While based on some extremely limited understanding of the world this is technically true, you do understand that a) you'd all die in nuclear hellfire as Russia and China retaliate (because if you start a nuclear war for no reason, you can't be trusted not to do it on a whim to them) and b) "you americans" can do squiddly doo. 0.0001% of you can do. I think on a metaphor your small brain will understand, compared to your body that is about the equivalent of those three hairs on your balls you don't like.
Also, "those greasers" had democracy when America was ruled by buffaloes. They already were over with a full civilization, artists, philosophers and scientists included, when "USA" became spellable because latin letters had just been invented. They laugh on your history of 300 years, because they can add an entire order of magnitude to that. Those "greasers" invented the logic that is the foundation of the math that is the foundation of the computer science that is the foundation of the hardware and software you unwashed redneck use to spit out your mental sperm into the world.
In many respects, Greece is the seed and core of everything that you admire in your world, but it would be stupid to ask you for some respect, because people like you don't know what that is.
Ironically, Greece had a balanced budget in 2014. Germany did not. Yes, this is true.
Austerity is not the problem, it's a solution.
Austerity has resulted in the Greece GDP imploding. The amount of debt a country is allowed under EU rules is based on the GDP. Thanks to austerity, even with a balanced budget the debt ratio of Greece became worse, even as the actual debt itself was being paid back.
Did you Notice that Greece has not proposed one solution in which they pay back the debt?
Did you notice that the vast majority of the "debt relief" money that was given to Greece never actually arrived there? The whole thing has been another scam to bail out banks, and they took almost all the money that was allegedly "given" to Greece.
When the whole crisis thing happened, we should have jailed the bankers, and the politicians that let them do it (by repealing regulation laws, removing funding from compliance offices, etc.)
Germany is playing hardball exactly because it can not afford Greece to step out of the austerity program.
If Greece does it, and survives - even if badly, it just needs to survive - then Spain, Portugal and Italy will certainly follow, with Cyprus, Ireland and others close behind.
Merkel has presented austerity as "without alternative" in the same way she has run her own country (disclaimer: I am german). Every major decision in her entire reign was never justified by being the best option or shown to be productive, the primary argument has always been that there are no other alternatives and that's it.
If the new Greece government can demonstrate that there is an alternative, the whole house of cards will come crashing down. Merkel will fall, because her entire political system (she's even made sure that there is no alternative to her within her own party, guaranteeing that they will not win the next election after she steps down) is based on this "without alternative" premises.
And if you don't think that politicians are willing and able to ruin whole countries or continents over their personal ambitions and powerplays, you've slept through all of history class.
Germany in particular doesn't want to give any ground
Because it's been running an internal class warfare for the past 20 years. Germany is strong right now because all of the burden has been shifted to the low and middle classes, with real wages being stagnant for over 10 years, more unemployment than at any time since the war, and massive amounts of the workforce employed in temporary or part-time jobs.
In other words: The cost of labour has been systematically driven down. The problem for Germany is that this system is unsustainable, unless you can always shift off the cost to someone else. The austerity is not new, it's the same recipe that Merkel and her predecessor cooked Germany with. They cannot allow another country to shake off this yoke without their home country asking why the fuck they need to justify spending 12 Euros instead of 10 Euros on a sports club for the kids when the rich have doubled their income in the same time everyone else has only lost.
But Greece is apparently either unable or unwilling to go after them.
The old government was, because of the strong ties between the old parties and the business moguls. The new government has no such ties, and has, in fact, announced steps to do exactly what you say they should do.
But, of course, since they're evil communistsocialistliberalevilcommitraitors, it doesn't matter what they actually do, does it?
The crisis in Greece has many reasons. Inefficiency is a problem, but not a crisis cause. The fact that the country had a strongly interconnected (not to say, inbred) web of corruption between politics, administration and business is much more likely to have been a leading cause.
The greek "giveaway state" is such a cheap myth. They don't even have social welfare the way that those who cry loudest (e.g. Germany) have.
The real problem is that Greece was heavily in debt to foreign banks. Instead of giving them a way out, the governments of the countries of those banks pressured them into paying their debts and interests, and cutting spending. When your economy is in a crisis, every economist who's not a total idiot knows that cutting government spending will deepen the crisis. What a surprise, that's exactly what happened. And now comes the magic trick: The amount of debt that the EU, European Central Bank and IWF consider "acceptable" is calculated based on a countries GDP. Greece actually cut spending a lot and last year ran on a balanced budget, something that our own Mrs. Merkel didn't manage to do with our country. Greece debt has actually decreased. However, due to the magic trick, Greece debt ratio has become worse, not because of more debt, but because of less GDP.
