Exactly. Make those people a browser extension that captures a screenshot, lets them paint a big red rectangle, a comment field, then annotates with things like all cookies for current page, browser history (on the current site), user email address,...
Then teach them "something goes wrong, push the button".
And use a general exception handler that makes damn sure that the user id cookie is available inside the exception.
I do not suggest that European law is similar to chinese laws or islamic barbarism. But it's also very unlike American law, and has no direct right to free speech like Americans do.
Google does not actually have physical business presence anywhere outside of the US (in fact I believe they don't even have that outside of California). They have wholly owned subsidiaries, some of which are physically located inside the EU. Technically those subsidiaries are resellers.
So google's methods of making profit are governed by the laws of the state of California, while google's profits are distributed according to the laws of the British territory of the Bermudas. Read all about it
A voltage multiplier is an electrical circuit that converts AC electrical power from a lower voltage to a higher DC voltage, typically by means of a network of capacitors and diodes.
This is, by the way, a circuit that you might as well describe as "a cute AC voltage multiplier met a very nice rectifier gentleman one night and...".
And the DC -> DC circuits there always convert to AC, then change the voltage, then convert back to DC. This works, but it's very inefficient. It is so inefficient that you probably wouldn't use them if there is any other option.
No, but there's a range of opinions that is banned. Starting with anything that you can identify as "nazism" (which is *a lot*. Anything to the left of stalin has been forced to at least retract a few statements, Police regularly break up parties (yes, youth parties*) because of these laws, hell's angels groups are harassed,...), several political parties destroyed and broken up,...
In theory you have free speech. In practice it is the case that a certain segment of lefties have taken to calling everything that doesn't sufficiently agree with them nazist (like, for instance, social democrat parties who felt that men and women should have equal unemployment benefits, I believe the issue was that "sole fathers" would get increased benefits just like sole mothers do, and apparently that's not very socialist).
This has led to sometimes funny situations, like the dutch socialists in Belgium calling the french socialists nazis, *and* vice-versa. It stopped being fun when they involved the justice department though. The french ones won, but it is whispered that may have had something to do with the trial being overseen by a french judge. Keep in mind that the french socialists have been in power in > 60% of the french-speaking part of the country for decades, and thus have had veto rights over judge appointments. If you ever have a rent dispute in belgium and you're a tenant, request a trial in French, you'll be amazed what they let you get away with.
* there's several "neo-nazi" organizations who organize a lot of parties (which really only think that name is somehow cool, they certainly don't follow that ideology. They're very socialist, but much more focused on young people than the mainstream socialists. They're more about scholarships and unemployment and care very little about pensions, for example. They hardly ever campaign outside of discos and the like)
In recent years, further crackdowns have been ordered against anything considered culturally insensitive. Btw : this is not people acting like total buffoons because they perceive something to be racist, this is people ending up in jail because someone managed to build a case that they were insensitive. As an example was a hairdressing salon refusing to hire a veiled muslim woman (3 guesses why they did that, right ? Hair is their business, they don't want to hide it. They made the *big* mistake of telling that woman why they didn't hire her).
Or are you trying to suggest that US companies should be above the law?
Well, the problem is that... yes... we kinda do...
Above European law ? Yes... first, isolated from the 56 different conflicting sets laws that govern all sorts of parts of Europe ? Yes, definitely. Able to publish free speech into Europe on areas where European laws forbid it (e.g. criticizing unions, or politicians/institutions,...) ? Again, yes, definitely Above Chinese law ? Yes Above $dictatorship's laws ? Yes Above muslim countries' laws ? Yes... (the list goes on)
I would absolutely HATE to see US companies (any one of them) forced to comply to even a single one of these laws, except where it concerns people on the ground in those countries. But their websites and their business itself should be immune.
True... but only true if you 1) trust the service provider to have a trustworthy DC network (the damage a DC power surge will do is much higher than an AC surge) 2) assume safely isolating servers from this DC net does not carry any cost either in efficiency, or in money 3) assume that you can convince server makers to build & support such servers (not a problem if you are google or facebook, but...)
Problem with DC : upscaling the voltage is hard, complex and inefficient (but you can convert AC directly into high-voltage DC) Problem with AC : there does not exist such a thing as an AC battery. You want battery backup, you need DC
Only in datacenters, which work with battery backup and thus usually have multiple AC->DC->AC conversion points, with big losses, is this even a factor.
