Sure, you can sell things with contractual conditions. This would be a considerable drag on your sales.

First, something with conditions is inherently worth less. If I buy a horse with no intentions of using it for farm labor, and with every intention of feeding it well, your conditions would become problems if either I needed money and wanted to sell the horse in an agricultural community, or if carrots became very expensive and difficult to get. Second, the act of signing a contract puts me at some legal risk, even if I perform the condition. What if you suspect I'm not providing the requisite carrots, and take legal action? If there were no contract, you'd have no standing to sue, and even if I handily win the lawsuit it's going to be stress, time, and expense to me. Third, if the horse is ever transferred from me without the contract (possibly in a bankruptcy), you've got no way to enforce your rules. Fourth, the signature requirement makes the sale clumsier. I can't just pay you with Paypal and have you mail the horse and then get the plates for it*, I have to have an exchange with an actual signature.

Now, apply this to creative work. If you need to sell your music with contractual ties, you get the above problems and more. You can't let me hear it for free unless I first sign an NDA, and it's impractical to get NDAs from anybody who might receive a radio station. My fictional fifteen-year-old daughter can't buy it on her own. As a result, people will buy music they can get without binding contracts, and if all music is only available under similar contracts the Justice Department is going to investigate you and friends for restraint of trade. (You also have to individually negotiate each contract or make very, very sure it very clearly says what you want - it is then a contract of adhesion, and the courts will settle any ambiguity in the purchaser's favor.) With this model, if even one copy gets out not under contract, or one person breaks a contract and makes copies, everybody can get free legal copies of your music. (If Joe violates his contract with you, and I get an uncontracted copy, you can sue Joe for breach of contract but you can't sue me, because I have no legal obligations to you.)

So, instead, we pass a copyright law. The Constitutional purpose, in the US, is to induce you to write music, not to grant you some sort of moral right. If the Founding Fathers had considered copyright to be some form of ownership, they wouldn't have bothered to give Congress specific powers to allow such monopolies. There's nothing in the Constitution specifically permitting laws in defense of property.

Now let's take the GPLv3 scenario. In a regime with copyright laws, you've violated the license and commercially redistributed large numbers of somebody else's copyrighted code without a license. You're in trouble. In a regime without, there's nothing to prevent somebody from buying an ASDAA, copying the executable software and distributing it freely, and reverse-engineering your changes to add back into the original code. You're not able to sell it for big bucks because you're undercut by free copies. The GPL was originally intended as a judo-like tactic, using copyright law against the idea of copyright. While it serves some other of Stallman's goals, its essential purpose is to prevent copyright restrictions from being slapped onto code.

*My knowledge of horses is not great. Work with me here.

I'm fine with my organs being reused. It's this business of being killed beforehand that I would object to. The way you put it implies that getting executed for something I didn't do is not that objectionable provided my organs aren't harvested.

Yet you're telling me that, if I try to bypass a blacklist for any reason, I'm committing fraud?

No, nobody's telling you that.

The judge apparently assumes that people are in general authorized to access public web sites, but that a formal letter revoking that authorization to a particular entity does remove the authorization. A C&D letter isn't a legal mandate, and you won't be prosecuted for violating one, but you could be if you do something potentially illegal. The fact that 3taps circumvented the IP block established intent.

It's possible that there will be a ruling saying that bypassing and IP block is unauthorized access (and I hope not), but this isn't it.

This ruling does not imply that Aaron Schwarz was acting illegally, and it isn't a slippery slope. Terms of use had nothing to do with the decision.

The important features are the formal letter CL sent to 3taps, informing them that they didn't have permission to access CL servers with HTTP requests, and the IP block CL set up. Schwarz was never formally notified that he didn't have access permission, although he did evade some technical restrictions. If the judge's ruling stood up as the definitive interpretation of the law, Schwarz wouldn't be guilty of violating the CFAA (which of course would not have prevented the overzealous prosecutor from threatening him)

What part of the Internet don't you understand? You're making a direct analog between meat-space and cyberspace where it doesn't work.

If I look at a Wal-Mart entrance from off their property, I am standing there being passive. I'm just receiving and interpreting large numbers of photons that go from the entrance to my eyes. I might be doing this even if I have no desire to look at a Wal-Mart. If I look at a web page, I'm sending a HTTP request to the appropriate server, and expecting to have that server do the appropriate work to return some HTML/etc. No HTTP request, no returning web page. This is, in a very real sense, computer access. A better meat-space analogy would be if I walked into the Wal-Mart to look at the fliers. This is normally harmless, accepted, and perfectly legal. If I'm barred from entering Wal-Mart, it turns into trespass.

