I always feel sad for using Flash to embed videos with the functionality missing from it but as I can't tell people to "download 30 mb application" or "give up your IE and use that open source browser" (sorry!), I embed Flash.
Within a year or so you should be able to serve 20% or more of your users using <video> (depending on the percentage that's non-IE and how fast they upgrade). It has fallback built-in, so you can put in the <video> tag and stick the embedded Flash garbage inside. IE and whatnot will ignore the <video> tag, while the new browsers will ignore the Flash.
Another failure for Open Source. There are now TWO non-beta 100% fully ACID compliant CLOSED SOURCE browsers available (Opera and Safari). Why can't the "Open Source" community come up with something competitive?
WebKit and Opera had 100/100 on the same day (March 26, 2008). WebKit is, of course, open-source. It's used by more than one open-source browser, including Chromium. WebKit and Chromium aren't developed solely by the stereotypical basement-dwelling hackers who communicate only over the Internet, but corporate-funded open source is still open source.
By the way, "Acid" is not capitalized. Perhaps you're confusing it with the database concept of ACID compliance (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability).
This is something quite different and exciting: a log-structured file system, for storing your files on dead trees.
Um, mods, I think you meant "Funny", not "Informative". The "logs" here are a way of structuring data on the storage medium. Specifically, by writing changed blocks sequentially to the end of the filesystem instead of changing them in-place. They don't have to do with trees.
There's clear roadmap posted here describing features and implications of version numbers.
Are you sure that's actually still accurate? I've followed LWN and Kernel Newbies coverage of Linux releases for a while now, and have never seen any mention of a difference between even and odd third-level version numbers.
The biggest waste was the 8 terms of advanced calculus.
My college only offered five terms of calculus total. I was a pure math major and I only took eight semesters of even vaguely calculus-related stuff, and that was only because I took four electives (differential equations, real analysis, complex analysis, differential geometry). I could only have crammed in about two more even if I had tried to take every course offered that involved any calculus. WTF kind of school requires engineers to take eight calculus courses?
And by that you mean, like, 30 seconds a week, right?:)
And you only get that much until you're married.
I realize you're joking, but still, this meme just isn't true. Married people have significantly more sex than others. See, e.g., Money, Sex, and Happiness: An Empirical Study. (Money required, but I was able to get it e-mailed for free by providing my college e-mail address.) For instance, the chart on page 20 indicates that 44% of the general population has sex on at least a weekly basis, 56% of married people, and 43% of people who have never married. One of the authors' findings is "unmarried people say they have much less sex than those who are married".
Of course, usual disclaimers about self-reporting apply. Strangely, if you add up all the heterosexual males' reported sexual activity, it ends up being much higher than the sum of the heterosexual females' reported sexual activity . . . but still, there seems to be no reason to doubt this specific point.
I actually read the article and it seems to lack one important thing... Why? Why should a Windows Power User wish to install Ubuntu? I mean it is "free" but my time certainly isn't, so I guess what is in it for me? What advantages does it have over, let's say, Windows XP?
For the average user, if price isn't a concern, there is probably no net gain from switching to Linux. The advantages (like less virus vulnerability) are more than outweighed by application compatibility, etc.
If you're a typical Windows user, my advice is to try Linux if you're interested in trying another OS. If you're not interested to begin with, and especially if you don't even know what an OS is, don't bother yet. Maybe 2015 will be the year of the Linux desktop and it will really truly be better in all respects, but it's not yet.
Bull. Wesnoth is an okay strategy game. An amazing strategy game would be, say, StarCraft. Wesnoth does not even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as games like that.
And StarCraft's graphics are significantly better than Wesnoth's, too, which is saying something, since StarCraft was published in 1998.
. ..
Damn, I just did mention them in the same sentence, didn't I?
This seems easily fixable. Have the server wait a random amount of time (say between 1 and 5 seconds) before throwing an error and disconnecting. During the "wait" period the server would continue to accept data and simply pipe it to/dev/null.
