There are some things that reasonably can be ascribed the quality of being a worthy candidate for ridicule.

Certainly the notion that a representative democracy would copyright its laws and attempt to control their distribution for profit or any other motive is worthy of ridicule.

AFAIK the motivation is almost always financial, usually in collusion with some big legal publisher who gets exclusive rights and kicks back to the state. But it's not hard to imagine some kind of conspiratorial intent to restrict information to protect the legal class or bury details.

About the only rationale that makes any sense is to try to maintain an official reference presentation. The state could actually format and print a small run of the code and annotations themselves, which anyone could copy, but that would probably be a non-trivial amount of overhead, so they outsource it to a publisher in exchange for exclusivity.

You're forgetting more functional reasons -- like pain relief?

It wouldn't surprise me at all if more than a few long-time lab rats ended up with orthopedic issues from decades of standing in lab environments.

It's not a stretch from that to morphine synthesis to treat back pain.

I blame airline consolidation.

Fewer airlines, each hiding out in their fortified monopoly hub airports, means less gate competition and less gate competition means airports can probably charge less for gate access. It's probably even worse, because with fewer airlines overall a lot of airports worry about losing their hub status and probably charge even less to the big carrier left providing service or provide other accommodations which save the hub carrier money.

This revenue pinch causes them to turn to commercial providers to install and run their wifi networks or if they run their own, to charge for service.

Flying sucks.

An economist who studies the commercial pollination market hasn't seen any real impact from the bee crisis.

Wally Thurman on Bees, Beekeeping, and Coase

Yeah. I mean, there should be, just purely from an economic perspective you should see evidence of this. So we started looking. And surprisingly enough, as I speak here today, in 2013, we have more bees in America than we did in 2007, before Colony Collapse Disorder was observed and named. There is virtually no effect--there has probably been some effect on the price of pollination services, but it's not dramatic. And it's probably only for almonds, the only early-season crop that is pollinated. Not for the other crops pollinated the rest of the year. And this is surprising, given all the discussions of CCD and honeybee health.

We've found there's been no effect of Colony Collapse Disorder on the prices of queens.

It does make a person wonder how many university organic chem labs churn out drugs on the side, even if its only for self-consumption.

I would imagine by now that the precursor chemicals for relatively easy synthesis are controlled, but I would think a good PhD in organic chemistry would merely take that as a challenge and attempt a more complex synthesis which made the precursors.

Hell, if they were clever they may even be able to some of it (or even all of it) as a legitimate project if it somehow advanced the synthesis know-how. I think I've read that the total synthesis of morphine is ridiculously complex but that it would be highly desirable to develop a synthesis that avoided any kind of opium base.

You can be a lot more subtle - tell them that your host is xbcd.com

I always keep an "atashi" or "eg" subdomain on my sites configured thusly ;)

It's what collection agencies do with lawsuits and what many mortgage holders have done when going after homeowners.

The collection companies have gotten bad press from filing bogus lawsuits with inadequate documentation. Like sending summonses for their suits to the wrong address, resulting in bench warrants being issued to people who never got the notices and ignored the default judgements that resulted. I don't think most county level civil courts did much about it, though.

The mortgage industry I think earned more heat from bankruptcy courts when they showed up with bad documentation that basically couldn't prove they owned the mortgages. I think some judges got annoyed with the mass litigation many engaged in and started discharging the mortgages unless they could provide accurate documentation, but I think it only happened after a few savvy defense attorneys began to understand the maze of paperwork and lack of legal documents (ie, pen and paper notarized paperwork) that actually proved the plaintiffs owned the mortgages.

IMHO, there ought to be a set of steep progressive penalties imposed on both counsel and plaintiff who file serial/mass litigation with flimsy or substantively inaccurate documentation. Like the first one is a slap on the wrist, the second within some window of the first is a $10,000 fine and the third in the same window is a $100k fine, risk of disbarment to counsel and perjury charges to the plaintiff. You need these kinds of penalties to restrain counsel and clients.

Um... read the paper, page 10.....

Voltron [33] is a language designed for distributed mobile sensing. Voltron allows the developer to specify the logic to be executed at several locations, without having to dictate how the robots must coordinate to achieve the objectives...