Well, in this country, bigotry goes hand in hand.

You can hate blacks *and* women and claim that you're all for freedom.

Earlier than that.

The Mac IIfx had a pair of chips each of which effectively had such a creature. One ran the serial/network ports, and I forget the other.

Had apple sold that chip, combined with the network that ran on the second (unused) pair of standard home wiring, they could have *owned* home automation years ahead . . .

hawk

>Wow, you don't come across people who've even heard of
>Ohio Scientific that often, much less actually used one.

*sigh*

get off my lawn, I suppose. (I just reseeded it anyway)

hawk, suddenly feeling old

Prodos?

PRODOS????

damned newbies . . .

hawk

And I'm kicking myself for not buying the used Apple ][ in a wooden case at the surplus store around the corner, which I've come to realize wasn't a ][ at all . . . :(

hawk, who still has his 128k mac and 1802 wirewrap systems

for hires, rather than reading the same 40 bytes eight times in a row, and feeding to a character generator,eight different sets of 40 bytes were read (of which six set bits, and two danced around the colorburst signal. the pixel rate was just at the colorburst signal, so shifting half a bit tickled it and gave a different set of colors. Not just clever,but fiendeshly clever)

hawk

I used to be a programmer... over a decade ago. And I used to love programming in college.

But I haven't directly touched code (for a living anyway) in a long time, other than recreational coding, and that's mostly been in Python/Perl/Ruby/PHP.

I remember enough to be dangerous with SQL and with the fundamentals, and thankfully, C/C++ haven't changed much.

But while I am former programmer, I still I grok CS quite well. Algorithmically, I could write a ray tracer or optimize the cycles in a complex routine based on certain assumptions or optimize a graph or write up a crypto hash in no time.

However, what I do lack is an understanding of the various technologies and APIs that seem to keep changing. I can tell you all about data structures and compilers, but I wouldn't know how to instantiate a class in Java. But solving an IPP or DPP? That's still cakewalk.

The article seems to conflate content knowledge with being smart.

I would argue that raw analytical skills are much more important than content knowledge. Being able to regurgitate information is only marginally useful, and its most important value is that you're equipped with a framework and a lens through which to examine problems.

However, absent analytical capabilities, your ability to use your knowledge and past experiences to solve problems is severely limited.

Google makes people think they are knowledgeable, which is not necessarily the same as being "smart".

Err . . . how would this make it any different than Star Trek???

hawk

The mafia style tactics were probably a reference to the sad case of Karen Silkwood, a whistleblower in the nuclear industry who had died under mysterious circumstances only a few years earlier.

Well, I'm a copyright lawyer, so I doubt I'm "completely and totally ignorant of the law." Have you considered the possibility that your analysis is wrong?

Just thought I'd mention it, since you did make a rather broad statement suggesting that works cannot enter the public domain unless deliberately placed there by the copyright holder. While copyright holders can put works into the public domain, it's not true that that is the only way for works to enter the public domain.

"Um, no. That would not be the scenes a faire doctrine."

The scenes a faire doctrine, which I don't have to google for, thanks, permits people to copy without fear of infringement, stock elements from works, which are typical, if not indispensible, for works that have a particular setting, genre, theme, etc.

In this case, where you have a show about teenagers fighting monsters with martial arts and giant robots, it would not infringe if you had a five person team, each member of which had personalities as described above, and where the members of the team were color-coded. It's simply expected of the genre, and therefore fair game, even if you copied it from another copyrighted work.

Now if the specific thing you copied was a very detailed example, and you kept all the details, you might then have a problem. So it depends on how much Power Rangers embellished on this standard device, if they did, and if so, how much of that embellishment, if any, was used in this case.

If you disagree as to my explanation, please feel free to actually say what you think the scenes a faire doctrine is.

I didn't say Disney's Peter Pan. I was talking about JM Barrie's Peter Pan, which Disney's Peter Pan is based on.

A new version of Peter Pan, based on Barrie's, could still tarnish the character well enough (if done right, and if widely published) so as to harm Disney's Peter Pan merely by association. But it would be lawful to do this. Disney's copyright on their version of Peter Pan does not extend to stopping other people from making their own derivatives of Barrie's work, even if they're very unwholesome derivatives.

Spock in Amok Time is good Spock, just rageful and murderous. Evil Spock (with a goatee -- that's how you can tell he's evil) was from episode 33, "Mirror, Mirror."

Time shifting is typically something that the end-user does. Tivo, like Sony before it (The original time shifting lawsuit was against Sony for their Betamax), merely makes the machine. So long as there is at least a potential lawful use for the recording function of the machine, they can go on making them. The Supreme Court found that at least some time shifting would be fair, and that was enough.

Space shifting is another example, the original case was against Diamond for their Rio MP3 players, but Apple's iPod relied on it, as did basically everyone else.

No, the purpose of the use for time shifting, while not precisely commercial, is to simply use the work in the way that an ordinary user, who did not time shift, would use it. It's not strongly against fair use, but it certainly doesn't weigh for it in the way that an educational or transformative use would. At best it is a wash.