Huh? This makes no sense. If they're Android, they can do an incredible variety of stuff. Being low-end, they might not do it well, but they should run pretty much every Android app out there. If they "can't do much to begin with", they're not Android.

1. The court who handed down the injunction is the arbiter for copyright law

Agreed so far.

2. The cache-only service is the means of enforcing the injunction.

Nope. The cache-only service isn't the one being enjoined. The party being enjoined is ISP A (the users' ISP). However, they aren't in a position to actually do anything about the injunction because they aren't ISP B (the Pirate Bay mirror's ISP). Their only way of "handling" it is to block the site in a manner that directly harms the business of CDN C (CloudFlare) and hundreds of other innocent businesses. CloudFlare, in turn, is also not capable of truly enforcing the injunction, because the Pirate Bay website mirror can trivially switch off CloudFlare with a simple DNS change and avoid any block that CloudFlare might put up.

The sole plausibly effective means of enforcement is for the courts to order CloudFlare to disclose the source IP for the website, and to then get an injunction against the correct ISP. And if that ISP turns out to be outside the UK, then it is likely beyond the reach of UK law, and that's a reality that the UK government will simply have to accept.

3. If you go to the other end of the spectrum and follow the lowest level of law the copyright is dead on the internet.

The reality is that there will always be sites on the Internet in countries that have weak laws. Any government that thinks it can somehow put up road blocks that will adequately prevent people from accessing those sites is a government of fools. Just take a look at how many people pay for VPN service to get around geo-blocking of TV shows, or to avoid censorship by oppressive governments.

As John Gilmore put it, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." That's the way it has always been, and practically speaking, that's the way it always will be.

For this reason, if you want to fight piracy, you cannot hope to do so using technical measures. It never worked before, yet in spite of more than thirty years of trying to do so and failing (think Macrovision, floppy disk copy protection, etc.), corporations keep trying to make it work, and idiotic governments keep trying to find ways to legislatively turn this hopeless cause into something that's magically feasible. You know what they say about insanity?

Mind you, I don't have the right answer; if I did, I'd be rich. But I do know how to spot the wrong answers.

4. The cache only service could segregate the different sources to different IPs so different countries could enforce their own laws by blocking selected content.

First, there are only so many IP addresses. They can't realistically cache each site on its own IP address. The cost would be astronomical. Second, even if they could, how can you do that without also making it easier for oppressive regimes to suppress information? Ethically and morally speaking, a CDN must be content-neutral. There's simply no acceptable alternative.

Yeah, like good luck trying to win a case against Microsoft or IBM or similar patent trolls (I think IBM clocks the most patents, but I don't see any products labeled IBM I'm using, so it's like they are not really innovating, more like trolling, unlike Arm chips for instance, or even Intel and AMD), as there is no judge or lawyers alive who will go against the big dogs and risk their own livelihood and own children's welfare pissing them up while upholding justice. So that's all that intellectual property laws ensure, more ways and means to abuse power, and the lil guy, the individual inventor has all the more reason to hate intellectual property rules they concocted out of nothing, cuz all they get out of that is abuse from people that got good at not creating anything, but abusing the artifacts and subjugating everyone else into intellectual property slavery. And Microsoft and gang is pretty high up on that list when it comes to abuses, and they, but also Disney, are the main reason why intellectual property in general is viewed as something horrible, besides some publishing or label houses that pay like 50/50 or much less to the actual creators.

I been to Niagara Falls, behind the waterfall. It's not really all that.

