You haven't seen Resident Evil, hey?

Yes copyright is automatic but if the mere act of downloading copyrighted material was a crime then the internet simply could not (legally) work the way it does since you would need explicit permission to visit a random page prior to visiting said page. So the reasoning goes that if someone puts something on the net, a third party can freely copy it. What the third party can't do is redistribute the material, so messages such as "leave your computer running" are going to hang them. When you think about it. It's not that different to the way libraries work, you can take the book home and read it, and even take a personal copy, but you can start handing out copies to all your mates.

No matter how much "downloading is theft" propaganda the MAFIAA spews, or how much I despise them for it, the above "default" arrangement is the only one that makes any sense. If we allowed redistributions w/o permission then I could simply buy up the iTunes catalog for a one time fee of $1/song and start selling copies at $0,90/song. Five seconds after I've done that, someone else does the same to me and sells at $0.50/song.

Interesting! I first heard that idea from David Brin, who was proposing it as something to be used for disasters.
http://davidbrin.wordpress.com...
Maybe the governent of Hong Kong qualifies as a disaster.

While I personally see a device like this (sorry... ROBOT!) of rather limited use for testing prepared dishes, I can see great utility for it for testing ingredients. You could have a standardized, unambiguous way to rate the quality or at least properties of a given product, be it meat, fruit, vegetables, etc. I bet cultivar breeding programs in particular could really benefit from this - "Well, I was hoping that this new mango would be a huge innovation, but actually it's almost identical to a Keitt. Though to be fair its mouthfeel is somewhat like a Carrie, and it does have a small amount of a new novel aromatic compound..." Just a single mass produced sensor package that measures a wide range of different properties at once in a repeatable, universal manner. If such a thing could become widespread, I'd bet half of the "cultivars" out there would pretty much disappear, having been shown to be essentially identical to others.

You are suggesting that every single one of a multitude of completely independent temperature records are all wrong. You are trying to dismiss them on the irrational basis that they all point in the same direction by slightly different amounts.

Furthermore you are assuming that every single one of a multitude of completely independent temperature records are all wrong in the same direction, imposing your pre-determined bias upon them.

You are baselessly filtering out any satellite data that doesn't fit the story you want to hear.

You are baselessly filtering out ocean temperatures, which account for 90% of climate heating, because it doesn't fit the story you want to hear.

You are engaging in wild conspiracy-theoryism claiming (or implying) that some hundredthousand scientists are ALL too stupid to account for novice-level obvious measurement difficulties, or that they are ALL conspiring to deliberately lie.

And most of all you're denying THE LAWS OF PHYSICS.
CO2 lets sunlight in and blocks the escape of thermal radiation. There is no possible dispute there. End of argument. The science is utterly and unarguably settled. All that's left at that point is determining the size of the effect.

It's astounding that it somehow doesn't make it into your conscious awareness that you are baselessly ignoring anything and everything that doesn't fit the story you want to hear.

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but simply building a peaceful house, there is no fighting...

That's invasion or illegal landing of an illegal immigrant. If someone tried dropping (say) a Mexican on an island off the coast of America, you'd count that as an illegal immigrant being landed, which would result in the arrest of the landed person and the seizure of the vessel assisting the illegal immigrant.

Your thought experiment isn't well thought out. Try running it again in the Great Salt Lake, as I said up-thread. The Kara Sea is surrounded by Russian-occupied islands. Everything in it is as Russian as any islands in the Great Salt Lake are American.

I work in exploration of the continental slopes (there's a damned good reason for my vessel to have holds capable of carrying 3km of riser pressure-rated to 20kpsi). It's on-going. Unfortunately the costs are much higher than for exploring, developing and producing in shallow water, which is why only the highest-quality prospects are worth developing.

Unless you believe Tom Gold (which would get you laughed out of any board room with a geologist in it), you need sediment in considerable quantities to generate significant quantities of hydrocarbons (note below). After which, looking at your hypsographic curve you'll see that the 5km water depth contour (OK, "isobath") encompasses something slightly less than 5% of the Earth's surface while the average depth of the oceans is 3800m.

