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The GP's dates are a little off, but here's the standard starting point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He

It's quite a poorly written article, even by Wikipedia standards; but good enough to get you where you want to go.

http://www.international.ucla.edu/asia/news/article.asp?parentid=10387

I think one of the hindrances for businesses to move to Linux on the desktop is the lack of programs for Linux that allow the complete lock-down of the desktop.

Lack of? It comes with every base distro, even floppy disk versions!

You should probably check man chmod

Even this fine outstanding developer knows chmod!

> It's just yet another technology invented in a lab for academics' sake.

Yeah, and what's that ever given us?

http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~ianb/history/
http://www.research.ibm.com/about/past_history.shtml
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/awards.shtml
http://www.parc.com/about/milestones.html ...

Uhh... .org has already signed. .se (Sweden) has been signed for years.

If you want to get a list of all signed domains, check out:

http://secspider.cs.ucla.edu/

Look up any TLDs you want there.

Here is the scan of Kleinrock's notes from that day, which was October 29th (giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "early October"): http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~lk/LK/Inet/1stmesg.html. It was October 30th before they got it to work without crashing (nothing's ever easy). Kleinrock is still alive and still at UCLA, and these scans are on his own university web site, so that seems pretty authoritative to me.

I'm having doubts too, after seeing this yesterday at http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~lk/LK/Inet/1stmesg.html. It's a scan of Leonard Kleinrock's lab notebook of this event, which is dated Oct. 29th, and it seems they didn't get the whole message across without crashing until Oct. 30th. He's still at UCLA, it happened in his lab, and this is his university web site.

You can look at places without the death penalty and see that that claim is absurd.

You can also look at history and at other places to see what happens to innovation when there are no patents, or when patents expire. Which seems to show that innovation goes up slightly in such cases.

Before I go read your 325 page PDF on my lunch break, would you mind giving some quote or an indication of what page to look at first?

The slippery slope really does exist!

(That is, while in logic, a slippery slope argument is a kind of fallacy [they aren't logically inevitable], in the real world, many kinds of political change do in practice resemble a slippery slope, where each successive change makes it easier to introduce the next one.)

Several key inventions, like the steam engine, electricity, airplanes, cars, electronic transistors have launched entire industries that have provided jobs and other material benefits to millions of people for over a century. Without these inventions, these jobs wouldn't exist, these industries would not exist, and you and your parents, even the govt., would probably be poorer.

And without patents, those inventions would have been more widely available sooner, with more improvements. You can find a number of actual historical examples here.

Nobody is asking for a handout, just what is rightfully, and justly owed.

You bloody well are asking for a handout, and at a net cost to society. Go look at history, note the prevalence of simultaneous inventions. Look at the innovations in software before it was considered patentable. You're seriously trying to claim that you're that indispensable, that only you can come up with a particular idea?

It's equivalent to an assertion that if we didn't have the death penalty, there would be a thousand-fold increase in the murder rate. Sure, that's an interesting thought, but there's no evidence whatsoever, so on its own, it doesn't really mean much.

You can look at places without the death penalty and see that that claim is absurd.

You can also look at history and at other places to see what happens to innovation when there are no patents, or when patents expire. Which seems to show that innovation goes up slightly in such cases.

At that point, he's indemnified. Therefore, he performs no due diligence, because it's expensive and he's fully covered against loss.

But he never does that anyway, because if he did ask someone knowledgeable they specifically told him that looking can triple his liability and is therefore a really bad idea.

Innovation doesn't happen by itself, people have to spend time and money on it. And patents ensure they get paid for their efforts.

Except of course, that you routinely see things like the burst of innovation in steam engines that happened immediately after Watt's patents expired (quotes from here):

During the period of Wattâ(TM)s patents the U.K. added about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following Wattâ(TM)s patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of steam engines changed little during the period of Wattâ(TM)s patent; while between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to have increased by a factor of five.

Many new improvements to the steam engine, such as those of William Bull, Richard Trevithick, and Arthur Woolf, became available by 1804: although developed earlier these innovations were kept idle until the Boulton and Watt patent expired. None of these innovators wished to incur the same fate as Jonathan Hornblower.

