"I was obsessed with dinosaurs for a few years when I was a kid, but haven't dug into them in any depth since then... this kind of discussion churns up memories of sitting in a dim corner of the library, poring over books that were way over my head."
This pretty much describes me, although the interest in extinct life forms rather than dinosaurs in particular has stayed with me (it is not however my profession). It's interesting to note that there have been several mass extinctions throughout the Earth's history, some of which were far more devastating than the so-called "KT event" (e.g. the Permian extinction, knows as P-TR (Permian-Triassic), which palaeontologists call "the Great Dying", and vacated a number of ecological niches that dinosaurs would later fill), yet these don't seem to draw anything like as many crackpot theories as the one at the end of the Cretaceous, which at best ranks only third or fourth among extinction events in terms of severity and the time taken for life to recover. It should also be noted that this is far from the first claim that a disease was responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs, and it will be rejected for the same reasons that the others were, i.e. it fails to explain why so many forms of life that differed significantly from dinosaurs in biology and habitat also became extinct along with them.
"as for biting insects, this was a major new change."
We don't actually know that this was the case. Insect fossils are rare, and amber-bearing trees only go back (as far as we know) to the early Cretaceous, and ones as old as that are extremely rare (the majority of "amber fossils" are less than 30 million years old). Note also that Ixodoidea (the group that includes mites and ticks) go back at least as as far as the Devonian period, so it's very possible that parasitic forms evolved almost as soon as there were animals to carry them (many of today's insects and arachnids for example are subject to a variety of parasitic mites, so ectoparasites of this type didn't have to wait for more complex endoskeletal land animals animals to evolve -- indeed, many prey on plants). These creatures are known vectors for diseases that attack nearly a huge variety of life forms today, so it's probable that they also carried a number of them that affected both dinosaurs and the various other types of animal that inhabited their world.
NB: I agree with the rest of your post. Given the antiquity of most of the organisms that produce (rather than merely act as vectors for) diseases, any claim that a group of animals which survived alongside such pathogens for 130 million years hadn't evolved an extremely sophisticated immune system is absurd. Furthermore, as other posters have noted, the mass extinction that finally put paid to the dinosaurs (which had been declining in diversity and numbers for millions of years) wiped out around 70% of life on the planet, including creatures such as ammonites that lived in water and weren't related to dinosaurs (well, technically they were, but in the same way that we're related to squid if you go back far enough).
For this theory to hold water, we would therefore have to postulate vast swarms of super mosquitos that could both fly on land and swim to the depths of the oceans carrying a mortal disease that affected some plants, dinosaurs, and other specific sets of land animals, sea-going reptiles, pterosaurs, and ammonites (a cephalopod mollusc), but not crocodilians and most other reptiles, most mammals, birds, fish, or any other forms of cepahlopod mollusc despite the fact that they were closely related to ammonites.
The encryption isn't "older style". WMA 9.0 DRM is the variant supported by current versions of Windows Media Player and all non-Zune WMA personal music systems, whereas WMA 9.1 is Zune-specific, cannot be licensed by third parties, and can only be managed on a (Windows) computer using the special software supplied with Zunes. Unencrypted WMA files can be used by most players, including the iPod via the simple expedient of dragging and dropping them onto iTunes, which will automatically convert them to AAC or MP3 (depending on the way it's been set up).
NB: one major advantage of the Zune's 9.1 DRM is much more generous usage terms than most WMA 9.0 encrypted content. Stuff that's bought rather than rented can be burned to CD several times, so Zune owners who want to remove DRM can use the same method as iTunes, i.e. burn to an audio CD and then re-import as MP3, AAC, or unencrypted WMA.
"Lets assume larger animals usually have much longer life cycles."
Far from all dinosaurs were large though. Some species were no bigger than turkeys, and probably had a similar generational cycle.
"This might also help explain why smaller dinosaurs seemed to have lived on and were able to eventually evolve into birds."
Dinosaurs diverged from birds around a hundred million years before the dinosaurs themselves became extinct.
"It's also possible that mammals biology was different enough than dinosaurs that most parasites preferred to infect dinosaurs"
If that was the case, then it couldn't have been any of the diseases mentioned in the article, as all of those seem to have been notably successful at attacking mammals, and some also attack birds and reptiles. It's notable that all of these seem to have survived the prevalence of such pathogens, and the fact that these researchers have found them in cretaceous amber doesn't preclude them from having coexisted with the dinosaurs since their early origins, because bacteria, protozoans, nematodes, and insects to carry them were all around long before johnny-come-latelies such as dinosaurs.
I shall thus file this under "yet another weak attempt to explain dinosaur extinction by someone trying to make a name for themselves".
"and the Sauropods (Brachiasaur, Triceritops, etc)"
Triceratops wasn't a sauropod. Like other marginocephalians, it was a member of one of three orithischian (bird hipped) groups (the other two are threophora which includes armoured dinosaurs such as ankylosaurus and stegosaurus, and ornithopods such as the hadrosaurs). Sauropods were saurischian (lizard hipped), and are therefore more closely related to therapods than either are to the ornithischians.
"If it were so desirable, don't you think at least Microsoft employees would favor Zunes because they support WMA?"
Zunes aren't compatible with WMA 9.0 (PlaysForSure), so they can't use WMA content bought from online stores other that Microsoft's own Zune Store. As with Apple's DRM, MS won't license the Zune's WMA 9.1 to anyone else, so Zune content won't play on non-Zunes, and encrypted Windows media (audio and video) doesn't play on the Zune.
"Unfortunately we have fanboys that think they are the best and knockers that think they are worthless."
Fanboys and knockers tend to accrue around anything that attracts hobbists, not just computers and software. Cars, plastic modelling, train sets, audio visual equipment, cameras, musical instruments, sports, military vehicles and armaments, boats, fishing tackle, antiques, telescopes, and a whole host of others have a vocal minority of people who insist that something is the most perfect example of its type that has ever existed, while another equally vocal minority say insist that it's a crap fest of epic proportions which only exists because there are so many idiots with more money than sense.
"Linux was simply the first x86 Unix that supported the sort of hardware that people actually have rather than some Sun engineer's notion of what a PC should be."
This is true if of course one chooses to ignore Coherent and SCO Xenix (the original SCO, not the Caldera bunch who now own the name), both of which were available for IBM PCs and clones thereof in the early 1980s.
"Newspapers in Britain on par with the likes of the New York Post (eg. The Sun and The Daily Mail) are held in high regard"
Neither of those "newspapers" or their readers are held in high regard. "Sun reader" has been used as a synonym for "unthinking mouth-breathing idiot" since the 1970s, and it's main contribution to British culture was introducing "Page Three Girl" as a generic term for a witless bimbo (The Sun used to have a different topless model every day on it's third page, together with a small, patronising piece of text that described people with one CSE in anything as having both brains and beauty. This, together with various competitions that were heavily advertised on TV was, and may still be, its major selling point).
"Were web browsers considered difficult to develop?"
