(Obviously I meant "rights" not "writes.")

No, it wasn't. TFA is talking about American copyright law, which dates to the first copyright act of 1790. The statute you're citing applied in England, but it was certainly not the first copyright statute, whose concept dates back to the late 1400s in various Italian cities where certain publishers or writers were granted exclusive writes to publication, usually for periods of 7-10 years.

I completely agree with you that 20ish years is plenty before a work enters public domain. The original 1790 statute which had a default period of 14 years was also plenty.

However, I think there are some things overlooked in your arguments...

That's because you have a choice to get paid up-front. Most artists/creators don't. If someone offered you a contract: "Hey -- you can design my building for me, and I'll give you X% of the rents for the next Y years, but I'll pay you nothing now," would you do it? What if the building was in the middle of nowhere in a completely untested market? What if your design was also very unconventional and you didn't even know if it would work?

Those are the kinds of things a novelist or even a non-fiction author, say, has to deal with all the time. They invest their time and effort spending months or perhaps years generating a work, often with no money up-front. And unless they're an established author, they're often breaking new ground, perhaps trying out something new which may or may not sell well.

I suspect most architects and engineers here wouldn't take such a risky deal. They'd prefer to actually get paid when they do their work, as do most people. Most creators take much bigger risks in the hope that MAYBE some day down the line they might recoup their expenses and time.

And -- of course -- the vast majority DON'T. For every creator who makes millions of dollars off of their books or songs or screenplays or whatever, there are thousands of creators who never really make a profit. But they try anyway, and maybe they get something back.

I don't know why everyone is so obsessed with deaths of authors.

Look -- copyright is broken, but it's effectively a contract between creators and the public. If you signed onto a deal like I offered you above, where you got no money up-front, but I said you'd get a share of the rents on the building you designed for 20 years, that contract generally wouldn't void at your death. The rents would be paid to your estate or your heirs for the original term of 20 years.

Why should it be any different? The few creators who do actually make money often have kids to feed. If I spent a year writing a novel and with my family suffering without enough money expecting X years of possible revenue from my novel, why should they not get the expected years of revenue if I drop dead from a heart attack the minute after my book is published? Copyright terms should be fixed and short -- whatever they are. The death of the artist is irrelevant.

Not sure what this has to do with anything. Are you saying that we shouldn't pay anyone anything if they don't do something "essential" enough or something? Why the heck do we pay sports players or actors or whatever? Most people spend significant portions of their days listening to music, watching TV, etc. Just because something is viewed by you as "entertainment" or something doesn't mean that it isn't hugely important to you or society -- and if we don't have a system that rewards creators, art gets worse. Good artists choose to do something else with their time. And there are also writers who contribute significantly to new ideas, knowledge, etc. -- if these people won't get compensation, they may not choose to do it. That's potentially "somethign of consequence" happening.

Again, I think most artists/creators would LOVE to take a deal like most people and get paid up-front. But that's not generally an option, and it's not the way we seem to do things in our culture. The only people who can demand significant compensation up-front (commissions, book contracts, etc.) are generally the people who will already be guaranteed to get a significant return anyway. For artists who do things that aren't as high-profile or are less popular, they take big gambles. If they do succeed, they should be appropriately compensated -- otherwise, why the heck should anyone spend months or years of their time creating quality intellectual works?

Really? A list like this is just a "drop in the ocean"? And that's just Catholic clerics who made scientific contributions; it doesn't include other non-ordained folks supported by the church over the centuries. People who founded entire new major ideas in science (Copernicus, Mendel, Mersenne, Roger Bacon, etc., if you include non-clerics, people like Lavoisier, Descartes, Pasteur, etc.) are just a "drop in the ocean"?

The "times [I] mention" were the past 1000 years. It's true that European scientific advances were slower for maybe the first 500 years of that or so, and activity outside Europe was often greater. But the Catholic Church was the "best game in town" for supporting science and production of new research into nature, mathematics, etc. during Europe of that time.

But you'll also notice many, many scientists (mostly Jesuits) listed in the link above from the past couple centuries too. During the "Age of Discovery" in the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s, Catholic missionaries were a huge network of people who shared and then distributed new knowledge and findings around the world. There's also a reason why dozens of craters on the moon are named after Jesuit scientists -- who were incredibly active in astronomy for centuries (despite the common myths in the Galileo story about Carholics who supposedly refused to look through telescopes and believe what they saw).

Look -- even if you believe that all of this is just a "drop in the ocean" of scientific discovery, I wasn't trying to argue that the Catholic Church was solely responsible for scientific discovery -- only that it has not been vehemently anti-science throughout its history, as some people seem to imply.

You want to know what is really a "drop in the ocean"? Give me a list of scientists who were supposedly actively persecuted by the Catholic Church during its history for their "scientific" findings. You have Galileo and maybe Bruno (if you even count him as a "scientist" -- his ideas were pretty wacky and his "methods" were more of speculative philosophy than anything like "science"). That's two people. Maybe a few other incidents in a thousand years, but somehow that's all most people seem to know about the Catholic Church and science. How does that square with the list of people in my links above? Church persecution and suppression of science is a "drop in the ocean" compared to its consistent support of science over the centuries.

Well, for most of the past 1000 years, the Catholic Church has been a leading force in scientific advancements of knowledge -- numerous scientific discoveries and theories came from priests, monks, and other church affiliates, and the church played a major role in the dissemination of knowledge. It's really only in the past 150 years or so that the church's role in science has significantly decreased. For every Galileo affair (which, though inexcusable, was more about politics and freedom of speech than scientific progress), there are dozens of other examples of significant scientists or ideas coming from Catholic sources.

