posting instructions on how to make a US military nuclear bomb is illegal. It is illegal because it's treason. Posting non-classified information is not illegal, and that includes HOWTOs on the production of various munitions, just not the classified ones.
And if your logic about owning/using was the law, why the hell do people keep getting arrested for drug "possesion"? I agree with your last sentence 100%, but the reason we don't focus just on the crimes themselves is because we've moved away from our original criminal justice model, which was reactive(ie you do something bad, we put you in jail). Now it's preventive, or "people who do this bad thing usually do that thing first, so let's make it illegal, too." And because the last vestiges of the original system remain in place, like trying to run Norton 4 on Windows 2000, nothing works right.
Oh well, no country's perfect, I guess. Maybe some nice company will buy our country and take all our rights away so we don't have to worry about them anymore. Then I could just sit and watch TV.
Okay, maybe just the shallow American end of the English language puddle, then. It is tired. Now it's used by the same Dawson's Creek-watching dimwits who use it instead of the formerly popular "on drugs" term.Incidentally, this is the same group known for using the term "naturally high" and "contact high" on a regular basis. In America, drug references are invectives used by the uninformed, so the overuse should fade as these morons go to their State University of choice, get stoned, and come to terms with their own hypocrisy, if only briefly.
I'm not looking up the supreme court decision that set this, you feel free. Often legailty of an action is determined by the interaction of legislation and court orders. I think the court said making copies for personal use is fine, then Congress passed a law limiting it to one copy.
You can make a backup copy, but if you get caught with more than one, it implies you're distributing. Much like 20g weed = possession, weed + box of ziplocs = intent to distribute.
No, it isn't. Posting instructions for making bombs which are classified info (ie US nuclear weapons) is illegal. Posting instrucitons for making plastic explosives or the type of bomb McVeigh used in Oklahoma City is not illegal, though. Thanks, Anarchist's Cookbook!
We were making crack jokes back in the late 80s, before TV censors allowed writers to use it as a joke. It's funny to see it go up from people to TV, then back down to people again. I think this new usage has replaced the word "dope" in the English language. We seem to need a term word that means both "stupid" and "makes stupid" at the same time.
Yeah, really, that would be great! Then when the Baptists decide to boycott all the companies who sponsor the stuff, and GloboCorp decides to force the libraries to put the filtering software or lose funding, who will they turn to then?
Could you possibly think in terms that don't require us to trade one evil for another? Let's try skipping sucking anyone's teat for a change and take care of our own communities. There's a small amount of political power in each town/neighborhood, and whoever provides services to that town gets to control that power. Govt does it: Govt controls it. Corps do it: Corps control it. You do it yourself...it gets done right.
So here's my solution: go to your local library and use your mad haX0r ubergeek skills to build and configure a computer for surfing the net. It doesn't have to be an S-390 or anything, just a basic 486-66 (hmm, I've got three old ones in this closet right here...) and a cable modem (unless you can get 56K leased cheaper).
Add it up: 3 Computers/Monitors/Ethernet cards($0)(in closet gathering dust anyway), 3 ether cables($0)(I got the cable at work, they won't miss it), SuSE6($0), little 3com hub($80), cable modem ($100)(+$40/month). I could swing everything but the $40 per, but I live outside Boston, I think I could get some other people to pitch in...Or maybe the town? Of course, if I let the town do it, they may want the filters, so maybe I pass the hat at the LAN parties, RPG games, and Linux install fests I go to. Think I could get $40 a month that way?
But no, it's easier to ask some wanker company who's equipment I don't even like to do it for me. I swear I'm turning into a social darwinist, every time a school or town goes the sponsorship route and gets fucked I say "well, hopefully their kids won't breed." After "Coke got me Hooked on Phonics" and "I Say No to Drugs because Mr. fucking T. said so," breeding's the only thing they seem capable of.
