Good point. Though my opinion of the behaviour would change sligthly if he also made it a point to in the future purchase stuff exclusively from the shop with the good return-policy. For added bonus, let them know.
I know I spesifically bought gear from Mindfactory in Germany, even when they wheren't always the cheapest supplier. Reason ? I twice had problems with stuff bougth from them. In both cases they stepped on the problem as if it actually *mattered*. Having an online store take your word that a hard-disc is bad, and ship you a new one, in overnigth express shipping, so that you can copy stuff over before returning the old one -- all at their expense -- is downright impressive.
Add in customer-relations people who have a clue and aren't mere salesdroids and you get one happy customer. It's very refreshing sending an email and asking for recommendations for a new laptop, mentioning that it's for Linux (Ubuntu), and get back a suggestion that includes: "Unfortunately you'll need a binary-blob driver for full support of the FooBar widget, there's a open driver included in Feisty though, so the problem will solve itself in that timeframe" (this was back when the first beta of Feisty was just becoming available)
You don't know if a shop is any good until you've experienced how they act when things *don't* go smoothly. When you like a shop -better- after having had problems than you did before having problems, they're doing something right.
While I agree with the basic idea in the rest of your post, I do want to voice a protest;
"Devout, moral, religious people" are no less and no more moral than people who *aren't* religious or devout.
There is no correlation between religiousity and morals. There are good and bad religious people in aproximately equal proportions as there are good and bad nonreligious people.
The difference is that technology makes stuff in *general* easier and/or more practical. This includes legal AND illegal activities. Which is very unsurprising.
What would really be strange would be if some magical technology got invented that somehow benefited everyone who use it for legal stuff, while at the same time didn't benefit those who use it for illegal stuff.
Sort of. Higher frequencies mean more energy in each photon. True. At some point the energy in a photon is sufficient to break up complex molecules, true. Molecules being destroyed in your body include the risk of DNA or other important molecules in your cells suffering damage, which leads to increased cancer-risk. True.
BUT, and this is a large BUT, the frequency of where this happens is a long way away from mm-wave, and fairly well-known.
We bathe in this thing called visible light every day. Visible light has a wavelength of around 400 to 800 nanometres, which is to say 400 to 800 billionths of a metre. 1 mm is a *thousandth* of a metre, so we're talking 6 orders of magnitude lower frequencies.
Once we get below 400nm damages start happening, most know that UV-light will increase the risk of skin-cancer, even higher frequencies such as x-rays will cause cancers generally, and not just in the skin since they're ionising *and* more penetrating that UV-light is.
Short answer: ir-wave radio is MUCH too low frequency to even start getting close to ionising.
It's silly. The current standard of having a parking-garage in the basement and a private elevator up to your apartments is better in several ways:
Space high up is worth more than space in the basement, because people prefer living on the 10th floor instead of in the basement.
A private elevator that opens directly at your apartment is *less* risky than this, did you look at the floorplans ? Sure there's a garage on your floor-level, you do however need to exit that garage, and go trough the stairwell to enter your actual apartment. Said stairwell is accessible to everyone in the building. (it needs to be, for fire-security reasons)
A private elevator is *quicker*, quite simply because it doesn't need to lift 8000lbs.
So, what are you going to prefer:
Driving into the basement-garage, stop at the turner-plate, enter elevator, wait 20 seconds and be in your apartment.
Or Driving into the car-lift. Wait a minute. Driving into your garage. Exiting and locking the garage. Go trough the stairwell. Unlock and enter your apartment.
That's the thing though, the US media-taboo is largely context-free. That is, they'll strenously avoid saying the "bad" words, even when it'd perfectly apropriate, or even an understatement.
