Adding something to an existing work doesn't extend a copyright: whatever copyrights already existed continue unchanged. Rather, new copyrights are created when the new work is, provided that the new work is a "work of authorship". All works are derived, because all of us rely upon historical material of the past. Conceptually just saying "ABC" is deriving content from the alphabet, but in such a case there is a work but no substantial authoritative content to hang copyrights on. Incorporating letters, words, colors, sounds, and anything else that existed before is a derivation of that content; the author must add something additional in the class of authorship to develop his claim to copyright protection.

I think Miamicanes got it mostly right, except that I would emphasize that transforming or changing a work in an automated, random, unintelligent or specification-conforming way is not "authorship", and would not render the product copyrightable. If you passed one of Shakespeare's works through Google translate to produce something in French or modern English, that effort would arguably not create a copyright because there would be no authorship. (The software running the translation is copyrighted, but not the product of the execution of that copyrighted software.) We can argue about whether or not such works are valuable, but that value must be created by something other than through copyrights.

Experts inherently favor the interests of those who pay them. The FBI doesn't get paid to find people innocent. In a world where the FBI can choose to hire this expert or that expert, it will rehire the ones most likely to make a finding helpful to a finding of guilty.

Courts are masters of deciding truth between opposing parties. Where one side possesses more resources than the other (the U.S. Attorney General's Office vs. the local public defender) the criminal court is crippled to find the truth of guilt or innocence.

The same holds true for the experts reporting to the IPCC...

They'll use $20 bills instead. Multicore processors with networking interfaces are in your phone, manufactured in South Korea and .... (wait for it) China! Okay, so it might take a bit more of them to get the same processing power, or it might take the Chinese longer to run their simulation, but they ain't stoppin' nobody.

Buying a copy of a copyrighted work is not "owning" that work. It's owning that copy with its associated rights against the copyright holder (under an implied license). The fact that you can copy a copyrighted work (i.e. "control" it) doesn't make doing so legal.

Well, yes, but it's an implied license. The purchaser of a car doesn't sign a separate piece of paper permitting him to do stuff with the auto's code. It's like that video you bought over the weekend. Copyright law prohibits performances of protected works. Can you invite the neighbors to watch that video for free? Yes, because with your purchase you got the implied license to do so. Can you open your own movie theater and charge admission? No, because your implied license doesn't cover that.

Now, if you want to look at the code, copyright law won't stop you from doing that. (But the manufacturer might by not giving you a port of access.) If you possess the copy of the work, you get to look at it. You just don't get to reproduce it or perform it (say, in another model of a car, modified or not).

The manufacturer might claim the code to be a trade secret too, but that won't work very well because they will have published it by putting it in the cars they sell to the public.

So unless the car manufacturer is going to make the purchaser sign a contract not to fiddle with the code, and to make any subsequent purchaser bound to the same terms, I think they just have to put up with the modders and the rodders...

I stand corrected...

Impeachment? Why would the Republicans do that? Obama is embarrassing the hell of of the Democrats on a daily basis with his pompous press releases. Oh, I assure you that the Republican members of Congress absolutely love Obama and want this to continue as long as possible. It assures their future re-elections...

Wow. I'm glad that you educated me. I had always thought that the Constitution granted the power to declare war to Congress alone.

I always thought, too, that there were civilian administrative procedures. I'm sure glad you let me know that that lady working in the drivers license division was drawing military hazard pay. And judges and courts ... all part of the military machine, eh?

... and that mystical power of the President to command the executives of banks in foreign countries ... I had no idea about that either. If you tell me Bigfoot is real, I'll believe that too.

Until Congress changes it, yep. That's how it is, no matter how illogical it might seem.

Nope. Look it up for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

You seem to be confused there. If he's issuing "sanctions" (as per the announcement), then there is some kind of judicial or administrative procedure. If he's waging war, then he can use the War Powers Act. (BTW: Obama declaring this to be a "national emergency" doesn't make it one sufficient to engage that Act.) That Act doesn't authorize a president to do whatever-the-hell-he-wants.

I can't wait for the news report of the Apaches dropping off the "enforcers" in places like China and North Korea. Good luck with that!

April Fool's Day turned into the April Fool's decade...

Obama has no authority to impose sanctions on anybody for these acts, unless (1) Congress passes a law that says he does or (2) a foreign country says he does, creating jurisdiction. Neither has happened.

Obama said "From now on, we have the power to freeze their assets, make it harder for them to do business with U.S. companies, and limit their ability to profit from their misdeeds" in the making (apparently) of an executive order. If the power existed, it existed prior to Mr. Obama's order because it was authorized by 1 or 2 above. Mr. Obama's declarations of power are worthy of the bottom of my birdcage.

This idiot of a reporter at The Stack dot com thinks that an executive order is "legislation". Someone should inform her that legislation almost always appears in the U.S. Code, not in some press release on the White House Blog. I can't wait for this administration to try to enforce these sanctions: they're going to get tossed out of court on their rear ends if they try.

1. It doesn't matter if the attack is online or not. If the hacker has your hashed password, then he can get your password from that. The brute force attack becomes feasible because he can run millions/billions of tries per second on your password. (If he does it on a repository of hashed passwords, then the rewards per try are even greater.)

2. The words are in your memory, not in the password. If my password is "agmlpoas", then I can remember it as "all good men like pickes on afternoon sandwiches". The password can be as random as you like.

3. When you have an organization like the NSA devoting tens of thousands of CPUs (or specially designed digital circuits implementing a hash/encryption function) to such an effort, your offline attack becomes feasible (unless you have a lot more characters in your password than most people want to type.)

A truly unbreakable encryption method will make it impossible for an attacker to tell whether he's had success in breaking the encryption. (That's why the one-time pad works: it decodes to a very large number of potentially valid messages.) If everyone's messages were littered with words from the Bin Laden book of anarchy, then the NSA would have a more difficult time knowing who the real bad guys were. :-)

The whole point in using passwords and passphrases is that the point of entry (the screen or page where you enter it) can't be reproduced millions of times per second. If a human can only press "enter" once per second, it will take a long time for a hacker (NSA or otherwise) to brute force through. If the attacker can get his hands on the password stored in the system (encrypted or not) the game is already lost.

Besides: anyone can think up a poem or a mnemonic for a password using random letters and/or numbers, and you'll be using your own words and not those of someone else out of a dictionary (which makes it more likely for you to remember).

Unbreakable passwords are easy to generate: just use a randomly-generated password as long as the information you're encrypting (the so called "one time pad"). When I'm logging into my bank or other on-line service, I don't want to have to deal with that much data. That's why it lets me have three tries at entering the password every ten minutes.

Go sell this idea to the next guy, please...