The real problem with the used games market is that it's worse than piracy.
Horsecrap! Lets take a much more complicated scenario, but to simplify it, we'll ignore the details that don't matter.
A. New game is purchased for $X. Game developers get their cut, $C. B. Game changes hands some unknown number of times, possibly with intermediaries involved, possibly not. C. Final result, one and only one person owns that one copy of the game which was fully paid for.
All the other details (how much some hypothetical intermediaries might have made and so on) are completely irrelevant. One copy was sold to one owner, and one owner now owns one copy. That's all the developers can and should care about. The fact that they may be jealous of Gamestop's insane profits doesn't mean they deserve one nickel more money or that Gamestop is doing anything wrong. (Actually, they are doing something wrong, but selling used games is not it.)
Gamestore through reselling probably made far more in profit from selling used than new copies.
Gamestop has a near monopoly, and they're abusing it badly. Now, that's still not a problem for the developers (no matter how jealous they might feel about the situation), but it's a problem for us. Unfortunately, the only way to deal with a monopoly is to create competition (or regulate it, and I sincerely hope we don't come to that pass). So the game devs are jealous of all the perfectly legal abusive profits that Gamestop is making? Answer is obvious: open their own stores, and compete on used game prices. If there were competition in the used games market, Gamestop wouldn't be able to charge their insane markups (and they are insane).
Note that it doesn't have to be the developers competing directly with Gamestop--I only suggest them because they're the ones that whine about Gamestop's monopolistic profit margins. It could as easily be Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Radio Shack. The point is, Gamestop's insane profits don't come because there's something wrong with selling used games; they come because there's no competition, so they don't have to compete on price. Period.
That's fair enough; it's true that California is an exception. At the same time, the headline says he can't work "anywhere in the world", implying that California is not anywhere in the world. Jokes about the exotic and otherworldly nature of its inhabitants aside, that's not true, so the headline is false.
There's well-established connection between hackers and very hot foods, as documented in the Jargon File. See, for example, the entry on food and laser chicken. I know numerous nerds who are obsessed with the Scoville ratings of their condiments.
Also, as an AC noted, SCIENCE! But in this case, science that touches on a common nerd obsession.
you intentionally bought a device that is a walled garden
I intentionally bought a system that was advertised as being a cheap supercomputer which ran Linux and played games! At the time I bought it, it was more openly open than even the devices you mention, which are usually sold with no indication that OtherOS is even an option.
If Google's ad-selling news area doesn't benefit from using the photo, why are they using it?
The "ad-selling news area" that doesn't feature (or sell) ads? Is that the "ad-selling news area" you're referring to? You might have a valid argument if it weren't for the simple fact that you plainly don't. Obviously Google derives some benefit from their ad-free news aggregator, but mainly because the cost is so low, since they're already crawling the web. If you imagine that their use of (a thumbnail version of) your one little oh-so-precious pic really makes that much of a difference to their bottom line, then do what they suggested and file a goddamn takedown notice, rather than engaging in useless, misguided, and inaccurate whining on slashdot. That'll show 'em!
An even better example is the Watcom C/C++ compiler, where the initial release (in 1988) was v6.0, to suggest it was competitive with compilers from MS and Borland (which it was--more than). Version numbers have been irrelevant and nigh pointless for decades. For an interesting example of the opposite effect, where the version numbers are much lower than one might expect, consider the Linux kernel, which still hasn't reached v3.0 after nearly 20 years. How long ago was Win3.0 released? (And how long was the period between Win1.0 and Win3.0?) Or consider the X Window System, which made it up to v11 fairly quickly, but has stalled out there for longer than Linux has even existed.
I guess my point is that if you're trying to derive any sort of useful information from version numbers, without investigating how a particular project uses version numbers, you're simply wasting your time.
