No, that would still be public performance. It's defined in the Copyright Act, and includes performances to only one person at a time:

Instead there'd have to buy one CD per user who wanted to listen.

They could save momey by renting them to users. Except that you can't rent music CDs as a rule due to an exception to first sale ( 17 USC 109 (b)(1)(a) ), they might need to create a complicated system of selling and repurchasing discs on demand which would probably not convince a court that it was something other than rental.

And when someone copies your fingerprints or can otherwise spoof them well enough to get into your account, will your bank provide you with ten replacement digits? Likewise, what if you do a lot of manual labor, which can wear down the ridges enough to make them hard to read?

Biometrics are a long way from being foolproof.

I agree, but it often has that effect, and it should be recognized. Indeed, for a lot of people, that is the main thing they seem to notice about it.

(And of course there are wealth and property taxes, which to some extent deliberately have this effect, though that's not the only reason to have them)

Could you link to it please?

I would agree that wealth disparity is a serious problem, but I'd just address it directly through wealth taxes. (Possibly in the form of inflation, which is just a marvelously handy tool when you've got a populace with a lot of debt and little to no savings. Got to make sure that wages et al keep pace though)

Anyway, I was only talking about progressive taxation before, and that fairness, IMO, is rooted in an attempt to cause the least harm for the given amount of revenue you need to raise, not to merely have numbers which look equal but have wildly unequal effects.

I disagree. You're forgetting about the declining utility of money (i.e. the more money you have, the less useful the additional amount is to you).

If you only make $50 around here, you're going to need every penny to survive and even then you likely won't unless you can survive in the woods on what you can hunt and gather. Whereas if you make $1 billion, you can spend a tiny fraction of that to support yourself in great comfort, and wind up with nearly a billion dollars still in the bank not doing much for you personally.

What's fair is to determine how much a person needs to live on in a reasonable amount of comfort. Not luxury, but not poverty either; a decent standard of living in between. If a person earns more than that, any of the remainder is eligible for being taxed, if needed or socially useful. If a person earns less than that, they're given the difference and not taxed at all.

Remember, a tax is like a burden. If we were all obligated to deal with a physical burden, like carrying a heavy rock up a hill once a year, it would make more sense to assign loads based on our respective ability to carry them, rather than to force a small child, a physically handicapped person, or an elderly person to carry what is to them, a back breaking load, while the really strong people carry what is to them a puny amount.

Of course he's not. As we all know, cats that are on the Internet can't spell worth a damn and have terrible grammar skills.

But dogs, OTOH -- they blend in perfectly. No one knows if you're a dog on the Internet. Anyone here could be a dog; you, OP, even me. Anyone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T55ArHjeR1c

Well, circumstances matter a lot in fair use. Here's what the court had to say with regard to ReDigi:

The analysis of the first three fair use factors is straightforward and against ReDigi, as was obvious, so well skip to the fourth factor:

transfer my music to it (fair use?) then sell it to someone who'll transfer their music off it (fair use?)

This is the tricky part. Both transfers would have to be fair uses, both to avoid being infringing themselves, and also because only lawfully made copies are eligible for first sale.

A better solution from the legal standpoint IMO, although it does have a problem with people needing to use the service long before they plan on selling anything, is to have a small disk partition on a ReDigi server, just big enough for a single track, and to mount it as a disk on your local computer and download a newly legally purchased music file to it (each file you buy from iTunes or wherever would get its own partition). Then you need only sell access to the server. Would likely require some client software to handle the disk mounting in a way that kept things simple and tidy. Feels like a non starter to me.

First sale allows people to resell legally made copies. A copy is defined in the statute as a material object in which a work is fixed. Thus, a file on a computer isn't a copy, but the hard drive the file is written to is. You're free to sell the hard drive with the music on it, but not to reproduce the file over the network, regardless of whether you delete the local file or not. Basically, you can't move a copy -- a hard disc, a flash drive, etc. across the net. It's physically impossible.

iMacs initially had G3 processors; everything with 68040 chips had been discontinued before he came back. (And it was MacOS 8.1 that they started out with, IIRC)

The Mac IIci had a 68030, and it didn't have any built in ethernet support at all. You're probably thinking of the AAUI port on the Quadra 700. And he was long gone from Apple when that stuff came out.

And the main thing I'd object to was this:

Bullshit. The NeXT cube was not consumer hardware. The thing cost $6500 and was initially only sold to the higher ed market. When they finally hit the retail market, they were priced at $10,000 and were about as big a flop as the similarly priced Apple Lisa.

ASPIRIN is a special case. It became generic in the US due to the mark holder being Bayer, a German company, and us being a little upset about WWI. They also lost the HEROIN trademark that way.

The law is retarded if it doesn't segregate common and commercial use of the term.

Well, it doesn't, but I think it's better than you think. The raison d'Ãtre of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion. If you buy a bottle labeled with the COCA-COLA mark, you should be able to expect the contents to have the same quality (taste, ingredients, etc.) and same origin as every other identically marked bottle. OTOH, if you buy a bottle labeled SODA, POP, or COLA, there are a lot of different things that it could be, some of which might even be worse than the crab juice. Where there is no consistent quality, or no single origin, there's no trademark.

If the public uses a mark to refer to goods or services of differing qualities or origins though, they redefine the mark so as to make it generic. Typically this is caused by confusing the mark for the name of the underlying good or service, rather than as a trademark identifying that a good or service is interchangeable with other so-marked goods or services, which may have different origins. E.g. XEROX brand photocopiers vs. xerox machines.

The typical way to stave this off -- a trademark becoming dangerously synonymous with the marker good or service -- is advertising. Xerox has been doing it for years. My favorite ad of theirs was "You can't xerox a xerox on the xerox." But I wouldn't put a lot of money on their continued success as keeping their mark for photocopiers if it came down to a fight.

The closest thing I've ever seen to what you describe was that Thermos is entitled to use the THERMOS mark with a capital T, but everyone else who makes vacuum insulated flasks can use it without the capital T.

And a stopped clock is right twice a day.

McCarthy didn't know that was true, and had no reason to think it was true, he just lied about it. It was total coincidence that it happened to be true. And since he had no real information, he was no good at actually ferreting them out. And it's bad counterintelligence to just publicly identify enemy agents -- you're better off feeding them disinformation, turning them, or using them to find more, all very quietly.

The man was a drunk and a lout and deserves nothing but scorn.

Sorry, I meant breaking CSS. In my defense, it's been a long day.