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All your Spoony Bard Are Belong To Us !!

And now for something completely different.

All your Spoony Bard Are Belong To Us !!

And now for something completely different.

All your Spoony Bard Are Belong To Us !!

And now for something completely different.

All your Spoony Bard Are Belong To Us !!

And now for something completely different.

All your Spoony Bard Are Belong To Us !!

And now for something completely different.

All your Spoony Bard Are Belong To Us !!

And now for something completely different.

All of previous human law is about to become terribly outdated and unable to deal with robots and cyborgs

At least this'll get Congress to reduce the copyright term from life + 70, as if "life" can be perpetual, a copyright term longer than "life" flies in the face of the "for limited times" limitation of the Copyright Clause even more than repeated copyright term extensions do.

..considering the limited options the government had to choose between.

Let's face it, we all know the best way to dispose of something is to flush it down the toilet. Hell, it works for fish - it should work for nuclear waste too! Just a quick flush later, and it should be on its way to a nuclear waste treatment plant. Unfortunately, in 1992, congress shot themselves in the foot by limiting the volume of flush water to 1.6 gallons (6.08 liters, to the rest of the world) per flush. As anyone who has tried to flush the end result of a recent mexican buffet knows, this isn't even enough water to flush the average feces log, let alone nuclear waste!

Clearly, flushing down the toilet is still a good solution, so I propose the government take a long hard look at the new pressure assisted toilets available today, which make the best use of the 1.6 gallons available to them by using the line pressure to increase the velocity of the flush. I've had the pleasure of trying one of these toilets out for myself and I have yet to find anything this toilet cannot flush. The sheer sucking power is nothing short of breathtaking. I'm sure this is our solution to nuclear waste disposal.

What you people have to realize is that movies and music ARE NOT PART OF YOUR INALIENABLE RIGHTS. Companies can charge WHATEVER THEY WANT for their products.

My concern is that in the future, Goliath will own every possible melody (there are fewer than a trillion by one count, or fewer than a million by another), and no independent music will be created because Goliath will sue David: "We own every possible melody; therefore, we own the song you just wrote. Pay us $100,000 for each song on your album."

The exclusive privilege of creating derivative works must be weakened.

Is [creating a Linux kernel module] a GPL violation?

No. Linus has allowed binary-only modules into the kernel provided they communicate with the kernel using well-defined APIs. For instance, the vmware package includes a binary-only kernel module.

If Apple can't make BASH the MacOS X command line shell (apparently they asked, RMS said no, that would be a violation)

I don't see how it would be a violation under the "mere aggregation" clause of the GPL.

handy tetris playing calculator.

Which calculator is that? BPS has never authorized a TETRIS® game for the TI, Casio, or HP calculator platforms. You may have had a falling tetramino game (incidentally, here's how to make one), but it wasn't Tetris brand (for instance, I remember playing "Jetris" on a TI-89 calculator, where the J was a reversed half-uncial T); if it was, the author infringed the trademark on Tetris. We don't want ticalc.org to shut down again, do we?

handy tetris playing calculator.

Which calculator is that? BPS has never authorized a TETRIS® game for the TI, Casio, or HP calculator platforms. You may have had a falling tetramino game (incidentally, here's how to make one), but it wasn't Tetris brand (for instance, I remember playing "Jetris" on a TI-89 calculator, where the J was a reversed half-uncial T); if it was, the author infringed the trademark on Tetris. We don't want ticalc.org to shut down again, do we?

Link up Super Circuit brings back the days of the good old Super Mario Kart on SNES.

And some of the bugs in both implementation and specification.

On the Gamecube we have Super Smash Bros. Melee

I agree that SSB2 is the best thing since SSB1 (the Mario Party games suck eggs), but unlocking half the hidden stuff requires unlocking all the hidden characters, and one of the characters requires playing 1,000 Vs. matches at 5 minutes a piece. Is this just a way to get players to buy more controllers when they wear out?

10 Audio cd's of music that I made.

And the songwriters' organizations haven't sued you for writing songs that are too similar to the songs they control? Remember, the finite (sub-trillion) number of melodies combined with the birthday paradox makes it extremely likely that one of the songs you wrote is "similar enough" to one of theirs.

