You can't just plug these into "any" ethernet. They require specific switches that provide that capability, so I seriously doubt this will ever be aimed at home use.
They don't seem to have caught on, at all(more's the pity, everybody hates wall-warts); but you can get an otherwise wholly undistinguished 8-port switch that will support 50-60 watts worth of PoE devices(some on all 8 ports, with devices below maximum draw limits, some on only 4) for under $80...
Humans who plan their aggressive dominance displays ahead of time also tend to receive longer periods of imprisonment as well(unless elected to suitably high office, or endorsed therefrom, of course)...
The really high-end thin client setups might be affected(never mind the ones that demand point-to-point dedicated fiber and are basically remote KVMs with USB support); but I've never seen an RDP, ICA, or X11 thin client environment that assumed GBe all the way to the terminal...
Pure latency considerations will make it detectable that you aren't sitting at the computer; but thin client protocols are designed to be usable even over boring residential internet connections, 10/100 is comparative luxury.
The no-screen ARM thin client HP already sells is ~$200(HP t5335z list price, I assume that the rep would cut you a deal if you buy a bunch).
Based on monitor prices, I'm assuming at least another $100 for the version with a monitor. Quite possibly $400 for a monitor that keeps within PoE energy use limits and reduces cables and loose bits to wander off....
On HP's x86 thin client line, 'hacking' has historically been pretty trivial. They totally don't support doing this; but it's just a normal PC bios with a disk-on-chip as the default boot medium; but it won't blink if you ask it to PXE boot or boot from a USB device.
Also of note, their non-WinCE clients have, historically, run a badly butchered version of debian(and, unless they've finally decided to fix the problem, several years later, one that has amazingly trivial exploits to get to a root shell even in 'kiosk' mode, much less in admin mode). I don't know if they've played bootloader games with their ARM models or not; but unless they've tightened the hell out of their linux firmware I strongly suspect that at least the non-kiosk mode will still have a way to sneak into the guts of the stock image. Also, since they tend to support running a browser locally(either WinCE's delightful IE build, or a slightly elderly version of Firefox, I'm assuming that X11 is already set to go, for local use, in the stock firmware.
I'd give it "about as long as it takes for one to get on ebay". HP's prices for thin clients are...optimistic... given their hardware specs; but you can find them at pleasingly low prices once they get shuffled off to support-contract-expired corporate retirement land. They make decent little mini-PCs for the price.
Unfortunately, 'even a controlled flight into terrain', as I'm told it is polite to describe it, looks rather bad if 'Sukhoi’s chief civil test pilot' is the man at the controls(which it was). A very common form of accident, even among the competent; but probably doesn't give buyers the warm-and-fuzzies.
Incidentally, are the motivations of these spammers known? Are they just trolling the group? Providing a first-hit-is-free to prospective customers? Is this the kiddie-porn equivalent of numbers stations, indiscriminately broadcasting a signal intended for only a few recipients?
Something like Link prefetching would make it fairly easy to 'download' in only the strictly technical sense of the term, without intent or knowledge on your part, which seems to be what the case means by 'download'. The same would be true of certain flavors of spam or malware infestations.
You go to page A, fasterfox starts gobbling its way through all the links on page A, all of Page B's images end up in your cache. Your computer obviously 'downloaded' the file; but the chain of intent between your actions and the download is pretty tenuous. If you went to page B, right-clicked, and hit 'save as' your computer was still the one that downloaded it; but the chain of intent is quite clear and points right back to you, not to an unintended behavior of a complex tool.
If we're distinguishing between illegal-intentional-downloads and legal-unintentional-downloads by the location the download is saved to, then ANY "temp" files should be exempt, right?
As is not uncommon in legal proceedings, the court is interested in the person's intent. Architecturally, something being stashed in a temporary cache of some flavor certainly counts as evidence in favor of it being 'unintentional'; but that is hardly equivalent to a stirring cry of "/tmp? He must go free!"
If it were discovered(by inspection of your browser's list of downloaded files, or by an expert witness' determination that the saves in the 'browser cache' don't actually follow the correct structure conventions for resource caches produced by that browser, or by looking at files-recently-opened as stored in the OS or some image viewer, say) that you were intentionally downloading and storing things in a normally unintentional location, the location would not save you.
