually just diminishing the artificial right that has been temporarily granted to the copyright holder.

That right (copyright) was never intended to be more important than an individuals natural right to share ideas and information.

Copyright's purpose is to give additional incentive to people who create, to share that creation, by allowing them an artificially stronger (than it would normally be) right to decide who to share the creation with.

That right directly conflicts every individuals natural rights to communicate and share ideas. There needs to be a balance.

I think there are things we need to reconsider.

In the case of music, what has this type of incentive provided us? Has copyright actually given us better music? What kind of musician (composer, player, singer etc.) has this form of copyright favored evolutionarily? I would argue that over all the quality of musician has gotten worse as copyright has grown in scope and strength.

Thus we need to reconsider how music is protected by copyright.

Other media needs to be subject to the same scrutiny as well.

To simply chant the mantra that "it's the law" is basically an appeal to tradition, and not a valid argument for why it is wrong to copy things. It is a valid argument in favor of not copying things, but that is not the same as saying copying things is "wrong."

I would hope that most Americans, while not always willing to exercise it, would still recognize that civil disobedience is not immoral and that blind faith in "the law" is not something one should be proud of.