10 Audio cd's of music that I made.

And the songwriters' organizations haven't sued you for writing songs that are too similar to the songs they control? Remember, the finite (sub-trillion) number of melodies combined with the birthday paradox makes it extremely likely that one of the songs you wrote is "similar enough" to one of theirs.

I didn't think there was a royalty included on normal CD-Rs.

In both the US and Canada, there are patent royalties due to Taiyo Yuden and two other companies for all use of CD-R technology, and in Canada, there are also taxes levied on both types of drive and blank media, but Canada provides some defences to copyright infringement for non-commercial home copying of sound recordings and underlying musical works (of which there are only a limited number).

Write songs for the fun of it

How? The Western tuning systems can create only a limited number of possible melodies, and the big publishers already own hundreds of thousands of them. Even if they don't own the particular melodies that make up the song you just wrote, they're skilled at convincing a court that your song is similar enough to something in their back catalog.

Since the poor bastard is dead, I don't care that you're violating the Sneetches copyright.

Copyright lasts longer than life; it currently lasts life plus 70 years, and Congress has an unwritten contract with Disney to extend it by 20 more years every 20 years. The only way to stop is to send everybody this link to a story explaining why perpetual copyright is a bad idea: http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___ 1.htm

In other words, slashdot is slowly beginning to get closer and closer to that other Blockstackers project...

^_^

major innovations by nintendo, including ... the digital boardgame (Mario Party)

I'm sorry, but chess (Chessmaster(tm) and Battle Chess(tm)), reversi (Othello(tm)), and and Monopoly(tm) were available as officially licensed NES games several years before the release of the first Mario Party 3 game. (Yes, I say 3, because in the US it went Mario Party 3 with 3 on the die and rototorture in the game, then Mario Party 2, then the game officially called Mario Party 3.)

As A Greeting Card Artisan... [I demand that Hallmark encrypt all cards it sends so as not to violate my copyright]

Are you Sam Butcher of Precious Moments Inc? If so, any claims of restrictive copyright on your Precious Moments characters have two checks:

1. The PM likeness (head 38% of height; simple facial features including large teardrop-shaped eyes) is quite similar to that of the Eloi characters of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (public-domain in the United States), to the alien characters of many other SF worlds, and to Super-Deformed characters in anime. It may turn out, as it did for Alexey Pajitnov, that you own nothing but a name.
2. The PM motto is "Loving, Caring, Sharing." Yes, sharing. Strong copyright represents hoarding, the opposite of sharing. Enforcing the opposite of the policy your products teach is called hypocrisy. I am a customer of several PMI licensees, including Enesco, and if PMI pulls any funny stuff when I execute my fair use, I will become a former customer.

What's to stop some clod from printing one of these cards that I've fashioned, and giving it to a friend for free? Nothing.

Other than traditional copyright law.

As A Greeting Card Artisan... [I demand that Hallmark encrypt all cards it sends so as not to violate my copyright]

Are you Sam Butcher of Precious Moments Inc? If so, any claims of restrictive copyright on your Precious Moments characters have two checks:

1. The PM likeness (head 38% of height; simple facial features including large teardrop-shaped eyes) is quite similar to that of the Eloi characters of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (public-domain in the United States), to the alien characters of many other SF worlds, and to Super-Deformed characters in anime. It may turn out, as it did for Alexey Pajitnov, that you own nothing but a name.
2. The PM motto is "Loving, Caring, Sharing." Yes, sharing. Strong copyright represents hoarding, the opposite of sharing. Enforcing the opposite of the policy your products teach is called hypocrisy. I am a customer of several PMI licensees, including Enesco, and if PMI pulls any funny stuff when I execute my fair use, I will become a former customer.

What's to stop some clod from printing one of these cards that I've fashioned, and giving it to a friend for free? Nothing.

Other than traditional copyright law.

Except you violated copyright by using the word "batman".

No, that's trademark. And there are other generic senses of "batman" other than the trademarked sense for comic books, films, TV shows, and toys. For example, in Turkey, batman weighs only 157 pounds.

