Prohibition ended because of plain old lawbreaking (resulting in some corpses and blind people to boot). Sometimes civil disobedience does not send the message clearly. The most effective message is direct action and if it takes money from RIAA members and indirectly their political pawns then it is more just than parades.
It also happens that some great metal bands come out of Finland. Case in point:
...And Oceans Amorphis Catamenia Children of Bodom Cryhavoc Enochian Crescent Eternal Tears of Sorrow Finntroll Impaled Nazarene Kalmah Norther Sentenced Stratovarius Terveet Kadet The Black League Throes of Dawn
But then again, all of these bands are great up to their third album or so. Finland has the highest suicide rate of young men in the world and therefore some of them might crank out some intensely nihilistic metal before they strap a bomb to their back and blow up innocent civilians at a shopping mall. Its always a good idea to find music from places that are condusive to your style.
Alien abduction stories are so bland that the only way that they can possibly excite me is if they actually showed an uncensored anal probing. I seriously think that alien abductions are at around the same stylistic level as any mediocre porn film and therefore they should be made into real porn so that they can actualize the full potential of these contrived mythos. It's sad how much the quality of a culture's mythology says about the culture.
I feel that it was alright for Gimli to be used as a tension breaker in this film since we spend the most time with him, Legolas, & Aragorn in the film.
We need comic relief in epic movies as much as we need Jar Jar Binks to show up in The Return Of The King. IMHO it is atrocious to have humor in any serious work of epic scope. I never felt that Gimli served that purpose in the novel and I certainly despise this act by Peter Jackson.
Most terrorists will use credit cards and checks without a second thought. Most necessary purchases for any terrorist can be placed without giving the slightest indication of terrorism such as gasoline, nails, backpacks, household ammonia, hexamine, car batteries, SUVs, glassware, growth media, gas masks, firecrackers, food, shelter, and prostitutes. Most of what would be tracked could be easily stolen from a low security University laboratory, libraries, by killing the owners of a gun shop (tricky), hospitals, stealing large trucks, or by killing Air Marshalls and taking their guns. Terrorists can easily build a scrapnel bomb or a culture of bacteria with less than a thousand dollars and perhaps a trip to the laboratory. The terrorists already have the policing under control, its you citizens who don't.
The distribution of Xboxes nets Microsoft a loss of money. If Microsoft requires only virgin systems to be used in their network then everyone who has a modded system who wishes to suscribe will have to buy another system. This will cause Microsoft to loose money as a result without any major effect to the consumers of dual systems since they already own a copy of all of their games (Microsoft's real source of money) and the purchase of a $200 dollar piece of hardware is a relatively sound investment. If Microsoft can be aware of losses in the tens of thousands of dollars then they will quickly reverse their stance on modding. Still, modding is a very good way of sticking it to them.
Monsanto has a known history of misplacing toxic waste. If someone firebombs the wrong facility, they could irreversible contaminate the environment for hundreds of thousands of people. It is a good idea to first know what you are firebombing before the actual commision of the act.
The bio-corn - which is grown to produce trypsin and another compound to treat diarrhea - has not been approved for human or livestock feed.
Trypsin is a primary digestive enzyme in stomachs. I wonder what could possible go wrong with ingesting more trypsin, even if it was from another species. This other compound used to treat diarrhea couldn't be that bad either. I don't see what the real problem here is besides the small potential that someone might be allergic to this protein. I know that the FDA has to be conservative but there is no real need for a scare.
I really don't trust corporations taking charge of a major Open Source project in any manner. Even if they stick to the GPL all the way I will still have doubts. First of all, AMD is another official supporter of DRM technology. I really don't trust the motives of companies' subvertion of Apache. If they continue to modify Open Source projects for the first real DRM equipt AMD, what prevents a major media corporation from funding an initiative to add DRM software to Apache and sell it to unsuspecting business customers? Why are they spending their time and resources to do something that Apache developers probably will get to in the near future? We should be more cynical with regards to corporate support of Open Source projects. In my opinion, critical Open Source projects should be managed and developed by an unbiased group of developers.
The SIIA certainly can do something about it. Remember the attempt to legalize hacking? Well, with the SIIA and their depraved tactics, I wouldn't be surprised if they sent Muslim terrorists after the PubScience.org staff and infrastructure, claim that PubScience.org is a terrorist organization by some strange logic of being associated with their own firey demise, and get military commandos to raid every free information source on the planet.
