That isn't entirely true. North Korea is not well suited for agriculture, and due to the war and mismanagement the economy is a mess, but it has large ore deposits. Mining is a significant component of the economy even now, and with good management and investment for infrastructure (such as adequate electrical power) could grow considerably.

That was true in some societies, but for the most part not in the African slave trade. There slavers went out specifically in order to capture slaves. They weren't otherwise engaged in warfare.

I think that Disney may have shot themselves in the foot. A patent must by definition describe the method in sufficient detail that a person of ordinary expertise in the field can figure out how to implement it by reading the patent. Since the patent merel describes a ranking algorithm, it can be trivially inverted to select sites likely to contain pirated material.

A scripting language that I find much cleaner than Perl and without the unpleasant tabbing of Python is Tcl. A more recent language with more familiar syntax than Tcl is lua.

A misdemeanor is a criminal offence. Breach of contract is not a criminal offence.

Can anyone explain why Oregon is suing six executives as well as the company itself? Normally in such commercial litigation it is only the company that is liable, not individual employees, and if Oregon thinks that the executives went beyond the pale, you'd expect criminal charges. Furthermore, the executives presumably don't have enough assets to contribute substantially to the damages sought. So why are the executives defendants?

Also, the machine isn't large enough to print the whole house: it is going to be used to create pieces. Those pieces will have to be assembled and joined to each other. That will require labor.

Shark was sold in Boston in the early 1980s, touted as a substitute for swordfish, which was more expensive and contained a lot of mercury. I don't know how well it did but I bought it occasionally. (In my opinion, it doesn't taste as good as swordfish, though there is a resemblance.)

As I understand it, these devices allow you to copy from CDs onto their internal hard drive so that you can keep your own selection of music on the device. Is it possible to use these devices to burn a CD? AS far as I know, the answer is no. If they can't burn a CD, then they cannot be used for illicit copying.

That article doesn't discuss this scenario at all. It neither supports nor refutes the GP.

Some publishers already CAN'T sell through Amazon. For example, I have a book that is published by the College of New Caledonia. My book is not available through Amazon because Amazon demands a huge discount (70%, as I recall) from all publishers, including non-profits like this one. In order to sell its books through Amazon, they would have to hugely increase the retail price so that the heavily discounted amount they would receive from Amazon would cover their costs.

That's 150 euros, about US$225, per box, not total. It is understandable why he would balk at that.

Are you kidding? The Russians waited until the Japanese were on their last legs so that they could grab some Japanese territory. The Russians weren't much of a threat - they were exhausted by the war with Germany.

When I was a grad student at Bell Labs in 1983, a senior programmer told me about how she first programmed, when the labs were in New York City. She would write her program VERY carefully, punch the cards, put them in her briefcase, and fly to Washington, D.C. where she had access to a computer. She would give the deck to the attendant, wait a few minutes, receive her output, go back to the airport, and fly back to New York.