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True enough. But by the same token, if you're paying $60M to launch your $120M satellite, you might want to pay the extra $500k* to protect your asset.

* Note: I have no idea what the extra cost would be. But at minimum it would have to pay for hauling the booster stack back to the hangar after the static fire, to 'integrate' the payload, and then hauling the now-loaded rocket back to the launch pad again.

Perhaps, in response to this, SpaceX will figure out some sort of gantry system to allow vertical integration right on the launch pad. That way, they could avoid this situation entirely.

Or a really long railgun.

To be fair, self driving cars like the Google ones use Radar and Lidar to do navigation. They sometimes however consider a plastic bag blowing in the wind as a person, so it isn't perfect, but it has been able to stop just fine for people stepping out into traffic.

Check out answer 2 here:

http://ai.stackexchange.com/qu...

It has a video of what the car sees as a combination of all the sensors. You can clearly see the people in the video. The second video is even more impressive, the car is responding to a police officer (or crossing guard) giving hand signals.

I think you are creating generalities from your specific situation.

No, I specifically said it varies; did you miss that? You even quoted it. I also said that addressing is controlled by local governments, so places with alleyways are obviously going to be handled differently.

AFAYK. But it's not that way in real life. There is no "default". You have to know.

No, you'd don't "have to know". Enter some lat/lon coordinates into Google Maps, and it'll show you a location on the map. It doesn't ask you for your datum. That's because there IS a default.

That's funny, because I can get my location in any number of datums using GPS. Wikipedia isn't always right..

And I'm supposed to believe you over a cited article? If you think it's wrong, then go correct it. From a little bit of Googling, what I've read supports Wikipedia:
http://www.gpsinformation.org/...
http://gis.stackexchange.com/q...

The only reason anyone uses other datums is because they have old maps that are based on them, not because they're better in any way (they're not).

OR, in our case, spend $150K on "Consultants" to review and document our department's recommendation and put it in a TPS Report that nobody reads. Basically duplicating what our Department recommended, because we are too stupid to know what we are talking about.

You can read some interesting anecdotes of how people get around people who have to add their $.02 worth to every decision, just to seem important.

http://programmers.stackexchan...

I would.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
* http://skeptics.stackexchange....

Anyone only needs to study the history of MS to see how they -effectively- drove tech company after company out of business.

Stac Electronics, Borland, etc.

However, Windows is not my day-job OS, and I need to be economical with the time, energy, and number of neurons I spend babysitting that OS.

So what were you doing up until now? Reading each KB article? Vetting each update on a test system? I dont' really see that based on you response, so how on earth does THIS cumulative update model really change anything for YOU exactly?!!

Meanwhile, a dead simple off-the-shelf backup software packages for windows suitable for a single system seems like a perfect solution...

For example...this is pretty much exactly what you seem to need...but choose any you like.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/p...

Full Disk-Image Backup

Back up your entire computer including your operating system, applications and data, not just files and folders to an external hard drive or NAS.

You've already got the photographs properly protected; so this would be a perfect solution for the operating system.

that more likely I am to just switch to a platform that's more reliable and is easier to rebuild.

For Photoshop and Lightroom? What platform OSX? Here, I'll save you some time:

====
Q:
I installed the latest version of Mavericks and it broke some stuff (instruments) which I cannot afford to have broken. Is there a way to roll back to my previous release? Am currently on 10.9.2 and want to go to 10.9.1 or 10.9.

A: (paraphrased)
there is not an uninstall feature for patches, upgrades and even apps.

Unfortunately the only real way to do this is to wipe the drive, install the pervisous version, assuming you have the installer or can find it and restore from backup.

http://apple.stackexchange.com...
=====

OS X invented cumulative software updates that can't be rolled back.

And Linux or BSD don't even run photoshop or lightroom.

So, what exactly is your plan?

Coal already gets massive subsidies http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind... http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... http://www.climatechangenews.c... and that doesn't count the huge cost to health care and lost worker productivity: http://www.fastcompany.com/172...

DOE did a study on savings to date through the Clean Air Act (passed through Congress without a single vote against it!) which found the Act had a *net benefit* to the economy for that reason. Nuclear sucks too, but Coal kills more than Nuclear https://www.newscientist.com/a... If someone can get alternative up to coal and nuclear then all the more power to them! :-)

Environmental policy used to be bipartisan https://www.washingtonpost.com... Fuck partisanship!