It really isn't fundamentally different from any other attempt by a court at a finding of fact about whether something was intentional or not(which comes up a lot, in degrees of murder, attempted murder vs. assault, treble damages, etc.) Evidence in favor of an 'unintentional' finding doesn't have any legal bearing in itself, it is merely a clue by which to attempt to determine the defendant's intent state.
Arguably, the nostalgia for manufacturing is(in no small part) also a nostalgia for the conditions that prevailed during the time-period that people who use the word 'manufacturing' are generally implying to the audience.
(Also, of course, there really isn't much good news about 'jobs' in any sector, especially if you are counting compensation-in-inflation-adjusted-dollars, job stability, or 'what you can do with a high school diploma' as variables, so there aren't many attractive options to keep nostalgia at bay. Some optimist occasionally mentions 'green jobs'; but even they don't seem to know what a 'green job' is, or why it isn't equally vulnerable to automation, offshoring, or helotized day-laborers)
Can I install a different browser on a Chromebook? Can I install a different browser in iOS? Heck, Apple bans ANY app that duplicates functionality that Apple provides.
Why is MS always being held to a double-standard that others aren't?
And has Slashdot ever been happy about Apple's little cryptographic lockdown party, Android devices with locked bootloaders, or particularly enthusiastic about paying more for a googlepliance than for the netbook of equivalent spec?
Each time those subjects come up, they generally catch flack from everyone except a few die-hard apologists(and half the apologies seem to be of the form 'but the chains are breakable, so it's ok!'). Now that Microsoft is stepping up and making it clear that 'Windows RT' is essentially the NT kernel/MS development tools equivalent of iOS, rather than a Windows port to ARM(in the sense that WinNT was about as similar as technology allowed across its supported architectures). Why wouldn't it be totally normal for them to get the same criticism for doing the same things?
I'm not sure if it's 'honor' as much as 'apathy'(though the results are the same).
At a population level, it isn't really the existence or nonexistence of a tool that matters as much as its availability to laypeople. As long as you don't exert any overt pressure, even relatively tiny barriers to use(whether inherent to the technology, because of common ignorance, or because of UIs that uphold the finest stereotypes concerning why programmers aren't UI experts) will keep people away in droves. The only ones bothering will be privacy geeks and atypically clueful criminals, both of which are relatively scarce.
If you do exert overt pressure, you create a substantial incentive for even people who care nothing about technology to know about some basic circumvention tools. This creates not only a wider skill base; but a much larger pool of basically-legitimate users among which to hide.
If you block facebook, even people who are socially obligated to dislike geeks will take a sudden interest in the otherwise alien notion of 'proxy servers'...
But why only for women. There's also a problem with men in most magazines. Most of them look like they spend 16 hours a day in a gym and are probably on steroids. Should we start to legislate how much muscle men pictured in magazines can have. Because if we don't we might have too many young men experimenting with steroids.
Such proposals have been advanced, on roughly the same logic about body-image issues, sometimes explicitly mentioning steroids, sometimes not.
My impression is that they are a harder sell because they just don't have the same body count to work with. Unless you really go to town on the steroids, most of the things you would do in the pursuit of an impossible musculature are somewhere between 'actually healthy' and 'harmful, in the common-gym-injuries sense'. You won't actually get there, and you might still be filled with crippling self loathing; but nothing you could write a good human-interest story about. Overenthusiastic dieting, on the other hand, seems to provide a modest, but steady, stream of alarming and dramatic anecdotes.
These 'photoshop' regulations and proposals generally require some sort of written disclaimer if a model has been photoshopped. However, that seems like a very questionable assumption about how this stuff works...
Does anybody seriously suspect that advertisements prove compelling because we are deceived by them in some trivial 'I believe that this advertisement is a representative depiction of reality." sense that could be refuted simply by a textual disclaimer?