Apple makes portable drives called time capsules. Maybe they could enhance the selection in their product lines and add one of these balls to their list of offerings, called a zombie apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse capsule. In a nuclear apocalypse you only have to make it for 1 year or 10 years, which is the amount of time they keep nuclear waste in a pond near the reactor, for the half lives to decay away, then there is a window in halflives for all possible decay elements, and the next ones have halflives on the order of hundreds or maybe thousands of years, which makes them faily safe and livable, or more like at least compared to the initial year or decade.
Make sure the include iodine and strontium nonradiating isotope doses, which people will have to use to replenish their bodies (iodine is in HGH, most important, while strontium not so much, other than for strong bone crystals you need crack propagation stopping defect sites, my guess is that, and then you have to eat pure strontium purified calcium only material, such as processed eggshells or even mined limestone but not seasalt or seawater extracted calcium, or seafood, where the calcium would be polluted with bone marrow destroying contamination.
The way the world is headed, increasingly stressed on rising costs, lack of resources and ever increasing population, there is a good chance that eventually somebody somewhere would go nuts and initiate a nuclear war. For instance when Henry Kissinger tried bludgeoning Mao Ze Dong into submission by threatening him with nukes, he replied: you threateing us? We welcome a nuclear war, in fact we could send 150 million women to the US and get instant voting majority over there and not even feel the loss in population from the 3/4 billion we have here (now it's 1.3 billion only increasing at a rate of 150 million per decade or so, or it used to in the 90's, which is still half the population of the US amount of growth per decade, but at least they have a one child policy, unlike India which just reached 1 billion in like 2007 and now they are about to overtake China with their 1.2 billion these days, and they have no one child policy, instead they have rolling blackouts of their electric grid crumbling from the load, they pull off a Mars mission costing not only less than what NASA spends on it, but costing less than Hollywood spends making a movie about going to Mars. They are also sitting on a shitload of Thorium, biggest reserve in the world, which can, in theory, with effort, be converted into you threaten us with your guns? Well our Buddha smiles back right back at you which a flash followed by a mushroom cloud. Check out this picture, http://i.imgur.com/I81xSNt.png Can you find Australia and Canada, dominion of the United Kingdom on it? What these mofos lack the most is good free porn and looser morals. Plus one is mostly ice, the other mostly desert, while India, Vietnam and Indonesia are mostly monsoon jungle. In Freedoom doom2 in later levels there are kama sutra or indian looking wall decorations everywhere, I have no clue if that's any kind of Omen. For now lots of Indians are vegetarian, but they have been bruised and abused through history with muslim invader pasha's shooting cannon balls at the Iron Pillar in Delhi, shedding a whole lot of their territory to muslim majority countries of Bangladesh and Pakistan (yeah now look at that chart again and include Pakistan and Bangladesh into your image of beach assault soldiers and count how much ammo you need to defend in case you have to), then they were the crown jewel of the British crown (i'm betting a good 50-80% of income of the british royalty that supported their world dominant navy such as at the Battle of Jutland was extracted from India, while the people there starved, just like people starved in Ireland during the potato famine while grain was being exported to England from Ireland, what else is new) with bloody putting down of uprisings by blowing from the gun (cannons) elderly hindus as punishment, then Ghandi liberated them through a hunger strike and partitioned India into the muslim and hindu majority regions, and recently they started asserting their power with giving the finger to patent trolls about pharmaceuticals with world IP coming at them from Switzerland and the US, and we are helpless unless we're willing to attack, they are also pissed at Monsanto for giving them seeds that fail to germinate when resown after harvest, they are all sterile plants and their failed farmers are committing suicides over it like lemmings, so there are all kinds of excuses to feel angry about if it is excuses you're looking for, and gone are the times of world stability when the two superpowers of CCCP and USA with cousins telephoning each other via a Washington-Moscow hotline dominated the world top down and ensured a stable world, and these new powers of China, India, Brasil, etc, are starting to assert more and more their power. We in the USA are fucking ourselves playing pyramid schemes with the housing market, then pyramid schemes with forced insurance like car insurance and Obamacare, and we got ethnic tensions here like I'm feeling it on my own skin and in my own body and in my budget, personally harmed over simply issues of ethnicity, so a socialist economy of high taxes and everyone benefits does not work here unlike in France, Germany or Sweden with superhigh taxes but a unified bulk single ethnicity, or even in China or India the ethnic tensions are lower. But if anything, I have seen no threats from India yet, if anything North Korea is the only one on the open discussion table about nukes, and I consider them simply the puppet of China that they wag at us every time they get pissed off, such as China holding the most US government debt, and all we can do is keep raising the debt ceiling over high housing cost, because high housing cost, that pyramid scheme scheme is the sole reason why the US is not competitive in the global marketplace, being by far the major cost in everyone's budget, except now here comes Obamacare fucking everything up even worse, bound to outdo housing cost, and what a fucking retard plummeting the country like that. Hey if they work for $5/day in Mexico right across the border, or $1/day in china for 14 hr days 6 days a week, me over here in the USA ain't got no problem working for 50 cents a day and leaving them all in the dust in creativity and productivity, but you gotta let me work out a way where I can make it on 50 cents a day. Duh. That means zero bills pretty much, and the government instead goes about the the other way, increasing taxes and piling on even more mandatory basic costs, instead of cutting taxes and working on cutting housing cost and other basic costs and dropping the minimum wage to make US small businesses competitive in the global marketplace, and people have jobs. I'd much rather work for 50 cents a day where my mandatory costs are 10 cents a day, then live in New York where you can make $40/hr but your cost of living adds up to like $41/hr. What fucktard wants to live in New York, or California?