If you think that sounds far fetched, remember that the SIIA can wait, unlike us. Whereas we have to be lucky all the time, they only have to be lucky once, as in the case of shutting down PubScience.gov. We are fighting a losing battle and the public is unaware because each step the SIIA makes only makes the next step seem more normal. No one would have thought that the free dissemination of research articles would be actively banned in ten years ago. They are just trying to transform public opinion into thinking that what was once legal to be worse than murder. Since the age old crimes have been discussed to death, the oppression of freedom comes exclusively through crimes developed only in the last century.
Be afraid. The moral minority has enough control that within another century the landscape of human thought will be so different that it could be argued rather we will still have a human society.
[MIT: from the
Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] A design
or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until
someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way
notices that it never should have worked, at which point the
program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though
(like bit rot) this sounds impossible, it happens; some
programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs for years. Compare
heisenbug, Bohr bug, mandelbug.
Restricting tax funded public research to only overpriced private channels costs tax payers more money than running a damned web site. It only costs a few thousand dollars to set up a couple of ftp sites and dump research documentation (that are already digitized) onto them, which I would be perfectly happy with since people who find the research useful will handle the polishing. By denying access to free information, the SIIA members are engaging an illegal collusion with the government to swindle our tax money. The public research is meant to be public. When the government denied people open access to the research, they effectively burned millions of MY tax dollars.
The elimination of signal interference is a primary concern in quantum systems. I wonder if this polymer fiber can be used as a secure Heisenberg channel and if so at what speeds can we expect reliable operation?
It sucks how University libraries recieve Science(tm) two weeks late.
These SIIA people are worse than the MPAA and RIAA combined. They are actively stealing MY money that I have ALREADY paided by squelching free dissemination of information. They are doing this purely as a way to gain market share for their members.
This is worse than the entertainment lobbies because they are limiting the rights that I have already brought with my hard "earned" tax dollars whereas the MPAA and RIAA are only targeting potential costumers. The SIIA and its members should be the only ones who should be barred from access to free information, peroid. This is insane people! Its things like the SIIA who make me want to go postal sometimes.
The electron clouds give an "illusion" of large atoms when viewed with gamma or X-rays. These electron configurations are just as effective for providing radiation obstruction as any heavy element such as lead or bismuth. Illusions can beget real effects if used correctly.
The GPL is clearly a Leftist document. The whole premise of the GNU project is to overthrow our capitalist republic.
Notice how they claim that the evolution of software follows that of academia. They say that software will be free like scholarly information. This trend toward the academic culture will lead to the death of our nation. Academia leech enormous amounts of money from us taxpayers. The Leftists want to fund their software projects using Tax money. I would assure you that no resonable tax payer would agree to pay money to a project that undermines the capitalist ideals of profitable companies.
The GPL is a virus that must not enter into government. If it does the public mindset might change to accomedate the Liberal ideas incorporated in it. We must not allow communism to reemerge and therefore Liberal ideas must be purged from our government.
A small, reliable, battery is perfect for the construction of high explosive, remotely detonatible, grenades. A normal 9-volt battery is the smallest practical way of detonating the primer for a C4 charge. With a dense battery, one can pack the same effect into something smaller than a c.c. It would be excellent to have cheap compact C4 charges availible in packages of 20 for a fighting marine. Ten c.c.'s of C4 has the explosive potential of a normal grenade. If one can pack about 50 c.c.'s of C4 into a charge plus a radio reciever, which is not an impractical device considering the use of miniture batteries, then the prospect of blanketing a perimeter can become very feasible. I can't wait until these batteries are available.
My boss would not give us another computer for the light of day. It has always been nice to have a fast computer with a lot of memory working on the background as a computing workhorse. The workhorse at home serves mostly as a SETI@home client and file server but occasionally I use it to do mult-day computations of fractal and other mathematical images (and compressing movies to DivX;) . It is always nice to have an equivalent at work so that I can have a little more clock cycles to throw into the fire, doing two long term computations on the same machine is not worth it. It would always be nice to have a 100mbps connection to a machine right under my desk instead of a 1mbps connection to the machine at home.
