Yes, but how much does Microsoft ADVERTISE that they are innovative. How many times do you think the word innovate shows up on www.microsoft.com?
What about the general public? From the people I have asked, they feel microsoft is innovative, they don't really know that they are just really good at copying/buying out other companies and using their innovations. Only the geeks really know whats going on with their 'innovations'.
I myself do not own a gun, I don't feel I need to. I think its great that we have a right to bear arms and all that, I just chose not to myself. Also, I hope my post is what you were referring to..
What I am really amazed at is this:
Gun manufacturers make a product, which people buy. Some people then take this product, and kill other poeple. The gun manufacturer has no liability in this at all, they continue to make guns, which end up killing people.
Software 'manufacturers' make a product. Lets say this is a p2p program, that is mainly used to transmit mp3's lets say of music that is copyrighted. This software is also used for legal purposes, trading person pictures or whatever. This product causes no sort of physical harm to any person whatsoever. The only sort of harm this particular product causes is the loss of some potential money some large corporation (RIAA). This product is going to be attacked by the lawyers of said corporation, and it will be shutdown. Just because they are 'predicting' the loss of sales. No actual sales have been lost, as they have no way to put a figure on that. Who knows if johnny would have bought that cd if he didn't download it.
Anyway, I guess I find it funny that im better off making weapons that kill people then I am making software that could have potential copyright issues.
Here is another example of computer 'crime' and the law which really scares me:
This guy put the distributed.net client on 7 machines at his university. He is now being charged with computer tresspassing, and faces a maximum of 120 years in jail. I am really amazed that a victimless crime such as that would carry a large penalty.. life in prison. Does that person deserve life in prison?
Now here is someone I can trust when they say this. I am a bit suprised as to why kazaa stated that they couldn't bring the servers down, if they could be. What happened 3 months ago to warrant the change?
Their stance right now is that it is too late. XX Million people have downloaded it, and they can run it with no central servers. Quotes from the article:
"Our software can't disappear, it is already out there" said KaZaa's lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm.
That statement is not totally true, though, as KaZaa has shown that it has the power to disable older versions of its software remotely. But the company is using another tactic that they hope will allow them to remain open.
Now from that, it looks like they can disable older versions of the client. (this leads me to believe that they do have some sort of check that can be done when someone logs into kazaa) The other tactic they talk about is a legal tactic, and about how they have to comply with some older order that was placed on them.
Now, my biggest confusion comes from the section above:
The company told the court two weeks ago that since the software did not rely on centralized servers, the service could not be shut down. Users had downloaded over 27 million copies of the program and they would be able to continue to trade even if the company folded.
Wouldn't they be getting themselves into A LOT more trouble if they told the courts that they could not shut the system down, when in fact they could?
Like I said before, I don't know this stuff, im only going from what I read about it. Also, has anyone (RIAA) contacted audio galaxy yet? I find that to be a much better service then napster was, im wondering if they have been hassled yet. Thanks for the reply though.
It could be bullshit, you dont work for kazaa, and I dont work for kazaa. I doubt you have looked at the system enough to give a definate answer, and I know that I have not. This is what I have read about the system, and from what Kazaa told the courts, they can't shut the system down.
Do you have any links to support your theory? If you do please share. I am not saying your wrong, as I really dont know for a fact, so it might be your way, or the way kazaa states. I know that in the article that I read, kazaa stated that they couldn't bring the system down. Where can I find info about that otherwise?
By the way, if your going to call bullshit, back it up =)
No, the client doesn't actually. They could take their servers down, and we could still trade files. I think the servers that they have up only give you the news on the front page when you start the program up. The actual searching of files uses supernodes (if you have broadband, kazaa, morpheus, etc will enable your machine as a supernode, pretty much indexes what people have shared, and my computer will be one of the machines that does the search when someone searches for something).
1) Since I have ZERO knowledge of FF (did watch the movie tho, and it's below my expection), I dont know which one I should start with. Should I start with FFX, or is there any chronological order to the series (Ultima comes to mind).
