Governments need to decide whether they want to be trusted. If they want trust, then they should avoid any hint of sneakiness.
Let's be honest. We don't have to condone everything our government does, but one of the big jobs a government has is keeping its people safe. The Soviet Union was actively agitating at all levels to overthrow the US government; even now, even such allies as France and Israel spy on us. A government that did not try to mitigate those acts and undermine or infiltrate the countries that started them would fail to serve its people.
The U.S. government secretly overthrew a democratically elected president of Iran, President Mossadegh. That started a chain of events that eventually continued with retaliation: The destruction of the World Trade Center.
That's nonsense. Yes, we overthrew the president of Iran, a heinous act, which caused the 1979 revolution in Iran. But Osama bin Laden is not Iranian; I don't know that Osama bin Laden was ever in Iran, and he certainly didn't base his operations from there, nor did he use that act as his primary source of propoganada.
Old idea: "You shall not kill." New clauses: [...] c) Except if you fear something that someone might do in the future.
This is a new clause? This clause was used to justify the Jews slaughtering the Israelites and giving no quarter a few hundred years after they heard "you shall not kill", if you accept the biblical testamony. Even if you don't, the "new" clause has been around for about as long as the "old" idea.
*If* you actually made a system so fragile, that explosions could be triggered by software,
The Therarad systems, the one's that killed patients through radiation overdoses, elimenated hardware checks and trusted (buggy) software ones. In any case, it'd be hard to safeguard every system; even if you install all the obvious checks, there's probably one pipe that has to be run sometimes at x pressure, but will burst if constantly under x pressure, especially with Soviet quality workmanship.
Didn't the russians wonder why code they stole from the enemy would run on their own computers?
If you were looking to steal Intel code to run on your computers, wouldn't you expect it to run on Intel processors and have a batch of them set up to run it? In any case, I understand that the Russians largely ripped off US designs, like the VAX.
For the record, deliberately inserting bugs into a software program to cause the destruction of a natural gas facility and billions in economic damage would almost certainly be called terrorism today. Except, of course, it's by definition not terrorism if the US government does it.
There's hardly an implied warranty on stolen merchandise. If they had bought or wrote software, you might have a point, but it was the USSR's responsibility to check out to see if any of the software they stole was actually worth anything. The guy who robs the armored car hardly has cause to complain that the money was counterfit.
Since the FSF considers dynamic linking to be derivation, I am FORBIDDEN to distribute any BSD licensed work that links to GPL libraries.
That's nonsense. The GPL only requires that the work as a whole be licensed under the GPL. All it means is that your work as a whole will be licensed under the GPL; all you code treated seperately from the library will still be BSD.
So by your logic, saying "This software is free, as long as you give credit where it is due via a copyright notice" is the logical equivalent of "This software is free, as long as you release it the way WE tell you to?"
You were asking for more than a copyright notice; you were asking for recognition in the help file. And yes, you are demanding certain things about the way people edit and distribute the software. Your very statement is inflammatory. The FreeBSD license demands somethings about how you release your software, as does the Artistic license and the GPL.
The FreeBSD license (Like the OpenBSD and NetBSD licenses you mentioned) allow code released under that license to be released under ANOTHER license (including the GPL).
Certain licenses; not ones that demand that all license text to the software be in French, for example.
In that sense, GPL'ed software is the LEAST "free as in libre."
So a license that demanded that you only distribute patches and that you provide Sun the unlimited right to use your patches as they see fit would be more free, because you can slap an advertising clause along the side?
In CompSci, an OS refers to just what's needed to run the system,
So now it's more than a kernel. FOLDOC (the Free Online Dictionary of Computing) claims that a OS "presents a default interface to the user when no application program is running", which would on most Linux systems mean that Bash is running.
As a technical term in some branches of computer science, the Windows operating system doesn't include Notepad. But I haven't seen much objection to the name Mac OS X, even though the "OS" is clearly Darwin. The truth is, even computer scientists talk about Mac OS X and Debian and Red Hat as operating systems, and the rest of the world has no hesitation to calling everything that ships on the CD's labeled Operating System part of the operating system.
The fact that you have to supply the 3 paragraphs somewhere on your distribution CD is a problem now?
If they just had to supply the 3 paragraphs, why all the verbage? All they would have to say then is just keep this license with the program. That's part of the problem with this license; it's clearly asking for a lot more than the writers are admitting, because otherwise they'd just use the old BSD clause, which would be much less of a problem.
