Why? The damages are greater to the copywrite holder.
Three years minimum in jail worse? The most popular and largest money making films have been leaked before the theatrical release. Are you really trying to tell me that it had any real effect on these films financially? If anything it probbably only increased the hype. Three years in jail minimum to me would be more akin to costing a film company millions of dollars.
Even that dumb kid who released a variant of the Blaster worm only got 18 months. Are you really saying that releasing a crappy quality rip of a movie before its released to theatres does more damage than a major internet worm?
No, no it could not. Conceptual is abstract, a car is not.
Actually a car is an abstract idea as well. It has physical presence, but the idea of "carness" is an abstract creation of your mind.
A much bigger difference would be the context in which you use them.
Maybe, but that's really beside the point I was trying to make. People put "creation" into a positive sense whereas "destruction" is negative. My only point is that positive and negative are only value judgements placed upon the thing created or destroyed. If I attack and destroy Christianity, or Paganism, or whatever I only make a new place for something else to exist in its place.
Destruction and creation are one in the same. If I destroy a car by crushing it, haven't I created a lump of metal? The same can be said of conceptual destruction. The only difference is you value the old thing and don't value the new. That's the only difference between the two words, one of personal value.
I can understand the impulse to believe something without proof because it makes your life easier. I understand it, but I don't believe in it. Life after death, judgement of the wicked, etc, etc are all beliefs that make living life a lot easier to live. Though really I don't get the appeal of actual eternal life though. People would go all batty after the first few hundred years. I suppose many people just haven't thought it through far enough. It's a personal choice and should be respected.
Why should I believe someone elses beliefs carte-blanche? What if their beliefs in faith interfere with my own beliefs? This just strikes me as an easy way out to try to appease everyone. In other words "Why can't we all just get along?".
I hope one of the new gospels has something that will really get the Bible-thumpers in a rage.
Doubtfull. It's well known among biblical scholars that there are works in Christianity that have been rejected from 'the cannon" of works that is the bible. These books are refered to as Apocrypha Rejecting alternative texts as authoritative is old hat at far as Christianity is concerned.
Traffic lights, sidewalks, police, and fire are all examples of "public good". From Wikipedia:
In economics, a public good is a good hard to produce for private profit, because the market fails to account for its large beneficial externalities. By definition, public goods possess two properties:
* Non-rivalrous--its benefits fail to exhibit consumption scarcity; once it has been produced, everyone can benefit from it without diminishing other's enjoyment.
* Non-excludable--once it has been created, it is very difficult to impossible to prevent access to the good.
The real takehome is the part about because the market fails to account for its large beneficial externalities
Essentially that means that the company, or individual doesn't get a direct benefit from it, but there's a large public good that comes from it.
The Verizon CEOs argument is stupid of course. Any public good needs to be built, maintained etc. The real question here is is Wi-Fi a public good? It's certainly easy to argue that internet access in a library is a wonderfull public good. We need an educated populace to be an effective society, and increasingly people have a need to access the internet for a huge variety of services. Providing that at public libraries is both cheap, and easy to maintain. It also provides interernet access to those that couldn't normally afford it. This is much like a public library providing access to books to people who can't afford to just buy books.
Does the same argument apply to Wi-Fi? Maybe.. I find it harder to accept than say traffic lights or police though. I do think it makes a lot of sense in say a downtown area to encourage economic development, etc.
Everyone can be a real idiot sometimes. See the key word? Perens didn't call him an idiot, he just said he can be an idiot sometimes. That's a lot different from just calling someone an idiot.
However I do have a goodly bit of management experience and this kind of talk is bad no matter how you slice it.
Bruce Perens doesn't work with Linus, and Linus doesn't work with Perens. This isn't a "make everyone feel nice-nice" situation. Anyway, if Linus has such a thin skin he can't stand someone saying he can be a real idiot.. well, that's Linus's problem. Saying these kinds of things to the press can only hurt the whole OSS movement as it give all the MS, Sun, et all shills plenty of ammo to use. I can see press release from MS now, "And even Linus' colleagues wonder about his decision making process, going so far as to call them idiotic."
Any statement taken out of context can be used against you. In the real world people disagree on things, and that's OK. Pretending otherwise is just lame. Real people with real opinions say things like "that guy can be a real idiot sometimes" and everyone accepts that statement at face value. If you start playing that game of "never say anything bad", you just wind up sounding like a dickless politician. The public at large is pretty stupid, but dickless politicians can be identified by anyone from a few light years away.