The impact of the expiration of his patents on Wattâ(TM)s empire may come as a surprise. As might be expected, when the patents expired âoemany establishments for making steam-engines of Mr. Watt's principle were then commenced.â However, Wattâ(TM)s competitors âoeprincipally aimed at...cheapness rather than excellence.â As a result, we find that far from being driven out of business âoeBoulton and Watt for many years afterwards kept up their price and had increased orders.â

In most histories, James Watt is a heroic inventor, responsible for the beginning of the industrial revolution. The facts suggest an alternative interpretation. Watt is one of many clever inventors working to improve steam power in the second half of the eighteenth century. After getting one step ahead of the pack, he remained ahead not by superior innovation, but by superior exploitation of the legal system.

This finding also supports earlier research which showed the area of the brain associated with pain lighting up due to social rejection. There's a PDF from 2007 which describes the earlier research. It was also reported on the Australian Science show Catalyst.

Oooh, what nice anecdotal evidence you have there! That sure proves exactly... nothing. Got any studies citing column inches positive/negative on given issues? Then shut up, you are talking out of your ass.

Why yes, Yes I do! Here is a study from UCLA:

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS' "Evening News," The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

That's 90% of media that is left of center. 90%!!! So, evidently, I'm not the one whose speaking from the ass.

Watch that and please tell me that the press is not biased.

The press is not biased in the way you want them to be.
All you've demonstrated is that a reporter was probably biased.

Um... reporter ARE the press. You don't see the producers, camera men, or anyone else that is needed to produce a news cast. All you see is the reporters and anchors. If they are biased, then the news is biased. I've shown that the reporters are biased, without even mentioning the tingle up Chris Matthews' leg when he hears Obama speak.

Also, you've ignored the UCLA study that backs my claim up. See, it's not just me. There are many MANY studies that all say the same thing.

For differentiable products in a competitive market, typically competitors' reactions to pricing changes preserves the monotonic quality of the demand curve. That is, decreased price will always result in increased demand, so it does not change whether this applies to differentiated products as well as commodity goods.

For items with a high fixed cost, it still holds as well... it's just that prices approach some value above the unit cost. This other value is the unit cost plus adjustments... that adjustment is proportional to the fixed cost but inversely proportional to the production volume. For very high fixed costs, the market leads to monopoly or oligopoly as economies of scale work... but a reduction in unit cost, if it allows pricing flexibility, will tend to a reduction in price.

Here's some additional reading if you've got an economic bent...

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/ely.dahan/content/unit_cost.pdf

I am of course tlkaing about science based medicine, Natural path, homeopaths, acupuncturist and others of there ilk are a different matter.

I can't speak for either naturopathy or homeopathy, but to lump all acupuncturists into failing to practice medicine with an empirical basis is just nebulous.

My father went to the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine (which works closely with UCLA Medical School) to study acupuncture:
http://www.cewm.med.ucla.edu/

He credits part of his very successful career in acupuncture (which included a lot of collaboration with MDs to treat chronic illnesses) to having participated in this program.

There are acupuncturists (and medical doctors, for that matter) who fail to center their decisions around evidence-based medicine. That noted, to declare that "all doctors" from a certain discipline as being of no value is hardly a scientific way to approach it.

All of those can be accomplished in Fortran 90/95. There is even direct language support for the third requirement (private members of derived types), and I do it all the time; it works just like other public/private declarations, just placed inside the type definition. Inheritance and polymorphism (I'm guessing this is what dynamic binding means from a quick look at Wikipedia) are a bit trickier, but the techniques have been worked out and documented by these fellows (Viktor Decyk's page is also quite helpful). If you prefer to avoid typing out a certain necessary amount of boilerplate to do this, you could use Drew McCormack's forpedo preprocessor (described in detail on MacResearch). So, it's not necessary to wait for 2003, and in fact, many people haven't but have managed to write and maintain very large codes in Fortran 90/95. Good luck!

Let me tell you something: God speaks ForTran, and the guys who translated the bible from ForTran to Hebrew did a really really bad job.

Indeed. For example, here's the FORTRAN source code to Genesis.

It is better to set the gulity free than to punish the innocent.

The more interesting societal issue: At what ratio?

I meant write your own stuff

George Harrison tried that, got sued for having accidentally copied someone else's song, and lost. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976). What reasonable steps should I take when writing music to make sure that the same thing doesn't happen to me?

