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1. Pay teachers very well so they are in say the top 5% of all wage earners. This will attract the highly skilled and educated back into teaching.

2. Send teachers to school during school holidays to further their own knowledge. Pay them for this. This ensures teachers are constantly updating their knowledge instead of driving taxi's during the school breaks.

3. Don't let your local community decide what should be taught in schools. Curriculum should be decided by a national panel made up of leaders in each field of study. Education should be a national issue, not one decided based on local beliefs no matter how "intelligent" those beliefs are.

4. Provide options for traineeships in traditional trades (e.g. electrical, plumbing etc) for the non-academic students. This will help remove disruptive elements from classes allowing those who want to study or have the aptitude to study to do so in peace. (not that you don't need to study to become a plumber and such, but I'm sure you all know what I mean)

5. Properly fund the schools and get rid of the Coke/Chip machines. I know the sugary drinks and food taste great, but they don't help you sit still and concentrate. (A new slogan perhaps? :)

6. Ban the teaching of religion on any and all school grounds. AND ENFORCE IT!!! Religion has it's place in society, but not in schools!

Some how i don't think you would like it, despite the fast Internet connection (Utah was that state that decided to pass a law that mandated all ISP's filter their connections if asked by the customer, threating jail time to those who didn't)

Oh, cry me a river. So what if ISPs are required of offer the customer the optional filtering of content? What's wrong with a government responding to the wishes of the people? Different areas have different laws, and Utah parents decided they wanted to be able to control what content comes into their homes. When they ask me if I want it I will say no. And no, not because I can't live without pr0n, but because I don't want to deal with a filter that blocks websites I might want to read for whatever reason. The same reason I turned Google's SafeSearch off.

Further more, Provo is the town that is home to BYU the LDS Church run school (i don't think you could really call it a 'school' it really should have it's accreditation revoked for, among other things, it's depressing lack of academic freedom).

Give me a break. I've attended BYU and it very much is a school, just as much a school as any other private school is. The keyword is private, meaning that whatever limitations or expectations the governing body wishes to enact is completely up the them. Nobody is forced to attend the school and it receives no money from the government. As far as it's "lack of academic freedom", I'm not sure what you mean. The only thing that comes to mind is the religion credits required for graduation, but that's what you'd expect from a school funded and owned by a church. Other than that there is a dress and honor code that students are expected to follow, but there's nothing very shocking in there, just your basic "be good a good boy" type stuff.

Which brings up another point, Provo is ~90% Mormon, I, who am Mormon couldn't stand to live in Orem (just a stones throw from Provo, in the same county) for 6 months (how i survived there i will never know)

Yeah, it's hard. Real tough. Watch out, they throw Books of Mormon at you.

There is lots of this work going on now see here "A Library of Mud and Ashes" Great stuff will come from this.

"Incidentally, was I the only person who felt that insinuating that PJ's religion was wacko was particularly ironic, given that Maureen's paymasters at SCO were based in Utah, home of the not-exactly-christian-orthodox Church of the Latter Day Saints."

Anyone else feel that this post is just as as bad? Welcome to the muck and the mire. You are now exactly what you claim to hate.

Frankly if a member of the LDS church did okay such an insult it would be a violation of one of the Articles Of Faith. This one to be exact.

11 We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may

BTW a good number of Linux uses and developers are LDS. Novell is based in Utah after all. Not only that but BYU is very Linux friendly.
Here is the a page on using the BYUTV.org streams with Linux. http://www.byutv.org/streaming/linux.asp
And here is a link to the BYU users group. http://uug.byu.edu/links.php

BYU switched several years ago. By the time I took CS 240 back in 2000 what had once been the UNIX lab was full of Dell linux boxes.

BYU switched several years ago. By the time I took CS 240 back in 2000 what had once been the UNIX lab was full of Dell linux boxes.

Absolutely not. The Church stays strictly out of politics, except where a serious moral issue is involved, and then only the moral at issue is taught, but the vote and the law is up to the members individually.

Explain Ezra Taft Benson's affilation with the Birch sociecty then; not to mention his political appointments. How about the bank that Joseph Smith founded to print money? Who was the governer of Navoo? What about the law of consecration and Brigham Young's confescation of all wealth (or the Nation of Deseret, for that matter)?

