I've got a big screen, in my TV room. My 50" set is a large fraction of the size of many movies I see in theaters, especially when I go see a fringe or rerun movie, or just wait until it's about to leave the theaters.
What I want is PS3 videogames that have a long, detailed "attract mode": a script that runs the game through its paces. Once someone has "solved" these games, there isn't any reason that a script showing how it's played through shouldn't be available. I'd love to leave my big screen TV set playing some cool games against itself, just a fascinating work of art. Like a 21st Century lava lamp. Since I don't really like to play games myself, just look at the imagery, that feature might even get me to buy some games.
I'd even settle for a Linux version of "Myst" or some other old but cool looking game that runs on my PS3. It's gotta be good for more than watching the one Blu-Ray video that was worth buying.
Mostly true. But there's a lot more to reinstalling a corrupted (or possibly) OS than just the kernel image. Or I'd just (apt-get --reinstall install kernel-image). When I upgrade drives, I also like to prune back my installed apps. It decreases the dependency hell. And it removes the bloat from all the apps I installed for one-shot tasks, or experimenting.
I hear there's a way to get APT to generate a graph of all the installed apps, with dependencies. I wish I could use that graph as a UI to prune and add apps from/to the dependency network. That would be the ultimate APT GUI for me. And make it easier to save little config files with complete installation instructions. That could also make rolling my own distros for specific tasks on specific machines a lot easier. Make it all directable from a remote console to a "blank" new host plugged into the network, and it's all easy and efficient.
I wish I had one of those, but not "secure" (and so much cheaper) that can just clone one existing HD I'm replacing onto a larger one with which I'm replacing it. Even 1Gbps would be good.
Maybe there's a dead-simple Linux app that will do this across a Gb-ethernet. Not just "network tar", but which reloads a new drive that's got only a new install of the OS (eg. Ubuntu) with only the non-OS data, plus OS configs (eg./etc), from the old one.
I didn't say it was a "hunch". I said that Einstein didn't respect the quantum theory implications that contradicted his own theory. Both of which are rigorous, highly reliable and predictive, and notoriously contradictory in several fundamental mechanics of their respective models.
Theories aren't proof. Science can only disprove by experiment, and FTL has not been disproven by experiment. It's hard to think of an experiment that could rigorously (thoroughly) disprove that limit. So, as science works, we can now say only that current theories disagree on the possibility of FTL. And that there are current experiments that might be consistent with disproving one theory that limits the velocity.
FWIW, even Feynman (a quantum champion) pointed out that photons can exceed (and run slower than) c, for short distances. Though in (unmediated) nature, the effects average out in the large scales of human perception, like all quantum mechanics, to the familiar limits and behavior. However, even experiments established for decades have shown that there is a way to exceed c, which indicates the possibility of extending the range larger than we've found in nature, by applying appropriate technology. Much as some starlight among all the star emits is coherent, so some properties of coherency exist in nature, though they're lost in the overwhelming "averaging" of the other light incoherent with it. Until we produce the laser, when we use a natural phenomenon refined by engineering to produce those exceptional results as a matter of course.
On the other hand, insisting that c is absolute, ignoring the new evidence in new experiments that are consistent with exceptional results from old experiments, is certain to prevent us from producing FTL. That's not science, that's dogma.
Well, the ansible was described by various SF authors for decades, some of which are mentioned in the Wikipedia article to which I linked. That article, though, rules out as impossible communication by entanglement which is clearly being demonstrated in the experiments which we are discussing.
That's not an "overhaul", it's a tiny tweak. That doesn't protect real inventors, but rather protects big bundlers too incompetent to patent search every part they include in their hugely complex products - that they patent. There ain't gonna be any real "patent overhauls" sponsored by Microsoft and IBM, which make most of their hundreds of $billions a year protected by the current rigged patent system. This tweak is just a change to one spreadsheet cell in their accounting departments, not a reform of the twisted patent monopoly system with which those companies monopolize anemic "innovation" while locking out real inventors.
Wake me when the patent system compromises our First Amendment free expression rights only for the economically necessary "limited times to promote progress in science and the useful arts". That reform won't have Microsoft or IBM fingerprints all over it.
