I wouldn't mind him pleading fair use as an alternative defense. That way we might at least get a read on it. A lot of people seem to think "sharing music" is, or should be OK. (Charlie's point that laws have to be comprehensible to those expected to obey them seems cogent - and how DO you explain the boundaries of Fair Use to a kid?) While I'm with you in thinking it won't fly, nobody else seems to be even attempting it. And I can't think of many bigger guns to take the shot than a Harvard Law School team lead by a professor with Charlie's track record.
But IMHO he'll be doing his client a disservice if that's the ONLY shot he takes. (Unless his client WANTS to risk martyrdom over this point and to keep the other issues off the table to keep the court from avoiding this issue. Or unless it's the only shot available.)
... how about individual Civil Disobedience? Consider filesharing as protected, not for profit, speech in protest of the decades of record companies ripping off consumers as well as artists...
As I understand it, committing a crime or tort as an act of Civil Disobedience does not carry a legal justification. The civilly disobedient person is still liable for whatever punishment, restitution, etc. is appropriate for the action.
It may be construed to provide a MORAL justification, resulting in a jury nullification. It may set the stage for pleading a necessity defense. It may be a necessary step in obtaining the standing to prove in court that a law is unconstitutional and getting it struck down. There may be so many others participating and/or the cause may be so popular that the authorities decide to let it drop. And so on. But absent something like that, expect to be a jailed and/or paupered martyr for the cause if the authorities bring you to court over such an act.
Unlike Prof. Nesson, I can see no advantage flowing to my clients and future clients from my tipping my hand to the RIAA.
Which makes me wonder if Charlie Nesson might be leading the opposition down the garden path, attempting to bury any real leaks out of his student brain trust under a barrage of unrelated sideshow acts?
(I'm reminded of an alleged CIA tactic called "the second cover": You wrap the secret in TWO cover stories. The first is plausible, even if potentially easily detected as bogus. The second is the kind of stuff you read about in tabloids and certain late-night talk shows (some of which may be the fossils of old second cover stories). When somebody penetrates the first cover they find the second cover. At that point any of several things may happen, including: A) They believe the second cover. Hilarity ensues. B) They "recoil" back to the first cover. C) They become suspicious of any other reports on what is actually under the covers.)
(Then again, maybe Charlie's mind has finally gone. B-( )
As with NYCL's adversaries, we'll know what the Billion Dollar Charlie team's arguments REALLY are when we read them in the court papers. B-)
Meanwhile, if this is what is going on, I hope my speculation (if it has any effect) adds to the confusion rather than blowing the cover.
An immediate application, of course, is prosthetics for lost or damaged limbs.
But if it works out as described, where it's possible to direct additional stuff without interfering with your normal actions, by imagining what you want done and having the device do it, it could be used to control a robot helper or ADDITIONAL artificial limbs.
How many times have people wanted extra hands while soldering, welding, assembling models or appliances, building houses, repairing cars,...?
Looks like Doctor Octopus may soon be technologically feasible.
google news decide[s] which agency stories to place on their front page [by using] the story placement on the... news sites they're aggregating[. T]his work is an essential part of running a news web site [a piece of skilled input from highly-paid editors, which it's unfair to appropriate without payment]
And how is this different from all the mainstream news outlets in the US looking at the New York Times ("The Newspaper of Record") to decide which stories are important, rather than figuring it out for themselves?
I had a {domainname}.com back when they would all fit on three pages of professionally-printed bound-book hardcopy. But the {domainname} part was the UUCP machine name from earlier.
OMG. "Max Headroom" Over twenty years ago. Time to crank up the geez-o-meter.
Sonny, the first machine I programmed for money used vacuum tubes - for the DIODES, too.
But before that I programmed machines that used relays to perform computations for fun - and to print my QSL cards. Built some, too.
My first personally-owned email machine exchanged email directly with IHNP4 (in Napierville Illinois). From Michigan. At 300 baud. (Because I had hacked the filters in a 110-baud modem to speed it up.) Uphill through the snow both ways! I paid the long distance out-of-pocket, back when it cost by the minute in major bux.