Hell, they even avoid saying "fuck" when the characters are -literally- fucking. Some avoid it in pecularily silly ways, like going to the extreme of inventing a perfectly fictious word that everyone understands within the first 3 minutes actually just means "fuck", then using that word regularily. Farscape I'm looking at you. Frell you ! (they speak perfectly normal english, but they've invented about half a dozen words to use instead of swear-words. "Frell" for "fuck", "boll-yotz" for "bull-shit", "dren" for "shit", "trelk" for "whore".
It's just silly. They use the words in a way that is perfectly apropriate for the show and the situations, I just don't get why they can't just bloody -say- "bull-shit" if that's what they mean.
It's really obvious that it's been done to avoid the "bad" words too. Because literally ALL common swear-words used in the show have alternative words for them, such as these I mention, while a miniscule portion of other (non-swearing) existing words are similarily reinvtented.
Their ultimate goal is plain as pie: Make a shitload of money. That tends to be the ultimate goal of most companies. You're correct to be suspicious: Their goal of making money may not align well with -your- various goals.
Yeah, true, pretty soon you'll be able to store all human culture on your wristwatch.
Well, except for whatever is made in the last decade, because offcourse the bandwith of media will keep going up with storage. (a Blueray disk takes more space than a DVD. Whatever we have in 20 years for movies will take more space than blueray does)
It's a US-thing. Acting as if the words themselves are poisonus, while in reality the offensiveness is in the -meaning-.
This leads to complete nonsense such as people writint "f**k you" which avoids the taboo word, but does absolutely nothing to the meaning, since everyone above age 4 understands perfectly well what is meant.
Or TV-channels with "-BLEEP- you, you BLEEEEP piece of BLEEEEEP" which is exactly as offensive as it'd have been without the bleeps.
I don't get it either. And I agree, you can be patently offensive without using any word a distinguished gentleman wouldn't use.
No. HD-DVD/Blueray will likely be the last generation of physical media.
Oh, there'll be media offcourse, you need to store stuff -somewhere-, but bundling the data, which is what you pay for, and the storage-medium is no longer interesting, makes about as much sense as selling water, and insist it only be stored in YELLOW bottles, not BLUE ones damnit.
Music, Movies, Software, these are all just data. Where I want to -store- my data is up to me, I will choose based on price/performance/convenience, but my choice is my choice, the people making movies, music, software shouldn't concern themselves with that.
It'll take a -little- bit more time, but not all that much. Music and software first, movies last, since they're largest and the infrastructure needed is most rare as of yet.
Depends on your perspective. And that's one of the problems with current politics. Too many politicians think only in terms of the next election-cycle. In that scale, nothing we do (or don't do) makes any difference at all. These things work over decades.
Economists also have a problem with that. If you amortize at 5% a year, then anything that is more than a decade or two into the future is irrelevant, or very nearly so. Because at that rate, for example, owning a piece of land for the next 100 years is 99.3% of the value of having it forever. Put differently, if preventing your land from being flooded in 50 years cost more than 0.7% of the value of the land, it's not worth it.
So, let's say you own land worth a million in an area that migth be flooded in a hundred years if we do nothing. How much should you be willing to pay to prevent that from happening ? Well, 0.7% of a million is $7000, which is a good lump of change. But the real number is lower. That would be the correct number if flooding was 100% certain without intervention, and 0% likely with the $7000. Which ain't going to be the case, at best one can manage to -decrease- the risk. But it won't go from 100% to 0%.
Besides, this all assumes people give a fuck what happens after not only -they- are dead, but their children and quite possibly grandchildren are -also- dead. Most people don't. Hell, many enough have a problem saving -today- to benefit themselves in a -decade-.
I don't -agree- with this line of thinking, but I *understand* it.
There's no need for that condensing tone. There's a difference between not understanding and not -agreeing-.
Everyone agrees that the -ideal- situation ("what should be") is that when a person causes damage trough criminal activity, that person has to cover the damage himself. He/she is the responsible afterall. That's a no-brainer.
When we don't know who did it, that option is closed to us.
