That's not 100% correct either, but I like your middle-ground better than anyone else I've seen posting on this thread.

Characters can be covered by copyright. It is not established that these characters are covered by copyright, and characters are not always automatically covered by copyright, but when they are sufficiently developed, and if the courts decide to rule in your favor, characters in and of themselves can be protected by copyright.

Circuit courts have ruled both ways.

Sorry but you are wrong. Look it up. It's both.

http://www.trademarkandcopyrig...

http://copyright.uslegal.com/c...

http://dearauthor.com/features...

You are not a lawyer, you are right about that. The character of Mickey Mouse is copyrighted, in addition to being protected by Trademark.

No, it's not a trademark issue unless you attempted to sell merchandising. You need to be engaged in a trade in order to violate a trademark. Then, the marks which are owned by original Power Rangers must only not be confusingly similar to be unprotected.

Mickey Mouse the character is copyrighted and you cannot market Mickey Mouse cartoons or goods without Disney's say-so. This is entirely because of copyright. They may also have trademarks that mean you can't make a cartoon and call it Mickey Mouse, even if the appearance of the cartoon is dissimilar enough to not be a copy or confusingly similar. The name is also trademarked. Those trademarks only stay good for Disney if they are renewed and defended. They are not the only protection around the Mickey Mouse brand, though.

By using the "Power Rangers" name for his piece, Kahn got way more views than he would have gotten if he had released it as "just another dark sci-fi short film."

That's what makes it satire. The video itself was not funny, but the concept was hilarious. My jaw was on the floor when I watched this.

It would not have been funny or satire if it was not about the Power Rangers. I only watched half of the short before I ran out of attention but I agree, this was worthy of a "Staff Pick"

Yes, they are pseudo fixes, because Apple won't fix what works. They love this "outrage." It is entirely on purpose. 100% agree.

Did you know you actually have to follow special instructions just to remove this one "Gift" album, since it registers as a purchase in your iTunes library? You can't just delete it as you suggested.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201396

Similar to how you have to opt-out of iMessage when you quit having an iPhone through some obscure form on Apple's website, I can tell you I have actually heard people tell the story of how frustrating it is to "lose all of your messages" when giving up your iPhone. Every time you have an expectation of regular people to perform some minimally technical menial task, be prepared for 90% or more of those people to give up and fall off the edge of the funnel instead. This is not even a discussion of "the intelligence of Apple's targeted market segment."

You already know how that conversation ends, every time. "I just gave up and got another iPhone." And... wait for it... Apple's scheme really works! They (lusers) never ever connect it on their own as being "something bad/anti-competitive that Apple did," and something that Apple ostensibly should be punished for (with market forces moving away.) Network effect = gravity. Seems that Apple is well past the critical mass.

https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage

That page honestly could not be any simpler or easier to find, but I don't know anyone who can say they actually used it. Most people won't even connect the dots for the first two weeks and realize they are not receiving iMessage or any messages from any of their friends with iPhones anymore. If they can even find someone who will explain it to them, they will usually just hear "bad user, should have stayed loyal to Apple; Apple good, new phone problem."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in normal operation on a busy night you can see Uber prices surge up to 500% or more. If you want to see anti-gouging laws implemented like they have in New Jersey, where gas stations and service providers are not allowed to increase their prices during a disaster situation, go ahead and support Uber's right to surge pricing whenever they want it.

Uber has done this thing voluntarily to try and avoid that, or to try and make themselves look like gracious help-your-neighbor types, earning goodwill and getting exposure with good impressions or whatever. It's not like they've done away with surge pricing either, they've only capped it at 290%, which means again -- if they were a gas station or other essential service in New Jersey, they might be already running afoul of anti-gouging laws that do exist there.

Think of it from a risk management perspective, too. If you have the possibility of earning three weeks pay in two days just by going out to risk your life driving around strangers in the storm of the century, are you going to do it? Maybe every driver will! What if you had the potential to make only two and a half days worth of pay in the same amount of time instead? How bad is that storm supposed to get again?

