Yes, it is all about copyright law.

But for what it's worth, the GPL doesn't even really relinquish any of the restrictions of copyright law either. Copyright law says that you need explicit permission from the copyright holder to copy a work or to create a derivative work of it. The GPL explicitly grants such permission to anyone who agrees to abide by the terms of the license. If you don't agree to abide by the terms (by failing to abide by them), then the terms of the license are simply not applicable to you, and you have not received permission to copy the work or create a derivative work in the first place.

Simple.

From the above post, to which I responded.... (emphasis mine)

English is the standard language of business because a huge majority of the businesses...

I do not disagree with this assertion... I was only trying to point out is no "official" language for anything that is practiced worldwide... although there can easily be a standard one. The very definition of the adjective official means that it must be designated as such by some recognized authority, and there is no single recognized authority that governs how the entire world communicates, even if there are extremely widely recognized standards that are followed. A company can have its own official language for doing business, because it can be an authority for everyone who works in that company, but it cannot be an authority for how any other company does business. Companies communicate with other companies for business purposes based on *standard* practice, not because anyone ever made the mechanisms "official", because nobody ever did, and I was merely suggesting that the poster to whom I had responded above was conflating those two terms.

In a nutshell, "standard" != "official".

Exactly... *standard*... Not "official", which suggests an official organization sch as a government designating it as such.

Worse, on the surface it would appear to even be opposed to driving your kids to school on your way to work instead of forcing them to take a taxi or at least public transit.

Think of the children!

Yeah. I went there. :)

You appear to be conflating the terms "official" and "standard".

Do you believe that society would be better off if it no longer permitted freedom of religion at all? If it were revoked from the charter of basic human rights and freedoms, what do you think the ramifications would be?

...so you can't grant a free license or other permission.

One would wonder how that would extend to things that a copyright holder is actively choosing to freely share or distribute,. such as BSD or GPL works.

I would agree that facts may be racist... since attitudes about racism or anti-racism are based only on what society might prefer to be the case, but it is always possible that real data, when measured might show that what was preferred is not reflective of reality.

For example, one could say that it is racist to suggest that white people are brighter than black, but when talking strictly about the optical spectrum, this is indisputable, since white, by definition, is a brighter color than black.

He was saying, in a nutshell, is that in the data that he had analyzed, he could not find evidence to support the notion that Afircans are as smart as Europeans. Whether this is because this was actually a valid conclusion, or because his data set was not large enough, or because he was misinterpreting the data, or because there were potentially other causal factors influencing the data that were not accounted for is not known, but speaking for myself, I actually doubt the validity of his conclusion, and were I in his position, I would want to carefully investigate exactly why the data appeared to indicate such a result before ever thinking of making such a statement.

... which, if Comcast were reimbursing their customers for, is an expense that Comcast would be paying for... and could probably easily afford to do so from their profits.

More generally, he stated that there is no actual data to support the notion that race does not contribute to intelligence, making a specific reference to Africans, and which happens to be a politically incorrect notion, but is still an accurate statement.

This does not mean that members of one race are necessarily intellectually inferior to another, it only means that there exists some sizable amount of data which merely suggests it as a possibility, and that no data has yet been accumulated which can actually show that this is not the case. The strongest objection to the conclusion comes from a political reaction to it, and does not arise from the data itself. It would have been far more interesting to do a detailed exploration on exactly why the data appeared to indicate that than to simply make the statement about the data that he did, since there was absolutely no possible way to interpret it without him being seen as racist.

Unless you want to argue that living creatures cannot be intelligent, there is no reason that exists that would preclude artificial intelligence in a machine, since all living organisms are, in fact, machines.

What year is being projected, based on both the current population and its current increase levels, as when the world will run out of resources?

As I said, they could, at least in theory, reimburse customers for the extra electricity that the modem uses so it would cost the consumer nothing.

Enabling the mobile hotspot on my cell phone is a different story, since the cell phone is battery powered, and the hotspot will drain the battery more quickly than normal. Although this will not increase my monthly costs by any significant amount, it *does* have a significant impact on the convenience of the cell phone, which will need to be recharged more frequently, or even worse, may end up running out of power when it otherwise would not have, and during a time when I was actually requiring use of it. For something that's plugged into the wall 24/7, that is not an issue. The only factor that costs the customer anything at all that they weren't already paying for and personally getting use out of is the electricity to power the public hotspot.

Comcast does not currently reimburse their customers for the electricity usage that the hotspot incurs, but even if they did, the amount would not be very much, and probably wouldn't feel remotely justified by the amount that people are complaining about it.

Considering the fact that one is probably generally not just using a modem as a hotspot for comcast, but is actually getting some personal use out of it, and considering that, for example, to declare even a *portion* of your rent or mortgage as a business expense in a home business you have to actually almost *exclusively* dedicate some square footage of your home, such as a den or what have you, to that business, and not use it for any personal purposes (cheaters on this front get dinged a lot if they are unfortunate enough to get audited, and the likelihood of a home business owner being audited in any given year is not insignificant), so I'd suggest that the fact that the modem might be taking up some real estate in one's home that they pay tax on is not grounds for compensation to that effect, since they are getting use out of the modem that has nothing to do with what may be benefiting comcast.

Even if you wanted to argue that the customers deserve more compensation than 50cents per month because of the real estate used by the modem, considering they can easily take up less than a tenth of a square foot, plugging that into the average square-foot rate for real estate in the area where the customer lives would probably only amount to perhaps a only a few additional pennies per month. If you factor in the notion that it would not be reasonable to compensate them for 100% of that, becuase the customer is getting some use out of the modem as well, it probably doesn't even work out to a whole penny.

As for bandwidth, if the public wifi is not on the same hotspot that the customer is expected to use, then the customer has the full wifi bandwidth, and anyone on the router's public wifi hotspot will not generally impact any upstream wired connectivity. And hey, it's comcast's network... they have a right to put whatever equipment they want on their own network. The modem that they you lease from them to use their network belongs to *THEM*... the fact that it may be in your home does not make it your property.

As for the impacts on the customer's network... it's not on the customer's network. It would be on comcast's network, unless the customer is expected to use the same hotspot that the router is supposed to have open to the public, which is probably not going to be the case.