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Nice try.

You said: "How about we let nature take its course and we worry about changing ourselves instead of the planet?"

I said: We are not letting nature take its course (re: accelerating atmospheric CO2 concentrations).

Then you accused me of wanting to mess with nature more, which I most definitely did not say. I've been listening to the current US administration too long to fall for that fallacy.

And what's with "worry about changing ourselves instead of the planet"? I presume you are suggesting that we just adapt. Tell that to the hundreds of millions (of poor people, with minimal GHG emissions) who live at an altitude within 10m of sea level. Who's paying the moving bills? Or the cats in Northern Europe who are going to find things a little chilly if the Gulf Stream, as a consequence of warming, does in fact stop downwelling, a possibility first raised by Wallace Broecker, the dude who figured out the ocean conveyor in the first place.

Me, I think boot-strapping the Gulf Stream is crazy. The lead scientist for this study doesn't seem too keen either: "Flynn emphasizes that his group does not propose this scheme as the first or best choice, since all geo-engineering projects have a risk of unforeseen circumstances."

See this paper [warning: PDF] for content-based analysis of traffic and how encrypted traffic differs quite a lot from normal traffic. Thus, an ISP can simply wait for this type of traffic and kill it (or charge the endpoint extra).

Intelligent design? In the military? Isn't that pushing your faith a bit *too* far?

"How many iterations do you need before you're on the wiretap list?"

After five to seven iterations every American is linked to terrorism, and after eight to nine every human. When they say "linked", it's code for the process you described. 99% of people don't realize this.

And then there are a handful of us who majored in environmental science in college who think that computer models are as susceptible to subjective modelers as computer benchmarks are to industry types trying to sell you their latest processor. Large majority eh? Got any relevant links? I'm not going to pick on you specifically MightyMartian, because there are a lot of people here racking up +5's with nothing but rhetoric. Here's why I think this global warming business is a sham.

The soil releases an order of magnitude more CO2 into the atmosphere than all the fossil fuels burned each year combined. No till farming in America could take as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as taking half of all the cars in America off the road. A full 40% of the Earth's arable land is being used for agriculture and most of it is being severely degraded by tillage. Why aren't you people up in arms about that? Hey, burn the f'in farmers right? They're greedy evil bastards.

Studies have shown that fertilizing plankton with iron sulfate could significantly reduce atmospheric CO2. (IronEx II is a notable success.) "Oh teh Noes!!11oneone1eleventyone! After 500 years it wont teh wurk anymore!?ONE" Well gee, we'll be out of fossil fuels by then. So why aren't you guys who are belly aching about global warming doing it? Afraid you'll have egg on your face if CO2 drops and mean temps continue to rise? What you say? Your models might be flawed?

Wow, the Sun IS getting hotter, and Earth's temperature correlates directly with it.

And as for plastics, we can make most of that out of corn and it's more environmentally friendly. Most of the crowd around here loves parroting each other with this global warming chicken little horseshit, but I personally am sick to death of hearing it. Produce something besides a BBC article written in layman's terms that says the sky is falling, PLEASE! I thought this was news for nerds, not drama queens.

Would anyone like to provide a little evidence to the contrary that is not entirely based on a computer model?

The basic problem is this: String Theory predicts that at some (non-specified) energy E, Stringy effects will become apparent; but the virtually infinite set of physical models which the theory allows (the infamous "landscape") means that there's no cut-off point for E, no realistically attainable maximum energy beyond which it's not worth looking for any Stringy effects. So for any specifically tested energy, e, at which no stringy effects are observed, the String Theorist can always claim e < E, and the effects will be observed at some higher energy.

Some people (quite plausibly it seems to me) interpret this as the non-falsifiability of String Theory.

On the other hand, it's been argued that as a theory that admits of many solutions, String Theory is far from unique: for example, while the tensor equations of General Relativity admit a multitude of solutions and no-one is in a position to say which one is the solution that we actually live in, there is no problem with the standing of GR. (But then, if there was a theory which stood in the same relation to GR as the Standard Model stands to String Theory, perhaps things would be different!)

Some informed and heated debate on string theory is available at Peter Woit's not even wrong (anti) and Lubos Motl's somewhat rabid pro string theory counter-blog

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=33 5

A snippet of which is:

The half a dozen references to string theory in the short press release might lead the gullible to think that we're about to be provided with evidence for the "exotic predictions of string theory", but that has little relationship to the reality here, one aspect of which of course is that there are no "predictions of string theory" about any of this.