Oh, for crying out loud, it was a joke! iainl was parodying what they thought Echostar was doing. iainl has a perfect right to do so, under the United States' First Amendment to the Constitution.
Even so, his post is an assult on this country. The First Amendment only forbids government from taking action against speech, not private entities. People like you who badmouth private enterprise can me sued or convicted (hopefully both) under certain statutes.
<I>So sorry, but we are a nation "of the people, by the people, for the people" according to Abraham Lincoln. The Declaration of Independence states that it is men that are created equal and given rights that can not be taken away, and lists among those "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." No mention of nations for the corporation, or any rights given to the corporations (a very recent concept).</I>
The Declarations of Lincoln and Jefferson are just that, declarations of their opinions. This nation is based on the conservative idea that those who earn money deserve more rights than those who do not. Until recently, only property owners were allowed to vote. Women were not allowed to own property because they are less capable of doing manual labor. The same holds true for children, who can not work and therefore deserve no rights whatsoever. This country is a practical one. Ideas that don't work are dismissed and their sympathisers can be called before a congressional hearing and charged with being unAmerican.
<I>Thankfully, that isn't the case. Sometimes lawsuits are the only way to reign in greedy sharks that are negligent enough to make defective products that kill people. Of course, if corporations were always responsible and fair, there would be no reason to sue them.<I>
The reversal of the tradition of requiring both parties to have comparable risk has led to many frivilous lawsuits. Every foreign country are laughing at us for not having a loser-pays system of civil law.
Private individuals can NEVER achieve enough wealth to compare to any corporation and therefore shound never be allowed to sue a corporation.
Corporate fairness can be punished by a harsher sentence, the loss of revenue. Do you think that an intelligent person would buy a defective product? Customer rights have dumbed down the populace. People should take responsibility for their own actions and knowledge. Ignorance is no excuse for extorting millions from hard working corporations.
<I>Only if you are a snooty patuty rich person.</I>
And also if I am a Freedom loving individual. Classes are supposed to let people know what their place in society is. The reason why we have so a lazy, incompetant, workforce is because they do not know their place. If they know that they can not hope to achieve any more than what they have then maybe they won't be so cocky and dismiss their jobs as being menial. The reason why we don't have world class (pun intended) academic achievement is because everyone is at garenteed food and shelter. If they are forced to work hard then maybe we won't have so many social problems.
<I>Yeah, well, a mass of corporations (and their greedy CEOs) should never wield the kind of power to deprive Joe Sixpacks of 7 trillion dollars of retirement money. But they did.</I>
And whose fault is it to put so much money into risky ventures. People should accept loss and not cry to the government for reparations. Only a fool would put their life's savings in one kind of investment.
<I>Please quote the section of the Constitution that says this</I>
And please quote where the Constitution prevents government agencies from contracting an assassination on your head? Just because something is not in the constition doesn't mean that it has no basis. It's funny how leftists like you would refer to the Constitution only when it suits you.
<I>There is no parity. Corporations still do not have all the rights of a citizen, and they never should. I am a citizen of the United States of America. News Corp. is not.</I>
The established norm is that corporations are more deserving of favoritism because they fund and sustain the nation, period. Civilians don't have the power and therefore should deserve less attention.
It's people like you who are destroying this country. You people feel entitled to everything that you can never achieve with your godforsaken attitudes. There were places in the world where people like you poisoned with your way of thinking. Your post isn't even funny. Joking about the confescation of property is an assult on the principles of this nation.
Major corporations made this country Great. Civilians should not have the same rights as corporations because they do not contribute as much to our nation. The only ones who should be allowed to sue (and reap irreperible damage to a corporation) are corporations who have as much at stake. Our Nation is founded upon the concept of a Constitutional Republic(tm). We have class separations that must be enforced. An average Joe Sixpack, or a mass of them, should never wield the kind of power deprive companies of millions.
On the other hand, News Corp. has every Right to hack their competition because they dominate the market. People recieve more rights as they ascend the ladder, and it should be that way or otherwise we would have a ruling mob. Those of you who believe in a parity between Corporate rights and civilian rights are socialists. The fact of the matter is that America is an aristocracy and that is what makes this nation Great.
Slashdot Mirror
Prohibition ended because of plain old lawbreaking (resulting in some corpses and blind people to boot). Sometimes civil disobedience does not send the message clearly. The most effective message is direct action and if it takes money from RIAA members and indirectly their political pawns then it is more just than parades.
