I know that. I meant the code is released under the GPLv3 in addition to whatever other licenses apply (like the GPLv2). Of course it's still available under the GPLv2 terms as well, at least until someone accepts a non-GPLv2 patch (GPLv3-only / GPLv3-or-later).
Unless the committers transfer copyrights to a central body like in the case of the gnu tools and FSF, it is hard to move to another license if not bordering on impossible.
Unless, of course, all the commits were "GPLv2 or later", in which case the project was effectively already under the GPLv3 from the moment it was released.
All the EU are doing is checking if that's really the case or if the market is still open for consumers to shop around.
In this case you need to distinguish between "consumers" (i.e. you or me) and "customers" (i.e. people wishing to advertise online).
No, the term "consumers" still applies here. Google produces advertising opportunities; advertisers consume them. That makes the advertisers consumers in this context.
If what you want is one or two certain cable channels, you are indeed forced to buy them as part of a package.
No, you're buying the one or two channels you want for the price of the full package. The extra channels are irrelevant.
(total amount you pay) / (channels you want) = (your price per channel)
For the most part the extra channels are there because they subsidize the channels you want. If you eliminate those channels your overall cost will most likely increase, not decrease.
SCOTUS decided that SCOTUS is the final authority on the meaning and interpretation of the USCons
And if I said I was "the final authority on the meaning and interpretation of the" US Constitution, would you just take my word for it?
The concept that any body which derives its sole authority from the Constitution could possibly be qualified to interpret that Constitution, at least with regard to its own powers, is patently absurd. All branches of the govenment supposedly draw their authority from the people themselves, by way of the states, as mediated by the Constitution written by and supposedly accepted by the people, again as represented by the various state governments. If there is any disagreement over the interpretation of the Constitution the responsibility for resolving that dispute lies with those who created the document in the first place (symbolically, i.e. the people and the states, not the founders). The mechanism for that resolution is either an amendment, a Constitutional Convention, or succession and reformulation of a new government under a different system altogether.
"How many people haven't tried LISP because of the whole 'no side effects' thing?"
I think you meant Haskell (or, to a lesser extent, some other ML-like language). Lisp has plenty of opportunities for side effects. You can do without them, if you want, but you could do that just as easily in C or Java.
Much simpler: Energy = 1/2 * Capacitance * Voltage^2
Stored energy for a 500F capacitor at 9V: 1/2 * 500F * 81 V^2 = 20.25 KJ.
Average power for a one-second total discharge: 20.25 KW (obviously).
9V battery energy: about 2.5 amp-hours (varies widely) or about 80 KJ.
You should be able to charge the capacitor off a single 9V battery, provided you can keep the voltage stepped up (which you can do at a fair efficiency with a single IC these days) and avoid losing too much to heat. It will take a lot longer to charge the capacitor than to discharge it, though, due to the battery's internal resistance. I doubt you could get a sustained 15W out of a standard 9V battery without an elaborate cooling system -- less when you consider losses in the step-up power supply -- and even then you'd need to run it for over a thousand hours to fully charge the capacitor at a constant current. Once it was charged, though, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near those leads. Even a partial charge could easily be deadly, particularly if one somehow managed to bypass the normal skin resistance in imitation of this Darwin Award winner.
From what little I know about copyright law, it's meant to prevent one person from profiting from the sale of another person's intellectual property...
Obviously false, or there wouldn't be any CD or phonograph record retailers.
In the music case, . . . nor can I give it away for free since that interferes with the holder's ability to profit.
Nothing in copyright law -- at least not as interpreted by the courts under the First Sale Doctrine -- prevents you from legally giving away a CD or record for free, or even from selling it for personal or commercial profit. You just can't legally keep a copy for yourself. (Otherwise used CD/record stores would be in clear violation of the law.)
So if both you and your friend own the same CD and all you're doing is basically helping him change formats, that should be perfectly legal. After all, the same effect could be had if your friend brought his copy to your computer and ripped the songs off his own CD using your equipment.
