As the doctor in the joke said, "then don't do that". First, buying DRMed content is unethical - you're contributing to the problem. Second, if you happen to run across some PDF with DRM, you can probably take it out and shoot it using a Calibre plugin.

There are many Free Software PDF and ebook readers which have no DRM capabilities. I use Zathura, for example.

Again, that shows a remarkable lack of understanding of computer security, particularly the notion of privileges. My browser can read /etc/hosts, but can't delete it, even though "software" as a whole can. That's because I don't give it permissions to do so. Similarly, you can also not give your PDF and ebook readers permission to delete the file.

Besides, even if that wasn't true, it's anything you can do *with software*. But why exactly are you limited to that? Try this: copy the file to an USB drive, unplug it, and then run the PDF reader. Hard to delete that, innit?

Uhm, here in /., I think people are expected to know the different between executable and non-executable formats, the ability of APIs and such.

If you buy a PDF or EPUB file and don't allow it to run scripts, there's no way it can "delete itself", or run anything else, for that matter.

Yes, please enforce copyright infringement! Help the Pirate Bay!

What makes you think one is needed?

Thank you, Captain Obvious!

Of course, adding a copyright license doesn't prevent anyone from using the code in a place without copyright, so that's completely irrelevant.

Don't make it public domain, because that's not valid everywhere. Use CC0 or WTFPL.

They actually do, since they publish CUPS, though with proprietary exceptions.

It's just your impression. Yale, for example, has a 20 billion dollar fund, with returns that make a Wall Street investor jealous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_F._Swensen

Sure there is, if instead of trying to stream high-def video to the mothership, the feed is processed on the spot and only the digested information (e.g., iris hashes) is sent.

Yeah, but why would you want to save a species full of jerks, anyway?

Not everyone lives in some uncivilized shithole. The cops here got my brother's $25 cellphone back after it was stolen. And they didn't need a full SWAT team with heavy gear to take it from the kid who stole it, either.

As the sibling post said, they don't. But unlike cash, Bitcoin are extremely divisible (you can send 0.00000001 BTC to someone), so the same practical problems (not having enough coins and bills to pay for things) don't really apply.

There are economic consequences of having a fixed supply, of course, but that's a different issue.

Well, if you used cookies, you could set them as HttpOnly, which would prevent even your JavaScript code from accessing them.

That said, I was thinking more about that scheme vis-a-vis using HTTPS, and in particular in the case of a man-in-the-middle attack. The problem with JS crypto is that you can't securely deliver the code to the browser, so all bets are off if you have an attacker that can modify the stream.

That's fine; I rather work harder than help the slave owners.

In the same way that increasing the cost of whips would help the slaves.