That analogy doesn't work. You can't pass someone using IE on the internet in your gleaming, super-fast browser, then accelerate off, leaving them in a cloud of dust. Nor do they have to park their dingy, sputtering browser in a parking lot where theirs is the ugliest car. They don't even notice that many sites had to adjust their parking lots when they could fit more cars in.
I also have unreasonable fears--of performing in public, of letting certain people know things about myself. However by definition there is a lack of trust there--either I lack trust that I can handle anything that results, or I lack trust that they will respond reasonably.
For example, if my parents learned certain of my habits, I fear that even though no harm has come of my actions, and none likely will, they will consider me a bad person. In other words, I have no trust that around them, my reputation is based strictly on things of consequence; things that are, pragmatically speaking, inconsequential may alter my relationship with them, and as they are a major part of my life, this affects my own self-image significantly.
Even assuming the above is not true, even if they would in fact be perfectly reasonable, I cannot trust them in regards to it. If I trusted them, and they were worthy of that trust, then privacy would be a non-issue between us.
It's not that privacy itself is essential. It's fine as long as everyone who gets access to your information is worthy of your trust; that is to say, they won't do anything creepy, harmful, or exploitive, or give that information to anyone who might be creepy, harmful, or exploitive.
Microsoft does not fit into the category of companies I would trust.
Better yet, make it a hashed password only based on the SN; using a private key so it can't be reversed.
That would defeat the purpose of it being the SN. At that point you could just make the password entirely random, of the same length, because have to print the password separately.
End users--especially noob users--are not going to read the SN, download a custom application to turn that into a password, and then use that.
I hate "No matter what"s. There's often a perfectly valid "what" that should be mattered. You're still entitled to do whatever you like, it just bugs me when people use absolute language on judgement calls.
I have to say I disagree with your opinion. I haven't studied tablets extensively, but from everything I've read, they've been treated like existing computers, using existing OSes--and they shouldn't be, because existing window managers and other OS features just don't make the switch. When you come from a platform that starts explicitly with only the things the hardware is designed to be used for, you get something like the iTouch/iPhone, which is actually useful.
You can say that they should have done exactly the same thing except [long list of changes] if you like, but in the end, they made it the way they did for a reason. Celebrating their genius and scoffing at their judgement in the same breath is a little bit suspect.
From the summary at the top of that wikipedia page:
Estoppel is... legal and equitable doctrines that preclude "a person from denying or asserting anything to the contrary of that which has, in contemplation of law, been established as the truth, either by the acts of judicial or legislative officers, or by his own deed, acts, or representations, either express or implied."
stripping out the parts that just repeat what has been said different ways for legal purposes and reorganizing:
Doctrines that preclude a person from denying anything that judges or legislators established as truth
I assume it means it would stop RIAA lawyers from making assertions that a judge has ruled are not true, on penalty of law... but you would have to ask a lawyer. I'm not one.
While this is factually true, you have to understand that that will only be effectively true as long as the laws can be trusted. Citizens--including law enforcement--often ignore laws which proscribe punishment for common acts if it seems like the law is too severe or out of touch--unless they get caught and it becomes a public sort of thing, in which case the law has to upheld, even if in a tongue-in-cheek manner.
In some cases this is a bad thing. In some cases it is even A Bad Thing. However, for some things like bandwidth allocation, it's quite possibly just a silly thing, in which case it might only still be law because of institutional inertia.
In other words, when every law is a law because breaking that law is wrong, then illegal means illegal. In the meantime, illegal should be considered illegal, even though it isn't always, and even though sometimes you can, should, or even have to break it.
People don't generally like things added to a service that should "just work". If a show is broadcast without ads, the consumer will likely assume it can and should continue like that. Unless the show's producers themselves come in apologetically and say they're going to have to start adding them to stay afloat, the addition will be seen as pure greed.
Now, with numbers as high as 500M, losing 50% of the demographic when you add ads doesn't exactly leave the advertiser scraping the bottom of the barrel. However, if that's implemented sitewide, losing that much traffic is devastating.
