Some small fraction of authors' works are popular and produce lots of revenue. Copyright law in the US was explicitly intended to encourage these authors to get into the business. As the US Constitution says, "To 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."

There are some authors who can and do make a living at their craft. What if they spend a year working on a book and then die just as it's released? The law can and should allow their rights be inherited, so that their heirs can benefit from the work, rather than having it immediately fall into the public domain.

The rationale why itunes song can be inherited, meanwhile, is even simpler. In general, all property can be inherited. Copyright doesn't change the fundamental nature of the property, it's just a restriction imposed on the property's owner -- even though the owner owns the property, the owner is not free to copy it. This does not change the property's capability of being inherited in any way.

So I see no contradiction. The copyright itself should be inheritable by the author's heirs, and copyright-protected materials should be inheritable by the purchaser's heirs.

Both the rights and the content should be inheritable. The rights because they are part of the incentive for authors -- if the author dies young, the author wants his/her family to be provided for. The content because it's just like any other property from an inheritance and trasnferrence perspective, with the sole proviso that it cannot be *copied*.

"Redeem" in this context means that one gives a certain amount of money to the priest. The Hebrew name for this is pronounced like "Pidyon HaBen." It's still practiced to this day in Jewish Orthodox communities. There is a wikipedia article on it.

In 1993, Apple shipped their first PDA, a primitive tablet-like device, the Newton. Which they had started work on in 1987. Obviously, Apple did not get the idea from a speech Bill Gates made in the 1990s. Although in all fairness, Apple didn't invent the idea, either. Psion had a shipping device in 1984. And Alan Kay had been pushing his Dynabook since the 1960s.

Welcome aboard!

I was talking about when they "entered the market", which was indeed the original xbox. The 360 and its ads were later. That's the point -- MSFT started out lame, and eventually figured it out.

The most important question is, which Microsoft model will this emulate, Zune or Xbox?

Zune -- MSFT enters an existing market with a device that is putatively well-speced and well-priced. But MSFT fails to get the details right, and has a crappy advertising campaign. MSFT sinks tons of money into it and eventually gives up.

Xbox -- MSFT enters an existing market with a device that is putatively well-speced and well-priced. But MSFT fails to get the details right, and has a crappy advertising campaign. MSFT sinks tons of money into it and eventually outspends the competitors and fixes enough hardware and software issues that it comes to dominate the market.

With Zune, MSFT's front-running competitor was Apple. With Xbox, it was Sony and Nintendo. Now, it's Apple again. This does not bode well for MSFT's ability to win through.

I only see two ways that MSFT can pull through this: (1) they can leverage the Office and desktop monopolies to go after the business space; (2) their sheer desperation to keep from becoming irrelevant will force them to keep spending until they figure it out. With Zune, failure was on the table -- music players did not directly threaten their core Windows business. The iPad and Apple ecosystem, OTOH, now are threatening their core Windows business.

It's perfectly natural for the head of a space agency to want to expand what his agency does.

Follow-up questions:

(1) Has the Russian government actually committed budget to the proposal?

(2) What does Russia expect to accomplish with its moon base?

Note that Russia has been talking about this for a while.

So you believe that anyone who contradicts what you believe on these quotes is lying to you. Convenient.

Here is a fix: you should go and hunt down these sources for yourself and try to find these quotes for yourself. At which point, you will find what I told you above to be true, without having to rely on anyone else.

As I've mentioned previously on Slashdot, I no longer follow the religion. I think the religion is wrong. I don't have a problem with legitimate criticism of Judaism. The above list of quotes is not legitimate. Judaism does not believe in killing, raping, lying to, or cheating non-Jews.

You are apparently a troll. Any reasonable third party reading what I wrote would understand it. So I will not bother explaining again.

I will leave off with this site about the quotes, which goes into detail on each one.

No. Most of quotes do not exist. Most of the *books* exist, but they've been misquoted -- if you read the originals, you'll see something else.

It would be like if someone presented a list of Christian holy books and said that the book of Matthew 180:37 says Christian must kill all non-Christians, while the book of Shadrach 3:4 says Christians must cheat non-Christians. The first book exists but has been misquoted; the second book does not exist. In both cases, the quote is wrong, but for different reasons.

A person can claim to be anything online. Whoever posted this list is wrong. This is not a list of Jewish beliefs.

A fair number of the quotes above are from books that flat out don't exist. What's "Libbre David 37"? It appears several times, but I've never heard of it. "Szaaloth-Utszabot, The Book of Jore Dia 17"?

The rest of these are fabrications and/or misquotes that are refuted elsewhere online.

This seems like a troll, but I'll bite anyway. Kosher restaurants are often frequented by groups of people who include both kosher and non-kosher folks. For example, if your workplace has a going-away party for an Orthodox person, you will probably hold it at a kosher restaurant. This means that you get plenty of people in a kosher restaurant who don't care about kashrus.

Another problem is that different people can have different kashrus standards. If the restaurant is certified OU, then all food brought in needs to acceptable to the OU certifiers. If a person comes in who keeps kosher, but whose standard is one that isn't acceptable to the certifier, that won't work very well. Using the OU example above, OU would not recognize a Conersvative certification, but a Conservative customer would have no problem the other way. Similarly, the customer could have prepared the food themselves, and genuinely believed they did so correctly, but made a mistake. So the certifier can't rely on a customer's claims that outside food is kosher.

+1. I wish I had mod points. Everything said above by betterunixthanunix is exactly how the Haredi community thinks.