> 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.

Three scientists took the train northwards from England to attend a multi-disciplinary conference in Edinburgh.

Conversation flagged as the journey continued, until some time after crossing the border into Scotland when the social scientist, used to seeing Friesan herds in the south, pointed out some Highland cattle.
"Oh, look", he said, "the cows are brown in Scotland!"

The physicist put down the newspaper and looked out of the window.
"Yes, so I see, but your remark isn't scientific, you know. You can't know that all the cows are brown. What do you think, Bob?"

Bob the mathematician glanced up over his glasses at the grazing cattle.
"Observation shows that, through this window, at least one side of some bullocks in Scotland appears brown".

Moral: question your assumptions.

As AC points out, I WAS talking in my first reply about whether or not SCOG could be said to own the code, not on the fact of copying or derivation from anywhere.

I'd add another point to your list of So:
-Even if they owned the code and even if some lines of it were infringed and even if Novell's waiver doesn't hold, SCOG went on distributing *the same code* under the GPL for years after they started suing folk (IBM, Novell, Autozone, RedHat...).

I've got a licence for the Linux kernel from Caldera/SCOG already. As SCOG's lawyer said in his summing up for the jury trial in Utah, SCOSource is gone and it can't be resurrected.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100326184700459

Please, if you don't have a grasp of the history, don't post stuff that just confuses the issue. Novell bought the entirety of UNIX from AT&T. Caldera did a deal to acquire the UNIX licensing business from Novell. Caldera changed its name to SCO. The courts have decided that the UNIX copyrights still belong to Novell.

You only missed a verdict if you haven't looked up for seven years! Recently a jury in Utah confirmed what a judge found in a bench trial: Caldera (later SCO Group) did not get, and was not entitled to get, the UNIX copyrights in the 1995 deal they did with Novell. Unless you think that the jury was unreasonable in that finding (and guess what, SCOG and its lawyers do), SCOG does not 'own' UNIX in any useful sense.

Because in mathematics, i, j and k are traditional notation for, e.g. summations. I can't do formula embedding here but think of the big Sigma: sum for all i, integer i ranges from 0 to infinity, that sort of thing. Fortran is FORmula TRANslation language.

King George III is dead. Some time ago. Sorry to break it to you so harshly.

NoYob quoted text from www.videoprofessor.com and wrote "this is on the front page of his site". Apparently one of the tricks of the trade is to vary the nature and composition of the landing page, depending on how you got there (referrer) and/or by geolocation of your IP address. If this is the case, we can't reliably tell somebody what they'll see on the front page of the site, can we?

From the link:

The manual was translated into English and was introduced earlier this year at the embassy bombing trial in New York. The Department is only providing the following selected text from the manual because it does not want to aid in educating terrorists or encourage further acts of terrorism.

So it seems the US Department of Justice is fairly clear that this is suitable for the public domain, and if it's been introduced as evidence, it's squarely IN the public domain.

Then from the TFA:

On Tuesday they read me a statement confirming it was an illegal document which shouldn't be used for research purposes.

It seems that the Plod haven't even followed up on their sources.

Now, I haven't got the bottle to actually download any of those PDFs (to here in the UK). However, some clueless folk are going to get some real interesting tinyurls real soon now.

PS also from the link:

The attached manual was located by the Manchester (England) Metropolitan Police

WTF? There's no such organization as the Manchester Metropolitan Police. The force is called the Greater Manchester Police.