THAT is "free as in libre" software. Anyone can take the code and do anything they want with it.
Except, of course, not acknowledging you. Just like you can do anything you want with GPL software as long as you distribute the source and don't change the license. If you want to whine about being uber-free, join OpenBSD and NetBSD in going to the 2-term BSD license or just place it in the public domain.
strictly speaking, the OS is a kernel.
All those boxes on store shelves labeled FooOS include a heck of a lot more then just a kernel. Likewise, the Portable Operating System standard (POSIX) didn't standardized system calls, it standardized a programming interface for C (provided under Linux by GNU Libc) and a set of utilities (again, mostly provided under Linux by GNU). I have never seen operating system used to mean a kernel except in these naming debates.
Because the GPL does not suit many forms of development,[...]
This is not about the GPL. Theo de Raadt, who dislikes the GPL with a passion, doesn't like this license. This license is more onerous in some directions than any license widely recognized as free, even the GPL which doesn't have any attribution requirements.
To the extent that it is about the GPL, Gnome, KDE and GNUStep are all GPLed programs that have been working with X for their entire existence, but suddenly XFree86 is the one that changed the rules.
And people wonder why Microsoft is winning.
To the extent that Microsoft is winning, it seems much more rational to explain by the fact that they have a lot more money than free software developers and more ability to drill on to one specific target. I wouldn't blame on the fact that many free software developers use a license that encourages people to work within free software instead of taking software proprietary.
The furor over the license is generated by commercial interests and little else.
I've heard Theo deRaad and Branden Robinson come out against this license, and neither of them are connected to commercial interests. The furor comes from someone creating yet another license with the obnoxious, unliked, BSD advertising clause (which NetBSD and OpenBSD has worked to remove from their systems, and Berkeley removed from all the original BSD code) and applying it to an ancient codebase that has always been licensed under the most liberal of terms.
The "let's make this as cheap as possible" or "market market market" mentality is what lands people with useless and buggy [I've seen many buggy DVD players in my time] equipment.
Okay, then we throw it out and get another one. If I'm buying a DVD player, I want it to be cheap as dirt. I don't need it to play VCDs or OGG or anything but plain old Region-1 DVDs. If you want that, then you're welcome to spend the extra money and buy it, but don't complain about me not wanting to spend that extra money.
You can mod me to hell, but a good part of success in the software industry is a healthy respect for rivals, and a willingness to accept good ideas wherever they come from.
A good part of psychological success is blowing off a little steam, often in the form of making fun of our opponents. Most of the people on slashdot are not actively involved in writing open source software, and even those who are who rag on Microsoft aren't necessarily dismissing everything Microsoft does off-hand.
They did exactly that here in the USA, stole about 10 year's worth of stuff from the public domain and put it back under copyright.
No, they didn't. In Britain, when they enacted life+70, they returned all stuff that had left life+50 but not life+70 to copyright. In the US, however, copyright extensions have merely extended the length of copyright, not returned anything to the public domain. The latest copyright extension made it 95 years for old books, but all the books that had left copyright - those older than 1923 - stayed out of copyright.
There's one exception, though. At one time, to get US copyright, you had to publish in the US within 30 days, and renew that copyright in 28 years. Failure to do so would lose copyright in the US. The URAA returned copyright to all the foreign books that had lost US copyright or (more common) not got it in the first place.
You can't; that's basic social contract theory. But the TOS are between two individuals, not the individual and the state.
TOS is legally binding[...]You may say you don't accept, but but just being on the website, you say otherwise.
Why? When I walk into a mueseum, they don't have a little sign saying "by walking into the mueseum, you accept the terms of usage." They have big signs saying "no cameras, no food or drink", and big guys to enforce those terms. I could easily wander around this website without reading the TOS, and possibly without even knowing they exists.
If you go into a grocery store, do you automatically accept their terms of usage? Why do webmasters get to paste a legal document somewhere random and assume that everyone agrees to it?
If it required detailed understanding, then we'd have to. Fortunately, it seems to work without us completely understand how it does so.
Worked out well for Stephen King, did it?
Even if he had put a free novel online, strings free, and failed, that still wouldn't prove anything. There's very few authors in the class of Stephen King, and it's hard to stir up more interest in them. Perhaps it isn't a good plan for them. Straight paper press has failed many authors, and we don't ignore it based on those failures.
your formula is far too complex and with too many variables that are impossible to even guess.
Reality is far too complex and has far too many variables that are impossible to even guess.
