Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment A periodic formality, like adopting House rules (Score 2) 223

A pattern of Congress continually extending term lengths retroactively is not the same as a law declaring that copyrights do not expire, because the action that occurs if Congress does not act is that copyrights expire. Whereas in the latter scenario Congress has to act in order to make copyrights expire.

Each house of Congress also has to act every two years in order to set its rules. The requirement of a periodic formality to prevent copyrights from expiring does not change the practical outcome, just as the requirement of a periodic formality to readopt House and Senate rules every two years does not keep the House and Senate from having rules.

Nobody actually wants perpetual copyright terms, except maybe Disney.

And the Gershwin estate. And the leadership of the Motion Picture Assocation of America (to find sources, search the web for the phrase "forever less one day"). And Dr. Seuss Enterprises, whose argument in its Eldred amicus was that an author and his heirs deserve royalties from adaptations of the author's work to media invented decades after the work's first publication.

Comment Pleading the thirteenth (Score 1) 208

"Free" tuition would not fix it because there is already lots of ways of getting tuition paid for without running up any debt.
From government programs that are under utilized where they will pay your tuition if you work, and get paid, in places they want you to and in position related to your degree for a few years.

I thought the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed indentured servitude. And even if these programs are structured not to qualify constitutionally as indentured servitude, how do they handle a graduate who faces structural unemployment in positions related to his degree?

Comment Which services does it support? (Score 1) 105

I already have a media player, thanks, and the web browser is not it.

How many streaming music and video services does your preferred media player support? And how can a new streaming music or video service arrange to be supported in your preferred media player? Finally, how should a browser-based video game play its music and sound effects? Or is the concept of a "browser-based video game" itself abhorrent to you?

Comment Multigenerational households (Score 1) 155

And if you're sufficiently poor, you might not have the option to fix it.

If someone has finally saved up enough to move out of their parents house in their hometown

Many poor people live in multigenerational households because they have no way of saving up that much money.

We are talking about an extra $100 or $200 to get to a better place, on top of the $1000 or so they already saved to pay for security deposit and start up stuff.

That's sort of hard at the equivalent of $0.25 per hour.

Comment root knows all (Score 2) 445

The information content of God has to be greater than or equal to the information content of the Universe (this is literally the God-property of omniscience).

That's not how God's omniscience was explained to me. It's more "all seeing" than "all knowing". It's not that God knows every detail of everything in the universe as much as that he can know anything he needs. It's like having a debugger.

Comment The Apple-provided app is launched instead (Score 1) 90

What exactly is stopping an app developer for using http or https as a custom scheme?

The fact that Safari has already grabbed it. Apple's Inter-App Communication page states: "The handlers for these schemes are fixed and cannot be changed. If your URL type includes a scheme that is identical to one defined by Apple, the Apple-provided app is launched instead of your app."

Comment Previous attempts (Score 1) 1

The Avengers had an official game on the Super NES and Game Gear, and Nice Code has produced a Titanic game for Famicom.

From the article: "The Cinefix channel says copyright is not an issue because the creations fall under the umbrella of 'parody' which is included in the 'fair use' clause of US copyright law." But how long until YouTube gets OCILLA takedown orders from Disney (Frozen, The Avengers, and Spirited Away) and Fox and Paramount (Titanic) anyway, on the basis that the studio disagrees with the fair use claim?

Slashdot Top Deals

Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"

Working...