IAAL but TINLA, but you should see an intellectual property lawyer and ask for their advice on the following matters. These things do vary by jurisdiction, although some of it is based on the TRIPS treaty (required for WTO membership), so it is getting to be less different between the jurisdictions. Firstly, if you did this as a contractor, you quite likely still own the copyright, unless you signed an agreement saying you don't. In that case he client has a licence, the scope of which may vary, but not so far as to allow them to apply their own copyright claim to the exclusion of you. Secondly, what they have done is quite likely a breach of your moral right of attribution, especially if you were a contractor rather than an employee. There may well be scope for a nice scary letter from a lawyer to get them to behave.

How so? Manning is the one who gave it to them. If I give a loaded handgun to my five year old, and he shoots and kills a person, is it not my fault? Or is your contention that newspaper reporters (trying desperately to get any edge over the competition) are more trustworthy with sensitive data than a five year old is with a handgun?

Manning was a punk with a political agenda who recklessly endangered the lives of Americans. Snowden at least did something that could be colorably called civil disobedience. Manning is just a tool. Of course, the problem with civil disobedience is that sometimes you've got to take the hit to make your point.

In "The Five Doctors," the Time Lords gave the Master a whole new set of regenerations in exchange for helping out. So it's been plausible to extend past 13 lives for 30 years now. Nobody mentioned the mechanism for "granting" a new set, but if anybody can figure out how to cheat death, the Doctor ought to be able to. Corner unpainted.

Zero-balanced dwarf star alloy. It's the perfect prison.

And what is the Truth, since you seem to know so much about both the legal profession and the Truth? I once litigated a patent case where a key infringement question was whether a headphone whose rear cavity was sufficiently leaky had a meaningful acoustical compliance that could be compared to another acoustical compliance. One side said yes, the other side said no. There were no textbooks that addressed the exact configuration in question. Both sides had experts. I was genuinely thoroughly convinced that our side was right, and I thought our expert was more qualified. But it never crossed my mind to accuse opposing counsel of misconduct because they espoused a credible position that was favorable to their client and that I disagreed with. The case settled, so there was never a final determination of which side was right. But since you have the key to all Truth in the universe, perhaps you could share with me the True Answer to this puzzle.

By the way, you miss the whole point of what lawyers do in litigation. (Plenty of lawyers write contracts all day. All I do these days is write patent applications all day.) They are not there to search for some final, objective Truth. Usually, there is no final, objective Truth. They are there as advocates. Their purpose is to make the best case they can for the one of many possible interpretations of law or facts that is most favorable to their clients.

In other words, if you are searching for some ultimate, philosophical Truth, call a priest. If you are searching for a falsifiable model of an objective phenomenon, call a scientist. If you have been accused of, for example, "Reckless Endangerment," and you want somebody who will zealously argue that your particular behavior was not "reckless" according to the statutory definition, hire a lawyer.

Agreed. There's a sort of prisoner's dilemma with sports doping. Since you can safely assume that everybody else is doping, you have to dope to just compete on the same level. But since everybody's doping, the advantages of doping are somewhat canceled out. I don't know if Armstrong's victories were bestowed on his next-closest competitors, but if they were, then they probably went from a guy who doped and got caught to a guy who doped and didn't get caught.

The problem is that you will have several highly-talented people competing for the top spots. Lance Armstrong is a perfect example. The problem is not that he was lacking in talent. Even with performance-enhancing drugs, Joe Average will never be as fast on a bicycle as Lance is without performance-enhancing drugs. The problem is that there were other people who were also extremely talented, and he wanted to be faster than those guys. The "right" way is to work harder, train longer, push yourself further. But sometimes, even that won't be enough. So Lance gave himself a guaranteed edge.

I like how you toss out a token reference to Democratic corruption, and then happily regurgitate, verbatim, the Democrats' talking point that "Republicans are the Party of No." It must be nice to live in a world where there is a political party that you trust to do all your thinking for you. Some of us don't have that luxury.

By the way, to bring this back on point, let's not forget that the DNC is practically a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Media. Or that Chris Dodd is now chairman of the MPAA. When a Democrat inevitably introduces this legislation, I will be perfectly content to let Republicans play the "No" card.

This is the sole reason I'm on the fence about class actions. On the one hand, the consumer plaintiffs never get anything out of them. They're solely for the enrichment of plaintiffs' attorneys. On the other hand, it is often the only way to hold a big player accountable when it screws a whole lot of people just a little. It's like commissioning a privateer to fight pirates by saying, "Capture them, and any stolen booty you can find on the ship is yours to keep. Just get them out of my shipping lanes." (Which, by the way, is almost exactly what the King of England told Captain Kidd. Except he also said, "And I get a cut of the booty, too.")

Words have both meaning and context. "Unlimited" in a service contract does not mean "mathematically infinite." Ordinary people understand that, pay for their "unlimited" internet service, and happily use it to their hearts' content as much as they want for ordinary, consumer-grade internet operations. Want to watch streaming HD video, all day, every day? Go for it. You won't use nearly as much bandwidth as this guy did. How else would you have Verizon inform people, in a simple, understandable way, that they are providing internet service with no arbitrary usage caps as long as you aren't trying to host google.com? And how are they not within their rights to say, "We haven't charged you extra for your abuse of our 'unlimited' internet service (it is "unlimited" after all), but if you keep it up, we will refuse to provide you service in the future"? Should they be compelled to do business with everybody?

What this guy did is analogous to going into an "all you can eat" restaurant, filling up buckets full of food, and standing on the sidewalk outside selling it---and then complaining when they ask you to leave. It's the kind of thing that smarmy, basement-dwelling geeks do when they pretend to not understand what a word means because technically it has a different definition in a different context. It's also why they can't get dates.

Hate to break it to you, but we still don't care. Seriously. 99% of the people who use Android have no idea that it has anything to do with Linux. They just call it Android. And of the small minority of people who run "Linux" on the desktop, about 99% (from my observation), just call it "Linux." Richard Stallman and a handful of his groupies are still the only people who still care about putting "GNU" in front of Linux.

You have more faith in the DNC than I do. All I've seen them do is use tragedies to push their long-term political goal of ensuring that Americans do not have access to firearms. (They're not subtle about this goal, except when they're pushing gun laws. Then they pretend to have never said it.) None of the measures they have proposed would have done anything to prevent those tragedies, but they would have the effect of advancing the DNC's distinctly statist agenda of making people increasingly reliant on the State for everything from basic necessities to personal safety.

(And please, no rants about how Republicans are evil and corrupt too. Yes, they are. But on this issue they happen to be coincidentally right.)

The universe is approximately 13.7E9 years old. There are 8.766E3 hours in a year. Thus, the universe is approximately 1.20E14 hours old. So at a rate of 100 hours per second, it would take 1.20E12 second to exceed the age of the universe in YouTube videos. 1.20E12 seconds works out to around 1 million years. So we have a way to go still.

You may want to loosen your tinfoil hat. If you tighten the straps too hard, sometimes it can cause extreme irritability. Ideally, the fit should be "snug" but not "tight."

Right, which is why we have the Sherman Antitrust Act. In fact, I took a whole class on antitrust law in law school, and it was an awfully thick book, so I know first hand that we already have a ton of antitrust law. We don't need the McCain Micromanagement of Media Act.