I'm awfully excited to note (belatedly) that Banshee, the free/open music player for GNU/Linux, turned 1.0 a couple weeks ago while I was still on the road. When I first surveyed all the music players available for Ubuntu, Banshee looked the most promising, but it was still in a fairly unstable beta. Now that it's finished, I'm happily importing all my playlists and chortling to myself. Basically, this does everything iTunes does -- including video playback, podcasts, remembering last-played position for audiobooks, ripping and burning -- and acts more or less like iTunes. But there's no DRM, it natively drives players other than the iPod (it supports iPods too),
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In 1998, Disney led an entertainment industry lobbying effort that resulted in the term of copyright being extended by 20 years, even for works that had already been created -- a law with an incoherent basis, given that the US copyright system is constitutionally constrained to passing laws to promote new creative works (giving creators […]
Lucian Constantin's Motherboard guide to protecting your home router is full of excellent, nearly impossible-to-follow advice that you should follow, but probably won't.
When the USA decided to retroactively extend the term of copyright, it deprived itself of free, open access to important cultural treasures that new creators could build upon as creators have done since time immemorial.
