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Michael Hart (of Project Gutenberg) has it right. He's been saying for about a decade now that publishers, music companies, software companies, etc. are trying to move us into a world where ownership as we know it will no longer exist; nothing will be owned (at least not by consumers), everything will be rented. E.g. http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2003&post=2003-01-22,3>here

This is an issue that both liberals and conservatives should be united on. The desire to own stuff goes deep in the human psyche. The person who rents everything is utterly dependent on a high, steady stream of income can't survive even a short interruption or reduction in that stream. It's a very insecure and anxiety-provoking way to live.

I don't know if anyone else has thought about this, or if it's even practical, but why not establish a court system for High-Tech cases?

The idea of a "science court" [PDF] has been batted around for a few decades now.

My understanding is that the security model is actually pretty old, and has been around since at least 1979.

...and his Little Wars: A game for boys from twelve years of age to 150, and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boy's games and books. (Dig the not-so-veiled sexism of that title!) Yes, his rule set for gaming has passed into the Public Domain, so you can use them for free if you want to.

Little Wars was initially released in 1913. A 2004 printed edition of the work comes with a foreword...by Gary Gygax.

Maybe it was written by one of these people:. (Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to post the link).

"He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree"

"The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon."

"John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met."

Yes, it's true that some individual people do benefit from business process and software patents, but they do nothing to encourage innovation. In fact, they end up stifling innovation. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, not stifle it.

Do you actually believe this? Patents, from the very beginning, were devised to protect existing technology. Vested interests write the law, not some non-existent altruistic ideal handed down from the heavens.

Yes because patents were meant to encourage progress. Originally Thomas Jefferson, who didn't like corporations, opposed patents however his friend James Madison convinced him they could encourage progress.

At least I didn't pay fictionwise, which is charging twice as much.

Randy Barnett in "Restoring the Lost Constitution" (ISBN 0691123764) argues that the law should be interpreted as a reasonable person would at the time of enactment (original meaning). Not the intent of the writers, but the meaning.

So what makes you think that we'll be able to figure out accurately the nuances of English from 225 years ago? And more importantly, what makes you think that the "meaning" of those laws can be definitely fixed by appeal to that criterion? Do you think that the people who approved the laws didn't disagree among themselves about what those laws meant, at any point?

There are many common phrases from many years ago that people currently misunderstand, for example, "one nation under God". So we will most certainly need experts in a specialized field to read laws. (Hey, don't we have those already?) And those experts will be fallible, and will often disagree about how to read a text.

Think of it this way in terms of contracts: contracts are written down so it is understood what the parties agreed to. If the meaning of the contract can change over time based on who reads it then the whole point and premise of writing it down is lost. The only way to maintain a contract's validity is to interpret based on the meaning of when it was written down.

The problem here is that no document can fix its own meaning, no matter how carefully you write it or read it. Therefore all your talk about the "meaning" of a contract or of the constitution begs the question that it had a fixed meaning when it was written down. How can a contract or a law have a meaning beyond the concrete applications that are made of it? (This is all Wittgenstein 101, applied to law...)

"Banal" can be pronounced with two unstressed syllables, as you do, or it can rhyme with *giggle* *giggle* anal. Notice that in Merriam-Webster's online, banal has THREE possible pronunciations. One of them is BANE-all. The Oxford English that comes with OS X seems to agree. In an interview, I'd probably pronounce it with unstressed syllables, but in casual conversation you should pronounce it however you want.

On a tangent, Language Log often cites examples of hyper-(in)correctness like yours.

In short, it stored meta information about objects and relations and then used a database and some inference algorithms to resolve these entities to protolanguage "nouns" and "verbs."

Here is workshop paper on the research.

It's not ironic! It's creepy. (God, kids these days.)

So, if the UN is NOT a US evil-puppet organization why is it letting the people from Gaza strip suffer on the same way the Jews suffered on the Warsaw ghetto?

