I'd be more inclined to believe that if the leading Israeli pilot had not seen a huge US flag on USS Liberty, and told ground control that he could not attack an American ship. The report by the US Navy's Judge Advocate General said:
"that the Liberty was easily recognizable as an American naval vessel; that its flag was fully deployed and flying in a moderate breeze; that Israeli planes made at least eight reconnaissance flights at close range; the ship came under a prolonged attack from Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats."
According to Jeffrey St Clair (http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair06082007.html)
"A few years after Attack on the Liberty was originally published, Ennes got a call from Evan Toni, an Israeli pilot. Toni told Ennes that he had just read his book and wanted to tell him his story. Toni said that he was the pilot in the first Israeli Mirage fighter to reach the Liberty. He immediately recognized the ship to be a US Navy vessel. He radioed Israeli air command with this information and asked for instructions. Toni said he was ordered to "attack". He refused and flew back to the air base at Ashdod. When he arrived he was summarily arrested for disobeying orders".
Ennes is James Ennes Jr, who was officer of the deck during the attack, and author of "Attack on the Liberty". http://tinyurl.com/yo6po9
"For comparison, the US SSN-688 (Los Angeles [wikipedia.org] class) is over twice as long and has ~three times the displacement".
You say this with apparent pride, which (I suppose) is perfectly understandable. A nuclear-powered submarine is a glorious thing, and no doubt the bigger, the better.
But does it actually buy you anything? As a landlubber and a peasant, I would have thought that provided a submarine can get inside a carrier's escort and fire torpedoes or missiles (which I assume the Song can) any additional size would be a liability. Doesn't it make it easier to detect, less navigable, and a better target?
Patrick Robinson's thriller "Kilo Class" explored the possibility of an ex-Soviet diesel submarine, chosen for its quietness, doing exactly this - before launching a torpedo with a nuclear warhead and pretty much vapourising a nuclear-powered carrier. That was published ages ago.
Or she could just lie back and enjoy it, the way the Johnson administration did when USS Liberty was attacked by Israel. It's always tough resenting military (or naval) insults from people whom you owe big-time.
Despite all the replies pointing out that Wikipedia's academic standing is relatively low, the question itself is valid, interesting, and of some importance.
I am reminded of the story about the guy who writes a paper for the government which is then classified so that he is no longer entitled to read it. (Always wondered if he is also legally obliged to forget everything he wrote? What if he has an eidetic memory?)
IANAL, but when I worked for a big multinational a similar situation came up. I had a meeting with my manager, a good guy whom we felt we could trust, and he warned me that refusing to sign would accomplish nothing except getting me on management's shit list. He said that legally, if I went on coming in to work after being shown the new contract, I would be deemed to have accepted it whether I physically signed it or not.
Obviously, don't take this on trust. But it might be something to ask your lawyer about.
"After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: sentient beings in the dark depths of space?"
After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: America, nuclear power, antibiotics, a cure for cancer, higher-yield crops, more efficient water distillation, more efficient solar power, military intelligence... the list goes on and on.
In case you're still in doubt, the answer is: NO.
Actually, when you come to think of it, it's usually fairly dumb to waste much money trying to find something that is already well known.
Who should be the ultimate arbiter of JavaScript's future? Obviously Netscape, the company that invented it.
Since Netscape is no longer with us, MS should obviously inherit its rights. It's traditional and customary: you kill someone, you get to keep their possessions and cast their votes.
That says it all, really. You just need to decide whether you want to deal with a company that speaks to its customers like that. I would say, "Not while there are any other companies".
"...look how long it took to get to a point where we had a genuine 32-bit operating system that practically didn't crash (windows 2000 / XP) unless you happen to get poor hardware/drivers or bloat the sysem up too much with junk".
Hmmm, didn't VMS ship in 1976 or something? That was 32-bit, until 1992 or thereabouts when it became 64-bit. And it ran fine on appropriate hardware (i.e. VAX, or Alpha when it appeared).
The reason we wound up with a monoculture was that most people - even those working for big organizations - were too mean to pay for high-quality hardware and software. They wanted everything at bargain-basement prices. Microsoft was smart enough to exploit this weakness, in order to get a headlock on the worldwide PC market. Then they started to screw the prices back up again...
"Shared source" is NOT open source in any shape or form. Nor is it "like" open source, either.
When I worked for DEC 20 years ago, the company offered customers the chance to read (most of) the VMS source code. For a fee. Of course, there was never any question of their being allowed to change any of it, or use it for their own purposes. What DEC did then was not open source, and what Microsoft is doing today is just the same.