It's like telling you that because you're in debt, you need to sell your car to pay me. And after you've done so, telling you that because your net worth has now declined, you've now got a different credit rating and owe me more money for the higher risk.
Greece can't back its own crypto currency with anything it has a monopoly on either because it doesn't have anything that valuable.
Really? And other currencies are backed by what, exactly? Promises of the government, that's what. It's been a long time a major currency was actually backed by anything valuable.
Greece doesn't need a currency, it needs liquidity - a crypto currency won't bring that.
A currency under the control of the government will bring that. One price that countries paid for joining the Euro zone was that they lost fiscal control. Your own currency - doesn't matter if it's called Drachme or Bitme - gives that control.
I am with you on this. If you have a place to go, walk with determination. Don't look like you are in a hurry, just go.
This used to work, it doesn't work anymore.
I've been using this trick for more than a decade. If your body language shows clearly that you're not going to give way, that you will go where you want to go and if you have to kill someone to do it, you will, crowds part in front of you like waves for a ship. Well, it's not movie-perfect, of course, but largely it works like a charm.
But it works because people see and subconsciously understand your body language. Mobile users are not paying attention. You are, at best, in the far corner of their visual field, where the retinal resolution is too low to discern nuances of posture. They will not understand that it's better for them to move a little left, they will walk right into you.
If you want to work on compilers or operating systems, to give just two examples, then you need a solid grasp of computer architecture.
Your view of computer science - as well as that of most universities - is seriously outdated. After 15 years of business, I've had some university experience again last year, and I feel pity for the students who go there.
That's mostly because computer "science" actually isn't. We're a long way from science, with much of the teaching revolving around best practice and "we think this is how it should be". Computer languages taught in university are subject to fashion, not to any empirical evidence of which language is best suited for teaching programming skills. I could go on for one hour.
The main problem I see, however, is that the education is built like a craftsman training. It starts with fundamentals like you want (except that it's mostly math, programming and such) and then branches out into specialties.
Of all the math I learnt back when I was in university, in 15 years of professional work my review is this: Most of what I learnt I never needed, and most of what I needed I hadn't learnt (and needed to learn). Cryptography, for example, I learnt entirely from books, it wasn't even mentioned and to this day it is a rare sight on the curriculums.
And if you want to learn programming, going to university is probably the worst way of doing it. You'll learn the most simply Java anyone can imagine, will be dissuaded from doing what good programmers should be doing - writing as little code as possible by yourself and using library functions wherever possible, and things like testing and frameworks you will - maybe - meet in higher semesters when your bad habits are already solid. Also, you'll learn a couple programming languages that are so obscure that your professor is one of 10 people submitting patches to the compiler and its Wikipedia page doesn't require you to scroll. On an iPad.
If you want to work on compilers or operating systems, to give just two examples, then you need a solid grasp of computer architecture.
If you don't want to bring the machine to a crawl because you thought your memory-hungry loop over all your entities is cute, you need the same. But you don't need to be able to reproduce the exact layout of a hardware multiplication with only NAND gates by heart. Computer science education trains the wrong shit. I've seen a test paper for a computer graphics course and I thought "what the fuck?".
The real criminals in this society are not criminals according to the law, they are never prosecuted in any court, much less put behind bars.
We thought when communism broke apart, that capitalism had won. We were wrong. Capitalism died a few years later, just less visible and more gradual, as it has been increasingly replaced by a kleptocracy.
Uh, because they are different categories of things?
I know what you want to say, but you need to think about it more in depth before you throw it out here. The better analogy would be a service- or craftsman that you pay by the hour. You can watch at the clock yourself, but if you don't, three weeks after the fact the only proof available will be his notes about when he started and when he stopped.
It's not like Kim is just a pirate: he is stealing from the other pirates, the ones who legally rob authors like you.
Painting him like some kind of Robin Hood is exactly what he wants. The truth of the matter is that he almost certainly doesn't give a fuck who he's taking from. His past crimes are evidence that he'll screw over you, me, his companions and friends, everyone, as long as he can make a buck from it.
without being able to do anything about the ones who get the lion's share resulting for your work, the legal distributors.