Come on, wake up. The USA are the biggest losers of this century already, and are we on the rest of the world supposed to pay because of your stupidity and childish mentality?
You have to let your world power go, as the Brits did after the WWII. You are a destroyed nation, on all aspects: economic, political, cultural, military and ideological.

You don't have anymore the moral authority that used to give you enough power to oversee world institutions.

By the way, your US is the nation that OWES more money to UN... http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Urgent_Action/dc_7997.html

Many people seem to forget that the whole concept of intellectual property is entirely unnatural and the word 'property' in this context is a misnomer. Without some very strong reason no-one should have the right to stop me from copying something. There is no natural ownership to the intangible. We only extend 'rights' to intangibles if it benefits all of us. Quite often the applications of intellectual properties do not benefit 'the whole' on balance. Rather quite perversely they simply protect private interests. There is also a vast difference between theory and practice. In theory we have fair use. In practice the courts have severely limited its application. So frequently even in educational institutions, materials are denied to students because of fear of copyright (unless they cough up very big bucks). Many types of copyright of simply unnecessary for creativity. We had no copyright on buildings before December 1, 1990 but we do after that date. Did that damage creativity there? No of course not. But now they are copyrighted.

We also quite often forget that preventing people from speaking, or singing, or playing an instrument, or creating a DVD or using a photocopier in a way they deem proper takes away from their personal freedom and their economic freedom. Does anyone take into account the money saved on allowing people to use more copyrighted, trademarked and patented concepts with greater ease. Does the $15 I save because an album is 30 years old and 'could' be actually out of copyright count? Take that $15 and multiply is by 10 million. Now people have saved $150 million. You have to weigh their costs and benefits against the artists. And let us not forget that the artist and the corporation that has been putting out their music has been making money off the copyright for 30 years. They have made a fortune.

What about the right to use copyrighted material as part of a large of a larger whole? Eg a documentary film that wants to use short copyrighted clips. Often the cost of obtaining them makes their use uneconomic. Here commercial prorogation of something new is inhibited by 'Copyright' despite the fact that the reason d'etre of 'Copyright' was to encourage commercial prorogation of new ideas and art. Copyright owners who extol the value of copyright often 'forget' quite conveniently that IP may actually supress creativity. Often copyright is used simply to deny public use of material. So let me get this right. You need copyright law that allows the complete prevention of artistic material from circulating at all so you can encourage future creativity. Because mr/ms creative would only produce something for the public if they knew they could prevent any public dissemination. Right?!

I always get a laugh out of the heirs who already enjoy copyright revenues. So they didn't do jack sh*t but they are an heir so they should rake in cash for doing nothing. There was a New York Times article that had the audacity to argue for perpetual copyright. So you want to put on a Shakespeare play - better pay his descendants or some rich corporation. You want to read your bible in the church. Not before you hand over some cash. This idea is absurd but it's scary that the copyright crazies are advocating it. They claim they own ideas. We get this...no-one owns ideas! IP is not susceptible to ownership. We just put restrictions on IP for societal benefit not for the narcissistic desires of the original producer and certainly not their descendants.

Some of the restrictions of IP impinge on free speech. Sometimes you need to be able to film some event that has political implications without worrying about the 'person' rights. Eg Police brutality. Think this is an exaggeration? Just wait till you hear that free speech is cool but because some political speech intruded on commercial ri

Real programmers publish their resumes in LaTeX format. Unfortunately, only other real programmers can read them.

FWIW, I was most interested in the "gardening accident". I didn't do the research yet, but I wondered how many of those references related to Spiñal Tap drummer John "Stumpy" Pepys.

invalidates them from having a higher meaning

Why is there a need for the attribution 'higher'? I am working from the premise that 'meaning' is a transitory phenomenon.

impossibility in rationalizing the two

Here I am troubled with the term 'rationalizing' – integrating? as parts of a whole?

I'm a philosophical Taoist mathematician

Well, I am in good faith :) that I am in the process of approaching the still distant target to have a grasp of Taoism (for short: Taoist agnostic).

