The devices I worked on in the past had protection in firmware and such. The goal however was to protect against competitors and unauthorized resellers, not random hackers. Ie, trying to crack down on the second hand market where they try to clone the firmware and try to resell old machines as new or to sell license features they haven't paid for. Firmware wasn't encrypted in this case but is definitely signed. Encrypting doesn't help much if the attacker has access to the bus.

If it's at the expense of everyone else (those evil freeloading authors!) then make the copyright expire in 2 months. If no one is hurt then make it last for infinity. Clearly we need something in between the extremes. I am just arguing why I think 20 years is too short.

I suspect most of these devices have either minimal operating systems, home grown operating systems, or no operating system at all. Even if security is in the network stack it doesn't fix things. Ie, do you require your hospital to run IPsec everywhere for every device? Having a top of the line IPsec enabled networking doesn't prevent hacking things if there are bugs due to injecting packets of the right type (ie, it isn't breaking through security to read data, but it is crashing the machine or corrupting data).

The other thing is that when these machines are hacked it is very often due to reverse engineering the machines. These don't run windows or linux, there's no pre-built hacker kit available, the attackers have access to actual machines and have cracked them open, read the flash or monitored the bus to figure out what the software is doing or what style of OS it has, scanned through to find out if there's a recognizable file system type, etc. When you're up against sophisticated attacks like that then your builtin OS security isn't going to be much defense.

I suspect most of these successful attacks are happening on machines that use Windows internally; ie, an app on a turnkey system, or Windows bolted onto the side of a device to provide a front end. But Windows already has a built in securre communication feature.

People don't create works of art in order to become rich. They do not get the $100K/year salary. You may put in $18K in a 401K every year to save up for retirement, and in 30-40 years you'll still be getting paybacks on that investment. But an author doesn't get that salary and doesn't have the 401K. Has a roth though but it won't pay out nearly was well especially when income is low to put into it. For the creators of works of art part of their payback over time is the royalties (which always decline over time anyway). Even if they keep churning out the works, one every 2-5 years, the royalties they will be getting in old age may still not be enough to live on.

This is not locking away a work of art forever, it can be done by having a minor locking away for a very short period of time (life of author plus a few years). I think 20 years is just way too short just so that you can get something for free. Twenty years ago was Bridges of Madison County, still a good seller. Schindler's List and Jurassic Park on the movies side. That's how short twenty years is. And those are the hits, think about the things that weren't popular.

I'm not defending the copyright-in-perpetuity like they have now, it's clearly too broad.

I'd like to see changes, such as not being able to completely and irrevocably sign away copyright to someone else, but they can grant temporary exclusive publishing rights to a corporation.

Freedom of speech exists. However there's no freedome to retain your job once you've pissed off your employer or your employer's primary customer. That's the real problem that is going on. Many of these scientists are work for "arm's length" agencies; that is they're supposed to be free of pressure from the government. However they certainly know that their funding may be at risk if they annoy the government ministers.

The same problem exists if the government backs out and is replaced by private industry though. As long as there's a funding source that can vanish overnight due to someone's whim this problem will exist.

Thus throwing all their heirs into poverty perhaps. Ie, children not of employable age yet, or disabled children or spouses without means of income. If the work of art is worth money to someone, then that money should go to the heirs. What if the law was that if you died for any reason other than natural causes that your 401K would go to the state?

Twenty is fine for me. Many works remain popular sellers for longer than that; there are series of books that took longer than that to write. It can take more than 20 years for a book to become a movie, and if copyright expired that soon then all profits go to hollywood and zero go to the author.

I also think extensions to copyrights should be allowed but that the original author is required to apply for them and not a publisher or media company. Remember that some of the time the royalties are also the retirement plan of the author (or songwriter or artists, whatever). Authors are not fabulously wealthy on average, and some may be hovering around the poverty line if they have no alternative means of income.

That doesn't mean corporations are people though. It just says that corporations are deserving of the same rights as individuals in some instances.

There are 13 notes in the range of an octave. At the very least you will have 2 notes in an eighth of an octave, one near each end of that range, plus you'll often be able to squeeze in a half step note. As in C, C#, D.

Patent the methods used to get the DNA information, but the information itself should not be patentable. That should be somewhat obvious and not worth the effort to get it through a long sequence of court decisions.

But can you play 1993 games on it like you can on a PC?

It's just a newer alienware, it's not a new marketing strategy.

But a PS4 isn't a PC. So you'd need a PC and a PS4. And on the PS4 you'd be stuck playing console games which is a major drawback.

I thought we were in an autonomous collective.

I would just like to have a law that makes it illegal to break the law.