But that is a different fight to be fought with different weapons.
I wouldn't be the least surprised if Kimble and Hollywood were working together in this, making a big show for the world, and in the end Hollywood will get some new laws and Kimble will get to live in comfort with his fortune left intact and no charges. Both sides are the kind of scumbags for such stunts.
And you are very satisfied with "the rule of law" in the US currently, and do not sense any problem with its functioning?
I'm not, but even if I disagree on the specifics of the law about, say, murder (maybe I'd prefer longer jailtime, or shorter), I very much think that murder should be illegal.
I will gladly discuss how the laws and the system could be improved, but to doubt the foundation of society because you're unhappy with the way the government finally nailed a scumbag, that's a dangerous road.
don't you find it peculiar that the DOJ would make a condition of this plea bargain to be that the programmer in question "testifies" to the dollar amount of the economic damage to the rightsholders?
Par for the course. Do you think Kimbles lawyers will be less sleazy? The adversial court system pretty much demands that both sides use any trick available.
judge a person's worthiness as a human being based solely on your misfounded opinion because "Law, gubmint said so!"
Not in the least. If what Kimble did were legal, my opinion of him wouldn't be one inch better. In fact, a lot of these parasites work completely within the law, not because they are good people but because they understand that exploiting holes in the system lets them abuse society longer with less risk.
outside an extremely small portion of lawmakers had any involvement in determining if these things were illegal.
I'm quite a big fan of copyright, to be honest. Because I'm an author and a software developer. I'm not a fan of the corporate extensions to it, because for all I care when I'm dead my children can find jobs like I did. Covering them for around 20 years is good, just in case you die young, to make sure your kids have a start in life anyway, but death + 70 years? Crazy.
But you misrepresent our culture if you paint this as a backroom conspiracy. Most people on the street would agree that musicians, painters, authors, etc. deserve to make a living. What is determined by a small number of lawmakers is the details, and yes some backroom dealings from lobby work. But reality is grey, not black or white.
yes, I actually know that you slobber over every detail, because you really, really dislike Kim Dotcom
Not him personally, but his kind of people. Every time one of these parasites goes away, society as a whole benefits. Unfortunately, one of the reasons these kind of people survive is that they're like Ophiocordyceps unilateralis and can make the same people that they exploit like and defend them.
"Legally speaking", you're not supposed to make up weird new interpretations of laws,
You've never been in a real, non-trivial court case in your life, I assume? Interpreting the law is what lawyers and judges do for a living, and in most interesting cases, basically you have the facts and two sides debating how to interpret the facts and how to interpret and apply the law to them. And new interpretations of laws are so common that there's a whole industry publishing books with collections of them.
What is important is that governments shouldn't be doing things which ethically speaking are questionable.
The difference between the law and ethics is that the law is a public, written and detailled record. Ethics is a fuzzy concept that no two people agree upon exactly. Ethics is the environment that law is born from, but the process of codifying, specifying and actually writing it down is very important and one of the reasons that "the rule of law" is basically a precondition for civilization.
It was a file storage site, and any such site inevitably contains copyrighted information. Merely knowing that infringing files are stored doesn't make it a criminal operation.
You missed or forgot about the part where intra-office communications revealed that they knowingly and intentionally encouraged illegal uploads, even searching them out?
There's a difference between hosting a forum where you can't be sure that someone will not copy a chapter from a book into a posting, and doing everything in your power to actively get illegal content into your site.
And yes, copying is not theft, and I never said it was. Maybe you took the bank robbery metaphor a little too literal? I could've used anything else, the point is that knowingly contributing to a crime makes you a criminal, and that's what he was prosecuted for.
I don't insult his lifestyle, though to be frank I would, because smoking is an addiction and like any addiction a sign of reduced willpower. However, what I attacked in my original post was his insistance that it's ok for him to cause harm to other people.
What I've said many times in many places still holds true: Smoking is causing harm to people around you, so I would be ok with smoking being allowed in all places where in return I'm allowed to punch the smoker in the face. Both are ways to harm someone's health and well-being, so quid pro quo, deal?
I see you've never seen anyone panic in your life. Here's a hint: Making a verbal statement while remaining seated is not in the category described by the word "panic".