The idea that this is an information problem, caused by people just not knowing certain facts, seems about as naive(or deliberately toothless) as believing that you can make somebody stop gambling or buying lottery tickets with a dose of stats 101... It's nonsense. Do people advance these proposals because they actually do believe that? Or do they submit them because the alternative of banning photoshopping is just too dire; but Something Must Be Done?
I thought this has been known for a while, and is the origin of the myth of the cyclops?
The fossil specimens aren't newly discovered; but there was apparently some phylogenetic wrangling about whether they were mammoths or elephants and there weren't enough specimens to get a good size estimate.
The present discovery is that the remains show distinctively mammoth characteristics and that there are enough of them to infer size.
And here I thought that fighting a war to hold onto the south was a bad idea... I'm surprised that Quebec hasn't been expelled forcibly for foisting that abomination on everyone...
One could argue that 'infra-red' covers absolutely everything below red on the spectrum; but the accepted definition starts calling them 'microwaves' at some point. Cosmic background radiation mostly falls into that camp, below IR; but that is very chilly indeed...
What strikes me as a bad sign is not so much that the GPU transcoding doesn't necessarily produce massive speed improvements; but that the products tested produce overtly broken output in a fair number of not-particularly-esoteric scenarios.
Expecting super-zippy magic-optimized speedups on all the architectures tested would be the mark of expecting serious maturity. Expecting a commercially released, GPU-vendor-recommended, encoding package to manage things like "Don't produce an h264 lossy-compressed file substantially larger than the DVD rip source file" and "Please don't convert a 24FPS video to 30FPS for no reason on half the architectures tested" seems much more reasonable.
I can imagine that the subtle horrors of the probably-makes-the-IEEE-cry differences in floating point implementations, or their ilk, might make producing identical encoded outputs across architectures impossible; but these packages appear to be flunking basic sanity checks, even in the parts of the program that are presumably handled on the CPU(when a substantial portion of iPhone 4S handsets are 16GB devices, letting the 'iPhone 4S' preset return a 22GB file while whistling innocently seems like a bad plan...)
It makes much more sense if you think of them as being competing companies who belong to the same industry trade group, which in turn is sensitive to the concerns of any other industry groups with which it is associated.
By way of analogy, a given rancher would strongly prefer that you purchase his cows, rather than somebody else's. However, in his capacity as a member of his industry trade group, he would likely be in harmony with other ranchers on the matters of chicken, pork, and other inferior meat products. In turn, while the trade group would certainly prefer that you eat delicious beef, they would likely stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their poultry-raising brethren should any unpleasant legislation concerning livestock treatment come before congress or some vegetarian health fad gain public traction.
The christian and muslim fundamentalists are each, of course, extremely interested in ensuring that their salvation goods are the ones purchased. However, they face external competition: they are both radical abrahamic monotheists with a strong patriarchal bent; but there are liberal and moderate counterfeits of their goods being openly peddled, hindu polytheists, apathetic secularists, enthusiastic secularists, etc.
As members of the Old Men with Funny Hats and Invisible Friends Council, they agree on certain essential issues: old men with funny hats and invisible friends are the rightful voices of authority in society, women should know their place, fags are icky, and so forth.
However, while their trade group takes a strong interest in increasing the consumption of fundamentalism, rather than liberalized counterfeits, they can still agree with the moderates on broader issues like fretting about secularists, affirming religion as a valuable moral influence in society, lobbying for the preservation and extension of various state privileges of religious institutions, and similar.
This is why the radicals of various persuasions can't quite seem to decide whether loathing or admiration is a more appropriate emotion when talking about one another(jokingly referred to as 'fatwa envy' when a christian authority figure sound a little too fascinated by the power of some barbarous pronouncement from team Imam), and why various uneasy and slightly comical alliances crop up from time to time(this also applies to their opponents, of course, as in cases like the awkward overlap between the xenophobic hard right and the liberal feminist left on the Swiss minaret controversy).
There is an important matter you are failing to address:
It is arguable that the degree of harm presented by 'piracy' is immaterial in judging its illegality, or even its wrongness; but it is overwhelmingly harder to argue that it is immaterial to the question of what measures should be adopted to stop it...