How it works today is : BIG high-voltage AC input to the datacenter, which is converted to DC (inefficient) and fed into the power system, which charges the batteries (inefficient) and powers several huge inverters which convert back to AC (inefficient), then this AC is transmitted over a normal power distribution system into the server racks, and each server takes in AC and... converts it into 5V and 12V DC (inefficient).
So the theory is, let's change this into : BIG high-voltage AC input to the datacenter, converted to DC (inefficient), which charges the batteries (inefficient), is distributed troughout the building and powers the servers.
The idea being that a huge extremely high-voltage power supply is more efficient than all the ping-pong conversions going on today.
The alternative to this is what google does. Instead of eleminating the AC-DC conversions at the headend, eliminate them at the tail end.
Google datacenters: BIG high-voltage AC input to the datacenter, which is directly distributed into the datacenter and fed into the servers, which convert it to DC, and with that DC line, charge a battery specific to that one server, and use the same source for the actual server.
It has the same efficiency gains, obvious massive redundancy and maintenance gains. You have transformed the datacenter from a big centralized SPOF into a much more resilient and more efficient beast. BUT it requires people to maintain their own battery backup.
Actually western states actually mostly do obey their own laws. Especially within the justice system. Additionally, the laws governing government operations are actually very, very similar to the laws governing any company or person. The laws governing behavior of judges are MUCH more stringent than for normal persons (e.g. a judge will get a lifetime ban, both on serving as a judge or a lawyer, if a reasonable case (without proof) can be made that they committed fraud. Obviously those 2 professions are the only ones accessible for someone with a legal education, so this is quite a serious punishment).
It depends on how you want to judge, right ? You want to judge by absolutes ? Sure, western governments are a disaster. Compared to, oh, China, or islamic states, or dictatorships ? You know where this is going.
I don't fully understand your argument. What would such proof entail ? Obviously you cannot require a conviction for child-abuse (which would be the normal standard) as proof, since many states (e.g. islamic states) have simply legalized child abuse. Others have no justice system at all. And to make things really really complicated there are all sorts of exception cases (international waters, flights, embassies, various kinds of immunity,...)
What can I say about that, except "read the complaint" ? Chanel makes and defends the case that the offending websites demonstrated intent, and that they sell those fake products. They make this case about 5 times using slightly different reasoning even. They make the case that this demonstrates that chanel suffers damages, to the satisfaction of the judge.
LOL. Keep telling yourself that. Apple especially, if people weren't willing to overpay for the brand, they would have gone out of business a decade ago.
Not an apple fan I take it ? Me neither.
As for Canonical or RedHat, these business don't sell products in so far, they sell services and that is where their money comes from. So how do you counterfeit that?
Easy, you make sure every offer of redhat support anywhere is flanked by 3 offers for "redhat support", indistinguishable from the original, where everything is understaffed by very cheap labor, except the sales department. Potential customers won't be able to differentiate between the real brand and the miserably low quality copies and won't be able to contact the real redhat in practice.
Redhat (and many others) would be reduced to finding customers by word of mouth.
You're seriously making the case that you can sue a foreigner with interests in the US *without telling them* ? The answer, obviously is that you can't. Granted the standards for information are necessarily lower, because the justice system has no agents outside of the US, but obviously defendants were informed.
So 1) all defendants were informed 2) they get to respond when they receive the complaints, and are asked either to come to court or appoint a representative to do so (ie. they should get a lawyer, or send anyone who can speak for them) 3) feel free to show me where the judge stressed this point... A judge cannot use law enforcement in civil cases, never mind law enforcement outside of his/her jurisdiction. 4) the defendants were told, and didn't show up. They did not bother to defend their domains. Simple as that. Doing that, of course, is generally not appreciated by the courts
So you mean you would like to make Americans perfectly at liberty to pay someone else to abuse children sexually, as long as the actual abuse does not happen within American borders (e.g. more than 11 km offshore).
Then you have nothing to fear from "it's illegal to posses child-porn" laws. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean you'll get thrown in jail for accidentally doing something that somewhat resembles what is declared illegal.
You need 3 things to convict someone with laws like these 1) he must have violated a law 2) someone must have suffered damage as a result of this 3) there must be intent
So while it may be true that you're "over the line" on point 1), it will be very hard to prove 2) since you didn't pay for it and were grossed out by it, and 3) is impossible. What you're doing does not really fall in the danger zone.
