While Cooper's heart is in the right place, and he is generally on top of things, I wasn't all that impressed with him. Only his firm support that computers should remember what the user tells them really stands out in my mind. (which has been around for a while, but always bears repeating since no one seems to be doing it!)
If you really want a good starting bibliography, read the one in the System 7-era "Apple Human Interface Guidelines." (which is available as a pdf on the Web) I'd add Tog's books, Raskin's book, all of Tufte's material, Brenda Laurel's...
Well, be happy. Apple agreed with you, back when the idea was first invented in the early 80's.
Basically, the Mac at that time didn't have hard disks, and only shipped with a single 400kB floppy drive. Since people were prone to use multiple disks at once, but to still be able to see what was located on one or the other w/o a remount (remember it single-tasked too, making it even more annoying) an image of the disk could be left on the desktop post-ejection.
When you wanted to eject a disk, you did so from a menu. When you wanted to permanently eject the disk, you chose the 'Put Away' item in the menu. It was also used to get rid of unmounted disk icons.
One of the programmers developed a shortcut of dragging both mounted and unmounted disk icons to the Trash to mimic the Put Away command.
Even though all the HCI people railed against it, everyone used it because it was more convenient. That's why it was left in. Although the idea is at least a decade old IIRC, in OS X the Trash icon turns into an Eject icon if you're dragging disk icons around.
Yeah, I know. I've been writing html professionally for several years, and been doing it ever since the days of the first Mosaic, when I decided that bookmark lists isolated on individual computers were kind of dumb.
This was really caused by a convergence of a couple of factors: 1) I usually post in text mode and don't do html just to write 2) I was lazy and didn't preview. So I've learned something valuable - don't bother using html mode;)
Looking at magic bytes is good, I'll agree, and ought to be one of the many methods used to determine and confirm file metadata. But it's not the only way, and it can't hold everything without conflicting with existing formats. (I'm also unsure if it would be faster to maintain a db of metadata or to have to read parts of every file to acquire the same information to be processed and presented to the user.)
Well, the entire file structure of Unix is a gigantic piece of crap. (not that Windows is any better, or the Mac these days, though they've reorganized it several times, best in System 7)
But what I really was thinking about here was file name completion.... how do you have it set up? So that you have to hit a key to do it, or like a web browser where it does it automatically, but lets you continue typing over it. I'd favor the latter any day.
Okay, clearly/. didn't like that too much. It's too difficult, and the comment was just for you, you'll figure it out dammit. I'm tired and want to go home!
Well the main reason I think it's so cool is that when people want to manipulate something - in this case a menu - it makes little sense to have to go someplace else entirely and shuffle things around in the file manager, and in folders, to have an effect.
Think about how rare it is for people other than actual typesetters to 'properly' use tabs instead of multiple spaces for indentation, or style sheets instead of setting styles inline by hand. As with many other things, users' natural instincts are to take direct action rather than relying on abstract connections between different parts of the UI. There's really nothing wrong with this; we ought to support it when we can.
Your point is well taken, though I wonder if you have the same problem when clicking on icons in the regular file manager. It is tricky for the computer to determine what it is you're trying to do, and this needs work, though we're probably doing reasonably well presently....
Don't kid yourself. There's plenty of places where Windows has been improved over the years. But it's still pretty damn nasty.
Storing file type descriptions in the filename? Having menus that hide functions variably? Having scrollbar thumbs that barely stand out over the shafts? I could probably go on for ages about things MS needs to work on.
(OTOH, one of my favorite things they did were dragging items in the Start menu to customize it. It's not as good as it ought to be, but it's a great idea at the core.)
Are you kidding? The Apple Menu has been a thorn in their sides for ages. There are tons of people who have no idea that it's a menu at all, and why should they? It doesn't look like one, and there are other non-menu things that have been known to appear in that area. (e.g. clocks)
It could really use a word - and not just 'Apple Menu' neither, dammit.
