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See Orlando Patterson's book, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. Patterson makes a substantial argument that our very concept of freedom came from ancient Greece - but not the from the high culture, from the slaves. The concept then worked its way from the slaves into the high culture (it was after all a very small place) particularly through the playwrights.

But then, being a slave is not the same thing in all times and places. The biggest slaveholders in recorded history were the Arabs. But some of their slaves rose to high positions, despite their slave status. (The reason the Africans were so ready to trade slaves to the Europeans when their ships showed up was that they already had for many centuries profitably traded slaves to the Arabs who lived closer to them. The Europeans were looking for anything of value they could trade their goods for; it was the Africans who came up with the idea of offering slaves for those goods.)

Here's a different hypothesis: Islamic countries are not progressing because they're monotheist. When Europe went through its heavily monotheistic period that produced the Dark Ages. Science re-emerged in the Renaissance precisely when European education returned to Roman and Greek texts, and its intellectual culture largely embraced the polytheism in those texts, leaving monotheism largely to the uneducated classes. Aside from that, even in the Dark Ages the Church, with its many saints, was far more polytheistic than almost all forms if Islam. The claim could be made that at least some of our Jewish scientists have been monotheists; but a close examination of what, for example, Einstein said about religious belief makes it clear that his use of "God" has little in common with the religious uses. More importantly, Judaism has never had a monolithic interpretation of its texts - there is far less dogma than in most forms of Christianity and Islam, and the scholars have always been expected to engage in open and active debate.

As for America's success at science, that came from our Deistic background - which stresses neither dogma nor faith. Ben Franklin set the tone on this. Very few of the American scientists have ever been particularly religious, in the way of wearing blinders in loyalty to some set of revealed teachings.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this video yet. My prof showed it to us on the first day of cell biology and it really genuinely created an interest in biology that I didn't have before. More detailed version is here: http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html
Really quite amazing, even if you know absolutely nothing about biology

Look at the cost per kilowatt hour for nuclear. It includes decommissioning fees (unlike all other power plants), and is still on-par with, or cheaper than, oil and gas. With rising gas prices, it'll probably become even more cost efficient.

40% of all CO2 produced in the US is produced by power plants. (http://www.cleanair.org/Air/clearTheAir.html) Switching to nuclear will save more CO2 emissions than any carbon-trading or carbon-offset plan. If you're any kind of environmentalist, you should be giving nuclear power your wholehearted support, like the founder of Greenpeace did

Personally, the lower gas prices and less vulnerability to foreign energy suppliers are the two best reasons to switch to nuclear.

If you're a peace activist, who doesn't like "Blood for Oil", again you should be giving your wholehearted support to nuclear energy.

Programmable pocket calculators have become awfully clumsy to use. It would be nice if one could move to iphone type interfaces or include a (maybe stripped down) computer algebra system. They survive only because they have become cheep,rugged and robust and can be used in schools early on. I loved to play with these toys when I was younger. But thats what they have remained: toys.

Copyright infringement suits can be filed against any alleged perpetrator in any fashion. They don't have to do it evenly. In fact, it's impossible for the RIAA to even sue all file-sharers, as there are dozens of millions.

To answer your main question, the reason they're not hitting Harvard is because Harvard's cyber law guys are willing to stand up for the students. Specifically, they oppose the idea of serving as the "unpaid enforcement arm of the provincial interests of the RIAA". While not anti-copyright, they oppose the strong-arm tactics.

Anyhow, the point seems to be that while the RIAA is hitting schools that pass along the letters, they're not going after Harvard, which I'm sure NYCL (who rocks, btw) is trying to point out - any powerful group offering resistance to the RIAA will be left alone.

There are various ways of storing heat over night.

e.g.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1982STIN...8323793C

Consumers' rights are based on the general idea of "fair use," which isn't a right defined in law. Instead, it's a general defense against claims of copyright infringement. If the recording industry were to sue an individual for copying music from their CDs onto their iPod, they would likely lose because the idea of fair use generally determines that consumers can use their own music in reasonable ways.

