Of all the drugs in the world, I've never before worried if I was abusing ibuprofen.:)
In my case, I consider 800 mg to be a normal dose. I'm very resistant to pain medicines of all types (or overly sensitive to pain). Even the dentist has to give me a larger than normal dose of novocaine.
Um, how are they going to know about your indoor veggies or tanning bed if they can no longer scan your home for infrared and use that to obtain a warrant? These scans-- until now-- were a major source of evidence for probable cause, since fans blowing out heat look like flame-throwers on infrared cameras. What I'd like to know is how many people convicted for drug offenses where the prosecution hinged on evidence obtained as a result of these scans will be released or offered new trials on evidence that was legally obtained.
According to motrin.com, ibuprofen is easier on the stomach than aspirin-- the key is to take any stomach irritating medicine with milk or food. But I've never experienced any stomach pain that I can associate with ibuprofen, in spite of the fact that I often take 800 to 1000 mg of ibuprofen for headache and neck pain-- and I do not have a strong stomach, nor do I usually take it with food or milk. YMMV.:)
For every banner case that the ACLU takes that may make you uncomfortable, I think you'll find several cases where the injustice they are fighting against will make you even more uncomfortable.
Personally, I think a publicly funded Nativity is not only unconstitutional (and it was not the ACLU that decided this, but a judge, mind you) but it is obscene. This is what they use my tax money for? To promote a religion to which I do not belong? I thought the government was supposed to be religion-neutral here in the U.S.... oh well. Thankfully the ACLU stepped in.
But even so, I think if you read through the news reports at the ACLU site you'll find they are sticking up for a 15 year old who was harrassed out of her school after being suspended for casting a spell on her teacher (no, she was not caught casting the spell, the teacher became ill, that was the evidence that led the principal to this decision). You'll find they are defending a female student in Hawaii who, after being accused of stealing $20 was partially strip searched. You'll find that they are fighting to remove random drug testing for Michigan student athletes-- out of hundreds of tests given, only two positives have been found. You'll find that they worked in California to make it so that law enforcement actually need to prove that defendents are involved in gang activities before they can obtain injunctions restricting their activities based on said gang activity. Go back far enough and you find them helping out at the Scopes Monkey Trial, making it legal to teach evolution in school.
Quit whining about quality. Your solution isn't helping at all anyway. What you are doing is wasting your time and bandwidth on movies you don't even like. Oooh. Fight the System! Why not take a few moments to be thoughtful, and either locate alternative movie venues to support, or find something else to do besides watch bad movies?
You might also consider renting movies on VHS or DVD for $1 or $2, or seeing them in a discount theater for $2 a screening (even on Friday night).
This offer void in some areas. If your only local theater is MegaLoCinePlexOdon and your only local rental shop is Blockbuster, then you are, indeed, up a creek.
All I know is that I know people (including myself) who would have willingly voted for McCain over Gore, but wouldn't touch GW with a ten foot punch card. You may be right. Considering that the election wasn't actually decided by the voters, voting seems to have become an irrelevant pasttime anyway.
If you have 150 friends and they are all cool, then I don't care what kind of music you listen to. I may not be a software developer or a UNIX admin, but I'm geeky enough to know that being that cool and being friends with that many cool people is totally uncool.
They may have a monopoly on the wires that run the cable network in Manhattan, but they do not have a monopoly on the channels available. If a TW channel won't carry ads for competing services, then there is likely to be a Disney channel that would be more than glad to sell commercial time for that ad in the same market. Although, given TW's recent shenanigans with Disney in the Manhattan market during contract negotiations, I think they should be required by the FCC to run commercials for anyone who can pay the money. Of course, this probably violates their "right" to free speech, which includes the right NOT to say something they don't want to.
No stake except that their golfing buddies and relatives are still heavily invested. Not to mention campaign contributors. Who do you think gave Bush enough money to edge out McCain in the first place? From my informal sense of public opinion, McCain wouldn't have needed the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court to hand him the presidency. He would have handily crushed Al Gore.