Now watch someone sue me for including a "BandAid" in this comment.
Who is ScuttleMonkey? A Slashdot editor who will post a story about "feminazis" from a site featuring a Climate Change denier "cartoon" charging _The Weather Channel_ with some kind of paranoid conspiracy. A weekend Midnight shift Slashdot drudge.
Sure ScuttleMonkey's in love with GI Joe, and the myth of the "Greatest Generation". Why does he think the rest of us share their fetish?
Ah, but the Russian holy water I bought over the intarwebs is stronger than this hellish mineral! The damn yankees might have used these devil powers to win the cold war and trigger the Chernobyl disaster, but my holy water has cleansed me through my soul. And now I will wash clean this mineral from my Web pages, before they can bewitch me.
Just look: My holy water has already brought their mineral webserver to its knees!
You're just saying that Congress has legitimate reasons to write laws - that courts uphold and direct for enforcement - that restrict speech, so it is not perfectly "free". But you claim that the First Amendment prohibits any such restrictions. Congress has indeed written the "fire in a theater" laws, which are upheld, enforced, popular and necessary. Likewise there are other reasons for exceptions to free speech. The prescription for copyright in the Constitution itself is an even more explicit reason.
We are ruled by more than the Constitution. We are ruled by a Congress empowered by the Constitution. It exists to interpret the Constitution in any current era, especially where other rules have boundaries or even contradictions. The Constitution wasn't communicated to its signers by some omniscient power, but as agreement among enlightened people for how to protect their rights. We've spent the last couple hundred years showing the success of living up to even a majority of the freedom for which they prescribed a government to protect. But in an imperfect world, we use what we've got - more people - to decide how to reconcile even the highest, most enlightened principles when they contradict each other.
Copyright law is just another of those cases. And, as I've shown, it's even more strongly in contradiction than others less contentious. But that doesn't mean that the resolution can be found by enforcing only one part of the Constitution, just because that would be simpler. In fact, the fundamentally equal roots of the contradictory prescriptions are even more reason to balance the enforcement of them against the realities of the day. Copyright is probably the best example of that need for contemporary balance.
An ansible is a device described in science fiction for superluminal communication. It's usually portrayed as a pair (or more) of devices closely connected, as if separated from a common origin.
I'm looking forward to a day when ansible devices are as common as symmetric key crypto, which will likely be the only way to secure their communications, other than the "conservation of info" already built in to quantum entanglement.
Yes, except the Constitution is full of prohibitions on Congress making laws, but in which reality requires laws like that. The most familiar is laws against shouting "fire" in a (not burning) crowded theater. Which also restricts free speech, but we want the restriction. Less "crisis" restrictions we still want are laws against defamation, false advertising, harassment, threats.
I prefer the Constitution state the strict exclusion, then let Congress, the Executive, and the courts work through due process (including that "redress grievances" right of the people) to specify just where the balance rests in any era.
FWIW, the Bill of Rights does not specify any new rights: it is just a clarification of the implicit rights and protections in the rest of the preceding document, made explicit to help ensure the people have an easier process ensuring the government acts to protect our rights. Especially those rights the Revolutionaries exercised to beat the British tyrant out of their lives.
Government accountants (those searching for money to sieze, anyway) are a lot more competent than authors and inventors of music.
That's why I said the copyright must be registered with auditable invested cost. Then their revenues are available by income tax. A fair remedy for a content holder caught cheating those books would be revoking the copyright on every content held by that entity at the time they committed the crime. Pretty good deterrence, especially against those corporations or rich people who think they can cook the books because they've got so much in the vault: which would be their bond against these crimes.
There should also be a bounty for independent operators who can expose these accounting crimes. Like a 10% reward, drawn from the actual cost of production that they identify. Even if the content holder cannot pay, the government should reimburse. Small cost for legitimately freeing all that content into the public domain, which sounds like a natural job for a government of, by and for the people.
I agree. That's why I specified a procedure for starting with 17 years (which I was properly corrected into agreeing should be 14 years), but then adjusting the expiration to whatever's working.
