skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've seen citations that the common law requires the property to be "tangible" for theft or larceny to have occurred. In the legal, British definition, however, this is not required.

Calling piracy "theft" doesn't require considering whether piracy results in lost sales. Instead, does piracy involve dishonest appropriation of someone else's property (virtual or otherwise)? Yes, usually. But, importantly, does piracy involve permanently depriving that person of that same property? If merely taking a photo, recording sound, or copying some files, clearly not.

To me it seems that if theft were legally defined as merely the dishonest appropriation of someone else's property without their consent, piracy is theft. If as is typical, though, theft requires depriving the owner of that same property, piracy is clearly not theft.

I'm no lawyer, so what's the legal definition of theft in the US? In the UK, "permanent deprivation" is required and so piracy is certainly not "theft."
I'd imagine anyone who wanted to start a business doing this would rent the building and then sublet to the co-workers.

Make a lot more money that way!
I would like to see something like a Netflix or Hulu for music. Something where you have unlimited access to all the music you want to listen to, but musicians are fairly compensated for their work. The Internet has made the information cost of music distribution vanishingly small, but there's no way for producers or consumers to take advantage of this.

Actually, now that I think about it, there were once services like this... anyone know what happened to them? The closest thing I can think of is Pandora, but having to be at the mercy of the site's RNG only suits certain listening patterns.
Your use of Silverlight makes me question that assertion :-)
Calling it a Hobby is a great entry point, as in removing the threat from the usurper on the most cherished media device in the typical american home - the TV, the size of the thing? you don't even need to reorganize your setup. just plop it there.

They are positioning themselves better then say Microsoft is, simply by referring to it as TV something, which is familiar to most people and isn't regarded as a niche market.

Consider the Xbox360, it has a relativity competitive price, all the features the Apple TV has plus, and superior implementation of others (codec support for one), and I am not even mentioning the fact that you can play games on it. (and the networks currently supported on Xbox can be seen here - http://social.zune.net/tv)

The Xbox however, is marketed as a game console, not as a Netflix, Music Video streaming/renting/buying device, that leaves it in a corner that apple is currently free to dominate using their considerable marketing clout.

The form factor and name are unassuming and non threatening, it passes clear below geek radar, but grabs the imagination of the public, in this case even without any clear technical innovation.
That is just about the most brilliant thing I've seen all week!
You will see this from a lot of politicians...drives me batty, but I see why they do it.
In UK the income tax for high-rate earners (anyone earning about $70k) is 40%. As in, that's what is reflected in your pay check.

Then you add on council tax (equiv of state tax although it's calculated based on value of house), VAT (sales tax, 17.5% moving to 20% next year), property tax (only at sale and if you own more than one), and all the sin taxes (cigarettes and gas is WAY higher cos it's mostly tax).

I like living in California and America... the taxes are so low here!

(caveat: yes we get health care paid for in UK which I have to pay for here)
You may be on a machine that doesn't have screen installed and it may be quicker to use job control then install it. There is something to be said for travelling light.
I don't think it's necessary to disagree with a certain amount of someone's work- it's more important to be able to explain exactly why you agree with or don't agree with someone. This is what really prevents you from being the proverbial sheep.
I think the big thing people are missing in Apple's strategy with this is the streaming from iOS to AppleTV. Steve demoed the feature in such a way that it got very little attention - but I think that was intentional because the feature isn't coming until iOS 4.2 and Apple doesn't ordinarily like to show off features that are so distant, but since iOS 4.2 was already mentioned, they decided to show it yesterday.

I think that feature is the disruptive angle to the AppleTV and that's the reason I bought one. Here's why:

All Apple has to do is add a single Boolean switch to the built in video player: allowsAirPlay. If they do this, then with a single line of code, any app developer can make an app that allows their content to be streamed to an AppleTV. Your iDevice becomes the worlds most powerful remote control almost instantly. Developers (studios, individual shows, whatever) just need to create apps for iOS which authenticate or manage the subscription to their content, and the customers can tap a single button to see it on their big screen. You gain all the advantages of apps on the AppleTV itself without actually needing them to be installed there!

Suddenly the App Store becomes a cable TV network. The added benefit is - you don't need to have an AppleTV to enjoy the benefits! Plug your iPad into your TV using that adapter cable, and you could still enjoy the same content. Or take it with you when you travel - your TV channels are all there. And when you're at home, just tap the AirPlay button to see it on the big screen.

That's the disruption I'm hoping for and Apple has every single piece in place now to do this.
What if its a company with over 4 years, some sucesses but now into bankrupcy?
It depends on what you do, I suppose. If your work doesn't have a large command-line component, using the command line might be disruptive.

