Then, out of nowhere last week came news that the plan had resurfaced at the Richmond Federal Re serve, where one Marvin Goodfriend, a senior vice president, proposed placing a tracking code on every dollar bill. "The magnetic strip could visibly record when a bill was last withdrawn from the banking system. A carry tax could be deducted from each bill upon deposit according to how long the bill was in circulation,"
This may sound like just so much paranoid rantings, but this quote is pretty accurate. I recall seeing information about this on the Richmond FR site at the time. It was a trial ballon surfaced to guage reaction by people of the idea of automatically deflating currency. The idea was, they want you to keep as much of your money in the banking system as possible, and not have too much cash on hand, as cash in the hand makes their calculations messy. The proposal was to have currency to automatically start deflating once you withdrew it from a bank. Obviously, there are a =lot= of issues that would have to be dealt with if they were to enact such a system (the technical ones are as intense as the social ones).
This proposal was part of a war against cash, which, to the government is untracable by them and therefore evil. Luckily, it was quickly shot down by many as loony. The bad thing is, that this loony proposal was actually put forth by a governor of a federal reserve bank.
You might try using a client such as Everybuddy. I too find it to be somewhat of a pain that there are so many different systems used by those I wish to communicate with. With EB however, I can talk to just about anyone, (AIM, ICQ, jabber, MSN, Yahoo, and probably others as well), though those without the other servers can't necessarily talk to each other.
A unified messaging protocol would be useful, but until then, we have to settle for unified clients.
everybuddy seems to be pretty stable these days. It fills the need for me at the moment.
I'd have to disagree. Time wasted reading my email is time not spent by congresscritters or their staffs trashing the constitution. If the buggers would take a 6 year holiday, I'd not protest one bit.
A while back I had a DEC UNix box that had a calendar program. It's sharing features were cool, but the one thing that I really liked was that when you had it in single-day mode, the time portion of the window actually scrolled with the time-of day. i.e., if you opened the program at noon, 11:am would be at the top, and the current time would have the focus. It was nice not to have to scroll down to the current time.
Some people probably wouldn't like this, so it would have to be selectable as an option.
It might be better given the weird state of the laws in the U.S. though to use something like, 'IPPrivacy Inc.' or something similar. The ever-popular Acme brand ethernet adapters would work for Wile E. Coyote, why not me?
Actually, if it's done right, is reasonably priced, and is easy to use, I don't have much of a problem with subscription services.
I already have a subscription to a service that sends me an updated CD every month with all bugfixes and patches inclued. It's at http://www.tummy.com/krud/. I've found it to be useful.
Ya get a new disk, drop it in the drive, goto the directory for that month and "rpm -Fvh *rpm". Pretty painless
Note: I don't have anything to do with these people other than I'm a fairly satisfied customer.
When I was a system mananger on an HP-3000/70 minicomputer, we created a small ramdisk for certain heavily used files, and spent a hell of a lot of time tuning the random and sequential cache parameters. We managed to eliminate 30% of all I/Os with just 4 or 5 files. The files were probably going to live in the cache anyway, but we just wanted to be absolutely sure that they were in memory. It gave us a serious performance boost. I'm not sure if it was our cache tuning or the ramdisk that did us the most good, but we definitely saw an improvement from the ramdisk. Cache tuning is an ongoing thing that would need to be looked at as your computing environment changes.
I'd really like to see the ability to do more cache tuning on all the unixen I run. Being able to tell it how much I want read by default when sequential reads are made as opposed to 'random' reads can be a really powerful tool if you do your homework and identify your bottlenecks.
I'd like to know if anyone out there has ever seen a port of WARP. It ran on HP-3000 minicomputers. (probably still does, but I don't have one in my attic keeping my house warm anymore).
If you know of such a beast email zeugma@pobox.com please
Cerf is a VP at MCI. Of course he's going to suck up the Gummit...
MCI was swallowed by the Borg collective known as Worldcom. You just have to wonder how many of those Carnivores are living in UUNET now (Another member of that particular Borg hive.)
With all the mergers and aquisitions that WCOM is constantly going through, do you really think that any VP at the company is free to piss off FEDGOV? They need the mergers to feed the Ponzi scheme that Bernie Ebbers has built.
Unfortunately for the poor bastards at MCI, the Ponzi scheme doesn't appear to be holding up quite so well at the moment. See http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=wcom&d=b.