Amorphis
Catamenia
Children of Bodom
Cryhavoc
Enochian Crescent
Eternal Tears of Sorrow
Finntroll
Impaled Nazarene
Kalmah
Norther
Sentenced
Stratovariu
Terveet Kadet
The Black League
Throes of Dawn
But then again, all of these bands are great up to their third album or so. Finland has the highest suicide rate of young men in the world and therefore some of them might crank out some intensely nihilistic metal before they strap a bomb to their back and blow up innocent civilians at a shopping mall. Its always a good idea to find music from places that are condusive to your style.
Alien abduction stories are so bland that the only way that they can possibly excite me is if they actually showed an uncensored anal probing. I seriously think that alien abductions are at around the same stylistic level as any mediocre porn film and therefore they should be made into real porn so that they can actualize the full potential of these contrived mythos. It's sad how much the quality of a culture's mythology says about the culture.
We need comic relief in epic movies as much as we need Jar Jar Binks to show up in The Return Of The King. IMHO it is atrocious to have humor in any serious work of epic scope. I never felt that Gimli served that purpose in the novel and I certainly despise this act by Peter Jackson.
#2: Believable science.
Greg Egan. At least he uses real scientific terms unlike some <COUGH>Gene Roddenberry</COUGH> writers.
Most terrorists will use credit cards and checks without a second thought. Most necessary purchases for any terrorist can be placed without giving the slightest indication of terrorism such as gasoline, nails, backpacks, household ammonia, hexamine, car batteries, SUVs, glassware, growth media, gas masks, firecrackers, food, shelter, and prostitutes. Most of what would be tracked could be easily stolen from a low security University laboratory, libraries, by killing the owners of a gun shop (tricky), hospitals, stealing large trucks, or by killing Air Marshalls and taking their guns. Terrorists can easily build a scrapnel bomb or a culture of bacteria with less than a thousand dollars and perhaps a trip to the laboratory. The terrorists already have the policing under control, its you citizens who don't.
Fox News can go to hell.
The distribution of Xboxes nets Microsoft a loss of money. If Microsoft requires only virgin systems to be used in their network then everyone who has a modded system who wishes to suscribe will have to buy another system. This will cause Microsoft to loose money as a result without any major effect to the consumers of dual systems since they already own a copy of all of their games (Microsoft's real source of money) and the purchase of a $200 dollar piece of hardware is a relatively sound investment. If Microsoft can be aware of losses in the tens of thousands of dollars then they will quickly reverse their stance on modding. Still, modding is a very good way of sticking it to them.
Monsanto has a known history of misplacing toxic waste. If someone firebombs the wrong facility, they could irreversible contaminate the environment for hundreds of thousands of people. It is a good idea to first know what you are firebombing before the actual commision of the act.
The bio-corn - which is grown to produce trypsin and another compound to treat diarrhea - has not been approved for human or livestock feed.
Trypsin is a primary digestive enzyme in stomachs. I wonder what could possible go wrong with ingesting more trypsin, even if it was from another species. This other compound used to treat diarrhea couldn't be that bad either. I don't see what the real problem here is besides the small potential that someone might be allergic to this protein. I know that the FDA has to be conservative but there is no real need for a scare.
Sorry for replying as an Anonymous Coward
I really don't trust corporations taking charge of a major Open Source project in any manner. Even if they stick to the GPL all the way I will still have doubts. First of all, AMD is another official supporter of DRM technology. I really don't trust the motives of companies' subvertion of Apache. If they continue to modify Open Source projects for the first real DRM equipt AMD, what prevents a major media corporation from funding an initiative to add DRM software to Apache and sell it to unsuspecting business customers? Why are they spending their time and resources to do something that Apache developers probably will get to in the near future? We should be more cynical with regards to corporate support of Open Source projects. In my opinion, critical Open Source projects should be managed and developed by an unbiased group of developers.
I'm glad that a Microsoft community has tanked. They deserve every failure they recieve.
The SIIA certainly can do something about it. Remember the attempt to legalize hacking? Well, with the SIIA and their depraved tactics, I wouldn't be surprised if they sent Muslim terrorists after the PubScience.org staff and infrastructure, claim that PubScience.org is a terrorist organization by some strange logic of being associated with their own firey demise, and get military commandos to raid every free information source on the planet.