It's not necessarily a safe bet that, by allowing piracy, you'll end up with more overall sales.
No; you need to run through the formula. The question is, how many people would pirate it and not pay for it. Baen has discovered that sales of an author go up with the offer a free novel or two online. Piracy may hurt games, but antipiracy sometimes can hurt too.
They want to retain their copy-rights [...] If they didn't have TOS that said DON'T COPY THESE, THESE ARE OURS, someone else could come along and take their photograph clean-up work
If they had copyrights, they wouldn't need the TOS. Copyrights are automatic.
Isn't this exactly what most./'ers are ranting for on the other stories about unsolicited faxes and unsolicited emails?
No. We aren't looking for the ability to threaten casual people who want to communicate with us. We want the people who spam us and have no intent to set up a line of honest communication to go away.
Copyright cases are decided on a case by case basis, and as such the Judge involved can disagree with a case that has precedent.
So you're saying that a judge may rule that you can keep that Bruce Springsteen song on your website? Every legal opinion I've ever heard on the subject relies on that case and agrees with it, including the lawyers that Project Gutenberg retained. "IANAL, but the judge might be stoned" doesn't exactly lead me to believe otherwise.
it might as well be a copyright, even if the original item is in the public domain.
But it's not. If you post it on your website and someone copies it, you may be able to sue the copier on the basis of your EULA, but it won't be a copyright case, which is a lot more cut and dried. (If SCO could point to lines in System V and Linux, they wouldn't be arguing contract law with IBM.)
But you can't sue anyone who copied it from them, since you had no copyright with them. If you publish a picture in a book, people can use it, or people can make imitations of it from memory. You can't blanket enjoin the whole world like copyright does.
Ever buy a print at the store? A reproduction of a work is a copyrightable work in of itself.
No, it's not, not in the US. BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY, LTD. v. COREL CORP says that a reproduction of a work does not get a new copyright, because copyright is given for creative works, and reproduction, especially an accurate one, isn't creative; it's merely a reproduction.
most of you also said Einstein was full of it and then said the same of Heisenberg.
Have you ever read Budget of Paradoxes, by Augustus de Morgan? It was published first in 1872, based on articles published in the Athenaeum in the 19th century that mocked all the kooks who thought they had something new. Guess what; in the century since, none of those people have become famous or any of their theories accepted. There are a lot of people who like to toot their own horn and publish a mismash as the theory of everything. It's usually pretty obvious, and it almost always happens to the intellegent and often to those who should know better.
I could easily create a dirty bomb with your few kilograms and nuke New York
You can't nuke New York. There's a big difference between dropping a nuclear weapon on New York and spreading radioactive dust around New York.
In any case, you can easily steal this material? And then pulvarize it (without killing yourself) and attach it to a bomb that can distribute it throughout a city? This seems way more complex then the most complex attack that terrorists have ever carried out.
the waste will still be there when your grandchildren walk this earth
So? A lot of waste will still be here when my grandchildren walk this earth.
Take a look at the sun, and you'll see a huge clean efficient way of getting about 90-99% of the chemical energy stored in molecules
In other words, you know nothing the subject. Burning releases chemical energy. Nuclear reactions release energy bound in the nucleus of the atom, not chemical energy stored in molecules.
I am very much in favor of nuclear fusion, NOT fission
And I'm in favor of opening a wormhole to another universe and directly sucking the energy through. But that, like nuclear fusion, isn't possible today. So we have to use real-world power generation. So far, fission is one of the few pratical means of generating the power we need anywhere on Earth.
The point is that most counterfeit bills are not being made in large quantities but by people making one or two fake bills each.
Where does that fact come from? It doesn't even fit with psychology; it's like eating one cookie. Either you wouldn't make any counterfeit bills, or you would pass the first one, realize how easy it was, and make more.
How does this benefit the average Joe? Simple. Take every bit of personal information you can think of, stick it into a database, and file for a copyright on it.
It's not a copyright; people can't copy your database, but they can independently collect the information. Even if that weren't true, do you think that a court would let your trick work? Or that even if they did, Congress would let it stand? The number of buisness that would have to change their patterns would be huge.
Slashdot Mirror
Governments need to decide whether they want to be trusted. If they want trust, then they should avoid any hint of sneakiness.
Let's be honest. We don't have to condone everything our government does, but one of the big jobs a government has is keeping its people safe. The Soviet Union was actively agitating at all levels to overthrow the US government; even now, even such allies as France and Israel spy on us. A government that did not try to mitigate those acts and undermine or infiltrate the countries that started them would fail to serve its people.
