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Try Kermit 95 from Columbia University. It has the all the bells and whistles, and the kitchen sink.

Kermit 95.

• High Accuracy: The total surface deviations are small, and the partitions fit very well to the contours of the original surface
• Speed: the method is apparently reasonably fast, though not as fast as greedy methods
• Ability to allow user interaction for variable refinement of specific regions, without requiring it in general cases
• Iterative process means that in time constrained situations a time/quality tradeoff can be made without modifying the algorithm
• Possible fuure applications in animation and simulation by introducing a time variable into the partitioning process

I don't mean to nitpick, or try to argue against your point, but I feel compelled to point out that men can be raped by both men and women. (see the second paragraph of the answer)

The fact that we are unable to provide satisfactory estimates of the probability that a conveyor shutdown will occur or of its consequences is certainly reason to be extremely prudent with regard to CO2 emissions. The record of events that transpired during the last glacial period sends us the clear warning that by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we are poking an angry beast (Fig. 5).

There was a guy who lived on my floor this year at school who claimed to have had sex with both of them. I don't think he would even have mentioned it if they hadn't visited him the first week of school. It was really, really weird... and really, really hot.

Oh get off it. Your e-mail can be searched with the same court orders that have been in place for years, well before Ashcroft and Poindexter, I might add.

Absolutely --- I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I'd go so far as to say that your email is being searched court order or not. Regardless of what people might think, unless you are encrypting your mail you should have no expectation of privacy from anyone. Anyway, after PATRIOT was passed the Feds probably don't even need the court order to snoop.

At his keynote address at HLT-NAACL 2004 conference, Andrei Broder (once of AltaVista, now at IBM TJW) mentioned that IBM has a regular policy of purging deleted email every 3 months. But one must believe it still exists, at least for the next lawsuite.

People just aren't taking any risk on new intellectual property (IP).

Could it be at least in part because they're afraid of subconsciously infringing somebody else's copyright? George Harrison got bit in the butt.

And so what Disney did was it didn't make R-rated moves.

Bullshit. Look at the Kill Bill movies, produced and published by Miramax Films, a division of The Walt Disney Company.

Or do you mean only the Walt Disney Pictures division? After The Lion King, the mean quality of WDP's in-house productions has gone downhill fast; at least Treasure Planet, Brother Bear and Home on the Range have bombed at the box office, and so did The Alamo. You may counter with Finding Nemo, but Pixar has announced it will dump Disney after the two more movies in its contract.

So what does WDP do? Sequels. Apart from Pixar, WDP is making money off Winnie-the-Pooh sequels (The Tigger Movie, Piglet's Big Movie, Springtime with Roo, etc) because it managed to buy enough senators to get Pooh's copyright (and thus Disney's life-of-the-copyright exclusive license) extended twice. See also this partial list; one reading that list could almost imagine the sequels popping up like the cliche badgers.

the most innovative game I saw was Destroy All Humans, which is destined for failure. But it is a very clever to twist everything so that you're actually an alien shooting people. It'll never sell, because it's over-the-top violent.

Gee. Tee. Eh?

The FSF *HAS* all-star lawyers

Lessig & Moglen

If you want a word processor that's more powerful than TextEdit, WordPerfect 3.5e for Classic can still be found on the web, Remember that Corel released that version as a free download.
I keep it going on my powerbook running under classic (works wonderfully) out of nostalgia, but it is still a very capable and quick word processor.

PROJECT DAVID about to resign. Ladies and Gentlemen, we are proud to announce the end of the Project David joke. SpecOps, a Phillipines company, decided that it wouldn't be a good thing to show what's under the hood of Project David AKA CrossOver Office. The David Technology section is temporarily disabled, as well as the David Technology Validations and the David Development Plan. The SpecOps engineers are asking for more time to find and remplace all wine occurence to david. Chief architech said by the end of the year there shoudn't be any trace of WINE or Crossover Office inside the code. Then the CD will be released as a binary app. for $39. Technical support will be done through the WINE mailing list. Please be patient. Project David is about to be a nightmare for Steve Ballmer.

I deliver pizza to the Arkin group, and Leor is a customer of mine.

Here is the reference and the PIC of the actual pizza that he ate the month the research featured in the Wired report was done:

PIC: http://tinyurl.com/pizza

Would you hire an engineer who recieved his degree from Columbia, Johns Hopkins, or Georgia Tech?

