Now the interesting thing is going to be (if this ever gets challenged in court): who owns the copyright over those e-mails?

A better question, if this ever gets challenged in court, is who registered the copyrights?

IANAL, but my understanding is that for a copyright lawsuit in the USA to go anywhere, the "work" has to be registered with the copyright office. No registration, no lawsuit, do not pass "Go".

Which, practically speaking, means a DMCA complaint on something like an e-mail (which is unlikely to be registered) is mostly just a bluff. Admittedly, even having to get such a lawsuit dismissed is too much for the average DMCA complaint recipient to fight and most of them would cave.

Moving production to Africa won't be a trend until honest government prevails in Africa.

I'm fairly confident that a Chinese business might know a thing of two about working with a corrupt government.

I'm pretty sure that if I ran a business and I misrepresented a $4 million deal to my business partners, investors, and/or the general public as being 20 times larger, either my ass would be in jail or I'd be sued into oblivion.

Burning flags is free speech.

You'll find that there's a lot of people who don't think it is free speech or should be. And in places that don't put a value on freedom of speech, it isn't.

A real head-scratching conundrum about the universe is explaining why it's not already overrun with self-replicating robots.

Because the need/urge to reproduce and expand your territory is a biological imperative which would have to be taught to robots?

Because an biological lifeform smart enough to make immortal intelligent robots might just be smart enough not to also make them infinitely self-replicating?

Because the universe is big enough and hostile enough to make unbounded expansion less than a sure thing?

My question is whether a Hollywood B movie is a cause worth anyone -- our military and diplomatic people, civilians movie goers -- risking their lives?

I hate to quote celebrities, but George Clooney makes a good point:

"With the First Amendment, you're never protecting Jefferson; it's usually protecting some guy who's burning a flag or doing something stupid."

Why is this any different than counties that don't allow the sale of alcohol adjacent to counties that do?

Applying logic to the War On Drugs is a lot like bringing spaghetti to the beach.

Yes, I'd go to the mall. I have a better chance of being killed in an accident driving to the mall.

I will bet your chances of being killed in a mall go way up if there are specific threats against that mall.

Absolutely. If there's specific threats against that mall, there's going to be a fuckton of heavily armed law enforcement types swarming the place. Anybody with a grasp of statistics and/or current events should know that's a situation to avoid.

The ONLY people in the whole world who really care about this two-bit movie are the North Koreans. They're not going to pull off any real terrorist attacks.

Sony is a Japanese corporation. Japan is, if you glance at a map, within spitting distance of North Korea. North Korea is well known for being collectively batshit insane, and for pulling some bad stuff on Japan with less cause.

I wouldn't be making bets either way on this one...

Unfortunately, many (small) websites are hosted on a shared server with one IP for multiple domains. The name is required in the URL else it simply does not work.

It's required in the HTTP Host header, but close enough.

I'm aware that it won't work for everyone, but in this particular discussion we're talking about sites that nobody in their right mind should ever be sharing a server with, nor do I believe a site like the Pirate Bay would want to get pinned down to a specific server.

In any case, if Sony decides to have a go at a small website, they're pretty much screwed irrespective of web server configuration.

A huge number of people already barely use DNS. They go to places like "The Pirate Bay" by entering "The Pirate Bay" in the Google Search window, and following the first link or two that they find. So, if Google indexes 194.71.107.27 or there's a Wikipedia link to it (since, you know, that'd be newsworthy), the effect of a DNS ban has little impact on the original discovery of the site URL.

Some (stupid) ISP's already take care of this search mechanism... enter a bad URL, go right to a search page. Most browsers will also be more than happy to help out.

It'll break bookmarks, but once you know something exists, has value to you, and you know how to find it, it's nothing more than an inconvenience.

In other words, delisting doesn't work for longer than it takes a new URL to propagate.

Taking over the hostname would last a little longer, but news travels fast.

the solution looks costly but hardly unmanageable

According to this, the largest plant in the country costs about $1 billion and will be able to handle about 50 million gallons per day.

If you built $21 billion dollars worth of those plants, you get about 1 billion gallons per day of desalination capacity, which would take about 30 years to just to regenerate those 11 trillion gallons, not even considering what's needed to handle existing overconsumption.

Still manageable, but it's not a good short-term fix.

While there were extreme options available to Google, such as law suits and massive lobbying, Google took a rather mild approach

Well, they could have taken an even milder approach... kept Google News in Spain, but only shown news from sites published outside of Spain. Sure, no more local news, much less news about Spain, and most of what was available would be slanted in ways the government and/or people might not like, but c'est la vie...

Just because someone lives in any particular area doesn't mean that stories about other areas aren't of interest. The bigger the news event, the broader the distribution.

Not to mention that the insights on foreign news sources on local events can be quite... interesting. Everyone has their own spin, and usually the real story is in the intersection of as many spins as possible.

What tends to aggravate me more about Google News is how reporting on major international events gets diluted with "$event Victim Has Ties To $city" types of headlines. I assume Google News has some sort of "uniqueness" score to filter out all the wire service duplication which causes these one-off local interest types of stories to bubble up the rankings, but I never find them remotely relevant.

Yeah, that's kind of my sense. These lines are a *human* artifact, carved into the earth and left there for a thousand years. That's pretty much the definition of man despoiling the earth and it's not something I can see the hardcore environmental activist types having any qualms about trashing. They might not go out of their way to destroy it, but I can't imagine them feeling much remorse over it.