They pretty difficult to develop from scratch, hence the fact that Microsoft originally licensed code from Spyglass for use in early versions of Internet Explorer. Lest we forget, the original web browser was written on a NeXT cube, which had a set of libraries and development tools that were vastly more sophisticated than anything Netscape could take advantage of for their multi-platform code base in the early 1990s, and Microsoft's Windows libraries of the period also lacked anything resembling the sophisticated URL handling and rendering support that they have today. Anything's easy to develop when others have already supplied most of the required functionality in documented libraries, OS services, and readily available source code!
"If you want to base your dominance of the future market on developing software, at least make it difficult software, like an operating system."
The operating system that established Microsoft's dominance was MS-DOS, which was originally QDOS, something that, like the CP/M that inspired it, was written by one guy in a few weeks. Netscape was vastly more complex than either of those products on its own, and Netscape Corporation also added a variety of other components fairly quickly (not in release order: their own Java VM, a JavaScript interpreter for a language they designed, a mail and newsgroup reader, HTML editor, and a host of other bits and pieces). All of these were written to work with a variety of different operating systems and graphical rendering mechanisms.
"Microsoft saw Netscape as a way to undercut their desktop monopoly"
It was actually one of the big cheeses at Netscape Communications (I think it was Marc Andresson, but could be wrong) who publicly stated that Netscape made operating systems, and Windows in particular, irrelevant. Microsoft had shown little interest in the Internet up until that point (Gates said it was a fad in the original version of "the Road Ahead", although that bit was removed from subsequent reprints), but this put Netscape firmly in their sights as a potential threat that had to be neutralised, so they starting looking for ways to do so.
Note that at the time (1994 to 1995 if memory serves me, although it could have been slightly earlier or later), Netscape's statement didn't look anything like as bone-headed as they do in retrospect. The Internet was undergoing a rapidly mounting hype frenzy, and Netscape was the default gateway to it on nearly every platform, while Microsoft was a late entrant with an initially weak offering that wasn't a part of retail and upgrade Windows packages prior to Windows-98 (although it was included in the OEM-only Windows-95 OSR1 and OSR2). It wasn't until some time in 1999 that IE displaced Netscape as the dominant browser, so many people both inside and outside the IE industry thought that Netscape rather than MS would be the likely winners of this particular battle. Subsequent talks between MS and Netscape about dividing up the Internet between them (with MS having Windows, and NS everything else) indicate that Microsoft themselves doubted their ability to win for several years, so this wasn't just another case of the usual culprits (analysts) reading their tea leaves wrong.
"Which is something that was only achieved after they were defeated in the marketplace"
So the Apple-II. which had an open architecture (both hardware and software) long before IBM even had a prototype of their PC, came out after Apple had been defeated in the marketplace? Interesting...
"That isn't my words, I just switched Microsoft and Zune with Apple and iPod."
What I was really trying to point out was due to the fact that both the Zune management software and iTunes allow DRM protected music bought from their respective stores to be "burnt" to CD several times, neither of them actually tie anyone to either a particular player or piece of proprietary management software.
"ripping the CD will have the side effect of having annoying artifacts after recompression if you want to move the data to a untainted 'lossy' formats"
I already said this in my post. It's not an ideal situation, and it'd be much better if neither system used DRM, but both vendors are currently obliged to do so by certain media vendors. The bright light at the end of the tunnel is of course that more and more music copyright holders seem to be getting the message that consumers don't like DRM, so one can only hope that MS will follow Apple in offering DRM-free purchases from media companies who permit it, and that these unencumbered versions will be popular enough for the others to see that they can make more money without DRM than with it. Until that happens however, the fact that both Apple and MS do at least provide a work-around for people who want to use DRM encumbered music bought from them on an unsupported OS or player should be welcomed by owners or potential owners of either system.
"If you buy music to play it on your iPod (if you even had one, that is), you won't be able to play them anywhere else on that format, right ?"
I assume by this you mean DRM music bought from the iTunes store (not everything purchased from it has DRM), in which case, apart from one of five simultaneously authorised Windows or Mac computers, Apple TV devices, iPhones, iPods, and any device capable of playing a standard audio CD or copying tracks from it to a computer (playlists can be burned to CD up to seven times, and Apple DRM songs can be burned an infinite number of times by deleting one playlist and including them in a different one each time the limit for a specific playlist is reached), then no, you can't play them anywhere else.
"Well if this is the case, and given that not all users know how to convert music from format to another, do customers have to buy the same music multiple times"
Those users who are incapable of finding and starting the iTunes Help, selecting the third entry down ("Create playlists and burn CDs"), and following a set of simple step-by-step instructions may well end up buying content several times. This is because people who write even GUI-based computer operating systems usually expect their customers to be marginally literate, and familiarise themselves with a few basic operational techniques such as clicking on menus, and using the one that says "Help" when they don't know how to do certain things. Individuals who don't fit into both of these categories but still buy and attempt to use computers are modern examples of the old adage about fools, money, and the ease of parting one from the other.
"Anyhow, the answer is that the DRMed files will only work with the Zune software suite and the Zune."
The Zune management software also allows songs bought from the Zune Marketplace to be burned to an audio CD up to seven times, but not those obtained through a Zune Pass (which are bulk rented rather than bought, so you have to buy anything you like enough to want on a CD). Note that this restriction is on a per song rather than per playlist basis, but for most purposes it's equivalent, so Zune DRM music can be converted to MP3 or whatever for use under a non-Windows OS or with other players via the same set of steps required for removing the DRM from protected iTunes store content (burn to audio CD, import as an MP3 file, with a reduction in quality due to two lossy formats being used). This makes the Zune a better and more consistent platform for those who want an albeit somewhat circuitous route to other operating systems and players than PlaysForSure, where restrictions are set by individual vendors, so one doesn't necessarily know precisely what they until after an item is paid for and downloaded.
"the 'original' fair use, though, dealt with quotations"
Quotations, satire, criticism etc. were among the exceptions that I was referring to as others we weren't discussing at the moment, mainly because they are generally fragments of a copyrighted work that are included in another work, so even without the fair use provisions, they would fall under the category of derivative works rather than being the actual copies that are the subject of the discussion.
"I said that you could be prosecuted for making those copies. I didn't discuss whether someone would be convicted or not, what defenses they'd have, etc."
It's actually very rare for people to be prosecuted in the criminal sense unless they're involved in commercial counterfeiting, i.e. producing and / or selling copies that resemble the authorised ones. Most other sorts of copyright infringement are civil matters where the copyright holder sues for infringement, so the "bar of proof" is lower than would be the case in a criminal prosecution (preponderance of evidence rather than guilt beyond a reasonable doubt). This is why most cases end up being settled before they go to litigation, and are therefore rarely reported because they aren't matters of public record, and it's common for such settlements to have confidentiality agreements that prevent either side from revealing the details to third parties.
"I don't doubt that it would be infringing (I recall cases along these lines), but merely whether it would be distribution if it was purely internal. Easier to argue reproduction."