What if I told you taht this individual finished his degree in an off-site evening-degree or distance learning program?

We live in an era of cheap paper. You can buy your diploma from just about anywhere. Sure, some quality is there, but it's not the same. Would you really want to hire somebody who studied rocket science at home? Schools don't make engineers; that's why co-ops, internships, and senior projects are important.

This sounds very similar, except they'll be using the web as an interface, instead of X-windows.

Larger organizations really ought to be giving the X Window System a good hard look. Remember 20 years ago when the cube farm was nothing but acre upon acre of IBM 3270 terminals? Those were the days when a single desktop flunkie could service hundreds of users, because a terminal either worked or it didn't, and when it didn't, you just swapped it out for a working one.

Now it's 2004, and we have IBM behind Linux. Imagine the power of LTSP (the Linux Terminal Server Project) running on a big mainframe serving applications to hundreds, or even thousands, of LTSP client stations. This is the true power of Network Computing -- and yes, it's still a good idea. It failed in the late 1990's because the McNealy/Ellison idea of Network Computing meant that you had to throw away all your Windows applications on day one and replace them with pure Java applications. Not so with what I'm suggesting here -- you can mix Java apps, web apps, native Linux apps, and even Windows apps using your choice of emulation (Wine, etc.) or rdesktop to a Windows appserver.

The desktop as we know it needs to disappear for large installations. It makes sense for small installations, and for developers, and hackers, etc. but for your typical large office full of hundreds of nontechnical users, we need to go back to the "glass house" model of computing that worked so well for so long. And we'd be there already, if Microsoft and Intel weren't so good at preserving the inefficient, bloated status quo.

Here's a paper from Columbia University on using GPUs to accelerate cryptographic calculations.

The screen is bigger than any PDAs of the same age, and the processor is really slow - it was designed as an ereader. There is some really substandard PIM software that comes with it, but is too crappy to trust your organization to.

Franklin still sells them on their website for $200 but they're on ebay used in the $50 range. They stopped making them after getting the shaft from Microsoft, who were going to port the MS reader to the platform then backed out after the launch (I guess in favor of Pocket PCs?)

Anyway, I thoroughly recommend the value-for-money my eBookman has given me. I use NiMH batteries, one pair in the eBookman and one in the charger. , which seems like less trouble than an internal battery to me, since I never have to remember to charge it, just swap the batteries whenever they're low.

Oh yeah, and there's a way to load books on from linux. Maybe one day I'll even finish it!

And to the people who say they could never leave books, I understand the sentiment, I love having a book in my hands... but I also love being able to hang on to a pole in the subway with one hand and read with the other, slipping it back in my pocket when I get to the other end. I also love being able to read in bed without a light on (my s.o. loves that too). Ew. I just realised I take something from the subway into my bed. I should invest in some heavy duty bleach!

Reminds me this story that my dad told me, who's worked on big systems back in the 50's and 60's working as an aerospace employee, back when they were still using magnetic cores. They had been having major problems with the core overheating. Somehow, and don't ask me how, they figured out that Wildroot Cream Oil was the perfect coolant, and the core worked like a charm from then on.

Guess they figured it out in much the same way they figured out green tea cleans heads really well!

Haven't used apt-get myself, but I did an upgrade via yum a few weeks ago and things went pretty well. Of course, I'd been installing things via RPM so I didn't have to deal with sources colliding, so YMMV.

Overall, I was worried going into it, but everything Just Worked.

More info here and here.

Copyrights cover a specific expression of an idea, like source code or prose or poetry. You can do the same thing, as long as you don't copy the original.

In some cases, such as songs that commercial radio plays, one cannot avoid copying the original. Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976).

Patents and copyrights, on the other hand, can't be lost until they expire.

Unless laches kicks in. Look up laches on Google for more information.

1. Manhattan is an island, but Washington DC isn't.
2. Prospective terrorists can ship innocent radioactive materials and observe the police response, so they can rehearse their attack to evade it.
3. Lead is inexpensive. Knowing that the detectors exist, the bomb can be encased in a nice thick box for transport. The terrorists can get their own radiation detectors and practice on the package until it's sure that nothing is leaking out.
   
