statistics can be so misleading. What does it mean, even adjusted for income people with guns were still happier? Is it relative income or absolute income? If the average gun owner making $20,000 a year in Arkansas is happier than the average person making $20,000 a year in New York City that doesn't own a gun, and this is true for all incomes, can I say that even adjusted for income gun owners are happier?

If so, it seems like the fact that more gun owners live in rural settings where the cost of living is lower would skew the results because the adjustment for income would be incomplete.

To really have any experimental worth they would have take the guns away from people that have them and give them to people that don't have them and see how it affected the average happiness. Anything less is worthless given how many factors are at work here.

Finally, (and most importantly) it may well be that those of us that don't own guns suffer decreased happiness because of the fact that other people do own them. In other words, my happiness may be low because I'm terrified of all the people that do have them. In fact, people that do own guns might be less happy due to fear of other people with guns, but simply be less affected because they also have a gun. Perhaps the average percentage of very happy people in a world with no private gun ownership is 40% for both former gun owners and non-owners.

Trying to draw conclusions from a survey like this is worthless.

seriously, I know it's been said, but I'll repeat how ridiculous it is to assume a true fan will pay $100 a year. Let's say you're a musician, you put out one album at most a year, direct download so you get all the money, and maybe a true fan goes to see you twice a year. By the time the venue takes it's cut tickets probably have to be around 60 bucks each to have that add up to $100. That would be at least double what a typical mildly popular musician usually charges, so only true fans will come, and the venue probably won't be thrilled with you only filling the place 1/3 full or less since they won't get drink orders, so they probably won't let you sell for so high. So for music it's highly unlikely someone can spend $100.

For an author, I think we all agree it's near impossible for an author to get someone to pay $100, unless your name is J.K. Rowling. If you're an artist, you could probably try selling prints for $100 each. But getting 1000 true fans in the art world is no small task. So congratulations, they've found a way for NIN and Radiohead and Michael Crichton to make money, as if they needed suggestions.

what an awful title. use the death of a baby to promote whatever pet issue you want, but you don't have to be so sarcastic about it.

I agree with #9, I saw this last night and thought he came off very poorly. Stephen would ask him about what it meant to cure aging, and he would say well we're talking about people not getting decrepit anymore. Great, but maybe next time you could mention what you're doing other than talking about it. There was no mention of what research was being done, no mention of any type of success that had made him think that this was possible, nothing. It came off exactly like his interview with the BBC a few years ago; he started a group that wants to cure aging, and that's it. He should really consider holding off on the interviews until the group has produced something, because until then there's nothing that distinguishes him from Ponce de Leon or anyone else. I can see it now: "Well Stephen, we're talking about finding a fountain near Florida that stops aging".

and i'm sure researchers at one of the best schools in the country forgot all about frequency when theorizing about this material...

also, as you can see from your quote it says ". . . the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . for ... news reporting, . . . is not an infringement of copyright." which is obviously different from if it said "the use of a copyrighted work for news reporting is not an infringement of copyright. Note particularly that it still says it has to be fair use, not that any use for news reporting is fair. As I read 17 USC 107, it says there can only be fair use if it's for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research". If it's for one of those reasons then whether or not the actual use of it for that reason was fair depends on four factors. Gawker is a commercial site so it fails the first one, it included the entire work, so it fails the third one, and obviously the Church of Scientology can't sell it since it's now available for free, so it fails the fourth one. So at best they could win number 2, but I don't see how that would outweigh the other factors.

I think your distinction is artificial. Jay-z says some crazy stuff on his albums. He talks about killing people in half his songs. In this video Tom Cruise is shown talking over music. (Copyrighted music actually, and just because the scientologists may have broken that copyright doesn't mean Gawker can, but that's another issue) I guarantee I could find a music video for a band that is extremely similar in almost every way, there are plenty of bands that have singers that just talk over music, most people think that's all rappers do. So you want to argue that if the content of the album is sufficiently "crazy" I can host it because it's "news"? I guess you'll probably want to clarify that it only counts if the content isn't intended as a joke or a performance, or maybe it only counts if it's not art but something like an interview is fair game. Well great, I can't wait for the courts to get to decide what's "crazy" and what's not, and just nullify the copyright if they decide that it's "crazy". By this standard I can almost certainly host anything ever written about conspiracy theories, after all, most of those are "crazy". Hell, I'd like to see someone argue why I can't host anything ever written about religion. How will the court justify allowing one religion's believers to maintain copyright on their videos, while another group loses their copyright because they're "crazy"?