I had a bunch of comments modded, and now I have to blow them all away you got me so pissed off. This "shadowy distant federal power bad, lets turn to the shadowy distant supernational corporate power" caveman bullshit has really got to end.
Right, and I don't want more Windows. What I want is an OS, any OS, with the GUI from the old Thinking Machines. Someone told me there's a port of it around, but I can't find it anywhere. The one where the filesystem is a 3D city, directories are buildings, etc. I wanna program a little sudo chopper to blow up deleted users' files...
I quit too. I mean yeah, yeah, "Hello World" and all, but then what? All these people where I work, using Windows, and all I do all day (when I'm not making a nuisance of myself around here) is hold their hands while they reboot. Now here's *nix, and I install it on my computer, and it's fun, and I tweak this file and this happens, then I tweak that file and that happens, and then I think, "Ooh, if only I could install this on all my users machines, I could spend the rest of my life tweaking stupid text files." I can hear it now: "I want samba so I can share my Britney fucking Spears CDs with the whole office!" "Ooh let's hire more people and pack 'em in six high and ten across, you can get machines for them if they start Monday, right?"
Sorry, looks like I went off there. Excuse: I just found out they're selling my apartment and I have to find a new one. New school year's not the best time to look in Boston. Again, sorry.
I like that program. Why don't these WINE/ReactOS/OWP people quit wasting their time with rebuilding the whole OS and just make an open version of VM? Weren't there types of UNIX that did this on mainframes years ago? Someone's gotta have the source for it...I know not everyone here's a Stallman fan, but that would be the sort of handy "baseline" app I'd like to see done by GNU for ALL versions of *nix, rather than a bunch of kids who needed a senior project and decided to reinvent the square wheel (not WINE, but this new one...)
ASCAP/BMI money goes to songwriters, not recording artists. Additionally they just sort of guess how many times a song gets played, so whoever has the most airplay gets like 90% of the money. Therefore Britney and co get nothing, but the 40 year old losers who write their songs get most of the ASCAP licensing.
Salvi sits in a hole in the ground here in Massachusetts. He knew he was going to spend the rest of his life in jail, so he offed himself. If suicide gets you into Heaven, why don't you start your trip right now? You don't, because your faith is weak. You believe in something that doesn't exist, and deep down it bothers you, so you stay alive. I, on the other hand, have to stay alive for a while yet, since I won't be able to taunt you halfwit ideologues once I'm dead.
is deep water. And needles. And meeting the perfect woman and having her turn out to be...a Christian.;P
Half Serious: My creators were a couple of stoned hippies who couldn't bother to lie to me about Santa Claus.
Full-on Serious: We are all threatened by any ideology which leads its followers towards intellectual sloth. There is a level of stupidity below which you cannot reason morally, and this is where ideological amoralism starts. The "any price for my faith" concept is just fine as long as you're the one paying it. The second you Bible-thumping halfwits try to take other people's minds and lives as yours to sacrifice, I'm going to be there to call you on it. Example:
It's time we excercised some common sense and put a stop to this madness.
Implication: you have a right to stop someone from doing scientific research which directly and immediately harms... no one. You do not. You DO have a right to keep science from affecting you or your children directly, but not by stepping on someone else's curiosity and free will. Wait until they offer the treatment, then say 'no'. See how easy that is? And no one has to get shot.
I work at a non-profit cancer research organization that tests drugs to help people get well again. All year round I get e-mail off the webpage contact link: "Cancer is God's will, stop trying to change God's plan." Oh yeah? Well, your God made people so their organs go ballistic and eat them alive. That is going to stop. Either He can come down here and fix it Himself, or we'll do it for... ourselves.
We will take responsibility for our own destiny, because there is no morally acceptable alternative. The morally unacceptable alternatives include: letting people die for no good reason at all, letting "nature" push us around, or leaving it all to God's will. There is no fundamental difference in these, when they all result in inaction.
