> You cannot copyright a name like "Gollum" or an idea like "let's tell a story about looking for Gollum after the trilogy."

That is a totally wrong interpretation of copyright law in the United States, which specifically covers derivative works (parody, criticism, and other Fair Use provisions notwithstanding).

Thanks for your comments. This thread has given me a few things to think about, although I'm still not totally sold on the concept.

Some have compared this sort of exercise to a fire drill. We don't do those, at least without prior notification, for fear of freaking people out, like in the trauma caused by active shooter drills on children.

Also, I've not yet fallen for one of these. Given how they come in with our URL checker stripped, having "phishing" tags coded in the image bugs, from domains openly registered to security companies, they are fairly easy to spot.

So it seems like overkill, at least in my environment. I don't work with launch codes or anything, and besides, without my 2FA fob, you're not going to go far with my password anyway.

These are people I'm entrusting with my work files and communications, and they can't even be truthful with me in return. Maybe that's why it rubs me the wrong way, no matter how the means and ends are weighed.

I'm glad this was fixed, but for several days I had a bricked device (you ended stuck on the activation screen, with no option to skip that process) and in a situation best summed up by Cory Doctorow: “Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.”

That's a rather short-sighted perspective on things.

Old library catalogs and databases, which are still around, work this way. The problem is that unless you've been trained to do non-intuitive things like omit initial articles from titles ("Old Man and the Sea" instead of "The Old Man and the Sea"), they don't work. This causes far more problems than an expert searcher grousing about having to occasionally add back in +/- operators to search for a known it

The webm video kept sticking for me (right around the part about sacrificing convenience . . .) so I found the TEDx Talks video.

Here's a similar gem, made by Steve Case in 1997, in response to gripes from people unable to connect to swamped AOL servers after their switch to unlimited hours:

Just as you would be sensitive about using a public phone booth if others were waiting in line to use it . . . try to show some restraint at night during the next few months when we're in this transitional mode.

In other words, it's your fault for trying to use what you've paid for.

Was a university's primate research laboratory. They were doing studies on addiction. So you had these metal cages, not much bigger than the monkeys, just stacked together in a room.

Assuming you guys are talking about McCain's 2008 Presidential campaign, that was indeed before the Santelli rant, which happened on 2/19/2009.

Yes, point taken... "My entire profession" should be "Libraries" above.

As a reference librarian, my main goal is to be Bablyon 5. I'd love it if we succeeded in creating a powerful enough search and retrieval tool with an intuitive interface that negated the need for library user instruction. My career mission is to work towards this ideal. It would, just as how B5 succeeded in its mission so much so that it was no longer necessary, make a large part of what librarians now do obsolete.

I'm a librarian. My entire profession would not exist if not for similar provisions.

Remember all the outrage over colorizing Casablanca in the 1980s? There were even congressional hearings that warned of the dire consequences of unmitigated technology (someone even imagined at the time dead actors being re-inserted in new movies, unthinkable at the time). Sounds crazy....