The appeals courts generally rule on the LAW, not on the FACTS. So when they overturn a decision they frequently remand it with an instruction (not a request) to decide it in accordance with a specific understanding of the law.

Why send it back rather than just deciding the outcome of the case? Because the appellant ruling on the law may or may not change the outcome of a case. Imagine someone confessed to a murder, and there were also witnesses. The appellant court might rule that as a matter of law the confession is not admissible. They'd remand the case to be tried without the confession. The murderer might well still be convicted based on witness testimony and other evidence. The appeals court doesn't hear from witnesses, they just rule on points of law. The trial court would need to judge guilt or innocence, while following the appellant court's instruction to not play the confession for the jury.

Suppose you bought a car which had a significant safety defect. You sue the car company. After a spending a million dollars on lawyers and experts, the company's lawyers convince the judge that you filed suit in the wrong court, so you lose. Now you owe the car company a million bucks. That type of outcome would happen often enough that it would be very, very rare for anyone to sue someone with more money than they have.

    Instead, the fees are based on fairness- if you file a frivolous suit, you can plan on being ordered to pay the defendant's costs. Also, if you clearly CAUSE a suit, you can be ordered to pay the other party's costs. As an example, suppose you write to the car company asking them to fix the defect, at a cost of $350. They give you the run around for two years, promising to fix it but they never fix it. They admit it's a problem, they admit they caused the problem, but they just won't fix it without being sued. In such a case, you'd probably be awarded costs (and possibly treble damages).

To be fair, there *are* fixed costs to the power company in keeping you connected to the grid, in fact those costs are a fairly significant portion of the normal power bill. It's just that the current fee structure doesn't reflect it well.

By depreciating to zero in 10 years you're implying that a battery with 70-80% of its capacity is useless. That's hardly true.

It could also be a real boon for windmill users. Store power that the windmill provides at night (when you probably aren't using much, if any, power) and sell it back (or use it) during peak usage periods.

And 48kWh, which is cited above as "about average", means, no home-servers running 24x7 (about 200Watts*24h=4.8kWh — or 10% more than the estimate — per server), no super-duper Christmas lights [komar.org], and other limitations...

My home server runs 24x7. It draws 11W when idling, or about 264 watt-hours per day, and the current versions draw barely half that. Compared with heating and cooling, the server is lost in the noise. Unless you're serving a site that absolutely requires staggering amounts of computing power or desktop-sized hard drives, might I suggest you consider more power-efficient server hardware?

If I were still using such an ancient 200W horror, replacing it with a 6W server would save me almost $650 annually at my current PG&E rate. In other words, the new hardware would be basically free after the first year or so.

Cloudfare blocks Tor exit nodes heavily; you have to fill out a captcha almost every other page refresh. It makes it almost impossible to navigate a website.

CloudFlare blocks any IP address that sends an insane number of page hits in a short period of time, because the vast majority of those IPs are being used by automated bots running on sites like Amazon EC2 to scan websites and post spam links en masse. There's no good way for CloudFlare to tell the difference.

And yeah, that policy is problematic. It caused me to endure a protracted back-and-forth with Amazon over getting my affiliate account activated, because CloudFlare was treating Amazon's web crawler bot's IP range as a potential spammer and showing it a captcha page for every result.

That seems incompatible with your distaste for "kowtowing to the enemies of freedom" and trying to allow customers access to your books even if a government doesn't want them to have access.

There's also a decided benefit to blocking web-posting mass spammers, and although the captchas are annoying, they don't prevent you from using the site entirely; they merely make it a pain in the backside. On balance, although it isn't ideal, it is acceptable, IMO, because A. it is trivial for end users to get around and thus is not a true block, and B. it serves a very useful purpose in the default case while causing a hassle for only a tiny fraction of a percent of the site's users (at most).

