If the Kindle in Amazon is being consumed at an unprecedented rate, I guess, that is good for the company

> you're gonna have to vote for left wing, pro-working class politicians.

Which left wing?

- The pro-corporate wing. Remember Bill Clinton passed the CTEA, URAA, and the DMCA, These acts extended copyright an additional 25 years (70->95 years), Moved public domain material back into copyright, and made reverse engineering a crime.
I guess you could say that democrats and republicans favor different corporations.

- The pro illegal alien wing - This group is not really concerned about your phone fine print.
And also not concerned working class citizens. Quite possibly the opposite is true.

- The pro union wing - This group while representing some working class people, this comes at a cost of working class people not in the union. A teacher's union advocates teacher's pay, tenure, status quo, rather than promoting the best education. And the general working class with children get the negative effects of that.

I would vote for someone who genuinely wanted to represent the general public (citizens of the US). Instead, all politicians represent their pet special interests. This is evident by looking at their popularity. How does a congress person with 40% approval get elected? The politicians constituents pay for the election/reelection. Who pays? special interests.

> The belief is that you should be free to enter into any contract you want.

The main problem here is not the freedom to enter into contract. It is that an inadvertent contract is valid. Such licenses like shrinkwrap are really one way contracts. Has this issue been addressed at the supreme court?

Linux is used on your router, your car, your camera, your "cloud" services, 50% of your phones.
The other 50% of your phones run another POSIX OS, OSX.

What's left for Windows?

Most of the PC/Laptop market.
Second and third place for PC/Laptop is Linux/OSX(POSIX)).

One hopes that as Chromebooks and Ipads are the norm in schools, the next generation can finally stop seeing that ancient dos prompt and C:\.

Or perhaps, Microsoft will buy Canonical....

Agreed that current AI is not "I". But 50 years or never?

Why?

Is your assumption that AI or self awareness can only be written by a million humans at keyboards? (not adaptive algorithms)

Or that the resources (memory, computation) for intelligence or awareness can not fit on computers for the next 50 years? How much is enough?

Or that the computation architecture for the the next 50 years is not adequate to implement intelligence or awareness?

Or that technology just moves that slow? (we still don't have flying cars...)

Or that the human brain is a unique (magic) machine, that cannot be reproduced because it was created by magic.

OSX broke Messages twice and it still does not work.

First, Apple removed support for Google Hangouts.
So everyone had to manually add Google as an XMPP client.
Then they removed support for XMPP, making the Messages client useless unless you only use Apple services.
Now, to use non apple messaging, you need to install Adium, Pidgin or similar.

Possibly they are doing the same thing with Mail, Break 3rd party support, perhaps with workarounds, then slowly remove 3rd party support.

Forget no DST or permanent DST.

The easy reference should be midnight and noon.

Midnight should roughly be halfway between sunset and sunrise.
Noon should roughly be halfway between sunrise and sunset.

For PDT (DST in CA, US), right now, midday and midnight are at 12, which is why permanent DST make sense on the west coast.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhelp.vivaldi.com%2Fartic...

It builds on open source, but not it is is not.

I suppose one could make an open source browser from their released modified source, replacing the proprietary UI code.

But why bother. Why not just start with upstream chromium?
If their changes are great, why can't they be upstreamed to chromium?

Opera, like many companies, does not understand how to work with open source.

webasm is great for advertisers, and media companies.
not so much for users...

If you do not modify the source of GPL software, then you can use without restriction or cost.

The only real GPL requirements come when modify the software and use the modified software. And practically, the requirements are practically only enforced when you distribute the modified software or sell something with the modified software.

This is actually much less restrictive than the software license of Microsoft, since you mentioned WIndows.

Imagine if you modify the source code for Windows, then wanted to distribute the modified software...
Well first, you would need to get the software from Microsoft, which is likely only available in very rare circumstances.
Derivatives of the software would be under Microsoft's copyright, and could not be distributed without Microsofts explicit permission.

AC3 patents expired on March 20, 2017
For Mpeg2,

OS news says 2018.
http://mobile.osnews.com/story...

But DVD's were sold in the US in 1995(1996 with CSS), so for patents after on mpeg2, DVD is prior art. So 2016 or 2018.

The easy way to preserve old content is to restore the public domain, and limit the current infinitely extended copyright.

Currently, most every audio and video recording ever made is copyrighted and extended every few decades to protect the interests of a few large companies.

As a side effect, preserving old media is often illegal without permission/licensing (which may be impossible), even if the media is abandoned.

If there was a reasonable limit on copyright duration, then preservation occurs naturally by the public.

In the current model, public preservation is strictly prohibited and prevented with DMCA and similar, and old media may just disappear.

"3/14 is the third day in the fourteenth month".

Why would you assume the European notation or little endian order?

Note that European notation is inconsistent as well.
(Otherwise you would have 59:59:23 14-03-2011, for little endian order, or 95:95:32 41-30-1102 for real little endian)

This is slashdot, so perhaps the international scientific notation should be assumed.

YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss

I live in the U.S., and only use this form.

03-14 (MM-DD) is not middle-endian, BTW.

In the US, the constitutional purpose of patents, is to promote the advancement of science and art, not giving a "fair chance to profit".

Most all ideas behind software patents would be developed whether or not there was a way to patent them.
Software patents are primarily used as weapons or threats against other companies.

Or can you give an example of: "Without software patents, xxx would never have been developed".

In reality, software patents give an artificial monopoly on an idea with an inventive duration (time before someone else would think of it) of 0-1 year. They company holding such an idea will naturally invent less, as it can profit and litigate from old ideas for 20 years.

20 year patent and 95 year copyright monopolies interfere with competition/capitalism, as monopolies in general do. But these monopolies are government backed.

In 1557 the British Crown chartered the Stationers' Company and gave the company a publishing monopoly in order to stem the flow of seditious and heretical books.

This publishing monopoly lasted for more than 150 years.

After revolution, publishing monopolies were first abolished then limited to 14 years with the Statute of Anne.
The founding USA adopted the 14 year rule.

However, due to pressure from large companies in the US, the monopoly has been continually extended, and is now 95-120 years.

The media associations relationship to the Internet is very similar to the Stationers relationship to the printing press.

The Apple TV draws 25-35 watts and Ubuntu can run on it.