There's plenty of thieves' cant in the OED. Why shouldn't the dictionary document the language that people actually speak and write, rather than some made-up pseudo-platonic "ideal" language that bears only a faint resemblance to an actual human language. And what's the difference between a "prescriptivist" in linguistics and a creationist in biology? At least descriptivists do something that actually resembles science. The prescriptivists (like the creationists) don't seem to contribute anything more useful than converting food (and ideas) into excrement.
Note that "l33t" is not actually in the OED yet, and if it does get added, it will certainly be marked as slang, so I don't see the problem. It's not like people find things marked as slang in the dictionary and then use them in formal writing (at least, not if they're not idiots), and it's not like the presence or absence of a dictionary entry for "l33t" (especially if marked as slang) is going to have any effect, positive or negative, on whether and how people use the term. The type of people who use the term are unlikely to give a rat's ass whether it's in the dictionary. "Ain't" has been in the dictionary for decades, but I rarely see it in print outside of dialog, so I don't think the world is coming to an end quite yet.
I was literally going to shit my balls. Yes, I'm being facetious
Pick one, you retard. "Literally" does not mean "here comes some hyperbole!"
Yes, yes it does. Despite what peevologists[1] claim, the use of "literally" as an intensifier dates back hundreds of years, and can be found in formal and academic writing as regularly as in casual speech. The American Heritage dictionary lists this as a "usage problem", but still lists it. Collier's lists it without comment. Note that the "usage problem" doesn't say it's wrong, it merely observes that this is something some people complain about.
Words often have multiple meanings in English. Do you jump up and call someone a retard because they use "cool" to mean something other than "has a low temperature"? If not, why not? It would be no less silly.
If you want to complain about the ambiguity, don't worry. Linguists who have studied the use of "literally" have found that it's almost never used in ambiguous contexts. Nobody (not even you, no matter how much you might pretend) thought for a second that GPP actually meant that his testicles would be expelled via his anus. People naturally avoid the ambiguous cases.
And if it's not the ambiguity that bugs you, then why on earth does it bother you any more than the uses of "cool" or "hot" to refer to something other than temperature? I really am curious.
[1] I prefer the term "peevologist" to the term "grammar nazi" because the latter term implies that the peevers actually know something about the language they claim to defend, even though this is usually not the case, as here.
Really? Because even after it's been suggested, I'm finding it impossible to read as saying that the wife had died. Even if the commas were removed, "was used by my wife died" makes no sense. Dieds don't use.:)
Without the commas, it becomes a Crash Blossom that leaves me hanging in a world of no sense till I go back, reparse, and mentally fill in the missing commas. But the commas aren't missing from the actual quote, so the sentence makes perfect sense to start with, and I can't figure out how anyone could misinterpret it. Care to explain further?
Is it? Modern GPUs can do a pretty amazing array of complicated stuff, and I wouldn't at be surprised to find that each has its own strengths and weaknesses at particular tasks or subtasks. I agree with you that the results don't really matter to the vast majority of us, though.:)
I was going to raise the same point about optimizing compilers, but to your second point, I don't see a great deal of difference between "++i;" and "i++;" as far as clarity goes, and with operator overriding in (e.g.) C++, the actual work that goes on behind the scenes for the two flavors of "++" may well be more than any optimizing compiler can really cope with.
I strongly agree with the idea of striving for clarity and avoiding premature optimization, but when two approaches are equally clear, and one of them has a strong possibility of imposing pointless overhead, I see no reason not to avoid that approach.
Or for the projects where having to manage every allocation and deletion is tedious and gets in the way of actually implementing a program.
you know, for folks that never understood what RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) is or how to use it.
C++ offers both dumb pointers (for those rare occasions when you actually need them) and smart pointers, and C++0x will offer vastly improved smart pointers (shared_ptr)--currently available in Boost, and one of the best reasons for using Boost up until now.
People who insist on writing C++ as if it were a mildly enhanced form of C have no one to blame but themselves for the problems they encounter.