If you honestly believe that after years of living with, working with, and hanging out with oil industry moguls and having an immense personal stake (even if it now "sold") in the oil industry that Bush and Cheney are anywhere near approaching objective on the issue of oil, then you are seriously delusional. Of course, as Americans, we all have a stake in the oil industry. Without oil we wouldn't even have server farms to worry about during blackouts, or SUV's, or highway systems to drive them on. Okay, well we might have them, but not at the incredible prices we have them now. I mean a gallon of gas costs less than a gallon of milk-- that's a bargain.
I agree and would extend this to say that libel, slander, and defamation laws are antiquated and unnecessary. I mean, who buys the Enquirer or the Weekly World News or any other tabloid crap, except to laugh at it? Does anyone here believe that the guests on Springer are telling the truth about their lives? Haven't we reached a point where a free market would help us establish what is and what is not a credible news report? For Dow Jones, or the New York Times, or Newsweek, running too many stories that can be seriously shown to contain outright falsehoods is disasterous. Look at how NYT's credibility has eroded simply as a result of the Wen Ho Lee affair. As long as there are at least two media companies (and we have at least three, still, don't we?), they will always keep an eye on each other. What a scoop it would be to be able to frontpage a story about how your primary competitor is a lying dirtrag.
And all the GNU stuff (except emacs) is there to replace UNIX utilities. So right there, Linux as a part of the free software movement has an advantage in that the core OS was already well-established and has been building for 30 years. Even the X windowing stuff is not exactly new. I was mostly referring to the fact that the kernel is an excellent piece of work (from a user perspective)-- and the drivers are an uphill battle, making it even more admirable. And things like KWord, KPresenter, Konqueror-- even the improvements that I've seen in the whole year since I started using Linux amaze me. At first Linux was a nice diversion from all the blessed Apple stuff, but now it may just be able to replace it. (I've never used or liked Windows, except when forced to at work-- and MS Access was great three years ago, but the same hardware from three years ago can run Linux and PostgreSQL with much more authority).
No kidding. Besides, even if this new method only allows you to burn downloaded songs once (successfully) to audio CD, you can always rip a wav or mp3 from that.:)
I am using Outlook here at work and it has both encryption and digital signature capabilities built in. They require a digital certificate, but the MS site says Thawte will issue personal certificates for free. The Thawte site seems to back this up. And by personal, I see no indication that this means anything other than individual human being. There are four vendors for certificates listed on the MS Outlook page where they discuss this.
Personally I'd rather see them hook in GPG/PGP keys, but I didn't write the email clients. What, if anything does AOL have? That's a bigger part of the battle getting regular consumers into this, imho.
Frankly, I disagree that we shouldn't be looking for ways to make this stuff easier. The main thing I'd like to see be simple is getting data securely from point A to point B, even if I have to call the recipient and tell them the passphrase to unlock the data (but that's not much security unless your passphrase is a minimum of 16 characters and well-chosen). Key management is a lot more work than the everyday benefit will give in payoff.
Don't be a twit. CmdrTaco is not an idiot for thinking differently than you want him to about patents.
CmdrTaco, as inelegant as he is when stating his opinions, was doing merely that. What should and should not eligible for patent is a religious matter and is not subject to logical discussion. Once the patent rules are written, of course, we can discuss logically whether something falls under their scope or not-- and that is a legal matter for lawyers and the like typically.
As to whether "math" or audio codecs should be patentable... society has reached an agreement that seems to say it should be so. Members of society are free to disagree and urge changes in the law-- such is the basis of democracy. But it's Taco's opinion, and he can no more be an idiot for it than he would be an idiot for liking the color blue or wishing everyone was poor. There is no empirical source from which to build a proof about what should be patentable-- it's a matter of conscience and feeling.
In fact, the scientific method has been blatantly disregarded in evaluating public policy matters regarding science. No decent inquiry has been made (imho) into whether or not patent law encourages invention and creativity. The only thing we can say it accomplishes certainly is that individuals who do create something which can be patented are granted a temporary monopoly on that invention. We haven't even shown whether or not the average patent is a reliable factor in the success of the invention itself, or in the financial success of the inventor. We have only the thinnest of studies on the issue of patents vs. creativity, and most who participate in these debates do not accept their assumptions about what "should" be the case to be questioned.