CC.

Similarly, if you want to talk about snow, you can't beat the Inuit language, and if you want to talk about time as relative rather than discrete units Hopi is a good choice, and if you want to talk about burning things, you can't beat Latin - damn those Roman pyromaniacs.

And if you want to talk about urban legends and half-remembered bits of Whorf, English is just perfect.

Further explanation from the Language Log: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005246.html

What if this Christmas-time article lumping together all the other Christmas-time articles as a hoax is itself a hoax?

Either way, the research (whether it's real or made up) clearly indicates that the difference is more than 2%, and the BBC (and Next Generation, and Slashdot), suckered or not, is just flat out wrong: Wii Bowling (most sedentary Wii game) had a mean energy expenditure of 190.6 kJ/kg/min (with a SD of 22.2) and the Xbox had 125.5 kJ/kg/min (SD: 13.7).

This is a hoax. The original research "appears" at http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7633/1282

It is worth noting that BMJ regularly provides joke studies on Christmas.

Further explanation from the Language Log: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005246.html

One reason it's important to do so is that the US Supreme Court doesn't render advisory opinions; to have the Court overturn a law that makes something a crime, somebody has to actually break it, be tried and found guilty, appeal and then lose in the appellate courts, then appeal to the Supreme Court.

Further, there are tribal and hunter-gatherer cultures still alive on earth whose entire grasp of counting is "one, two, lots" or "one, two, three, lots" -- but, interestingly enough, never "one, two, three, four, lots."

Actually, this doesn't go all that far back. The reconstructed proto-language for the Indo-European family had nouns and adjectives marked for single, dual, and plural. Relics of this appear in most modern Indo-European languages, though English has simplified it almost out of existence. In Arabic and some other Semitic languages, there's a dual form that is still active, complicating life a lot for people trying to learn those languages. So the one/two/many system is still with us, built into many of our languages' basic morphology.

Of course, it's a mistake to make too much of such bits of linguistic evidence. You run the risk of noticing languages that lack such plural forms (such as the Chinese languages), and inferring that they must be either much more or much less advanced (it's not clear which) than the languages with plurals.

Less than a month ago, there was an interesting Language Log article illustrating a major pitfall of claims that some particular language can't express some important concept. The author shows that English is such a primitive language that most of its speakers have no words to express a class of concepts that are of growing importance in our modern world. These concepts can only be discussed by technical specialists using a vocabulary of words borrowed from other languages. While non-specialists may have heard those words, they are generally incapable of using them correctly or engaging in meaningful discussions of the concepts.

It's a useful example to keep in mind when reading comments on what other "primitive" languages can or can't express.

You forgot the obligatory link! In Soviet Russia YOU are inside the chip!

If you look at Apple's description of the time machine functionality, it's not possible for it to work the way they claim. Suppose my backup drive has a capacity of 80 Gb, and so does my primary drive. I record 79 Gb of data onto my primary disk. I run out of space, delete all of that video, and then record 79 more Gb of video, filling the disk again. Then let's say I go through the cycle for a third time. They're claiming that I can then go back in time and get back my first or second video. No way. I don't have enough total disk space to store all three videos. So realistically, there are implementation limits, which they conveniently don't mention. Their description makes it sound as if everything Just Works, and will never fail to let you recover old files. In reality, it will Just Do Its Defaults, which may or may not be what you would have liked. Does it default to deleting the oldest files first? If so, then that's probably not what you would have liked in many cases, because you probably care more about preserving the 500 kb manuscript of your novel than about preserving the 70 Gb video of your kids' soccer games. Maybe it has some heuristics, so it tends to delete bigger files first, or files of a certain type first. Well, maybe that's what you wanted, but maybe it's not. Or maybe it asks you to make the decision whenever the backup drive fills up. Well, maybe that's what you want and maybe it's not, but it wouldn't be the same thing as the zero-work solution that Apple claims in their description.