Unfortunately, fair use has not been upheld in clear court precedents or in law to the point where it can really be called a right. This leaves things enshrouded in a grey fog where consumers assume that anything they can do with "their music" is fine, while the music industry seeks to find new ways to sell its products.

Let's dissect those two paragraphs. A simple Google search yields the following reference as its first result: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

Let me quote the salient points from the U.S. Copyright Office's website:

One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of "fair use." Although fair use was not mentioned in the previous copyright law, the doctrine has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years. This doctrine has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law.

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered "fair," such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair[...]

So, what have we learned about TFA?

1. The author of TFA claims that fair use is not actually defined in law. This is contradicted by Section 107 of Title 17, U.S. Code. Section 107 even helpfully enumerates examples of fair use.
2. The author of TFA claims that there have been no clear court precedents upholding fair use. In fact, there have been many, too numerous to list here, but I'll simply mention the landmark case of the RIAA vs. Diamond Multimedia which established that the RIO, and all subsequent MP3 players, are non-infringing devices used for space shifting. It is because of this legal precedent that we have a market segment for MP3 players at all.
3. The author of TFA totally misses one of the oldest and best-known prior legal precedents establishing the right to time-shift and space-shift, the infamous Betamax case, Sony vs. Universal City Studios
4. The author apparently doesn't know how to do basic fact checking using a resource like Google.

The article was great right up until the section on fair use, and I couldn't really stomach reading the rest of the article because the author clearly didn't bother checking any facts. Whether that's due to laziness or some twisted personal interpretation of U.S. copyright law, I couldn't say. I thought maybe this article was written from a European/British perspective (since fair use is not an established right in the U.K., for example), but no, he's using American spellings and seems to be writing from an American (albeit ignorant) POV. Sad, really.

The info about the dispute between Apple and NBC is interesting, as it explains Apple's comments about needing to charge almos

Consumers' rights are based on the general idea of "fair use," which isn't a right defined in law. Instead, it's a general defense against claims of copyright infringement. If the recording industry were to sue an individual for copying music from their CDs onto their iPod, they would likely lose because the idea of fair use generally determines that consumers can use their own music in reasonable ways.

Unfortunately, fair use has not been upheld in clear court precedents or in law to the point where it can really be called a right. This leaves things enshrouded in a grey fog where consumers assume that anything they can do with "their music" is fine, while the music industry seeks to find new ways to sell its products.

Let's dissect those two paragraphs. A simple Google search yields the following reference as its first result: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

Let me quote the salient points from the U.S. Copyright Office's website:

One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of "fair use." Although fair use was not mentioned in the previous copyright law, the doctrine has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years. This doctrine has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law.

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered "fair," such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair[...]

So, what have we learned about TFA?

1. The author of TFA claims that fair use is not actually defined in law. This is contradicted by Section 107 of Title 17, U.S. Code. Section 107 even helpfully enumerates examples of fair use.
2. The author of TFA claims that there have been no clear court precedents upholding fair use. In fact, there have been many, too numerous to list here, but I'll simply mention the landmark case of the RIAA vs. Diamond Multimedia which established that the RIO, and all subsequent MP3 players, are non-infringing devices used for space shifting. It is because of this legal precedent that we have a market segment for MP3 players at all.
3. The author of TFA totally misses one of the oldest and best-known prior legal precedents establishing the right to time-shift and space-shift, the infamous Betamax case, Sony vs. Universal City Studios
4. The author apparently doesn't know how to do basic fact checking using a resource like Google.

The article was great right up until the section on fair use, and I couldn't really stomach reading the rest of the article because the author clearly didn't bother checking any facts. Whether that's due to laziness or some twisted personal interpretation of U.S. copyright law, I couldn't say. I thought maybe this article was written from a European/British perspective (since fair use is not an established right in the U.K., for example), but no, he's using American spellings and seems to be writing from an American (albeit ignorant) POV. Sad, really.

The info about the dispute between Apple and NBC is interesting, as it explains Apple's comments about needing to charge almos

I don't know who writes your material, but it is top class all the same. What a shame someone has to spend their time torturing the language just to earn a crust .. :)

"OOXML is ECMA standardized .. Yes, there are problems with the standard, but they are all minor"

'The goal of the Technical Committee is to produce a formal standard for office productivity applications within the Ecma International standards process which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats '

"The OOXML XSDs are not proprietary. Microsoft has made them freely available .."