The options granted to MCI employees who were absorbed into the collective at WCOM are now worth approximately -$30,000. Yes, that's a Negative $30K.
For example, I could have a "vocal," "choral," "madrigal," "classical," "baroque," "religious," song, depending on what service I looked for information about it....
Indeed. One thing I've tried to do on Gnapster is to sort my music out at least a little bit when I rip the files off a disk and store them by type in subdirectories. This is sometimes hard to do. How excactly does one classify "Cosmik Debris" by the late Frank Zappa? I've settled on broad brushes to paint a not very accurate picture of my collection because it quickly gets rather confusing. I do this for my own listening pleasure because sometimes I'm more in a classical mood than I am for, say psychadelic rock. I've created playlists that cater to my listening habits. It's much better than changing disks all the time.
As the poster I'm responding to said, it quickly gets pretty subjective. Perhaps a database
of tunes (perhaps more than one) that gives a (generally) agreed upon label to given songs or artists would be useful. Multiple competing databases would probably be better as I may not agree with one single group's interpretation of what genre a given title belongs in.
Moderately intellegent software might be able to draw correlations between different songs and artists that could make decent recommendations if you decided to press a button that says "suprise me" based on music you have. Such a thing would be valuable to me as a comsumer as it would might point me to bands I'd have otherwise missed. Ultimately, this technology will (hopefully) help to broaden people's musical horizons, and ultimately stimulate sales in a way that I do not think is totally predictable.
There is probably a way to do this where things won't get to horribly messy, the problem is that the RIAA is attempting to defecate upon anything net-based that they can't continuously make money off of.
On a slightly different note, I've purchased 4 copies of Dark Side of The Moon over the years due to various circumstances. I believe the Floyd and RIAA has made their money off me enough for that particular album. It's not going to happen again because now I have backups and the net itself is a backup for me as well.
The secrecy FEDGOV is attempting to maintain around this Privacy Invasion Tool(PIT)(tm) is laughable if you even think about it just a little while.
FEDGOV appears to be implementing what is essentially just a custom filter that seems to be tweakable to some degree that is designed to suck up email (and possibly other traffic) for a targeted individual. The key to this is that they aren't willing to settle for logs and the cooperation of the ISP they are placing their black box in front of. Seems to me that they are trying to do a bit of an end-run around any possible accountability that might somehow be seen if they had to actually ask politely and show a warrant like they have had to do in the past.
This is the real danger of such devices being placed in the network. What is it that will be coming out of this box? Bits and Bytes. Are we really supposed to trust the FBI by essentially writing them a blank check? Let's consider that question in light of the fact that the FBI has been known to manufacture evidence when they feel the need is "pressing".
If they want to place these PITs on a network, there need to be verifyable protocols to determine that the bits the FBI claims were found were actually there. I think if they are entirely on the up-and-up, these things should be opened up and the internet community solicited for comments on how to make sure that they are verifiable and trustworthy.
The difference being that if you looked in the HTML source, you could find the offending link
and fix it so that it does not reference the page. You could download it, and package it together
with the HTML, modifying the reference so that other people will not hit the link. With the
binary file format of Word, it's going to be hard to do this.
Many moons ago, while using WordPerfect 5 (or so), I found that I really loved the "reveal codes" feature. It actually made my initial foray into HTML much easier because I was already somewhat familiar with the concept. MS hides all that stuff and, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't give you the option to view it in simple text mode with formatting marks displayed. It is typical of their entire philosophy of letting users see as little as absolutely necessary of what they actually need to properly format documents.
This is one reason their exported HTML looks so horrible. I can't tell you how many times I've seen "<b></b>" in converted HTML. It also makes the docs needlessly larger than they need to be.
First, all you've done is translated the command line tool to a graphical one. The only advantage is that
all your options are laid out in front of you. Yes, that helps the user who is unfamiliar with the tool. But
take a longer view of the user's lifetime interaction with the computer--it's foolish to optimize the
entire machine for the first few minutes/days/months when the user doesn't know what's going on.
Why not do something like what SMIT does on AIX? Allow the push buttons, but also give access to the direct syntax to be executed? I actually like that a lot when dealing with rather complex commands that are potentially catastrophic.
