I'm trying to recall the last time I've seen a physical series configuration; but I just realized my old-ass flashlight counts as one.
Most devices that require more than two batteries use a series-parallel configuration for space reasons. Usually, it's two and two. For example, my universal remote, my first-generation Apple wireless keyboard, etc.
UDF seems like it would be a good choice to consider. It's natively writable in Mac OS X v10.5 and later, Linux 2.6 and later, and Windows Vista and later.
Source, when it comes to natural water, refers to the headwaters. Thus, this sentence says that the isotope ratios of water vary depending on the minerals present in the ground where the water fell out of the air originally. The second sentence is poorly worded and should have said that the human body breaks down water into its constituent atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to construct the proteins. As a result, you can tell from the isotope ratio in the water where it fell originally.
It's at best disingenuous to call a patent-encumbered file format "open". Yes, it is open insofar as it is documented, and if the designers decided to withhold licenses, could *eventually* be implemented by someone to get your data out of it, but that's not open in the same way as, for example, JPEG baseline is open. The difference is that the JPEG folks started out trying to create an open standard, whereas the H.264 folks started out trying to develop a proprietary codec, then opened up only the minimum amount they could get away with and still get adoption.
The source code is posted on Apple's open source site and is pushed upstream to the GCC repository on a branch. If you want to port the Apple branch to create a cross-compiler from a Linux host, go for it. Nobody's stopping you....
They're choosing the person they think is most like themselves.
Actually, if that were the case, we'd at least average out to somebody reasonably competent who represents the average view of the public as a whole. That's a heck of lot better than what we usually get.
Generally speaking, voters vote for the person who shouts the loudest/most frequently/most recently. The result is that the person with the most money wins, which in general is the person least like the people voting. If the two candidates shout equally loudly, frequently, and recently, then voters vote for the person who does the best job of telling them that he or she is the most like they are, which is almost never a person who actually resembles them.
At best, the ox example suggests that given an problem that for which:
an average of the answers can easily be obtained (it's a numeric answer),
the crowd has enough information and experience to come to a reasonable conclusion (people have weighed other things, or at minimum, themselves, so they all have significant knowledge of the weight of a bag of meat of a given size), and
the crowd answers honestly without being influenced by people with an agenda,
then the mean value will likely be at least close to the right answer. In other words, a panel of moderately expert individuals can probably come up with the right answer. That's not the same thing as a "crowd" of random people.
Even if the crowd is truly wise on general matters (or at least is smart enough to not participate in things they don't understand), it's unlikely that you'll ever be able to get rid of all of the outside influences on their answers, and thus their answers for any sufficiently complex issue are unlikely to be precise enough to be useful. If the answers all sound like a mix of Democrat and Republican talking points, an average of their opinions is garbage because neither group of people is expressing any fine detail. A significant percentage of those people haven't even considered that there should be fine detail to consider, instead just answering the questions the way someone else told them to answer them.
Even if you somehow could eliminate outside influences, most problems can't be distilled to a simple average. If you could average the public's opinions on complex social issues, you might come up with some useful information, but it's essentially impossible to average a million paragraph-long answers in any useful way, and anything short of that doesn't provide sufficient detail to accurately discern the opinions of the people involved.
If you try to reduce a complex issue to a series of yes and no questions or even "agree, mostly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, mostly disagree, disagree" questions, you'll automatically get bias introduced by the way you distill the issue down to those questions. No finite number of questions can realistically express every subtle detail of a person's opinion on an issue. For example, what if I believe that abortions should be allowed in cases of rape and incest, but not on Sunday? I can pretty much guarantee no question writer will ever ask that one, but in theory, somebody might feel that way. That's a rather absurd one, but not all of the fine details would be, and some of them are the very data you're looking for. The outliers provide critical insight into complex issues.
