AOL is the company that nicely sent out free floppy disks containing the entire internet to everyone back when the internet was small enough to fit on floppy disks. They later upgraded to CD's as the internet grew in size.

now that the internet has been upgraded to a series of tubes i am not sure what AOL is doing any longer.

Cowboy Neal always seems to do well in the Polls around here

that fits well in the current credit based economy. people don't pay up front, they buy on credit and then pay the interest.

depending on when she sold them the rights, they would need to find a contract that had been written 85 years ago to determine whether they actually had the rights to sell this to someone else.

this is anything but straight forward.

this is similar to the happy birthday debacle.

some of these items are so old that no one even remembers who actually owns the copyright any longer. that alone should help illustrate the problem with such long copyright terms.

I would view copyright terms as being too long, but it wouldn't bother me quite so much if they just limited the copyright increases to newly created works. The real problem is that they always extend it retroactively to already existing works, and are keeping items out of the public domain that would have landed their long ago under their original copyright terms.

Yeah there probable is value. However, best case scenario there is something like a 30 minute round trip for communications to mars, so for a medical robot to have value in such an environment it would likely need to be able to do most procedures autonomously. with the doctor just checking on the outcome after it has been completed.

getting 1ms latency to mars to allow this would be quite an amazing feat and would rewrite our knowledge of physics.

Steve Wozniak spent the night in jail over his device

even better is this tidbit from the article:

combine this story about wireless EV charging autonomous cars and a crazy software developer and i wonder how long it will be before someone programs their autonomous car to drive them around in an infinite loop after they die...or at least until the car breaks down.

who cares what googles car looks like now. when google gets the sensors ans software working then someone that has a sense of style will come along and design one that looks good.

what profits? the profits for selling SD cards at least don't go to the phone manufacturers they go to either kingston or sandisk.

i suggest we give them a grant to buy some red shirts and have them observe this star. if they all die in some horrific accident then we will know for sure.