That sounds to me like something to which the word "fraud" would apply. And it should have been treated as such, not with some omnibus bill full of crap like "individuals purchasing gold must be reported to the government" that congress (aka "the opposite of progress") voted for recently.

You may be missing a point here, too.

The problem isn't collecting royalties on a song for years, it's the copyright law making it required for such an absurdly long time. (such time which just happens to keep getting extended long enough to ensure that Steamboat Willie's copyright never expires) And it's especially the tenuous bullshit lawsuits like this (as well as "He's So Fine" / "My Sweet Lord").

There's no reason that you couldn't pay an original author money after a copyright expires, other than under current laws they'd probably already be dead by then.

But if he did that, he'd lose his uptime!

Sounds like we need a Linux kernel module that does memtest86 type stuff during idle time, looking for RAM pages with hard errors. Or at least a checksum/ECC for the disk cache pages that can be checked during idle time. Once a bad page is found, the kernel can then lock it out.

That's okay, Harry Reid just needs five months so that he can get re-elected by saying "Look at this delicious pork I brought you! Mmm, bacon!" After that he couldn't care less what happens to it.

Oh no, someone on the internet is wrong... maybe!

You really thought that someone who understands how multipath is a problem with ATSC might not understand virtual channels? Geez.

Yes it's on 5, and its PSIP is 2.

Actually, living too close to the transmitter can be a problem because ATSC is vulnerable to multipath reflections (aka "ghosting"), especially with older generation tuners. Proper aiming of your antenna is essential, and if it's outdoors, wind can knock it out of alignment over a few months. A signal attenuator may even help with your reception.

However, channels 2-6 (low VHF) tend to be really bad for ATSC for other interference reasons too, and most stations have abandoned them with their final assignments. There's one in the next market area over, just at the edge of reception with a good antenna, that went from channel 2 to 5 that I can sometimes receive, but I couldn't even get a barely watchable picture back when it was still analog.

The first episode I watched was the finale episode of season 1. I could tell right away that they were too busy making plot twists to ever finish untangling them, and I would only occasionally watch an episode if I channel-surfed across it. None of what I watched afterward refuted my initial assessment.

So your answer is "no". Don't waste your time unless you enjoy characters being randomly yanked with for the amusement value of the yanking around. And there are better shows for that. That's the only reason I watch Legend of the Seeker, and Sam Raimi is awesome at making that kind of campy stuff. (Also Bruce Spence is awesome in it too.)

I had a Mac with a Levco 2 meg RAM upgrade in '87 or so, and I broke a lot of protections because I ran 1.5 meg of that as a ramdisk (nothing really needed more than 512K at the time), and I liked to keep that thing running as long as possible, with a debugger loaded too, of course. Copy protection code fucked over enough of the system that I would have to reboot from the startup floppy... if a game didn't lock up on startup.

Usually breaking the copy protection was more fun than the game itself.

Yes, and we'll get off your lawn too ;)

The LCD/CRT thing had me pretty mad last year when one of my twin 19" NEC CRTs finally bit the dust. Finding a CRT proved impossible, so I finally ended up replacing them with twin Samsung Touch of Colors screens. I was very surprised at the image quality. It's a lot better now than it was when LCD started to take over. My monitors' refresh rates are actually better than the NECs' were. I don't see any ghosting even on very fast-moving games and videos. And with dynamic contrast, the washed out black issues don't exist for me either.

What I'm getting at is that, compared to HDD technology right now, SSD still pretty much sucks. But it will get better and eventually will outstrip HDD tech. And until then, we need the "ignorant public" who will "buy any new pile of garbage as long as it's hyped to hell" in order to provide the funding for the research that will make SSD something you and I want to buy as well. Consider it a moron tax on the early adopters ;)

HDDs have been around for 30 years. They've had a hell of a run, and it's not quite over yet, but the next generation is gearing up to replace them.