How exactly do you plan on doing this? Would you block access by default and only allow a whitelist of sites that have paid your ransom to allow access? Or would you only block sites that you've targeted as "sites that we want to pay us" and then only unblock them when they've paid? And what technical methods would you use for blocking?

How would you select which companies you'd like to pay you, and how would you approach them? Like would you block Amazon? And if so, is your plan to just email their customer service and say, "Yo, we want you to pay us to allow access for 35k students!" Because you'd need contacts within the company to hope to broker a deal. Who's going to negotiate the deal? And I'll tell you what, it'll be a tough negotiation because, even assuming you have enough prospective consumers to get their attention, you'd be asking them to set a very dangerous precedent. Smaller companies might be stupid enough and short-sighted enough to make that kind of agreement, but they're not going to have enough money to make the whole venture worthwhile.

And now, lets assume that you've created an appropriate system and signed a deal with the businesses you're interested in. Who are you going to get to monitor and maintain this system? That's going to cost money too. Add up the money you're going to pay out to create this system, to broker the deals, to monitor/maintain/enforce the system. Is that amount of money substantially less than the money you're making from all this?

Putting aside questions of whether it's moral or appropriate, I just don't see how you would pull it off.

That's your argument? "We all die"? Sure, we all die, so might as well play Russian roulette. Why all the childish fear mongering about Russian roulette? "Putting a loaded gun to your head and pulling the trigger is DANGEROUS!" they say. They're historical. They should wake up and attack rich people!!

Or maybe you're a paranoid retard.

Are you saying that I'm pandering because I think that the fictional "Mutant Registration Act" was probably partially inspired by the real-life "Alien Registration Act"?

I think you're being overly sensitive and being weirdly reverse-politically correct. Instead of being "politically correct" by being sensitive and demanding that nobody say anything that might be construed as "offensive", you're being sensitive and demanding that nobody say anything that might be construed as "inoffensive". Lighten up.

It doesn't even need to be a mutation. The fact is that immunizations are not 100% effective, and immunized people can get sick. They're just less likely to get sick.

Aside from that, some people don't have the option of being immunized.

How did this get on the front page? Comparing vaccination registrations with mutant registration? A remotely educated person would have at least tried to compare it to the real-life events that inspired the idea of "mutant registration", which were the treatment of Jews in Europe and of the Japanese in the US during WW2.

And this:

Is this a joke? Is the suggestion that they won't use sentinels sarcastic?

And it's not "fear based on misinformation", it's fear based in real risk. When large numbers of people refuse to get vaccinated from serious infectious diseases, they're putting everyone else in the population at greater risk of infection.

It seems to imply that the following thought process: The only purpose of TrueCrypt was in order to support Windows XP, which is no longer supported, so it's not useful for that purpose anymore. Since new operating systems provide their own encryption mechanisms, there is no value in the project, so we're shutting things down.

However, the fact that Windows XP has lost official support does not mean that no one is using Windows XP anymore. Further, one of the valuable aspects of TrueCrypt was that it was open source (meaning the encryption could be independently verified) and cross-platform (meaning a disk encrypted on Mac could be accessed on Windows and vice versa). There's still a lot of potential uses for such a project.

Aside from that, what would possibly be the harm in continuing to provide the source code? If the intention were to deny people binaries as a method of providing a stern warning to potential users, surely they could still provide the source and say, "... but if you know what you're doing well enough to make use of the source code, go ahead and use at your own risk."

Something's wrong here, unless the people maintaining the project are just kind of retarded.

Of course I don't know, but I think it's likely that they will eventually honor the GPL to some extent because of the inherent non-legal punishment for not honoring the GPL: increased maintenance costs.

If I take your code and build my own version, making changes, and then you make substantial improvements to your code, then I'm left with 4 choices:

1) Ditch my changes and use your new code.
2) Go back and re-impliment my old changes on your new code, possibly needing to rewrite my changes to account for changes in your code.
3) Live without the improvements of your new version.
4) Submit my code to your project so that they become part of the parent project, and then I can continue to get updates from you without additional work.

Unless you have some reason to keep your changes secret, option number 4 is actually pretty attractive.

Good. They should be considering Linux. We all should be.

I guess some of that depends on your interpretation of what the NSA is "supposed to do". The Intelligence world is a bit funny in that, probably every country's Intelligence agencies are doing some things that they're are in some ways illegal and unethical, like spying on private communications of their allies' leaders. Are they "supposed to do" those things? I don't know.

And this sort of thing is going to become very important once antibiotics stop working.