The first recordings that included Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain at this point, yes, but there's no reason whatsoever why Mickey Mouse as a trademark couldn't and shouldn't remain valid in the fields for which it has been registered, if it remains in use. Trademarks != copyrights.

HE washer takes about 2 hours to clean a sanitary load, but uses just a few cents of water and detergent. Cleaning costs are in the noise.

Modern cloth diapers, while expensive, are very easy to use, and contain waste as well as disposable diapers. They pay for themselves in a reasonably short time and prevent all of this landfill waste.

Our daughter was premature, and we used disposables until she was large enough to move into the "one size" BumGenius diapers we got from our registry. I think we have ~20 of them, which means about $340 spent and a 3ish day supply without laundry. When we're done with them, though, we can resell them - yes, they have resale value.

The alternative we would be using is $0.21 each, so we'll break even after 245 or so days. Larger disposable diapers are more expensive so the savings will grow with time, not shrink, and the cloth ones are very adjustable.

Why would I be a fool to accept their cash? I wouldn't promise a conversion rate until I had it in hand and was at my bank, and if it's worth nothing all I lost was a few minutes of my time (and they're out all their money).

My domain contact email is my work email, not the one on my domain, because if the hosting service has problems and the domain is down I want to be able to move to a new service (this has happened). I wouldn't trust a third party email to this either - Yahoo closed lots of unused accounts last year and Google or anyone else could do the same. My work email I check daily and has been stable for more than a decade.

And yet - were I to get fired or quit, I could forget to switch, or miss a reminder email before I log in and fix it.

So while yeah, losing access to your own domain is dumb, have a little sympathy. It's not 100% trivial to keep on top of this.

At that rate, I bet there's a market for Argentinians to mail me cash, which I'll use to establish them a Paypal account. Hell, if Paypal and I both take 10% they still come out on top.

If I had an idea for something that was okay, not earth changing, but it was in a field I wasn't an expert in (or was just too boring to bother), I'd happily take $17k from anyone who would hand it to me. I got I think $800 from my employer for my patent, which was obviously what I agreed to when I was hired but puts $17k in perspective.

Something I think conservatives know well, but other leanings don't always grasp, is that it's a good thing to take money from your opponents. That's why I don't buy from companies and people I disagree with, but I would happily sell to them.

I'd do it as mandatory triple pay for anyone working on a secular U.S. holiday: Memorial, Labor, Thanksgiving. The only people who need to be working are police and emergency services, and we can pay enough in taxes to cover this.

I know, some people want to work on holidays, and some businesses want to be open. But it's too easy to coerce an employee who doesn't work into working, so laws that mandate "employees can't be punished for refusing to work" are harder to enforce than those that mandate "triple pay if they work, whether they wanted too or not".

I suspect Walgreens and CVS and a few gas stations would stay open on those days, but most everywhere else would close. That's okay.

While the science may not be settled, the "drag on sled while someone wets the sand" method is corroborated with available records:
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-...

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014...

We could create permanent cloud cover to block out the sun. That would have the added side effect of stopping the solar-powered robot menace, though perhaps it would drive them to find a more sinister power source.

We should all use covered cups and never set them down even once, just in case someone tampers with them? That's the "better" world you want to live in?

If you're going to divide sentence by number of crimes, then shouldn't you divide his 33 months by [number of physical sales x scaling factor for profiting + number of downloaded copies]? If the 700k downloads number isn't totally made up by the studio (I'm making no judgement here) and ignoring the physical sales entirely, then he was actually sentenced to less than 2 minutes per infringement. That makes murder about 69 thousand times worse than contributing to copyright infringement.

On the contrary, its eloquent use of car analogies is one of Slashdot's remaining fine points. =p

What if the offender's employer refuses? What if the offender's employer doesn't have a bank account? What if the offender's employer's customers refuse? What if it's turtles all the way down?

Physical confinement is a good deterrent for white collar crime - far better than it is as a deterrent to violent crime, in my opinion, because the type of people who use violence tend to have minds better able to shut off emotions and critical thought as needed, whether than need is for 10 minutes while shooting and robbing someone or 15 years behind bars.

>> I don't think that the name "Identity theft" puts the blame on the victim, though, any more than "car theft" puts the blame on the owner of the stolen car.

I think there is a distinction, though, because in the case of "car theft", you rarely have to prove that it was not you using the car. Imagine if every time a car was stolen, the owner never noticed until it was used in a robbery (or driven through a red light camera), and you were assumed guilty until you proved it was not you driving. That would make it a comparable car analogy.

In the case of the red light camera, you probably are assumed guilty, but fortunately most car thieves don't want to run red lights, so the frequency of occurrence is rare, whereas most people using a borrowed ID intend to use it in a way that will hurt its credit.