Copyright law is concerned with the actions themselves, not their effects. Making a copy for someone else would still be distribution, and thus infringement, even if the other party could've done the exact same thing without any legal trouble at all; that's just one of the many things wrong with copyright law, somewhere behind the DMCA and the entire concept that it could possibly be justified to forceably restrict distribution in the first place (in that order).
Needless to say, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. (As if anyone would expect to find legal advice in an anonymous public forum....)
It seems to me (and apparently the GP as well) that you're criticizing Wikipedia for not having the same limitations as a paper encylopedia. Who cares what proportion of the articles fall into some niche category, as long as one can still easily find all the information one is looking for? The simple fact that a physical encyclopedia has limited storage space and thus cannot contain in-depth articles on every little special-interest detail does not appear to me to somehow constitute an advantage for physical encyclopedias.
Or were you perhaps simply protesting the direct comparison of article counts between Wikipedia and Britannica? That I could understand, since the comparison could hardly be fair. Their requirements are simply too different for any direct quantitative comparison to be meaningful.
Yes, except the Constitution is full of prohibitions on Congress making laws, but in which reality requires laws like that.
If Congress requires additional powers, there is a Constitutional amendment process in place to accomplish that. However, any "laws" they may pass without a clear Constitutional basis have no more moral authority than my own; which is to say, none at all. The concept that they can derive any just power to control anything from a document which no one currently alive ever agreed to is shaky enough without straying well beyond the already-extensive powers that document supposedly grants them.
The most familiar is laws against shouting "fire" in a (not burning) crowded theater. Which also restricts free speech, but we want the restriction.
First, that was a court ruling, not a law. Second, there were plenty of ways in which the person who shouted "Fire!" could've been held responsible for the consequences of that speech -- considering the obvious malicious intent and the immediate and entirely predictable harm it caused -- without violating the Constitutional ban on abridging the freedom of speech. The reasoning given in that particular ruling simply wasn't one of them. To put it bluntly, the court's ruling on that case was blatently unconstitutional and in any just (or even merely consistent) system would never have been permitted it to stand.
FWIW, I never said that I thought Article I.8 and the 1st Amendment actually overlapped -- although it is an interesting possiblity to consider -- but rather that if they did overlap there was no way that the earlier Article I.8 could override parts of the later 1st Amendment; that would defeat the entire point of passing the amendment in the first place.
Let's try this. UPS has a contract with the operator of the toll road negotiating a price for their trucks full of packages to use the roads. The toll operator then starts inspecting the trucks on their way through and sending them on the slow road unless the shipper of the packages pays tolls as well.
In that case you have a clear breach of contract -- or, in the original context, the peering agreements and/or SLAs -- which can be trivially handled without passing any new "shipping neutrality" laws. It's no surprise to me that the DoJ doesn't feel any need to specifically support special (and potentially disruptive) "network neutrality" laws when the existing system should prove more than sufficient.
Congress can make an exception to protecting our rights to free expression (like copying someone else's expression) where economics requires exclusivity of some expressions to promote progress in science and useful arts.
Actually, going by your interpretation of the relationship between the 1st Amendment and Article I.8, the opposite should be true. The 1st Amendment was written after Article I.8, and is worded in stronger language -- "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". If anything, the 1st Amendment should nullify Article I.8, not visa-versa. If Congress is first declared to have the power to regulate something, but is later prohibited from making any law touching on that subject, the logical conclusion would be that the prohibition renders their former power inert.
What is sad to me is that agriculture is shrinking at the same time the demand for food world-wide is increasing.
The summary didn't say that worldwide food production was decreasing, just that fewer workers are employed in agriculture (relative to industry and services) than were in the past. At least part of that is probably due to more efficient production methods that allow the same or greater amounts of food to be grown by fewer workers. I don't know the actual statistics, but it would surprise me greatly if overall food production wasn't increasing year-on-year, despite the shift toward service-based employment.
The problem is that economics is a messy real-world phenomenen. Questions of economics cannot be answered without empirical data, an understanding of sociology and psychology and much more. "It sounds logical, so it must be true" just isn't enough. True economics should be based on claims such as "... the data suggests that...".