In short, you're trying to extract an instantaneous RMS of a complex analog waveform by looking at a copy of the waveform that gets latches up to the rail just on either side of zero, which in turn gets transmitted through a noisy channel so that the SNR goes negative by about 60 dB. It doesn't work, but not because it's impossible to get the SNR from the original waveform. You just have to get to it before the data gets quantized, clamped to the extremes, and buried in noise.
Maybe in some fields. For software patents, the current duration is way too long, IMHO, and really, for all tech patents. Given how quickly technology is evolving, little from 15-20 years ago would be seen as even remotely valuable if brought to market today. I can count on two hands the tech inventions I know of from that far back that are still used in any form that resembles the original form.
More importantly, all six of them are file formats, which IMHO shouldn't be patentable anyway. Content creators (users) have a fundamental right to access content (data) that they create. File format patents make that impractical, and often impossible (at least for the duration of the patent) if the manufacturer goes out of business.
The purpose of patents is to drive innovation. Unfortunately, right now, tech patents primarily stifle innovation by making it nearly impossible for new players to enter the field. It's nearly impossible to implement anything of any real use in tech without violating dozens of patents, if not hundreds. Most of those patents are stale, ancient patents that border on fundamental design principles of modern computing that can't feasibly be worked around. The industry as a whole would be in much better shape if there were far fewer of these fossilized patents.
I would argue that technology patents should last the shortest of the following periods:
Five years from the date of first public release of the finished product.
Fifteen years for unreleased products to allow the inventor to sell the concept to a manufacturer.
Five years from the date of assignment if the patent is subsequently assigned to a corporation).
Five years is about the useful lifetime of a high-tech invention anyway.
Only diff I'd suggest: being unpublished works for hire might be associated with patents, so I'm wondering if that duration shouldn't be the same as for patents, so that internal documentation and suchlike associated with patents won't become a source of contention. Still, that's only 17 years, not infinity.
DUH! Of course that is what he meant. Or you could just change a few words and recopyright the result. But then your rant would be a strawman argument.
First, in 1976, copyright law changed so that copyright begins on the date of creation rather than the date of first publication. Thus, it is *not* an automatic assumption that in the future, a 7-year period would start at the date of publication.
Second, you cannot change a few words and copyright it again because such a derivative work would not meet the minimum standards for a copyrighted work because it would not display sufficient originality. Even if you could get past that, copyright protection would only cover the new portion of the work, and would not extend protection for the original work (17 U.S.C. 103(b)), so someone could continue to republish the unmodified version freely.
Can you come up with an example of self-publishing where the income is not almost 100% concentrated in the first year?
Technically you can't copyright an unpublished work anyway, at least so the Copyright Office told me.
I don't know who you talked to at the Copyright Office, but you should be sure to talk to someone else in the future. He/she seriously misspoke.
First, in the U.S., all works published after 1978 are automatically copyrighted beginning on the date of creation.
Second, most works should be unpublished at the time of registration. Although you do technically have a three month grace period to register your copyright, anything after that and you risk losing the ability to obtain statutory damages for infringement. Thus, it is common to register prior to publication. Just use form CO.
Perhaps you're thinking about registering for a copyright on an incomplete work? You couldn't do that until a few years ago, IIRC.
I can tell you don't work in the creative industries - in general, it's not copyright that determines longevity of a work, but economics of demand.
It's more subtle than that. Copyright also generally means that only a single publisher has the rights to reprint the work. This means that a work has to be immensely popular to remain in print over the long term. Works that are still somewhat popular have to be prioritized against newer works that are likely to make more money even if the original work would have made some money. As a result, once a work goes out of print, it rarely ever gets printed again unless the author dies or the copyright expires. Those two points in time are the two opportunities for a work to enjoy a resurgence.
When a work goes out of copyright, if the work is still remembered by enough people who saw or read it when it was new, the work gets republished, causing a new generation of people to enjoy it, thus increasing the chances that the work will live on. And because any publisher can reprint it, there's a much greater chance of the work getting republished than if those rights are locked up in the hands of a single corporation that couldn't care less.