As an employee of MCIWorldcom, I have to say that I'm rather pleased that this latest attempt by Bernie Ebbers to maintain his little Ponzi Scheem has failed. Worldcom has created an atmosphere of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt amongst its employees that is reaching absurd levels.
I've been with MCI for a bit over a decade, and I can tell you that it was a completely different place before Worldcom came to pillage the company. Right now, I'm looking for the right opportunity to exit, like many other people. There are groups I know of with 30%+ turnover if you take it at an annual rate.
Screw Bernie. He thinks because people are stupid enough to believe that by printing stock certificates, he is creating something of value. Can any of you think of a single product or service that has come from this Borg-like entity called Worldcom?
A cotton gin pulls the seeds out of harvested cotton. Prior to the invention of the gin, extracting seeds from cotton was a rather laborous and time consuming process.
Actually, Project Gutenberg does have a CDROM available. The biggest problem with PG is that Mr. Hart isn't a very good publicist. He admits this freely. It's a great idea, but it needs better support.
Second, by the time the spacecraft has traveled to the outer planets, it is pretty much shot. Exposure to energetic particles, micrometeorites, etc. have a cumulative effect. In addition, a lot of the spacecraft systems are actually fairly fragile. The plasma wave antenna on Galileo is actually made of nothing but "robust" aluminum foil! (not to mention the PW antenna failed two years ago...)
Actually, your reply above is an element in favour of attempting to plot a reacquisition of one of these probes. If we humans are to survive as a species, we'll eventually be spending a lot more time out there in space, and I don't mean low earth orbit. I imagine there are quite a few scientists who would just about kill to have a probe in their hands that had seen a decade or so in the vicinity of jupiter's radiation belt.
Such a return mission would be fairly expensive even compared to the cost of probes like Cassini, and would have to be designed into the mission, not just as an afterthought. Many of the objections mentioned previously would have to be taken into account, though I think such a mission would have tangible scientific benefits. We can simulate and test materials all we want here on earth, but need the actual conditions to really get a feel for the environment IMO.
I suspect such a thing will eventually be done. It probably won't happen anytime soon though as we're a bit short-sighted here on this planet.
I like pictures as well. Since my children tend to hang around this computer almost as much as I do, babes won't do it, so I use heavenly bodies from APOD.
There are some shots here that absolutely take your breath away. The universe is a beautiful and wonderful place...
Perhaps it might be a good thing to have the different sites that believed they were targeted to post the IPs they were attacked from. Run some comparisons against each other and see how well they match up. If it is a trinoo or tfn type attack, it would be beneficial to be able to find out if one's system was part of the hack so steps could be taken to remedy the situation.
It's been a while since I looked at the CERT notes about the trinoo trojans, so I'm not sure if they have been updated, but I don't recall any sure-fire way to tell if you've been hacked in the alerts. The actions to take they gave was to run 'strings' against various binaries to see if vertain text appeared in them. They weren't even sure if they knew all the places to look. I did this as a precautionary measure, just to be sure, but never got warm fuzzies from it.
Bottom line is that there was a tremendous amount of data created by the attacks and it should probably be put to good use.
I find it hard to believe that a discussion such as this is occurring without any reference at all to Project Gutenberg. Right now, there are about 3000 public domain works in the PG library. You can find everything from the Bible to the complete works of Mark Twain.
Because of the explosion of poublishing over the past century, 99% of all works available to the public are currently under copyright! It was never the intention of the founders of the U.S. to have a copyright that was perpetual. The idea was that it provides inducements to the creators of works if they will have a limited time under which they might profit exclusively if they so desired. The very concept of someone's great grandson holding copyright over a work that was written over 60 years previously makes a mockery of the purpose for which the copyright was included in the constitution.
For those of you unaware of the wording of the relevant portion of the constitution, I offer the following from Article 1 Section 8 of same:
Section 8. The Congress shall have power...
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
I fail to see how withholding a work from the public domain for 90 years could "promote the progress of science and useful arts. Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to the logic?
I further fail to see how one could stretch the phrase "for limited times" to one that could encompass almost a century.
Slashdot Mirror
Commment to other readers...