'Like the specification itself, the license contains a seIf-contradiction: it is a promise that is not, in practise, a promise'

"MSIE is "tied to the OS" for the same reasons that Konqueror is tied to KDE; it is a shared library reused by the Explorer shell to provide similar services. It's called modularity, and it's a good design. This was an inevitable result"

'modularity' must have a different meaning in your universe where in the modular MSIE can't be removed without breaking the OS. Konqueror can be totally removed from this Ubuntu or not even installed, without breaking the OS.

MSIE was first tied to the OS to kill NETSCAPE, remember to cut off their oxygen supply. There was no valid technical reason for doing so. That they later on buried part of it in the OS regardless of the security implications merely demonstrates the priorities at Redmond at the time.

There are some extreme Creationists out there who don't want to debate the topic and just want to shut up anyone who doesn't believe

When you believe in something that is provably untrue, and flies in the face of the science that we use every day, surely shutting anyone up who doesn't believe is the only way to win the 'debate'?

Seriously, Noah had an arc? The Earth is only 6,000 years old? There are rocks in Greenland that have been shown to be over 4 billion years old. If God created the Universe 6,000 years ago how how the heck are we able to see stars (and other astronomical delights) that are over 6,000 light years away?

When it comes to a rational debate Creationism falls on its face almost immediately. The only way this lie can spread at all is if the truth is silenced: reminds me of Scientology.

You scare me a little, because of how knowledgeable you seem to a layman and yet how wrong you are. At the molecular scale, water molecules don't just decide to break up and go their own way willy-nilly... Yes, they do, and it's called equilibrium. This probably the most fundamental concept of high school chemistry. Water molecules continually break into H+ and OH- ions and reform themselves from those ions. You'll find that when perfect equilibrium is reached, the product of their molarities (that's the moles solute per liter solvent) is 10^-7. That's where we get the neutral pH 7 from. Look it up here. Fascinating stuff.

...not the least because both elements involved (hydrogen and oxygen) really don't like being alone (the two hydrogen atoms can go off on their own merry way as a diatomic molecule, but the oxygen will be lonely).

Please stop pretending to know what you're talking about; you clearly have no concept of even ionic bonding. Water would never split that way unless you run a hydrolysis reaction (running an electric current through the water). Water ALWAYS splits into H+ and OH- ions. Read that sentence again; it's important. They are IONIC BONDS. You seem to think they are covalent. When water dissociates (that means splits, see equilibrium above), those ions HAVE to stay in solution. H+ DOES NOT bond with another H+ to form H2. Neither does the oxygen.

Breaking molecular bonds in water takes energy

Really? Then why does salt dissolve in water? EQUILIBRIUM.

Cracking water is endothermic, but so is making it AARGH. Then water would not exist! The heat of formation is ALWAYS the opposite of the heat of decomposition. Please, I'm begging you, take a chemistry course. Your sophomore one does not count, but you obviously slept through it anyway.

and a net change in the number of water molecules, of zero. YES! Good job! That's perfect equilibrium. The grandparent had the right idea about equilibrium, although he failed to realize that since there is a net change of zero, the mass also does not change. Ions do not leave solution, nor does their mass magically disappear.

Corrosiveness

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Compressibility

This is a fundamental property of water - it is INCOMPRESSIBLE. See here. You know nothing about chemistry. Stop, stop, stop.

Last, but not least: evaporation

Last, but not least: sealed container.

Very easy, actually; the problem is maintaining its purity after it cools down from superheated steam.

Solutes dissolve MORE in superheated water.

I don't know who you are. I don't know much about you. But I do know that you know nothing about chemistry. I know this is /., but STOP. STOP. STOP. People might actually believe you.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989feaf.proc...54B

Brown, David L.; Henshaw, William D.; Kreiss, Heinz-Otto; Chesshire, Geoffrey
Affiliation: AA(Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM), AB(IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY), AC(California, University, Los Angeles; Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan, Stockholm, Sweden)
"The fundamental principles, implementation, and applications of CMPGRD are reviewed; CMPGRD is a software package developed by Brown et al. (1988) to generate two- and three-dimensional curvilinear composite overlapping grids for flow computations. Particular attention is given to the numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) on composite grids: discretization, interpolation, FDM convergence rates, and the treatment of elliptic and time-dependent PDEs. Results for a typical problem involving supersonic channel flow are presented graphically."