As long as you don't accidentally download big amounts 3-4 times or over a large period of time or sell it or something, you have nothing to be afraid of.
(yes I know there are laws where you are convicted whether or not there was intent. Please keep in mind that unreasonable amounts of negligence are considered to constitute a weak form of intent. The basic principles behind the law are pretty well thought out (unlike many more recent laws))
But we need to consume those things anyway, and biking a few miles per day does not significantly increase your energy needs.
It nevertheless increases your energy needs. Just because your body has a really good battery (ie. your fat tissue and your liver) does not mean it doesn't use energy to move. Your body can actually store nearly double the amount of energy per kilogram that oil can, making your body about 10x more energy dense than the best electrical storage system known to man.
However, while the battery that is a human being is really, really good (I once calculated that human fatty cells + a liver should actually be able to provide enough energy to get a car like a clio to do 100km/h, though only for about 15 minutes or so, so the range would be significantly less at high speeds, and actually a little more at low speeds). Even if we can store huge amounts of energy, systems that have more intermediate steps necessarily pay the price in efficiency. The human body is no different here. Humans are actually worse than a hummer at converting energy into movement (calorie intake vs work done).
Add to that the fact that we are very inefficient (energy-wise) at growing plants and breeding animals, using massive amounts of fossil fuels to breed them. The best plants are about 4% efficient at using the energy in solar radiation, the ones we eat generally 2% or less. So, the overall efficiency of a human moving around is dismal, less than one-thousandth of a percent.
You move -> you eat more (over a period of weeks or months, so you don't notice, but it's there)
Unfortunately, the mindless properties of capitalism prevent this from happening because sterling engines won't turn a profit tomorrow, and tomorrow is as far as most business people see.
1) scratch "business" out of there 2) economics states that if you're doing well, and there is an inevitable global collapse coming, which will impact everyone equally... that you should... try to accelerate and worsen the collapse.
Even if the collapse can be avoided the case can easily be made that a global collapse will not impact villages in afghanistan much (they're dead either way), yet it will impact their competitors (ie. you, me) hugely, resulting in a huge net benefit for them (their skills will gain enormous amounts of value as a result of the collapse).
Sadly a misguided interpretation of economics that's at fault here, not so much short-term view of people. Economic collapse would be hugely inconvenient for everyone in an advanced society, which is only about ~50% of the human race (and that's counting the huge amount of people that may live in an "advanced" city but don't have the living conditions that exist in the US, otherwise, I doubt you'll make 30%). For the rest of the human race, it would probably be a huge boon.
Furthermore, you should travel to Africa once. Compare a Stirling engine (you will find them, built by a well-meaning monk, for example) to a diesel engine. Diesel engines are nice little things. You supply the fuel, and they almost maintain themselves. Stirling engines are twitchy, unreliable little things that require constant problem-solving, cleaning,... to keep them running. Their speed is far from constant, their torque is far from constant,... And a diesel engine "works like the west" : you don't have to do anything, they do the work for you (mostly).
So the diesel engines you find are mostly operational, the Stirling engines, despite being "free" to run, are rusted broken down remains. I have little doubt that an American village would probably choose to run a Stirling engine in a pinch, if they didn't have money for the fuel. African villagers will simply do nothing at all.
African people aren't nearly as dumb as you think. They fully understand that the only way they're ever going to work themselves up to the living standard "in the west" is by massive aid. And they're perfectly aware that to get more aid, they need to get in more serious trouble. As long as you think it's their knowledge/intelligence that is the problem, your solutions will fail. The problem is that if they don't *have* to do something (absolutely positively have to do it for survival that is) they won't. Doing nothing brings planes with the letters "US" on their hulls that drop almost ready-made west-quality bread from the sky. Making their own bread... well you should go there and taste it once. Maniok. Brrrrrrr...
Try to see the perspective of people outside of the west. Think about it. You should not do this to "make your peace" with having a collapse, but because it will enable you to see how you can actually fix the problem. How you can make sure that incentives change, which will eventually change people and might (might) prevent the collapse here. Saying that some easy piece of technology is the solution and looking for conspiracies... will make things worse.