When the media owners are(more or less continually in one guise or another) continually demanding greater legal protection and enforcement, which carries both direct monetary costs to the public, as well as potential damage to the interests of people and other industries, the amount of harm that they are suffering is very much an important detail.
Even if we are agreed that 'piracy' is theft, the question "Theft of how much?" matters. The law enforcement expenditures, and the curtailment of the interests of other parties, one could justify for the theft of $1 are totally different than the theft of $1,000,000.
If we do not so agree, the question acquires an even greater importance. If, for instance, we construct the phrase "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." to suggest that Congress should only extend copyright if, and where, doing so promotes the progress of science and the useful arts, this immediately raises the question of where, and where not, additional copyright protection leads to additional production.
At a bare minimum, even if copyrights are viewed as fully equivalent to real property, and infringement fully equivalent to theft, there is an important question of fact about how big the theft is. One simply must answer it in order to categorize, and respond to, the calls for detection and prosecution of such theft.
If one takes a less expansive view of the scope of copyright, it is entirely possible that the degree of economic harm to the owner of the work becomes directly relevant to the question of what protections you will give it. Protections are, after all, carved out of the scope of what others are allowed to do. They inevitably represent compromises. The gravity of each party's concession is important to deciding where the correct compromise lies.
One would think that spitting jpegs would be a fairly trivial task(or, at very least, be the sort of task where one succeeds or fails atomically, rather than in any intermediate degree). I wonder if Snapfish applies some sort of 'optimization' that 8 out of 10 focus group participants agreed looked brighter and more vivid? Given the horrors perpetrated upon TVs and monitor color and backlight defaults based on what looks best on the showroom floor, it wouldn't entirely surprise me if there are some 'punch-up-the-color-saturation-by-default' algorithms lurking in the digital print industry...
That one is more of a problem(which is presumably why the second formulation exists...)
I'm not surprised that the doctor doesn't know(the vagaries of insurance coverage seem to exist to make a mockery of the idea that drugs even have a 'price'); but it seems like outrageously bad customer service that the doctor can't have the practice's billing-and-coding people look it up for you...
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You can't just plug these into "any" ethernet. They require specific switches that provide that capability, so I seriously doubt this will ever be aimed at home use.
They don't seem to have caught on, at all(more's the pity, everybody hates wall-warts); but you can get an otherwise wholly undistinguished 8-port switch that will support 50-60 watts worth of PoE devices(some on all 8 ports, with devices below maximum draw limits, some on only 4) for under $80...
Humans who plan their aggressive dominance displays ahead of time also tend to receive longer periods of imprisonment as well(unless elected to suitably high office, or endorsed therefrom, of course)...
The really high-end thin client setups might be affected(never mind the ones that demand point-to-point dedicated fiber and are basically remote KVMs with USB support); but I've never seen an RDP, ICA, or X11 thin client environment that assumed GBe all the way to the terminal...
Pure latency considerations will make it detectable that you aren't sitting at the computer; but thin client protocols are designed to be usable even over boring residential internet connections, 10/100 is comparative luxury.
The no-screen ARM thin client HP already sells is ~$200(HP t5335z list price, I assume that the rep would cut you a deal if you buy a bunch).
Based on monitor prices, I'm assuming at least another $100 for the version with a monitor. Quite possibly $400 for a monitor that keeps within PoE energy use limits and reduces cables and loose bits to wander off....
On HP's x86 thin client line, 'hacking' has historically been pretty trivial. They totally don't support doing this; but it's just a normal PC bios with a disk-on-chip as the default boot medium; but it won't blink if you ask it to PXE boot or boot from a USB device.
Also of note, their non-WinCE clients have, historically, run a badly butchered version of debian(and, unless they've finally decided to fix the problem, several years later, one that has amazingly trivial exploits to get to a root shell even in 'kiosk' mode, much less in admin mode). I don't know if they've played bootloader games with their ARM models or not; but unless they've tightened the hell out of their linux firmware I strongly suspect that at least the non-kiosk mode will still have a way to sneak into the guts of the stock image. Also, since they tend to support running a browser locally(either WinCE's delightful IE build, or a slightly elderly version of Firefox, I'm assuming that X11 is already set to go, for local use, in the stock firmware.