...and which might be worth reading if this interests you.

creationism, ID, and evolution are not even necessarily contradictory.

let's say "God created intelligently, and his creations evolved."

thus picking one of creationism, ID, and evolution would be nonsensical, because if you believed this statement (I do not but that is a digression) then you then "believe" in all 3.

evolution is not a theory that deals with the origins of the universe.

creationism and ID are not beliefs (I did not say theories) that deal with the progression, proliferation, and diversification of life.

how did the universe begin? how did life begin? what was before that?

asimov had a fun story about it called The Last Question that is a nice little read. Arthur C Clarke has a short called The Nine Billion Names of God that isn't terrible reading either.

if this kind of thing interests you, The Abolition of Man might interest you as well, or even Chesterton's Orthodoxy.

The Supreme Court held in 1800 (Bas v. Tingy), and again in 1801 (Talbot v. Seamen), that Congress could formally authorize war by joint resolution without passing a formal declaration of war; and in the post-U.N. Charter era no state has issued a formal declaration of war. Such declarations, in fact, have become as much an anachronism as the power of Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal (outlawed by treaty in 1856). - Robert Turner, co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, FISA vs. the Constitution

And what shall we say about the dark realm of criminality as such? Legal frames (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights. There are many such cases. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, 1978

But you apparently don't even like for people to question whether you're really a lawyer, so you post anonymously, giving us no information to determine if you're actually a lawyer as you claim to be.

Your pseudononymous post is no better. Who are you? Where do you live? How are you trained? If you are an attorney, do you mind if someone acts on your Slashdot comment and then sues you for malpractice because they adopted your "legal advice"? If you are not an attorney, do you mind if someone refers you to your state's attorney disciplinary commission because you dared to practice law without a license?

"jbn-o", feel free to choose an ID and a throwaway email address, and I'll happily rise to the sainted level of the average Slashdot poster. It's a meaningless distinction, but I'll accede to your demands for respectability. Perhaps you don't mind if people call you at 217-333-XXX1, but I would.

Eben Moglen, counsel for the FSF, is also a lawyer who has said repeatedly that "Licenses are not contracts". Perhaps you would take the matter up with him instead. After reading his essays and listening to his talks, I find him to be a far more patient and informative speaker than you appear to be.

I would.

But I think it's telling that instead of patiently explaining the difference between the terms 'license' and 'contract' you instead chose to take a needlessly confrontational and remarkably uninformative route to point out that most non-lawyers don't understand the terms.

Needlessly? The initial post was both non-confrontational and informative. The first reply was baseless, wrong, and snide. The second reply was only baseless and objectively wrong. The grandparent post rose to the bait. Of course, it also included a link to an external source, which none of the prior posts bothered to include, but we'll call that uninformative, ignore the link, and attack the poster instead of sticking to the topic.

Lots of lawyers are wrong in their legal views and some of them even lose cases.

Including Eben. Frequently.

Lots of lawyers are wrong in their legal views and some of them even lose cases. Lots of basketball players who can perform slam dunks sometimes miss the basket and sometimes lose games. Being an expert doesn't mean you're above being questioned. But you apparently don't even like for people to question whether you're really a lawyer, so you post anonymously, giving us no information to determine if you're actually a lawyer as you claim to be.

Eben Moglen, counsel for the FSF, is also a lawyer who has said repeatedly that "Licenses are not contracts". Perhaps you would take the matter up with him instead. After reading his essays and listening to his talks, I find him to be a far more patient and informative speaker than you appear to be. Then again, he might object to some anonymous nobody claiming to be a lawyer arguing a point with him that he's rehashed so many times.

Pamela Jones, a journalist with a paralegal background who runs Groklaw, has gone on record saying that "The GPL is a license, not a contract" in which she cites Moglen's essay and expands on it a bit. Perhaps you'd rather discuss the matter with her, since she too might be more on your level of expertise.

But I think it's telling that instead of patiently explaining the difference between the terms 'license' and 'contract' you instead chose to take a needlessly confrontational and remarkably uninformative route to point out that most non-lawyers don't understand the terms. It's unfortunate that the /. moderators don't seem to penalize such posts in an attempt to raise the level of discourse here.

Yes, maybe they should have got a Professor of Law and Legal History to help them write this. Oh wait, they did.

"Hot air and rants" ? You could have written something like "wishful thinking". Somehow, you don't come across as exactly neutral.

