I agree.. Westlaw/Lexis information includes history context, legal analysis, links to secondary (court cases) sources that interpret the law, and as well as if the law is in the process of being appealed as unconstitutional or whatever.

This is what Westlaw and Lexis sell to lawyers, the actual content of the law itself is something required in order for the money making part to exist.

I have worked on systems in the past (for West specifically) that perform automated primary law patching.

The key thing is to understand the standard language and breakdown of the code. In some jurisdiction, it's by section, others it is by subsection, others, paragraph, and others sentence or sentence fragment.

The laws themselves need to be organized in a fashion they can be searched, patched, and retrieved (verified) based on offical versions.

One thing people have ignored is that generally speaking is there are two types of legal codes. Codified sections and Articles/Laws/Uncodified. The Codified sections are of the type mentioned above.. Title 17, section 237, subsection (a) is amended to read... vs Articles -- Act 236 of the 85th congress is amended as follows.. This is MUCH harder to patch.. because in essence you are patching a patch. (Note, most Tax and Social Security related rules are non-codified. This is because the only way to change from non-codified to codified is to repeal and then re-enact the legislation with an official title. And absolutely no congressman wants to be know as someone who voted to repeal social security, or know as someone who voted in all of these taxes...)

I attended a college with a wonderful Sci-Fi lit course. As others have indicated forcing students to see Lit through the eyes of the teacher is going to kill any interest in the course. Instead the class was focused on discussion of the topics, background into the reason why various facets of the material were generated, i.e. Parallelism to time and events, etc.

Also focusing a Lit class specifically on reading books is IMHO a mistake often made in course like this. Doing things like bringing in movies such as "When the Earth Stood Still" (the original not the WHOA! version).. Even reading books like Jurassic Park (which I hated), and then paralleling it to the movie (which was worse then the books) and what trade-offs had to be done. It was very informative and a good way to introduce people who are not into Sci-Fi (and Fantasy) into the genre, and give additional background to people who may have been reading it for years.

Start with short stories, and move toward more mainstream novels and authors. During half a year you should be able to go through at least 5 books and numerous short stories and at least 2 or 3 movies adaptations.

I wish people would stop spreading the misconception that US gasoline is lower octane then European.

Octane is simply measured differently in the US vs Europe. 87 octane in the US is equivalent of I believe 92 in Europe..

EFI is useful in the same way Open Firmware on PowerPC and Sparc is useful. It gives you an extensable system that can do different things with devices. This is great on a system where you don't know what the hardware may be (i.e. Workstations).. but starts to fall down when you get to servers, blades or embedded systems.

On most systems these days BIOS or any type takes between 3 and 30 seconds to boot to the OS. This is simply not acceptable to many blade and embedded system designs.. (Even some server designs this isn't acceptable.)

I can boot a system with coreboot in a second or less to the OS. This is really the most important part of coreboot. (For embedded systems, most of the time our target is in the .2 to .5 range from power on to OS start... this almost all but excludes ia32 from many embedded applications today.)