Why is it called "shared source" then, I hear you cry. Aha! That is left as an exercise for the student.
"Advanced societies that are governed by the rule of law and that require complex rules will naturally require more lawyers".
Advanced societies are also governed by vast numbers of computers, and they require even more rules that are even more complex. That means we need large numbers of very highly skilled programmers - but do we get them? Hell, no.
So much for the market. Sure, it does allocate resources to some extent. But if every manager in the land is convinced that lawyers should be paid five times as much as programmers, why, that is how it is going to be.
'"London is the libel capital of the World. American journalists dub it 'a town named sue' since its claimant-friendly environment attracts litigants unable or unwilling to take their chances under American or European defamation laws which afford better protection for media defendants". (Robertson and Nicol, Media Law).
'The English courts have been known to hear cases involving a foreign claimant and a foreign defendant, where the "publication" in England is marginal to the damage alleged'.
'Many Americans would go, "The damned Europeans, the gall they have punishing a Red White an Blue company.."'
The difference this time is that the EU is not some puny little nation that the USA can lean on until it gives way - or else launch an invasion and remove the obstructive government and justice system. Of course the USA could threaten to nuke Brussels, but I don't think that would look too good...
As for $690 million being chump change to MS, the solution is obvious. Apply a relative, rather than absolute fine. For example, 50% of the latest year's total profits. That would get their attention - and fund a lot of useful government programs in Europe, too.
"Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are as much socially-granted rights as fair use."
Quite so. And socially-granted rights are bestowed by government, which can take them away again. Bentham expressed this simple fact very clearly over 160 years ago:
"Right is the child of law; from real laws come real rights, but from imaginary law, from 'laws of nature', come imaginary rights... Natural rights is simple nonsense, natural and imprescriptable rights... nonsense upon stilts." - Jeremy Bentham ("Anarchical Fallacies", 1843)
Windows XP is *my* last MS operating system. Although Windows 2000, which I am still running on one computer, is arguably better.
There is no earthly reason why I should pay the MS tax any more. Especially since its products are implemented and sold by only one company, so I have no second source to fall back on if they let me down. With Linux I have dozens of acceptable distros, many of which are - as far as I'm concerned - just as good as Windows. Plus the support is better, and I get about 5,000 apps bundled with the distro, which MS (or other vendors) would charge me heavily for.
Whenever MS wants to say a final "goodbye" to me as a customer, all it has to do is discontinue patches for W2K and WXP. I'll modulate across to SuSE or Ubuntu without the tiniest twinge of regret. Indeed, I think I will probably heave a sigh of relief.
"Of course being exposed to some bacteria over your life is a good thing anyhow - it builds the immune system".
Not to mention the hundreds of grams of bacteria on a typical "clean" person's skin, hair, etc.; and the couple of kilograms or so of bacteria inside them, some of which are essential for life.
The demented tone of so many advertisements is deplorable. They come on as if all "germs" were dangerous. That's like saying all insects are nasty, so let's eradicate them. (Then sit back and wait to starve to death...)
"Modern chess programs do more than brute force search".
Of course, you are absolutely right. And with the power available from modern hardware, it would be ridiculous not to special-case wherever feasible.
I was trying to keep things simple. Besides, even if programs do take account of "strategy tweaks", these are more in the nature of auxiliary algorithms. Whereas a human player's whole approach to the game - in a sense, even his perception of the position - is shaped by general principles. I suspect that, at some level, we even recruit physical reflexes. Have you ever thought of a fianchettoed bishop, for example, as an arrow drawn back and ready to let fly across the board? Or a rook as a massive piston that pounds its way along a rank or file, smashing everything in its path? Of course that's not quite how the pieces work in the game, but I think it's part of the way my mind approaches it.
Dennett's article suggest to me that he himself does not know a huge amount about chess. For instance, he writes, "The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess..."
Sometimes, but not always. As is well known, computers excel in "random" positions where tactics predominate. That's because they have no concept of "general principles" or strategic goals as human chessplayers think of them - instead, they just calculate furiously and find the move that, against what look like the best replies by the opponent, gives the best "worst-case" outcome after a given search depth. They are programmed to follow the game theory "minimax" strategy, which essentially chooses the best (maximum) outcome if the opponent plays as well as possible (minimum). So in a typical open position with lots of pieces flying around, where there are dozens of variations to calculate, a computer tends to have an accentuated advantage over a human player of similar strength. For many years masters and grandmasters have carefully avoided wide-open positions (like those arising from the King's Gambit, for instance) for that very reason. Playing the King's Gambit against a really strong program looks very much like suicide. You start by giving the thing an extra pawn, which is enough of an advantage for it to win. Then you try to outplay it in its natural environment. It's like fighting a crocodile underwater.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few closed positions (i.e. with locked pawn structures) where even very strong chess programs fail to see what a reasonably good human player spots immediately - for instance, "this must be a draw because White's queen can never escape". (However, it might also sometimes happen that a program spots a clever and previously unnoticed way to break that kind of impasse).