Distribution is supplying copies (or broadcasting) to third parties, although this is of course subject to any additional permission that may be obtained from the copyright holder (e.g. site licenses, Internet age open source licenses such as the GPL which don't class internal corporate copying as distribution, etc.). Every company employee or visitor to its premises counts as a party for copyright purposes because they do not normally reside at those premises, so making copies that can be read / listened to / viewed / run etc. by more than one of those parties at the same time counts as distribution, not reproduction/in the case of unauthorised broadcasting / re-broadcasting to third parties, reproduction need not even be involved as a step in the infringement process) . Premises are defined as distinct postal addresses, so apartment blocks etc. don't count as a single premises for copyright purposes
"I don't recall that to be the case. The royalties may be exceedingly small at times, but I don't recall any that can be zero. Could you provide a cite?"
Yes:
17 USC 119 (a) (15) (D) : "Royalty fees. -- Notwithstanding subsection (b)(1)(B), a satellite carrier whose secondary transmissions of the primary transmissions of a low power television station are subject to statutory licensing under this section shall have no royalty obligation for secondary transmissions to a subscriber who resides within 35 miles of the transmitter site of such station,..."
This excellently written piece of satire obviously went right over the heads of quite a few Slashdotters, who seem have trouble understanding anything more complex or subtle than "m$ sux, ballmer throze charze and darnsis lyk a munki, lol, linux roolz".
"You can even be criminally prosecuted for making 5,000 copies with no intention to distribute them (and where you never do)"
That's because fair use copying exemptions would regard 5,000 complete copies (or for that matter 50) on a small number of sites as being excessive and unnecessary for the purposes of those exemptions, i.e. archiving or backing up (note that I realise there are other types of exemptions, but we aren't currently discussing those).
"But if you never reveal to anyone else what you've done, you are simply more likely to get away with it, is all."
Indeed. If there's no distribution, then copyright holders are unlikely to know that there's been any infringement. However, if they did find out somehow (e.g. somebody reports you for one of those Federation Against Software Theft rewards), it would be very difficult to argue that one had expended significant amounts of time and money making large numbers of copies without intending to distribute them
"Copying is reproduction, a different flavor of infringement"
Indeed, although as you have said, under US copyright law at least (as I wrote previously, some places such as the UK prohibit any form of copying without the copyright owner's permission) copying isn't always infringement. IMO the US laws are more reasonable in balancing consumer rights and those of copyright holders than those of some other countries, although I know many on Slashdot would disagree!
"As for the distribution aspect of that, within an organization, it seems iffy. Certainly possible, but not open and shut."
It's not at all iffy, because companies are by definition organisations that exist to make a profit, so any copying (internal or otherwise) falls under the "for profit" heading, and a fair number of them have been sued for either making unauthorised copies of works, or "publishing" them on internal networks, although most seem to settle out of court because it's less expensive than fighting a possibly protracted legal battle, so it's not clear whether any precedents have been set or not. Congress has however produced a written opinion that in the case of corporate libraries, in the absence of any copyright holder licensing agreements to the contrary, making a single copy of a work for use in a library does not constitute infringement, but more than one copy for library use, or any copies for non-library purposes that do not fall under fair use and compulsory license provisions do count as infringements (those that have applicable compulsory licenses may also constitute infringement if a company doesn't make a good faith effort to pay appropriate statutory royalties to copyright holders or a representative body acting on their behalf).
"But you said that some compulsory licenses had no royalty"
Read what I wrote again, because I quite clearly said that statutory royalties for _some_ compulsory licenses may be zero or very small _for certain types of usage_ (primarily, but not exclusively ones that don't derive any direct or indirect profits from a work). This is not the same as a compulsory license itself having no royalties.
"Distribution infringements are just another kind of infringement; there is nothing magic about them."
Distribution (or the obvious intent to do so, e.g. having 5,000 copies of a work in fake packaging sitting in boxes) is what will usually end up with people getting prosecuted, so I'd say there is something rather magical about them, at least in the legal sense.
"USC 117 copies, which may be lawfully made without authorization by parties that qualify under 117, and which may be distributed without authorization as well pursuant to both sections.)"
Section (b) of USC 117 says the following:
"Lease, sale, or other transfer of additional copy or adaptation. Any exact copies prepared in accordance with the provisions of this section may be leased, sold, or otherwise transferred, along with the copy from which such copies were prepared, only as part of the lease, sale, or other transfer of all rights in the program. Adaptations so prepared may be transferred only with the authorization of the copyright owner."
The last sentence of this clause quite clearly states that, contrary to your claim, copies made under 117 cannot be distributed _in any way_ without permission from the copyright holder.
"Shame on you for not knowing that there is an exception to that exception! First sale does apply, in full force, to console games, as well as to software that is ordinarily uncopyable (if there is such a thing). Take a look at 17 USC 109(b)(1)(B) for the details."
(B)(ii) actually says "a computer program embodied in or used in conjunction with a limited purpose computer that is designed for playing video games and may be designed for other purposes."
So it isn't actually console games that are exempt, but games that run on devices specifically designed for games and _nothing else_, which isn't the case with any of the current generation of consoles (even the hand-held ones can do things other than running games).
Furthermore, the "cannot be copied" bit in clause (B)(i) is obviously intended to address embedded systems, so there is indeed "such a thing" as un-copiable software (in the sense that it can't be copied by anyone who doesn't have access to special equipment):
"a computer program which is embodied in a machine or product and which cannot be copied during the ordinary operation or use of the machine or product".
One can therefore happily sell, lease, rent, or lend TVs, washing machines, talking toy dinosaurs, cars, doorbells, and programmable industrial milling machines without having to worry about the copyrights to any firmware running on micro-controllers that may be inside them.
"I suppose so, but really, the analysis would hopefully not get that far; as Ray has mentioned lately, a prima facie element of distribution is that it is to the public; private distribution is not covered by the exclusive right in 106."
It doesn't have to be public. Certain types of what could be termed "private" distribution are also prohibited, e.g. copying for distribution within a company's premises.
"This is poorly worded at best. There are numerous exceptions, some of which are compulsory licenses. Generally, I'd define the latter to be the ones that have statutory royalties."
Nothing I wrote indicated that there weren't other types of exceptions. Furthermore, the term "compulsory license" is the one Title 17 uses for those that have statutory royalties, and do not therefore require explicit permission from copyright holders, which is precisely what I said. If you don't agree with the terminology used in the legislation itself, then I suggest you take it up with the people who wrote it rather than me.
"US copyright law is not extraterritorial, however, it is possible for persons outside of the US to affect things inside the US enough that we consider them to be subject to our jurisdiction."
This still does not change the fact that other countries have different copyright laws from those in the US, and as much as the RIAA an
"No on both counts. Copyright law prohibits unauthorized distribution of unlawfully made copies; unauthorizedly-but-lawfully-made copies are a-ok."
