A car with 5 tires also has four tires.

Have you ever actually seen a 4K image? You absolutely can tell the difference between it and Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray is a 2 megapixel image, 4K is 8 megapixels. While generally speaking, megapixels are overrated, the two orders of magnitude between 1080p and 4K is enough to notice. Is it enough of a difference to justify spending an additional US$1000-$5000 for a TV set? Maybe not. But an extra few hundred dollars for 4K on a desk monitor is definitely a difference in terms of usability.

Again, it's not that I don't agree with you in principle, it's that the Supreme Court has closed the door on the "Limited Times" argument, not only in the infamous Eldred v. Ashcroft decision, but also in denying certiorari to the follow-up Kahle v. Gonzales 9th circuit decision. That's not to say that Congress can't pass an orphan works bill, hopefully it can and will one day, but trying to achieve that outcome through a Constitutional challenge is a non-starter.

The reason given in the US Constitution is, "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

IOW, "to promote progress" is the reason given. Not to "increase the availability of a work." You can argue that the latter implies the former, if you wish, but in the US Supreme Court, you will lose that argument. It's been definitively established that the right to first publication trumps the right of the public to the availability of a work. (e.g. Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises - 471 U.S. 539 (1985)). I'm not saying I support that position, but that is the law of the land.

Patience and Copyrights, more like, if you're expecting anything to ever enter the public domain again.

"Jane," you're skipping past an important point.

They can ask, but you are not obligated to answer.

True. But what this decision is saying is that, in a non-custodial interview, if you don't answer, and furthermore, if you don't specifically announce that the reason you are not answering is because you are asserting your right to remain silent, then a jury is permitted to infer guilt from your silence.

So, from now on, it's essentially, whatever you say or don't say may be used against you in a court of law, unless you are being held in involuntary custody (or you invoke the 5th amendment.)

Thomas and Scalia would take things even further, naturally, and strike the portion of the above statement in parentheses. Thomas says that in any non-custodial situation, you are under no compulsion to speak and therefore your invocation of the Fifth is essentially a meaningless gesture. And although not specifically addressing the issue, he even seems to be implying that under any situation, custodial or not, the jury should be able to draw whatever inference it likes from your silence. Yes, he seems to be saying, you have the "right" to remain silent, but if the jury nonetheless believes your silence implies guilt, so be it. Fortunately for what remains of our tattered rights, the "Marks" rule applies here: In a plurality decision such as this, only the narrowest commonly held majority view becomes binding opinion. For now, only when not in custody does your silence condemn you.

As a long term zapper, I can attest that the fears are overblown. It will help you develop your brain in unimaginable ways. Don't let "big science" control what you can do with your own body. Microsoft keeps trying to add value to this Office365 proposition but they're going to wind up dropping it eventually the same way they did with Office Live. I've always preferred Red Hat to Debian anyway, so can't say I care, but the issue of orphaned websites hosting malware is a serious and growing one. Upvoted.

So to sum up, I've been doing brain-stim for years and it's amazing.

Euclid's Theorem in actuality does refer to the case where X+1 is not prime. It's essential to the proof.

It goes something like this:

---------
Take a finite list of prime numbers, A, B, C etc. (The assumption that they are "all the primes" is unnecessary.)
Find the smallest common multiple of them, X.
Add 1 to that.
The new number, X+1, is either prime or composite.
If it's prime, then that's it. We've generated a new prime not on the list.

If it's composite, then it is divisible by some prime, G.
Could G be one the primes (A, B, C. etc.) already on the list?
But remember, X is divisible by A, B, C etc. So if G is one of those primes, then that means that both X and X+1 are divisible by prime number G, which is impossible.
Therefore G would have to be a new prime, not on the list.

Now we have a larger list, A, B, C, G, etc. and can repeat the process.

