Devil's advocate: those do in fact include copyright.

Typical red-planet ranting. We blue-planeters are more reasonable. And what happened to biplanetsenism? Don't pay attention to the moon... strictly flyover country.

The Pirate Roberts?

As someone who went to Mudd 20-cough years ago, I've found it works well, when seeking employment, as the best school no-one's heard of. Sure everyone and their dog knows MIT and Caltech, but if your interviewer knows Mudd, it's a good sign of a with-it interviewer and a truly tech- (or engineereing- or science-) savvy, non-WTF company. Their self-deprecation pretty much fits this image; underneath it they absolutely know they're elite.

I'd personally go back to watch one of Shakespeare's lost plays (e.g. Cardenio), write down the words, and make millions. Millions! And we're just outside the Renaissance Industry Artists Association's copyright period, too.

But you'd think The Nazis should have known.

Why was I hoping that story would end very differently?

I think this is the real point. Why bother to post a news story that every wire service (and thus google news etc.) has aggregated faster?

Isn't Popular Mechanics art what started the whole flying car thing in the first place?

Um, despite the "worry over net neutrality" cited in the article, the actual service just looks like they're repackaging a higher speed/business connection as a "gamer" package. Nothing there actually says that your connection will be slower by packet category.

If the organizer recorded your performance in the talent contest, then made a #1 single out of it without paying you, that's the problem. Not that it's not wholly legal if the participants agree beforehand to sign away their performance, but it could be a scummy business practice and worth looking out for. Which is all the article is saying, really.

On the other hand, if your performance brought you fame (or in computing, a bright spot on your resume) that might be a reasonable exchange.

That depends, are you talking delivery system or content?

Car analogy alert: Why should a non-mechanic driver learn the basics of internal combustion and what the spark plug thingie does?

Agreed, I didn't know about that one!

Thank you very much for your extremely useful skills. I never would have guessed! If you think I haven't tried dozens of permutations of same and not constantly come up with hits based on stray letter 'R's, well... you haven't really done anything challenging with a search engine before. (I'm not talking about cases where you're trying to just get basic facts about R, but when you want to look up some arcane error messages etc. that the stray R's doom many searches).