That, however, is exactly the problem. There are two major drawbacks to the pure-emperical approach to economics: first, the emperical data is useless without a model to compare it to; and second, there are no constant cause/effect pairs in human behavior.
On the first point, emperical data can only tell you what happened. Without a logical model of human economic behavior (hereafter "human action") you can't answer the questions of why those things occurred, or how the historical data points relate to each other. The same data can trivially lead to multiple explanations, depending entirely on which model you filter it through. A purely emperical approach doesn't even acknowledge the existance of a model, and thus any answers an empericist may give for "why" and "how" necessarily derive more from their own biases than the data itself.
On the second point, human actions are an essentially chaotic system due to the undiscoverable internal states of each of the participants and the fact that each of those participants is constantly learning and adapting to changing circumstances. There are certain fundamental patterns, such as supply and demand, but those patterns only hold so long as the participants are free to act as they will; whenever someone tries to control the outcome through force the patterns shift, or disappear altogether. The only real certainty in human action is that any attempt to control it through anything less than overwhelming force -- in other words, by making the participants somehow less than free human beings -- will both fail to fully achieve its primary goal and create unintended and unforeseeable side effects.
Re-read my comment yourself. I didn't say that the conditions on the sign were legally binding, I said that it was reasonable for them to be binding. The details of various state laws are irrelevant to the fact that (a) the store is the property of someone else; (b) knowingly entering someone else's property against their wishes is commonly known as trespassing; (c) the sign clearly indicates that the owner grants permission to enter the property only to those who agree to the conditions; (d) ergo, after having seen the sign, continuing to enter indicates your acceptance of the owner's terms -- unless you care to admit to trespassing instead. Any differences between that conclusion and contract or property law are indicative of one or more defects in the law.
Sorry, but you don't lose your rights by walking past a sign which states that you do.
Not just by walking past the sign, no, but it is perfectly reasonable to assume that by choosing to enter the private property of another after having been advised of the conditions of such entry you have indeed agreed to abide by those conditions for the duration of your presence. To continue onto the property while rejecting the conditions would be an obvious case of trespassing. The sign is meaningless except as a limitation on the general permission to enter extended by the owner, without which you have no right to enter the store in the first place.
If you want Alzheimers patients "to die earlier with dignity" then you'll have to start killing them, like witches, at the first sign. Because for most of them it's the first thing to seriously go wrong. And for most of them it develops very, very slowly, sliding down a slope where by the time you might wish they'd say "Kill me now, please," any such rational choice is finally behind them.
If anyone really did want to take that approach, they could record such a decision in advance, while they still have the capacity to make rational choices. This would be similar to the concept of a living will -- a way of expressing one's will in the face of foreseeable future events that may render one incapable of doing so directly.
To make that practicible, of course, one would need to challenge the current legal status of assisted suicide; otherwise the individual's will would remain irrelevant regardless of their ability to reason about and express such a choice.
It also bars you from commercial access to property which you are not given property rights...
Could you elaborate on this? I did some searching and was unable to locate any other uses of the term "commercial access" in a related context. Perhaps you could cite the relevant portion of the copyright laws? Also, are there any differences between your use of "commercial access" and your former use of the unqualified term "access"?
Anyway, if the copyright laws are so strict as you claim that merely makes them even more unjust than I had thought. As you are probably already aware I'm strictly anti-"IP" on the basis of natural law, and even if that were not so I would still assert that copyright was intended as a priviledge and not a property right from a Constitutional point-of-view. If the authors had intended copyrights and patents to be property they would've directed Congress to protect that pre-existing right, or more likely omitted it entirely as they did with real property rights, not given them the option of granting exclusivity at their leisure. Congress created copyrights and patents and can repeal them at will, but eliminating real property rights would require at least a Constitutional amendment. It is interesting though, at times, to debate the finer points of legalism, not least because it's one of the more contorted and inconsistent areas of the law.