Returning to my assertion that Dennett is wrong in saying that "The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess," I can immediately think of two classic counter-examples. First, the game in which Deep Junior, with the Black pieces, sacrificed a bishop on h2 and soon after forced a draw. If Kasparov had tried to play on, he risked losing. No one had ever even seriously considered that sacrifice before in the given position, although the general type (the "Greek gift") is one of the most familiar even to beginners. That certainly wasn't indistinguishable from human play, because no human had ever dared to play it. My second counter-example is the way Deep Fritz squashed world champion Vladimir Kramnik flat in the sixth game of their match last year. I was watching live on the Web, and when Deep Fritz played 10.Re3 I thought "Great! the stupid computer is going to get thrashed by Kramnik's ultra-sophisticated play". After some more foolish-looking moves by White, at move 20 I thought the game was definitely going Kramnik's way. But lo and behold! 25.e5! introduced, not so much a tactical melee as the threat of one. Kramnik shuffled his pieces anxiously, on move 30 Deep Fritz grabbed a pawn - and then it was over. Deep Fritz remorselessly ground the world champion down, forcing him to resign in just 17 more moves. In the final position Kramnik, still just a pawn down, could hardly move a single piece. In that game Deep Fritz played the final, technical phase like Bobby Fischer. But it played the attack between moves 10 and 30 better than Fischer could have! Its moves looked like a beginner's, yet they defeated Kramnik.
Strong programs have a big "psychological" advantage over human players, in that they don't have any psychology! Even super-grandmasters like Kasparov and Kramnik, on the other hand, very quickly start to exhibit signs of nervousness after a few games. Eventually, this can assume proportions that start to resemble post-traumatic stress disorder - especially if the human being has had a nasty shock, such as
"So what do you want me to do, only post stories when I'm surprised?"
Good grief, no! Nothing that I wrote was intended to criticize or detract from your post in any way. I merely took the opportunity to air some related opinions.
It does look as though the RIAA is well toward one end of the spectrum of corporate behaviour. Not the good end.
This is precisely the kind of behaviour to be expected of a big modern corporation. It's not quite accurate to say that they ignore the law completely. It's more that they don't have any of the emotional respect for law that some (I hope, many) of us individual citizens have. Sure, we might cut corners in a few small matters... parking where we technically shouldn't, taking some stationery from the office cupboard, that kind of thing. But we would never dream of defying a court order.
Joel Bakan explains what's going on in his great book The Corporation. Thanks to a framework of laws set up in Britain, the USA and other places in the late 18th and 19th centuries, corporations get treated as people - except that they don't have all the responsibilities of people. You can't imprison a corporation, and if it runs out of other people's money, it can simply declare bankruptcy and leave everyone else holding the bag.
As Bakan explains, while corporations are hard to pin down legally, they are increasingly compelled by law to leave no stone unturned in the search for profits. Not just profits, maximum profits. Not just maximum profits, but maximum profits NOW. That makes them liable to behave, in some important ways, just like human psychopaths. A corporation has no "better nature"; no decency, no innate or learned morality, and very little actual reason to fear the law. To it, "ethics" means a set of showy acts designed to improve its public image.
So it's hard to be surprised when a corporation behaves the way the RIAA has done. It simply compares the upside with the downside, and acts accordingly. Don't expect it to think or act like a decent human being: there's no "there" there.
"Scientists have turned into theoretical zealots".
Not proper scientists like Dyson. It is the task of scientists to find out the truth about how the world works, as far and as fast as they can. Politicians, business leaders, and others may then act on the scientists' discoveries.
If the scientists start trying to do it all, they will undermine the impartiality of their own work, on which everything else rests.
Slashdot Mirror
"It was a friendly-fire incident".
I'd be more inclined to believe that if the leading Israeli pilot had not seen a huge US flag on USS Liberty, and told ground control that he could not attack an American ship. The report by the US Navy's Judge Advocate General said:
"that the Liberty was easily recognizable as an American naval vessel; that its flag was fully deployed and flying in a moderate breeze; that Israeli planes made at least eight reconnaissance flights at close range; the ship came under a prolonged attack from Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats."
