Price fairly,

How do you price fairly to beat free?

make things available early

Again, how do you beat those that make it available even before you do as I outlined above.

Make it easy for people to do the right thing.

Doing the right thing involves education to know right from wrong. Circumstances can override that education such as the ease it is in getting the content with little to no repercussions for doing the wrong thing.

Remember that pirated copies are almost never lost sales

Agreed, however they are a dent to your ability to realize sales absent the illegal activity. In short, although they can't be counted as sales lost it can be argued that at least some of those that pirated would have purchased it legally had the illegal avenue not existed.

Maybe in the future, things like crowd-funded software and open-source will take over if it isn't profitable enough.

Ah, but open source software relies on the very same copyright laws to exist. Absent copyright, or more importantly, copyright enforcement, open source itself couldn't exist. Crowd-funded seems more realistic to me to overcome that.

same for entertainment. Perhaps live theatre will make a comeback.

It has been a while since I have seen a live theater show. We have them in town from time to time. Worth seeing but it lacks the special effects that draws the younger crowd to the theaters to begin with. Who knows though...

Education would have at least some mention about the public domain and its advantages, and the fact that copyright is a privilege, not a right.

I am probably going to draw flack for this but WTF, here we go...

Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 of the US Constitution makes it a right in the US. Besides that, let's play Devil's advocate here for a while:

Tell me just how an artist or distributor of content is supposed to make a living regardless of the length of time given for the "limited time" as listed in the Constitution? Right now, things are showing up on the illegal sites even before they are officially released by the rightful owner. Just how do you overcome that? Look at software piracy for example, as soon as a vendor of a popular program (think Photoshop) makes a new version, it is usually up at the torrent sites at most 2 days after initial release and sometimes before initial release. So just how are they to reap the benefits of their work when the next day it is being distributed with no benefits being returned?

Don't get me wrong, I do think the term of copyrights are too long. I also think the public domain is getting the shaft. But given that they can't win in today's connected world, just what is the solution? You see many here bitching about copyrights and the "old business model failure" but no proposals for how to realize benefit out of your hard work. Because you see, regardless of what you think as you download that pre-release program, it still boils down to putting food on the table for those making it to begin with.

I'd have to be insane to believe everything I've read on an internet forum.

So you mean my date isn't a French model???

Using one service to describe another service is doing a huge no-no in definitions. Namely using the term you want to define in the definition. So in this example, what if you have no idea what Google Reader was? That is a total assumption on TFS editor's part. I certainly had no idea what either was until I went to the site and did a bit of investigation.

More importantly, this is a non-news story since they have since rolled back those changes.

This summary aside, there is at least one valid reason a project should drop support after EOL. Namely reputation. When a flaw in the OS gets exploited via the browser, people tend to blame the instrument that first started the failure. It happens all the time today even on patched systems. The browser will catch the blame for the failure in the OS since it is where the trouble started.

Hell, we've all seen it with granny getting infected because the pre-installed version of Norton's timed out and hasn't seen an update in years. Does Symantic get blamed for the failure? Does granny blame herself for not purchasing the updates? No. To granny it is the computer that is bad.

That's where you are conflating these issues. PRISM was engaged in without even FISA warrants. That is what they mean when they say "warrantless wire tapping". This isn't FBI Security Letters we are talking about here. This is a wholesale fishing expedition.

NSA doesn't have police powers.
CIA doesn't have police powers.
DIA doesn't have police powers.
NRO doesn't have police powers.
NGA doesn't have police powers.

No, they don't DIRECTLY have police power but they do have regulatory power and the ability to turn those that are in some form of violation of their powers over to those that do have police powers such as the FBI, DEA, Secret Service and IRS.

There is a reason there was put up a wall between the intelligence gathering community and police community. Namely to prevent the McCarthyism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism ) that preceded it from happening again. Then came along 9/11 and whole new laws known as the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act that tore down those barriers leading to a new era of McCarthyism this time substituting "communist" for "terrorist".

And what is the driving force? Well, in the McCarthy era it was the military industrial complex. Today, it is the security industrial complex. There is huge money to be had in peddling fear.

Then you would still have to overcome the "but in a manner to be prescribed by law." part. Since the "national security" part (I am assuming at least in the Patriot Act and / or Homeland Security Act) would satisfy that.

No, a better way would be to take back our Congress and get them to revoke those acts that allow stuff like this. Of course, that requires a ground swell against the established parties and is likely to not succeed because of the campaign financing / media control mess.

That's really grabbing at straws. Several things would have to be resolved for that to stick.

1. Is the FBI and / or the court considered "soldiers"?
2. Is an email service considered "home"?
3. Is the Supreme Court likely to make such a broad interpretation especially since they tend to take a very narrow view on just about everything?
4. And lastly, is it even likely to make it that far?

What does the 3rd Amendment have to do with it???

Amendment 3:

No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

It sounds to me then that your beef is with the provider who removed the sites for relying solely on a single source. Yes, confusion could have been avoided but your real target should be the provider who removed the sites based on the RBL.

The largest cry that spam filter providers hear is, "I am in your filter by mistake!". Spamhaus in particular is also known for blocking spam resource providers. Have you checked that your upstream provider isn't housing spammers or other spam resources? The idea behind that is to curtail providers that do nothing about their spam problems. It forces the users of those domains to complain to the provider raising the noise level to get them off their ass and fix their spam problems. And it works too. Hit them where it counts.... The wallet when their users leave in droves because their emails are blocked nine ways to hell.

Web-bugs are also only effective for HTML based clients. I routinely setup my client to only deal in plain text. And no, I don't use webmail in any form. It boils down to using the right tool for the right job. A web browser is NOT an email client any more than an email client is a web browser. They have differing security concerns not least of which are things like web-bugs.

I work in state government and can tell you that the arbitrary and capricious manner employed in this state's filtering boggles the imagination. A site that was accessible for weeks suddenly gets blocked today. They have even blocked federal sites from time to time and those truly are work related. And given that most agencies have a social network presence blocking them really doesn't make sense anymore. Instead of counseling or disciplining those that abuse the rules, they are punishing everyone and doing it poorly.

A better solution is to allow specific times that the system can be used for personal use such as lunch or in the case of the school, after the last class has dismissed. Still block the most egregious sites (porn) but allow the others at those specific times. The employees know exactly when they can do outside personal business (such as banking, shopping, chatting with friends and family, etc) which will make a happier employee. And a happy employee is far more productive than an unhappy one.