No, regular copyright law legally prevents you from distributing original or modified copies of the code. The DMCA legally prevents you from distributing or describing any of your own tools or methods which have the primary purpose of circumventing technological measures intended to prevent you from accessing the code. Neither copyright law nor the DMCA makes it illegal to access the code. You can still legally do so -- including the creating of any necessary tools -- provided you manage it without external assistance and never distribute those tools or describe how you accessed the code to others. The DMCA's primary influence is thus to curtail people's ability to communicate their own discoveries and to distribute their own property. Discouraging legal and illegal access to both copyrighted and (eventually) public domain works is merely a side effect.
Regardless of the merit--or, as it more likely, lack thereof--of copyrights and other so-called "intellectual property", the areas affected by the DMCA and not pre-DMCA copyright laws certainly do affect items which are exclusively one's own property. That was the whole purpose of the Act, to curtail individuals' legal ability to communicate and/or use their own property in ways that may threaten technological measures intended to inhibit copyright infringement.
People[']s wellness should NEVER EVER be something ANYONE can profit from.
Let's say you manage to enforce that decree. Why should anyone bother to provide health care if they can't profit from it? I don't expect to hear you offering to provide treatment at cost (much less for free!) after spending 12+ years of training for it at your own expense. Why should anyone else?
Even you must agree that expensive healthcare is preferable to non-existant healthcare.
For the overall economy that's a zero sum game. Either the money gets spent at the theater or it gets spent on the music.
Money is zero-sum; wealth is not. True, the same amount of money gets spent either way, but total wealth has increased, which means society is now better off than before. For the same cost any given consumer can now have both music and a visit to the theatre, rather than just one or the other.
Copyright is a definite short-term loss to the economy; that much has always been obvious. When it was first created it was assumed that the long-term benefits (encouraging the creation of copyrightable media) would outweigh the short-term disadvantage of encouraging greater concentration of wealth, codifying an extremely inefficient distribution system, and unnecessarly infringing on individual liberty. That assumption is becoming more and more questionable, however, as both the opportunity costs of restricted distribution and the cost of copyright enforcement continue to rise.
Re:No Child Left Behind doesn't matter
on
Failing Our Geniuses
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Congress shall make no law establishing a state religion. But congress may make a law abolishing religion.
Not without a new constitutional amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
Anyway, you can't simply eliminate irrationality by government edict, and if you tried you'd only end up creating a bunch of martyrs. The more fanatical elements would continue believing in secret, and you'd end up with all the myriad social repercussions normally associated with severe ideological repression. Religious persecution has failed to achieve its goals too many times throughout history to be taken at all seriously at this point.
You're right in theory, but do you really want people who couldn't hack it in any other major but education teaching economics?
Because that's what you'll get, and we'll have millions more shrieking idiots running around who think they know how economies work because they read about Karl Marx in high school.
Well, when you put it that way . . . not really. To be blunt, I'm against public schools in general, and I'm hardly the kind that would entrust anything important -- education in particular -- to the government. On the other hand, your prediction just might be preferable to the current situation, where students study currency manipulation, antitrust regulation and price controls in their political science classes -- where these are almost always presented in an overly positive light, in favor of government power -- and think they know all there is to economics anyway.
Even a mere attempt to present economics as what it truly is, the logical study of human action, would probably be a vast improvement over the current default view that economics is some strange merger between accounting and political science.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that. I meant the code is released under the GPLv3 in addition to whatever other licenses apply (like the GPLv2). Of course it's still available under the GPLv2 terms as well, at least until someone accepts a non-GPLv2 patch (GPLv3-only / GPLv3-or-later).
Unless, of course, all the commits were "GPLv2 or later", in which case the project was effectively already under the GPLv3 from the moment it was released.
You can connect four points on a 2D surface without intersection:
/ \ |
| O
| /|\
| / | \
| / | \
| | O |
| | / \ |
| |
| O-------O
(Imagine this isn't ASCII and the left and right sides are straight line segments.)
No, the term "consumers" still applies here. Google produces advertising opportunities; advertisers consume them. That makes the advertisers consumers in this context.
