This is not venture capital, but donations. In my limited exposure to venture capital and other business investments, there is usually an ownership stake or some other form of equity being purchased.

Society has been dealing with snake oil salesmen for centuries. And civilization has come up with some novel concepts to fund ideas and protect against fraud. Back before we called it crowd sourcing, we called it the stock market. I think that might still be around in some form or another...

Consider this thought exercise. You have an idea that you find important. You think other people will find it important. You want to share it with others. You want people to remember the message long after the messenger. How do you spread your message?

I know I would personally prefer that as a society we have higher level political philosophy debates and discussions and less sound bites and attack ads. But a society tends to have a very short attention span. As individuals, we all tend to have more than enough on our plates at a personal level without having to scale our perceptions up to the broader political arena. So it might be more tasteful and civil if anti-Santorum groups put up sites that detail merely the hows of whys of what they disagree with, rather than vulgar imagery. Unfortunately, our brains tend to gloss over the logical and thoughtful debates, and fixate on the shocking and the vulgar. Which is why the most popular political ad remains the negative attack ad, and why SpreadingSantorum has elevated political displeasure into a decade long bathroom humor punchline that continues to delight and disgust.

It's actually even more complex than that. Police are now basically being required to do their own recording merely to provide evidence of their own side of the argument, to prevent any 'provocateurs' from rabble-rousing.

This leads to pressure in law enforcement to deploy even more invasive surveillance. We could have officers then being required to keep their own personal cameras running constantly merely to prevent them from self blatantly self censoring footage that is not advantageous to their own point of view. And while I'm not strictly against police officers being under additional scrutiny, I'm not sure how I'd feel if every officer showing up to a public or domestic disturbance call needs to be wearing personal video surveillance. How much public privacy are we willing to sacrifice in order to keep everyone honest?

I run Linux at home AND work you insensitive clod! And my girlfriend borrows a Linux machine when... well, not really. She's happy off in Mac land. But my home has been Windows free since the last drive running Windows ME died back in 2003ish. And ME was what really convinced me to stay off Windows for good. And I can't say I miss it.

I won't lie, I certainly became less of a gamer as a result. But console games and Wine fill the need that the small but slowly increasing handful of Linux released games can't fill. And I'd also like to think I've become a much better developer/system administrator/alpha geek as a result.

Seriously, what's to be surprised about? What do you really think you can do under Windows that we poor Linux users can't manage with our cryptic command line ways?

I'm not saying this isn't a free speech issue. I think these ICE domain seizures are total bullshit.

I'm merely pointing out that the part in the rules which says you can declare something a violation on First Amendment grounds hasn't happened yet. This is a ruling on a petition which is covered by the same rules that ICE used to seize the domains in the first place. And that section of law declares that after the domain Nazis seize your domains, you get to file this petition to declare the seizure bogus.

In the petition, you can appeal to the judge on several different grounds. The specific part of law they're claiming in their petition is that they that they're suffering an undue financial hardship. On those grounds the judge says he's denying the petition and letting the case move forward.

They haven't yet reach the part in the court drama where they get to ask the judge to throw out the case on First Amendment grounds. It's still coming up after the next few commercials.

The actual ruling here is on a specific provision of the law where a seized domain owner to petition the courts to have the domains returned.

(Relevant part of the code here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/983.html)

The judge is merely ruling here that this provision doesn't meet the requirements of this specific provision.

The Judge continues, "Although some discussion may take place in the forums, the fact that visitors must now go to other websites to partake in the same discussions is clearly not the kind of substantial hardship that Congress intended to ameliorate in enacting 983. See 145 Cong. Rec. H4854-02 (daily ed. June 24, 1999) (statement of Rep. Hyde) (“Individuals lives and livelihoods should not be in peril during the course of a legal challenge to a seizure.”). Puerto 80 may certainly argue this First Amendment issue in its upcoming motion to dismiss, but the First Amendment considerations discussed here certainly do not establish the kind of substantial hardship required to prevail on this petition."