4. From New Jersey, you can launch bombs into Manhattan with a simple mortar. The weapon can be constructed in-place from ordinary steel pipe. (The launch shock might damage an atomic detonator, but firing 20+ "dirty" bombs would still make an effective assault, and require less technical expertise too)

If you like TEU, I recommend the book I'm reading now, Brian Greene's latest - "The Fabric of the Cosmos".

I had the good fortune of hearing Brian talk about the book at a book signing. He discussed the implications of string theory and the EPR paradox at length which suggests that the book will have shed some light on the subject. (I haven't gotten that far yet)

There is also a great discussion of the arrow of time in the book, something I find fascinating.

These researchers say the Rockies encourage cold polar air to come down across North America. This flow encourages warm air to flow up the eastern edge of the continent and off toward Europe.

Look up a map of average atmospheric pressure and you'll see high pressure over NW American continent, low in SE America, low over Iceland, and high over Azores. NW Am is due to cold polar air, SE Am is warm air including from Gulf of Mexico. The flow between Iceland and Azores is, of course, to the east, bringing the warm air from south and west. Southern cold flow over Labrador is weaker than the NW Am and its corresponding SE Am warm flow.

The Rocky Mountains reduce the flow of warm air from the Pacific, so the cold polar flow dominates. As weather flows toward the east, the cold high pressure is dominant over the American continent. This is balanced by the SE Am warm flow. A similar cold zone is over northern Asia.

The Gulf Stream theory seems to have come from an old British ocean publication.

Actually it has been tested. Eben Moglin would argue it simply hasn't made it to court because it clearly can't be beat. From one of his speech

"For ten years, I did all of the GPL enforcement work around the world by myself, while teaching full time at a law school. It wasn't hard, really; the defendant in court would have had no license, or had to choose affirmatively to plead my license: they didn't choose that route. Indeed, they didn't choose to go to court; they cooperated, that was the better way. My client didn't want damages, my client wanted compliance. My client didn't want publicity, my client wanted compliance. We settled for compliance all the time. We got compliance all the time."

Basically, when faced with actually going to court, people violating the license have always come to the conclusion that they couldn't win.

If it's really done by percentage, where is Columbia? Their campus is about four blocks, and all useful parts of their campus are covered.

Also, why isn't Dartmouth ranked first? The ones ranked above them must have more than 100% coverage.

Which should be in just a few years, apparently. Google gives: Summarization at Univ. Southern California/ISI Summarization at Columbia University Narrative in Italy Narrative at Carnegie Mellon

Current day CPUs like the Pentium march to an internal clock that at this moment runs at around 2 Ghz. This is both difficult to design and very inefficient.

There is research going on that changes the clock based design for much more energy efficient clockless design. Mind you this is nothing new, just not applied yet to every day computers.

One interesting chip design is/was the Amulet which is compatible with the very popular ARM design in a clockless version.

IT LIVES!!! C-Kermit 8.0

There are competions in the US that use the Sony Aibos to play soccer. (Ok, so Aibo's Japanese)There's even a "RoboCup American Open". Aibo's are cuter anyway. Clicky Clicky

No joke.

Going from rh (7.2-9.0) to fc1 is just an apt-get dist-upgrade away.

Here's instructions to do it with yum, I did it just this week with apt (faster, in my opinion.) You should not have to reinstall anything (as long as you stick to rpms), and your home directory will be completely left alone, for the most part.

Upgrading from RedHat 8/9 to Fedora Core 1

Also #fedora on freenode is your friend.

Copyright law protects the copyright holder, whether that happens to be a record company ... or the artists themselves

I see practical problems with this reasoning, based on the inability for an individual songwriter to retain the copyright and succeed in the music business:

• National brick-and-mortar retail chains tend to carry only recordings by "those artists who have signed away their rights."
• Commercial radio tends to play only recordings by "those artists who have signed away their rights," and I know of no promotion mechanism other than commercial radio that reaches captive listeners in moving vehicles in geographic areas whose FM spectrum is too crowded to admit college radio (such as my hometown).
• A singer-songwriter who hasn't signed up with a publisher the size of Warner Chappell often has trouble gaining access to expert musicologists who can verify whether or not a given song is in fact original, given that the space of legally unique melodies is provably finite and that commercial radio taints all listeners with "access", so he has no way of knowing whether it's safe to record a particular song that he wrote. If you don't believe me, ask the estate of George Harrison (read more).

it doesn't take a genius to look up and go "you know if that building were twice as high...

they allow anyone to upload their own music to be downloaded by others.

