The issue is that he became a victim of identity theft quite a while ago, and not just once but many times. He advertises that his company will protect you from identity theft, but it quite clearly doesn't. Because he himself was a victim, but he continued to advertise that he was being protected, he obviously knew his service didn't work, so promoting it as such is false advertising. There's also the issue that the company apparently is making claims about the services it provides that it doesn't actually provide.
You need to go to the credit reporting agencies directly not through intermediaries. Since there are three major agencies you'd have to contact them separately and sign up for each of their credit protection plans. This shouldn't be confused with the "credit protection plan" that the credit card companies are always trying to shove down your throat, or similar services for other companies, as the former is really a form of insurance in case you become unemployed or otherwise unable to pay off your card for a time, and the later are just companies that are trying to make money by offering a centralized more "convenient" way to sign up for the free fraud reporting offered by the credit agencies (for a monthly fee naturally).
1) I think it's more of a combination of outrage that gradually fades into apathy at the state of the credit industry. I'm sure everyone here can agree the credit system is in shambles and needs to be fixed, but exactly how to go about doing that, and who needs to be contacted to get the ball rolling is the problem.
2) It's that clever marketing bit that seems to be the issue here, as one mans clever marketing is another mans fraud. As for the "It sucks to be you.", it's everyone laughing at the guy getting bit by his own scam. In essence everyone knows he's selling snake oil, so it's ironic when he himself is proof that it doesn't work, and as we all know, irony is funny.
And you can go to court and prove you're not responsible, but the monetary damages aren't the real problem. The problem arises because of the centralized credit agencies that score your "risk" for various banks and lenders. It doesn't matter if you never have to pay the money if your credit score is so abysmal you can no longer take out a loan for a new car or house. Not to mention there's the legal fees of proving you didn't do it even if it's fairly trivial to do.
It says it prevents identity theft, not that it prevents people from obtaining loans in your name. The articles all mention that a lot of people (at least 20, but possible many more) have obtained drivers licenses using his SSN, and many more attempted to but were unsuccessful. Further there service won't protect you from someone using your identity to obtain a job, or several other types of identity theft that don't directly impact your credit report. There's also the fact that they're charging for a service that the credit companies offer for free. It's perfectly possible to request fraud alerts directly from the credit companies but most people don't realize they have that option so this company is really making money off peoples ignorance.
It's not moving the goalpost as you put it, it's explaining the chain of interactions that make that original argument about the difference between stealing something and copyright infringement important. As to your last point, the students do have a right to have access to that content for the simple reason that any right not expressly forbidden is allowed. Of course, because they're on the school campus and the school controls the network, the school then has the right to forbid certain activities, but irregardless of whether the school has a right to do what they do, it's still limiting the rights of the students, it's simply a question of whether it's legal or not.
There's a difference between not carrying something because you can't afford it, or there's insufficient storage space, and banning it. In the first instance it's possible someone could make a special request, or do a inter-library loan in order to obtain the material they want, where as in the later the school would refuse even if the material was available in another public library. I'm quite sure that somewhere a library has a complete collection of hustler (or the library system taken as a whole does), and if you really wanted to you could fill out requests and have them sent to your local college library. You might have to pay a fee (although I don't believe so), but it's perfectly possible (and importantly the fee is irregardless of the material in question).
When was the last time you saw explicit sex acts broadcast during prime time on network television? There's plenty of censorship going on all the time, especially from the government.
I'm glad you brought that up, as it's an excellent example of my point. Most people seem to have forgotten that the rules that limit what can and cannot be broadcast on public television are (mostly, more on that shortly) just that, rules, not laws. That's because the companies responsible for entertainment in our country (be it television, movies, radio, or games) all realized long ago that it's best to keep the government out of everything they possibly can, and so agreed to form organizations to monitor and control themselves. Now, they failed slightly in their mission because the FCC still has control over radio broadcast content which covers radio and the few broadcast television stations, but outside of that they've been largely successful. As for explicit sex acts, there's nothing wrong with showing them during prime time television (outside the stations controlled by FCC), except for any agreements the broadcasters might have made with their respective organizations. Likewise the movie industry is self-regulating via the MPAA. Anyone is of course free to make a movie with anything they like in it, but it won't get the MPAA seal of approval, and thus won't in all likelihood be shown in most movie theaters. Whether that's good or not depends on your view of censorship, I tend to view it as a bad thing myself, but even then I have the option of going straight to the manufacturer and ordering a copy of the movie for myself. Even if a movie theater decided to show something not approved by the MPAA, outside of any contractual obligations to the MPAA they'd be perfectly within their legal rights to do so.
