Some friends of mine were looking into selling USB drives embedded in silicone wristbands for a university club, and they found they could make a small profit if they sold 4GB ones at US$8.50 (converted from money), bought in a pack of 200 from the manufacturer. USB thumb drives aren't as cheap as the ancestor thinks, but there would be room for a pretty good discount on a large purchase.

If they're trying to encourage corporate growth, they might even be going about it the wrong way. IIRC, in about 1999, a Liberal-aligned (for the rest of the world, this means conservative) think-tank released a report which showed that, ignoring the sanctions which would probably be imposed, Australia would, as a whole, have a better balance of trade and higher economic growth if they abandoned copyright altogether(and other countries did so reciprocally). Their conclusion was essentially that the only economic reason for having copyright in Australia was that they would be punished by the US if they didn't.

This really deserves to get modded up. Kids these days, they just have no culture. Exterminate! the lot of them, I say!

It would be relatively simple to tack onto Usenet the ability to send replies which contain up- or down-votes and a description (although newsreader support would be an issue, obviously), and a moderation bot (the Scary Devil Monastery uses one, this can be a more complex version) could ignore any moderation posts to the /. groups which are not from current mods. THis would be tricky to do with a public group, but if each article were a group hosted on /.s own server. Thus this article might be slashdot.tech.spam-causes-microsoft-to-kill-newsgroups, and /. could ignore karma and prevent moderation from anyone not logged in to their server via ssl.

Of course, this is just hypothetical, although I would use it if they offered it, I don't really expect anyone to.

It does a reasonable job of guessing the content based on a single image. For better results, you'd want one of the tools which uses scene descriptors formed from image derivatives to find matching segments in a huge library of images and paste them together, using some sort of Poisson blurring to mix the edges in. I have seen this demonstrated, but I forget the name of the tool which was used. I do recall that it used a library of 2.3M images of northern Mediterranean towns for its example data set, and returned a selection of about 20 images so that a human can solve the rather tricky problem of checking for silly mistakes of scale or orientation in the pasted material (one of the suggestions produced by the example I saw put a giant footprint on a beach, for example). Whilst this requires an awful lot of images, and does take quite a while to run, it only needs help at the beginning (to mark what is to be removed) and end (to check the result) of the process.

Whilst that sounds like a good idea, the actual decision is so political and cultural that it would probably need far more people than the RFC process can easily handle, and the whole debate would very likely produce more heat than light.

That said, it would be nice if there was some sane and widely used standard for providing bibliographic information which could be readily embedded into most if not all document formats, so that, say, a new cite [X]HTML tag could cause user-agents to pull in and summarise in a suitable, user- or agent-defined manner.

The Institute of Physics's magazine /Physics World/ did an article on his trial last year (IIRC, it may have been earlier). He was tried for heresy, but the reason he was tried was not for heliocentric theory, but rather for insulting the Pope (who had been interested in his theories) about an unrelated (somewhat political) matter instead of answering his questions. IOW, he was killed not for arguing against the church but for publicly insulting the man with the power to have him killed, which is generally regarded as a bad idea.

What I was taught was that any idea or principle which is well-known doesn't need to be cited, just referenced by its own name (for example one would just say "using Newton's 3rd law" or "by the second law of thermodynamics"), or in a computing context, something like quicksort or mergesort can just be used, because everyone knows them, but if you copied the function from somewhere (rather than using a library call to a standard library), then you should acknowledge it.

In terms of a presentation or the like, what was expected was that only important or less widely-known points would need to be cited in the speech, the rest could merely be referenced against a list distributed with whatever printed notes are given out, unless teh material was a direct quotation or something liek a graph taken from someone else's data.

There's nothing wrong with a hereditary nobility, since there is usually no effective difference between an aristocrat and a commoner with the same amount of money, and at least a society with an aristocracy is honest enough to admit that some people are wealthier and more powerful than others (and I say this as a person who has no realistic prospect of getting so much as a CBE, let alone a hereditary title). (Of course, if you are a far-socialist or a communist, then your problem is no so much with the titles and honours as the money and power, which is a separate issue entirely.)

However, my objection to long copyrights is not about the benefit to heirs of the owner, but that it is not beneficial to society, either artistically or financially.

The passage of text relating to that was being discussed a few months back made it look like using WEP and posting the password on the wall would be enough to get around the restrictions, at least as far as cafes with internet access and so on are concerned.

Love letters are still worthwhile. Phone calls (or equivalent) are good, and video chat is better, but there is something about a proper letter which is good too, especially in long-distance relationships across a time-zone barrier and when differing timetables become a real nuisance (so getting a decent block of uninterrupted time to talk is a PITA except late at night).

Also, only RFC2549 seems like a suitable way of sending rose petals embedded in messages using the internet.

We need one of the 1-digiters to come in now, and then for CmdrTaco to top (bottom?) them all.

Now, if I was running this site, I'd have a script which watches for any poster with 3 or fewer digits replying to anyone with a higher UID and mentioning the string "UID", just so I can jump in and trump them.

There were quite a number of amusing stories of locomotive failure on British steam excursions, especially in the '90s, where the locomotive that failed was not the steam loco, but the diesel which was required by the operating authorities in case the steam loco broke down (and often to provide air braking and sometimes electric heating). I believe this has become less common now.

You mean, if the list is made even broader, it will increase the chance of having all terrorists on it, so we will have no airborne terrorism? Perhaps we should make the list larger until we have, say, 100% certainty of including all terrorists, and to hell with the disruption to all innocent travellers included on the list.

The right to travel by air is an intrinsic right, which can only *legitimately* be removed for the greater good of others, and only with clear evidence that both the greater good of others is in fact real and that the removal of that right is the least intrusive means of protecting that greater good. However, this does not require anyone else to carry them, and does not mean that we cannot, for example, forbid untrained people flying aeroplanes, because that s very likely to be unsafe.

Likewise, you have an inherent right to healthcare: in normal circumstances no-one may prevent others treating you if you desire it (if someone is sentenced to death, you obviously lose that right when the sentence is executed). What is under debate (and I'm not going to get into who is right, that's not important) is whether (a) ensuring that every person can get treatment without finacially crippling themselves and (b) what is the least intrusive way to do this.