> How many streaming music and video services does your preferred media player support?

One. It streams from my playlist. Only. Ever.

> And how can a new streaming music or video service arrange to be
> supported in your preferred media player?

Streaming services can go jump in a lake. I listen to what *I* want
to listen to. If I wanted to hear random ear-punishing junk somebody
else picks without consulting me that doesn't match my tastes at all,
I could turn on a radio.

> Finally, how should a browser-based video game play its music
> and sound effects?

A) I can't think of any reason for a video game to be browser based.
B) When I do play games that have sound and music, I normally
        turn the game's sound and music off so I can listen to what *I*
        want to listen to, which is generally much better than listening
        to video game music.

Ironically, once we get past that point, we can actually do away with all of the stop signs. They exist only for humans, who have limited reaction times and can only see line-of-sight. The computers will be able to know where all of the other cars are (at least, the one with transponders). They'll signal, but they'll do it in a far more meaningful way than just a blinky-blinky light.

They can probably even go considerably faster than the current speed limits, safely. But they probably won't have to, since the those 5-10 mph are rarely big enough to make a significant difference in your arrival time. The only times when it would really matter is when you're making very long trips, and then we'd want to take into account the significant additional fuel costs of driving that much (compared to just leaving a little sooner).

Is it the customer who's causing the copyright violation? Or is it Netflix, for feeding the content to somebody not coming from the US?

I would assume that Netflix would be considered sufficiently diligent in having attempted to feed it only to US-based IP addresses, but perhaps they have a case against the VPN provider? Or against the customer themselves, not for the copyright per se but for violating the terms of use (which presumably say "You will only use this from America, and not attempt to fool us with a VPN")?

Perhaps that would be the ultimate way to put it, that the customer is attempting to defraud Netflix, putting Netflix at risk of violating their licensing terms. I'm not sure what the law has to say about such cases, where you've got a chain of causation. It would certainly be wildly inefficient for the providers (all of them) to sue Netflix for violating the terms, then have Netflix attempt to recover the money by suing those who broke their own terms. But that would be, as far as I can tell, the logical chain of events.

Well... the guy does have a lot of other political positions. This was the minor point that made it to Slashdot. Everybody else is talking about his position on the Iraq War: he voted against it while Hillary Clinton voted for it. That boosts his foreign policy credentials, though it's still extremely unlikely that he's going to win. It puts him competing with Martin O'Malley for a shot at the VP chair, unless on the off chance something totally tanks Clinton between now and February. Which isn't impossible. (There's also Sanders, but he doesn't want the VP chair and I don't think he really wants to take over if she does tank. He's just trying to force everybody else to run to the left in a party that has run very hard to the center.)

His announcement is news, but not for nerds. The minor point about the metric system is for nerds, but not news. Slashdot, being Slashdot, tried to make news-for-nerds out of it, but all it generated was a lot of the same old talk about the merits and difficulties of switching to metric, all of which is decidedly Not News.

I think I'm already shopping there!

It's not Hot Topic and GameStop that are merging; it's GameStop and ThinkGeek. There is the opportunity for "synergy" (yeah, I hate the word, too) in that they're both retailers to a similar demographic, but one is online and the other is brick-and-mortar. They can do all kinds of cross-selling and get a combined company that sells more than either of the two separately. As well as eliminating a few minor redundancies in the staffing (such as maintaining two completely independent web sites), though that kind of thing never produces really huge gains.

That's an *opportunity*, of course, not a guarantee. They can still fuck it up royally. In fact, that's where I'd lay my money.

For some reason, al Qaeda seemed to have a thing for planes. They did try after 9/11, like the Underwear Guy and the Shoe Guy, though both were quite incompetent.

I suspect it's related to people's general fear of planes, even though they know on a per-mile basis the planes are really safe. The combination of the rather remarkable fact that they fly at all, that people are trapped in them, and the spectacle of many people dying at once seems to attract a lot more attention than it really merits in terms of the sheer calculus of death. Terrorism became really prominent through hijacking and bombing planes. It still seems to hold a fascination.

It is notable that we haven't seen any attempted bombing or hijacking for quite some time. Perhaps al Qaeda has realized that it's pointless, though they're not really doing all that much against softer targets, either. I think we all know how easy it would be, and how much disproportionate terror it would cause in Americans, and I don't really know why they haven't tried harder. Not that I'm unhappy about it, but it does leave me uneasy. Not uneasy enough to impose TSA-level draconian measures on everything, of course.

Thanks!

An author's copyrights can be assigned or transferred to a third party. This leaves the author with only the same rights as any member of the general public. (There are a few narrow exceptions, but nothing that would prevent the possibility of an author infringing on the copyright of a work he created)

It's also possible for a person who prepares a work to not be considered the author. This is the case for works made for hire.

And of course copyright isn't mandatory, though that just leads to works being in the public domain, so at least there's no danger of infringement there.

However, bear in mind that copyright only applies to original material, not to pre-existing material. A review which includes a quote is copyrightable, but the new copyright for the review only covers the portion original to the reviewer; the material quoted is only covered by the copyright of the work the quotes are drawn from.

17 USC 103(b):

Any idea why they're allowed to emit the CFCs, rather than trapping them? I would expect it to be a closed system. Is this just tiny, unavoidable leaks, or is it deliberately releasing them to the atmosphere?

Found this:

http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawki...

It says that a 3K black hole has a mass of 4x10^22 kg, a bit larger than the Everest-sized black hole.

The Everest-hole hole is extremely hot, 10^8 K, but it's still radiating so slowly that it'll take 10^21 years to evaporate, so it would be more than enough to destroy the earth.

I'm not quite sure how to solve for one that would be hot enough to suck in the earth before evaporating, but I see that a black hole that would last 1 second is a mere 70 million kilograms, with a radius of about a picometer.

1. Go to Mars.
2. There is no step 2.
3. There is no step 3 either.

Indeed. Web browsers have generally not been on my list of applications that are permitted to play sound, ever since the capability to play MIDI was introduced in Netscape. Why would anyone want that? I do NOT want random websites that I look at to be able to decide what sound comes out of my speakers. I already have a media player, thanks, and the web browser is not it.