There is no world in which tax avoidance is ethical.
"Tax avoidance" is just a fancy name for not paying more in taxes than you're legally obligated to. Just how much extra did you choose to pay this year, above and beyond the amount the IRS claimed that you owed? If you chose to keep any part of your earnings above the poverty line (and even that's being rather generous) rather than donating the extra to the government then you're "guilty" of tax avoidance yourself.
This is the first time I've seen anything that was more than a proof of concept attack for Linux.
It isn't an attack for Linux, it's an attack for the OEM's web interface. The fact that the firmware is based on Linux is incidental. From the article:
The bug is the result of a file upload vulnerability in a Web administrator interface that allows at least one of the worm variants to replace the existing password file...
So if you wanted a copy of a book, so long as it wasn't YOU that photocopied it, but you just took a photocopy of the entire book from a pile (whether you pay or not complicates matters, let's assume not but with the permission of the person who photocopied), would you expect to not get into trouble?
One can "get in trouble" for just about anything, much of it perfectly legal, but what could they possible charge you with? You didn't do anything to violate anyone's copyright. The one in serious trouble would be whoever who made the copies.
(If you disagree, please point out the precise U.S. law which would be violated merely by possessing an unauthorized copy.)
Nobody is "taking" the book from someone who owns it, but they are making unauthorised copies of the works under copyright. That's the actual offence.
Exactly. Making the copies is the offense, not possessing them.
As such, downloading a file - WHETHER OR NOT YOU WERE THE SOURCE OF THAT FILE - that you know is a copy of copyright material that's been made without the permission of the copyright holder, is an offence.
This does not follow from your argument. The uploader made the copy. That is the part that requires permission. The downloader did nothing, in the act of downloading the file, which would violate anyone's copyright.
fake books, movies, music, etc.
There is no such thing, at least not in the sense you're using the term. A perfect copy of a digital work is no more "fake" than the original, whether or not the copy was authorized. A fake work of art is an item marketed as having been produced by a particular notable artist, when it was actually produced by someone else. There will be observable differences; it's not just a matter of who authorized the production of the copy.
For that matter, a work of art produced by anyone else would be just as fake if the nominal artist had authorized its production and sale under his or her own name. That is an offense which occurs with depressing regularity, and a far more serious crime than any amount of copyright infringement. The harm from this is trivial to demonstrate: would the buyer have been interested in this item if they had known that 90% of the content was contributed by a no-name subcontractor and the primary input of the well-known author was in allowing the use of their name on the cover? If the answer is no, then the price the buyer payed for the book is directly attributable to fraud.
As to whether a country with that well in hand... has any right to impose that upon another country... that's a very nasty can of worms. Best you can do without effectively inviting them to change your own rules and regulations is to restrict trade, tourism and immigration.
"Imposing" your own rules on another country (government) would be one thing, but the individuals living in that country have their own rights regardless of what their government thinks, and there is no moral dilemma when it comes to supporting others in their self-defense. You can easily do better than restricting trade and tourism, while preventing immigration away from oppressive regimes would be actively harmful. Instead, stand ready to protect those who choose to defend themselves, and offer safe passage and unrestricted immigration to an area outside the regime's influence for those willing to leave.
Seems like if you can get a site's certs, you can probably compromise the cert-obtaining automation as well, no?
In the most typical installations, probably, though there are ways to prevent that. The automation doesn't actually need to run on the same machine as the main site, much less under the same user account. The script just needs to be able to publish a file at a well-known HTTP URL on the target domain—the operator could easily arrange to have that request forwarded elsewhere, and pass the new certificates to the server through a dedicated channel. A reverse proxy could also be employed to keep the HTTPS certificates away from the server running the main site, which is the most likely target for attack.
In any case, even if one assumes that the server itself is compromised along with the certs, fixing that is just a matter of cleaning up or replacing the server, whereas the compromised certificates remain a threat until they eventually expire. Once the server is fixed the attacker won't be able to obtain any new certificates.
