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Comment Re:3 laws deleted (Score 1) 180

The Three Laws of Robotics IIRC were actually something John W. Campbell thought up on the fly in a meeting with the young Asimov, giving them to him as a story challenge. It is interesting how what was basically a quick and dirty plot device has become so firmly entrenched in the general consciousness that so many people think they're real.

Comment Re:1984 (Score 1) 148

As I recall in Max Headroom it was illegal to turn off your television. Some people got a bit of respite by throwing a blanket over their set. This was to ensure you kept watching, it didn't have anything to do with the system's surveillance capabilities, whose only obvious manifestation I think was that Max could see and hear through any monitor. Of course in the quaint world of twenty minutes into the future, the set had to be on. Now, we know that that's just silly.

Comment Re:"educational" is not "fair use" (Score 2) 268

The big problem is, you can do all your due diligence and claim Fair Use in your usage of copyrighted material, but Fair Use doesn't actually exist until someone sues you for infringement and loses because a judge agrees with you. If you cannot defend yourself in court, you only have Fair Use until you lose an infringement suit.

Comment Re:TPB legit? (Score 1) 97

Copy machines in libraries tend to be out of sight of the librarian's station. This is so the librarian can't see if you're violating someone's copyright by copying entire works rather than a few fair-use pages. There will probably be a warning against copyright infringement posted on or near the machine itself. This way, the liability is yours as the copier, and not the librarian's/library's, as the "facilitator" of the copying. A lame solution to a lame problem, but the alternative is no copiers, which would lead to an unending stream of complaints that there are no copiers.

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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

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