And fear...well, I live right down the street from where John Salvi took an AK-47 to the employees of a women's clinic. I lived in FL when some asshole did the same with a shotgun. Do whatever you want with your amoral, responsibility-denying religion, just don't fucking include me.
GM allows completely unrelated species to swap genes.
No it doesn't. Before, we could splice orange tree branches on to a lemon tree. Now we may be able to cross the lemon and orange and come up with something new, but still related. We will not, however, be able to make an orange tree sprout jellyfish. It will take another round or two of serious advances (remapping, anyone?) and many years before we can do that. Don't believe the hype: We haven't really unlocked the key to life, just broadened our reach a bit...
On the other hand, it may take genetic engineering to produce children who can survive in space. We aren't ready for this tool as a species, now, but we will probably need it at some point in the future. It's here, all the good and bad that can come of it is coming, and it's going to be up to us to figure out how to use it wisely.
All the fundamentalists in the world can't stop this, now, and they're too blind to see the cyclical nature of their own "truth":
The way things were yesterday is ALWAYS The Garden, and what we learn today is ALWAYS The Fruit. Guess where that leaves tomorrow...
but we love ya anyway, AC. Just like Jesus does, but with less homoerotic overtones.
We don't need genetics to prove evolution, natural selection takes care of it for us. Speaking of which: shouldn't you be dead by now?
OK, OK, enough kidding around. You're alright, for someone who isn't smart enough know better. I mean, thank God we don't actually need to know anything about the world around us, right? We might realize religion is a response to our fear of our own shadows! We might have to take responsibility for both doing the right thing AND enjoying our lives now, since we won't have another chance once we stop living! Boy, facing the truth without help from a non-existant primordial consciousness sure would suck!
Only a very select few care enough or are adventurous to venture from well-trodden paths -- this is certainly true of OS's and probably would be no less so of genetics. And generally people only change when there is a good reason too; people aren't very apt to "experiment" with their own bodies unless they expect a good return on investment.[bold mine]
Yeah right, my little sister's still waiting for those nose-ring dividends to roll in...
And since evolution is on a large scale, there's no reason to think that small aberrations will affect the course of evolution.
Again I disagree. Over the course of generations of human reproduction, the numbers would probably fall in the "butterfly flaps wings in Africa, starts monsoon in Bangladesh" range of mathematics. Small changes now can easily multiply their effects over generations. Nothing major in our lifetimes, but we might be a different race 1000 years from now, and the change, for better or worse, will be enabled by this early gene research.
Futurism, plain and simple. Too much talk about what you could do and not enough about what you just did. Technology is advancing very quickly, but because of the nature of the tech media, we have a thorough knowledge of the new tech by the time it hits the market.
Since we rely on the media (like/., or maybe more like kuro5hin or The Register...;P) to tell us about what's approaching (ie vapor), rather than going out and examining new things ourselves (ie fscking reality), we end up jaded by the endless stream of exaggerated hype and outright lies about new products that never materialize. To give you a quick example of this: I've been reading/. for around two years, not long compared to the life of the site, but long enough to remember Bluetooth being discussed then (and it probably was before, too). Two years, and where the fsck is it? If you let yourself get set up for new vapor-tech like this, you're inevitably going to be disappointed.
While many more people are informed by the futurist model, you do get an unpleasant sense of being "ahead of the curve" AND a sense of perpetual disappointment when the shiny new tech doesn't live up to the vapor. I'm finding that what I can do with what I have (ie a bunch of pII-400s, 100mb LAN, varied and infinite OSs) is more fascinating and ultimately more rewarding than wasting my time getting worked up over superconductive ceramics (still stuck at -33C, gentlemen? What's it been, 10 years?), solar-electric cars (That SunRaycer ready to ship yet?) and my all-time bitter favorite, NOT LIVING IN FSCKING OUTER SPACE, where no doubt even if I could go there would still not live up to 2001: A Space-Travel Brochure.
