Saying "the pictures will never be saved" is known as a "Pie Crust Promise" - easily made, easily broken. Here is some interesting reading on similar promises from the government, especially on how the SSN will never be used for identification. http://www.scragged.com/articles/the-plague-of-presidential-pie-crust-promises . The moral is never EVER trust the government .

I remember when they shut down the Apollo program to do this thing it was suppose to be a permanent hopping off point in space to get us out to the other planets and beyond. They never told us it was just going to go around circles just outside the atmosphere and let astronauts perform little science fair experiments and do little else. Basically, I believe now the space station and the space shuttle were just welfare programs for aerospace companies. Now NASA wants to crash it back to earth and loose everything. I don't blame Russia and the other countries wanting to detach their modules and taking them to play elsewhere. If NASA really wants to salvage the space station project, they need to push it to a higher, more useful orbit, and start building some real interplanetary manned (and unmanned) spaceships out there.

Send me some money and I'll tell you all about them. I'll even wear some dark aviator shades and a UFO cap while I do so.

I can almost picture Sony Recipe Corporation and Disney Recipe International suing moms and pops for cooking dinner using pirated recipes...

>You can be sure that were someone to call for it's repeal 300 years later there'd be no >lack of "professional recipe composers" who would talk about how much work they put >into working out new recipes and the time and effort it takes and how we're bad people >for implying that they haven't worked hard and that they somehow don't deserve a cut >whenever someone follows their recipies.

Really good post. Spells it out exactly so almost anyone can understand what the problem is.

Actually, the expansion of corporate monopolies by use of DRM and DMCA restricts what used to be inalienable rights of both artists and users far more that most people imagine. It is a very dangerous situation right now. Anything to weaken DRM and DMCA is good, at least until the the political process starts working for the people again.

Let me get this straight. Both Verizon and Comcast have lines running across the back of my property in the right of way. Since obtaining the rights to this passage they have each added massive amounts of programming which I have never been compensated for. Looks like it is time to started adding up a bill for each of them. Also, since they have no cable neutrality, I am claiming the right to continuous deep inspection of their programming to make sure they stick to their original agreements for use of my property.

>There's nobody to identify - there's nobody to criticize. They like to stay in the shadows and let their
> lawyers do their work, and the lawyers can claim that they're just "representing their client" so
>you can't even point to them.

It is true these type of organizations would like to operate with impunity and with no personal accountability. The way to counter this is to shine a light on the people who are really responsible and keep that light shining. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Williams_(songwriter) is their fearless leader who a long time ago wrote such songs as "We've Only Just Begun" and "(Just An) Old Fashioned Love Song". Something to consider (or not) when choosing a wedding song.

As an engineer, my work can be heard on television and various other communication devices. With shrinking engineering budgets, I wish I could depend on people being forced to send me moneys in order to pay my mortgage, feed my kids and upgrade my computer. I have a totally middle class income, and no-one is doing anything to guarantee my milking locked in users based on past work. My engineering and other friends are all professionals, and we all need to pay for groceries. The next time you use something I might of had a hand in creating, consider that you don't have to continue support my spending habits based on something I did a long time ago. If you are really passionate about doing this, feel free to donate my moneys you owe me to the EFF instead, because I do wish to share my earlier work with anyone. Also, keep in mind creativity in your industry too was freely shared for most of the history of humanity until the culture barons started to try to privatize and control everything artistic and musical.

North Korea deployed robots a long time ago. They are called North Koreans.

What's more interesting is if you take the first letters of each word in their mission statement and parse them correctly, you get 'UPC is a cat' followed by a list of acronyms for all sorts of shadowy secret organizations and technologies...

upc is a cat dto ados dod in a pta wd cfs mco io tea ia de UA foa i cad tst oa

Sadly Nuts and Volts is dumbed down compared to the old Radio-Electronics mags. I let my subscription expire after only a year because it became too repetitive. Too much stuff about how to make LED's blink and the like. I don't think there is a good general electronics hobby mag anymore.

and the event horizon should just disappear due to Hawking_radiation and Black_hole_evaporation leaving a naked singularity.

I hope local TV stays. I am on the verge of ditching the huge sewage pipe AKA Verizon FIOS and just go with local digital TV, internet options, and maybe re-activate my C-Band Sat system. Verizon FIOS has a zillion channels of which almost all of it is garbage programming and the rest is near un-watchable due to 5 minute+ commercials.

Corporations are not human, they have no intelligence, they aren't even alive in any meaningful sense. If companies could ditch the actual end consumer entirely, they would.

This is very well said and so true.