I don't really have a position on this debate, but this is patently false:
"For the record, Christianity has an equally terrifying concept: That God punishes the faithful for the sins of the unfaithful, thus making the sinner an existent threat to the Christian (and indeed, him/herself and all mankind). We see this in Sodom & Gomorrah and the Floods."
I'm not a Christian nor a Muslim, but there is no way that God punishing sinners is as terrifying a concept as men believing they are commanded by God to punish sinners.
In the former case, the worst that can happen is that we attribute natural disasters to God's will.
In the latter case, we have people blowing themselves up to kill other people.
Although I didn't like the outcome of this election, and in fact felt quite sick inside for a while, I have come to accept it and I've decided to try to nurture some hope that things won't be as bad as I thought they would be.
The responses to this particular Slashdot article are probably the best and most interesting I've ever read on Slashdot. And I've been here a *long* *time*.
I can fix everything that comes my way in Linux with enough time and effort. I can go all the way down to modifying kernel source and recompiling if necessary.
The thing is, I don't want to spend my time doing that. There was a time in the 90's when that was fun because it was a liberating feeling of having a level of control not afforded by other operating systems. But pretty quickly, it became a chore, when I had to keep fixing the same sorts of problems over and over again.
I agree that not being able to fix low level problems is a drawback of Windows and Mac OS X; however; major problems occur (on Mac OS X at least, Windows definitely is still quite a bit flakier) so rarely that the tradeoff is very, very worth it... for me.
I agree with you, Windows 10 is an abomination. It forces me to reboot on its schedule when it has updates to perform (it's literally told me "I'm going to reboot your computer in 1 hour to install updates), and I've missed/not noticed dialogs and had the thing just reboot itself on my while I was in the middle of work, which was lost. It also spends a significant part of my network bandwidth continuously loading updates.
I'd say every three or four reboots, it goes into a lengthy update process that takes minutes.
An operating system that forcefully reboots itself, without user control, and that takes minutes to boot up a significant percentage of the time, is in my opinion, fundamentally broken. I loathe Windows 10. I only use it because it's required on my VR PC at the moment, and probably always will be, because let's face it, Apple doesn't do a good job keeping up with high end graphics hardware (at a reasonable price), and Linux is completely hopeless when it comes to being an OS for the masses.
So I've been a Linux user since 1994, and it's been my primary development environment, and provided me a job, for 20+ years now, and for that I'm very thankful. I love developing on Linux.
That being said, I owned a succession of Linux laptops that never worked entirely correctly before I got my retina macbook pro in 2012. I'd say 25% of system updates to my Linux distro would break something, maybe a wireless driver would get flaky, maybe X11 would crap out in some new or unusual way, maybe the battery life would be bad because some kind of battery optimization would stop working. There were ALWAYS problems, it was like living with a finicky collector's automobile that you're spending as much time tinkering with to keep it running as you are actually driving it. A major source of problems with Linux was always sleep and hibernate modes, which were clunky to engage, slow to suspend and resume, and, if they worked, almost always had caveats (I don't know how many scripts I wrote that would switch to a virtual console away from X before suspend and then back again after resume, because X would so often just die if you suspended while it controlled the display).
Maybe things have improved, but I doubt it. On the other hand, this 2012 macbook pro has been a complete pleasure to use. EVERYTHING works correctly, I have never had a single problem of any kind with it. Tons of little details all work seamlessly together. I can close the lid and the thing sleeps, open it, and it wakes up. Never had a graphics problem or a driver problem of any kind.
Of course I know this is because the deck is stacked in favor of Apple, who own the entire stack from hardware through operating system and up through most software. But I don't care. Because it just works, and works so well.
That being said, I am very disappointed with the newest iteration of the macbook pro and I don't think I'll be buying one despite having assumed that I would, leading up to the actual announcement. I will just chug along with this 2012 rMBP. I will NOT switch back to Linux. I'll take a correctly functioning slower and older laptop over a fast and new machine filled with quirks and bugs.