And what shall we say about the dark realm of criminality as such? Legal frames (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights. There are many such cases. A World Split Apart

The IBM 1403 http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/1403.html was immediately programmed to play music. It was a chain printer so the time between successive hammer hits depended on the letter sequence.

encapsulates: To express in a brief summary; epitomize: headlines that encapsulate the news.
seems ok to me.

And for Pete's sake, lay off the parentheses, ellipses, generalizations, overuse of subordinate clauses, overuse of multiple descriptive adjectives per clause, and the like. Thankfully, you didn't use "quite" or "a tad" as qualifiers. You did, however, use "rather" several times; those three qualifiers are among the strongest indicators of amateur writing.

Please read Bill Stott's classic Write To The Point to help you cope with your obsessive prose/style/grammar insecurities.

Even Apollo 11 had to fill out a customs declaration. I'm sure the same rules would apply to commercial space travel that involves a stop somewhere outside of the US. (Say, on a privately run space station, which is likely to happen in the long run if commercial spaceflight is a success.)
-JMP

http://www.cacert.org/ - Bad example.

You're right. Cacert.org is a bad example because it lists "Inclusion into mainstream browsers!" as a goal, not a feature. Cacert.org certificates are no more "trusted" by Firefox and (more importantly at the moment) Microsoft Internet Explorer than a "Snake Oil CA" (that is, self-signed) cert. Get bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215243 resolved and then we can talk.

isn't credible to take camcorders and HD camcorders out of the public's hands.

If MPAA can convince Congress that failure to regulate interstate and foreign commerce in HD camcorders would only increase the quality of the analog hole, on the other hand...

The more restrictive the traditional media the better the chance for growth in the liberally licensed stuff

Unless those who control the restrictive traditional media start suing independents on grounds of infringement through subconscious copying. If it worked against George Harrison on his solo debut, then it might work against you.

eventually a year or three down the road you won't be able to view any content from any major corporate providers. At least that's the plan. I suspect if they even get that far down the road, the anti-DRM/TCPA public community will largely replace those resources anyways.

What happens six or seven years down the road when both the local cable ISP and the local DSL ISP require a working TPM before you get an IP address? Then how will you connect to these Free information providers? Even if not, what happens when the corporate providers start filing nuisance lawsuits against their Free competitors in the same way that Bright Tunes successfully sued George Harrison over subconsciously copying "He's So Fine" into "My Sweet Lord"?

First off, the electroplating tank:

These are a blast. Everything looks better if you electroplate it!

Any of the cool looking, under the hood gagetry for your car, found cheaply at Schuks Auto would look better in gold. Any flat sided metal object can be enhanced with whatever artwork you can make a sillouette of on your computer, print in Press-n-Peel masking material
iron on, and plate.

Flatware should never be monochromatic
Your own Electron Microscope? Sweet.

The first thing to do is find the guy that's good at operating this and buy him several good lunches. Getting good images is tricky. That done, there is a world of stuff that looks better super close up, and best yet, the annoyingly black and white nature of this device lends itself to.... Yes! Electroplate sillouttes! Imagine how cool the aluminum case sides of your favorite computer would be if this were etched on the side. Your kids/nephews could have the coolest metal lunchboxes in the school. Like this or this or this or this.
A clear spray-on enamel will keep oxidation from uglying things up if your experiment with some of the more easily tarnished metals like copper and silver....

Sounds like you're in for a good time. Good luck.

From talking to my brother (a musician who sells his own CDs via his website using CDBaby)

Is he a cover artist, or does he write his own songs? If the latter, then how does he manage to make sure that he doesn't subconsciously copy someone else's copyrighted songs? I'm curious as to how real independent musicians avoid making the same mistake that George Harrison made when he wrote "My Sweet Lord".

I can't believe that no one has posted a link to Eric Siegel's songs for teaching Computer Science. He has published a paper about them.

I can't believe that no one has posted a link to Eric Siegel's songs for teaching Computer Science. He has published a paper about them.

I half expect an undead George Harrison to start clawing at my bedroom window tonight.

Would it have something to do with revenge for the "My Sweet Lord" case that got "subconscious copying" written into the law books, making it impossible for somebody without a huge legal fund to lawfully write music? Read it and weep.

I understand your argument, and you are correct, however take away the Hz and you don't have a computer! So clockspeed means everything if you look at it that way. So many people these days including G5 and AMD enthusisasts are making statements like "clockspeed means nothing", but I think it weakens their arguments because although you get the gist of what they are trying to say, it sounds ridiculous. Your arguments will have more gravitas if you avoid extreme statements such as this.