The threat model is an attacker with one-time access to the certificates and the ability to mount an active MitM attack, but not persistent control over the server; if the attacker controlled the server itself they wouldn't need to compromise the certificates.
Given the fact that certificate revocation lists have not proven particularly effective, the advantage of the short renewal period is that a compromised certificate can only be used for a few months at most before it expires naturally. This requires a bit more (automated) network activity, but reduces the exposure to attacks against the site's private keys.
Absent the government, if a product sold by Mr. Smith kills someone, I hope Mr. Smith has purchased some local warlord for protection against the angry family of the victim. In an orderly society with civil courts, Mr. Smith would need to defend himself in court.
You make it sound as if an orderly society with courts is not an option without government. History disagrees, as does the existence and widespread use of private arbitration. Even if the family were inclined to avenge what was most likely an accidental death, blood feuds are expensive and carry a high risk of social ostracism. Given a choice, in the absence of government, most such cases would still be settled civilly without resort to "warlords".
I agree that business liability is no different from personal liability, though. Reparations would be the same either way—and if there is any question of criminal intent, that is always a matter of personal responsibility. Only individuals can have intent, not groups.
(definitionally NOT innocent, as they were convicted)
Innocent means you didn't do it. This is a matter of objective fact.
Convicted means that a court has concluded "beyond reasonable doubt" that you did it, which is a matter of judgement.
These two labels are not contradictory. It is entirely possible to be both innocent and convicted, i.e. you didn't actually do it but a court wrongly concluded that you did.
We'll have single payer healthcare before we have "driverless cars", because the insurance industry lobby will prevent it. If everyone had a perfectly-run, accident free, computer controlled vehicle that obeys every law and will always avoid an accident, they'd have to lower rates. And you *know* they aren't going to do that.
That would apply equally well to self-driving cars with a hands-off designated "driver". The insurance industry may be able to hold up the legalization of truly driverless autonomous vehicles, but I doubt they have the necessary influence to significantly delay self-driving technology altogether. If automated vehicles really do reduce accident rates as much as some expect, insurance rates will be forced to drop long before the laws regarding human drivers are revised.
The leading cause of pollution is no longer the tailpipe if we've effectively controlled it.... I believe that in both cases there is no flaw with progress. We simply need to move on to the next problem and solve it, while taking care to make sure that old problems don't reoccur.
There is a difference between merely unmasking less immediate problems that were there all along and creating new ones. Yes, there will always be a leading source of pollution, but just the same let's try to ensure that the cure isn't worse than the disease. It's not enough that the problems are different. Replacing one known problem with an even worse one is not progress.
Governments can do things that individuals / companies can't do because its economically unattractive.
Such things are economically unattractive because they are wasteful. Governments can do such things, of course, relying on their powers of taxation and regulation to force the situation, but they shouldn't. Wasting resources like this imposes an external cost imposed on all of society.
Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law and that is right, but how can they expect you to obey they law if they won't tell you what it is?
The error here is in the premise. Ignorance is a perfectly good excuse when the law is secret, or else so complex that one one can reasonably be expected to be familiar with all the rules and regulations and legal precedents applicable to their actions or how they are likely to be interpreted. The concept that "ignorance is no excuse" dates back to a time when the entire law could be inscribed on a sign and posted in the village square. Even putting aside laws which are not freely available to the public (e.g. building codes) or outright secret, the wild proliferation of the legal system into a mass of overlapping and conflicting laws governing every aspect of modern life—more often than not accompanied by punishments far out of proportion to the supposed crimes—has rendered that argument obsolete. Ignorance can no longer be considered a matter of negligence.
It is most certainly at gunpoint; just try not paying and see. They start out with the "soft" approach—threatening letters, leaning on your employer and/or bank—but if they can't get what they want that way they will send out agents with guns to kidnap you and hold you against your will until you pay up, and they will shoot you in the end if you try to resist.
You get something for your money when you pay taxes. It's not like they're robbing you.