I'm afraid that it's you who is wrong, because fair use provisions for example permit copying for backup purposes and media / time shifting (i.e. they are legal copies), but any attempt to distribute such copies to others is illegal unless specific permission to do so is granted by the copyright holder (licenses such as Creative Commons and various opens source software licenses are specific grants of permission by copyright holders for the works that are released under them, i.e. they _authorise_ free distribution of copies under certain conditions). This is the crux of the case being discussed: the people who are being sued have fair use rights to copy music from a CD onto a computer for their own use in any format they choose, just as they'd be allowed to copy it to tape, but this does not mean they can distribute those _lawfully made copies_ to anyone else (in this case by putting them in a Kazaa shared folder).
Authorisation to make copies != authorisation to distribute copies.
"Also, you cannot rent, lease, or lend, most computer software or sound recordings without authorization, unless you're a non-profit library or school."
Section 109 of the US copyright act contains specific exemptions for _all_ sound recordings and computer software (not merely most of it), which unlike other types of copyrighted work that are subject to the "first sale" doctrine (the section specifically states that the sale of a copy is a transfer of rights to that copy, and the copyright owner therefore has no say in what the owner does with it), cannot be lent or leased _for profit_ without prior consent. One does not however have to be a school or library to lend them to others, because the law is very specific in stating that permission only has to be obtained if one is renting, leasing, or lending sound recordings or computer programs for commercial advantage, so lending your legally obtained copy to a friend is allowed. Libraries and education establishments have an additional exemption that permits charging a fee for lending such items (which may or may not be included in a general membership or education fee), although said fee is only allowed to cover reasonable costs, not make a profit.
Note also that US copyright law states all copyrighted works except computer software are subject to a series of compulsory licenses which only require payment of statutory royalties for certain types of usage (these vary depending on that usage, and may be zero or extremely small in some cases, e.g. non-profit performances of dramatic or musical works), with no prior permission from the copyright holder being required.
NB: Despite the fact that some organisations act as if US copyright laws apply everywhere, they don't, so things that are permitted in the US may be illegal elsewhere, and vice-versa.
"speaking strictly technically the vikings brought the language that is now English to England."
It was actually the Saxons who had the greatest influence on Old English rather than the Vikings, although there are some words and constructs in modern English that came from Old Norse.
"So English came from...Germany....sort of."
This is correct in that Saxons came from what is now called Germany, but the Vikings didn't (they were Nordics).
"Welsh, Irish and other Celtic languages are more English (as in from England) then English is."
The Celts were also invaders, so their language is no more "English" than that of other, later invaders who had a far greater influence on old, middle, and modern English (e.g. Romans, Saxons, Normans). The Beaker Culture was present in both Britain and Europe before the Celts arrived, the Henge builders predate them in Britain, and stone tools found in East Anglia indicate that Homo Erectus was present in England around 700,000 years ago, so there were probably lots of successive waves of "human" migrants whose languages (for those that had languages) have a better claim to being called "English" than the Celts, who only dominated the country for around 500 years before the Romans took over. Contrast this with the Henge builders, who were the dominant culture for a significantly longer period than the one between the Celts arriving in Britain and the present day!
NB: there are few Celtic-derived words remaining in the English language that aren't toponyms (place names, which themselves often include words that the Celts "borrowed" from Roman Latin, e.g. "coln" and "caster" in Lincoln and Lancaster are "Celticisms" of "colonia" and "castra", which the Celts changed to "ceaster"). This wasn't the case with early Anglo Saxon, which adopted a fair number of Celtic terms, but they rapidly fell into disuse, and had disappeared from the language some time before the Normans arrived. Ones that we now use such as "loch", "cairn", "bog", "slogan", and "crag" actually re-entered the language from Welsh and Scots Gaelic during the 16th and 17th centuries rather than being part of a common Celtic linguistic heritage in English itself, while some others were borrowed (albeit in a degraded form) from Romance languages during the Renaissance.
"Makes you wonder why they haven't gone after libraries for "making available" yet..."
Copyright law prohibits distributing unauthorised copies, not lending, leasing, selling, or giving away works in their original published form. Libraries are not therefore doing anything illegal by lending copyrighted works on their original media, something you or I can also do if we choose without contravening any copyright laws (we can also sell or give away our original copies, although the music industry in particular would love to make that practice illegal. Unfortunately for them, other types of copyright holders also have powerful political lobby groups, and prohibiting resale of 2nd. hand works would have a dramatic negative impact on their bottom line).
" it seems to me,if we can build virtualization tools for Linux that can allow me with VERY little trouble to run an entire Windows OS and have it interact with the host OS in real time, then surely we can build something that allows me to run the stupid windows printer drivers the way I run those damned broadcoms."
You are assuming that the ability to do one thing proves that it's therefore possible to do something entirely different. Virtual machines of various types have existed since the 1950s because they're conceptually fairly simple, and the mainframe world has been virtualising operating systems for the best part of four decades because it isn't particularly difficult to do, especially when the ones being virtualised can already boot in a non-virtual way on the host hardware. Running software for one OS under an entirely different one is however (as the people who've been writing WINE will attest) a _much_ more difficult process, because one has to implement all the APIs that it interacts with on the other OS, something even Microsoft have trouble achieving between versions of their own operating systems despite having the entire source code to all of them, hence the fact that every new version of Windows "breaks" lots of software and drivers that ran perfectly well under the previous ones. If there was a simple solution to this problem, then one of the people with a deeper knowledge of both Windows and Linux than you or I would have already implemented it, just like somebody already implemented ndiswrapper to cope with some types of Winmodems.
"If there was only some way to virtualize printer drivers,she and a lot of folks who know almost nothing about the pc and have even less money could have a safe and reliable OS."
The only possible solution to this would be WINE or a similar Windows API layer for Linux, because (as I've said repeatedly) cheap all-in-one printers use the Windows API and Windows fonts to handle things that less crappy hardware does for itself. However, the fact that few if any drivers for printers bought a year ago will work under Windows Vista means that the chances of them running under WINE are minimal at best.
"I firmly believe that ultra cheap pc's like the everex will end up taking over the granny and joe sixpack crowd,if only we can figure out a way to get those damned printers to work.I've never had any trouble getting any other piece of hardware running,but those damned printers end up being the dealbreaker every time."
Software, irrespective of whether it's a driver or an application, is often a deal breaker both for Linux / OS X and newer versions of Windows won't run something people need to use. I don't think there'll ever be a guaranteed way of making those devices work with anything except the specific versions of Windows they were designed around unless their manufacturers decide that (for example) Macs become worth supporting, which will help with Linux due to the fact that OS X is conceptually far closer to it than either of them are to Windows. I wouldn't hold my breath though, because the fact that Macs are becoming much more common nowadays doesn't mean that those who buy them will want a cheap, slow, resource-intensive device that uses ludicrously overpriced refills when a few extra dollars gets something with much better performance and durability that's cheaper to run, and therefore costs the same amount (and quite frequently less) over its useful life.
Slashdot Mirror
"I was obsessed with dinosaurs for a few years when I was a kid, but haven't dug into them in any depth since then... this kind of discussion churns up memories of sitting in a dim corner of the library, poring over books that were way over my head."
