"Legible" may be sufficient at Podunk University/College/Pub, but in the Ivy League, you better have everything perfectly pristine using ink made of virgin's blood on 30lb paper stock with a brightness rating of no less than 110.
Personally, my professors were fine with chicken scratch, and bonus points for chicken blood, too.
Note that "not resuscitate" and "not using medical devices" are already legal. So is "sufficient pain medication to keep pain at bay, even though it may end my life earlier than not using it." Meanwhile, things like "starving to death" (withholding food, water), which, I'm told, is much more tortuous, or KCl, are not legal, as they have no purpose other than causing death, and, in the case of food, is not considered "extraordinary" effort - because we all eat, every day (for most of us), that's quite ordinary. Most of the discussion about assisted suicide is already moot, because a) it's legal, and b) it's not suicide (refusing extraordinary care is already legal).
I would suggest that emphasising, and strengthening, normal palliative care, would take care of almost all "assisted suicide" requests. Education about what are already legal options would then neuter most of the assisted suicide arguments, especially the ones that seem to be most persuasive.
You have to prove residency. Some people, especially the homeless, don't. (Though even the homeless can - they have to simply jump through hoops not dissimilar to those proposed by your Republicans for voter identification - which also is not a problem in Canada, I don't understand what your Democrats have against it.)
I also have lifetime and yearly caps on my employer-provided insurance in some areas (orthodontics, off the top of my head, would be the first one).
And health issues is the third leading cause of bankruptcy even in Canada. Sorry to burst that bubble. As to the question of dying due to breast cancer, or, really, any cancer, because they can't afford insurance? I don't have anything directly relevant, but given that people do file bankruptcy over health issues, I'd say the answer is probably yes. In fact, since cancer treatments likely involve expensive drugs, and drugs aren't covered by provincial plans, but by your private insurance, I'd say that it's almost impossible for people not to be dying in Canada due to being unable to afford insurance. And "thinking you're insured" only to have the insurance company deny the claim is not unique to the US, either. It happens even here in Canada, for the same reason: it's profitable to let people die.
Seriously, Canada simply is not all sunshine and light, it's not a magical land of milk and honey. We don't have the magical answers. Our governments are struggling with huge healthcare costs that are spiralling out of control, and are looking to divest themselves from as much health care as possible while still claiming to have that mythical "universal health care" (which, as I stated earlier, we don't actually have).
It's universal only in that even if you had enough money to pay for your procedure and the next person's procedure, you still can't get the line moving any faster. The rich and the poor have the same waiting period for procedures that are covered by the province. Only procedures that are not covered (orthodontics, vision, dentistry) generally move quickly.
You're entertainingly deluded if you think Canada is a single-payer system.
We have a tiered healthcare system, it's just that most people don't seem to acknowledge it.
I have partial coverage from my province. I have partial coverage from my employer. And I cover the rest out of pocket.
My mother-in-law, having turned 65, but is still working, has even more payers: the province, her employer's health care coverage, the provincially-mandated health care coverage (different pocket, not sure if she pays for it or not), and then the rest out of pocket.
There are health-related items that are fully covered by provincial plans, some that are partially covered, and many that are not covered at all. For the last two categories, private health insurance can cover all, some, or none of the extra costs. If you have multiple health insurance providers (e.g., two different employers for a household, usually they cover the employee and their spouse and kids, so you have two insurances covering the household), there is some sort of duking it out for who covers what, but, in the end, you usually end up with the higher percentage of the choices being covered somehow. And then, whatever is left, is your responsibility.
I go to the doctor with a cold. The province pays the doctor for my visit. He wrongly prescribes me some antibiotics. I go to the pharmacy, get the pills. The province doesn't pay for any of that (though they play a role in regulating the drug costs). My employer's health insurance pays some of the drug cost (the percentage widely varies on which drug it is) and none of the pharmacy fees (other insurances do pay for pharmacy fees). I then pay the rest, never less than 10% due to the plan I have with work.