The final fantasy series really does not carry a story between them. Its almost like 'the final fantasy' for different worlds. You really aren't going to miss anything if you start with FFX.
a) Story
I myself liked the first final fantasies (US FF1-3). The stories in the newer games are pretty good, I will explain why I do not like them though later.
d) Total enjoyment / amount of time needed to beat game. (Important ratio for someone with little free time)
Once again, the first final fantasies were my favorite. When final fantasy 7 came out (the first playstation version of final fantasy) the game turned more into an interactive movie. The story was very linear, and it was so bad, that there were points where I was not told where I was supposed to go, but after just randomly talking to people, I would find my way fairly easily. (this is because that game really didn't give you many options for 'exploring', you were kinda forced to go in a certain direction).
The battle scenes in the new final fantasies are not fun. (note, I have not played 10, and I have heard this has changed a bit) FF7-9 use the random battle system, where every 4 steps you take, you have to fight something. This gets really annoying after a while. FF7 and 8 had a big problem where some of the special attacks during battle take forever, and you are forced to watch it everytime. I am sure its in 7, I THINK 8 had the problem too but not sure. I have heard they have changed his with 10, so it might not be as bad.
Now, I myself love the older final fantasies, so I am a bit skewed in my opinion on these games. I really think square is going in a bad direction lately with these games. They now have a huge amount of media to store movies, cut scenes, and things like that, and their focus is a lot on graphics now, and not 'fun'. I bought FF7, 8, and 9, and the story did not keep me playing the game, and I usually gave up fairly early on in the game..
Another thing I really didn't like much about the newer final fantasies was that the armor and weapons you have usually are tied to you thru out the whole game, and you use certain powerups to make them stronger. I love rpgs where you go explore, find a new town, and visit the armor/weapon shop, and get new stuff for your characters. Then going out battling some to get some more cash if need be, but I haven't been able to do that sort of stuff since FF3.
All in all, try some of the older final fantasies with an emulator, FF10 is probably going to be some fun, but I am going to keep a real good eye out for a crappy story and great graphics.
And I can say that FFX is probably ALOT better then summoner. Square still is a great company that has put out some great games, so you will probably not be disappointed.
Atlas seems to be relying upon this new Intel chipset and the Mckinley processor (one of intels new 64bit processors). This new chipset will support hotswapping it sounds like, and any motherboard maker that would use that chipset, would make sure that the slots could do that. So yes you do need a special mobo, but it wont be available for a while.
I was pretty impressed when Gandalf and Bilbo were talking after the birthday party, and Bilbo accused Gandalf of trying to take the ring, and Gandalf used a real powerful sounding voice which really hinted early on that this guy is pretty powerful. I thought a lot of the 'galdalf humor' in the movie was pretty good, it makes him out to be more of a lovable wizard like he is in the book, but fitting that in 3 hours.
I really think that if anyone goes and sees the movie, and has not read the book, to READ THE BOOKS!! There really is a lot 'missing' from the movie, and I mean that in a way that does not put the movie down whatsoever. Name me a movie/book combo where the movie gives you more info then the book does.. its impossible. I think it really helps to have read the books though before seeing it, as pretty much every scene put a big smile on my face as I remembered reading that part in the book.
Yea, I agree completely. Not that it is really bad or anything, but anytime that guy talks in any movie in the future, im going to remember him from the matrix. Just the way he moves his mouth or something.. He did a great job though.
I noticed them right off the bat when they were in the boats. I was a *little* bit disappointed that it went right to that scene, as I thought Gimli's comments and the whole part about them all getting these parting gifts from the elves was a real good part in the book.
Ahh well, in my opinion its hands down the best movie I have ever seen, it was really amazing to actually get to see some of the things that I had only imagined about when reading LotR.
I really liked the water part, when it turned into running horses, also the fireworks at the beginning were great also. The nazgul(sp?) were very well done, scary bunch of folk as they should be. They were really creepy looking when Frodo looked at them with the ring on.