The government very rarely performs any sort of censorship, and when it does it's always forced to walk a very fine line. We have somewhat stupidly given them the right to censor certain broad categories of content in select mediums, but the government is always looking for ways to tighten that control, and so we have to be very careful to limit their power. A very bad precedent was set recently by giving the FCC limited power to censor the internet, a power that if we aren't careful they will certainly expand upon. As for that prompt slide "into a totalitiarian regime of oppressive dissent-stifling", totalitarian regimes do not happen over night, it's a gradual process of ever increasing government control. You also miss the point, in that censoring dissent
The danger of this one isn't so much this limited case. As you point out, the college is well within their right to do whatever they want to the students internet connections. However this is something to keep an eye on for the same reason people would be upset if the school started banning books from it's library. Freedom of speech, and related concepts such as freedom of information hold a special place in the minds of the American public, and much of our legal framework is based around preventing censorship of one kind or another. The worry here is that we have a slippery slope sort of situation, where the colleges start out censoring (or otherwise degrading as in this case) internet connections, and it spreads to the point where the government (either for their own reasons, or because they have lobbyist pushing them) pressures ISPs to take up similar systems. There's also the danger that once someone gets used to something that erodes their freedoms, even if legally and even morally proper, that they're less resistant to similar erosions in other situations where the legality or morality of said freedoms is more suspect. The real danger here is not that the college is doing this, but that it sets a dangerous precedent for all ISPs (as in this case the school is acting as a ISP for their students).
For such a trivial law, sure. We break the law for "convenience" every day, it's just that everyone knows that the laws are intentionally broad and laxly enforced specifically because they know people will break the laws but in most instances the offense doesn't justify prosecution. People speed all the time, even if only a little. Most people on average do 5 over the speed limit except when cops are visible. The cops don't care, they don't even bother to flash their lights even when they see the people because it's the ones blatantly flaunting the law, those that do 10 or 20 over the limit they're interested in stopping. People jaywalk all the time but no one really cares. People do stupid things that void warranties and then bring the items in for repair under warranty when they break. Underage drinking, and smoking not to mention marijuana use are rampant but most of the time nobody cares because most people don't consider it a crime. It doesn't have to be a life or death situation to justify the breaking of the law, it's a question of whether the law deserves respect or not. If the general public doesn't believe the law deserves to be followed it probably shouldn't be a law in the first place. Sadly things have reached the point in America and in much of the world where the government is not run by the people, it's run by corporations and the select wealthy (or in some cases key dynasties).
Of course this is also a tangent to the real issue at hand here, which is that in an effort to protect the interests of a select few incredibly wealthy individuals this school has enacted measures that grossly impinge on the rights and freedoms of their students. Like it or not, there are plenty of perfectly legitimate uses for P2P (honestly every use I've put it to in the last 2 years has been perfectly legitimate, mostly downloading game patches or distro ISOs), and infringing on a persons right to perform an activity on the even substantial risk that they'll violate a law smacks dangerously of guilty until proven innocent.
Ok, here's an example. I buy a song of iTunes say, I've now legally purchased a copy of the song. The song of course comes in a format that has DRM attached to it that limits what I can do with it, and in addition I'm further limited to further downloads of the same file to a handful of systems. I decide that I want to load the song onto my laptop (running linux) and take it with me (lets assume it was downloaded on a desktop Windows system). Legally, I must not purchase a new copy of the song in some other format, as the one it was provided in is protected by the DMCA from any changes I'd make to it to remove the DRM (which would be necessary to get it to play on anything not specifically "authorized" by iTunes, in this case my laptop). Under the letter of the law (although not the intent) if I were to take that song file (not sure the format iTunes uses, mp4?) and convert it into a drm-less mp3 or ogg file, I would be breaking copyright law. As another example, lets say I wanted to record tonights episode of something or other on a cable channel. So, I setup my DVR to record the episode and go out for a nice dinner with some friends. I come home and find out that the show didn't record because the network set the do not record flag. So, I fire up my favorite P2P client and download the show instead. Now this is sort of a legal grey area at this point. Yes it's illegal under the letter of the law, but it's questionable whether it violates the spirit of the law. The biggest controversy right now is over exactly how much right the copyright holder has to control what's done with their work after it's already been sold. This isn't even a question of resale, although that is another issue (how do you resell a DRMed song? The law says you have the right), rather it's a question of so called format-shifting, place-shifting, and time-shifting.
