Raise your hand if you never heard of it. There's just too many people that want to do this kind of thing. I don't think it would have helped them, but the site design sucks too. 1. Metro-like on the front page, always a bad sign. 2. Read the article on Zanskar, which is interesting except that the borderless wall of photos that fill the window is too hard to scroll through on my machine... It jerk, Jerk, JERKS and I have to play finger games to maybe get it to line up right. Don't make it hard on your users like that.

I suppose it all looks great on an iPad, but really... writing code that accomodates different (and not nearly as uncommon as you think) browsers really shouldn't be that hard.

Of course none of that would have saved them because like I said, there's too much of this stuff already.

I look forward to more $unknown_site is shutting down articles on /. in the future.

The NSA is run by a four-star admiral and a four-star general before that. It is a branch of the military already.

You're thinking of armed forces intelligence like the Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence guys. I can't think that they'd be much better if tasked with the same mission.

What needs to change is the mission, not the agency.

Emphasis mine. Driving is a privilege. It can be revoked at any time for any cause that the elected government deems reasonable.

But your inalienable rights are not privileges. They cannot be revoked.

Police checkpoints by themselves do not violate any rights. But the methods of selection and screening at the checkpoints may.

Of course, I agree that associating checkpoints with free speech zones is a rather broad leap. It is wrong in the same way that the airport security lines by themselves do not violate anybody's rights, but the (current) method of screening by the TSA does. Now free speech zones and say, the no-fly list are far closer. Speech is a right. Travel is also a right.

The party(ies) itself is a farce. There is no party in power. Only men.

Yes, but doesn't the guy at 1600 report to the corporations and special interest groups? Truman probably didn't, but Obama, (along with most presidents since Kennedy), probably does.

This makes me wonder if Carl Sagan ever built his own telescope. If you don't grind your own optics, then the level of difficulty is comparable to building a PC since you're just assembling components. When I was into astronomy I never built a scope.

There is a quote that goes something like, "computer science is about computers like astronomy is about telescopes". Googling that is left as an exercise. Wait, maybe I should build my own search engine.

In other words, don't worry about it. The NC should remain in your possession.

Well, there are ways to do it with CDs you don't own where you will be protected from legal trouble. But in practice, it never comes up.

No, the car doesn't count.

Let's look at a bit more of the relevant language in the statute:

It's what the primary purpose of the digital recording function is (or is marketed as) that matters. We disregard the car and the rest of the machine altogether.

No, there's no license, particularly no license 'implied in the law,' whatever that means.

You have an inherent free speech right to do anything with a work that you like, except for things that copyright gives an exclusive right to the copyright holder about. A copyright holder can only possibly grant a license for something that he holds a right to; he cannot give you permission to do something you don't need his permission for. And once the copyright on the work expires (no, seriously), you're no longer limited as to the exclusive rights either.

So for example, there is an exclusive right to publicly perform music, but not an exclusive right to privately perform music. Even if you have a stolen CD that was itself made illegally, you can lawfully privately perform it without infringing on copyright. No license or anything.

All this licensing bullshit basically is a side effect of stupid (and largely unnecessary) practices in the software industry. It's mostly folk myths. If there's a license, you'll usually know it: it will almost certainly be pages and pages long, written, and you'll have to expressly agree in some way. Record companies would not sell CDs with some sort of implied license.

Depends. Assuming you just mean an album, and not the piece of plastic, it'll either be a work or a compilation.

No, that's preparation of a derivative work, probably; an exclusive right at 17 USC 106(2), and doing it is infringing at 17 USC 501(a). You'll need an exception to copyright, or for the work not to be copyrighted, or a license, in order to just make the derivative, never mind distributing it. And if it's not a derivative work after all (see the definition at 17 USC 101), it's likely an infringement of the reproduction right at 17 USC 106(1).

Correct. Though as a practical matter, it's treated like an affirmative defense... it just makes more sense to do it that way, even though it is indeed an exception to copyright.

No, it's only legal under the right circumstances. Fair use is entirely a case-by-case thing. Just because it could be a fair use sometimes doesn't mean that it will be every time. And vice versa, under the right circumstances, any sort of infringement might be a fair use.

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend relying entirely on it if a better option were available.

Correction: I said non-infringing, but I meant to say non-actionable. Non-infringing would, in fact, be legal.

I apologize for the error.

No.

First, it doesn't make it legal, it makes it non-actionable; there's a difference. (I am reliably told that it was supposed to be legal, but it got changed at the last minute in a suspicious manner)

Second, it doesn't say you can give the AHRA-compliant copies away. Just that they can be noncommercially 'used.'

Actually, it was never quite clear. It's since been expressly made non-infringing (not technically the same thing as legal; they're very sneaky) in some situations, but not any that are relevant to most people. There's also a fair use argument, but that's not the best thing in the world to rely on; fair use depends on the specific circumstances at hand, and doesn't always produce consistent results.