And yes, car exhausts are toxic, too, and I can't wait for electric cars to usher in the end of the age of oil. However, there's an important difference: Cars have a primary purpose and the gas they create is a side-effect. Cigarettes primary purpose is the creation of addictive, toxic fumes.
Which, even though it is massively abused, is at its core a good idea and used exactly in the way that it was intended to in this case: Give the small guy a smaller sentence if he helps you jail the big boss, who has the resources and connections to fight you tooth and nail with the best lawyers money can buy.
This is exactly what extradition hearings are for - to determine these questions. In general, you are right and the USA is famous for overreach. On the other hand, it is international law and a good idea that you can't hide your criminal activities simply by living 10m across the border.
But again, the details are to be determined in a court, and it's a NZ court that will decide whether or not to extradite him.
So legally speaking, everything is exactly as it should be.
Not sure why Andrus Nomm is charged with anything. Was he responsible for business decisions at the company?
He is charged because he knowingly participated in a criminal operation.
If you participate in a bank robbery, they will charge you with robbing a bank, even if you were not responsible for coming up with the idea, you know?
Why don't we just remove all personal choices that slightly affect other people
slightly? Blowing poison gas into the air I breathe is not "slightly". Neither is the fact that zigarette smoke smells so badly, when you've been in a room with some smokers for even half an hour, you can wash all your clothes and shower yourself.
"Slightly" is when a guy on the train smells badly. Smoking is on a different level.
The reality is that many people enjoy smoking.
All addicted people rationalize their addiction. It is, in fact, one of the points that differentiates an addiction from a simple preference.
The problem is, those that want it banned don't smoke, so it doesn't affect them. They are just self-righteous, selfish, useless idiots.
You can smoke everywhere where it doesn't affect me. As soon as you're in public, and you light up, you're an antisocial asshole. It really is as simple as that.
As much as I hate to admit it as someone strongly opposed to smoking, GP is right. While they do use some additional health care, the net effect is that smokers cost less because of early death. As far as I remember, the primary reason is that old-age health care is so very expensive and they statistically don't get there too often.
Slashdot Mirror
While based on some extremely limited understanding of the world this is technically true, you do understand that a) you'd all die in nuclear hellfire as Russia and China retaliate (because if you start a nuclear war for no reason, you can't be trusted not to do it on a whim to them) and b) "you americans" can do squiddly doo. 0.0001% of you can do. I think on a metaphor your small brain will understand, compared to your body that is about the equivalent of those three hairs on your balls you don't like.
Also, "those greasers" had democracy when America was ruled by buffaloes. They already were over with a full civilization, artists, philosophers and scientists included, when "USA" became spellable because latin letters had just been invented. They laugh on your history of 300 years, because they can add an entire order of magnitude to that. Those "greasers" invented the logic that is the foundation of the math that is the foundation of the computer science that is the foundation of the hardware and software you unwashed redneck use to spit out your mental sperm into the world.
In many respects, Greece is the seed and core of everything that you admire in your world, but it would be stupid to ask you for some respect, because people like you don't know what that is.
They are constantly running an operating deficit.
Ironically, Greece had a balanced budget in 2014. Germany did not. Yes, this is true.
Austerity is not the problem, it's a solution.
Austerity has resulted in the Greece GDP imploding. The amount of debt a country is allowed under EU rules is based on the GDP. Thanks to austerity, even with a balanced budget the debt ratio of Greece became worse, even as the actual debt itself was being paid back.
Did you Notice that Greece has not proposed one solution in which they pay back the debt?
Did you notice that the vast majority of the "debt relief" money that was given to Greece never actually arrived there? The whole thing has been another scam to bail out banks, and they took almost all the money that was allegedly "given" to Greece.
Iceland did the right thinag.
This.
When the whole crisis thing happened, we should have jailed the bankers, and the politicians that let them do it (by repealing regulation laws, removing funding from compliance offices, etc.)
Germany is playing hardball exactly because it can not afford Greece to step out of the austerity program.
If Greece does it, and survives - even if badly, it just needs to survive - then Spain, Portugal and Italy will certainly follow, with Cyprus, Ireland and others close behind.
Merkel has presented austerity as "without alternative" in the same way she has run her own country (disclaimer: I am german). Every major decision in her entire reign was never justified by being the best option or shown to be productive, the primary argument has always been that there are no other alternatives and that's it.