I'd give it "about as long as it takes for one to get on ebay". HP's prices for thin clients are...optimistic... given their hardware specs; but you can find them at pleasingly low prices once they get shuffled off to support-contract-expired corporate retirement land. They make decent little mini-PCs for the price.
They still have Aeroflot to fall back on...
Unfortunately, 'even a controlled flight into terrain', as I'm told it is polite to describe it, looks rather bad if 'Sukhoi’s chief civil test pilot' is the man at the controls(which it was). A very common form of accident, even among the competent; but probably doesn't give buyers the warm-and-fuzzies.
Incidentally, are the motivations of these spammers known? Are they just trolling the group? Providing a first-hit-is-free to prospective customers? Is this the kiddie-porn equivalent of numbers stations, indiscriminately broadcasting a signal intended for only a few recipients?
Something like Link prefetching would make it fairly easy to 'download' in only the strictly technical sense of the term, without intent or knowledge on your part, which seems to be what the case means by 'download'. The same would be true of certain flavors of spam or malware infestations.
You go to page A, fasterfox starts gobbling its way through all the links on page A, all of Page B's images end up in your cache. Your computer obviously 'downloaded' the file; but the chain of intent between your actions and the download is pretty tenuous. If you went to page B, right-clicked, and hit 'save as' your computer was still the one that downloaded it; but the chain of intent is quite clear and points right back to you, not to an unintended behavior of a complex tool.
If we're distinguishing between illegal-intentional-downloads and legal-unintentional-downloads by the location the download is saved to, then ANY "temp" files should be exempt, right?
As is not uncommon in legal proceedings, the court is interested in the person's intent. Architecturally, something being stashed in a temporary cache of some flavor certainly counts as evidence in favor of it being 'unintentional'; but that is hardly equivalent to a stirring cry of "/tmp? He must go free!"
If it were discovered(by inspection of your browser's list of downloaded files, or by an expert witness' determination that the saves in the 'browser cache' don't actually follow the correct structure conventions for resource caches produced by that browser, or by looking at files-recently-opened as stored in the OS or some image viewer, say) that you were intentionally downloading and storing things in a normally unintentional location, the location would not save you.
It really isn't fundamentally different from any other attempt by a court at a finding of fact about whether something was intentional or not(which comes up a lot, in degrees of murder, attempted murder vs. assault, treble damages, etc.) Evidence in favor of an 'unintentional' finding doesn't have any legal bearing in itself, it is merely a clue by which to attempt to determine the defendant's intent state.
Arguably, the nostalgia for manufacturing is(in no small part) also a nostalgia for the conditions that prevailed during the time-period that people who use the word 'manufacturing' are generally implying to the audience.
(Also, of course, there really isn't much good news about 'jobs' in any sector, especially if you are counting compensation-in-inflation-adjusted-dollars, job stability, or 'what you can do with a high school diploma' as variables, so there aren't many attractive options to keep nostalgia at bay. Some optimist occasionally mentions 'green jobs'; but even they don't seem to know what a 'green job' is, or why it isn't equally vulnerable to automation, offshoring, or helotized day-laborers)
Can I install a different browser on a Chromebook? Can I install a different browser in iOS? Heck, Apple bans ANY app that duplicates functionality that Apple provides.
Why is MS always being held to a double-standard that others aren't?
And has Slashdot ever been happy about Apple's little cryptographic lockdown party, Android devices with locked bootloaders, or particularly enthusiastic about paying more for a googlepliance than for the netbook of equivalent spec?
Each time those subjects come up, they generally catch flack from everyone except a few die-hard apologists(and half the apologies seem to be of the form 'but the chains are breakable, so it's ok!'). Now that Microsoft is stepping up and making it clear that 'Windows RT' is essentially the NT kernel/MS development tools equivalent of iOS, rather than a Windows port to ARM(in the sense that WinNT was about as similar as technology allowed across its supported architectures). Why wouldn't it be totally normal for them to get the same criticism for doing the same things?
I'm not sure if it's 'honor' as much as 'apathy'(though the results are the same).