Then, out of nowhere last week came news that the plan had resurfaced at the Richmond Federal Re serve, where one Marvin Goodfriend, a senior vice president, proposed placing a tracking code on every dollar bill. "The magnetic strip could visibly record when a bill was last withdrawn from the banking system. A carry tax could be deducted from each bill upon deposit according to how long the bill was in circulation,"
This may sound like just so much paranoid rantings, but this quote is pretty accurate. I recall seeing information about this on the Richmond FR site at the time. It was a trial ballon surfaced to guage reaction by people of the idea of automatically deflating currency. The idea was, they want you to keep as much of your money in the banking system as possible, and not have too much cash on hand, as cash in the hand makes their calculations messy. The proposal was to have currency to automatically start deflating once you withdrew it from a bank. Obviously, there are a =lot= of issues that would have to be dealt with if they were to enact such a system (the technical ones are as intense as the social ones).
This proposal was part of a war against cash, which, to the government is untracable by them and therefore evil. Luckily, it was quickly shot down by many as loony. The bad thing is, that this loony proposal was actually put forth by a governor of a federal reserve bank.
You might try using a client such as Everybuddy. I too find it to be somewhat of a pain that there are so many different systems used by those I wish to communicate with. With EB however, I can talk to just about anyone, (AIM, ICQ, jabber, MSN, Yahoo, and probably others as well), though those without the other servers can't necessarily talk to each other.
A unified messaging protocol would be useful, but until then, we have to settle for unified clients.
everybuddy seems to be pretty stable these days. It fills the need for me at the moment.
I'd have to disagree. Time wasted reading my email is time not spent by congresscritters or their staffs trashing the constitution. If the buggers would take a 6 year holiday, I'd not protest one bit.
I can't believe this is only a '2'. Is anyone moderating this thread?
Another time related function of the client...
A while back I had a DEC UNix box that had a calendar program. It's sharing features were cool, but the one thing that I really liked was that when you had it in single-day mode, the time portion of the window actually scrolled with the time-of day. i.e., if you opened the program at noon, 11:am would be at the top, and the current time would have the focus. It was nice not to have to scroll down to the current time.
Some people probably wouldn't like this, so it would have to be selectable as an option.
While not current works, about 3k titles of 'great works' can be found at Project Gurenberg (http://promo.net/pg/)
There is a lot of good stuff there if you are interested in older works that have entered the public domain.
That's funny, and a good idea to boot!
It might be better given the weird state of the laws in the U.S. though to use something like, 'IPPrivacy Inc.' or something similar. The ever-popular Acme brand ethernet adapters would work for Wile E. Coyote, why not me?
Actually, if it's done right, is reasonably priced, and is easy to use, I don't have much of a problem with subscription services.
I already have a subscription to a service that sends me an updated CD every month with all bugfixes and patches inclued. It's at http://www.tummy.com/krud/. I've found it to be useful.
Ya get a new disk, drop it in the drive, goto the directory for that month and "rpm -Fvh *rpm". Pretty painless
Note: I don't have anything to do with these people other than I'm a fairly satisfied customer.
Z
When I was a system mananger on an HP-3000/70 minicomputer, we created a small ramdisk for certain heavily used files, and spent a hell of a lot of time tuning the random and sequential cache parameters. We managed to eliminate 30% of all I/Os with just 4 or 5 files. The files were probably going to live in the cache anyway, but we just wanted to be absolutely sure that they were in memory. It gave us a serious performance boost. I'm not sure if it was our cache tuning or the ramdisk that did us the most good, but we definitely saw an improvement from the ramdisk. Cache tuning is an ongoing thing that would need to be looked at as your computing environment changes.
I'd really like to see the ability to do more cache tuning on all the unixen I run. Being able to tell it how much I want read by default when sequential reads are made as opposed to 'random' reads can be a really powerful tool if you do your homework and identify your bottlenecks.
Z
I'd like to know if anyone out there has ever seen a port of WARP. It ran on HP-3000 minicomputers. (probably still does, but I don't have one in my attic keeping my house warm anymore).
If you know of such a beast email zeugma@pobox.com please
Cerf is a VP at MCI. Of course he's going to suck up the Gummit...
MCI was swallowed by the Borg collective known as Worldcom. You just have to wonder how many of those Carnivores are living in UUNET now (Another member of that particular Borg hive.)
With all the mergers and aquisitions that WCOM is constantly going through, do you really think that any VP at the company is free to piss off FEDGOV? They need the mergers to feed the Ponzi scheme that Bernie Ebbers has built.
Unfortunately for the poor bastards at MCI, the Ponzi scheme doesn't appear to be holding up quite so well at the moment. See http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=wcom&d=b.
