"I mean, if I build a chair and sell it, my family gets the money I made from selling the chair. Similarly, my family gets any money I made off of a copyright. However, when I die, they get nothing more from the chair but they get to ride my copyright until it expires or, more realistically, they die?"

Look, I believe in copyright on the scale suggested in the Constitution. Nevertheless...

If you build a chair and die before you sell it, the chair passes to your family, which they may then sell. Allowing copyrights to pass to heirs serves exactly the same purpose as allowing material items to pass to heirs; it allows the full value of the thing inherited to be realized by the family, whether the creator is dead or alive. The crucial difference between the chair and the copyright is that the full value of a copyright is not realized in a single transaction.

"I really wish Google News had an NNTP feed, even if it charged a low fee."

What they do have are RSS feeds and a way to access the original NNTP form of a post, which, with wget, a little bit of programming and a newsreader that can use a local spool, amounts to the same thing.

That would be the Marmite made in New Zealand, which actually has sugar added.

Vegemite has a milder flavor than British Marmite, which is not at all sweet.

"I still haven't seen anything on Linux with approaches the elegance of [edit.com] without being dependent on a GUI."

Take Midnight Commander's file editor for a spin sometime.

If Kentucky wants to ban gambling within its border, its certainly within its right to do so, just the same as Spain can ban gambling insides its border.

Well, actually it's not gambling per se that the current administration wants to ban here; after all, Kentucky is one of the (if not just THE) world's premier Thoroughbred breeding centers, and we have always had racetracks that have always made the bulk of their revenue off the wagering of their patrons. We also have a state lottery. Indeed, the current administration wants to actually have casino-style gambling (which is banned here) *made legal*, both for government revenue and to prop up the racetracks.

What the government of Kentucky does want banned is Kentuckians gambling at out-of-state internet sites, because we can't make a buck off that. So they told those sites to take steps to prevent Kentuckians from using them, or they'd take action; the seizing of the domain names constituted that action. Presumably what will happen eventually is that the administration will realize what they can and cannot do, and another category will show up on our state income tax forms requiring us to pay tax on money wagered out of state, in addition to that we already have to pay on untaxed out-of-state purchases.

As for whether Kentucky has a Constitutional right to prevent out-of-state entities without a Kentucky presence from selling services to Kentuckians, that is a matter for the courts to decide. As to whether it's unthinkable, it's not that different from France's case against eBay over the sale of Nazi memorabilia a few years back.