It is a valid complaint that C++ makes creating dumb (dangerous) pointers so much easier than smart pointers, but then if you use RAII for your classes more broadly, the need for pointers of any type is usually greatly reduced. Why, you can create whole complex structures of trees of lists of sets of strings, modify them wildly on-the-fly, and never once have to worry about pointers or allocation or deallocation.
There are plenty of reasons to complain about C++. The language is full of warts, and has some really tedious and error-prone corners. But if your complaint is simply about overuse/abuse of pointers leading to memory leaks, Ur Doin' It Rong(tm)!
If you're providing "publicly available source code" (as Firefox is, and Microsoft isn't), the export controls almost melt away. You have to send in a notification, but no review is required.
Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't have it quite so easy, but I'm sure that their reviews get expedited, so I seriously doubt that EAR/ITAR plays any role in this.
If you use unit tests, you won't need a debugger anymore.
Until something happens that you didn't plan for--some detail that you completely overlooked, or some quirk of the language that doesn't completely match your mental model. Then a debugger may be useful to determine just what it is that you forgot to add to your unit tests.
Not that I'm a fan of debuggers. I considered them to be a tedious, slow, and generally inefficient way to find bugs even before I discovered TDD. Since I started using unit tests, my use of the debugger for my own code has gone from once in a blue moon to I-can't-remember-the-last-time. But when it comes to other people's code, a debugger can definitely help get you up to speed quicker. And of course, other people's code, especially when it appears in third-party libraries, may well lack unit tests, no matter how religiously you write tests for your own code. So I still sometimes need a debugger--but not often enough that I'd set up a separate monitor for one.
The answer to that is to require compulsory licensing from the guild to anyone with the resources to do what Google did.
That might indeed be better than what's actually proposed. By the way, this is not a hypothetical scenario. The non-profit Internet Archive has been working on a similar project for many years (albeit much more slowly), and they were one of the parties that filed to oppose the Google Books deal, precisely because they would have been cut out and their labor (and hard-to-come-by money) would have been wasted.
Frankly, I'd much rather see a deal that allows the Internet Archive to continue their work, because I trust and respect them a whole lot more than I do Google.
So be sure you strip out all inline functions and macros from GPL header files and just use the structures, typedefs, and enums.
Inline functions and macros that are trivial or which constitute scènes à faire are not going to be protectable either. Thus "substantial" is the correct term (although it may not take a whole lot to reach something approaching substantial).
Even if they don't complain now, they could complain later on
So much for the theory that viablos is FM. I'm pretty sure that Florian knows about doctrine of laches, and won't bother to post such ignorant nonsense.
Are you bragging about your pathetically high user ID again, newb?:p;)
Anyway, everyone knows that Slashdot as created by the FSM only 6000 minutes ago, so obviously user IDs like yours and mine were merely planted to test our faith*.
* Isn't it interesting how often a "test of faith" resembles a test of intelligence, except with the opposite result expected?:)
You can already run that one with CGI, if your goal is simply to make your server commit suicide. No need for a GTK wrapper (which you forgot to provide in any case). I think, perhaps, you don't understand that the apps are running on the server and only using the browser for display and input.
I've only ever seen that on Windows installs, so I think your instinct about braindead installers is exactly correct. However, even in those cases, it would be better to use some simple and more accurate text, like:
You agree that you recognize that this software comes without warranty, except as required by law, and can only be redistributed under the terms of the General Public License (see the file named COPYING for details).
A clickwrap "license" with a single sentence--that would blow people's minds!:)
If the software is a library, though, it does get a little trickier, but mere APIs are not copyrightable, so you actually have to link with the GPL'd library for the GPL to have any affect. Merely compiling against the headers won't have any affect, and, to the extent that the libraries implement public standards (like POSIX or ISO C), even dynamic linking may not affect your program (if you can drop in a non-GPL'd equivalent library without affecting the operation of the program), as I understand it. (Anyway, libc's headers come with an explicit exception that if you use them with GCC, they don't require any license.)