I just don't agree that punishing a hundrefold or a millionfold someone who happens to have been convicted for the same crime is more fair than letting the loss sit with whoever is the victim.
Put more concretely; I think I prefer letting a million garden-owners each lose $0.30 rather than ruining for life the unlucky 16-year-old who gets caugth stealing an apple, as fining him $300000 dollars would likely do.
Oh, and when people get hit with absurdly high judgements, they typically do NOT pay. They cannot. When interest alone on the payment is more than what's left of your income after having paid for basi nessecities, there's no way you'll *ever* get out of it.
5 years of prison for rape. A *lifetime* of poverty for the crime of stealing a single apple.
You may find that a fair system. I do not.
Re:I kinda feel sorry for the employees.
on
SCO Layoffs Begin
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· Score: 1
Except the honourable thing would be to -long-ago- jump ship.
"I was just working there" ain't much more convincing than "I was just following orders", neither of which gets you off the hook if you're helping evil.
Unless you hold that it's reasonable to stay lojal to your employer no-mater-what the company is up to, and *then* later to turn around and claim "I was just working there, it's not my fault." That argument ain't particularily valid when working there is very much optional.
I wouldn't hire an ex-SCOer that stayed until the bitter end. That's poor judgement, plain and simple.
That's rational though. Being overly suspicious has significant opportunity-cost. If you go around assuming that everyone is always only out to get you, you miss out on a lot of opportunity. This loss is likely to in most cases be -bigger- than the loss incurred when, occasionally, someone is really out to get you.
In general, that is simple. When a loss is incurred trough a crime, but the perpetrator is never caugth, the victim bears the loss. That is, plainly, how it works.
If someone steals your car, and is never caugth, you bear the cost. If this risk is unacceptably high for you, you can purchase insurance to convert a low-likelihood high-cost into a high-likelihood low-cost, but the cost is still carried by you.
Sure. But we're talking several orders of magnitude here. Let's be real: We're talking about a new, improved, plastic-membrane to replace current plastic-membranes. It may be better, and if so that's great. It's however unlikely to be 100 or 1000 times better.
Besides, if you want to combat sea-rise that way, it'd be easier to collect and store the water running off from melting glaciers, such as on greenland. That water is -ALREADY- fresh, so you've got only the problem of storing it, not the problem of desalinating AND storing it.
If you're in front of a judge, being accused of some crime. Pointing out that -lots- of other people are guilty of the same crime, without being punished, is not a valid defence. If you're guilty, you're guilty, regardless of what -others- do.
That was one of my critiques: that the current system gives HUGE power to the ones deciding who to investigate.
Not at current desalination-costs, no. If you spent the GDP of USA doing desalination, and went at it for a decade, you'd still not have desalinated enough to lower sea-levels by even a single mm.
There's a lot of water in the sea. You fail to grasp the magnitudes.
In principle. You're forgetting that 90% of the water in the world is saltwater, and 2/3rds of the fresh water is ice in glaciers and polar-caps.
Thus only aprox 3% of all water is fresh-and-not-frozen.
So, yeah, if you where to make -MASSIVE- freshwaterstores, there'd be a sligth difference. Desalination ain't that cheap though. Besides, currently the oposite thing is happening: freshwaterice is melting, ijn nprinciple making the oceans somewhat less salty. doub't its really noticeable though.
You misunderstand me. I wasn't arguing what citizens -SHOULD- do. I agree with you there. I was describing what they ACTUALLY do. In actual fact, the large majority of people, particularily in the 14-30 age-bracket break copyrigth-law regularily.
I know, but I wasn't talking copyright versus theft. I agree they're not comparable.
I was pointing out how grotesque it would be to apply the argument of the grandparent, that punishment should be divided by the chance of getting convicted, would be if applied to other cases of criminal behaviour with sub-1$ damages. That's all.
If the damage is $1, $0.50 or $0 can be debated, that wasn't my point. My point was that it's -small- and we don't normally consider it a good thing to have a law-system that completely ruins someones life over what is, frankly, a detail.