Maybe if that's all you can make, you're gonna check that weather report again or look outside and think about it for a minute before you just sign on your car and open up shop today.

This whole business of patches is really nonsense, if you want my actual opinion. If your data is worth $X and you have a contract with insured software vendors that protects you from liability to exposure from information loss up to $X-N, your exposure to a loss event is $N. If you don't have such contract, your exposure is $X. That's all I'm saying.

I know I am living in fairy dream land here, but I think it's irresponsible that basically every company it seems is taking software that they can't inspect (because it's closed source, or because it's so gargantuan and impossible to audit without an army of coders at your own disposal) and going out collecting secrets from their customers and putting them into the magic box to be trusted to keep them safe. All I'm saying is, put your money where your mouth is.

When did software get so hard? Why does every computer system need to always be such a great big ball of mud?

No! Just no!

If you are a business in the business of making money, small or large, and you have taken my data for some business reason and are careless with it, you should be liable for whatever happens. Every time I hear about another retail company that is storing a bunch of credit cards against the law and PCI, who really doesn't need to be storing any credit card numbers at all, I say "Well no wonder. It was probably the fault of some poor overworked, underpaid IT department." Probably the sales department charged the clients not enough to cover the actual cost of operating the business, and they cut corners. You don't win bids pricing services reasonably, you have to undercut the competition!

If you think that every company should have carte blanche to do just whatever with customer data, without regard to keeping it secure from hackers, because "computer hard, IT too expensive" then you are part of the problem. Until some of these companies that are gutted by hackers with their "secure" data splayed out all over the internet, get gutted again afterwords by regulators, or even customers leaving to hold them to account after the event, the executive suite is going to continue to place the security bulletin into the circular file and we are going to see more and more of these breaches.

And I have made a basic error of assuming that 1.0 = 100% (gamma where relativity has no effect) means 1.06-1.0 = 6% (effect of reduction is 6%.)

To understand the mistake, explain what happens when Gamma is 2.0... I'll give you a hint, it doesn't mean that you are now 100% shorter than you were.

If you were moving at 1/3 the speed of light, you are approximately 6% shorter than you were in a rest frame. (To an outside observer? I am never sure if I have this stuff right because it's totally impossible for me to demonstrate with an experiment. For a thought experiment, inside of your frame of reference you wouldn't be able to tell because your measuring devices would experience the same transformation.)

If you were at 2/3 the speed of light, you would be about 34.1% shorter. This is length contraction. As you approach the speed of light, it is harder and harder to accelerate (more energy input is required). If you were at 99.99% the speed of light, you would be 1/70th your current length. This is the same factor that determines how much harder it is to accelerate. It's called gamma. At normal (non-relativistic speeds) your gamma is 1.0. At 1/3 the speed of light, your gamma is about 1.06066 (so the effect of gamma is 0.06066, or roughly 6%). I am rusty but I think you could consider anything with a gamma measurably greater than 1 to be "close to the speed of light" compared to how fast we are moving on this rock, for example at 1% speed of light your gamma is only 1.00005. Our solar system moves around about 220km/s according to Google, or 0.073% the speed of light. So, gamma of 1.00000 out to at the very least least 5 digits.

I think that loophole is called a "Trust"

I don't fully understand how it's different than just having your money in a bank, but that is supposed to provide you with some insulation against having your property seized due to a judgement against you. I also don't understand how putting your money in an irrevocable trust can be of any value, if the point is that you can no longer access your own money to pay a judgement, what would have been the point of earning it in the first place?

So what you're saying is, there were occasional failures.

This does not mean they need to reply to _your particular_ e-mail. It simply means that any legal challenges and/or requests which are appropriate to send via e-mail can be addressed to the support address, and the consequences of ignoring those requests can be legally binding as if they were delivered (since they were.)

What kind of requests those might be, I don't think is addressed by the filing. I think they would also be abiding by the ruling if they closed the address and opened a new one, required 2FA to get ahold of a person, captcha, or any other spam-protection measures you can imagine. It's the auto-responder that says "yeah customer, don't try to e-mail us, we don't read e-mail at all" that is against the law.