The point being you want numbers that tell you how many times you ad will be seen as things are today, not how many times the ad will be seen assuming that the viewers don't go apeshit that you put ads in their formerly free show and assuming the site doesn't go under or get passed by because they suddenly lost traffic.
They likely have far more pressing things on hand, like getting enough money to live off of.
Further, if they prove it can be done by disorganized, preoccupied rabble, then sooner or later they might get captured by Chinese government officials and forced to reveal their methods, at which point other "human rights groups in China" would do "copycat attacks", purely, of course, to try to pin the blame on China itself, who is "innocent".
I don't frankly understand why that skill has to be taught, as it is the intuitively obvious thing to do. In fact, teaching it or otherwise officially encouraging it seems to me to put the emphasis entirely in the wrong place--it says that the truth isn't important as long as it can be sussed out.
How many times, in the past or the present, are you going to be completely and utterly without any way to find out how to spell a word? No dictionaries, nobody around who knows, no nothing? If at any particular moment you don't know how to spell it, that's fine, even if you have resources available to you--barring of course some sort of technical or official document where it matters. But it's generally polite if you do it casually to go back and find out later, and not make the same mistake again.
I do agree about the learning by osmosis bits. In the same way some people love language, I guess, some hate it, or just think it's a giant dork.
At what scale do you expect the horsepower to be useful? A micrometer engine won't power your SUV, but if you want to create extremely small ducted fans that can be embedded in a processor, for example, I think it has the horsepower to push air.
Although that raises the immediate question of what happens if the mechanism gets clogged by dust or something. At that scale, there ain't shit you can do to clean it.
You're not wrong but come on, everyone's been cloning from everyone making little tweaks, changes, additions, snips - nearly every piece of software out there, be it FOSS, Microsoft, Apple - is deriviative at some level.
The question is - how derivitive does it have to be to be "wrong", and at which point do you start letting fly the patents?
Where by cloning of course you mean "standardizing" or even better "not reinventing the wheel".
Copying a fifty thousand line program verbatim--or heck, a tenth of that or less, really--is cloning. Taking a dozen or fewer closely-knit, low-level ideas that make sense together, and implementing them very similarly to the way someone else does it, especially so that users can use either one equivalently, is getting the damn job done.
I've never understood why there are no good examples of extremely short-range terminals in mobile computing. For example, a laptop-sized main computer in your backpack (probably an actual laptop, really) connected via either a cable or high-bandwidth wireless to something that is literally just a display and keyboard (and battery) -- No guts, no heat, no awkward/stupid limitations. If you need a different size terminal, you get a different sized terminal. The computer itself, while it will run on batteries, doesn't necessarily require that the battery fit in the form factor of the rest of the device, so you have significantly more juice.
A wireless monitor on your wrist makes plenty of sense in that context, as long as you understand that it will only ever be an accessory, not a full-fledged terminal or PDA.
Relatedly, I think a clown is something you could reasonably expect to see on a unicycle, and the idea that some form of entertainment would be at a popular college location isn't unheard of. Some of the people probably checked it off as some sort of silly event without even bothering to care. I know I might have.
If it was a BEAR riding a unicycle, then that's a different story. It gets the danger senses up at least momentarily, plus, why the crap is there a bear riding a unicycle?
Even assuming the GP is correct, that assumes that the cold doesn't take more energy out of you than your newly augmented body puts out. The surface area to volume ratio of a human is pretty high, especially in the case of your extremeties, where you have a very small area (the base of your finger, say) that all the expended energy has to first flow through. If it doesn't get enough energy, with prolonged exposure, you lose your finger/hand/arm/nose/ear/toe/foot/leg/whatever.
In normal humans, the problem is the same. You can get frostbite in the limbs to the point at which they can't be saved and have to be amputated, and yet still survive, specifically because the body doesn't try to waste energy on those things when it needs to make sure the organs are safe.