That 14,000 abandoned wind turbine claim is bullshit: They are old ones which were decommissioned and replaced, so it's like claiming the automobile is a failed idea because there are so many cars have gone to the wreckers. Just more Nimby bullshit. http://skeptics.stackexchange.... http://www.wind-works.org/cms/...

an internal combustion engine - as used in a petrol-driven vehicle - gets around 20% efficiency

Actually, the engines themselves are 30% to 40% efficient on modern gasoline-powered cars. There are some additional losses in the transmission, which is something like 95 to 98% efficient. Running outside the optimal load range also makes the engine a lot less efficient, but that's only relevant in stop-and-go traffic, and hybrid electric systems largely solve the issue. Even non-hybrid cars do a lot better in this respect than they used to, by automatically stopping and starting the engine at lights, and having more gears.

The efficiency of the complete drivetrain of a new ICE vehicle is 20% (standard) to 35% (efficient hybrid) for stop-and-go, and considerably better on the highway.

That's 6.189km per kWh, or about 162 grams of carbon dioxide of emissions - using worst case carbon generation - per km travelled.

Electric cars aren't 100% efficient, either; total up the losses in charging and discharging (86% efficient), power conversion (97%), and the motor(s) themselves (91%), and the total efficiency of the drive train is more like 76%.

An electric car? The infrastructure is already in place; there is negligible marginal cost in getting the power from the plant to the car.

That's not true. Even in the USA, grid transmission is only about 94% efficient. (It's much worse in developing countries; for India it's estimated at 70%. The huge difference is because building and maintaining reliable, efficient power transmission and distribution is not cheap, and some places are too poor to do it well.)

So best case, with a diesel S-class vehicle, you're about one third better than the Model S; worst case (5+ litre petrol engine), you're 50% worse.

We must adjust your 162 g/km estimate upward by 40% to account for the EV inefficiencies that you ignored, which gives us a revised estimate of 227 g/km - worse than all but the most over-powered of the four Mercedes models found in the document that you linked.

Another factor to consider as well is the cost of transporting the fuel: trucks have to carry that fuel (diesel, petrol, etc.) to the station, and you have to drive to the station to refuel.

You can't pretend this is a useful or fair comparison if you only consider the supply chain for the contents of the ICE car's gas tank, and ignore everything else. Mining and moving coal has a substantial environmental and economic impact as well. So does mining Lithium for batteries, or refining and doping Silicon for solar panels, etc.

There are really only two reasonable ways to estimate the true environmental impact of a product:
1) Start from nothing but labour and raw natural resources (think minerals still in the ground, not steel) and work your way up every stage of the production, supply, and maintenance chain - you can't assume trains are moving coal, until you've figured out the full impact of making and running trains from scratch.
2) Or, assume that the selling price of an item already accounts for its environmental impact (partially true).

(1) is probably more accurate, but if you're going to do it you need to do it for everything, or at least apply

It seems that it's not entirely unparsable.

Similarly, Falcon has second stage which is toasted, a recovered first stage which needs rework and the Dragon is theoretically about as reusable as the shuttle. Not too different abstractly, but arguably a better architecture.

The most important difference between the SpaceX system versus the Space Shuttle, is that SpaceX designed theirs for what it will actually be used for: moving people and a modest amount of cargo to and from LEO. The Shuttle was a horrific waste of money because it combined too many functions into one: crew launch, temporary space station, science lab, satellite launch, and satellite recovery.

That last one dominated the entire design, and pretty much ruined any possibility of economical operation all by itself. It was driven by the military, not NASA. The irony is, I don't think they ever even used it...

I'll just give you this linkdump to StackExchange on the subject so you can stop spreading incorrect information.

Which commercial aircraft are capable of computer-only landings, without human assistance?

Why don't pilots always use autoland?

Autoland is typically only used when it absolute has to, which means when the weather dictates or when it needs to be used for currency requirements.

Why do we still use pilots to fly airplanes?

On modern commercial airliners, how much of the flight could be fully taken care of by the auto pilot? (Note the word 'could', not 'is')

I'll just give you this linkdump to StackExchange on the subject so you can stop spreading incorrect information.

