Using google translate for German I got: She sat down at the kitchen table and discussed in the morning the news.
For "chinese-simplified" They sat at the kitchen table and discuss the morning's news
For chinese-traditionsl: They sat on the kitchen table to discuss the morning's news

50? Go with 50 Thousand!

http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Thousand-Shades-Of-Grey-Ashen/dp/1479215430

The "look inside" first few pages are particularly droll.

Thanks for the response. I now understand the worry - any statements may be used to show an apparent contradiction that might be viewed negatively at trial.

I'm curious what a competent lawyer would advise in this case. Alice gets picked up, and refuses to talk until her lawyer shows up. Her and the lawyer converse - would the lawyer say she was at mom's place, or would the lawyer want to wait until trial?

This starts to become part of a "game theory" exercise. For an "innocent citizen" there is a chance that giving the police information that you have will help them to find the guilty party, which is a positive outcome for you. There is also a chance that giving information will make it more likely that you will have increased legal troubles, possibly up to being wrongly convicted of a crime you did not commit. How to behave in a given situation depends on the chances of each of those things happening, as well as how serious the consequences might be if they do.

If nobody ever talked to the police, solving crimes would be much harder. I refuse to live in fear that my behaving reasonably will come back to bite me - so when I see someone rob a bank, I will probably come forward to testify to what I saw to the best of my ability. If I was out shooting at the target range with no witnesses and drove home past my enemy's house and stopped to apologize for shouting "The next time I see you I'll kill you!" after our last barroom fight, and just as I was reaching the door my identical twin rushes out and hands me a bloody gun before running off into the night - I might seriously consider not speaking to the police without my lawyer's very careful advice.

For the vast majority of stuff, a $10 fee is sufficient to prevent anyone who has no intention of trying to monetize something from filing the extension, and it is low enough that it is hard for anyone to complain about it being too high. Setting it at $1000 right from the outset might lead to the victimization of artists without deep enough pockets.

In my mind, the problem with current copyright is not that "great works" are locked up for a long time - Steamboat Willy can enjoy protection for an arbitrary time and I would think our cultural history would still be safe - but rather the problem is the fact that EVERYTHING is locked up for as long as SBW. If we put ANY renewal requirements in place, the VAST majority of things won't be renewed at all, and scholars and artists will have potential access to those items without the worry of copyright infringement. There is no great need to be super concerned that some things might still have a long copyright if 80% of things are public domain within a decade and 90% within two decades, and 99% within three.

Heck, as a first step, go with the Berne Convention (50 year minimums) and then start the doubling fee with at least a few thousand. The trick is to get the vast majority of stuff that is not providing the creator with income, into the public domain so that it can be used to build upon!

I like the double-each-year method. Let the "valuable" ones be retained by the owners, let the rest of us have everything else in a reasonable time.

It is nice to have an automatic first few years free so that I can do things like write a blog and then compile it into a book after a while without having to worry that someone else will do so with my unregistered work before I make use of it.

Ten year for free, $10 for the 11th year and double each year after that gives similar numbers to the 1-cent start.

Double the price for a one year extension every year is what I prefer (each decade goes up by a factor of 1024) with a very low ($10 or even $1) initial price, but your five year system works too.

I like the idea of extendable terms at a price that doubles annually. Anyone who has something that is a big enough money maker can keep extending it, but the vast vast vast majority of stuff would get into the public domain quickly. Double every year and a few decades will quickly price it into the public domain.

First decade for free, $10 registration for the next year, doubling every year after that, in perpetuity. This allows the "owner" to extract any economic value they can see in the item, and very quickly puts the vast majority of works into the public domain. Central registration also makes it easy to find the owner if you actually do want access to the work for licensing or the like, or to find out if the work has been registered. Each ten years the cost go up by a factor of 1024.

Year 11 - $10 (total $10)
Year 12 - $20 (total $30)
Year 13 - $40 (total $70)
Year 14 - $80 (total $150)
etc.

