Most likely, Warner Bros sent Linden Labs a DMCA take-down notice asking for the removal of Avatar content, just like Warner and others do for all kinds of content all over the internet.
Just because its in Second Life doesn't magically mean the take-down process doesn't apply.

Show me that exception in the constitution. Courts have upheld the right to travel, don't see what a border has to do with this.

There has always been a lot of talk on /. about RedHat not playing mp3 out of the box, supposedly for patent reasons.

I have never had such an issue using non-US distros (mainly Mandrake/Mandriva, now also Ubuntu). And all those software patents are very much a US-only issue

nice

well i don't know if it really helps but here's the CXXFLAGS i export before i configure it

  -O3 -fsched2-use-superblocks -fbranch-probabilities -fsched2-use-traces -funsafe-loop-optimizations -Wunsafe-loop-optimizations -ffast-math -fprofile-use -march=athlon64 -fmodulo-sched -funswitch-loops -ftree-loop-im -ftree-loop-ivcanon -fivopts -ftree-vrp -ftracer -fvariable-expansion-in-unroller -fgcse -fgcse-las -fgcse-after-reload -fsched-spec-load-dangerous -fvpt -fbranch-target-load-optimize -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections

There are ones for multicore too, look those up if you want ._.

Sodium metal in liquid metasl cooled reactors is corrosive.

No it's not. One of the reason sodium is used as a coolant is that it hardly corrodes the steel components at all. Even after decades of operations molten-sodium systems the "wet" side of the components can still have the scratch marks in the steel from when the reactor was constructed.

This is not to say sodium is trivial to work with. On contact with air or water it combusts spontaneously, and the chemicals formed can be quite corrosive. Also whether something is corrosive or not depends what it is reacting with. Sodium-hydroxide is extremely corrosive to organic compounds but it doesn't attack metals or glass. Water readily dissolves ionic compounds like salts, but not fatty compounds like butter.

Which is pretty weird considering the lemons themselves can be used as a battery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_battery and http://hetlab.kro.nl/hightech/citroenbatterij.aspx (includes a nice video)

I've been approached by vendors on the floor of many trade shows - not while at their booth but while looking at another product. It's a good way to find people who might be interested in your stuff. And I've also been invited to attend off-site events while on the floor of a convention.

I agree that a lot of vendors also take advantage of their customers and potential customers all being in the same place at the same time, to convene them at after-hours parties and events, with invitations issued ahead of time.

CES doesn't have the moral right to kick you out of your hotel room - but it appears that they have sufficient influence to do so. I'm not saying it was right - but it appears they did it, and unless big media picks the story up, they'll probably get away with it.

And even then, you must have been able to switch to offline mode/verify the install initially while you still had an internet connection.

I found this out the hard way when I lost internet for a month right after a reinstall. "Nah, I'll be fine without internet - I still have this whole orange box to play through." :P

The dangerous case with your note is that it's result dependent.

"Spends all his time with math" ... and writes semi-pro papers, tutors a kid, and writes little freeware puzzles to amuse the net hordes. Win.

"Spends all his time with math" ... and tries to figure out the numerology of life, but crucially, gets the worst of new age with none of the science of emergence. Then he's total bait for medical pigeonholing. Too smart for "ordinary" types, but too flawed to play the "strange genius" card.

I do not know anyone here in the UK that does not love Woolworth's. We feel really aggreived in the UK about the closure of all the stores that had been with us for over a 100 years and served SOCIETY well! It was the liquidators that made the store bankrupt and if you do some digging you will find out that it did not have to close at all. It was the accountants, solicitors that did this and it was funded underhandely by Tesco.

Thing is math is often a few paces ahead of understanding.

Shut up, calculate, and when we get the result let's try matching key points to known facts and see if any patterns emerge so that parts we don't understand (yet) match facts yet to be uncovered.

If reality doesn't match math, it means we missed something essential so we insert another variable into our equations, recalculate and know we have uncovered something new...

Thanks for explaining that.

So when I say:

"Secondly, how do you go about not having a credit card in the USA? I always felt kind of strange, because I felt I was the only one who paid most things cash, the rest by debit card, and only used cheques when I really had to. Everybody else seemed to use mostly credit cards, making it the expected and sometimes actually only possible payment method."

that basically means they've got me where they want to: namely believing that getting and using a credit card is the normal thing to do. Better yet, I know from having lived in the States for a while that it's beneficial to have a credit card, because, that way, you can build up a credit rating. No credit rating makes it harder to get loans. Although, on the other hand, I think getting a loan isn't particularly hard; it seems people are being bombarded with loan offers, credit crunch or no. No wonder personal debt is such an issue in the US...

I decided on one paranoid night to try to do just that. I found that for the most popular free solutions (AVG, Avast, Avira) you can install them side-by-side and narrowed it down to just one resident scanner running. You either have to find the hidden option in the menus, disable the start-up entries, or just opt not to install them during setup. I was able to safely ignore the warnings about having other AV products installed during the various setups.

An easy solution for individual files is VirusTotal. You can upload the file (less than 20MB) and have it scan it with ~39 different antivirus programs.

The most important thing to remember is that security is a process, and not a product. (If I remember that saying right... and I don't mean explorer.exe)

Of course, some would say that having the Y chromosome (being an X chromosome with one of the "legs" left off) leaves men in a genetically inferior state.

On the other hand, the fact that it takes an extra "leg" for the double X to get everything expressed could explain a lot about the female tendency toward talkativeness.

Speaking as a married Western woman who relies on her husband to be her intellectual, sexual and financial equal (except when I'm at home raising children, when he's happy to bring in the cash): Where the hell are you looking for women? Because you fail pretty hard at it.

Yes, there's a lot of neurotics and gold-diggers out there. They're probably a majority. But then the majority of men are self-centered assholes just looking for something pretty to fuck. And no, I can't name any women who have absolutely no annoying characteristics, particularly myself. But I can't name any men either.

Seems like you might have a major case of being-unable-to-deal-with-other-humans.

And what is with this "Western" or "American" generalisation? Are nice subservient women more to your taste? Because that's usually what asshole misogynists mean when they complain about Western women. Do you need your woman to always defer to your judgement and follow your orders? You might be in for a pretty rude shock with a lot Asian women if you expect them to be meek, demure little dolls. You sure as shit can't claim that women from other cultures are less interested in a man's money, as this particular complaint of yours is older than dirt.