Luckily law doesn't work like that. It doesn't concern itself with irrelevant details.
If the start-point is that you have a file. And the end-point is that you have the file AND I have the file, then a file was copied. The spesific technical and mathemathical details between don't make a lick of difference. Nor should they.
Why would that cause problems, other than extremely locally ?
You're not changing the total amount of salt in the sea, nor the total amount of water in the sea, so the end-result should be pretty close to zero. Keep in mind that the water isn't permanently removed from the sea, it returns to the sea in short order.
If it *is* a problem locally, which also seems pretty unlikely except in extremely closed, small, sea-arms, the obvious solution is simply more mixing.
Your step 2 is unreasonable. Causing a miniscule amount of harm is still a miniscule amount of harm, even if, say, the police choose seldom to investigate. (perhaps/BECAUSE/ the harm done is miniscule)
If you steal a single apple from your neighbour, it's not reasonable to argue that the risk of being convicted after having stolen a single apple from a neighbour is 1:1000000, so despite the apple being worth $0.20, you should be fined $200000. It's an unconstitutional excess to put someone in debt for life for the crime of stealing a single apple.
A different problem is that when a huge part of the population is guilty of breaking a certain law, but the risk of being investigated are very low, and punishment very high, this has the effect of giving whomever decides who to investigate the power to essentially punish people at will.
Politicians should make law. Police should investigate. Courts should convict. (or not) That's the way it's supposed to work. With filesharing it works more similar to this:
Politicians make a law, that a huge part of the population breaks regularily. Police essentially never investigates anyone for breaking it. Private companies are free to, according to their own criteria, decide who to investigate. Courts tend to convict (not surprising, since most people are guilty)
This puts a -HUGE- amount of power in the hands of those private companies. I'd guess in a average group of college-students, that company is, currently, free to bankrupt for life anyone they chose to. Well, not -EVERYONE- but close enough. (certainly 90%)
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Good point. Though my opinion of the behaviour would change sligthly if he also made it a point to in the future purchase stuff exclusively from the shop with the good return-policy. For added bonus, let them know.
I know I spesifically bought gear from Mindfactory in Germany, even when they wheren't always the cheapest supplier. Reason ? I twice had problems with stuff bougth from them. In both cases they stepped on the problem as if it actually *mattered*. Having an online store take your word that a hard-disc is bad, and ship you a new one, in overnigth express shipping, so that you can copy stuff over before returning the old one -- all at their expense -- is downright impressive.
Add in customer-relations people who have a clue and aren't mere salesdroids and you get one happy customer. It's very refreshing sending an email and asking for recommendations for a new laptop, mentioning that it's for Linux (Ubuntu), and get back a suggestion that includes: "Unfortunately you'll need a binary-blob driver for full support of the FooBar widget, there's a open driver included in Feisty though, so the problem will solve itself in that timeframe" (this was back when the first beta of Feisty was just becoming available)
You don't know if a shop is any good until you've experienced how they act when things *don't* go smoothly. When you like a shop -better- after having had problems than you did before having problems, they're doing something right.
While I agree with the basic idea in the rest of your post, I do want to voice a protest;
"Devout, moral, religious people" are no less and no more moral than people who *aren't* religious or devout.
There is no correlation between religiousity and morals. There are good and bad religious people in aproximately equal proportions as there are good and bad nonreligious people.
The difference is that technology makes stuff in *general* easier and/or more practical. This includes legal AND illegal activities. Which is very unsurprising.
What would really be strange would be if some magical technology got invented that somehow benefited everyone who use it for legal stuff, while at the same time didn't benefit those who use it for illegal stuff.
Sort of. Higher frequencies mean more energy in each photon. True. At some point the energy in a photon is sufficient to break up complex molecules, true. Molecules being destroyed in your body include the risk of DNA or other important molecules in your cells suffering damage, which leads to increased cancer-risk. True.