Disclaimer: Not a biologist or physician. Consult a doctor before amputating anything. Erections lasting longer than four hours are disturbing and I don't want to hear about them.
How about we replace "chaos" with an equivalent word, "unstable".
Developers are expecting the things they are working with to be malleable and assume they are suitable to be changed. They may easily leave a system in a state where it's easy to do something interesting later, with the understanding that if something goes wrong, it can and will be fixed.
Then, since their job isn't to be a professional SA, they run off and do other things and completely forget about it for a while, and things degenerate. If they WERE professional SAs, they would notice them fairly quickly and keep trying new solutions until they came upon one that worked. Since they aren't, they just sort of hack together a workaday solution and then forget it again.
I'm sure if they had the same skills but were hired as an SA and only did programming on the side, they would be half-assed programmers for a similar reason, if probably in different ways.
1) Previous tablet makers have shown little imagination around UIs and how a touchscreen changes things.
Previously, a tablet maker had to write drivers and shitty little programs to make their touchscreen work with an existing OS. However, you can't really make a tablet work well using a windowing system designed for a mouse and keyboard; you just can't. Buttons work well, but titlebars don't, menus often don't (concealed by your hand), things like alt texts don't, you can't mouse over screen edges to make hidden menus pop up or do similar things, there are trouble with any parts of the system when you have to get the pointer to something a few pixels wide, etc. So unless improved features are built into the OS, or you hack an open windowing system like X/KDE/Gnome to accommodate it, using existing OSes is a bad idea.
It requires someone like Apple or Microsoft to modify a full OS enough to really natively support a tablet, and Microsoft doesn't get that sort of thing. They're decent at making things work and they don't look terrible, but they don't innovate, and I think they know it as much as anyone. Apple is the only one who could reasonably be expected to completely rethink their OS enough to accommodate a new paradigm like that.
In theory (and I'm sure any military or stunt pilot could correct me) this stems from similar setups in fighter planes, etc. While extra buttons are "neat" when you're sitting on the ground, the ability to reliably reach controls without fighting high gee forces or waiting for those forces to subside or stabilize is critical.
But maybe I'm wrong. Go try to flip a switch a foot or two in front of you while experiencing fluctuating gee forces, and remember that the switches just to either side, or just above or below, will have entirely different functions and you might kill yourself if you hit them on accident. I'll wait.
That's all true and largely understandable, even for the record folks.
However, they're still doing what they're doing what they've always done and getting what they've always gotten, only now they think they can sue what amounts to people chosen at random for insane amounts of money. They are choosing to continue to put out songs in media with known vulnerabilities. They know that the consumers can take advantage of these vulnerabilities to get untraceable copies. They know that these copies can be exchanged en masse and anonymously. They are also at this point completely and utterly under no illusion whatsoever that they can track down enough of the people doing the trading to stop it. They probably are also pretty darn aware that the people they are suing into financial oblivion are not the people that they want to get, even if the tactic of suing people was correct. And I believe, cynicism aside, that a lot of the people there don't think it's the right thing to do, but do it anyway.
Frankly I'd string em up for knowing all those facts and still pursuing this campaign, and rewrite the laws to prevent it in the future. And I don't mean I'd bankrupt their company, but I'd figure out exactly who was capable of stopping this and didn't, no matter how far up the chain, and make sure they never ran anything larger than a lemonade stand ever again.
But then, IANAL and IANAJ and IANA Congressman or senator or whatever else.
We should also point out the degree of culpability the consumer actually should be considered to have.
1) Did they create the method by which the music was ripped? No, this is done with available tools for which the cost of entry is negligible or zero, and which has no particularly greater barriers to entry than installing a new text editor. 2) Did they create the method for distribution of the music? No, they neither had any hand in the creation of bittorrent, nor were they hosting a tracker nor otherwise going out of their way to create new infrastructure to ease the distribution. Again, the barrier to entry to gaining access to this method is no higher than downloading any other software. 3) Did they create or do they maintain or manage the media (read: the internet) on which the distribution is taking place? No, they are using someone else's network, which for various reasons isn't well monitored and arguably should not be. 4) Did they create any other tool at all or in any way invest more than trivial effort? No, they did not, in fact what effort was needed to create this system was fairly distributed across a number of other people, and virtually none of the offenders--whether they have been prosecuted yet or not--had any hand in it at all.