Including a majority of the Utah state government, of course. What of a church that routinely gets such perks as the land swap for the "reflecting pool" in downtown Salt Lake (complete with a censoship zone); or how about the temple ceremony, in which members swear to uphold their leaders on penalty of death? Here are some quotes by the church's prophets, seers and revelators on the subject.

On the contrary, the Church is only homogenous in that we share certain core beliefs.

Wow, that list doesn't even scratch the surface of what I was taught while growing up in the church:

• All religions apart from Mormonism are an "abomination" in the sight of God
• People of "dark skin" were less valiant in the pre-existence, so God cursed them in this life
• American Indians are really errant Jews, who lost the gospel when they rebeled against God
• There are three levels of heaven, and you can only get to the highest level by practicing polygamy; then you will be a God and have your own planet
• John the Beloved and the Three Nephites are eternal beings that roam the planet, even today, doing the work of God (and the prieshood needed to be restored through Joseph Smith... why exactly?)
• Joseph Smith could translate a common Egyptian Funeral Book, to find that it contained extensive writings by father Abraham
• Homosexuality is a disase that you must suffer for (I wonder when the 1978-esque "oops, my bad, blacks can have the priesthood now" gay revelation will come). Masturbation is almost as bad.

To be fair, the church has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, and it continues to evolve into a more mainstream puritanical protestant sect (I bet Joseph Smith is rolling in his grave). Most of the members are people of high quality; heck, all my extended family are still members. They are generally great people to know, associate with and love. Despite that, I just get ruffled when the church portrayed as something that it really isn't; I did enough of that on my 2-year mission with the ultra-simplistic 6 discussions.

If you are interested in apologetic responses to any of the above, feel free to visit the FAIR website.

So you're saying the missing pages that were lost were not retranslated. That must mean they were written first in English and never translated in the first place? That's a valid enough theory but faith requires that you accept the explanation that they were lent out and copied from memory with the Lord's help.

You really need to do some research on this topic if you want to discuss it rationally. It's common knowledge among the LDS that Joseph Smith allowed Martin Harris to "borrow" 116 pages of the translation of the Book of Mormon which consisted of the Book of Lehi. These pages were lost or stolen and they were NOT retranslated NOR recovered by some miracle of memory. They are simply NOT in the Book of Mormon. So please cease with the "copied from memory" theory. It is categorically false.

Only Mormons can see the sacred texts, only Mormons can go into the church

Please feel free to view our sacred texts any time you wish. They are all online:

http://scriptures.lds.org/

While you are at it, find a church in your area, visitors are welcome!

http://lds.org/basicbeliefs/meetinghouse/

Tell you what... why don't you provide some documentation or a fraction of evidence that proves [x, y, z]

Prove? I can't "prove" anything to you. Even if I had the plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated, it wouldn't prove a thing to you. It wouldn't prove to you that Joseph Smith was telling the truth about how he got them, or even that he ever had them--all it would "prove" to you is that some guy has gold plates...

If you want academic evidences for the LDS faith, you might try:

The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormom Studies

Tons of rigourous, critical materials can be reviewed there. I doubt it will "prove" anything to you, but it might help you with some of your historical misconceptions/misinformation. You decide.

Oh please! This isn't Mormon bashing. We are not attacking a single individual for their belief system. We are being critical of Mormonism... which is a cult.

I think you misunderstood my comment regarding Mormon-Bashing by ACs. That was an observation from a general review of the posts whenever things related to Utah appear here, not necessarily specific to your remarks.

At any rate, the pejorative "cult" that you chose is generally not indicative of respect towards anothers beliefs. I know the difference between bashing and persecution, do you? Your concluding remarks lead me to believe that it's okay in your view to "shoot wackos", which I suppose means anyone whose world-view is not akin to your own.

This ain't religious prosecution [sic] when you shoot a nut job on your property that is obviously off their rocker!

I'll leave your final remark here without comment, other then to say if this isn't the pure description of mobocracy then I don't know what is...

Big deal.