In reality, I think you can have some, but not all, of the following:

1. The system takes zero work to configure and maintain.
2. The system has minimal impact on performance.
3. The system has simple, highly predictable behavior (such as always deleting older versions first).
4. The system has behavior that is what you choose.
5. The system doesn't require buying an expensive external drive that takes up space on you desk.
6. The system automatically gives you an off-site backup in case your house burns down.

Personally, what works for me is the unison file synchronizer (I use it on Linux, but it's cross-platform), plus monthly backups on CD or DVD. Using the network file synchronization takes care of two things: (1) I have an off-site backup that's always fairly up to date; (2) it makes it easy to undo mistakes like "oh no, I didn't want to delete that file." The CD backups let me (3) go back in time and get very old versions of files. I'm not saying that my solution is right for everyone. No solution is right for everyone. However, my OSS solution works much better for me than Apple's expensive, proprietary system would work for me.

Could you please supply a reference for this statement? TIA

The top entry is responses to questions from Slashdot.. Nice!

Rep. Boucher:

I am in the process of drafting comprehensive legislation which will
reaffirm the fair use rights of the users of information and create a
better balance between the copyright owners, who currently dominate the
Congressional debates on intellectual property measures, and the users
of copyrighted information.

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2001&post=2001-03-28$7

http://www.boycott-riaa.com/editorials/boucher
http://www.jambase.com/Articles/Story.aspx?StoryID=10943
http://www.house.gov/berman/newsroom/p2p_analysis.html

I've seen very few textbooks released in e-book format; most of the ones I have seen were in very specialized subjects and released under the GNU FDL.

Do you live in the Third World? They are most useful there, however they are used elsewhere. U Penn list more than 25,000 e-books. The University of Texas lists more. Those are just the first 2 results of a Google of e-books "text books", which lists almost 25,000 results. Of the XO ZDNet" has this to say:

"Assuming this device can survive its harsh environment and continue to function over a period of a half-dozen or more years (still a stretch, in my estimation), a single lightweight (but rugged) device, could easily outlast 100 textbooks in a hot and humid environment. And, by any measure, a $100 laptop equipped with 100 electronic textbooks could be worth its weight in gold in such a third-world setting."

Shielding a 2m audio interconnect cable will provide no benefit, and might cause much harm.

Set your cell phone behind your stereo and tell me that again. RF is a problem if it is enough to be detected in a non-linear circuit such as an amplifier stage.

Lay an unshielded interconnect cable next to the amplifier power cable and tell me that again..
Inductive coupling is an issue not to be ignored. The lack of the ability to pick up a 60 HZ radio signal is no reason to disregard capacitive pick-up from the power cord or inductive pickup from any power wire carrying current, such as the wire powering the baseboard heater.

If you manage to form a ground loop, you can create a ground loop big enough to actually recieve interference!

This is absolutely true! Ground loops is a common problem in the improper installation of sound gear. Proper layout of power, ground, and signal wiring is the job of a good studio audio engineer. Proper use of balanced cable, equipment selection to use balanced inputs to reject common mode noise, and other aspects are all part of the design of a quality sound system installation.

Here is a link to some information on common grounding errors. Of note is item 8.
http://www.ese.upenn.edu/rca/instruments/misctutorials/Ground/grd.html

Here is a good paper regarding with dealing with the subject. It's a little lengthly, but that's the diffrence between understanding the concepts and buying a $7000 cable that won't fix the problem.
http://www.epanorama.net/documents/groundloop/index.html

Anyone who has done extensive audio work has had to deal with this.

from the article..

Usually ground loops are an after-the-fact type of problem in which the end-user blames the installer, the installer blames the manufacturer, and actually nobody is at fault. Neither the manufacturer nor the installer can usually predict where a loop will occur. Only after the system is installed can it be determined if a problem will exist.

Ground loop problems can be corrected and avoided. It is important for the dealer, isntallee and the end user to be aware that this problem can occur. It is a good idea to design the system to avoid most obvious source of this kind of problems, and then be prepared still to face some problems when starting to use the system. A ground loop problem may occur at several points in the system, and each occurrence of the problem must be corrected individually.

