What is a reasonable cost to assign to the carbon and pollutants put into the atmosphere during operation of a coil, oil, or gas power plant? Can you compare the price of fusion-generated electricity to other known technologies, including *all* costs to society.?

"costs much less than paper to distribute."

This is almost certainly not true in any practical sense.

We are concerned about the cost to consumers, so the cost to produce the copy is not important. What matters is that cost minus the advertising revenue. Advertisements on the web don't make anywhere near as much money for the NYT as ads in the paper. A digital-only subscription does not necessarily bring in more money for them; there is however a shift in the fraction of the cost paid by the reader vs. the amount paid for by ad revenue.

First, please note that I do not think the application of these laws is justified in this case (that's my personal opinion, based on what I have read).

But I would ask you to rethink the justification for hate crimes laws. Consider the kind of actions that were committed in the southern US earlier in the last century, such as burning a cross in the yard of an African American family. Is trespassing in the yard the only crime committed? The action was a message to the entire African American community, telling them not to step out of line or irritate the white community or they risk the lives of their families. This is one kind of intimidation that hate crime laws are meant to address. For one group of people to attempt to control another group using threats of violence is indeed a crime by itself.

None of this argues that the actual laws we have were well written or are appropriately enforced. On those matters, I don't know enough to have an opinion.

"another person felt so bad about having his private live revealed that he killed himself"

Did he? There is no evidence of this at all. The suicide note was apparently deemed to be not relevant to the case and was never made public. It isn't justice to assume that the suicide was caused by the webcam and then judge Ravi based on it. It was reported that Tyler's coming out caused some extreme conflict with some of his close family members. Can we say definitively which thing caused the suicide?

JD, your question as posted by the editors is contradictory and either uninformed or uninformative.

You seem to say first that one company has something they are entitled to offer a closed-source license for that includes part of the Linux kernel. This makes no sense. Second, you seem to claim that a company that offers version 1 of its code under the GPL must also make version 2 GPLed even if it owns the code, and that is simply wrong.

If you can't make a clearer case for a GPL violation, you shouldn't "harass" anyone. Let the copyright owners of the GPLed code know what is happening--they are the only ones who can do anything out it.

It is unclear...if...perhaps...unless...

"When is it a good time to complain?" Sometime after you understand the facts and the laws relevant to the matter at hand.

Weird that "confusing to newbies" is not in TFA. Was it invented by the submitter?

The reasons stated were 1. "clean up the mess that was made when the /sbin and /bin directories were first split" 2. "it would be far simpler to run multiple instances of the operating system on different machines on a network," 3. "facilitate the use of snapshots"

The first of these is begging the question (what mess?). I can't make heads or tails of the other two.

If Lennart Poettering is a primary advocate, it means that the change would make something the Lennart wants to do on his personal desktop easier for him.

"there should be cooperation between the Linux and BSD camps"

Of course there should be, but you won't see it from Pottering. He doesn't care if anything works on Linux except under Gnome. He certainly isn't going to care if things work on BSD.

Oddly, as someone trying to use a modern Linus distro without Gnome, Potterings antics have made me wonder if I should switch to a BSD.

Laboratory-grade surfaces are needed to reflect laboratory-grade laser intensities, like GW/m^2 cw, or much higher for brief exposures.

What's the highest power laser you can deploy in the field? What's the tightest beam you can fire a km or so at a target after accounting for diffraction? These are not the kinds of numbers that give you instant vaporization of your target.

Speaking empirically, the Supreme Court often does whatever it wants and cites or ignores precedence as required to justify the ruling.

You can argue that they should follow precedent except in extreme cases in the interest of maintaining a functional legal system. It is a big step from that to argue that they actually do it.

You can also argue that this was a bad case to use to establish new precedent, and society is better off because they followed res judicata this time.

The bit about the court repeating back to us our own standards seems completely false. Lots of laws limiting access by minors to violent material have been passed by duly elected bodies (and subsequently declared unconstitutional). At what point do those elected legislators become a better representation of "our own standards?"

That's the easier part. The harder part is to switch permissions to the new user so they have access to audio devices, so automounted file systems have the right owner, and so on. If that isn't needed, then a simpler solution is good enough.

This is not quite correct. The publishers did get paid for editing, proofreading, marketing, etc., when the books were first published, as was Cherryh's agent. No one thinks that those books will sell enough to pay printing, shipping, and so on today, so they are out of print. The only reason she can sell them for a couple bucks on a web site is because they already made money, or at least enough money was made from her other books to support the writing and publishing of her subsequent books. (Regenesis was excellent.)

"While I understand that the Kindle is sold somewhat as a loss-leader and a mechanism to try to sell ebooks for absurd prices (it's bad enough that paperbacks are $9; to charge that same price that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...hard to swallow)"

It's not clear that you do understand. To a reasonable first approximation, the cost of printing and binding a book, hardback or paperback, is zero. Most of the cost goes to paying people, like authors, agents, editors, proofreaders, artists, buyers, marketers, and so on, who do the same work whether a book is a hardback, an ebook, or etched onto gnat's wings. The only reason that hardbacks cost so much more is because people are willing to pay it the get the book when it is first published. That's where most of the money is made. If people switch from $30 hardbacks to $10 ebooks, there will be no more money to pay the people who produce books the way we know them today. A massive switch to $10 ebooks will kill the creation of new book.

Once you pay the fixed costs, like writing and editing, from the revenues from the hardbacks, any sale that makes any money is worthwhile, so we have paperbacks. If the ebook were to be released with the paperback, it could be sold for $1-2 less than the paperback and everyone would be happy. If it is released concurrently with the $30 hardback, they have to sell it for hardback prices. You could argue that all ebook sales are in addition to hardback sales, not replacing hardback sales, but that isn't very plausible.

Remember that the abstraction-filtration-comparison test is applicable to cases in the 10th Circuit. Other circuits have different tests. Until the Supreme Court weighs in, copyright law will in effect be different in different parts of the US.

Anyone with experience with simulations of this complexity must cringe at the thought of what bad approximations, improper algorithms, and just plain dumb mistakes must be in there. In some cases, the simulation will be robust to problems, and you can get good answers anyway (e.g. an energy sink in a particular equation can damp oscillations whether it is particularly accurately modeled or not). Sometimes the mistake is in the main feedback channel governing the system behavior, and you get nothing but garbage out. Considering the, what, trillions? quadrillions? of dollars in damage that could be caused by anthropogenic global climate change, any number of billions of dollars spent on improving the models is worth it.

On the other hand, the glaciers and ice sheets really are vanishing, aren't they?