You've also said there was no authorization mechanism, but CL used an IP block. It isn't much of an authorization mechanism, but a pitiful lock is still, legally, a lock.

The ruling said that CL had formally notified 3taps that it was no longer authorized to access CL's systems (the C&D letter), and that CL had taken steps to prevent this access (the IP block). Therefore, 3taps (a) knew it wasn't to access CL's servers, and (b) intentionally took action to access them anyway. Without (a), there'd be no case. Without (b), it would be hard to prove intent.

AES-256? Somebody cracking it by brute force would need to be incredibly lucky to succeed before the Sun turns cold. Even with weaknesses in the cipher, there's still way over a hundred bits of entropy in the key.

It is of course possible that there's a completely unexpected weakness in the cipher, but I don't think that's the right way to bet. I think the insurance file is quite secure.

When I was involved, AI was divided between the "neats" and the "scruffies". The scruffies were the Perl hackers you mention, although much more likely to be using Lisp or Prolog than Perl. The neats looked at what the scruffies did, and created a more theoretical understanding of it. (Of course, if they were too successful, that particular area would cease to be AI. In the early 60s, finding integrals was AI.) This, in turn, would help scruffies take further steps into AI. Both were necessary.

Silenced by whom? Phelps has a right to rant in his own preferred way, but not a right to make anybody listen to him. By claiming the attack was God's punishment for tolerating homosexuality, he appears to have something of a receptive audience. That doesn't mean he'd have the same audience for claiming it was God's punishment for not enacting Sharia law. It also doesn't mean somebody would do something nefarious and/or illegal to silence him if he were Muslim.

Personally, I'm not fond of either Bible thumping or Koran thumping in the service of hate, and think that anybody irrational enough to go along with it is very likely to think their particular religious group is good and others are bad.

The Telegraph article quoted Hitler, that bastion of honesty and truthfulness, of being a Socialist, and seemed to consider the matter closed. Socialism had a lot of appeal back then, and Hitler would say anything to gain an advantage. The National Socialist German Worker's Party did indeed have socialist elements, who were purged in the mid-1930s. They were becoming embarrassing to Goering's courtship of big business interests.

If you study what the Nazis actually did, it looks pretty right-wing. Favoring big business over workers and fostering insane levels of nationalism are rather right-wing. Hitler had support from normally right-wing military men pretty much through his career. Explicitly rejecting rationality (as opposed to just being irrational) seems to me primarily associated with the right.

I can't magically unmake the Nazis left-wing because, with some parts of the party that were purged before they could be influential, they weren't.

Possibly, but I often miss the spirit of words that include inaccurate and sweeping generalizations to make a point. I understand his point that highly immoral things can be legal, but I'd think of real examples - and Dr. King had enough of those.

To be fair, Martin asked for such fan reactions. In the second to last book of the "Song of Ice and Fire" ("A Feast for Crows"?), he wrote that he had divided the story, and that the companion volume covering the other characters in that timespan was written and in the pipeline. This was a lie. That volume hadn't been written, and it took Martin an unexpectedly long time to write it. Many fans were not only disappointed at not getting what they wanted, but angry because they had been lied to. They felt that Martin had assumed a sort of obligation by claiming the next book was going to be available soon.

The takeaway here is not that fans are unreasonable, it's that you don't lie to your fans and promise them what you can't deliver.

Rats, my main Linux box isn't a desktop. It lives under the desk.

Except that Hitler did not always obey the law. In particular, he committed illegal acts before he could dictate the laws, but even afterwards he violated treaties binding on Germany, including the laws of war. I rather doubt he always went through the formality of changing the law when he could, and very likely broke German law, but I haven't studied that part of his career as much.

However, the truth is out there. I have easy access to news sites around the world, and all sorts of blogs and such from all points on most conceivable political spectra. The truth may not be easy to find, but it's very easy to find propaganda from any viewpoint you like. There is no actual single propaganda message possible in this. If the current government tried to introduce Goldstein as a scapegoat, we'd immediately have (more or less) news sources claiming he was made up, that he was a plant, and that he really did have a Kenyan birth certificate.

Dunno about anyone else, but I work things out in vim.