If you want to attend this Church sponsored educational institution you will be required to abide by the Honor Code of the same.

http://campuslife.byu.edu/honorcode/

Clearly stated is the following:

Computer pornography
Students are expected to avoid involvement with pornography. They must also understand that use of the BYU owned and operated computing network to obtain or distribute pornographic material constitutes an inappropriate use of the computer network. See the BYU Computer Network Patron Policy which describes expectations and potential actions in regard to this matter.

So BYU filters their net connections, again, big deal. If this offends your sensibilities, attend another university.

at a campus lecture at my college. The professor gave very good evidence that the universe is expanding at an accellerating rate. The devotional was called "Exploding Stars, Expanding Universe."

Unfortunately, the school does not have a transcript of the forum, but you can download it in mp3 format for free

It was, and still remains, a very good talk about the accelerating expansion of the universe.

If you want something a little more substantial, here's a post I know of:
http://www.godawful.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=181 615&highlight=#181615

Quintilian 9.2.45-51; Bede 615; Aquil. 7 ("ironia," "simulatio"); Susenbrotus (1540) 14-15 ("ironia," "illusio"); Sherry (1550) 45 ("ironia," "dissimulatio"); Peacham (1577) D3r; Fraunce (1588) 1.6; Putt. (1589) 199 ("ironia," "the dry mock")

http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/1918p/mesopo.html Spy satellites are handy but the current intelligence failure is of human and not technological nature.

Having quite a bit of experience in this area, I can say that immersion is by far the best way to learn a language. You need to get the students speaking, reading, and hearing nothing but Japanese as many hours per day as possible. Software can help with this by providing recordings of native speakers and allowing the students to interact with the recordings.

I would mimic the best language school out there as much as possible.

The amazing thing is how well Moore's law has stood up against repeated Malthusian forecasts of its demise. One still presumes that the fences of quantum uncertainty, relativistic delay, and heat production will prevent Moore's law from continuing number of device doubling indefinitely, without major paradigm shift (async to beat the clock?reversible to beat heat & entropy? optical? quantum?), but mere technological advances may continue far beyond my Malthusian imagination.

================
Cole's Law -- Finely Sliced Cabbage with dressing.

Actually, both make perfect sense. Of course, FTP doesn't give them headaches, because it's not used by the broad public, and because the legal usage probably is on about the same level as the illegal usage.
BitTorrent is in fact a protocol, in exactly the same way as ED2k is - both also have programs of the same name realizing the protocol, although I'd assume among file sharers of both protocols the original programs have decreased in popularity.

However, whether it's a protocol or not really isn't relevant in the given sentence. Saying that Suprnova gives them a headache would be more specific, but it's not only Suprnova worrying them, but rather all the sites and people using BT. BitTorrent is basically used to refer to all of the problems associated with it. This might strike you as unfair to all the legal usage, and imprecise as well, but it's really a fairly normal thing to do in language.

About a year ago, I was talking with a US Army recruiter about enlisting in the US Army. I got as far as MEPS. I passed the ASVAB and the physical, but they denied me enlistment after the security interview, which started out as a 10-page written questionnaire.

I answered "yes" to several questions that they wanted me to answer "no" to, but there were two that especially seemed to require a lot of "further clarification":

1. On the last page, just before a long affirmation about "this knowledge is true to the best of my knowledge and belief...", etc., etc., there was a question about like "Have you ever [...] misused [...] an information-technology resource?" I said "yes", and mentioned something that hadn't made my teachers happy during high school, about nine years before; I later found out that the high-school's disciplinary records have been destroyed from that time. However, if you think about it, downloading an illegal copy of a popular song off KaZaa is a forbidden use of an information-technology resource; I suspect the majority of the kids who did that stuff in Abu Ghraib had been regular KaZaa users...
2. The other thing was that I had visited a professional counsellor or therapist several times, all within a year or two, plus or minus, of the computer-related incident. They decided to totally misread the examining doctor's statement for something that was not in the record, and disqualify me as medically unfit by reason of depression (apparently). Of course, perhaps a college graduate who wants to join the Army is crazy. It may be that anyone who wants to join the Army has a little something wrong with them...

Funny, you can't have members of the opposite sex in a BYU dormitory bedroom.