Wall mounts? Meh. That's alright for some, but what I'd really want would be a gitanic concave screen, since ultimately people tend to pivot around a particular spot, and would want the same image, corrected for distortion. The Starfire demo had one of those, and is nowhere near to having accurately predicted much at all.;)
Some big archivements where made before IP laws was put in place but if you look at the last 100 years it has been an amazing development that is absolutely unmatched in history. To a big degree thanks to IP law.
Whether or not it's due to copyright law (which really has nothing to do with property, you know) as opposed to developments in printing technology, photography, artificial lighting, new forms of content delivery such as audio recording and video recording, increases in literacy nation and world-wide, is kind of debatable.
So rather than give credit to copyright law, I'd give much more creedence to lowered barriers to entry by improvements in the technology of writing (or whatever) and in enlarging the audience by giving them enough lesiure time to be able to enjoy it. It doesn't improve the quality of writing across the board, but it does mean that there are more good writers, even if the overall percentage doesn't really change. PJ O'Rourke touched on this a bit, once: "When you had to carve things in stone, you got the Ten Commandments. When things had to be written with a goose quill and you had to boil blood or whatever to make ink, you got Shakespeare. When you went over to the steel pen and manufactured inks, you got Henry James. You get to the typewriter, you get Jack Kerouac. When you get down to the wordprocessor - you get me. So improvement in the technology of writing hasn't improved writing itself, as far as I can tell."
However, why don't we test this? We could revert our copyrights to the state that they were in in 1901, when both video and audio recording existed, (as did software technically, though it was not copyrightable for decades yet) and see if there continues to be an amazing development. (term lengths at this time were probably between 28 - 56 years, I'll have to poke around some to find the specific value)
I predict that there will be. Authors will _still_ make more money publishing, even when copyrights are significantly reduced in scope, than they will from not publishing. And that the public's ability to disseminate works freely sooner due to the shorter term limits, and other authors' ability to create works more derivative than at present, will increase the amount of art, raising all boats.
That doesn't mean the IP owners should be allowed to do whatever they want to but have a right to make sure they are getting paid by the people who use it.
At any rate, they do not have a right to make sure they are getting paid by the people who use their works. The expiration of copyrights, the fair use doctrine that derives from the Constitution, the ability of Congress and their designees to arbitrarily change the scope of copyright -- these all attest to that fact.
Authors will get what the people through its government want to give them, and it's more than they'd get naturally, so they ought to be happy with it. And should authors (or more accurately it turns out, publishers) manage to subvert the government here, that doesn't indicate that it's working properly.
That it's possible to have GIFs that aren't LZW compressed? That the patent isn't enforced against freeware/shareware authors? (among others) That the patent expires in a few years?
Sure they can - but the basis for their deal, the existance of a copyright, and its nature as property (quite distinct from the nature of the content as not property) has nothing to do with freedom.
The government, acting on the behalf of the people, who formally recognize the usefulness in the development of the arts and sciences in the law of the land, grants copyrights. Conditionally, and with strings attached.
And copyrights are entirely contrary to the notion of freedom. Just look at them:
Let's say that Alice creates a work, Foo. She does not copyright Foo, and everyone in the world is free to (should they legally obtain a copy - breaking into her house is illegal regardless of what's taken) make copies of the work, and disseminate them at will. Perhaps Alice didn't want a copyright, perhaps in Alice's country there are no such things as copyrights, or perhaps the Copyright Office didn't find her work worthy of a copyright for some reason. At any rate, this is the natural state of things - everyone may exercise their freedom of speech at will, even to speak that which others have already spoken.
If Bob creates a work Bar, and copyrights it, the Copyright Office is incapable of granting him rights, although it's convenient to say so as a sort of shorthand. What they actually grant him could be considered a token which indicates that Bob retains his natural rights. The token may be shared or transferred, in whole or in part. Meanhwile, the Copyright Office infringes on everyone else's rights (with permission, as it's a democratic government, or else it all falls apart) barring them from freely making use of their natural rights. Only Bob, and other token holders may continue to do so.
Although the system is voluntary, to the extent that any legitimate government recieves its power to govern directly from the people it governs, it is all about infringing on the rights of the many for the benefit of the few. (in the short term - it's required that in the long run, the many will have their rights restored to them, and that it'll be worth it)
If you have a nation of pirates, then it seriously behoves the Congress to legalize that piracy, or face the danger of not representing their constituents. We're probably not there yet, but the copyright holders seem to be going down that road - grasping so hard that the object of their desire slips through their fingers.