What kind of stupidity does it take to not be able to tell the difference between humor and trolling? Who are the idiots on this site nowadays that downvote posts as "troll" just because they are too dumb to understand or appreciate them, or just don't agree with them?
Yeah I'm an old timer. I don't come to this site that often any more. But even more troubling than the slide to mediocrity of the story editing and selection (which happened in the mid-2000's by the way, and unfortunately never improved), is the increasing stupidity of the Slashdot readership. Or perhaps it's really just a part of the overall trend of this new generation not being able to handle any viewpoint they don't agree with without furious downvoting.
It may be more entertaining than men's soccer, if you're into soccer (I'm not), but it's hard for me to get past the fact that the best women's teams in the world (the ones that win the world cups and olympics and such) can be easily beaten by their own national under-17 boy's teams.
I don't know why exactly, but knowing that the people I am watching are only competitive in the sport because of gender segregation, takes some of the excitement away for me.
What could possibly motivate a hospital staff to open themselves up to negligence lawsuits just so that they could... what? Torture a patient for jollies? Or something?
Before you draw conclusions that fit your tinfoil hat world view, please just spend even the tiniest moment trying to reason out why any group of people would behave in a way that defies logic, before concluding that this is what they must have done.
A single person can do batshit crazy stuff, yes. But a group of professionals working in a hospital? Nope. Not going to happen. There may be some bending of rules, some I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you'll-scratch-mine situations, but a group of doctors intentionally trying to injure a child? That doesn't happen. Period.
Guess what man - if that's how you value spending your life, then by all means do it; but why must you call anyone who chooses a different path a "problem"?
Also do you know what profit is? It's the result of doing what other people want you to do. And then you get to spend that profit on getting others to do what you want them to do. Profit is not evil. What it in fact represents is you doing the best you can at pleasing other people, of making their lives better. And then you get to ask the same of other people, and everyone gets what they want and/or need.
And before that, if you wrote a novel, you didn't just print it and sell copies to the public, where anyone could copy it. You printed one copy, put it behind lock and key and only let someone read it when you could be there to be sure they wouldn't take it away or make a copy of it. Right?
Thank you, that is some very good analysis. I tried to read the ruling and it's just so verbose and confusing, I really don't understand what it definitively states, but your comment gives me alot to go on.
> An tag is just a link you have to follow, too. The user agent may or may not do that for you. It is, after all, the agent acting on behalf of the user.
I think that the expected behaviors of different kinds of HTML is well known. If it's not standardized explicitly, it certainly must be standardized in practice by now. When people author web pages, they're usually pretty certain how they're going to end up looking when the browser renders them. So trying to argue "I linked to that copyrighted image right here in my document in a place where the embedded display of that image would make perfect sense, using an HTML tag that typically shows the image embedded, but didn't think that end users would end up seeing a copyrighted image within the flow of my document" would seem to me to be pretty weak.
> Links are not the original work. Period. Facts trump wishes. Deal with it.
I think we just need to expand our definition of what constitutes a document to something more relevant to the age. Web servers explicitly tell web clients what to display and when, with a few minor differences of behavior that are likely not particularly relevant (yes I can run lynx and not see any images, but when I serve a page to millions of people expecting them to see the images, the lynx user isn't really relevant). No, the web server did not serve up every bit of what was displayed to the user. But they did serve up the instructions which they could know ahead of time would result in the display of a copyrighted work to the user. I think it would be reasonable to call that copyright infringement.
If I make a back-up copy of software on my USB drive (not copyright infringement) and then give you the USB stick to use, knowing that you can install the copyrighted software yourself, have I violated copyright? But I didn't give you software! I just gave you some electrons in a particular arrangement that don't do anything unless you use them as the input to several extremely complex mechanism that rearrange those electrons and transmit them elsewhere. Surely I didn't violate copyright! Right?