Which commercial aircraft are capable of computer-only landings, without human assistance?

Why don't pilots always use autoland?

Autoland is typically only used when it absolute has to, which means when the weather dictates or when it needs to be used for currency requirements.

Why do we still use pilots to fly airplanes?

On modern commercial airliners, how much of the flight could be fully taken care of by the auto pilot? (Note the word 'could', not 'is')

I'll just give you this linkdump to StackExchange on the subject so you can stop spreading incorrect information.

Which commercial aircraft are capable of computer-only landings, without human assistance?

Why don't pilots always use autoland?

Autoland is typically only used when it absolute has to, which means when the weather dictates or when it needs to be used for currency requirements.

Why do we still use pilots to fly airplanes?

On modern commercial airliners, how much of the flight could be fully taken care of by the auto pilot? (Note the word 'could', not 'is')

I'll just give you this linkdump to StackExchange on the subject so you can stop spreading incorrect information.

Which commercial aircraft are capable of computer-only landings, without human assistance?

Why don't pilots always use autoland?

Autoland is typically only used when it absolute has to, which means when the weather dictates or when it needs to be used for currency requirements.

Why do we still use pilots to fly airplanes?

On modern commercial airliners, how much of the flight could be fully taken care of by the auto pilot? (Note the word 'could', not 'is')

> http://programmers.stackexchan...

-1 for trolling

Talented engineers use whatever works. All of Google's on Perforce. Surprising? Yes, but apparently that works for them.

I'm not sure I follow; just because a piece of malware comes from the internet doesn't mean your only diligence must be in your web browser (... and email client, torrent client, ...). Nowadays, we're more plagued than ever when it comes to zero-day malware, meaning that A/V misses it the first time around. You need a local A/V scanner that regularly evaluates potential threats, ideally upon each execution.

Ad blockers only protect you from malvertising, not straight-up malicious web sites. These days, they're as important as A/V (and often more effective), but you really want both. Microsoft has in the past caught fewer viruses than even ClamAV (Windows Defender is lauded as "better than nothing, but it’s not a whole lot better. Most of the popular antivirus [solutions] can do better." I'd happily take the free solutions from Avira, Avast, AVG, or Panda over it. I currently suggest Avira to my friends and family, though I don't run Windows.

See also this security question on Stack Exchange, which shows how a similar misconception (protecting only filesystem edits) is similarly risky.

http://aviation.stackexchange....

Seems roughly a quarter of the total weight during flight is in the "payload containing" part of an airplane.

It's the same thing with people like Magellan or your very own Columbus. So much of what we were taught about these people was so very wrong it's appalling

That's the thing: How history as taught to schoolkids is and has always been completely political. Its about teaching kids the "proper" foundational mythology. If that makes it so whitewashed that its boring, more's the better. Then kids won't go off on their own and learn about the bad things their ancestors did (or worse yet, their government is still doing).

On the plus side, the result tends to be so boring that kids don't actually learn much of this BS. I think kids are actually a lot smarter here than we give them credit for. Those of us who got interested in History in general did so off of our own research, not through school.

Obligatory plug: Wikipedia today is a great resource, but if you have questions about history, check out the History StackExchange site

Why do technically-knowledgeable give their work self-defeating names?

Rust: Happens with iron as iron becomes useless red dust.

Gimp: (1) a derogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medical problem that results in physical impairment.

LaTeX: Use two different alphabets to write a name! Inspired by the Greek word ÏÎÏ. Sorry, Slashdot can't display those characters.

I'm not sure how knowing your LAN IP is 192.168.0.101 is going to identify you. The only way to make that a viable attack would be to pwn another system on the LAN (such as the router) and phone home through it. At that point, you don't even need WebRTC, just a JS-based port scanner.

They already did that. The Thunderbolt displays only work with Macs because they require a special OS X-specific driver that turns them on. They have no power switch otherwise and are completely controlled by the Mac you hook them up to.

Actually, they do have a Windows control-panel bundled with some Windows-side driver stuff in Bootcamp 5 that can do that and control the brightness as well on a non-Mac Windows machine.