Skype has a guide for network administrators, and there's also this analysis of the Skype protocol.

Of course, all it takes is a few modifications to sheet music and it's no longer the same song

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that's a wrong reading of music plagiarism case law. The real case law is worrisome.

And yet look at KDE. Look at any end-user-centric Unixy distro (Gentoo, Debian and the BSDs don't count here). If you consider the windowing and desktop environments to be "part of the operating system", and most people do, then these situations are exactly the same. You can't have a KDE system without Konq. And yet we don't yell, "Evil KDE! Evil Knoppix!"

Actually I was recently installing FreeBSD on a laptop. My ISP responds to any request you make with an HTML page containing its terms of service until you click the "Accept" button at the bottom. After FreeBSD gets done installing (I used a CD burned by my desktop machine for the install; these days there are 2 install CDs, the first one required with no packages and the second one a bunch of optional packages. I don't keep a stockpile of CD-Rs, so I only burned the first disk and figured I'd just install everything else later by FTP. Well, you know where this is going. Installing everything on the "required" disk (which contains some optional packages like an X server, source code, documentation and "games", all of which I installed) doesn't give you any kind of web browser whatsoever. Not even Lynx. In fact, you don't even get wget. You get telnet, but I didn't really feel like looking up the HTTP spec and typing in stuff manually. Not to say I haven't done it before ;-). Eventually I had to d/l the Lynx package onto my PC and transfer it by floppy disk to the laptop, which meant I had to *find* a floppy disk, no small undertaking. Ah, but the terms of use page wanted to be over https, and default Lynx package doesn't support https (crypto export/import regs, SSLeay restrictions for USians because RSA licenses are required... not quite sure why other F/OS browsers aren't similarly affected, though SSLeay might be an odd cookie in this regard). So, grab the BSD package for Lynx w/SSL (which given the long page of possible issues at http://www.columbia.edu/~ariel/ssleay/ssleay-legal -faq.html is probably a violation of international law), it just *barely* fits on the floppy, finally get it working. Note that because of the https thing telnet with HTTP commands wouldn't have worked anyway. That makes my soul cry. I don't think you can just use SSH for that either, though; currect me if I'm wrong.

Somehow, I find myself thinking bundling wasn't such a bad idea (and yes, I know that bundling doesn't mean "do what MS did", this is just a silly story about the hassles of not having a web browser).

I thought what Microsoft got in trouble for was pressuring OEMs not to offer alternate operating systems or programs like Netscape with the threat of losing their Windows discounts or ability to ship Windows altogether. But I am not super-knowledgeable about this at all.

Do you consider astronomy a soft science?

Astronomy is a science. Cosmology, String Theory and alike are not. For example see here.

You can have a more recent example of the pointlessness of classification. In 1970 the British CESG (their equivalent of NSA, though I think it pre-dates it!) invented Public Key Encryption. They classified it, and it never saw the light of day until Diffie-Hellman invented it independently in the public arena in the 1980s.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/ refers.

Incidentally, I don't think the UK would have been much richer if they had not suppressed their crypto advances (on Churchill's orders!). They are suprisingly good at 'blue-sky' research and inventing new technology, and suprisingly bad at making money out of it. Jet engines and radar, for instance, were just given away. Of course, if they hadn't been, we would just have taken them anyway? Look at the story of the Miles M-52 aircraft ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic )....

Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) was accepted as an IETF standards track protocol in January 1996. The research goes back as far as the 1970's.

that is essentially TCP

RTP is not specific to any particular transport layer, but in IP networks is layered upon UDP.

That being said, it most assuredly cannot be used over TCP.

Furthermore, it is most unlike TCP in that it is an unreliable transport protocol.

augmented by a "QOS" (guaranteed minimal throughput) feature.

From the RFC:

Note that RTP itself does not provide any mechanism to ensure timely delivery or provide other quality-of-service guarantees, but relies on lower-layer services to do so. It does not guarantee delivery or prevent out-of-order delivery, nor does it assume that the underlying network is reliable and delivers packets in sequence. The sequence numbers included in RTP allow the receiver to reconstruct the sender's packet sequence, but sequence numbers might also be used to determine the proper location of a packet, for example in video decoding, without necessarily decoding packets in sequence.

Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) was accepted as an IETF standards track protocol in January 1996. The research goes back as far as the 1970's.

that is essentially TCP

RTP is not specific to any particular transport layer, but in IP networks is layered upon UDP.