If, because of insane copyright durations, a work has been completely forgotten by the time it goes out of copyright, then reprinting is unlikely to occur. Because the work never gets republished, it essentially becomes lost to time as the last few remaining copies of the original printing decay.
Further, ignoring a handful of highly popular works (pop culture references), works that are not protected by copyright are more likely to be adapted, translated, excerpted in other works, parodied, and so on, resulting in further boosts to the longevity of the original work.
So in the short term (the first decade or two after publication), copyright benefits a work by providing it with a "champion", as you put it. At some point, however, the pendulum swings the other way. The exact point depends on the work itself.
That's only true for major Hollywood blockbusters. Indie movies can make much of their money many years after their first release. Remember that any copyright law changes have to be fair to the smaller players, too.
There's hardly a single independent composer, author, or songwriter who would make a living if copyright ended within 7 years. A copyright term that short would eliminate any real incentive for non-corporate creation of works, resulting in a massive reduction of creative diversity.
Case in point: right now, I'm in the early stages of writing the third book in a trilogy in my spare time. I'm waiting to publish until the third book is finished. With a seven year copyright duration, the first book would be out of copyright, and a portion of the second would be. Even if I had started soliciting publishers immediately after finishing the first book, it can take six months for a publisher to get back to you. It doesn't take many rejection notices at all to run out that seven year copyright, and then you would be screwed. More to the point, the publishers would know this and could readily wait it out, then publish your work seven years later without compensating you.
Perhaps you meant seven years after first publication. That might be acceptable, again, for large publishing houses, but for anyone considering self-publication, seven years doesn't cut it. Your income is down in the long tail from the very first day.
I'd be okay with works of corporate ownership (works for hire, etc.) having a shorter duration than works owned by an individual. Indeed, that's the way it probably should be, since works for hire have a budget behind them and thus have a shorter time to market and better initial sales due to advertising. I don't think seven years is even remotely appropriate for works created by an individual.
A more reasonable copyright scheme is:
Unpublished works: lifetime of the author plus 25 years. (This allows heirs to publish works after the author's death that could not be published in the author's lifetime for various reasons.)
Unpublished works for hire: 10 years. (Face it, if a company fails to publish it in that time, they never will.)
Published works: 14 years renewable for 14 years, beginning on the day the first copy is distributed publicly (not counting pre-release review copies).
Maybe I can give the WKRP folks a break because of when those shows were produced; certainly the greedy publishers bear some portion of the blame. More recent shows, though, have no excuse.
We got our first a VCR not long after WKRP first aired. It was definitely a rapidly growing market even then, though it was only about 0.05% of U.S. households at the time. The movie producers at that time were almost certainly thinking about it. The first commercial movie released on VHS was way back in '76. I don't think it had anything to do with the popularity of home video.
I think it was more that nobody believed at the time that there would ever be a real secondary market for buying copies of a TV show that they gave them away for free over the air. That market didn't really become practical until the advent of the DVD. (Imagine a season of a one-hour show on VHS tapes that only hold two episodes apiece at SP speed. We're talking about a dozen tapes or more.) Add to that the fact that people could just tape them off the air, and I suspect most people wouldn't have even considered the possibility that people would willingly pay money for a copy of a whole season of TV shows.... That's a lack of foresight on the part of the industry as a whole.
In the greater Cupertino area, my iPhone 2G almost never drops calls unless I'm driving and there's a handoff failure. In San Francisco, by contrast, calls only survive about two minutes between call drops (with five bars of signal). Terrain and density makes a mess of GSM, so it depends highly on where in California you mean.
Well there are enough ASCAP members on Slashdot who got it. Shouldn't be hard to cut and paste. Headers and footers stripped.
On behalf of songwriters and composers everywhere, I am urging you to support ASCAP's Legislative Fund for the Arts (ALFA).
At this moment, we are facing our biggest challenge ever. Many forces including Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation and technology companies with deep pockets are mobilizing to promote "Copyleft" in order to undermine our "Copyright." They say they are advocates of consumer rights, but the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free.