I think this really comes down to (as I have said in other posts) whether or not we want to acknowledge that a 'document' in the modern sense is different than the simple concept of a printed page that you have to physically give to someone.
The web transmits instructions for creating documents to display to users. HTML is the instructions. Web clients turn those instructions into the documents that we read. I think it's reasonable to say that distributing instructions on how to create a document that violates copyright is in itself a copyright violation.
A physical analogy: I create a machine that can take a bag full of small squares of paper, each with a letter on it, and stitch them together into pages of text. I distribute instances of that machine widely. Now I start distributing bags of letters which themselves nobody will look into to see the squares, but when put in my machine, will produce copies of copyrighted texts.
Am I guilty of copyright? I never distributed a copyrighted document. But I did distribute what are essentially machine instructions which can be combined with a machine in a way that will create a copy of a copyrighted document.
I'm thinking that is a pretty good analogy for web servers and web clients.
Now, what I think I ought to be able to distribute is little bags of paper that turn into ordering instructions for how to buy copyright documents, or which libraries to go to to find the copyrighted documents. I think of that has being analogous to web pages that carry links to copyrighted works, where the links do not instruct the web browser to directly download and display the linked-to document embedded in the page that contains them. Kind of link how search engines give you links to pages, not the text of the linked-to pages.
I wasn't clear, then. I was talking about linking to photos with a link that would embed the photo directly in the displayed page. The search results you describe would not do that, they'd just present a link that you have to follow.
If the search engine presented images directly in the search results page (in anything other than fair-use thumbnail form), then that would be copyright infringement.
I tried reading the ruling, I didn't quite understand whether or not they differentiated between presenting the copyright content to the user directly, or just linking to it, was considered copyright violation. I also read alot of text that seemed to be trying to narrow the scope of the infringement to willingly and knowingly linking to copyright content, but I didn't understand it all that well, and I don't know if a search engine could be said to knowingly link to anything in particular, it's just a machine that spits out data. Whereas a person who could be shown to have made an informed decision about the specific links they are authoring would be a different thing.
I don't see how this burden to search companies is a reason to weaken the rights of copyright holders.
Image thumbnails in search results would probably be covered under fair use no?
Frankly I'm surprised that copyright wasn't already enforced this way. Documents viewed on the world wide web are these ethereal things that are composed on the fly by client browser software as instructed by web server software. If the web server software instructs the client software to present a document which mixes non-copyright-infringing and copyright-infringing content, it seems eminently reasonable to me that this would be copyright infringement.
What if I distributed a bunch of mini printing presses that, when you pressed a button, produced a perfect copy of this year's best selling novel? Sure, I didn't actually distribute the novel, but I enabled a mechanism whereby the user, when using my device as intended, would end up with a copyright infringing document.
I think of the web browser in the same way. The servers tell it what to display. Therefore, if they tell it to display something that violates copyright, then the server has violated copyright.
Here's how I would make the rules if I could:
- Publishing web pages with links to copyrighted content where those links cause the display of the copyrighted content inline in the linking document, would violate copyright - Publishing web pages with links to copyrighted content where those links do not cause the display of the copyrighted content inline in the linking document, but instead merely lead the user to the content, would not violate copyright
Analog: you can publish instructions on where to go to listen to a copyrighted song. You cannot publish a document which plays the copyrighted song to the user.
Linking to photos is a means for having them embedded in content you are serving. You are basically serving to clients instructions on how to compose a displayable document. By linking directly to copyrighted images you are instructing the user's computer to produce a document which is a mix of your content, and copyrighted content.
Basically this ruling says that instructing client software to present documents which when examined in sum total are copyright infringing, then you have violated copyright, even though you haven't actually distributed the sum total of the copyright violating document yourself.
It seems perfectly rational to me and it simply requires that we acknowledge that HTTP documents which when composed as expressly desired by the document author violate copyright, then the author is guilty of copyright infringement even if they themselves didn't actually serve up the copyright bits. The nature of documents has changed drastically since they were all hard copied on paper, and changing copyright law to acknowledge that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I didn't read the entire ruling but I assume that the following is not violations of copyright:
Linking to a copyrighted document via a hyperlink... because then it's the server you are linking to which is serving up the entire document, not you.