According to Jeffrey St Clair (http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair06082007.html)
"A few years after Attack on the Liberty was originally published, Ennes got a call from Evan Toni, an Israeli pilot. Toni told Ennes that he had just read his book and wanted to tell him his story. Toni said that he was the pilot in the first Israeli Mirage fighter to reach the Liberty. He immediately recognized the ship to be a US Navy vessel. He radioed Israeli air command with this information and asked for instructions. Toni said he was ordered to "attack". He refused and flew back to the air base at Ashdod. When he arrived he was summarily arrested for disobeying orders".
Ennes is James Ennes Jr, who was officer of the deck during the attack, and author of "Attack on the Liberty". http://tinyurl.com/yo6po9
"For comparison, the US SSN-688 (Los Angeles [wikipedia.org] class) is over twice as long and has ~three times the displacement".
You say this with apparent pride, which (I suppose) is perfectly understandable. A nuclear-powered submarine is a glorious thing, and no doubt the bigger, the better.
But does it actually buy you anything? As a landlubber and a peasant, I would have thought that provided a submarine can get inside a carrier's escort and fire torpedoes or missiles (which I assume the Song can) any additional size would be a liability. Doesn't it make it easier to detect, less navigable, and a better target?
Patrick Robinson's thriller "Kilo Class" explored the possibility of an ex-Soviet diesel submarine, chosen for its quietness, doing exactly this - before launching a torpedo with a nuclear warhead and pretty much vapourising a nuclear-powered carrier. That was published ages ago.
Or she could just lie back and enjoy it, the way the Johnson administration did when USS Liberty was attacked by Israel. It's always tough resenting military (or naval) insults from people whom you owe big-time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
Despite all the replies pointing out that Wikipedia's academic standing is relatively low, the question itself is valid, interesting, and of some importance.
I am reminded of the story about the guy who writes a paper for the government which is then classified so that he is no longer entitled to read it. (Always wondered if he is also legally obliged to forget everything he wrote? What if he has an eidetic memory?)
IANAL, but when I worked for a big multinational a similar situation came up. I had a meeting with my manager, a good guy whom we felt we could trust, and he warned me that refusing to sign would accomplish nothing except getting me on management's shit list. He said that legally, if I went on coming in to work after being shown the new contract, I would be deemed to have accepted it whether I physically signed it or not.
Obviously, don't take this on trust. But it might be something to ask your lawyer about.
"After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: sentient beings in the dark depths of space?"
After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: America, nuclear power, antibiotics, a cure for cancer, higher-yield crops, more efficient water distillation, more efficient solar power, military intelligence... the list goes on and on.
In case you're still in doubt, the answer is: NO.
Actually, when you come to think of it, it's usually fairly dumb to waste much money trying to find something that is already well known.
Who should be the ultimate arbiter of JavaScript's future? Obviously Netscape, the company that invented it.
Since Netscape is no longer with us, MS should obviously inherit its rights. It's traditional and customary: you kill someone, you get to keep their possessions and cast their votes.
"He said I was shit out of luck".
That says it all, really. You just need to decide whether you want to deal with a company that speaks to its customers like that. I would say, "Not while there are any other companies".
"...look how long it took to get to a point where we had a genuine 32-bit operating system that practically didn't crash (windows 2000 / XP) unless you happen to get poor hardware/drivers or bloat the sysem up too much with junk".
Hmmm, didn't VMS ship in 1976 or something? That was 32-bit, until 1992 or thereabouts when it became 64-bit. And it ran fine on appropriate hardware (i.e. VAX, or Alpha when it appeared).
The reason we wound up with a monoculture was that most people - even those working for big organizations - were too mean to pay for high-quality hardware and software. They wanted everything at bargain-basement prices. Microsoft was smart enough to exploit this weakness, in order to get a headlock on the worldwide PC market. Then they started to screw the prices back up again...
"Shared source" is NOT open source in any shape or form. Nor is it "like" open source, either.
When I worked for DEC 20 years ago, the company offered customers the chance to read (most of) the VMS source code. For a fee. Of course, there was never any question of their being allowed to change any of it, or use it for their own purposes. What DEC did then was not open source, and what Microsoft is doing today is just the same.
Why is it called "shared source" then, I hear you cry. Aha! That is left as an exercise for the student.