And all the students at BYU have to sign the Honor code, part of which is a promise to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, etc. Another part of the honor code is abstaining from extra-marital sex.

I realize that everyone breaks the rules in college, but do you think someone like KenJen is going to risk being kicked out of school for this?

You clearly don't know any mormons.

Your details are correct.

If there was no literal first man and woman, then there was no talking snake to tempt them into eating an apple. If that didn't happen, there was no literal fall (the fall had to be by CHOICE, protestants don't accept that God just made humans imperfect from the start). If there was no literal fall, then mankind is not in need of redemption. If there is no need for redemption, there is no need for Christ. This would basically invalidate protestant Christianity.

You've left out one important point: your #2 argument hinges on this paragraph, but this paragraph depends necessarily on #1 (the Word of God in the Bible is inerrant and literal). It's not actually a stronger argument, because it depends on the first, weaker one.

Here's the problem. Fundamentalist Christianity rejects the idea of continuing revelation from God through any single source. Prophets - as they were understood in the Bible - don't come around anymore, as a matter of doctrine. The only thing left they have to base their faith in is the Bible. It's their only witness of Christ. If parts of it can be allegorical, Christ himself doesn't really have to have existed, and there goes the religion.

So #1 actually exists out of necessity. That's where the circular arguments come from ("the Bible is literally true because the Bible says so [in our interpretation]", etc., etc.) - it's because they haven't actually got anything better.

I'm LDS, and I go to BYU. In this school - which is run basically by my church - we actually don't have a problem with evolution at all. We even (gasp) teach it. Why? We believe that God still speaks through a single source, and we have more than one witness of Christ. The idea that parts of the Bible might be allegorical or severely watered-down for the people of the time doesn't bother us at all.

In fact, before the U.S. entered WW1 there was some question about which side the U.S. would be on, if it came to war (it did, of course). Unrestricted submarine warefare on merchant vessels, and the Zimmermann Telegram were two of Wilson's primary points for entering the war against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire.

Much like Congressional conservatives fought with Clinton over our involvement in Kosovo. Hell, every time Clinton did anything internationally, all the conservatives could say was Wag the Dog !!!!.

My point is that traditionally conservatives fight against nearly all military intervention. Some of them, but not all, say that 9/11 was the spark against Iraq. Some top Republicians are now saying that they also think that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time. Trouble is that we are stuck there, and we need a President who can come to the international table with fresh creditability. If you take a look at Northern Ireland, the real solution to terrorism (or insurgency) is a political solution, military action can 'hold off' the terrorists for the most part, perhaps even cripple them for a time, but if you don't get to the source, it will resurface time and time again. Don't get me wrong I am not saying that the situation in the three counties is stable, just significantly better than it was not 10 years ago.

I figured I'd post my own results here.

It's true that digital zoom can't replace information that was lost due to scaling and sampling. It's possible to get something reasonably close, though. There are a bunch of algorithms available for photographs, but their biggest problem seems to be execution time. It's not pretty.

Here's mine. Please be kind to the server...

I've gotten better-looking results since I put that together but I haven't had time to put them up yet. The slowest part of my algorithm requires solving a nonlinear system of nine equations for the least sum squared error per pixel. That's orders of magnitude slower than bicubic interpolation (which is standard).

I don't know which interpolation algorithms are used for so-called digital zoom. Is there someone in the industry here that knows?

BYU Internet Security Research Lab
Urbana-Champaigne Database and Information Systems Laboratory

Brigham Young University in Provo, UT has online courses, albeit, they aren't free, but the courses are avaliable. Additionally, the available courses aren't limited to upper level courses, many of them are generals, so students can take them at their leisure.

Plague

Non-zero chance, and increasing as the climate gets nicer for mosquitos and such, as seen recently in NY.

The old version of this book was used as a textbook for CS 240 at BYU, which is an advanced programming /slash/ C++ course.

I find it great that some professor is actually teaching coding standards. Imagine my surprise of discovering JavaDoc commenting after haven taken 3 Java classes and not one of them ever mentioned JavaDoc.

