I know this would never happen, but the damages here should have to go further than just returning the money. How many movies and TV shows over the years have been forced to not film a birthday scene to avoid royalties? How many people have been deprived of the standard birthday song at a restaurant or other public celebration, because the staff was not licensed for public performance?

Birthdays are important events. Movies and films often have scenes that want to show such events. Time Warner has deliberately impeded the "progress of the arts" which was the entire point of the Constitution by artificially limiting the production of such scenes in films and movies.

Every filmmaker who has ever filmed a birthday scene without the song or who had a birthday scene in a script by cut it because of royalty concerns should join in a class-action lawsuit and seek damages. Every person who wanted to hear "Happy Birthday" at a restaurant but got some crappy weird song from the waitstaff should sue them for damages. I imagine the cumulative amount, with damages, should come to billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

Only then will justice truly have been done. Only then will we begin to turn the tide against copyright trolls and those who would falsely claim copyright.

But that interpretation is not possible in context. Read it again:

So, copyright terms can only be justified if they "promote progress." Which basically occurs if the specified "authors and inventors" are encouraged to create more things. A 1000-year copyright term doesn't encourage more "progress" -- it only rewards someone (and that person's descendants) lucky enough to come up with something really popular.

A copyright term longer than a lifespan is thus not justified by the Constitution.

If I said to an artist or inventor, "You've done really cool things: I'll pay you X dollars per month starting now 'to promote progress' in your science/arts" and all you do is sit on your butt for the rest of your life and collect your check, have you done what I asked for? If you die and send some random guy to collect your check every month, are YOU (the artist/inventor) "promoting progress" in your science/art? So a 1000-year copyright term cannot achieve what the text of the law demands.

For me the real problem is hidden EULAs. If I buy a car that is advertised as having certain features but then discover that I can't use them because I don't agree to the EULA, which was not presented before the sale, I'm returning it. Same with smart TVs and anything else with a licence agreement. If you advertise it has a feature, it better work without agreeing to being spied on or you had better make damn sure that the requirement is made clear up front.

NO. The whole point of copyright was to encourage writers and publishers and artists to invest time in making a good product. It originated because publishers who tried to print a book had to invest a lot of money in things like manual typesetting and proofreading -- but the better-known publisher down the street could just buy the first copy, recreate it (cheaper, with more errors, but good enough), and make all the money (because they make it on the cheap), while the first (lesser-known) publisher goes out of business.

The whole idea is to allow time for people to recoup their time and investment in creating a quality product. Unlike most professions where you get paid at the end of the week or the month, a novelist may spent months or years creating a book, and a publisher (in the olden days) might spend months typesetting it... in hopes to recoup that investment of time and resources.

Most copyrights back when they started (in the late 1400s) were 7-10 years. That's plenty, in my view. But I'd be happy to go back to the original 1790 Copyright Act: 14 years, plus the possibility of a single renewal. That is MORE THAN ENOUGH. If you can't recoup your expenses in 14 years or produce something else in those 14 years that keeps your business going, you deserve to go out of business.

The idea of copyright was never that somebody would do one thing and live off of the profits forever. It was to provide payment for services rendered, which would encourage creators to make more quality products in the future.

You can disable all this stuff easily.

1. When installing you are asked if you want the default settings. Select custom settings and turn everything off. Things like Cortana that rely on having data about you won't work, of course.

2. Open the Windows Update settings and go into the options. Disable downloading updates from other machines on the internet. You might want to leave the option to get updates from other machines on your LAN enabled though, to save bandwidth.

If anyone is any doubt that you can disable all the "spying" stuff, consider that enterprise users would demand it or simply refuse to use Windows 10.

Actually this is exactly the kind of research governments should be doing. Stuff that is commercially risky but could have massive pay-offs. If Japan can build a reasonably quiet and efficient supersonic passenger jet they could really boost their aircraft industry. Currently they focus on smaller regional jets, but this could be a big new opportunity.

It's similar to how they developed their high speed trains. The government did the basic research and development, and then it grew into a huge business where Japan lead the world for over 50 years.

Wow, so much rage. You should see a doctor.

The alleged buggy implementation of NCQ TRIM in the Samsung firmware is not a bug at all. It can be safely re-enabled now, no need to blacklist it. It works fine on other operating systems too.