Well, it's really a question of different levels of copyright violation, not to mention the whole fair use issue. In and of itself I see no problem with copyright and on the whole respect it, but in cases where the copyright holder is trying to step over the line as it where (such as abusive DRM) I have absolutely no qualms with violating the letter of the law. You're post actually hints at something very interesting though, in that you mention that "theft" is actually a blanket term for a number of offenses with various levels of social stigma and legal repercussion. Just as stealing a pack of gum from a drug store is drastically different than armed robber, so to I feel violating a EULA is a far cry from selling bootleg copies of movies. This of course leads to the problem that although "theft" is actually covered by several laws with various legal ramifications, copyright infringement is covered by only one and has no, for lack of better term, balance in the repercussions of violating it. The fines that can be imposed for even trivial, perhaps in many cases justified violations of it are so huge as to be unjust in all but the most extreme of cases.
Actually, the reduction of visible light, or to view it another way, extra mass in other galaxies seems to impact on a great many things and can't be taken in isolation. Once we nail down a more exact figure for the mass of other galaxies, then we need to recalculate the standard candles which in turn shifts the distances between galaxies. There may also be other effects related to potential quantity, and thus mass of interstellar dust.
Dark Matter was postulated to account for a discrepancy between what we observed in one area, and what was observed in another as well as issues with various models and predictions. If it now turns out that some of those observations will have different discrepancies, or possibly that some of the models will need to be adjusted slightly, it could have all kinds of effects as to the expected amount of "dark matter" we're currently trying to observe.
First, we need to figure out what these observations mean, and what effects that have on established and well accepted theories and measurements. Once we've got that nailed down, then we can go on to see what this does to the less established theories like dark matter.
That is essentially what we're arguing about, although it's really a tangent to the original argument at this point. This started as a discussion on the morality of copyright infringement and got sidetracked into an argument of whether copyright infringement is semantically the same thing as theft in casual conversation. My argument is that in the context of the original discussion, that of the morality of copyright infringement, the difference between theft and copyright infringement is great enough that the two are not interchangeable even in informal discussion because of the potential for a large disparity in moral stigma attached to each of them. In essence, how can we debate the morality of copyright infringement when it keeps getting referred to as theft which has an entirely different and well established morality.
Now, had the conversation been about something else, say the costs of bandwidth with regard to P2P traffic, then using the term theft in place of copyright infringement might be acceptable, depending on usage and intended audience.
It's a question of trying to confuse the moral stigma of one act with the moral stigma of a completely different one. They're different issues and have different factors and considerations. The fact is they are not legally, morally, or semantically the same thing, and continually referring to copyright infringement as theft is the equivalent of always referring to a charge against someone of drunk and disorderly conduct as a DUI. You can argue that from a moral standpoint copyright infringement is equivalent to theft, but since that's the topic under debate you cannot take it as a foregone conclusion and treat it as such in discussion. The legality of the issues is of course a factor in any moral discussion, in as such as people in general consider the legality of an act when deciding on the morality of it, but it is certainly not the only factor, and adding legal ambiguity to the discussion by equating two different and distinct legal terms only serves to confuse not enlighten.
I imagine most of the CS department would bail. You'd be left with the two ends of the bell curve though. On the one side you'd have the ones so technically inept that the loss of a major chunk of the internet wouldn't even register on them. On the other end you'd have the ones who've already setup encrypted tunnels out of the schools network and are completely un-constrained by anything the school could possibly do short of physically cutting their network (or killing any encrypted traffic, but that would negate any secure web browsing). It's fairly simple to bounce a port through SSH running on 443, although it does eat up bandwidth on a server somewhere. You could also encrypt the P2P traffic without proxying the connection, but that's a good bit simpler to detect (unlike using a port 443 proxy where there's only 2 ways of detecting it, decrypt the stream, or fingerprint the remote server).