The real problem is that we have 7 billion people on this planet, and we can only "use" about 1-2 billion of them ("provide jobs for" if you want to use the lefty terminology), a number that is rapidly going down. If no solution is found... let's just say nature will adapt, and you know perfectly well what I mean by that. That's what's at stake, and there is no "quick fix".
1) defendants were informed, to the satisfaction of the court, at least 2 months in advance (probably more) 2) if they responded they would have had the right to demand the court case come to them (within US territory of course) or appoint a representative 3) this is a civil case at this point, not a criminal one, so the judge does *not* have the right to "track down the person" using law enforcement (at this point in the proceedings), everything has to be done by, essentially, looking the guys up in the phone book and asking companies to inform their clients of the case (which registrars generally do) 4) the defendants didn't bother to show up at all, nor did they even bother to tell the court why they couldn't be there. And frankly, at this point even saying "the dog ate the first draft of my speech" would have gotten them a 2 month delay
I'm sure you can understand that given that this happened, the court did not want to spend big resources or make big concessions on behalf of the defendants. Do you truly find this strange ?
The danger is that you cannot have premium brands without trademark law. It would become impossible to build a reputation as a company. Only people would be able to build reputations, and only in cases where there is direct contact between people.
Companies that people here care about that would be bankrupt in a heartbeat without trademark law would include apple, lenovo, redhat, canonical,...
Slashdot opinion != the law (and thank God for that)
It's really simple : this was said by a judge and is thus (ie. in English common law, like the US) the only valid interpretation of the law (in this specific instance, ymmv, yadda yadda yadda). Although that's not entirely true since this isn't a supreme court case, so in practice if someone actually defends themselves against this, he's probably not going to be bothered by this judgement at all.
This does of course means that it's not the judge that thinks he's above the law, nor chanel, nor "the US", nor the government, but merely that you have a wrong idea about what the law is. You want to change the law, convince your local congress critter, or elect another one.
I would tread carefully, especially in this case. Trademark law is just about the only law that actually gives normal people a chance against domain squatters, that gives you the exclusive right to your own name. Either you seize domains for the "owner" of the name, or you don't. If you don't that means anyone is perfectly at liberty to start a "how to defraud banks" tutorial on a site bearing your name, with obvious consequences.
And there's plenty of black swans as well. You know why medicine is based on statistics these days ?
Because people who have been diagnosed completely healthy have been known to drop dead for no apparent reason, and in quite a few cases even autopsies were unable to find out what happened. And people who were diagnosed with "at best a few hours to live" have managed to stretch those few hours to 50 years, which was more than a normal lifespan in more than a few cases. Some people live for decades with as far as diagnosis can tell identical tumors to people who collapsed in a matter of hours.
This is normal. It's in the introduction to every medicine textbook these days. Both of these are not nearly as rare as you would think. It can get weirder : there was a study recently on how these phenomenon have increased in occurence in the last few decades. More people become heavily sick or have died for no identifiable reason and more people heal when age-old accepted theories state they should have died.
In short : there is no shortage of unexplainable events at all. There is only a shortage of a clear line linking unexplainable events, there is no obvious reproducible unexplainable event. Sometimes a series of coincidences really do seem to have a clear and obvious purpose, yet when you try to recreate the circumstances, the weird events fail to pass. We've all seen stuff like this happen to people.
It's not an entirely 100% in-your-face example, but just test yourself. If you paused these clips halfway and had to predict what would happen, would you have been correct ?
First of all, you should read the old testament once.
As for your comparison to science... do you mean as compared to "the law of the jungle" from Darwinism ? And let's not forget that economics and evolution both say the same : if you're running out of natural resources due to population issues, you should start breeding faster, and even do anything you can to bring the inevitable crash closer ("if you want to win the gene race"). It's a "tragedy of the commons" scenario : you're fucked whether or not you procreate, but you're much more fucked if you don't.
So how is science an improvement in this area ? Except, of course, in that people don't actually follow it's advice (and thank God, specifically Jesus, for that - literally - even if you're an atheist).
Slashdot Mirror
Sure they are, just not of either the legislative or executive branches.
Exactly. Make those people a browser extension that captures a screenshot, lets them paint a big red rectangle, a comment field, then annotates with things like all cookies for current page, browser history (on the current site), user email address, ...
Then teach them "something goes wrong, push the button".
And use a general exception handler that makes damn sure that the user id cookie is available inside the exception.