I haven't taken CS 240 yet, but I plan to this fall. I already talked to the professor about the textbooks he plans to use, and he said that if they came out with the new edition (which they did) then he would probably use the new edition for class. This means though that current students with the book now will have a hard time selling the book, and future students will have a harder time finding used book deals on it. I guess I should start saving my college student pennies.

Reunite Church and State? UNCheck ... due to no links to supporting data

Hold citizens with[something missing ;-);-);-)] trial or bail? UNCheck ... due to no links to supporting data

Nation building without proper cause? UNCheck ... due to no links to supporting data

Tax breaks that only benefit the rich? UNCheck ... due to no links to supporting data

Dismantle the EPA and let Corporations write Enviro Laws? UNCheck ... due to no links to supporting data

Create a Police State where you can spy on cizitens with impunity? Pending/already going on ??? no links to supporting data

Famous Phrase To Know and Love: "data talks and bullshit walks" ... Where are your links to data supporting your claims???

This nation has gone to Hell and the changes they are making and have already made are going to haunt us for the next 50 years. [childish expletive removed] ... Dude, you are like several decades/centuries late and an Euro short ... Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it:

Sedition Act of 1918

Sedition Act of 1798

A remembrance from "The Decade of Greed (1990s)" and its fun stock market bubble with its "White Stain of Courage"

Indiana, The people who declared 3 equal to pi.

I don't think you can look at it that way. Though many have (like Carl Sagan - he had a similar view IIRC). It takes a strange confluence of countless events to produce significant technical advances.

It could also be said that given our innate capability for self-destruction, it's a miracle that we are where we are at today. For an instance, it's a miracle that Kruschev's ego didn't get the better of him. Because if it had, we would have had a nuclear war in the sixties, and we would not be using computers in our comfy homes on the internet reading slashdot right now.

The Soviets were not dumb. They would have nuked fairchild semiconductor, and there would be no group of scientists to later start a bunch of high tech companies that would make up silicon valley. One of which is intel that was started in 1968.

We would be very lucky if we were hacking COBOL. RMS would have not have invented the GNU project that many here are fond of. Because there would be no Hawvad or MIT or PDP for him to hack on. He would not have needed that printer driver, _because there would have been no printer_

Likewise, some of the things that have held us back have been natural in nature, and beyond our control, like the black plague that killed off a third of Europe. I bet a lot of smart people died then. Who knows where we would have been if it had not been for the black plague.

So, as you can see, the game "woulda coulda shoulda" is a pretty frivolous game to play.

One last thing. In modern times, Soviet Russia plagues slashdot. I said it so you don't have to.

I was a physics student (undergrad Physics for Engineers course) of Dr. Steven Jones when this whole thing broke loose. About 3 weeks before the Pons & Fleischman announcement, he announced some interesting results that were very similar to the cold fusion announcement.

At the time, Dr. Jones was a peer-referee for the article that Pons & Fleischman were writing, and it turned out that their research was following similar lines that he and other researchers at BYU were following. He asked for permission (and was granted) to break the confidentiality agreement with the publisher to share research information. (Details of this are well documented elsewhere, including things I saw on the PBS-TV show Nova about this episode.... I can confirm this so far as this is what Dr. Jones mentioned to our class prior to the whole fiasco breaking loose).

Dr. Jones was following an earlier line of research where he was studying Muon-induced fusion (where a Muon would take the place of a normal electron and bring atomic nuclei closer together under certain conditions... potentially triggering a fusion reaction). He was also studying natural phenomina including a speculation that there might be some other process besides nuclear fission and meteoric landfall that causes volcanic hotspots around the earth. I'm not here suggesting that cold fusion causes Mauna Loa, but some isotopic measurements of gasses emitted by that volcano contained traces of Helium-3 and Helium-4 that could not otherwise be accounted for. The speculation was that perhaps a limited form of fusion might also be taking place.

The key element of Dr. Jones' research was that he was indeed measuring emitted particles instead of measuring heat. Some graphs he showed to our class (after the big fiasco) included some very telling information about some of the particles being emmitted, but at levels so low that it seemed improbable that a calorimeter would be able to measure the effect.

