Any chance to pin that on the content mafia or patent trolls? C'mon, at least ONCE such a story has to hit someone we can uniformly hate and not be controversial.

Can't be. Great Leader invented the Ozone Layer.

Can't we just do what we usually do? Kill them all and call the ones that don't deserve it "unfortunately unavoidable collateral damage"?

Can we just agree on greed being the culprit? Democrat, Republican, where's the difference? As long as there's money to be made by ignoring the law and as long as breaking a law and getting caught is cheaper than heeding it, greed trumps "doing the right thing" any time.

Really? The public demanded? Who? Where? When? All I remember is scaremongering from the press and politicians telling us that the sky is about to fall and how they need to protect us.

I honestly cannot remember a single instance where anyone demanded to trade his liberties for "safety".

Erh... I'm kinda wondering whether a good deal of the more recent takedown requests come from the European right-to-be-forgotten rather than the US DMCA.

This.

9/11 was much like the trojan horse stunt Odysseus pulled. Worked great back then. Won't work again, ever.

The reason 9/11 worked out was because people were used to other kinds of plane hijackings. Hijackers that steal a plane, fly it somewhere, then demand something to be fulfilled before returning plane and passengers. That was the standard of plane hijackings before 2001. That's why it worked. Everyone expected just that. That's why the pilots opened the cockpit doors, that's why the passengers stayed in their seats.

Today, neither would happen. Nothing you would threaten the pilot with could make him open that door, and if you have anything short of a machine gun you'll certainly find passengers willing and able to come to the conclusion "if I fight I have a chance, if I don't I'm dead for sure". In a 300+ passenger plane, if only one out of fifty people gets that idea it's enough to make the whole hijacking very unlikely to succeed.

Face it, flying is safer than ever. Security theater or none, one thing is certain: 9/11 will not happen again. Simply because the people involved will react very, very differently.

Our society? Citation needed...

So you think that's why fewer and fewer of us go to cons?

Well first of all Linus has never been overly concerned with market share, just building a technically damn good kernel so I doubt this will have much practical influence on his work. It's got to be frustrating though, Linux works on massively huge and complex servers. It works on the smallest mobile and embedded devices. But a regular desktop that from the kernel's side is rather simple, one CPU and usually one GPU and pretty much no exotic devices (from the kernel side all USB devices look the same, for example) and no absurd limits being pushed in any direction.

I think the last real significant desktop feature was when they increased interactivity by changing the default time slice from 100 Hz to 1000 Hz and that was in 2004 or so. Heck, I would say it was at least as ready as the BSD kernel was when Apple created OS X in 2001. It's quite telling that the one thing Google did not want to rewrite when they made Android was the kernel. All else they ripped out and replaced with Apache licensed code, but not that. Well that and a bunch of Google proprietary APIs, but that's another flame war. I think I'd feel just the same in his shoes.

They're solidly in the realm of the legal in the US because of USC 17 512(d):

If they don't respond to DMCA notices they fail condition (C) and become liable. This has been established legal history since way back when web pages used to link to illegal MP3 files, perhaps longer. It's not true in the general case, just because you point them to other website that might contain something illegal won't get you into trouble. But pointing directly to infringing content and claiming you aren't liable because you're not the one hosting it doesn't fly.

What drugs are you on really? You make as much sense as saying that because this knife didn't come with an EULA not to behead unbelievers the manufacturer supports what the Islamic State is doing in Iraq/Syria. I've never to my knowledge bought or owned anything that has a political agenda as condition for use and newer will. I do care how they were produced (no child labor, animal testing, destroying the rain forest, social dumping or so on) but I'd never buy a car that had the gall to tell me where I could and couldn't drive in the EULA. So are you nuts, a troll or just trying to kill OSS? Because you make RMS look pragmatic.