Then you wait five seconds between each byte you send. You could also say the server should accept a random number of bytes before giving the error, but that's still only going to slow an attacker down. Just keep submitting the same string over and over, and if you know the distribution of the number of extra bytes accepted, you can figure out to arbitrarily high probability which byte was really responsible for the error. Just check the average byte number rejected after a hundred tries, say, and then subtract however many extra bytes the server will add on average.
Metamaterials can only cloak objects smaller than the wavelength of light you are dealing with.
That makes no sense. It's a standard principle of optics that light can't even resolve things lower than its wavelength, or at least not usefully. You can't inspect molecules with visible light, for instance. So what would it mean to cloak such things?
While that may work really well with people and detection systems that depend on light, it's probably worth pointing out that these metamaterials will probably have little affect on other methods of detection, such as radar and infrared, for example.
Visible light is not the only type of light. Radio waves (the mechanism for radar) and infrared are also light.
Visible light is not physically special at all. The electromagnetic spectrum is a continuum, and there's no clear cutoff between (for instance) infrared and visible light. The only reason we can see visible light and not other types is because the light emitted by the Sun happens to peak right around the part of the electromagnetic spectrum we'd call visible green light. There's more visible light on Earth than anything else, and we get the most bang for the buck by being able to see it, in terms of evolution.
AFAIK, though, current models of this kind of thing will only work for particular ranges of frequencies. (Last I heard they'd only gotten down to microwave and infrared, and hadn't gotten to visible light yet. That's why they give diagrams and not simple photographs.) So you could make a cloak that works for red light, or yellow light, or purple light, or if you're really lucky maybe most of the visible spectrum. But the same cloak won't protect you from infrared, or radar (which uses radio waves or microwaves). I don't see why you couldn't nest them, though.
Of course, if the cloak only affected visible light, it would be a simple thing to equip every US soldier with infrared goggles and lamps. You can get them pretty cheap, AFAIK.
If having a plant listen to a phone conversation is legal (and it is), I'm not sure why doing the same thing through a switch-box would not be.
Having a police officer eavesdrop on someone without a warrant, where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, is not legal. For instance, having them eavesdrop on a phone booth or a phone inside a private dwelling would require a warrant, to the best of my knowledge. You have a right to privacy if you're talking on the phone in your own house or other private place, and that's only superseded by a warrant (or hot pursuit, etc.).
Eh, for the 10*1 thing, I didn't [spell|specify] it clearly enough, I meant 1(0)*1 or 11, 101, 1001, 10001, etc in a grammar format.
I know that. I still don't get what you were saying.
As for the counting of the Fermat Primes, I would imagine that since it quit working for after n=4 that that means that it's just a neat trick, but that there's no actual principle involved here.
Quite possibly, but nobody knows how to prove it. (It's the first five, by the way. 2^2^0 + 1 = 3 counts as a Fermat prime.)
I'm not sure what a complete count gives us, other than to say that we can count those primes. But counting what Fermat Numbers are Primes looks like a non-"useful" thing...
The same could be said of all pure mathematics, or all basic research generally. You never know where developments will lead. The entire field of number theory was assumed to be useless for centuries, until it suddenly became the cornerstone of computer cryptography. If we put enough work into interesting problems, our greater understanding of the subject matter has a tendency to lead us to practical uses sooner or later that weren't obvious at the outset.
At least some percentage of the time. What do I care if it's useful to anyone else, it's fun, and at least I get paid for it.:)
It seems like the number of primes of the form:
11 - three
101 - five
1001 - nine? But that's not prime...
10001 - seventeen
100001 - thirty-three? But that's not prime...