As far as we know, he said nothing. That was a character in one of his plays.
Dan Ravicher, from this "interview", strikes me as a decent lawyer and probably a decent person as well. It's fun to lump lawyers into the "bad" group, especially since the more laws they pass, the more we all end up paying lawyers for things we shouldn't have to pay lawyers for. But it's easy to forget that not all computer programmers are automatically "good" guys either-- think Bill Gates.
To me what's interesting is the recurring theme in the answers Mr. Ravicher gave that point up how utterly futile it may be to take on a Goliath if one is only a David. The enormous cost of litigating professionally in such a way so that a judge will take the case seriously seems to be a major factor in preventing progress. Businesses and groups like MS, IBM, RIAA, MPAA have a lot of money and staff lawyers who can easily do things like file for temporary restraining orders and injuctions and whatnot-- even when they don't expect to be awarded damages, they can offset the lawyers' expense by ruining their competition (or whatever). But to even start a copyright infringement case against a company like MS would require any programmer to convince a judge to compel MS to turn over source code to a 3rd party for review. Without such a review, any injunction is going to be short-lived, let alone the prospect of damage awards. And really, with GPL software how exactly do you measure damages (since right now most GPL software is available for the price of a download)?
Mr. Ravicher is right, open source isn't going to win because it has a license with the legal kryptonite to undo proprietary software. It's going to win when users get tired of exaggerated license fees and bizarre EULA's and because it's technologically superior. He's right, the state of open source is impressive. Look at where Microsoft is after 10 years of dominating the desktop OS/office market and buying up or undercutting their competition and having all major hardware vendors except Apple specifically tailoring workstation hardware to run various flavors of Windows. Then compare the state of GNOME, KDE, and Linux and how much the groups responsible for each have accomplished in less than a decade, often meeting complete apathy or heavy resistance from larger manufacturer's on various fronts.
Considering the filtering is only RIAA crud (although I'm always surprised to find some of my favorite "independent" labels are RIAA members), the new filtered Napster is a lot easier to use. It is now possible to get sensible search results without being too specific-- no more of the 85 listings for the same 30 seconds of the beginning of the same pop song that happens to have the word I was searching on in the tags. Now I get the songs I was looking for in the first place-- if anyone's actually got them (I've got some pretty esoteric interests).
Considering that RealPlayer has video whereas Ogg does not, this wouldn't be a complete replacement. Are there any realistic alternatives to Windows media, QuickTime, or RealProprietary on the Linux platform that aren't based on xanim (which does not meet the DFSG, sadly)?
Now that I've found a couple of non-mpg123-based mp3 players, I'm not even that anxious to switch to ogg for home recording purposes.
Thank you for a reasoned response to a very passionate, but shallow critique of the U.S. I disagree with your stance on capitol punishment, but that is a matter of public policy in which we all get a vote-- unless of course the Supreme Court gets involved.;)
I think your most salient point is that even when Americans do vote, they tend to vote FOR the stuff the AC was complaining about. The average American complains about big business the same way they complain about taxes, but ask an average American to change something about their lives to change it and the attitude quickly changes from a "what's wrong with MegaXYX Inc," to "Hey, love it or leave it," or "Well, that's what's great about America, you can do YOUR thing and I can do MINE".
I am probably a heavy user, but I know it's not any cheaper for me to have my dialup situation than it is to go with RoadRunner (approx $50 in my area). I didn't go the 2nd line route, but I did buy the Qwest home/cell/ISP package that rolls home phone calls to the cell phone (approx $90).
This way I get "always on" with the phone and the modem-- since if the cell phone is on, the calls are autoforwarded past the line the modem is using. Cable might actually be cheaper for me. I could go back to a regular dirt-cheap monthly POTS line ($25-30), instead of the hyped up package. Total cost goes down. Of course I lose the cell phone in the mix, but either way, cable is cheaper than any two-line solution from the phone company.