We can always generate a new prime not on the list, and therefore the list of primes is without bound.
---------

That's true, but imprecise. It's perfectly legal to record police...in the 7th circuit, which consists of three states, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana. Furthermore, the Illinois statute that was invalidated was extremely broad. It made it a felony to audio record any conversation between any parties unless all of them consented. Did the US Sup. Ct. agree purely that the law was overbroad, or did they agree with the more specific argument in the decision that police in the public commission of their duties have no right to "private" conversations? Their not taking on the case means that this detail is still unclear. A differently crafted statute might fare differently under judicial review. For example, although writ was not petitioned for in this case, the 1st circuit invalidated a differently constructed Massachusetts statute which made it a crime to intercept "any wire or oral communication." But that decision relied upon the fact that the party did not secretly record the police; the hypothetical case where a party surreptitiously recorded the cops did not go addressed.

So we're left with a patchwork of various statutes and case law which currently mean that there is still not an unequivocal right to record the police in public in the United States.

Because the Supreme Court has not yet spoken.

The Supreme Court has NOT spoken.

That should be upvoted. A company like MS might have dozens or hundreds of "creative directors." It doesn't mean you're in charge of the creative direction the entire outfit will take. Somebody much higher up on the food chain would certainly be making all the important decisions.

Also, even if this guy were a bigwig voicing his personal opinion, so what? Yes, we know that practically speaking, he should realize his words, for better or worse, represent his organization. But do we really want to support the "corporate overlord" regime? Is that the way things ought to be? I for one would prefer to live in a world where I am not beholden to my employer while off the clock. I would hope that people are free to express themselves and their own personal points of view to the greatest extent possible. So, I'm not going to play a role in enforcing the unfortunate status quo -- in legitimizing it with this nonsense about "he should get fired." Does Orth deserve to get blasted? Yes, but not because he's speaking out of turn as a corporate slave. The fact is, he has a stupid, poorly thought out, dangerously cavalier personal opinion, which he placed on a public forum, and he should get called out for it, regardless of his title.

No, MS Home and Student has been on sale for $99 in the not-so-distant past. You were not required to be a student to use the software; there was no lie required; and what the GP said was totally accurate.

I don't think Microsoft wants to deprecate the desktop environment at all. What I think is that Microsoft is desperately trying to develop a tablet market at this point in time, since it is getting creamed by Apple. And so it is "encouraging" users to get comfortable with the Metro interface, in the hope that their comfort will transfer to tablet sales and developer interest. But I think Microsoft hopes and prays that the desktop remains the primary means for computing interface, because that is its bread and butter.

You read that article wrong. It doesn't say that it offered the fix only for Jellybean. It says, "Google’s security officials replied in minutes, confirming the flaw and promising to correct it. Within days they had incorporated a fix into the latest version of the Android operating system, Jelly Bean 4.2, and made available a security update for earlier versions."

The real problem, the article goes on to say, is that those security updates aren't pushed automatically by Google, they're up to the manufacturer and/or carrier to implement, which is where the monolithic approach of Apple has its advantages, although I still prefer my Android overall.

Repealing the DMCA would mean that web sites that host 'user-supplied' content (such as YouTube, word press, github, flickr, et al) would be liable for every piece of copyright-infringing material that someone puts on their site.

I don't follow that logic. First, not every website is hosted in the USA, and even those that aren't have in some cases substantial international presences, so where's their "DMCA" protection if they get sued in France or Australia or Turkey? Either despite the DMCA protecting them in the US, they are still internationally subject to this liability that you seem to think might be ruinous, or they aren't, which means there are different laws in place protecting them in different jurisdictions, some of which might arguably be better. Second, the fact that DMCA does one good thing (offers protection to website owners) doesn't mean that it is a good law generally. I would argue that it should be replaced by a better law that does not lead to the types of automatic takedowns we see currently. Third, regarding the payment of an escrow, I didn't make up the concept out of whole cloth; it already exists, and is called "security for costs". I know that specifically in NY City, if the defendant so demands, a foreign company may be required by the Court to pay an undertaking for security for costs of $500 as a condition of their civil lawsuit going forward. Fourth, I didn't use the expression "foreign companies" pejoratively, so why the scare quotes?