This isn't eminent domain. Incidentally, they can't take whitehouse.com, the supreme court decided all titles and names associated with the federal government belonged to the public domain, ie Federal United MegaGloboCorp-type names are free for people to use as long as they don't impersonate an officer of Federal United MegaGloboGovernment... I mean the US.
The real issue is whether their copyright/trademark can take a word out of the public domain, and consequently deprive him of his first-come privilege to the domain name. It will never hold up in court, though I suspect he won't fight it. Too expensive. He may as well just get a domain for Deuteronomy.com or find a new hobby for all it'll cost him, unless some rich-ass church wants to sponsor his freedom of religion or some BS...
He doesn't speak for any Christians (If you ask Kierkegaard there aren't any anyway). The word "Corinthians" has been around long enough that it's in the public domain (unless Congress just extended the time period after death from 80 years to 2000+). Even in its current form and spelling it's 400-500 years old (not allowed to be translated into English until the Protestant Reformation), at which point it should be first come, first served. So JD Sallen gets it.
Besides, if you hand that stuff to the religions you'll have the jews suing the catholics for incorporating their copyrighted works into the Old Testament, and the Orphics suing the christians for stealing the trademarked concept of the martyr, and the Egyptians suing everyone for copying Akhnaten's trade secret - monotheism.
Atheism, on the other hand, continues to be open source.
Slashdot Mirror
posting instructions on how to make a US military nuclear bomb is illegal. It is illegal because it's treason. Posting non-classified information is not illegal, and that includes HOWTOs on the production of various munitions, just not the classified ones.
And if your logic about owning/using was the law, why the hell do people keep getting arrested for drug "possesion"? I agree with your last sentence 100%, but the reason we don't focus just on the crimes themselves is because we've moved away from our original criminal justice model, which was reactive(ie you do something bad, we put you in jail). Now it's preventive, or "people who do this bad thing usually do that thing first, so let's make it illegal, too." And because the last vestiges of the original system remain in place, like trying to run Norton 4 on Windows 2000, nothing works right.
Oh well, no country's perfect, I guess. Maybe some nice company will buy our country and take all our rights away so we don't have to worry about them anymore. Then I could just sit and watch TV.
-jpowers
Okay, maybe just the shallow American end of the English language puddle, then. It is tired. Now it's used by the same Dawson's Creek-watching dimwits who use it instead of the formerly popular "on drugs" term.Incidentally, this is the same group known for using the term "naturally high" and "contact high" on a regular basis. In America, drug references are invectives used by the uninformed, so the overuse should fade as these morons go to their State University of choice, get stoned, and come to terms with their own hypocrisy, if only briefly.
-jpowers
I'm not looking up the supreme court decision that set this, you feel free. Often legailty of an action is determined by the interaction of legislation and court orders. I think the court said making copies for personal use is fine, then Congress passed a law limiting it to one copy.
You can make a backup copy, but if you get caught with more than one, it implies you're distributing. Much like 20g weed = possession, weed + box of ziplocs = intent to distribute.
-jpowers
Posting bomb making instructions...is illegal;
No, it isn't. Posting instructions for making bombs which are classified info (ie US nuclear weapons) is illegal. Posting instrucitons for making plastic explosives or the type of bomb McVeigh used in Oklahoma City is not illegal, though. Thanks, Anarchist's Cookbook!
-jpowers
We were making crack jokes back in the late 80s, before TV censors allowed writers to use it as a joke. It's funny to see it go up from people to TV, then back down to people again. I think this new usage has replaced the word "dope" in the English language. We seem to need a term word that means both "stupid" and "makes stupid" at the same time.
-jpowers
a single backup copy of any work you purchase. That includes music and software, at the very least. It's the redistribution that's illegal.
-jpowers
Yeah, really, that would be great! Then when the Baptists decide to boycott all the companies who sponsor the stuff, and GloboCorp decides to force the libraries to put the filtering software or lose funding, who will they turn to then?