BUT, and this is a large BUT, the frequency of where this happens is a long way away from mm-wave, and fairly well-known.
We bathe in this thing called visible light every day. Visible light has a wavelength of around 400 to 800 nanometres, which is to say 400 to 800 billionths of a metre. 1 mm is a *thousandth* of a metre, so we're talking 6 orders of magnitude lower frequencies.
Once we get below 400nm damages start happening, most know that UV-light will increase the risk of skin-cancer, even higher frequencies such as x-rays will cause cancers generally, and not just in the skin since they're ionising *and* more penetrating that UV-light is.
Short answer: ir-wave radio is MUCH too low frequency to even start getting close to ionising.
It's silly. The current standard of having a parking-garage in the basement and a private elevator up to your apartments is better in several ways:
Space high up is worth more than space in the basement, because people prefer living on the 10th floor instead of in the basement.
A private elevator that opens directly at your apartment is *less* risky than this, did you look at the floorplans ? Sure there's a garage on your floor-level, you do however need to exit that garage, and go trough the stairwell to enter your actual apartment. Said stairwell is accessible to everyone in the building. (it needs to be, for fire-security reasons)
A private elevator is *quicker*, quite simply because it doesn't need to lift 8000lbs.
So, what are you going to prefer:
Driving into the basement-garage, stop at the turner-plate, enter elevator, wait 20 seconds and be in your apartment.
Or Driving into the car-lift. Wait a minute. Driving into your garage. Exiting and locking the garage. Go trough the stairwell. Unlock and enter your apartment.
It's a no-brainer....
That's the thing though, the US media-taboo is largely context-free. That is, they'll strenously avoid saying the "bad" words, even when it'd perfectly apropriate, or even an understatement.
Hell, they even avoid saying "fuck" when the characters are -literally- fucking. Some avoid it in pecularily silly ways, like going to the extreme of inventing a perfectly fictious word that everyone understands within the first 3 minutes actually just means "fuck", then using that word regularily. Farscape I'm looking at you. Frell you ! (they speak perfectly normal english, but they've invented about half a dozen words to use instead of swear-words. "Frell" for "fuck", "boll-yotz" for "bull-shit", "dren" for "shit", "trelk" for "whore".
It's just silly. They use the words in a way that is perfectly apropriate for the show and the situations, I just don't get why they can't just bloody -say- "bull-shit" if that's what they mean.
It's really obvious that it's been done to avoid the "bad" words too. Because literally ALL common swear-words used in the show have alternative words for them, such as these I mention, while a miniscule portion of other (non-swearing) existing words are similarily reinvtented.
Their ultimate goal is plain as pie: Make a shitload of money. That tends to be the ultimate goal of most companies. You're correct to be suspicious: Their goal of making money may not align well with -your- various goals.
Yeah, true, pretty soon you'll be able to store all human culture on your wristwatch. Well, except for whatever is made in the last decade, because offcourse the bandwith of media will keep going up with storage. (a Blueray disk takes more space than a DVD. Whatever we have in 20 years for movies will take more space than blueray does)
It's a US-thing. Acting as if the words themselves are poisonus, while in reality the offensiveness is in the -meaning-.
This leads to complete nonsense such as people writint "f**k you" which avoids the taboo word, but does absolutely nothing to the meaning, since everyone above age 4 understands perfectly well what is meant.
Or TV-channels with "-BLEEP- you, you BLEEEEP piece of BLEEEEEP" which is exactly as offensive as it'd have been without the bleeps.
I don't get it either. And I agree, you can be patently offensive without using any word a distinguished gentleman wouldn't use.
No. HD-DVD/Blueray will likely be the last generation of physical media.
Oh, there'll be media offcourse, you need to store stuff -somewhere-, but bundling the data, which is what you pay for, and the storage-medium is no longer interesting, makes about as much sense as selling water, and insist it only be stored in YELLOW bottles, not BLUE ones damnit.