I run Tao Linux on my laptop, which is just another RedHat Enterprise clone like CentOS is. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "geared toward servers" though. Previously I had Fedora 2 on the box, and I see little difference between the two installs beyond age of the underlying apps.
To answer your question though, they probbably want a stable, low cost distribution that's going to be supported several years per release. That's Centos. What they don't want is a cutting edge distribution that's going to be supported for 6-12 months, and then out the door. Ubunutu is another possibility, but it's still catching on, so it's not a particularly conservative choice at this point.
So Tridge is guilty of some unwritten agreement of not playing fair? Even if I agreed with that, since when is reverse engineering not playing fair?
This reminds me of the author of E-Donkey 2000 whining about how his poorly supported (but very useable) P2P program was reverse engineered and e-mule was created. Emule took over the market within a few months because e-donkey had so many problems.
Time and time again people are taught that they can't just rest on their laurels with a good idea. The competition will outtake you in a heartbeat if you let up. I don't know exactly what's happening with this bit-keeper program, but the author whining about someone figuring out his "secrets" is just plain lame. If that's what your edge is, you're doomed to failure. Do you think Coca-Cola has a huge advantage in the soft drink market because no one can replicate the secret Coke formula?
This is perhaps the first time I've strongly disagreed with Linus, but I think he's completely wrong here. How do you think we got Samba? All of Samba was reverse engineered, and Linux has gained a huge amount of functionality from that.
There's nothing dishonest about looking at how someone else did something and using their ideas. If Larry Mcvoy has a problem with that, he can take the low road and apply for software patents.
I think what I dread the most is some alien discovering this world a thousand years from now, a corpse planet, a slow hour long series of flashbacks and a slow fadeout to, "they were destroyed by their own hubris!"
Now you've gone a bit to far. The 1957 virus strain didn't destroy mankind in 1957, and it's not going to in 2005 either. It's terribly dangerous of course, but no virus is going to destroy humanity. The viruses have been trying to kill us for millions of years. We've been able to survive all this time despite them.
No, joesgarage.ict.ks.us is just too hard to remember. I doubt many people care much about what the actual name is, but they do have to remember the name at least once for it to be at all usefull.
Granted, the Shuttles goes into a much higher orbit,
If by that you mean AN orbit. Spaceship one is a dinky little 3 man craft that didn't achieve orbit in the slightest. The space shuttle on the other hand is a giant bus that can haul tons of payload into orbit. It's like the difference between a bicycle and a Mack Truck.
it, like every bureaucracy, has become an entrenched special interest, more concerned with preserving its budget than in actually moving the cause of space flight forward.
Nasa has quite a small budget, and more than just a mission of space flight. The main mission Nasa is pursuing is one of science. The secondary (and FAR more costly one) is manned flight. Nasa simply doesn't have the budget to develop next-gen spaceflight (Rutan is pursuing yesterdays spaceflight at cheap prices, a VERY different goal). No politician in there right mind wants to give Nasa the huge amounts of money it'd take to develop these new technologies. The shuttle monopoly has strangled the development of alternative launch vehicles,
The shuttle has done about nothing either way to the development of alternative launch vehicles. Satelite launch technology has been steadily developed. If you're talking about manned missions, lack of public interest in the whole endeavor is what killed that. Public interest == money. No bucks, no Buck Rogers. A lot of people had predicted we'd not only have launched a manned mission to Mars by now, but set up a colony.
A lot of people are idiots and don't realize how much more difficult Mars is compared to the moon. Until there's a serious shakeup among the upper echelons of NASA bureaucrats, expect for the U.S. manned space program to creep along rather than soaring.
No, until the majority of the public gets motivated to dedicate massive funding to Nasa the manned US space program will creep along. During the 50s and 60s the US was motivated by the Cold War. We reached the moon, and defeated the "bad guys". After that everything was just anti-climactic. Now that we've been to the moon and the Cold War is over, what's motivating the public?
The article is extremely misleading. The swift probe mentioned in the article has nothing to do with protecting anyone, and is unrelated (except tangentially) with this extinction theory. The probes purpose is all about astronomy and being able to understand these gamma ray bursts better by detecting them faster and more often (and thus getting more data on them). That leads to better understanding of stellar physics, and the universe at large.
You're correct that the extinction theory is just pure speculation though. The article is essentially saying "the laws of physics and our understanding of the frequency of these events say it could have happened sometime in the past"
I think the various football game placard pranks would qualify. I also think MITs prank of hiding the new presidents office would qualify. The "One Ring" around the great dome at MIT was pretty creative. Really there's a lot of very creative, interesting, etc pranks that've been done by many different schools and people (and I'm sure I'm missing some major ones). Unfortunately these CalTech guys don't even approach anything resembling a good prank.
