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What I don't understand is where the law is that says you are entitled to make huge sums of money because you can write and record a good song.

It actually says you're not. The copyright owner has the exclusive right to prepare derivative works from a copyrighted work, and the courts have interpreted "derivative work" quite broadly, especially in the commercial arena, where "fair use" seldom applies. Only 50,000 melodies exist in the Western musical scale, and by now, somebody probably owns them all. It's possible to infringe copyright without even knowing it. Without the ability to build on previous works, how will it be possible to create new works?

Ah, a republican AC troll. So pleased you guys still take the time to respond "personally." You're an audacious liar, so much so that it's obvious to me you wont benefit from attention to your little fantasies, so I will keep my responses brief...

Reaganites were notorious cost cutters

Like saying Nazis were notorious for their hygiene. Actually they were notorious deficit spenders; oh yeah, and the Iran/Contra affair was rather notorious too... The only costs they ever cut were in civil rights enforcement. MILSPEC was one way they tried to cover the procurement corruption, laughable, really. The kickbacks, and who profited, even made the news (the "Ill Wind"). Oh yeah, you drink that water, don't you.

The president has no recollection...

Electric utilites were not privatized, they were degregulated

Actually, you're wrong again, moron; even your own propoaganda machine doesn't split that hair... You're really funny - I love that you guys are still trying to find cover on this one - you shut off the lights in California with a fake shortage - and the fact got covered on CNN! Well, the show must go on, I guess. Please, read a summary of a rational position on Calif/Enron. You know, the utility privatization scam is widely documented enough now that almost everyone knows about it... you might want to find another dodge, or just pretend you missed it altogether rather than respond with this drivel.

NorthPoint goes out of business and this is proof that Michael Powell is "notoriosly corrupt".

Yep; since you're obviously ignorant, or hoping we are, I'll give you the executive summary: to the RBOCs, Northpoint was a "competitor" and a "client" at the same time. Like most CLEC's, it was brutally abused via service sabotage, but the deathblow was some clever Verizon fraud. Then the bells made a huge show of pulling the plug on 12 hours notice, creating the most widespread, massive and prolonged (months?) downtime in the history of the commercial internet; millions nationwide were affected, including MSN's customers. The message was loud and clear: Don't deal with CLEC's. You might get shut off. Federal regulators? Off somewhere sending faxes from the beach, approving massive RBOC mergers while counting their bribe money.

You know, Verizon settled Northpoint's fraud claim for 175 million dollars...

So if beef prices rise

Slow down there cowboy. Telecom is regulated; the RBOC's prices and service quality aren't based on how well they wrastle their cows, they're based on how good their oversight is. But of course, you knew that, since your whole point here is just to make disingenuous comments that sound like arguments. I don't have to convince anyone Verizon is outrageously overpriced or offers abysmal service - any professional whose dealt with them knows that... Now that he's overseen the final days of behind the scenes sabotage of TA96, Powell has actually gone on record opposing the CLEC concept... backpedaling on the entire idea of competition in the industry. As I say, notoriously corrupt.

So you seem to believe that the proper role of government officials to pick winners and losers in the marketplace.

Thank you - I could have just accused you of having no idea either what I was saying or how the post-TA96 telecom industry works, but you've made my point better than I ever could.

You don't have any specific allegations of wrongdoing.

Thank you - I could have just accused you of either being senile or blatantly ignoring parts of your screen, but you've made my point better than I ever could.

just gratifying his own political bias

This is conservative dogma 101: Any attack is a partisan attack. Any criticism is a political bias. Unfortunately the facts dramatically point to Satanism. But I'll settle for cronyism and nepotism. And to your ignoring all the evidence in a goofy attempt to paint these clear and egregious failures as something other than grounds for criticism... poitical bias? You're gunning to have your headshot next to the definition, aren't you?