If you think that sounds far fetched, remember that the SIIA can wait, unlike us. Whereas we have to be lucky all the time, they only have to be lucky once, as in the case of shutting down PubScience.gov. We are fighting a losing battle and the public is unaware because each step the SIIA makes only makes the next step seem more normal. No one would have thought that the free dissemination of research articles would be actively banned in ten years ago. They are just trying to transform public opinion into thinking that what was once legal to be worse than murder. Since the age old crimes have been discussed to death, the oppression of freedom comes exclusively through crimes developed only in the last century.
Be afraid. The moral minority has enough control that within another century the landscape of human thought will be so different that it could be argued rather we will still have a human society.
He may have been responsible for getting the Principle but we can never be certain how he got there.
schroedinbug /shroh'din-buhg/ n.
[MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though (like bit rot ) this sounds impossible, it happens; some programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs for years. Compare heisenbug , Bohr bug , mandelbug .
Leeched from the Jargon Files.
Restricting tax funded public research to only overpriced private channels costs tax payers more money than running a damned web site. It only costs a few thousand dollars to set up a couple of ftp sites and dump research documentation (that are already digitized) onto them, which I would be perfectly happy with since people who find the research useful will handle the polishing. By denying access to free information, the SIIA members are engaging an illegal collusion with the government to swindle our tax money. The public research is meant to be public. When the government denied people open access to the research, they effectively burned millions of MY tax dollars.
Sorry for replying as Anonymous Coward.
The elimination of signal interference is a primary concern in quantum systems. I wonder if this polymer fiber can be used as a secure Heisenberg channel and if so at what speeds can we expect reliable operation?
It sucks how University libraries recieve Science(tm) two weeks late.
Is a list of SIIA members. Its important that we know who we are dealing with.
These SIIA people are worse than the MPAA and RIAA combined. They are actively stealing MY money that I have ALREADY paided by squelching free dissemination of information. They are doing this purely as a way to gain market share for their members.
This is worse than the entertainment lobbies because they are limiting the rights that I have already brought with my hard "earned" tax dollars whereas the MPAA and RIAA are only targeting potential costumers. The SIIA and its members should be the only ones who should be barred from access to free information, peroid. This is insane people! Its things like the SIIA who make me want to go postal sometimes.
The electron clouds give an "illusion" of large atoms when viewed with gamma or X-rays. These electron configurations are just as effective for providing radiation obstruction as any heavy element such as lead or bismuth. Illusions can beget real effects if used correctly.
The GPL is clearly a Leftist document. The whole premise of the GNU project is to overthrow our capitalist republic.
Notice how they claim that the evolution of software follows that of academia. They say that software will be free like scholarly information. This trend toward the academic culture will lead to the death of our nation. Academia leech enormous amounts of money from us taxpayers. The Leftists want to fund their software projects using Tax money. I would assure you that no resonable tax payer would agree to pay money to a project that undermines the capitalist ideals of profitable companies.
The GPL is a virus that must not enter into government. If it does the public mindset might change to accomedate the Liberal ideas incorporated in it. We must not allow communism to reemerge and therefore Liberal ideas must be purged from our government.
A small, reliable, battery is perfect for the construction of high explosive, remotely detonatible, grenades. A normal 9-volt battery is the smallest practical way of detonating the primer for a C4 charge. With a dense battery, one can pack the same effect into something smaller than a c.c. It would be excellent to have cheap compact C4 charges availible in packages of 20 for a fighting marine. Ten c.c.'s of C4 has the explosive potential of a normal grenade. If one can pack about 50 c.c.'s of C4 into a charge plus a radio reciever, which is not an impractical device considering the use of miniture batteries, then the prospect of blanketing a perimeter can become very feasible. I can't wait until these batteries are available.
My boss would not give us another computer for the light of day. It has always been nice to have a fast computer with a lot of memory working on the background as a computing workhorse. The workhorse at home serves mostly as a SETI@home client and file server but occasionally I use it to do mult-day computations of fractal and other mathematical images (and compressing movies to DivX ;) . It is always nice to have an equivalent at work so that I can have a little more clock cycles to throw into the fire, doing two long term computations on the same machine is not worth it. It would always be nice to have a 100mbps connection to a machine right under my desk instead of a 1mbps connection to the machine at home.
