jessespears

This would take an extraordinary departure from our current politics. Government intruding on software would (rightly) cause cries from the most stalwart Free Software advocates and from proprietary software companies.

Can you imagine the outcry if a new Linux fork had to seek government approval in order to post their distribution?

Can you expect Google or Oracle to fail to lobby the government to make sure they don't have to get each major revision certified?

The upper bound isn't limited by the number of dollars in circulation. The upper bound is limited by what's economically feasible. The outcome of the theoretical Alabama community college language teacher is that the language program just gets cut. The fees for a niche program wouldn't support a highly-paid faculty member.

The company officers or agents who were served with the letter could be held personally liable for failure to comply with the order. I think it's a little unfair to expect employees to go to prison for contempt of court in defiance of the order.

> I can only question your sincerity.

This is the mark of a viewpoint unfettered by exposure to the other side. Assuming malicious intent of someone just because they have an opposing viewpoint is simplistic and naive.

1. Manning leaks: exposure of one war crime and its coverup. Hardly a trend. Furthermore, Wikileaks edited the Collateral Murder video to imply malicious intent and obfuscate the ambiguity in the situation.

2. Snowden leaks: where was the U.S. military implicated in any of them?

3. Hospital bombings: yes, targeting fails happen in wartime. It is tragic and regretful. War zones are dangerous.

4. Senate report on torture: wasn't that the CIA as directed by Attorney General Gonzalez?

5. Obama refusal to exercise the laws against torture: this is the first time I'm hearing of this, please discuss.

6. Gitmo: hardly the U.S. military; this is an artifact of a Congress that refuses to allow any appropriations toward relocating prisoners elsewhere.

7. Kill lists: how would you approach terminating military commanders engaging in continuous operations (that kill noncombatants) against your country, yet they don't belong to a nation-state?

In the last 100 years, the U.S. military is guilty of much wrongdoing. Compared to other nations, and considering the volume of combat in which the U.S. military has been engaged, the U.S. military fares well when compared to other nations. The reality is that warfare inherently involves the killing of people who should not have been killed, simply because their homes were in a combat zone. You could argue that the U.S. shouldn't have entered most of its wars; that might be true. At the time, it was considered to be the right thing by the U.S. electorate in order to prevent much more bloodshed. World War 2 is the textbook example of a war entered too late to prevent massive bloodshed. This informs U.S. decision makers and cannot be discounted.

The paper that this article is derived from: http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-stem...

I found the paper to be more detailed and have a higher signal:noise ratio.

Fascinating: The Court of Appeals ruled that for a software licensee's violation of a contract to constitute copyright infringement, there must be a nexus between the license condition and the licensor’s exclusive rights of copyright. However ... that a finding of circumvention under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act does not require a nexus between circumvention and actual copyright infringement.

The DMCA's anti-circumvention section appears to be the only thing that preserved parts of the original finding. Perhaps the next time this law is up for review, some less onerous terms can be placed for reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability.