"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so". -The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Actually, I think the reference was to Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. The White Queen, unimpressed at Alice's inability to believe impossible things, suggested that she had not had much practice: 'When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.' Then she turned into a sheep.
Yeah, your 256MB of space was trivial when you had a 30GB hard drive... and 8GB of space is still trivial with a 750GB hard drive.
I have an Eee 901. It has 1GiB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. A swap partition on the 'twice your RAM' rule would be far from trivial.
I decided to be bold and installed Hardy with no swap partition. It seems to work just fine so far; Firefox greys out for a few seconds sometimes while loading pages, which might have to do with my reckless configuration, but on the whole it's pretty snappy.
As for my desktop PC, it has 4GiB of RAM. I followed the traditional rule when I installed on that. I don't think that swap partition has ever even been used.
When I was a freshman in engineering school, my intro to engineering class required us to purchase a book similar to this. We were given two class periods to work with Excel, supervised by a TA. (it was considered a lab) I remember the assignment involved proving that sin^2+cos^2=1.
Proving that with Excel? How does that work? That's a trigonometry problem, and it follows from the definitions of the sine and cosine functions, and from Pythagoras's theorem. You do it with a pen and paper and you write 'QED' at the bottom. To prove it with Excel, you'd have to calculate the result individually for every possible angle, and unless Microsoft have released an update I haven't had yet then Excel doesn't have a transfinite number of available rows.
Oh, wait...
engineering school
That's dangerously close to reality. That's where they think that if something works the first fifty million times, then it's going to work every time.
Still, it could be worse. You could be in
If you couldn't figure out Excel within those two class periods, it was recommended that you switched your major to business administration.
But what I find hard to believe is that we are in the exact center of such a region. So therefore, the universe should appear to have different properties in different directions. Has anybody seen that?
There's an unexplained anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background. Hot and cold spots don't appear to be quite randomly distributed. Nobody's come up with a good explanation, and it might be an instrumentation error or due to some local gravitational anomaly - say, lensing around the next supercluster over - but at the moment it's very unclear.
Because of the lack of a link, I'm forced to guess as to what you're going on about. This is why it's important to cite sources. But I made that rant in a more deeply nested reply.
I think what you're looking at is the infrared absorption spectrum. I quite agree that the principal frequencies at which carbon dioxide absorbs infrared are quite saturated - to a good approximation, all the infrared at those frequencies is absorbed.
Thing is, though, what happens then? Your molecule absorbs a photon and goes into an energetically excited state. There are two things it may now do. The molecule may collide with others, and the energy be spread as kinetic energy, warming the whole gas slightly. Or alternatively it may drop back to a ground state, emitting a photon at the same characteristic frequency. It's a 50-50 shot whether that photon goes down, back to Earth, keeping the place warm, or up, out to space, cooling the planet.
So, some percentage of the absorbed photons are re-emitted. Half of those which are, are going up. They'll probably be absorbed again by still more carbon dioxide higher up in the atmosphere. You end up with a statistical matter: how long does a typical infrared photon spend being scattered about in the atmosphere, before it ends up either as heat in bulk matter, or escaping into space? That is the problem. Add more carbon dioxide, and your average photon will have its first absorption sooner, trapping heat nearer the ground. And on average it will have more scatterings before any escape, increasing the likelihood of it becoming absorbed entirely into warm air or ground.
Real science. Grandparent is correct, and if you spend a few minutes researching the subject you'll (easily) find his missing link.
Well, why don't you provide that link, then? It's the done thing to cite one's sources when making claims, rather than expecting your readers to do the work on your behalf. After all, if it's such a small job of work, it's better that you do it once, than that every one of your readers should have to do it separately. Unless you enjoy wasting your readers' time?
I spent a few minutes investigating anyway and found a discussion to the effect that temperature rises logarithmically with CO2 concentrations - as CO2 increases by orders of magnitude, temperature increases linearly. A law of diminishing returns.
But that's not what the original poster claimed. He claimed that there was a certain CO2 concentration beyond which there would be zero extra warming effect, and moreover that we were already at that concentration.
So it's quite possible that I'm reading the wrong thing. Or perhaps he was reading the wrong thing. Since neither of us have provided links or citations, we can't go to the source and find out, and so the argument goes nowhere.
If they sent up additional fuel for it, it could be re-used again and again
For what? Its primary mission is to deliver supplies from Earth. Oxygen, water, food, fuel. While docked it acts pretty much as a walk-in wardrobe. Once its supplies are exhausted there's no further use for it; they load it up with rubbish and send it off to burn up. Then another one gets launched.
It would probably be possible to redesign the ATV with a heatshield to allow it to come home intact. But that adds a lot of weight and drastically reduces its capacity as a cargo carrier; you'd only do that if you wanted to use it to carry human crews. Maybe that'll be done some day, but not right now.
The only other use for the ATV while in orbit is for station-keeping. It can boost the Station's orbit, and some day an ATV may be given the mission of de-orbiting the entire structure. But there's no sense sending up more fuel to allow the ATV to continue working as a tugboat - that fuel would be delivered by, er, another ATV. So you might as well let that do the job.
If there were other stations in near-Earth space, then keeping a spare ATV in orbit might make sense. It could ship equipment and perhaps crews between them. But right now there's nowhere to go from the Station except for back to Earth.
Some parts of Skylab landed in inhabited parts of Australia; IIRC, an American newspaper had offered a prize for the first Skylab fragments handed in, and an enterprising citizen picked up some bits from the roof of his house and took them with him on the first flight over there.
Why was an explosion a success? I would think getting it the ground in one piece would be better, but what do I know.
The Jules Verne was carrying nothing but rubbish; it was intentionally burned up on re-entry. It's just a supply ship: it carries stuff up to the Station, serves as a little extra habitable volume while docked (I hear some of the crew have found it a very quiet place and have pressed it into service as sleeping quarters), and finally carries away waste and junk and incinerates the lot in the atmosphere.
With the uncertainty over the future of the American manned capability, there is now talk of developing an upgraded ATV which would include a re-entry module, and make ATV into a complete manned spaceflight system. Mind you, there's always talk; ESA headquarters is full of extremely expensive paperwork relating to manned spacecraft that never flew. At least in this case there's something concrete to point at, though.
No kidding, there was one DS adventure game I played that used every feature possible in at least one puzzle. I do mean *every*, including stylus, microphone, even the lid closed sensor.
That would be Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. When I worked out what was going on with the lid puzzle, I really did want to punch somebody:-)
It's funny though, because, you know, as much as everyone deservedly knocks the 6000 year old figure, few actually probe the ancient conceit that drove it - that is, the universe could not exist without mankind, and so, it more or less exists to serve mankind, and therefor we can spread out across the world and conquer it.
As a matter of fact, the 4000 BC date isn't a bad estimate for that. It's about the time of the first civilisations - when people stopped living as hunter-gatherers following the herds as they migrated, and began living as settled agriculturalists. This is a drastic change in lifestyle, and from it there follows class and caste and specialisation and work. And also philosophy and education and writing. For the getting of knowledge, the price we paid was that we left Eden to till the soil and live by the sweat of our brow.
The numbers I've seen from legalizing drugs would only boost US Revenue by about 20-30 billion per year.
How much is spent on police efforts to prevent the drug trade? How about the losses to the economy from drug-related crime? Both of those would drop dramatically if prohibition were to be abolished. Do those figures include that?
The point is that if we were to arrive late on the scene and find an arch bridge, with the scaffolding long gone, we might examine the bridge, realise that if any part were removed then the whole must fall, and conclude that we were looking at an irreducibly complex system.
In fact, of course, the bridge is the remainder of a larger, still more complex system of bridge plus scaffolding, most of which has been removed as being redundant.
The same goes for the supposed 'irreducibly complex' structures put about by creationists. They argue that the removal of any part of such structures would cause the whole to fail completely. Perhaps they're even right. But the discussion of the arch bridge shows that it's possible to arrive at such a structure by subtraction, rather than by addition: the 'irreducible' structure exists as a relic of a more complex, less efficient system, hacked together ad hoc, which did the job poorly but nonetheless did it - and which was then gradually optimised until it achieves the engineer's perfection, when there is nothing left to take away.
The fall of the Islamic intellectual tradition wasn't entirely born of their own fundamentalism. It followed the sack of Baghdad by the Mongol horde. The centre of a civilisation stretching from India to Spain, full of the intellectual riches and history of all Eurasia, all burned. The loss of the Library at Alexandria was bad. This was worse.
There followed a long decline. Wars, on and off, with the crusaders of Europe raiding into the Middle East. Various rulers of Arabic and Persian and Turkish dynasties competing for domination of the Islamic world. A gradual eclipse as the nations of Europe set about building their empires. And finally irrelevance, a culture respected only insofar as it provides crude oil to its betters. Small wonder that a civilisation brought so low from such a glorious past turns to its god for answers, and finds dark counsels.
If *I* were in charge of promoting/legitimizing ID, I would put it up against the Big Bang/String theorists and the like. When we can't yet explain why the universe is the way it is on a fundamental (quantum?) level, *THAT's* when you can trot out the "God did it"s. Evolution is just too well researched and tested a subject to topple (logically and rationally, that is).
You ought to apply for a job at the Vatican. That's what they do. Scientists say the Universe began in a hot, dense fireball of intense radiation? Fine. 'And God said, let there be light. And there was light.'
The problem for fundamentalists is this. If the modern view of human origins is correct, then the Genesis story is not true. If the Genesis story is not true then there was no Fall. If there was no Fall then there is no Original Sin. If there is no Original Sin then there is no need for salvation. If there is no need for salvation then there is no need for Christ. If there is no need for Christ then there is no need for Christianity. If there is no need for Christianity then there is no need for fundamentalists. If there is no need for fundamentalists, then they have to go and get a proper job.
When discussing the idea of 'irreducible complexity', it's probably best to consider a simple everyday system which fits the bill.
So: consider the arch bridge.
An arch bridge is held up by internal pressure. Remove any part of the arch bridge and the whole thing falls into the river. An arch bridge is irreducibly complex, by the creationists' definition. It works as a whole, or not at all; take any part away and it collapses.
Does that mean, then, that all the arch bridges in the world were assembled all at once? Shipped pre-fab to the site and installed as a whole?
Not at all! When we build such things, we use scaffolding. We first build a huge, clumsy, inefficient structure, a grid of poles and joints. This structure is flimsy, it cannot bear very great weight, nor carry much traffic - but it does span the river, it is indeed a bridge. And it can be built up piece by piece - it will stand up even if the span is not complete. Then we work on the arch bridge itself. We build up stone alongside our scaffolding. The scaffolding holds up the stone and the stone braces the scaffolding. Each new stone added strengthens the whole structure.
And there comes a day when the arch bridge is completed. Now we find that the whole scaffolding structure is redundant - it can be done away with. That leaves only the arch. The irreducibly complex arch.
The same could easily go for living things. Evolution can take away as well as add, and if some older structure has been made redundant by a newer development that grew from it, then that structure can surely be done away with. Behe's notion of irreducible complexity would only be a problem if evolutionary theory only allowed for organisms to become more complex over time - but if an organism is already complex, and it happens to benefit that species to become simpler, then it will do so. And it might well arrive at an 'irreducibly complex' structure from above.
It's all a hangover of the old idea of a 'great chain of being'. It's a common misconception: men are more advanced than apes, which are more advanced than dogs, which are more advanced than... you get the picture. This is the kind of thinking where the X-Men are the 'next stage' of evolution. Evolution doesn't work that way. There's no great plan, no distant goal, no inevitable increase of sophistication. Evolution does whatever works, and if that means eliminating redundancies, refactoring, and going ahead with a simpler design, then so be it.
From my understanding of the GPL, this would only be true if the government is distributing the modified binaries to the terrorists.
The US air force drops a bomb on my wedding party in the belief that it is a terrorist training camp. The bomb is a dud, and it fails to explode. I now have in my possession an unexploded bomb with embedded, Pentagon-modified GPL software.
Are the Pentagon now required to furnish me with a machine-readable copy of their source code?
The question would, I suppose, depend upon the legal status of unexploded ordnance. Is it still the property of the US military? If so, there might be long-term liabilities to consider. Is it instead considered to be like any other discarded property, belonging to anyone wishing to claim it under the tradition of finders-keepers? If so then I think this constitutes 'distribution', in which case they ought to make the source code available.
I suppose in practice the military would declare the modified software to be Top Secret and refuse to publish the source for that reason. But does that disqualify them from using modified GPL code for their project in the first place, since they have no intention of honouring the licence terms?
More like the Articles of Confederation, yes? I wonder how long it'll take them to end up like us...
We're ahead of schedule in quite a few ways. World domination? Been there, done that, got the museum full of loot. Horrifically bloody civil war? Depending on how you count it, on and off from 1914 to 1990. And you should see how fast the frontier on the Wild East is being pushed back.
Although it is nice to see positive news, you must remember that Europe is not one country. It is many countries and what is legal in one can be very illegal in another. As if you start comparing laws in Israel, China and Japan, just because it is all Asia.
Not quite the same thing. Israel, China and Japan are not joint members of any supranational confederation. The European Union now includes 27 states, and more and more matters are dealt with cooperatively. Since network rights are inherently international, they're exactly the sort of thing that ends up coming to the attention of Brussels - and the decision they reach will be shaped by the consensus among the various states. Precedents established in a single country today may well affect the whole Union tomorrow.
The problem people have with it is they take COMMERCIAL stuff that costs millions to make, and reproduce it freely, without paying the creators a penny, and pocket the ad revenue.
TPB do no such thing. They provide a venue for their users to take material (commercial, GPL, Creative Commons, public domain, they don't care at all) and reproduce it freely. All you'll find on the TPB website itself is trackers, and a means to search them. TPB tell you where to get free copies of commercial material, but do not themselves provide that material.
It's just the same as what Napster used to do. US courts decided that was illegal. Swedish courts disagree.
As for the ad revenue, I doubt there's too much of that. Remember, their audience consists chiefly of pirates; do you think these people have any qualms about using Adblock Plus?
... installed it long ago on my iHP-140 when I finally accepted that iRiver would never make good on their promise to get us gapless playback and working shuffle in a firmware update. Absolutely terrific: huge improvement on the stock firmware.
The site being currently very/.'d, does anyone know what's new in this release, other than the 'officially supported' status?
This is a discussion of fundamentalism. No matter how ludicrous or outlandish a statement may be, someone is going to take it literally. That's kind of the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think the reference was to Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. The White Queen, unimpressed at Alice's inability to believe impossible things, suggested that she had not had much practice: 'When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.' Then she turned into a sheep.
I have an Eee 901. It has 1GiB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. A swap partition on the 'twice your RAM' rule would be far from trivial.
I decided to be bold and installed Hardy with no swap partition. It seems to work just fine so far; Firefox greys out for a few seconds sometimes while loading pages, which might have to do with my reckless configuration, but on the whole it's pretty snappy.
As for my desktop PC, it has 4GiB of RAM. I followed the traditional rule when I installed on that. I don't think that swap partition has ever even been used.
Proving that with Excel? How does that work? That's a trigonometry problem, and it follows from the definitions of the sine and cosine functions, and from Pythagoras's theorem. You do it with a pen and paper and you write 'QED' at the bottom. To prove it with Excel, you'd have to calculate the result individually for every possible angle, and unless Microsoft have released an update I haven't had yet then Excel doesn't have a transfinite number of available rows.
Oh, wait...
engineering school
That's dangerously close to reality. That's where they think that if something works the first fifty million times, then it's going to work every time.
Still, it could be worse. You could be in If you couldn't figure out Excel within those two class periods, it was recommended that you switched your major to business administration.
Yeah.
There's an unexplained anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background. Hot and cold spots don't appear to be quite randomly distributed. Nobody's come up with a good explanation, and it might be an instrumentation error or due to some local gravitational anomaly - say, lensing around the next supercluster over - but at the moment it's very unclear.
If that's what American soldiers do to each other, I'm amazed that anyone was surprised at all about what they do to their prisoners.
How can they sleep without the soothing fan noise?
I think what you're looking at is the infrared absorption spectrum. I quite agree that the principal frequencies at which carbon dioxide absorbs infrared are quite saturated - to a good approximation, all the infrared at those frequencies is absorbed.
Thing is, though, what happens then? Your molecule absorbs a photon and goes into an energetically excited state. There are two things it may now do. The molecule may collide with others, and the energy be spread as kinetic energy, warming the whole gas slightly. Or alternatively it may drop back to a ground state, emitting a photon at the same characteristic frequency. It's a 50-50 shot whether that photon goes down, back to Earth, keeping the place warm, or up, out to space, cooling the planet.
So, some percentage of the absorbed photons are re-emitted. Half of those which are, are going up. They'll probably be absorbed again by still more carbon dioxide higher up in the atmosphere. You end up with a statistical matter: how long does a typical infrared photon spend being scattered about in the atmosphere, before it ends up either as heat in bulk matter, or escaping into space? That is the problem. Add more carbon dioxide, and your average photon will have its first absorption sooner, trapping heat nearer the ground. And on average it will have more scatterings before any escape, increasing the likelihood of it becoming absorbed entirely into warm air or ground.
Well, why don't you provide that link, then? It's the done thing to cite one's sources when making claims, rather than expecting your readers to do the work on your behalf. After all, if it's such a small job of work, it's better that you do it once, than that every one of your readers should have to do it separately. Unless you enjoy wasting your readers' time?