These pranks only seem to indicate that CalTech students have a massive inferiority complex? These pranks are lame. How hard, interesting, creative, or amazing is it to release balloons with C.I.T on them or print T-shirts? Flying thousands of miles just to do that only shows you have too much money and not enough creativity.
Sorry CIT, but you only seemed to have proven to the rest of the world how lame you are (and I didn't even go to either of these schools).
No, the only way to get rid of paper dollar bills is to just get rid of the paper dollar bills and replace them with coins. I was in Canada a couple weeks ago and didn't see one single dollar bill, all one and two dollar coins. I can only assume Canada stopped printing the one dollar and two dollar bills several years ago.
I'm still not sure if I liked them or not, mostly because of the change you wind up carrying around.
has gone right into the shitter, at least at the University of Missouri. This program was actually approved for school wide use? What the hell is wrong with the University of Missouri? I find the whole thing just reprehensible. I guess at least Ed Brent has finally defined exactly the qualities of a "good paper".
I'd be interested to put the Gettysburg address, MLKs "I Have A Dream" speech, major works of literature, etc through Mr. Brents meat grinder and see what grade they get. The whole thing reminds me of that scene in Dead Poets Society where they try to measure the "greatness" of a poem using trumped up terms like "importance" and "perfection". Sprinkle in a little computer wizardry, and suddenly you've got a mysterious, unbending, rule machine.
Frankly this kind of thing just disgusts me. I'm no romantic, but you can't analyse how good a paper is based on some algorithm. It's like the idiots who try to analyse a songs potential through computer analysis.
Flourescents use a large amount of energy when initially starting up.
That's all a bunch of hogwash. Florescent lights take more energy to turn on for maybe half a second or two. So if you're going to turn off the lights for a minute or two, you'd save energy keeping them on. Beyong that, turn them off.
Additionally, those lights are helping to heat the building at night and keep the heating system from coming on (even the little bit of flourescent helps)
They do, but the heating system is actually engineered to produce heat, not light. Obviously that makes it a lot more efficient. Electric heat is by far more expensive than gas heat (which is what most heating systems use). It's also a lot more efficient in energy usage to go from gas-> heat than from (coal,gas, etc) -> heat -> electricty -> power_lines-> office -> heat.
Another thing on the lights is that it is cheaper (in many places) to leave them on, than to pay someone to go around and turn them all on and off in the evening/morning.
Telling your employees to turn off the lights at night is mighty inexpensive. From what I understand most people have mastered the high-tech lightswitch. It also (slightly, but signifcantly enough) degrades their lifespan causing them to need to be replaced sooner.
This is far less than the lifespan lost by keeping the lights on.
Only if said secrets belong to a big company with money to sue you and meet the definition of "trade secrets". I'd bet even trade secrets aren't protected if revealing them is in the public interest. Look at the whisteblowers in the tobacco companies who revealed all the "trade secrets" research the tobacco companies did on addiction for instance.
You're not free to repeat somebody else's words without permission.
Copyright? I'm not sure what you're getting at, but repeating someones words is largely a guaranteed right. Repeating an entire chapter of a book, speech, etc likely isn't covered under fair use. Maybe this is what you're taling about, but it sure sounds like you're going way beyond copyright issues. You're not free to lie
In most cases you are free to lie. Unless you're under oath, or for slander/libel. Those are the exceptions, and not the rule. If lying were illegal our entire House, Senate, and executive branch would be in jail for the next thousand years.
lying to deprive somebody of money or value is fraud
But that's not just speech, that's fraud. Fraud involves intent, not just speech. I'd guess fraud also involves an overt act like taking someones money under false pretenses. Speech is obviously involved in fraud, but deceptive speech isn't the primary reason that fraud is illegal.
I've never hit a computer, but I have slammed a HD that didn't spin up against a hard surface, and it worked fine after that (obviously the HD wasn't powered on at the time). I suspect the heads were sticking to the platters.
Old televisions are famous for working after being hit a few times, so there's definite precedence for the "wack it a few times" approach to fixing electronics.
Behind? It doesn't do anything! There hasn't been a single useful scientific thing produced with the billions that have been pumped into that flying white elephant.
Very true, but to be fair it hasn't done anything because it isn't completed. They don't have enough room for crew to both take care of maintenance, and do any experiments.
