duh. I mean 1.2 million m3

One of my possessions is a 2.3 hectare lot with, amongst others, a 53 metre tall tree on it. If I needed it to fit in a conventionally shaped box, that would be 12,200 m3.

But water-cooled reactors leave some 95 percent of the fuel's potential energy untapped.

Light water reactors, sure. But heavy water reactors are a whole different kettle of fish. CANDU can already burn anything from natural uranium through plutonium. Hot stuff you just dilute down.

No need to invent some new crazy reactor, just burn it at Bruce or Pickering.

I collect Cowboy Neal action figures.

To me, it seems that this iCloud class of stuff has triggered an interesting paradigm shift.

From a downloader's perspective, who's to say you are not recording from radio, ripping from vinyl, ripping from a full-price, flea-market, or borrowed CD, cassette tape, or (infingingly) singing the tune into your audio recorder. All of these things should be transferable to iCloud with the infringing or non-infringing status of the actual recording unchanged. As others have pointed out, the music cloud thing does not launder the legal status in any way. It just format shifts.

In most of the world simply copying music for your own use is not being attacked by the recording industry. In Canada own-use copying from any source is expressly permitted by section 80 of the Copyright Act 2005. The RIAA has never gone after downloaders, only sharers. The whole "making available" theory of facilitating infringement is designed around nabbing folks that give away music, according to the RIAA, improperly. They do not sue those that merely download and do not "make available."

This iCloud thing does not translate into anyone other than the cloud operator potentially treading the dangerous "making available" ground. So what is going on that makes people think that the music cloud is going to change the playing field and expose users of music, as opposed to sharers of music to some new kind of legal nightmare that didn't exist before? If there are rumours of new kinds of liability, who's starting them?

So you are suggesting that going to 128 bit rather than 48 bit is the reason that there is no takeup of IPv6?

No, the main reason for NOT adopting IPv6 is that it is inconvenient and carries disincentives for many of the big telcos.

Since the main reason FOR adopting IPv6 is the putative exhaustion of address space, why not create a standard that addresses THAT problem alone, and that does not create a squirming mass of additional incompatible and incomprehensible features and headaches?

That is the key reason we will never see IPv6: the entities that have to do something to make it happen have no incentive to do it, and a significant disincentive. IPv4 can be controlled by a few large organizations -- large telcos, governments, large technology corporations. IPv4 addresses are scarce and it is impossible for any new entity to come along and start challenging Verizon or Bell. Things like RFC 1918 addresses, NAT and tunneling make is possible for users to get stuff done in the face of IPv4 limits, so there is little subscriber-driven requirement to upgrade. End subscribers -- even very large ones -- essentially depend on the connectivity providers to lead the way in this sort of upgrade transition, and the large telcos have nothing to gain by giving up their de-facto oligopoly power in the market. Why should any guy with a couple of microwave dishes be able to go into business up against AT&T? That would be bad for business. As long as he does all that with RFC 1918 addresses, that's fine. But if IPv6 came to town, a guy like that would be selling fully routable connectivity, and that's no good at all.

Seriously, I was looking forward to another round of thoughtful analysis of what happens in the various Sony litigations.

It is certainly true that the SCO circus wound down to an exceedingly dull side show in the last year, and that Groklaw has been searching a bit to find material that really captures the imagination. But with a new, interesting Sony circus setting up in town, I would have thought that Groklaw would be back at the top of its game -- indeed recent postings on SCEA indicate that it is.

In SCO, it is clear that both sides, and maybe the judges, read Groklaw. That thoughtful and thorough analysis contributed, I'm sure materially, to the rightful outcome. It also gave thousands of folks an insight into this sort of protracted, cynical legal process that we would otherwise never have had. I always assumed that litigants like SCO were full of bovine droppings, but it took Groklaw to demonstrate the exact shade of brown, and what methods they might use to pretend that the droppings were solid gold.

I am grateful to PJ and all the other contributors to Groklaw for their efforts and the material benefits that have come from them. The world is a better place because of their efforts. Thank you.

Project Gutenberg is scrupulously careful and does not post material without a very solid case that they have a right to do so -- usually because things are public domain in the USA. PG Canada, Australia, Germany etc abide by their applicable laws just as scrupulously.

Whatever may be wrong with the copyright rules in the US (and elsewhere) it is certain that the rules are spelled out in enough detail to allow an unequivocal determination that these items are public domain in the US.

The authors don't have a leg to stand on and they know it. They are nothing but whiners.

Everyone who tried to do something useful in APL, put up your hand.

I have and still use several film cameras, though I never have prints done from the film any longer -- I run the film through my negative scanner. I have a DSLR, a drawer full of P&S digitals and a VGA atrocity in my phone.

I think with full-frame sensors above 12 MP and the emergence of usable HDR, film is finally eclipsed not just from a convenience perspective, but from a technical perspective also. Only the large-format guys are going to be using actual chemical processes to capture images. It will take 700 to 1,200 megapixel cameras with full perspective control movements to eclipse what those guys are doing. Give it a few weeks.

Wait! This is good news: by patenting, Apple prevents HTC, Nokia, Moto and all the others from bricking your phone when you unlock it. All the more reason for buying an open phone.

I still have a 9-track tape from my first job. It's in VMS Files-11 format and has accurate timestamps. Older than that I wasn't using computers that had clocks -- or that kept timestamps on stuff.

I switched to FrostWire a while ago. I'd be interested to see how they try and come after an open source project.