If I then spend more than a certain percentage of my pre-tax income on health expenses, I can submit them against my taxes for a further refund, though I've never hit that amount, personally. I'm sure lower incomes could easily hit that.
If I go to the optometrist's, the province pays nothing for my visit, but all of my children's visits as they're all under 18 years of age. I submit to my employer's health insurance for my visit and any and all prescription eye wear that results, including for my children.
If you cannot get health insurance from your employer, or you cannot afford to get insurance on your own (here in Alberta, there is a cheap provincial-run insurance available for purchase, not sure about other provinces, and no idea what kind of coverage it gets you), you get to pay full costs for chiropractic and vision care. Dental visits are also not covered, or any orthodontic care. If you're poor, you're going to be stuck with bad eyes and bad teeth. Even in Canada. Because you're in the bottom tier of health care. Which itself is because we have tiered healthcare.
Sure, emergency access is paid for. But same in the US - effectively. If you can't afford it in the US, the hospitals eventually absorb the cost, by law. In Canada, the government absorbs it. However, if you can't produce your healthcare card, you're still responsible to pay for it - tourists and out-of-province patients don't get free rides. (However, when I was in Toronto a couple months ago, had I required health care during that time, my home province would have covered the costs same as if I were at home. Which, again, means not everything is covered.)
More time spent paying attention even when you didn't think it was important may have paid off on spelling and grammar. "ideas", "were" limited, "fully involved mentally" (ok, that one is probably debatable), "The" 20"-"somethings", "bored"
That said, the road we've been going down for decades already, since even the 40-somethings were kids, is one of more and more stimulation, of lower and lower quality. A hundred years ago, kids likely had to invent their own games, or, if they had access, they could read. 40 years ago, it was TV. Today it's Facebook. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that we've been training ourselves to require constant stimulation, with no regard for how good it is. Or, rather, we've stopped learning how to just be quiet and focused on the here and now, no matter how "boring" it might be. It apparently is also a helpful skill for being respectful of those around you.
Keyboard/mouse are special. My keyboard and mouse are both USB and worked fine with the open-source version of VB. I went to the closed version to try to get a USB headset to work, as well as to try to connect to my kids' LeapFrog Tag pens. Didn't work, but haven't switched back as much out of laziness as anything else.
Yes. But you were the one to use the term "engineer" to refer to the guys who wrote the firmware for these routers. I was merely using it colloquially, in the same way you did.
I thought it was too strong of a word, but I decided that "engineer" was not the focus point of your original post. This one seems to have confirmed that.
Basically, the people who write this stuff wouldn't be what I'd normally call an engineer. But they do show why we need the Bobby Tables site (among others).
If, by answering questions about some other crime, I were to move from "known not to be an accomplice" to "known to be an accomplice", having been forced to answer those questions would fail the fifth amendment. By forcing Risen to answer these questions, we may find out he was actually a co-conspirator or an accomplice (or perhaps even the source of the leak itself). And thus forcing him to answer now has trampled his fifth amendment rights.
While it would be very dangerous, a very principled person (more principled than I) might think about using the opportunity to claim some illegal association with the crime, and then mounting a constitutional challenge over it.
As a Christian who is offended by the US Evangelical misuse of the term "Creationism" to mean something entirely silly, and tired of having to explain how it's only a small minority of Christians, with whom I do take an active role in attempting to re-educate every chance I get, and not Christianity in general that believes the earth is less than 10k years old...
At the office, I told one coworker to fuck off. Just once. In person. In front of the team (sans manager). He sulked off. When a round of layoffs hit and took him with it, he asked for me to be a reference.
Sometimes, just sometimes, that verbal slap in the face is exactly what is needed to wake someone up. And they may just respect you more afterwards than they did before.
Fingerprint with no name, address, phone number, etc., attached = no useful information to be gained via subpoena.