No, you're buying the one or two channels you want for the price of the full package. The extra channels are irrelevant.
(total amount you pay) / (channels you want) = (your price per channel)
For the most part the extra channels are there because they subsidize the channels you want. If you eliminate those channels your overall cost will most likely increase, not decrease.
And if I said I was "the final authority on the meaning and interpretation of the" US Constitution, would you just take my word for it?
The concept that any body which derives its sole authority from the Constitution could possibly be qualified to interpret that Constitution, at least with regard to its own powers, is patently absurd. All branches of the govenment supposedly draw their authority from the people themselves, by way of the states, as mediated by the Constitution written by and supposedly accepted by the people, again as represented by the various state governments. If there is any disagreement over the interpretation of the Constitution the responsibility for resolving that dispute lies with those who created the document in the first place (symbolically, i.e. the people and the states, not the founders). The mechanism for that resolution is either an amendment, a Constitutional Convention, or succession and reformulation of a new government under a different system altogether.
I think you meant Haskell (or, to a lesser extent, some other ML-like language). Lisp has plenty of opportunities for side effects. You can do without them, if you want, but you could do that just as easily in C or Java.
Much simpler: Energy = 1/2 * Capacitance * Voltage^2
Stored energy for a 500F capacitor at 9V: 1/2 * 500F * 81 V^2 = 20.25 KJ.
Average power for a one-second total discharge: 20.25 KW (obviously).
9V battery energy: about 2.5 amp-hours (varies widely) or about 80 KJ.
You should be able to charge the capacitor off a single 9V battery, provided you can keep the voltage stepped up (which you can do at a fair efficiency with a single IC these days) and avoid losing too much to heat. It will take a lot longer to charge the capacitor than to discharge it, though, due to the battery's internal resistance. I doubt you could get a sustained 15W out of a standard 9V battery without an elaborate cooling system -- less when you consider losses in the step-up power supply -- and even then you'd need to run it for over a thousand hours to fully charge the capacitor at a constant current. Once it was charged, though, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near those leads. Even a partial charge could easily be deadly, particularly if one somehow managed to bypass the normal skin resistance in imitation of this Darwin Award winner.
Obviously false, or there wouldn't be any CD or phonograph record retailers.
Nothing in copyright law -- at least not as interpreted by the courts under the First Sale Doctrine -- prevents you from legally giving away a CD or record for free, or even from selling it for personal or commercial profit. You just can't legally keep a copy for yourself. (Otherwise used CD/record stores would be in clear violation of the law.)
Copyright law is concerned with the actions themselves, not their effects. Making a copy for someone else would still be distribution, and thus infringement, even if the other party could've done the exact same thing without any legal trouble at all; that's just one of the many things wrong with copyright law, somewhere behind the DMCA and the entire concept that it could possibly be justified to forceably restrict distribution in the first place (in that order).
Needless to say, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. (As if anyone would expect to find legal advice in an anonymous public forum....)
It seems to me (and apparently the GP as well) that you're criticizing Wikipedia for not having the same limitations as a paper encylopedia. Who cares what proportion of the articles fall into some niche category, as long as one can still easily find all the information one is looking for? The simple fact that a physical encyclopedia has limited storage space and thus cannot contain in-depth articles on every little special-interest detail does not appear to me to somehow constitute an advantage for physical encyclopedias.
Or were you perhaps simply protesting the direct comparison of article counts between Wikipedia and Britannica? That I could understand, since the comparison could hardly be fair. Their requirements are simply too different for any direct quantitative comparison to be meaningful.
If Congress requires additional powers, there is a Constitutional amendment process in place to accomplish that. However, any "laws" they may pass without a clear Constitutional basis have no more moral authority than my own; which is to say, none at all. The concept that they can derive any just power to control anything from a document which no one currently alive ever agreed to is shaky enough without straying well beyond the already-extensive powers that document supposedly grants them.
