You don't need to copyright all combinations, 12 sets of 3. The first, AKA a tonic, a third and a fifth. Like this; C, E, G. You have just copyrighted a C major chord. How many songs use a C major chord? Copyright all major and minor chords and you own most of western music.

Unfortunately, those smart IT people who have spent years in the trenches and understand, in detail, how to build a robust and resistant infrastructure are often overruled by the a CFO who's only qualification is they have an MBA. In many tech companies the group that handles the infrastructure (DNS, email, backups, etc.) reports to the CFO not the CTO. Why is this? After 25 years in the computer field I still have not heard a rational explanation for this idiocy.

my father was friends with a number of Jazz musicians. I remember one of them told me that he had been a smoker and a heroin addict and that he found it easier to stop using heroin than smoking

Yes but thermite is so much fun to play with.

I did buy Satanic Verses and I did read it. Well, I got about a quarter of the way thought it before decided it was not very good so now it sits in one of the bookcases. As to kicking Salman Rusdie I would nominate Ayn Rand for several good, swift kick for all the trouble her poorly written crap novels expounding an insane philosophy have done. If I have to listen to one more sophomoric idiot ranting and raving about Objectivism I may have to hurt someone.

Sorry, I think I'm a quart low on coffee.
 

I think that if Mark Twain were alive today he would be very pleased that one of his works is upsetting people so much that they want to ban and/or censor it.

One of my rules of thumb is if there is a book that people want to ban and/or censor I run right out and buy and read it.

The guy that I love to hate is the serial entrepreneur. Not all of them but one very special strain. This is the guy who is an abusive asshole who once made a boat load of money on one of his ventures. Because he made so much money he sees this as validation of his asshole ways. In his mind that only way to make more money is to continue to be an abusive asshole only he steps it up a few notches. Unfortunately, the Silicon Valley is overrun with these clowns.

I've got QIC-24 tapes that contain COBOL code that I wrote back in 1983. Several months ago I was given an old QIC tape drive and to test it I dumped out this code and compiled it. Looking at this code my first thought was "What was I thinking? This code sucks."

Have you ever heard of the Internet and TCP/IP ? Both developed by government funded research.

Excuse me, could you point to the private enterprise that developed TCP/IP ? Oh, right it was a wasteful government grant to those egghead liberals.