If the new Greece government can demonstrate that there is an alternative, the whole house of cards will come crashing down. Merkel will fall, because her entire political system (she's even made sure that there is no alternative to her within her own party, guaranteeing that they will not win the next election after she steps down) is based on this "without alternative" premises.
And if you don't think that politicians are willing and able to ruin whole countries or continents over their personal ambitions and powerplays, you've slept through all of history class.
Germany in particular doesn't want to give any ground
Because it's been running an internal class warfare for the past 20 years. Germany is strong right now because all of the burden has been shifted to the low and middle classes, with real wages being stagnant for over 10 years, more unemployment than at any time since the war, and massive amounts of the workforce employed in temporary or part-time jobs.
In other words: The cost of labour has been systematically driven down. The problem for Germany is that this system is unsustainable, unless you can always shift off the cost to someone else. The austerity is not new, it's the same recipe that Merkel and her predecessor cooked Germany with. They cannot allow another country to shake off this yoke without their home country asking why the fuck they need to justify spending 12 Euros instead of 10 Euros on a sports club for the kids when the rich have doubled their income in the same time everyone else has only lost.
But Greece is apparently either unable or unwilling to go after them.
The old government was, because of the strong ties between the old parties and the business moguls. The new government has no such ties, and has, in fact, announced steps to do exactly what you say they should do.
But, of course, since they're evil communistsocialistliberalevilcommitraitors, it doesn't matter what they actually do, does it?
You've read too much propaganda.
The crisis in Greece has many reasons. Inefficiency is a problem, but not a crisis cause. The fact that the country had a strongly interconnected (not to say, inbred) web of corruption between politics, administration and business is much more likely to have been a leading cause.
The greek "giveaway state" is such a cheap myth. They don't even have social welfare the way that those who cry loudest (e.g. Germany) have.
The real problem is that Greece was heavily in debt to foreign banks. Instead of giving them a way out, the governments of the countries of those banks pressured them into paying their debts and interests, and cutting spending. When your economy is in a crisis, every economist who's not a total idiot knows that cutting government spending will deepen the crisis. What a surprise, that's exactly what happened.
And now comes the magic trick: The amount of debt that the EU, European Central Bank and IWF consider "acceptable" is calculated based on a countries GDP. Greece actually cut spending a lot and last year ran on a balanced budget, something that our own Mrs. Merkel didn't manage to do with our country. Greece debt has actually decreased. However, due to the magic trick, Greece debt ratio has become worse, not because of more debt, but because of less GDP.
It's like telling you that because you're in debt, you need to sell your car to pay me. And after you've done so, telling you that because your net worth has now declined, you've now got a different credit rating and owe me more money for the higher risk.
Greece can't back its own crypto currency with anything it has a monopoly on either because it doesn't have anything that valuable.
Really? And other currencies are backed by what, exactly? Promises of the government, that's what. It's been a long time a major currency was actually backed by anything valuable.
Greece doesn't need a currency, it needs liquidity - a crypto currency won't bring that.
A currency under the control of the government will bring that. One price that countries paid for joining the Euro zone was that they lost fiscal control. Your own currency - doesn't matter if it's called Drachme or Bitme - gives that control.
I am with you on this. If you have a place to go, walk with determination. Don't look like you are in a hurry, just go.
This used to work, it doesn't work anymore.
I've been using this trick for more than a decade. If your body language shows clearly that you're not going to give way, that you will go where you want to go and if you have to kill someone to do it, you will, crowds part in front of you like waves for a ship. Well, it's not movie-perfect, of course, but largely it works like a charm.
But it works because people see and subconsciously understand your body language. Mobile users are not paying attention. You are, at best, in the far corner of their visual field, where the retinal resolution is too low to discern nuances of posture. They will not understand that it's better for them to move a little left, they will walk right into you.
Source: Been there, done that.
Several prototypes for such an app already exist. Here's one I found fast, there are others, giyf:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If you want to work on compilers or operating systems, to give just two examples, then you need a solid grasp of computer architecture.
Your view of computer science - as well as that of most universities - is seriously outdated. After 15 years of business, I've had some university experience again last year, and I feel pity for the students who go there.
That's mostly because computer "science" actually isn't. We're a long way from science, with much of the teaching revolving around best practice and "we think this is how it should be". Computer languages taught in university are subject to fashion, not to any empirical evidence of which language is best suited for teaching programming skills. I could go on for one hour.