I'm also not sure how with the Java precompiler or the Dalvik compiler itself is supposed to include the C headers that come with the kernel in your Android app, since, to the best of my knowledge, including a C header in Java is guaranteed to produce a compile-time error! The whole thing sounds pretty sketchy to me.
In the after-article article they make it clear that they're not trying to destroy the objects (which they cannot do in any event)
Unless they're very large objects (very large indeed!) I would think that trying to deorbit them would tantamount to destroying them. But no, I understand that the lasers aren't intended to directly destroy the objects, which is why I mentioned outgassing.
They also clearly state that they are relying on light pressure, not outgassing or heating in general.
Ah, well in that case I retract my comment, but as you say, the basic idea of moving the objects enough to avoid collisions is within the realm of the possible, and I would tend to suspect that they've had people with at least a rudimentary knowledge of physics look at their plan already. NASA may be cutting corners, but I find it implausible that they'd be talking about funding for an idea that any freshman could shoot down. So, until there's evidence to the contrary, I'm inclined to mark this as plausible, rather than dismiss it out of hand, as you seemed (to me) to be doing.
The light from the sun seems irrelevant, as it's not purposeful, though I imagine they would have to take it into account when calculating when and how (and whether) to aim their lasers.
Depends on whether it could be argued that you fall afoul of the Inducement Rule. If you just have the search box and no description, it would be hard to argue that you were "promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement", On the other hand, if it were labeled "Use this to find popular TV shows", then there's a good chance that it could be considered inducement.
It's pretty clear that Google does not promote the illegal use of their system, so the argument presented in the slashdot summary is basically meaningless. Whether IsoHunt mentioned the inducement rule in their brief, I don't know, but if they didn't, it's unlikely to carry much weight.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem with the used games market is that it's worse than piracy.
Horsecrap! Lets take a much more complicated scenario, but to simplify it, we'll ignore the details that don't matter.
A. New game is purchased for $X. Game developers get their cut, $C.
B. Game changes hands some unknown number of times, possibly with intermediaries involved, possibly not.
C. Final result, one and only one person owns that one copy of the game which was fully paid for.
All the other details (how much some hypothetical intermediaries might have made and so on) are completely irrelevant. One copy was sold to one owner, and one owner now owns one copy. That's all the developers can and should care about. The fact that they may be jealous of Gamestop's insane profits doesn't mean they deserve one nickel more money or that Gamestop is doing anything wrong. (Actually, they are doing something wrong, but selling used games is not it.)
Gamestore through reselling probably made far more in profit from selling used than new copies.
Gamestop has a near monopoly, and they're abusing it badly. Now, that's still not a problem for the developers (no matter how jealous they might feel about the situation), but it's a problem for us. Unfortunately, the only way to deal with a monopoly is to create competition (or regulate it, and I sincerely hope we don't come to that pass). So the game devs are jealous of all the perfectly legal abusive profits that Gamestop is making? Answer is obvious: open their own stores, and compete on used game prices. If there were competition in the used games market, Gamestop wouldn't be able to charge their insane markups (and they are insane).
Note that it doesn't have to be the developers competing directly with Gamestop--I only suggest them because they're the ones that whine about Gamestop's monopolistic profit margins. It could as easily be Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Radio Shack. The point is, Gamestop's insane profits don't come because there's something wrong with selling used games; they come because there's no competition, so they don't have to compete on price. Period.
That's fair enough; it's true that California is an exception. At the same time, the headline says he can't work "anywhere in the world", implying that California is not anywhere in the world. Jokes about the exotic and otherworldly nature of its inhabitants aside, that's not true, so the headline is false.
There's well-established connection between hackers and very hot foods, as documented in the Jargon File. See, for example, the entry on food and laser chicken. I know numerous nerds who are obsessed with the Scoville ratings of their condiments.
