Well, all the people who published works before 1710 had no copyrights. All the people who published after that, but not in England had no copyrights until various countries slowly adopted copyright (the US picked it up in 1790, the French after that, and most of Europe in the 19th century -- and they only exported it to the rest of the world by means of colonialism, not on its own actual merits).

Plus there were various limits, e.g. the US only granted copyrights to Americans until almost the end of the 19th century; British authors had no option to get an American copyright at all... unless they became American citizens.

More recently, various classes of work were ineligible. For example, architectural works (in practice, buildings) were uncopyrightable in the US until 1990. Were no buildings designed and built in this country until architects were given copyrights?

What I think you're missing here is that there are a plethora of incentives for an author to create and publish a work. Money gained by exploiting a copyright on the work is but one of those incentives, and often is not the most important one, and also often is not an essential one.

I certainly agree that it can be useful, but that doesn't mean that we ought to go hog wild with it; as with many other things, a little might be beneficial, but too much can be harmful.

The point is to grant authors copyrights as an additional incentive in order to entice them into creating and publishing works which they would not have created and published, but for copyright. If they would've done it anyway, the copyright is superfluous, and granting it would be wasteful. If they require more copyright than is healthy for society, all things considered, we're literally better off not granting it even though it means we'll be bereft of the work in question.

It's not intended to give authors control over works for their own sake. That's just the means by which it functions. It's intended to produce a public benefit. And while the public does benefit from having works created and published, it also benefits from not having anyone controlling works.

Well, that's how it operated in the US from 1790 through to the end of 1977. Turns out that relatively few published works were copyrighted. Further, since there was a renewal term (that is, the copyright would be good for an additional number of years if you re-upped in a timely fashion) we also know that most authors of copyrighted works didn't bother to get a renewal, and let their works enter the public domain sooner than they had to.

It worked fine. We got great literature and the golden age of Hollywood on both film and tv, as well as tons of great music.

And frankly, a system of strict formalities to get copyrights is a more important thing to change in the law than shortening the term length.

Why should the rest of us aid them in doing so? E.g. by conferring upon them some sort of legal rights that pertain to how the work is used by others.

While I think it could potentially be beneficial for the public to grant rights to authors, it's surely not always beneficial under every circumstance, and every permutation of works and rights.

And if the author doesn't like the terms under which the public might deign to give them rights, they're free to not create the work.

I am mid way through developing a GPS logger that uses public key encryption to protect privacy. It definitely is possible to make these kinds of device more secure at very little cost.

Hopefully more companies will follow Google and Apple's lead in marketing privacy and resistance to legal attack as features.

The fact that they charge companies to get out of their filtering is probably where they will make their arguments. Maybe claim that there is copyright violation for altering/stealing their content for commercial purposes. If AdBlock didn't try to make money by charging to let companies bypass it they probably wouldn't be able to touch it.

By the way, everyone should switch to AdBlock Edge or another fork that doesn't allow companies to pay to get through.

Isn't that what AdBlock already does? The primary block list is EasyList, which at least back in the day was not maintained by the author of AdBlock.

What TFA and Wikipedia don't say are what game his original prototype actually was. Presumably it was similar to one of the early Odyssey games.

"Withstand" is a relative term... The engine is designed not to explode in a ball of fire and take the aircraft with it if hit by a bird, but that doesn't mean it will continue working properly. At the very least the aircraft will have to loop round and land again for inspection.

As the GP pointed out there isn't a single "intelligence" trait, and your argument doesn't address that. IQ tests measure a very specific ability, and one which has been improving in all races for decades. IQ is affected by many environmental factors too, and it's hard to deny that some races have, on average, much more favourable environments to live in, even within a single country. People can learn to do better at IQ tests with practice.

At most we can say that the evidence suggests that some races are intelligent in different ways, similar to how some people learn visually and some learn through experience. To leap to "black people are dumb", as Watson did, is ridiculous.

A lot of batteries die completely because one cell is faulty. There is loads of info on replacing dead cells in power tool and laptop batteries in the internet, but you can of course recover the remaining good cells and use them for something else. They are popular with people building their own large batteries for solar backup packs.

In Europe convictions are considered "spent" after some time, and you don't have to report them even if they ask. Credit reference agencies and the police are not allowed to reveal those convictions to employers, banks or anyone else.

So, the OP should move to Europe.

No crime should ever prevent a person from voting. It's a fundamental right to participate in democracy, and if the goal is to rehabilitate offenders then they must be able to fully participate in society after they have paid their debt.

The stupid thing about that song is that Koreans can say the "L" sound perfectly well. They confused Korea with Japan. A lot of people seem to think that Chinese people can't say L either.

The problem is that the price will be so high that only established companies will be able to afford it. Start-ups will need to raise massive amounts of extra capital just to buy in to the fast lane.

It will also give ISPs an excuse for providing crap service. "Sorry, SuperDuperVideo didn't pay us, so you can't watch their streams." At the moment if YouTube starts to stutter people complain to their ISPs about the poor quality of their service, and the ISP in obliged to upgrade their network or lose customers.