The one I saw had a chick in it, didn't seem like a sargent or anything, very spy like.
I read a story on it and it was some guy from a school doing a project. I think what your talking about is similar but a different commercial. It has been a while since I saw it though..
I think the only time I saw when adcritic took down an ad, was when apple asked to take down the fake apple ad. The ad was some people meeting in some barn or something, and one of them handed the other a briefcase full of money, and in return they got an apple g4, they then put it in their car and killed the other guys or something. Been a while since I saw it, I thought it was a great ad, but it ended up being a project that some student did in california I think.
I still think its too bad, I loved to be able to show someone an ad I saw the other day on tv, its pointless to tell them to watch the same channel, as they probably wont see the ad again, unless its run a lot. Ive seen some company websites that have their ads from tv as downloadable movie files (the one I am thinking of is gap.com.. if yer wondering why i was at gap, it was for that angus commercial with the chick playin the guitar). Anyway, too bad to see them go, I hope something else comes along that is similar..
Ensemble Studios is a great development house. AoE2 was tested by them for insane amounts of time, during that process, it was a requirement for every employee to help playtest the games, even the janitors. There was a good article about them a while back in Game Developer Magazine. I could almost consider the game to be bug free, as well as a blast to play.
Lets say I have 5 Asheron Call accounts. With this new passport system, I have 2 choices when it comes to how I can manage those accounts with passport.
Choice 1:
I can create (or use existing) 5 seperate email accounts. I would set each AC account up to a seperate passport account. This will let me log into the game with each account at the same time.
Choice 2:
I can make a single passport account, and link all 5 accounts to the passport account. The problem here is that you can only have 'one' active at a time. So, someone that had 5 accounts, and if they did this, they reclaimed each of their zone names and the last one they did, is the active account. If he wants to change the account, he has to reclaim one of his other names that are in his 'inactive' list.
The problem I see with choice 2 is that they are turning 5 seperate accounts, with x amount of character slots, to 1 single account with x * 5 character slots. If you chose the second choice, you can only log on the account and play the single active account.
Also, most of these people created new hotmail accounts to do this. They are going to have to make sure that they log into that hotmail account once every 60 days (it might be 90) to keep the email account active. If they dont, it will become disabled, and someone else can make another hotmail account with the same name.
Ive seen download accellerator connect to a single ftp site multiple times. I think it does this when it cant find any mirrors. But, ive even seen that help.
Lets say that for a single connection, and ftp site has the bandwidth throttled for 5k a sec. With download accellerator, I can connect up to the server 5 times, and each 5 connections seems to get its own 5k a sec, so 25k total.
But, I got mad at how these programs will sometimes come up when downloading something, and sometimes the default browsers download window will come up. Ive just gone back to using whats within the browser..
Yea, there is someone here at work who has a Honda Insight, he has had it for about a month or so. Ugly lookin car but its a hybrid, would love ot have one.
From what I have looked at, Tivo has patents dealing with the physical hardware and transport of movie files that get recorded to a hard disk.
Replaytv has patents that are pretty similar, but they focus more on the channel guide, and how to record using it.
Tivo submitted their patents on this 8 days before replytv did. They got their patent awarded to them about 6 months prior to when Replaytv got their patents awarded to them.
From what I can see, they are both using each others ideas from the patents, BUT, tivo was there first.
Ah well, im not a lawyer, so I really dont know whos in the right here, but id side with Tivo.
When I tried this (WinME, IE6) it asked me to open/save. I chose open (hey its a work computer, I could care less if it breaks). After a few seconds, sound recorder came up and said that it was not a valid wave file.
Now, I think this will still work, maybe audio would have been a bad thing to set it as. Try that same thing but set the mime type as html/txt or whatever it was.
Ive thought about this for a bit, and I do not think you are right at all.