So, all is well if you ask me. So you can't embed copyright images in your web pages anymore. I don't see how that's a bad thing. Make your own images or pay the person who made the one you want.
I don't know. Doesn't sound that bad to me. You make a web page, you link to photos that you either own or know that you have the rights to have presented embedded in your page. You want to show an image or video that someone else owns? You link to the page that they have made that embeds that image/video.
Yes, you are 100% correct, and there is no reason to even debate it. This whole "Breakthrough Starshot" baloney is a waste of time. Even typing the words "Breakthrough Starshot" uses energy and time that I could have used more productively nearly any other way possible.
If they're going to make up ridiculous schemes why do they stop there? I think they should instead propose vaporizing every atom on the planet Earth simultaneously in a single large blast that is able to propel a large spacecraft full of ultra sophisticated machinery powered by continuous motion systems all the way there at 0.99999c. It will only take a few years to get there and it can use all of the devices on board to simultaneously sample tons of data in the microsecond it has to view the planet as it flies by. And all of humanities hopes and dreams can be put into a box at the helm of the ship so that none of that is lost when we all blow up.
These guys are clearly amateurs and making dumb shit up.
I personally have no interest or patience in something that has zero payoff in my lifetime, my children's lifetime, or my grandchildren's lifetime. I'd rather pay a million dollars for a pencil eraser I can use today than a million dollars for a wealth of information that will not be available until 400+ years after I am dead.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really have a position on this debate, but this is patently false:
"For the record, Christianity has an equally terrifying concept: That God punishes the faithful for the sins of the unfaithful, thus making the sinner an existent threat to the Christian (and indeed, him/herself and all mankind). We see this in Sodom & Gomorrah and the Floods."
I'm not a Christian nor a Muslim, but there is no way that God punishing sinners is as terrifying a concept as men believing they are commanded by God to punish sinners.
In the former case, the worst that can happen is that we attribute natural disasters to God's will.
In the latter case, we have people blowing themselves up to kill other people.
There is a real difference there.
Every "news" article that begins with "How" is a puff piece, and I refuse to read any of them, including this one.
That was a really great read, thanks.
Although I didn't like the outcome of this election, and in fact felt quite sick inside for a while, I have come to accept it and I've decided to try to nurture some hope that things won't be as bad as I thought they would be.
The responses to this particular Slashdot article are probably the best and most interesting I've ever read on Slashdot. And I've been here a *long* *time*.
"I guess it comes down to two kinds of people: those who don't like change, and those who welcome it."
That is condescending bullshit.
I can fix everything that comes my way in Linux with enough time and effort. I can go all the way down to modifying kernel source and recompiling if necessary.
The thing is, I don't want to spend my time doing that. There was a time in the 90's when that was fun because it was a liberating feeling of having a level of control not afforded by other operating systems. But pretty quickly, it became a chore, when I had to keep fixing the same sorts of problems over and over again.
I agree that not being able to fix low level problems is a drawback of Windows and Mac OS X; however; major problems occur (on Mac OS X at least, Windows definitely is still quite a bit flakier) so rarely that the tradeoff is very, very worth it ... for me.
I agree with you, Windows 10 is an abomination. It forces me to reboot on its schedule when it has updates to perform (it's literally told me "I'm going to reboot your computer in 1 hour to install updates), and I've missed/not noticed dialogs and had the thing just reboot itself on my while I was in the middle of work, which was lost. It also spends a significant part of my network bandwidth continuously loading updates.
I'd say every three or four reboots, it goes into a lengthy update process that takes minutes.