(Incidentally, the book thing was purely hypothetical; my books are pretty tame.)

In any case, you're asking the wrong questions. You're looking at it from the perspective of one of those big cloud providers. The truth is, the big players can't protect your site. The big players have too much to lose. If you want your site protected, you can not go to the cloud.

On the other hand, the big players are also the only ones that can protect the site. The small players who have nothing to lose will just get blocked and won't have enough pull to do anything about it. They'll have no choice but to bend to any random government's demands if they want to avoid their entire IP range getting blocked en masse. Only a company that is big enough to serve real companies' content can be even slightly effective at protecting you against bullying by world governments.

So basically, when you combine that fact with your statement, you end up with a world in which there can be no protection from free speech, because the only companies big enough to defend it have too much to lose, and thus cannot afford to do so. In effect, the world's free speech becomes limited to the lowest common denominator—to content that complies with the strictest limits of all of the strictest sets of laws in the world. I know that's what the leadership of those countries would like, but it is simply too high a price.

IMO, what is needed is a U.S. law that says that any U.S. company, being an entity that exists solely at the pleasure of the U.S. government, can be fined for not preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution, including the first amendment, against all threats, foreign and domestic. That would at least provide a counterweight—a punishment for bending too far.

In the absence of that, though, the CDNs need to step up on their own. They need to stand up for free speech, and they need to defend their presumed innocence as a blind cache by requiring that all legal actions be taken against the original site directly, and by taking steps to make it painful for anyone who tries to make an end run around that policy. It is a legally defensible position to hold, and more importantly, it is the only morally and ethically reasonable position to hold. All other positions are a slippery slope that eventually leads to blocking speech that truly deserves defending.

Cloudflare could serve from different IPs if they wanted to but don't. That's what I mean by "human shield". Shield infringing material with non-infringing material. That is much the same as shielding combatants with non-combatants.

Except it isn't. As a rule, nobody dies if a cat pictures website gets blocked. Financial loss and human loss are two very different things to most people.

Besides, what determines whether something is infringing: the U.S.'s insane copyright laws, China's lax copyright laws, or something in the middle? There is no one worldwide standard for what is and is not protected by copyright. As soon as you allow one country to hold you hostage over copyright, you allow any country to do so, no matter how absurd their laws might be.

User-created content, for example, is protected by copyright in the U.S. What happens when some country takes that one step further and demands that site owners pay users every time the sites show their user-contributed content? It would be insanity, but there's nothing preventing a country from passing such a law, and if you aren't really careful with your licensing terms, it could even happen in the U.S. under U.S. copyright law.

The moment someone sues for an injunction, there would be millions of websites around the globe that would be technically violating copyright laws, and blocking all the sites that do so would also be very directly blocking free speech. Thus, as you can see, by allowing a caching-only service to be the arbiter for copyright law rather than requiring the aggrieved party to take legal action against the original site, you're just a hair's breadth away from throwing all free speech under the bus.

Sorry but "sharing" artistic works that can be purchased elsewhere is not speech.

Even as someone who makes most of his income off of intellectual property, I consider that a ridiculous claim. Speech is the dissemination of information, period, full stop. Therefore disseminating information about where you can download something is speech. The fact that the download is illegal in most of the world doesn't change that, nor does the fact that the download is (arguably) immoral and unethical change that.

The moment you start deciding that one thing is speech and another isn't, regardless of your personal views on the merits of that speech, you begin running headlong towards despotism. This isn't to say that you must tolerate all forms of speech on your own sites, but there's a big difference between that and a government—any government—making that decision for you.

Yep. It's wierd because the symptoms can correspond with many different causes. For example, the climate change thing makes sense because bees can be tricked into thinking it's spring and start foraging or even swarming in the middle of winter when they really should stay in the winter cluster. The occasional warm day is good for them to be able to get out and void themselves, but longer periods of significantly fluctuating weather can be bad.

But it also matches other problems. Diseased or dying hives often lead to "desperate" swarming where bees start abandoning the hive to try to establish a new, safe place. Most of these swarms, however, will die. The behavior could be seen as a general "exteme stress" behavior. It could also be seen as a neurological disorder from pesticide exposure.

In short, it could match almost any possible cause. And probably is a result of many of them.