Maybe you should try to understand this issue before going full ragetard on it.

(like closing or failing to provide public restrooms)

Which usually stems from another first-world problem, homeless people.

If you're effectively making a cable that costs maybe $10 to manufacture, but selling it for $340, you don't need many "audiophiles" to make a significant profit. If you have a few hundred of them, you're already making 6-figure profits. (Obviously some cables may cost a little more to manufacture, but certainly not anywhere near as much as they are charging.)

It's kinda like wine. There have been studies that show that if you serve cheap wine in expensive bottles, people like it better. There have been studies that show that many wine prizes are awarded so haphazardly that you might as well choose them at random. There have been studies that show that actual wine judges at a major competition could barely rate the same wine with consistency above random chance on consecutive days.

And yet, people still will pay hundreds of dollars for some bottles. Recent studies have even shown that people literally get a better "pleasure" response in their brain when they are told a wine is expensive, compared to when it is supposedly cheap. It's more than a casual "placebo effect" -- it's something that people will pay hundreds of dollars to experience, even if most of that effect comes from the act of paying the hundreds of dollars rather than the product itself.**

I'm sure most audiophiles have a similar experience -- they literally receive more pleasure when they listen through an expensive cable. They want to pay more for that experience. So why not let them, I suppose? It's not like faith healers or psychics, who might do real damage with their charlatanism... the only damage these cable dealers could do, I suppose, would be with some obsessed audiophile who goes and throws his money away on expensive cables while his family starves. Maybe there's a couple people like that in the world, but it's certainly not a common problem.

And these sorts of "tests" won't convince anyone. I'm not sure what the point is anymore. It's like James Randi going after Uri Gellar -- true "believers" don't give a crap what the tests of "skeptics" say... they'll just keep believing. Let 'em enjoy their magic cables.

[**NOTE: To be clear, I am NOT saying all wine is the same. There are a lot of different varieties and flavors. But I do believe you should just buy what you like. There are $5 wines that have easily beat out $100 wines at blind tastings. So, if you like a wine and discover it's only $5, keep buying and enjoying it. If you like the $100 wine, and you like the taste enough to pay $100, fine.]

If companies that provide auto insurance are smart and see the writing on the wall (I have to assume so, since they are entirely about risk/benefit analysis), they will gradually transform into a different kind of entity. While they'll still provide insurance, they'll turn into a "subscription" version of a car rental company: Customers with the proper plan can request a self-driving car for certain periods, and may even receive a discount for doing so over using their traditional vehicle.

As autonomous car adoption rates increase, these hybrid companies will move more towards being an "auto club", where people pay a monthly fee (likely comparable to the combined cost of a loan payment+insurance) and will be able to order up self-driving cars. Depending on their plan, it may only be with advance planning and an extra charge for on-demand, or it is unlimited on-demand. They use the vehicle as necessary, then send it back.

They might only get so much time to allow it to sit idle, so if they're going to spend a day at Disneyland they have a car that will bring them, send it away, and order another when they go home. In fact, such "clubs" will likely have garages right outside of amusement parks. After all, if your car can drive itself, and you don't need to leave anything in the vehicle, why bother with parking? You could send it home, or to a far-off lot. And if you're going to do that, why bother with owning a vehicle at all? You can avoid all the maintenance of ownership, the cost of having a garage, and registration fees by just using one of these clubs.

The companies will still offer insurance: there will always be people who want to own their own car, self-driving or not. But that will become a "side" business, and the remaining portions of existing businesses may be sold off until you have only a handful of national auto insurers. I doubt the companies that focus on consumers would sell insurance to car companies, as the car companies have their existing liability insurance that will just increase if/when there's added risk from autonomous cars.

Even with the loss of the generators and distribution panels there was still a backup option. They used pump trucks to inject water into the system for emergency cooling. They were in place and operating in time to avert a major disaster, but a critical valve was in the wrong position so the pumped water ended up in storage tanks instead of the reactor cooling system. The valve could not be checked because the monitoring equipment was damaged, and damage to the plant made physical inspection difficult.

The real heart of the issue is that there was both inadequate tsunami resilience and due to management being cheap, and mistakes made by operators due to lack of experience, understanding and proper procedures thanks again to management being cheap.