Are less than the number of binary fields of characteristic 10*1, so it's definitely countable
Um, it's less than the number of integers, so obviously it's countable. I don't know what fields of characteristic 10*1 have to do with anything -- in many cases that won't even make any sense (since 10*1 is usually not prime).
but seeing as how the algorithm only says "insert more zeros", that the number of insertable zeros is infinite. Therefore, while it's countable (only positives), it's still infinite
There are obviously infinitely many numbers of the form 2^n + 1. But are there infinitely many primes of that form? That's an open question.
I'm just stymied what having a count of said primes is going to do for us? It seems like the guys doing work on this have figured out that the pattern is (2^2^n)+1 where n>=1 and integer, so I'm not seeing how this is an unanswered question. The range of those is countable, but infinite.
Any prime number of the form 2^n + 1 must be of the form 2^2^n + 1, of course. Otherwise, n has an odd factor, so we can write n = m(2k + 1) with m, k > 0, and 2^n + 1 = (2^m)^(2k + 1) + 1 = (2^m + 1)((2^m)^(2k) - (2^m)^(2k - 1) +... - (2^m) + 1), and neither factor can be equal to 2^n + 1, so it can't be prime.
But the converse isn't true. A number can be of the form 2^2^n + 1 but composite. In fact, according to Wikipedia, every such number with n > 4 has so far been found to be composite. It's not clear that there are even six Fermat primes, let alone infinitely many. If you could prove that there were infinitely (thus obviously countably) many Fermat primes, that would answer the question of how many there are.
But how many would contain all 1s? Answer that, and provide a proof for your answer, and you'll make math history.
For those who didn't get it: it's not known whether there are infinitely many Mersenne primes, which have this form in binary (they're primes of the form 2^n - 1). Similarly, if you could figure out how many primes have only their first and last bits equal to 1, you would answer a longstanding question about Fermat primes (which are primes of the form 2^n + 1).
Um, IE8 does the exact same thing. It uses child processes to control groups of tabs by domain.
That doesn't mean it makes sure to avoid blocking on the interface tab. So in principle, the interface might still freeze up. (Since I use Firefox on Linux, I don't know, personally.)
Of course, IE8 was doing it since the first public beta, over 5 months before anyone knew about Chrome. The implementation in Chrome is a near carbon copy. Who is copying whom?
Neither is copying anything. You think Chrome wasn't already a working internal alpha with most of its design fixed (obviously including major structural issues like use of threads) by five months before its release?
Sadly, IE8 still has this problem. Anyone know for Chrome?
Chrome is designed so that no blocking operations whatsoever are allowed on the UI thread. In theory, therefore, the interface should never freeze up. Since Linux builds still tend to crash a lot, though, I haven't been able to give it a good workout personally.
So, my best guestimate about actual market penetration of Linux is probably about 5-6%. It seems about right to me.
I doubt it. For instance, Wikipedia users are only 1.45% Linux. Given the attachment of Wikipedia to the free software movement, this is probably an overestimate if anything. I'd figure 1% is about right.
Even worse, "10 pounds kilograms" is not nonsense. It is the standard way (except for the s on "pounds") to mean that you have some funny unit that is mass squared.
Even if they wanted to, the military would have to open source their code and published documents, unless they can figure out a sneaky way to bypass the letter of the law, which happens way too much anyway.
One doesn't follow from the other. They could simply not release the programs for public use -- doesn't matter whether software is copyrighted if you don't have a copy. They could also declare them classified. Copyright isn't the only thing that could prevent you from distributing software and other documents.
You could try filing a FOIA request for all the military's closed-source code and documentation, of course. Good luck with that.
The whole "microkernels are
simpler" argument is just bull, and it is clearly shown to
be bull by the fact that whenever you compare the speed
of development of a microkernel and a traditional kernel,
the traditional kernel wins. By a huge amount, too.
The whole argument that microkernels are somehow "more
secure" or "more stable" is also total crap. The fact that
each individual piece is simple and secure does not make
the aggregate either simple or secure. And the
argument that you can "just reload" a failed service and
not take the whole system down is equally flawed.