Price for year "n" = $10 x 2^(n-10)
Total price to pay for every year up to and including year "n" = $10 x ( 2^(n-9) - 1)

Year 20 costs $10240, total cost $20470
Year 30 costs $10,485,760, total costs $20,971,510

The details of the free period length or the first yearly amount can of course be changed, but the doubling rate is what makes this type of system work. Make it five years free and one dollar for the 6th year, and it works great too. Heck, one penny for the first year gets you to the ten bucks level in a decade, so maybe that's the way to go.

OK, I'll try to do this as disdainfully as the AC:

Err, did you just try to claim that "the research" on future trends "proved wrong" historical demographics data? Here's a clue: those numbers quoted on the historical population and its growth rate were not questioned by the UN/UW research. That's not what the article is about.

I realize it's a tradition not to understand anyone's comments, but to completely fail to understand that even the summary is talking about projections while my comments were talking about historical demographics seem excessive, no?

The research did not prove that the Wikipedia numbers are wrong. Nobody has questioned the current and historical numbers, all the research quoted in the article was about possible future trends. The Wikipedia numbers quoted were all historical, and contradict the assertion that the population has been increasing at an accelerating rate. The population has been increasing at a decelerating rate since 1963, when the rate of increase was the highest. The current world population growth rate is about 1%, which has a doubling time of a bit less than 77 years, and over the 87 years till 2100 would bring us to (1.01)^87 = 2.377 times the current population (resulting in a population of about 16.6 billion). Thus to reach 11 billion, the average growth rate will need to be LESS than 1%

Thus the UN/UW article is in no way asserting that the population has been increasing at an accelerating rate, and in fact require that the growth rate decrease from its present 1% growth rate in order to match the numbers that they arrive at.

Except that the growth rate has been decreasing for a while now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_population_growth_rate

Globally, the growth rate of the human population has been declining since peaking in 1962 and 1963 at 2.20% per annum. In 2009, the estimated annual growth rate was 1.1%.[5] The CIA World Factbook gives the world annual birthrate, mortality rate, and growth rate as 1.915%, 0.812%, and 1.092% respectively.[6] The last 100 years have seen a rapid increase in population due to medical advances and massive increase in agricultural productivity[7] made possible by the Green Revolution.[8][9][10]

The actual annual growth in the number of humans fell from its peak of 88.0 million in 1989, to a low of 73.9 million in 2003, after which it rose again to 75.2 million in 2006. Since then, annual growth has declined. In 2009, the human population increased by 74.6 million, which is projected to fall steadily to about 41 million per annum in 2050, at which time the population will have increased to about 9.2 billion.[5] Each region of the globe has seen great reductions in growth rate in recent decades, though growth rates remain above 2% in some countries of the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, and also in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.[11]

Maybe we can get it applied wider: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/force-all-law-enforcement-officers-wear-uniform-embedded-cameras/Mx2KDCtl

How is Alice worse off for telling that she was on the drive, compared to remaining silent?

I agree that it looks like Alice is in deep trouble, but I don't see how her statements are going to be used against her, or that if she had remained silent how she would be better off. If she remains silent and they finally come around and arrest her based on Carol's testimony, and Alice gets a chance to talk to her lawyer about it, is her lawyer going to not tell the police that she was out for the drive?

The British right to silence is interesting in that they tell you that if you don't tell them something (like "I was out for a drive") that you later use at trial for your defense, the jury may be allowed to consider it negatively that you held that information back.

To be fair, that is the type of situation that some people don't particularly like. "Why should we care if the thief self-incriminates?" they would ask.

The reason is that there are many valid reasons that an innocent person might want to keep quiet. Maybe they told their spouse they were at the gym rather than the bar, or maybe they were there due to a sexual fetish they have about alleys. Maybe they were taking a short-cut home from a meeting of AA, the White-Race Party, the Black-Race Party, or the local LGBTA. Nothing illegal, but potentially embarrassing, or politically dangerous. The principle is not to protect those who are guilty, but rather to ensure that NONE of those who are innocent will have to suffer.

"Better that 100 guilty go free than one innocent be jailed" is the type of thing we are looking at here. The "protection" of the guilty is an unfortunate side-effect rather than a feature of the system.

In the court of public opinion, it has always been that way, and likely always will. It is human nature to make that leap.