Not as convenient as it could be; but Slashdotters shouldn't have a problem with doing it.

And you don't need a Mac or Windows 10 to download or install it.

That's an answer to my question that makes me very sad. Apparently, the misuse has become common enough in this context that it's now in the dictionary, so the answer to my question is "yes, we've given up".

The article was talking about acoustic vibrations (sound). Lessening vibration is called damping. Dampening has connotations related to emotion that do not apply in the same way, but the words are similar enough and dampen misused enough that now it doesn't matter, apparently.

Comparative graph for usage of "acoustic damping" and "acoustic dampening" since 1920

Discussion of this topic.

There are innumerable reports that say you're wrong:

http://travel.stackexchange.co...

Yeah, they should have used one of the programs discussed here to generate a more readable address.

Yeah the Phenom thing is a good one, we were trying to figure that out earlier in hangar flying. (Also a PPL.)

This is certainly a military "area denial" test, with the secondary effect of "aviation users, let us know if there's any gotchas we didn't know about as we move to GPS-only" (NextGen). Probably there will be no actual impact, and if there is, between pilotage, dead-reckoning, and VORs pilots should be just fine. If they aren't, they really shouldn't be flying anyway. IFR makes things slightly more interesting, but then again they have ATC to work with.

Aviation GPS is unlike your car or phone, and it comes with a wide range of self-monitoring built in. First RAIM and now WAAS can tell you if you're experiencing a degradation of sufficient magnitude to mess up your navigation - in particular, a RNAV approach - and you need to switch to an alternate (or go missed, for the approach case).

The interesting thing here is that WAAS will be affected, but the FAA doesn't require you to have a non-GPS backup to operate under instrument flight rules (IFR) if your GPS is WAAS. So I guess if you're IFR you should just not go there...? Or have a backup... (for this one case)? That's the only thing that's weird to me. They need a better story here.

The military does these things all the time. Not sure why this one is making the news - here's an identically-sized one from 2015 (the reason for the identical size rings is just line-of-sight plus earth curvature to those altitudes)

Are you positing that the client creates the hash from the user password?

That's not how it works. If the client generated the hash, then the hash would essentially become the password, and all of the benefits of hashing and salting would be lost.

There's a pretty good discussion here about why hashing occurs on the server:
http://security.stackexchange....

On the back end, if you must store passwords, make sure they are hashed using a modern secure algorithm (AES-256, SHA-2 or SHA-3) and salted, and do that as soon as possible in your back-end processes. No, your users do not need a way to recover >

No. Use one of

• PBKDF2
• bcrypt
• scrypt

instead. See: http://security.stackexchange....

" but I still want a border/filter to keep out the folks from (say) ISIL/Daesh."

It just won't work, so don't place too much faith in your immigration department.

I was curious to know if there are any countries with no restrictions to who can enter and/or live there. Andorra requires no visa to enter, but I'm guessing living there is a different story. In terms of allowing both, the only one that came up was Svalbard. According to some post:

"Although governed by Norway, there are no restrictions for foreigners to enter, reside or work on Svalbard."

Cool...ice bears!

Why would you expect the code for this program to be of such a size that the human mind couldn't grasp and verify

Colloquially, if its bigger than "Hello World", it has bugs. Lots of "Hello World"s have bugs too.

But if you are talking about Formal Verification, that's actually a research topic in CS. Its possible to do, but very expensive. Usually you have to use special compilers designed for that, like SPARK. You ever heard of anyone using SPARK? Well, that should tell you how common that is.

But even then, that doesn't mean you don't have bugs. As Math/CS god Donald Knuth once said of a relatively more simple queuing algorithm: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

Computers can't do this for you either. That's part of Computability Theory. You've got the Halting Problem in general, and Rice's Theorem more specific to mathematical transforms. There's a halfway (but not great) discussion of this on this SE Question.

According to this guy - who actually did some testing - both the mic and speaker are typically good to at least 21 KHz.

I think it's a terrible hotkey, backspace? It's an awful idea, pretty sure I use ALT back as well. That being said, when people fuck with your workflow, it's frustrating.

Chrome loves to not give a shit about standards or let people customise things. They are as arrogant as Apple.

Right. those arrogant bastards at Apple won't let you configure ANYTHING like Keyboard Shortcuts....