I'm not being silly. The effort anyone puts into downloading a torrent--legal or not--is insignificantly small. To try my first slashdot car analogy, if driving with the windows down and the AC on was illegal, they'd be asking the judge to revoke your license, impound your car, repossess your house, and send your kids to child services, even though it just takes the flick of a couple switches to do it, and there are reasons why you'd want to, and all the cars are shipped capable of doing so.
If the record companies don't want us to create so many digital copies, maybe they shouldn't be using technology they know can be copied, and they should just hold more concerts and go back to vinyl or something.
I agree with you, and I'm not really sure where the GP is coming from.
If the CEO or sales team makes a 10% increase in functionality by the coders into a 200% increase in sales, then at most they are 20x as valuable. If the coders improve the product by 50% but the sales only increase by 10%, then it's the CEO etc have been less important than the effect of the coders; or rather, this is true IF you accept the previous argument. The 'pragmatic' in me wants to say that perhaps it's the program's at fault, even though the previous example assumed that the salespeople were the ones resulting in the net increase. It's a double standard, and it's stupid.
I view CEOs the same way I view government officials, and that is that anyone who applies for the job should not be allowed to have it. If the person gets 400x more salary than everyone in the company out of merit, rather than position, I have no beef. However, the idea that a person should get that wage because they can fire the accountants is at best dubious and at worst ought to be flipping illegal. The idea that it's "just how CEOs are paid" is no better.
Slashdot Mirror
That analogy doesn't work. You can't pass someone using IE on the internet in your gleaming, super-fast browser, then accelerate off, leaving them in a cloud of dust. Nor do they have to park their dingy, sputtering browser in a parking lot where theirs is the ugliest car. They don't even notice that many sites had to adjust their parking lots when they could fit more cars in.
I also have unreasonable fears--of performing in public, of letting certain people know things about myself. However by definition there is a lack of trust there--either I lack trust that I can handle anything that results, or I lack trust that they will respond reasonably.
For example, if my parents learned certain of my habits, I fear that even though no harm has come of my actions, and none likely will, they will consider me a bad person. In other words, I have no trust that around them, my reputation is based strictly on things of consequence; things that are, pragmatically speaking, inconsequential may alter my relationship with them, and as they are a major part of my life, this affects my own self-image significantly.
Even assuming the above is not true, even if they would in fact be perfectly reasonable, I cannot trust them in regards to it. If I trusted them, and they were worthy of that trust, then privacy would be a non-issue between us.
It's not that privacy itself is essential. It's fine as long as everyone who gets access to your information is worthy of your trust; that is to say, they won't do anything creepy, harmful, or exploitive, or give that information to anyone who might be creepy, harmful, or exploitive.
Microsoft does not fit into the category of companies I would trust.
That assumes it's not rejected, that it physically lasts the user's entire life without replacement, and that that process actually works.
Also, the concept that it would be created but I, no longer being a child, couldn't have it makes me immeasurably sad.
Better yet, make it a hashed password only based on the SN; using a private key so it can't be reversed.
That would defeat the purpose of it being the SN. At that point you could just make the password entirely random, of the same length, because have to print the password separately.
End users--especially noob users--are not going to read the SN, download a custom application to turn that into a password, and then use that.
I'm sure they want to chew the fat just like everyone else.
I hate "No matter what"s. There's often a perfectly valid "what" that should be mattered. You're still entitled to do whatever you like, it just bugs me when people use absolute language on judgement calls.
I have to say I disagree with your opinion. I haven't studied tablets extensively, but from everything I've read, they've been treated like existing computers, using existing OSes--and they shouldn't be, because existing window managers and other OS features just don't make the switch. When you come from a platform that starts explicitly with only the things the hardware is designed to be used for, you get something like the iTouch/iPhone, which is actually useful.