An operating system that forcefully reboots itself, without user control, and that takes minutes to boot up a significant percentage of the time, is in my opinion, fundamentally broken. I loathe Windows 10. I only use it because it's required on my VR PC at the moment, and probably always will be, because let's face it, Apple doesn't do a good job keeping up with high end graphics hardware (at a reasonable price), and Linux is completely hopeless when it comes to being an OS for the masses.
So I've been a Linux user since 1994, and it's been my primary development environment, and provided me a job, for 20+ years now, and for that I'm very thankful. I love developing on Linux.
That being said, I owned a succession of Linux laptops that never worked entirely correctly before I got my retina macbook pro in 2012. I'd say 25% of system updates to my Linux distro would break something, maybe a wireless driver would get flaky, maybe X11 would crap out in some new or unusual way, maybe the battery life would be bad because some kind of battery optimization would stop working. There were ALWAYS problems, it was like living with a finicky collector's automobile that you're spending as much time tinkering with to keep it running as you are actually driving it. A major source of problems with Linux was always sleep and hibernate modes, which were clunky to engage, slow to suspend and resume, and, if they worked, almost always had caveats (I don't know how many scripts I wrote that would switch to a virtual console away from X before suspend and then back again after resume, because X would so often just die if you suspended while it controlled the display).
Maybe things have improved, but I doubt it. On the other hand, this 2012 macbook pro has been a complete pleasure to use. EVERYTHING works correctly, I have never had a single problem of any kind with it. Tons of little details all work seamlessly together. I can close the lid and the thing sleeps, open it, and it wakes up. Never had a graphics problem or a driver problem of any kind.
Of course I know this is because the deck is stacked in favor of Apple, who own the entire stack from hardware through operating system and up through most software. But I don't care. Because it just works, and works so well.
That being said, I am very disappointed with the newest iteration of the macbook pro and I don't think I'll be buying one despite having assumed that I would, leading up to the actual announcement. I will just chug along with this 2012 rMBP. I will NOT switch back to Linux. I'll take a correctly functioning slower and older laptop over a fast and new machine filled with quirks and bugs.
What kind of stupidity does it take to not be able to tell the difference between humor and trolling? Who are the idiots on this site nowadays that downvote posts as "troll" just because they are too dumb to understand or appreciate them, or just don't agree with them?
Yeah I'm an old timer. I don't come to this site that often any more. But even more troubling than the slide to mediocrity of the story editing and selection (which happened in the mid-2000's by the way, and unfortunately never improved), is the increasing stupidity of the Slashdot readership. Or perhaps it's really just a part of the overall trend of this new generation not being able to handle any viewpoint they don't agree with without furious downvoting.
I wouldn't call Fat Tire beer either.
It may be more entertaining than men's soccer, if you're into soccer (I'm not), but it's hard for me to get past the fact that the best women's teams in the world (the ones that win the world cups and olympics and such) can be easily beaten by their own national under-17 boy's teams.
I don't know why exactly, but knowing that the people I am watching are only competitive in the sport because of gender segregation, takes some of the excitement away for me.
You guys are all a bunch of wakos. Seriously.
What could possibly motivate a hospital staff to open themselves up to negligence lawsuits just so that they could ... what? Torture a patient for jollies? Or something?
Before you draw conclusions that fit your tinfoil hat world view, please just spend even the tiniest moment trying to reason out why any group of people would behave in a way that defies logic, before concluding that this is what they must have done.
A single person can do batshit crazy stuff, yes. But a group of professionals working in a hospital? Nope. Not going to happen. There may be some bending of rules, some I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you'll-scratch-mine situations, but a group of doctors intentionally trying to injure a child? That doesn't happen. Period.
Wow, you are one precious snowflake!
Guess what man - if that's how you value spending your life, then by all means do it; but why must you call anyone who chooses a different path a "problem"?
Also do you know what profit is? It's the result of doing what other people want you to do. And then you get to spend that profit on getting others to do what you want them to do. Profit is not evil. What it in fact represents is you doing the best you can at pleasing other people, of making their lives better. And then you get to ask the same of other people, and everyone gets what they want and/or need.