I have a 2010 Macbook Air. Performance did get worse with each update of OSX and I was told that El Capitan would be better but I didn't notice an improvement. Lately, Chrome has been burning up the machine which goes to 100% and full fans when opening more than a few tabs... some weird stuff there so I switched back to Firefox. My UI comments are in comparison to Linux (I haven't used Windows for 15 years). My reference to toy UI refers specifically to the "skeumorphic" UI which I find childish and counterproductive.

Now I KNOW you're lying!

For the last two or three major revs., OS X has almost completely removed the skeumorphic and "lickable" 3-D-ish design elements. In fact, Scott Forrestal was basically fired over the design war between his love of skeumorphic UI and Jonny Ive's love of "minimalism". Ive won. So, unless you are talking about certain design elements in Logic Pro, you will be hard pressed to find many skeumorphic applications in El Capitain.

I did enjoy Spotlight at first but for some reason later updates to it have made it almost useless. I used iMovie occasionally but, again updates made it confusing and difficult. I avoid iTunes like the plague but it (and iCloud) keep intruding.

You aren't very smart, are you?

Spotlight has actually gotten better, and they have improved the interface in El Capitan. But apparently you can't handle ANY change whatsoever.

As for iMovie, I disliked the new UI at first, but they actually SIMPLIFIED it. Once I messed around a little, and did a little online searching, I found that it is, overall, a little better than before. Having said that, I was pretty glad that Apple still offers iMovie HD 6 for download. Install that, and you will be right back to that old familiar iMovie.

Don't like iTunes? DELETE IT. Done. And the only time iCloud "intrudes" for me is at startup, when it prompts me for a password. I click "Cancel", and that's the last I EVER see of it. But, if you find even that too "intrusive", you can completely tell it to go away:

Adjusting iCloud Settings in El Capitan

Now wasn't that hard? It took me about 30 seconds on Google...

I appreciate OSX Unix roots but the substitution of the "Command" key for the standard Control key for some (but not all) functions is something that just keeps irritating me.

If you are referring to Cut/Copy/Paste/Undo/Redo, as a person that goes back and forth between OS X and Windows, that is the hardest thing to retrain. HOWEVER, you have it exactly backwards; those concepts ( and the keyboard shortcuts therto) actually ORIGINATED ON THE MAC in 1984 (and in fact, might even go further back to the Lisa). It is the OTHER OSes that COPIED THE CONCEPT, but didn't have the Mac's Command Key; so THEY Substituted the Control Key for Apple's Command Key.

Next time, learn some history...

And although you CAN reassign MOST keyboard shortcuts in OS X in the Keyboard Preference Pane in System Preferences, the shortcuts above are a bit more "intrinsic". HOWEVER, the last time I tried to do that was in OS X 10.2, so they might be more well-behaved at this point. having said that, the tool "Keyboard Maestro", while not free, could even reassign the "editing" keys; so you might want to check it out.

And actually, it is INDEED much easier now. You don't need Keyboard Maestro at all...

The "Finder" program has been inexplicably crashing since El Capitan. I just don't understand how they can screw up a simple basic file list.

Maybe because it is much more than that. You really ARE dull, aren't you?

a public company has an obligation to its shareholders to make as much money as possible.

Except they don't.

The sooner people stop repeating this blatant lie the sooner people will start holding companies and the people within them to proper moral standards.

Maybe they saved even more lives than they took, both Japanese and American.

FWIW: That exact question was asked on the History stack.

As the author of the top-rated answer there, I can try to summarize: If we stick to the debate among professional historians (and not random people with grudges), the schools of opinion are:

• 0.25 - 0.5 million US lives and millions of Japanese lives were saved.
• Thousands of US lives were saved, and 0.25 million Japanese lives were lost

Which camp a historian falls in depends on weather they believe the Japanese would have surrendered very soon without a US invasion of the home islands or not. (If you are interested in the pros and cons for those, read the link I gave). But personally I think from the US perspective they were forced to behave as if it was going to be worst case for their side (the first option). If historians *today* still aren't sure which it would be, arguments that US planners should somehow have known the collective thinking of enemy leaders at the time is patently ridiculous. If we can't figure it out in hindsight, they certainly couldn't know then.