If I store the key blueprint against my fingerprint, all the subpoena will be able to determine is that this key will open something (presumably a house or vehicle) associated with that fingerprint. The only actually useful information here is likely to be proximity - most likely, this is the most conveniently available KeyMe kiosk for the person with that fingerprint.
That's an awfully big net to cast for a vanishingly small amount of information.
Unless you suppose that the police have a suspect's key and want to reverse lookup to get their fingerprints, and you think that some judge will sign off on that subpoena more easily than just taking the suspect's fingerprints. Technically not impossible, but, really? I'm as paranoid about the police as the next slashdotter, but even that strikes me as a bit far fetched if only due to practicality reasons. Well, not if only, but actually only.
I agree. What looks like your bad reading comprehension skills is actually your need for me to be wrong so you can be right.
To even contemplate that "some of us [...] wouldn't do this in the first place" is supremely arrogant and self-delusional.
And I saw the second part, but it still misses the point. We have these faults without necessarily noticing. You may not be in the original company's position of having your hypocracy pointed out to you in front of everyone, or at all, and may miss it altogether.
And even THAT misses the point. The point is that the hypocracy still existed, even if corrected later, and that further hypocracies will always exist due to our imperfect nature (inability to know everything and comprehend everything). Because we all have this, it should surprise nobody that the company referred to in the original summary would also have it. To say you're surprised by this is just your failure to understand human nature, and says nothing about their misdeeds.
And none of that justifies it. You keep reading justification into my responses. I didn't justify it. All I did was say I wasn't surprised by it. Their original position is still disproven by the hypcracy, not because it's hypocritical, but because they just proved why zero-marginal-cost information cannot have the business model they want to attach to it.
Any attempt to focus on the hypocracy will get them to be defensive, just like you are. We need to focus on the market rationale and how they proved what the market says about their product instead of flaming them. Understanding can lead to conversation which can lead to changes of heart. As long as they're getting defensive, they'll go on the offense and attack. And that doesn't help anyone.
When you do a "job", someone has promise to pay you for doing X, and you deserve to be paid if you've met your end of the contract. If, however, you do X and then try to find a buyer, then you may not find a buyer.
If a company produces 1,000,000 frobnits to sell at $10 a piece, that does not guarantee them $10m in gross revenue. If no one buys the frobnits, the company could actually lose money. They do not deserve to be paid simply because they performed an activity. It must be an activity that their potential customers assign some marginal value to in excess of the price the company wants to charge.
And this... is a surpremely arrogant self-delusional response. If you can't admit your faults, that doesn't mean you don't have them. We all do. We all have our areas of extreme intelligence/specialty, and areas of extreme ignorance. Only the supremely ignorant are ignorant of their ignorance.
Of course, you completely missed the point as well, too focused on your righteous anger that someone called you a hypocrite, like everyone else.
The point is that since the behaviour they are so opposed to is just simple human behaviour, and that this is the marketplace we're talking about (they want us to buy their offerings even though we place no value on them, that's the marketplace), they're simply wrong, and they, themselves, are the evidence of it.
I'm not justifying their hypocracy. I'm pointing out that it, too, is completely normal, and thus not surprising. If you're surprised at it, it's most likely due to your denial of your own hypocracies, no matter how small. Only once you admit to your own normalness at hypocracies can you stop being surprised at this type of behaviour and then possibly find an antidote to it.
That they try to dodge their responsibility for behaving hypocritically shows that they, like you, are in denial of their own hypocracy. The difference is that they are having it pointed out to them very specifically, whereas with you I'm being general since I obviously don't know who you are. But you're human, I'm assuming, so that means that you therefore must be ignorant in some facets of life, like the rest of us. You must be tempted to act other than how you wish at times, and you must fail at that temptation at times. That's guaranteed. It's part of being human.
This dodge of responsibility also shows how complete their faith in their business model is, that they attempt to rationalise away and trivialize their misdeed instead of learn from it. While this, too, is normal, and thus unsurprising, again, that doesn't make it acceptable.