You can say that they should have done exactly the same thing except [long list of changes] if you like, but in the end, they made it the way they did for a reason. Celebrating their genius and scoffing at their judgement in the same breath is a little bit suspect.
From the summary at the top of that wikipedia page:
Estoppel is ... legal and equitable doctrines that preclude "a person from denying or asserting anything to the contrary of that which has, in contemplation of law, been established as the truth, either by the acts of judicial or legislative officers, or by his own deed, acts, or representations, either express or implied."
stripping out the parts that just repeat what has been said different ways for legal purposes and reorganizing:
Doctrines that preclude a person from denying anything that judges or legislators established as truth
I assume it means it would stop RIAA lawyers from making assertions that a judge has ruled are not true, on penalty of law... but you would have to ask a lawyer. I'm not one.
While this is factually true, you have to understand that that will only be effectively true as long as the laws can be trusted. Citizens--including law enforcement--often ignore laws which proscribe punishment for common acts if it seems like the law is too severe or out of touch--unless they get caught and it becomes a public sort of thing, in which case the law has to upheld, even if in a tongue-in-cheek manner.
In some cases this is a bad thing. In some cases it is even A Bad Thing. However, for some things like bandwidth allocation, it's quite possibly just a silly thing, in which case it might only still be law because of institutional inertia.
In other words, when every law is a law because breaking that law is wrong, then illegal means illegal. In the meantime, illegal should be considered illegal, even though it isn't always, and even though sometimes you can, should, or even have to break it.
People don't generally like things added to a service that should "just work". If a show is broadcast without ads, the consumer will likely assume it can and should continue like that. Unless the show's producers themselves come in apologetically and say they're going to have to start adding them to stay afloat, the addition will be seen as pure greed.
Now, with numbers as high as 500M, losing 50% of the demographic when you add ads doesn't exactly leave the advertiser scraping the bottom of the barrel. However, if that's implemented sitewide, losing that much traffic is devastating.
The point being you want numbers that tell you how many times you ad will be seen as things are today, not how many times the ad will be seen assuming that the viewers don't go apeshit that you put ads in their formerly free show and assuming the site doesn't go under or get passed by because they suddenly lost traffic.
They likely have far more pressing things on hand, like getting enough money to live off of.
Further, if they prove it can be done by disorganized, preoccupied rabble, then sooner or later they might get captured by Chinese government officials and forced to reveal their methods, at which point other "human rights groups in China" would do "copycat attacks", purely, of course, to try to pin the blame on China itself, who is "innocent".
I don't frankly understand why that skill has to be taught, as it is the intuitively obvious thing to do. In fact, teaching it or otherwise officially encouraging it seems to me to put the emphasis entirely in the wrong place--it says that the truth isn't important as long as it can be sussed out.
How many times, in the past or the present, are you going to be completely and utterly without any way to find out how to spell a word? No dictionaries, nobody around who knows, no nothing? If at any particular moment you don't know how to spell it, that's fine, even if you have resources available to you--barring of course some sort of technical or official document where it matters. But it's generally polite if you do it casually to go back and find out later, and not make the same mistake again.
I do agree about the learning by osmosis bits. In the same way some people love language, I guess, some hate it, or just think it's a giant dork.
At what scale do you expect the horsepower to be useful? A micrometer engine won't power your SUV, but if you want to create extremely small ducted fans that can be embedded in a processor, for example, I think it has the horsepower to push air.
Although that raises the immediate question of what happens if the mechanism gets clogged by dust or something. At that scale, there ain't shit you can do to clean it.
You're not wrong but come on, everyone's been cloning from everyone making little tweaks, changes, additions, snips - nearly every piece of software out there, be it FOSS, Microsoft, Apple - is deriviative at some level.
The question is - how derivitive does it have to be to be "wrong", and at which point do you start letting fly the patents?