Oh, for crying out loud, it was a joke! iainl was parodying what they thought Echostar was doing. iainl has a perfect right to do so, under the United States' First Amendment to the Constitution.
Even so, his post is an assult on this country. The First Amendment only forbids government from taking action against speech, not private entities. People like you who badmouth private enterprise can me sued or convicted (hopefully both) under certain statutes.
<I>So sorry, but we are a nation "of the people, by the people, for the people" according to Abraham Lincoln. The Declaration of Independence states that it is men that are created equal and given rights that can not be taken away, and lists among those "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." No mention of nations for the corporation, or any rights given to the corporations (a very recent concept).</I>
The Declarations of Lincoln and Jefferson are just that, declarations of their opinions. This nation is based on the conservative idea that those who earn money deserve more rights than those who do not. Until recently, only property owners were allowed to vote. Women were not allowed to own property because they are less capable of doing manual labor. The same holds true for children, who can not work and therefore deserve no rights whatsoever. This country is a practical one. Ideas that don't work are dismissed and their sympathisers can be called before a congressional hearing and charged with being unAmerican.
<I>Thankfully, that isn't the case. Sometimes lawsuits are the only way to reign in greedy sharks that are negligent enough to make defective products that kill people. Of course, if corporations were always responsible and fair, there would be no reason to sue them.<I>
The reversal of the tradition of requiring both parties to have comparable risk has led to many frivilous lawsuits. Every foreign country are laughing at us for not having a loser-pays system of civil law.
Private individuals can NEVER achieve enough wealth to compare to any corporation and therefore shound never be allowed to sue a corporation.
Corporate fairness can be punished by a harsher sentence, the loss of revenue. Do you think that an intelligent person would buy a defective product? Customer rights have dumbed down the populace. People should take responsibility for their own actions and knowledge. Ignorance is no excuse for extorting millions from hard working corporations.
<I>Only if you are a snooty patuty rich person.</I>
And also if I am a Freedom loving individual. Classes are supposed to let people know what their place in society is. The reason why we have so a lazy, incompetant, workforce is because they do not know their place. If they know that they can not hope to achieve any more than what they have then maybe they won't be so cocky and dismiss their jobs as being menial. The reason why we don't have world class (pun intended) academic achievement is because everyone is at garenteed food and shelter. If they are forced to work hard then maybe we won't have so many social problems.
<I>Yeah, well, a mass of corporations (and their greedy CEOs) should never wield the kind of power to deprive Joe Sixpacks of 7 trillion dollars of retirement money. But they did.</I>
And whose fault is it to put so much money into risky ventures. People should accept loss and not cry to the government for reparations. Only a fool would put their life's savings in one kind of investment.
<I>Please quote the section of the Constitution that says this</I>
And please quote where the Constitution prevents government agencies from contracting an assassination on your head? Just because something is not in the constition doesn't mean that it has no basis. It's funny how leftists like you would refer to the Constitution only when it suits you.
<I>There is no parity. Corporations still do not have all the rights of a citizen, and they never should. I am a citizen of the United States of America. News Corp. is not.</I>
The established norm is that corporations are more deserving of favoritism because they fund and sustain the nation, period. Civilians don't have the power and therefore should deserve less attention.
It's people like you who are destroying this country. You people feel entitled to everything that you can never achieve with your godforsaken attitudes. There were places in the world where people like you poisoned with your way of thinking. Your post isn't even funny. Joking about the confescation of property is an assult on the principles of this nation.
Major corporations made this country Great. Civilians should not have the same rights as corporations because they do not contribute as much to our nation. The only ones who should be allowed to sue (and reap irreperible damage to a corporation) are corporations who have as much at stake. Our Nation is founded upon the concept of a Constitutional Republic(tm). We have class separations that must be enforced. An average Joe Sixpack, or a mass of them, should never wield the kind of power deprive companies of millions.
On the other hand, News Corp. has every Right to hack their competition because they dominate the market. People recieve more rights as they ascend the ladder, and it should be that way or otherwise we would have a ruling mob. Those of you who believe in a parity between Corporate rights and civilian rights are socialists. The fact of the matter is that America is an aristocracy and that is what makes this nation Great.