I have issues with turnitin.com as well (and I'm a teacher and work in academic technology) but mostly because instructors/institutions can force a student to give up their intellectual property in order to support a 3rd party's business model.

I've started adding a footer on my papers I submit as a student along the lines of "this paper is the intellectual property of i.r.id10t. any commercial use is prohibited"

Don't think I'll ever get anywhere because of it, but at least it makes me feel half way ok for a few moments...

I'm in N Central Florida and I've regularly seen traceroutes leaving local residential/commericial access, go up to Atlanta, and back down to a local college.

Some do have use, if they are constructed carefully at the beginning.

For example, a coworker lives out in a rural area, on a 7 acre lot, surrounded by other 7 to 10 acre lots. The "road" through the "neighborhood" - a big U shape connecting to the same 2 lane county road at both ends - was hard packed lime stone.

The HOA was formed and its sole purpose is to collect $50 per month to pay to have the road re-graded every year with the extra going into an account to have the road paved "for real" at some point in the future.

But yeah, I agree, the behavior that "most" HOA horror stories depict needs to be made illegal.

What is the difference between live remote viewing or viewing a static file of the event later? Other than the "no spoilers" part, I can't think of one....

I can see where it would be beneficial to some types of training - working on follow through, etc. for shooting skeet, trap, or sporting clays. Or working on control for position shooting matches.

But for the common consumer end user? Pure novelty. And we've been doing similar for a long time - taking pictures or video thru scopes, etc. so it really isn't much new. I guess being able to include range finder and calculate distance so you know about the drop would be nice, but usually wind is a much bigger issue (for me anyway) and I'm not sure how it could help there without more specialized equipment (wind flags w/ maybe a pattern or something so it can provide a speed/direction reading to the computer)

Nah, wasn't poor shooting - it was vandalism. Guy walked the lenght of a cinder block wall separating 2 pistol ranges and blasted a hole every few feet with a shotgun.

There was an off duty fish and game officer there, arrested him for destruction of federal property (the range is in the Osceola National Forest and is maintained by funds from the Pitman-Robertson act)

Most of the casual shooters I know (and a few not so casual) shoot more in any given month that the few dozen sworn officers I know shoot in a year.

The local police academy range has holes and divots in all sorts of "wrong" places indicating serious or potentially serious "accidents" - the public no restrictions range I shoot at has some intentional vandalism damage, but I've not heard of any accidents or near accidents happening there in years.

Some states have even passed laws allowing new manufacture of machine guns *as long as* they are for in-state use. Theory being that the BATFE (and fed gov) only get the ability to restrict/deny based on interstate commerce.

And while I am definately for gun rights, and love shooting full auto (if someone else is buying the ammo) I don't have pockets deep enough to become a test case.

Depends on how many dollar bills I have in my pockets....

Dunno. Depends on the toaster. My current one is a 4 slice model with wide holes, so I can do the nice thick bagels we get from a local bakery. Haven't seen a toaster like it in ages, and if it died I may be tempted to have it fixed or try to fix it myself.

They already did 15 years ago. I put my money where my mouth is - I use Linux not just for the Freedom, but for a stable OS, and yes, I'll cheerfully pay retail for software. In fact, I just unearthed my copies when I cleaned my garage yesterday. All Linux branded versions of Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, UT GOTY Edition, UT2004, Soldier of Fortune, MechWarrior II, Descent 3d, and quite a few others from Loki Games. I even found my unopened l33t tin editon of Q3 for Linux.

Of course, now my son wants to set it all up and play them.... :)

This is why I love my home ISP - it is a telco (windstream) and I'm far enough out that anything more than the 1.5mb service is unreliable (chronic disconnects) but they don't block any ports, and if I connect to a server capable I can download at the full 1.5mb speed (and/or upload at the 384k speed) as long as I want, or at least have tested downloading ISOs from my linode, etc.

So if "we" could wave a magic wand and change copyright law *everywhere* to something "we can all live with" what would you suggest?

Off the top of my head I can think of

1) Copyright begins with first publication/release/distribution. An upthread example shows a guy working on a trillogy where the first book was done in 2001 and that 20 years would be too short. Although I wonder why he hasn't published the first one or two to see if there is a market for more.... and to get income and a fan base going.

2) Copyright gives a fixed number of years of protection. Doesn't matter if it is by a corporation/other legal entitity or an individual (or small group of individuals), Doesn't matter how long the owner(s) live or don't live. Lets say it is 50 years - plenty long enough for most commercial use and exploitation, but it gets stuff into "free(er) to use" territory within living memory.

3) Instead of totally free use that public domain gives, perhaps something along the lines of one of the CC licenses. If Disney grabs $NEXT_BIG_HIT from the pd and creates a hot new princess tale/etc. then that same PD still needs to be available for others to use in the same manner - it can't be locked back up. For software, one of the Free software licenses should work or the FSF should be able to come up with a new one that is acceptable.

Or just figure out their mailing address and sign them up for some Harriet Carter catalogs

Wouldn't providers to home users (ie, not on an expensive business account) just love to be able to deny any connections initiating from outside their edge though? I bet that most non-slashdot types would never know if they suddenly no longer had a "real" ip at home but was instead behind a massive NAT network. They can initiate connections and consume content all they like, but nothing new from outside.