Maybe that's part of your point, too, that I'm somehow saying that just because it's unsurprising due to its normalcy it must therefore be acceptable. No. Just because one can understand a thing doesn't mean they have to agree with it or condone it. Just because I can understand that they, like myself, are hypocrites, doesn't mean I have to accept or condone their, or my, hypocracy. But understanding it may give an opportunity to combat it. Telling them they're wrong to their faces obviously isn't working.
I don't find it fucked up at all. This is expected behaviour. And it's not because it's coming from the very copyright trolls who want to better enforce these laws, it's because they're human like the rest of us (I can hear the collective gasp from here). They naturally treat digital media the same as the rest of us do - casually. Because there is no marginal cost - the same reason the rest of us have.
They, like many people, think that authors/artists should receive payment for their activities (instead of just for activities that their customers attribute some marginal value to), but, again, like many people, fail to see the disconnect that they prove with their own actions. We all do this - we say one thing, but when it comes time to do it, we take the easy way out, we cut corners. And then fail to see how hypocritical we are. However, most of us do this over trivial things and aren't trying to create a media circus around us about it. That doesn't mean we are less hypcritical, it means we just aren't caught, and the repurcussions are smaller.
All this does is provide another example of why they're wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
"Legible" may be sufficient at Podunk University/College/Pub, but in the Ivy League, you better have everything perfectly pristine using ink made of virgin's blood on 30lb paper stock with a brightness rating of no less than 110.
Personally, my professors were fine with chicken scratch, and bonus points for chicken blood, too.
Note that "not resuscitate" and "not using medical devices" are already legal. So is "sufficient pain medication to keep pain at bay, even though it may end my life earlier than not using it." Meanwhile, things like "starving to death" (withholding food, water), which, I'm told, is much more tortuous, or KCl, are not legal, as they have no purpose other than causing death, and, in the case of food, is not considered "extraordinary" effort - because we all eat, every day (for most of us), that's quite ordinary. Most of the discussion about assisted suicide is already moot, because a) it's legal, and b) it's not suicide (refusing extraordinary care is already legal).
I would suggest that emphasising, and strengthening, normal palliative care, would take care of almost all "assisted suicide" requests. Education about what are already legal options would then neuter most of the assisted suicide arguments, especially the ones that seem to be most persuasive.
Writing grant proposals is my hobby, you insensitive clod!
No, not everybody is covered in Canada.
You have to prove residency. Some people, especially the homeless, don't. (Though even the homeless can - they have to simply jump through hoops not dissimilar to those proposed by your Republicans for voter identification - which also is not a problem in Canada, I don't understand what your Democrats have against it.)
I also have lifetime and yearly caps on my employer-provided insurance in some areas (orthodontics, off the top of my head, would be the first one).
And health issues is the third leading cause of bankruptcy even in Canada. Sorry to burst that bubble. As to the question of dying due to breast cancer, or, really, any cancer, because they can't afford insurance? I don't have anything directly relevant, but given that people do file bankruptcy over health issues, I'd say the answer is probably yes. In fact, since cancer treatments likely involve expensive drugs, and drugs aren't covered by provincial plans, but by your private insurance, I'd say that it's almost impossible for people not to be dying in Canada due to being unable to afford insurance. And "thinking you're insured" only to have the insurance company deny the claim is not unique to the US, either. It happens even here in Canada, for the same reason: it's profitable to let people die.
Seriously, Canada simply is not all sunshine and light, it's not a magical land of milk and honey. We don't have the magical answers. Our governments are struggling with huge healthcare costs that are spiralling out of control, and are looking to divest themselves from as much health care as possible while still claiming to have that mythical "universal health care" (which, as I stated earlier, we don't actually have).
It's universal only in that even if you had enough money to pay for your procedure and the next person's procedure, you still can't get the line moving any faster. The rich and the poor have the same waiting period for procedures that are covered by the province. Only procedures that are not covered (orthodontics, vision, dentistry) generally move quickly.
