I think that's why he was talking about prepaying. It implies that you haven't accepted any good or service yet, so the business has no legal right to demand payment since they haven't given you anything yet. IANAL so I can't vouch that what he said about prepaid businesses not having to accept legal tender is true, however.

You'd probably like I, Robot by Cory Doctorow. It explores on the implications of the Laws of Robotics in a corporate world - a pretty good read. =)

The title is wrong. FunnyJunk isn't suing, their lawyer Charles Carreon is. He's not representing them, he's representing himself. At least, that's what I got from the title of the case on Courthouse News Service, "Charles Carreon v Matthew Inman".

It's not Patent Holders Only. The current text of the license, as found on Github, states that:

So you can take part if you don't have any patents as long as you promise to license any patents you get later under the DPL.

While I agree that 10 years of real-time is not a good indication of how far the game has gotten, he says in his post that he's up to year 3991 AD. This is the first time I've heard of anyone going so far in a game, let alone keeping at it 10 years after he started it. =)

You can Archive messages in Gmail, which removes them from your Inbox. Regarding Labels, you can either add a label to a message in your inbox, which simply tags it, or you can use the Move To option to tag it and remove it from your Inbox. The More You Know. =)

True, those take a lot of bandwidth and I though of the Linux DVDs, but I didn't think you'd use all that stuff to the point of having a full-time, 24/7 pipe at 2 MB/s, which your calculations seemed to imply. I guess I was wrong. =)

While this is true, I was speaking more of the fact that complaining that the cap is ridiculously low would be hard to justify if most of that cap is used up with illegal downloads. If you're torrenting all the movies you can find, of course your cap is going to seem low, and IMO your ISP doesn't have to cater to your needs for a higher allocation of resources in that case. However, you have shown me that there can be users that legitimately need a higher cap, so I can understand it if you think 250 GB is small. Still, my whole household uses about 100 GB/month, so I'm impressed that you actually use that much.

The slowest one to give the answer, clearly. =P

Canadian here, and I'm curious. What are you running that takes up a sustained 2 MB/s? I can't think of much that would be legal - unless you're hosting a high-traffic website/service on your residential connection - so I would be interested to know. =)

A point could be made that telling people to change their schedules/habits "for science", with no proof that it would actually be beneficial, might be harder than telling them to do so after it has been tested and shown that it would improve their lives in documented ways. Also, with automation, you can try strategies without having to worry about the social part of the experiment. For example, robots will not complain if their "sleep" schedule changes 4-5 times over a given month, so you can try a lot of different strategies, changing as soon as you figure out that it's not going to work. I think you'd get a lot more testing efficiency that way.

Regarding the usefulness of the results, while it's true that the optimal configuration for a city might not be attainable if it has actual inhabitants, you can at least get an idea of what the city should strive towards. Although... There might be a situation where the result of a real city trying to achieve optimal configuration will end up being less efficient (on whatever metric we're using here) than another that has set a more realistic, human-friendly goal. I see what you mean, now. =)

How about, say, 2 + 5?

Mind you, you'll run into a problem when you get to 11. As stated elsewhere in the comments, though, the Conjecture actually says "Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.", so I agree the summary isn't accurate. =)

Yup, I agree. There's civil disobedience, and then there's "let's do illegal stuff and say it's activism". Breaking a storefront window tends to be the latter, IMO. I do hope that it'll go as you say, and that the 10-year penalty will only be awarded to people who did a lot worse than simply having a mask on.

From Wikipedia:

From what I know, at some point during a protest, police may declare a protest illegal if they believe that it will lead to a disturbance of the peace, for example to a riot. It happens on a pretty regular basis lately here in Montréal, and I've heard that once they declare it as such they go around and tell everyone to disperse and leave, informing them of the fact. Now, if they do so in a way that people have a reasonable chance to understand it and GTFO if they'd rather not get arrested, I can't say - I wasn't at any such protest.

I think this move probably has something to do with the current situation here in Québec, where student protests have led to the formation of less-than-pacific groups of masked protesters roaming the protests and causing havoc in Montréal. I can see the motive behind such legislation - make suspect identification easier if they bolt after throwing a brick through a storefront - but wow, that's a pretty strong penalty for what is a essential victimless crime, if it can even be called a crime in the first place.

Now, will police officers ask for masks to be taken off? I don't think there are enough officers to actually enforce this with any efficiency, nor will it prevent people from putting a mask on just before committing an illegal act - and then running away. Sure sounds like more of a "let's reassure the general public that we're in control here" move than a policy that'll actually have a positive effect, IMO.

They used to say that about Macs, too. Be careful. =P