When all was said and done, the best that could be offered by the researchers I talked to afterward was that this research could be used to make a neutrino emmitter that could be turned on and off electronically. Now that does indeed have some interesting uses, but neutrino detectors are another problem. As a futuristic energy source, there were many other much more productive lines of research to consider.

The other nice thing about cold fusion was that it didn't require huge laboratories to study the effects, which is convient to relatively underfunded universities for research activities (like BYU), it also brings out the weirdos, scammers and crooks. As a result, research discussions tend to have a very low S/N level. This makes finding information all that more difficult.

It is also something to note that BYU is also where Philo Farsnworth did his final research on the Fusor technology. In fact, the cold fusion research was conducted in the very same laboratory (buried underground just south of the HBLL library). They were indeed worried about radiation damage, and chose to buy $20,000 worth of pennies to build a cheap radiation shield. I'm not sure if they ever put them back into circulation, but it was a sort of joke when walking into the lab and it looked more like the inside of a bank vault.

The funniest thing that I ever did with a spreadsheet was a fourier transform (and an inverse ft). I had all the data down one side, a big block of sines, a big block of cosines, and a few lines that put stuff together and some graphs. The main problem I ran into was the limits on the size of the spreadsheet - 65k rows and 256 columns, iirc. I didn't want to mess with different sheets.

If you're interested it's available on my website. Be warned, it's 11 meg.

Giving Gray credit where credit is due but he was neither the first discover electricity nor did he make electricity assessable to society. For that the prize goes to Eddison.
Brief history of electricity

Bell is indeed Scottish. His patent applications for the telephone are filed first in the US. Also it is AT&T thatmakes the telephone ubiquitous.

Nicolaus August Otto invented the gas motor engine in 1876. It was Ford who gave the auto to everyone.

As for pyramids, well they are tall. They also have neat stuff inside. They are also 99.99 etc. percent stone. Hardly qualifies as a high rise building.

I'm not saying that America is perfect or for every one or is the only contributor to knowledge but I am stating this: It is the American sense of entrepreneurship, ownership and freedom that makes so many great things possible. After The US has been around long enough to grow it's own inventors then the list provided is truly American. No other country in the history of civilization has advanced discovery, science and engineering like the US. period.

Name any single country that has even come close. Just one.

I too use firefox to load up six different pages. Just scroll through to visit all my standard pages every morning:
Pooch Cafe Get Fuzzy Sluggy Freelance Megatokyo User Friendly Slashdot BYU
Then I usually go to cnn, nytimes, bbc, and deseret morning news for the second set of tabs. I love firefox

Back in the mid-1990's, I was the subject of a research experiment that sounds a lot like this. It was being conducted by Brigham Young University. They were testing to see if certain kinds of music could enhance concentration. Using electrodes that were hooked up to my head, I'd look at a monitor and, depending on the frequency of my brainwaves, a puzzle would solve itself more or less rapidly (or some other similar premise).

".reteiuq senigne tej gnikam :dnuorgkcab s'rosseforp eht nevig yllaicepse ,gnisimorp eb dluoc ti ekil skool ti tub -- hsoohw eht ton ,enihw eht sexin ylno ti -- tey detcefrep t'nsi tI .esion nwo sti tuo lecnac ot srekaeps dna senohporcim llams sesu taht naf UPC wen a detaerc sah UYB ta rosseforp a ,saw retupmoc sih ysion woh gnizilaer retfA" setirw yenekalB_ycreP

.tped smrala-rac-rof-eno-deen eht morf

MP33:80@ ,51 hcraM yadnoM no yhtomit yb detsoP

First-Year Calculus Notes
Difference Equations to Differential Equations: An Introduction to Calculus
Lectures on Calculus
Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals
The Calculus Bible

Tens of millions is quite low number. Many diseases have killed more in the short timespan.

Name one -- you're either trolling or on crack (or both, I suppose). Even the "Black Death" took about five years to kill about 25 million, and that was over 600 years ago and before the concept of sanitation was regarded as a good thing.

A search for Conan Albrecht reveals this guy? Content on his site seems consistent with recent postings.

Keystroke timings have been shown to be a reliable, cheap biometric, and was first proposed as early as 1980. The only problem is that NetNany owns the "patent portfolio" on these methods, and agressively threatens not only competitors, but academics who do research in this area.