I had a.com back when they would all fit on three pages of professionally-printed bound-book hardcopy. But the part was the UUCP machine name from earlier. It was (and still is) a "good" name, four letters long, in a global namespace including ALL the machines that exchanged mail via UUCP mailnet at the time I picke it. (It was my second choice. I missed the one I really wanted - also four letters - by a week - while my "upstream contact" was twiddling his thumbs rather than forwarding the application forms, in the days before the web. B-b )
I was ON the project that coined the term "hypertext".
Geez-o-meter? I can out-geezer nearly everybody here. B-)
With that, Sun can:
- License the code (non-exclusively) to customers under OTHER licenses than the open source license under which it was released.
- Sue others for infringement when THEY use it in ways not included in the open source license.
- Make derived works that they don't release under the open source license.
These are all things that Sun can now do and no others can (presuming Sun continues MySQL's tradition of keeping the main codebase clean of outside code for which they don't have additional non-open-source licensing).
Re:Selling an open-source software business?
on
Locating the Real MySQL
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This calls into question whether it's viable to sell a business based on open-source software.
I was under the impression that MySQL operated with a full-featured, proprietary, licensed, commercial version getting immediate upgrades and support, plus a less-featured open source version with releases of code (ported?) from the full-featured branch that ran some months behind the for-pay version.
If that's right, I'd say Sun bought the whole shebang, including the code and customer bases for the licensed deluxe version, not just the open-source codebase, trademark, and employment contracts of a room full of engineers.
As for the viability of "sell[ing] a business based on open-source software", why don't you bring that up with the stockholders of Red Hat? B-)
Back in the '60s and '70s, when the current "drug war" was getting its start, some municipalities passed "narcotics paraphernalia" laws banning possession of anything that "could be used" for preparing or consuming controlled substances.
Aluminum foil was used to improvise "pipe screens" by lining a pipe bowl or a hole in a toilet paper roll and poking small holes in it with a pin. So these laws ended up banning aluminum foil. (Don't recall if this eventually got them struck down...)
As for crappy VOIP, that's baloney. VOIP quality is indistinguishable from regular calls.
That requires a minimum link speed and depends on what your carrier's QoS rules are (or if it's implemented).
If your VoIP packets get "best effort" service along with everything else you're sending/receiving (which is both typical with ISPs who didn't pay extra for QoS or configure it right and the fallout of the simple interpretation of "network neutrality"), you're hosed whenever things get congested.
Try running both a VoIP call and multiple big downloads on your home system simultaneously. Then tell us that "VOIP quality is indistinguishable from regular calls".
Unless the low-bandwidth stream of VoIP packets takes priority over the file transfer packets you'll get jitter, latency, and packet loss (as the VoIP packets wait behind varying numbers of file packets and the transfers ramp up until they experience packet loss - which means the VoIP experiences it, too). That will translate, at a minimum, into delay, which breaks the handoff dynamics of conversation. It will probably also result in dropouts, reconstruction artifacts, "Max Headroom" style repeats, etc. depending on how the VoIP application handles packet delivery flakeyness.
The hypothesis supposed that the plankton would fall to the bottom of the ocean and ultimately turn into oil. Instead the biomass is being turned into energy by large predators, to do this they release CO2 that was stored in the biomass back into the environment.
By the way: It isn't a TOTAL failure at sequestration. The predators don't get it ALL.
It's just nowhere NEAR as good as they thought it would be (because the predators get, and eventually release, A LOT, maybe even MOST, of the carbon.)
It will be interesting to see if the amount of carbon that DOES make it to the bottom and out of circulation for geologic time is less than the lossage due to releasing some of it as methane, which has several times the greenhouse effect of an equivalent amount of carbon as CO2. "My dog wrecked my homework project by farting." is an even worse excuse.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Can you clarify?
When the finger is moving on the key and the key hits a sudden stop the finger is also suddenly stopped. Much of the momentum of the finger/hand/whatever ends up violently compressing the tissues of the joint and skin, dissipating the energy of motion there and damaging the tissue.