Music, Movies, Software, these are all just data. Where I want to -store- my data is up to me, I will choose based on price/performance/convenience, but my choice is my choice, the people making movies, music, software shouldn't concern themselves with that.
It'll take a -little- bit more time, but not all that much. Music and software first, movies last, since they're largest and the infrastructure needed is most rare as of yet.
Depends on your perspective. And that's one of the problems with current politics. Too many politicians think only in terms of the next election-cycle. In that scale, nothing we do (or don't do) makes any difference at all. These things work over decades.
Economists also have a problem with that. If you amortize at 5% a year, then anything that is more than a decade or two into the future is irrelevant, or very nearly so. Because at that rate, for example, owning a piece of land for the next 100 years is 99.3% of the value of having it forever. Put differently, if preventing your land from being flooded in 50 years cost more than 0.7% of the value of the land, it's not worth it.
So, let's say you own land worth a million in an area that migth be flooded in a hundred years if we do nothing. How much should you be willing to pay to prevent that from happening ? Well, 0.7% of a million is $7000, which is a good lump of change. But the real number is lower. That would be the correct number if flooding was 100% certain without intervention, and 0% likely with the $7000. Which ain't going to be the case, at best one can manage to -decrease- the risk. But it won't go from 100% to 0%.
Besides, this all assumes people give a fuck what happens after not only -they- are dead, but their children and quite possibly grandchildren are -also- dead. Most people don't. Hell, many enough have a problem saving -today- to benefit themselves in a -decade-.
I don't -agree- with this line of thinking, but I *understand* it.
There's no need for that condensing tone. There's a difference between not understanding and not -agreeing-.
Everyone agrees that the -ideal- situation ("what should be") is that when a person causes damage trough criminal activity, that person has to cover the damage himself. He/she is the responsible afterall. That's a no-brainer.
When we don't know who did it, that option is closed to us.
I just don't agree that punishing a hundrefold or a millionfold someone who happens to have been convicted for the same crime is more fair than letting the loss sit with whoever is the victim.
Put more concretely; I think I prefer letting a million garden-owners each lose $0.30 rather than ruining for life the unlucky 16-year-old who gets caugth stealing an apple, as fining him $300000 dollars would likely do.
Oh, and when people get hit with absurdly high judgements, they typically do NOT pay. They cannot. When interest alone on the payment is more than what's left of your income after having paid for basi nessecities, there's no way you'll *ever* get out of it.
5 years of prison for rape. A *lifetime* of poverty for the crime of stealing a single apple.
You may find that a fair system. I do not.
Except the honourable thing would be to -long-ago- jump ship.
"I was just working there" ain't much more convincing than "I was just following orders", neither of which gets you off the hook if you're helping evil.
Unless you hold that it's reasonable to stay lojal to your employer no-mater-what the company is up to, and *then* later to turn around and claim "I was just working there, it's not my fault." That argument ain't particularily valid when working there is very much optional.
I wouldn't hire an ex-SCOer that stayed until the bitter end. That's poor judgement, plain and simple.
That's rational though. Being overly suspicious has significant opportunity-cost. If you go around assuming that everyone is always only out to get you, you miss out on a lot of opportunity. This loss is likely to in most cases be -bigger- than the loss incurred when, occasionally, someone is really out to get you.
In general, that is simple. When a loss is incurred trough a crime, but the perpetrator is never caugth, the victim bears the loss. That is, plainly, how it works.
If someone steals your car, and is never caugth, you bear the cost. If this risk is unacceptably high for you, you can purchase insurance to convert a low-likelihood high-cost into a high-likelihood low-cost, but the cost is still carried by you.
Sure. But we're talking several orders of magnitude here. Let's be real: We're talking about a new, improved, plastic-membrane to replace current plastic-membranes. It may be better, and if so that's great. It's however unlikely to be 100 or 1000 times better.