I do not suggest that European law is similar to chinese laws or islamic barbarism. But it's also very unlike American law, and has no direct right to free speech like Americans do.
Google does not actually have physical business presence anywhere outside of the US (in fact I believe they don't even have that outside of California). They have wholly owned subsidiaries, some of which are physically located inside the EU. Technically those subsidiaries are resellers.
So google's methods of making profit are governed by the laws of the state of California, while google's profits are distributed according to the laws of the British territory of the Bermudas. Read all about it
The first line of that page :
A voltage multiplier is an electrical circuit that converts AC electrical power from a lower voltage to a higher DC voltage, typically by means of a network of capacitors and diodes.
This is, by the way, a circuit that you might as well describe as "a cute AC voltage multiplier met a very nice rectifier gentleman one night and ...".
And the DC -> DC circuits there always convert to AC, then change the voltage, then convert back to DC. This works, but it's very inefficient. It is so inefficient that you probably wouldn't use them if there is any other option.
No, but there's a range of opinions that is banned. Starting with anything that you can identify as "nazism" (which is *a lot*. Anything to the left of stalin has been forced to at least retract a few statements, Police regularly break up parties (yes, youth parties*) because of these laws, hell's angels groups are harassed, ...), several political parties destroyed and broken up, ...
In theory you have free speech. In practice it is the case that a certain segment of lefties have taken to calling everything that doesn't sufficiently agree with them nazist (like, for instance, social democrat parties who felt that men and women should have equal unemployment benefits, I believe the issue was that "sole fathers" would get increased benefits just like sole mothers do, and apparently that's not very socialist).
This has led to sometimes funny situations, like the dutch socialists in Belgium calling the french socialists nazis, *and* vice-versa. It stopped being fun when they involved the justice department though. The french ones won, but it is whispered that may have had something to do with the trial being overseen by a french judge. Keep in mind that the french socialists have been in power in > 60% of the french-speaking part of the country for decades, and thus have had veto rights over judge appointments. If you ever have a rent dispute in belgium and you're a tenant, request a trial in French, you'll be amazed what they let you get away with.
* there's several "neo-nazi" organizations who organize a lot of parties (which really only think that name is somehow cool, they certainly don't follow that ideology. They're very socialist, but much more focused on young people than the mainstream socialists. They're more about scholarships and unemployment and care very little about pensions, for example. They hardly ever campaign outside of discos and the like)
In recent years, further crackdowns have been ordered against anything considered culturally insensitive. Btw : this is not people acting like total buffoons because they perceive something to be racist, this is people ending up in jail because someone managed to build a case that they were insensitive. As an example was a hairdressing salon refusing to hire a veiled muslim woman (3 guesses why they did that, right ? Hair is their business, they don't want to hide it. They made the *big* mistake of telling that woman why they didn't hire her).
So let's focus on the point he *did* make ... is corruption illegal in the US ? Of course it is.
So the "tsa" post is full of bullshit. It is of course not legal in the US for politicians to be corrupt.
Or are you trying to suggest that US companies should be above the law?
Well, the problem is that ... yes ... we kinda do ...
Above European law ? Yes ... first, isolated from the 56 different conflicting sets laws that govern all sorts of parts of Europe ? Yes, definitely. Able to publish free speech into Europe on areas where European laws forbid it (e.g. criticizing unions, or politicians/institutions, ...) ? Again, yes, definitely ...
Above Chinese law ? Yes
Above $dictatorship's laws ? Yes
Above muslim countries' laws ? Yes
(the list goes on)
I would absolutely HATE to see US companies (any one of them) forced to comply to even a single one of these laws, except where it concerns people on the ground in those countries. But their websites and their business itself should be immune.
True ... but only true if you ...)
1) trust the service provider to have a trustworthy DC network (the damage a DC power surge will do is much higher than an AC surge)
2) assume safely isolating servers from this DC net does not carry any cost either in efficiency, or in money
3) assume that you can convince server makers to build & support such servers (not a problem if you are google or facebook, but
For AC, yes. For DC, no. Which is the problem ...
Problem with DC : upscaling the voltage is hard, complex and inefficient (but you can convert AC directly into high-voltage DC)
Problem with AC : there does not exist such a thing as an AC battery. You want battery backup, you need DC
Only in datacenters, which work with battery backup and thus usually have multiple AC->DC->AC conversion points, with big losses, is this even a factor.