This pretty much describes me, although the interest in extinct life forms rather than dinosaurs in particular has stayed with me (it is not however my profession). It's interesting to note that there have been several mass extinctions throughout the Earth's history, some of which were far more devastating than the so-called "KT event" (e.g. the Permian extinction, knows as P-TR (Permian-Triassic), which palaeontologists call "the Great Dying", and vacated a number of ecological niches that dinosaurs would later fill), yet these don't seem to draw anything like as many crackpot theories as the one at the end of the Cretaceous, which at best ranks only third or fourth among extinction events in terms of severity and the time taken for life to recover. It should also be noted that this is far from the first claim that a disease was responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs, and it will be rejected for the same reasons that the others were, i.e. it fails to explain why so many forms of life that differed significantly from dinosaurs in biology and habitat also became extinct along with them.
"as for biting insects, this was a major new change."
We don't actually know that this was the case. Insect fossils are rare, and amber-bearing trees only go back (as far as we know) to the early Cretaceous, and ones as old as that are extremely rare (the majority of "amber fossils" are less than 30 million years old). Note also that Ixodoidea (the group that includes mites and ticks) go back at least as as far as the Devonian period, so it's very possible that parasitic forms evolved almost as soon as there were animals to carry them (many of today's insects and arachnids for example are subject to a variety of parasitic mites, so ectoparasites of this type didn't have to wait for more complex endoskeletal land animals animals to evolve -- indeed, many prey on plants). These creatures are known vectors for diseases that attack nearly a huge variety of life forms today, so it's probable that they also carried a number of them that affected both dinosaurs and the various other types of animal that inhabited their world.
NB: I agree with the rest of your post. Given the antiquity of most of the organisms that produce (rather than merely act as vectors for) diseases, any claim that a group of animals which survived alongside such pathogens for 130 million years hadn't evolved an extremely sophisticated immune system is absurd. Furthermore, as other posters have noted, the mass extinction that finally put paid to the dinosaurs (which had been declining in diversity and numbers for millions of years) wiped out around 70% of life on the planet, including creatures such as ammonites that lived in water and weren't related to dinosaurs (well, technically they were, but in the same way that we're related to squid if you go back far enough).
For this theory to hold water, we would therefore have to postulate vast swarms of super mosquitos that could both fly on land and swim to the depths of the oceans carrying a mortal disease that affected some plants, dinosaurs, and other specific sets of land animals, sea-going reptiles, pterosaurs, and ammonites (a cephalopod mollusc), but not crocodilians and most other reptiles, most mammals, birds, fish, or any other forms of cepahlopod mollusc despite the fact that they were closely related to ammonites.
You are correct. My post contained an unfortunate typo.
The encryption isn't "older style". WMA 9.0 DRM is the variant supported by current versions of Windows Media Player and all non-Zune WMA personal music systems, whereas WMA 9.1 is Zune-specific, cannot be licensed by third parties, and can only be managed on a (Windows) computer using the special software supplied with Zunes. Unencrypted WMA files can be used by most players, including the iPod via the simple expedient of dragging and dropping them onto iTunes, which will automatically convert them to AAC or MP3 (depending on the way it's been set up).
NB: one major advantage of the Zune's 9.1 DRM is much more generous usage terms than most WMA 9.0 encrypted content. Stuff that's bought rather than rented can be burned to CD several times, so Zune owners who want to remove DRM can use the same method as iTunes, i.e. burn to an audio CD and then re-import as MP3, AAC, or unencrypted WMA.
"Lets assume larger animals usually have much longer life cycles."
Far from all dinosaurs were large though. Some species were no bigger than turkeys, and probably had a similar generational cycle.
"This might also help explain why smaller dinosaurs seemed to have lived on and were able to eventually evolve into birds."
Dinosaurs diverged from birds around a hundred million years before the dinosaurs themselves became extinct.
"It's also possible that mammals biology was different enough than dinosaurs that most parasites preferred to infect dinosaurs"
If that was the case, then it couldn't have been any of the diseases mentioned in the article, as all of those seem to have been notably successful at attacking mammals, and some also attack birds and reptiles. It's notable that all of these seem to have survived the prevalence of such pathogens, and the fact that these researchers have found them in cretaceous amber doesn't preclude them from having coexisted with the dinosaurs since their early origins, because bacteria, protozoans, nematodes, and insects to carry them were all around long before johnny-come-latelies such as dinosaurs.
I shall thus file this under "yet another weak attempt to explain dinosaur extinction by someone trying to make a name for themselves".
"and the Sauropods (Brachiasaur, Triceritops, etc)"
Triceratops wasn't a sauropod. Like other marginocephalians, it was a member of one of three orithischian (bird hipped) groups (the other two are threophora which includes armoured dinosaurs such as ankylosaurus and stegosaurus, and ornithopods such as the hadrosaurs). Sauropods were saurischian (lizard hipped), and are therefore more closely related to therapods than either are to the ornithischians.
"If it were so desirable, don't you think at least Microsoft employees would favor Zunes because they support WMA?"
Zunes aren't compatible with WMA 9.0 (PlaysForSure), so they can't use WMA content bought from online stores other that Microsoft's own Zune Store. As with Apple's DRM, MS won't license the Zune's WMA 9.1 to anyone else, so Zune content won't play on non-Zunes, and encrypted Windows media (audio and video) doesn't play on the Zune.
"Unfortunately we have fanboys that think they are the best and knockers that think they are worthless."
Fanboys and knockers tend to accrue around anything that attracts hobbists, not just computers and software. Cars, plastic modelling, train sets, audio visual equipment, cameras, musical instruments, sports, military vehicles and armaments, boats, fishing tackle, antiques, telescopes, and a whole host of others have a vocal minority of people who insist that something is the most perfect example of its type that has ever existed, while another equally vocal minority say insist that it's a crap fest of epic proportions which only exists because there are so many idiots with more money than sense.
"What product, exactly speaking, does Nethack copy ?"
Rogue.
"Linux was simply the first x86 Unix that supported
the sort of hardware that people actually have rather than
some Sun engineer's notion of what a PC should be."
This is true if of course one chooses to ignore Coherent and SCO Xenix (the original SCO, not the Caldera bunch who now own the name), both of which were available for IBM PCs and clones thereof in the early 1980s.
"Newspapers in Britain on par with the likes of the New York Post (eg. The Sun and The Daily Mail) are held in high regard"
Neither of those "newspapers" or their readers are held in high regard. "Sun reader" has been used as a synonym for "unthinking mouth-breathing idiot" since the 1970s, and it's main contribution to British culture was introducing "Page Three Girl" as a generic term for a witless bimbo (The Sun used to have a different topless model every day on it's third page, together with a small, patronising piece of text that described people with one CSE in anything as having both brains and beauty. This, together with various competitions that were heavily advertised on TV was, and may still be, its major selling point).
"Were web browsers considered difficult to develop?"
