They do NOT plan to release it to public domain! The opening line under the link is misleading; they later on specify that they plan to release the music under "a" Creative Commons licence. That's a huge difference.

Are you coming from Verizon?
$300,000 is not the same as $30,000,000 (=300 hundred thousand dollars)

look like CowboyNeal!

He probably wants nothing more than being left alone. It's ironic that he doesn't seem to grasp that his eccentric behavior makes that even more difficult to achieve.

The article says that the $100.000 Jacobsen was awarded doesn't compensate him for going through the procedure.

If this is true and projects to future cases, then developers still won't have incentive to fight their case in the court (even if they have a decent chance to win), and infringing companies will have reason to think that they are not going to be brought to court, which rather increases the chance of indulging in infringement. The deterrence factor is low.

Moreover, was featured on Slashdot a week ago! But then again the Chuck Norris part of the story captivated more the ./ crowd.

By the way the odds of TFA don't add up to 1 either, as they should given all possibilities are covered: 1/500+1/750+1/75+1/50+1/300+1/200+1/75+1/100+1/10+1/20 = 0.2183*.

Anyone ready to Dutch-book the Macworld fanboys?

"Status @ 22:30 NZT, 17:30 Beijing time, 13-01-10: Despite reports to the contrary Google.cn is still censored."

... is that the process will take longer and longer time. Carnot efficiency is defined by the efficiency of a reversible heat engine operating between the given temperatures; but truly reversible processes would take infinite amount of time. Efficiency is certainly an important aim, but certainly not the solely desirable aim.

...when should we throw our end-of-the-world parties?

..and it is accessible without limitations from the entire area of the airport. So I'm not sure what is the added value of having an extra free Google hub here during the holidays.

450,000 new permanent jobs sounds an awful lot. Are they going to pay people to travel on the train or what?

Score:5, Funny: Only on Slashdot

From TFA:

The 32-bit version of Menuet was released under the GPL, but the 64-bit version uses a non-open-source licence that is free for "personal and educational use". Why did you decide to licence the 64-bit version differently? Has this had any impact on encouraging people to join the effort?

Ville: With a completely new type of open source project, people seem to have strong opinions about what direction to take. Even up to a point when time is actually spent more with disputes than doing the actual coding. And when that happened, I decided to concentrate more on the original path of Menuet with the 64-bit version and with a new type of license. However, I don't have anything against open source or possibly opening up the Menuet64 source later. But with the current licence, I'd say the people are a bit more committed and willing to put more effort in to a new feature.

Too bad that the fine tuning argument doesn't make sense. In order to run the argument you need to assume the existence of a (probability) measure over the possible values of fundamental physical constants (to make sense of ideas such as "this interval must be extremely SMALL" / "the SMALLER the interval the less probable that it was produced by chance" etc.). But we only observe our own universe where these constants have a given value, and there is no natural measure whatsoever on the space of possible physical constants, neither probabilistic nor a priori. Since we have no empirical basis for making any claims about how this measure looks like (why not a Dirac-measure?), claims about "smallness" of intervals make no sense and the fine-tuning argument falls apart.
It always amazes me how easily people commit the fallacy of thinking that the Lebesgue measure is/should be special.