First, that was a court ruling, not a law. Second, there were plenty of ways in which the person who shouted "Fire!" could've been held responsible for the consequences of that speech -- considering the obvious malicious intent and the immediate and entirely predictable harm it caused -- without violating the Constitutional ban on abridging the freedom of speech. The reasoning given in that particular ruling simply wasn't one of them. To put it bluntly, the court's ruling on that case was blatently unconstitutional and in any just (or even merely consistent) system would never have been permitted it to stand.
FWIW, I never said that I thought Article I.8 and the 1st Amendment actually overlapped -- although it is an interesting possiblity to consider -- but rather that if they did overlap there was no way that the earlier Article I.8 could override parts of the later 1st Amendment; that would defeat the entire point of passing the amendment in the first place.
In that case you have a clear breach of contract -- or, in the original context, the peering agreements and/or SLAs -- which can be trivially handled without passing any new "shipping neutrality" laws. It's no surprise to me that the DoJ doesn't feel any need to specifically support special (and potentially disruptive) "network neutrality" laws when the existing system should prove more than sufficient.
Actually, going by your interpretation of the relationship between the 1st Amendment and Article I.8, the opposite should be true. The 1st Amendment was written after Article I.8, and is worded in stronger language -- "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". If anything, the 1st Amendment should nullify Article I.8, not visa-versa. If Congress is first declared to have the power to regulate something, but is later prohibited from making any law touching on that subject, the logical conclusion would be that the prohibition renders their former power inert.
The summary didn't say that worldwide food production was decreasing, just that fewer workers are employed in agriculture (relative to industry and services) than were in the past. At least part of that is probably due to more efficient production methods that allow the same or greater amounts of food to be grown by fewer workers. I don't know the actual statistics, but it would surprise me greatly if overall food production wasn't increasing year-on-year, despite the shift toward service-based employment.
That, however, is exactly the problem. There are two major drawbacks to the pure-emperical approach to economics: first, the emperical data is useless without a model to compare it to; and second, there are no constant cause/effect pairs in human behavior.
On the first point, emperical data can only tell you what happened. Without a logical model of human economic behavior (hereafter "human action") you can't answer the questions of why those things occurred, or how the historical data points relate to each other. The same data can trivially lead to multiple explanations, depending entirely on which model you filter it through. A purely emperical approach doesn't even acknowledge the existance of a model, and thus any answers an empericist may give for "why" and "how" necessarily derive more from their own biases than the data itself.
On the second point, human actions are an essentially chaotic system due to the undiscoverable internal states of each of the participants and the fact that each of those participants is constantly learning and adapting to changing circumstances. There are certain fundamental patterns, such as supply and demand, but those patterns only hold so long as the participants are free to act as they will; whenever someone tries to control the outcome through force the patterns shift, or disappear altogether. The only real certainty in human action is that any attempt to control it through anything less than overwhelming force -- in other words, by making the participants somehow less than free human beings -- will both fail to fully achieve its primary goal and create unintended and unforeseeable side effects.
Re-read my comment yourself. I didn't say that the conditions on the sign were legally binding, I said that it was reasonable for them to be binding. The details of various state laws are irrelevant to the fact that (a) the store is the property of someone else; (b) knowingly entering someone else's property against their wishes is commonly known as trespassing; (c) the sign clearly indicates that the owner grants permission to enter the property only to those who agree to the conditions; (d) ergo, after having seen the sign, continuing to enter indicates your acceptance of the owner's terms -- unless you care to admit to trespassing instead. Any differences between that conclusion and contract or property law are indicative of one or more defects in the law.
Not just by walking past the sign, no, but it is perfectly reasonable to assume that by choosing to enter the private property of another after having been advised of the conditions of such entry you have indeed agreed to abide by those conditions for the duration of your presence. To continue onto the property while rejecting the conditions would be an obvious case of trespassing. The sign is meaningless except as a limitation on the general permission to enter extended by the owner, without which you have no right to enter the store in the first place.
If anyone really did want to take that approach, they could record such a decision in advance, while they still have the capacity to make rational choices. This would be similar to the concept of a living will -- a way of expressing one's will in the face of foreseeable future events that may render one incapable of doing so directly.