So please don't go around making that sort of claim....
This is true. Libraries have indeed traditionally been private in one way or another (e.g. you had to be associated with the monestary or school, or library somehow in order to have access) and the books considered to be so valuable, often b/c they were hand-written, that they couldn't be left unattended or unchained.
*But* books and libraries are not the entire scope of content.
If you went to a bar and performed, oh, I dunno, "Twist and Shout," even if from memory, you'll be committing copyright infringement. If you performed "Greensleeves" five hundred years ago in the same bar (there are some surprisingly old bars in this world) you'd be A-OK.
Even in a preliterate society, all content was free. Specific works, then as now, might have cost a small fortune to obtain, but could nevertheless be copied all you pleased.
There are wonderful stories told about the famous Library of Alexandria, which embraced this roughly 2200 years ago. Any ship or caravan entering the city was searched by customs officials for interesting scrolls and written materials. If there were any, they were copied by the Library staff, then returned. One of the Ptolemaic kings once convinced the Athenian government to let the Library borrow and copy the original scrolls onto which Sophocles had written his plays, giving them a large ransom as a deposit. Of course, they weren't above valuing the originals too, and kept them, losing their ransom. (but sending the Athenians copies at least;)
A case could be made, yes. Although it's nowhere near as onerous as the requirements for trademarks, patent (and to an even lesser extent, at least in practice) copyright holders have a responsibility to not abuse what they've been granted by the public.
However, it would probably be kind of tricky, and it would require someone being sued by Unisys to pursue this.... it's probably not going to happen. Maybe here it will.
Because:
1) Their work is not honest. When Stephen King writes a book, he's making use of plots, idioms, words and characters that other people developed and which he isn't compensating them for. (provided they'll even permit him to use them)
2) A world in which this was all carefully accounted would be so encumbered that it would probably collapse under its own weight
3) It would also conflict significantly with humanity's natural (copyrights are not natural, remember) freedom of speech, and on the whole most people would likely prefer the latter.
Remember, kiddo - the people permit there to be copyrights, which are entirely optional, because they find it convenient. Make them too inconvenient for the public at large, and they'll have Congress shut the whole system down or reform it significantly. Provided that the government fundementally still works, and it's a _seriously_ bad thing if it doesn't.
Well, there is the latches doctrine, but it mostly hinges on how the plantiffs acted between the filing of the claim and the filing of a lawsuit, and how they interacted with the defendants. (and other alleged infringers)
(essentially, it's an abuse of patent to encourage others to infringe on your patent with the hope of later suing them for all the money they made when they were doing it)
Well, there is an argument to be made that self-help is unacceptable in the realm of copyrights and patents, as they are grants given to authors by the public under specific conditions, etc. That is, there is a quid pro quo in which the public temporarily, conditionally and partially surrenders its right to freely copy and disseminate works but expects that authors will only be permitted to use the legal system against pirates as no technology is capable of discriminating between functionally identical fair, public domain and illegal uses.
If you pursued this line of reasoning (which is not half bad) then by implementing such a system, the copyright holders would themselves be commiting an abuse of copyright, risking its revocation.
It would be easier if the Congress would do its job properly and simply write into law the requirement that copyrights grants have such strings attached.
There is a long-standing judicial 'fair use' doctrine, which comparatively recently was generally codified into law by the Congress. However, although the Congress is capable of significantly enlarging (or negating the need for, by reducing copyrights themselves) fair use, it cannot move against the courts and eliminate it.
Section 17 of the US Code is basically where you're going to find actual copyright laws. Cornell University has a nice database on the web.
Well to be a bit more specific, the mp3 is also a physical object, and being digital is entirely besides the point - paper books are also digital in nature.