Anyone who is actually interested may want to check out one response paper to the Vul Voodoo Correlations paper which points out a number of problems that Vul himself has in his analysis. http://www.scn.ucla.edu/pdf/LiebermanBerkmanWager(invitedreply).pdf

There's a big problem with the BMI. It's a quadratic aproximation to a cubic mesure. I.e. the body should be proportional to the cube of the height.

No, it most certainly shouldn't.

Cube square law.

Large humans cannot be scale models of small humans. Bone strength is proportional to the square of the linear dimension, not the cube. If you scale the skeleton up by a factor of X, the mass you hang on it had better scale up by no more than X^2. Check out Haldane's essay "On Being the Right Size"

He's a researcher at UCLA and has ran a government study over the course of 30+ years to conclude that marijuana does not cause cancer, and even possesses anti-cancer qualities. Cells die before they have a chance to mutate. The closest thing you'll get to his research is an interview with him on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJmQ16cGBHU&feature=player_embedded And you can see Dr. Tashkin's profile at the UCLA website. http://www.lung.med.ucla.edu/faculty/tashkin.htm He's America's leading expert into smoked marijuana, and he was employed to conduct this research by the US Government quite some years ago.

Don't use the same three chords the spin doctors did.

I don't follow what you're saying. "Two Princes" by Spin Doctors uses D, B minor, A, and G. I just want to know how to avoid losing a lawsuit.

I've found Phil Agre's tips http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/how-to-help.html to be extremely useful. I re-read it every 6 months just to be sure I'm headed in the right direction.

Make own song, 1 minute long (must be original, but quality not important).

That's harder than it sounds. The good hooks are taken, and accidentally copying one of them could land you in court. It happened to George Harrison.

I know this will hard for you US'ians to accept but it's a proper role for Government to regulate what you can eat when your obesity rates are driving up the cost of medicine.

Yes, you're right. The government should not allow its property to do anything dangerous. After all, that might drive up the cost of medicine.

Let's ban fatty foods, soft drinks, alcohol, driving, boating, motorcycling, sky diving, marathon running, and playing music too loud. What's that, random special interest group? You're experiencing censorship envy? Ok, we'll ban computer monitors, too, since they cause eye strain. Anyone else need anything banned?

Its nothing new, the idea of cars talking to each other to transmit road conditions, keep a certain distance, allow faster fluid road usage, impose road-travel pricing, etc have been around for a while.

http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/070508_network-on-wheels.aspx
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-10895_7-6733591-1.html

There are probably other reasons to have it, from the 2nd link:

Google is also taking a strong interest in this technology. Why would an Internet search company be interested in car technology? Because it wants to extend its reach into your car. And where Google goes, Yahoo and Microsoft are likely to follow. Right now, navigation systems have static databases of restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses. A vehicle communication infrastructure could make that dynamic by sending requests for local restaurants, for example, over the network, with results coming back from Google, Yahoo, or any other online database.

so - safety, taxation, and advertising. I suppose it would also make stealing your car nigh on impossible, and it might help with congestion too.

In addition to Oxyrhynchus, significant finds have been made at Herculaneum and Pompeii.

If those ones take your fancy more than the ones from Oxyrhynchos -- and there are some good reasons why they might -- you might find it useful to have these links at your disposal:

• Oxyrhynchos papyri site (Oxford) -- here's some info on the imaging process, but I think it's rather out-of-date and only covers basic photography in the visible spectrum
• more up-to-date info on more advanced imaging techniques, with regard to papyri from Bubastos
• the Philodemus Project, dedicated to the most important ancient author to be discovered from carbonised books found at Herculaneum

For texts, the Big Two sites are Oxyrhynchos and Herculaneum (though, IIRC, the idea of using multispectral imaging for damaged manuscripts was first got from trying to decipher the Dead Sea scrolls).

What's distinctive about Herculaneum is the finding of the works of the philosopher Philodemos, as noted above. Editions have started to appear in the last two decades; I think there's at least one translation available. Oxyrhynchos is overall much more important, though. Oxyrhynchos doesn't have a Philodemos, but that's more than compensated for by the sheer quantity of papyri -- in the first century of publication only about 1-5% have been edited and published so far, and that isn't because they've been slacking off. No complete literary works have emerged from Oxyrhynchos -- but we do have gajillions of letters to a relative who lives in the next town over, contracts, land deeds, shipping lists, shopping lists; but also a few bits of literary stuff -- tiny bits of lost plays, about a thousand lines of an otherwise lost epic called the Catalogue of Women, heaps of pieces of texts of which we already had complete copies, and other odds and ends. And yes, in response to the sibling post, ancient porn too. (Well, I know of one sex manual by Philainis, at least.)