That being said, it most assuredly cannot be used over TCP.

Furthermore, it is most unlike TCP in that it is an unreliable transport protocol.

augmented by a "QOS" (guaranteed minimal throughput) feature.

From the RFC:

Note that RTP itself does not provide any mechanism to ensure timely delivery or provide other quality-of-service guarantees, but relies on lower-layer services to do so. It does not guarantee delivery or prevent out-of-order delivery, nor does it assume that the underlying network is reliable and delivers packets in sequence. The sequence numbers included in RTP allow the receiver to reconstruct the sender's packet sequence, but sequence numbers might also be used to determine the proper location of a packet, for example in video decoding, without necessarily decoding packets in sequence.

Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) was accepted as an IETF standards track protocol in January 1996. The research goes back as far as the 1970's.

that is essentially TCP

RTP is not specific to any particular transport layer, but in IP networks is layered upon UDP.

That being said, it most assuredly cannot be used over TCP.

Furthermore, it is most unlike TCP in that it is an unreliable transport protocol.

augmented by a "QOS" (guaranteed minimal throughput) feature.

From the RFC:

Note that RTP itself does not provide any mechanism to ensure timely delivery or provide other quality-of-service guarantees, but relies on lower-layer services to do so. It does not guarantee delivery or prevent out-of-order delivery, nor does it assume that the underlying network is reliable and delivers packets in sequence. The sequence numbers included in RTP allow the receiver to reconstruct the sender's packet sequence, but sequence numbers might also be used to determine the proper location of a packet, for example in video decoding, without necessarily decoding packets in sequence.

http://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?tech reportID=363&format=pdf provides additional performance data that indicates that PHP is a pretty reasonable choice from a performance perspective, even without the Zend engine.

Besides, having seen code that does something, then writing code to do that thing does not put you on the losing end of a copyright suit.

Really? The standard for illicit copying in an infringement case is the defendant's "access" to the plaintiff's work plus "probative similarity" of the works (based on expert testimony) plus "substantial similarity" of the works (based on lay impression). George Harrison got burned about this.

Oh man, you were talking a good game until you came out with the The "best model" in 1995 mispredicted the temperature in 2000 by 300% LIE.

How many times must this lie be debunked?

Apparently, very many times. Key points: It wasn't 1995, it was 1988, and Hansen wasn't off by 300%, he was frickin' on the money.

Also, remember that Arrhenius predicted anthropogenic CO2 global warming over 100 years ago. The basic premise- more atmospheric CO2 means more trapped heat- is well-understood and not controversial. The open question is the strength of the climate's negative feedback cycles.

Oh man, you were talking a good game until you came out with the The "best model" in 1995 mispredicted the temperature in 2000 by 300% LIE.

How many times must this lie be debunked?

Apparently, very many times. Key points: It wasn't 1995, it was 1988, and Hansen wasn't off by 300%, he was frickin' on the money.

Also, remember that Arrhenius predicted anthropogenic CO2 global warming over 100 years ago. The basic premise- more atmospheric CO2 means more trapped heat- is well-understood and not controversial. The open question is the strength of the climate's negative feedback cycles.

No way that all those vacuum tubes will fit into a two-drawer file cabinet. Takes more like a whole room full of file cabinets!

Marijuana has carcinogenic factors in it, just like tobacco. Heavy pot smokers may develop lung cancer just the same as people who smoke tobacco products.

A little snippet from http://www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/1516.html

"Burning marijuana for smoking releases many substances other than THC, the ingredient which produces the drug's psychoactive effects. THC does not appear to be carcinogenic, but some of the other chemicals released by both marijuana and tobacco smoke are problematic. These include tar, carbon monoxide, and cyanide. One known carcinogen, benzopyrene, though found in both types of smoke, seems to be greater in pot smoke."

So I guess the lesson is bake your MJ in brownies, or use a bong. :)

It would be nice if he did draw his own. It would be even nicer if he drew one that was accurate to the actual geography of NYC. The mta maps are grossly distorted, making it difficult to use them to do things like say... choose the subway line closest to a given location.

The MTA has this little problem with confusing the concepts: ""art" and "map".

Again, I'm left feeling rather let down by statements that seem to indicate that unless somethings signed off and tide up by the content cartels, it's somehow illegitimate.

Given the precedent of liability for infringement through subconscious copying in the United States, those statements might unfortunately be accurate.