I'm still not certain there will be any science that'll ever come out of it. But I'd love someone to show me otherwise.
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Why? The damages are greater to the copywrite holder.
Three years minimum in jail worse? The most popular and largest money making films have been leaked before the theatrical release. Are you really trying to tell me that it had any real effect on these films financially? If anything it probbably only increased the hype. Three years in jail minimum to me would be more akin to costing a film company millions of dollars.
Even that dumb kid who released a variant of the Blaster worm only got 18 months. Are you really saying that releasing a crappy quality rip of a movie before its released to theatres does more damage than a major internet worm?
It's still an abstract creation of your mind no matter if its an instance or not. A car is a concept, as all words are.
No, no it could not. Conceptual is abstract, a car is not.
Actually a car is an abstract idea as well. It has physical presence, but the idea of "carness" is an abstract creation of your mind.
A much bigger difference would be the context in which you use them.
Maybe, but that's really beside the point I was trying to make. People put "creation" into a positive sense whereas "destruction" is negative. My only point is that positive and negative are only value judgements placed upon the thing created or destroyed. If I attack and destroy Christianity, or Paganism, or whatever I only make a new place for something else to exist in its place.
Someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
Destruction and creation are one in the same. If I destroy a car by crushing it, haven't I created a lump of metal? The same can be said of conceptual destruction. The only difference is you value the old thing and don't value the new. That's the only difference between the two words, one of personal value.
Those that lack it, can never understand it.
I can understand the impulse to believe something without proof because it makes your life easier. I understand it, but I don't believe in it. Life after death, judgement of the wicked, etc, etc are all beliefs that make living life a lot easier to live. Though really I don't get the appeal of actual eternal life though. People would go all batty after the first few hundred years. I suppose many people just haven't thought it through far enough.
It's a personal choice and should be respected.
Why should I believe someone elses beliefs carte-blanche? What if their beliefs in faith interfere with my own beliefs? This just strikes me as an easy way out to try to appease everyone. In other words "Why can't we all just get along?".
I hope one of the new gospels has something that will really get the Bible-thumpers in a rage.
Doubtfull. It's well known among biblical scholars that there are works in Christianity that have been rejected from 'the cannon" of works that is the bible. These books are refered to as Apocrypha Rejecting alternative texts as authoritative is old hat at far as Christianity is concerned.
The real takehome is the part about because the market fails to account for its large beneficial externalities
Essentially that means that the company, or individual doesn't get a direct benefit from it, but there's a large public good that comes from it.
The Verizon CEOs argument is stupid of course. Any public good needs to be built, maintained etc. The real question here is is Wi-Fi a public good? It's certainly easy to argue that internet access in a library is a wonderfull public good. We need an educated populace to be an effective society, and increasingly people have a need to access the internet for a huge variety of services. Providing that at public libraries is both cheap, and easy to maintain. It also provides interernet access to those that couldn't normally afford it. This is much like a public library providing access to books to people who can't afford to just buy books.
Does the same argument apply to Wi-Fi? Maybe.. I find it harder to accept than say traffic lights or police though. I do think it makes a lot of sense in say a downtown area to encourage economic development, etc.
Everyone can be a real idiot sometimes . See the key word? Perens didn't call him an idiot, he just said he can be an idiot sometimes. That's a lot different from just calling someone an idiot.
However I do have a goodly bit of management experience and this kind of talk is bad no matter how you slice it.
Bruce Perens doesn't work with Linus, and Linus doesn't work with Perens. This isn't a "make everyone feel nice-nice" situation. Anyway, if Linus has such a thin skin he can't stand someone saying he can be a real idiot.. well, that's Linus's problem.
Saying these kinds of things to the press can only hurt the whole OSS movement as it give all the MS, Sun, et all shills plenty of ammo to use. I can see press release from MS now, "And even Linus' colleagues wonder about his decision making process, going so far as to call them idiotic."
Any statement taken out of context can be used against you. In the real world people disagree on things, and that's OK. Pretending otherwise is just lame. Real people with real opinions say things like "that guy can be a real idiot sometimes" and everyone accepts that statement at face value. If you start playing that game of "never say anything bad", you just wind up sounding like a dickless politician. The public at large is pretty stupid, but dickless politicians can be identified by anyone from a few light years away.
I run Tao Linux on my laptop, which is just another RedHat Enterprise clone like CentOS is. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "geared toward servers" though. Previously I had Fedora 2 on the box, and I see little difference between the two installs beyond age of the underlying apps.
