As someone else said, BitTorrent is a protocol. You can actually extract the .torrent file from the Blizzard updater and use your favorite BitTorrent client to download the patch.

How is an 8 year old boy seeing a vagina, a 100% natural human body part, harmful? (hint: it's not)

I don't know anyone who would say "July 10th, 1990" is in the 80's. (Picked that date at random.)

Thank You For Smoking becomes reality.

*whoosh!*

Yeah, TFA is total bullshit. The PHP scripts probably spend 99% of their time waiting on the network or on a database query. Rewriting in C++ would have virtually no gains, but development/maintenance effort would shoot way up.

I can't help but smile when I see stories like these. It just reinforces the idea that DRM is bad for everyone.

Good! I'm glad someone posted what immediately came to my mind. Thank you!

Yeah, I noticed that too. It's the ultra-conservative ones, that would make adultery illegal if they could, who are the ones caught cheating on their wives. The whole Mark Foley incident. The fervently anti-gay pastors that get caught cheating on their wives with other men. How do their minds work that inconsistency out?

I'd like to point out Freenet to the UK people here. That is all.

Heh, well put!

I develop software for a living and I don't require the restrictions of copyright to do it. It's all used internally to support our research.

You're getting lots of answers, but they're all just circular: "Because the license says so." That's an uninteresting answer that misses the purpose of your interesting question.

Imagine the time when the GPL was conceived. There was no world wide web, and the Internet still barely existed. RMS was selling copies of Emacs source code over snail mail on tapes. At this time there's not really a central, official repository for the various projects going on. It's just people passing source code around to each other in a distributed fashion, with the GPL enforcing the distributed system. That way there's really no authority for the code. Someone gets it, modifies it, passes it along, and so on, forking and branching like modern distributed version control. The distributed nature of the code makes its availability more robust.

It's still important today because it's better to have code distributed from many places than from a lone host, which would be a single point-of-failure.

Thanks! That thing's awesome! Though someone could still be misleading with it.

Here's what you do instead of creating abusive "cyberpolice": you set up the system so that cheating is very difficult to impossible in the first place, through self-enforcing protocols and smart contracts. Distributed systems, like DHT and P2P, already apply this to some extent.