Could you possibly think in terms that don't require us to trade one evil for another? Let's try skipping sucking anyone's teat for a change and take care of our own communities. There's a small amount of political power in each town/neighborhood, and whoever provides services to that town gets to control that power. Govt does it: Govt controls it. Corps do it: Corps control it. You do it yourself...it gets done right.
So here's my solution: go to your local library and use your mad haX0r ubergeek skills to build and configure a computer for surfing the net. It doesn't have to be an S-390 or anything, just a basic 486-66 (hmm, I've got three old ones in this closet right here...) and a cable modem (unless you can get 56K leased cheaper).
Add it up: 3 Computers/Monitors/Ethernet cards($0)(in closet gathering dust anyway), 3 ether cables($0)(I got the cable at work, they won't miss it), SuSE6($0), little 3com hub($80), cable modem ($100)(+$40/month). I could swing everything but the $40 per, but I live outside Boston, I think I could get some other people to pitch in...Or maybe the town? Of course, if I let the town do it, they may want the filters, so maybe I pass the hat at the LAN parties, RPG games, and Linux install fests I go to. Think I could get $40 a month that way?
But no, it's easier to ask some wanker company who's equipment I don't even like to do it for me. I swear I'm turning into a social darwinist, every time a school or town goes the sponsorship route and gets fucked I say "well, hopefully their kids won't breed." After "Coke got me Hooked on Phonics" and "I Say No to Drugs because Mr. fucking T. said so," breeding's the only thing they seem capable of.
I had a bunch of comments modded, and now I have to blow them all away you got me so pissed off. This "shadowy distant federal power bad, lets turn to the shadowy distant supernational corporate power" caveman bullshit has really got to end.
-jpowers
Right, and I don't want more Windows. What I want is an OS, any OS, with the GUI from the old Thinking Machines. Someone told me there's a port of it around, but I can't find it anywhere. The one where the filesystem is a 3D city, directories are buildings, etc. I wanna program a little sudo chopper to blow up deleted users' files...
-jpowers
Good luck. I used to have the kind of conversations that start these projects...when I was high.
Yeah, yeah, it'll be just like Windows, but, y'know, good...
Yeah, we'll write in Haskell so there'll be no errors...
And my personal favorite:
Fuck Astrophysics, I don't need a science degree to get a fun job!
-jpowers
I quit too. I mean yeah, yeah, "Hello World" and all, but then what? All these people where I work, using Windows, and all I do all day (when I'm not making a nuisance of myself around here) is hold their hands while they reboot. Now here's *nix, and I install it on my computer, and it's fun, and I tweak this file and this happens, then I tweak that file and that happens, and then I think, "Ooh, if only I could install this on all my users machines, I could spend the rest of my life tweaking stupid text files." I can hear it now: "I want samba so I can share my Britney fucking Spears CDs with the whole office!" "Ooh let's hire more people and pack 'em in six high and ten across, you can get machines for them if they start Monday, right?"
Sorry, looks like I went off there. Excuse: I just found out they're selling my apartment and I have to find a new one. New school year's not the best time to look in Boston. Again, sorry.
-jpowers
This is similar to what VMWare does.
I like that program. Why don't these WINE/ReactOS/OWP people quit wasting their time with rebuilding the whole OS and just make an open version of VM? Weren't there types of UNIX that did this on mainframes years ago? Someone's gotta have the source for it...I know not everyone here's a Stallman fan, but that would be the sort of handy "baseline" app I'd like to see done by GNU for ALL versions of *nix, rather than a bunch of kids who needed a senior project and decided to reinvent the square wheel (not WINE, but this new one...)
-jpowers
ASCAP/BMI money goes to songwriters, not recording artists. Additionally they just sort of guess how many times a song gets played, so whoever has the most airplay gets like 90% of the money. Therefore Britney and co get nothing, but the 40 year old losers who write their songs get most of the ASCAP licensing.
