"We all agree"? Not everyone agreed about the ruling in Gaye v. Thicke to apply exclusive rights to the overall feel of a musical composition. Not everyone agreed about the ruling in Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music to penalize someone for having copied a melody completely by accident. What steps should a songwriter take to keep from infringing (and remain a songwriter) in this sort of legal landscape? At least expiry keeps, say, the Shakespeare estate from claiming that the entire world is guilty or liable of "nonliteral similarity". It acts as one of the checks on "stupid cases".

Then would you agree with most of my essay "Consoles are easy"? And is there anything you'd add?

Then you buy a PlayStation 4 for most games, Wii U for Wii U exclusives, and Xbox One for Xbox One exclusives, and the total bill is on the order of $1100. How much does a gaming PC cost?

I can think of several reasons to use consoles:

1. A game isn't ported well to OS X.
2. A game isn't ported well to X11/Linux.
3. Weak sauce PCs.
4. People who prefer to game on a a big screen and own only one PC in another room.
5. People who prefer to game on a a big screen and have a small form factor home theater PC in the living room, mostly for noninteractive things like music and video.
6. People who prefer to avoid cheaters in online competitive multiplayer games. Consoles have historically had less of a problem with cheating.
7. People who aren't interested in amateur games or mods.
8. A franchise is first-party.

If you're a "the sky is blue [citation needed]" type, let me Google that for you:

• Seoul population density brought 44,691/sq mi (17,255/km^2)
• Los Angeles population density brought 8,092.3/sq mi (2,913.0/km^2) and 546.3/sq mi (210.9/km^2) for the Greater LA area.

In fact, Wikipedia's list of cities by population density includes only one U.S. city in the top 50, and that's the comparatively small city of Union City, New Jersey.

Incidentally, Slashdot includes neither the character 'SUPERSCRIPT TWO' (U+00B2) in its character whitelist nor <sup> in its HTML element whitelist.

So are you willing to pay for all electric utility companies to replace meters that read out in kWh with meters that read out in joules, at the same time for all customers in order to satisfy franchise regulations that require a city-wide (or larger) uniform rate?

I agree. One can avoid doing JavaScript. But it's still "DOM manipulation, which is something you generally want to avoid doing as much as possible." el is a DOM element, and assigning to its outerHTML property is manipulation. I guess I may have misunderstood XO's opinion of "as much as possible."

Besides, a web application's offline mode (using application cache, local storage, and IndexedDB) still has to manipulate the DOM because it doesn't have a server to conveniently format the data as HTML for insertion as an element's innerHTML or outerHTML property. Using DOM methods is the HTML counterpart of SQL parameterized statements so that you don't end up with a script injection vulnerability.

I thought property was defined as that which is subject to exclusive rights. I don't know about Canada, but the United States Code has used the term "intellectual property" to refer to copyright at least since 1996 when the Communications Decency Act added 47 USC 230. If you disagree with this definition, whose definition are you using so that we don't talk past each other?

The opinion of the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft held that the safety valves of fair use and the idea/expression divide keep copyright from unduly restraining speech.

Even with undocumented migrants, population density in most U.S. cities is still nowhere near the high-rise apartment density you see in Japan or Korea.

That's fine if you agree to upgrade the urban population density to at least South Korea networks.

I can think of a couple fantasy authors with R. R. in their name who have followed that model.

In northeast Indiana, Super NES games typically went for $60 new, and PlayStation games were $50 because the disc was cheaper to replicate. Those who stuck with Nintendo saw a price cut between the Nintendo 64 ($60-$70) and the GameCube ($50) and then another price hike with the Wii U ($60). If you're looking for reliable sources to add to (say) a Wikipedia article, you can put something like super nes game msrp into a search engine and find things like "Why 1990s SNES Games Were so Damn Expensive" by Luke Plunkett.

In the Super NES era, you likely had to share a monitor with other members of the family who wanted to watch broadcast or cable television. Because you got only about an hour per day with the TV, those same 10 to 12 hours stretched over several days. Besides, it was common to repeat those 10 to 12 hours for a better overall score. This is how speedrunners got good enough to complete all 101 goals in Donkey Kong Country in 50 minutes (source: YouTube).

Unlike the Super Bowl, the NCAA College Football Championship Game is on cable. Source

In certain circles, chess and poker have become spectator sports.

This is why e-sports won't take off, as the publisher has power to shut down any league competing with the publisher's approved league.

In the Super NES era, games used to cost $60, which is about $90-something in today's money after inflation. Now in the Xbox 360 and Xbox One era, games still cost $60. Day one expansions make the extra $30 of content optional to buy.

Because they can't afford an Internet connection that'll transfer 30 GB in one hour. So instead, they let Steam download the game over the preorder period and then install it on release day.

Lack of skill, lack of strong enough PC, lack of the correct console, game being out of print, etc. Why do people watch football instead of playing football?