Not a lot of damage on any given keystroke. But with a LOT of keystrokes it adds up.
An energy absorbing pad would decelerate the finger more gradually and dissipate the energy mainly by heating (or whatever) the pad rather than crushing the finger's tissues.
A mechanism to absorb the energy exerted on the keystroke.
Without that the energy ends up being dissipated in the muscles, tendons, and (especially) joints of the hand.
This is one of the factors leading to repetitive stress injuries and perhaps also accelerates arthritis.
I'd like to see a keyboard design that "catches" the key after it's pressed far enough to be detected as a "press" and consumes the energy.
If it does it by making a sound (especially if the sound has a one-to-one correspondence with the detection of the keystroke) it also provides feedback. All the better for typing accuracy.
A quarter ton of Ammonium Nitrate made into slightly more than that of ANFO. If they mixed it ideally it's 1.6 times the power of an equivalent weight of TNT. (Even if they used fertilizer grade stuff and only got 0.4x TNT that's a darned big bang.)
Not in the kiloton range yet. But give 'em time and budget...
More universities MUST join this. Preferably, a number of state universities. At that point, congressmen will have a difficult time saying no to this.
IMHO, now that it is started, evolutionary pressure comes into play.
Those who publish their works online, quickly, with broad access, will be more available for reference from other works, compared to those who wait for journal publication. Their good works will get a higher citation rate and sometimes priority. Such feathers in their cap will selectively advance their careers and retard those of their journal-publishing peers. (Just as journal publishing replaced things like anagram-publication to claim priority without actually making the work public.)
This will work even better if the peer-review function can be disconnected from the print-journal publication and ported to an electronic publication model. That would avoid burying the respectable work in the chaff and aid in search filtering as well as re-enabling the manual method at electronic network, rather than print library, speeds.
IMO... a free/open system [loses] the imprimatur of journal publication [producing] increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works.
Which produce the opportunity to fill the void (if the publications don't come to their senses and do it) by organizing a peer-review group to fill this sudden void.
Think "Journal of Links" - though it might also provide editing feedback, talking the author into revisions to improve the paper and/or make it conform to the journal's standards and become suitable for linkage, just as print journals do for publication.
The two functions became conflated by the cost structures of print publishing - allowing the editorial function to be funded by the journal subscription fees as a convenient revenue stream to be tapped.
But the bulk of the work in journal peer-review is volunteer. Seems to me, once the printing costs were eliminated, such a journal could be funded by a number of sources: advertising (i.e. lab equipment suppliers), grants / endowments, making "being an editor of the journal" a prestige function for salaried faculty members, subscriptions to archival-quality links-plus-content hard media, print-on-demand copies of papers (or journal "issues") as a service (for instance by contracting with operations such as Kinkos or Amazon), etc. (Some of these might require a non-exclusive copyright license from the authors as a condition of "inclusion".)
They may not spend as much time with makeup and outfits as the uberbimbos. But IMHO their bodies are often quite as functional. Even more so: Brains have a lot to do with that.
Tracing the individual variations on peripheral neural pathways and working out their operation is even more fun (for both) when the tracee knows and appreciates what is going on and can give additional feedback beyond the basic flushes, indrawn breath, postures, erections, secretions, etc. And there's such synergy when the partner can reciprocate.
Being able to have an intelligent conversation can be far better afterplay than smoking cigarettes. (Though sometimes it DOES distract.)
Then there's the love for gadgets, tool-making, and tool use. (For instance: It's not a coincidence that some of the largest and most active consensual BDSM communities formed in Silicon Valley and other tech centers and organized over the net and email, or that some of the big names in tech are major participants. Did you really think all that pron on the intertubes was just frustrated geeks who COULDN'T get any? B-) But even if such tastes are more common with geek girls it's far from a universal attraction. So use care bringing it up.)
But one of the hottest things about geek girls is that they can appreciate a geek's mind and tend to be attracted - indeed, turned on - by a good one. If said male geek can reciprocate, treating her as a valued team member rather than someone to play smarter-than-you-nyah mind games on, it's the foundation of a solid long-term relationship.
