There's so much about what you wrote that is simply wrong. Let's run down the list.

1. Rick Boucher isn't a member of the Virginia General Assembly, he's a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

2. There was never a heyday of Virginia politicians who spearheaded smart internet laws. You can tell because, if there had been, then we'd have smart internet laws. The closest that we ever got was Gov. Jim Gilmore, who created the Secretary of Technology cabinet position and created those asinine "@" internet license plates. Oh, and he required censorware on all school computers. That was the high point for Virginia.

3. You speak of the legislature as a single unit, wondering why "they" did something or "they" didn't do something. It's made up of 140 members, each of whom is free to introduce legislation on a given topic. Do you live in Virginia? Did you ask your legislator to introduce such a bill? Nothing is "on tap for next year," because it's not possible. It's not possible to prefile a bill until summer, some months after the veto session. If you have an idea for a better UCE ban, I wish you'd write up a proposal to share with the legislature.

4. In fact, two bills were introduced into the Virginia General Assembly to deal with UCE, both by Del. Manoli Loupassi (R-Richmond). HB1796: Unsolicited bulk electronic mail; penalty and Unsolicited bulk electronic mail (spam); penalty. (HB1797). The former was killed in a Senate Committee for Courts of Justice subcommittee, the latter was killed in a House Courts of Justice subcommittee.

There are lots of good reasons to do such filtering. Note the joking comment about 4chan elsewhere in the discussion. Managing an online community is a lot of work, but it's a great deal easier when its participants are a member of the same physical community. Those face-to-face encounters do a lot to defuse online anger.

He's not worrying about "what is of use to other people," he's worrying about what is of use to him. That's not self-centered, that's just smart product development.

They'll have no trouble with it at all. I'm yet to encounter a screen reader that reads the name element of an input field. Perhaps it would if the field was otherwise devoid of any descriptive text, but you'd have to be a real jackass to provide an unlabeled input field and expect anybody to know what to do with it. :)

Im afraid you misunderstand me. Again, only the field name is affected, not the label for the field. I've used text-only browsers regularly since 1994 (Mosaic over a 14.4k modem, Lynx, and now Links), and I'm yet to encounter one that displays the name element of an input field to the user.

Third, do they fill out a hidden inputbox? This is sort of the reverse captcha.

This is really a very good test. As others have mentioned in this thread, it's the sort of thing that spammers will circumvent if it becomes widespread, but for now it's great.

There's something else I've found to be really quite effective: deliberately misnaming my form fields. For instance, give the input field that's labelled "First Name" an input name of "phone number." Humans don't use input names to determine what text to enter, but spambots do. Then check that inputâ"if the first name field contains a phone number, you know you've got yourself spammer.

I've used solely the combination of these two things to run one of my websites for two years now, and I get a vanishingly small amount of spam.

I didn't say that the GPL wouldn't be necessary, just that it wouldn't be possible.

But I'd argue that it would still be necessary. After all, anybody can release their software into the public domain. But we don'tâ"we give it away under a license, like the GPL. Why? I'd posit that it's because we like the restrictions that it places on those who use it, and it ensures the existence of a vibrant open source software bazaar. But, no matter the reason, the point is that we have the option to release our work without restrictions now, and yet vanishingly few people do so. I think that demonstrates the necessity of the GPL, even in a world without copyright for software.

You write that Apple "granted permission" to the maker of Franklin and then yanked it. That's simply not true. Not even close.

In Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., the 3rd Circuit found that Franklin did so without any permission from Apple, but Franklin's logic was that you can't copyright something software isn't written down on paper. They copied ROMs that had no equivalent for sale on paper, ergo they didn't need to ask permission and Apple couldn't stop them. The circuit court ruled in favor of Franklin, because there was no legal precedent allowing software to be copyrighted, which is how it got bumped up to the circuit court, who ruled for Apple.

Obviously, Apple was right here. Without copyright for software, we'd have no GPL and the open source movement would still be stuck at the "freeware" stage.

Eponysterical!