If some nefarious group really wanted to poison people, there are a lot less flamboyant and troublesome ways to get your poison into the food supply. For example, why not just contaminate the supply? If they can break into the reserve and go undetected long enough to siphon off hundreds of gallons of the stuff, that's surely long enough to poison the whole reserve. Much easier.

The stuff's really valuable, right? That's why they keep a strategic reserve in the first place, after all. So the motive is obvious - money. And pure maple syrup is worth more than contaminated deadly maple syrup. A lot more. So poisoning the maple syrup would be a really boneheaded move.

Only movie crooks would come up with a plan that involves stealing hundreds of gallons of valuable merchandise, moving it across a border, then poisoning it and letting it be recovered. About the only thing missing are the sharks with frickin laser beams.

That's absolutely right. But while I admit that I'm disquieted by the FBI's persuasiveness in some of the cases reported, let's turn that around a bit.

How do you think Al Qaeda recruits people? Probably more or less the same way, right? After all, it's very rare that people who aren't disgruntled about something go out and join a terrorist group.

So by trawling for these people, you accomplish two things. First, the ones you directly catch can't join Al Qaeda because they're in jail. There isn't a terribly great supply of recruits to begin with, and having to compete with a huge organization like the FBI makes it much harder for Al Qaeda to get to them first. Second, mimicking real terrorist recruiters means that people who ARE like minded, and are approached, can't be sure by whom - Is it the FBI, or a real operative? So it will discourage people from throwing in their lot.

Without knowing all the specifics, I can't judge any of the specific cases. But setting up 'fake crimes' and 'manufacturing' criminals is a bit much. There are dozens of similar stories where people try to hire a "hit man" to off someone -- usually a spouse. Invariably it starts off with someone asking a friend if they know anyone who can get hold of a hit man. The friend calls the police, who are all too happy to have an undercover cop perform the sting. Now, there is no actual murder-for-hire contract here; just a sham. Does that really mean the person was entirely innocent? In my book, no, it makes them guilty of attempted murder.

Really? I think I would remember that. I must have been playing the wrong games ...

Go on, I'm listening.

If the ads are more interesting than the movie, you may need to look into your taste in movies ...

Can't believe I forgot these: The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy and another series by the same author, Limekiller.

Such a shame he doesn't plan on making any more. I would have at least liked to read his planned ending.

Definitely second Bridge of Birds and its ilk. I'll also just throw these out there: Wizard of the Pigeons. The Iron Dragon's Daughter. The High Crusade. Revelation Space. Traveller in Black. . And finally, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Also, for the sources of many of these recommendations: The obvious, and the much more obscure. That second link is ... Well, it's a great source of recommendations. The style ... I don't think it's pretentiousness; doesn't seem to me like he's 'pretending' to be anything. His style can be very off-putting, and I dunno if he's a professor or what, but I fear for the minds of his students if he is. But the book recommendations to be found there are indeed quite good.

If they're actually claiming birdsong is copyrighted to them, then that is either a lie or a statement made with gross disregard for the truth. And it (the takedown notice) is a false statement made for the purpose of negatively impacting your reputation (accusing you of illegal activity), that in fact did negatively impact your reputation (Google believed them) and the result of which is they gained real money.

IANAL, but in most jurisdictions, this is called libel, and it's highly likely you can sue Rumblefish for it. But that would be an awful lot of work for very little money - the cost of the lawyer would far eclipse what you could get. However, just the act of having a lawyer send them a threatening letter might be enough.

In any organization, there are basically two optimization games being played at any given moment: The long-term game, and the short-term game. In general charting an optimal course is hard, both because the long game is very hard to play, and because how well you play the short game affects your long game. The negative effects are well-known: witness big business' almost being straightjacketed to quarterly and yearly forecasts. The consequences of this? A tendency to play for short-term gain at the expense of foreseeable long-term ruin.

But also witness Netflix shooting their feet off at the knees. Why did that happen? They played too much in favor of the long game, essentially. Far enough down the road, it will make as much sense to be in the DVD-by-mail business as it currently makes to be in the DVD-by-rental-store business. The problem is, their long-term plays were premature, and very harmful to the short-term game.

So, space exploration. Everyone agrees that it's very important, right? But it's a long-term game, with long-term payoffs. Possibly very long term. The true maturation of space exploration - the transformation from mankind's journey into space being a herculean endeavor, funded at considerable expense by entire nations - into the space industry, undertaken by various firms for different businesses ... This is the long term goal. But how long term? I think it's not unreasonable to estimate that it will be a hundred years. Now, the US is less than 250 years old. A hundred years is a VERY long time. A hundred years ago, it was 1912, and WW1 (yes, 1) was more than two years off.

Meanwhile, there is a very real chance the financial system underpinning the entire world economy could implode within a few decades. If that happens, every penny that has ever been spent on long-term goals with a maturation significantly further into the future than this ... will have largely been wasted, spent building castles in the sky.

So it makes sense to cut the Mars stuff. I want to know what kind of life is on Europa, or Mars, or wherever else ... just as much as you do. But it just doesn't make sense, given the realities of enormous deficits, and a political process paralyzed by gridlock.