What you're trying to say really is that there is a difference between a physical medium into which a work is fixed (e.g. a record bearing a copy of a copyrighted arrangement of notes in the form of a sound wave) and the work itself, which is intangible and copyable independent of the fixed form (e.g. the arrangement itself, which could just as easily go onto a CD, or be rearranged for an orchestra)
The funny thing is that in Akira, Tokyo is destroyed twice, and in Evangelion the actual Tokyo is flooded in 2000 by the melting of the Antarctic ice pack, and the city the Angels are attacking is a different Tokyo, a new city built up in the mountains. (Tokyo is actually in a plain; Tokyo-2 is the civilian replacement, Tokyo-3 the Nerv replacement)
But yeah, it's just the matchstick city, you know. Maybe 'cos the US more or less leveled it with firebombing in the war?
Of course, that could also partially be b/c that ship belonged to a Queen who already spends a lot of time on fashion. And for a non-militaristic planet that couldn't defend against an embargo and invasion without the writer saving the day, the fighters look about right as a ceremonial thing. Bright and shiny and never really used much.
Han Solo couldn't give a womp rat's ass - it probably helps him the more his ship looks like a piece of crap. (because who would expect it to perform like it does, at least when it's working properly) Things like the pods also had the same cobbled together, who cares what it looks like if it works style.
The more military vessels were fairly similar though - the interiors of the Star Destroyers and Death Star were not far off from the interiors of the Trade Federation ships, and both looked relatively functional but wierd.
It's kind of impractical to both move out all the nuclear waste (which isn't just glow-in-the-dark goo, but also includes the chambers used to store the goo, up to very large portions of entire buildings) load it onto enough rockets to get it into space at all (without accidents, as you note) and then have those rockets be so powerful as to be able to transfer into an orbit that intersects the sun, which is not an easy task. (the last thing we sent into that neighborhood had to get a gravity assist from Jupiter, if I remember properly)
No, BSD is more restrictive than the public domain. There will be *no* license when the term expires, none at all, and none will be necessary. Anyone can use it, for any purpose, in whole or in part. Copyright just doesn't exist for it anymore. Of course, the various moneyed interests that have copyrights coming up to their expiration (notably Disney with their copyright on the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, which will bring down their trademark on that character) keep successfully bribing Congress to extend terms retroactively.
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While Cooper's heart is in the right place, and he is generally on top of things, I wasn't all that impressed with him. Only his firm support that computers should remember what the user tells them really stands out in my mind. (which has been around for a while, but always bears repeating since no one seems to be doing it!)
If you really want a good starting bibliography, read the one in the System 7-era "Apple Human Interface Guidelines." (which is available as a pdf on the Web) I'd add Tog's books, Raskin's book, all of Tufte's material, Brenda Laurel's...
Well, be happy. Apple agreed with you, back when the idea was first invented in the early 80's.
Basically, the Mac at that time didn't have hard disks, and only shipped with a single 400kB floppy drive. Since people were prone to use multiple disks at once, but to still be able to see what was located on one or the other w/o a remount (remember it single-tasked too, making it even more annoying) an image of the disk could be left on the desktop post-ejection.
When you wanted to eject a disk, you did so from a menu. When you wanted to permanently eject the disk, you chose the 'Put Away' item in the menu. It was also used to get rid of unmounted disk icons.
One of the programmers developed a shortcut of dragging both mounted and unmounted disk icons to the Trash to mimic the Put Away command.
Even though all the HCI people railed against it, everyone used it because it was more convenient. That's why it was left in. Although the idea is at least a decade old IIRC, in OS X the Trash icon turns into an Eject icon if you're dragging disk icons around.
Yeah, I know. I've been writing html professionally for several years, and been doing it ever since the days of the first Mosaic, when I decided that bookmark lists isolated on individual computers were kind of dumb.
;)
This was really caused by a convergence of a couple of factors: 1) I usually post in text mode and don't do html just to write 2) I was lazy and didn't preview. So I've learned something valuable - don't bother using html mode
Looking at magic bytes is good, I'll agree, and ought to be one of the many methods used to determine and confirm file metadata. But it's not the only way, and it can't hold everything without conflicting with existing formats. (I'm also unsure if it would be faster to maintain a db of metadata or to have to read parts of every file to acquire the same information to be processed and presented to the user.)