I don't think it's about proving anything, although that's clearly a side benefit, rather I think it's about nagging the crap out of the students to try to discourage all P2P usage. As in most things of this nature, it's a minor annoyance, just a speed-bump on the internet, and easily bypassed, but it will seriously discourage the technically inept. The university is probably also considering the savings they can theoretically get on bandwidth usage I imagine as well, although whether any such savings would be seen is highly debatable.
The main point is that someone who passes this test either knows that it's illegal to share copyrighted materials that they aren't licensed to share or they have gone through some effort to remain ignorant, which would lead one to believe that they know that they are doing is wrong and want to remain ignorant about the details. Wrong is a moral call and as such up to the individual. Illegal yes, wrong, not necessarily. This is also ignoring the fact that there are lots of perfectly legal uses for P2P.
When you appropriate that work without their permission, they no longer have the privilege granted to them by law. You are, in fact, taking something away from them. Which is of course an illegal act with a specific name of copyright infringement. It is not stealing as that applies to physical goods. Depriving a person of a right is not stealing that right from them as by definition it's impossible to "steal" a right. Normally I wouldn't argue semantics, but in this case it's a valid point because of the extreme social stigma attached to theft. I don't think anyone is arguing over the legality of copyright infringement (or stealing for that matter), what's under question however is the morality of it. Even more to the point, is the question of whether all copyright infringement is immoral, or only some, or only in certain quantities. Would downloading a copy of last weeks sitcoms because you were busy and missed seeing them carry the same weight as downloading a couple CDs because you want to listen to them? What about downloading an artists entire library? Is it less moral to download an independent artist CDs versus those of a major record label?
He can't seem to fathom the concept of people developing software because they enjoy it rather than because they want money in return. That's because he's never done software because he enjoyed it. In fact, I'd say he was never really a programmer. He's always been a business guy that just happened to have an interest in computers. Gates isn't a geek, he's a suit, and we would do well to remember that. He's less concerned with the programs than he is in how they can be leveraged for profit. Had he developed an interest in something besides computers, like say construction, he might not be as successful as he is now, but I'm sure he'd still have done quite well, he'd just be sitting at the top of a company specializing in construction instead.
Comparing the brain to a computer is a rather poor analogy, because the brain doesn't have software, rather it modifies its own state. In this way, it's less like a turing machine, and closer to a von neuman machine. If you must compare it to a computer, a better comparison would be an FPGA, but that's not even a very good comparison. The neurons that make up the brain are the physical medium it operates on, but the arrangement and inter-connections between those neurons, further modified by various chemicals are what determines its state, and thus the outputs to any given inputs. In many ways the brain integrates three different systems in order to function. The electrical of synapse responses, the chemical of neuro-transmitters, and the physical of axon and ganglion arrangements. Of these all three can be modified, either directly, or by modifying the other two, and it's demonstrable that these modifications then produce changes in perception of inputs, and on outputs as well. The system is really very easy to explain without having to force the concept of software into the whole thing. As for your tangent on material versus immaterial products, that's a complete and total red-herring and I'm not going to bother with it.
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Public Key Infrastructure, it's not just for the internet anymore!
Good reflexes not withstanding that's at least 86 tigers that the rock failed to keep away. And that's just the known ones.
The issue is that he became a victim of identity theft quite a while ago, and not just once but many times. He advertises that his company will protect you from identity theft, but it quite clearly doesn't. Because he himself was a victim, but he continued to advertise that he was being protected, he obviously knew his service didn't work, so promoting it as such is false advertising. There's also the issue that the company apparently is making claims about the services it provides that it doesn't actually provide.
You need to go to the credit reporting agencies directly not through intermediaries. Since there are three major agencies you'd have to contact them separately and sign up for each of their credit protection plans. This shouldn't be confused with the "credit protection plan" that the credit card companies are always trying to shove down your throat, or similar services for other companies, as the former is really a form of insurance in case you become unemployed or otherwise unable to pay off your card for a time, and the later are just companies that are trying to make money by offering a centralized more "convenient" way to sign up for the free fraud reporting offered by the credit agencies (for a monthly fee naturally).
1) I think it's more of a combination of outrage that gradually fades into apathy at the state of the credit industry. I'm sure everyone here can agree the credit system is in shambles and needs to be fixed, but exactly how to go about doing that, and who needs to be contacted to get the ball rolling is the problem.