To answer your question though, they probbably want a stable, low cost distribution that's going to be supported several years per release. That's Centos. What they don't want is a cutting edge distribution that's going to be supported for 6-12 months, and then out the door. Ubunutu is another possibility, but it's still catching on, so it's not a particularly conservative choice at this point.
So Tridge is guilty of some unwritten agreement of not playing fair? Even if I agreed with that, since when is reverse engineering not playing fair?
This reminds me of the author of E-Donkey 2000 whining about how his poorly supported (but very useable) P2P program was reverse engineered and e-mule was created. Emule took over the market within a few months because e-donkey had so many problems.
Time and time again people are taught that they can't just rest on their laurels with a good idea. The competition will outtake you in a heartbeat if you let up. I don't know exactly what's happening with this bit-keeper program, but the author whining about someone figuring out his "secrets" is just plain lame. If that's what your edge is, you're doomed to failure. Do you think Coca-Cola has a huge advantage in the soft drink market because no one can replicate the secret Coke formula?
This is perhaps the first time I've strongly disagreed with Linus, but I think he's completely wrong here. How do you think we got Samba? All of Samba was reverse engineered, and Linux has gained a huge amount of functionality from that.
There's nothing dishonest about looking at how someone else did something and using their ideas. If Larry Mcvoy has a problem with that, he can take the low road and apply for software patents.
I think what I dread the most is some alien discovering this world a thousand years from now, a corpse planet, a slow hour long series of flashbacks and a slow fadeout to, "they were destroyed by their own hubris!"
Now you've gone a bit to far. The 1957 virus strain didn't destroy mankind in 1957, and it's not going to in 2005 either. It's terribly dangerous of course, but no virus is going to destroy humanity. The viruses have been trying to kill us for millions of years. We've been able to survive all this time despite them.
No, joesgarage.ict.ks.us is just too hard to remember. I doubt many people care much about what the actual name is, but they do have to remember the name at least once for it to be at all usefull.
Granted, the Shuttles goes into a much higher orbit,
If by that you mean AN orbit. Spaceship one is a dinky little 3 man craft that didn't achieve orbit in the slightest. The space shuttle on the other hand is a giant bus that can haul tons of payload into orbit. It's like the difference between a bicycle and a Mack Truck.
it, like every bureaucracy, has become an entrenched special interest, more concerned with preserving its budget than in actually moving the cause of space flight forward.
Nasa has quite a small budget, and more than just a mission of space flight. The main mission Nasa is pursuing is one of science. The secondary (and FAR more costly one) is manned flight. Nasa simply doesn't have the budget to develop next-gen spaceflight (Rutan is pursuing yesterdays spaceflight at cheap prices, a VERY different goal). No politician in there right mind wants to give Nasa the huge amounts of money it'd take to develop these new technologies.
The shuttle monopoly has strangled the development of alternative launch vehicles,
The shuttle has done about nothing either way to the development of alternative launch vehicles. Satelite launch technology has been steadily developed. If you're talking about manned missions, lack of public interest in the whole endeavor is what killed that. Public interest == money. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
A lot of people had predicted we'd not only have launched a manned mission to Mars by now, but set up a colony.
A lot of people are idiots and don't realize how much more difficult Mars is compared to the moon.
Until there's a serious shakeup among the upper echelons of NASA bureaucrats, expect for the U.S. manned space program to creep along rather than soaring.
No, until the majority of the public gets motivated to dedicate massive funding to Nasa the manned US space program will creep along. During the 50s and 60s the US was motivated by the Cold War. We reached the moon, and defeated the "bad guys". After that everything was just anti-climactic. Now that we've been to the moon and the Cold War is over, what's motivating the public?
The article is extremely misleading. The swift probe mentioned in the article has nothing to do with protecting anyone, and is unrelated (except tangentially) with this extinction theory. The probes purpose is all about astronomy and being able to understand these gamma ray bursts better by detecting them faster and more often (and thus getting more data on them). That leads to better understanding of stellar physics, and the universe at large.
You're correct that the extinction theory is just pure speculation though. The article is essentially saying "the laws of physics and our understanding of the frequency of these events say it could have happened sometime in the past"
I think the various football game placard pranks would qualify. I also think MITs prank of hiding the new presidents office would qualify. The "One Ring" around the great dome at MIT was pretty creative. Really there's a lot of very creative, interesting, etc pranks that've been done by many different schools and people (and I'm sure I'm missing some major ones). Unfortunately these CalTech guys don't even approach anything resembling a good prank.