The main problem I see, however, is that the education is built like a craftsman training. It starts with fundamentals like you want (except that it's mostly math, programming and such) and then branches out into specialties.
Of all the math I learnt back when I was in university, in 15 years of professional work my review is this: Most of what I learnt I never needed, and most of what I needed I hadn't learnt (and needed to learn). Cryptography, for example, I learnt entirely from books, it wasn't even mentioned and to this day it is a rare sight on the curriculums.
And if you want to learn programming, going to university is probably the worst way of doing it. You'll learn the most simply Java anyone can imagine, will be dissuaded from doing what good programmers should be doing - writing as little code as possible by yourself and using library functions wherever possible, and things like testing and frameworks you will - maybe - meet in higher semesters when your bad habits are already solid. Also, you'll learn a couple programming languages that are so obscure that your professor is one of 10 people submitting patches to the compiler and its Wikipedia page doesn't require you to scroll. On an iPad.
If you want to work on compilers or operating systems, to give just two examples, then you need a solid grasp of computer architecture.
If you don't want to bring the machine to a crawl because you thought your memory-hungry loop over all your entities is cute, you need the same. But you don't need to be able to reproduce the exact layout of a hardware multiplication with only NAND gates by heart. Computer science education trains the wrong shit. I've seen a test paper for a computer graphics course and I thought "what the fuck?".
This.
The real criminals in this society are not criminals according to the law, they are never prosecuted in any court, much less put behind bars.
We thought when communism broke apart, that capitalism had won. We were wrong. Capitalism died a few years later, just less visible and more gradual, as it has been increasingly replaced by a kleptocracy.
So, why does this not apply to bits and bytes?
Uh, because they are different categories of things?
I know what you want to say, but you need to think about it more in depth before you throw it out here. The better analogy would be a service- or craftsman that you pay by the hour. You can watch at the clock yourself, but if you don't, three weeks after the fact the only proof available will be his notes about when he started and when he stopped.
It's not like Kim is just a pirate: he is stealing from the other pirates, the ones who legally rob authors like you.
Painting him like some kind of Robin Hood is exactly what he wants. The truth of the matter is that he almost certainly doesn't give a fuck who he's taking from. His past crimes are evidence that he'll screw over you, me, his companions and friends, everyone, as long as he can make a buck from it.
without being able to do anything about the ones who get the lion's share resulting for your work, the legal distributors.
But that is a different fight to be fought with different weapons.
I wouldn't be the least surprised if Kimble and Hollywood were working together in this, making a big show for the world, and in the end Hollywood will get some new laws and Kimble will get to live in comfort with his fortune left intact and no charges. Both sides are the kind of scumbags for such stunts.
And you are very satisfied with "the rule of law" in the US currently, and do not sense any problem with its functioning?
I'm not, but even if I disagree on the specifics of the law about, say, murder (maybe I'd prefer longer jailtime, or shorter), I very much think that murder should be illegal.
I will gladly discuss how the laws and the system could be improved, but to doubt the foundation of society because you're unhappy with the way the government finally nailed a scumbag, that's a dangerous road.
don't you find it peculiar that the DOJ would make a condition of this plea bargain to be that the programmer in question "testifies" to the dollar amount of the economic damage to the rightsholders?
Par for the course. Do you think Kimbles lawyers will be less sleazy? The adversial court system pretty much demands that both sides use any trick available.
judge a person's worthiness as a human being based solely on your misfounded opinion because "Law, gubmint said so!"
Not in the least. If what Kimble did were legal, my opinion of him wouldn't be one inch better. In fact, a lot of these parasites work completely within the law, not because they are good people but because they understand that exploiting holes in the system lets them abuse society longer with less risk.
outside an extremely small portion of lawmakers had any involvement in determining if these things were illegal.
I'm quite a big fan of copyright, to be honest. Because I'm an author and a software developer. I'm not a fan of the corporate extensions to it, because for all I care when I'm dead my children can find jobs like I did. Covering them for around 20 years is good, just in case you die young, to make sure your kids have a start in life anyway, but death + 70 years? Crazy.