They pretty difficult to develop from scratch, hence the fact that Microsoft originally licensed code from Spyglass for use in early versions of Internet Explorer. Lest we forget, the original web browser was written on a NeXT cube, which had a set of libraries and development tools that were vastly more sophisticated than anything Netscape could take advantage of for their multi-platform code base in the early 1990s, and Microsoft's Windows libraries of the period also lacked anything resembling the sophisticated URL handling and rendering support that they have today. Anything's easy to develop when others have already supplied most of the required functionality in documented libraries, OS services, and readily available source code!
"If you want to base your dominance of the future market on developing software, at least make it difficult software, like an operating system."
The operating system that established Microsoft's dominance was MS-DOS, which was originally QDOS, something that, like the CP/M that inspired it, was written by one guy in a few weeks. Netscape was vastly more complex than either of those products on its own, and Netscape Corporation also added a variety of other components fairly quickly (not in release order: their own Java VM, a JavaScript interpreter for a language they designed, a mail and newsgroup reader, HTML editor, and a host of other bits and pieces). All of these were written to work with a variety of different operating systems and graphical rendering mechanisms.
"Microsoft saw Netscape as a way to undercut their desktop monopoly"
It was actually one of the big cheeses at Netscape Communications (I think it was Marc Andresson, but could be wrong) who publicly stated that Netscape made operating systems, and Windows in particular, irrelevant. Microsoft had shown little interest in the Internet up until that point (Gates said it was a fad in the original version of "the Road Ahead", although that bit was removed from subsequent reprints), but this put Netscape firmly in their sights as a potential threat that had to be neutralised, so they starting looking for ways to do so.
Note that at the time (1994 to 1995 if memory serves me, although it could have been slightly earlier or later), Netscape's statement didn't look anything like as bone-headed as they do in retrospect. The Internet was undergoing a rapidly mounting hype frenzy, and Netscape was the default gateway to it on nearly every platform, while Microsoft was a late entrant with an initially weak offering that wasn't a part of retail and upgrade Windows packages prior to Windows-98 (although it was included in the OEM-only Windows-95 OSR1 and OSR2). It wasn't until some time in 1999 that IE displaced Netscape as the dominant browser, so many people both inside and outside the IE industry thought that Netscape rather than MS would be the likely winners of this particular battle. Subsequent talks between MS and Netscape about dividing up the Internet between them (with MS having Windows, and NS everything else) indicate that Microsoft themselves doubted their ability to win for several years, so this wasn't just another case of the usual culprits (analysts) reading their tea leaves wrong.
"Which is something that was only achieved after they were defeated in the marketplace"
So the Apple-II. which had an open architecture (both hardware and software) long before IBM even had a prototype of their PC, came out after Apple had been defeated in the marketplace? Interesting...
"That isn't my words, I just switched Microsoft and Zune with Apple and iPod."
What I was really trying to point out was due to the fact that both the Zune management software and iTunes allow DRM protected music bought from their respective stores to be "burnt" to CD several times, neither of them actually tie anyone to either a particular player or piece of proprietary management software.
"ripping the CD will have the side effect of having annoying artifacts after recompression if you want to move the data to a untainted 'lossy' formats"
I already said this in my post. It's not an ideal situation, and it'd be much better if neither system used DRM, but both vendors are currently obliged to do so by certain media vendors. The bright light at the end of the tunnel is of course that more and more music copyright holders seem to be getting the message that consumers don't like DRM, so one can only hope that MS will follow Apple in offering DRM-free purchases from media companies who permit it, and that these unencumbered versions will be popular enough for the others to see that they can make more money without DRM than with it. Until that happens however, the fact that both Apple and MS do at least provide a work-around for people who want to use DRM encumbered music bought from them on an unsupported OS or player should be welcomed by owners or potential owners of either system.
"If you buy music to play it on your iPod (if you even had one, that is), you won't be able to play them anywhere else on that format, right ?"
I assume by this you mean DRM music bought from the iTunes store (not everything purchased from it has DRM), in which case, apart from one of five simultaneously authorised Windows or Mac computers, Apple TV devices, iPhones, iPods, and any device capable of playing a standard audio CD or copying tracks from it to a computer (playlists can be burned to CD up to seven times, and Apple DRM songs can be burned an infinite number of times by deleting one playlist and including them in a different one each time the limit for a specific playlist is reached), then no, you can't play them anywhere else.
"Well if this is the case, and given that not all users know how to convert music from format to another, do customers have to buy the same music multiple times"
Those users who are incapable of finding and starting the iTunes Help, selecting the third entry down ("Create playlists and burn CDs"), and following a set of simple step-by-step instructions may well end up buying content several times. This is because people who write even GUI-based computer operating systems usually expect their customers to be marginally literate, and familiarise themselves with a few basic operational techniques such as clicking on menus, and using the one that says "Help" when they don't know how to do certain things. Individuals who don't fit into both of these categories but still buy and attempt to use computers are modern examples of the old adage about fools, money, and the ease of parting one from the other.
"Anyhow, the answer is that the DRMed files will only work with the Zune software suite and the Zune."
The Zune management software also allows songs bought from the Zune Marketplace to be burned to an audio CD up to seven times, but not those obtained through a Zune Pass (which are bulk rented rather than bought, so you have to buy anything you like enough to want on a CD). Note that this restriction is on a per song rather than per playlist basis, but for most purposes it's equivalent, so Zune DRM music can be converted to MP3 or whatever for use under a non-Windows OS or with other players via the same set of steps required for removing the DRM from protected iTunes store content (burn to audio CD, import as an MP3 file, with a reduction in quality due to two lossy formats being used). This makes the Zune a better and more consistent platform for those who want an albeit somewhat circuitous route to other operating systems and players than PlaysForSure, where restrictions are set by individual vendors, so one doesn't necessarily know precisely what they until after an item is paid for and downloaded.
"the 'original' fair use, though, dealt with quotations"
/in the case of unauthorised broadcasting / re-broadcasting to third parties, reproduction need not even be involved as a step in the infringement process) . Premises are defined as distinct postal addresses, so apartment blocks etc. don't count as a single premises for copyright purposes
..."
Quotations, satire, criticism etc. were among the exceptions that I was referring to as others we weren't discussing at the moment, mainly because they are generally fragments of a copyrighted work that are included in another work, so even without the fair use provisions, they would fall under the category of derivative works rather than being the actual copies that are the subject of the discussion.
"I said that you could be prosecuted for making those copies. I didn't discuss whether someone would be convicted or not, what defenses they'd have, etc."
It's actually very rare for people to be prosecuted in the criminal sense unless they're involved in commercial counterfeiting, i.e. producing and / or selling copies that resemble the authorised ones. Most other sorts of copyright infringement are civil matters where the copyright holder sues for infringement, so the "bar of proof" is lower than would be the case in a criminal prosecution (preponderance of evidence rather than guilt beyond a reasonable doubt). This is why most cases end up being settled before they go to litigation, and are therefore rarely reported because they aren't matters of public record, and it's common for such settlements to have confidentiality agreements that prevent either side from revealing the details to third parties.