This is why your help now is vital. We fear that our opponents are influencing Congress against the interests of music creators. If their views are allowed to gain strength, music creators will find it harder and harder to make a living as traditional media shifts to online and wireless services. We all know what will happen next: the music will dry up, and the ultimate loser will be the music consumer.
We cannot afford to lose the support of our legislators either at this time or into the future. To this end, we must urge the members of Congress to support our rights.
Of course, a legislative campaign of this magnitude requires funds. We are coming to you--along with many other professional ASCAP members-- to help protect your future. Of course, we understand that these are tough times for everyone. Accordingly, we are asking you to make a very small contribution to wage this battle. Our thinking is that if everyone we are approaching responds with the modest sum we are requesting, it will add up to a reasonable result. In line with this, we are requesting that you write a personal check for five dollars ($5.00) or more made out to the ASCAP Legislative Fund for the Arts. If your contribution is greater than $200, federal law requires that you provide the necessary information requested on the attached form. Please send any checks to ASCAP Legislative Fund for the Arts, c/o Adrian Ross, One Lincoln Plaza, New York, NY 10023. Please note that corporate checks are not permissible.
You can also charge the amount to your credit card, if you prefer, by clicking on the following link:
Think of it as investing in your own future----which is precisely what it is. We will use the funds to advance our agenda in Washington on your behalf. Please read and complete the information requested on the attached form, and say "yes" to helping us help you safeguard your rights and your future income.
ASCAP doesn't really have a horse in that race. They don't represent composers or publishers in licensing of mechanical rights.... If they are expressing an opinion at all, they're kind of exceeding their bounds. Either way, they are not a party to such transactions, making their leadership's opinions largely if not wholly irrelevant.
That's unrelated to ASCAP. ASCAP does not have any part in negotiating synchronization rights. Those are negotiated individually between the composer, the publisher, and the company wanting to do the synchronization. All ASCAP can do in the matter is provide contact information for the publisher and composer.
The problem is not unusual. Most TV shows don't pre-license the rights for subsequent DVD release, and when they decide they want to do so, the publishers feel like they have them over a barrel, and try to extort as much as they can out of them. Ultimately, this is all caused by the short-sightedness of the TV show producers not getting the license agreements in place up front. Had they done so, they might have chosen different music in some cases, but they would not have needed to change things between broadcast and DVD release.
I can't speak for Windows, but speaking as a Mac OS X owner, I haven't seen filesystem corruption since about 10.2, nor Linux filesystem corruption since ext3 came out. If you're experiencing filesystem corruption with a filesystem, that means one of three things:
The filesystem you are using is immature.
The OS's VFS layer is immature.
You have bad RAM or a bad CPU or ATA controller (or ATA drivers, I suppose).
That third one is not as uncommon as it sounds. Most filesystem corruption is caused by bad hardware. Hint: if software is crashing regularly, your filesystem is at risk.
I've lost half a dozen hard drives to mechanical failure since the last time I saw filesystem corruption (not counting an ancient ext2-based, 2.2-kernel-based box that has a few unlinked inodes and a truckload of zero dtime inodes every time it reboots, neither of which results in actual data loss).
A couple of days ago, I was using my microwave oven while watching a MythTV stream over the Wi-Fi network from a laptop three feet away. Not even a hiccup.
The whole point of the design of a microwave is that the holes in its Faraday cage are much smaller than the wavelength of the signal generator within. If your microwave is wrecking your Wi-Fi connection, don't grumble about it. Get a newer microwave oven.
Slashdot Mirror
Most devices that require more than two batteries use a series-parallel configuration for space reasons. Usually, it's two and two. For example, my universal remote, my first-generation Apple wireless keyboard, etc.
The normal term is stereophonic....
We were all hoping he'd announce proof that P = NP....