Maybe a place to start. Kreiss seems to be specializing in the field. Not exactly new, but the problem is not either, I guess.

Disclaimer: IANAP/M

CC.

• Using technology is like telling jokes. Some people can deliver, other better do not.
• Teaching is complex. Not everybody can handle the additional challenge of technology additionally to the organisatorial and pedagogical parameters. Most of us have experienced bad use of technology. I certainly have produced disasters myself.
• It is often not the technology which produces the failures but the lack of a backup plan. Technology often fails. The advantage of the "good ol blackboard" is that it always works. Even white-boards fail when markers are dry.
• Overuse of technology is like dishing up the same meals again and again. The benefits of technology can wear off, if the novelty is gone.
• I use the rule of thumb: technology can improve a lecture by 20 percent, but adds the risk to losing 80 percent. This risk makes the use of technology exciting and worthwile.

I think of a leftist as someone who believes in a benevolent government that taxes the wealthy to provide benefits to the have-nots. This equates to Big Government.

Then you are thinking wrong, or at least much too simplistic. You know, there is actually contemporary leftist theory out there to read, why not try it instead of being stuck in a world view that fits your grandparents' time? E.g., Empire. PDF, txt and html versions here.

You've overlooked the key point: flash card provider is just passing along, unmodified, one-to-one, the copies he received from his upstream provider. This does NOT require permission of the copyright owner.

The flash card provider isn't passing it along*, the flash card provider is selling it. It's a bundle, but each component of that bundle has its own licensing requirements.

Perhaps this is why the GPL v3 uses the term "convey" rather than "distribute". Did you read the linked sections?

But if you aren't doing anything with software that requires permission, you have no obligation to obey GPL.

Nobody is under an obligation to obey the GPL if they don't distribute/convey.

Hypothetically, if there was actually no obligation to obey copyright restrictions/licensing when an item was resold, then the following scenarios may occur:

• Any second-hand books would be in the Public Domain.
• Any other resold software could be in the Public Domain or have any other license.

*Passing it along: I'm not sure what that means, but if it's something other than selling, please clarify. It looks to me like transfer of ownership of content fixed in a tangible medium and thus falls under copyright law.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html might explain it better than I can. Or perhaps this.

Upon closer look at 109's wording, lawfully made seems to be the key. If the accompanying CD is discarded then the product is no longer lawfully made and the First Sale doctrine might not apply. However, the caselaw is still coming into being.

A message from the Tribler researchers...:

Download of the software
Planned next features and documentation
Browse the Python code (LGPL)
SVN repository
Scientific paper on Give-to-Get algorithm

Please post any question you have and we will reply asap.

A message from the Tribler researchers...:

Download of the software
Planned next features and documentation
Browse the Python code (LGPL)
SVN repository
Scientific paper on Give-to-Get algorithm

Please post any question you have and we will reply asap.

A message from the Tribler researchers...:

Download of the software
Planned next features and documentation
Browse the Python code (LGPL)
SVN repository
Scientific paper on Give-to-Get algorithm

Please post any question you have and we will reply asap.

There is a lot more going on with the whole "Life On Mars" thing than you will see really published anywhere. I'm not saying there are little green men on mars, but it seems like every article I read, this one included, downplays the significance of finding Life Outside Earth. That is a Big Deal.

If you're interested, there is quite a bit of background material surrounding Life on Mars and the really famous '76 Viking Lander experiments that were completely glossed over in the article.

One absolutely interesting bit of research (that I'm surprised wasn't mentioned in the article) has to do with circadian rhythms.