Where has he ever said that making Linux monolithic was a mistake?
70 years in the United States? Yeah, back at the turn of the 20th century. Toward the end of the 20th, the Sonny Bono copyright act extended copyright in the United States to more than a century.
Read your own link. Grandparent is correct about the length of copyright. Sonny-Bono extended the duration of copyright from fifty years after the death of the author to seventy years after the death of the author. Assuming most authors live thirty years or more after they publish a given work, this will often amount to a century or more of copyright, yes. (This is all ignoring works that are written anonymously, pseudonymously, by multiple authors, unpublished, etc.)
However, the summary makes it clear that this isn't seventy years p.m.a., it's seventy years from the date of the performance, and only applies to performances: "So performers will collect for 20 more years from the date of performance; composers' rights already extend to 70 years beyond their deaths." I don't know what the law is in the U.S. right now on duration of copyright for performances, or whether this harmonizes with it at all.
In 1900, by the way, the maximum length of copyright was 28 years from first publication, nowhere close to 70 years. In 1909 it was 56 years, still less than 70. According to, again, your own link.
Yet the Wikipedia didn't bat an eyelash when Jimbo started Wikia using 'wiki' in the name. Double standard.
...
Besides, there are no rules against the same organisation using the same trademark in two different ways, so even if the word "wiki" was a Wikimedia invention, it wouldn't be a problem that they operated two different sites that had it in their names.
The Wikimedia Foundation is not directly affiliated with Wikia, Inc. There has been some overlap between their employees, boards, and communities, but Wikimedia has only ever given anything to Wikia at fair market rates. Anything else would probably cause legal issues -- non-profits aren't allowed to give away assets to businesses, as far as I know. Otherwise they could abuse their tax-exempt status by acting as a front for a for-profit institution.
Slashdot Mirror
I always feel sad for using Flash to embed videos with the functionality missing from it but as I can't tell people to "download 30 mb application" or "give up your IE and use that open source browser" (sorry!), I embed Flash.
Within a year or so you should be able to serve 20% or more of your users using <video> (depending on the percentage that's non-IE and how fast they upgrade). It has fallback built-in, so you can put in the <video> tag and stick the embedded Flash garbage inside. IE and whatnot will ignore the <video> tag, while the new browsers will ignore the Flash.
Another failure for Open Source. There are now TWO non-beta 100% fully ACID compliant CLOSED SOURCE browsers available (Opera and Safari). Why can't the "Open Source" community come up with something competitive?
WebKit and Opera had 100/100 on the same day (March 26, 2008). WebKit is, of course, open-source. It's used by more than one open-source browser, including Chromium. WebKit and Chromium aren't developed solely by the stereotypical basement-dwelling hackers who communicate only over the Internet, but corporate-funded open source is still open source.
By the way, "Acid" is not capitalized. Perhaps you're confusing it with the database concept of ACID compliance (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability).
It's very difficult to evolve wheels, and the concrete floors/roads that make them so efficient.
Rotation in living systems
Wikipedia can be pretty awesome.
This is something quite different and exciting: a log-structured file system, for storing your files on dead trees.
Um, mods, I think you meant "Funny", not "Informative". The "logs" here are a way of structuring data on the storage medium. Specifically, by writing changed blocks sequentially to the end of the filesystem instead of changing them in-place. They don't have to do with trees.
There's clear roadmap posted here describing features and implications of version numbers.
Are you sure that's actually still accurate? I've followed LWN and Kernel Newbies coverage of Linux releases for a while now, and have never seen any mention of a difference between even and odd third-level version numbers.
The biggest waste was the 8 terms of advanced calculus.
My college only offered five terms of calculus total. I was a pure math major and I only took eight semesters of even vaguely calculus-related stuff, and that was only because I took four electives (differential equations, real analysis, complex analysis, differential geometry). I could only have crammed in about two more even if I had tried to take every course offered that involved any calculus. WTF kind of school requires engineers to take eight calculus courses?