In my work in the audio field, this was one of the top 3 issues I had to deal with and the most time consuming.

Also, I have to say that I hate this role of correcting elementary errors of linguistic analysis, or questioning unthinking prescriptions that are logically incoherent, factually wrong and promptly disobeyed by the prescriber. Historians aren't constantly confronted with people who carry on self-confidently about the rule against adultery in the sixth amendment to the Declamation of Independence, as written by Benjamin Hamilton. Computer scientists aren't always having to correct people who make bold assertions about the value of Objectivist Programming, as examplified in the HCNL entities stored in Relaxational Databases. The trouble is, most people are much more ignorant about language than they are about history or computer science, but they reckon that because they can talk and read and write, their opinions about talking and reading and writing are as well informed as anybody's. And since I have DNA, I'm entitled to carry on at length about genetics without bothering to learn anything about it. Not.

And here's a list to get you started.

Perhaps necessary was too strong of a word. They thought it's benefits probably outweighed it's problems. However these between Jefferson and Madison clearly show they were very interested in copyright from a philosophical point of view. It wasn't just put into the Constitution to make the law standardized. They considered actually banning copyright and instead adding to the Bill of Rights the idea that such monopolies would be illegal.

Case law is mixed on this, however. NWA lost in Bridgeport v. Dimension even though the sample was modified until it was unrecognizable (and the original sample wasn't what anyone would call melodic or even recognizably music anyway).

Since you asked, I went back and dug up some information. You can verify this stuff yourself with very little effort on the Web. In fact, I strongly suggest you do that, rather than believing everything you are told by the mainstream media, or asking others to do the work for you! You have no way to know if ANYBODY is telling you the truth unless you look things up and verify them to your own satisfaction. The very popularity of An Inconvenient Truth proves that point.

One point made in that movie (and repeated, seemingly endlessly, by news sources) has been the retreat of the snows and glaciers around Kilimanjaro. While those have in fact been retreating, it has long been known (and there were two more recent papers released in 2004) that the cause is lack of moisture due to deforestation at lower altitudes. Temperatures around Kilimanjaro are actually colder now than before the retreat.

Another misleading point made in the movie was about the ice shelves in Antarctica that have been melting. However, some ice shelves around Antarctica are ALWAYS melting. Others are growing. The ice sheet on Antarctica continues to get thicker.

Gore says that melting ice could raise the levels of the oceans by many meters. What he does not mention, is that it would take thousands of years to do so at the current rate -- which according to IPPC reports has NOT accelerated during the 20th century! And you know what that rate actually is? 1 to 2 mm per year, and it has been pretty steady for the last 8,000 years!

So much for "the blue is growing"... if by blue you mean ocean water. Does more fresh water make you nervous for some reason? But as for glaciers... NOBODY is denying that the earth has been getting warmer! I repeat: it has been getting warmer for 6,000 years! Big frigging surprise! The debate is not about warming, it is about whether WE are causing it! And guess what? Most of the evidence says: little if at all.

There is lots more. Here is one reference (University of Pennsylvania):

http://www.upenn.edu/researchatpenn/article.php?1247&soc

I am sure you can find many others yourself, if you were to go look them up rather than asking others to do your homework for you.

Cobian is excellent. Along a similar vein, I also like Unison File Synchronizer.

Seconded. Anyone interested should read the Language Log article written this morning about it.

This is pure hype; it's not even close to a legitimate attempt at the imperfect machine translation systems that are already in use, much less a step forward in research.

You were right in expecting gibberish, just read here for example: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/004867.html

unison -batch performs excellent automated synchronization. incron can be used to run unison -batch whenever a file is modified. Together they'll do the job.

