I watched the first season of Game of Thrones on netflix, then gave up.

The discs are nearly empty, with two ~55 minute episodes per disc. The subtitles (vobsubs) are ugly as hell, compared to the beautiful subtitles included when broadcast, the copy protection is aggressive, wasting my time, there are no special features to speak of. etc, etc.

The Bible doesn't cause all that stuff (though it depicts); it's just the fan clubs that are a problem. No Bible, and they'd rally around something else; _Dianetics_, maybe.

No.

The primary purpose of copyright is to serve the public interest in advancing the progress of science. The means by which it functions involves giving authors a chance to profit (it's far from ensured; in fact most never make a cent from their copyrights and never will) but its a big mistake to confuse the means with the ends.

That would just make things worse. We need to seriously reduce the scope and duration of copyright. It's grown so bloated that authors would barely notice any effects of this, but the public would benefit greatly.

What the hell are you talking about?

We've always been able to flawlessly copy books. We haven't always done enough of it, but we've always been able to. And music and movies can generally be preserved and reproduced fairly well if some care is taken.

Copyright interferes with the preservation and reproduction of works by imposing additional costs on archivists and outright impeding copying and distribution.

We put up with it, to the extent that we do, because we hope that it will spur the creation and distribution of more works which will enter the public domain as fully and as quickly as possible, since it is only when works are in the public domain that they are of the greatest value to the public. Specifically, we hope it will spur the creation and publication of more works than if we didn't have copyright, with the ideal law being the one that spurs the most but impairs the public the least.

You're wrong about the market too; most works have a very brief window of copyright related commercial viability. It can be measured in hours to, at most, a few years. (A typical novel, for example, will make most of the copyright related money it will ever make within a couple of years of first being published.) This is why old works are generally available fairly cheaply. Yet people always want the new things. Even if we abolished copyright altogether, people would still want new things.

the topic it describes would be an acre of bread.

I figured the women who like sports and dogs (where are all the cat girls :D )

They're at home with their 1001 cats. Stay far away.

All the algorithms in the world aren't going to help when the intersection of "people you'd care to date" and "people who'd care to date you" is empty. What we need is an algorithm to convince people to lower their expectations when they're unattractive, boring, unmannerly, old, poor and/or cheap, have baggage, etc.

Except that's just a striped down front page. Managing the horde of comments is the challenging part, and they made no attempt to do so.

Without a doubt, the biggest tech failure of the year is slashdot's new mobile site, and the horendous beta desktop site. I can't imagine the motivation behind the flashy, slow, non-functional mess. If classic.slashdot.org ever goes away, so too will I.

I was considering a tablet instead of a netbook some time ago, but hit on a major stumbling block right away... Ethernet ports.

RJ45 gives me faster and more reliable network access when I need it. RJ45 allows me to connect to the network (and the internet) in places (or particular subnets) where there is no wifi. RJ45 allows me to configure my WiFi router/AP out of the box, or when the configuration gets erased. RJ45 lets me configure my WiFi PTZ camera to join them to my WiFi network in the first place. RJ45 allows me to use my netbook as a basic server or network analyser temporarily, or as an end-of-life job. RJ45 allows my netbook to act as a wireless bridge for other devices, and provide wifi and network access for your tablet, smartphone, ultrabook, etc.

Even if I could install a real OS like Linux on a piece of tablet hardware, the universal lack of RJ45 ports would be a continual problem. Carrying around a bunch of dongles is a nightmare. And netbooks are cheaper than decent tablets anyhow.

Now, if anyone can find me a nice cheap and small laptop that also has actual RS-232 ports built-in, I'll buy one in a second, since USB only provides 5V, and some serial devices strictly need the old +12V/-12V signaling to work... Not to mention issues with timing and similar...

Let's just call the place Airstrip One and be done with it.

I'm pretty sure CMMI, ISO 9000, TQM, and all the rest ultimately derive from Deming, so despite having "ISO" in the name it's not a European plot; it's an American own-goal.

I would fucking kill for software developers to be licensed like an engineering displine, do you realize how much more those of us with a clue would be worth if we could dump all the morons who managed to install a compiler or IDE on their Linux box and suddenly think they are 31337 h4x0rz programmer gods after they managed to run a shell script on their own.

Too bad you'd also dump nearly all the "morons" who wrote the fucking compiler and the Linux kernel and the drivers for it and the IDE and the shell.

Of course, the problem with that is that any sort of proper certification would weed out 9 out of 10 employed 'developers' instantly.

To anticipate the No True Scotsmen answer: No such proper certification has ever been described. Every system proposed which would weed out 9 of 10 employed developers would leave at least 99/100 good developers in the weeded-out bunch. And that certainly includes CMMI.

1) They won't give up the long copyrights, they're not those sorts of people;

2) Rights on derivative works, aside from being part of copyright, are extremely useful for the public and should not be bargained away so casually. Indeed, we ought to seriously consider reducing the scope of derivative works rights in copyright itself.

The optimist's viewpoint is that 60% of American's *do* believe in evolution.