It's like treating a patient for anemia with iron supplements made from his own extracted blood from the future.
Unfortunately, when you finance with debt on an economy-wide basis you pay double - or more. There's the return payment. (Plus the interest - which is the "more".) But there's also the cost to the economy of whatever WOULD have been done with the "borrowed" resources but now is not done because the resources were diverted.
When they talk of how many jobs were created by the stimulus, ask how many jobs were destroyed by it: Destroyed because money was stolen by taxes or the value was stolen from the existing money by inflation. Normally the answer will be "more" - "a lot more" - because the funded programs are less productive than what was defunded and government-managed funds transfer is far less than 100% efficient.
What I was alluding to was that the fundamental breakthrough that led to the fission bomb LED to it. It wasn't a bomb itself. Nor was it anywhere near breakeven.
The first experiments with fission were single atoms being observed to go pop on demand. This is a far cry from releasing more energy than the apparatus consumed.
Building the bombs required a lot of observation of phenomena and creation of an understanding of them, followed by lots of engineering design and construction.
(Unlike nitroglycerine - which demolished the lab and experimenter (who, fortunately, took good notes). Eventually Nobel engineered/discovered a way to make it safe to handle (soak it in kaolin or the like to create dynamite).)
Cold fusion (presuming it exists beyond muon-catalyzed fusion and has a potential for passing breakeven) is still in the "WTF is going on here?" stage. It will need either a better understanding of the process' physics or another lucky accident before a past-breakeven device is made - or the possibility of one can be evaluated.
... one would assume that something like this does regular off-site back-ups, which must add up to a hell of a-lot,..
As I recall from one of Brewster's talks: Part of the idea was that you can install redundant copies of this data center around the world and keep 'em synced.
You can ship 4.5 petabytes over a single OC-192 link in about 71 days.
Slashdot Mirror
... of developing a new pathogen - like an airborne ebola virus.
I wouldn't mind him pleading fair use as an alternative defense. That way we might at least get a read on it. A lot of people seem to think "sharing music" is, or should be OK. (Charlie's point that laws have to be comprehensible to those expected to obey them seems cogent - and how DO you explain the boundaries of Fair Use to a kid?) While I'm with you in thinking it won't fly, nobody else seems to be even attempting it. And I can't think of many bigger guns to take the shot than a Harvard Law School team lead by a professor with Charlie's track record.
But IMHO he'll be doing his client a disservice if that's the ONLY shot he takes. (Unless his client WANTS to risk martyrdom over this point and to keep the other issues off the table to keep the court from avoiding this issue. Or unless it's the only shot available.)
... how about individual Civil Disobedience? Consider filesharing as protected, not for profit, speech in protest of the decades of record companies ripping off consumers as well as artists ...
As I understand it, committing a crime or tort as an act of Civil Disobedience does not carry a legal justification. The civilly disobedient person is still liable for whatever punishment, restitution, etc. is appropriate for the action.
It may be construed to provide a MORAL justification, resulting in a jury nullification. It may set the stage for pleading a necessity defense. It may be a necessary step in obtaining the standing to prove in court that a law is unconstitutional and getting it struck down. There may be so many others participating and/or the cause may be so popular that the authorities decide to let it drop. And so on. But absent something like that, expect to be a jailed and/or paupered martyr for the cause if the authorities bring you to court over such an act.
Unlike Prof. Nesson, I can see no advantage flowing to my clients and future clients from my tipping my hand to the RIAA.
Which makes me wonder if Charlie Nesson might be leading the opposition down the garden path, attempting to bury any real leaks out of his student brain trust under a barrage of unrelated sideshow acts?
(I'm reminded of an alleged CIA tactic called "the second cover": You wrap the secret in TWO cover stories. The first is plausible, even if potentially easily detected as bogus. The second is the kind of stuff you read about in tabloids and certain late-night talk shows (some of which may be the fossils of old second cover stories). When somebody penetrates the first cover they find the second cover. At that point any of several things may happen, including: A) They believe the second cover. Hilarity ensues. B) They "recoil" back to the first cover. C) They become suspicious of any other reports on what is actually under the covers.)