How it works today is : ... converts it into 5V and 12V DC (inefficient).
BIG high-voltage AC input to the datacenter, which is converted to DC (inefficient) and fed into the power system, which charges the batteries (inefficient) and powers several huge inverters which convert back to AC (inefficient), then this AC is transmitted over a normal power distribution system into the server racks, and each server takes in AC and
So the theory is, let's change this into :
BIG high-voltage AC input to the datacenter, converted to DC (inefficient), which charges the batteries (inefficient), is distributed troughout the building and powers the servers.
The idea being that a huge extremely high-voltage power supply is more efficient than all the ping-pong conversions going on today.
The alternative to this is what google does. Instead of eleminating the AC-DC conversions at the headend, eliminate them at the tail end.
Google datacenters:
BIG high-voltage AC input to the datacenter, which is directly distributed into the datacenter and fed into the servers, which convert it to DC, and with that DC line, charge a battery specific to that one server, and use the same source for the actual server.
It has the same efficiency gains, obvious massive redundancy and maintenance gains. You have transformed the datacenter from a big centralized SPOF into a much more resilient and more efficient beast. BUT it requires people to maintain their own battery backup.
Try building a circuit to increase the voltage of a DC power source, then you'll understand.
Yes, we know that once you magically have huge voltage DC, there is no more problem. Getting to that point, however, is the problem.
Actually western states actually mostly do obey their own laws. Especially within the justice system. Additionally, the laws governing government operations are actually very, very similar to the laws governing any company or person. The laws governing behavior of judges are MUCH more stringent than for normal persons (e.g. a judge will get a lifetime ban, both on serving as a judge or a lawyer, if a reasonable case (without proof) can be made that they committed fraud. Obviously those 2 professions are the only ones accessible for someone with a legal education, so this is quite a serious punishment).
It depends on how you want to judge, right ? You want to judge by absolutes ? Sure, western governments are a disaster. Compared to, oh, China, or islamic states, or dictatorships ? You know where this is going.
I don't fully understand your argument. What would such proof entail ? Obviously you cannot require a conviction for child-abuse (which would be the normal standard) as proof, since many states (e.g. islamic states) have simply legalized child abuse. Others have no justice system at all. And to make things really really complicated there are all sorts of exception cases (international waters, flights, embassies, various kinds of immunity, ...)
What can I say about that, except "read the complaint" ? Chanel makes and defends the case that the offending websites demonstrated intent, and that they sell those fake products. They make this case about 5 times using slightly different reasoning even. They make the case that this demonstrates that chanel suffers damages, to the satisfaction of the judge.
LOL. Keep telling yourself that. Apple especially, if people weren't willing to overpay for the brand, they would have gone out of business a decade ago.
Not an apple fan I take it ? Me neither.
As for Canonical or RedHat, these business don't sell products in so far, they sell services and that is where their money comes from. So how do you counterfeit that?
Easy, you make sure every offer of redhat support anywhere is flanked by 3 offers for "redhat support", indistinguishable from the original, where everything is understaffed by very cheap labor, except the sales department. Potential customers won't be able to differentiate between the real brand and the miserably low quality copies and won't be able to contact the real redhat in practice.
Redhat (and many others) would be reduced to finding customers by word of mouth.
You're seriously making the case that you can sue a foreigner with interests in the US *without telling them* ? The answer, obviously is that you can't. Granted the standards for information are necessarily lower, because the justice system has no agents outside of the US, but obviously defendants were informed.
So ... A judge cannot use law enforcement in civil cases, never mind law enforcement outside of his/her jurisdiction.
1) all defendants were informed
2) they get to respond when they receive the complaints, and are asked either to come to court or appoint a representative to do so (ie. they should get a lawyer, or send anyone who can speak for them)
3) feel free to show me where the judge stressed this point
4) the defendants were told, and didn't show up. They did not bother to defend their domains. Simple as that. Doing that, of course, is generally not appreciated by the courts
So you mean you would like to make Americans perfectly at liberty to pay someone else to abuse children sexually, as long as the actual abuse does not happen within American borders (e.g. more than 11 km offshore).
I can only hope you see the problem.
Then you have nothing to fear from "it's illegal to posses child-porn" laws. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean you'll get thrown in jail for accidentally doing something that somewhat resembles what is declared illegal.