2) It's that clever marketing bit that seems to be the issue here, as one mans clever marketing is another mans fraud. As for the "It sucks to be you.", it's everyone laughing at the guy getting bit by his own scam. In essence everyone knows he's selling snake oil, so it's ironic when he himself is proof that it doesn't work, and as we all know, irony is funny.
And you can go to court and prove you're not responsible, but the monetary damages aren't the real problem. The problem arises because of the centralized credit agencies that score your "risk" for various banks and lenders. It doesn't matter if you never have to pay the money if your credit score is so abysmal you can no longer take out a loan for a new car or house. Not to mention there's the legal fees of proving you didn't do it even if it's fairly trivial to do.
I hear it on XM radio all the time.
Todd Davis apparently.
It says it prevents identity theft, not that it prevents people from obtaining loans in your name. The articles all mention that a lot of people (at least 20, but possible many more) have obtained drivers licenses using his SSN, and many more attempted to but were unsuccessful. Further there service won't protect you from someone using your identity to obtain a job, or several other types of identity theft that don't directly impact your credit report. There's also the fact that they're charging for a service that the credit companies offer for free. It's perfectly possible to request fraud alerts directly from the credit companies but most people don't realize they have that option so this company is really making money off peoples ignorance.
There's a difference between not carrying something because you can't afford it, or there's insufficient storage space, and banning it. In the first instance it's possible someone could make a special request, or do a inter-library loan in order to obtain the material they want, where as in the later the school would refuse even if the material was available in another public library. I'm quite sure that somewhere a library has a complete collection of hustler (or the library system taken as a whole does), and if you really wanted to you could fill out requests and have them sent to your local college library. You might have to pay a fee (although I don't believe so), but it's perfectly possible (and importantly the fee is irregardless of the material in question).
When was the last time you saw explicit sex acts broadcast during prime time on network television? There's plenty of censorship going on all the time, especially from the government.
I'm glad you brought that up, as it's an excellent example of my point. Most people seem to have forgotten that the rules that limit what can and cannot be broadcast on public television are (mostly, more on that shortly) just that, rules, not laws. That's because the companies responsible for entertainment in our country (be it television, movies, radio, or games) all realized long ago that it's best to keep the government out of everything they possibly can, and so agreed to form organizations to monitor and control themselves. Now, they failed slightly in their mission because the FCC still has control over radio broadcast content which covers radio and the few broadcast television stations, but outside of that they've been largely successful. As for explicit sex acts, there's nothing wrong with showing them during prime time television (outside the stations controlled by FCC), except for any agreements the broadcasters might have made with their respective organizations. Likewise the movie industry is self-regulating via the MPAA. Anyone is of course free to make a movie with anything they like in it, but it won't get the MPAA seal of approval, and thus won't in all likelihood be shown in most movie theaters. Whether that's good or not depends on your view of censorship, I tend to view it as a bad thing myself, but even then I have the option of going straight to the manufacturer and ordering a copy of the movie for myself. Even if a movie theater decided to show something not approved by the MPAA, outside of any contractual obligations to the MPAA they'd be perfectly within their legal rights to do so.
The government very rarely performs any sort of censorship, and when it does it's always forced to walk a very fine line. We have somewhat stupidly given them the right to censor certain broad categories of content in select mediums, but the government is always looking for ways to tighten that control, and so we have to be very careful to limit their power. A very bad precedent was set recently by giving the FCC limited power to censor the internet, a power that if we aren't careful they will certainly expand upon. As for that prompt slide "into a totalitiarian regime of oppressive dissent-stifling", totalitarian regimes do not happen over night, it's a gradual process of ever increasing government control. You also miss the point, in that censoring dissent
The danger of this one isn't so much this limited case. As you point out, the college is well within their right to do whatever they want to the students internet connections. However this is something to keep an eye on for the same reason people would be upset if the school started banning books from it's library. Freedom of speech, and related concepts such as freedom of information hold a special place in the minds of the American public, and much of our legal framework is based around preventing censorship of one kind or another. The worry here is that we have a slippery slope sort of situation, where the colleges start out censoring (or otherwise degrading as in this case) internet connections, and it spreads to the point where the government (either for their own reasons, or because they have lobbyist pushing them) pressures ISPs to take up similar systems. There's also the danger that once someone gets used to something that erodes their freedoms, even if legally and even morally proper, that they're less resistant to similar erosions in other situations where the legality or morality of said freedoms is more suspect. The real danger here is not that the college is doing this, but that it sets a dangerous precedent for all ISPs (as in this case the school is acting as a ISP for their students).
