Not strictly true: if you wrote an elaborate statement to affirm that hydrogen is the element with the least mass you would probably have copyright *on the statement*, just not on the hydrogen fact. This is how you have copyright on e.g. science books, which are basically based on the explanation of facts (and why you can take said facts and put them on wikipedia, but you can't copy the actual phrasing of the book).

Actually, back then commoners tended to be able to read and write, at least to some extent (enough to scribble profanity on the walls, at least), and you even had many chances to hear many books read aloud, if you cared.

The Alexandria example is not applicable today, however, mostly because back then the act of copying was expensive (both in materials and time), while today it is extremely cheap, suggesting a totally different method of dissemination.

The problem I see with a 20 year copyright term instead of life of the author is that I worry about delayed (mass) publishing and expecially derivative works.

E.g. somebody writes a relatively successful book, which sells just enough to cover expenses and make a very modest living, and is then left to fade into oblivion; exactly 20 years later a blockbuster movie gets made, which also promotes further sales of the original book, but the original author doesn't see any money.

This is why I believe that there should be a short time (5-20 years from publication) of full copyright protection followed by a longer term (life of the author) of limited control that covers for-profit copying and derived works, but gives more permissions for non-profit activities, expecially for "abandonware" works.

To keep Disney happy, corporations and heirs may even be able to pay for extensions on the copyright protection for a work indefinitely, but at a progressively growing rate, and as long as they keep them available to the public, so that they can keep control of the few huge selling ones, but society gets to benefit from everything else.

My very dumb, 25€ phone features an alarm clock; it won't update itself for DST or timezone change, but it won't even fail every morning after a DST change, like certain other smart phones.
It also has a simple calculator, and a very useful led torchlight.
It has survived drops, being wet, consumes quite little (I recharge about once a week its 700mAh, 3.7V battery) and fits in every pocket.

On the other hand, I also usually have some other internet capable non-phone device with me: it used to be a netbook, now it is a pandora: those need more power, of course, but I'm able to turn them off when not in use (not just in a standby status that allows them to receive calls), and I can use them dry when needed, knowing that in any small emergency I still have the phone for important communcations.

It may be reasonable in a movie, expecially an older and/or low cost one: painting an actor blue is much easier than building and animating a credible model of an outworldy alien, expecially one that is not supposed to be just a ravaging monster.

Books, on the other hand, are another matter.

Not really, accordingly to the catholic church to marry you MUST be willing to have sex, since "entering marriage with the intention of never having children is a grave wrong and more than likely grounds for an annulment." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_marriage#View_of_Catholic_Church

Of course, the church position would be that you ONLY had sex with your spouse, which in theory would work in preventing the spread of HIV, but in practice has never been followed enough to prevente the spread of STD, and won't probably ever.

Not really. Horse is one of the few animals whose meat becomes softer with age and exercise; in the countries where horse is eaten the best cuts tended to come from racehorses who had to be killed because of injuries. I don't know if it is still possibile to eat them, however, because of the different regulation on medicinal use.

I'm too in the very rarely camp.

Most of my emails are sent to public mailing lists, so crypto wouldn't make sense, but I try to sign at least some of those, so that people know I have a gpg key.
A good percentage of the rest are trivial enough that there is no need to bother encrypting. I do take a point to send at least some encrypted message now and then, just so that the few really private ones don't stick out as much. Most of what I encrypt for that reason are mildly NSFW links sent to friends (and the encryption works as a nice NSFW reminder, bonus point).

The fact that lots of my friends are nerds, and a significant part is somewhat related to the debian project and thus have to have a key of course helps.

I use mutt, so I just had to create a key, configure it once and now I can choose to crypt and/or sign with just two keypresses (a graphical client whould use a pair of checkboxes). Sign check and decrypting is usually automatic (after I've entered a passphrase in the second case, of course), or rarely requires a single keypress.

For people who use webmail, there is a gpg implementation as a chrome extension at http://gpg4browsers.recurity.com/ which looks promising, and any other email client could implement an easy interface to gpg/pgp, if there was enough request.

This leaves out the scenario where you use a computer you don't own to check email, but you don't want to use it for confidential data anyway (and encrypting confidential messages would allow you to quickly check your other email with less worries).

If I know that every couple months there is an Humble Bundle, I can expect most indie games to be available in there, and unless some title is extremely interesting I will probably wait a few months for the bundled version.

On the other hand, if the HB comes only once or twice in a year, with some 5 titles each time, the chance to get an individual indie game in less than a year are lower, and people are encouraged to buy them directly.

This happens also with stores, even for basic things such as groceries: if I know that every 6 months or so there is a sale on e.g. canned tomatos (or anything other non perisheable good that I use) I will wait for the sale and stock for the next 6 months.

Cheap hosting can be had for something below 10$/year, but likely includes just apache, php and mysql. If you want to run something else (e.g. some python based framework, rarer php libs, or you just want a shell to keep a permanent irc presence) you probably need a VPN, at more than 50$/year.

A small home server with http can be done using a low power, arm based device like the "plug" ones, using less than 10W (including a 2.5" hard disk), or 87.6 kWh/year.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing that will cost between 0.80$ (Iran) and 37.57$ (Denmark), with the US at 9.81$, definitely in the cheap hosting range.

One difference is that the area used for solar and wind plants can be easily recovered for other uses after the plant is no longer in use, while cleaning areas from a nuclear incident is way more expensive, when possible at all.

It is true that the same is true for most chemical industries, and there isn't the same widespread panic about those, but it is also true that those don't have as alternative methods to get the same product as there are with the production of electricity.

Also, at least in the case of solar the area used by the plant isn't rendered useless: many panels are placed on the rooftops of otherwise used buildings, both in small scale (homes) and plant size (e.g. malls).

> In FOSS however you can fork the project, which you can't here.

Yes, you're free to fork the Android project and do whatever you want with it, it's under a FOSS license.

What you can't do with the fork is distribute Google's proprietary apps that happen to run on Android: if you need their capabilities you have to write an alternative.
While such applications feature strongly in the "google phone" as usually sold, they have no technical advantage, and there is nothing in the system that prevents alternative applications from taking their place.

> Wrong. Children learn to work on the platform that's mostly used in
> Businesses today, giving them the necessary skills to obtain a job.

Children who learn to use the platform in use _today_ will have no useful skill with the platform in use in 10-15 years, whey they will have to obtain a job.

Children who learn about computing, on the other hand, will be able to adapt to the platforms in use in 10, 20, 40 years, as needed in the various jobs they'll have. This is something that is harder to teach, however, even if it can be done with any OS.