A large part of my job involves working with remote Linux servers, so I chose to invest time learning Linux command line tools and vim. Now I'm more productive in a terminal than in a GUI environment. I use common tools that are installed by default on Linux/Unix/OSX, so I can sit down anywhere and do my work, or SSH directly into my machine and have my exact work environment securely and without latency.
It depends on the jurisdiction but other crimes are defined as taking place in such a system, such as trespass, gaining unauthorized access to a computer system, copyright infringement, and invasion of privacy.

These things can be considered, in some cases, to be even more severe than theft. "Theft" is a highly charged word even though copying source code from a nuclear missile silo would be punished more severely than the theft of a chocolate bar from a 7 Eleven.
Just so you know where I'm coming from: I actually think what you'd doing is a form of theft. I don't think the word is inappropriate. You are free to disagree. I think many objections to the word "theft" in this context are reasonable, even I don't agree with them.

But I am genuinely amused that people expect political correctness from people whose livelihoods they are probably disrupting unlawfully. (I chose my words carefully there).

It is especially interesting to hear this from a Cocoa developer, by the way, considering the rate at which Cocoa apps are pirated. (I'm not calling you a hypocrite; no, quite the opposite. "Suicidal" might be a better epithet here.)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ec...
A cyber-house divided
Two days ago, almost all HNers agreed with Rackspace's decision to shut down PandaForm's website because of some user-generated content that seemed like phishing.Almost everyone (including me) was critical of PandaForm

So I find it interesting that all current comments on this thread are critical of CNN. A journalist's job is to ask tough questions. I haven't seen anyone refute the fact that a huge amount of sex trafficking (of minors and adults) hapens through Craig's List.

In the post, Craig talks about his "support for our troops and veterans" and his support for "Net neutrality". That support is great, but it is irrelevant when it comes to the question of sex trafficking of minor girls.

So why should journalists not ask tough questions of the founder of Craig's List ?
If supporting "piracy-centric formats" were a turn-off to content providers, wouldn't the same thing have happened with the iPod, which support everyone's favorite piracy format, the mp3? Granted, the tv and movie studios are in a much stronger negotiating position than the record labels, but I don't think that would be a sticking point for them. I'd guess that Apple is pushing a single format for the same reason they do with their mobile devices - hardware decoding.
Thanks for the response and for the PusherApp lead. I'm going to try it out myself.
Didn't stop Microsoft from including DivX support on xbox360, and they have a wider range of content providers. At issue here is the legitimacy of Apple as content provider, not others.
the animation shows the last 36 images, which should amount to a few hours.
He has recently gotten a lot of heat for some of his recent comments. But calling him a snake oil salesman hardly seems fitting, as he has heavily contributed to the AI field (in OCR, pattern recognition, and speech recognition if I recall correctly). Sure, the guy is a whack job (the stuff about medicine comes to mind), but he's one smart whack job.
Sure, but given that I already use screen, what use cases would I find easier using job control instead of plain screen?
I don't really go for new release type movie generally, so I call shenanigans.

I was a heavy user who got movies sometimes the day after I returned the last one, which was great. Then I started getting them 3, 4, 5 days later.

They blamed USPS, even though no other mail to or from me was slow at all, so I started tracking the returned movies. They uniformly were delivered back to the warehouse just as quickly as before, but remained (via the netflix interface) unreturned for several days after that.

Normally I'd chalk that up to simple incompetence: they just weren't processing the movies very fast and/or their backend system was a piece of shit. I could buy that.

But I'd seen just how efficient they could be when they _wanted_ to be, ie before I passed the "heavy user" threshold, so I knew they were doing it deliberately.

I get the logic, I'm a heavy user, they can only send so many movies before I'm not profitable. But like I said before: don't lie to me about it.

I would've paid extra for a premium "heavy user" account if they had offered me the option, but instead they pretended USPS was magically slow JUST for netflix movies, and they permanently lost a customer.

Their loss.
Do you hold the same opinion when it comes to software? And by software I mean code you've spent months laboring over that you perhaps hope to make some sort of living off of.
Really cool name, logo, and concept.
So you're saying that the founders should be wary that VC's aren't as risk-averse in this sense?
There are two large categories of apps that don't have the same degree of raison d'etre on the iPad. You've hit on one, which is that having a larger browser and a faster processor makes having a "native interface for a web app"-type app less important. There is no Facebook desktop app to the best of my knowledge (one made by Facebook, anyway).

The other category of apps that don't make sense on the iPad are the "small utility that you always want to have in your pocket" apps. The iPad isn't small, and you don't carry it everywhere the way that you do an iPhone or iPod Touch. Two examples that look a little ridiculous when scaled up to iPad size are a compass and a calculator.

The situation isn't likely to get much better until a big chunk of laptop users start adopting iPads as their primary portables. At that point I could see a lot of web apps start to make native-code interfaces.