At a population level, it isn't really the existence or nonexistence of a tool that matters as much as its availability to laypeople. As long as you don't exert any overt pressure, even relatively tiny barriers to use(whether inherent to the technology, because of common ignorance, or because of UIs that uphold the finest stereotypes concerning why programmers aren't UI experts) will keep people away in droves. The only ones bothering will be privacy geeks and atypically clueful criminals, both of which are relatively scarce.
If you do exert overt pressure, you create a substantial incentive for even people who care nothing about technology to know about some basic circumvention tools. This creates not only a wider skill base; but a much larger pool of basically-legitimate users among which to hide.
If you block facebook, even people who are socially obligated to dislike geeks will take a sudden interest in the otherwise alien notion of 'proxy servers'...
But why only for women. There's also a problem with men in most magazines. Most of them look like they spend 16 hours a day in a gym and are probably on steroids. Should we start to legislate how much muscle men pictured in magazines can have. Because if we don't we might have too many young men experimenting with steroids.
Such proposals have been advanced, on roughly the same logic about body-image issues, sometimes explicitly mentioning steroids, sometimes not.
My impression is that they are a harder sell because they just don't have the same body count to work with. Unless you really go to town on the steroids, most of the things you would do in the pursuit of an impossible musculature are somewhere between 'actually healthy' and 'harmful, in the common-gym-injuries sense'. You won't actually get there, and you might still be filled with crippling self loathing; but nothing you could write a good human-interest story about. Overenthusiastic dieting, on the other hand, seems to provide a modest, but steady, stream of alarming and dramatic anecdotes.
These 'photoshop' regulations and proposals generally require some sort of written disclaimer if a model has been photoshopped. However, that seems like a very questionable assumption about how this stuff works...
Does anybody seriously suspect that advertisements prove compelling because we are deceived by them in some trivial 'I believe that this advertisement is a representative depiction of reality." sense that could be refuted simply by a textual disclaimer?
The idea that this is an information problem, caused by people just not knowing certain facts, seems about as naive(or deliberately toothless) as believing that you can make somebody stop gambling or buying lottery tickets with a dose of stats 101... It's nonsense. Do people advance these proposals because they actually do believe that? Or do they submit them because the alternative of banning photoshopping is just too dire; but Something Must Be Done?
I thought this has been known for a while, and is the origin of the myth of the cyclops?
The fossil specimens aren't newly discovered; but there was apparently some phylogenetic wrangling about whether they were mammoths or elephants and there weren't enough specimens to get a good size estimate.
The present discovery is that the remains show distinctively mammoth characteristics and that there are enough of them to infer size.
And here I thought that fighting a war to hold onto the south was a bad idea... I'm surprised that Quebec hasn't been expelled forcibly for foisting that abomination on everyone...
One could argue that 'infra-red' covers absolutely everything below red on the spectrum; but the accepted definition starts calling them 'microwaves' at some point. Cosmic background radiation mostly falls into that camp, below IR; but that is very chilly indeed...
De-facto; because the supreme court says so. I share your skepticism; but IANAL...
What strikes me as a bad sign is not so much that the GPU transcoding doesn't necessarily produce massive speed improvements; but that the products tested produce overtly broken output in a fair number of not-particularly-esoteric scenarios.
Expecting super-zippy magic-optimized speedups on all the architectures tested would be the mark of expecting serious maturity. Expecting a commercially released, GPU-vendor-recommended, encoding package to manage things like "Don't produce an h264 lossy-compressed file substantially larger than the DVD rip source file" and "Please don't convert a 24FPS video to 30FPS for no reason on half the architectures tested" seems much more reasonable.
I can imagine that the subtle horrors of the probably-makes-the-IEEE-cry differences in floating point implementations, or their ilk, might make producing identical encoded outputs across architectures impossible; but these packages appear to be flunking basic sanity checks, even in the parts of the program that are presumably handled on the CPU(when a substantial portion of iPhone 4S handsets are 16GB devices, letting the 'iPhone 4S' preset return a 22GB file while whistling innocently seems like a bad plan...)
He is strong on the terror issue, though, which is a plus...
It makes much more sense if you think of them as being competing companies who belong to the same industry trade group, which in turn is sensitive to the concerns of any other industry groups with which it is associated.