How does Amazon check to see if a particular submitted recording is Bright Tunes-safe before publishing it? The agreement requires "The worldwide rights to your song" for reasons obvious to any reader familiar with copyright law, but how does the songwriter go about proving that he does indeed have such rights? (The term "Bright Tunes-safe" refers to the case that established that subconscious copying is actionable infringement.)

That string theory "explains a lot of things (aren't they trying for everything?)" and that "it is beautiful" has all the hallmarks of religion to me.

I don't see where I asked you to believe string theory.

This is the problem I have with string theory. People who defend string theory are asking for faith.

Here is what Jim Gates, theorist of string theory had to say. From the link;

Gates: String theory is often criticized as having had no experimental input or output, so the analogy to a religion has been noted by a number of people. In a sense that's right; it is kind of a church to which I belong. We have our own popes and House of Cardinals. But ultimately science is also an act of faith -- faith that we will be capable of understanding the way the universe is put together.

If that isn't "from the horses mouth", I don't know what is. He makes my entire argument for me.

There is no connection between string theory and the observable universe. This singular undeniable fact is the reason that it is not science.

String theory is a siren song, that people mistakenly cling to because it offers explanations and mathematical beauty. But the abstract string theory has no connection to the real world.. As the article pointed out (more eloquently than I could), string theory is the "fad" among scientists right now.

BTW, I am not a "troll" because I show skepticism about string theory. Is not skepticism the foundation of science, or is that the part of the "scentific method" that is not "correct" anymore? Indeed, disagree with a popular theory here on slashdot and even though you offer a rational explanation, you get modded as a troll. (Not that slashdot has any credence whatsoever).

It seems this is the problem with string theory too. It is popular among a few elitist scientists right now, and disciples are eagerly waiting for these "high priests" to "mete out" explanations on how the universe might work, without any scientific justification whatsoever. Hence the popularity of this particular book being reviewed. So if you stray from the "sacred doctrine" of string theory you are not playing "the only game in town". Peer pressure will haunt you even though there might be totally different and valid ideas that are worth investigating.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.....it must be. Taken all together, string theory fits "religious thinking" better than it fits a scientific description of the universe.

Here is a very recent review of one such revival.

It doesn't offend me (yet), I just find it amusing that supposed scientists do not recognize the "religion" that they are escaping into. Truly a spectacle.

Better start practicing singing a song in your head to block out the thought police.

Let the eagle soar,
Like she's never soared before.
From rocky coast to golden shore,
Let the mighty eagle soar.
Soar with healing in her wings,
As the land beneath her sings:
'Only god, no other kings.'
This country's far too young to die.
We've still got a lot of climbing to do,
And we can make it if we try.
Built by toils and struggles
God has led us through

Here are two clear examples of hostility coming directly from Mono project leader Miguel de Icaza:

• This slashdot posting is one of several instances in which Miguel has publicly spread FUD against Portable.Net, attempting to cast a shadow of legal doubt on that project because it was started before the ECMA specs were published. According to our lawyer (Eben Moglen) what was done back then was perfectly legal, but even if that wouldn't be the case, it wouldn't matter because all the old code from back then has long been removed from the codebase anyway. These matters have been explained to Miguel, but in spite of that he has continued to spread this FUD. I think this is totally unacceptable. He also calls me and the other DotGNU coreteam members "kids", and makes other false statements that however are not so significant, hence I won't discuss them in detail.
• In response to my last proposal of collaboration, Miguel first said he's interested but when I shared some more thoughts, he responded by attacking me, calling my view "intellectual dishonesty" and "an exercise in deception". Of course Miguel is free to have his own opinions, and Mono is free to respond with "no" to proposals of collaboration, but he could have said "no" without attacking me like that.

Each host computer has a quota of 120 megabytes sent out to the Internet in a one hour period. Hosts exceeding this quota will have their bandwidth restricted to a lower rate for the remainder of the hour and the hour following if excessive bandwidth use continues.

No, it is clearly a better distribution system in terms of efficiency, cost, and convenience. (For example, see Eban Moglen's discussion of the topic.)

If the market is willing to pay what the seller's asking, then that's the price.