For such a trivial law, sure. We break the law for "convenience" every day, it's just that everyone knows that the laws are intentionally broad and laxly enforced specifically because they know people will break the laws but in most instances the offense doesn't justify prosecution. People speed all the time, even if only a little. Most people on average do 5 over the speed limit except when cops are visible. The cops don't care, they don't even bother to flash their lights even when they see the people because it's the ones blatantly flaunting the law, those that do 10 or 20 over the limit they're interested in stopping. People jaywalk all the time but no one really cares. People do stupid things that void warranties and then bring the items in for repair under warranty when they break. Underage drinking, and smoking not to mention marijuana use are rampant but most of the time nobody cares because most people don't consider it a crime. It doesn't have to be a life or death situation to justify the breaking of the law, it's a question of whether the law deserves respect or not. If the general public doesn't believe the law deserves to be followed it probably shouldn't be a law in the first place. Sadly things have reached the point in America and in much of the world where the government is not run by the people, it's run by corporations and the select wealthy (or in some cases key dynasties).
Of course this is also a tangent to the real issue at hand here, which is that in an effort to protect the interests of a select few incredibly wealthy individuals this school has enacted measures that grossly impinge on the rights and freedoms of their students. Like it or not, there are plenty of perfectly legitimate uses for P2P (honestly every use I've put it to in the last 2 years has been perfectly legitimate, mostly downloading game patches or distro ISOs), and infringing on a persons right to perform an activity on the even substantial risk that they'll violate a law smacks dangerously of guilty until proven innocent.
Ok, here's an example. I buy a song of iTunes say, I've now legally purchased a copy of the song. The song of course comes in a format that has DRM attached to it that limits what I can do with it, and in addition I'm further limited to further downloads of the same file to a handful of systems. I decide that I want to load the song onto my laptop (running linux) and take it with me (lets assume it was downloaded on a desktop Windows system). Legally, I must not purchase a new copy of the song in some other format, as the one it was provided in is protected by the DMCA from any changes I'd make to it to remove the DRM (which would be necessary to get it to play on anything not specifically "authorized" by iTunes, in this case my laptop). Under the letter of the law (although not the intent) if I were to take that song file (not sure the format iTunes uses, mp4?) and convert it into a drm-less mp3 or ogg file, I would be breaking copyright law. As another example, lets say I wanted to record tonights episode of something or other on a cable channel. So, I setup my DVR to record the episode and go out for a nice dinner with some friends. I come home and find out that the show didn't record because the network set the do not record flag. So, I fire up my favorite P2P client and download the show instead. Now this is sort of a legal grey area at this point. Yes it's illegal under the letter of the law, but it's questionable whether it violates the spirit of the law. The biggest controversy right now is over exactly how much right the copyright holder has to control what's done with their work after it's already been sold. This isn't even a question of resale, although that is another issue (how do you resell a DRMed song? The law says you have the right), rather it's a question of so called format-shifting, place-shifting, and time-shifting.
Well, it's really a question of different levels of copyright violation, not to mention the whole fair use issue. In and of itself I see no problem with copyright and on the whole respect it, but in cases where the copyright holder is trying to step over the line as it where (such as abusive DRM) I have absolutely no qualms with violating the letter of the law. You're post actually hints at something very interesting though, in that you mention that "theft" is actually a blanket term for a number of offenses with various levels of social stigma and legal repercussion. Just as stealing a pack of gum from a drug store is drastically different than armed robber, so to I feel violating a EULA is a far cry from selling bootleg copies of movies. This of course leads to the problem that although "theft" is actually covered by several laws with various legal ramifications, copyright infringement is covered by only one and has no, for lack of better term, balance in the repercussions of violating it. The fines that can be imposed for even trivial, perhaps in many cases justified violations of it are so huge as to be unjust in all but the most extreme of cases.