Lots of things *could* be used for drug delivery. How about demonstrating that things can be put into and taken out of these boxes before jumping to conclusions?

Protein capsules which can be opened and closed have been tested for more than 20 years. Loading those things with concentrated enough drugs to make them work has not been too easy.

hmm... I certainly think that it can result in waste, but on the whole, proper patent laws are a benefit.

Remember, letting an inventor earn a profit off of their invention isn't a bad thing.

Patents do this by permitting the patent holder to forbid other people from doing certain things or using certain knowledge. It seems that the negative effects of this tend to outweigh any positive effects of making it easier for inventors to turn a profit.

Uhh no, that is definitely not the case that there is any sort of unanimous consensus on Keynesian economics. It didn't work in the 30's, it in fact prolonged the great depression. All that you're doing is spending a bunch of money we don't have that will have to be procured through borrowing/printing more of it(increasing inflation), or by raising taxes. Sucking money out of the economy to be put into the federal govt. to filter it back into the economy just does not work.

Not a lot of Middle Eastern content? I'm a PhD student in Cuneiform Studies, and I'd like to point out that a conservative estimate of the number of tablets (which are equivalent to European manuscripts) excavated exceeds 500,000. The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative has catalogued more than 225,000 from museums and private collections around the world, with pictures and translations of many of them.

Comparatively there is much less evidence for much of early European history (or any continent's, for that matter).

You are correct. There's no shortage of Middle Eastern material already on the Internet ETCSL, Library of Congress, CDLI all have collections of cuneiform documents from Sumeria, Akkadia and Babylonia. It would have been child's play to collect all of that and add it to the collection.

They might well do so, in future. The standings in the league table are merely the starting point. But, yes, because of who is doing the starting, it IS no surprise that American and British researchers would concentrate on texts closer to home, particularly as there's going to be a national incentive to prioritize home-grown stuff above museum pieces. Especially if *cough* some of the museums would rather not remind people of what they have.

On the other hand, Middle Eastern countries don't have quite the same fascination with massively ancient cultures, many simply don't have the money or the resources (Iraq being a good example), and even when they DO have these, more than a few of the really early writings from the region are, ummm, elsewhere.

I suspect he means something like this. As if most of law isn't about balancing one person's freedom versus another's.

And as if we are here to discuss copying files from one directory to another on one's own personal computer.

Because copyright law has continually gotten fairer for the individual and there is not a single case of industry pushing for new legislation to strengthen the right holder's side of an an already extremely unbalanced system.

If you don't believe the system has changed that much then just look here

If you need to know exactly what changed here is the wikipedia article on the U.S. DMCA which was copied in one form or another by most other first world contries.

It's even gotten so extreme now that they have even passed a law to get the government to enforce what is basically a civil matter. Seen here

Read Galbraith's book, "The Great Crash", where he analyises the 1929 stock market crash.

Read how UCLA professors Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian's study concluded "FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years. Others believe protectionism like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act made the Great Depression worse. After the US raised tariffs on imports other nations retaliated by raising their own tariffs against US goods. With US employers not able to sell goods internationally they could not pay employees.

Falcon

Now why would you post the link to buy the book instead of the site with a freely downloadable PDF version?

Different scientific fields have somewhat different practices for what does imply causation, driven often by some form of pragmatism. In physics, for example, you typically hypothesize causation, then try to think of things that your hypothesis predicts that haven't yet been shown, and see if you can find those, or find contrary evidence. In medicine and the social sciences, you often try to collect many sets of correlations and then try to factor them out of each other, e.g. compute effect of income on disease X, after controlling for level of education and geographic location and diet. Then in cases where it's practical to do so, you might try the "gold standard" of controlled experiments, though these too must often deal with confounding factors. In other fields there are yet more subtly different standards.

For one attempt to treat the issue fully rigorously, which also shows how complex it is both mathematically and philosophically, I recommend Judea Pearl's book Causality .

A Measure of Media Bias

Tim Groseclose
Department of Political Science
  UCLA

Jeff Milyo
Department of Economics
University of Missouri

December 2004

How about this?

This poll follows another Rasmussen poll conducted July 19 which revealed that 57 percent of likely voters think Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has received the best treatment from the media so far, while 21 percent or respondents think Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has received the best media treatment.

