Law is fun.

From the Wikipedia article "Larceny"

Traditionally, a thief must not only gain dominion over the property, but also must move it from its original position. The slightest movement, a hair's breadth, is sufficient. However, the entirety of the property must be moved. As LaFave noted critically this requirement is the difference between rotating a doughnut (larceny) and rotating a pie (not larceny), as all of the doughnut is moved through rotation while the pie's exact center remains in the same place when rotated.

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"It's a handy thing, this experimental attitude," said Castle. "The scientist can be sure of himself before he knows anything. We philosophers should have thought of that."

So does the doughnut's! I don't get it.

The doughnut's center is empty space, not part of the doughnut.

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"It's a handy thing, this experimental attitude," said Castle. "The scientist can be sure of himself before he knows anything. We philosophers should have thought of that."

And thus we see the beginnings of that recent spate of legislation about the Internet.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

But I don't think I got that one.

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C-x C-s C-x k RET

The stationary part is a point and that's infinitesimally small.

Well, we better hope that SOPA etc. feel like infinitesimal points in retrospect instead of the Beginning of the End of the Internet.

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C-x C-s C-x k RET

I thought the idea of internet providers charging for bandwidth was the beginning of the end?
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Well, there is a new accent of n00b language. It's called: Vet LUEser goes Foreign!-MegaSpy22
Those must be the pants of the gods!-Digitalpython

Nah, it's just that people seem to adjudicate (and legislate) based on understandings of things that come from metaphors that have the primary appeal of being inscrutable and relating to food. "This involves taking control of and moving an object" is already perfectly clear. No doubt there are grey areas (I suppose relating to intangible assets?) but "rotating a pie" is not one of them, because no one will ever be charged with rotating a pie, and no one charged with rotating a pie will be doing so in a perfectly calibrated pie rotator built to ensure that the center of the pie "moves less than a hair's breadth."

There's no reason to provide that simile, because that simile doesn't describe a real situation or clarify the underlying point, it just describes some contrafactual situation. We're torturing a fairly straightforward thing in the name of providing a metaphor, any metaphor, on the basis that metaphors inherently illustrate and illuminate. But they don't if they're terrible metaphors. Then they muddle the issues and supplant the actual things that they describe. That's how we get that the internet is a series of tubes.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

Oh. That was actually pretty interesting.

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C-x C-s C-x k RET

Yeah, the increased posting rate of PADM allows me to test experimentally the premise that my posting becomes more coherent as the day goes on.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir

So.... Who is going to build the perfectly calibrated Poe rotator? I mean pie rotator. Missed a letter and autocorrect decided to be silly, but I found it amusing enough to leave.
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Fame is but a slow decay.
-Theodore Tilton