Besides, if you want to combat sea-rise that way, it'd be easier to collect and store the water running off from melting glaciers, such as on greenland. That water is -ALREADY- fresh, so you've got only the problem of storing it, not the problem of desalinating AND storing it.
I understand that. That's why I said "other than locally"
Law doesn't work like that either.
If you're in front of a judge, being accused of some crime. Pointing out that -lots- of other people are guilty of the same crime, without being punished, is not a valid defence. If you're guilty, you're guilty, regardless of what -others- do.
That was one of my critiques: that the current system gives HUGE power to the ones deciding who to investigate.
Not at current desalination-costs, no. If you spent the GDP of USA doing desalination, and went at it for a decade, you'd still not have desalinated enough to lower sea-levels by even a single mm.
There's a lot of water in the sea. You fail to grasp the magnitudes.
In principle. You're forgetting that 90% of the water in the world is saltwater, and 2/3rds of the fresh water is ice in glaciers and polar-caps.
Thus only aprox 3% of all water is fresh-and-not-frozen.
So, yeah, if you where to make -MASSIVE- freshwaterstores, there'd be a sligth difference. Desalination ain't that cheap though. Besides, currently the oposite thing is happening: freshwaterice is melting, ijn nprinciple making the oceans somewhat less salty. doub't its really noticeable though.
You misunderstand me. I wasn't arguing what citizens -SHOULD- do. I agree with you there. I was describing what they ACTUALLY do. In actual fact, the large majority of people, particularily in the 14-30 age-bracket break copyrigth-law regularily.
I know, but I wasn't talking copyright versus theft. I agree they're not comparable.
I was pointing out how grotesque it would be to apply the argument of the grandparent, that punishment should be divided by the chance of getting convicted, would be if applied to other cases of criminal behaviour with sub-1$ damages. That's all.
If the damage is $1, $0.50 or $0 can be debated, that wasn't my point. My point was that it's -small- and we don't normally consider it a good thing to have a law-system that completely ruins someones life over what is, frankly, a detail.
Luckily law doesn't work like that. It doesn't concern itself with irrelevant details.
If the start-point is that you have a file. And the end-point is that you have the file AND I have the file, then a file was copied. The spesific technical and mathemathical details between don't make a lick of difference. Nor should they.
Why would that cause problems, other than extremely locally ? You're not changing the total amount of salt in the sea, nor the total amount of water in the sea, so the end-result should be pretty close to zero. Keep in mind that the water isn't permanently removed from the sea, it returns to the sea in short order. If it *is* a problem locally, which also seems pretty unlikely except in extremely closed, small, sea-arms, the obvious solution is simply more mixing.
Your step 2 is unreasonable. Causing a miniscule amount of harm is still a miniscule amount of harm, even if, say, the police choose seldom to investigate. (perhaps /BECAUSE/ the harm done is miniscule)
If you steal a single apple from your neighbour, it's not reasonable to argue that the risk of being convicted after having stolen a single apple from a neighbour is 1:1000000, so despite the apple being worth $0.20, you should be fined $200000. It's an unconstitutional excess to put someone in debt for life for the crime of stealing a single apple.
A different problem is that when a huge part of the population is guilty of breaking a certain law, but the risk of being investigated are very low, and punishment very high, this has the effect of giving whomever decides who to investigate the power to essentially punish people at will.
Politicians should make law. Police should investigate. Courts should convict. (or not) That's the way it's supposed to work. With filesharing it works more similar to this:
Politicians make a law, that a huge part of the population breaks regularily.
Police essentially never investigates anyone for breaking it.
Private companies are free to, according to their own criteria, decide who to investigate.
Courts tend to convict (not surprising, since most people are guilty)
This puts a -HUGE- amount of power in the hands of those private companies. I'd guess in a average group of college-students, that company is, currently, free to bankrupt for life anyone they chose to. Well, not -EVERYONE- but close enough. (certainly 90%)