You wrote that 30 years ago? That's an extremely visionary piece, I have to admit. And surprisingly current still, considering the fight between established media and social networks.

Hamstering? I think you mean "gerbiling". - Yes, I was on Usenet too, back in the days.

Have a look at his map. http://media.chrismartenson.com/images/US-military-presence-around-Iran.png

And then consider the US did this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax

In this situation, it would be insane for Iran not to want nukes.

There are 17 available nuclear power plants in Germany. While some were down for maintenance in 2010, the remaining ones produced 22.6% of Germany's electricity.

Also in 2010, "green power" (electricity from regenerative sources) was at 16.5% in Germany.

8 nuclear power plants have been shut down in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and will remain so. With 5 down for maintenance, this leaves Germany with currently only 4 running nuclear power plants. I didn't notice any recent shortage of electricity. And obviously green power has outpaced nuclear power already.

And regarding the alleged expensiveness of green power, here's a Bloomberg article which claims it's keeping the power price down: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-21/solar-doubling-gas-glut-drive-down-german-power-prices-energy-markets.html

There are plans to have Germany completely on green power by 2050. Should be possible.

This has been used by the police, at least in Germany.

The general problems with this approach are the poor resolution of the data, giving you too many false positives in populated areas, and that you have to know the time of the event - hard to know without witnesses in sparsely populated areas where the resolution would be sufficient.

The case where I know cell phone location has been used was where a woman had been killed in a car by a tree trunk being thrown from a bridge on the autobahn. Here you had a sparsely populated area (the fast-moving people in the cars are easy to rule out) and the precise time of the event (her horrified husband was the witness).

So they got hold of the suspect, a junkie who happened to be around. They got a confession from him - by withholding him from drugs until he confessed, so I'm not entirely convinced that he really was the perpetrator. Which illustrates a big problem with this approach: The police has a tendency to make people confess somehow as soon as they have a 'convenient' suspect, and cell phone tracking can give you plenty of them, guilty or not.

BTW: Only 20% of the killers in the US are caught and convicted? It's > 95% here in Germany...

Yahoo clueful? Maybe when it comes to accepting email. Try to report spam to them. You'll get some nice boilerplate answers telling you either they've taken action, or that they didn't send the spam, both for emails clearly originating from Yahoo (and yes I know how to read headers). And of course the spam keeps coming in either case.

Yahoo is the only big ISP I had to block at work.

Well, I guess the problem is the Florida colo. Florida has very spam-friendly laws (just google "florida spam"), so my guess would be you have some spammers in your neighborhood (i.e. colo) and are caught in the collateral damage of filtering them.

More info about the accusations: http://radsoft.net/news/20101001,01.shtml

Doesn't look like the case has any merit unless Sweden has so batshit insane laws that no one should be extradited there.

I think professors should be required to teach with TeX, but maybe that's only me.

YOU sell widgets in a store, don't you? You and your store should definitely get paid for that. I write music for a living...I should only get paid for the first copy sold?

The plumber does plumbing for a living. Why should he only get paid once for the plumbing he did? Oh, wait...

Now ask yourself, if there was both more money in the bank following a previously successful product and a greater potential profit from any new project, does this make it more or less likely that new and innovative products will be given more of a chance?

My impression is: less likely, because why bother trying new and innovative products when you've seen that you can make a nice profit with a proven product? Riding it to death in the umptheenth installation, of course, but we've all seen this before. "New and innovative" products come with a risk, and potential profits with a risk attached don't fly well with established companies.

I don't get why MP3 patents are enforceable. If it was special hardware they are running on, I would understand it, but - for example -the Sandisk Sansa players, which were confiscated at Cebit some years ago and one of which I incidentally own, are generic hardware, simple MP3 decoding on the ARM CPUs of the player, no DSP or custom chip support. If that is enforceable, everything is. Or where is the difference to other software?

Please document your research and your findings on the web somewhere. Thanks.

The free market only has problems when:
1) People are allowed to do unethical things
2) Monopolies or oligopolies are created
3) There's a moral hazard

None of these conditions exist here.

You mean using DRM is not unethical? gee...

I just went to amazon.de and did a search for "Linux Netbook". It returned 20 results for computers. Yes, I got my eeepc 901go there, too.