If you were going to ask a "someone" how they meant to define "derived work", you would ask Congress, not the author(s) of one out of a million contracts which happen to make use of that term.

You're right that it's upsetting that (mostly) people who don't really work with copyright would end up answering it, but that's the nature of law, or at least until you start electing[/appointing/etc] authors. (Cynic: or until those people start funding election campaigns.)

It's only after you have determined that something is a derived work, that you go study licenses. Until that point, licenses are irrelevant.

Well, maybe, but as long as they stick to targeting muslin and don't attack wool or polyester, I think we'll be OK.

Hey, Bennett. Have you asked the /. editors if you can be made an editor so those of us who want to block your stories can? It would improve the S/N ratio on the comments for your stories.

Presumably if the Incas aren't around anymore, their ancestors aren't either...

While you probably can't just fix it with a rake, I find it hard to believe that it's impossible to restore it at all. Get some engineers out there -- at Greenpeace's expense -- and have them figure out a way to put dark rocks on top of light sand.

It's kind of like those boy scout leaders that knocked over the rock formation at Goblin Valley. People were calling for them to spend the rest of their lives in jail over it. We've been putting rocks on top of other rocks for thousands of years -- the better solution would have been to have them pay to get a construction crew out there to fix it.

My understanding is that he can. Congress could then override the veto with a 2/3 majority of both the House and the Senate, but at least the President would be on record that he refused to approve the bill.

Isn't Slashdot exactly the same?

So he's forcing his kid to play these games? I wonder if he ever has to tell his son that he has to beat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before he's allowed to do his homework...

They've already got the "block by posting editor" feature. All they have to do is make Bennett an editor.

Of course, I'm sure they realize that everyone will block Bennett, and pageviews are king at Dice.

It took a full-on revolt to get the slashdot staff to condescend to comment about the slashdot Beta. It would presumably take something similar to get them to change how they handle the Bennett stories.

It is. At this point, I don't even know why "journal publishes nonsense paper" is even a news story any more. It's been happening for close to 20 years now.

Have you really not used the web in the last 10 years, or are you just exaggerating?

Web page sizes and complexity have, if anything, grown faster than available bandwidth. Websites with many embedded flash widgets will bog down even a new-ish system, much less a less-powerful laptop.

The advertisers are getting exactly what they are paying the owners of the sites for: they are getting to serve ads to the users visiting the sites.

If the advertisers think that they're paying to have real people click on their ads -- well, they should learn how the internet works. That's not under the control of the website owners.

So, this is apparently security software designed by the Time Cube guy? I'm sold.

The lists are already there -- that's what those "filter subscriptions" you set up when configuring ABP are all about. I don't know whether there are any competing plugins that don't have any direct association with anyone maintaining a list, but even if there aren't it's not exactly rocket science to develop a new one.

Do you have some kind of problem with trouble?

If people didn't get into trouble, we wouldn't even be talking about robots, yet. We'd be posting on Slashdot, stuff like "sucks that I didn't find enough berries today, and the area is running out of meaty squirrels, so I'll probably be moving along soon." You think you want to be a factory or farm slave for the rest of your life, but you don't even get to do that, until after you've already figured out that you don't want it.