The thing about copyright law is: it was created to prevent people from using other people's works, and selling it as their own or making a profit off it in some other way. In short: it was created to make sure that the only person allowed to sell content was the original creator.

Because physical copying was hard, this made sure that content-creators had a fairly secure income from selling their content. These days copying is easy though, so now the "offenders" are often the people that may or may not have bought the content, but managed to get a free copy now. This (arguably) leads to lost sales.

This is not what copyright was created to prevent though. In fact, if I write a scathing review of your work, saying it sucks and that every time someone buys it, God kills a kitten, I am probably costing you sales too. I am costing you money in exactly the same way that I would be if I was sharing your stuff. In fact, if I shared it people might conclude on their own that it is worth buying anyway, where as if they believe my review they will never buy it.

In short: people burning content to CD's and selling them: still very easily procecutable. In fact, they probably suffered the most from file sharing since that market just dried up. Why buy a knock-off now?

Customers sharing files? Maybe morally wrong, but unenforcable. Yes, it's sad, but with the advent of digital technology content creators lost an avenue of possible income. It's what happens though, and other ways have sprung up. It also created new ways to reach your customers, and provide a more personalized experience.

The world is changing, and those that don't change with it get left behind.

You're basically proposing to use a website as a One time pad. In theory a one-time pad is unbreakable, but that does require that the content of the one time pad would be truly random, which a web-site text is obviously not.

Also, if the text of the site changes, your key breaks, though that may actually be a benefit.

This has to be the most biased write-up I've seen in a while... sure, most carriers are probably Lawful Evil, but this makes me want to avoid the whole article like the plague....

Yes, it does.

It's actually better than the zoom. The zoom itself is excellent, but it resets on each page turn, making it virtually worthless for the thing I use zoom for most: zooming in to remove margins in PDF tech books.

Way to go attacking someone, yet completely missing the point.

The argument was about freeware vs open-source software... freeware as in free as beer, but closed-source. Since it's closed-source, it can (and often will) contain loads of spyware and other crap.

So yes, it is not economically auditable, as opposed to open-source where you can have someone check the source.

Freeware really is the worst of both worlds: no source to check and use for support and/or changes, and no vendor to get support from.

Under US law you're probably right, but it's not the same everywhere.

For example, here in the Netherlands it's legal to download content like music and movies, but illegal to upload or distribute it. BREIN has been trying to come up with things like "purchase-replacing downloads", which are illegal according to them, but AFAIK it hasn't been proven in court.

Using bittorent means that you're also uploading while you download, making it illegal. Downloading from things like RapidShare is legal though, regardless of whether you pay money to do so.

The main difference would be that they can't actually prove that you have a second key, so it's a lot harder to convict you for refusing to give it.

The people mentioned in the original article were convicted because they refused to give their main encryption key. Since it was easily provable that they had encryption on their machines, it was enough to get them convicted.

It really depends what you're trying to protect yourself from: TrueCrypt or a similar solution may be enough to keep you from getting convicted in a trial, but it probably won't offer much protection from organizations willing to use torture, blackmail, etc. In a trial you need evidence, in the other case suspicion will do.

One thing I can think of is completely cross-platform gaming...

I have to second that, I absolutely lived the over-the-top B-movie atmosphere. The only thing missing were boobies ;)

I also picked up the House of the Dead II and III for the Wii, mostly for the extra gun... so I've been having a great time shooting zombies with the mrs... looking forward to what else Sega comes up with!

From the pictures in the article it seems to mostly consist of small metal pipes, with pieces of plastic connecting them.... from what I gather it's only able to print the plastic connection parts, so I'm not sure how this counts as "self-replicating".

Also it has a big bunch of wires coming out the back, which I bet are not replicated either... so someone was jumping the gun a bit while writing this article :)

Still... this is some seriously cool technology... if the resulting plastic parts are strong / durable enough it could certainly have a huge impact... essentially being able to download physical objects from the internet...