Bullfighting is well established and widely accepted also. Does that make it okay?

In Spain, yes. In India, no.

I'm not sure whether this morality means that any change to a law or its interpretation is always wrong (after all, clearly either the change will permit something that isn't accepted or it will suppress something that is accepted!), or whether it means that any such change is always right (after all, after the change, the new law will be the accepted law!). Either way it seems like a pretty optimal morality to use for avoiding going to jail and a tautologically worthless morality to use for designing or evaluating law.

It's at the heart of every bubble, and it always seems to work, right up until the point when some of its most fervent proponents realize they've become the Biggest Suckers.

And it doesn't have any "gotcha" clauses changing its effects on vs. off US soil.

The reason the US Constitution doesn't always apply off US soil is the same reason why it doesn't always apply on US soil: it's just a piece of paper which doesn't enforce itself. And if you can phrase your excuses for contradicting it in ways people want to believe ("Liberals, the Commerce Clause means we get to buy everyone puppies!" "Conservatives, none of that due-process, no-torture stuff applies to terrifying foreigners!"), then you don't need to worry about anyone else enforcing it either.

It's been settled since all that DeCSS stuff that code is protected by the 1st amendment.

The DeCSS case specifically was "settled" exactly the opposite way. Freedom of speech didn't do jack to help the glider or bnetd authors either.

If I'm kept in the dark about the details of important actions committed by my government, what hope do I have to ever make a truly informed decision when it comes time to vote?

In such a situation the only safe rule possible is to never vote for an incumbent. Decent rule in most other situations, too.

it's better not to piss of the legal authorities either

Generally when the legal authorities aren't supposed to force you to do something, they're not supposed to coerce you into doing it either.

ironic that not the free market, but REGULATION is what's fixing that crap.

Ideologue much? As you just finished pointing out, video is ever-increasingly being transmitted over media that isn't subject to this regulation! Congress is just now getting around to trying to fix a decades-old problem while ignoring its modern manifestation.

Me, I'm just glad that all my TV and computer systems come with mute buttons. I'm sure I have the Federal Department of Muting to thank for that, right?

How close we get to thermodynamic limitations? We're still many orders of magnitude away from that; even doubling every year wouldn't get us there in one decade. Landauer's bounds on the theoretically possible seem to be much "looser" from a human perspective than Carnot's were. (and they seem to have more loopholes)

Movies would become copyable! You'd be able to go right over to Google, type "avatar torrent", and get millions of hits pointing you at places where you could download Avatar without paying its producers a dime!

So what if the studios have to make it harder for those of us who are willing to pay them? Surely not getting as much of our money is a small price to pay, as long as they're successfully preventing nightmarish copyright infringement such as I described above. Why, the only conceivable excuse for giving up on DRM would be if, for some strange reason, it doesn't actually work.

stop trying to improve on what you have.

It's so cute when Luddites publish their half-baked philosophy on the internet. And they don't even notice the irony!

He estimates that sending an Apollo-sized capsule to the nearest star would take as much energy as is produced on Earth in a year.

5 days, he says, but without assuming inefficiency, so let's call it a millenium to be conservative.

That's as much energy as is produced by our star in half of a millisecond.

By the time our heirs are crowded enough here that seeding civilization around other stars looks sensible, sending those seeds will also look easy.

But by that time TFA is no more relevant than Stross' calculations. The first starfarers will think it's cute that we expected them to want to all climb back down a deep gravity well after they get there. As if we were fish futurists, imagining how useful lungs and legs would be for getting to another pond where we would dispose of them again.

You're conflating two very different ways to screw up a series.

A: If you extend it so far that you have to pad it out with boring subplots and unlikeable characters, then that's not so bad - just fast forward through the tedious stuff and enjoy the exceptions. Babylon 5 Season 5 was no worse than Season 1 in that regard; in both cases you can pretty much skip the non-Londo-and-G'Kar stuff and you're still good.

B: If you extend the story in such a way that it changes the background or themes from the first story for the worse, then that's much more awful. Starting with a Neo who says "I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people a world you don't want them to see." and inexplicably transitioning to "I'm mopey." doesn't just make a bad second movie, it makes the first movie worse. Following Newt's rescue in Aliens with her pointless death in the Alien3 backstory turns Ripley from a hero into a tragic farce. And following up "They Have A Plan" with "But The Writers Can't Think Of A Good One" was just sad. Here the best way to go really is to just pretend that the sequel/prequel stories didn't exist.

I can't imagine they accept any piece of trash "hello world" app just because it was submitted.

Your failure of imagination is more complete than that. Ubuntu's (or your own distro's) repository doesn't even have to accept your app for your app to benefit from Ubuntu's repository management! Users can also add whatever third-party repositories they want, giving them easy access to, dependency checking for, and updates of software that hasn't been accepted into their core distribution.

This functionality exists in practically every Linux package manager, because if you're designing a software update tool to benefit your users rather than to benefit your company, it's plainly obvious that you don't want to lock them out of updating even non-company-approved software.

We could always replace the removed lunar mass with something that Earth has a surplus of. I suggest using people who can't do back-of-the-napkin arithmetic.

If think screwing over and locking out third parties is evil, then Apple already became an evil company for what it did to other OSX-compatible hardware vendors. At least with the App Store they just ban some of their competition and take some of the receipts.

And if you don't think screwing over and locking out third parties is evil, then what's with all the skepticism about Apple trying to make even more of their software ecosystem fractionally as locked down as their hardware ecosystem? Answer for me: why shouldn't they?

They know that, even if they do so, you'll still be an apologist for them afterwards.