Well, towards that end, it's not just payment processing that remains a sink hole for fraud.

Identify Theft could also be mitigated by the banks, yet at present they have no financial incentives to make any changes. This is because when a bank allows a criminal to open a credit line in your name, it remains your problem rather than a problem for the bank.

It's far worse than that. Anyone can apply the "Anonymous" moniker to anything, and there can be no way to prove or disprove such a relationship. Because, at the end of the day, "Anonymous" resolves into exactly what it sounds like... anonymity.

Which is not to say that there aren't individuals acting collectively under the name "Anonymous" that could be identified. Merely that you can't identify someone as solely being a member. You need to tie them back to specific actions to give them a 'real' identify, such as posted on a specific forum with a given user name, or participated in a given DDoS from a given IP address.

Which becomes even more confusing when people want to attribute press releases to "Anonymous" which is analogous to saying "someone, somewhere posted this and we don't know who."

Certainly, the gaming industry is not immune to the march of 'progress'. But neither is any other. Advertising continues to become more effective as new techniques emerge that allow them to be more targeted and tantalizing. So, too, do games that want to charge you by the month instead of a lump sum up front become better at luring their players back for just one more numerical increase. And there are certainly a host of creepy psychological factors at work, being taken into account when designing new games or television series or grocery store advert.

But I have to take exception with the idea that an MMO is an 'inherently amoral business'. Escapism isn't some new concept created by the video game industry. The entertainment industry has been feeding off society's desire to escape from the banality of reality since the dawn of art. They've just gotten better at it over the years.

More specifically, if you want to point out the large downside in the growth of all this new and compelling entertainment content, is the growing need many people feel for it. Not because the entertainment is getting better... which, to be sure, it is. But because the reality of their lives is getting worse, and they feel powerless to change things. And this change in society has very little to do with the entertainment industry, and more to do with greed in general.

Actually, this was was part of the entire point behind the creation of copyright law. In the US, the 'for a limited' clause was there so that the author could benefit by monetizing a short term monopoly on their work, and then the copyright would expire and it would revert into the public domain.

Of course, this was in the days of hand written scribes and latter of movable type presses. The concept of digital information transmission did not yet exist, nor with it the idea that information could be shared near instantly at a fraction of the cost.

Since then, copyright laws have increased in duration from the original 'Statute of Anne' which provided 14 years, with an additional 14 years of the copyright was renewed. Compared to the current US version which protects from 70 years after the death of the author, or for corporate owned works, 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication.

We've also moved away from the publication of plain text works, to the new age of computer binary code. So even if the copyright on a computer program would expire, there are no provisions that the author need also provide the original source code. So the US copyright on Lineage should expire in 2093 (should no further extensions be added, and NCSoft is South Korean, so foreign copyrights can get even tricker) then we would be freely able to distribute the compiled client code... but without access to the never published source code or server software... well, doubtless 95 year old software would only be of any interest to historians anyways. Who could freely view the copyright code all that wanted, even during the duration of the copyright... just as long as they didn't distribute it amongst themselves for study.

Yes, you can make money in the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy entertainment, and history is fraught with such examples.

And while LOTR and Harry Pottery are notable examples of commercial successes, there are plenty of examples of Sci-Fi failures in the market place. For those looking to invest their money in a profitable adventure, your safer investment is with reality television, as you can generate the greatest amount of market share for the least cost. Fantastical scenes tend to require a significantly higher investment in terms of set design and special effects than your typical Rom/Real/Sit/Com.

Capitalism is not a system designed for making entertainment, it's designed to make money. And so long as entertainment continues to be funded by those who would rather make money than good entertainment, they will continue to happily cater to those market bases that generate the most revenues for the least cost.

If fans of science fiction really want their fix, they will likely need to put together their own content industry where they are willing to spend more and generate less revenue in lieu of getting the quality content they desire.