And there are more fixes. The whole copyright regime should specify that the default is First Amendment freedom to copy anything, any time, by anyone. Then proceed to specify exceptions: registered copyrights are entitled to exclusivity for the length of the current term. But then specify that exclusivity does not include exceptions to some immutable First Amendment freedoms: fair use. Like satire, critique, review, or noncommercial/noncompetitive sharing among small groups of people (which could prohibit P2P sharing of perfect copies distributed at geometric rates that competes with the copyright holder's commerce). And then the rules for reasonably short expiration terms.
But the term is the main fix. Because even if the exclusivity regime is crushing, the term limit frees everything fairly soon. But of course the secondary details must include preserving the rights to copy without restriction in cases that minimum commerce doesn't justify excluding, like fair use. Otherwise the copyright is just a scam that violates the First Amendment and Article II.8 .
Also, they should change the name of the legal construct to "copystop" or something: the current term frames the right to copy exactly backwards, by calling the exclusions the "right", and denying the actual right to copy we're created with. That branding is part of the reason content holders get away with making the government work against our rights rather than protecting them.
Saying it does make it so in our government, when it's Congress saying it (except when the president says something different, and then we have a whole system for that). It depends on who says so. When a lawyer makes an argument like mine, it matters. When a Congressmember says it in passing a bill, it matters. When someone in the public says it, especially repeatedly whenever people discuss this issue, it matters. Because that's how public opinion turns to law turns to court arguments. Which is how Disney and others have perverted that Constitutional provision into the travesty that is the modern law.
The economics are the reason, as that's the reason the Constitution made that compromise in protecting our rights. So it's the right argument to revisit. In order to return us to the original framework, applied in modern terms, because it's the right way right now. Congress has the power to do whatever it says. I'm just pushing for it to say something new (that's really old). Courts have to consider precedent, but Congress does not when making law. Congress will consider precedent (lazy lawyer "inertia" claimed to be "momentum") if someone there wants, but it will consider economics with more weight.
Especially when we're talking about bribing them to vote. So it will take quite a lot of people working for quite a while to reverse today's copyright tyranny. I'm not in the business of bribing politicians, or even paying lawyers to do so, so all I'm doing is putting out a sound policy, with sound reasoning. It's up to the rest of us to do the rest, once we've got our story straight.
Bush's "Justice" Department hates even neutral, impartial justice. Why would its priorities of political monopoly be any different on the intarwebs?
AT&T and Microsoft, the two defining monopolies of the Info Age, are their biggest customers. AT&T has been illegally spying on the world for Bush and Gonzales. Microsoft probably has, too. Why would Bush protect you nearly as much as he protects the corporations who deliver you at a price too cheap to meter (that you're paying with your taxes - that they don't pay)?
I chose 17 years as an upper bound. It was the original term of exclusivity. And it's about how long a human generation takes to turn "pop" content into "folk" content.
But there is clearly a measurable economic underlying this principle. To be more precise, every registered copyright (which should be required for any enforcement, not just the current system which gives punitive damages only to registered ones) should have an auditable cost invested. As soon as the work has returned 10x the investment, or 17 years, whichever comes first, the copyright expires. Every 5 years or so the average time to return 10x investment should be recalculated for the previous maximum expiration, and the default set to that new term. That way, progress by profit motive will be ensured, as will return to the public domain.
Here's all the power there is to deal with our rights to free expression:
Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
Article I.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;
Congress can make an exception to protecting our rights to free expression (like copying someone else's expression) where economics requires exclusivity of some expressions to promote progress in science and useful arts. But only where necessary for that promotion of progress, and only for limited times - and only to authors and inventors. Not when economics doesn't require the exemption. Not for unlimited (or so long that the limits are effectively meaningless, or renewable) times. And not to record labels, which are neither authors nor inventors.
The "fair use" isn't some exception to copyright. It's the basic right, to free expression. In recognition of its nonthreat to progress, the exclusivity, the artificial monopoly that Congress can create, doesn't apply to that free expression.
