I'm not about to claim the US went to war over access to natural gas, but you might want to look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Afghanistan_Pipeline.

They reverse-engineer it and make cheap local copies. Fortunately people in developing countries have realized that IP laws are being pushed by developed nations to retain their economic dominance - and so they ignore them.

Only the people who comment don't read the article. This is mostly because of the moderation system - if you stop to read the article then your comment will appear to late to gather any mod points - thus you are lost in the +1 noise. Only by jumping in as soon as you see something posted and saying something pointless, uninformed, and inane will you have a chance of getting moded to +5 by your peers - who also didn't read the article.

This is true, which leads me to think that how 'strong' an opponent is (hp, ep, etc) is not a very good measure of how much experience you get from fighting them.

It would seeme that a system measuring the length of the fight, how much damage each participant took, if the fight was balanced, and how close you came to losing would e a much better way to calculate experience gained.

So, you start a level, battle your way through it for hours, nearly die several times, and of course you get a ton of experience. Or, you throw fire at everything, run from start to finish in five minutes, and get almost nothing.

IANAL ... But I've at least read the court ruling

FunkWorks appears to be an almost identical case to this, they are copying simple facts that are arranged in chronological order, where that order is the natural and obvious order for such facts.

They might have a bit of a problem in that they are copying a large part of the timetable (all weekdays I beleive, but not weekends), but I can't really see RailCorp being able to claim that they put much effort into compiling the timetable - it's not that big.

Interestingly, one of the deciding factors in this case was that Nine claimed the copyright of their weekly schedules was being infringed, not the copyright of the database as a whole. The court then decided that only a small part of any schedule was being copied, and that part had little originality.

It might have been different if they had considered it as copying the scheduling database as a whole, since it might have ammounted to a substantial part then (but I doubt it).

Reading the full decision from the High Court is actually (for a change) worth while. It's in pretty plain English, and is very well written.

It correctly identifies that facts can not be copyright, even when "colocated" with original material that can be. However, the "original material" may consist of the presentation of those facts, such as their order. Consider a poem that consists of well know facts, but presented in a dramatic and original order.

They determined that IceTV had indeed copied facts, and that there was minimal originality in the ordering of those facts because they were simply presented in chronological order - which is both obvious and necessary for their intended function.

Finally, they also noted that Nine Networks had probably not expended much effort to arrange the information, which could also be a factor in such cases.

Ahh, but the great thing here is, any original work you do is copyright. All you have to do is create something suitably awww-ish, and then email it to someone you don't like. Include the usual 'this email is copyright' footer that companies add, and that everyone ignores.

The chances are that person will forward the email to friends and bingo, you can make a complaint.

Sorry, but this was blatent corruption.

Section 92 of the copyright ammendment act was written at the prompting of the entertainment industry. It was then widely criticised during public review of the proposed law, and removed. But, surprise suprise, it was magically re-inserted after the public consultation period ended.

Yo Dawg, we heard you like LCD screens, so we've put an LCD screen inside your LCD screen. So now you can look at things while you look at other things.

We also heard you like pointing devices, so this baby has three of them!, with two sets of buttons!

a few hundred kilos of oxidiser
The oxidiser weighs a lot. Take the shuttle for instance, at take-off the shuttle proper weighs 109,000 kg, the external LOX tank? 629,340 kg (just the LOX, not the LH2).

On the ground they won't be moving fast enough to scoop oxygen out of the air
"The Sabre engine is essentially a closed cycle rocket engine with an additional precooled turbo-compressor to provide a high pressure air supply to the combustion chamber. This allows operation from zero forward speed on the runway and up to Mach 5.5 in air breathing mode during ascent."

Let's face it, no review by anyone that you do not personally know is worth anything.

Professional reviewers 'do it for the money' and can therefore be either bought, or just recognised and given preferential treatment.

Reviews by members of the public can be faked. Anyone can sign up and claim anything.

Some people just love to complain, and will do so in every forum at every chance. Negative reviews will always dominate. (This very article is a negative review, in a way). Satisfied customers have no reason to leave a review.