Where by cloning of course you mean "standardizing" or even better "not reinventing the wheel".
Copying a fifty thousand line program verbatim--or heck, a tenth of that or less, really--is cloning. Taking a dozen or fewer closely-knit, low-level ideas that make sense together, and implementing them very similarly to the way someone else does it, especially so that users can use either one equivalently, is getting the damn job done.
I've never understood why there are no good examples of extremely short-range terminals in mobile computing. For example, a laptop-sized main computer in your backpack (probably an actual laptop, really) connected via either a cable or high-bandwidth wireless to something that is literally just a display and keyboard (and battery) -- No guts, no heat, no awkward/stupid limitations. If you need a different size terminal, you get a different sized terminal. The computer itself, while it will run on batteries, doesn't necessarily require that the battery fit in the form factor of the rest of the device, so you have significantly more juice.
A wireless monitor on your wrist makes plenty of sense in that context, as long as you understand that it will only ever be an accessory, not a full-fledged terminal or PDA.
Relatedly, I think a clown is something you could reasonably expect to see on a unicycle, and the idea that some form of entertainment would be at a popular college location isn't unheard of. Some of the people probably checked it off as some sort of silly event without even bothering to care. I know I might have.
If it was a BEAR riding a unicycle, then that's a different story. It gets the danger senses up at least momentarily, plus, why the crap is there a bear riding a unicycle?
Even assuming the GP is correct, that assumes that the cold doesn't take more energy out of you than your newly augmented body puts out. The surface area to volume ratio of a human is pretty high, especially in the case of your extremeties, where you have a very small area (the base of your finger, say) that all the expended energy has to first flow through. If it doesn't get enough energy, with prolonged exposure, you lose your finger/hand/arm/nose/ear/toe/foot/leg/whatever.
In normal humans, the problem is the same. You can get frostbite in the limbs to the point at which they can't be saved and have to be amputated, and yet still survive, specifically because the body doesn't try to waste energy on those things when it needs to make sure the organs are safe.
Disclaimer: Not a biologist or physician. Consult a doctor before amputating anything. Erections lasting longer than four hours are disturbing and I don't want to hear about them.
How about we replace "chaos" with an equivalent word, "unstable".
Developers are expecting the things they are working with to be malleable and assume they are suitable to be changed. They may easily leave a system in a state where it's easy to do something interesting later, with the understanding that if something goes wrong, it can and will be fixed.
Then, since their job isn't to be a professional SA, they run off and do other things and completely forget about it for a while, and things degenerate. If they WERE professional SAs, they would notice them fairly quickly and keep trying new solutions until they came upon one that worked. Since they aren't, they just sort of hack together a workaday solution and then forget it again.
I'm sure if they had the same skills but were hired as an SA and only did programming on the side, they would be half-assed programmers for a similar reason, if probably in different ways.
In the year 2525
If mankind is still alive
You can google into your DNA
And download the perfect thing to say...
1) Previous tablet makers have shown little imagination around UIs and how a touchscreen changes things.
Previously, a tablet maker had to write drivers and shitty little programs to make their touchscreen work with an existing OS. However, you can't really make a tablet work well using a windowing system designed for a mouse and keyboard; you just can't. Buttons work well, but titlebars don't, menus often don't (concealed by your hand), things like alt texts don't, you can't mouse over screen edges to make hidden menus pop up or do similar things, there are trouble with any parts of the system when you have to get the pointer to something a few pixels wide, etc. So unless improved features are built into the OS, or you hack an open windowing system like X/KDE/Gnome to accommodate it, using existing OSes is a bad idea.
It requires someone like Apple or Microsoft to modify a full OS enough to really natively support a tablet, and Microsoft doesn't get that sort of thing. They're decent at making things work and they don't look terrible, but they don't innovate, and I think they know it as much as anyone. Apple is the only one who could reasonably be expected to completely rethink their OS enough to accommodate a new paradigm like that.