1. Have you never heard of a monopoly?
2. If a company (or group of companies) jacks up the price because people will pay it, that is by definition over-inflated.
3. The price would be a lot cheaper if they fixed the business model and using modern technology. Right now, the recording industry benefits most by overspending. It makes money on both ends: performing recording services, and selling the recordings. Because of their monopoly on the sales, they benefit most by being inefficient in the recording services.

Go read Marx yourself. Your paraphrasing of the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital is completely out of whack. What you are describing is Leninism, which although founded on Marxism is most assuredly not what Marx meant.

Of course, as a good Libertarian Socialist (aka an Anarchist), I must point out that some of Marx' ideas were a recipe for disaster. His faith in the proletariat rulers after the revolution is what set up the Soviet Union. Unfortunately the problem is that as soon as you create a ruling class, you'll have all the problems that come with it, regardless of whether that ruling class is the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.

The lack of power relationships in Free Software would be a good reason to classify it as at least closely related to Anarchism. In fact, prof. Eben Moglen makes this point very convincingly in this essay.

What about those that encode their own music... as in music they made.

If you record a song to which you do not own the copyright, you have recorded a cover song. If you distribute phonorecords (e.g. in MP3 format) of a cover song to the public, then you owe a royalty to the songwriter('s publisher). If you write your own song, record it, and distribute it, then you owe a royalty to the songwriter('s publisher) whose song you subconsciously copied. Subconscious copying is actionable infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (SDNY 1976). Or do you know of a foolproof way to write music while preventing oneself from accidentally copying a copyrighted work?

Several government organizations (supreme court!) use mp3 as one of the means with which they provide transcriptions.

Granted. Works of the United States government enter the public domain upon publication.

He was responding to the talk given by our buddy Darl McBride Text here

Eben Moglen is lead counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a professor at Columbia Law School in New York City . He's a proponent of freedom on-line, a friend (or at least acquaintence) of Lawrence Lessig, and someone who works actively as a lawyer to promote open software and copyright issues on the web.

I had him as a professor for three of my classes while I was there, and he's a lightening rod for controversy. He often interacts with professor Jane Ginsburg, who takes an opposite view of copyright (and teaches copyright at Columbia; she's also the daughter of Justice Ginsburg on the Supreme Court).

Here are you hints:

Groklaw
SCO
(Richard) Stallman

With apologies, these names should ring a bell to anyone who occasionally visits /.

I'm feeling lucky

Er, it was Eisenhower who sent the first advisors to Vietnam. Nixon could have ended the war in 1969/70 on just about the same terms he got 4 years later. Lots of American soldiers died during that time, far more than Jane Fonda killed.

While there were atrocities committed by certain parts of the government (such as the national guard at Kent), it was not some sort of conspiracy to end free speech, as you can plainly see with all the huge, relatively peaceful anti-war protests that were carried out in America by free Americans.

Killing college kids who disagree with your policies seems like killing free speech to me. Any idea how many of those peaceful anti-war demonstrators still have FBI files?

The draft and others will be discussed at the IETF meeting in Seoul next week. One possibility is that instead of a nationwide emergency number, we will get a global emergency identifier, 'sos'.

As the GPL is a copyright license it is enforced through copyright law and there wont be any case ever about a 'GPL violation'. Any such 'violation' is simply copyright infringement and any court case about it would be a civil or criminal copyright violation case, not a civil contract case.

But ok, I'll do some research for you.

License, not contract

Moglen.

Australian perspective

Wikipedia

Those are just a few starters from any number of articles you wish written by lawyers, legal experts, or laymen.

If you're interested in the concepts of open source licenses I'd also reccomend gmane OSS license mail list and debian-legal.

And, no, I'm not a lawyer. Altho I've been researching copyright law (US and various european versions) and the GPL and other OSS licenses for a decade by now out of interest. If you want a legal opinion I suggest you consult one of the many lawyers you'll find while researching these issues.

Mistaking the GPL for a contract is easy tho, and the reason for most misconceptions about it.

Even so, the number of those 9 million songs to which someone can have had proven access is far smaller

Based on what I've read of this case list to which yerricde's piece linked, the burden of proof on the plaintiff for proving access isn't very high. If a song has been on the Billboard Top 100 even once since the defendant's date of birth, the plaintiff will argue that the jury should assume that the defendant has in fact heard the song.