Also, as an AC noted, SCIENCE! But in this case, science that touches on a common nerd obsession.
you intentionally bought a device that is a walled garden
I intentionally bought a system that was advertised as being a cheap supercomputer which ran Linux and played games! At the time I bought it, it was more openly open than even the devices you mention, which are usually sold with no indication that OtherOS is even an option.
If Google's ad-selling news area doesn't benefit from using the photo, why are they using it?
The "ad-selling news area" that doesn't feature (or sell) ads? Is that the "ad-selling news area" you're referring to? You might have a valid argument if it weren't for the simple fact that you plainly don't. Obviously Google derives some benefit from their ad-free news aggregator, but mainly because the cost is so low, since they're already crawling the web. If you imagine that their use of (a thumbnail version of) your one little oh-so-precious pic really makes that much of a difference to their bottom line, then do what they suggested and file a goddamn takedown notice, rather than engaging in useless, misguided, and inaccurate whining on slashdot. That'll show 'em!
An even better example is the Watcom C/C++ compiler, where the initial release (in 1988) was v6.0, to suggest it was competitive with compilers from MS and Borland (which it was--more than). Version numbers have been irrelevant and nigh pointless for decades. For an interesting example of the opposite effect, where the version numbers are much lower than one might expect, consider the Linux kernel, which still hasn't reached v3.0 after nearly 20 years. How long ago was Win3.0 released? (And how long was the period between Win1.0 and Win3.0?) Or consider the X Window System, which made it up to v11 fairly quickly, but has stalled out there for longer than Linux has even existed.
I guess my point is that if you're trying to derive any sort of useful information from version numbers, without investigating how a particular project uses version numbers, you're simply wasting your time.
There's plenty of thieves' cant in the OED. Why shouldn't the dictionary document the language that people actually speak and write, rather than some made-up pseudo-platonic "ideal" language that bears only a faint resemblance to an actual human language. And what's the difference between a "prescriptivist" in linguistics and a creationist in biology? At least descriptivists do something that actually resembles science. The prescriptivists (like the creationists) don't seem to contribute anything more useful than converting food (and ideas) into excrement.
Note that "l33t" is not actually in the OED yet, and if it does get added, it will certainly be marked as slang, so I don't see the problem. It's not like people find things marked as slang in the dictionary and then use them in formal writing (at least, not if they're not idiots), and it's not like the presence or absence of a dictionary entry for "l33t" (especially if marked as slang) is going to have any effect, positive or negative, on whether and how people use the term. The type of people who use the term are unlikely to give a rat's ass whether it's in the dictionary. "Ain't" has been in the dictionary for decades, but I rarely see it in print outside of dialog, so I don't think the world is coming to an end quite yet.
Pick one, you retard. "Literally" does not mean "here comes some hyperbole!"
Yes, yes it does. Despite what peevologists[1] claim, the use of "literally" as an intensifier dates back hundreds of years, and can be found in formal and academic writing as regularly as in casual speech. The American Heritage dictionary lists this as a "usage problem", but still lists it. Collier's lists it without comment. Note that the "usage problem" doesn't say it's wrong, it merely observes that this is something some people complain about.
Words often have multiple meanings in English. Do you jump up and call someone a retard because they use "cool" to mean something other than "has a low temperature"? If not, why not? It would be no less silly.
If you want to complain about the ambiguity, don't worry. Linguists who have studied the use of "literally" have found that it's almost never used in ambiguous contexts. Nobody (not even you, no matter how much you might pretend) thought for a second that GPP actually meant that his testicles would be expelled via his anus. People naturally avoid the ambiguous cases.
And if it's not the ambiguity that bugs you, then why on earth does it bother you any more than the uses of "cool" or "hot" to refer to something other than temperature? I really am curious.
[1] I prefer the term "peevologist" to the term "grammar nazi" because the latter term implies that the peevers actually know something about the language they claim to defend, even though this is usually not the case, as here.
