You're honestly claiming that it took them 2 months to verify the guy's result?

And sure, you might ignore it after a week, but someone might see the advert for the first time after that. If they buy the game purely to enter this competition (which already has a winner by that point) then they've been frauded.

I believe the one of the problems with the Sacagawea (sp?) dollar and all the other one-dollar coins is that they are heavy and bulky, and they don't fit into wallets without coin chambers. If I get $4 in bills for change, they go right into my wallet and add scarcely any bulk or weight. If I get coins, they go into my pocket.

That also brings up a second problem. I believe the dollar is a psychological threshold in the U.S. mind. Amounts under one dollar seem trivial to me, but on the left side of the decimal point, I begin counting.

That said, I'd still rather have the dollar coin. They were very helpful when I took the bus to work -- a couple of coins in the front pocket spared me having to fish out my wallet to pay my fare. And yes, I had trouble finding the coins, even at the bank.

If you want two-dollar bills, go to Monticello, where they are given in change if possible.

As for the penny, I'll happily take any I can get. One hundred of them will get me a paper or metal dollar.

Uh, you can. Use Mono, or write your own VB.NET-to-elf compiler. Nobody will stop you.

Piracy is an exception, but self interest remains a rather poor guide for proper behavior, generally speaking.

That's an odd thing to say, given that self-interest is the entire basis for copyright.

The public is self-interested; they want more works created and published, and they want those works in the public domain, where they are most useful to the public. In order to get more works created and published, they will temporarily allow restrictions on those works (where representatives of the public get to determine the scope and duration of the restrictions), so as to incentivize authors at the least cost to the public. Ultimately, the works are required to fall into the public domain. If the cost of copyright to the public is greater than the benefit to the public, there would be no point in having it, as the public would literally be better off without it (or with a differently formulated copyright law where the public benefit outweighed the public cost). The ideal copyright law is the one that provides the greatest public benefit, regardless of how appealing authors and publishers may find it as opposed to some alternative.

In doing this, the public has appealed to the self-interest of the authors, who want to make money by charging monopoly prices for their works, in order to recoup their investment and make a profit. It isn't guaranteed that they'll do so -- a work could still be a flop -- but they've got an opportunity. Financial self-interest is the only incentive that copyright can offer; while there are other incentives to create works (e.g. becoming famous, art for art's sake, sending a message to the audience, etc.), copyright doesn't matter for those.

So really, copyright is self-interest all the way down. It may only appeal to one kind of self-interest, rather than the whole panoply, and it may involve delayed gratification of self-interest, but it's still self-interest. There's nothing else at work there; it is not altruistic.

Piracy is simply self-defeating, in that pirates, who cannot stand to wait for the copyright term to end, engage in what would be lawful behavior later, but at the cost of reducing the incentivizing effect that all of the rest of society is counting on, thus reducing the overall benefit to society. Of course, this assumes that the copyright law is properly formulated. If the lawmakers have become corrupt, and no longer write the law so as to best serve the public interest alone (with whatever benefits authors receive being determined purely as a matter of what's best for society), or if social norms have changed, and the law no longer quite reflects what society wants out of it, then it may be that the law is no longer justified, and the pirates are acting correctly, if unlawfully. In that case, it's the law that needs correction, not the pirates.

In any case, though, I think you really missed the mark regarding self-interest. Self-interest is the only legitimate reason to have copyright, and governs whether there should be copyright, and if so, what it should consist of -- so as to exploit the self-interest of others in serving your own self-interest.

Also, the capitalization of "creator" in the first sentence of the second section (the famous one) could constitute religious belief in a higher power... thus alienating atheist citizens

If only the scientific theory of Evolution had been proposed before the DOI was written instead of about 80 years later, it could also mean evolution.

Falcon

Tell that to European banks who don't really even accept checks anymore. If you really want to cash in a check, you have to wait like 3-4 weeks so it clears for the bank and then they transfer it to you. With high costs, of course. A bank woman even said that 99% of checks now a day are fraudulent and that's why they have to do it.

Paying via wire transfer (or ACH, not sure which is the equivalent) is a lot safer as is online banking. Here at least - it seems like US banks managed to fuck up that too with username/password like protections, instead of running physical pin list like we have here.

Physically you can just pay with cash if you're worried about credit cards. Then you avoid the fees and privacy issues too.

I pay all of my bills online. Then of course, there is also PayPal... I’m in the USA, and I have news for you.

Perhaps the secrecy is, ultimately, a sign that the government is scared.

And why not? We have to stamp their next round of paychecks.

Uh-huh, because the html5 developers aren't deaf to that segment of the content production market. 10 years ago, no open standard was anywhere near flash.

Didn't we see an article recently of a CEO stating that netbooks were on the way out?

I think one part of the test should include the probability that two independent parties doing the same work ending up with the exact same result should determine whether or not something should be a creative work.

Would two parties doing the exact same work come up with two [substantially] different models of the Washington monument? I doubt it.

If this test were applied, I think it becomes increasingly more obvious as to what is a creative work and what is not.

It would be interesting if it could watch you draw, then imitate your style as it draws other subjects. It isn't fun to re-draw the same subject over and over just to see how you progress. Instead you could use it to take each of your drawings and show you, say, a lightbulb would look. Plus it would be fun for people like me who like to draw on occasion but quickly get lazy. That way I could just draw half of something and let the robot finish it. Heck, you could use it to do one of those photo-every-day things, but instead of a photo it's a self-portrait based on your current drawing ability.

Of course, if it became complex enough, it could analyze money and learn how to mimic that drawing style...

Remember when HP spun off Agilent? They basically sold their soul to in the name of becoming a cash generating machine. No one I know associates HP with innovation anymore. It will be sad if the same comes to pass with Motorola.