I spent a few minutes investigating anyway and found a discussion to the effect that temperature rises logarithmically with CO2 concentrations - as CO2 increases by orders of magnitude, temperature increases linearly. A law of diminishing returns.
But that's not what the original poster claimed. He claimed that there was a certain CO2 concentration beyond which there would be zero extra warming effect, and moreover that we were already at that concentration.
So it's quite possible that I'm reading the wrong thing. Or perhaps he was reading the wrong thing. Since neither of us have provided links or citations, we can't go to the source and find out, and so the argument goes nowhere.
For what? Its primary mission is to deliver supplies from Earth. Oxygen, water, food, fuel. While docked it acts pretty much as a walk-in wardrobe. Once its supplies are exhausted there's no further use for it; they load it up with rubbish and send it off to burn up. Then another one gets launched.
It would probably be possible to redesign the ATV with a heatshield to allow it to come home intact. But that adds a lot of weight and drastically reduces its capacity as a cargo carrier; you'd only do that if you wanted to use it to carry human crews. Maybe that'll be done some day, but not right now.
The only other use for the ATV while in orbit is for station-keeping. It can boost the Station's orbit, and some day an ATV may be given the mission of de-orbiting the entire structure. But there's no sense sending up more fuel to allow the ATV to continue working as a tugboat - that fuel would be delivered by, er, another ATV. So you might as well let that do the job.
If there were other stations in near-Earth space, then keeping a spare ATV in orbit might make sense. It could ship equipment and perhaps crews between them. But right now there's nowhere to go from the Station except for back to Earth.
Some parts of Skylab landed in inhabited parts of Australia; IIRC, an American newspaper had offered a prize for the first Skylab fragments handed in, and an enterprising citizen picked up some bits from the roof of his house and took them with him on the first flight over there.
The Jules Verne was carrying nothing but rubbish; it was intentionally burned up on re-entry. It's just a supply ship: it carries stuff up to the Station, serves as a little extra habitable volume while docked (I hear some of the crew have found it a very quiet place and have pressed it into service as sleeping quarters), and finally carries away waste and junk and incinerates the lot in the atmosphere.
With the uncertainty over the future of the American manned capability, there is now talk of developing an upgraded ATV which would include a re-entry module, and make ATV into a complete manned spaceflight system. Mind you, there's always talk; ESA headquarters is full of extremely expensive paperwork relating to manned spacecraft that never flew. At least in this case there's something concrete to point at, though.
That would be Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. When I worked out what was going on with the lid puzzle, I really did want to punch somebody :-)
I would be fascinated to hear how you measured the radius of the Earth to the nearest proton diameter.
As a matter of fact, the 4000 BC date isn't a bad estimate for that. It's about the time of the first civilisations - when people stopped living as hunter-gatherers following the herds as they migrated, and began living as settled agriculturalists. This is a drastic change in lifestyle, and from it there follows class and caste and specialisation and work. And also philosophy and education and writing. For the getting of knowledge, the price we paid was that we left Eden to till the soil and live by the sweat of our brow.
How much is spent on police efforts to prevent the drug trade? How about the losses to the economy from drug-related crime? Both of those would drop dramatically if prohibition were to be abolished. Do those figures include that?
In fact, of course, the bridge is the remainder of a larger, still more complex system of bridge plus scaffolding, most of which has been removed as being redundant.
The same goes for the supposed 'irreducibly complex' structures put about by creationists. They argue that the removal of any part of such structures would cause the whole to fail completely. Perhaps they're even right. But the discussion of the arch bridge shows that it's possible to arrive at such a structure by subtraction, rather than by addition: the 'irreducible' structure exists as a relic of a more complex, less efficient system, hacked together ad hoc, which did the job poorly but nonetheless did it - and which was then gradually optimised until it achieves the engineer's perfection, when there is nothing left to take away.
There followed a long decline. Wars, on and off, with the crusaders of Europe raiding into the Middle East. Various rulers of Arabic and Persian and Turkish dynasties competing for domination of the Islamic world. A gradual eclipse as the nations of Europe set about building their empires. And finally irrelevance, a culture respected only insofar as it provides crude oil to its betters. Small wonder that a civilisation brought so low from such a glorious past turns to its god for answers, and finds dark counsels.
You ought to apply for a job at the Vatican. That's what they do. Scientists say the Universe began in a hot, dense fireball of intense radiation? Fine. 'And God said, let there be light. And there was light.'
