1. Put civil liberties and the general princicples of individual liberty (in the Jeffersonian sense) first, before national security or profit motive
2. Electoral reform (Distributed Direct Democracy would be nice, but there are much less radical improvements that could be easily made, e.g. overturning Citizen's United)
3. Technological literacy (for want of a better term), i.e. representatives who either understand (at least in principle) how the technologies that affect our daily lives work, or who are willing to take approriate impartial advice on matters; we have laws that deal inapproraite/unfair/immoral/illegal interactions between various legal entities (including people), no need to make more of them just because those interactions happen over the internet or on a mobile phone

Just an aside, I'm not a libertarian. and I strongly believe point 1 would require more regulation of companies and industries, not less.

Like the telecomms weren't granted immunity?

You mean like the yellow pages?

Hmm, maybe the alleged drug dealer should get his lawyer to go after the cops for violations of terms of service, Aaron Swarts style. Life in prison sound fair according to prevailing prosecution opinion.

I'd agree with this. Ease of use is more often than not a bad phrasing of "familiar to the user". Windows isn't easy to use. My parents can't use it any more than they can use linux. They could use WP 5.1 and DOS just fine, but back then my dad was writing a Phd and my mum was drafting municipal legislation, both of them using them the computer daily. Since then their computer usage has eased off to the point of just email and web browsing, and the odd letter. I could give them an XFCE desktop with firefox, and thunderbird and libreoffice or a windows desktop with the same and it would probably take them a while tel notice that there are differences between the two that aren't cosmetic. Hell! It they've used my laptop, only commenting on the difference in available fonts.

In this vein, gentoo isn't "hard to use" if your familiar with it. It's easy enough to follow the handbook and install it. It scrolls a lot of intimidating text past during compiles, but that doesn't make it hard to use. What gentoo does do is put a lot of choice and control into the user's hands. More than any other distro I find gentoo has "intelligent defaults". I can emerge almost anything from stable, and not only does it work straight out, but it doesn't auto-start, open a security hole, or otherwise fuck with other stuff on my system. PostgreSQL springs to mind here. I was frutrated to tears trying to figure out how to log in to postgres in a vanilla ubuntu install, until I discovered I had to sudo su postgres. It's been a while since I had a fresh postgres install in gentoo, but I remeber it was obvious to get into, becasue the default install creates a role for local access with a password, iirc

Okay, I didn't notice the kopimi logo before, but subsequent investigation turns up the following

• The kopimi logo only exists on the front page, and what it covers is not specified explicitly. Presumably, in source file licence notices would override the somewhat vague domain covered by a linked image. At most generous interpretation, it covers entire front page (html, css, js, images), more likely it could be argued that since the logo is only linked in the html, that's all it covers.
• That said, I can't find any licence notices in the html or css source either. It'll be interesting to see whether automatic assumed copyright will take precedence over the vague assertions of the kopimi logo or not. Are copyright (dis)claims automatically inherited by by derivative/associated works? Considering the language in the GPL probably not.
• Finally, the kopimi wording doesn't explicitly grant permission. Flimsy, I know, but also a posisble argument.

All in all, you raise a good point, but I don't think it'll sink TPB's case

No! This is win-win for TPB. If they win the case they get to publically point out the hypocracy of the anti-piracy lobby, as well as solidly discredit their 'expertise' (as pointed out by engeekner below). If they lose, presumably because of fair use/parody being used as a defense, they have a precedent set that is actually supportive of their larger goals, i.e. that parody and fair use are applicable defences in cases of copyright infringement. The only other ways it could go are, in the worst case the case is thrown out, and TPB get to say "We aren't even given fair access to the justice system anymore", or they lose because the situation isn't considered infringement, i.e. that their claims are false. If this is the case, then there's a precedent that a direct digital copy does not constitute infrigment.

I disagree! A year after graduating high school, most people can't do basic arithmetic nearly as proficiently as they did when in school. You get rusty at those skills real fast if you're not using them daily. As for trigonometry, basic calculus and stuff you may have had less than a year learning (Maths until final year was compulsory in my school) that's even worse.

No! I'm pretty sure that 10,000 years ago, one over sized caveman intimidated better prices out of one nerdy caveman. Without the protection, and thus regulation, of law there can't be a free market

The point here is to reform the system so that there is a regulated priority of payouts. As a company grows and becomes "too big to fail", it comes under increasing regulation regarding distribution and liquidation. First step: employees are retrenched with a minimum of 2 years cost to company payout before any other debts or bonuses are paid. Executives get paid last and receive no bonuses, incentives, increases to salary, exceptional payouts, or other weasle word names for bonuses. Second Step: creditor clients get paid before shareholders/other debtors. (maybe make this first in the case of financial institutions). Third step: increase minimum asset/cash reserves required to cover one and two accordingly. Basically the idea is that as a company grows to become single point of failure in an economy it is forced to become more secure/less risky, and less profitable. Shares price will fall as new regulations get introduced, because higher profit from higher risk becomes less faesible, generally making the idea of profiteering off an attitude of 'fuck you: you can't take me down down because I have the entire economy by the goolies!" unworkable. It extends the idea of laws against monopolies beyond anti-trust and raqueteering, and also addresses the industry wide abuses rather than single company abuses.

Indeed! Only 150 requests compared to 500,000 memebership within 14 hours of going live. Clearly this site exists substantially for piracy purposes, after all 0.003% of users (assuming those requests each targeted a unique user) are known infiringers! </sarcasm>

(By contrast, in the peer-to-peer proxying model outlined above, every new downloader can also be made to act as a proxy for other users, so additional users don't slow down the system because they contribute as much as they take out of it.)

I know we're about 10 years beind the times here (South Africa) but most people here are on ADSL (max 20mbit, mode 2Mbit). While the speeds may be higher elsewhere in the world, it seems from other similar discussions that ADSL or Async cable is still the primary method of connection. So the quote above isn't true, every downloader is contributing only as much upload bandwidth as they have, which is a lot less than their download bandwidth, unless the protocol allows a difference in proportion, e.g. 1kb up gives you credit for 10kb down; either that, or its one-for-one, but that means your download speed is effectively limited to your upload speed.

Assuming there's advertising revenue involved in the views as well, artificially inflating your count would constitute fraud wouldn't it. No need for a shareholder complaint.

Actually, if I go into my local Incredible Connection (a local computer retail chain in South Africa, more fondly called the the terrible infection, incredible decption etc) and buy a brand new laptop with windows and ask about support I get told pretty much exactly the same thing. If want windows support in this country, it costs me roughly $20 an hour extra, more if I want to phone microsofts support line directly because it's an international phone call for me. Sorry, support costs no matter the operating system. If your complaint is about being told to go somewhere else and pay for it, instead of the strore at which you bought it, then again I have to say there are a ton of retail stores that don't offer desktop support (only hardware repairs) too.

You see this as a problem ... I see this as an opportunity!