UDF seems like it would be a good choice to consider. It's natively writable in Mac OS X v10.5 and later, Linux 2.6 and later, and Windows Vista and later.
Source, when it comes to natural water, refers to the headwaters. Thus, this sentence says that the isotope ratios of water vary depending on the minerals present in the ground where the water fell out of the air originally. The second sentence is poorly worded and should have said that the human body breaks down water into its constituent atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to construct the proteins. As a result, you can tell from the isotope ratio in the water where it fell originally.
HTH.
It's at best disingenuous to call a patent-encumbered file format "open". Yes, it is open insofar as it is documented, and if the designers decided to withhold licenses, could *eventually* be implemented by someone to get your data out of it, but that's not open in the same way as, for example, JPEG baseline is open. The difference is that the JPEG folks started out trying to create an open standard, whereas the H.264 folks started out trying to develop a proprietary codec, then opened up only the minimum amount they could get away with and still get adoption.
The source code is posted on Apple's open source site and is pushed upstream to the GCC repository on a branch. If you want to port the Apple branch to create a cross-compiler from a Linux host, go for it. Nobody's stopping you....
So what you're saying is that Fark > Bannination > 4Chan?
Actually, if that were the case, we'd at least average out to somebody reasonably competent who represents the average view of the public as a whole. That's a heck of lot better than what we usually get.
Generally speaking, voters vote for the person who shouts the loudest/most frequently/most recently. The result is that the person with the most money wins, which in general is the person least like the people voting. If the two candidates shout equally loudly, frequently, and recently, then voters vote for the person who does the best job of telling them that he or she is the most like they are, which is almost never a person who actually resembles them.
At best, the ox example suggests that given an problem that for which:
then the mean value will likely be at least close to the right answer. In other words, a panel of moderately expert individuals can probably come up with the right answer. That's not the same thing as a "crowd" of random people.
Even if the crowd is truly wise on general matters (or at least is smart enough to not participate in things they don't understand), it's unlikely that you'll ever be able to get rid of all of the outside influences on their answers, and thus their answers for any sufficiently complex issue are unlikely to be precise enough to be useful. If the answers all sound like a mix of Democrat and Republican talking points, an average of their opinions is garbage because neither group of people is expressing any fine detail. A significant percentage of those people haven't even considered that there should be fine detail to consider, instead just answering the questions the way someone else told them to answer them.
Even if you somehow could eliminate outside influences, most problems can't be distilled to a simple average. If you could average the public's opinions on complex social issues, you might come up with some useful information, but it's essentially impossible to average a million paragraph-long answers in any useful way, and anything short of that doesn't provide sufficient detail to accurately discern the opinions of the people involved.
If you try to reduce a complex issue to a series of yes and no questions or even "agree, mostly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, mostly disagree, disagree" questions, you'll automatically get bias introduced by the way you distill the issue down to those questions. No finite number of questions can realistically express every subtle detail of a person's opinion on an issue. For example, what if I believe that abortions should be allowed in cases of rape and incest, but not on Sunday? I can pretty much guarantee no question writer will ever ask that one, but in theory, somebody might feel that way. That's a rather absurd one, but not all of the fine details would be, and some of them are the very data you're looking for. The outliers provide critical insight into complex issues.
In short, you're trying to extract an instantaneous RMS of a complex analog waveform by looking at a copy of the waveform that gets latches up to the rail just on either side of zero, which in turn gets transmitted through a noisy channel so that the SNR goes negative by about 60 dB. It doesn't work, but not because it's impossible to get the SNR from the original waveform. You just have to get to it before the data gets quantized, clamped to the extremes, and buried in noise.
Maybe in some fields. For software patents, the current duration is way too long, IMHO, and really, for all tech patents. Given how quickly technology is evolving, little from 15-20 years ago would be seen as even remotely valuable if brought to market today. I can count on two hands the tech inventions I know of from that far back that are still used in any form that resembles the original form.