In fact it might get worse once iPhone-4-optimized apps can be run full screen on the iPad complete with non-pixellated graphics and text.

So that leaves productivity apps, games, and a few miscellaneous categories.
You can also use :!command to execute a command from within vim. This is handy to execute :!make for instance.
I'm pretty much resigned to buying a Mac mini (current with HDMI), Drobo, and ipod/iphone dock. It does everything the Apple TV does and can also serve as a central media station / sync box for the iOS devices. Plus, I can get all my media off my dev machine and goto flash drives. I can then use my old Apple TV with a second tv.
Once the company is considered a loss they want to get as much of their money back as quickly as possible. What else would you expect from them?
Google: "einstein avogadro" gives me http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Avogadro%27s_number as the first result, it's quite good, certainly more than sufficient as a starting point.

Note that sub- and super-scripts have not copy-pasted properly.

>Einstein wrote in his 1905 Ph.D. thesis about the size of molecules and the closely related problem of the magnitude of NA. He derived equations for diffusion coefficients and viscosities in which Avogadro's number appears. From experimental values of the diffusion coefficients and viscosities of sugar solutions in water Einstein gave the estimate NA = 2.1×1023. In a later paper derived from his doctorate work[6] he gave a better estimate from improved experimental data: NA = 4.15×1023, close to Maxwell's value of 1873. Later (1911) it was discovered that Einstein made an algebraic error in his thesis[7] and in the paper based on it. When this was corrected the very same experimental data gave NA = 6.6×1023.

Prior to that Perrin's better estimate was 6.2E23
God, Hawking and the Universe
You know, if it were theft, I think the cases would be tried as cases of theft. I love a semantic argument as much as the next guy, but I find I'm most successful in those arguments when I avidly defer to time-proven definitions. And when those definitions have been so thoroughly debated that they have been intrenched in law almost universally consistent across multiple nations and languages, I really defer to those.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Comparis...

I hope you take the opportunity at some point in your life to revisit your opinion on this issue.
The actual link is pointed to from the submitted article, and was already posted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1656044

The same subject was covered here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647759

and here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1256516 <- Although dead, the existing discussion is interesting
If you're someone who makes copyable content for profit, it's best to think of purchase rate instead of piracy rate. You make as much money from someone who pirates your Cocoa app as from someone who uses Linux. But the Linux users aren't "stealing" your revenue.

Anyway, I wrote a book. It ended up on Scribd, Google Books, and the Pirate Bay. I still made plenty of money. Could I have made more? Maybe, maybe not. I certainly don't know what percentage of the pirates would have bought it had it not been available on TPB. My estimate is zero, which means piracy cost me nothing.

Piracy, in my opinion, is just a scapegoat for "nobody wants my crap anymore". Yeah, piracy happens. But even in the absence of piracy, it's possible that nobody wanted to pay $50 for a season of a TV show anyway.
http://www.blurrypeople.com
This is what's great about the Internet: Obama's opinion on how people use it doesn't matter.

"Piracy is bad."

OK, good luck shutting down that warez server in North Korea.
For the record, the use of the word "pirate" as "one who takes another's work without permission" dates back to the 1700s, when Daniel Defoe wrote of one of his novels: "Its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates"... hardly newspeak.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pirate
Did the Manhattan Transfer Use Auto-Tune?
So his thought out response after the fact was to say the reporter was playing "gotcha"? What a cheap answer.

How about coming out and saying you weren't the right one to speak with BUT you did the research and here are the answers to all of your questions. He can't do that because the underlying report was right in many ways. Crying foul because you're a geek does not resolve the issues in the report.

Im a geek and have trouble with questions in public sometimes too but if you want to follow up because you were caught on the spot then do so with specific answers to the questions answered. Instead we see him crying and giving the same old canned answers.
Appreciate the point in the first sentence; that's just what I was looking for :-) But..

Not knowing the order of the alphabet is like not knowing the order of the numbers 0-9.

This is where I'm unsure. In relation to literacy, is not knowing the order of the alphabet as severe as not knowing the order of digits in numeracy?

It's hard to imagine not knowing the order of the alphabet, but I don't think it would impede most of my day to day speaking and reading, whereas not remembering the order of 0-9 would basically render my numeracy skills useless since digits are inherently ordinal whereas the order of the alphabet could be entirely different and still work (if we all agreed on the new order).
Unfortunately, that still leaves us with the trouble of getting the content providers on board. I would love it if I could use, for instance, a Hulu app on my tv. I'd even put up with having to use both an iPad and an Apple TV to do it, if the interface were slick enough. But that won't happen, because even if AirPlay provides that functionality, Hulu won't enable it. They'll block it just like they blocked Boxee. I don't blame the Hulu guys for this, since I'm fairly confident that they are forced to take these stances by the content providers, but it's an unavoidable fact of the situation.
What if a product that costed us to develop was over $100,000, and I am getting an offer to buy it for $1,000?
And we have many products like this example (close to 20)

Is it normal they will literally force you to sell it for pennies on the dollar? I understand that it was their money, how would you handle it? Just sell it and move over to the next thing?
There's a line between "tough questions" and "stupid questions." The reporter was pretty clearly asking the latter.