"I don't doubt that it would be infringing (I recall cases along these lines), but merely whether it would be distribution if it was purely internal. Easier to argue reproduction."
Distribution is supplying copies (or broadcasting) to third parties, although this is of course subject to any additional permission that may be obtained from the copyright holder (e.g. site licenses, Internet age open source licenses such as the GPL which don't class internal corporate copying as distribution, etc.). Every company employee or visitor to its premises counts as a party for copyright purposes because they do not normally reside at those premises, so making copies that can be read / listened to / viewed / run etc. by more than one of those parties at the same time counts as distribution, not reproduction
"I don't recall that to be the case. The royalties may be exceedingly small at times, but I don't recall any that can be zero. Could you provide a cite?"
Yes:
17 USC 119 (a) (15) (D) : "Royalty fees. -- Notwithstanding subsection (b)(1)(B), a satellite carrier whose secondary transmissions of the primary transmissions of a low power television station are subject to statutory licensing under this section shall have no royalty obligation for secondary transmissions to a subscriber who resides within 35 miles of the transmitter site of such station,
This excellently written piece of satire obviously went right over the heads of quite a few Slashdotters, who seem have trouble understanding anything more complex or subtle than "m$ sux, ballmer throze charze and darnsis lyk a munki, lol, linux roolz".
"You can even be criminally prosecuted for making 5,000 copies with no intention to distribute them (and where you never do)"
That's because fair use copying exemptions would regard 5,000 complete copies (or for that matter 50) on a small number of sites as being excessive and unnecessary for the purposes of those exemptions, i.e. archiving or backing up (note that I realise there are other types of exemptions, but we aren't currently discussing those).
"But if you never reveal to anyone else what you've done, you are simply more likely to get away with it, is all."
Indeed. If there's no distribution, then copyright holders are unlikely to know that there's been any infringement. However, if they did find out somehow (e.g. somebody reports you for one of those Federation Against Software Theft rewards), it would be very difficult to argue that one had expended significant amounts of time and money making large numbers of copies without intending to distribute them
"Copying is reproduction, a different flavor of infringement"
Indeed, although as you have said, under US copyright law at least (as I wrote previously, some places such as the UK prohibit any form of copying without the copyright owner's permission) copying isn't always infringement. IMO the US laws are more reasonable in balancing consumer rights and those of copyright holders than those of some other countries, although I know many on Slashdot would disagree!
"As for the distribution aspect of that, within an organization, it seems iffy. Certainly possible, but not open and shut."
It's not at all iffy, because companies are by definition organisations that exist to make a profit, so any copying (internal or otherwise) falls under the "for profit" heading, and a fair number of them have been sued for either making unauthorised copies of works, or "publishing" them on internal networks, although most seem to settle out of court because it's less expensive than fighting a possibly protracted legal battle, so it's not clear whether any precedents have been set or not. Congress has however produced a written opinion that in the case of corporate libraries, in the absence of any copyright holder licensing agreements to the contrary, making a single copy of a work for use in a library does not constitute infringement, but more than one copy for library use, or any copies for non-library purposes that do not fall under fair use and compulsory license provisions do count as infringements (those that have applicable compulsory licenses may also constitute infringement if a company doesn't make a good faith effort to pay appropriate statutory royalties to copyright holders or a representative body acting on their behalf).
"But you said that some compulsory licenses had no royalty"
Read what I wrote again, because I quite clearly said that statutory royalties for _some_ compulsory licenses may be zero or very small _for certain types of usage_ (primarily, but not exclusively ones that don't derive any direct or indirect profits from a work). This is not the same as a compulsory license itself having no royalties.
"Distribution infringements are just another kind of infringement; there is nothing magic about them."
Distribution (or the obvious intent to do so, e.g. having 5,000 copies of a work in fake packaging sitting in boxes) is what will usually end up with people getting prosecuted, so I'd say there is something rather magical about them, at least in the legal sense.
"USC 117 copies, which may be lawfully made without authorization by parties that qualify under 117, and which may be distributed without authorization as well pursuant to both sections.)"
Section (b) of USC 117 says the following:
"Lease, sale, or other transfer of additional copy or adaptation. Any exact copies prepared in accordance with the provisions of this section may be leased, sold, or otherwise transferred, along with the copy from which such copies were prepared, only as part of the lease, sale, or other transfer of all rights in the program. Adaptations so prepared may be transferred only with the authorization of the copyright owner."
The last sentence of this clause quite clearly states that, contrary to your claim, copies made under 117 cannot be distributed _in any way_ without permission from the copyright holder.
"Shame on you for not knowing that there is an exception to that exception! First sale does apply, in full force, to console games, as well as to software that is ordinarily uncopyable (if there is such a thing). Take a look at 17 USC 109(b)(1)(B) for the details."
(B)(ii) actually says "a computer program embodied in or used in conjunction with a limited purpose computer that is designed for playing video games and may be designed for other purposes."
So it isn't actually console games that are exempt, but games that run on devices specifically designed for games and _nothing else_, which isn't the case with any of the current generation of consoles (even the hand-held ones can do things other than running games).
Furthermore, the "cannot be copied" bit in clause (B)(i) is obviously intended to address embedded systems, so there is indeed "such a thing" as un-copiable software (in the sense that it can't be copied by anyone who doesn't have access to special equipment):
"a computer program which is embodied in a machine or product and which cannot be copied during the ordinary operation or use of the machine or product".
One can therefore happily sell, lease, rent, or lend TVs, washing machines, talking toy dinosaurs, cars, doorbells, and programmable industrial milling machines without having to worry about the copyrights to any firmware running on micro-controllers that may be inside them.
"I suppose so, but really, the analysis would hopefully not get that far; as Ray has mentioned lately, a prima facie element of distribution is that it is to the public; private distribution is not covered by the exclusive right in 106."
It doesn't have to be public. Certain types of what could be termed "private" distribution are also prohibited, e.g. copying for distribution within a company's premises.
"This is poorly worded at best. There are numerous exceptions, some of which are compulsory licenses. Generally, I'd define the latter to be the ones that have statutory royalties."
Nothing I wrote indicated that there weren't other types of exceptions. Furthermore, the term "compulsory license" is the one Title 17 uses for those that have statutory royalties, and do not therefore require explicit permission from copyright holders, which is precisely what I said. If you don't agree with the terminology used in the legislation itself, then I suggest you take it up with the people who wrote it rather than me.
"US copyright law is not extraterritorial, however, it is possible for persons outside of the US to affect things inside the US enough that we consider them to be subject to our jurisdiction."
This still does not change the fact that other countries have different copyright laws from those in the US, and as much as the RIAA an
"No on both counts. Copyright law prohibits unauthorized distribution of unlawfully made copies; unauthorizedly-but-lawfully-made copies are a-ok."