More importantly, all six of them are file formats, which IMHO shouldn't be patentable anyway. Content creators (users) have a fundamental right to access content (data) that they create. File format patents make that impractical, and often impossible (at least for the duration of the patent) if the manufacturer goes out of business.
The purpose of patents is to drive innovation. Unfortunately, right now, tech patents primarily stifle innovation by making it nearly impossible for new players to enter the field. It's nearly impossible to implement anything of any real use in tech without violating dozens of patents, if not hundreds. Most of those patents are stale, ancient patents that border on fundamental design principles of modern computing that can't feasibly be worked around. The industry as a whole would be in much better shape if there were far fewer of these fossilized patents.
I would argue that technology patents should last the shortest of the following periods:
Five years is about the useful lifetime of a high-tech invention anyway.
What do you mean new?
Or shorten the duration for patents. :-)
First, in 1976, copyright law changed so that copyright begins on the date of creation rather than the date of first publication. Thus, it is *not* an automatic assumption that in the future, a 7-year period would start at the date of publication.
Second, you cannot change a few words and copyright it again because such a derivative work would not meet the minimum standards for a copyrighted work because it would not display sufficient originality. Even if you could get past that, copyright protection would only cover the new portion of the work, and would not extend protection for the original work (17 U.S.C. 103(b)), so someone could continue to republish the unmodified version freely.
Yeah. Almost every self-published book that was later published by a commercial publishing house.
I don't know who you talked to at the Copyright Office, but you should be sure to talk to someone else in the future. He/she seriously misspoke.
First, in the U.S., all works published after 1978 are automatically copyrighted beginning on the date of creation.
Second, most works should be unpublished at the time of registration. Although you do technically have a three month grace period to register your copyright, anything after that and you risk losing the ability to obtain statutory damages for infringement. Thus, it is common to register prior to publication. Just use form CO.
Perhaps you're thinking about registering for a copyright on an incomplete work? You couldn't do that until a few years ago, IIRC.
It's more subtle than that. Copyright also generally means that only a single publisher has the rights to reprint the work. This means that a work has to be immensely popular to remain in print over the long term. Works that are still somewhat popular have to be prioritized against newer works that are likely to make more money even if the original work would have made some money. As a result, once a work goes out of print, it rarely ever gets printed again unless the author dies or the copyright expires. Those two points in time are the two opportunities for a work to enjoy a resurgence.
When a work goes out of copyright, if the work is still remembered by enough people who saw or read it when it was new, the work gets republished, causing a new generation of people to enjoy it, thus increasing the chances that the work will live on. And because any publisher can reprint it, there's a much greater chance of the work getting republished than if those rights are locked up in the hands of a single corporation that couldn't care less.
If, because of insane copyright durations, a work has been completely forgotten by the time it goes out of copyright, then reprinting is unlikely to occur. Because the work never gets republished, it essentially becomes lost to time as the last few remaining copies of the original printing decay.
Further, ignoring a handful of highly popular works (pop culture references), works that are not protected by copyright are more likely to be adapted, translated, excerpted in other works, parodied, and so on, resulting in further boosts to the longevity of the original work.
So in the short term (the first decade or two after publication), copyright benefits a work by providing it with a "champion", as you put it. At some point, however, the pendulum swings the other way. The exact point depends on the work itself.
That's only true for major Hollywood blockbusters. Indie movies can make much of their money many years after their first release. Remember that any copyright law changes have to be fair to the smaller players, too.
There's hardly a single independent composer, author, or songwriter who would make a living if copyright ended within 7 years. A copyright term that short would eliminate any real incentive for non-corporate creation of works, resulting in a massive reduction of creative diversity.
Case in point: right now, I'm in the early stages of writing the third book in a trilogy in my spare time. I'm waiting to publish until the third book is finished. With a seven year copyright duration, the first book would be out of copyright, and a portion of the second would be. Even if I had started soliciting publishers immediately after finishing the first book, it can take six months for a publisher to get back to you. It doesn't take many rejection notices at all to run out that seven year copyright, and then you would be screwed. More to the point, the publishers would know this and could readily wait it out, then publish your work seven years later without compensating you.
