Of all the new uses of Mickey we’re now seeing, one thing I really hope is to see Mickey showing up on murals in kindergartens and daycares. This is really what it means for the character to be entering the public domain. He’s has been a part of American, if not world culture for decades, but that part of the culture has been illegal for people to use.
Finally, after nearly a century of Disney getting absolute control, that cultural element finally belongs to everyone. Now parents and caregivers can paint images of Mickey and make kids happy without having to get permission from Disney.
It’s tricky. Sometimes changing things truly is a creative act. A big portion of Disney’s portfolio is from retelling European fairy tales: Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, etc. It would be hard to argue that they added nothing of value when they remade those fairy tales. In many cases, people wouldn’t recognize the original stories because Disney changed so much.
OTOH, it seems like bullshit when tiny elements are changed. For example, the Conan-Doyle estate has sued because although Sherlock Holmes was in the public domain, they said that was only the stories where he was aloof and analytic. They said that in stories published in the 1920s he was more capable of empathy, so any depiction of Holmes where he was empathetic infringed on their copyright.
If I were on a jury deciding this sort of thing, I’d require that there be something brand new. For example, Beauty and The Beast is public domain, and as long as someone is making an animated movie based on that story the default assumption should be that they’re inventing new aspects based on the public domain story, not based on the Disney movie. OTOH if they have an animated candle / candelabra, it’s reasonable to assume that infringes on the new character created by Disney.
The original was 14 years renewable for another 14. I like that better. It means that abandonware goes into the public domain faster, but it’s easy to renew a copyright if it’s still being used.
No exceptions.
I disagree. Exceptions for sports and software: shorter. Sports is most relevant when it’s live, and copyright-holders for sports content are much more vicious when it comes to taking down tiny clips of goals or something. So, make a special category that gives them extra protection when it comes to tiny clips in exchange for much shorter copyright terms. For software, it’s essential to be able to maintain old equipment, especially old industrial equipment. That soft of software could be used in power plants, medical equipment, water purification plants, etc. Companies are notoriously bad at keeping that stuff safe especially decades later. Instead, make it public domain faster.
I would bet that the people of the time saw themselves as very civilized for not simply wiping the native population out.
Like, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad just 250 years before the European ships started arriving in the Americas: “Most of the residents were massacred during and after the siege, with civilian casualty figures ranging in the hundreds of thousands.” The end of the Mongol period was when Timur / Timurlane resulting in the deaths of 20 million people. That’s just a century before the Europeans started conquering the new world.
Maybe the Europeans of the 1500s to 1800s thought of themselves as kind and enlightened in that they made treaties with the natives instead of just massacring them. Maybe they thought of themselves as exceptionally kind because they actually assigned land to the natives, instead of simply taking all the land for themselves.
Instead of thinking of the European colonial forces as an especially brutal and rapacious group, maybe it’s better to think of that entire time period as brutal.
Also, as an aside, the natives are always portrayed as being peaceful, gentle people who are victims of the awful Europeans. But, we know that they were fighting amongst themselves before the Europeans arrived. The Europeans found native villages surrounded by palisades. There were already native groups who had been driven off their land by other native groups. They were massacred, but that was more a function of diseases and technology, rather than a difference in character.
Libraries are also written and maintained by humans.
It’s fine to optimize if you can truly justify it, but that’s going to be even harder in libraries that are going to be used on multiple different architectures, etc.
For a long time I’ve been of the opinion that you should only ever optimize for the next sucker colleague who might need to read and edit your code. If you ever optimize for speed, it needs to be done with massive benchmarking / profiling support to ensure that the changes you make are worth it. This is especially true with modern compilers / interpreters that try to use clever techniques to optimize your code either on the fly, or before making the executable.
I think just reading his Wikipedia entry, I caught someone at CNN being kind:
O’Brien left CNN in December 2008. He was rehired by CNN as an aviation analyst in March, 2014.
2008–present: owner Miles O’Brien Productions, LLC in Washington, DC
In February, 2014, O’Brien was injured when a Pelican case filled with television equipment fell on his left forearm, causing acute compartment syndrome and resulting in the amputation of his left arm above the elbow.
So, the month after a gruesome injury he was re-hired by CNN, who probably have a pretty good medical plan, better than what he probably would have had when he was self-employed. Maybe not, maybe it’s just coincidence. But, it’s nicer to believe that someone at CNN thought they should look out for a former colleague / friend who needed some help.
As a side note, the program is amazingly performant. For small numbers the results are instantaneous and for the large number close to the 2^32 limit the result is still returned in around 10 seconds.
It seems like it would work because people wouldn’t think they got their value out of their prime membership yet and are reluctant to cancel after such a short time.
A quantum Santa could deliver presents to every house simultaneously if nothing observed his passage. On the other hand, at some point the wave function will collapse, like say when people check what presents are under the tree. When the wave function collapses, the probabilities all go away and there’s a single answer, so he could deliver presents to one and only one house.