When you win a copyright case you may be awarded your attorneys fees. I can't wait to see YouTube's attorneys fee motion. It's going to make my firm's bills seem like chicken feed.

But the defendant's lawyers have done a great job of beating back the Evil Empire, and in so doing have accomplished an important victory for the vitality of the internet.

Yeah.

And trying to 'maximize' the 'minimal' legal authority that exists to support their positions.

And trying to maximize their eroding monopolies.

Actually, you're 100% right. I think I was trying to decide between the phrase "content cartel" and "copyright maximalists", so my aging brain settled on "content maximalists". Would you change that to "copyright maximalists" for me, please :)

It means the big old school content "gatekeeper" companies, and their trade groups like the MPAA, RIAA, ASCAP, etc., whose economic power is being eroded by digitalization and the internet, and who are fighting back by taking extremist positions in defense of their copyright ownership.

Oops, I forgot to put "(PDF)" after the link to the Judge's 24 page decision, which is indeed a PDF file. I always like to give that heads-up, but forgot to this time.

What do you bury them with? Fossil fuel powered construction equipment? That's a bit like driving 10 miles to the recycling center with a six pack of soda cans because you don't have curb side pickup. ;)

Not when the trees die and release virtually all of that carbon back into the atmosphere as they decompose.

The watt is a measurement of power. The kilowatt-hour is a measurement of energy. 31 Gigawatts on its own is meaningless. That incandescent light bulb in your closet is rated for 100 watts, does that tell you how much it cost you to operate last month? The power consumption is useless without knowing how long the device was turned on, and it's easier to say "That light bulb consumed 15kWh last month" than to say "That 100 watt light bulb was turned on for 150 hours last month."

pop-ups as in http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/802841/pop-up-populism-how-the-temporary-architecture-craze-is-changing-our-relationship-to-the-built-environment

Modern hard drives identify bad sectors on the physical media and remap them in a way that is transparent to the operating system. Wiping the HD with /dev/zero will not zero out these sectors, because the OS does not see them, and the HD will not touch them once they're marked bad. If they contained confidential data prior to being marked bad then that data may well be recoverable. It's a huge long shot, but nation-states have the time and resources to chase such long shots.

Physical destruction is really the only way to be sure. Encrypting the drive from the get-go is the next best thing, since any bad sectors will contain encrypted data, though with the cheap price of drives these days you may just as well destroy it when you're done with it.

Sure it does. Human beings have been possessing the cutting edge weaponry of the day since the very first Homo sapiens picked up a rock and bashed in his neighbors head. Possession of weaponry is the quintessential natural law right. It can't even effectively be taken away in highly controlled environments, just ask the poor SOB who just got shanked in the prison shower.

Are you talking about my law firm web site or my blog post on blogger.com?

I don't have the power to do that; the site was set up with Yahoo Site Solutions which is pure junk, and doesn't let you do anything.