IIRC the '76 viking lander had 3 types of experiments on board that would conduct various kinds of tests to determine if there was life on mars. One of those was cell respiration.. another a test for known organic compounds or organic materials. Two of the three tests showed signs for life in at least one of the experimental runs.. but the test for "organic material" consistently failed. I met one of the folks at a conference that claimed to have worked on this and he made it very clear that NASA's usual policy was 2/3 experiments w/positive results == Strong Indications for Life. Yet for some reason NASA announced something to the effect of "No Organics, No Life" . He was very bitter about it because he was absolutely convinced there was life on Mars.

In 2000 someone thought to analyze the cell respiration study that already indicated there was life or at least a life-like biological process. SURPRISE! The cell respiration data seemed to indicate cell respiration with circadian rhythms. Could not possibly be a simple chemical reaction. The whole idea of Circadian rhytms did not even exist in 1976! But the data fits. Not only that, but the rhythm itself was tuned to a martian day! I quietly decided there was life on mars at that moment. See this or here.

This new article is interesting, but it is Yet Another Analysis of 30 year old data!! I'd love to see what would happen if NASA (or CNN. I'd take CNN) would announce, in big bold letters, "HEY! We found very conclusive signs of life on another planet! Short of going there and looking at the soil under a microscope ourselves, we're 95% sure the planet is not quite dead and has new and unique life!" Maybe I'm cynical but it seems like we should be actually doing modern experiments to compare with the '76 experiments. It seems more like a pissing contest to see which person/group/agency is right more than The Search for Truth and Knowledge. "Why do we need to search for life on mars? We already found out there isn't life, right?"

On June 28, the Texas Transportation Commission, the final word on transportation issues in the state, ordered that the Regional Transportation Council and NTTA reach an agreement on the Highway 121 contract before Aug. 27 or else the contract would go to Cintra.

• Both Viking landers were nuclear powered (RTGs).
• So are both of the rovers, to a certain extent. Both rovers contain slugs of plutonium which keep the electronics boxes warm and reduce the amount of solar power needed for heating.
• Viking 2 lasted 1281 sols and died when its batteries failed. Although the RTGs would have produced usable power for another ten years, the power levels were too low for 70s electronics. So the RTGs would slowly charge the batteries then the batteries would power up the lander for short durations.
• Viking 1 lasted 2245 sols and lost contact with Earth when a bad command was sent which instructed Viking to point its antenna in a different direction (sort of like typing "shutdown -h now" on the command line of a remote server, there's no recovery short of a house-call).

We are going to experience cycles of warming and cooling, especially as water vapor (the most important greenhouse gas) and CO2 fluctuate. CO2 levels are actually very low now compared with normal planetary activity.

While I am concerned about the future of our planet and our species' place upon it, I am growing increasingly sceptical of the wild claims surrounding a looming global warming catastrophe. When a scientist such as Stephen Hawking warns "I am afraid the atmosphere might get hotter and hotter until it will be like Venus with boiling sulfuric acid," any reasonable person begins to fear for the future.

My surprise and shock was learning that past concentrations of carbon dioxide were much higher than they are today (indeed, limits so high as to be unreachable, assuming that we have hit peak oil), as revealed in the interview below:

We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.

I have learned that these past CO2 concentrations have been documented in peer-reviewed research journals:

We find that CO2 emissions resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.

My interest in past CO2 concentrations began by reading a (somewhat) more partisan summary of this information:

When dinosaurs walked the earth (about 70 to 130 million years ago), there was from five to ten times more CO2 in the atmosphere than today. The resulting abundant plant life allowed the huge creatures to thrive. . . . Based on nearly 800 scientific observations around the world, a doubling of CO2 from present levels would improve plant productivity on average by 32 percent across species.

An even more thorough refutation, specifically of An Inconvenient Truth, can be found here.

"There's nothing wrong with easy games."

You're right but the truth is when a game becomes too easy it becomes boring, so there must be some kind of push-pull with the player or gaming becomes a pointless excercise (no risk, no reward). There is such a thing as too easy and too hard. The thing that differentiates games from movies is PASSIVITY and lack of interactivity (taking part). Many modern games are becoming more passive, and hence skewing towards what a game shouldn't be: Passive. We have movies and other forms of entertainment for those people.

"It has treated the less-skilled player with contempt and derision for far too long."