(Then again, maybe Charlie's mind has finally gone. B-( )
As with NYCL's adversaries, we'll know what the Billion Dollar Charlie team's arguments REALLY are when we read them in the court papers. B-)
Meanwhile, if this is what is going on, I hope my speculation (if it has any effect) adds to the confusion rather than blowing the cover.
An immediate application, of course, is prosthetics for lost or damaged limbs.
But if it works out as described, where it's possible to direct additional stuff without interfering with your normal actions, by imagining what you want done and having the device do it, it could be used to control a robot helper or ADDITIONAL artificial limbs.
How many times have people wanted extra hands while soldering, welding, assembling models or appliances, building houses, repairing cars, ...?
Looks like Doctor Octopus may soon be technologically feasible.
google news decide[s] which agency stories to place on their front page [by using] the story placement on the ... news sites they're aggregating[. T]his work is an essential part of running a news web site [a piece of skilled input from highly-paid editors, which it's unfair to appropriate without payment]
And how is this different from all the mainstream news outlets in the US looking at the New York Times ("The Newspaper of Record") to decide which stories are important, rather than figuring it out for themselves?
Make that:
I had a {domainname}.com back when they would all fit on three pages of professionally-printed bound-book hardcopy. But the {domainname} part was the UUCP machine name from earlier.
OMG. "Max Headroom" Over twenty years ago. Time to crank up the geez-o-meter.
Sonny, the first machine I programmed for money used vacuum tubes - for the DIODES, too.
But before that I programmed machines that used relays to perform computations for fun - and to print my QSL cards. Built some, too.
My first personally-owned email machine exchanged email directly with IHNP4 (in Napierville Illinois). From Michigan. At 300 baud. (Because I had hacked the filters in a 110-baud modem to speed it up.) Uphill through the snow both ways! I paid the long distance out-of-pocket, back when it cost by the minute in major bux.
I had a .com back when they would all fit on three pages of professionally-printed bound-book hardcopy. But the part was the UUCP machine name from earlier. It was (and still is) a "good" name, four letters long, in a global namespace including ALL the machines that exchanged mail via UUCP mailnet at the time I picke it. (It was my second choice. I missed the one I really wanted - also four letters - by a week - while my "upstream contact" was twiddling his thumbs rather than forwarding the application forms, in the days before the web. B-b )
I was ON the project that coined the term "hypertext".
Geez-o-meter? I can out-geezer nearly everybody here. B-)
Oh, yes. The Copyright!
With that, Sun can:
- License the code (non-exclusively) to customers under OTHER licenses than the open source license under which it was released.
- Sue others for infringement when THEY use it in ways not included in the open source license.
- Make derived works that they don't release under the open source license.
These are all things that Sun can now do and no others can (presuming Sun continues MySQL's tradition of keeping the main codebase clean of outside code for which they don't have additional non-open-source licensing).
This calls into question whether it's viable to sell a business based on open-source software.
I was under the impression that MySQL operated with a full-featured, proprietary, licensed, commercial version getting immediate upgrades and support, plus a less-featured open source version with releases of code (ported?) from the full-featured branch that ran some months behind the for-pay version.
If that's right, I'd say Sun bought the whole shebang, including the code and customer bases for the licensed deluxe version, not just the open-source codebase, trademark, and employment contracts of a room full of engineers.
As for the viability of "sell[ing] a business based on open-source software", why don't you bring that up with the stockholders of Red Hat? B-)
Back in the '60s and '70s, when the current "drug war" was getting its start, some municipalities passed "narcotics paraphernalia" laws banning possession of anything that "could be used" for preparing or consuming controlled substances.
Aluminum foil was used to improvise "pipe screens" by lining a pipe bowl or a hole in a toilet paper roll and poking small holes in it with a pin. So these laws ended up banning aluminum foil. (Don't recall if this eventually got them struck down ...)
As for crappy VOIP, that's baloney. VOIP quality is indistinguishable from regular calls.
