Oligopolies can form in free markets. A free market doesn't mean a competitive one, it just means the government doesn't interfere. Governments can interfere to promote oligopoly, or to dissuade it.

Apple uses the same trick as Microsoft did in the past, they modulate how easy/convenient it is to pirate/jailbreak their shit to maximize earnings.

Wait, so the Jailbreakme pdf exploit was left there intentionally? Allowing anyone on the intarwebs to execute arbitrary code on my device?

I don't see any modulation going on- every update breaks the last jailbreak, within a couple of months a new jailbreak is out, rinse, repeat.

I have a soft spot for Logo, it was my first programming language. It's a great learning language, it caught my imagination pretty much immediately.

I remember the media saying that other pandemic flus had peaked twice, once in the fall and once later. So if that had happened, it could have helped.

Anyway, I don't think we physically have the ability to manufacture flu vaccines much faster than we did. It's grown in eggs, sloowwly. If anything it was a good wake-up call that we can't expect to be protected by a vaccine in the event of a really deadly epidemic.

[citation needed] on the first one, there...

They ramped up vaccine production as fast as they possibly could, IN CASE by the time it was available, the virus would be still going gangbusters.

Luckily it wasn't, but we just don't know enough about flu to have known ahead of time, let alone guessed.

Too late.

http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=r1c4qr7k5y8t&scene=38572790&lvl=2&sty=b

Bing maps has had aerial imagery for forever. The area around my house is higher res than this link, actually (down to a swingset).

Reading it narrowly, Congress has the power to give content producers the exclusive right to use their own works.

My question is, since the extensions aren't in the Constitution, under what clause of the Constitution does Congress get to enforce copyright beyond the death of the author?

A) We have laws against murder for that. Anyway, I'm not so sure that corporations would want to do this: once it's in the public domain, anybody would be able to use it. A corporation with a monopoly is bound to make more money off what it's selling than if corporations B and C are also selling it, so it'd be in its best interests to buy the rights.

B) Possible, but I don't see it being a huge incentive. This is hard to quantify- if it's a small enough effect, then extending copyrights beyond death is a net loss to society.

Say I've got money from copyright royalties.

I bankroll my kids' educations.

They work hard at school, do well, go on to earn money in the real world. Maybe one of them makes money by producing works under copyright.

By the time THEY have kids, they've got enough money to get them through college. Maybe they inherit some of my money when I'm dead.

Rinse, repeat.

No need for inherited copyright.

"by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

So, Authors can be given the exclusive right to sell, perform, use, whatever, things they've made or discovered. Cool. Except that right extends beyond the author's death- either to his/her estate, or whatever corporation had been given it.

What is the Constitutional rationale for rights extending after death? I can't imagine it promoting useful art.

It took me 30 seconds to work out what you just did there, but I'm posting this FTL, so you will not have needed to have posted at all now.

And if you could, then you could violate causality without breaking a sweat:
http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html

Not sure I want to live in a universe where we've invented FTL communication, it would get really, really confusing.

IANAPhysist either, but I am pretty good at math.

Yes, FTL communication leads to causality violation. The "tachyon pistols" is a thought experiment that explains it:
http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html
You can argue this, I guess, but it falls out of special relativity. If these experiments already done actually do propagate a signal faster than light then engineering a paradox would not be that hard, and that would be huge news.

"By carefully adjusting the frequency of the voltage and the phase displacement the researchers say they can make the wave travel at greater than the speed of light. However no physical quantity of charge travels faster than light speed."
The experiment in the article is fundamentally the same as sweeping a laser across the moon. As I read it, they're basically shoving the EM field enough that one part wiggles, then another part wiggles, and if you calculate the "speed" as if the wiggles were a wave moving from one place to another then you get a number faster than light. However, the wiggles aren't actually causing one another and don't transmit information in the direction of propagation.

One of the funny things about special relativity is that subjective time slows down the faster something moves. An atomic clock in orbit ticks slower than one on the ground. When you hit the speed of light (you can't, if you've got mass, but say you're a photon) then time stops entirely. Photons do not experience time.

Actually, all photons move at the speed of light. The apparent speed of light can slow down, by putting a bunch of atoms in the photon's way. The photon is absorbed and another is emitted, and that takes time. It's possible to take that emission and slow it down almost arbitrarily, "freezing" light.

Er, when did beauty come into it? If it had been an ugly person would he have been less of a "sick fuck"- even marginally?