Well, the entire file structure of Unix is a gigantic piece of crap. (not that Windows is any better, or the Mac these days, though they've reorganized it several times, best in System 7)
But what I really was thinking about here was file name completion.... how do you have it set up? So that you have to hit a key to do it, or like a web browser where it does it automatically, but lets you continue typing over it. I'd favor the latter any day.
Okay, clearly /. didn't like that too much. It's too difficult, and the comment was just for you, you'll figure it out dammit. I'm tired and want to go home!
Well the main reason I think it's so cool is that when people want to manipulate something - in this case a menu - it makes little sense to have to go someplace else entirely and shuffle things around in the file manager, and in folders, to have an effect.
Think about how rare it is for people other than actual typesetters to 'properly' use tabs instead of multiple spaces for indentation, or style sheets instead of setting styles inline by hand. As with many other things, users' natural instincts are to take direct action rather than relying on abstract connections between different parts of the UI. There's really nothing wrong with this; we ought to support it when we can.
Your point is well taken, though I wonder if you have the same problem when clicking on icons in the regular file manager. It is tricky for the computer to determine what it is you're trying to do, and this needs work, though we're probably doing reasonably well presently....
Don't kid yourself. There's plenty of places where Windows has been improved over the years. But it's still pretty damn nasty.
Storing file type descriptions in the filename? Having menus that hide functions variably? Having scrollbar thumbs that barely stand out over the shafts? I could probably go on for ages about things MS needs to work on.
(OTOH, one of my favorite things they did were dragging items in the Start menu to customize it. It's not as good as it ought to be, but it's a great idea at the core.)
Are you kidding? The Apple Menu has been a thorn in their sides for ages. There are tons of people who have no idea that it's a menu at all, and why should they? It doesn't look like one, and there are other non-menu things that have been known to appear in that area. (e.g. clocks)
It could really use a word - and not just 'Apple Menu' neither, dammit.
Wall mounts? Meh. That's alright for some, but what I'd really want would be a gitanic concave screen, since ultimately people tend to pivot around a particular spot, and would want the same image, corrected for distortion. The Starfire demo had one of those, and is nowhere near to having accurately predicted much at all. ;)
Whether or not it's due to copyright law (which really has nothing to do with property, you know) as opposed to developments in printing technology, photography, artificial lighting, new forms of content delivery such as audio recording and video recording, increases in literacy nation and world-wide, is kind of debatable.
So rather than give credit to copyright law, I'd give much more creedence to lowered barriers to entry by improvements in the technology of writing (or whatever) and in enlarging the audience by giving them enough lesiure time to be able to enjoy it. It doesn't improve the quality of writing across the board, but it does mean that there are more good writers, even if the overall percentage doesn't really change. PJ O'Rourke touched on this a bit, once: "When you had to carve things in stone, you got the Ten Commandments. When things had to be written with a goose quill and you had to boil blood or whatever to make ink, you got Shakespeare. When you went over to the steel pen and manufactured inks, you got Henry James. You get to the typewriter, you get Jack Kerouac. When you get down to the wordprocessor - you get me. So improvement in the technology of writing hasn't improved writing itself, as far as I can tell."
However, why don't we test this? We could revert our copyrights to the state that they were in in 1901, when both video and audio recording existed, (as did software technically, though it was not copyrightable for decades yet) and see if there continues to be an amazing development. (term lengths at this time were probably between 28 - 56 years, I'll have to poke around some to find the specific value)
I predict that there will be. Authors will _still_ make more money publishing, even when copyrights are significantly reduced in scope, than they will from not publishing. And that the public's ability to disseminate works freely sooner due to the shorter term limits, and other authors' ability to create works more derivative than at present, will increase the amount of art, raising all boats.
That doesn't mean the IP owners should be allowed to do whatever they want to but have a right to make sure they are getting paid by the people who use it.
At any rate, they do not have a right to make sure they are getting paid by the people who use their works. The expiration of copyrights, the fair use doctrine that derives from the Constitution, the ability of Congress and their designees to arbitrarily change the scope of copyright -- these all attest to that fact.