So in my experience the best way to avoid accidentally writing someone else's song is to avoid the cliched and obvious, and try for originality - if your chord changes are going from Bb to Ddim7 to Am6 your melody line is very unlikely to follow the same basic contours as someone else's.

It's still a gamble. If I try for originality, and my supposedly original melody matches something that made the pop charts when I was, say, eight years old, then I'm in even deeper doo-doo.

look how many songs get written and recorded every year

BS. I conjecture that like the electronics industry, which has established patent pools, some major music publishers have established copyright licensing pools and may bring Bright Tunes harassment lawsuits against anybody not in the pool. What can one do to defend oneself against nuisance lawsuits if one lacks the finances to hire an attorney and a forensic musicologist?

how many lawsuits of this type can you think of that have actually taken place?

While researching in that case list, Mozilla crashed, taking the first version of this comment with it.

The one that gets trotted out time and again is My Sweet Lord

And Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton, 212 F.3d 477 (9th Cir. 2000), which yerricde's journal piece mentioned.

I hardly think songwriters are under threat from a tidal wave of lawsuits, somehow...

In that case, isn't it entirely possible that most of these get settled, heavily in favor of the plaintiff, before they get to trial?

Bottom line is that I would like to know 1. how to control my songwriting such that copyrighted songs I have heard and forgotten about do not leak in, 2. how to negotiate a settlement should a publisher discover that I did in fact subconsciously copy something, and 3. how to afford a good legal defense in this U.S. economy, where unemployment is still up.

Even so, the number of those 9 million songs to which someone can have had proven access is far smaller

Based on what I've read of this case list to which yerricde's piece linked, the burden of proof on the plaintiff for proving access isn't very high. If a song has been on the Billboard Top 100 even once since the defendant's date of birth, the plaintiff will argue that the jury should assume that the defendant has in fact heard the song.

So in my experience the best way to avoid accidentally writing someone else's song is to avoid the cliched and obvious, and try for originality - if your chord changes are going from Bb to Ddim7 to Am6 your melody line is very unlikely to follow the same basic contours as someone else's.

It's still a gamble. If I try for originality, and my supposedly original melody matches something that made the pop charts when I was, say, eight years old, then I'm in even deeper doo-doo.

look how many songs get written and recorded every year

BS. I conjecture that like the electronics industry, which has established patent pools, some major music publishers have established copyright licensing pools and may bring Bright Tunes harassment lawsuits against anybody not in the pool. What can one do to defend oneself against nuisance lawsuits if one lacks the finances to hire an attorney and a forensic musicologist?

how many lawsuits of this type can you think of that have actually taken place?

While researching in that case list, Mozilla crashed, taking the first version of this comment with it.

The one that gets trotted out time and again is My Sweet Lord

And Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton, 212 F.3d 477 (9th Cir. 2000), which yerricde's journal piece mentioned.

I hardly think songwriters are under threat from a tidal wave of lawsuits, somehow...

In that case, isn't it entirely possible that most of these get settled, heavily in favor of the plaintiff, before they get to trial?

Bottom line is that I would like to know 1. how to control my songwriting such that copyrighted songs I have heard and forgotten about do not leak in, 2. how to negotiate a settlement should a publisher discover that I did in fact subconsciously copy something, and 3. how to afford a good legal defense in this U.S. economy, where unemployment is still up.

And yes, it has actually begun, in fact involving a late Beatle.

Speaking of which, has anyone actually done a mashup of "He's so Fine" and "My Sweet Lord"?

If you want to create your own music then do so

Even if I do write a song "from scratch" as they say, how can I make sure that I'm not subconsciously sampling somebody else's work? Under current precedent, even subconscious copying is actionable infringement.

The author (or their agents) of any art should have absolute rights (with a sunset) IMO.

If the sunset provisions of the Copyright Act of 1790, which provided a maximum 28-year term, were still in effect, there would be no case because copyright the samples in question would have expired. What do you consider a fair copyright term?

Progressing art was art based on anothers art, not art which is anothers.

How would you specifically define the difference between "based on" and "is"? If I play a tune on a trumpet, does the manufacturer of the trumpet own copyright in the recording? Likewise, if I play a tune using sub-1-second samples from The White Album, then what? What specific difference can you find between these scenarios?