Perhaps you meant seven years after first publication. That might be acceptable, again, for large publishing houses, but for anyone considering self-publication, seven years doesn't cut it. Your income is down in the long tail from the very first day.
I'd be okay with works of corporate ownership (works for hire, etc.) having a shorter duration than works owned by an individual. Indeed, that's the way it probably should be, since works for hire have a budget behind them and thus have a shorter time to market and better initial sales due to advertising. I don't think seven years is even remotely appropriate for works created by an individual.
A more reasonable copyright scheme is:
Maybe I can give the WKRP folks a break because of when those shows were produced; certainly the greedy publishers bear some portion of the blame. More recent shows, though, have no excuse.
We got our first a VCR not long after WKRP first aired. It was definitely a rapidly growing market even then, though it was only about 0.05% of U.S. households at the time. The movie producers at that time were almost certainly thinking about it. The first commercial movie released on VHS was way back in '76. I don't think it had anything to do with the popularity of home video.
I think it was more that nobody believed at the time that there would ever be a real secondary market for buying copies of a TV show that they gave them away for free over the air. That market didn't really become practical until the advent of the DVD. (Imagine a season of a one-hour show on VHS tapes that only hold two episodes apiece at SP speed. We're talking about a dozen tapes or more.) Add to that the fact that people could just tape them off the air, and I suspect most people wouldn't have even considered the possibility that people would willingly pay money for a copy of a whole season of TV shows.... That's a lack of foresight on the part of the industry as a whole.
In the greater Cupertino area, my iPhone 2G almost never drops calls unless I'm driving and there's a handoff failure. In San Francisco, by contrast, calls only survive about two minutes between call drops (with five bars of signal). Terrain and density makes a mess of GSM, so it depends highly on where in California you mean.
Well there are enough ASCAP members on Slashdot who got it. Shouldn't be hard to cut and paste. Headers and footers stripped.
ASCAP doesn't really have a horse in that race. They don't represent composers or publishers in licensing of mechanical rights.... If they are expressing an opinion at all, they're kind of exceeding their bounds. Either way, they are not a party to such transactions, making their leadership's opinions largely if not wholly irrelevant.
That's unrelated to ASCAP. ASCAP does not have any part in negotiating synchronization rights. Those are negotiated individually between the composer, the publisher, and the company wanting to do the synchronization. All ASCAP can do in the matter is provide contact information for the publisher and composer.
The problem is not unusual. Most TV shows don't pre-license the rights for subsequent DVD release, and when they decide they want to do so, the publishers feel like they have them over a barrel, and try to extort as much as they can out of them. Ultimately, this is all caused by the short-sightedness of the TV show producers not getting the license agreements in place up front. Had they done so, they might have chosen different music in some cases, but they would not have needed to change things between broadcast and DVD release.
I can't speak for Windows, but speaking as a Mac OS X owner, I haven't seen filesystem corruption since about 10.2, nor Linux filesystem corruption since ext3 came out. If you're experiencing filesystem corruption with a filesystem, that means one of three things:
That third one is not as uncommon as it sounds. Most filesystem corruption is caused by bad hardware. Hint: if software is crashing regularly, your filesystem is at risk.
I've lost half a dozen hard drives to mechanical failure since the last time I saw filesystem corruption (not counting an ancient ext2-based, 2.2-kernel-based box that has a few unlinked inodes and a truckload of zero dtime inodes every time it reboots, neither of which results in actual data loss).
A couple of days ago, I was using my microwave oven while watching a MythTV stream over the Wi-Fi network from a laptop three feet away. Not even a hiccup.
The whole point of the design of a microwave is that the holes in its Faraday cage are much smaller than the wavelength of the signal generator within. If your microwave is wrecking your Wi-Fi connection, don't grumble about it. Get a newer microwave oven.