I'm afraid that it's you who is wrong, because fair use provisions for example permit copying for backup purposes and media / time shifting (i.e. they are legal copies), but any attempt to distribute such copies to others is illegal unless specific permission to do so is granted by the copyright holder (licenses such as Creative Commons and various opens source software licenses are specific grants of permission by copyright holders for the works that are released under them, i.e. they _authorise_ free distribution of copies under certain conditions). This is the crux of the case being discussed: the people who are being sued have fair use rights to copy music from a CD onto a computer for their own use in any format they choose, just as they'd be allowed to copy it to tape, but this does not mean they can distribute those _lawfully made copies_ to anyone else (in this case by putting them in a Kazaa shared folder).
Authorisation to make copies != authorisation to distribute copies.
"Also, you cannot rent, lease, or lend, most computer software or sound recordings without authorization, unless you're a non-profit library or school."
Section 109 of the US copyright act contains specific exemptions for _all_ sound recordings and computer software (not merely most of it), which unlike other types of copyrighted work that are subject to the "first sale" doctrine (the section specifically states that the sale of a copy is a transfer of rights to that copy, and the copyright owner therefore has no say in what the owner does with it), cannot be lent or leased _for profit_ without prior consent. One does not however have to be a school or library to lend them to others, because the law is very specific in stating that permission only has to be obtained if one is renting, leasing, or lending sound recordings or computer programs for commercial advantage, so lending your legally obtained copy to a friend is allowed. Libraries and education establishments have an additional exemption that permits charging a fee for lending such items (which may or may not be included in a general membership or education fee), although said fee is only allowed to cover reasonable costs, not make a profit.
Note also that US copyright law states all copyrighted works except computer software are subject to a series of compulsory licenses which only require payment of statutory royalties for certain types of usage (these vary depending on that usage, and may be zero or extremely small in some cases, e.g. non-profit performances of dramatic or musical works), with no prior permission from the copyright holder being required.
NB: Despite the fact that some organisations act as if US copyright laws apply everywhere, they don't, so things that are permitted in the US may be illegal elsewhere, and vice-versa.
"speaking strictly technically the vikings brought the language that is now English to England."
It was actually the Saxons who had the greatest influence on Old English rather than the Vikings, although there are some words and constructs in modern English that came from Old Norse.
"So English came from...Germany....sort of."
This is correct in that Saxons came from what is now called Germany, but the Vikings didn't (they were Nordics).
"Welsh, Irish and other Celtic languages are more English (as in from England) then English is."
The Celts were also invaders, so their language is no more "English" than that of other, later invaders who had a far greater influence on old, middle, and modern English (e.g. Romans, Saxons, Normans). The Beaker Culture was present in both Britain and Europe before the Celts arrived, the Henge builders predate them in Britain, and stone tools found in East Anglia indicate that Homo Erectus was present in England around 700,000 years ago, so there were probably lots of successive waves of "human" migrants whose languages (for those that had languages) have a better claim to being called "English" than the Celts, who only dominated the country for around 500 years before the Romans took over. Contrast this with the Henge builders, who were the dominant culture for a significantly longer period than the one between the Celts arriving in Britain and the present day!
NB: there are few Celtic-derived words remaining in the English language that aren't toponyms (place names, which themselves often include words that the Celts "borrowed" from Roman Latin, e.g. "coln" and "caster" in Lincoln and Lancaster are "Celticisms" of "colonia" and "castra", which the Celts changed to "ceaster"). This wasn't the case with early Anglo Saxon, which adopted a fair number of Celtic terms, but they rapidly fell into disuse, and had disappeared from the language some time before the Normans arrived. Ones that we now use such as "loch", "cairn", "bog", "slogan", and "crag" actually re-entered the language from Welsh and Scots Gaelic during the 16th and 17th centuries rather than being part of a common Celtic linguistic heritage in English itself, while some others were borrowed (albeit in a degraded form) from Romance languages during the Renaissance.
Spain produces more electricity than it consumes, so they wouldn't be a likely customer for excess French capacity.
"Makes you wonder why they haven't gone after libraries for "making available" yet..."
Copyright law prohibits distributing unauthorised copies, not lending, leasing, selling, or giving away works in their original published form. Libraries are not therefore doing anything illegal by lending copyrighted works on their original media, something you or I can also do if we choose without contravening any copyright laws (we can also sell or give away our original copies, although the music industry in particular would love to make that practice illegal. Unfortunately for them, other types of copyright holders also have powerful political lobby groups, and prohibiting resale of 2nd. hand works would have a dramatic negative impact on their bottom line).
" it seems to me,if we can build virtualization tools for Linux that can allow me with VERY little trouble to run an entire Windows OS and have it interact with the host OS in real time, then surely we can build something that allows me to run the stupid windows printer drivers the way I run those damned broadcoms."
You are assuming that the ability to do one thing proves that it's therefore possible to do something entirely different. Virtual machines of various types have existed since the 1950s because they're conceptually fairly simple, and the mainframe world has been virtualising operating systems for the best part of four decades because it isn't particularly difficult to do, especially when the ones being virtualised can already boot in a non-virtual way on the host hardware. Running software for one OS under an entirely different one is however (as the people who've been writing WINE will attest) a _much_ more difficult process, because one has to implement all the APIs that it interacts with on the other OS, something even Microsoft have trouble achieving between versions of their own operating systems despite having the entire source code to all of them, hence the fact that every new version of Windows "breaks" lots of software and drivers that ran perfectly well under the previous ones. If there was a simple solution to this problem, then one of the people with a deeper knowledge of both Windows and Linux than you or I would have already implemented it, just like somebody already implemented ndiswrapper to cope with some types of Winmodems.
"If there was only some way to virtualize printer drivers,she and a lot of folks who know almost nothing about the pc and have even less money could have a safe and reliable OS."
The only possible solution to this would be WINE or a similar Windows API layer for Linux, because (as I've said repeatedly) cheap all-in-one printers use the Windows API and Windows fonts to handle things that less crappy hardware does for itself. However, the fact that few if any drivers for printers bought a year ago will work under Windows Vista means that the chances of them running under WINE are minimal at best.
"I firmly believe that ultra cheap pc's like the everex will end up taking over the granny and joe sixpack crowd,if only we can figure out a way to get those damned printers to work.I've never had any trouble getting any other piece of hardware running,but those damned printers end up being the dealbreaker every time."
Software, irrespective of whether it's a driver or an application, is often a deal breaker both for Linux / OS X and newer versions of Windows won't run something people need to use. I don't think there'll ever be a guaranteed way of making those devices work with anything except the specific versions of Windows they were designed around unless their manufacturers decide that (for example) Macs become worth supporting, which will help with Linux due to the fact that OS X is conceptually far closer to it than either of them are to Windows. I wouldn't hold my breath though, because the fact that Macs are becoming much more common nowadays doesn't mean that those who buy them will want a cheap, slow, resource-intensive device that uses ludicrously overpriced refills when a few extra dollars gets something with much better performance and durability that's cheaper to run, and therefore costs the same amount (and quite frequently less) over its useful life.