If PCB's are toxic, I need to get out of the computer biz!

Recording artists are no different, they like the comfort of the labels and I don't blaim them. They should be paid.

Except that most albums fail to recoup all expenses and thus fail to pay the artist one thin dime. If the record labels consider album a work for hire, why is the employee paying the expenses rather than the employer? I can potentially see bringing minimum-wage laws into this.

Also, if you insist of trying to prevail with this whole no intelectual property idea, say good bye to biotech and your expected 100 year lifespans, who will bother without a profit?

At least patented drugs pass into the public domain while the inventors are still alive (20 years after filing, generally 20 years after it works in rats and rabbits), unlike copyrighted works (95 years after December 31 after first publication; may Sonny Bono rot in hell). A short privilege term promotes progress by forcing creators to continue to create new things such as the new weekly formulation of Prozac rather than sit on their as^H^Hback catalog.

That was because TAG was made here in the 313. TAG was better than Telegard in many ways, in the early days, back when Carl Mueller ran it. But, TAG had a tremendous problem of using .CHN files (a Turbo Pascal artifact where your "currently unused" routines were stored on disk, and only loaded when needed). Swapping to .CHN files was much slower than Telegard's "Always in memory" model, since Telegard ran with the assumption that the SysOp would have more than 64k free memory. (Yes, 64k. TAG used a .COM file then.)

When Eric Oman started working on Telegard, he was a spitfire of energy. Amazing, just amazing. It was almost like an open source project: "Hey, Eric, can you add THIS new feature?" Poof. It would be there. (Surprised the hell out of me when I found out he was only about 12 or 13 at the time...) I got to be one of his Beta sites, and got to play with the source code (nothing of mine of import is in the BBS anymore).

I was out of BBSs by the time Tim Strike took over Telegard again, but it definitely looked like a step in the right direction, but by that time Cott Lang got ahold of the source code that a buddy of mine took from my disk box and posted on a lot of BBSs. (He was trying to hurt Telegard, for some odd reason.)

This story and more amusing Telegard nostalgia is available on e2: I miss BBSs, Telegard.

Oh. And wow. I just checked the Timeline of the article above. And um. Wow. Martin Pollard lost it back then. I knew he had "retired" from the programming of Telegard, but I never did catch his "farewell" letter - I was too busy in college at the time. Check it out: Martin says "goodbye"

That was because TAG was made here in the 313. TAG was better than Telegard in many ways, in the early days, back when Carl Mueller ran it. But, TAG had a tremendous problem of using .CHN files (a Turbo Pascal artifact where your "currently unused" routines were stored on disk, and only loaded when needed). Swapping to .CHN files was much slower than Telegard's "Always in memory" model, since Telegard ran with the assumption that the SysOp would have more than 64k free memory. (Yes, 64k. TAG used a .COM file then.)

When Eric Oman started working on Telegard, he was a spitfire of energy. Amazing, just amazing. It was almost like an open source project: "Hey, Eric, can you add THIS new feature?" Poof. It would be there. (Surprised the hell out of me when I found out he was only about 12 or 13 at the time...) I got to be one of his Beta sites, and got to play with the source code (nothing of mine of import is in the BBS anymore).

I was out of BBSs by the time Tim Strike took over Telegard again, but it definitely looked like a step in the right direction, but by that time Cott Lang got ahold of the source code that a buddy of mine took from my disk box and posted on a lot of BBSs. (He was trying to hurt Telegard, for some odd reason.)

This story and more amusing Telegard nostalgia is available on e2: I miss BBSs, Telegard.