In theory (and I'm sure any military or stunt pilot could correct me) this stems from similar setups in fighter planes, etc. While extra buttons are "neat" when you're sitting on the ground, the ability to reliably reach controls without fighting high gee forces or waiting for those forces to subside or stabilize is critical.
But maybe I'm wrong. Go try to flip a switch a foot or two in front of you while experiencing fluctuating gee forces, and remember that the switches just to either side, or just above or below, will have entirely different functions and you might kill yourself if you hit them on accident. I'll wait.
That's all true and largely understandable, even for the record folks.
However, they're still doing what they're doing what they've always done and getting what they've always gotten, only now they think they can sue what amounts to people chosen at random for insane amounts of money. They are choosing to continue to put out songs in media with known vulnerabilities. They know that the consumers can take advantage of these vulnerabilities to get untraceable copies. They know that these copies can be exchanged en masse and anonymously. They are also at this point completely and utterly under no illusion whatsoever that they can track down enough of the people doing the trading to stop it. They probably are also pretty darn aware that the people they are suing into financial oblivion are not the people that they want to get, even if the tactic of suing people was correct. And I believe, cynicism aside, that a lot of the people there don't think it's the right thing to do, but do it anyway.
Frankly I'd string em up for knowing all those facts and still pursuing this campaign, and rewrite the laws to prevent it in the future. And I don't mean I'd bankrupt their company, but I'd figure out exactly who was capable of stopping this and didn't, no matter how far up the chain, and make sure they never ran anything larger than a lemonade stand ever again.
But then, IANAL and IANAJ and IANA Congressman or senator or whatever else.
We should also point out the degree of culpability the consumer actually should be considered to have.
1) Did they create the method by which the music was ripped? No, this is done with available tools for which the cost of entry is negligible or zero, and which has no particularly greater barriers to entry than installing a new text editor.
2) Did they create the method for distribution of the music? No, they neither had any hand in the creation of bittorrent, nor were they hosting a tracker nor otherwise going out of their way to create new infrastructure to ease the distribution. Again, the barrier to entry to gaining access to this method is no higher than downloading any other software.
3) Did they create or do they maintain or manage the media (read: the internet) on which the distribution is taking place? No, they are using someone else's network, which for various reasons isn't well monitored and arguably should not be.
4) Did they create any other tool at all or in any way invest more than trivial effort? No, they did not, in fact what effort was needed to create this system was fairly distributed across a number of other people, and virtually none of the offenders--whether they have been prosecuted yet or not--had any hand in it at all.
I'm not being silly. The effort anyone puts into downloading a torrent--legal or not--is insignificantly small. To try my first slashdot car analogy, if driving with the windows down and the AC on was illegal, they'd be asking the judge to revoke your license, impound your car, repossess your house, and send your kids to child services, even though it just takes the flick of a couple switches to do it, and there are reasons why you'd want to, and all the cars are shipped capable of doing so.
If the record companies don't want us to create so many digital copies, maybe they shouldn't be using technology they know can be copied, and they should just hold more concerts and go back to vinyl or something.
Correct.
Engineering is about doing something and getting the expected results.
Science is about giving the engineers something new to play with.
I agree with you, and I'm not really sure where the GP is coming from.
If the CEO or sales team makes a 10% increase in functionality by the coders into a 200% increase in sales, then at most they are 20x as valuable. If the coders improve the product by 50% but the sales only increase by 10%, then it's the CEO etc have been less important than the effect of the coders; or rather, this is true IF you accept the previous argument. The 'pragmatic' in me wants to say that perhaps it's the program's at fault, even though the previous example assumed that the salespeople were the ones resulting in the net increase. It's a double standard, and it's stupid.
I view CEOs the same way I view government officials, and that is that anyone who applies for the job should not be allowed to have it. If the person gets 400x more salary than everyone in the company out of merit, rather than position, I have no beef. However, the idea that a person should get that wage because they can fire the accountants is at best dubious and at worst ought to be flipping illegal. The idea that it's "just how CEOs are paid" is no better.