"Okay, my trusty feline friend, let's head for some moonlight!" (ever noticed how it's always full moon when you play?).
It's only the full moon in-game when it's the full moon in real life, about one week out of the month.
And you only get that much until you're married.
I realize you're joking, but still, this meme just isn't true. Married people have significantly more sex than others. See, e.g., Money, Sex, and Happiness: An Empirical Study. (Money required, but I was able to get it e-mailed for free by providing my college e-mail address.) For instance, the chart on page 20 indicates that 44% of the general population has sex on at least a weekly basis, 56% of married people, and 43% of people who have never married. One of the authors' findings is "unmarried people say they have much less sex than those who are married".
Of course, usual disclaimers about self-reporting apply. Strangely, if you add up all the heterosexual males' reported sexual activity, it ends up being much higher than the sum of the heterosexual females' reported sexual activity . . . but still, there seems to be no reason to doubt this specific point.
I actually read the article and it seems to lack one important thing... Why? Why should a Windows Power User wish to install Ubuntu? I mean it is "free" but my time certainly isn't, so I guess what is in it for me? What advantages does it have over, let's say, Windows XP?
For the average user, if price isn't a concern, there is probably no net gain from switching to Linux. The advantages (like less virus vulnerability) are more than outweighed by application compatibility, etc.
If you're a typical Windows user, my advice is to try Linux if you're interested in trying another OS. If you're not interested to begin with, and especially if you don't even know what an OS is, don't bother yet. Maybe 2015 will be the year of the Linux desktop and it will really truly be better in all respects, but it's not yet.
Battle for Wesnoth is an amazing strategy RPG
Bull. Wesnoth is an okay strategy game. An amazing strategy game would be, say, StarCraft. Wesnoth does not even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as games like that.
And StarCraft's graphics are significantly better than Wesnoth's, too, which is saying something, since StarCraft was published in 1998.
. . .
Damn, I just did mention them in the same sentence, didn't I?
This seems easily fixable. Have the server wait a random amount of time (say between 1 and 5 seconds) before throwing an error and disconnecting. During the "wait" period the server would continue to accept data and simply pipe it to /dev/null.
Then you wait five seconds between each byte you send. You could also say the server should accept a random number of bytes before giving the error, but that's still only going to slow an attacker down. Just keep submitting the same string over and over, and if you know the distribution of the number of extra bytes accepted, you can figure out to arbitrarily high probability which byte was really responsible for the error. Just check the average byte number rejected after a hundred tries, say, and then subtract however many extra bytes the server will add on average.
Metamaterials can only cloak objects smaller than the wavelength of light you are dealing with.
That makes no sense. It's a standard principle of optics that light can't even resolve things lower than its wavelength, or at least not usefully. You can't inspect molecules with visible light, for instance. So what would it mean to cloak such things?
While that may work really well with people and detection systems that depend on light, it's probably worth pointing out that these metamaterials will probably have little affect on other methods of detection, such as radar and infrared, for example.
Visible light is not the only type of light. Radio waves (the mechanism for radar) and infrared are also light.
Visible light is not physically special at all. The electromagnetic spectrum is a continuum, and there's no clear cutoff between (for instance) infrared and visible light. The only reason we can see visible light and not other types is because the light emitted by the Sun happens to peak right around the part of the electromagnetic spectrum we'd call visible green light. There's more visible light on Earth than anything else, and we get the most bang for the buck by being able to see it, in terms of evolution.
AFAIK, though, current models of this kind of thing will only work for particular ranges of frequencies. (Last I heard they'd only gotten down to microwave and infrared, and hadn't gotten to visible light yet. That's why they give diagrams and not simple photographs.) So you could make a cloak that works for red light, or yellow light, or purple light, or if you're really lucky maybe most of the visible spectrum. But the same cloak won't protect you from infrared, or radar (which uses radio waves or microwaves). I don't see why you couldn't nest them, though.