The U.S. government secretly overthrew a democratically elected president of Iran, President Mossadegh. That started a chain of events that eventually continued with retaliation: The destruction of the World Trade Center.
That's nonsense. Yes, we overthrew the president of Iran, a heinous act, which caused the 1979 revolution in Iran. But Osama bin Laden is not Iranian; I don't know that Osama bin Laden was ever in Iran, and he certainly didn't base his operations from there, nor did he use that act as his primary source of propoganada.
Old idea: "You shall not kill." New clauses: [...] c) Except if you fear something that someone might do in the future.
This is a new clause? This clause was used to justify the Jews slaughtering the Israelites and giving no quarter a few hundred years after they heard "you shall not kill", if you accept the biblical testamony. Even if you don't, the "new" clause has been around for about as long as the "old" idea.
My view is that feeding bad code is just an attack, and of a similar ethical stance to a bomb or similar acts.
In other words, an entirely ethical act under many circumstances.
*If* you actually made a system so fragile, that explosions could be triggered by software,
The Therarad systems, the one's that killed patients through radiation overdoses, elimenated hardware checks and trusted (buggy) software ones. In any case, it'd be hard to safeguard every system; even if you install all the obvious checks, there's probably one pipe that has to be run sometimes at x pressure, but will burst if constantly under x pressure, especially with Soviet quality workmanship.
Didn't the russians wonder why code they stole from the enemy would run on their own computers?
If you were looking to steal Intel code to run on your computers, wouldn't you expect it to run on Intel processors and have a batch of them set up to run it? In any case, I understand that the Russians largely ripped off US designs, like the VAX.
For the record, deliberately inserting bugs into a software program to cause the destruction of a natural gas facility and billions in economic damage would almost certainly be called terrorism today. Except, of course, it's by definition not terrorism if the US government does it.
There's hardly an implied warranty on stolen merchandise. If they had bought or wrote software, you might have a point, but it was the USSR's responsibility to check out to see if any of the software they stole was actually worth anything. The guy who robs the armored car hardly has cause to complain that the money was counterfit.
Since the FSF considers dynamic linking to be derivation, I am FORBIDDEN to distribute any BSD licensed work that links to GPL libraries.
That's nonsense. The GPL only requires that the work as a whole be licensed under the GPL. All it means is that your work as a whole will be licensed under the GPL; all you code treated seperately from the library will still be BSD.
So by your logic, saying "This software is free, as long as you give credit where it is due via a copyright notice" is the logical equivalent of "This software is free, as long as you release it the way WE tell you to?"
You were asking for more than a copyright notice; you were asking for recognition in the help file. And yes, you are demanding certain things about the way people edit and distribute the software. Your very statement is inflammatory. The FreeBSD license demands somethings about how you release your software, as does the Artistic license and the GPL.
The FreeBSD license (Like the OpenBSD and NetBSD licenses you mentioned) allow code released under that license to be released under ANOTHER license (including the GPL).
Certain licenses; not ones that demand that all license text to the software be in French, for example.
In that sense, GPL'ed software is the LEAST "free as in libre."
So a license that demanded that you only distribute patches and that you provide Sun the unlimited right to use your patches as they see fit would be more free, because you can slap an advertising clause along the side?
In CompSci, an OS refers to just what's needed to run the system,
So now it's more than a kernel. FOLDOC (the Free Online Dictionary of Computing) claims that a OS "presents a default interface to the user when no application program is running", which would on most Linux systems mean that Bash is running.
As a technical term in some branches of computer science, the Windows operating system doesn't include Notepad. But I haven't seen much objection to the name Mac OS X, even though the "OS" is clearly Darwin. The truth is, even computer scientists talk about Mac OS X and Debian and Red Hat as operating systems, and the rest of the world has no hesitation to calling everything that ships on the CD's labeled Operating System part of the operating system.
The fact that you have to supply the 3 paragraphs somewhere on your distribution CD is a problem now?
If they just had to supply the 3 paragraphs, why all the verbage? All they would have to say then is just keep this license with the program. That's part of the problem with this license; it's clearly asking for a lot more than the writers are admitting, because otherwise they'd just use the old BSD clause, which would be much less of a problem.
THAT is "free as in libre" software. Anyone can take the code and do anything they want with it.
