of course WE will be the ones paying the price when the cost of goods increases to reflect the extra cost to the companies.

and so why should orphaned works, that are no longer printed and produce no income for the copyright holder be protected? So you can hold them back from the world and say mine?

the point of copyright was to protect these works for a time so that authors could make money off of them, and then to be open to the public to promote public good.

The way the government has extended copyright is atrocious and no longer does what it was supposed to.

I highly doubt most lawyers are qualified to determine ethics of any sort. the lawyers job is to determine the legality of something not ethics.

Kinda disappointing that the first thing nowadays when people see something new it's that "Wow, humans really stuffed up the planet" instead of "Wow, that's an interesting natural phenomenon"

Simple. Some movie quote described the shuttle as "10 million parts all made by the lowest bidder." That's what happens when you get politics involved. Every congressman wants some company in his district to have a piece of the pie, or NASA wants that to be the case to guarantee program survivability. It's stupid and probably doesn't make a lot of business or engineering sense. But it makes a lot of political sense, and if you're going to get something done with government money, it has to make political sense, which also means it often lacks common sense.

Destroying your competition by being better is ok, destroying by doing things like bribing the the governemnt has nothign to do with capitalism. Fraud is illegal. Partial capitalism? i think not, you may need some government regulation, but not a whole lot.

Most of our problems stem from government getting involved. The current economic mess as far more to do with the ability of fed to arbitrarily create money than any ponzi schemes. (Unless you consider the entire stock market the ponzi scheme, which maybe an argument can be made for)

Exactly. Rather than complaining about WMP not going out of it's way to support iPod, Apple simply wrote their own Sync software. They had no expectation that WMP would put out an update that allowed it to sync an iPod. I simply don't understand the issue here. Palm should have never released a product without sync software, either their own, or an open source choice that actually planned to support the device. Instead, they relied on another competing vendor's and also presented the device as the competitors brand in that competitors software.

Microsoft didn't go out of it's way to make the iPod compatible with WMP, and no one expected it to. I would actually be shocked to the core if MS went out of their way to sync an iPod. Apple also didn't make it's iPod look like a Zune in WMP. If they had, you wouldn't have had time to exhale before a lawsuit was slapped on Apple. It simply doesn't make sense for competing vendors to support their competitors hardware.

There are third party products where it does make sense, but it does not make sense from a vendor that makes it's money from the hardware, not the software.

this is one of the funniest I have heard today, along with the squeeze bacon from thinkgeek

You complain about the "corporate monopolies", but do you just want to replace it with a government monopoly? How is that any better? The only difference is that you'll have completely inept and/or corrupt people running the monopoly, with little or no check on their powers or budget.

Read again, short timeframe, how long do you think it would take to mail them and how long till they get it. Plus from my reading she didn't use a maillist, but, carefully selected them

maybe Apple caved because they want to sell iphones there?

first of all, the same would be true for basically any GPS cell phone. Secondly, banning it will only stop law abiding citizens.... are they afraid of the law abiding citizens or terrorists, I assure you the terrorist does not care about the ban.

They should just bad suicide bombers, and go ahead and make terrorists illegal too. Obviously making things illegal makes them go away so if you outlaw being bad everyone will be good.

because it could eventually kill off Apple, like the first wave of clones almost did. Apple is a hardware manufacturer the software is to boost hardware sales, if they loose the software, it could hurt apple.
now, I am not saying Microsoft is behind it, but that would be a possible motivation.

The problem with your example is simply
that is Microsoft's business model. They know what they are in for
they sell their software to run on basically any computer.

Now call Microsoft and tell them that your vista doesn't work on your 386 with 128mb of ram and see what they tell you