You're entertainingly deluded if you think Canada is a single-payer system.
We have a tiered healthcare system, it's just that most people don't seem to acknowledge it.
I have partial coverage from my province. I have partial coverage from my employer. And I cover the rest out of pocket.
My mother-in-law, having turned 65, but is still working, has even more payers: the province, her employer's health care coverage, the provincially-mandated health care coverage (different pocket, not sure if she pays for it or not), and then the rest out of pocket.
There are health-related items that are fully covered by provincial plans, some that are partially covered, and many that are not covered at all. For the last two categories, private health insurance can cover all, some, or none of the extra costs. If you have multiple health insurance providers (e.g., two different employers for a household, usually they cover the employee and their spouse and kids, so you have two insurances covering the household), there is some sort of duking it out for who covers what, but, in the end, you usually end up with the higher percentage of the choices being covered somehow. And then, whatever is left, is your responsibility.
I go to the doctor with a cold. The province pays the doctor for my visit. He wrongly prescribes me some antibiotics. I go to the pharmacy, get the pills. The province doesn't pay for any of that (though they play a role in regulating the drug costs). My employer's health insurance pays some of the drug cost (the percentage widely varies on which drug it is) and none of the pharmacy fees (other insurances do pay for pharmacy fees). I then pay the rest, never less than 10% due to the plan I have with work.
If I then spend more than a certain percentage of my pre-tax income on health expenses, I can submit them against my taxes for a further refund, though I've never hit that amount, personally. I'm sure lower incomes could easily hit that.
If I go to the optometrist's, the province pays nothing for my visit, but all of my children's visits as they're all under 18 years of age. I submit to my employer's health insurance for my visit and any and all prescription eye wear that results, including for my children.
If you cannot get health insurance from your employer, or you cannot afford to get insurance on your own (here in Alberta, there is a cheap provincial-run insurance available for purchase, not sure about other provinces, and no idea what kind of coverage it gets you), you get to pay full costs for chiropractic and vision care. Dental visits are also not covered, or any orthodontic care. If you're poor, you're going to be stuck with bad eyes and bad teeth. Even in Canada. Because you're in the bottom tier of health care. Which itself is because we have tiered healthcare.
Sure, emergency access is paid for. But same in the US - effectively. If you can't afford it in the US, the hospitals eventually absorb the cost, by law. In Canada, the government absorbs it. However, if you can't produce your healthcare card, you're still responsible to pay for it - tourists and out-of-province patients don't get free rides. (However, when I was in Toronto a couple months ago, had I required health care during that time, my home province would have covered the costs same as if I were at home. Which, again, means not everything is covered.)
(*) unless it gets cancelled on you, forcing you to buy a more expensive, more comprehensive version with features you neither want nor can afford.
More time spent paying attention even when you didn't think it was important may have paid off on spelling and grammar. "ideas", "were" limited, "fully involved mentally" (ok, that one is probably debatable), "The" 20"-"somethings", "bored"
That said, the road we've been going down for decades already, since even the 40-somethings were kids, is one of more and more stimulation, of lower and lower quality. A hundred years ago, kids likely had to invent their own games, or, if they had access, they could read. 40 years ago, it was TV. Today it's Facebook. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that we've been training ourselves to require constant stimulation, with no regard for how good it is. Or, rather, we've stopped learning how to just be quiet and focused on the here and now, no matter how "boring" it might be. It apparently is also a helpful skill for being respectful of those around you.
If the map says Taiwan (ROC) is a nation, that will offend mainland China (PRC). If the map says Taiwan is a province of PRC, that offends Taiwan.
Really, they're screwed either way.
At $work, we are mandated to call ROC a "region". That's as accurate as we can go without offending anyone.
I really wish you'd get off the fence and pick a position on the issue.
Keyboard/mouse are special. My keyboard and mouse are both USB and worked fine with the open-source version of VB. I went to the closed version to try to get a USB headset to work, as well as to try to connect to my kids' LeapFrog Tag pens. Didn't work, but haven't switched back as much out of laziness as anything else.