That requires a minimum link speed and depends on what your carrier's QoS rules are (or if it's implemented).
If your VoIP packets get "best effort" service along with everything else you're sending/receiving (which is both typical with ISPs who didn't pay extra for QoS or configure it right and the fallout of the simple interpretation of "network neutrality"), you're hosed whenever things get congested.
Try running both a VoIP call and multiple big downloads on your home system simultaneously. Then tell us that "VOIP quality is indistinguishable from regular calls".
Unless the low-bandwidth stream of VoIP packets takes priority over the file transfer packets you'll get jitter, latency, and packet loss (as the VoIP packets wait behind varying numbers of file packets and the transfers ramp up until they experience packet loss - which means the VoIP experiences it, too). That will translate, at a minimum, into delay, which breaks the handoff dynamics of conversation. It will probably also result in dropouts, reconstruction artifacts, "Max Headroom" style repeats, etc. depending on how the VoIP application handles packet delivery flakeyness.
Not sex. Foreplay. It's a particular technique (or class of them).
Yeah, that is big black hole.
The hypothesis supposed that the plankton would fall to the bottom of the ocean and ultimately turn into oil. Instead the biomass is being turned into energy by large predators, to do this they release CO2 that was stored in the biomass back into the environment.
By the way: It isn't a TOTAL failure at sequestration. The predators don't get it ALL.
It's just nowhere NEAR as good as they thought it would be (because the predators get, and eventually release, A LOT, maybe even MOST, of the carbon.)
It will be interesting to see if the amount of carbon that DOES make it to the bottom and out of circulation for geologic time is less than the lossage due to releasing some of it as methane, which has several times the greenhouse effect of an equivalent amount of carbon as CO2. "My dog wrecked my homework project by farting." is an even worse excuse.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Can you clarify?
When the finger is moving on the key and the key hits a sudden stop the finger is also suddenly stopped. Much of the momentum of the finger/hand/whatever ends up violently compressing the tissues of the joint and skin, dissipating the energy of motion there and damaging the tissue.
Not a lot of damage on any given keystroke. But with a LOT of keystrokes it adds up.
An energy absorbing pad would decelerate the finger more gradually and dissipate the energy mainly by heating (or whatever) the pad rather than crushing the finger's tissues.
(and some older keyboards had as well):
A mechanism to absorb the energy exerted on the keystroke.
Without that the energy ends up being dissipated in the muscles, tendons, and (especially) joints of the hand.
This is one of the factors leading to repetitive stress injuries and perhaps also accelerates arthritis.
I'd like to see a keyboard design that "catches" the key after it's pressed far enough to be detected as a "press" and consumes the energy.
If it does it by making a sound (especially if the sound has a one-to-one correspondence with the detection of the keystroke) it also provides feedback. All the better for typing accuracy.
And finally ... Jamie got big boom.
No kidding.
A quarter ton of Ammonium Nitrate made into slightly more than that of ANFO. If they mixed it ideally it's 1.6 times the power of an equivalent weight of TNT. (Even if they used fertilizer grade stuff and only got 0.4x TNT that's a darned big bang.)
Not in the kiloton range yet. But give 'em time and budget...
More universities MUST join this. Preferably, a number of state universities. At that point, congressmen will have a difficult time saying no to this.
IMHO, now that it is started, evolutionary pressure comes into play.
Those who publish their works online, quickly, with broad access, will be more available for reference from other works, compared to those who wait for journal publication. Their good works will get a higher citation rate and sometimes priority. Such feathers in their cap will selectively advance their careers and retard those of their journal-publishing peers. (Just as journal publishing replaced things like anagram-publication to claim priority without actually making the work public.)
This will work even better if the peer-review function can be disconnected from the print-journal publication and ported to an electronic publication model. That would avoid burying the respectable work in the chaff and aid in search filtering as well as re-enabling the manual method at electronic network, rather than print library, speeds.
IMO ... a free/open system [loses] the imprimatur of journal publication [producing] increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works.
Which produce the opportunity to fill the void (if the publications don't come to their senses and do it) by organizing a peer-review group to fill this sudden void.
