The peer review process is separate from the publication process. One is run by volunteers from academia. The other is run by employees of the publisher. You'll absolutely know if they try to blackball you due to your funding sources. (My apologies if I'm misreading you.)

I don't know how it is in other areas, but the publishers in my area wouldn't survive the backlash if half the submissions were barred from publication over this. The social dynamics at play are subtle, but if even 10% of articles accepted by the peer review process were rejected over shenanigans like this, things would change.

Something you and a few other commenters seem to have missed is that many publishers already have policies that allow Open Access (or some sort or another) if it is required by a researcher's funding agency. What they don't allow is Open Access just because an author wants it.

If this passes, I would like to apply for a $1 grant even though I am not in California. Some publishers allow open access only when required by law and this would give me leverage. (As an academic it is in my interests to have my articles as easily accessible as possible. I never see a dime from the paywalls on my published articles.)

As long as we're talking about better syntaxes, don't forget the ISWIM/Miranda/Haskell style which IMHO is one of the best.

Performance is a problem but it isn't the problem. The distributed enforcement of policy is potentially a harder problem than even performance.

For example, on a monolithic kernel, ensuring that no process (except a specified list) is both setuid and talks to the network is (relatively) easy because different parts of the kernel can trust and rely on each others behavior. In a microkernel setting, these sorts of policies have to be encoded into how the different services interact with each other. That sort of distributed policy enforcement is much harder and something that we as a discipline are not good at yet. You can even see this play out if you look at the history of the L4/Hurd project and some of the complicated protocols that were proposed for securely establishing a basic handshake between services.

Given that in Dard, the type checker is only ceremonial as far as I can tell, this is an interesting choice of words. The purpose of a true type checker like you find in Haskell, Agda, ML, ATS, etc. isn't just ceremonial. It guarentees certain properties of the resulting program (e.g., that variables of a certain type actually contain an object of that type, that you can never apply an invalid operation to an object, etc.). That is far from ceremonial.

It probably depends on what you are into. Also, keep in mind some of why I enjoy these may have to do with me not having enough time to play games myself, but having time to watch an LP.

• Giant Bomb's Quick Look of "Digital Combat Simulator: A-10C Warthog"
• Beagle Rush's XCOM: Ironman Impossible Series
• Videos by CHKilroy such as this one or this one.
• Videos by NerdCubed such as this one or this one.
• The WTF Is... series by Total Biscuit

Yes, really. The particularly popular LP-ers make their entire living off of the videos they produce.

That might sound strange at first, but some of the best LP-ers are something of a cross between comedians and critics. Both of these are jobs that we are accustomed to seeing making a living off of their work. A good LP-er doesn't just play the game, their value is in their commentary and jokes as they play the game.

What three new wars did Obama start? (I don't intend that to sound snarky. I just don't know what you are refering to.)

Alsup for Supreme Court!

Seriously though, this judge spent a good bit of time doing the legal research needed to produce a solid ruling. He knew it would be appealed so he included stuff in it to keep the appeals court from having the wool pulled over their eyes.

I think the argument is that winning a large city such as Chicago, Miami, Atlanta could no longer be used to win high value states.

I'm not sure I buy the argument. Like you say, someone would have to run the numbers for the past several elections. However, even those results would have to be taken with a grain of salt because how an election turns out depends on how candidates campaign which in turns depends on the rules. For example, in 2000 with the current rules it made no sense for Bush to spend much time campaigning in Texas but under a popularist system it would make a lot of sense(*). Thus it is kind of silly try to use the popular vote results from 2000 to predict who would have won under a popularist system.

(*) Which is one of the arguments against a popular vote for president. Candidates pander to voters that give them the most votes per unit effort (e.g. advertising dollars, candidate time, etc.). While your votes might count equally in a popularist election, the amount of effort to win your vote varies widely depending on geographic location. Thus a popularist election would not give voters equal political power.

The Kansas City airport is an International Airport. (Yes, technically the airport is in Missouri, but it's less than ten miles from the border.)

I think it is for the same reason that (some) people are against GPS tracking by cops even though manual (by human) tracking is legal. When it is more expensive for the government to do, there is an in-built incentive against casual use.

We see the same dynamic with privacy and personal information. Before computers, technically someone could track and mine just as much information about your buying habits, but it wasn't worth the effort until computers made it cheap and easy. There may have been a few instances of abuse before, it didn't become a serious concern until it was widespread.

Since this is implemented voluntarily by the ISPs instead of being imposed by law, I don't see how this violates any treaty rights. (Though that doesn't change the fact that it's still stupid and wrong.)

It's puzzled me for some time that ISPs are so eager to help with these piracy measures. Can someone explain to my why they are so eager to please when there is no reasonable legal threat against them? (IIUC, the DMCA safe-harbor clauses immunize them.) The same goes for YouTube. Why is Google so eager to go above and beyond the DMCA(*)?

(*) I am aware of Viacom v. Google, but my understanding is the appellate judgment in many ways reaffirms the DMCA safe-harbor provisions.