You would license software you sell as BSD? Since that would be even worse for restricting redistribution I can only assume you mean that when you want to use other people's code in your proprietary program you prefer BSD.

Obviously proprietary software vendors like to use other people's work for free without reciprocating as it gives them a competitive advantage. I trust you understand that people who illegally copy your work are just applying the same principles as you, sans license compliance.

I'm not saying I approve of copyright infringement, I don't. I use predominantly software under GPL or similar license because I want to use software legally. The license conditions are not at all onerous to me, unlike some EULAs and copy protection schemes etc.

Thirst, possibly? Depending on the size of the atoll, it might have been very difficult to find fresh water.

Obviously not you, and yet you took the time to post. Tell me, exactly how boring is your life?

A famous aviator, that everyone in the US knows of (if only for the fact that she disappeared). The phrase "needs no introduction" comes to mind. Explaining who she is would have been like starting an article with "Abraham Lincoln, the president of the United States during the Civil War". If you don't recognize the name, then you're either a small child or from some other country. If it's the latter, you should accept that American websites will sometimes refer to American celebrities, and in such situations Wikipedia is your friend.

The GPL is a copyright license. Anything that is not covered by copyright can therefore not have the GPL applied to it.

It bothers me that you could not figure this out for yourself and had to ask.

The "double standard" is because EULAs are designed to restrict what you can do with a piece of software over and above what copyright does to restrict you. The GPL and other FOSS licenses give you rights you don't already have.

I respect the GPL because it recognises one thing that EULAs never recognise -- the unlimited right to run the program.

Unfortunately, neither the quantum soup nor time existed prior to the Big Bang, so....

Not trying to claim a divine creator here, just saying that this logic seems pretty circular. The best we can do with current knowledge is say we don't know what caused the Big Bang, but we wouldn't be around to wonder had it not happened, so we shouldn't read much into that lack of knowledge.

You have format shift. Buy a DVD and rip it. It's really easy. Yeah, the studios don't like it, but at least you're putting some money in the pockets of the people who are entertaining you.

We also have preview for music (e.g. Pandora, FM radio), and books (chapter previews, libraries), and games (demos, open betas). Unfortunately, the preview system doesn't work for most movies, since a lot of them are the sort that you only really want to see once. "Aha!", you yell, "That means it sucks and is worthless and I'm justified in stealing it!" Well, no. Movies can be valuable and enjoyable even if you only watch them once. We do, however, have plentiful reviews. They won't screen out all the crap, since it's subjective, but they work in most cases.

Also, on the Bridge to Terabithia example, how did you get through childhood without reading the book and discovering how heart-rending it was? Seriously, that's like the shared childhood trauma of everyone born in the past forty years.

Are kids really that easily fucked up that looking at a picture or video will ruin them? I'd say that institutionalized bullying at schools is a far greater concern than access to porn in terms of damage done. There have been mass shootings at schools in response to bullying, what damage can you demonstrate from porn?

You clearly want us all to know you're saying "fucked" yet you replace the u with an asterisk. What do you think you're achieving? Are your thoughts or words more pure because you deliberately spelled fuck incorrectly? Is your post now harmless to children, whereas another u in the wrong spot would traumatize them? Your post is a great demonstration of the mentality of people who desire censorship.

Actors and athletes take a risk. The odds of a payoff are low, and the payoff is high to make up for that. By comparison, your mainframe know-how had a very good chance of paying off, so the payoff was lower. The expected value of the two positions is likely pretty similar.

Think long and hard about paying athletes and actors and the like less. Those professions are one of the precious few remaining paths by which a person born into a poor family can become wealthy. And they gain that wealth by making a whole lot of people happy, which strikes me as a pretty deserving path. If we go back to the bad-old-days of businessmen colluding to pay athletes peanuts, that'll just be one more wall keeping the poor poor.