Authors will get what the people through its government want to give them, and it's more than they'd get naturally, so they ought to be happy with it. And should authors (or more accurately it turns out, publishers) manage to subvert the government here, that doesn't indicate that it's working properly.
That it's possible to have GIFs that aren't LZW compressed? That the patent isn't enforced against freeware/shareware authors? (among others) That the patent expires in a few years?
Got me. You might as well go ahead and tell.
Sure they can - but the basis for their deal, the existance of a copyright, and its nature as property (quite distinct from the nature of the content as not property) has nothing to do with freedom.
The government, acting on the behalf of the people, who formally recognize the usefulness in the development of the arts and sciences in the law of the land, grants copyrights. Conditionally, and with strings attached.
And copyrights are entirely contrary to the notion of freedom. Just look at them:
Let's say that Alice creates a work, Foo. She does not copyright Foo, and everyone in the world is free to (should they legally obtain a copy - breaking into her house is illegal regardless of what's taken) make copies of the work, and disseminate them at will. Perhaps Alice didn't want a copyright, perhaps in Alice's country there are no such things as copyrights, or perhaps the Copyright Office didn't find her work worthy of a copyright for some reason. At any rate, this is the natural state of things - everyone may exercise their freedom of speech at will, even to speak that which others have already spoken.
If Bob creates a work Bar, and copyrights it, the Copyright Office is incapable of granting him rights, although it's convenient to say so as a sort of shorthand. What they actually grant him could be considered a token which indicates that Bob retains his natural rights. The token may be shared or transferred, in whole or in part. Meanhwile, the Copyright Office infringes on everyone else's rights (with permission, as it's a democratic government, or else it all falls apart) barring them from freely making use of their natural rights. Only Bob, and other token holders may continue to do so.
Although the system is voluntary, to the extent that any legitimate government recieves its power to govern directly from the people it governs, it is all about infringing on the rights of the many for the benefit of the few. (in the short term - it's required that in the long run, the many will have their rights restored to them, and that it'll be worth it)
If you have a nation of pirates, then it seriously behoves the Congress to legalize that piracy, or face the danger of not representing their constituents. We're probably not there yet, but the copyright holders seem to be going down that road - grasping so hard that the object of their desire slips through their fingers.
So please don't go around making that sort of claim....
This is true. Libraries have indeed traditionally been private in one way or another (e.g. you had to be associated with the monestary or school, or library somehow in order to have access) and the books considered to be so valuable, often b/c they were hand-written, that they couldn't be left unattended or unchained.
;)
*But* books and libraries are not the entire scope of content.
If you went to a bar and performed, oh, I dunno, "Twist and Shout," even if from memory, you'll be committing copyright infringement. If you performed "Greensleeves" five hundred years ago in the same bar (there are some surprisingly old bars in this world) you'd be A-OK.
Even in a preliterate society, all content was free. Specific works, then as now, might have cost a small fortune to obtain, but could nevertheless be copied all you pleased.
There are wonderful stories told about the famous Library of Alexandria, which embraced this roughly 2200 years ago. Any ship or caravan entering the city was searched by customs officials for interesting scrolls and written materials. If there were any, they were copied by the Library staff, then returned. One of the Ptolemaic kings once convinced the Athenian government to let the Library borrow and copy the original scrolls onto which Sophocles had written his plays, giving them a large ransom as a deposit. Of course, they weren't above valuing the originals too, and kept them, losing their ransom. (but sending the Athenians copies at least
A case could be made, yes. Although it's nowhere near as onerous as the requirements for trademarks, patent (and to an even lesser extent, at least in practice) copyright holders have a responsibility to not abuse what they've been granted by the public.
However, it would probably be kind of tricky, and it would require someone being sued by Unisys to pursue this.... it's probably not going to happen. Maybe here it will.
Because:
1) Their work is not honest. When Stephen King writes a book, he's making use of plots, idioms, words and characters that other people developed and which he isn't compensating them for. (provided they'll even permit him to use them)
2) A world in which this was all carefully accounted would be so encumbered that it would probably collapse under its own weight
3) It would also conflict significantly with humanity's natural (copyrights are not natural, remember) freedom of speech, and on the whole most people would likely prefer the latter.