It's robbery when someone takes your property without authorization, regardless of whether they deign to give you something in return. Especially when that "something" isn't anything you wanted at any price, and in many cases is actively contrary to your own interests.
The difference between robbery and simple payment for goods or services is consent—an aspect which taxes conspicuously lack.
"the temperature in summer in these regions will increase more than twofold"
This literally means that if the temp averaged 90F it will then average 180F. That's a lot of climate change.
It's worse than that, because 0F is just an arbitrary point on the temperature scale. The only sensible way to interpret a doubling of temperature is relative to absolute zero, so this means that if the temperate averaged 90F (305 Kelvin) it will then average 638F (610 Kelvin).
That is, indeed, well outside the range of human habitability.
No one is claiming that authors should work for free. However, if they want guaranteed payment for their labor then they need to negotiate that payment before they do the work, like everyone else, rather than relying on an unnatural monopoly on an completely unrelated activity (copying and distribution of the work) after the fact.
In any case copyright does not guarantee that authors will be paid. It is not uncommon to put a great deal of effort into producing a new work only to find that the result is simply unpopular, even at unprofitably low prices (or even free), and consequently provides little in the way of royalties. As payment is never guaranteed it is disingenuous to complain that the expected revenues never materialized, regardless of whether the cause was unpopularity or copyright infringement.
In any case we currently have a glut of new media, with extremely low barriers to entry, as well as any number of mechanisms for collaboratively funding the production of larger works without reliance on artificial scarcity. Regardless of whether it might have been justifiable in the past, a broad and intrusive subsidy for the creation of new works is clearly no longer required. Copyright should be phased out, starting with a significant reduction in duration and exceptions for non-commercial copying.
I don't understand why people believe they are entitled to someone else's property....
That isn't what people (or at least these people) believe at all. They just believe that they are entitled to the use of their own property—DVDs, hard drives, books, etc.—regardless of the information it encodes, even if that information represents images or videos or audio or text or any other form of media.
It is the copyright holders who assert that they are entitled to control others' property for the sake of enforcing their unnatural monopoly on making copies.
And where do you think the corruption comes from? It takes 2 sides for bribery to happen: someone to give and someone to take the bribes.
The corruption lies in being willing to accept a bribe (or demanding one), regardless of whether an actual bribe is forthcoming. As such it is entirely possible for only one side to be corrupt.
It could also be argued that there are two very different kinds of bribery. A corrupt official may demand bribes as a condition of doing the right thing, or may accept bribes in exchange for acting contrary to their assigned role (e.g. ignoring a crime or helping someone to circumvent restrictions). The official is corrupt either way, but in the former case anyone paying the bribe would only be getting what they are legally entitled to receive, whereas in the latter case both parties contribute to breaking the rules. (This analysis, of course, glosses over a great deal of nuance; paying the bribe in the former case could be seen as contributing to a culture of bribery, while the rules being circumvented in the latter case could well be unjust. The issue is far from black and white.)
"A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fullness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural. There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death." —Adam Smith (emphasis added)
That isn't a statement against inheritance at time of death, which in any case is indistinguishable from a gift given by a living owner just prior to death. It's a statement against the dead having the ability to impose rules and restrictions on their (former) property which endure long after the original owner has died. The full rights to dispose of any property must always be distributed among its living owners.
The current system is a compromise—most jurisdictions allow property to remain subject to the original owner's influence for at most one generation after inheritance.
Here's a clue: The first amendment applies to americans living in America. Not american and not in America? Not covered.
Bzzzt, wrong! The 1st Amendment recognizes a natural, pre-existing right to freedom of speech (among other things) possessed by all human beings. It prohibits Congress from passing any law which would infringe on the freedom of speech—anyone's freedom of speech, not just the freedom of speech of Americans or of people living in America. Directing or authorizing (or funding) any branch of government to infringe on anyone's freedom of speech would constitute passing just such a law.
In short, because it means you're being paid retail for your electricity, rather than wholesale.
