Arguing with someone's sig is a fundamentally silly thing to do, but i'll indulge you. Our nature gives us the capacity for culture. Our culture is a product of environment and history. If nature produced culture then we'd have world peace, one language, and we would have committed suicide out of boredom long ago. The quote itself has to do with our culture's obsession with fame and money and the truly shitty things we do to each other in pursuit of those - abuse of intellectual property laws, trademarks, and copyright being tangential examples of that.

That whole segue into pedophilia thing was pretty non-sequitur, so did you know that birds are probably descended from dinosaurs?

To be clear, we agree that it's bad form, probably even fraudulent in some way - i just don't think copyright is the right tool for the job. You writing a page and a search engine generating a list of results on the fly are two fundamentally different things. Even so, if you have an ad service serving ads to your page or even if you didn't create the ads yourself, then i'm pretty sure you can't claim any sort of copyright protection on them. Even the creator of the ad can't claim copyright protection if the ad just gets stripped out and disappears.

Take the WoW vs. Glider case from a little while back. There was no distribution there either, but Blizzard was able to take the Glider makers to court and win via DMCA and whatever other Frankenstein case they cobbled together. Right or wrong, it's another crack for the weasels to slip through. Best to avoid that area entirely and pick another battlefield.

I don't think the work can be established because it changes from minute to minute. Copyright is about protecting specific expressions of ideas. Trademark or just plain old fraud statutes are much more likely to address this.

AdBlock isn't for commercial gain, but it could be argued to cause financial harm.

Copyright law is just such a huge clusterfuck and so ripe for abuse that it's better just to avoid it completely until sane, comprehensive copyright reform happens...so...probably never. Trust me - it is not friendly to the little guy. As soon as you figure out a way to use it to your advantage, the *IAAs will find 10 ways to fuck you with that same method.

Piss in one hand and hold the other out for that refund and see which one fills up first.

Whine all you want about "should" and "deserve" but without real pressure and real action, nothing is going to happen. AGs don't care about DPI because average Joes and Janes don't care about it. Average Joes and Janes doesn't care about whose ads he sees when he googles for porn, lolcats, or hot dish recipes so long as they gets their results. AGs care about making it look like they are fighting crime (which is different from actually fighting crime) and ISPs are their friends because any time they want to make a headline by busting someone on kiddie porn, the ISPs bend over backwards to help them. (That and the huge campaign contributions they give.)

I'm not sure you really want them to open up that can of worms. Can a procedurally generated page be protected by copyright? It's not a static work and who exactly is the author? Trademark certainly seems to be the cleaner way to go here. Also, what would this line of attack have to say about things like AdBlock?

Anyone who hasn't figured out by now that twitter is really only good for advertising and ego-tripping attention whores probably is an ego-tripping attention whore.

I'd like to hijack the topic a little bit in order to ask a question because i don't have the time to bust out the google-fu and dig in for some serious research right now.

The last time i really looked into the matter was 5-ish years ago, and the conclusion i came to was that radeons had slightly better hardware, but nvidia's drivers were so far superior that this theoretical lead was completely obliterated. Is this still true? (No die-hard brand shilling here please - i'd like to hear from people who at least think they can be impartial.)

And people wonder why America is losing its edge. Gee, why can't Americans compete in science and technology these days? Religious interference in American politics and education is going to be our downfall - socially, economically, and spiritually.

Honestly...no. These people are one rung above mall cops.

They can't even find guns with scanners and full-body gropers and you expect them to be able to know the difference between a real document and a forgery?

Government official accepts campaign money from corporate interests - legally sound, ethically questionable.
Government official backs legislation favorable to corporate interests - legally sound, ethically icky.
Government official leaves government, goes to work for corporate interests for 7+ figure salary - legally sound, ethically repugnant.
Ex-government official offers campaign donations to new government official on behalf of corporate interests - the cycle is complete.

Aside from some extremist outliers, 9/11 DID unite the world. The colossal arrogance that was demonstrated and outright that were told in the aftermath of that attack just divided things up again, perhaps even worse than before.

The fail in the article is the part where he tries to hold Assange personally responsible for a reactionary backlash against the press that may or may not happen. Wikileaks is responsible for the direct damage their revelations bring about, which, so far, is not much. They cannot be held responsible for the damage our nation does to itself in response to Wikileaks. If our leaders decreases the freedom of the press and we let them do it that cannot be laid at the feet of Wikileaks in general nor Julian Assange in particular.