I for one welcome our new copyright enforcing, DMCA-takedown-issuing, encyclical wielding, Papal overlord.

Could you point out to me where in the constitution it gives us the "right to kill" particularly the right to slaughter another human with premeditation and likely with malice? This is what I gather is your argument: "DMCA breeches our right to fair use, that's true, but we also gave up the right to kill innocent people for the greater good of humanity, so sometimes restrictive laws are for the best." I'm pretty sure it was established that we DON'T have the "right" to kill, hence the restrictive laws upon murder, but let's just examine the argument as if it holds any water to begin with, shall we?

This is a weak argument against giving up our rights to circumvent access control in the vein of fair use while not infringing upon copyright. This is a particularly weak analogy when the profits of rich companies are the only things being protected by the law. Making it weaker is its placement in the same thread with an argument for using an already established constitutional litmus test against laws which infringe upon our rights as American citizens to see if DMCA stacks up.

Honestly, I'm not even really sure what exactly you are arguing. It seems like a typical libertarian idealist counter to a question of "how can we have any laws and still be free?" arguing that sometimes giving up freedoms is for the betterment of society. However, the fact that you seem to be arguing that DMCA is akin to murder law, and thus fair use is akin to the "right to kill" and thus we should give up our right to fair use for the good of society, you seem to be perverting libertarian thought to benefit corporate interests. Truly, I am quite confused to your reasoning here, but it gave me a good laugh. I vote he should be modded up as +5 Funny.

Good plan, except some services need that loopback address. Wikipedia says use 0.0.0.0

Most everyone keeps bringing up legalities like theft, copyright, trademark, plagiarism, etc.but not really evaluating the ethical issues for why these laws exist. I think what is important to look at here is intent. Is the intent to make an homage to a pre-existing work or to simply steal all the hard work and pass it off as your own? Is the intent to improve on the work already done or to simply copy it? D&D ripped off a lot of Tolkein, but it created a new universe and placed it in a new environment (the RPG). Paladium Fantasy rips off a lot of D&D, but puts it in Paladium's own universe with their own RPG system. Warcraft rips off D&D as well, but again, new universe, new environment (video games). I don't consider these "clones." The intent of these games were to take pre-existing content and improve upon it and creatively make it their own.

It's an entirely different story when we're looking back at the old days of Atari / NES. How many Gradius clones were there, for instance? Did these games really improve upon the content of Gradius, or simply take the same gameplay the same concepts and simply change how a few things functioned to make a "different" game? Castlevania clones, SMB clones, Defender clones, they all abounded in the land of 8-bit, because it was easy to do it. We don't see as many clones these days unless we're looking at the mod community, and the majority of those modders are attempting to make an homage to their favorite games within another of their favorite games, with no intent of ever making money off it.

I think modding should be encouraged, as it leads to new and better games. I think using inspired content to branch out into new universes and new genres should also be encouraged. It is the actual lazy turn-a-buck copypasta clone games which should be despised --

-- but without them, we wouldn't have many games on our cell phones...

Sorry mate, you've forgotten Namco's Pac Land But SMB was pretty darn close.

Point taken.

True...unless it isn't so abhorrent that politicians cannot survive being associated with it. If it's a matter of foreign policy so important that the executive branch of the United States is actually pursuing negotiations with foreign powers to establish a treaty during a time when his popularity has been on the decline, then I would hazard to guess that there may be something worthwhile in the treaty.

I wonder who here on /. has actually even considered for a moment what matters of foreign policy might warrant secrecy in establishing an international copyright treaty. It would seem nations like the US would benefit the most from having copyright enforcement from outside nations such as China or Sweden. I wonder what sorts of arrangements might be on the table in terms of lifting trade tariffs, etc. in exchange for more aggressive adherence to US copyright law. I wonder how many politicians would be in an uproar over their leader lifting such tariffs or sanctions and such across the globe in order to protect our own creative endeavors and open up more trade opportunities with these nations. How many would try to raise a huge public outcry against what would essentially be a good thing? I can't imagine ANY reason why ANYONE could have a LEGIT reason to keep this under wraps. ::eyeroll::

You make such wonderfully eloquent arguments. What a shame the people you are addressing obviously get their information from Faux News and have no interest in reading your response. ;-)

Though not uncommon, it is technically a violation of the Facebook TOS to have multiple accounts, fictitious accounts that don't use your real name, and so on. Facebook really needs to update their TOS in addition to their privacy settings. If you can manage to use the service with a fictitious name, you shouldn't have to worry that some d-bag is going to come and suspend you for it down the road.

Yup, great comic. However it's about as related as 3 tigers in tub. :-P

Oh I can be. But I call a spade for a spade. Your post was a troll.

It's good to know that the US and the UK haven't cornered the market on legislating from the bench and shifting the burden of proof to the defendants. When did we decide that prosecutors no longer had to establish evidence of intent before someone could be declared guilty of committing a crime? Next thing you know, taxi drivers will have to go out of business because they might be charged with accessory to armed bank robbery for "driving the getaway car" without any knowledge of it. A word to our wonderful judges across the world: fit the crime to the law, not the law to crime, please!

How is this funny? The entire pretense this troll uses for his "funny" post is based on poor reading comprehension. "Consider this sentence..." The summary stated the resurgence of vinyl was curious, not the parallel revival of turntables. What you go on to say after the fact implies the opposite.

Quite obviously it would take a fool to think that this parallel revival was "news," however TFA has little to do with discussing just turntables, but the widespread increase in vinyl records, new turntable models, and so on in popular retailers like Best Buy. TFA is about the spread of this phenomenon from confinement to the corner record store out into the mainstream. The summary is weak, but you'd have realized that had you read TFA rather than skimming the summary, misreading it, and deciding to troll for karma. This is a clear case of EMPF (Epic Mod Point Fail).

It IS completely legal to modify your hardware. However it is ALSO completely legal for hardware manufacturers and service providers to limit their warranties and services when you do.

And because it's now "routinely done" that somehow makes his statement, however so long ago, "stupid." During that time I'm sure it wasn't routinely done, if done at all, so it probably felt a lot less "stupid" of a statement when he made it. This statement was also coming into formation as an idea of Mises in the wake of a wildly turbulent economic collapse known as the Great Depression, and the unpredictability that would lead to the Cold War. The context of the statement provides further explanation as to its meaning. To simply flaunt this one statement as being "stupid" because of 50+ years of advancement into social science that wasn't available at the time he made it, I would argue is a far more "stupid" assertion.