Although I'm not a Windows user myself. I maintain a virtualized test copy running under That Other OS for the benefit of my IT clients. I have a standardly purchased XP and a standardly purchased Vista (in the time when it was new) and am now running the beta 10.

And will people who just downloaded the beta, and are using it and filing bug reports, still get a free copy of the release evrsion?

You're thinking of the Billy Rose's Aquacade case in New York, in which a small business owner named Billy Rose was not allowed to apply his own name to his business, because of confusion with the established brand of Billy Rose's Aquacade. "B-B-But..." sputtered his lawyer, "Billy Rose is my client's real name. The guy who runs the Aquacade is named Rosenstein!" The ruling was still that the established nature of the Aquacade brand superseded the defendant's use of his own name.

But in this case, Mr. Lush registered first, and because it's his own name he can't be accused of domain squatting.

Phoenix has a central separation facility. Everyone gets a blue wheelie bin, somewhat smaller than the regular trash wheelie. Everything recyclable goes into the blue bin, and it gets separated at one downtown facility.

  Because recyclables tend to be light but bulky items like milk jugs and newspapers, having to ship recycled material overseas means we have already lost. Processing needs to be by city and region, so transportation costs don't eat up the value of the material and so that the value of what is produced stays in our economy. In my rural area we have "German-style" recycling, in which end-users separate everything into a series of village bins. Not that many people, especially the young, are wiling to put in the time to do that.

This is an amazing change from the way it used to be in Vegas. People dashed from resort to resort in cars, ad you never saw a pedestrian on the street. But now the Strip has become a highly walkable place, with shops right on it, as opposed to being only in resorts, and even food trucks and pushcarts. I even saw a Segway being ridden in the wild there once - not by a mall cop, not a tour group.

My area (rural northern AZ) is going whole hog for roundabouts. They have worked really well once people got used to them, but this area is really tourist-intensive, and that's where we get problems. They are a great replacement for 4-way stops and low-volume signals, and we even have some two-laners.

The substance of the native rights argument is that Mauna Kea is venerated in Hawaiian culture in the same way that Fujiyama is venerated in Japanese culture. Having been on both mountains (and also Mt Graham) has given me an earth-level view of what actually takes place on them. Mauna Kea has had telescopes since 1968, when I was able to see the very first one going in. What else was up there at the summit? Absolutely nothing, except for the access road and other hikers - and unlike most other mountaintops, it's a vast area with a gentle slope. The most spectacular thing about it was the view, of the Big Island on one side and the Pacific on the other. In pre-colonial times everything above the treeline on it was reserved for the ali'i, the one-percenters of old Hawaii. Only now, in America, does the summit belong to the people, administrated by U of H under that 1960 agreement by which they have to preserve it from desecration.

Fujiyama is venerated also, and because of this is one of the busiest high mountains in the world. Every Japanese is morally obligated to climb it once in a lifetime, like Muslims going to Makkah. You take trains and a bus to about the midway point, and then climb through a series of five "stations" or resthouses, each one of them a romping hive of commercial activity. Japanese pilgrims buy a LOT of mementos. Every day of the summer climbing season there is a solid line of people coming up the one-way trail from the side facing Tokyo. You camp out at the top, and get up early to watch goraiko, the sunrise that is so special that it has a word of its own. There is a weather station and a radio complex at the top. At the moment of sunrise I could look back on an endless sea of cameras. Yes, people hauled tripods and big lens kits up there for the occasion.

The same set of people protesting Mauna Kea as protested GMOs and all the other tech that liberals hate, you say? Yes, that's exactly what happened here too. Nobody seemed to mind when the hunting lodge and the campground and the federal prison were built on Mt Graham, but the wackosphere erupted at the first sign of astronomical activity. Why, exactly, did they hate pure science more than they did a federal prison? I suppose for the same reason that your protesters hate pure science more than the annual dirt races on their mountain.

No, NIST is working toward a test for the presence of intelligent life in the teenage population.

Women in STEM is a perfectly valid nerd issue.

Put me down as being proud of his "underhanded accomplishment" too. May the Earth First!ers, in particular, die in a fire.

When I visited the U of A Steward mirror lab on the Tucson campus, we were told that as each of the big mirror segments cast and ground there was completed, it had to be moved out at a secret randomized time of the night, in case terrorists tried to attack.

If it wants to convince artists that they will gain by signing on to Apple Music, the company with the largest cash reserve in the world could easily demonstrate this by paying the subscription royalty rate for trial period music.

Getting more women into STEM is not about glitter, or color choice, or upper body strength, or the need for occasional time off to bear children. It has to be about overcoming the risk-averse fearfulness that pervades women's culture. Feminists need to accept that this problem exists as a holdover from primordial gender roles and that it is no longer needed in modern society. It needs to be discussed as openly as we hash over the ancient problem of aggression in men. If women are going to make the most of their brains, this has to happen.

Race-based nationalism doesn't magically become Good if it's not white people who are indulging in it.

Because it's the most active volcano in the world.

In 1960 the University of Hawaii entered into an agreement with Hawaiians that it maintain an 11,300 - acre natural preserve at the top of Mauna Kea, which over the years had been used for such activities as Enduro mud racing. Within this area, it could pursue astronomy with a 525-acre "astronomy precinct" within the reserve. What's going on now is an attempt to renege on this deal.

For the good of science, let's hope that Gov. Ige evolves a spine when the protests resume.