Well, that's not entirely true. Copyright does cover derivative works. For example there's the issue of The Wind Done Gone that was based on Gone with the Wind, but was written from the slaves' point of view. Much legal trouble ensued, and it had to be rebranded as a parody and the characters renamed (and some money spent) before the case could be settled.

If it weren't legal, Rupert Murdoch would surely be in jail by now.

If they can make Sintel, how long before a video game is made that way and of that quality?

I don't have numbers to offer, but they could be banking on the iPad being cheaper in the long run than having to update dead-tree textbooks year after year. Also many of the open courseware digital textbooks are as good as, if not better than ye olde paper texts. And almost any school could easily replace their literature textbooks with e versions, so maybe they're looking to extend this beyond math. If so, they will almost certainly be saving money.

Besides, textbooks are sooo 20th century.

Insightful? Seriously?

Finally something I can use to easily sort my porn.

Very, very., very well said. Not only do I wish I had mod points, but I wish you could go higher than five for exceptional comments.

Complaining about how dumb American kids are, or how bad American schools are, is just one of those things people default to without ever giving it a shred of thought. I'm so glad to see that someone actually manages to think the situation through before whining.

That might actually work on the moon.

LOL!! Ah, for some mod points....

Leaving them with only the propaganda permitted by said theocracies? What do you suppose would happen then, a sudden burst of enlightenment based on the same ideas that have made them "backwards" to begin with?

There's a reason tyrants block the flow of information. There is no greater threat to tyranny than the knowledge that people elsewhere are freer and happier than you are, and the information that explains how they got to be that way.

Gods I hope you were just being sarcastic and I missed it. I'm more than a little disturbed by the fact that you got an "insightful" mod for this.

And while I'm at it, was I the only one mentally calling "fake Lock" unLock that whole time?

Was it just me or did it all end with the fate of the universe resting on the changing of a prehistoric stone light bulb? In fact, it must have been a Christmas light bulb, because if one went out, they all went out...

It's very different. "Nature" takes existing sequences and changes them, seeing if they fit in with the rest of the existing organism and environment. The process is slow and competing sequences have an opportunity to try their own variations. Wholesale fabrication of an entire genome is several orders of magnitude more drastic.

A machine that can calculate anything, regardless of complexity? I, for one, welcome our new garage-built overlords.

Obligatory Dilbert... http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/10000/8000/300/18358/18358.strip.gif