There was an interesting article in Foreign Policy a couple years ago (possibly paywalled link here [foreignpolicy.com]) which argued that the Soviet declaration of war was what really prompted the surrender. The author bases this on several arguments, among them:

The problem I have with this argument is that you don't hear a lot of serious historians making it. The guy who wrote that article (Ward Wilson) is a full-time anti-nuclear activist, not a historian. In other words, he spends all his time trying to convince people that Nuclear weapons are inherently bad, and should all be gotten rid of.

Now that's a legit opinion, and he's welcome to it. I can certainly think of less noble ways to make a living too. However, its indisputable that 1) He's not an expert on the Pacific theater of WWII, and 2) The existing historical consensus that the nuclear drops precipitated the surrender is very inconvenient for him in his day job.

Wilson's argument is discussed in this question on the history stack, if you're interested.

How do we know it's a link if it's the same color as the text? The whole point of hypertext is that links are called out visually.

CSS can be used to change the followed link color. http://www.w3schools.com/css/c...

The problem is if someone's browser overrides that setting, for example.

Some people find darker backgrounds easier on the eyes--there is less light emitted so it is not as big a change from ambient indoor light.

However, studies have shown that black text on a white background results in easier focus, so there are some people where black-on-white is better than white-on-black. https://ux.stackexchange.com/q...

Conclusion: if you can afford (or benefit significantly from) user customization, pick the least offensive default based on market research but leave both options available. If you don't, some of your users will migrate to another search engine.

Oddly enough, water is conductive, especially when in food. Do you find food nutritious? Strangely, ice, which is far less conductive, doesn't defrost in a microwave all that easily, yet it's water molecules. Explain that.

And tell me, how does the microwave, the actual wave, know the difference between food and foil? It acts one way with food, and another in metal foil?

Did you try heating 99.9% alcohol in there? Why did it get hot?

Why do you avoid the questions and simply repeat nonsense? Is it a religion with you?

Did you not read the supplied link? Or is too scary to confront your old wives tale?

How come astronomers use the "Water hole" at 1.6GHz for their observations, yet the oven works at 2.45GHz? That's not very resonant if you're off by that much... And keep in mind this "water hole" is caused by water at astronomical scales, not the cup of water in your microwave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://physics.stackexchange.c...

To make it simple, the food is a dielectric.

"The absorption (equivalent to dielectric loss) is used in microwave ovens to heat food that contains water molecules"

Dielectric loss? My heavens! What is that??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But they're talking about currents and stuff. Must be wrong. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll put some aluminum foil in the microwave, since it's not polar and induced current has nothing to do with it, it's perfectly safe.

Two-Step Authentication

No guarantee. A lot can be obtained from third-party sites, to which people login using their existing accounts. It is not only Slashdot, which allows you to login with your Yahoo! or Facebook credentials...

When you use this method on a web-site, you get a notice, that you authorize the site to "access your contacts" and some other information. This is easy for the sites to set up and they like it because they want to encourage people to comment — it increases "pageviews". The site itself may not be abusing this access (some operators may not even realize, they have it).

Unfortunately, not all sites are good at guarding it — this is how your entire Yahoo! addressbook, for example, may end up in the criminals' possession without them ever actually accessing your mailbox. Having such addressbooks, spammers can (and do!) generate customized spam in which you appear to be the sender for each of your contacts and which opens with the salutation you used to identify the contact. Such spams, obviously, have a far higher chances of being read by the victims — and the links in them are much more likely to be clicked.

Surely you mean two thirds ?

I've seen occasional questions about IFTTT security issues (link, link, link), but nothing that isn't theoretical or speculative. Seems like there are a lot of avenues for compromising your network security and privacy. I'd love to see some hard facts about IFTTT security.

There's a really great discussion of this over on Stack Exchange: http://aviation.stackexchange....

Your fallacy is you keep forgetting that copyright is for a LIMITED time.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Originally it was 17 years. Now the duration is a retarded author's lifetime + 70 years.

Holding popular culture "hostage" for the sake of greed is immature.

The fundamental problem is copyright kills creativity, yet copyright is ignored in the fashion industry.

>> Q. How many friends can I loan my DVD / BluRay to before it becomes piracy?
> All of them. It only becomes piracy if they make a copy of it.