Really? Because even after it's been suggested, I'm finding it impossible to read as saying that the wife had died. Even if the commas were removed, "was used by my wife died" makes no sense. Dieds don't use. :)
Without the commas, it becomes a Crash Blossom that leaves me hanging in a world of no sense till I go back, reparse, and mentally fill in the missing commas. But the commas aren't missing from the actual quote, so the sentence makes perfect sense to start with, and I can't figure out how anyone could misinterpret it. Care to explain further?
The 'fastest' card is easy to determine.
Is it? Modern GPUs can do a pretty amazing array of complicated stuff, and I wouldn't at be surprised to find that each has its own strengths and weaknesses at particular tasks or subtasks. I agree with you that the results don't really matter to the vast majority of us, though. :)
I was going to raise the same point about optimizing compilers, but to your second point, I don't see a great deal of difference between "++i;" and "i++;" as far as clarity goes, and with operator overriding in (e.g.) C++, the actual work that goes on behind the scenes for the two flavors of "++" may well be more than any optimizing compiler can really cope with.
I strongly agree with the idea of striving for clarity and avoiding premature optimization, but when two approaches are equally clear, and one of them has a strong possibility of imposing pointless overhead, I see no reason not to avoid that approach.
Or for the projects where having to manage every allocation and deletion is tedious and gets in the way of actually implementing a program.
you know, for folks that never understood what RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) is or how to use it.
C++ offers both dumb pointers (for those rare occasions when you actually need them) and smart pointers, and C++0x will offer vastly improved smart pointers (shared_ptr)--currently available in Boost, and one of the best reasons for using Boost up until now.
People who insist on writing C++ as if it were a mildly enhanced form of C have no one to blame but themselves for the problems they encounter.
It is a valid complaint that C++ makes creating dumb (dangerous) pointers so much easier than smart pointers, but then if you use RAII for your classes more broadly, the need for pointers of any type is usually greatly reduced. Why, you can create whole complex structures of trees of lists of sets of strings, modify them wildly on-the-fly, and never once have to worry about pointers or allocation or deallocation.
There are plenty of reasons to complain about C++. The language is full of warts, and has some really tedious and error-prone corners. But if your complaint is simply about overuse/abuse of pointers leading to memory leaks, Ur Doin' It Rong(tm)!
Damn, it's rare that a post deserves both +1 insightful and +1 funny, but you pulled it off! :)
If you're providing "publicly available source code" (as Firefox is, and Microsoft isn't), the export controls almost melt away. You have to send in a notification, but no review is required.
Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't have it quite so easy, but I'm sure that their reviews get expedited, so I seriously doubt that EAR/ITAR plays any role in this.
If you use unit tests, you won't need a debugger anymore.
Until something happens that you didn't plan for--some detail that you completely overlooked, or some quirk of the language that doesn't completely match your mental model. Then a debugger may be useful to determine just what it is that you forgot to add to your unit tests.
Not that I'm a fan of debuggers. I considered them to be a tedious, slow, and generally inefficient way to find bugs even before I discovered TDD. Since I started using unit tests, my use of the debugger for my own code has gone from once in a blue moon to I-can't-remember-the-last-time. But when it comes to other people's code, a debugger can definitely help get you up to speed quicker. And of course, other people's code, especially when it appears in third-party libraries, may well lack unit tests, no matter how religiously you write tests for your own code. So I still sometimes need a debugger--but not often enough that I'd set up a separate monitor for one.
I believe that's California-wide, not just LA. At the least, it seems to be standard throughout the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area as well.
Red Hat has said that customers will have access to the patch information
So what's to stop Oracle from becoming a customer? :)
The answer to that is to require compulsory licensing from the guild to anyone with the resources to do what Google did.