I am not a lawyer. And I am not saying that the current legal system doesn't need a good dose of common sense. But to your example, I'm not even sure that Fair Use comprises making a backup copy of a work in the first place-- but how would they even know unless you start sharing the "backups". Software has frequently allowed single backups in its licenses, but I've never run across language in the laws I've read that lead me to believe this was explicitly permitted for CDs or books.
So OCR your books all you want, but as soon as you start sharing that work anonymously, over the internet, let me know. Otherwise you and your friend have a right to privacy that is going to make it difficult to discover this infringement, let alone prosecute it. And if it were discovered, I'm guessing a judge would rule in your favor, since you've both bought copies of the same edition of the book and presumably kept them-- even in their damaged condition.
The courts have tended in the past to be lenient on sharing when the copy was analog and not commercial. But now with digital copying and a heavy involvement of commerce (even though Napster users don't pay or receive any money for mp3s right now), they are tending to be less lenient. Personally I think they are not putting enough burden of proof on the plaintiffs, and that they are allowing the wrong defendants to be gone after, but I just vote here. My opinions don't actually matter.
What I'm curious about is, can I take a piece of public domain code, add to it, and GPL the resulting work?
Either way, I'd agree that the government-funded work should be public domain-- no matter how much Microsoft innovates on top of that, we've always got the PD portion. I also believe the government should be working on making sure it is not Microsoft-dependent-- especially by refusing to use now-proprietary "innovated" public domain software. Of course, if I'm lucky, there are twelve other Americans who agree with me, and four of them are willing to vote about it.
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Of all the drugs in the world, I've never before worried if I was abusing ibuprofen. :)
In my case, I consider 800 mg to be a normal dose. I'm very resistant to pain medicines of all types (or overly sensitive to pain). Even the dentist has to give me a larger than normal dose of novocaine.
Um, how are they going to know about your indoor veggies or tanning bed if they can no longer scan your home for infrared and use that to obtain a warrant? These scans-- until now-- were a major source of evidence for probable cause, since fans blowing out heat look like flame-throwers on infrared cameras. What I'd like to know is how many people convicted for drug offenses where the prosecution hinged on evidence obtained as a result of these scans will be released or offered new trials on evidence that was legally obtained.
(I'm no doctor, standard disclaimers apply)
:)
According to motrin.com, ibuprofen is easier on the stomach than aspirin-- the key is to take any stomach irritating medicine with milk or food. But I've never experienced any stomach pain that I can associate with ibuprofen, in spite of the fact that I often take 800 to 1000 mg of ibuprofen for headache and neck pain-- and I do not have a strong stomach, nor do I usually take it with food or milk. YMMV.
(first off, your links are backwards. :)
For every banner case that the ACLU takes that may make you uncomfortable, I think you'll find several cases where the injustice they are fighting against will make you even more uncomfortable.
Personally, I think a publicly funded Nativity is not only unconstitutional (and it was not the ACLU that decided this, but a judge, mind you) but it is obscene. This is what they use my tax money for? To promote a religion to which I do not belong? I thought the government was supposed to be religion-neutral here in the U.S.... oh well. Thankfully the ACLU stepped in.
But even so, I think if you read through the news reports at the ACLU site you'll find they are sticking up for a 15 year old who was harrassed out of her school after being suspended for casting a spell on her teacher (no, she was not caught casting the spell, the teacher became ill, that was the evidence that led the principal to this decision). You'll find they are defending a female student in Hawaii who, after being accused of stealing $20 was partially strip searched. You'll find that they are fighting to remove random drug testing for Michigan student athletes-- out of hundreds of tests given, only two positives have been found. You'll find that they worked in California to make it so that law enforcement actually need to prove that defendents are involved in gang activities before they can obtain injunctions restricting their activities based on said gang activity. Go back far enough and you find them helping out at the Scopes Monkey Trial, making it legal to teach evolution in school.