Is unison still supported in any way? According to its website, it seems a little confusing. I'm not sure when this quote was written. "Unison is no longer under active development as a research project. (Our research efforts are now focused on a follow-on project called Harmony, described at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/harmony.) At this point, there is no one whose job it is to maintain Unison, fix bugs, or answer questions. However, the original developers are all still using Unison daily. It will continue to be maintained and supported for the foreseeable future, and we will occasionally release new versions with bug fixes, small improvements, and contributed patches."

Unison is 2-way rsync. But as the poster noted, unison/rsync doesn't easily support automatic synching (that I know of)- you have to kick it off and then deal with any conflicts, etc., manually. I think the poster is looking for ideas of at least automating Unison/rsync (BTW does rsync support 2-way updating, as the poster explicitly mentions?).

As someone who relies on running unison manually (too lazy to figure out how to automate on my Windows box), I'd be interested in relevant solutions.

Maybe a two-way rsync tool made just for this purpose?
You might have to do A-B, A-C, A-B type syncs for more than 2 paths, unless you stick to a hub/spoke or cascading distribution model.
Not all conflicts are automatically resolved, by default.

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Good luck.

That's correct, enjoy them at Project Gutenberg or the Online Books Project at U Penn. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the one by Plumly ...

The "Chinese Room" always makes me think of examples such as the one analyzed in this article. Look through the archive at engrish.com for many, many more examples, many quite funny. Here's one of my favorites. (How would an AI - or a human - know that this isn't the correct translation, unless they had and understood a lot of the context? It is a valid translation of the two characters, after all. ;-)

The ongoing attempts to make computers handle human languages keep falling afoul of this sort of problem. The above article uses the term "dictionaryitis" to characterize such translations, which are especially common with Chinese.

But it's a good, reliable source of humor.

Recently, foreigners in China have been lamenting the fact that, with the expected surge of tourism during the 2008 Olympics, Beijing has been redoing a lot of their bilingual signs. The improved translations have eliminated a lot of the fun of reading signs while travelling around the area.

Unison is an excellent rsync-frontend with a nice gui for synchronization without the "grinding halt"... http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

I'm currently playing with Unison http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ which does syncing through SSH, it runs on Linux, MacOS X and Windows (on Windows you have to install SSH though) Is runnable from a command line and is configurable from a simple text file describing what directories you want synced and what exceptions there are.

It's very similar to rsync except that it has an added module that keeps a history of the directory contents to properly handle syncing file removals/renames/etc. It is quite nice.

Reduce the language to just one word for everything and you'll be fine.

Linguistics is way ahead of you here...

"I'm a linguist. My job is to make communication simpler. I invented a language with no grammar, no syntax, no ambiguities. In fact, it had only one word: CHICKEN."

Also note the recently published paper on this topic, "Doug Zongker, "Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken", Annals of Improbable Research, 12(5) September-October 2006, 16-21, and the associated presentation.

I don't know where linguists get their ideas from but I wish I had a supplier :-P

Reduce the language to just one word for everything and you'll be fine.

Linguistics is way ahead of you here...

"I'm a linguist. My job is to make communication simpler. I invented a language with no grammar, no syntax, no ambiguities. In fact, it had only one word: CHICKEN."

Also note the recently published paper on this topic, "Doug Zongker, "Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken", Annals of Improbable Research, 12(5) September-October 2006, 16-21, and the associated presentation.

I don't know where linguists get their ideas from but I wish I had a supplier :-P

I came into this business from a bit of a back door (although I suspect it to be a common back door these days). I started with spaghetti code PHP, moved to OOP php with php4, then php5. I am now quite frustrated by the partial OOP implementation of php5, as I develop more complex applications. I become even more frustrated with PHP the more I learn about java.

I started with PHP too a long time ago. I've tried Perl, Python and Java. I'm a (very satisfied) Ruby programmer right now since it has a good balance of nice features taken from other languages, in my humble opinion. Learning Ruby has motivated me to know more about programming languages and now I'm looking to try SmallTalk, LISP and Haskell.

If you like Java's object orientation, you'll love Ruby's real object orientation. OOP as it was intended[1]. It's like Java done right, and without the verbosity.