Of course, if the cloak only affected visible light, it would be a simple thing to equip every US soldier with infrared goggles and lamps. You can get them pretty cheap, AFAIK.
If having a plant listen to a phone conversation is legal (and it is), I'm not sure why doing the same thing through a switch-box would not be.
Having a police officer eavesdrop on someone without a warrant, where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, is not legal. For instance, having them eavesdrop on a phone booth or a phone inside a private dwelling would require a warrant, to the best of my knowledge. You have a right to privacy if you're talking on the phone in your own house or other private place, and that's only superseded by a warrant (or hot pursuit, etc.).
(Disclaimer: IANAL.)
Eh, for the 10*1 thing, I didn't [spell|specify] it clearly enough, I meant 1(0)*1 or 11, 101, 1001, 10001, etc in a grammar format.
I know that. I still don't get what you were saying.
As for the counting of the Fermat Primes, I would imagine that since it quit working for after n=4 that that means that it's just a neat trick, but that there's no actual principle involved here.
Quite possibly, but nobody knows how to prove it. (It's the first five, by the way. 2^2^0 + 1 = 3 counts as a Fermat prime.)
I'm not sure what a complete count gives us, other than to say that we can count those primes. But counting what Fermat Numbers are Primes looks like a non-"useful" thing...
The same could be said of all pure mathematics, or all basic research generally. You never know where developments will lead. The entire field of number theory was assumed to be useless for centuries, until it suddenly became the cornerstone of computer cryptography. If we put enough work into interesting problems, our greater understanding of the subject matter has a tendency to lead us to practical uses sooner or later that weren't obvious at the outset.
At least some percentage of the time. What do I care if it's useful to anyone else, it's fun, and at least I get paid for it. :)
It seems like the number of primes of the form: 11 - three 101 - five 1001 - nine? But that's not prime... 10001 - seventeen 100001 - thirty-three? But that's not prime...
Are less than the number of binary fields of characteristic 10*1, so it's definitely countable
Um, it's less than the number of integers, so obviously it's countable. I don't know what fields of characteristic 10*1 have to do with anything -- in many cases that won't even make any sense (since 10*1 is usually not prime).
but seeing as how the algorithm only says "insert more zeros", that the number of insertable zeros is infinite. Therefore, while it's countable (only positives), it's still infinite
There are obviously infinitely many numbers of the form 2^n + 1. But are there infinitely many primes of that form? That's an open question.
I'm just stymied what having a count of said primes is going to do for us? It seems like the guys doing work on this have figured out that the pattern is (2^2^n)+1 where n>=1 and integer, so I'm not seeing how this is an unanswered question. The range of those is countable, but infinite.
Any prime number of the form 2^n + 1 must be of the form 2^2^n + 1, of course. Otherwise, n has an odd factor, so we can write n = m(2k + 1) with m, k > 0, and 2^n + 1 = (2^m)^(2k + 1) + 1 = (2^m + 1)((2^m)^(2k) - (2^m)^(2k - 1) + ... - (2^m) + 1), and neither factor can be equal to 2^n + 1, so it can't be prime.
But the converse isn't true. A number can be of the form 2^2^n + 1 but composite. In fact, according to Wikipedia, every such number with n > 4 has so far been found to be composite. It's not clear that there are even six Fermat primes, let alone infinitely many. If you could prove that there were infinitely (thus obviously countably) many Fermat primes, that would answer the question of how many there are.
But how many would contain all 1s? Answer that, and provide a proof for your answer, and you'll make math history.
For those who didn't get it: it's not known whether there are infinitely many Mersenne primes, which have this form in binary (they're primes of the form 2^n - 1). Similarly, if you could figure out how many primes have only their first and last bits equal to 1, you would answer a longstanding question about Fermat primes (which are primes of the form 2^n + 1).
