If you look during the whole prop 19 thing beer companies were one of the biggest contributors to the anti-marijuana campaign.

I have to no doubt that if Anheuser-Busch thought they could make more money selling pot than beer they would support it, but right now they have the factories, workers, and everything else set up to make beer. So I don't really see them switching businesses anytime soon. Not to mention, if pot was legal it would be fairly easy to get some seeds and grow my own.

Yes, I could make my own beer too if I wanted. But that is a lot more effort than growing a few plants.

And don't forget companies that sell alcohol. I mean, why would you let someone take away your government monopoly on legal substance abuse?

Even worse than that, his argument is that because one thing eventually created new problems we shouldn't try something completely different because it has the possibility of creating problems later. So basically, he's against trying to make any progress at all because there's always some problem that may or may not come from it.

My first thought was Mystery Men:

Mr. Furious: Seems there was a little controversy there regarding your father's death.
The Bowler: Yes, the police said he fell down an elevator shaft. Onto some bullets.
The Blue Raja: You know, I've always suspected a bit of foul play there.
The Bowler: As have I.

I'm not sure if you're joking or being serious. That's like saying that ACLU is pro-rape or pro-murder because they'd fight against a bill that allows police to search your home without a warrant. You don't need to keep secrets from the police unless you're a criminal right?

I don't think he meant they literally can't do business there, what I believe he if referring to is that by having their company (or one division of it) headquartered there they get special treatment when dealing with members of the EU that your company does not.

While that's certainly true, anyone buying a Kinect without an Xbox is only icing on the cake. Plus since it's not a MS driver they don't even have to support it.

All they really have to do is make another crappy Halo sequel using Kinect and 90% of Xbox owners will have one anyway.

This is why I think copyright should be something granted to you when you first publish for free, but after something like 5 you start having to pay to renew it for another 5 years. If you can't make enough money to keep renewing it then it lapses, but if you make something incredible that can sustain itself you can keep renewing it for however long it is profitable. If you set it at something reasonable (I'd say $5,000/5 years after the first 5 years), then you get several years to try and make money off it and could probably extend once by saving up money even if you're an independent author.

The only thing I'm not sure how this would work for is paintings/sculptures/etc. As far as I know you don't generally make tons of money from selling copies of your work for this type of art and I'm not sure how you'd be able to keep up the money for maintaining a copyright on a piece if you wanted to.

Didn't Apple employees call themselves slaves a few months ago and file a class action suit?

I find the quote about defenses only improving after it's been penetrated funny for a different reason. Fabric may be built to be more "secure", but it's going to work exactly the same way as any other language or program built with a language. More likely than not if Fabric becomes popular someone is going to figure out a way to exploit the code to do something it wasn't intended for and they'll have to some up with a way to solve that problem after the fact, just like everyone else. Isn't the reason that our defenses have to be proven inadequate at first usually because the people that either designed the language or used it to write a piece of software didn't know that the exploit possibly to begin with? I don't see how that's going to change.

I've been reading Slashdot for a few years now and for some reason I'm amazed every time this happens where I see a headline and/or read a summary, then later on when I read the article I find out that the original information was either misleading or completely inaccurate. You'd think I'd have learned by now.

It seems like this technology's usefulness went out the window years ago whenever nearly everyone started carrying cellphones with cameras around with them at work. A notice was posted at my work with the address and directions for where we were having an office party last year, so instead of writing it down I just snapped a picture with my phone. And when I pulled it up later it was easy to read on my phone, and I bet it would have been even easier to read if I had pulled it up on my computer. Anyone that has enough time to copy a document can probably snap a few pictures, getting at least the most important information from it.

I don't really see how you can think we should be to do "whatever we want" with a photo just because the government took it. Can I use photos of former/current presidents taken by government staff and then use them to imply (or even say outright) that those men (and perhaps women in the near future) have used and endorse my product when that's not true?

What McCandless is claiming is something he could sue over even if Dido herself did own the copyright of the photo because he's claiming the use of the photo violates his privacy rights as a citizen, not that she doesn't own it or that he didn't want it to be used outside of NASA purposes. Just because the government took the photo doesn't mean you can do something illegal with it, it just means that it's publicly available and you can use it in any way you could have legally used it if you can taken it yourself and were sole owner.

I want to point out again though, that I'm not in any way on McCandless' side here and don't think his claims are at all legitimate.

From my understand what you're talking about is copyright, which is not what this is about. McCandless is claiming that Dido used his good will and persona as the first astronaut to do an untethered space walk to boost album sales.

If a government photographer takes a picture of someone famous that doesn't mean that anyone can now take that publicly owned and available photo and use it to imply that the celebrity endorses their products, even if the celebrity is a government employee as well. However, this case still seems like a bunch of bull because McCandless is claiming that some people will see the album and either think "Woah, Bruce McCandles endorses this album it must be good" or "I'm totally gonna buy this because it has a picture of Bruce McCandless on the cover"* which seems unlikely.

*For some reason the shoppers seem to have watched way too much Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.

It also didn't hurt Sony that the PS3 was a blu-ray player.