It genuinely seems unreasonable to me to simultaneously both be in a public place and while still having any expectation of privacy. Unless they are turning around and arresting the people whose plates they found at such lawful meetings without charging them with a crime beyond the fact that they were there in the first place (which is not illegal) then there'd be something wrong. That's not what's happening, so I don't see the problem.

Bleed you dry how, exactly? At what point does stating the truth, that is specifically, that facts are not copyrightable, require paying a lawyer?

How would they bankrupt a person who they haven't got any successful ruling against yet? To get a successful ruling, they would still need to convince a judge that events from history, or mere facts, could actually ever be considered a form of intellectual property. They cannot be.... and this point is even explicitly stated in copyright law.

They are, of course, perfectly welcome to claim that they will prohibit it all they want to... the fact of the matter is, however, that they have precisely zero ability to actually enforce that prohibition except against people who believe that they ever had such power in the first place.

Tell that to the NFL Lawyers after they file suit against you.

I would. I would hope I should not have to ever remind a judge of the point, since they should be more versed in such matters.

Then you will be bankrupted just getting it in front of a Judge.

How do you get bankrupted without a judge making a ruling against you in the first place?

They can "prohibit" it all they want... them saying something does not make it true.

History cannot be copyrighted. Accounts of those historical events can be, but the events themselves are facts, and facts cannot be considered property, intellectual or otherwise.

To successfully sue somebody, you still have to actually show how that party had actually done some sort of wrong by you... and them simply saying that it is wrong doesn't actually make it so. They would still need to convince a judge of that.

I would not have thought that information and intelligence were synonyms....

it looks pretty likely that intelligence cannot be created by matter+energy alone

Says who?

... acellerated evolution

And we will end up with super-mosquitos that are even more resistant to anything we try to throw at them.

Browsing tends to imply a cursory style of reading, while I would characterize what I do more like detailed studying, which can sometimes require me to look back or forward one page or so because the text may be describing something that is illustrated or presented on the preceding or following page. But I do not read books cover to cover, any more than STEM students generally read their class textbooks from cover to cover. One typically advances directly to the chapter of interest, and reads the relevant material to whatever they wish to study.

Linux on the desktop is a failure because of its own lack of innovation and imagination.

Really? Because other than the availability of applications for it, can you name even one thing that Linux itself actually lacks? I'm betting that you can't. Can you further explain how the lack of applications being developed for Linux is anything other than a reflection of the fact that not many people use it in the first place, which itself is a direct consequence of the fact that the applications that people want aren't found on it? Of course, it's a vicious cycle... but that's not the operating system's fault. Before Visicalc came out, for instance, there was almost no practical reason whatsoever for any non hobbyist or professional computer programmer or computer scientist to ever own one of these new-fangled home computers. Visicalc's success was not because of any technical merits of the computing platform it was developed for, it was because it was software that did what people actually wanted, and so people went and bought it.

I would challenge you to find a study which backs the alternative. The human tendency to prefer choices that positively benefit oneself is almost axiomatic, and I would suspect you would actually need to give ample evidence that this is actually *not* the case. Practically every commercial game ever made, killer productivity appliications like spreadsheets and paint software, and even operating systems like Windows itself... the single greatest driving force behind them is nothing more or less than simple greed.

Of course, it's also greed that makes most of us get up every morning and go to work.... since we have to keep a roof over our heads. My point being that this is such a primal and instinctive characteristic of human nature that to thing that merely being a disruptive technology could overcome it is extremely naive. As was already said above, on technical merits alone, Linux easily meets the criteria of being such a disruptive technology, but because not enough people use it, there isn't an abundance of commercial application development for it, which in turn leaves the OS as feeling less useful to people who necessarily need or expect such applications to be available on their computer.

Linux desktop distributions in any usable form most certainly were late to the game.

No [application development] is driven by making something disruptive and useful,

I'm going to assume that you genuinely believe that and are not deliberately trolling... your assumption, however, is mistaken. The number one motivating factor in application development, by far, is the human instinct of selfishness and greed. I would challenge you to find any study which shows that this is *not* the case. While certainly there is no lack of applications developed with more altruistic motivations, mainstream application development is almost invariably motivated by some sort of commercial incentive... which does not necessarily mean that the software itself will cost any money, but that in some way the development of the application will provide an increase in revenue.

Linux on the desktop is just not good enough...

Except that by the aforementioned definition, what makes something "good enough" is an availability of applications in the first place.

The technical merits of an operating system are not sufficient to drive mainstream application creation.... what ultimately drives it is nothing more or less than human greed, and the desire to get a piece of the action.

Linux was not late to the game at all... it actually predates Windows 95.