These pranks only seem to indicate that CalTech students have a massive inferiority complex? These pranks are lame. How hard, interesting, creative, or amazing is it to release balloons with C.I.T on them or print T-shirts? Flying thousands of miles just to do that only shows you have too much money and not enough creativity.
Sorry CIT, but you only seemed to have proven to the rest of the world how lame you are (and I didn't even go to either of these schools).
No, the only way to get rid of paper dollar bills is to just get rid of the paper dollar bills and replace them with coins. I was in Canada a couple weeks ago and didn't see one single dollar bill, all one and two dollar coins. I can only assume Canada stopped printing the one dollar and two dollar bills several years ago.
I'm still not sure if I liked them or not, mostly because of the change you wind up carrying around.
has gone right into the shitter, at least at the University of Missouri. This program was actually approved for school wide use? What the hell is wrong with the University of Missouri? I find the whole thing just reprehensible. I guess at least Ed Brent has finally defined exactly the qualities of a "good paper".
I'd be interested to put the Gettysburg address, MLKs "I Have A Dream" speech, major works of literature, etc through Mr. Brents meat grinder and see what grade they get. The whole thing reminds me of that scene in Dead Poets Society where they try to measure the "greatness" of a poem using trumped up terms like "importance" and "perfection". Sprinkle in a little computer wizardry, and suddenly you've got a mysterious, unbending, rule machine.
Frankly this kind of thing just disgusts me. I'm no romantic, but you can't analyse how good a paper is based on some algorithm. It's like the idiots who try to analyse a songs potential through computer analysis.
Flourescents use a large amount of energy when initially starting up.
That's all a bunch of hogwash. Florescent lights take more energy to turn on for maybe half a second or two. So if you're going to turn off the lights for a minute or two, you'd save energy keeping them on. Beyong that, turn them off.
Additionally, those lights are helping to heat the building at night and keep the heating system from coming on (even the little bit of flourescent helps)
They do, but the heating system is actually engineered to produce heat, not light. Obviously that makes it a lot more efficient. Electric heat is by far more expensive than gas heat (which is what most heating systems use). It's also a lot more efficient in energy usage to go from gas-> heat than from (coal,gas, etc) -> heat -> electricty -> power_lines-> office -> heat.
Another thing on the lights is that it is cheaper (in many places) to leave them on, than to pay someone to go around and turn them all on and off in the evening/morning.
Telling your employees to turn off the lights at night is mighty inexpensive. From what I understand most people have mastered the high-tech lightswitch.
It also (slightly, but signifcantly enough) degrades their lifespan causing them to need to be replaced sooner.
This is far less than the lifespan lost by keeping the lights on.
You're not free to tell somebody else's secrets.
Only if said secrets belong to a big company with money to sue you and meet the definition of "trade secrets". I'd bet even trade secrets aren't protected if revealing them is in the public interest. Look at the whisteblowers in the tobacco companies who revealed all the "trade secrets" research the tobacco companies did on addiction for instance.
You're not free to repeat somebody else's words without permission.
Copyright? I'm not sure what you're getting at, but repeating someones words is largely a guaranteed right. Repeating an entire chapter of a book, speech, etc likely isn't covered under fair use. Maybe this is what you're taling about, but it sure sounds like you're going way beyond copyright issues.
You're not free to lie
In most cases you are free to lie. Unless you're under oath, or for slander/libel. Those are the exceptions, and not the rule. If lying were illegal our entire House, Senate, and executive branch would be in jail for the next thousand years.
lying to deprive somebody of money or value is fraud
But that's not just speech, that's fraud. Fraud involves intent, not just speech. I'd guess fraud also involves an overt act like taking someones money under false pretenses. Speech is obviously involved in fraud, but deceptive speech isn't the primary reason that fraud is illegal.
I've never hit a computer, but I have slammed a HD that didn't spin up against a hard surface, and it worked fine after that (obviously the HD wasn't powered on at the time). I suspect the heads were sticking to the platters.
Old televisions are famous for working after being hit a few times, so there's definite precedence for the "wack it a few times" approach to fixing electronics.
Behind? It doesn't do anything! There hasn't been a single useful scientific thing produced with the billions that have been pumped into that flying white elephant.
Very true, but to be fair it hasn't done anything because it isn't completed. They don't have enough room for crew to both take care of maintenance, and do any experiments.
I'm still not certain there will be any science that'll ever come out of it. But I'd love someone to show me otherwise.