As you can see from someone's post above regarding the New Yorker story, there are conspiracies that exist to discredit good researchers and good research. And apropos to BobMcD's post, the pharmaceutical industry has been one of the main perpetrators.

I read the New Yorker story, and while the behavior it describes is sleazy and unethical, it was also done semi-openly (and somewhat sloppily) and completely failed to silence the principal target. It did not involve taking over an entire field and convincing multiple independent scientists and journal publishers to lie through their teeth. Oh, and it didn't actually kill anyone. (There is also plenty of evidence to suggest that the New Yorker reporter was a little too credulous in writing that piece.) Extrapolating from that story to "shadowy medical interests sabotage key experiment and kill senior author" is a huge leap.

I work in bioscience too, and this thread is making my head hurt. Anyone who actually follows the biomedical literature would be aware that there's practically an epidemic of shitty papers that should have never been published in the first place, and that many supposedly groundbreaking results have turned out to be impossible to reproduce. And it's not even the first time there's been huge controversy over sketchy stem-cell protocols. For this to be a conspiracy by unnamed entities in the "global medical services" industry, we'd have to stipulate that the conspirators are able to a) subvert the (British) journal Nature into first publishing the paper with planted duplicate images (which would require knowing about it in advance of publication), then retracting the paper several months later, b) subvert every independent lab that claimed to have tried and failed to reproduce the experiment, and c) corrupt the largest research institute in Japan to produce a finding of fraud. The whole thing requires a godlike level of competency and power (in addition to pure evil) that makes Monsanto look like a ten-year-old's lemonade stand business.

Wow, yeah. There are some good videos on YouTube - it's not hard to imagine similar scenes in the Triassic.

Have chickens. Check out their feet. "Dinosaur" will indeed cross your mind.

We have wild turkeys where I work. Every time I see a flock, I think of the little pack of dinosaurs (Compsognathus?) that eats Wayne Knight in "Jurassic Park", and shudder. And the turkeys are actually much larger than this. Fortunately they also seem to be relatively slow-moving and don't eat anything larger than insects.

Data is easy to keep but it's also easy to leak. And given the consequences of leaks, companies need to start asking themselves whether it is worth storing all this data in the first place.

How many times did Mozilla ever actually use all this personal data internally? How many times on average the data for each of the 76,000 developers used? How many records were never accessed at all?

If you don't need all this data, then just don't store it. It's easy!

It's not the ripping software, it's the digital recording function, i.e. the ability to write to disk.

Here's what the court said in the RIAA v Diamond Multimedia case: (internal citations removed)

Unlike digital audio tape machines, for example, whose primary purpose is to make digital audio copied recordings, the primary purpose of a computer is to run various programs and to record the data necessary to run those programs and perform various tasks. The legislative history is consistent with this interpretation of the Act's provisions, stating that "the typical personal computer would not fall within the definition of 'digital audio recording device,'" because a personal computer's "recording function is designed and marketed primarily for the recording of data and computer programs." Another portion of the Senate Report states that "[i]f the 'primary purpose' of the recording function is to make objects other than digital audio copied recordings, then the machine or device is not a 'digital audio recording device,' even if the machine or device is technically capable of making such recordings."

So it really depends on what else the car's ability to write to disk is both primarily used for, and what it is primarily marketed for. The latter is probably worse for them; even if the car happens to be writing map or diagnostic information to disk, probably ripping CDs is what is mainly being advertised.

No. Here's the relevant part of the ruling, quoting the Senate report on the bill:

"[i]f the `primary purpose' of the recording function is to make objects other than digital audio copied recordings, then the machine or device is not a `digital audio recording device,' even if the machine or device is technically capable of making such recordings."

What information does the car's system digitally record other than music? That it might display digital information, or play digital information isn't relevant, since those don't involve the recording function.

Computers record lots of stuff to their hard drives. Some of it is music, but the ability to write to disk isn't primarily designed for digital music, nor primarily marketed for that.

The first Homefront game was nothing to do with Crytek. It was developed by Kaos and published by THQ. Crytek merely bought up the rights to do the sequel. For the record, I bought and played through Homefront on PC. It was basically a mediocre and generic shooter based on top of some really interesting fiction. In the right hands, it could have been a much better game.

And there are lots of people - self included - who will sing the praises of the original Crysis as a game rather than a tech demo. It's much smarter than the average shooter, with plenty of room for exploration and taking different approaches. There are few other shooters that permit the sheer on-the-fly tactical flexibility that came from Crysis's nanosuit.

The game did make a few mis-steps - the quality notably dives in the final 25% or so of the campaign, once the aliens show up (the floaty section in the alien mothership in particular goes on for far too long). But overall, it is an excellent shooter which has stood the test of time far better than most others in its genre.

Crysis 2, on the other hand, was crap. And Crysis 3 had a few moments where it was pretty good (mostly in the more open sections near the end of the game) but ultimately disappoints.

Well, there are ways to do it with CDs you don't own where you will be protected from legal trouble. But in practice, it never comes up.

No, the car doesn't count.

Let's look at a bit more of the relevant language in the statute:

It's what the primary purpose of the digital recording function is (or is marketed as) that matters. We disregard the car and the rest of the machine altogether.

No, there's no license, particularly no license 'implied in the law,' whatever that means.

You have an inherent free speech right to do anything with a work that you like, except for things that copyright gives an exclusive right to the copyright holder about. A copyright holder can only possibly grant a license for something that he holds a right to; he cannot give you permission to do something you don't need his permission for. And once the copyright on the work expires (no, seriously), you're no longer limited as to the exclusive rights either.

So for example, there is an exclusive right to publicly perform music, but not an exclusive right to privately perform music. Even if you have a stolen CD that was itself made illegally, you can lawfully privately perform it without infringing on copyright. No license or anything.

All this licensing bullshit basically is a side effect of stupid (and largely unnecessary) practices in the software industry. It's mostly folk myths. If there's a license, you'll usually know it: it will almost certainly be pages and pages long, written, and you'll have to expressly agree in some way. Record companies would not sell CDs with some sort of implied license.

Depends. Assuming you just mean an album, and not the piece of plastic, it'll either be a work or a compilation.

No, that's preparation of a derivative work, probably; an exclusive right at 17 USC 106(2), and doing it is infringing at 17 USC 501(a). You'll need an exception to copyright, or for the work not to be copyrighted, or a license, in order to just make the derivative, never mind distributing it. And if it's not a derivative work after all (see the definition at 17 USC 101), it's likely an infringement of the reproduction right at 17 USC 106(1).

Correct. Though as a practical matter, it's treated like an affirmative defense... it just makes more sense to do it that way, even though it is indeed an exception to copyright.

No, it's only legal under the right circumstances. Fair use is entirely a case-by-case thing. Just because it could be a fair use sometimes doesn't mean that it will be every time. And vice versa, under the right circumstances, any sort of infringement might be a fair use.

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend relying entirely on it if a better option were available.

Correction: I said non-infringing, but I meant to say non-actionable. Non-infringing would, in fact, be legal.

I apologize for the error.

No.

First, it doesn't make it legal, it makes it non-actionable; there's a difference. (I am reliably told that it was supposed to be legal, but it got changed at the last minute in a suspicious manner)

Second, it doesn't say you can give the AHRA-compliant copies away. Just that they can be noncommercially 'used.'