Um, IE8 does the exact same thing. It uses child processes to control groups of tabs by domain.
That doesn't mean it makes sure to avoid blocking on the interface tab. So in principle, the interface might still freeze up. (Since I use Firefox on Linux, I don't know, personally.)
Of course, IE8 was doing it since the first public beta, over 5 months before anyone knew about Chrome. The implementation in Chrome is a near carbon copy. Who is copying whom?
Neither is copying anything. You think Chrome wasn't already a working internal alpha with most of its design fixed (obviously including major structural issues like use of threads) by five months before its release?
The UI should never freeze for any reason.
Sadly, IE8 still has this problem. Anyone know for Chrome?
Chrome is designed so that no blocking operations whatsoever are allowed on the UI thread. In theory, therefore, the interface should never freeze up. Since Linux builds still tend to crash a lot, though, I haven't been able to give it a good workout personally.
So, my best guestimate about actual market penetration of Linux is probably about 5-6%. It seems about right to me.
I doubt it. For instance, Wikipedia users are only 1.45% Linux. Given the attachment of Wikipedia to the free software movement, this is probably an overestimate if anything. I'd figure 1% is about right.
Even worse, "10 pounds kilograms" is not nonsense. It is the standard way (except for the s on "pounds") to mean that you have some funny unit that is mass squared.
Pounds are a unit of force, not mass.
. . . works prepared by employees of the U.S. government are uncopyrightable. . . .
Even if they wanted to, the military would have to open source their code and published documents, unless they can figure out a sneaky way to bypass the letter of the law, which happens way too much anyway.
One doesn't follow from the other. They could simply not release the programs for public use -- doesn't matter whether software is copyrighted if you don't have a copy. They could also declare them classified. Copyright isn't the only thing that could prevent you from distributing software and other documents.
You could try filing a FOIA request for all the military's closed-source code and documentation, of course. Good luck with that.
Linus said himself, that his biggest error with Linux was, that he made it monolithic.
Bull. He's consistently said the exact opposite. See the Wikipedia article. Or look at this post of his from 2006:
Where has he ever said that making Linux monolithic was a mistake?
70 years in the United States? Yeah, back at the turn of the 20th century. Toward the end of the 20th, the Sonny Bono copyright act extended copyright in the United States to more than a century.
Just check wikipedia
Read your own link. Grandparent is correct about the length of copyright. Sonny-Bono extended the duration of copyright from fifty years after the death of the author to seventy years after the death of the author. Assuming most authors live thirty years or more after they publish a given work, this will often amount to a century or more of copyright, yes. (This is all ignoring works that are written anonymously, pseudonymously, by multiple authors, unpublished, etc.)
However, the summary makes it clear that this isn't seventy years p.m.a., it's seventy years from the date of the performance, and only applies to performances: "So performers will collect for 20 more years from the date of performance; composers' rights already extend to 70 years beyond their deaths." I don't know what the law is in the U.S. right now on duration of copyright for performances, or whether this harmonizes with it at all.
In 1900, by the way, the maximum length of copyright was 28 years from first publication, nowhere close to 70 years. In 1909 it was 56 years, still less than 70. According to, again, your own link.
Yet the Wikipedia didn't bat an eyelash when Jimbo started Wikia using 'wiki' in the name. Double standard.
...
Besides, there are no rules against the same organisation using the same trademark in two different ways, so even if the word "wiki" was a Wikimedia invention, it wouldn't be a problem that they operated two different sites that had it in their names.
The Wikimedia Foundation is not directly affiliated with Wikia, Inc. There has been some overlap between their employees, boards, and communities, but Wikimedia has only ever given anything to Wikia at fair market rates. Anything else would probably cause legal issues -- non-profits aren't allowed to give away assets to businesses, as far as I know. Otherwise they could abuse their tax-exempt status by acting as a front for a for-profit institution.