xkcd recently covered this kind of presumption of current trends continuing forever.

"Demonstrate why cold fusion is impossible."

What can I do to show him how destructive these bills actually are

Just program your friend's computer so it cannot access Google, Facebook, or Wikipedia. Ask him a week later how he likes the SOPA Internet.

USPTO: "Yeah, we approved these totally bogus patents that resulted in billions of dollars of litigation and now we're affirming our own malfeasance. What's your problem?" The USPTO needs to be sued into the stone age for this fraud.

This is about protecting their brand, trademarks and image.

Not really. It's about obstructing its competitors from bringing their phones to market. Apple figured out a year ago that its competitors have better phones than it does.

Just make your password be a confession to a crime. Then, reveling it would be a confession to a crime, which is self-incrimination by definition. If they were to offer some kind of immunity deal to induce you to reveal the password, you could have made your confession be to the crime of copyright infringement on the file in question.

RIAA: Statutory damages = $150,000, actual damages = $0.50 (lost wholesale price). Amount of punitive damages = $149,999.50, which is 299,999x the actual damages. The constitutional limit on punitive damages 10x actual damages.

If there is any validity to this kind of study, it is merely detecting that people who use IE tend to be late adopters to new technology and that late adopters have many other properties, including low "risk intelligence". I'd also expect them to be outside of the 18-49 demographic.

Blu-ray content can be ripped *exactly* using programs like MakeMKV and all the significant video media is released on Blu-ray these days. There's no need to try to capture this material from HDMI.

You're saying that you are surprised that a corporation would want to make money from appeasing both camps?