Actually, the reduction of visible light, or to view it another way, extra mass in other galaxies seems to impact on a great many things and can't be taken in isolation. Once we nail down a more exact figure for the mass of other galaxies, then we need to recalculate the standard candles which in turn shifts the distances between galaxies. There may also be other effects related to potential quantity, and thus mass of interstellar dust.
Dark Matter was postulated to account for a discrepancy between what we observed in one area, and what was observed in another as well as issues with various models and predictions. If it now turns out that some of those observations will have different discrepancies, or possibly that some of the models will need to be adjusted slightly, it could have all kinds of effects as to the expected amount of "dark matter" we're currently trying to observe.
First, we need to figure out what these observations mean, and what effects that have on established and well accepted theories and measurements. Once we've got that nailed down, then we can go on to see what this does to the less established theories like dark matter.
That is essentially what we're arguing about, although it's really a tangent to the original argument at this point. This started as a discussion on the morality of copyright infringement and got sidetracked into an argument of whether copyright infringement is semantically the same thing as theft in casual conversation. My argument is that in the context of the original discussion, that of the morality of copyright infringement, the difference between theft and copyright infringement is great enough that the two are not interchangeable even in informal discussion because of the potential for a large disparity in moral stigma attached to each of them. In essence, how can we debate the morality of copyright infringement when it keeps getting referred to as theft which has an entirely different and well established morality.
Now, had the conversation been about something else, say the costs of bandwidth with regard to P2P traffic, then using the term theft in place of copyright infringement might be acceptable, depending on usage and intended audience.
It's a question of trying to confuse the moral stigma of one act with the moral stigma of a completely different one. They're different issues and have different factors and considerations. The fact is they are not legally, morally, or semantically the same thing, and continually referring to copyright infringement as theft is the equivalent of always referring to a charge against someone of drunk and disorderly conduct as a DUI. You can argue that from a moral standpoint copyright infringement is equivalent to theft, but since that's the topic under debate you cannot take it as a foregone conclusion and treat it as such in discussion. The legality of the issues is of course a factor in any moral discussion, in as such as people in general consider the legality of an act when deciding on the morality of it, but it is certainly not the only factor, and adding legal ambiguity to the discussion by equating two different and distinct legal terms only serves to confuse not enlighten.
I imagine most of the CS department would bail. You'd be left with the two ends of the bell curve though. On the one side you'd have the ones so technically inept that the loss of a major chunk of the internet wouldn't even register on them. On the other end you'd have the ones who've already setup encrypted tunnels out of the schools network and are completely un-constrained by anything the school could possibly do short of physically cutting their network (or killing any encrypted traffic, but that would negate any secure web browsing). It's fairly simple to bounce a port through SSH running on 443, although it does eat up bandwidth on a server somewhere. You could also encrypt the P2P traffic without proxying the connection, but that's a good bit simpler to detect (unlike using a port 443 proxy where there's only 2 ways of detecting it, decrypt the stream, or fingerprint the remote server).
I don't think it's about proving anything, although that's clearly a side benefit, rather I think it's about nagging the crap out of the students to try to discourage all P2P usage. As in most things of this nature, it's a minor annoyance, just a speed-bump on the internet, and easily bypassed, but it will seriously discourage the technically inept. The university is probably also considering the savings they can theoretically get on bandwidth usage I imagine as well, although whether any such savings would be seen is highly debatable.
Damn lawful alignment. This is why we have a house rule of no paladins.
Comparing the brain to a computer is a rather poor analogy, because the brain doesn't have software, rather it modifies its own state. In this way, it's less like a turing machine, and closer to a von neuman machine. If you must compare it to a computer, a better comparison would be an FPGA, but that's not even a very good comparison. The neurons that make up the brain are the physical medium it operates on, but the arrangement and inter-connections between those neurons, further modified by various chemicals are what determines its state, and thus the outputs to any given inputs. In many ways the brain integrates three different systems in order to function. The electrical of synapse responses, the chemical of neuro-transmitters, and the physical of axon and ganglion arrangements. Of these all three can be modified, either directly, or by modifying the other two, and it's demonstrable that these modifications then produce changes in perception of inputs, and on outputs as well. The system is really very easy to explain without having to force the concept of software into the whole thing. As for your tangent on material versus immaterial products, that's a complete and total red-herring and I'm not going to bother with it.