Therefore, "schemas" isn't wrong according to Webster.

Unfortunately, my original post used the totally made-up "schemae" as the plural of Schema. I'm not alone in thinking along those lines, though my faux-Latin compatriots appear to be college students, for the most part.

2004 New Years Resolution: I will not use any word in a Slashdot post that I can't pronounce.

Oh, funny. Just a bit of info: Provo, Utah started a similar system a while ago. Right now I'm on a FTTH (Fiber to the Home) connection here at my apartment. $15 per month for my 3MBs connection and no filtering. You can read more at pafiber.net with a letter explaining how things have come along from the city's Telecommunications Manager. In actuallity, Utah may very well be ahead of the curve when it comes to technology in many ways. Think Utah and things like this, this and this should come to mind.

Here you are.

P.S. It was extremely difficult, practically impossible, to ignore another brilliant example

Namely because there are other ways of enforcing your contracts. I haven't seen all of the SGI contracts, but here is Ammentment X to the IBM contract and it clearly states IBM has an "irrevocable" and "perpetual" contract. It also says that SCO is not otherwise limited from enjoining or prohibiting IBM in other ways.

As for the autopilot, these two pictures show what looks like an awfully standard transmitter. Perhaps they've created some sort of spiffy autopilot, but they don't appear to be using it here. But even autopilots aren't new -- people have been doing that for years too, from systems that just automatically right the plane as needed, to full fledged auto-pilots where you just tell the plane what to do on a computer. And here is something in between -- a plane that crossed the Atlantic, where people controlled it directly only for takeoff and landing.

In any event, even the planes themselves look pretty standard. This one looks like your basic flying wing (Zagi makes a very popular model) and this just looks like your basic small electric plane with a V-tail.

... atleast they didn't blow up blow up their servers.

The Balfour Declaration by not means gave Israel any sort of territorial rights - it was merely a letter written by the British Foreign secretary, specifying that the British government would support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. (link)
This would be similar to Jack Straw (the current British FS) writing a letter to some "pro-Chilean" figure, stating that the British government would support the establishment of a Chilean nation in Argentina.

The Israelis, in fact, initiated the 6-Day war. It is true that there were troop build-ups on both sides and that there was a great deal of threatening from all parties, but it was the Israelis that started the fighting. (link)
It is interesting to note that as part of the Israeli's initial attack, they assaulted a clearly marked American recon ship (USS Liberty) from the air - disabling it completely with several phases of attacks, there is also evidence that the Israelis shot down US planes that were deployed to the assitance of the Liberty. (link1 link2 link3).
Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights were occupied by Israel during the 6-Day war (There were other pieces of land occupied during the war that were later returned).

The reason that it is accurately refered to as "Occupation" is that it precisely describes the situation (Similarly in concept to how the US is now occupying Iraq). The legal situation is that Israel has been mandated to return to its pre-1967 borders by a UN Security Council Resolution (242) and has ignored the international community's pressure along with several other Security Council Resolutions. Therefore, it is illegally occupying these territories .

What are these "Rules of War" that you are referring to? We've come a long way since the times when people could just take land from eachother just because they had a bigger army.

The full text of the subpoena contains several provisions whereby Canopy may apply to withold documents. These provisions include the protection of privelege, litigation strategy, and trade secrets. I expect Canopy's lawyers to avail themselves of these provisions.

From a quick search, I can't find a direct reference to cutting off the arms of children, but this article specifcally mentions cutting off the arms of people sympathetic to the government.

Other articles from the google search mention the torture of women and children, but don't go into specifics

From the homepage of BYU that some of the SCO execs went to:

The mission of Brigham Young University is "to assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life"

Seems to me they don't do a very good job.

Ah, well. Raymond was worked up. His insult to the state, in my opinion, was unwarranted. But then again, why hasn't Utah's AG gone after McBride and gang. These guys are doing more damage to the tourist industry than they can imagine.

Since I live only a couple miles from SCO headquarters, and since I've got plenty of rocks out in my yard, I'm more than willing to donate my rocks to the cause. Stop by, and I'll hook you up!

Of course, don't forget to pay SCO while you still have a chance.