Individuals backfeeding electricity into the grid is a less predictable source of power, and one outside the utility company's control. It is consequently of less value than the electricity they get—at lower wholesale rates—from large-scale power plants. The value may even be negative at times, if the variability of these unmanaged, distributed power sources is sufficient to destabilize the grid or force the utility company to maintain more short-term, high-cost reserve power plants with variable generating capacity in place of stable base load generators.
Ultimately, the utility is being forced to pay you more than the market rate for your electricity, as evidenced by the fact that net metering is adopted at scale only when laws are passed making it mandatory. Utilities do not adopt net metering of their own accord. That is not because of some bizarre conspiracy, it's because the energy randomly pushed back into the grid at the discretion of an individual homeowner or business is not worth retail price to the utility company. The difference between the retail price you get with net metering and the wholesale price (or less) that the utility would be willing to pay voluntarily is a subsidy.
If evidence was obtained through illegal means, no crime was committed.
The illegal means is the crime. What is illegal for us commoners is just as illegal for a police officer acting without a warrant. That is the entire point of a warrant: authorization to perform otherwise-illegal actions with impunity.
The accused in this case has every moral right to counter-sue the FBI under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, just as if any random person off the street had done the same.
The above was a somewhat simplified explanation which glossed over the dual particle/wave nature of light (among other things). Here is a wiki article with some more detail using the wave interpretation of light in case you're interested: Refractive index: Microscopic explanation. The wave explanation makes it a bit clearer why the emitted photon generally proceeds in the same direction. (My non-expert take from a particle point of view is that the photon is re-emitted very quickly relative to how "energetic" the absorbing particle is, so the particle doesn't have time to change its momentum. A longer excited state (e.g. florescence or phosphorescence) would probably make for more randomly-oriented emissions, whereas low-energy forms of matter such as B.E.C.s can retain the original direction longer.)
I've wondered, how does the constantness of the speed of light work with the known differences between speed of light in different media (vacuum, water, air)?
The photons travel at the same speed regardless of the medium. However, whereas in a vacuum the photons would be traveling continuously from A to B by the shortest path, in water or air they're interacting with matter along the way. This means that the energy spends part of its time traveling at light speed in the form of photons and part of the time at rest as potential energy absorbed by the particles that make up the medium before being re-emitted as photons. Combining the time spent traveling and the time at rest yields the average speed of light in the medium. Mediums which interact less with light will have less of a slow-down compared to a vacuum (at a particular frequency).
The case with the Galaxy Nexus is a bit special, as they had planned to support it longer until Texas Instruments, the supplier of the OMAP 4460 SoC used in the Galaxy Nexus, suddenly decided to get out of the mobile and tablet business and also stopped providing updated (binary) drivers for their SoC. Without updated drivers Google is limited in what it can fix; in particular, the old drivers won't work with newer versions of the kernel.
Could Google have continued supporting the Galaxy Nexus anyway, backporting security fixes and other changes that didn't depend on an updated kernel? Sure. It would have been a lot of trouble which would have detracted from their other Android development efforts, however, so it's understandable that they chose to E.O.L. the Galaxy Nexus and focus on the rest of the Android ecosystem not based on obsoleted components. They also switched to a different SoC for the next Nexus device and updated their supplier policies to make this scenario less likely in the future.
(What they did not do, unfortunately, was take the more principled stand of only using components with properly upstreamed open-source device drivers, which would have eliminated dependence on the manufacturers and carriers for updates once and for all.)
Speaking as a Galaxy Nexus owner who was rather annoyed with the change at the time. I've since upgraded to a Nexus 5, but the older phone still works well enough several years after its official E.O.L. date (running the last CyanogenMod build for the Galaxy Nexus). It's a bit underpowered by modern standards, but I sometimes employ it for remote monitoring or other simple tasks when I don't want to tie up my main device.
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There is no world in which tax avoidance is ethical.