Criticizing someone by saying that they got less done than a group of other people is a pretty lousy criticism. All you've really done is establish that there's a benefit to two types of testing: methodical testing, and let's-just-mess-around-with-it stress testing.

Just messing around is way faster, and it will quickly catch a lot of bugs. But it's no substitute for methodical testing. How many bugs did she find that the entire group of other people would have never noticed?

I feel sorry for her. It seems like she did a pretty good job, and it sounds like she did exactly what the business hired her to do, yet it doesn't sound like she got any respect for it.

This problem is not amenable to technical solution. Trying to stop attackers from cheating via the Internet, by using some a filter or other form of limited access -- is as futile as trying to solve the halting problem, and enumerate the irrationals, at the same time.

The halting problem fails because it's too easy to craft countermeasures aimed deliberately at the scanner. Enumerating the irrationals fails because there is so much complexity, it's literally impossible to go throgh it all.

But just because you can't solve this problem technically doesn't mean it can't be solved. It's difficult, but I believe it might be possible. Don't bother beyond the basics. Get a computer lab set up with computers you control. Don't allow the students to bring in any USB sticks or CDs.

Then simply install tracking software on every PC. (You can also use a network sniffer to back this up.) The idea isn't that to prevent cheating technically; rather, you want to preserve the ability to tell that people have cheated, and simply punishing them under the existing rules.

You tell everyone in the class that you'll be monitoring their internet usage during the exam. Then tell everyone what you consider cheating. Have your grad students go through the logs manually; the difference should be fairly obvious.

Unfortunately, the part where you said "If some of them aren't paying attention, then too bad" is plain and simple against the law. It is a copyright violation to redistribute someone's work without their permission, and you are contemplating doing precisely that.

It doesn't matter that what you proposed is a reasonable-sounding way to deal with the issue. It's against the law.

This is the thing holding up a lot of really interesting things, like Google Books. Hell, even the big multinationals can't do that kind of thing. Sony would probably like to make every PS1 game available for download. They can't due to rights issues. Their contracts 10, 15 years ago didn't give them permission to do X, so now they can't.

I'm sorry, but the plain truth is you propose to ignore the rights of people on the grounds it would be too much of a burden.

The Linux model is amazingly powerful, but at the same time, its reliance on an army of contributors creates legal problems. If those contributors didn't give you permission to do something with what they contributed, then you have 3 choices: 1) Don't do it; 2) Get permission; 3) Rip out their contribution.

It might be feasible to do what you proposed, get say 90% buy-in ... and then rip out the remaining code and re-implement that portion. But you cannot simply ignore their copyrights. They didn't give permission to license their work under GPLv3, and you can't relicense it without their approval.

Respect for the law is important. It's the difference between Sony (at least, back when they fought for Betamax) and Grokster. Groups that figure it's so much easier to simply ignore the law and do whatever they want tend to get smacked very hard. And it doesn't even matter whether the authority being ignored is just, or corrupt, they all react the same. Why do you think corporations spend all this money trying to slant the laws in their favor? It'd be so much cheaper to simply ignore them.

You really think (say) the EPA could file enforcement actions against every major company in the US? They couldn't, and neither could any other law enforcement agency in the world. The way to maintain law and order is to essentially intimidate people into respecting the rules using the powers you have, so that you don't have to try to smack down the entire world.

The key is that every organized group in the entire world knows this fact. So they come down hard on disrespecting authority, because they have no choice.

Besides, it's kind of hard to condemn others (for instance, large multinationals doing things like polluting the environment) for feeling that they shouldn't have to obey the laws because they're inconvenient ... if you're doing the same thing yourself.

One of the reasons, I think, that copyright is so screwed up is that the thing that it is actually attempting to regulate, and the thing the regulations directly affect, are not the same.

Copyright isn't actually about the thing being copyrighted. After a work has been created, is an abundant good - but the problem is, this ignores the part of the process that is not abundant. By the same logic, cars are an abundant good - the raw materials to duplicate them are (considering the volume of the earth) nigh-inexhaustible, if you ignore the energy sunk retrieving and refining said raw materials.

Similarly, people's time is not an abundant good. And the purpose of copyright is to regulate this non-abundant good: It's to create an incentive for people to spend their time in creative endeavors.

Things get weird, because to do this, the law cracked down on the duplication of legally-protected information. This worked just fine for hundreds of years, because you needed large and expensive machinery to duplicate in any significant way. It's not working nearly as well anymore. But attempting to protect information was never the goal, it was always a means to an end.

Two things: One, I agree with Shieldw0lf. Two, consider this: If these kids receive a crappy education, the course of their lives is negatively impacted. Most criminals are poorly educated. Most poorly educated people make crappy salaries compared to their more well-educated counterparts. A poor education system drags all of society down with it, in the form of crime rates and economic woes.

It's just that the problems caused by it don't set in until years after the fact. And even then it's too easy to simply blame the damage caused by this on the way the people affected chose to play the crappy hand they were dealt (ignoring the fact that the hands were crappy, so of course they were going to perform badly).