Except, of course, not acknowledging you. Just like you can do anything you want with GPL software as long as you distribute the source and don't change the license. If you want to whine about being uber-free, join OpenBSD and NetBSD in going to the 2-term BSD license or just place it in the public domain.
strictly speaking, the OS is a kernel.
All those boxes on store shelves labeled FooOS include a heck of a lot more then just a kernel. Likewise, the Portable Operating System standard (POSIX) didn't standardized system calls, it standardized a programming interface for C (provided under Linux by GNU Libc) and a set of utilities (again, mostly provided under Linux by GNU). I have never seen operating system used to mean a kernel except in these naming debates.
Because the GPL does not suit many forms of development,[...]
This is not about the GPL. Theo de Raadt, who dislikes the GPL with a passion, doesn't like this license. This license is more onerous in some directions than any license widely recognized as free, even the GPL which doesn't have any attribution requirements.
To the extent that it is about the GPL, Gnome, KDE and GNUStep are all GPLed programs that have been working with X for their entire existence, but suddenly XFree86 is the one that changed the rules.
And people wonder why Microsoft is winning.
To the extent that Microsoft is winning, it seems much more rational to explain by the fact that they have a lot more money than free software developers and more ability to drill on to one specific target. I wouldn't blame on the fact that many free software developers use a license that encourages people to work within free software instead of taking software proprietary.
The furor over the license is generated by commercial interests and little else.
I've heard Theo deRaad and Branden Robinson come out against this license, and neither of them are connected to commercial interests. The furor comes from someone creating yet another license with the obnoxious, unliked, BSD advertising clause (which NetBSD and OpenBSD has worked to remove from their systems, and Berkeley removed from all the original BSD code) and applying it to an ancient codebase that has always been licensed under the most liberal of terms.
My position is that if you write/own the code you get to say how it's used.
Some of that code dates back 30 years. Very little of it was written by the people who are changing this license; they're just the latest caretakers.
The "let's make this as cheap as possible" or "market market market" mentality is what lands people with useless and buggy [I've seen many buggy DVD players in my time] equipment.
Okay, then we throw it out and get another one. If I'm buying a DVD player, I want it to be cheap as dirt. I don't need it to play VCDs or OGG or anything but plain old Region-1 DVDs. If you want that, then you're welcome to spend the extra money and buy it, but don't complain about me not wanting to spend that extra money.
You can mod me to hell, but a good part of success in the software industry is a healthy respect for rivals, and a willingness to accept good ideas wherever they come from.
A good part of psychological success is blowing off a little steam, often in the form of making fun of our opponents. Most of the people on slashdot are not actively involved in writing open source software, and even those who are who rag on Microsoft aren't necessarily dismissing everything Microsoft does off-hand.
They did exactly that here in the USA, stole about 10 year's worth of stuff from the public domain and put it back under copyright.
No, they didn't. In Britain, when they enacted life+70, they returned all stuff that had left life+50 but not life+70 to copyright. In the US, however, copyright extensions have merely extended the length of copyright, not returned anything to the public domain. The latest copyright extension made it 95 years for old books, but all the books that had left copyright - those older than 1923 - stayed out of copyright.
There's one exception, though. At one time, to get US copyright, you had to publish in the US within 30 days, and renew that copyright in 28 years. Failure to do so would lose copyright in the US. The URAA returned copyright to all the foreign books that had lost US copyright or (more common) not got it in the first place.
you chose not to agree to the law?
You can't; that's basic social contract theory. But the TOS are between two individuals, not the individual and the state.
TOS is legally binding[...]You may say you don't accept, but but just being on the website, you say otherwise.
Why? When I walk into a mueseum, they don't have a little sign saying "by walking into the mueseum, you accept the terms of usage." They have big signs saying "no cameras, no food or drink", and big guys to enforce those terms. I could easily wander around this website without reading the TOS, and possibly without even knowing they exists.
If you go into a grocery store, do you automatically accept their terms of usage? Why do webmasters get to paste a legal document somewhere random and assume that everyone agrees to it?
Maybe we should scrap the whole economic system.
If it required detailed understanding, then we'd have to. Fortunately, it seems to work without us completely understand how it does so.
Worked out well for Stephen King, did it?
Even if he had put a free novel online, strings free, and failed, that still wouldn't prove anything. There's very few authors in the class of Stephen King, and it's hard to stir up more interest in them. Perhaps it isn't a good plan for them. Straight paper press has failed many authors, and we don't ignore it based on those failures.