"Tax avoidance" is just a fancy name for not paying more in taxes than you're legally obligated to. Just how much extra did you choose to pay this year, above and beyond the amount the IRS claimed that you owed? If you chose to keep any part of your earnings above the poverty line (and even that's being rather generous) rather than donating the extra to the government then you're "guilty" of tax avoidance yourself.
This is the first time I've seen anything that was more than a proof of concept attack for Linux.
It isn't an attack for Linux, it's an attack for the OEM's web interface. The fact that the firmware is based on Linux is incidental. From the article:
The bug is the result of a file upload vulnerability in a Web administrator interface that allows at least one of the worm variants to replace the existing password file...
So if you wanted a copy of a book, so long as it wasn't YOU that photocopied it, but you just took a photocopy of the entire book from a pile (whether you pay or not complicates matters, let's assume not but with the permission of the person who photocopied), would you expect to not get into trouble?
One can "get in trouble" for just about anything, much of it perfectly legal, but what could they possible charge you with? You didn't do anything to violate anyone's copyright. The one in serious trouble would be whoever who made the copies.
(If you disagree, please point out the precise U.S. law which would be violated merely by possessing an unauthorized copy.)
Nobody is "taking" the book from someone who owns it, but they are making unauthorised copies of the works under copyright. That's the actual offence.
Exactly. Making the copies is the offense, not possessing them.
As such, downloading a file - WHETHER OR NOT YOU WERE THE SOURCE OF THAT FILE - that you know is a copy of copyright material that's been made without the permission of the copyright holder, is an offence.
This does not follow from your argument. The uploader made the copy. That is the part that requires permission. The downloader did nothing, in the act of downloading the file, which would violate anyone's copyright.
fake books, movies, music, etc.
There is no such thing, at least not in the sense you're using the term. A perfect copy of a digital work is no more "fake" than the original, whether or not the copy was authorized. A fake work of art is an item marketed as having been produced by a particular notable artist, when it was actually produced by someone else. There will be observable differences; it's not just a matter of who authorized the production of the copy.
For that matter, a work of art produced by anyone else would be just as fake if the nominal artist had authorized its production and sale under his or her own name. That is an offense which occurs with depressing regularity, and a far more serious crime than any amount of copyright infringement. The harm from this is trivial to demonstrate: would the buyer have been interested in this item if they had known that 90% of the content was contributed by a no-name subcontractor and the primary input of the well-known author was in allowing the use of their name on the cover? If the answer is no, then the price the buyer payed for the book is directly attributable to fraud.
As to whether a country with that well in hand ... has any right to impose that upon another country... that's a very nasty can of worms. Best you can do without effectively inviting them to change your own rules and regulations is to restrict trade, tourism and immigration.
"Imposing" your own rules on another country (government) would be one thing, but the individuals living in that country have their own rights regardless of what their government thinks, and there is no moral dilemma when it comes to supporting others in their self-defense. You can easily do better than restricting trade and tourism, while preventing immigration away from oppressive regimes would be actively harmful. Instead, stand ready to protect those who choose to defend themselves, and offer safe passage and unrestricted immigration to an area outside the regime's influence for those willing to leave.
Seems like if you can get a site's certs, you can probably compromise the cert-obtaining automation as well, no?
In the most typical installations, probably, though there are ways to prevent that. The automation doesn't actually need to run on the same machine as the main site, much less under the same user account. The script just needs to be able to publish a file at a well-known HTTP URL on the target domain—the operator could easily arrange to have that request forwarded elsewhere, and pass the new certificates to the server through a dedicated channel. A reverse proxy could also be employed to keep the HTTPS certificates away from the server running the main site, which is the most likely target for attack.
In any case, even if one assumes that the server itself is compromised along with the certs, fixing that is just a matter of cleaning up or replacing the server, whereas the compromised certificates remain a threat until they eventually expire. Once the server is fixed the attacker won't be able to obtain any new certificates.