What the heck are you talking about? There have been many games who've tried to go beyond the hardcore crowd and didn't succeed financially or otherwise. MMORPG's in my opinion are the epitome of the mass market mindset: Computer controlled avatars you simply navigate and press menu buttons, everything else is handled automatically.

"You're an old-time hardcore gamer, so you think of easy games as bad ones."

Wrong again, hardcore is such a vague all-encompassing definition with no real specific meaning. I like games of all types because I like hardocore games doesn't mean I don't like "mass market" games. I am passionate about games, there's a difference between respecting someones enjoyment and wanting to understand enjoyment and fun as passion to create better games for different types of people. I analyze why different people enjoy games and what about them they enjoy, just because you enjoy something doesn't mean you are able to judge the quality of the overall development of gaming as a whole.

"but the days when the industry would pander to the hardcore gamer's every whim are over."

What? Zelda TWP and Halo 3, Final fantasy 12 are 'hardcore', in fact the hardcore base is what fueled gamings growth up to this point, it certainly wasn't the barbarian hordes that got gaming to this point.

"Don't worry, though, I'm sure a few companies will still make games for your little niche."

That "little niche" supported the likes of Civilization, Mario, Sonic, Halo, Half-life, etc, name any of histories greatest games and you will see "hardcore" written on it, and by "hardcore" I don't mean it in the sense of deriding other less experienced, casual gamers, etc, (since hardocre vs casual really is vague), I mean it in the sense of pushing the envelope or refining the quality of game development.

Game mechanics matter, I really truly wonder if Wii, PS3 or Xbox could survive without a hardcore audience (i.e. a market that actually BUYS games), and yes games like Halo are definitely hardcore even though they are percieved to be 'mainstream', the truth is the mechanics are still based off quality game design.

The truth is market economics and developing quality games to not mix well, period. You measure a games success by it's audience size or money it makes, this is of course incorrect way to judge value.

It's based on a MARKET VALUE SYSTEM, i.e. how much money can this item attract. While gaming is a 'business' the many people in the business are not in it just for the money.

An excellent example of the market value system can be seen with bill gates comments here, on why millions of people are allowed to die.

Bill gates said:

"So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: "How could the world let these children die?"

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system."

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/06.14/99- gates.html

There's nothing 'NASA' or 'threat' about that number. It is simply the identifier assigned to that particular rock (a.k.a. minor planet) by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. A few other ones are 1 Ceres, 136199 Eris, and 134340 Pluto.

1. People who would have bought the product, but didn't because they downloaded it.
2. People who wouldn't have bought the product, but downloaded it and liked it enough to buy/recommend it to their friends.
3. People who wouldn't have bought the product, but downloaded it and didn't like it enough to buy/recommend it to their friends.

I switched to a Kensington Expert Mouse last year for a similar problem. This input device works better for me than the traditional mouse. My wrist pain problem is so bad that I switched the trackball to my other hand and this has improved things a bit for me. I am not a graphics professional and I try to avoid the Mouse input device as much as possible. Guides like this table help very much.

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iar ticle_query?1974MNRAS.166..439H&data_type=PDF_HIGH &whole_paper=YES&type=PRINTER&filetype=.pdf and, yes, B. H. May is indeed the very same Brian Harold May we're talking about here... Enjoy!

Atari v. JS&A concerned the sale of devices that make chip-to-chip copies for "backup" purposes, not chip-to-disk copies for emulation purposes. Backups fall under 117(a)(2), and the court in Atari found that 117(a)(2) does not cover chip-to-chip backups. The copies used in emulation, on the other hand, are not backups; they are an "adaptation ... created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine" per 117(a)(1). Compare Vault v. Quaid, 847 F.2d 255 (5th Cir. 1988), which the page on Patent Arcade mentions but does not analyze.

In addition, Atari happened in the Northern District of Illinois, which is within the 7th Circuit, and to my knowledge was not appealed; Vault happened in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. A split between federal circuits is prime material for a review by the Supreme Court.

Actually, it is fats that produce the quickest feeling of fullness.

Anyone who is interested in relatively up-to-date diet research should check out the Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Source. They do a very good job of explaining what dietary research does and does not indicate.

