Fair Use is an affirmative defense; /. posting an article claiming that something "Is Not Fair Use" is misleading and irresponsible - only a judge/court can determine if something is or is not Fair Use, and only if given the chance to do so.

Given that the video in question is a work of fan fiction, the following seems relevant:

"Works of fanfiction are more likely to constitute fair use if they are "transformative" with respect to the original work, if they are non-commercial, if they appropriate relatively little of the original work, and/or if they do not tend to detract from the potential market for or value of the original work.[9]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... http://www.copyright.gov/title...

Bennett Haselton doesn't seem to know how Fair Use works, and is dangerously and irresponsibly mischaracterizing it as something he himself can assess and negate/affirm. The non-commercial and transformative aspects of the Power Rangers video in question might in fact hold up in court; he doesn't know otherwise, and to insist that he does is legally misguided.

If you are one of those ~800 (at time of posting) who installed microchips in your neighborhood squirrels, I would love to know why.

I need ideas.

Given that the Supreme Court has already weighed in twice on the constitutionality of campaign finance reform (money = speech, etc.), is traditional legislation even enough - at this point isn't an actual amendment necessary, to overcome existing rulings?

What are you talking about? JavaScript must always necessarily be slower than native code due to its abstracted nature. If it needs an interpreter, or virtual machine, or any other intermediate process between the program code and the CPU, there will be overhead.

Having the CPU execute native code directly will always be faster.

Now, there's an argument to be made that a higher-level, more abstracted language makes people more productive, and by extension, program code more expressive. But this is a different trade-off and objective than building a high-performance application.

            -dZ.

You're thinking of OLE (Object Linking & Embedding). COM (Component Object Model) was designed with distributed enterprise applications in mind, complete with a transaction coordinator and language-neutral'ish interfaces. It's the DLL paradigm taken to its natural position in the 7 circles of hell.

It was Microsoft's attempt to steal CORBA's thunder and nearly got away with it.

          -dZ.

Our little Timmy has always received a ribbon. If he doesn't get one this time, it may affect his self-esteem. And while we're at it, since little Timmy is getting a ribbon, then they all should get one, lest they feel left out or less capable.

So, yes, ribbons.

Don't forget the ribbons! Everyone must get a ribbon.

        -dZ.

And if so, by how much? It's one thing to say that flies perceive time differently than we do, but I'm curious as to whether: 1. Among many flies, there is variance from fly to fly (both independent and dependent of relative size), and if so, what that variance is... 2. For a single fly, whether there is variance based on age, environment, time of day, etc. It's always seemed to me like those with an extraordinary talent at something, esp. an athletic or musical talent, are able to slow down time when performing this talent. I'd tend to say that perception of time should more and more be considered a sense, like sight, sound, taste, etc.

When you say, "back in the day," when exactly do you mean? AltaVista was indeed a great service in the mid-to-late 1990s, until it succumbed to spam, porn, and advertisement corruption, like the rest of them.

        dZ.

That's been a piece of revisionist history, propagated by Google itself during the mid '00s, as a branding tactic. Google was a mere geek's toy during its first couple of years.

People started switching because the other search engines were full of spam, porn, and advertisements, and along came Google with its PageRank algorithm, which proved very effective at the time.

People suffered through all other search engines' "portals" for years and would not have switched if the only thing Google had to offer was a "page free from clutter."

Of course, eventually Google turned into another advertisement-riddled, cluttered portal, full of spam and irrelevant junk. The more things change...

        dZ.

Panda Eaters and Tasters Association

LOL! In Slashdot and Reddit, at least.

Plus it's kind of icky.

Well, you can't switch arguments mid-way.

All those people that you claimed replaced their smartphones with tablets when they go to conferences, used to bring laptops before smartphones. Weren't you paying attention?

So it went from paper pads, to tablets, to smartphones, to tablets.

That means that at least some businesses did dump laptops in favor of smartphones for at least some functions.

I know you are trying to be all smarty-pants with your straw-man argument pointing out how tablets are not going to replace laptops completely, in every facet of business--but nobody is claiming that.

What some of us are saying is that, there are some functions for which laptops and desktop computers used to be regarded as the most appropriate tool, and now tablets are taking their place.

Not only that, but tablets are being put to some uses by businesses to which laptops or smartphones weren't even considered.

          -dZ.

The trick is providing something that is truly useful without cannibalizing Laptop/Desktop sales.

And therein lies the business problem: the use case for tablets overlaps and even extends beyond that of the traditional PC. Moreover, they seem to fulfill the promises of ease of use, portability, multimedia capabilities, and personal adaptability that PCs have been making for two decades now. As such, the tablet market appears to be bigger than the one for traditional PCs.

If a business insists in ignoring this to avoid the cannibalization of their current PC cash-cow, a competitor will come along and do it for them.

Oops! I guess they already have.

      dZ.