The threat model is an attacker with one-time access to the certificates and the ability to mount an active MitM attack, but not persistent control over the server; if the attacker controlled the server itself they wouldn't need to compromise the certificates.
Given the fact that certificate revocation lists have not proven particularly effective, the advantage of the short renewal period is that a compromised certificate can only be used for a few months at most before it expires naturally. This requires a bit more (automated) network activity, but reduces the exposure to attacks against the site's private keys.
Absent the government, if a product sold by Mr. Smith kills someone, I hope Mr. Smith has purchased some local warlord for protection against the angry family of the victim. In an orderly society with civil courts, Mr. Smith would need to defend himself in court.
You make it sound as if an orderly society with courts is not an option without government. History disagrees, as does the existence and widespread use of private arbitration. Even if the family were inclined to avenge what was most likely an accidental death, blood feuds are expensive and carry a high risk of social ostracism. Given a choice, in the absence of government, most such cases would still be settled civilly without resort to "warlords".
I agree that business liability is no different from personal liability, though. Reparations would be the same either way—and if there is any question of criminal intent, that is always a matter of personal responsibility. Only individuals can have intent, not groups.
(definitionally NOT innocent, as they were convicted)
Innocent means you didn't do it. This is a matter of objective fact.
Convicted means that a court has concluded "beyond reasonable doubt" that you did it, which is a matter of judgement.
These two labels are not contradictory. It is entirely possible to be both innocent and convicted, i.e. you didn't actually do it but a court wrongly concluded that you did.
We'll have single payer healthcare before we have "driverless cars", because the insurance industry lobby will prevent it. If everyone had a perfectly-run, accident free, computer controlled vehicle that obeys every law and will always avoid an accident, they'd have to lower rates. And you *know* they aren't going to do that.
That would apply equally well to self-driving cars with a hands-off designated "driver". The insurance industry may be able to hold up the legalization of truly driverless autonomous vehicles, but I doubt they have the necessary influence to significantly delay self-driving technology altogether. If automated vehicles really do reduce accident rates as much as some expect, insurance rates will be forced to drop long before the laws regarding human drivers are revised.
The leading cause of pollution is no longer the tailpipe if we've effectively controlled it. ... I believe that in both cases there is no flaw with progress. We simply need to move on to the next problem and solve it, while taking care to make sure that old problems don't reoccur.
There is a difference between merely unmasking less immediate problems that were there all along and creating new ones. Yes, there will always be a leading source of pollution, but just the same let's try to ensure that the cure isn't worse than the disease. It's not enough that the problems are different. Replacing one known problem with an even worse one is not progress.
Governments can do things that individuals / companies can't do because its economically unattractive.
Such things are economically unattractive because they are wasteful. Governments can do such things, of course, relying on their powers of taxation and regulation to force the situation, but they shouldn't. Wasting resources like this imposes an external cost imposed on all of society.
Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law and that is right, but how can they expect you to obey they law if they won't tell you what it is?
The error here is in the premise. Ignorance is a perfectly good excuse when the law is secret, or else so complex that one one can reasonably be expected to be familiar with all the rules and regulations and legal precedents applicable to their actions or how they are likely to be interpreted. The concept that "ignorance is no excuse" dates back to a time when the entire law could be inscribed on a sign and posted in the village square. Even putting aside laws which are not freely available to the public (e.g. building codes) or outright secret, the wild proliferation of the legal system into a mass of overlapping and conflicting laws governing every aspect of modern life—more often than not accompanied by punishments far out of proportion to the supposed crimes—has rendered that argument obsolete. Ignorance can no longer be considered a matter of negligence.
Oh stop it, it's not at gunpoint.
It is most certainly at gunpoint; just try not paying and see. They start out with the "soft" approach—threatening letters, leaning on your employer and/or bank—but if they can't get what they want that way they will send out agents with guns to kidnap you and hold you against your will until you pay up, and they will shoot you in the end if you try to resist.
You get something for your money when you pay taxes. It's not like they're robbing you.
