I'm actually not clear on exactly how copyright works for the source code of closed-source products. My understanding was that the source is never published, so it is never copyrighted. Instead, I would expect it to be protected as a trade secret. That said, copyright of the binaries of a published product should be the same as the copyright on the source code, but presently there is no incentive for Microsoft to release the source code when their copyright expires (as that won't be for a very long time, they will have likely lost the source or simply no longer exist by the time that happens anyway).

The siblings have covered a lot of the issues with your suggestion. Wikipedia's page on philosophy of copyright might be informative as well. Other common arguments include the tragedy of the anticommons (having rightsholders for everything means doing anything new requires negotiating with too many different rightsholders) and the general fact that essentially all creative works build on prior creative works in some way, either direct retellings like many of Disney's movies or more indirectly like many fantasy books have elves that look a lot like those in Tolkien's Middle Earth.

There is also the complication that IP covers a lot of different things. Particularly I think there is a difference between artistic works like a novel and utilitarian works like Windows (and that there is not necessary a clear line between the two), but they are both covered by copyright under the exact same terms. Having copyright act differently for different works sounds messy and should probably be avoided in order to keep the law sensible, but both types of work have to be considered when arguing for how copyright should work.

For artistic works, the idea is that any published work is part of the collective culture and anyone should be able to build on it... with the exception that the author should have a limited monopoly on it in order to make money off of it. By having that time get too long, you get absurdities like the copyright status of the song "Happy Birthday to You" where the song has become part of American culture.

For utilitarian works, I think the argument might be closer to patents: the government wants to give some protection to new inventions in order to ensure a profit motive for developing them, but other companies should have access to old inventions in order to build on them. This doesn't quite work with software because there is no requirement tor release source code in order to get copyright on software. Of course, binaries alone can be useful and with effort can be modified to some extent if necessary.

The correct time-frame for both of those arguments is subjective and may be different, so the number that appears in copyright law should be a compromise between the two.

I am not sure if this is exactly what you want, but you could get pretty close by setting your foe modifier to -6 (assuming you never browse at -1, of course) and marking those users as foes (and perhaps removing them from your foes list later if you think they might write something you would want to read in a later discussion). You can set modifiers here, which I got to by clicking on the score of a comment and clicking the edit link next to a modifier. Also, if you do want to block any comments from the sibling poster, you can set your anonymous modifier to -6.

Corn means maize in the US and some other places, but elsewhere it is a generic term for cereal crops. Perhaps the parent (or the author of the parent's source) is from one of those other countries.

There is one. It's called a convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution. If two-thirds (34) of the state legislatures call for a constitutional convention, then Congress is obligated to arrange for a national convention during which any arbitrary amendments to the constitution can be proposed (the legality of the "arbitrary" part is not entirely clear due to the lack of precedence). They do not go into effect unless ratified by 3/4th of the states, though. See also: Second Constitution of the United States.

I am curious about your experiences with the Nokia N9 as I was planning on buying one in part due to liking the Nokia N810 and being able to use it as a pocket-sized Linux computer (I never got an N900). I had thought it was pretty easy to get access to a root terminal and do whatever on it just like the N810. Is this not the case?

O_o How did I manage to double post? I did get a "resource not valid" error the first time I tried to post, but I reloaded the thread and my post wasn't there...

This is certainly not a new idea. It is sometimes referred to as the "rapture of the nerds" version of a technological singularity. Ray Kurzweil is a big fan of the idea and one of the major proponents.

As to the actual feasibility, I ran across Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap a little while ago, which discusses the possibility given our current knowledge of how the brain works. It provides dates on how long Moore's Law would have to continue based on varyingly optimistic assumptions about how much work is necessary to actually emulate a brain.

Overall, I think there are two main problems with expecting immortality via brain uploading: (1) 40+ years is a very long time to assume Moore's Law for and (2) even if we can emulate a human brain, scanning an existing one and transferring it into a computer may not be possible.