Thanks, ACLU!
Quit whining about quality. Your solution isn't helping at all anyway. What you are doing is wasting your time and bandwidth on movies you don't even like. Oooh. Fight the System! Why not take a few moments to be thoughtful, and either locate alternative movie venues to support, or find something else to do besides watch bad movies?
You might also consider renting movies on VHS or DVD for $1 or $2, or seeing them in a discount theater for $2 a screening (even on Friday night).
This offer void in some areas. If your only local theater is MegaLoCinePlexOdon and your only local rental shop is Blockbuster, then you are, indeed, up a creek.
IE on Mac OS has this in 4.5, if not earlier. Heck, Lynx has this.
But if you want excellent cookie control-- not to mention some real control over Java[Script]* then the browser to have is Konqueror.
Hey, I didn't say it was scientific evidence. :)
All I know is that I know people (including myself) who would have willingly voted for McCain over Gore, but wouldn't touch GW with a ten foot punch card. You may be right. Considering that the election wasn't actually decided by the voters, voting seems to have become an irrelevant pasttime anyway.
I vote for Jack Chick.
Please to do no more linking to websites with onExit javascript where I'm seeing popup windows as I try to leave the site. Thanks!
If you have 150 friends and they are all cool, then I don't care what kind of music you listen to. I may not be a software developer or a UNIX admin, but I'm geeky enough to know that being that cool and being friends with that many cool people is totally uncool.
They may have a monopoly on the wires that run the cable network in Manhattan, but they do not have a monopoly on the channels available. If a TW channel won't carry ads for competing services, then there is likely to be a Disney channel that would be more than glad to sell commercial time for that ad in the same market. Although, given TW's recent shenanigans with Disney in the Manhattan market during contract negotiations, I think they should be required by the FCC to run commercials for anyone who can pay the money. Of course, this probably violates their "right" to free speech, which includes the right NOT to say something they don't want to.
No stake except that their golfing buddies and relatives are still heavily invested. Not to mention campaign contributors. Who do you think gave Bush enough money to edge out McCain in the first place? From my informal sense of public opinion, McCain wouldn't have needed the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court to hand him the presidency. He would have handily crushed Al Gore.
If you honestly believe that after years of living with, working with, and hanging out with oil industry moguls and having an immense personal stake (even if it now "sold") in the oil industry that Bush and Cheney are anywhere near approaching objective on the issue of oil, then you are seriously delusional. Of course, as Americans, we all have a stake in the oil industry. Without oil we wouldn't even have server farms to worry about during blackouts, or SUV's, or highway systems to drive them on. Okay, well we might have them, but not at the incredible prices we have them now. I mean a gallon of gas costs less than a gallon of milk-- that's a bargain.
Not to mention that if Felton's case helps weaken the DMCA, this does Corley an immense world of good!
Um, if you already own the song, why are you downloading it from Napster? Get a GRIP.
I agree and would extend this to say that libel, slander, and defamation laws are antiquated and unnecessary. I mean, who buys the Enquirer or the Weekly World News or any other tabloid crap, except to laugh at it? Does anyone here believe that the guests on Springer are telling the truth about their lives? Haven't we reached a point where a free market would help us establish what is and what is not a credible news report? For Dow Jones, or the New York Times, or Newsweek, running too many stories that can be seriously shown to contain outright falsehoods is disasterous. Look at how NYT's credibility has eroded simply as a result of the Wen Ho Lee affair. As long as there are at least two media companies (and we have at least three, still, don't we?), they will always keep an eye on each other. What a scoop it would be to be able to frontpage a story about how your primary competitor is a lying dirtrag.
And all the GNU stuff (except emacs) is there to replace UNIX utilities. So right there, Linux as a part of the free software movement has an advantage in that the core OS was already well-established and has been building for 30 years. Even the X windowing stuff is not exactly new. I was mostly referring to the fact that the kernel is an excellent piece of work (from a user perspective)-- and the drivers are an uphill battle, making it even more admirable. And things like KWord, KPresenter, Konqueror-- even the improvements that I've seen in the whole year since I started using Linux amaze me. At first Linux was a nice diversion from all the blessed Apple stuff, but now it may just be able to replace it. (I've never used or liked Windows, except when forced to at work-- and MS Access was great three years ago, but the same hardware from three years ago can run Linux and PostgreSQL with much more authority).