Think "Journal of Links" - though it might also provide editing feedback, talking the author into revisions to improve the paper and/or make it conform to the journal's standards and become suitable for linkage, just as print journals do for publication.
The two functions became conflated by the cost structures of print publishing - allowing the editorial function to be funded by the journal subscription fees as a convenient revenue stream to be tapped.
But the bulk of the work in journal peer-review is volunteer. Seems to me, once the printing costs were eliminated, such a journal could be funded by a number of sources: advertising (i.e. lab equipment suppliers), grants / endowments, making "being an editor of the journal" a prestige function for salaried faculty members, subscriptions to archival-quality links-plus-content hard media, print-on-demand copies of papers (or journal "issues") as a service (for instance by contracting with operations such as Kinkos or Amazon), etc. (Some of these might require a non-exclusive copyright license from the authors as a condition of "inclusion".)
Feel up to organizing such a thing?
They may not spend as much time with makeup and outfits as the uberbimbos. But IMHO their bodies are often quite as functional. Even more so: Brains have a lot to do with that.
Tracing the individual variations on peripheral neural pathways and working out their operation is even more fun (for both) when the tracee knows and appreciates what is going on and can give additional feedback beyond the basic flushes, indrawn breath, postures, erections, secretions, etc. And there's such synergy when the partner can reciprocate.
Being able to have an intelligent conversation can be far better afterplay than smoking cigarettes. (Though sometimes it DOES distract.)
Then there's the love for gadgets, tool-making, and tool use. (For instance: It's not a coincidence that some of the largest and most active consensual BDSM communities formed in Silicon Valley and other tech centers and organized over the net and email, or that some of the big names in tech are major participants. Did you really think all that pron on the intertubes was just frustrated geeks who COULDN'T get any? B-) But even if such tastes are more common with geek girls it's far from a universal attraction. So use care bringing it up.)
But one of the hottest things about geek girls is that they can appreciate a geek's mind and tend to be attracted - indeed, turned on - by a good one. If said male geek can reciprocate, treating her as a valued team member rather than someone to play smarter-than-you-nyah mind games on, it's the foundation of a solid long-term relationship.
It's like treating a patient for anemia with iron supplements made from his own extracted blood from the future.
Unfortunately, when you finance with debt on an economy-wide basis you pay double - or more. There's the return payment. (Plus the interest - which is the "more".) But there's also the cost to the economy of whatever WOULD have been done with the "borrowed" resources but now is not done because the resources were diverted.
When they talk of how many jobs were created by the stimulus, ask how many jobs were destroyed by it: Destroyed because money was stolen by taxes or the value was stolen from the existing money by inflation. Normally the answer will be "more" - "a lot more" - because the funded programs are less productive than what was defunded and government-managed funds transfer is far less than 100% efficient.
Look up the "fallacy of the broken window".
What I was alluding to was that the fundamental breakthrough that led to the fission bomb LED to it. It wasn't a bomb itself. Nor was it anywhere near breakeven.
The first experiments with fission were single atoms being observed to go pop on demand. This is a far cry from releasing more energy than the apparatus consumed.
Building the bombs required a lot of observation of phenomena and creation of an understanding of them, followed by lots of engineering design and construction.
(Unlike nitroglycerine - which demolished the lab and experimenter (who, fortunately, took good notes). Eventually Nobel engineered/discovered a way to make it safe to handle (soak it in kaolin or the like to create dynamite).)
Cold fusion (presuming it exists beyond muon-catalyzed fusion and has a potential for passing breakeven) is still in the "WTF is going on here?" stage. It will need either a better understanding of the process' physics or another lucky accident before a past-breakeven device is made - or the possibility of one can be evaluated.
... one would assume that something like this does regular off-site back-ups, which must add up to a hell of a-lot,..
As I recall from one of Brewster's talks: Part of the idea was that you can install redundant copies of this data center around the world and keep 'em synced.
You can ship 4.5 petabytes over a single OC-192 link in about 71 days.
... of a 4.5 petabyte datacenter in a shipping container in transit.