-jpowers
Color me impressed.
-jpowers
ps how is it I posted all that BS as me and didn't get modded down once? Am I the only one with mod points today or what?
-jpowers
Shut up, we were having fun...
-jpowers
Case closed. Thanks for clarifying that.
I'm sorry, was that Kierkegaard's Leap of Faith again? Looks like I missed it. Stupid troll.
-jpowers
Salvi now sits at the right hand of his Father.
Salvi sits in a hole in the ground here in Massachusetts. He knew he was going to spend the rest of his life in jail, so he offed himself. If suicide gets you into Heaven, why don't you start your trip right now? You don't, because your faith is weak. You believe in something that doesn't exist, and deep down it bothers you, so you stay alive. I, on the other hand, have to stay alive for a while yet, since I won't be able to taunt you halfwit ideologues once I'm dead.
-jpowers
is deep water. And needles. And meeting the perfect woman and having her turn out to be...a Christian. ;P
Half Serious: My creators were a couple of stoned hippies who couldn't bother to lie to me about Santa Claus.
Full-on Serious: We are all threatened by any ideology which leads its followers towards intellectual sloth. There is a level of stupidity below which you cannot reason morally, and this is where ideological amoralism starts. The "any price for my faith" concept is just fine as long as you're the one paying it. The second you Bible-thumping halfwits try to take other people's minds and lives as yours to sacrifice, I'm going to be there to call you on it. Example:
It's time we excercised some common sense and put a stop to this madness.
Implication: you have a right to stop someone from doing scientific research which directly and immediately harms... no one. You do not. You DO have a right to keep science from affecting you or your children directly, but not by stepping on someone else's curiosity and free will. Wait until they offer the treatment, then say 'no'. See how easy that is? And no one has to get shot.
I work at a non-profit cancer research organization that tests drugs to help people get well again. All year round I get e-mail off the webpage contact link: "Cancer is God's will, stop trying to change God's plan." Oh yeah? Well, your God made people so their organs go ballistic and eat them alive. That is going to stop. Either He can come down here and fix it Himself, or we'll do it for... ourselves.
We will take responsibility for our own destiny, because there is no morally acceptable alternative. The morally unacceptable alternatives include: letting people die for no good reason at all, letting "nature" push us around, or leaving it all to God's will. There is no fundamental difference in these, when they all result in inaction.
And fear...well, I live right down the street from where John Salvi took an AK-47 to the employees of a women's clinic. I lived in FL when some asshole did the same with a shotgun. Do whatever you want with your amoral, responsibility-denying religion, just don't fucking include me.
-jpowers
GM allows completely unrelated species to swap genes.
No it doesn't. Before, we could splice orange tree branches on to a lemon tree. Now we may be able to cross the lemon and orange and come up with something new, but still related. We will not, however, be able to make an orange tree sprout jellyfish. It will take another round or two of serious advances (remapping, anyone?) and many years before we can do that. Don't believe the hype: We haven't really unlocked the key to life, just broadened our reach a bit...
-jpowers
On the other hand, it may take genetic engineering to produce children who can survive in space. We aren't ready for this tool as a species, now, but we will probably need it at some point in the future. It's here, all the good and bad that can come of it is coming, and it's going to be up to us to figure out how to use it wisely.
All the fundamentalists in the world can't stop this, now, and they're too blind to see the cyclical nature of their own "truth":
The way things were yesterday is ALWAYS The Garden, and what we learn today is ALWAYS The Fruit. Guess where that leaves tomorrow...
-jpowers
but we love ya anyway, AC. Just like Jesus does, but with less homoerotic overtones.
;P Fool
We don't need genetics to prove evolution, natural selection takes care of it for us. Speaking of which: shouldn't you be dead by now?