No kidding. Besides, even if this new method only allows you to burn downloaded songs once (successfully) to audio CD, you can always rip a wav or mp3 from that. :)
I am using Outlook here at work and it has both encryption and digital signature capabilities built in. They require a digital certificate, but the MS site says Thawte will issue personal certificates for free. The Thawte site seems to back this up. And by personal, I see no indication that this means anything other than individual human being. There are four vendors for certificates listed on the MS Outlook page where they discuss this.
Personally I'd rather see them hook in GPG/PGP keys, but I didn't write the email clients. What, if anything does AOL have? That's a bigger part of the battle getting regular consumers into this, imho.
Frankly, I disagree that we shouldn't be looking for ways to make this stuff easier. The main thing I'd like to see be simple is getting data securely from point A to point B, even if I have to call the recipient and tell them the passphrase to unlock the data (but that's not much security unless your passphrase is a minimum of 16 characters and well-chosen). Key management is a lot more work than the everyday benefit will give in payoff.
Don't be a twit. CmdrTaco is not an idiot for thinking differently than you want him to about patents.
CmdrTaco, as inelegant as he is when stating his opinions, was doing merely that. What should and should not eligible for patent is a religious matter and is not subject to logical discussion. Once the patent rules are written, of course, we can discuss logically whether something falls under their scope or not-- and that is a legal matter for lawyers and the like typically.
As to whether "math" or audio codecs should be patentable... society has reached an agreement that seems to say it should be so. Members of society are free to disagree and urge changes in the law-- such is the basis of democracy. But it's Taco's opinion, and he can no more be an idiot for it than he would be an idiot for liking the color blue or wishing everyone was poor. There is no empirical source from which to build a proof about what should be patentable-- it's a matter of conscience and feeling.
In fact, the scientific method has been blatantly disregarded in evaluating public policy matters regarding science. No decent inquiry has been made (imho) into whether or not patent law encourages invention and creativity. The only thing we can say it accomplishes certainly is that individuals who do create something which can be patented are granted a temporary monopoly on that invention. We haven't even shown whether or not the average patent is a reliable factor in the success of the invention itself, or in the financial success of the inventor. We have only the thinnest of studies on the issue of patents vs. creativity, and most who participate in these debates do not accept their assumptions about what "should" be the case to be questioned.
As far as we know, he said nothing. That was a character in one of his plays.
Dan Ravicher, from this "interview", strikes me as a decent lawyer and probably a decent person as well. It's fun to lump lawyers into the "bad" group, especially since the more laws they pass, the more we all end up paying lawyers for things we shouldn't have to pay lawyers for. But it's easy to forget that not all computer programmers are automatically "good" guys either-- think Bill Gates.
To me what's interesting is the recurring theme in the answers Mr. Ravicher gave that point up how utterly futile it may be to take on a Goliath if one is only a David. The enormous cost of litigating professionally in such a way so that a judge will take the case seriously seems to be a major factor in preventing progress. Businesses and groups like MS, IBM, RIAA, MPAA have a lot of money and staff lawyers who can easily do things like file for temporary restraining orders and injuctions and whatnot-- even when they don't expect to be awarded damages, they can offset the lawyers' expense by ruining their competition (or whatever). But to even start a copyright infringement case against a company like MS would require any programmer to convince a judge to compel MS to turn over source code to a 3rd party for review. Without such a review, any injunction is going to be short-lived, let alone the prospect of damage awards. And really, with GPL software how exactly do you measure damages (since right now most GPL software is available for the price of a download)?