So if Joe blogs makes a copy (reproduction) of a Program/ISO/Audio track, then that copy is no longer a copyrightable work ?
No; you don't get a new copyright on it for copying it. The old copyright is still in effect.
your formula is far too complex and with too many variables that are impossible to even guess.
Reality is far too complex and has far too many variables that are impossible to even guess.
It's not necessarily a safe bet that, by allowing piracy, you'll end up with more overall sales.
No; you need to run through the formula. The question is, how many people would pirate it and not pay for it. Baen has discovered that sales of an author go up with the offer a free novel or two online. Piracy may hurt games, but antipiracy sometimes can hurt too.
They want to retain their copy-rights [...] If they didn't have TOS that said DON'T COPY THESE, THESE ARE OURS, someone else could come along and take their photograph clean-up work
./'ers are ranting for on the other stories about unsolicited faxes and unsolicited emails?
If they had copyrights, they wouldn't need the TOS. Copyrights are automatic.
Isn't this exactly what most
No. We aren't looking for the ability to threaten casual people who want to communicate with us. We want the people who spam us and have no intent to set up a line of honest communication to go away.
Copyright cases are decided on a case by case basis, and as such the Judge involved can disagree with a case that has precedent.
So you're saying that a judge may rule that you can keep that Bruce Springsteen song on your website? Every legal opinion I've ever heard on the subject relies on that case and agrees with it, including the lawyers that Project Gutenberg retained. "IANAL, but the judge might be stoned" doesn't exactly lead me to believe otherwise.
it might as well be a copyright, even if the original item is in the public domain.
But it's not. If you post it on your website and someone copies it, you may be able to sue the copier on the basis of your EULA, but it won't be a copyright case, which is a lot more cut and dried. (If SCO could point to lines in System V and Linux, they wouldn't be arguing contract law with IBM.)
But you can't sue anyone who copied it from them, since you had no copyright with them. If you publish a picture in a book, people can use it, or people can make imitations of it from memory. You can't blanket enjoin the whole world like copyright does.
Ever buy a print at the store? A reproduction of a work is a copyrightable work in of itself.
No, it's not, not in the US. BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY, LTD. v. COREL CORP says that a reproduction of a work does not get a new copyright, because copyright is given for creative works, and reproduction, especially an accurate one, isn't creative; it's merely a reproduction.
most of you also said Einstein was full of it and then said the same of Heisenberg.
Have you ever read Budget of Paradoxes, by Augustus de Morgan? It was published first in 1872, based on articles published in the Athenaeum in the 19th century that mocked all the kooks who thought they had something new. Guess what; in the century since, none of those people have become famous or any of their theories accepted. There are a lot of people who like to toot their own horn and publish a mismash as the theory of everything. It's usually pretty obvious, and it almost always happens to the intellegent and often to those who should know better.
I could easily create a dirty bomb with your few kilograms and nuke New York
You can't nuke New York. There's a big difference between dropping a nuclear weapon on New York and spreading radioactive dust around New York.
In any case, you can easily steal this material? And then pulvarize it (without killing yourself) and attach it to a bomb that can distribute it throughout a city? This seems way more complex then the most complex attack that terrorists have ever carried out.
the waste will still be there when your grandchildren walk this earth
So? A lot of waste will still be here when my grandchildren walk this earth.
Take a look at the sun, and you'll see a huge clean efficient way of getting about 90-99% of the chemical energy stored in molecules
In other words, you know nothing the subject. Burning releases chemical energy. Nuclear reactions release energy bound in the nucleus of the atom, not chemical energy stored in molecules.
I am very much in favor of nuclear fusion, NOT fission
And I'm in favor of opening a wormhole to another universe and directly sucking the energy through. But that, like nuclear fusion, isn't possible today. So we have to use real-world power generation. So far, fission is one of the few pratical means of generating the power we need anywhere on Earth.
The point is that most counterfeit bills are not being made in large quantities but by people making one or two fake bills each.
Where does that fact come from? It doesn't even fit with psychology; it's like eating one cookie. Either you wouldn't make any counterfeit bills, or you would pass the first one, realize how easy it was, and make more.
How does this benefit the average Joe? Simple. Take every bit of personal information you can think of, stick it into a database, and file for a copyright on it.
It's not a copyright; people can't copy your database, but they can independently collect the information. Even if that weren't true, do you think that a court would let your trick work? Or that even if they did, Congress would let it stand? The number of buisness that would have to change their patterns would be huge.