When you posted to USENET, you knew that the message you were typing was going to be copied to many many newsgroup servers out there. Im pretty sure when you did post that you didn't get any message that said this post will not be archived.
So, when you posted a message, it was copied to many many different servers. Back then, did they ask you if it was ok if they did this? No, it was part of the usenet system, and everyone that was using *should* know what is going to happen.
And anohter thing. Your second sentance "Those postings were made in the expectation that..."
Maybe your expectation was different then my expectation. Maybe I expected these posts to be here 15 years down the road. What im trying to get at, is its your fault for expecting something that wasn't explicitly said. Do you go to mcdonalds, and when you get your big mac meal, do you bitch because you EXPECTED a 5 star meal?
Now, when you get into this legality thing. Who said that those posts were part of a TEMPORARY DISTROBUTION? Who defines temporary. Maybe temporary means 30 years, maybe it means 10 seconds. Temporary is a relative term needs some more defining before labelling it as a 'set amount of time'. So, I wonder where you are getting this legally part from. I am not a lawyer myself, but I doubt if you were to say, "I EXPECTED this to be temporary" that would not get far in court.
This leads me to my last question. What on earth do you not want people to see? You know by asking this, us curious folks are gonna look you up just to see what your trying to hide. Anyway, I feel that you had made some bad assumptions back in the day, and you are mad that your assumptions did not turn out right. I may be wrong in all this, as I was not really posting to usenet until about 1990, so im not sure how they portrayed all this stuff prior to then. I can say when I posted in 1990 I didn't think that usenet would go away, and my posts would just disappear, I EXPECTED them to be there 10 years down the road. And they are =).
perhaps you can work on applying for that copyright in the meantime.
I am pretty sure that you dont apply for copyright, it just happens. So, if I create a song, and put it down someplace in some sort of form (on audio cassette, or written in musical notation) then it is copyrighted. You might actually have to put a copyright notice on the piece of information to make it copyrighted, but you dont have to 'apply' for it like you do a patent. I may be wrong though, im not a lawyer..
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but how much does Microsoft ADVERTISE that they are innovative. How many times do you think the word innovate shows up on www.microsoft.com?
What about the general public? From the people I have asked, they feel microsoft is innovative, they don't really know that they are just really good at copying/buying out other companies and using their innovations. Only the geeks really know whats going on with their 'innovations'.
What I am really amazed at is this:
Gun manufacturers make a product, which people buy. Some people then take this product, and kill other poeple. The gun manufacturer has no liability in this at all, they continue to make guns, which end up killing people.
Software 'manufacturers' make a product. Lets say this is a p2p program, that is mainly used to transmit mp3's lets say of music that is copyrighted. This software is also used for legal purposes, trading person pictures or whatever. This product causes no sort of physical harm to any person whatsoever. The only sort of harm this particular product causes is the loss of some potential money some large corporation (RIAA). This product is going to be attacked by the lawyers of said corporation, and it will be shutdown. Just because they are 'predicting' the loss of sales. No actual sales have been lost, as they have no way to put a figure on that. Who knows if johnny would have bought that cd if he didn't download it.
Anyway, I guess I find it funny that im better off making weapons that kill people then I am making software that could have potential copyright issues.
Here is another example of computer 'crime' and the law which really scares me:
The crime of distributed computing
This guy put the distributed.net client on 7 machines at his university. He is now being charged with computer tresspassing, and faces a maximum of 120 years in jail. I am really amazed that a victimless crime such as that would carry a large penalty.. life in prison. Does that person deserve life in prison?
Their stance right now is that it is too late. XX Million people have downloaded it, and they can run it with no central servers. Quotes from the article:
"Our software can't disappear, it is already out there" said KaZaa's lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm.
That statement is not totally true, though, as KaZaa has shown that it has the power to disable older versions of its software remotely. But the company is using another tactic that they hope will allow them to remain open.
Now from that, it looks like they can disable older versions of the client. (this leads me to believe that they do have some sort of check that can be done when someone logs into kazaa) The other tactic they talk about is a legal tactic, and about how they have to comply with some older order that was placed on them.