"Web creators", TFA says, yet I can find no mention of TBL. Are there some other Web creators around that I haven't heard of?
"Advanced societies that are governed by the rule of law and that require complex rules will naturally require more lawyers".
Advanced societies are also governed by vast numbers of computers, and they require even more rules that are even more complex. That means we need large numbers of very highly skilled programmers - but do we get them? Hell, no.
So much for the market. Sure, it does allocate resources to some extent. But if every manager in the land is convinced that lawyers should be paid five times as much as programmers, why, that is how it is going to be.
'"London is the libel capital of the World. American journalists dub it 'a town named sue' since its claimant-friendly environment attracts litigants unable or unwilling to take their chances under American or European defamation laws which afford better protection for media defendants". (Robertson and Nicol, Media Law).
'The English courts have been known to hear cases involving a foreign claimant and a foreign defendant, where the "publication" in England is marginal to the damage alleged'.
Quoted from http://www.website-law.co.uk/resources/website-libel.html
'Many Americans would go, "The damned Europeans, the gall they have punishing a Red White an Blue company.."'
The difference this time is that the EU is not some puny little nation that the USA can lean on until it gives way - or else launch an invasion and remove the obstructive government and justice system. Of course the USA could threaten to nuke Brussels, but I don't think that would look too good...
As for $690 million being chump change to MS, the solution is obvious. Apply a relative, rather than absolute fine. For example, 50% of the latest year's total profits. That would get their attention - and fund a lot of useful government programs in Europe, too.
"Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are as much socially-granted rights as fair use."
Quite so. And socially-granted rights are bestowed by government, which can take them away again. Bentham expressed this simple fact very clearly over 160 years ago:
"Right is the child of law; from real laws come real rights, but from imaginary law, from 'laws of nature', come imaginary rights... Natural rights is simple nonsense, natural and imprescriptable rights... nonsense upon stilts." - Jeremy Bentham ("Anarchical Fallacies", 1843)
Windows XP is *my* last MS operating system. Although Windows 2000, which I am still running on one computer, is arguably better.
There is no earthly reason why I should pay the MS tax any more. Especially since its products are implemented and sold by only one company, so I have no second source to fall back on if they let me down. With Linux I have dozens of acceptable distros, many of which are - as far as I'm concerned - just as good as Windows. Plus the support is better, and I get about 5,000 apps bundled with the distro, which MS (or other vendors) would charge me heavily for.
Whenever MS wants to say a final "goodbye" to me as a customer, all it has to do is discontinue patches for W2K and WXP. I'll modulate across to SuSE or Ubuntu without the tiniest twinge of regret. Indeed, I think I will probably heave a sigh of relief.
"Of course being exposed to some bacteria over your life is a good thing anyhow - it builds the immune system".
Not to mention the hundreds of grams of bacteria on a typical "clean" person's skin, hair, etc.; and the couple of kilograms or so of bacteria inside them, some of which are essential for life.
The demented tone of so many advertisements is deplorable. They come on as if all "germs" were dangerous. That's like saying all insects are nasty, so let's eradicate them. (Then sit back and wait to starve to death...)
"Modern chess programs do more than brute force search".
Of course, you are absolutely right. And with the power available from modern hardware, it would be ridiculous not to special-case wherever feasible.
I was trying to keep things simple. Besides, even if programs do take account of "strategy tweaks", these are more in the nature of auxiliary algorithms. Whereas a human player's whole approach to the game - in a sense, even his perception of the position - is shaped by general principles. I suspect that, at some level, we even recruit physical reflexes. Have you ever thought of a fianchettoed bishop, for example, as an arrow drawn back and ready to let fly across the board? Or a rook as a massive piston that pounds its way along a rank or file, smashing everything in its path? Of course that's not quite how the pieces work in the game, but I think it's part of the way my mind approaches it.
"I was just trying to be funny. Which rarely works for me".
Wow, a soulmate! 8-)
So now I've offended you twice in a row! (See what I did there?)
Dennett's article suggest to me that he himself does not know a huge amount about chess. For instance, he writes, "The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess..."