(Full disclosure: I'm not a Catholic, but I have done significant research on the history of science. Want more info? Start here.)

Obviously there are issues where the Catholic Church seems "backward," but -- in contrast with many other conservative religious groups -- it has embraced things like evolution, the Big Bang theory was actually first proposed by a Belgian priest, etc. So while this may be a great announcement from the Pope, it isn't really a significant change from most Catholic roles in science. The idea that somehow the Catholic Church is opposed to science was created by radical revisionist historians in the 19th century. But it's not really accurate.

I've enjoyed Power Grid with both 3 players and the maximum allowed by the game (6). I tend to believe that in between would probably be inferior. If you have 3 players, everyone can get in every city, at a cost. If you have 6, then half the people are locked out of every city. But if you have 4, then one person is locked out, which can lead to dogpiling, etc.

6 is fairly accommodating for differences in skill and experience, 3 less so.

There is a new 2 player version I am looking forward to trying.

I'm assuming you meant "aren't" in that first sentence, and in that case, obviously you're right. Most TV is obviously fiction, for example.

On the other hand, reality TV trades on the illusion of realism -- and if no one thought the people in those shows were actually in scary situations, potentially involving supernatural phenomena, then no one would watch them... And they wouldn't be able to sell advertising.

I personally love a good ghost story, like I love a good fantasy or sci-fi story, but I'm able to enjoy the unrealistic aspects of such stories because I know they are fiction, and I accept that this is some sort of alternative world where weird things are possible. But I can't stand to watch "documentaries" or "reality" shows about ghosts because it's so obvious that they're complete BS. If you can't get past that and allow the possibility of belief (I.e. legitimacy), why would you watch?

Yeah, except... Take a look at the number of "real ghost-hunters" reality TV shows, for example, to see how a "kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices" has clearly contributed to people claiming to find all sorts of recorded "evidence" of weird crap. It's broadcast on TV every freakin' day, and clearly somebody must think some aspect of it is legit, or there wouldn't be so many shows about it.

Interest in UFOs was a particular kind of fad. Everything from the clear increases in human technology (making many UFOs more likely to be human origin, even to the average person) to various conspiracy theories to the X-Files has probably changed the way people pay attention to odd objects in the sky these days.

But, if anything, the interest in various kinds of cheap recording technology has led to even more wacky made-up supernatural crap, so much these days that there are entire reality TV genres devoted to it. Just because UFOs aren't of as much interest in the past few years doesn't mean there isn't stuff out there. (And actually, poke around on the internet -- you'll clearly find loads of people out there with new UFO reports all the time.)

Just want to say thanks for a adding something of substance to this discussion, even if it didn't get modded p. I think our copyright system needs a lot of reform, and things should go into the public domain much more quickly, but those who just blindly that copyright is a completely irrational concept generally haven't thought at all about issues you bring up or their consequences.

I don't know if JJ can do worse than Old George did with E1 through E3,

Well, Lucas stuck around for all three movies. JJ is going to make two movies, realize he screwed up the setup so there cannot be a satisfactory conclusion, walk away, and blame the next director for fucking up his trilogy.

At least Lin has experience keeping a franchise going.

I agree. However....

Under these circumstances, the person found at fault will almost always be the person who rear-ended the car in front. If the car in front of you is stopping to avoid a red light, and you haven't allowed adequate distance to stop so you are forced to rear-end them, guess what? You are already a "high-risk" tailgating driver.

(And that's regardless of the stupid and insane manipulation of yellows that should cause any public official involved in it to be put in prison.)

Tailgating causes a huge number of accidents, from minor to major pile-ups on the highway. No one is "suddenly high-risk" if they were tailgating -- they were already doing "high-risk" driving and just happened to be a situation where they were caught due to someone else trying to comply with the law. I can absolutely see why insurance companies would be pleased, because in this scenario, they get to catch people who have demonstrably behaved in a manner that often causes accidents, so it allows them to detect these people and potentially offset their bad driving with higher premiums or dropping them altogether (though the latter would probably require previous evidence of high-risk behavior).

I agree. "Tommy I" and "Tommy II" are decent actual intros to calc. (To the non-math geeks out there, these are common names for Apostol's books.)

For those not ready to take the plunge into real calc with Apostol, better to do a simpler intro version first... Stewart's book is like the MS Word of calc textbooks -- bloated and trying to serve everybody. Most people would be better off with either something like Wordpad/text editor or using a real typesetting/layout app for serious formatting.

Thanks for taking one word from my post without the requisite context and using it as a basis for an ill-informed rant (or, rather, an informed rant about something different from what I was talking about).

Look, I hate the textbook edition nonsense as much as you, but my post was specifically about what usually happens when A NEW AUTHOR is added. I know major textbook authors personally. I've seen generational shifts where a new co-author is added onto a textbook. Usually that is when revision is most likely to happen, since the new author will often have a few choice tidbits to add or put their own spin on a few chapters. My post was actually intending to insult these co-authors for the little work they sometimes do when taking over, but you seem to have taken it as though I was somehow praising them or implying they do more than they do.

Whatever. Take a break from your lunatic thermo rant and go sit in on a reading comprehension class sometime.

"Extrapolation" implies some sort of trend or data. You don't have a trend or even data; you have a single datum. On that basis, I don't think anything can really be said to be "a far better bet."

Uh, no. When this happens, publishers just find another "co-author" to add on to the title page. If it's like most textbooks, the new author will make a few minor tweaks here and there, rewrite only one chapter in any significant way (or simply add a new chapter somewhere), and then move back to the standard "renumber the pages and exercises" for subsequent "revised" editions.