The problem for fundamentalists is this. If the modern view of human origins is correct, then the Genesis story is not true. If the Genesis story is not true then there was no Fall. If there was no Fall then there is no Original Sin. If there is no Original Sin then there is no need for salvation. If there is no need for salvation then there is no need for Christ. If there is no need for Christ then there is no need for Christianity. If there is no need for Christianity then there is no need for fundamentalists. If there is no need for fundamentalists, then they have to go and get a proper job.
Hence, Creationism.
So: consider the arch bridge.
An arch bridge is held up by internal pressure. Remove any part of the arch bridge and the whole thing falls into the river. An arch bridge is irreducibly complex, by the creationists' definition. It works as a whole, or not at all; take any part away and it collapses.
Does that mean, then, that all the arch bridges in the world were assembled all at once? Shipped pre-fab to the site and installed as a whole?
Not at all! When we build such things, we use scaffolding. We first build a huge, clumsy, inefficient structure, a grid of poles and joints. This structure is flimsy, it cannot bear very great weight, nor carry much traffic - but it does span the river, it is indeed a bridge. And it can be built up piece by piece - it will stand up even if the span is not complete. Then we work on the arch bridge itself. We build up stone alongside our scaffolding. The scaffolding holds up the stone and the stone braces the scaffolding. Each new stone added strengthens the whole structure.
And there comes a day when the arch bridge is completed. Now we find that the whole scaffolding structure is redundant - it can be done away with. That leaves only the arch. The irreducibly complex arch.
The same could easily go for living things. Evolution can take away as well as add, and if some older structure has been made redundant by a newer development that grew from it, then that structure can surely be done away with. Behe's notion of irreducible complexity would only be a problem if evolutionary theory only allowed for organisms to become more complex over time - but if an organism is already complex, and it happens to benefit that species to become simpler, then it will do so. And it might well arrive at an 'irreducibly complex' structure from above.
It's all a hangover of the old idea of a 'great chain of being'. It's a common misconception: men are more advanced than apes, which are more advanced than dogs, which are more advanced than... you get the picture. This is the kind of thinking where the X-Men are the 'next stage' of evolution. Evolution doesn't work that way. There's no great plan, no distant goal, no inevitable increase of sophistication. Evolution does whatever works, and if that means eliminating redundancies, refactoring, and going ahead with a simpler design, then so be it.
The US air force drops a bomb on my wedding party in the belief that it is a terrorist training camp. The bomb is a dud, and it fails to explode. I now have in my possession an unexploded bomb with embedded, Pentagon-modified GPL software.
Are the Pentagon now required to furnish me with a machine-readable copy of their source code?
The question would, I suppose, depend upon the legal status of unexploded ordnance. Is it still the property of the US military? If so, there might be long-term liabilities to consider. Is it instead considered to be like any other discarded property, belonging to anyone wishing to claim it under the tradition of finders-keepers? If so then I think this constitutes 'distribution', in which case they ought to make the source code available.
I suppose in practice the military would declare the modified software to be Top Secret and refuse to publish the source for that reason. But does that disqualify them from using modified GPL code for their project in the first place, since they have no intention of honouring the licence terms?
We're ahead of schedule in quite a few ways. World domination? Been there, done that, got the museum full of loot. Horrifically bloody civil war? Depending on how you count it, on and off from 1914 to 1990. And you should see how fast the frontier on the Wild East is being pushed back.
Not quite the same thing. Israel, China and Japan are not joint members of any supranational confederation. The European Union now includes 27 states, and more and more matters are dealt with cooperatively. Since network rights are inherently international, they're exactly the sort of thing that ends up coming to the attention of Brussels - and the decision they reach will be shaped by the consensus among the various states. Precedents established in a single country today may well affect the whole Union tomorrow.
TPB do no such thing. They provide a venue for their users to take material (commercial, GPL, Creative Commons, public domain, they don't care at all) and reproduce it freely. All you'll find on the TPB website itself is trackers, and a means to search them. TPB tell you where to get free copies of commercial material, but do not themselves provide that material.
It's just the same as what Napster used to do. US courts decided that was illegal. Swedish courts disagree.
As for the ad revenue, I doubt there's too much of that. Remember, their audience consists chiefly of pirates; do you think these people have any qualms about using Adblock Plus?
The site being currently very /.'d, does anyone know what's new in this release, other than the 'officially supported' status?
This is a discussion of fundamentalism. No matter how ludicrous or outlandish a statement may be, someone is going to take it literally. That's kind of the point.