Sometimes, but not always. As is well known, computers excel in "random" positions where tactics predominate. That's because they have no concept of "general principles" or strategic goals as human chessplayers think of them - instead, they just calculate furiously and find the move that, against what look like the best replies by the opponent, gives the best "worst-case" outcome after a given search depth. They are programmed to follow the game theory "minimax" strategy, which essentially chooses the best (maximum) outcome if the opponent plays as well as possible (minimum). So in a typical open position with lots of pieces flying around, where there are dozens of variations to calculate, a computer tends to have an accentuated advantage over a human player of similar strength. For many years masters and grandmasters have carefully avoided wide-open positions (like those arising from the King's Gambit, for instance) for that very reason. Playing the King's Gambit against a really strong program looks very much like suicide. You start by giving the thing an extra pawn, which is enough of an advantage for it to win. Then you try to outplay it in its natural environment. It's like fighting a crocodile underwater.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few closed positions (i.e. with locked pawn structures) where even very strong chess programs fail to see what a reasonably good human player spots immediately - for instance, "this must be a draw because White's queen can never escape". (However, it might also sometimes happen that a program spots a clever and previously unnoticed way to break that kind of impasse).
Returning to my assertion that Dennett is wrong in saying that "The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess," I can immediately think of two classic counter-examples. First, the game in which Deep Junior, with the Black pieces, sacrificed a bishop on h2 and soon after forced a draw. If Kasparov had tried to play on, he risked losing. No one had ever even seriously considered that sacrifice before in the given position, although the general type (the "Greek gift") is one of the most familiar even to beginners. That certainly wasn't indistinguishable from human play, because no human had ever dared to play it. My second counter-example is the way Deep Fritz squashed world champion Vladimir Kramnik flat in the sixth game of their match last year. I was watching live on the Web, and when Deep Fritz played 10.Re3 I thought "Great! the stupid computer is going to get thrashed by Kramnik's ultra-sophisticated play". After some more foolish-looking moves by White, at move 20 I thought the game was definitely going Kramnik's way. But lo and behold! 25.e5! introduced, not so much a tactical melee as the threat of one. Kramnik shuffled his pieces anxiously, on move 30 Deep Fritz grabbed a pawn - and then it was over. Deep Fritz remorselessly ground the world champion down, forcing him to resign in just 17 more moves. In the final position Kramnik, still just a pawn down, could hardly move a single piece. In that game Deep Fritz played the final, technical phase like Bobby Fischer. But it played the attack between moves 10 and 30 better than Fischer could have! Its moves looked like a beginner's, yet they defeated Kramnik.
Strong programs have a big "psychological" advantage over human players, in that they don't have any psychology! Even super-grandmasters like Kasparov and Kramnik, on the other hand, very quickly start to exhibit signs of nervousness after a few games. Eventually, this can assume proportions that start to resemble post-traumatic stress disorder - especially if the human being has had a nasty shock, such as
"So what do you want me to do, only post stories when I'm surprised?"
Good grief, no! Nothing that I wrote was intended to criticize or detract from your post in any way. I merely took the opportunity to air some related opinions.
It does look as though the RIAA is well toward one end of the spectrum of corporate behaviour. Not the good end.
This is precisely the kind of behaviour to be expected of a big modern corporation. It's not quite accurate to say that they ignore the law completely. It's more that they don't have any of the emotional respect for law that some (I hope, many) of us individual citizens have. Sure, we might cut corners in a few small matters... parking where we technically shouldn't, taking some stationery from the office cupboard, that kind of thing. But we would never dream of defying a court order.
Joel Bakan explains what's going on in his great book The Corporation. Thanks to a framework of laws set up in Britain, the USA and other places in the late 18th and 19th centuries, corporations get treated as people - except that they don't have all the responsibilities of people. You can't imprison a corporation, and if it runs out of other people's money, it can simply declare bankruptcy and leave everyone else holding the bag.
As Bakan explains, while corporations are hard to pin down legally, they are increasingly compelled by law to leave no stone unturned in the search for profits. Not just profits, maximum profits. Not just maximum profits, but maximum profits NOW. That makes them liable to behave, in some important ways, just like human psychopaths. A corporation has no "better nature"; no decency, no innate or learned morality, and very little actual reason to fear the law. To it, "ethics" means a set of showy acts designed to improve its public image.
So it's hard to be surprised when a corporation behaves the way the RIAA has done. It simply compares the upside with the downside, and acts accordingly. Don't expect it to think or act like a decent human being: there's no "there" there.
"The software will allow people who can't read to crash Vista..."
"Scientists have turned into theoretical zealots".
Not proper scientists like Dyson. It is the task of scientists to find out the truth about how the world works, as far and as fast as they can. Politicians, business leaders, and others may then act on the scientists' discoveries.
If the scientists start trying to do it all, they will undermine the impartiality of their own work, on which everything else rests.
"...but he's a lousy politician..."
I should damn well hope so. Honesty is a prerequisite for any serious scientific work.