You need 3 things to convict someone with laws like these
1) he must have violated a law
2) someone must have suffered damage as a result of this
3) there must be intent
So while it may be true that you're "over the line" on point 1), it will be very hard to prove 2) since you didn't pay for it and were grossed out by it, and 3) is impossible. What you're doing does not really fall in the danger zone.
As long as you don't accidentally download big amounts 3-4 times or over a large period of time or sell it or something, you have nothing to be afraid of.
(yes I know there are laws where you are convicted whether or not there was intent. Please keep in mind that unreasonable amounts of negligence are considered to constitute a weak form of intent. The basic principles behind the law are pretty well thought out (unlike many more recent laws))
Counterfeit is based on trademark laws, not copyright laws.
Chanel probably doesn't have much use for copyright.
But we need to consume those things anyway, and biking a few miles per day does not significantly increase your energy needs.
It nevertheless increases your energy needs. Just because your body has a really good battery (ie. your fat tissue and your liver) does not mean it doesn't use energy to move. Your body can actually store nearly double the amount of energy per kilogram that oil can, making your body about 10x more energy dense than the best electrical storage system known to man.
However, while the battery that is a human being is really, really good (I once calculated that human fatty cells + a liver should actually be able to provide enough energy to get a car like a clio to do 100km/h, though only for about 15 minutes or so, so the range would be significantly less at high speeds, and actually a little more at low speeds). Even if we can store huge amounts of energy, systems that have more intermediate steps necessarily pay the price in efficiency. The human body is no different here. Humans are actually worse than a hummer at converting energy into movement (calorie intake vs work done).
Add to that the fact that we are very inefficient (energy-wise) at growing plants and breeding animals, using massive amounts of fossil fuels to breed them. The best plants are about 4% efficient at using the energy in solar radiation, the ones we eat generally 2% or less. So, the overall efficiency of a human moving around is dismal, less than one-thousandth of a percent.
You move -> you eat more (over a period of weeks or months, so you don't notice, but it's there)
Unfortunately, the mindless properties of capitalism prevent this from happening because sterling engines won't turn a profit tomorrow, and tomorrow is as far as most business people see.
1) scratch "business" out of there ... that you should ... try to accelerate and worsen the collapse.
2) economics states that if you're doing well, and there is an inevitable global collapse coming, which will impact everyone equally
Even if the collapse can be avoided the case can easily be made that a global collapse will not impact villages in afghanistan much (they're dead either way), yet it will impact their competitors (ie. you, me) hugely, resulting in a huge net benefit for them (their skills will gain enormous amounts of value as a result of the collapse).
Sadly a misguided interpretation of economics that's at fault here, not so much short-term view of people. Economic collapse would be hugely inconvenient for everyone in an advanced society, which is only about ~50% of the human race (and that's counting the huge amount of people that may live in an "advanced" city but don't have the living conditions that exist in the US, otherwise, I doubt you'll make 30%). For the rest of the human race, it would probably be a huge boon.
Furthermore, you should travel to Africa once. Compare a Stirling engine (you will find them, built by a well-meaning monk, for example) to a diesel engine. Diesel engines are nice little things. You supply the fuel, and they almost maintain themselves. Stirling engines are twitchy, unreliable little things that require constant problem-solving, cleaning, ... to keep them running. Their speed is far from constant, their torque is far from constant, ... And a diesel engine "works like the west" : you don't have to do anything, they do the work for you (mostly).
So the diesel engines you find are mostly operational, the Stirling engines, despite being "free" to run, are rusted broken down remains. I have little doubt that an American village would probably choose to run a Stirling engine in a pinch, if they didn't have money for the fuel. African villagers will simply do nothing at all.
African people aren't nearly as dumb as you think. They fully understand that the only way they're ever going to work themselves up to the living standard "in the west" is by massive aid. And they're perfectly aware that to get more aid, they need to get in more serious trouble. As long as you think it's their knowledge/intelligence that is the problem, your solutions will fail. The problem is that if they don't *have* to do something (absolutely positively have to do it for survival that is) they won't. Doing nothing brings planes with the letters "US" on their hulls that drop almost ready-made west-quality bread from the sky. Making their own bread ... well you should go there and taste it once. Maniok. Brrrrrrr ...