Remember, kiddo - the people permit there to be copyrights, which are entirely optional, because they find it convenient. Make them too inconvenient for the public at large, and they'll have Congress shut the whole system down or reform it significantly. Provided that the government fundementally still works, and it's a _seriously_ bad thing if it doesn't.
Well, there is the latches doctrine, but it mostly hinges on how the plantiffs acted between the filing of the claim and the filing of a lawsuit, and how they interacted with the defendants. (and other alleged infringers)
(essentially, it's an abuse of patent to encourage others to infringe on your patent with the hope of later suing them for all the money they made when they were doing it)
Well, there is an argument to be made that self-help is unacceptable in the realm of copyrights and patents, as they are grants given to authors by the public under specific conditions, etc. That is, there is a quid pro quo in which the public temporarily, conditionally and partially surrenders its right to freely copy and disseminate works but expects that authors will only be permitted to use the legal system against pirates as no technology is capable of discriminating between functionally identical fair, public domain and illegal uses.
If you pursued this line of reasoning (which is not half bad) then by implementing such a system, the copyright holders would themselves be commiting an abuse of copyright, risking its revocation.
It would be easier if the Congress would do its job properly and simply write into law the requirement that copyrights grants have such strings attached.
There is a long-standing judicial 'fair use' doctrine, which comparatively recently was generally codified into law by the Congress. However, although the Congress is capable of significantly enlarging (or negating the need for, by reducing copyrights themselves) fair use, it cannot move against the courts and eliminate it.
Section 17 of the US Code is basically where you're going to find actual copyright laws. Cornell University has a nice database on the web.
Well to be a bit more specific, the mp3 is also a physical object, and being digital is entirely besides the point - paper books are also digital in nature.
What you're trying to say really is that there is a difference between a physical medium into which a work is fixed (e.g. a record bearing a copy of a copyrighted arrangement of notes in the form of a sound wave) and the work itself, which is intangible and copyable independent of the fixed form (e.g. the arrangement itself, which could just as easily go onto a CD, or be rearranged for an orchestra)
The funny thing is that in Akira, Tokyo is destroyed twice, and in Evangelion the actual Tokyo is flooded in 2000 by the melting of the Antarctic ice pack, and the city the Angels are attacking is a different Tokyo, a new city built up in the mountains. (Tokyo is actually in a plain; Tokyo-2 is the civilian replacement, Tokyo-3 the Nerv replacement)
But yeah, it's just the matchstick city, you know. Maybe 'cos the US more or less leveled it with firebombing in the war?
Of course, that could also partially be b/c that ship belonged to a Queen who already spends a lot of time on fashion. And for a non-militaristic planet that couldn't defend against an embargo and invasion without the writer saving the day, the fighters look about right as a ceremonial thing. Bright and shiny and never really used much.
Han Solo couldn't give a womp rat's ass - it probably helps him the more his ship looks like a piece of crap. (because who would expect it to perform like it does, at least when it's working properly) Things like the pods also had the same cobbled together, who cares what it looks like if it works style.
The more military vessels were fairly similar though - the interiors of the Star Destroyers and Death Star were not far off from the interiors of the Trade Federation ships, and both looked relatively functional but wierd.
It's kind of impractical to both move out all the nuclear waste (which isn't just glow-in-the-dark goo, but also includes the chambers used to store the goo, up to very large portions of entire buildings) load it onto enough rockets to get it into space at all (without accidents, as you note) and then have those rockets be so powerful as to be able to transfer into an orbit that intersects the sun, which is not an easy task. (the last thing we sent into that neighborhood had to get a gravity assist from Jupiter, if I remember properly)
I'd call it an urban legend alright.
No, BSD is more restrictive than the public domain. There will be *no* license when the term expires, none at all, and none will be necessary. Anyone can use it, for any purpose, in whole or in part. Copyright just doesn't exist for it anymore. Of course, the various moneyed interests that have copyrights coming up to their expiration (notably Disney with their copyright on the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, which will bring down their trademark on that character) keep successfully bribing Congress to extend terms retroactively.