The whole copyright exclusivity is obsolete. There's a case for very short times for exclusive exploitation, different lengths for different media, before the content becomes folklore. But these Copyright Alliance creeps are just thieves. Using our government against us. Trashing the First Amendment we use to get our government to protect us. And exploiting beyond any defensible reason their license to mint money that they find in Article I.8.
Let's take them up on their offer to start over. And strip down these artificial government monopolies to actually promote science and the useful arts. 17 years for books and songs, shorter for the rest, maybe a day for news, maybe 15 minutes for financial news. That's progress.
Microsoft is a monopoly. In other news, water is wet.
The bundling doesn't make it a monopoly. The bundling is a way to abuse a monopoly. To abuse one, you need to first have a monopoly. Apple does not have one to abuse.
Of course, you won't accept that. You'll spit back some more bullshit that looks good to you, because your brain is stuck on "Microsoft is good". But we know Microsoft is a monopoly. It's been proven in every way. And freaks like you eat it up, and keep it going. You deserve it, but we don't deserve you.
They're still a monopoly. They were an obvious monopoly, an officially declared monopoly, and they haven't been stopped. They've continued to abuse it.
Look, you just proved yourself a Microsoft slave who will say anything, as long as it's got English words in it, to "defend" Microsoft, no matter how nonsensical. The fact that Microsoft is a monopoly but Apple is not doesn't affect you. You're like a zombie shambling at me flapping your lips with nonsense. You might be uncomfortable that Microsoft has been a monopoly so long, but slaves like you are what keeps that monopoly working against the entire industry. Stagnating it and threatening us with worse than useless security.
Go shovel your bullshit at someone stupid enough to listen to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a big screen, in my TV room. My 50" set is a large fraction of the size of many movies I see in theaters, especially when I go see a fringe or rerun movie, or just wait until it's about to leave the theaters.
What I want is PS3 videogames that have a long, detailed "attract mode": a script that runs the game through its paces. Once someone has "solved" these games, there isn't any reason that a script showing how it's played through shouldn't be available. I'd love to leave my big screen TV set playing some cool games against itself, just a fascinating work of art. Like a 21st Century lava lamp. Since I don't really like to play games myself, just look at the imagery, that feature might even get me to buy some games.
I'd even settle for a Linux version of "Myst" or some other old but cool looking game that runs on my PS3. It's gotta be good for more than watching the one Blu-Ray video that was worth buying.
Mostly true. But there's a lot more to reinstalling a corrupted (or possibly) OS than just the kernel image. Or I'd just (apt-get --reinstall install kernel-image). When I upgrade drives, I also like to prune back my installed apps. It decreases the dependency hell. And it removes the bloat from all the apps I installed for one-shot tasks, or experimenting.
I hear there's a way to get APT to generate a graph of all the installed apps, with dependencies. I wish I could use that graph as a UI to prune and add apps from/to the dependency network. That would be the ultimate APT GUI for me. And make it easier to save little config files with complete installation instructions. That could also make rolling my own distros for specific tasks on specific machines a lot easier. Make it all directable from a remote console to a "blank" new host plugged into the network, and it's all easy and efficient.
I wish I had one of those, but not "secure" (and so much cheaper) that can just clone one existing HD I'm replacing onto a larger one with which I'm replacing it. Even 1Gbps would be good.
/etc), from the old one.
Maybe there's a dead-simple Linux app that will do this across a Gb-ethernet. Not just "network tar", but which reloads a new drive that's got only a new install of the OS (eg. Ubuntu) with only the non-OS data, plus OS configs (eg.
I didn't say it was a "hunch". I said that Einstein didn't respect the quantum theory implications that contradicted his own theory. Both of which are rigorous, highly reliable and predictive, and notoriously contradictory in several fundamental mechanics of their respective models.
Theories aren't proof. Science can only disprove by experiment, and FTL has not been disproven by experiment. It's hard to think of an experiment that could rigorously (thoroughly) disprove that limit. So, as science works, we can now say only that current theories disagree on the possibility of FTL. And that there are current experiments that might be consistent with disproving one theory that limits the velocity.