I'm sure you were out there dumping offal on dems and their appointees, too. At least there we have some common ground. It's not that dems wouldn't deserve your hypocritical contempt, just that you usually want to have some better reason for your arguments than drooling-fanboy-sports-team-loyalty.

I am not trying to shut down criticism of Bush

Yeah, right, AC Troll, you're just a freelance righter of wrongs, who gets 100% of their facts wrong and has no idea what they're talking about on any of the issues, but sure is fired up "bigtime" that someone may have disrespected your president and his friends.

Hail to the chief. Hit another one for the gipper, ACTroll! I'm waiting! And you can add why you don't log in - modded down too often?

3) The third party is whoever the distributor distributes to.

In contract law, a "third party" is " One other than the principals involved in a transaction". Thus, "any third party" can be taken to mean "anyone other than the author and the person redistributing the software".

the copyright defaults for the author are essentially "do whatever you want".

Not necessarily. If your work is a derivative work of another work, and the author of the other work refuses to license it under reasonable terms, you can't distribute your work. This has nasty implications for songwriters because it can be mathematically proven that every musical work is a derivative of a previous work.

that's A Modest Proposal?

another catagory I know is:

Is it stable or un-stable?

Well, it's not entirely true that community writing doesn't pan out. The author mentions Nupedia as a failed effort, but there are many examples of places where this kind of "group writing" has worked very well.

The best I can think of is Everything. I spend many hours reading the stuff there every week. Though it cannot be called an encyclopedia by any stretch of imagination, I've found it to be a very valuable source of general contemporary info.

Then there's the Encyclopedia Mythica.

Someone just mentioned Project Gutenberg too. It's a community effort that's coming out very well indeed. I know that it's not not community authorship, but a community effort.

There are many more counter-examples I can provide. Hell, even the usenet archives are a very useful source of info sometimes.

Community writing should not be written off (pardon the pun) lightly.

It's a logarithmic scale. The volume of the sound goes up ten times for every ten decibels. Here's some math and a comparison chart.

Who else would make a compiler that states "This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn't wide enough to read this whole error message"?

Maybe the programmer coding the errors is a parent, and had read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day recently.

Are the error messages the same globally (i.e., even in Australia)?

(Okay, if you're not giggling yet, read this link)

Who else would make a compiler that states "This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn't wide enough to read this whole error message"?

Maybe the programmer coding the errors is a parent, and had read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day recently.

Are the error messages the same globally (i.e., even in Australia)?

(Okay, if you're not giggling yet, read this link)

I got these Korea at a glance, 15 Fun Facts! Let me tell you, there are a lot of reasons to move there aside from the high bandwidth penetration

Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems What? They cum more than everyone else?

Did someone mention "subglacial Antarctica"? Care to give me modern maps of that?

...

Most of these conclusions drawn from old maps are just misunderstandings. People see things that, due to coincidence, look vaguely like modern things and think it's a "historical anomaly". Always ask yourself: which is more likely - an undocumented, wholly unnoticed cataclysmic change in Earth within the period of written history, or a misunderstanding of facts?

Philippe Buache's map from 1739, that you mention, didn't really show "Antarctica without ice". I don't know why people came to that conclusion - there is an "inner sea" in the map, but it's clearly labelled a "conjecture", and the notes on the edges of the map talk of icebergs and glaciers and stuff, which doesn't sound too convincing to me! And on top of that, I'd clearly doubt the skill of any mapmaker who mark New Zealand and Tasmania as part of Antarctica =)

I wrote a summary of the map discussion to E2 the day I heard of this (An "anomalous" map would be spooky enough to keep me up 'til early in the morning, huh?) - and you can check out a good site that has a lot of scans and zooms and translations. Here's even more stuff. And more.

Not exactly.

America (the landmass) has been inhabited for several thousands of years.

"People" began arriving in America between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago via the Bering Strait.
Columbus arrived here in 1492 as (supposedly) the first European.
Virginia Dare was the first American child born of European parents in 1587.
The Declaration of Independence was finished on July 4, 1776, creating the United States of America

An interesting sorite. When did America come into existance???