False.

1. If copyright is still ACTIVE then the answer is: All.
2. If copyright has EXPIRED then the answer is: None.
3. You're forgetting that in some places in the world, such as Canada, Germany, etc. you can loan your _original_ to a friend, and they CAN _legally_ make a copy, and return the original partially due to a) a levy tax on blank media, and b) due to a legal loophole:

With physical media like tapes or CDs the "owner" is the person in possession of the original copy. This definition made it legit, at least in Canada, to borrow original materiel, copy it, and then return.

Thankfully coercion for the criminal tax is ignored sometimes.

> It ain't fucking rocket science, dude.

No, shit Sherlock. However, Copyright Law is NOT black and white, when the law keeps changing:

* MPAA says making a backup copy is illegal. That is, you can NO longer legally archive your original DVD's which is retarded.

* When even lending your CD to a friend is illegal (WTF!?), the whole system has become corrupt.

You are under no obligation to follow bad laws.

Time to grow up kid and let me help you out. Then again, you do seem to be taking something from their playbook. Unable to dispute anything, and goes right for the insults.

No, seriously, whoever does it, why is it a problem? If she adopted a bit of a southern drawl in front of white southerners, is it white-on-white racism?

http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/4084/what-causes-some-people-to-unconsciously-imitate-the-accents-of-others

Sorry, you're wrong. Aside from Bessel beams (which are unphysical), any wave is going to diffract at the edges, due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. See here and here. Frankly, that we stopped short on perfect lasers "just because" when even this article demonstrates the limitations, is an odd notion to take into your head.

NTFS

OS X has had built-in read-only NTFS support since I think day one. I have definitely read NTFS drives with OS X. And since MS has never published the specs for Write or Format for NTFS, they can hardly be blamed. But apparently, you actually can enable NTFS WRITE (don't know about Formatting) on a per-Drive basis. Or, if you just want to pull out your wallet, these guys offer full NTFS support in OS X for the princely sum of $16.95.

But MacFuse brings supposedly full NTFS support (disclaimer: Never tried it) to at least Userland on OS X.

Android

Seriously?

NFS3

Not out-of-the box; but it supposedly can be fairly easily done with a little Terminal witchery.

Well, let's take a look at an example: http://stackexchange.com/legal and you'll see that first off MS would be mis-representing itself as a real person.

Any web crawler does exactly the same thing.

They could access some data under Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is irrelevant in this case, you understand we are talking about reading a site and learning from it which has nothing to do with creative commons, right? You seem to be falling into that same "on a computer" trap that these false patent "innovations" do. The fact that it is a computer learning from it makes no difference.

If there were no legal point to be made, why would Stack Exchange even have that in the ToS?

There is a legal point to be made, it just isnt relevant in this case. What part of creative commons (license) do you think applies here?

I know what you're getting at with crawlers--if certain types of scraping weren't allowed, then we couldn't even have Google.

What do you mean by "certain types of scraping" being "allowed"? I dont think i have seen any distinction in terms of what elements of a public website a machine is and is not allowed to look at.

OTOH, I think there's a difference between presenting search results that obey robots.txt as opposed to snarfing down an entire web site's contents in violation of their ToS.

How is it in violation of their ToS compared to a search engine? You say they would be "snarfing down an entire web site's contents in violation of their ToS" but this an odd and ambiguous statement, it doesn't seem to be in violation of their ToS and certainly I can instruct my machine to visit a whole bunch of websites and "snarf down their entire contents" if I want, in fact I often do that for offline viewing so I can read and learn from them later.

Well, let's take a look at an example: http://stackexchange.com/legal and you'll see that first off MS would be mis-representing itself as a real person. They could access some data under Creative Commons. If there were no legal point to be made, why would Stack Exchange even have that in the ToS? Maybe that's a loaded question.

I know what you're getting at with crawlers--if certain types of scraping weren't allowed, then we couldn't even have Google. OTOH, I think there's a difference between presenting search results that obey robots.txt as opposed to snarfing down an entire web site's contents in violation of their ToS.

The legal basis isn't for me to decide; it's for lawyers, which I'm not. I'm just guessing how I think they'd respond so I guess my guess is as good as yours.