FWIW, even Feynman (a quantum champion) pointed out that photons can exceed (and run slower than) c, for short distances. Though in (unmediated) nature, the effects average out in the large scales of human perception, like all quantum mechanics, to the familiar limits and behavior. However, even experiments established for decades have shown that there is a way to exceed c, which indicates the possibility of extending the range larger than we've found in nature, by applying appropriate technology. Much as some starlight among all the star emits is coherent, so some properties of coherency exist in nature, though they're lost in the overwhelming "averaging" of the other light incoherent with it. Until we produce the laser, when we use a natural phenomenon refined by engineering to produce those exceptional results as a matter of course.
On the other hand, insisting that c is absolute, ignoring the new evidence in new experiments that are consistent with exceptional results from old experiments, is certain to prevent us from producing FTL. That's not science, that's dogma.
I have, in poetry, replicated the harsh kiss of the moray eel.
"Spooky action at a distance" was derided by Einstein precisely because it would contradict Einstein's models supporting c as the fastest velocity.
But here it is in action. We'll see whether we can't by further experimentation with this new apparatus and others related to it.
Well, the ansible was described by various SF authors for decades, some of which are mentioned in the Wikipedia article to which I linked. That article, though, rules out as impossible communication by entanglement which is clearly being demonstrated in the experiments which we are discussing.
That's not an "overhaul", it's a tiny tweak. That doesn't protect real inventors, but rather protects big bundlers too incompetent to patent search every part they include in their hugely complex products - that they patent. There ain't gonna be any real "patent overhauls" sponsored by Microsoft and IBM, which make most of their hundreds of $billions a year protected by the current rigged patent system. This tweak is just a change to one spreadsheet cell in their accounting departments, not a reform of the twisted patent monopoly system with which those companies monopolize anemic "innovation" while locking out real inventors.
Wake me when the patent system compromises our First Amendment free expression rights only for the economically necessary "limited times to promote progress in science and the useful arts". That reform won't have Microsoft or IBM fingerprints all over it.
Now watch someone sue me for including a "BandAid" in this comment.
Who is ScuttleMonkey? A Slashdot editor who will post a story about "feminazis" from a site featuring a Climate Change denier "cartoon" charging _The Weather Channel_ with some kind of paranoid conspiracy. A weekend Midnight shift Slashdot drudge.
Sure ScuttleMonkey's in love with GI Joe, and the myth of the "Greatest Generation". Why does he think the rest of us share their fetish?
Ah, but the Russian holy water I bought over the intarwebs is stronger than this hellish mineral! The damn yankees might have used these devil powers to win the cold war and trigger the Chernobyl disaster, but my holy water has cleansed me through my soul. And now I will wash clean this mineral from my Web pages, before they can bewitch me.
Just look: My holy water has already brought their mineral webserver to its knees!
You're just saying that Congress has legitimate reasons to write laws - that courts uphold and direct for enforcement - that restrict speech, so it is not perfectly "free". But you claim that the First Amendment prohibits any such restrictions. Congress has indeed written the "fire in a theater" laws, which are upheld, enforced, popular and necessary. Likewise there are other reasons for exceptions to free speech. The prescription for copyright in the Constitution itself is an even more explicit reason.
We are ruled by more than the Constitution. We are ruled by a Congress empowered by the Constitution. It exists to interpret the Constitution in any current era, especially where other rules have boundaries or even contradictions. The Constitution wasn't communicated to its signers by some omniscient power, but as agreement among enlightened people for how to protect their rights. We've spent the last couple hundred years showing the success of living up to even a majority of the freedom for which they prescribed a government to protect. But in an imperfect world, we use what we've got - more people - to decide how to reconcile even the highest, most enlightened principles when they contradict each other.
Copyright law is just another of those cases. And, as I've shown, it's even more strongly in contradiction than others less contentious. But that doesn't mean that the resolution can be found by enforcing only one part of the Constitution, just because that would be simpler. In fact, the fundamentally equal roots of the contradictory prescriptions are even more reason to balance the enforcement of them against the realities of the day. Copyright is probably the best example of that need for contemporary balance.
An ansible is a device described in science fiction for superluminal communication. It's usually portrayed as a pair (or more) of devices closely connected, as if separated from a common origin.