You can play 4 notes a thousand different ways. Rhythm (alone is a huge variety)

I've already taken rhythm into account in my model.

pitch

The hook of "Hallelujah Chorus" is still the hook of "Hallelujah Chorus" no matter what key you transpose it to.

tempo, chorus, etc.

Inconsequential. The legal standard for copying is whether two melodies are "substantially similar", not whether their performances match exactly.

I guarrentee if you took a 4-note progression, you could make it into a techno song, a classical song, a vocal song, and a rock song that all sound completely different and most people wouldn't identify it as the same melody.

Oh really? Tell that to George Harrison.

I mean literraly there are only so many chords and note combinations possible. Unless something radical comes along I think that we will only have new instruments to rely upon.

Heck not even new instruments. If you use the same melody as a previously published song, you're likely to face legal action. Four notes are enough to infringe, and there are fewer than 50,000 possible combinations.

The theoretical limit on the number of distinct works is the subject of a short story called "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson. Read it and weep.

Anyway, I think it IS likely to cause spontaneous stripping. People are more readily programmed by television than you think. It puts you into an alpha state. (Boy is it hard to find reasonably reputable links about that!) As such, you are more suggestible (it is similar to the state achieved during hypnosis, though with somewhat different results here, we hope.)

Now, am I saying that guys are going to run around raping people because they see more porn? No. In fact, some studies have shown just the opposite. If you don't make people feel guilty about sexual urges they're more likely to beat off and get all that tension out of their system. Then they can just beat women up instead of raping them, like good little Americans. Hey, it works for football stars.

Will there be more unprotected sex? I'm sure there will be more sex, and a certain percentage of it is unprotected. So you could say yes, but probably not. Then again, if you make people horny enough they sometimes skip the protection and move right onto the beast with two backs phase of the evening.

Anyway, I think it IS likely to cause spontaneous stripping. People are more readily programmed by television than you think. It puts you into an alpha state. (Boy is it hard to find reasonably reputable links about that!) As such, you are more suggestible (it is similar to the state achieved during hypnosis, though with somewhat different results here, we hope.)

Now, am I saying that guys are going to run around raping people because they see more porn? No. In fact, some studies have shown just the opposite. If you don't make people feel guilty about sexual urges they're more likely to beat off and get all that tension out of their system. Then they can just beat women up instead of raping them, like good little Americans. Hey, it works for football stars.

Will there be more unprotected sex? I'm sure there will be more sex, and a certain percentage of it is unprotected. So you could say yes, but probably not. Then again, if you make people horny enough they sometimes skip the protection and move right onto the beast with two backs phase of the evening.

Anyway, I think it IS likely to cause spontaneous stripping. People are more readily programmed by television than you think. It puts you into an alpha state. (Boy is it hard to find reasonably reputable links about that!) As such, you are more suggestible (it is similar to the state achieved during hypnosis, though with somewhat different results here, we hope.)

Now, am I saying that guys are going to run around raping people because they see more porn? No. In fact, some studies have shown just the opposite. If you don't make people feel guilty about sexual urges they're more likely to beat off and get all that tension out of their system. Then they can just beat women up instead of raping them, like good little Americans. Hey, it works for football stars.

Will there be more unprotected sex? I'm sure there will be more sex, and a certain percentage of it is unprotected. So you could say yes, but probably not. Then again, if you make people horny enough they sometimes skip the protection and move right onto the beast with two backs phase of the evening.

What are you talking about? Jedi mind tricks can and do work on arresting officers, even without years of training.

Phew, that's a relief!

When I saw "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" my first thought was: "Someone's trying a buffer overflow attack..."

Unless they got permission from The Tetris Company LLC to use the TETRIS mark, this mod may infringe on Elorg's registered trademark on TETRIS for video game software.