But you misrepresent our culture if you paint this as a backroom conspiracy. Most people on the street would agree that musicians, painters, authors, etc. deserve to make a living. What is determined by a small number of lawmakers is the details, and yes some backroom dealings from lobby work. But reality is grey, not black or white.
yes, I actually know that you slobber over every detail, because you really, really dislike Kim Dotcom
Not him personally, but his kind of people. Every time one of these parasites goes away, society as a whole benefits. Unfortunately, one of the reasons these kind of people survive is that they're like Ophiocordyceps unilateralis and can make the same people that they exploit like and defend them.
"Legally speaking", you're not supposed to make up weird new interpretations of laws,
You've never been in a real, non-trivial court case in your life, I assume? Interpreting the law is what lawyers and judges do for a living, and in most interesting cases, basically you have the facts and two sides debating how to interpret the facts and how to interpret and apply the law to them. And new interpretations of laws are so common that there's a whole industry publishing books with collections of them.
What is important is that governments shouldn't be doing things which ethically speaking are questionable.
The difference between the law and ethics is that the law is a public, written and detailled record. Ethics is a fuzzy concept that no two people agree upon exactly. Ethics is the environment that law is born from, but the process of codifying, specifying and actually writing it down is very important and one of the reasons that "the rule of law" is basically a precondition for civilization.
It was a file storage site, and any such site inevitably contains copyrighted information. Merely knowing that infringing files are stored doesn't make it a criminal operation.
You missed or forgot about the part where intra-office communications revealed that they knowingly and intentionally encouraged illegal uploads, even searching them out?
There's a difference between hosting a forum where you can't be sure that someone will not copy a chapter from a book into a posting, and doing everything in your power to actively get illegal content into your site.
And yes, copying is not theft, and I never said it was. Maybe you took the bank robbery metaphor a little too literal? I could've used anything else, the point is that knowingly contributing to a crime makes you a criminal, and that's what he was prosecuted for.
That's an argumentative fail right there.
I don't insult his lifestyle, though to be frank I would, because smoking is an addiction and like any addiction a sign of reduced willpower. However, what I attacked in my original post was his insistance that it's ok for him to cause harm to other people.
What I've said many times in many places still holds true: Smoking is causing harm to people around you, so I would be ok with smoking being allowed in all places where in return I'm allowed to punch the smoker in the face. Both are ways to harm someone's health and well-being, so quid pro quo, deal?
I see you've never seen anyone panic in your life. Here's a hint: Making a verbal statement while remaining seated is not in the category described by the word "panic".
And yes, car exhausts are toxic, too, and I can't wait for electric cars to usher in the end of the age of oil. However, there's an important difference: Cars have a primary purpose and the gas they create is a side-effect. Cigarettes primary purpose is the creation of addictive, toxic fumes.
Which, even though it is massively abused, is at its core a good idea and used exactly in the way that it was intended to in this case: Give the small guy a smaller sentence if he helps you jail the big boss, who has the resources and connections to fight you tooth and nail with the best lawyers money can buy.
Yes and no.
This is exactly what extradition hearings are for - to determine these questions. In general, you are right and the USA is famous for overreach. On the other hand, it is international law and a good idea that you can't hide your criminal activities simply by living 10m across the border.
But again, the details are to be determined in a court, and it's a NZ court that will decide whether or not to extradite him.
So legally speaking, everything is exactly as it should be.
Not sure why Andrus Nomm is charged with anything. Was he responsible for business decisions at the company?
He is charged because he knowingly participated in a criminal operation.
If you participate in a bank robbery, they will charge you with robbing a bank, even if you were not responsible for coming up with the idea, you know?
Why don't we just remove all personal choices that slightly affect other people
slightly? Blowing poison gas into the air I breathe is not "slightly". Neither is the fact that zigarette smoke smells so badly, when you've been in a room with some smokers for even half an hour, you can wash all your clothes and shower yourself.
"Slightly" is when a guy on the train smells badly. Smoking is on a different level.
The reality is that many people enjoy smoking.
All addicted people rationalize their addiction. It is, in fact, one of the points that differentiates an addiction from a simple preference.
The problem is, those that want it banned don't smoke, so it doesn't affect them. They are just self-righteous, selfish, useless idiots.
You can smoke everywhere where it doesn't affect me. As soon as you're in public, and you light up, you're an antisocial asshole. It really is as simple as that.
As much as I hate to admit it as someone strongly opposed to smoking, GP is right. While they do use some additional health care, the net effect is that smokers cost less because of early death. As far as I remember, the primary reason is that old-age health care is so very expensive and they statistically don't get there too often.