I have the same setup, and did this one time working with a small company on the East coast.

They freaked out and cited copyright/trademark/whatever they could saying I had to change my email address or they would sue me.

(facepalm)

I knew someone would trot out the "rights" argument.

"to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8)

Your statement doesn't include the "limited times" component. That is crucial to the balance of 1) the author, to motivate them (not guarantee!) to spend their time to write down ideas and stories and to be compensated for it, while 2) society at large can then grow from that and take it new directions after that.

If #2 doesn't happen, then whey did society at large agree to #1? The constitution is by "we the people" not "we the publishers."

Patents have the same terms as in the 1700's because it is good for business to be able to leverage the ideas of competitors (after limited times) to then invent/produce new goods that would not have been thought up and invented and created without this symbiotic relationship. Since it's a win-win for business, nobody wants to change the times.

Some exclusive time to make back the money invested, while after that society can use it to go down new paths and avenues that the author never dreamed of.

But, with mickey mouse, the publishers (not so much the authors) want to tip this scale over and have exclusive control - forever.

When will "we the people" say no to this abusive rebalance of the scales?

Interesting fact: When the original copyright term was set to 28 years, guess how long it took for information to double in the world? 28 years. Now, it's doubling every 13 months. I would argue that copyright term should be tied to the rate of information doubling. The most basic solution that I can suggest, to avoid this whole "extension" mess, is to not print in a book what year it was published (which leaves the date it enters the public domain up for after-the-fact changes) to have works indicate the date it was first published and what the date will be when it enters the public domain, based on the publish date at that time. Then, it can't be extended. it's already determined at the first publish time. A person can pick up a book and know if it is in the public domain or not. Today, legally, it is such a mess to try and determine if a book is in the public domain, that nobody even tries if it is after 1978 (~45 years ago)

Wealth redistribution at its finest.

will develop a reusable mini-launcher to compete with the likes of Elon Musk's SpaceX

And here's a problem. They aren't doing it to provide a cheaper alternative 'servcie'. They are just competing with the man, the myth, the legend.

It isn't to solve problems, or to meet a grand goal, or do it for the betterment of what mankind can do.

Nope. Compete with Musk.

Nobody can top his tweets!

Windows95 basically solved this two decades ago. Arrange your own icons, throw in a search box, and an alphabetical list as a last resort. Everything else is BS, a mere distraction at best.

There. Fixed it for ya.

A quote:

Iliyan Malchev: With Treble, the operating system has separated to the adaptation layers that tailor down to the hardware. And that's still the case, but the devil is in the details. There's a ton of nuance that we still need to get right, and this is what we've focused on with this [Android P] release. What is the case today—and I think that gets overlooked by a lot of the press on Treble—is that any device that is preloaded with Google's apps, any device that launches with Oreo or subsequent releases, must work smoothly with a binary image of Android that we built for certification purposes.

This image isn't a product. The intent is not to launch this, but the idea is, by requiring that this "golden image" run on everything out there, we create a centripetal force that pushes our partners ever so gently toward not changing Android in ways that aren't really meaningful to their bottom lines. We finished that technical work with Android P this year, and we started working with silicon manufacturers.

Hopefully this will help reduce the re-done overhead across the phone manufacturers, hopefully reducing updates down the road. By 50%? I hope.

When words don't mean anything any more, 1+1 = 3 and Communism = Capitalism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BadFTesAPzY)

Whatever feels good, you can't be wrong.

What is going on with modern education???

I just hate how the 'related links' at the bottom of the page, about Wikipedia, for a site that is about tech "stuff" are:

1165 - 10 Confirmed Dead In Shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College
1094 - Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour
1081 - How To Execute People In the 21st Century
1032 - Writer: "Why I Defaulted On My Student Loans"
  965 - Explosions and Multiple Shootings In Paris, Possible Hostages

How are stories that are better suited to USA Today the most 'related' stories?

Slashdot, how the mighty have fallen.

Slashdot is a vehicle for advertisements, without care of what drives us, the readers. It's clear that the readers like vision, but Slashdot has made some terrible missteps as of late. Power users looking for intelligent discussion have mostly left and would probably be better served by some other website, even though Reddit packs more than enough paunch. ;)

It can be hard to search 10+ years of notes, to find some mention of a project or system name. If my work gave me a laptop, I'd definitely be looking for something other than pen + paper.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. And, to claim copyright, you have to put the copyright expiration "no later than" year in your work as well, so that even if they try to do another extension/etc after-the-fact, that work has a PD date NO MATTER WHAT and cant be changed.

My proposed solution for this problem in general, is to require not the starting date of copyright on a work, but the expiration date. No more extensions for Mickey, etc. After that date, it is clear that it is in the public domain, no matter what.

In this case, the person simply puts 2014 or some previous year, and it will be out of copyright by virtue of it being 'expired'.

It's not perfect in all cases, but it would prevent a lot of confusion and extensions that come from the current legal nightmare.

And, I took that into consideration as well.

Did you not notice my comment about having it run different teams/modes? What if they have a TV available? A student interested in learning to make web pages could make a scoreboard as a web page and use the HDMI port to drive it, etc.

Once you commit to "standard logic chips", that kind of flexibility would go way beyond a simple project that the students would be able to follow/help design/update over time.

For the students, this is more for flexibility with a low-barrier of entry, rather than an optimized one-off solution.

We homeschool, and my children are part of a homeschool co-op.

I'm currently working on using a BeagleBone Black to build a Jeapardy like game system, for when the co-op does their knowledge bowls, etc. I am going to build the first 'contestant' box and the main box, and do a class for the advanced students where they will help build the rest of the contestant boxes, and then we will both program in the software to support several different game setups, like 2 teams of 5, 5 teams of 2, 5 teams of 2 with a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order for teams to answer in, in case the 1st team doesn't get it right, etc. At that point, it's just software.

It's a great introduction to simple circuits (each contestant box will have a button and an LED, so power, ground a few resistors, etc), and simple software to read the GPIO pins and set the LED lights.

The co-op gets a cool Jeapardy team setup exactly how they want it, and the students get hands-on experience building it and programming it.

And, they can re-use the BBB for other projects as the students want to experiment with it. It's a flexible embedded computer that they can use for other projects. Just keep a different SD card for each hardware system that they keep.