Who is going to staff this "home"? Other 80 and 90 year olds? Or other people's kids and grandkids?

The grandparent post overstated the case, because of course there's no need for everyone to have their own kids to look after them when they're old. But we still need young people to follow us. So it's perfectly fine for lots of people to choose to be "evolutionary dead ends", as long as not everyon makes that choice. :-)

That's assuming that we know how the story will end. It won't necessarily end that way.

I agree.

I think I'm missing something here in this discussion. Signing a petition is a way of saying that *I* support this, it's a way of taking a public stand on the issue. That's why you sign your *name*, instead of ticking a box anonymously. That's also why petitions are, at least in theory, taken seriously -- it's not an anonymous mob who support the petition, it's a bunch of specific people who are willing to put their names on record.

Sometimes I think that if they did nothing, that might be a GOOD thing :-)

Just as a by-the-way, "apologist" does not mean what you seem to think it does.

Okay, I can understand measuring amount of data by comparing it to the data in a book or a DVD, but Lines Of Code?

The 1500's were the 16th century, not the 14th century.

Umm, the person I was replying to was saying that copyright should automatically expire as soon as the author dies, because then he or she doesn't need the money any more.

That's not a very good analogy.

Plumbers get paid for fixing the toilets at the time they fix them. And if the plumber dies before you pay your bill, you don't automatically get to forget the charges. Should the plumber have to buy insurance to cover that case? You might have life insurance to cover the fact that you won't be earning any more after you're dead, but do you buy insurance to cover your last paycheck because your employer won't have to pay it after you're dead?

So, yes, it is the "same difference".

Maybe a lot of slashdotters aren't old enough to have kids, but it seems to me that providing for one's widow and/or children is one of the things that an author would likely be concerned about, and probably even consider to be a "need".

Nobody is talking about locking up works "forever". This is about books that were written and published long after Mickey Mouse made his first appearance, and Mickey is still copyrighted (which seems to be stretching it a bit TOO far in my opinion).

Everything I've been reading suggests that ethanol has no advantages, other than for the subsidized corn producers. It takes more energy to grow the corn to be converted to ethanol than what you get out. You get lower mileage from running on a gasoline-ethanol mix than on pure gasoline. You produce less quantity of pollutants per amount of fuel burned, but this is pretty close to offset by the larger amount of fuel that you have to burn to go the same distance.

Maybe I'm wrong. I drive a diesel car that I run on biodiesel made from used restaurant oil, so I'm definitely not against biofuels in principle, but everything I've ever heard or read makes it seem like ethanol does not actually do anybody any good. Its only purpose is to make it SEEM like somebody is doing something, to make us feel good. But it raises the price of corn, and now, it appears, it destroys your car's engine as well.

It seems obvious to me that he was being sarcastic. Did you think he meant it seriously?

Okay, I'm obviously missing something here. How is having an extra parameter for the destination size any safer? I always thought the third parameter to memcpy was the amount of data to copy, and since obviously it should never be set to anything larger than the size of the destination, how will having the destination size explicitly passed in help any?

Or are we just talking about a convenience feature that will make it easier for lazy programmers?

I make my own coffee, I get it from the coffee machine at work, I really like Tim Horton's coffee, I drink coffee from Coffee Time or Starbucks or whatever -- these are all palatable. Pretty much every time I've bought McDonald's coffee, I've had to pour out most of the cup because it was totally undrinkable.

Why, you ask, would I have bought it more than once in such a case? It's because people were telling me that "McDonald's is making GOOD coffee now, you should try it again." I did, and they aren't.

Why don't you read about what happened before you guess about it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants seems to be a good summary of the case. Basically, a 79-year-old woman suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent. She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. Two years of treatment followed. The issue was that McDonald's required franchises to serve coffee at 180-190 F, which (it was claimed) is much hotter than coffee from other places.

Not that I can understand why anybody would want to drink McDonald's coffee anyway -- it's HORRIBLE! But that's just my opinion.