Now, my biggest confusion comes from the section above:
The company told the court two weeks ago that since the software did not rely on centralized servers, the service could not be shut down. Users had downloaded over 27 million copies of the program and they would be able to continue to trade even if the company folded.
Wouldn't they be getting themselves into A LOT more trouble if they told the courts that they could not shut the system down, when in fact they could?
Like I said before, I don't know this stuff, im only going from what I read about it. Also, has anyone (RIAA) contacted audio galaxy yet? I find that to be a much better service then napster was, im wondering if they have been hassled yet. Thanks for the reply though.
Zeno
It could be bullshit, you dont work for kazaa, and I dont work for kazaa. I doubt you have looked at the system enough to give a definate answer, and I know that I have not. This is what I have read about the system, and from what Kazaa told the courts, they can't shut the system down.
Do you have any links to support your theory? If you do please share. I am not saying your wrong, as I really dont know for a fact, so it might be your way, or the way kazaa states. I know that in the article that I read, kazaa stated that they couldn't bring the system down. Where can I find info about that otherwise?
By the way, if your going to call bullshit, back it up =)
Zeno
No, the client doesn't actually. They could take their servers down, and we could still trade files. I think the servers that they have up only give you the news on the front page when you start the program up. The actual searching of files uses supernodes (if you have broadband, kazaa, morpheus, etc will enable your machine as a supernode, pretty much indexes what people have shared, and my computer will be one of the machines that does the search when someone searches for something).
The final fantasy series really does not carry a story between them. Its almost like 'the final fantasy' for different worlds. You really aren't going to miss anything if you start with FFX.
a) Story
I myself liked the first final fantasies (US FF1-3). The stories in the newer games are pretty good, I will explain why I do not like them though later.
d) Total enjoyment / amount of time needed to beat game. (Important ratio for someone with little free time)
Once again, the first final fantasies were my favorite. When final fantasy 7 came out (the first playstation version of final fantasy) the game turned more into an interactive movie. The story was very linear, and it was so bad, that there were points where I was not told where I was supposed to go, but after just randomly talking to people, I would find my way fairly easily. (this is because that game really didn't give you many options for 'exploring', you were kinda forced to go in a certain direction).
The battle scenes in the new final fantasies are not fun. (note, I have not played 10, and I have heard this has changed a bit) FF7-9 use the random battle system, where every 4 steps you take, you have to fight something. This gets really annoying after a while. FF7 and 8 had a big problem where some of the special attacks during battle take forever, and you are forced to watch it everytime. I am sure its in 7, I THINK 8 had the problem too but not sure. I have heard they have changed his with 10, so it might not be as bad.
Now, I myself love the older final fantasies, so I am a bit skewed in my opinion on these games. I really think square is going in a bad direction lately with these games. They now have a huge amount of media to store movies, cut scenes, and things like that, and their focus is a lot on graphics now, and not 'fun'. I bought FF7, 8, and 9, and the story did not keep me playing the game, and I usually gave up fairly early on in the game..
Another thing I really didn't like much about the newer final fantasies was that the armor and weapons you have usually are tied to you thru out the whole game, and you use certain powerups to make them stronger. I love rpgs where you go explore, find a new town, and visit the armor/weapon shop, and get new stuff for your characters. Then going out battling some to get some more cash if need be, but I haven't been able to do that sort of stuff since FF3.
All in all, try some of the older final fantasies with an emulator, FF10 is probably going to be some fun, but I am going to keep a real good eye out for a crappy story and great graphics.
And I can say that FFX is probably ALOT better then summoner. Square still is a great company that has put out some great games, so you will probably not be disappointed.
Atlas seems to be relying upon this new Intel chipset and the Mckinley processor (one of intels new 64bit processors). This new chipset will support hotswapping it sounds like, and any motherboard maker that would use that chipset, would make sure that the slots could do that. So yes you do need a special mobo, but it wont be available for a while.