There's a reply still modded at zero that gets it right. Molecule sized objects can move really fast. Here's one reference about nanotubes spinning at 28GHz. That's not due to high velocity, it's just that they don't have very far to move before completing a cycle. A mere one kilometer per hour is 300 million nanometers per second, and that's not very fast. Typical molecular velocities at room temperature at a fair bit higher than 1kph.

The title should have read The Complete History of A/V Format Wars. Here I thought that it was going to document such things as CDF versus RSS versus Atom.

Most of it came from a legal brief in Eldred v. Ashcroft. Start at paragraph 61. The bit about foreign authors I found while researching the post. I may have embellished his statement (first bullet point) a bit. Finally, the bit about when the life + 50 years law took effect came from memory.

In 1862 copyright lasted 28 years with a possible 14 year extension. The law did not change again until 1909. So Taps would have entered the public domain in either 1890 or 1904.

For reference, see this legal brief from Eldred v Ashcroft. The relevant part starts at paragraph 61.

If you were a professional astronomer I'd say it sounds like you'd be better off finding a different organization to work for.

Try looking at cited sources on published papers for starters. http://arxiv.org/ will give you plenty of pre-publications. Here too http://sesame.stsci.edu/library.html

I'm well out of touch but here's what you get just from Google:

Skyview is a must. Images in any wavelength (multiple instruments)
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Learn about the FITS data format. Not just pretty pictures by any means.
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Chandra data
http://cxc.harvard.edu/cda/public.html

You want Hubble data? (and software to process it)
http://archive.stsci.edu/

More software to process astro data:
http://www.stsci.edu/resources/

SOHO use to publish their images in real time and if you want data...and apparently still do.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/data.html

There's lots more out there if you look at the major space instrument's web pages. I'm sure some of it is paid and a lot of it is held back for a year or so, but there's a LOT out there.

From here: http://www.hno.harvard.edu/guide/finance/index.htm l,

This:
Harvard University's endowment, valued at $25.9 billion at the end of FY 2005, is a collection of more than 10,800 separate funds established over the years to provide scholarships; to maintain libraries, museums, and other collections; to support teaching and research activities; and to provide ongoing support for a wide variety of other activities. The great majority of these funds carry some type of restriction.

I think they can scare up the change.

When you download a program onto your hard drive, you make a copy. When you load it into RAM, you make a copy.

The law doesn't agree that these copies constitue infringement. From Section 117 of US Code:

(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.-- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.

This was tested in Vault Corp. v. Quaid Software, Ltd., where the judge explicitly upheld the right to load computer software into memory in order to use it. MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. would later create an exception to this if you loaded the software into the memory of someone else's computer, but that is irrelevant to the situation at hand and actually supports my point. (Copyright law was also amended in 1998 to allow for Peak's maintenance usage to be legal.)

Futhermore, the GPL states:

The act of running a program using the Library is not restricted, and output from such a program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Library (independent of the use of the Library in a tool for writing it).

Another point to keep in mind is that the GPL is very specific in its language. Whenever it talks about copying, it uses the phrase "copy and distribute". It is thus understood that these actions are expected to happen together. Distributing a copy you already have is an invocation of the first-sale doctrine and is a well known "loop hole" in the GPL. (Not really a loop hole, mind you, as it's not really exploitable. You have to destroy your own copies when transferring the ownership. This is per US Copyright law Section 117 Paragraph (b).)

The distributor made or otherwise obtained copies that he's providing you. This is what's known as the "first sale".

No, the "first sale doctrine" means that a copyright owner can't control the resale of a copyrighted work.

Don't confuse the first sale with the first sale doctrine. The first sale is when a specific instance of an item is sold. First sale doctrine is a legal construct that says that rights cannot be further restricted past the first sale. The effects of First sale doctrine are codified for software distribution in Section 117 Paragraph (b) in such a way as to make the tracking of the license more important than the tracking of the individual copies. According to that law, I am distributing the software if I give you a copy and keep my own copy. If I give you a copy and destroy my own copy, however, I am transferring my rights obtained under first-sale to you.

Without the GPL you can't make a copy (right 1) you can't make changes (right 2) and you can't distribute (right 3).