Additionally, 49 percent think reporters will try to help Obama win the presidential campaign, while 14 percent think reporters will help McCain.

Media bias is real. You can deny it all you want, but it exists and no amount of you gnashing your teeth will change that. Ironically your argument is identical to most on the right, who just want the public to be able to evaluate the facts for themselves.

For instance my mother (average american, only sorta follows politics) for years talked about the "jobless recovery" under Bush, until I sat her down and showed her that the unemployment rate was actually higher under Clinton. The media just drove it into her head, and she refused to believe otherwise until I showed her facts.

The fourth most centrist outlet was "Special Report With Brit Hume" on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC's "World News Tonight" and NBC's "Nightly News" to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

Sounds surprising right? The report eventually concludes to with that while most media leans left of center, they are almost all more moderate in comparison to our politicians.

And no offense but I take it you are not a reporter. The fact that you would be unable to provide an unbiased article on the DNC does not indicate that people trained in journalism would be unable to do the same. The ability to put aside personal beliefs is a skill that is stronger in some compared to others. Lawyers do it everyday for instance.

As a businessman I believe Open Source Software reduces cost so an individual with a new idea can Quickly and for Under 2K get his message out.

That is, if new ideas even exist. Say someone named George writes a song, records it, and sells copies. If George's song is a hit, some big-name songwriter named Ron sues George, alleging that George's song was a copy of Ron's song and asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars. George says he didn't mean to copy anything, but the judge says it doesn't matter because George had heard Ron's song years ago. This actually happened, and Ron won. It turns out that there are only a limited number of possible melodies of any given length in a given musical scale, and judges compare only a few notes and contours of any two melodies to determine if they are "substantially similar". Under these conditions, how can anybody be sure that he actually has a new idea?

The hallmark of a mercantile nation is hoarding.

You're using "mercantile nation" differently than others do. For instance Dictionary.com says "2. engaged in trade or commerce: a mercantile nation."

if China were really trading fairly

China doesn't trade fairly, that I admit. If China wanted to trade fairly then they'd have to let the market set the price of yuan or the Chinese Renminbi. But instead the government does.

she would be spending that money around the globe and those dollars would ultimately work their way back to the US economy.

China does spend, er invest, that money throughout the world. For instance "China to invest in Brazil oil". China is one of the biggest investors in Africa. It's because of China that there hasn't been a solution in the Sudan before, but the Chinese are pushing for peace now.

those "New Deal" era reforms made by Roosevelt that were successful

Some economists believe FDRs reforms prolonged the Great Depression as I've said elsewhere. Here's what the Wall Street Journal has to say about "How Government Prolonged the Depression". The protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, enacted in 1930, may of made it worse.

Obviously, all taxes are bad in some theoretical sense, but if you were going to tax -effectively-, and raise revenue to do what it is that governments do, then, the things to tax would be hoards. Capital Gains taxes are the -worst- form of taxes because they encourage hoarding. On the other hand, sales taxes are pretty terrible too because they discourage spending, and that ultimately lowers the velocity of money.

Depending on how you look at it taxing something but not another may be bad, or visa versa. Taxing investments drives money away from investments, and taxing spending drives money away from spending. However not enough people in the US invest enough, too many people have been living beyond their means since at least the 1990s. That stimulus package passed in early 2008, where rebates were mailed out to tax payers, failed because many people used it to pay off debt instead of spending it. If they had spent it though then they would of had more debt. Damn if I do and damn if I don't. About the only thing I can see working is to reduce government spending so taxes can be lowered if not eliminated. Reduce the size of government and use user fees for those things government does mean to provide, like roads.

Falcon

Ever heard of the New Deal? It, not World War II, brought us out of the Great Depression.

Citation needed to back this statement up. Some economists have concluded the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression, and I'll back that up with some citations:

• "How Government Prolonged the Depression"
• "New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America"
• "New Deal or raw deal?"
• "FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate"

There's more from where those came from.

Falcon

I suspect that the sonoluminescence experiment (not to mention the Bell's inequality one) might be a little over-the-top for a first-year set of students. There are a lot of subtleties to them that would probably get lost unless the students really understand the basics about the principles.