Oh. And wow. I just checked the Timeline of the article above. And um. Wow. Martin Pollard lost it back then. I knew he had "retired" from the programming of Telegard, but I never did catch his "farewell" letter - I was too busy in college at the time. Check it out: Martin says "goodbye"

I could be off my rocker, but a SWAG that occured to me could be that he may have stumbled upon a Natural Law (ie. 'gravity' or 'no two forms of matter can occupy the same space at any given time') that has always been in existence and has manifested itself in this. Evolution could very well be the correct term, at a light speed rate of course. Could this be the first step into determining or simulating where the source of life came from, or could this lead to the destruction of it? (insert your favorite Sci-Fi scenario here)

I always thought
everything2.com had something interesting going on. A user can write a job request, either a feature request / bug fix / etc. in some kind of a message board system, and then people can upvote or downvote this idea - upvote to say I will reserve money right now for future payment to whoever does this job, or a downvote to say I will pay money to see that this job not be done. The users will have to pay for their votes, and thus the money indirectly goes to the programmers who do the work. Also, this will give incentive to programmers to add a feature / remove bug that is most demanded. Of course this is just a rough idea. there would be a need for moderators, elected or employed, and a system to correct possible flaws. People can even choose to pay the voters who seem to do a good job, with either votes to use, or for cash.

In essence, a complex system where payment is decided very democratically, in a decentralised and open manner. Run with the idea.

All this reminds me of the time I broke into my company's web server (NT). The boss had changed the PW and forgotten the new one. I offered to 'try' to get in for him and he gladly accepted (there were witnesses). He stepped out of the room for about 5 minutes to take a phone call. When he returned to see how I was doing he was shocked to find it was already *my* box. He said, "Guess I better change the password now." I just smiled and replied, "Why bother? ;)" He was suddenly very pale so I spared him the evil laughter.

Breaking into server to save boss's ass: 5 minutes
Look on boss's face when he realizes you could do that to any machine in the building: Priceless

Yeah, Everything2 links to itself a lot as well.

Yeah, Everything2 links to itself a lot as well.

Yeah, Everything2 links to itself a lot as well.

Yeah, Everything2 links to itself a lot as well.

aha! i was just looking for that.
they can put a tracking chip in me as soon as they make it turn on my lights, turn off my screensaver, get winamp going, and have the room say hello to me. and maybe put a cat5 plug in it so i can further my assimilation into everything.

I actually had something to say on the subject. Which, umm, was deleted by the Hitler-esque Everything2 editors. Bastards.

At one time, Alexey Pajitnov, one of the inventors of Tetris, thought he owned the rights to all video games based on falling blocks. The consensus now seems to be that he and the company he started with Henk Rogers owns only the word "TETRIS". Better use Vadim Gerasimov (the guy who wrote the first PC version of Tetris) instead.

Yes, and maybe they're all puppets of the alien race that lives on the far side of the moon and secretly took over the NSA after we faked the moon landing.

In short, the point is I have no personal knowledge of what goes on in the classified projects of the US government, but there's no good reason to think that this technology was developed earlier or has been developed faster. In fact, in view of issues covered in my original post, it seems rather unlikely. We could think up all sorts of crazy ideas that none of us can prove false, but I would suggest we follow Occam's Razor and choose the simplest explaination to fit the known facts.

It's degraded to the point that our corporate-centric society is practically breeding American youth like cattle

So we should be worrying not about 1984 but instead about 802701?

No--deeper, from the chest:

Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!(TM)

But all of these old CDs will be available from your favorite server, so you might be better off putting your money in the financial sort of CDs.

Sorry, but analog (including vinyl) is still superior in terms of sound quality despite it's technical limitations.

Few people can hear much above 19 kHz, and CDs can flawlessly encode any sound containing frequencies as high as 21.9 kHz. The -96 dB noisefloor of 16-bit linear PCM is lower than the Brownian noise of the air molecules in the recording studio. The "warmer" sound of vinyl is actually harmonic distortion caused by friction of the needle against the groove.

Read more in my article about digital DJing.
Read more on r3mix.net, especially the 'myths' section.

Oh my, that's an interesting word. Nothing quite says 'slut' like Maenad

Followers of Dionysos and companios of satyrs, these were women who engaged in riotous ceremonies of dancing and orgy, and their rituals often included the rending of human flesh.

