Which is exactly why Mark Cuban is so misguided. No one lives by free. That is, you might start up a business that lives by free and last until your money runs out, but you either find a way to monetize your customers or you go under. Companies which "live by free" actually live by a business model that includes free but isn't exclusively free. And such businesses are no different from any other business. Every business, regardless of whether or not it has free as part of its business model, faces competition and threat from other businesses. It's the way capitalism works. Woolworths and HQ, for example, didn't go out of business because of anything to do with "free." But they were still out-competed and failed. If you take the reference to "free" out of Cuban's comments, he's simply describing the challenges facing any business in a capitalistic system. Cuban of all people should know that.

Your point that the US is hardly a sterling example of protecting civil rights is valid. However, that doesn't change the fact that the US does have much more robust protections of free speech than many, many other countries, including some that outdo us in other areas of civil rights. European countries, partly in an attempt to protect the rights of minorities, generally have much harsher laws concerning "hate speech" and libel than the US, and most non-European countries routinely censor content they deem to be against the interest of the ruling parties. I'm as appalled at some of the recent US actions as anyone. They're a shame and an embarrassment to a country that is supposed to be "...the land of the free..." But I don't doubt that the article is spot on that US control results in a much freer Internet than would be the case under an international overseer.

Uh, not sure if you're trolling or just not aware, but the above is not true or, at best, might be true only in certain canons. In the Ultimate Marvel imprint, for example, Hulk goes on a rampage in New York City and kills several hundred people. Bruce Banner is tried and sentenced to die for the crime but Hulks out just before the nuclear weapon intended to carry out the execution explodes.

Actually, he didn't say the piracy was affecting his bottom line. He simply said it wasn't helping sales. Was that accidental or intentional? I strongly suspect that the piracy isn't hurting sells either, which means the answer to his question is "nothing." If he can post data which shows that sales are dropping and that those dropped sales don't correlate to, say, his book being replaced by a newer textbook in university courses, then I'll reconsider.

What you're talking about is called split tunneling. There is some security risk with allowing split tunneling, although it's not "...horrifically broken and insecure..." as you suggest, particularly if you require the client to have a local firewall before you bring up the VPN. (Decent VPN software will allow this.) The problem with not allowing split tunneling is that it greatly increases the load on your network, since all traffic is routed through you before going to the client, and that you break lots of things for the VPN'd user. For example, if I"m VPN'd and split tunneling is disallowed, I can't use a local network printer until I break the VPN.

Like every other situation, there is a trade off between security and functionality. Increasing security decreases functionality and vice versa. Whether or not it makes sense to allow split tunneling is greatly dependent upon the situation.

The CNN article commenting on the proposed bill says:

This appears to be covering things like uploading a photo or downloading a program to install. That doesn't even cover the half of it. What happens when you visit a web page? Your browser sends a GET request and downloads the file - it copies a file from the server to your computer. If the page is not static, of course, the file is generated on the fly by scripts. But if that isn't covered, then I'll simply code my P2P app to ROT13 all files. When you download it, a script reads it and generates the stream that's transferred to you. I'm no longer copying a file, so the law doesn't apply to me.

What happens when you visit many, many websites? They read your cookies. The cookie is a file on your computer. It's transferred from your computer to their server. What happens when you download your email, particularly if you're accessing a 'Nix based mail server where mail is stored in mbox or mailbox format? What happens when you open a file with your Word processor on a remote share? In short, what happens almost any time you do anything on a networked computer? Is every application you run going to have to nag you to death every time you open it?

This is so ludicrous that not even Congress could pass it.

It isn't clear to me why this is a failure, or a negative result if you prefer. Granted, the carbon didn't sink to the bottom of the ocean, but it was still removed from the water, which should allow the water to absorb additional CO2 from the air. It seems to me that, so long as the CO2 is pulled from the atmosphere, it's still an effective means of combating warming. Isn't one of the proposed remedies to increase the plant mass? Why isn't this just as effective as increased plants? What am I missing?

Right. There's no way to open up a phone and, say, cut the wires to the speaker or stuff cotton in the device...

All of the other examples you list - from messengers to telegraph to satcom - are technologies. The government's use of these technologies doesn't impact other uses of them in any way. The Internet, on the other hand, is a particular implementation of a technology. If the military wants to use TCP/IP as a military asset, few people would have any problem with that. But the ability to protect something necessarily means having at least some control over it. It means the ability to take action against anything interpreted as a threat, and the military/government definition of "threat" can be quite broad and quite self serving. (Go through airport security if you'd like to get an idea of how the government thinks security ought to be implemented.) So if the military wants to claim the Internet as a military asset, then I have a big issue with that. And I'm speaking as someone who is drawing a retirement pension from the US military.

Frankly, I don't see a set dividing line....? Nothing is really centered.

You just use the wrong keyboard.