The type safety at compile time makes it far easier to develop bug-free code ...

The reality is not that categorical. Static versus dynamic typing benefits is debatable[2]. Incidentally, Java seems not to be type-safe [3]

Additionally, Java gives me code re-use at it's ultimate.
[...]
Not to mention that I do my development on my Mac, and deploy software across our organization to Windows and Linux desktops.

You realize that code reusability and portability is not Java's exclusive, right?
Yes, you do, of course.
Don't stop at Java. Keep trying other languages. You'll be surprised.

My humble suggestion: Ruby.

[1] Dan Ingalls: Object-Oriented Programming - Google Video
[2] Static and dynamic type checking in practice
[3] Java is not type-safe

They /can/ be a signal for bad code, but they /can/ make certain types of code much clearer, e.g. iy you have a long list of test cases that you wish to test in turn - exiting any one if it fails.

I guess I wasn't as clear as I could've. If you write a function that's a big if-then-else statement with many clauses, it's ok to have return statements as the consequents of the clauses, even if they're "in the middle" of the function. This code is readable because it's clear what the structure is: it's a sequence of parallel conditional clauses. You can see from a quick look that in any one invocation, only one of the conditions will ever be successful. Also, if all the consequents return from the function call, this is an example of parallel structure, which is something that tends to make both text and code more readable. (Comparing this to the way Lisp does this is instructive; in Lisp, you'd use a single multi-clause conditional expression like COND; from seeing COND in the code, you immediately know that the outer layer of the logic is a multi-clause conditional, and that only one of the clauses will succeed.)

The key point I'm trying to make is more or less your point: the complaints about return "in the middle" of a function is really a complaint about code that doesn't make its flow control evident.

Closely related to using return "in the middle" of a function, another code smell is using a lot of if-then statements where you could have used a single if-then-else statement. If-then-else is good, because it makes it visually clear from just looking at the code that only one consequent will be executed in any call, and therefore, means that to understand the function, you may not need to consider cases where more than one of the blocks of code is executed. To use a bad example, if you have a long if-then-else statement with 8 clauses, the syntax of the language guarantees that only one of the consequents is run each time, for a total of 8 possibilities; if you have the equivalent without the else clauses, there are, in principle, 256 different combinations of consequents that could get called, and the only way you can figure out that 248 of these can never happen is by reading the code carefully.

Well Seagate say a maximum drive temperature of 60C

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/10 0389997c.pdf page 12

But that might not be the whole story

From here
http://www.calce.umd.edu/whats_new/2003/1203.pdf
"Nakamura (2001) derived an activation energy of 1.27 eV for the fatigue of piggyback PZT actuators, a common wearout mechanism, which resulted in a predicted lifetime of 6.4 years when operating at 3 kHz at 25C."

Googling for the paper I can only get the abstract
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/i el5/20/19818/00917646.pdf?arnumber=917646
"Summary:The experimental lifetime predictive equation for a piggyback PZT actuator was derived. A piggyback actuator is a fine actuator of a dual-stage servo system that is essential to increase the recording density of hard disk drives (HDD's). The obtained equation agrees with Arrhenius' equation."

Arrhenius's equation give a reaction rate which is exponential with temperature

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~wwalsh/arrhenius.html

So the drive will fail faster at 60C than at 25C. You could actually work out the constants in the equation from the figures in the first link and then work out the fail time at 60C. I can convince myself to spend a few dollars on a big fan from the above graph though. This guy

http://www.silentmods.com/section2/item213/part3

says "At the temperature of 65 C the life time of hard disks is shortened two times if not more.". Looking at the Arrhenius graphs above that might well be the case.

Or if you can't fit a fan to you Mac, try to get a low power drive. Either a 5400rpm one, or even a 2.5" one and an adaptor. Since you need an adaptor anyway, you could even get a 2.5" SATA drive and a mounting kit (ideally one that acts like a big heatsink) and connect it via a PATA to SATA dongle.

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.