      However, one often doesn't need a fancy setup for the sono experiments: I saw a talk several years ago where a student did the experiment extremely cheaply, and got fantastic results (and, I believe, the optics used to catch the results are probably quite informative in their own way). The technique is termed the "drop tube" method, and you don't need a transducer to trap/excite the bubbles. The abstract of the talk:

  Drop tube generates 10-W flashes of sonoluminescence (A)

        Brian A. Kappus, Avic Chakravarty, and Seth J. Putterman
        Phys. Dept., UCLA, 1-129 Knudsen Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095

  Use of a low vapor pressure liquid such as phosphoric acid, with dissolved xenon in a vertically exited tube, generates ~200-ns flashes of sonoluminescence with a peak power of 10 W. We are in the process of characterizing the bubble motion by use of backlighting, stroboscopic, and streak photography. We will also broach the topic of disequilibrium between atom and electron temperatures. [Research funded by DARPA. We thank Carlos Camara and Shahzad Khalid for valuable discussions.] a)Deceased.

and Putterman's webpage: http://www.physics.ucla.edu/research/putterman/gallery/index1.htm

This is perfect (not only) for high school students: "Solving mathematical problems: a personal perspective", Terry Tao You can even read it online: http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/preprints/problem.ps

If all the observed liquid on Titan is methane, it would only last a few million years, because as methane escapes into Titan's atmosphere, it breaks down and escapes into space.

Doesn't sound right. At a glance, from Wikipedia, if I assume methane is an ideal gas, the average velocity of methane gas is roughly:

v = sqrt(3kT/M).

Here, T = 94K, k =1.38*10^-23 m^2 kg/ (s^2 K), and M = 2.32*10^-26 kg (mass of a molecule of methane). Crunching the numbers I get that the average velocity of methane is roughly 400 m/s. In comparison, escape velocity from Titan's surface is 2.65 km/s. Titan's radius is more than 2,500 km. As I understand it, escape velocity scales as the square root of radius. So you'd have to be above 6,000 km radius in order to get escape velocities down to 400 m/s. But the atmosphere is nowhere near 3500 km thick. I just don't think this is a credible option for methane loss.

The second possibility is decomposition of methane due to UV light. Using the above formula, H2, which has a seventh the mass of methane has an average velocity of under 1100 m/s. That's not escape velocity until you're at a radius of 4,000 km. Plus, being on average 9.5 AU from the Sun, means that solar influx is far lower than on Earth. So you get something like 15 W/m^2 compared to 1300 W/m^2 at Earth. Hydrogen loss on Earth is pretty minuscule too. Plus, we're probably well below methane's freezing point by the time we get to the upper atmosphere (which I'd guess is probably mostly nitrogen with traces of other molecules). So just like water vapor freezes at high altitudes, I imagine that little methane reaches the upper atmosphere.

Solar wind doesn't play a role since apparently Titan is just inside Saturn's magnetosphere. The linked paper indicates that the dominate mass wasting process is the atmosphere's interaction with Saturn's magnetosphere.

To summarize, I just don't see the process that's going to eliminate most methane from Titan's atmosphere on the order of millions of years.

Here it is: Against Intellectual Monopoly (Boldrin and Levine).

Really insightful read; I forward it to anyone who still have the patent cotton-wool over their eyes.

Here in Korea, 90% coverage roughly translates as 1+ connections per household. Broadband routers permeate every apartment complex and many complexes offer in-house fiber-optic for half the rate of an outside company's rate.

You mean in Seoul or some metropolitan of Korea, as opposed to the whole Korea? For what it's worth, it's also easier to get fiber optics in metropolitan area in the US too. Not so easy if you live 30 miles into the woods. Try to find a decent patch of bushes in Korea...

Plus, many grandparents I know DO have broadband because they live with their children or vice versa.

You see, that's a major cultural difference than the US, where adult offspring seldom lives with the parents, let alone grandparents. Ever heard of the derogatory expression that someone still lives in his parents' basement?

I'm from Taiwan, which claims 100% broadband coverage by February 2008, but that just means the service is available to those who want it. It's a meaningless measure for broadband penetration.

There are many things that indicate lack of progress in the US, but broadband ain't one of them. Try to criticize social security, insurance, and the high cost of medical care. Try to criticize why construction workers here are so expensive and inefficient (blame it on the union?). Criticize their lack of appreciation in math and science education. Perhaps even the lack of a high speed railroad. These are real problems. Broadband is just a superficial measure.