By way of analogy, a given rancher would strongly prefer that you purchase his cows, rather than somebody else's. However, in his capacity as a member of his industry trade group, he would likely be in harmony with other ranchers on the matters of chicken, pork, and other inferior meat products. In turn, while the trade group would certainly prefer that you eat delicious beef, they would likely stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their poultry-raising brethren should any unpleasant legislation concerning livestock treatment come before congress or some vegetarian health fad gain public traction.
The christian and muslim fundamentalists are each, of course, extremely interested in ensuring that their salvation goods are the ones purchased. However, they face external competition: they are both radical abrahamic monotheists with a strong patriarchal bent; but there are liberal and moderate counterfeits of their goods being openly peddled, hindu polytheists, apathetic secularists, enthusiastic secularists, etc.
As members of the Old Men with Funny Hats and Invisible Friends Council, they agree on certain essential issues: old men with funny hats and invisible friends are the rightful voices of authority in society, women should know their place, fags are icky, and so forth.
However, while their trade group takes a strong interest in increasing the consumption of fundamentalism, rather than liberalized counterfeits, they can still agree with the moderates on broader issues like fretting about secularists, affirming religion as a valuable moral influence in society, lobbying for the preservation and extension of various state privileges of religious institutions, and similar.
This is why the radicals of various persuasions can't quite seem to decide whether loathing or admiration is a more appropriate emotion when talking about one another(jokingly referred to as 'fatwa envy' when a christian authority figure sound a little too fascinated by the power of some barbarous pronouncement from team Imam), and why various uneasy and slightly comical alliances crop up from time to time(this also applies to their opponents, of course, as in cases like the awkward overlap between the xenophobic hard right and the liberal feminist left on the Swiss minaret controversy).
There is an important matter you are failing to address:
It is arguable that the degree of harm presented by 'piracy' is immaterial in judging its illegality, or even its wrongness; but it is overwhelmingly harder to argue that it is immaterial to the question of what measures should be adopted to stop it...
When the media owners are(more or less continually in one guise or another) continually demanding greater legal protection and enforcement, which carries both direct monetary costs to the public, as well as potential damage to the interests of people and other industries, the amount of harm that they are suffering is very much an important detail.
Even if we are agreed that 'piracy' is theft, the question "Theft of how much?" matters. The law enforcement expenditures, and the curtailment of the interests of other parties, one could justify for the theft of $1 are totally different than the theft of $1,000,000.
If we do not so agree, the question acquires an even greater importance. If, for instance, we construct the phrase "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." to suggest that Congress should only extend copyright if, and where, doing so promotes the progress of science and the useful arts, this immediately raises the question of where, and where not, additional copyright protection leads to additional production.
At a bare minimum, even if copyrights are viewed as fully equivalent to real property, and infringement fully equivalent to theft, there is an important question of fact about how big the theft is. One simply must answer it in order to categorize, and respond to, the calls for detection and prosecution of such theft.
If one takes a less expansive view of the scope of copyright, it is entirely possible that the degree of economic harm to the owner of the work becomes directly relevant to the question of what protections you will give it. Protections are, after all, carved out of the scope of what others are allowed to do. They inevitably represent compromises. The gravity of each party's concession is important to deciding where the correct compromise lies.
One would think that spitting jpegs would be a fairly trivial task(or, at very least, be the sort of task where one succeeds or fails atomically, rather than in any intermediate degree). I wonder if Snapfish applies some sort of 'optimization' that 8 out of 10 focus group participants agreed looked brighter and more vivid? Given the horrors perpetrated upon TVs and monitor color and backlight defaults based on what looks best on the showroom floor, it wouldn't entirely surprise me if there are some 'punch-up-the-color-saturation-by-default' algorithms lurking in the digital print industry...
That one is more of a problem(which is presumably why the second formulation exists...)
I'm not surprised that the doctor doesn't know(the vagaries of insurance coverage seem to exist to make a mockery of the idea that drugs even have a 'price'); but it seems like outrageously bad customer service that the doctor can't have the practice's billing-and-coding people look it up for you...