Yes. But you were the one to use the term "engineer" to refer to the guys who wrote the firmware for these routers. I was merely using it colloquially, in the same way you did.
I thought it was too strong of a word, but I decided that "engineer" was not the focus point of your original post. This one seems to have confirmed that.
Basically, the people who write this stuff wouldn't be what I'd normally call an engineer. But they do show why we need the Bobby Tables site (among others).
If "most engineers are not morons" then we wouldn't need Bobby Tables as an example when explaining simple security issues to them.
You're proposing a technical solution to what is actually a social/legal problem. (Rest of form letter omitted.)
I am not in favor of capitol punishment.
I am. I think the entire capitol is in need of punishment. Unfortunately, some of them probably will like that.
However, we're now straying dangerously close to off-topic here, so I'll stop now.
If, by answering questions about some other crime, I were to move from "known not to be an accomplice" to "known to be an accomplice", having been forced to answer those questions would fail the fifth amendment. By forcing Risen to answer these questions, we may find out he was actually a co-conspirator or an accomplice (or perhaps even the source of the leak itself). And thus forcing him to answer now has trampled his fifth amendment rights.
While it would be very dangerous, a very principled person (more principled than I) might think about using the opportunity to claim some illegal association with the crime, and then mounting a constitutional challenge over it.
As a Christian who is offended by the US Evangelical misuse of the term "Creationism" to mean something entirely silly, and tired of having to explain how it's only a small minority of Christians, with whom I do take an active role in attempting to re-educate every chance I get, and not Christianity in general that believes the earth is less than 10k years old ...
I thought the OP was funny.
Should pack 'em up and send them to Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan or anywhere else that POTUS wants to enforce, ahem, speed limits.
On the other hand, whoever did this doesn't merely have a sick sense of humour. They're highly insightful to the way the government is heading.
At the office, I told one coworker to fuck off. Just once. In person. In front of the team (sans manager). He sulked off. When a round of layoffs hit and took him with it, he asked for me to be a reference.
Sometimes, just sometimes, that verbal slap in the face is exactly what is needed to wake someone up. And they may just respect you more afterwards than they did before.
Fingerprint with no name, address, phone number, etc., attached = no useful information to be gained via subpoena.
If I store the key blueprint against my fingerprint, all the subpoena will be able to determine is that this key will open something (presumably a house or vehicle) associated with that fingerprint. The only actually useful information here is likely to be proximity - most likely, this is the most conveniently available KeyMe kiosk for the person with that fingerprint.
That's an awfully big net to cast for a vanishingly small amount of information.
Unless you suppose that the police have a suspect's key and want to reverse lookup to get their fingerprints, and you think that some judge will sign off on that subpoena more easily than just taking the suspect's fingerprints. Technically not impossible, but, really? I'm as paranoid about the police as the next slashdotter, but even that strikes me as a bit far fetched if only due to practicality reasons. Well, not if only, but actually only.
Where's the "+1, Bitchslap" mod when you need it?
I agree. What looks like your bad reading comprehension skills is actually your need for me to be wrong so you can be right.
To even contemplate that "some of us [...] wouldn't do this in the first place" is supremely arrogant and self-delusional.
And I saw the second part, but it still misses the point. We have these faults without necessarily noticing. You may not be in the original company's position of having your hypocracy pointed out to you in front of everyone, or at all, and may miss it altogether.
And even THAT misses the point. The point is that the hypocracy still existed, even if corrected later, and that further hypocracies will always exist due to our imperfect nature (inability to know everything and comprehend everything). Because we all have this, it should surprise nobody that the company referred to in the original summary would also have it. To say you're surprised by this is just your failure to understand human nature, and says nothing about their misdeeds.
