How can I avoid "consum[ing] that slop" if grocery stores play proprietary music over their speaker system, the royalties for which come out of the price of the groceries I buy?

How is that possible when all major TV news sources that cover candidates for federal office share a corporate parent with one of the members of the MPAA? Fox=Fox, CBS=Paramount, ABC=Disney, NBC=Universal, and CNN=Warner. A candidate for federal office who openly opposes the excesses of what copyright has become will draw smear campaigns from all five of these studios' co-owned news channels.

Apart from the fact that you're mixing UPDATE syntax with INSERT syntax, substitution is perfectly valid so long as each string has been sanitized in the correct manner for a particular database connection (that is, not addslashes()). For the MySQLi client library, it looks like this:

$fname = $db->escape_string($fname);
$lname = $db->escape_string($lname);

Don't get me wrong; it's bad practice to escape manually unless you're using operator IN on a database client library that supports neither array parameters nor named placeholders (such as MySQLi). But code that correctly uses $db->escape_string() (or the equivalent for other languages or database drivers) should be safe from SQL injection, just as code that correctly uses htmlspecialchars() should be safe from script injection.

But how long do you keep these mirrors around, in case there's a screw-up that goes undiscovered for a while?

Against the uploader of the torrent, not against the site. OCILLA shields compliant providers from liability for uploaders' actions.

So which is Battlefield Earth? Or is it a cult classic only to those actually in a cult?

That depends, John. Have you been doing "dust" to stay young?

Please provide a counterexample to the claim "There is no other way [than taxation] to provide public goods" and I'll believe you. Preferably more than one, so that other Slashdot users don't shoot each down as impractical.

Would it not be stealing if I took your money and used it to shoot other people who try to take not only more of your money but also your life? Police and military are public goods. Giving a reasonable peaceful livelihood to orphans helps reduce the cost of police by keeping orphans from forming gangs that use violence against rich people.

If you got a certificate error when viewing the link that I posted above, here's another link to the definition of a license for free cultural works using cleartext HTTP.

What would be the grounds for such a suit, especially given the ruling in Viacom v. YouTube that OCILLA-compliant providers are not liable for their users' copyright infringement?

I don't see how Creative Commons is so boring for artists practicing their craft in part by remixing other artists' work.

Are you sure it wasn't canceled for a lack of hot tub Eloi and hot tub Morlocks?

Plus a mirror of a few of the torrent sites that do host themselves, for added protection against both hardware failure and paradoxes.

If hardware keyboards are such "a dead technology", why do PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS still have hardware directional pads, analog sticks, and buttons, as opposed to relying on multitouch with zero tactile feedback the way the iPhone and Android devices do? For game genres using directional as opposed to positional input, even the widely panned Turbo Touch 360 gamepad is better than a flat sheet of glass. So there's at least one niche of applications best served by a specialized input device that helps the user align his fingers without looking at them. BlackBerry fans believe that e-mail is another.

Even if you make a second proofreading pass on an article typed on a touch screen, placing the insertion point near a particular word to correct it is a pain too. Or do I just have overly fat fingers?

I wonder how hard it'd be to take The Open Bay and turn it into a "LegitTorrent" site centered around works under a Creative Commons license or other licenses for free cultural works. Such a site would promptly respond to OCILLA notices to help discover uploaders that have been engaging in license laundering.