Finally, I don't understand how you're justifying your check box news or not news argument. Your argument is Tom Cruise talking is news, so check, but using the tape of a man getting beat by the police lost in court, and if it's news you would win, so a man getting beat by police isn't news, no check?

really? there may not be a legal definition of newsworthy, but I can't imagine that anyone would actually argue that an interview with a celebrity is more newsworthy than the police beating a man. And it would have to be more newsworthy since the video of the police beating wasn't newsworthy enough. And even that is the best case Denton can hope for given that the fact that something is "newsworthy" is almost certainly not a good enough reason to violate copyright.

Surely no one actually thinks that as long as something is interesting to the public anyone can violate copyright and post it on their site. you'd get laughed out of court if you tried that. "well your honor, when i hosted the new jay-z album 2 million people downloaded it from me, proving that the public was interested in it, and jay-z is a public figure, so clearly i have the right to post it."

difficult time arguing damages? why, because people aren't saying that this makes all scientologists look crazy?

how is it fair use to post the entire video?

I'm not sure that the problem is that piracy is considered cool, so I'm not sure how making it "uncool" would work. In general I don't think it's considered "cool" to watch movies alone, and I'm positive it's not considered "cool" to be too cheap to rent a dvd and make people watch a crappy downloaded or streaming version if you have people over. On the other hand it might well be considered "cool" to have a massive party financed by all the money you saved not buying or renting movies. So the problem they need to address is that a good enough version of their product is available for free and given a choice between paying for the real version and buying something else people would rather buy something else.

I understand the argument for how the record industry will make money with piracy, people like concerts. But given that people are already whining about how expensive movie theater tickets are, how do you propose movies will continue to make money if dvd sales and rentals were to collapse? I may not want every movie to be Spiderman 3, but I happen to enjoy my share of big budget spectacle movies and would be dissappointed if the business model that supports them were to disappear.

yeah, I agree with everyone else. TV-Be-Gone is a horrible product, and using it in the middle of a presentation is ridiculous, I hope they don't get let in next year.

i love that #10 thinks these lines will be projected into thin air over the street for other cars to see.

say i bought an old product, an original airport express for example, and there was no way to get the software to secure the router if you were running windows vista, even though there was software available that would work. Say, just for the sake of argument apple refuses to make the latest version of the software downloadable. Say you even emailed them and asked for it and they told you they couldn't help. if you got arrested and locked up for downloading child porn and could later show it was someone else using your unsecurable network, would you have a case against apple? because i might just have a get rich quick plan.

@53 it's called an analogy. the hope was that by using a case that is similar in all details except the degree of the crime it would show that the degree of punishment should be different than robbing or beating, but that it doesn't absolve the man of all responsibility in either case. i think there's enough moral outrage in these comments that you don't need to manufacture any more. it's not like i said it would be just like if i was hitler and someone told me to kill 6 million jews. it seemed to me that saying if someone tells me to jaywalk and i do it wouldn't really get the point across.

and now just to throw this out there: i'd rather be robbed for my wallet than have people constantly trying to have sex in the middle of the park next to my apartment. probably rather be punched too actually.

@#12 entrapment is still available in strict liability cases: see United States v. Hedges or United States v. Thompson.

still, for all you saying it would be entrapment if she worked for the police you'll have to convince the court that a normally law-abiding person would have exposed themselves to the topless woman after she asked which I'm not convinced would work. and that he wasn't sufficiently predisposed to the crime, which almost certainly wouldn't work since he approached her.

@39 i guess you're right. come to think of it this is how they catch all big criminals, by ignoring the actions of the smaller criminals that work for them.

anyway as to #40 question 4 apparently it wasn't secluded because the cops were around. and my guess is showing the vagina is illegal, like the penis while showing the male chest is legal like the female chest. seems fair as can be.

as for real police work, fighting crime isn't always a question of manpower and i doubt they'd have prevented a single crime by walking around whereas by screwing this guy they'll probably prevent people from trolling there in the future, which according to an earlier post is a problem in that park. so yes i think the guy should have been arrested and given a small fine or something. it's not the fault of the police that the courts sentence him too harshly.

either it's entrapment or she's an accessory, one or the other, though the latter doesn't help the guy much. since apparently she wasn't with the cops i don't have any sympathy for the guy since what he did was illegal. we can argue about how much he should be punished, i'd agree he probably shouldn't have to be a registered sex offender, but what he did was still illegal. it's really no different than if someone passes me walking down the street and says they'll sleep with me if i rob the old guy in front of us. it's still my fault if i rob the old guy right?

the only question in this case is if they knew she was asking men to expose themselves and sat there waiting for one to do it, which seems pretty likely. i'm not clear on the laws but if asking people to commit a crime is itself a crime then they're ignoring a crime in order to catch a reaction to the crime which is also a crime, which might be illegal. I mean, I doubt they can watch someone key my car hoping to arrest me for punching the guy doing it. anyone know if this reasoning would hold up in court?