That might indeed be better than what's actually proposed. By the way, this is not a hypothetical scenario. The non-profit Internet Archive has been working on a similar project for many years (albeit much more slowly), and they were one of the parties that filed to oppose the Google Books deal, precisely because they would have been cut out and their labor (and hard-to-come-by money) would have been wasted.
Frankly, I'd much rather see a deal that allows the Internet Archive to continue their work, because I trust and respect them a whole lot more than I do Google.
So be sure you strip out all inline functions and macros from GPL header files and just use the structures, typedefs, and enums.
Inline functions and macros that are trivial or which constitute scènes à faire are not going to be protectable either. Thus "substantial" is the correct term (although it may not take a whole lot to reach something approaching substantial).
Even if they don't complain now, they could complain later on
So much for the theory that viablos is FM. I'm pretty sure that Florian knows about doctrine of laches, and won't bother to post such ignorant nonsense.
Are you bragging about your pathetically high user ID again, newb? :p ;)
Anyway, everyone knows that Slashdot as created by the FSM only 6000 minutes ago, so obviously user IDs like yours and mine were merely planted to test our faith*.
* Isn't it interesting how often a "test of faith" resembles a test of intelligence, except with the opposite result expected? :)
You can already run that one with CGI, if your goal is simply to make your server commit suicide. No need for a GTK wrapper (which you forgot to provide in any case). I think, perhaps, you don't understand that the apps are running on the server and only using the browser for display and input.
I've only ever seen that on Windows installs, so I think your instinct about braindead installers is exactly correct. However, even in those cases, it would be better to use some simple and more accurate text, like:
You agree that you recognize that this software comes without warranty, except as required by law, and can only be redistributed under the terms of the General Public License (see the file named COPYING for details).
A clickwrap "license" with a single sentence--that would blow people's minds! :)
If the software is a library, though, it does get a little trickier, but mere APIs are not copyrightable, so you actually have to link with the GPL'd library for the GPL to have any affect. Merely compiling against the headers won't have any affect, and, to the extent that the libraries implement public standards (like POSIX or ISO C), even dynamic linking may not affect your program (if you can drop in a non-GPL'd equivalent library without affecting the operation of the program), as I understand it. (Anyway, libc's headers come with an explicit exception that if you use them with GCC, they don't require any license.)
I'm also not sure how with the Java precompiler or the Dalvik compiler itself is supposed to include the C headers that come with the kernel in your Android app, since, to the best of my knowledge, including a C header in Java is guaranteed to produce a compile-time error! The whole thing sounds pretty sketchy to me.
In the after-article article they make it clear that they're not trying to destroy the objects (which they cannot do in any event)
Unless they're very large objects (very large indeed!) I would think that trying to deorbit them would tantamount to destroying them. But no, I understand that the lasers aren't intended to directly destroy the objects, which is why I mentioned outgassing.
They also clearly state that they are relying on light pressure, not outgassing or heating in general.
Ah, well in that case I retract my comment, but as you say, the basic idea of moving the objects enough to avoid collisions is within the realm of the possible, and I would tend to suspect that they've had people with at least a rudimentary knowledge of physics look at their plan already. NASA may be cutting corners, but I find it implausible that they'd be talking about funding for an idea that any freshman could shoot down. So, until there's evidence to the contrary, I'm inclined to mark this as plausible, rather than dismiss it out of hand, as you seemed (to me) to be doing.
The light from the sun seems irrelevant, as it's not purposeful, though I imagine they would have to take it into account when calculating when and how (and whether) to aim their lasers.
Depends on whether it could be argued that you fall afoul of the Inducement Rule. If you just have the search box and no description, it would be hard to argue that you were "promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement", On the other hand, if it were labeled "Use this to find popular TV shows", then there's a good chance that it could be considered inducement.
It's pretty clear that Google does not promote the illegal use of their system, so the argument presented in the slashdot summary is basically meaningless. Whether IsoHunt mentioned the inducement rule in their brief, I don't know, but if they didn't, it's unlikely to carry much weight.