And now you know why the commercial vessel I work on (one of 4 sister ships, built to the same basic design) has space for 3km of marine riser, and the largest vessels on the slipways of China only carry 5km of riser.

Some early explorations were discouraging, but MOST exploration is discouraging.

In intensely planned remote area deep water offshore exploration, the discovery rate is about one well in three.

I was discussing a previous well with another vessel's weather forecaster (that'll tell you which region we were in) who informed me that core was brought to the surface on three occasions which was oozing with oil; my geological sources refused to comment (quite correctly) several years later when I quizzed them about it, which I take as confirmation. A discovery! Yes. The prospect and regional license was abandoned. The discovery wasn't big enough to have a chance of repaying the billion dollars poured into finding it.

Welcome to offshore exploration.

I've lived in a place where I don't need a car for longer than Slashdot has existed - by a factor of over three.

You'll note that it doesn't stop me from having access to the internet. You might also note that I don't live in New York, another place where a car is more of a hindrance than a help. (Same for pretty much any city founded before 1900, and most cities founded afterwards.)

You only need one island â" no matter, how small â" to make a claim.

The "rockall" argument. And that has succeeded, has it?

Your rights end where their rights start.

What a nasty little racist shit you are. American, I assume?

It doesn't really matter how the accounting is done, utilities are going to have to charge more for power as they sell less of it, because their fixed costs are such a large proportion of their total costs. Fixed costs account for anywhere from 75 to 100% of plant costs: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/c... (the data in table 1 appear to mean "fuel cost" when they say "variable cost").

The utilities model is based on the notion that you can recover your capital costs (and more) over the lifetime of the plant. The rapid rise of solar in particular is putting that at risk, and utilities are caught between a rock and a hard place. They can fight by keeping power costs low, and lose, or they can fight by raising their power costs--however they want to do the accounting--and also lose.

Personally, I hope they raise the costs. It will make low-carbon alternatives like wind and solar more attractive.

Or the false.

Personally, I glanced at a Gladwell book once and just immediately knew, in the blink of an eye as it were, that it was pablum for the toothless mind.

Likewise, perhaps *we* can't focus a laser today, but that's not an inherent limitation of lasers even by today's known physics,

Errr, diffraction?

That's pretty fundamental for lasers, as long as they continue to consist of electromagnetic waves.

We could get away from it with particle beams - but that's substituting one wavelength for a shorter wavelength. And your particle beams have to be neutral, otherwise they'd disperse rapidly by electrostatic repulsion. And if the particles are not joined to each other then they're still going to disperse. So you're back to projectiles. It may or may not matter if they're solid or liquid if you can get your rail gun velocity high enough, but until then ... there are good reasons for making bullets out of depleted uranium, and those reason aren't going to go away in space.

Could we get around diffraction limits in future? Well, slim possibilities of using the negative refractive indices of metamaterials. But I've got a sneaking suspicion that you'll need to get the beam focussed to a particular range ... which is not a perfect solution, but would probably be useful. And putting anything relatively delicate (metamaterials) in the path of energy intended to cause damage is a recipe for things breaking.

You might find that the long term use of beamed energy weapons is restricted to pulsed and shaped beams of high-intensity microwaves intended to fuck up transmission and reception of communications, where the beam sources are controlled in phase to generate the damaging effects at a chosen range. Non-trivial weapons, but not a death ray.

Worked my way through "Red Mars" ; not feeling any particular desire to order Blue or Green. OTOH, if I found myself imprisoned on an oil rig (which happens several times a year, for up to several months at a time) with nothing else to read, I'd probably not be too upset. That's not going to happen, because I'm the only SF fan who takes books out for the rig's library.

A dome that large would probably be big enough for thunderstorms to develop within it.

Therefore, the people who came up with this idea are trying to develop a terribly unsafe solution. Which makes that proposer a terrorist.

The bus will be along to collect you soon. It's more economical than sending out a whole black helicopter for each convict.