I'm looking forward to a day when ansible devices are as common as symmetric key crypto, which will likely be the only way to secure their communications, other than the "conservation of info" already built in to quantum entanglement.
Yes, except the Constitution is full of prohibitions on Congress making laws, but in which reality requires laws like that. The most familiar is laws against shouting "fire" in a (not burning) crowded theater. Which also restricts free speech, but we want the restriction. Less "crisis" restrictions we still want are laws against defamation, false advertising, harassment, threats.
I prefer the Constitution state the strict exclusion, then let Congress, the Executive, and the courts work through due process (including that "redress grievances" right of the people) to specify just where the balance rests in any era.
FWIW, the Bill of Rights does not specify any new rights: it is just a clarification of the implicit rights and protections in the rest of the preceding document, made explicit to help ensure the people have an easier process ensuring the government acts to protect our rights. Especially those rights the Revolutionaries exercised to beat the British tyrant out of their lives.
Government accountants (those searching for money to sieze, anyway) are a lot more competent than authors and inventors of music.
That's why I said the copyright must be registered with auditable invested cost. Then their revenues are available by income tax. A fair remedy for a content holder caught cheating those books would be revoking the copyright on every content held by that entity at the time they committed the crime. Pretty good deterrence, especially against those corporations or rich people who think they can cook the books because they've got so much in the vault: which would be their bond against these crimes.
There should also be a bounty for independent operators who can expose these accounting crimes. Like a 10% reward, drawn from the actual cost of production that they identify. Even if the content holder cannot pay, the government should reimburse. Small cost for legitimately freeing all that content into the public domain, which sounds like a natural job for a government of, by and for the people.
I agree. That's why I specified a procedure for starting with 17 years (which I was properly corrected into agreeing should be 14 years), but then adjusting the expiration to whatever's working.
And there are more fixes. The whole copyright regime should specify that the default is First Amendment freedom to copy anything, any time, by anyone. Then proceed to specify exceptions: registered copyrights are entitled to exclusivity for the length of the current term. But then specify that exclusivity does not include exceptions to some immutable First Amendment freedoms: fair use. Like satire, critique, review, or noncommercial/noncompetitive sharing among small groups of people (which could prohibit P2P sharing of perfect copies distributed at geometric rates that competes with the copyright holder's commerce). And then the rules for reasonably short expiration terms.
But the term is the main fix. Because even if the exclusivity regime is crushing, the term limit frees everything fairly soon. But of course the secondary details must include preserving the rights to copy without restriction in cases that minimum commerce doesn't justify excluding, like fair use. Otherwise the copyright is just a scam that violates the First Amendment and Article II.8 .
Also, they should change the name of the legal construct to "copystop" or something: the current term frames the right to copy exactly backwards, by calling the exclusions the "right", and denying the actual right to copy we're created with. That branding is part of the reason content holders get away with making the government work against our rights rather than protecting them.
Saying it does make it so in our government, when it's Congress saying it (except when the president says something different, and then we have a whole system for that). It depends on who says so. When a lawyer makes an argument like mine, it matters. When a Congressmember says it in passing a bill, it matters. When someone in the public says it, especially repeatedly whenever people discuss this issue, it matters. Because that's how public opinion turns to law turns to court arguments. Which is how Disney and others have perverted that Constitutional provision into the travesty that is the modern law.
The economics are the reason, as that's the reason the Constitution made that compromise in protecting our rights. So it's the right argument to revisit. In order to return us to the original framework, applied in modern terms, because it's the right way right now. Congress has the power to do whatever it says. I'm just pushing for it to say something new (that's really old). Courts have to consider precedent, but Congress does not when making law. Congress will consider precedent (lazy lawyer "inertia" claimed to be "momentum") if someone there wants, but it will consider economics with more weight.
Especially when we're talking about bribing them to vote. So it will take quite a lot of people working for quite a while to reverse today's copyright tyranny. I'm not in the business of bribing politicians, or even paying lawyers to do so, so all I'm doing is putting out a sound policy, with sound reasoning. It's up to the rest of us to do the rest, once we've got our story straight.