• Previous discussion of The Tetris Company's activities
• Discussion showing that TTC owns only the exclusive right to the name "TETRIS" and not to falling tetraminoes

PGP addresses the problem of transporting private data securely across a public medium. Traditional cryptography involved a private key, in which you and your correspondent both need to know the unique cryptographic key in order to read the encrypted method. The problem with this method was that, while easy to program and use, real-life applications were complicated. After all, if you have a secure medium to transfer the key, why not just transmit your entire message that way? PGP was a major breakthrough (or implementation of, rather) in public key cryptography. Using this system, no secure channel is ever needed. Both the recipients public key and the message can be transmitted (or even broadcast publicly) via an insecure network. Because of the way data is encrypted, PGP is also good at guaranteeing the authenticity of a message - the idea that while others may have looked at your encrypted message while in transport to the recipient, if they have changed so much as a space, the recipient will be aware.

PGP (or any other program for that matter) can do nothing (or very little) against user malice/stupidity/carelessness. That is beyond the scope of PGP. If you whispered a secret message to Ms. Muslim in a dark alley, there is still nothing preventing her from doing as she wishes with your (until-now) private message. For more on software controlling the users, check out what Microsoft is trying to do (albeit fairly unsuccessfully).

PGP will also do you no good for "traffic attacks" (Alice sends an encrypted message to Bob, Bob murders Alice's spouse, Bob sends an encrypted message to Alice. You guess cop's #1 suspect) and has never intended to. You may want to look into cryptography's little sister, steganography for message hiding.

I would highly recommend browsing to http://www.pgpi.org/doc/faq/ and doing some more reading. I also own O'Reilly's PGP: Pretty Good Privacy and have found it an excellent resource. It was published back when PGP was still Phil's, but applicable today nonetheless. Heavy on theory and application, there's also a very good appendix on the dirty math involved.

What if the 'little guy' writes a cool song.

Then some more popular songwriter will notice some sort of similarity between the "cool song" and a published musical work (inevitable given the limited vocabulary of the Western musical scale) and file a lawsuit against the "little guy". Then, because the "little guy" has no legitimate source of funding for legal representation (as public defenders in the USA handle only criminal cases), the more popular songwriter will win.

Exactly the event I described has happened. Read about Handel v. Silver.

They built their empire on rock and roll.

Basically as one variable goes up the other goes down; to make an example from #1 above:
Font size. Inversely proportional to quality of the text
The bigger the font size; the lesser the quality of the text. The smaller the font size the higher the quality.

Go here for [slightly] more in-depth information

Actually, rimming is slang for analingus, which doesn't necessitate semen.

"Reaming" is slang for screwing.

The practice of sucking semen out of someone's asshole is called felching.

Actually, rimming is slang for analingus, which doesn't necessitate semen.

"Reaming" is slang for screwing.

The practice of sucking semen out of someone's asshole is called felching.

• In 1999, about 20% of Britain's population was over 60. This is predicted to rise to 34% by 2050, with half that number over 80.
  Fewer children are being born: 91 live births per 1000 women in 1961, dropping to only 55 in 2000. In the 25-29 age group, the drop is even more dramatic, from 178/1000 in 1961 to 95/1000 in 2000.
  
• Between 1993 and 2000 the number of under-25s owning their own property has fallen from 21% to 19%. The number of 25-29 year olds living with parents rose from 18% in 1978 to 23% in 1998.
  
• The number of 25-35 year olds living alone rose from 2% in 1973 to 12% in 2000. The average age of a first time house buyer is now 35. The average household income is GBP 24,000/year - the average mortgage exceeds GBP 140,000.
  
• Tax relief on mortgages and grants for university education have been slashed. Professor Tinker believes that people born within the last 30-40 years face paying 1/3 of their lifetime's earnings in taxes just to support pensioners born before them.
  