I've discovered a cheat code myself. While poring over the Super Mario Bros. hex code, I found the sequence "04 03 02 00 24 05 24 00 08 07 06". My previous experiments had confirmed "24" to be the game's code for a space character, and that world -1 was actually world (SPACE)-1, that is, 36-1. I realized that these codes matched the codes for the game's warp zones. After changing the 02 to 24, I was able to make the pipe at the top right of World 1-2 that normally takes the player to 2-1 to take the player to -1. The code is (in BASIC) POKE $87F4, $24 or (in Game Genie) GXNAGY.

Details on how I accomplished the hack

Hmmm. Not according to Everything2; Finland can be considered to be part of Scandinavia, it just depends on your criteria.

>The grammar is terrible for a non-Finn to learn,
>but some have!

Tolkien, for a start.

Disney, as the creator of [Pinocchio and the Jungle Book], gave us them to begin with. They gave that much back.

No. DisneyCo gave us derivative works of those stories. Collodi gave us Pinocchio, and Kipling gave us The Jungle Book. And there's no way to fix the bugs I find in the plot lines of most movies (especially many action movies and teen flicks) because they're proprietary.

corporate greed creates issues and Congress's buyability compounds them.

So solving this buyability will solve the problems of patents on obvious inventions, patents on inventions that have clear prior art, effectively perpetual copyright, DMCA, and SSSCA. Where do we start in reducing this buyability?

your attitude re copyright (or what I could get of it from your message) was analogous to the attitude of those people that take open source software and disparage the hobbyists that maintain it

In that case, you could have used the "GPL violation" example.

Create something. Work hard for years to create something truly original and unique.

Not much is truly original or unique anymore. At least the stuff that gets copyrighted all the time (teen movies, teen music, etc.) isn't. Heck, the total number of possible eight-note melodies is less than a million.

Then answer this question: is being the only one allowed to decide the use and dispensation of your creation a right, or a privilege?

Privilege. The United States Constitution, article 1, section 8, clause 8, gives Congress power to grant this privilege; it doesn't state that citizens automatically have that right. Free speech is a right; copyright is a privilege that Congress can in theory quite easily take away in whole or in part at any time. (I say "in theory" because Congress is too bought to consider a more reasonable set of copyright laws.)

Well, I don't know much about this vaporware Atari 2600 LotR game, but a lot of other games based on Tolkiens world has been made.
Check out this neat site. It has all the info you need about computer-based Tolkien games. LotR for Super NES is probably the only one I've tried so far, and it didn't quite meet my expectations ;)

Oh, and didn't someone announce a MMORPG a few years ago? I wonder what happened to it ... which reminds me: Mudconnecter has a list of some MUDs based on Tolkien's books. Of those, Elendor MUSH is probably the best one. I remember playing it some years ago...

Slashdorks can agree with any politician as on as they support the theft of intellectual property

The U.S. Constitution recognizes it not as a birthright but as a tool "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" (U.S. Const. 1.8.8) "Copyright" is a misnomer; it really should be "copyprivilege". The law doesn't recognize intellectual "property" as property at all, especially considering how it treats transfer of exclusive rights. Copying another's work isn't termed "theft" but merely "infringement" on a government-granted privilege. Besides, with enough storage space, I could generate and store every melody in the book or at least a melody confusingly similar to every melody in the book (thus killing practical trademark law).

Slashdorks can agree with any politician as on as they support the theft of intellectual property

The U.S. Constitution recognizes it not as a birthright but as a tool "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" (U.S. Const. 1.8.8) "Copyright" is a misnomer; it really should be "copyprivilege". The law doesn't recognize intellectual "property" as property at all, especially considering how it treats transfer of exclusive rights. Copying another's work isn't termed "theft" but merely "infringement" on a government-granted privilege. Besides, with enough storage space, I could generate and store every melody in the book or at least a melody confusingly similar to every melody in the book (thus killing practical trademark law).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe "M$" is childish name calling.

M$ is a name for a string variable in a language that Bill Gates and Microsoft popularized on early 8-bit home computers. This language was Basic. This code works on Applesoft Basic (the Basic interpreter included with Apple II) and QBasic (the Basic interpreter included with MS-DOS until about 7.1). I haven't tried it on Visual Basic.

10 M$ = "HELLO WORLD"
20 PRINT M$