It's robbery when someone takes your property without authorization, regardless of whether they deign to give you something in return. Especially when that "something" isn't anything you wanted at any price, and in many cases is actively contrary to your own interests.
The difference between robbery and simple payment for goods or services is consent—an aspect which taxes conspicuously lack.
So is there a way to disable it?
Sure, just install Linux.
"the temperature in summer in these regions will increase more than twofold"
This literally means that if the temp averaged 90F it will then average 180F. That's a lot of climate change.
It's worse than that, because 0F is just an arbitrary point on the temperature scale. The only sensible way to interpret a doubling of temperature is relative to absolute zero, so this means that if the temperate averaged 90F (305 Kelvin) it will then average 638F (610 Kelvin).
That is, indeed, well outside the range of human habitability.
Right, so are you going to work for free then?
No one is claiming that authors should work for free. However, if they want guaranteed payment for their labor then they need to negotiate that payment before they do the work, like everyone else, rather than relying on an unnatural monopoly on an completely unrelated activity (copying and distribution of the work) after the fact.
In any case copyright does not guarantee that authors will be paid. It is not uncommon to put a great deal of effort into producing a new work only to find that the result is simply unpopular, even at unprofitably low prices (or even free), and consequently provides little in the way of royalties. As payment is never guaranteed it is disingenuous to complain that the expected revenues never materialized, regardless of whether the cause was unpopularity or copyright infringement.
In any case we currently have a glut of new media, with extremely low barriers to entry, as well as any number of mechanisms for collaboratively funding the production of larger works without reliance on artificial scarcity. Regardless of whether it might have been justifiable in the past, a broad and intrusive subsidy for the creation of new works is clearly no longer required. Copyright should be phased out, starting with a significant reduction in duration and exceptions for non-commercial copying.
I don't understand why people believe they are entitled to someone else's property....
That isn't what people (or at least these people) believe at all. They just believe that they are entitled to the use of their own property—DVDs, hard drives, books, etc.—regardless of the information it encodes, even if that information represents images or videos or audio or text or any other form of media.
It is the copyright holders who assert that they are entitled to control others' property for the sake of enforcing their unnatural monopoly on making copies.
And where do you think the corruption comes from? It takes 2 sides for bribery to happen: someone to give and someone to take the bribes.
The corruption lies in being willing to accept a bribe (or demanding one), regardless of whether an actual bribe is forthcoming. As such it is entirely possible for only one side to be corrupt.
It could also be argued that there are two very different kinds of bribery. A corrupt official may demand bribes as a condition of doing the right thing, or may accept bribes in exchange for acting contrary to their assigned role (e.g. ignoring a crime or helping someone to circumvent restrictions). The official is corrupt either way, but in the former case anyone paying the bribe would only be getting what they are legally entitled to receive, whereas in the latter case both parties contribute to breaking the rules. (This analysis, of course, glosses over a great deal of nuance; paying the bribe in the former case could be seen as contributing to a culture of bribery, while the rules being circumvented in the latter case could well be unjust. The issue is far from black and white.)
"A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fullness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural. There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death." —Adam Smith (emphasis added)
That isn't a statement against inheritance at time of death, which in any case is indistinguishable from a gift given by a living owner just prior to death. It's a statement against the dead having the ability to impose rules and restrictions on their (former) property which endure long after the original owner has died. The full rights to dispose of any property must always be distributed among its living owners.
The current system is a compromise—most jurisdictions allow property to remain subject to the original owner's influence for at most one generation after inheritance.
Here's a clue: The first amendment applies to americans living in America. Not american and not in America? Not covered.
Bzzzt, wrong! The 1st Amendment recognizes a natural, pre-existing right to freedom of speech (among other things) possessed by all human beings. It prohibits Congress from passing any law which would infringe on the freedom of speech—anyone's freedom of speech, not just the freedom of speech of Americans or of people living in America. Directing or authorizing (or funding) any branch of government to infringe on anyone's freedom of speech would constitute passing just such a law.