The options granted to MCI employees who were absorbed into the collective at WCOM are now worth approximately -$30,000. Yes, that's a Negative $30K.
For example, I could have a "vocal," "choral," "madrigal," "classical," "baroque," "religious," song, depending on what service I looked for information about it. ...
Indeed. One thing I've tried to do on Gnapster is to sort my music out at least a little bit when I rip the files off a disk and store them by type in subdirectories. This is sometimes hard to do. How excactly does one classify "Cosmik Debris" by the late Frank Zappa? I've settled on broad brushes to paint a not very accurate picture of my collection because it quickly gets rather confusing. I do this for my own listening pleasure because sometimes I'm more in a classical mood than I am for, say psychadelic rock. I've created playlists that cater to my listening habits. It's much better than changing disks all the time.
As the poster I'm responding to said, it quickly gets pretty subjective. Perhaps a database of tunes (perhaps more than one) that gives a (generally) agreed upon label to given songs or artists would be useful. Multiple competing databases would probably be better as I may not agree with one single group's interpretation of what genre a given title belongs in.
Moderately intellegent software might be able to draw correlations between different songs and artists that could make decent recommendations if you decided to press a button that says "suprise me" based on music you have. Such a thing would be valuable to me as a comsumer as it would might point me to bands I'd have otherwise missed. Ultimately, this technology will (hopefully) help to broaden people's musical horizons, and ultimately stimulate sales in a way that I do not think is totally predictable.
There is probably a way to do this where things won't get to horribly messy, the problem is that the RIAA is attempting to defecate upon anything net-based that they can't continuously make money off of.
On a slightly different note, I've purchased 4 copies of Dark Side of The Moon over the years due to various circumstances. I believe the Floyd and RIAA has made their money off me enough for that particular album. It's not going to happen again because now I have backups and the net itself is a backup for me as well.
The secrecy FEDGOV is attempting to maintain around this Privacy Invasion Tool(PIT)(tm) is laughable if you even think about it just a little while.
FEDGOV appears to be implementing what is essentially just a custom filter that seems to be tweakable to some degree that is designed to suck up email (and possibly other traffic) for a targeted individual. The key to this is that they aren't willing to settle for logs and the cooperation of the ISP they are placing their black box in front of. Seems to me that they are trying to do a bit of an end-run around any possible accountability that might somehow be seen if they had to actually ask politely and show a warrant like they have had to do in the past.
This is the real danger of such devices being placed in the network. What is it that will be coming out of this box? Bits and Bytes. Are we really supposed to trust the FBI by essentially writing them a blank check? Let's consider that question in light of the fact that the FBI has been known to manufacture evidence when they feel the need is "pressing".
If they want to place these PITs on a network, there need to be verifyable protocols to determine that the bits the FBI claims were found were actually there. I think if they are entirely on the up-and-up, these things should be opened up and the internet community solicited for comments on how to make sure that they are verifiable and trustworthy.
Z
Poles stood against Germans twice (and we got our asses kicked badly). Do you have more respect for us ?
Actually, yes.
Some of us weren't entirely suprised that Poland was on the leading edge of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Z
I guess the obvious question is:
Is there a program for Linux that does what ZoneAlarm does?
Z
The difference being that if you looked in the HTML source, you could find the offending link and fix it so that it does not reference the page. You could download it, and package it together with the HTML, modifying the reference so that other people will not hit the link. With the binary file format of Word, it's going to be hard to do this.
Many moons ago, while using WordPerfect 5 (or so), I found that I really loved the "reveal codes" feature. It actually made my initial foray into HTML much easier because I was already somewhat familiar with the concept. MS hides all that stuff and, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't give you the option to view it in simple text mode with formatting marks displayed. It is typical of their entire philosophy of letting users see as little as absolutely necessary of what they actually need to properly format documents.
This is one reason their exported HTML looks so horrible. I can't tell you how many times I've seen "<b></b>" in converted HTML. It also makes the docs needlessly larger than they need to be.
Z
First, all you've done is translated the command line tool to a graphical one. The only advantage is that all your options are laid out in front of you. Yes, that helps the user who is unfamiliar with the tool. But take a longer view of the user's lifetime interaction with the computer--it's foolish to optimize the entire machine for the first few minutes/days/months when the user doesn't know what's going on.