I was pretty impressed when Gandalf and Bilbo were talking after the birthday party, and Bilbo accused Gandalf of trying to take the ring, and Gandalf used a real powerful sounding voice which really hinted early on that this guy is pretty powerful. I thought a lot of the 'galdalf humor' in the movie was pretty good, it makes him out to be more of a lovable wizard like he is in the book, but fitting that in 3 hours.
I really think that if anyone goes and sees the movie, and has not read the book, to READ THE BOOKS!! There really is a lot 'missing' from the movie, and I mean that in a way that does not put the movie down whatsoever. Name me a movie/book combo where the movie gives you more info then the book does.. its impossible. I think it really helps to have read the books though before seeing it, as pretty much every scene put a big smile on my face as I remembered reading that part in the book.
Yea, in my opinion the final fantasy series has changed from rpgs to interactive movies after ff7 came out.
Yea, I agree completely. Not that it is really bad or anything, but anytime that guy talks in any movie in the future, im going to remember him from the matrix. Just the way he moves his mouth or something.. He did a great job though.
I noticed them right off the bat when they were in the boats. I was a *little* bit disappointed that it went right to that scene, as I thought Gimli's comments and the whole part about them all getting these parting gifts from the elves was a real good part in the book.
Ahh well, in my opinion its hands down the best movie I have ever seen, it was really amazing to actually get to see some of the things that I had only imagined about when reading LotR.
I really liked the water part, when it turned into running horses, also the fireworks at the beginning were great also. The nazgul(sp?) were very well done, scary bunch of folk as they should be. They were really creepy looking when Frodo looked at them with the ring on.
Zeno
The one I saw had a chick in it, didn't seem like a sargent or anything, very spy like.
I read a story on it and it was some guy from a school doing a project. I think what your talking about is similar but a different commercial. It has been a while since I saw it though..
Zeno
I think the only time I saw when adcritic took down an ad, was when apple asked to take down the fake apple ad. The ad was some people meeting in some barn or something, and one of them handed the other a briefcase full of money, and in return they got an apple g4, they then put it in their car and killed the other guys or something. Been a while since I saw it, I thought it was a great ad, but it ended up being a project that some student did in california I think.
I still think its too bad, I loved to be able to show someone an ad I saw the other day on tv, its pointless to tell them to watch the same channel, as they probably wont see the ad again, unless its run a lot. Ive seen some company websites that have their ads from tv as downloadable movie files (the one I am thinking of is gap.com.. if yer wondering why i was at gap, it was for that angus commercial with the chick playin the guitar). Anyway, too bad to see them go, I hope something else comes along that is similar..
Zeno
Why could I not use a firewire/usb burner?
I just hope things don't change for them since Microsoft bought Ensemble Studios.
Zeno
--------
"Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for this change to take effect."
And in other news, all the moderators of a website www.slashdot.org were arrested while they were smoking crack.
Actually its a bit different then that.
Lets say I have 5 Asheron Call accounts. With this new passport system, I have 2 choices when it comes to how I can manage those accounts with passport.
Choice 1:
I can create (or use existing) 5 seperate email accounts. I would set each AC account up to a seperate passport account. This will let me log into the game with each account at the same time.
Choice 2:
I can make a single passport account, and link all 5 accounts to the passport account. The problem here is that you can only have 'one' active at a time. So, someone that had 5 accounts, and if they did this, they reclaimed each of their zone names and the last one they did, is the active account. If he wants to change the account, he has to reclaim one of his other names that are in his 'inactive' list.
The problem I see with choice 2 is that they are turning 5 seperate accounts, with x amount of character slots, to 1 single account with x * 5 character slots. If you chose the second choice, you can only log on the account and play the single active account.
Also, most of these people created new hotmail accounts to do this. They are going to have to make sure that they log into that hotmail account once every 60 days (it might be 90) to keep the email account active. If they dont, it will become disabled, and someone else can make another hotmail account with the same name.
