I very much doubt that the vinyl enthusiast shares the geek's obsession with DRM.

That's because they don't have DRM! Their classic turntable is actually able to play the records they buy!

If they had DRM (i.e. you buy a vinyl record and then there are technical barriers and legal risks to overcome before you're able to get it working) then you expect the situation to create "obsession." The social experience would be a some kind of hackathon, with occasional screetches where all the girls and boys would grimace and hold their hands over their ears. "Eww, that didn't decode right. I thought I had the key, but that wasn't it." The second half of the party begins when you're finally able to play the record, and everyone dances in celebration.

The machine is exposed and celebrated, not hidden.

And that's why it can't have DRM. You're allowed to understand how it works, whether or not you're a "geek" and bother to do so.

He didn't find all the secrets...

Apple are assholes, not cowards. They probably didn't approve the movie because something is the wrong color, or because it competes with their own movie, or because it has product-placement ads but Sony hasn't yet agreed to give Apple 30% of the ad revenue.

Jackie Chan is so many forms of awesome that it's not funny. (Well, no, actually.. he's funny too.) And you have provided Yet Another in the long list of ways he is awesome: as an example for why video fidelity is a good thing rather than a bad thing. (Which you'd think would be obvious, but some people don't get it. Until you mention Jackie Chan.)

There is a difference though, the 24fps frames makes up for the low frame rate with motion blur. If the new digital HFR doesn't have that it will always feel like you're watching a baseball game instead of a swordfight.

Wait, am I watching the sword fight live, or recorded on obsolete media? And does the same go for the baseball game?

You inadvertently put your finger on the truth: that a sword fight should look like a baseball game.

"I wish to sue Thomas Paine for the damage he has done to the British people." -- Horace Edwards, if he'd lived in the 1770s.

Can you name the brilliant invention, that was made to solve the problem of people like Horace Edwards? It was called America! Fuck yeah!

...about a stupid movie and a bunch of Hollywood execs and MORON ACTORS.

They do not like the interent as it is, and this whole staged iodiocy is just another way to invent new ways to shut the internet down.

Who gives a crap.

Not saying there is evidence it has happened. Saying it is a great idea and should have happened.

Have you ever retired a riddle by mistake?

Told kid about nano-cam dust today. He's only 4 years old, so he didn't know about them yet, and I'm trying to teach him basic hygiene. I explained for that for nearly a a hundred years we have all lived in an environment where other peoples' cameras are always in our homes. We track them in, on our shoes. The AC intake blows them in. The servers the cameras send video too, aren't owned by people who are practicing subterfuge. It's not like they snuck "spy" dust onto our porches in the hopes we'd track them in. It just happens; it's an inevitable consequence of the stuff blowing around everywhere.

My great grandparents complained about it. They thought they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes, because nanotech was new. They didn't see the dust, so they didn't know it was there. In the absence of sensual confirmation, the default expectation (at least to the layman) was that it wasn't there. That was naive, but my grandparents didn't work with nanotech or even use consumer models themselves, so perhaps their ignorance could be forgiven. (Just as my own ignorance of hyperspace can perhaps be forgiven, since I'm not a miner.)

My grandparents, though, grew up with the stuff, though it was still a bit expensive, so it wasn't totally ubiquitous yet. By their time, almost everyone at least knew about it, and if in a gathering of any five people you were to say "nobody sees me inside my home," chances were there would have been a few guffaws and someone would likely point out that the statement was likely incorrect. Sometimes the stuff got innocently tracked into your house, and sometimes it was manipulated into getting there, through subterfuge. The law and social norms lagged, though, and people debated privacy a lot.

By the time their children (my parents) grew up, though, it was all over. Everyone knew about nano-cam dust, and unless you did a rad-flash a few minutes earlier, fucking in your own bed was just as public as doing it in Times Square.

And now my kid knows too. It's just something everyone is expected to know about and deal with. If I were to write a story about it, I think I would set the story in the time of my grandparents, back when society was truly conflicted and in the midst of change. I bet those were interesting times.

If you were going to ask a "someone" how they meant to define "derived work", you would ask Congress, not the author(s) of one out of a million contracts which happen to make use of that term.

You're right that it's upsetting that (mostly) people who don't really work with copyright would end up answering it, but that's the nature of law, or at least until you start electing[/appointing/etc] authors. (Cynic: or until those people start funding election campaigns.)

It's only after you have determined that something is a derived work, that you go study licenses. Until that point, licenses are irrelevant.

"The 9 trillion dollar bank bailout."

Gad.

Do you realize what tech we could build with 9 trillion dollars?

We could go to alpha centauri for lunch, and be back just in time for dinner.

What a human and monetary waste of potential. Whoever approved that are enemies of the human race

Do you have some kind of problem with trouble?

If people didn't get into trouble, we wouldn't even be talking about robots, yet. We'd be posting on Slashdot, stuff like "sucks that I didn't find enough berries today, and the area is running out of meaty squirrels, so I'll probably be moving along soon." You think you want to be a factory or farm slave for the rest of your life, but you don't even get to do that, until after you've already figured out that you don't want it.

There is no fundamental difference between creating a strong AI and having a child.

I disagree, though some of it depends on exactly how you create the AI. A child is a machine optimized for serving the "interests" of its genes (half of which it copied from you), and even in the near-future of say "Gattaca" you don't really have much say in how the child works. Even if AIs were grown in a biological analog, the initial inputs would be totally different than anything else in Earth history, much less arbitrary (from our idealist viewpoint) than what goes into making up a person. Even if you set them up to evolve in a biological manner, where the inputs eventually drifted, their "genes" certainly wouldn't be anything like oldschool life genes, much less human. Perhaps you'd get some interesting convergence, but that's not the same thing.

To see the potential of AI, you really need to think like a god, not a biologist. Or possibly somewhere in between the two. Imagine what life on Earth would be like if the creationists were right, and you'll get an analogy of how AIs might end up. (Better yet, think like HPL's elder things, and consider the shoggoth.) Whatever they have in common with previous life would be remarkable exceptions, and most of it would be new and alien-like. I think they're be more alien than "real" (biological) aliens.

Maybe think of AIs as (initially!) part of humanity's extended phenotype, like a spider's web is to a spider, or a dam is to a beaver. Could you convince a spider that a web is like its child, the new spiderdom of the future? I don't think a web that can "do things" would make your argument to the spider any stronger.

I'm not saying you should freak out, but They Will Not Be Humanity.

And most of what I'm saying is from taking a fairly extreme biological view. I wonder if that's kind of outdated, and AIs are going to be even less like life, than predicted in previous decades.

Gimme gimme gimme.