And before that, if you wrote a novel, you didn't just print it and sell copies to the public, where anyone could copy it. You printed one copy, put it behind lock and key and only let someone read it when you could be there to be sure they wouldn't take it away or make a copy of it. Right?
Er, wait.
Thank you, that is some very good analysis. I tried to read the ruling and it's just so verbose and confusing, I really don't understand what it definitively states, but your comment gives me alot to go on.
I don't think so. Linking is different from embedding. The web part comes from the linking, not the embedding.
> An tag is just a link you have to follow, too. The user agent may or may not do that for you. It is, after all, the agent acting on behalf of the user.
I think that the expected behaviors of different kinds of HTML is well known. If it's not standardized explicitly, it certainly must be standardized in practice by now. When people author web pages, they're usually pretty certain how they're going to end up looking when the browser renders them. So trying to argue "I linked to that copyrighted image right here in my document in a place where the embedded display of that image would make perfect sense, using an HTML tag that typically shows the image embedded, but didn't think that end users would end up seeing a copyrighted image within the flow of my document" would seem to me to be pretty weak.
> Links are not the original work. Period. Facts trump wishes. Deal with it.
I think we just need to expand our definition of what constitutes a document to something more relevant to the age. Web servers explicitly tell web clients what to display and when, with a few minor differences of behavior that are likely not particularly relevant (yes I can run lynx and not see any images, but when I serve a page to millions of people expecting them to see the images, the lynx user isn't really relevant). No, the web server did not serve up every bit of what was displayed to the user. But they did serve up the instructions which they could know ahead of time would result in the display of a copyrighted work to the user. I think it would be reasonable to call that copyright infringement.
If I make a back-up copy of software on my USB drive (not copyright infringement) and then give you the USB stick to use, knowing that you can install the copyrighted software yourself, have I violated copyright? But I didn't give you software! I just gave you some electrons in a particular arrangement that don't do anything unless you use them as the input to several extremely complex mechanism that rearrange those electrons and transmit them elsewhere. Surely I didn't violate copyright! Right?
I think this really comes down to (as I have said in other posts) whether or not we want to acknowledge that a 'document' in the modern sense is different than the simple concept of a printed page that you have to physically give to someone.
The web transmits instructions for creating documents to display to users. HTML is the instructions. Web clients turn those instructions into the documents that we read. I think it's reasonable to say that distributing instructions on how to create a document that violates copyright is in itself a copyright violation.
A physical analogy: I create a machine that can take a bag full of small squares of paper, each with a letter on it, and stitch them together into pages of text. I distribute instances of that machine widely. Now I start distributing bags of letters which themselves nobody will look into to see the squares, but when put in my machine, will produce copies of copyrighted texts.
Am I guilty of copyright? I never distributed a copyrighted document. But I did distribute what are essentially machine instructions which can be combined with a machine in a way that will create a copy of a copyrighted document.
I'm thinking that is a pretty good analogy for web servers and web clients.
Now, what I think I ought to be able to distribute is little bags of paper that turn into ordering instructions for how to buy copyright documents, or which libraries to go to to find the copyrighted documents. I think of that has being analogous to web pages that carry links to copyrighted works, where the links do not instruct the web browser to directly download and display the linked-to document embedded in the page that contains them. Kind of link how search engines give you links to pages, not the text of the linked-to pages.
I wasn't clear, then. I was talking about linking to photos with a link that would embed the photo directly in the displayed page. The search results you describe would not do that, they'd just present a link that you have to follow.
If the search engine presented images directly in the search results page (in anything other than fair-use thumbnail form), then that would be copyright infringement.
I tried reading the ruling, I didn't quite understand whether or not they differentiated between presenting the copyright content to the user directly, or just linking to it, was considered copyright violation. I also read alot of text that seemed to be trying to narrow the scope of the infringement to willingly and knowingly linking to copyright content, but I didn't understand it all that well, and I don't know if a search engine could be said to knowingly link to anything in particular, it's just a machine that spits out data. Whereas a person who could be shown to have made an informed decision about the specific links they are authoring would be a different thing.