Something like "wouldn't it be possible for you to filter ads based on keywords that suggest illegal activities," or "couldn't you use the same techniques that other companies use to block spam to block illegal content" would have been tough questions. But she didn't ask any of them; instead, she asked a facile 'gotcha' question about a particular post, in an obvious attempt to get him to say something embarrassing.

It was a cheap, pandering bit of entertainment TV; if that's what 'journalism' has been reduced to, we ought to wish it a speedy death.
I always wondered how his views on copyrights jived with his plagiarism.
I know I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion by saying this, but the only reason we're upset by this is because we "know and love" Craig Newmark. If CNN did the exact same thing to a BP exec and got the same kind of answers, would anyone be criticizing them? Or would we be too busy falling all over ourselves pointing out what an asshole the executive was? (No, I'm not calling Newmark an asshole)

This was hardly "gotcha" journalism. If Craigslist says they report these kinds of ads but the relevant authorities say they never receive those reports, that's an actual problem, and CNN has every right to report it, and to question the folks in charge. Newmark's trying to say "Aww, shucks, I just do customer service these days", but the reality is it is his site, he is on the board, and if women and minors are getting hurt because CL fails to adequately police the adult ads it charges money for, then Newmark deserves to sweat over it as much as anyone.

I generally love Craigslist, and I generally hate CNN, but sorry, the shoes are on the other feet for this one.
Hacking commercial quantum cryptography systems by tailored bright illumination
I think you've described Spotify.
What is the true street value of Marijuana?
There's more to the game theory aspect, actually.

Since note holders get a better share with a lower valuation, it could cause collusion with the VCs...
Actually in that case, just :make will suffice.
Optimize your WordPress Site with W3 Total Cache on Rackspace Cloud Files
I think the recently added talks let you browse through various talks without having any topic in mind.
No, he's saying the VCs are much less risk-averse.
This is a project my friend and I launched to answer some curiosities we have about the real street value of marijuana. I got the idea after watching a National Geographic documentary on Marijuana where they gave some interesting but not totally believable figures about the price of marijuana as it travels across borders, facing different economic/legal statuses from state to state.

I realized nobody really knows the price or street value, as the flow of information is nearly none due to its black market status.
There is a delay for the button to "shift" up AND glow. That's two steps and most buttons have only a single visual feedback, so it feels like it's laggy due to this extra step. I agree that it's a bit too much.
It's still not theft -- i.e. taking something from. It's explicitly a lack of compensation, which is still not "taking something from" -- though there are laws which require compensation for services provided, they vary hugely across the world, and can get people in trouble when they apply their local knowledge in other jurisdictions. Several countries don't apply copyright/patent/IP or even contract law(s) in anything remotely like a USA style (for want of a better sterotype).

"Depriving" is a somewhat loaded term that implies a "take" behaviour to you, but it's just not strictly true.
Of course you're right and that is exactly how I feel. The problem is that it's uncomfortable for me to agree so much with someone. It's very rare as well. Even with people whose opinion's I respect as highly as PG's there tends to be a lot to disagree with.
am i the only one that was expecting something to do with the trapped chilean miners?
The future of the camera is - the computer
There's already a Hulu app for iOS. The only reason they'd have for blocking AirPlay would be if the content providers got bitchy about it - but the thing about AppleTV is that it's all streaming. This makes it, conceptually, no different than streaming the content to a browser or to the Hulu app itself like they already do. The AppleTV is a closed box with no apps, so Apple can claim to the networks that it's very secure, etc. The content providers might be more open to that idea since the data itself is always transient (streamed from the net to the app, from the app to the TV - nothing is ever stored which is what the providers are deathly afraid of).

The other angle here is that this could eliminate the need for Hulu entirely. Smart networks could make their own apps that follow their own desired content rules (letting you see live, non-live, only the last X days, whatever they want). And they can stream the content to the app in whatever manner of subscription they choose. And indie production companies could skip networks entirely and go straight to the App Store - just like indie musicians and podcasters are already doing.
Big in Japan Releases Standalone QR Code Reader for iPhone
So basically your argument is that when people like something, even if it's trivial for them to pirate it, they'll pay.

Yeah, I respectfully call bullshit on that.
More pay for Sr Engineers vs Amazon,many others (tech recruiter whose pulled people from both:) )