Galileo had that great pratfall routine with the feather and the hammer going for him though, and Einstein had that Carrot Top hair.
Bozo was mostly just funny because his mind control experiments didn't have a control group.

Add a determined young forensic economist, a jaded, but likable ex-agent for some government agency with guns and two cute and vulnerable, but otherwise inexplicable, child characters and you've got a blockbuster there. Oh and you'll need an ethnically ambiguous super-powered commodity trader who both sides are afraid is about to bring the whole thing down on their heads.

Working Title: Follow The Money

Just to be clear, I'm not arguing against the value of the Public Domain and I would be perfectly happy with a 15 year copyright after which things naturally fall into the Public Domain. I was only referring to the OPs question about just declaring the thesis Public Domain and calling it good. CC is a way of "dedicating works to the public domain"

I was mostly referring to the same confusion over rights that the OP was trying to avoid and that was described in the Wikipedia link posted above. There's no clear legal definition of "Public Domain," and there are places where it's actually not possible to legally release all rights (Germany is cited in the Wiki article, but Portugal is also an example, I believe). Those are some of the problems CC was created to solve. On the other hand, CC licenses are very explicit about what they allow and make it easy for someone to reuse the work. Without those assurances someone might reuse a work only to find that they original rights owner (or more likely an heir or assignee) is suing them and there's no recourse because the release into the Public Domain wasn't legally valid. You might still win, but it's murky enough in some cases to cost money defending the case.

There are other things that could happen without much legal recourse if you do manage to give up all rights, for instance someone could change the author's name only and republish it, which, depending on the work and the effort involved my be disappointing. Remember that the OP wanted to make sure that his work was properly cited. Worse, someone might leave the name on it, change the content to meet some agenda of their own and republish it, so that it appears the original author said things they didn't. If I wanted to release something directly into the public domain, I would be inclined to do it anonymously to avoid that problem.

Another advantage to using a real license of any sort is that somewhere an attorney was involved. From your comments, you are not an attorney. Neither am I. For good or ill the law doesn't work the way an engineer would design it. Public Domain doesn't work just because you or I may say it should. It works when and if a court will find that works in most cases. For most of my own stuff, CC works great because I don't want to have to reinvent all of this every time I publish something.

You seem to have a strong opinion about this. Do you have a problem with CC licenses that releasing material directly into the Public Domain seems to fix?

You lose all control over the material and some ugly things can happen.

The Creative Commons licenses give you excellent control and they have a helpful tool on the website to pick the license you want. And attribution is required in the license which will handle your citation requirement.

There are others including the GNU free documentation license is a bit more specialized, but CC should be plenty for your needs and most importantly has a community of users and attorneys backing it up. You can probably get quite a bit of help if you ever need to defend it.

If it's not on Netflix I probably won't bother.

Just wanted to add my thanks to all the others. I've been reading /. daily since the beginning (who am I kidding, I hit refresh all through the day). You built something fine and unique and should be proud.

please route around it.

I can't really answer that question comprehensively, but I can point to someone who made a fantastic attempt. Richard (no relation to Douglas) Hofstadter wrote a book about it. http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170

From some of your wording It seems like your trying to make a point about Google being wrong and also implying that I think they are in the right.
I never said they were right or wrong, I just posted a link with information on how to ask Google for proof.

However I can't help but notice that the article you linked

says:
"The GSA appears to be leaning toward agreeing with Google on this score, and told eWEEK it is working with Google to update the original FISMA documentation for Google Apps to incorporate Google Apps for Government."
Which doesn't seem to support your argument very well.

I haven't mentioned an opinion on the matter, but since it's come up, I assume both companies (Google and Microsoft) are splitting hairs to try to weaken each other's position in the bidding and both lawsuits will likely be settled quietly and go away after the hubbub dies down.

I'm not sure what you meant, but I was posting a link I didn't find when I read the article.

Did you read any of the subsequent articles?
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110413220154117

As usual, Vinge saw it coming. We can hope it's more like Rainbow's End, but I wouldn't count on it.

Sam Landstrom had an interesting alternative in Metagame.

Here's the link to Google's claim and a link to request the documentation if anyone wants to follow up:

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/government/trust.html

I'm betting they can back it up.

Isn't it amazing how you can read the personalities involved just by looking at their signatures? Or is it that you can tell who types all day and who signs things all day?

If this is true, then the problem described in the article is a design flaw. Changing your credentials should block access by any box which does not have the new credentials.

Here'st he discusson in the Dropbox Support Forum http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=36146

I keep my personal files encrypted on dropbox which then shares the archive to several other machines. It updates for every change and Dropbox journals the file.

If you want 2GB free space on Dropbox plus an extra 250 MB for using my referral link, here it is: http://db.tt/cKHP3d5
I don't have any other relationship to Dropbox, I'm just a happy customer.