Why do you call net metering a subsidy?
In short, because it means you're being paid retail for your electricity, rather than wholesale.
Individuals backfeeding electricity into the grid is a less predictable source of power, and one outside the utility company's control. It is consequently of less value than the electricity they get—at lower wholesale rates—from large-scale power plants. The value may even be negative at times, if the variability of these unmanaged, distributed power sources is sufficient to destabilize the grid or force the utility company to maintain more short-term, high-cost reserve power plants with variable generating capacity in place of stable base load generators.
Ultimately, the utility is being forced to pay you more than the market rate for your electricity, as evidenced by the fact that net metering is adopted at scale only when laws are passed making it mandatory. Utilities do not adopt net metering of their own accord. That is not because of some bizarre conspiracy, it's because the energy randomly pushed back into the grid at the discretion of an individual homeowner or business is not worth retail price to the utility company. The difference between the retail price you get with net metering and the wholesale price (or less) that the utility would be willing to pay voluntarily is a subsidy.
If evidence was obtained through illegal means, no crime was committed.
The illegal means is the crime. What is illegal for us commoners is just as illegal for a police officer acting without a warrant. That is the entire point of a warrant: authorization to perform otherwise-illegal actions with impunity.
The accused in this case has every moral right to counter-sue the FBI under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, just as if any random person off the street had done the same.
The above was a somewhat simplified explanation which glossed over the dual particle/wave nature of light (among other things). Here is a wiki article with some more detail using the wave interpretation of light in case you're interested: Refractive index: Microscopic explanation. The wave explanation makes it a bit clearer why the emitted photon generally proceeds in the same direction. (My non-expert take from a particle point of view is that the photon is re-emitted very quickly relative to how "energetic" the absorbing particle is, so the particle doesn't have time to change its momentum. A longer excited state (e.g. florescence or phosphorescence) would probably make for more randomly-oriented emissions, whereas low-energy forms of matter such as B.E.C.s can retain the original direction longer.)
I've wondered, how does the constantness of the speed of light work with the known differences between speed of light in different media (vacuum, water, air)?
The photons travel at the same speed regardless of the medium. However, whereas in a vacuum the photons would be traveling continuously from A to B by the shortest path, in water or air they're interacting with matter along the way. This means that the energy spends part of its time traveling at light speed in the form of photons and part of the time at rest as potential energy absorbed by the particles that make up the medium before being re-emitted as photons. Combining the time spent traveling and the time at rest yields the average speed of light in the medium. Mediums which interact less with light will have less of a slow-down compared to a vacuum (at a particular frequency).
The case with the Galaxy Nexus is a bit special, as they had planned to support it longer until Texas Instruments, the supplier of the OMAP 4460 SoC used in the Galaxy Nexus, suddenly decided to get out of the mobile and tablet business and also stopped providing updated (binary) drivers for their SoC. Without updated drivers Google is limited in what it can fix; in particular, the old drivers won't work with newer versions of the kernel.
Could Google have continued supporting the Galaxy Nexus anyway, backporting security fixes and other changes that didn't depend on an updated kernel? Sure. It would have been a lot of trouble which would have detracted from their other Android development efforts, however, so it's understandable that they chose to E.O.L. the Galaxy Nexus and focus on the rest of the Android ecosystem not based on obsoleted components. They also switched to a different SoC for the next Nexus device and updated their supplier policies to make this scenario less likely in the future.
(What they did not do, unfortunately, was take the more principled stand of only using components with properly upstreamed open-source device drivers, which would have eliminated dependence on the manufacturers and carriers for updates once and for all.)
Speaking as a Galaxy Nexus owner who was rather annoyed with the change at the time. I've since upgraded to a Nexus 5, but the older phone still works well enough several years after its official E.O.L. date (running the last CyanogenMod build for the Galaxy Nexus). It's a bit underpowered by modern standards, but I sometimes employ it for remote monitoring or other simple tasks when I don't want to tie up my main device.