• In 1997, Gordon Brown started taxing pension funds. It is estimated that GBP 100 billion has already been siphoned off - money that belonged to current contributors. The principle of compound interest means that the people who suffer the most will be the most recent joiners. Meanwhile, MPs recently voted themselves a 20% boost in the pensions - funded by the taxpayer.
  

Sounds like the results of a failed uberman sleep schedule to me...

I plan to try it one day, but I hear it could be dangerous to your health. Hmmm... Hard choice. :-)

the negative worlds were

Actually, the minus world was world 36-1, which consisted of world 2-2 repeated over and over. The "36-1" was displayed as " -1" because character 36 in the SMB1 font (most NES games didn't use ASCII) was a space.

You go to level 1-2, which is underground, and go to the very end of the level, but not through the final pipe, if you stand on top of the pipe and knock out all the blocks to the left of it (but not to the right) and jump backwards a special way, you can walk through the wall and jump in one of the warp zone pipes before they list worlds

Or just apply a patch to your copy of Super Mario Bros. According to an E2 writeup (here), the Game Genie code GXNAGY is rumored to work. It changes the world "2-1" pipe into a world " -1" pipe.

Nope, it was not intentional. A real bug. Here's a ton of info on it.E2 has the scoop.

After all, if there's no incentive for people to create things, nothing good will be created.

On the other hand, if there's no raw materials for people to create things, nothing good will be created. You can already start to see this happening in fields such as songwriting, where some songwriters are having trouble getting around the theoretical limit on the number of distinct melodies in the Western musical scale, which is fewer than 50,000.

ALWAYS check Everything2 first! :)

Why am I reminded of command and conquer, and the concept of Tiberium?

It's "boxes," you twat. There's no such word as "boxen."

It's "boxes," you twat. There's no such word as "boxen."

Coming from the world of Linux/Windows and other mainstream OSes, you may not be familiar with an OS that is capable of this. BeOS is actually only 45 MB. That's right. The entire OS, GUI, and all apps that come with it (including web browser, e-mail client, sound apps, C++ IDE, media player, editor, etc) is only 45 MB. Try it out! Amazing, isn't it? :)

It actually works by un-tarring into the /BeOS folder (it has to be that folder, afaik) on an ext2 (or ext3, possibly) FS. The total size is 500 MB after un-tarring, because the image file that contains the BFS partition (Be File System) has lots of free space. You can download programs and other stuff. I recommend BeShare. Read about it (in a writeup I wrote) at Everything2.

a whole buttload of them...

e2 has a handy guide to *load conversions.

a whole buttload of them...

e2 has a handy guide to *load conversions.

I thought that headline said "Norm MacDonald"...good lord. A million scenarios ran through my mind, but the primary question was, "What makes a pogue that made a movie like Dirty Work qualified to comment on software?

Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems

Note that "giving to your friend" is not even close to a fair use right as implied by this law.

I can see several instances where a mix tape could express "criticism" of the works involved. For instance, following "Puff Daddy feat. Dave Grohl - It's All About the Benjamins (rock remix)" with "Marilyn Manson - I Don't Like the Drugs (but the Drugs Like Me)" shows how Manson's guitar line is substantially similar to Puffy's. Manson's publisher can't sue me because of Manson's own unclean hands, and Puffy's publisher wouldn't want to waste its time with me because it can get more money from Manson's publisher, a commercial entity. Same with "Chiffons - He's So Fine" and "George Harrison - My Sweet Lord", if done non-commercially. It might even be OK to use any song first published between 1923 and (current year minus 75) non-commercially as a "comment" on the Bono Act. With regard to the "amount and substantiality" provision, I typically don't put the whole song in mix discs that I make.

1008 clearly covers the hardware, not the audio thereupon.

Are you sure about this? "No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright ... based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of [a recording] device or medium for making ... musical recordings" (17 USC 1008).

Section 106 seems skipped over

The sections I quoted start with "Notwithstanding section 106". Those sections are intended to give legitimate reasons to skip 106.