And none of that justifies it. You keep reading justification into my responses. I didn't justify it. All I did was say I wasn't surprised by it. Their original position is still disproven by the hypcracy, not because it's hypocritical, but because they just proved why zero-marginal-cost information cannot have the business model they want to attach to it.
Any attempt to focus on the hypocracy will get them to be defensive, just like you are. We need to focus on the market rationale and how they proved what the market says about their product instead of flaming them. Understanding can lead to conversation which can lead to changes of heart. As long as they're getting defensive, they'll go on the offense and attack. And that doesn't help anyone.
When you do a "job", someone has promise to pay you for doing X, and you deserve to be paid if you've met your end of the contract. If, however, you do X and then try to find a buyer, then you may not find a buyer.
If a company produces 1,000,000 frobnits to sell at $10 a piece, that does not guarantee them $10m in gross revenue. If no one buys the frobnits, the company could actually lose money. They do not deserve to be paid simply because they performed an activity. It must be an activity that their potential customers assign some marginal value to in excess of the price the company wants to charge.
So, I stand by my statement.
And this... is a surpremely arrogant self-delusional response. If you can't admit your faults, that doesn't mean you don't have them. We all do. We all have our areas of extreme intelligence/specialty, and areas of extreme ignorance. Only the supremely ignorant are ignorant of their ignorance.
Of course, you completely missed the point as well, too focused on your righteous anger that someone called you a hypocrite, like everyone else.
The point is that since the behaviour they are so opposed to is just simple human behaviour, and that this is the marketplace we're talking about (they want us to buy their offerings even though we place no value on them, that's the marketplace), they're simply wrong, and they, themselves, are the evidence of it.
I'm not justifying their hypocracy. I'm pointing out that it, too, is completely normal, and thus not surprising. If you're surprised at it, it's most likely due to your denial of your own hypocracies, no matter how small. Only once you admit to your own normalness at hypocracies can you stop being surprised at this type of behaviour and then possibly find an antidote to it.
That they try to dodge their responsibility for behaving hypocritically shows that they, like you, are in denial of their own hypocracy. The difference is that they are having it pointed out to them very specifically, whereas with you I'm being general since I obviously don't know who you are. But you're human, I'm assuming, so that means that you therefore must be ignorant in some facets of life, like the rest of us. You must be tempted to act other than how you wish at times, and you must fail at that temptation at times. That's guaranteed. It's part of being human.
This dodge of responsibility also shows how complete their faith in their business model is, that they attempt to rationalise away and trivialize their misdeed instead of learn from it. While this, too, is normal, and thus unsurprising, again, that doesn't make it acceptable.
Maybe that's part of your point, too, that I'm somehow saying that just because it's unsurprising due to its normalcy it must therefore be acceptable. No. Just because one can understand a thing doesn't mean they have to agree with it or condone it. Just because I can understand that they, like myself, are hypocrites, doesn't mean I have to accept or condone their, or my, hypocracy. But understanding it may give an opportunity to combat it. Telling them they're wrong to their faces obviously isn't working.
I don't find it fucked up at all. This is expected behaviour. And it's not because it's coming from the very copyright trolls who want to better enforce these laws, it's because they're human like the rest of us (I can hear the collective gasp from here). They naturally treat digital media the same as the rest of us do - casually. Because there is no marginal cost - the same reason the rest of us have.
They, like many people, think that authors/artists should receive payment for their activities (instead of just for activities that their customers attribute some marginal value to), but, again, like many people, fail to see the disconnect that they prove with their own actions. We all do this - we say one thing, but when it comes time to do it, we take the easy way out, we cut corners. And then fail to see how hypocritical we are. However, most of us do this over trivial things and aren't trying to create a media circus around us about it. That doesn't mean we are less hypcritical, it means we just aren't caught, and the repurcussions are smaller.
All this does is provide another example of why they're wrong.
Or perhaps, a utopian future where the amoral sociopaths aren't allowed to hold public office?
You win the patented Slashdot Delusional Optimist of the Hour award. Your prize is 2 Internets.