I saw a list of affiliated major record labels, but I didn't see any link for independent recording artists to offer their works on Peer Impact. Is it because Peer Impact might be afraid of lawsuits from the major labels alleging that the independent artist infringed by subconsciously copying from a song owned by a major label's affiliated publisher?

The key strength of the original paper in Science, is that it used worldwide data.

Data from a single region is not only noisier; it would also reflect cycles such as El Nino in the Pacific, or its counterpart, The North Atlantic Oscillation: http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/NAO/

It is entirely possible of course, that the pattern shown in the Science article is an outcome of natural processes. Nonetheless, to tack on Atlantic data without mentioning the North Atlantic Oscillation strikes me as dishonest in presentation.

... those pushing the global warming stuff seem to pick time periods for their studies based on what will disinclude data which might point to a natural cycle.

No. The Science article used all satellite data that was currently available, which dated from 1970.

I should add that Pacific data is available for longer time spans. If anybody was cherry-picking, it was the freeper author.

Uhh, nice try to yourself, but the average temperature *is* increasing. Methinks you need to look at the data again. The precise slope depends on how long of a period you look at, as the curve has been steepening; 20 years shows just under 0.2 per decade.

The overall plot is a an upward curve, matching CO2 concentrations, just like what we've seen in long terms in ice and sediment cores. There's only one difference: it is happening many times faster than any other change visible in core sample histories.

Although the NAO is a natural mode of atmospheric variability,
surface (ocean and land), stratospheric, or even anthropogenic
processes may influence its phase and amplitude. At
present, there is no consensus on the process or processes that
are responsible for observed low-frequency variations in the
NAO. The absence of a demonstrated skillful predictive model
leaves us with significant uncertainty about NAO variability in
the future. The proposed response to increased greenhouse gas
concentrations through forcing from warmer tropical SSTs (27)
or a strengthened stratospheric vortex (28) implies, however, that
the positive index phase might continue.

Colombia, please. Columbia is a school in New York City, and has nothing to do with being a big ditch (although it has quite a few of the people who rhyme with ditch). http://www.columbia.edu/

Wal-Mart actually forces their employees to do a pep-rally style cheer.

>Unless there is a TCPA-bootable-disk-key-checker the BIOS runs, but why?

It's the way security protocols normally change.
First generation will support the old way.
Second generation will support old and new way. aka (switch hitting).
Third generation ONLY supports the new way.
This by the way means the machine wont boot without DRM at the trusted root hardware level

When we get third gen hardware, it is the full intent of the TCP to eliminate old and switch hitting implementations, which means without DRM, your OS can not, WILL NOT boot.

This is what Microsoft and Intel think of, when they think of DRM, this is not what the public believes DRM is at all.

To give you an example, SHA-1 is a crypto hashing routine which will require extensive mods to several existing implemented encryption protocols.
They can't just remove SHA-1 and come out with version 2 they have to transition it.
When the new crypto protocols come in they also will HAVE to support the transition in stages as described above.

For more Crypto-Babble( all be it, excellent) on
transitions for old, switch hitting and new.
See "Deploying a New Hash Algorithm", Steven M. Bellovin and Eric K. Rescorla.
  http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/new-hash.pd f

I gurantee you, 3rd gen DRM at the hardware level WILL abosolutly require a full DRM TCP Linux implimentation or Linux my friend, wont run.

Also, how long would it take to stop spinning, or to develop a wobble?

The Earth already has a wobble. It's called axial precession and is a 26,000 year cycle. There's a page here that seems to cover a bunch of the Earth's odd tilt and wobble cycles.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/ab olition4.htm

The Tao is actually the set of laws common to all - things like not murdering and stealing, but also with some duties. The link above gives a listing and comparison, but the entire text of the Abolition of Man is available.

The problem with the original comment is that he confuses his opinion for truth, whereas his views on evolution (we don't have a mechanism but we know absolutely we weren't designed), the environment, or even economics (is Keynes or Mises right? Interestingly, Misesian sites have better economics and doubt darwinianism) are dogmatic statements, and not something which can be empirically verified.

Remember the full title of Darwin's work was ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE OF LIFE. Shall we talk about races, and eugenics, and maybe the Nazis had the right idea? Get rid of our soul and a lot of things become easy.

Science is not dogma, but many here seem to confuse the two. Or treat scientists as a priesthood.

"Of course it will never happen"

I think not even that it will happen, but that there is a natural necessity for it to happen.

Eben Moglen wrote a great essay about it.

The world changed. Information is no longer costy to replicate.