Mr. Ravicher is right, open source isn't going to win because it has a license with the legal kryptonite to undo proprietary software. It's going to win when users get tired of exaggerated license fees and bizarre EULA's and because it's technologically superior. He's right, the state of open source is impressive. Look at where Microsoft is after 10 years of dominating the desktop OS/office market and buying up or undercutting their competition and having all major hardware vendors except Apple specifically tailoring workstation hardware to run various flavors of Windows. Then compare the state of GNOME, KDE, and Linux and how much the groups responsible for each have accomplished in less than a decade, often meeting complete apathy or heavy resistance from larger manufacturer's on various fronts.
Considering the filtering is only RIAA crud (although I'm always surprised to find some of my favorite "independent" labels are RIAA members), the new filtered Napster is a lot easier to use. It is now possible to get sensible search results without being too specific-- no more of the 85 listings for the same 30 seconds of the beginning of the same pop song that happens to have the word I was searching on in the tags. Now I get the songs I was looking for in the first place-- if anyone's actually got them (I've got some pretty esoteric interests).
Considering that RealPlayer has video whereas Ogg does not, this wouldn't be a complete replacement. Are there any realistic alternatives to Windows media, QuickTime, or RealProprietary on the Linux platform that aren't based on xanim (which does not meet the DFSG, sadly)?
Now that I've found a couple of non-mpg123-based mp3 players, I'm not even that anxious to switch to ogg for home recording purposes.
Thank you for a reasoned response to a very passionate, but shallow critique of the U.S. I disagree with your stance on capitol punishment, but that is a matter of public policy in which we all get a vote-- unless of course the Supreme Court gets involved. ;)
I think your most salient point is that even when Americans do vote, they tend to vote FOR the stuff the AC was complaining about. The average American complains about big business the same way they complain about taxes, but ask an average American to change something about their lives to change it and the attitude quickly changes from a "what's wrong with MegaXYX Inc," to "Hey, love it or leave it," or "Well, that's what's great about America, you can do YOUR thing and I can do MINE".
I am probably a heavy user, but I know it's not any cheaper for me to have my dialup situation than it is to go with RoadRunner (approx $50 in my area). I didn't go the 2nd line route, but I did buy the Qwest home/cell/ISP package that rolls home phone calls to the cell phone (approx $90).
This way I get "always on" with the phone and the modem-- since if the cell phone is on, the calls are autoforwarded past the line the modem is using. Cable might actually be cheaper for me. I could go back to a regular dirt-cheap monthly POTS line ($25-30), instead of the hyped up package. Total cost goes down. Of course I lose the cell phone in the mix, but either way, cable is cheaper than any two-line solution from the phone company.
I am not a lawyer. And I am not saying that the current legal system doesn't need a good dose of common sense. But to your example, I'm not even sure that Fair Use comprises making a backup copy of a work in the first place-- but how would they even know unless you start sharing the "backups". Software has frequently allowed single backups in its licenses, but I've never run across language in the laws I've read that lead me to believe this was explicitly permitted for CDs or books.
So OCR your books all you want, but as soon as you start sharing that work anonymously, over the internet, let me know. Otherwise you and your friend have a right to privacy that is going to make it difficult to discover this infringement, let alone prosecute it. And if it were discovered, I'm guessing a judge would rule in your favor, since you've both bought copies of the same edition of the book and presumably kept them-- even in their damaged condition.
The courts have tended in the past to be lenient on sharing when the copy was analog and not commercial. But now with digital copying and a heavy involvement of commerce (even though Napster users don't pay or receive any money for mp3s right now), they are tending to be less lenient. Personally I think they are not putting enough burden of proof on the plaintiffs, and that they are allowing the wrong defendants to be gone after, but I just vote here. My opinions don't actually matter.
What I'm curious about is, can I take a piece of public domain code, add to it, and GPL the resulting work?
Either way, I'd agree that the government-funded work should be public domain-- no matter how much Microsoft innovates on top of that, we've always got the PD portion. I also believe the government should be working on making sure it is not Microsoft-dependent-- especially by refusing to use now-proprietary "innovated" public domain software. Of course, if I'm lucky, there are twelve other Americans who agree with me, and four of them are willing to vote about it.