OK, OK, enough kidding around. You're alright, for someone who isn't smart enough know better. I mean, thank God we don't actually need to know anything about the world around us, right? We might realize religion is a response to our fear of our own shadows! We might have to take responsibility for both doing the right thing AND enjoying our lives now, since we won't have another chance once we stop living! Boy, facing the truth without help from a non-existant primordial consciousness sure would suck!
-jpowers
Only a very select few care enough or are adventurous to venture from well-trodden paths -- this is certainly true of OS's and probably would be no less so of genetics. And generally people only change when there is a good reason too; people aren't very apt to "experiment" with their own bodies unless they expect a good return on investment. [bold mine]
Yeah right, my little sister's still waiting for those nose-ring dividends to roll in...
And since evolution is on a large scale, there's no reason to think that small aberrations will affect the course of evolution.
Again I disagree. Over the course of generations of human reproduction, the numbers would probably fall in the "butterfly flaps wings in Africa, starts monsoon in Bangladesh" range of mathematics. Small changes now can easily multiply their effects over generations. Nothing major in our lifetimes, but we might be a different race 1000 years from now, and the change, for better or worse, will be enabled by this early gene research.
-jpowers
Futurism, plain and simple. Too much talk about what you could do and not enough about what you just did. Technology is advancing very quickly, but because of the nature of the tech media, we have a thorough knowledge of the new tech by the time it hits the market.
/., or maybe more like kuro5hin or The Register...;P) to tell us about what's approaching (ie vapor), rather than going out and examining new things ourselves (ie fscking reality), we end up jaded by the endless stream of exaggerated hype and outright lies about new products that never materialize. To give you a quick example of this: I've been reading /. for around two years, not long compared to the life of the site, but long enough to remember Bluetooth being discussed then (and it probably was before, too). Two years, and where the fsck is it? If you let yourself get set up for new vapor-tech like this, you're inevitably going to be disappointed.
Since we rely on the media (like
While many more people are informed by the futurist model, you do get an unpleasant sense of being "ahead of the curve" AND a sense of perpetual disappointment when the shiny new tech doesn't live up to the vapor. I'm finding that what I can do with what I have (ie a bunch of pII-400s, 100mb LAN, varied and infinite OSs) is more fascinating and ultimately more rewarding than wasting my time getting worked up over superconductive ceramics (still stuck at -33C, gentlemen? What's it been, 10 years?), solar-electric cars (That SunRaycer ready to ship yet?) and my all-time bitter favorite, NOT LIVING IN FSCKING OUTER SPACE, where no doubt even if I could go there would still not live up to 2001: A Space-Travel Brochure.
-jpowers
This isn't eminent domain. Incidentally, they can't take whitehouse.com, the supreme court decided all titles and names associated with the federal government belonged to the public domain, ie Federal United MegaGloboCorp-type names are free for people to use as long as they don't impersonate an officer of Federal United MegaGloboGovernment... I mean the US.
The real issue is whether their copyright/trademark can take a word out of the public domain, and consequently deprive him of his first-come privilege to the domain name. It will never hold up in court, though I suspect he won't fight it. Too expensive. He may as well just get a domain for Deuteronomy.com or find a new hobby for all it'll cost him, unless some rich-ass church wants to sponsor his freedom of religion or some BS...
-jpowers
He doesn't speak for any Christians (If you ask Kierkegaard there aren't any anyway). The word "Corinthians" has been around long enough that it's in the public domain (unless Congress just extended the time period after death from 80 years to 2000+). Even in its current form and spelling it's 400-500 years old (not allowed to be translated into English until the Protestant Reformation), at which point it should be first come, first served. So JD Sallen gets it.
Besides, if you hand that stuff to the religions you'll have the jews suing the catholics for incorporating their copyrighted works into the Old Testament, and the Orphics suing the christians for stealing the trademarked concept of the martyr, and the Egyptians suing everyone for copying Akhnaten's trade secret - monotheism.
Atheism, on the other hand, continues to be open source.
-jpowers