Are you a troll employed by the RIAA or one of its member labels?

The moment you say that musical works are somehow worth less than written works or inventions, then you have stripped musicians of their rights.

There's no way to guarantee that the song you just wrote isn't also the song that somebody else just wrote. Such coincidences are exceedingly likely to happen, and defending oneself in court against an allegation of plagiarism is prohibitively expensive for a novice songwriter. Thus, songwriters are already stripped of their rights.

There are *very* few crimes that don't require some intent.

Unfortunately, copyright infringement (although not in Tresco's case) is one of them. In the USA, a legal precedent exists that it's possible to unknowingly infringe a copyright on a musical work by creating an original melody that's "substantially similar" to an existing work under a subsisting copyright. Another precedent found "substantial similarity" in four notes. Even though a copyright case is most often a civil action, you still go to jail for not paying $150,000 statutory damages that you can't afford.

"My god he's onto something."

Sigh...in this context, God is spelt with a capital letter.

"The old coot (empiror) is mr burns"

That should be emperor. And "mr" has a capital letter. FFS.

"and the guy in black (leather) could be smithers. bart and lisa as luke and lea? grandpa as obi wan?"

Smithers has a capital letter, since it is a name. Ditto Bart, Lisa, Luke and Leia. Leia has an i in it. Grandpa and Obi Wan are also capitalised, since they are also names.

Don't blame me. Blame the anal-retentive English teacher who lives in my forebrain.

He's not a troll. His words may be painful, but they sound pretty honest to me.

Please see the definition of "troll" at everything2.com

If I build the thing to play advertisements, and you still want to buy the thing, that's my decision.

That's fine, IF YOU'RE DOING SO on a fair playing field. However, what the MPAA is doing is only allowing selected manufacturers to sell equipment which plays DVDs. With the DMCA, they have purchased a law which PROHIBITS anyone from making their own products which play DVDs without restrictions (region coding, fast fwd controls, etc). That is FUCKED UP, UNAMERICAN, and UNCONSTITUTIONAL, and that's why we should fight for the repeal of the DMCA.

Yeah, they've just got a gun to your head and are forcing you to give up said music storage devices.

Again, no, they do not have a gun to my head to purchase their product. However, they ARE lobbying for even more laws to limit my choices in how I can use the content which I have purchased.

(a) No one is forcing to watch commercials, or for that matter, even purchase TV service from said media companies.

Not right now, but they are looking for ways to shut down products like Tivo. Your post is totally asinine - you fail to realize that I am not complaining not only about things which are illegal now - I'm even more concerned about what WILL be illegal if tthe RIAA/MPAA has their way.

TCPA/Palladium does *not* do this, dammit.

Did I say anything about those specific technologies? No. Regardless, I will address your point: Microsoft has the power to impose these restricitons on the ignorant masses, in the guise of improved security or what have you. That is wrong, and I hope that informed consumers will boycott them.

You can loan CDs to friends all you want.

You can... for now.

Tell me how copyright infringes against what YOU CAN SAY.

Overbroad interpretation of the "derivative works" clause does that. According to this article, there are fewer than 47,000 melodies, and each one has a copyright owner, making it next to impossible for a songwriter to create an "original" musical work.

Who is going to protect my right(I'm a recording artist) to make a living off of my work?

You too should be pushing for shorter copyright terms because underlying musical works do not come cheap. You can't give out free samples of your songs on the Internet because the songwriter wants a dime per copy. You can't write your own music because most of the 47,000 possible melodic hooks are taken.

listen to some songs that I made with my guitar and COOL EDIT PRO

How much did you pay for the rights to the underlying musical work? You can't have written them yourself, because you're bound to step on somebody else's copyright on the four-note melodic hook that you used.

It's called "netsplit."

"Apple is trying to "close the operating system to tweakers"

If I were in charge I wouldn't let them damn, dirty meth-heads use my OS either!