I recommend everyone to read J. Furman's judgment: it's crystal clear, and a pleasure to understand.

The argument establishes that what Baidu is engaged in is speech, not advertising or anything, I think these two quotes (or quotes of quotes) sum everything up beautifully:

'Since all speech inherently involves choices of what to say and what to leave unsaid,'" the Court explained, "one important manifestation of the principle of free speech is that one who chooses to speak may also decide 'what not to say.'"

As the Supreme Court has explained, "[t]he First Amendment does not guarantee that . . . concepts virtually sacred to our Nation as a whole . . . will go unquestioned in the marketplace of ideas."

what movie did you get that from?

You get to my age, some things in movies are almost as real as what really happened :)

However, this discussion on PPRuNe suggests that I didn't make it up. Several professional pilots are on there saying that it's their normal practice. Before anyone points it out, I can see that the thread is ten years old, and it may very well be that modern CVRs aren't using 30 minute magnetic tape loops.

Nobody seems to have mentioned that *pilots* would/might resist the streaming of flight data to the ground. As I understand it, there's a button in the cockpit which erases the flight deck voice recordings, and that button is one of the first things that the captain presses when the plane has landed.

What's said on the flight deck, stays on the flight deck!

Yes, as far as I can see, if you "corner" a market in BitCoin then you can control its price. A BitCoin, like a dollar or a diamond, is worth exactly what someone will pay you for it.

There was a similar flurry about virtual goods in Second Life, I vaguely recall.
Back on topic, is anyone alleging that the "real" Satoshi Nakamoto has cornered the market? If there is a real concern that the bitcoin architect could bring the edifice crashing down, I'd say that that was a good reason to stay well outside the said edifice.

... are in the business of talking up BTC, aren't they? The principle of crypto "currency" might be somewhat transformative, but I haven't yet seen any scenario in which BTC or any of the others would "fundamentally transform the economy".

@E-Rock Why do I never have mod points when someone cuts to the heart of the matter? What will be the public benefit of knowing the meatspace ID and location of the bitcoin architect? None. +1 Insightful at the very least.

> amassed a huge amount of money doing so

Well, it's more like that the early miners of bitcoin, including its inventor, *made* something that you (and several others) now want. He didn't amass money, he made something difficult (read: impossible) to forge, that now has a real-world value. Think of it like artwork.

I don't understand why anyone wants to know who Satoshi 'bitcoin' Nakamoto is. How will you be better off if you know?

That ratio is taken into account in the calculations presented in DeepSeaNews, see above, so the infeasible volume of water needing to be processed remains. Sorry.

A rather terse teacher in Beaulieu
Had a class which was very unreaulieu;
In a fine fit of pique, he resigned, so to spique:

Dear Headmaster,
I'm leaving.
Yours treaulieu,

Beaulieu

I submit a proof for evolution, by which I mean the fact of and explanation for mutability of species.

We will proceed by observation.

1. Life forms have offspring.
2. When those offspring are the result of sexual reproduction, they vary amongst themselves and from their parents in some respects.
3. More offspring are germinated/spawned/hatched/born than survive to reproductive maturity.
4. Variations exhibited by offspring are in some respects heritable.
5. Some heritable variations will make a certain individual offspring marginally more likely to breed successfully.
6. Heritable variation is passed between generations by means of the deoxyribose nucleic acid molecules known as chromosomes.

The first five observations, which are not reasonably refutable, lead one inevitably to the conclusion commonly known as "the survival of the fittest", though note that it is breeding success rather than actual survival which is enjoyed by the fittest; barren survivors don't come into the calculation.

When observation 6 and our detailed understanding of genetic heritability is added, it becomes perfectly _inevitable_ that a breeding population will change its heritable characteristics (i.e. EVOLVE) to fit its environment.

When populations are divided, observation 2 means that subsequent changes cause the two populations to diverge in their heritable characteristics, particularly if the populations are subjected to different environmental challenges or opportunities.

Sufficient genetic divergence then results in the appearance of different species, by which we mean a population with sufficiently different characteristics that a good taxonomist *says* they're separate species, or perhaps (given point 6) that chromosomal differences make interbred offspring non-viable or infertile. Q.E.D.
~~~~~~~~
I genuinely would like to know in what ways a creationist might argue against the above, if by creationism we mean immutability of all species created by $DEITY. If creationism is reduced only to special pleading for Homo sapiens, as being created in God's image, perhaps, then the debate is somewhat altered.

> many other data sets are expensive to regenerate...
Or maybe impossible to regenerate (for certain values of impossible). I remember reading a classified technical report (dating from the 1940s) related to military life-jacket development, wherein the question arose as to whether a particular design would reliably turn an unconscious person face-up in the water. The experimental design used was to dress some servicemen (sailors, possibly, but I don't recall) in the prototype design, anaesthetise them and drop them in a large body of water, checking for face-down floaters to disprove the null hypothesis. Somehow, I don't think that those data are going to be regenerated any time soon. I hope to God not, anyway.

I took the waypoint info from his tracking map and stuffed it into a spreadsheet. Synthesizing the vertical speed indications, it seems Mr Trappe may have had problems controlling his altitude: the maximum descent rate was over 600 fpm when approaching the New Brunswick coast, during a descent from 19,835 ft to just 968 ft in fifty minutes. Having bobbed back up to over 15,000 ft he again descended over the sea, this time to just 314 ft above sea level, with the VSI reading -220 fpm over the preceding ten minutes. I'm guessing that that looked like waves coming up pretty fast. I suspect that his ballast and helium might have been depleted to the extent that he was glad to put down in Newfoundland rather than ditch in the Atlantic. No doubt we'll be told shortly.