Bush's "Justice" Department hates even neutral, impartial justice. Why would its priorities of political monopoly be any different on the intarwebs?
AT&T and Microsoft, the two defining monopolies of the Info Age, are their biggest customers. AT&T has been illegally spying on the world for Bush and Gonzales. Microsoft probably has, too. Why would Bush protect you nearly as much as he protects the corporations who deliver you at a price too cheap to meter (that you're paying with your taxes - that they don't pay)?
Thanks for the correction. I note that 14 years is also about the minimum length of a human generation in 1790. Still probably a good maximum length.
I chose 17 years as an upper bound. It was the original term of exclusivity. And it's about how long a human generation takes to turn "pop" content into "folk" content.
But there is clearly a measurable economic underlying this principle. To be more precise, every registered copyright (which should be required for any enforcement, not just the current system which gives punitive damages only to registered ones) should have an auditable cost invested. As soon as the work has returned 10x the investment, or 17 years, whichever comes first, the copyright expires. Every 5 years or so the average time to return 10x investment should be recalculated for the previous maximum expiration, and the default set to that new term. That way, progress by profit motive will be ensured, as will return to the public domain.
Congress can make an exception to protecting our rights to free expression (like copying someone else's expression) where economics requires exclusivity of some expressions to promote progress in science and useful arts. But only where necessary for that promotion of progress, and only for limited times - and only to authors and inventors. Not when economics doesn't require the exemption. Not for unlimited (or so long that the limits are effectively meaningless, or renewable) times. And not to record labels, which are neither authors nor inventors.
The "fair use" isn't some exception to copyright. It's the basic right, to free expression. In recognition of its nonthreat to progress, the exclusivity, the artificial monopoly that Congress can create, doesn't apply to that free expression.
The whole copyright exclusivity is obsolete. There's a case for very short times for exclusive exploitation, different lengths for different media, before the content becomes folklore. But these Copyright Alliance creeps are just thieves. Using our government against us. Trashing the First Amendment we use to get our government to protect us. And exploiting beyond any defensible reason their license to mint money that they find in Article I.8.
Let's take them up on their offer to start over. And strip down these artificial government monopolies to actually promote science and the useful arts. 17 years for books and songs, shorter for the rest, maybe a day for news, maybe 15 minutes for financial news. That's progress.
Microsoft is a monopoly. In other news, water is wet.
The bundling doesn't make it a monopoly. The bundling is a way to abuse a monopoly. To abuse one, you need to first have a monopoly. Apple does not have one to abuse.
Of course, you won't accept that. You'll spit back some more bullshit that looks good to you, because your brain is stuck on "Microsoft is good". But we know Microsoft is a monopoly. It's been proven in every way. And freaks like you eat it up, and keep it going. You deserve it, but we don't deserve you.
I care about monopolies because they affect me. Apple's bundling isn't a monopoly, so it doesn't affect me.
Why do you care about it? Because it's a fallacious way to say "MS isn't so bad". That was "old" when it began.
I reply to your bullshit because I don't want others seeing it unopposed. But thanks for asking. There's nothing more for me to do here.
"Old monopoly BS is getting old"?
They're still a monopoly. They were an obvious monopoly, an officially declared monopoly, and they haven't been stopped. They've continued to abuse it.
Look, you just proved yourself a Microsoft slave who will say anything, as long as it's got English words in it, to "defend" Microsoft, no matter how nonsensical. The fact that Microsoft is a monopoly but Apple is not doesn't affect you. You're like a zombie shambling at me flapping your lips with nonsense. You might be uncomfortable that Microsoft has been a monopoly so long, but slaves like you are what keeps that monopoly working against the entire industry. Stagnating it and threatening us with worse than useless security.
Go shovel your bullshit at someone stupid enough to listen to it.
When the tide rises high
And a snake bites your thigh,
That's a moray!
Except that the bundling isn't a tool for Apple to abuse its monopoly. Because Apple doesn't have a monopoly.
Microsoft does have a monopoly. This MS Live bundling is one way it's abusing that monopoly. Like IE bundling was another way.
So yeah, thatever.