Try to see the perspective of people outside of the west. Think about it. You should not do this to "make your peace" with having a collapse, but because it will enable you to see how you can actually fix the problem. How you can make sure that incentives change, which will eventually change people and might (might) prevent the collapse here. Saying that some easy piece of technology is the solution and looking for conspiracies ... will make things worse.
The real problem is that we have 7 billion people on this planet, and we can only "use" about 1-2 billion of them ("provide jobs for" if you want to use the lefty terminology), a number that is rapidly going down. If no solution is found ... let's just say nature will adapt, and you know perfectly well what I mean by that. That's what's at stake, and there is no "quick fix".
This was a court case. So
1) defendants were informed, to the satisfaction of the court, at least 2 months in advance (probably more)
2) if they responded they would have had the right to demand the court case come to them (within US territory of course) or appoint a representative
3) this is a civil case at this point, not a criminal one, so the judge does *not* have the right to "track down the person" using law enforcement (at this point in the proceedings), everything has to be done by, essentially, looking the guys up in the phone book and asking companies to inform their clients of the case (which registrars generally do)
4) the defendants didn't bother to show up at all, nor did they even bother to tell the court why they couldn't be there. And frankly, at this point even saying "the dog ate the first draft of my speech" would have gotten them a 2 month delay
I'm sure you can understand that given that this happened, the court did not want to spend big resources or make big concessions on behalf of the defendants. Do you truly find this strange ?
The danger is that you cannot have premium brands without trademark law. It would become impossible to build a reputation as a company. Only people would be able to build reputations, and only in cases where there is direct contact between people.
Companies that people here care about that would be bankrupt in a heartbeat without trademark law would include apple, lenovo, redhat, canonical, ...
Slashdot opinion != the law (and thank God for that)
It's really simple : this was said by a judge and is thus (ie. in English common law, like the US) the only valid interpretation of the law (in this specific instance, ymmv, yadda yadda yadda). Although that's not entirely true since this isn't a supreme court case, so in practice if someone actually defends themselves against this, he's probably not going to be bothered by this judgement at all.
This does of course means that it's not the judge that thinks he's above the law, nor chanel, nor "the US", nor the government, but merely that you have a wrong idea about what the law is. You want to change the law, convince your local congress critter, or elect another one.
I would tread carefully, especially in this case. Trademark law is just about the only law that actually gives normal people a chance against domain squatters, that gives you the exclusive right to your own name. Either you seize domains for the "owner" of the name, or you don't. If you don't that means anyone is perfectly at liberty to start a "how to defraud banks" tutorial on a site bearing your name, with obvious consequences.
And there's plenty of black swans as well. You know why medicine is based on statistics these days ?
Because people who have been diagnosed completely healthy have been known to drop dead for no apparent reason, and in quite a few cases even autopsies were unable to find out what happened.
And people who were diagnosed with "at best a few hours to live" have managed to stretch those few hours to 50 years, which was more than a normal lifespan in more than a few cases.
Some people live for decades with as far as diagnosis can tell identical tumors to people who collapsed in a matter of hours.
This is normal. It's in the introduction to every medicine textbook these days. Both of these are not nearly as rare as you would think. It can get weirder : there was a study recently on how these phenomenon have increased in occurence in the last few decades. More people become heavily sick or have died for no identifiable reason and more people heal when age-old accepted theories state they should have died.
In short : there is no shortage of unexplainable events at all. There is only a shortage of a clear line linking unexplainable events, there is no obvious reproducible unexplainable event. Sometimes a series of coincidences really do seem to have a clear and obvious purpose, yet when you try to recreate the circumstances, the weird events fail to pass. We've all seen stuff like this happen to people.
It's not an entirely 100% in-your-face example, but just test yourself. If you paused these clips halfway and had to predict what would happen, would you have been correct ?
First of all, you should read the old testament once.
As for your comparison to science ... do you mean as compared to "the law of the jungle" from Darwinism ? And let's not forget that economics and evolution both say the same : if you're running out of natural resources due to population issues, you should start breeding faster, and even do anything you can to bring the inevitable crash closer ("if you want to win the gene race"). It's a "tragedy of the commons" scenario : you're fucked whether or not you procreate, but you're much more fucked if you don't.
So how is science an improvement in this area ? Except, of course, in that people don't actually follow it's advice (and thank God, specifically Jesus, for that - literally - even if you're an atheist).