Extremadura is one of the poorer regions of Spain and with the general funding squeeze trying to get the public deficit under control, I reckon they have a lot to gain from this.

Or give the pirates WoW subs. They'll be too busy with the rep grind to do anything else

I, for the good of humanity, volunteer for this strenuous task. Or at least for the good sites anyway.

While we desperately need some sanity injected into the system after the Digital Britain Bill, I suspect this is going to really favour big-media's use of our copyrighted work.

"He said the law could be relaxed to allow greater use of copyright material without the owner's permission."

There must be plenty of companies drooling at the idea of smash and grab raids on flickr accounts and GPL'd software.

Which is exactly why you will never see anything more than an expert system in space. There is no way any space agency is going to punt hundreds of millions or euros/dollars/pounds into space without a full understanding of the decision tree in the spacecraft control loop. It is hard enough at the moment without introducing outliers into the system.

Indeed. I'm not sure what the industry could do in this case. It would be up to the theatre owner to contact the musicians - which they can choose not to do. I imagine the composed would get a cut if electronic score has to be licensed for public performance (it would be slightly strange for this not to be the case).

It might be hard to find musicians later though; I'm not sure many musicians make a full time career out of this sort of work, but it might be just be the last straw - god knows I've seen enough string quartets busking these days and that can't be much of a money spinner.

All in all, it sucks to be a musician these days - composing, recording or performing seems to be a talent which is rather unappreciated (to the extent that anybody is willing to pay for what a musician produces).

Satire and journalism are not necessarily incompatible. Private Eye has mixed both for years although the loss of Paul Foot undoutably was a big loss to them.

Robledo (Madrid) was done a few years back - they had to replace the bearings IIRC. In fact it was largely due to the work on DSS63 at Robledo that NASA started to look at the DSS14.

I love how 'mercenaries' has been replaced by 'private contractors' in the minds of people, it's just really scary how Orwell knew the workings of language.

"proprietary" is just the standard terminology for data that has not entered into the public domain - used to distinguish from "published" in the sense that the data has been analysed and the results published (in a journal etc etc).

Information may want to be free, but there's plenty of people who want to keep it locked up