To make that practicible, of course, one would need to challenge the current legal status of assisted suicide; otherwise the individual's will would remain irrelevant regardless of their ability to reason about and express such a choice.
Could you elaborate on this? I did some searching and was unable to locate any other uses of the term "commercial access" in a related context. Perhaps you could cite the relevant portion of the copyright laws? Also, are there any differences between your use of "commercial access" and your former use of the unqualified term "access"?
Anyway, if the copyright laws are so strict as you claim that merely makes them even more unjust than I had thought. As you are probably already aware I'm strictly anti-"IP" on the basis of natural law, and even if that were not so I would still assert that copyright was intended as a priviledge and not a property right from a Constitutional point-of-view. If the authors had intended copyrights and patents to be property they would've directed Congress to protect that pre-existing right, or more likely omitted it entirely as they did with real property rights, not given them the option of granting exclusivity at their leisure. Congress created copyrights and patents and can repeal them at will, but eliminating real property rights would require at least a Constitutional amendment. It is interesting though, at times, to debate the finer points of legalism, not least because it's one of the more contorted and inconsistent areas of the law.
No, regular copyright law legally prevents you from distributing original or modified copies of the code. The DMCA legally prevents you from distributing or describing any of your own tools or methods which have the primary purpose of circumventing technological measures intended to prevent you from accessing the code. Neither copyright law nor the DMCA makes it illegal to access the code. You can still legally do so -- including the creating of any necessary tools -- provided you manage it without external assistance and never distribute those tools or describe how you accessed the code to others. The DMCA's primary influence is thus to curtail people's ability to communicate their own discoveries and to distribute their own property. Discouraging legal and illegal access to both copyrighted and (eventually) public domain works is merely a side effect.
Regardless of the merit--or, as it more likely, lack thereof--of copyrights and other so-called "intellectual property", the areas affected by the DMCA and not pre-DMCA copyright laws certainly do affect items which are exclusively one's own property. That was the whole purpose of the Act, to curtail individuals' legal ability to communicate and/or use their own property in ways that may threaten technological measures intended to inhibit copyright infringement.
Let's say you manage to enforce that decree. Why should anyone bother to provide health care if they can't profit from it? I don't expect to hear you offering to provide treatment at cost (much less for free!) after spending 12+ years of training for it at your own expense. Why should anyone else?
Even you must agree that expensive healthcare is preferable to non-existant healthcare.
Money is zero-sum; wealth is not. True, the same amount of money gets spent either way, but total wealth has increased, which means society is now better off than before. For the same cost any given consumer can now have both music and a visit to the theatre, rather than just one or the other.
Copyright is a definite short-term loss to the economy; that much has always been obvious. When it was first created it was assumed that the long-term benefits (encouraging the creation of copyrightable media) would outweigh the short-term disadvantage of encouraging greater concentration of wealth, codifying an extremely inefficient distribution system, and unnecessarly infringing on individual liberty. That assumption is becoming more and more questionable, however, as both the opportunity costs of restricted distribution and the cost of copyright enforcement continue to rise.
Not without a new constitutional amendment:
Anyway, you can't simply eliminate irrationality by government edict, and if you tried you'd only end up creating a bunch of martyrs. The more fanatical elements would continue believing in secret, and you'd end up with all the myriad social repercussions normally associated with severe ideological repression. Religious persecution has failed to achieve its goals too many times throughout history to be taken at all seriously at this point.
Well, when you put it that way . . . not really. To be blunt, I'm against public schools in general, and I'm hardly the kind that would entrust anything important -- education in particular -- to the government. On the other hand, your prediction just might be preferable to the current situation, where students study currency manipulation, antitrust regulation and price controls in their political science classes -- where these are almost always presented in an overly positive light, in favor of government power -- and think they know all there is to economics anyway.
Even a mere attempt to present economics as what it truly is, the logical study of human action, would probably be a vast improvement over the current default view that economics is some strange merger between accounting and political science.