Why not do something like what SMIT does on AIX? Allow the push buttons, but also give access to the direct syntax to be executed? I actually like that a lot when dealing with rather complex commands that are potentially catastrophic.
As an employee of MCIWorldcom, I have to say that I'm rather pleased that this latest attempt by Bernie Ebbers to maintain his little Ponzi Scheem has failed. Worldcom has created an atmosphere of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt amongst its employees that is reaching absurd levels.
I've been with MCI for a bit over a decade, and I can tell you that it was a completely different place before Worldcom came to pillage the company. Right now, I'm looking for the right opportunity to exit, like many other people. There are groups I know of with 30%+ turnover if you take it at an annual rate.
Screw Bernie. He thinks because people are stupid enough to believe that by printing stock certificates, he is creating something of value. Can any of you think of a single product or service that has come from this Borg-like entity called Worldcom?
I thought not.
Z
A cotton gin pulls the seeds out of harvested cotton. Prior to the invention of the gin, extracting seeds from cotton was a rather laborous and time consuming process.
They =do= have conductive legos. Go to www.lego.com, seek and ye shall find.
Actually, Project Gutenberg does have a CDROM available. The biggest problem with PG is that Mr. Hart isn't a very good publicist. He admits this freely. It's a great idea, but it needs better support.
Second, by the time the spacecraft has traveled to the outer planets, it is pretty much shot. Exposure to energetic particles, micrometeorites, etc. have a cumulative effect. In addition, a lot of the spacecraft systems are actually fairly fragile. The plasma wave antenna on Galileo is actually made of nothing but "robust" aluminum foil! (not to mention the PW antenna failed two years ago...)
Actually, your reply above is an element in favour of attempting to plot a reacquisition of one of these probes. If we humans are to survive as a species, we'll eventually be spending a lot more time out there in space, and I don't mean low earth orbit. I imagine there are quite a few scientists who would just about kill to have a probe in their hands that had seen a decade or so in the vicinity of jupiter's radiation belt.
Such a return mission would be fairly expensive even compared to the cost of probes like Cassini, and would have to be designed into the mission, not just as an afterthought. Many of the objections mentioned previously would have to be taken into account, though I think such a mission would have tangible scientific benefits. We can simulate and test materials all we want here on earth, but need the actual conditions to really get a feel for the environment IMO.
I suspect such a thing will eventually be done. It probably won't happen anytime soon though as we're a bit short-sighted here on this planet.
I like pictures as well. Since my children tend to hang around this computer almost as much as I do, babes won't do it, so I use heavenly bodies from APOD.
There are some shots here that absolutely take your breath away. The universe is a beautiful and wonderful place...
Z
Perhaps it might be a good thing to have the different sites that believed they were targeted to post the IPs they were attacked from. Run some comparisons against each other and see how well they match up. If it is a trinoo or tfn type attack, it would be beneficial to be able to find out if one's system was part of the hack so steps could be taken to remedy the situation.
It's been a while since I looked at the CERT notes about the trinoo trojans, so I'm not sure if they have been updated, but I don't recall any sure-fire way to tell if you've been hacked in the alerts. The actions to take they gave was to run 'strings' against various binaries to see if vertain text appeared in them. They weren't even sure if they knew all the places to look. I did this as a precautionary measure, just to be sure, but never got warm fuzzies from it.
Bottom line is that there was a tremendous amount of data created by the attacks and it should probably be put to good use.
Z
I find it hard to believe that a discussion such as this is occurring without any reference at all to Project Gutenberg. Right now, there are about 3000 public domain works in the PG library. You can find everything from the Bible to the complete works of Mark Twain.
Because of the explosion of poublishing over the past century, 99% of all works available to the public are currently under copyright! It was never the intention of the founders of the U.S. to have a copyright that was perpetual. The idea was that it provides inducements to the creators of works if they will have a limited time under which they might profit exclusively if they so desired. The very concept of someone's great grandson holding copyright over a work that was written over 60 years previously makes a mockery of the purpose for which the copyright was included in the constitution.
For those of you unaware of the wording of the relevant portion of the constitution, I offer the following from Article 1 Section 8 of same:
I fail to see how withholding a work from the public domain for 90 years could "promote the progress of science and useful arts. Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to the logic?
I further fail to see how one could stretch the phrase "for limited times" to one that could encompass almost a century.
Z