I don't see how this burden to search companies is a reason to weaken the rights of copyright holders.
Image thumbnails in search results would probably be covered under fair use no?
Frankly I'm surprised that copyright wasn't already enforced this way. Documents viewed on the world wide web are these ethereal things that are composed on the fly by client browser software as instructed by web server software. If the web server software instructs the client software to present a document which mixes non-copyright-infringing and copyright-infringing content, it seems eminently reasonable to me that this would be copyright infringement.
What if I distributed a bunch of mini printing presses that, when you pressed a button, produced a perfect copy of this year's best selling novel? Sure, I didn't actually distribute the novel, but I enabled a mechanism whereby the user, when using my device as intended, would end up with a copyright infringing document.
I think of the web browser in the same way. The servers tell it what to display. Therefore, if they tell it to display something that violates copyright, then the server has violated copyright.
Here's how I would make the rules if I could:
- Publishing web pages with links to copyrighted content where those links cause the display of the copyrighted content inline in the linking document, would violate copyright
- Publishing web pages with links to copyrighted content where those links do not cause the display of the copyrighted content inline in the linking document, but instead merely lead the user to the content, would not violate copyright
Analog: you can publish instructions on where to go to listen to a copyrighted song. You cannot publish a document which plays the copyrighted song to the user.
Linking to photos is a means for having them embedded in content you are serving. You are basically serving to clients instructions on how to compose a displayable document. By linking directly to copyrighted images you are instructing the user's computer to produce a document which is a mix of your content, and copyrighted content.
Basically this ruling says that instructing client software to present documents which when examined in sum total are copyright infringing, then you have violated copyright, even though you haven't actually distributed the sum total of the copyright violating document yourself.
It seems perfectly rational to me and it simply requires that we acknowledge that HTTP documents which when composed as expressly desired by the document author violate copyright, then the author is guilty of copyright infringement even if they themselves didn't actually serve up the copyright bits. The nature of documents has changed drastically since they were all hard copied on paper, and changing copyright law to acknowledge that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I didn't read the entire ruling but I assume that the following is not violations of copyright:
Linking to a copyrighted document via a hyperlink ... because then it's the server you are linking to which is serving up the entire document, not you.
So, all is well if you ask me. So you can't embed copyright images in your web pages anymore. I don't see how that's a bad thing. Make your own images or pay the person who made the one you want.
I don't know. Doesn't sound that bad to me. You make a web page, you link to photos that you either own or know that you have the rights to have presented embedded in your page. You want to show an image or video that someone else owns? You link to the page that they have made that embeds that image/video.
What's so bad about that?
Wrong. Nearly everything you can do which has benefit to future generations also has benefits to yourself, your children, and your grandchildren.
Useless information 400 years in the future on the other hand ...
Yes, you are 100% correct, and there is no reason to even debate it. This whole "Breakthrough Starshot" baloney is a waste of time. Even typing the words "Breakthrough Starshot" uses energy and time that I could have used more productively nearly any other way possible.
If they're going to make up ridiculous schemes why do they stop there? I think they should instead propose vaporizing every atom on the planet Earth simultaneously in a single large blast that is able to propel a large spacecraft full of ultra sophisticated machinery powered by continuous motion systems all the way there at 0.99999c. It will only take a few years to get there and it can use all of the devices on board to simultaneously sample tons of data in the microsecond it has to view the planet as it flies by. And all of humanities hopes and dreams can be put into a box at the helm of the ship so that none of that is lost when we all blow up.
These guys are clearly amateurs and making dumb shit up.
I personally have no interest or patience in something that has zero payoff in my lifetime, my children's lifetime, or my grandchildren's lifetime. I'd rather pay a million dollars for a pencil eraser I can use today than a million dollars for a wealth of information that will not be available until 400+ years after I am dead.