Ive seen download accellerator connect to a single ftp site multiple times. I think it does this when it cant find any mirrors. But, ive even seen that help.
Lets say that for a single connection, and ftp site has the bandwidth throttled for 5k a sec. With download accellerator, I can connect up to the server 5 times, and each 5 connections seems to get its own 5k a sec, so 25k total.
But, I got mad at how these programs will sometimes come up when downloading something, and sometimes the default browsers download window will come up. Ive just gone back to using whats within the browser..
Zeno
Yea, there is someone here at work who has a Honda Insight, he has had it for about a month or so. Ugly lookin car but its a hybrid, would love ot have one.
Zeno
From what I have looked at, Tivo has patents dealing with the physical hardware and transport of movie files that get recorded to a hard disk.
Replaytv has patents that are pretty similar, but they focus more on the channel guide, and how to record using it.
Tivo submitted their patents on this 8 days before replytv did. They got their patent awarded to them about 6 months prior to when Replaytv got their patents awarded to them.
From what I can see, they are both using each others ideas from the patents, BUT, tivo was there first.
Ah well, im not a lawyer, so I really dont know whos in the right here, but id side with Tivo.
Zeno
When I tried this (WinME, IE6) it asked me to open/save. I chose open (hey its a work computer, I could care less if it breaks). After a few seconds, sound recorder came up and said that it was not a valid wave file.
Now, I think this will still work, maybe audio would have been a bad thing to set it as. Try that same thing but set the mime type as html/txt or whatever it was.
Im just curious if, from the point your friends house caught on fire, until you die, any joke relating to fire would not be funny.
Ive thought about this for a bit, and I do not think you are right at all.
When you posted to USENET, you knew that the message you were typing was going to be copied to many many newsgroup servers out there. Im pretty sure when you did post that you didn't get any message that said this post will not be archived.
So, when you posted a message, it was copied to many many different servers. Back then, did they ask you if it was ok if they did this? No, it was part of the usenet system, and everyone that was using *should* know what is going to happen.
And anohter thing. Your second sentance "Those postings were made in the expectation that..."
Maybe your expectation was different then my expectation. Maybe I expected these posts to be here 15 years down the road. What im trying to get at, is its your fault for expecting something that wasn't explicitly said. Do you go to mcdonalds, and when you get your big mac meal, do you bitch because you EXPECTED a 5 star meal?
Now, when you get into this legality thing. Who said that those posts were part of a TEMPORARY DISTROBUTION? Who defines temporary. Maybe temporary means 30 years, maybe it means 10 seconds. Temporary is a relative term needs some more defining before labelling it as a 'set amount of time'. So, I wonder where you are getting this legally part from. I am not a lawyer myself, but I doubt if you were to say, "I EXPECTED this to be temporary" that would not get far in court.
This leads me to my last question. What on earth do you not want people to see? You know by asking this, us curious folks are gonna look you up just to see what your trying to hide. Anyway, I feel that you had made some bad assumptions back in the day, and you are mad that your assumptions did not turn out right. I may be wrong in all this, as I was not really posting to usenet until about 1990, so im not sure how they portrayed all this stuff prior to then. I can say when I posted in 1990 I didn't think that usenet would go away, and my posts would just disappear, I EXPECTED them to be there 10 years down the road. And they are =).
Zeno
perhaps you can work on applying for that copyright in the meantime.
I am pretty sure that you dont apply for copyright, it just happens. So, if I create a song, and put it down someplace in some sort of form (on audio cassette, or written in musical notation) then it is copyrighted. You might actually have to put a copyright notice on the piece of information to make it copyrighted, but you dont have to 'apply' for it like you do a patent. I may be wrong though, im not a lawyer..
Zeno
I know its not perfect, but if you dont want your posts on usenet to show up, you can ask google to take them down.
Im not sure why one would want to do this, as this archive is a great resource for all kinds of things. Is it better to have it there or not?