A homeless bum can burn down a million dollar house, doesn't mean there's any point in trying to get a million bucks out of him. I'm assuming the settlement was for all Hotfile's actual money because otherwise they'd just spend more on lawyers with Sony getting less in the end, while the $80 million was some kind of imaginary "what we would like to have been paid" damages.

And they say "Say hello to statutory damages, that's $750 minimum per infringement. We don't need to offer you anything, no matter what settlements we've reached in the past. Now, do you want this to be expensive or very expensive?"

That they moved the news up from 11?

This is why I pretty much gave up with these online requirements.

http://aqfl.net/node/5825 for its poll and comments. :(

I'll be a 40 years old virgin, and people still think I still look like a kid (not a baby goat). :P

Why is this linking to a Gawker site (IO9) instead of the actual original article at:
http://www.universetoday.com/117615/making-the-trip-to-mars-cheaper-and-easier-the-case-for-ballistic-capture/

The Gawker site merely copies/pastes what the original article states plus ad LOADS of additional advertising.
How does this get past the Slashdot editors? Was this an intentional Promo or has Slashdot declined just this much these days :(

Of course not. Did you even read the message you are replying to?

Me to. Now the way that politics and law generally work is that less intrusive solutions are tried first. That is what DNT was. Now the road is clear for some real regulations.

You don't understand politics I see. I was like you 10 years ago. I learnt the hard way that nifty tech solutions are cute, but to get them actually working in the real world, some politics can be extraordinarily useful.

A lot of ideas died in the halls of parliament not because they were stupid, on the contrary, a lot of them were brilliant. They died because those who proposed and supported them didn't understand how to convince people. If your target audience doesn't understand the technical details, the brilliance of your solution will be lost to them. Your persuasion skills - or lack thereof - however, will not.

Actually, proto-humans migrated repeatedly out of Africa. Homo erectus, Homo antecessor, Homo neanderthalensis, and finally two waves of Homo sapiens moved out of Africa and into Eurasia. North America was colonized repeatedly by Homo sapiens, by the Amerindian, Navajo-Dene, and Inuit peoples. Migration probably is in the genes. Lineages that become widespread are harder to wipe out as a result of drought, famine, climate change, etc. so lineages with some innate tendency to disperse probably tend to survive. But it's kind of a moot point. The places they went to already had atmospheres, normal gravity, ambient temperatures, radiation shielding, abundant game and edible plants. Mars has none of that. It was simple enough to move out of Africa that a cave-man could do it, literally. It doesn't follow that because humans could and did repeatedly move from continent to continent that it's a good idea to try to colonize a cold, barren, airless wasteland millions of miles away.

It's a bullshit argument. The problem is that a robotic mission is going to cost on the order of 1% of a human mission to do the same thing. If there's a risk of the lander failing, the cheapest and easiest solution is to create two or three separate robotic probes which minimizes the chance of failure. Obviously a 100 billion dollar manned mission will be more capable than a 1 billion dollar robotic mission. But a 100 billion dollar robotic mission would be vastly more capable than a comparably expensive manned mission.

I keep hearing this argument, in fact I've been hearing it for around 20 years. And during that time, we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on NASA. So it's about time to ask... where is all this spin-off technology we've been promised for the past 20 years? Most of the major innovations we've seen are either military (GPS, internet) or commercial (cellular networks, smartphones). It's hard to point to a single transformative innovation to come out of NASA recently, and historically the military has done far more to spur technological innovation than NASA. I'm not arguing that building more F-35s is the best way to spur technological innovation, but it's worth taking a hard look at where our research dollars make the biggest difference, and I think it would be hard to show that NASA is the best way to do that.

The defense budget is 20% of the federal budget, which is around 1/5th. America's defense budget exceeds that of the next 10 largest defense budgets *combined*. The U.S. still has unquestioned air superiority in every conflict it enters, a fleet of aircraft carriers to project that air power, ballistic missile submarines that can rain down nuclear death at a moment's notice, a rapidly growing drone army to silently hunt our enemies from the skies, electronic intelligence and cyberwarfare capabilities to spy on the whole world, and critically, the network of ships, bases, and air transport to rapidly move troops and supplies to conflict points anywhere on the globe and project that military force... America is the only remaining global military power. No one else- not China, not Russia- has that ability to project power beyond their regional sphere of influence. It's not limitless power, as shown by Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Viet Nam, but it still makes the U.S. the only remaining superpower. And if anyone's hurting the U.S. military preparedness, it's not the left, it's the generals who push for expensive toys like the F-35 instead of focusing on problems like counterinsurgency warfare.

DNT was a brilliant display of the advertisement industries unwillingness to regulate itself and respect such wishes. Now they cannot make those claims anymore, and there is evidence on record that actual regulation is required.

Without DNT, they would always have claimed they're good guys. Now the mask is off.

Wrong.

It is because you don't prevent it. At least legally, that is a very big difference. If I allow you to hit me in the face, e.g. by participating in a boxing match, then I can't later sue you for bodily harm. If you do it without my permission and I just fail to prevent it, then all the guilt falls on you anyway and I can sue you, plus you have committed a crime. That's quite a big difference there between those two words.

Yes, but not in the way you think.

DNT is useless technologically. But it is a gem when it comes to providing evidence that actual regulations and penalties are required, because the industry is unwilling to regulate itself and respect customer requests.

There's a tradition in law and law-making that you need to at least try the less intrusive choices first. Now we satisfy that, and we can move on to really stop the parasites.

Well since we haven't invented human cloning yet - though I can't wait to hear Bennet Haselton's opinion on the matter - that should be the one and only right? I'll take all four pairs of headphones, delivery to the galaxy known as KKs3. Warp speed delivery please, that'll be 7 million years of blissful silence before his radio signals reach earth.