Without the GPL, you can perform #1 under certain circumstances of copyright law. (As discussed above.) You can probably do #2 without invoking the terms of the GPL, simply because the copy is your personal property. (See: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalD istribution for an example situation.) #3 is meat of the GPL and the core of its legal capabilities. That's why Section 5 of the GPL explicitly states:

You are not required to accept this

There is a popular myth on slashdot that you have a legal right to rip music or movies that you've bought. There is no such right.

From RIAA vs. Diamond Multimedia:

"[t]he Rio merely makes copies in order to render portable, or 'space-shift,' those files that already reside on a user's hard drive... Such copying is paradigmatic noncommercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act."

damn, now I'm gonna waste another lunch hour reading about interesting crap I'll never need :)

Correction: The average, below average, and just-plain-dumb "bosses" will always want lower wages. The smart "bosses" are more concerned about the holistic profitability of their business, not just how cheap they can get with their workers. Harvard Business Review has a pretty good article on this facet of American business.

Apart from the technology not being ready yet, we are faced with the usual trouble of how to get heavy hardware up there. Laser systems, magnets and giant Hoovers are not generally lightweight items. There's also the issue of whether we want to have nuclear stuff in orbit.

Don't worry the second superpower will keep the US in line.

I think he's catching on very well for a big dog. Most of us would be very happy with a boss this open and clued.

I think he's catching on very well for a big dog. Most of us would be very happy with a boss this open and clued.

No, he's a noted historian of science and is on the faculty of Harvard.

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/shapin.htm l

"I suggest you begin by googling "hypersonic IR seeker"...you'll see there is a wide body of research in the field for just this type of scenario." You mean like this? Read the first line http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001SPIE.4369..662H ". Infra-red (IR) seekers on missiles at high Mach-numbers in the lower tier air defense often suffer from degradation in performance due to aerothermodynamic effects. Yes there has been a lot of research but they are not in production yet. THAAD is radar guided and uses a shroud to protect the IR terminal guidance sensor widow.
"You don't need to fly at Mach 8 to intercept a Mach 6 vehicle...simply standing still and letting it fly into you is enough."
That is true for a none maneuvering target. But when dealing with a maneuvering target traditionally you want a 30% to 50% speed advantage. This aerovehicle will be capable of maneuvering. A laser might work but even that will be difficult since a Mach 6 vehicle will be by definition heat resistant and will be a very hot air flow around it. Then you have the problem of a limited accusation time since you will be limited to line of sight and it will have a low radar cross section.
What it comes down to is it will be a hard target to hit. Nothing is impossible but this will be very tough.
Here are the problems
From the time you acquire the target you will have a very short time to launch an interceptor of any kind. In that time your interceptor must reach reach 100,000 ft of altitude and a pretty high velocity. The UAV will have probably detected the launch and started to jink so just popping up in front of it will not work. Not only that but odds are very good that any interceptor will be large and in a fixed position so the drone will be routed to avoid those that it can and possible destroy those that it can not if it is on an attack mission. To reach 100,000 in a few seconds is not a small task to start with since it is around 20 miles straight up!
So let's do some simple math.
Let's give a generous detection range of 100 miles to your intercept sight.
At 4000 mph or Mach 6 they will have around 1.5 minuets from the time they detect the drone to launch an interceptor and get it 20 miles straight up. And that is only if it is coming right at the launch site! So give a really fast 30 seconds to decide to launch you have a total of one minute to reach 100,000 feet. So the interceptor will have to climb at better than 1100 mph and that isn't allowing for acceleration! That is a very good clip going straight up by anyone's standards. If the drone isn't overflying the launch site then you have to deal with the slant range And then you will still need time to maneuver! After all the interceptor will not stop climbing instantly. Now throw in the drone making a 10 g turn after it detects the launch and you can see the numbers get very ugly.
This would almost always turn into a tail chase and that becomes very difficult.

A Mach 6 maneuvering target at FL100 is a nightmare intercept target. Lasers are still a big maybe.

It's the New Yorker...but the author is Steven Shapin, not exactly your typical Manhattan gossip-monger.

Read here