>I wish our copyright laws (I'm in the United States) were more considerate of the needs of computer historians and retrocomputing enthusiasts. 95 years is much too long of a copyright term for software that gets obsolete after 10-20 years.
Reposting my proposals regarding copyright:
Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.
* A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase, always remain available. If the only streaming service willing to pay to stream your movie has the smallest market share, too bad; the market has spoken on the value of your content. An ebook can fulfill this purpose for a print book; streaming can fulfill this purpose for a theatrical or physical-media film. But it must be available to maintain copyright.
* Compulsory licensing should apply; if Netflix wants to pay the same amount of money as the above-mentioned small market-share streaming service for the film, Netflix must be allowed to do so. The film's rights owner can demand more, raising the price for all, but if every outlet refuses, the film immediately goes into public domain. This process is reversible, but it would set a ceiling to prevent the owner from setting a ridiculously high price to prevent its availability.
* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.
* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes[1] without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.
Separate issue, but also very worthwhile:
* Streaming services must make all data regarding their content available in some standardized format. Consumers should be able to use one application to access all content they have access to. The creator of SmartTube (a very nice YouTube-compatible player) should be able to add the appropriate API support to search for and play Netflix/Prime Video/Disney+/Paramount+ content.
The above applies to software, too. Legalize abandonware!
[1] Something I understand already happens
>While I'm on the topic, there used to be a museum in Seattle named The Living Computer Museum where visitors could actually use old computers. I went there in 2019 and had a wonderful time; it's sad that it didn't survive the COVID-19 pandemic.
The museum closed because of COVID-19, but the real reason it did not reopen is because Allen did not create a dedicated endowment, and his sister and only heir was uninterested in maintaining the museum.
Because your proposal is that once a copyrighted work is distributed it has to be made public or the owner loses the right to control its distribution. People make sensitive documents and distribute them to other people, but don't want to make them available to the public.
> Because your proposal is that once a copyrighted work is distributed it has to be made public or the owner loses the right to control its distribution
No. I wrote
>A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase
>Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.
But your post also gave this rule for any content.
You overlooked something when reading my comment, so great was your desire to *ACKSHUALLY*, and now that you realize it, you prefer to make yourself look like you are unable to read with context and a smidge of common sense, so great is your desperation to not look "wrong".
>They are also quite good at translating poorly written and only semi coherent writing, which can be incredibly useful if the person you are communicating with is quite sloppy.
You see this with recent automated translation on YouTube. If the creator of (say) an English-language video doesn't upload subtitles, YouTube automatically creates them based on the audio, but they lack punctuation and have nonsense phrases. The AI-driven translation of those subtitles to other languages cleans up the text along the way, so the end result is that non-English speakers get better subtitles than English speakers.
> We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M
A very unusual case of a company explicitly deprecating its own proprietary OS, and shifting to an external standard, on the same hardware. Tandy giving existing Model 16 customers Xenix and shipping it with new units is the only other case I can think of offhand.
IBM did give up on marketing OS/2 by the late 1990s (and the PC division arguably did so around the time Windows 95 came out), but I am not aware of IBM explicitly telling new and existing customers that Windows is the way forward for existing systems.
A slightly different way of answering your question is that sometime after the PS/2's launch, IBM began explicitly noting that its software and peripherals were compatible with non-IBM computers. PC DOS 5.0 might have been the first. <https://np.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1jleun5/ni...>
and to say what I said before, hardly any movie that was made in one generation can be made in another. There will always be things that have to be changed. This same thing applies to basically every other work of art - despite the valiant efforts of Pierre Menard.
> * Unless you use the Oracle plugin, but you really shouldn't, because most features from it have been moved to the GPL base.
Oh? I moved to KVM via UnRAID, but not because of any particular complaint with VirtualBox or the Oracle plugin. But then, I only used the plugin for the RDP feature. Has that been moved into the main codebase?
Not RDP, but like encryption, it's the only other feature I can think of which remains on the extpack. IMHO they are all enterprisey "mark a checkbox" level features that should be irrelevant for even actual enterprise users.
Why do you have to use RDP anyway? It gives almost zero advantages over VNC here since all the output is going to be raster.
>Why do you have to use RDP anyway? It gives almost zero advantages over VNC here since all the output is going to be raster.
No preference for either protocol; I just used RDP because that was the most convenient with VirtualBox and the plugin. (I think (?) I tried VNC and couldn't get it to work.) I use VNC now with UnRAID's KVM, but probably would have stuck with RDP were it supported.
>If you want almost no-cost currency conversion (2 USD minimum, but you have to convert like 100k USD I think it is to go above that), use Interactive Brokers LLC. They won't let you have an account purely for currency conversion, but as long as you do a few trades now and then, it seems fine.
I wish I'd known this four years ago. I had US$2000 to send from US to Canada and the cheapest method (~$50) I found was, to my surprise, to send BTC within Coinbase (the recipient was another Coinbase user).
Reposting my proposals regarding copyright:
Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.
* A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase, always remain available. If the only streaming service willing to pay to stream your movie has the smallest market share, too bad; the market has spoken on the value of your content. An ebook can fulfill this purpose for a print book; streaming can fulfill this purpose for a theatrical or physical-media film. But it must be available to maintain copyright.
* Compulsory licensing should apply; if Netflix wants to pay the same amount of money as the above-mentioned small market-share streaming service for the film, Netflix must be allowed to do so. The film's rights owner can demand more, raising the price for all, but if every outlet refuses, the film immediately goes into public domain. This process is reversible, but it would set a ceiling to prevent the owner from setting a ridiculously high price to prevent its availability.
* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.
* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes[1] without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.
Separate issue, but also very worthwhile:
* Streaming services must make all data regarding their content available in some standardized format. Consumers should be able to use one application to access all content they have access to. The creator of SmartTube (a very nice YouTube-compatible player) should be able to add the appropriate API support to search for and play Netflix/Prime Video/Disney+/Paramount+ content.
The above applies to software, too. Legalize abandonware!
[1] Something I understand already happens
>While I'm on the topic, there used to be a museum in Seattle named The Living Computer Museum where visitors could actually use old computers. I went there in 2019 and had a wonderful time; it's sad that it didn't survive the COVID-19 pandemic.
The museum closed because of COVID-19, but the real reason it did not reopen is because Allen did not create a dedicated endowment, and his sister and only heir was uninterested in maintaining the museum.
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