In this case, he's not being published in reputable journals. He's had some letters published, which are not subject to peer review. The few times he's gotten his papers into major journals, they've been savaged, and they don't publish him any more. His work is relegated to minor journals and letters.

The peer review process does provide a strong bar against junk science, but not all peer review is the same. Researchers in the field know it, but when the goal is to appeal to the public, it's easy to gloss over the differences. Even other scientists rarely know which are the reputable and high-impact journals outside of their own field.

Does signing up for premium change anything from the artist's point of view? Pandora loses the revenue they get from the advertising, and I suspect it's roughly a wash.

Music is further made odd by the amount of money being spent to create demand. There's an enormous amount of marketing and advertising. Although there is some interest in the "long tail" of music, most of what people are willing to pay for comes from a well-oiled machine that has focus-grouped and promoted the bejeezus out of it.

That costs a lot of money, and it's aimed at getting people to take part of their overall budget and put it into music that could otherwise be spent on many different alternative goods: different entertainment, food, materials, education, retirement, etc. They're also vying for a limited factor of people's time budget: while songs can be done in parallel to other things, there's only so much attention, and they can listen to only so many songs.

A lot of factors enter into the economic model, and it goes far beyond just "supply and demand" even before you get the thumb on the scale of artificially-produced (and highly imperfect) scarcity.

Code can, in theory, be made largely unhackable. The more features it has, the harder it will be, and there's always the five-dollar-wrench hack, but nothing in theory prevents people from securing the code.

The law is always going to be hackable. Any significant law is always going to be far more complicated than code. It's dealing with people, not computers, who have far more different modes of operation.

The law will always end up relying on a certain amount of goodwill from the people. We'd love to have the law say, "Look, just don't be an asshole," but defining "asshole" turns out to be tricky, and there will always be somebody willing to be just-asshole-enough to be legal.

Worse... the law is retroactive: if you break it, the courts do something. Computer security prevents you from doing the illegal thing. That inherent delay creates inherent injustice. The delay also costs money. We've seen time and time again that it's been cheaper for companies to pay the extortion than to defend against it.

So I think that yes, they are evil, and not merely hackers taking advantage of a broken system. Even the best possible system is imperfect. We rely on human beings to engage in a certain amount of decorum, if only for the game-theoretic reason that too much incivility results in a breakdown and they lose.

Frequently, the patent trolls are breaking the law themselves, and counting on the delay to get away with it. That's pretty directly evil. And taking advantage of ambiguities in a system that must inherently be ambiguous, I'd say that's equally evil.

Simply calling them "evil" doesn't really accomplish anything, of course. But it doesn't make them smart. The system is easily hacked. Anybody could do what they do. They're more akin to script kiddies than hackers.

No, they fund things that have a military application, some of which are interesting. But it's not like the good old days, when they'd fund things that were interesting, regardless of military value.

If you're going to go around reading Wikipedia pages, you may as well finish reading them before citing them.

Here's what the very same Wikipedia page says, one paragraph after the one you quoted:

The ARPANET incorporated distributed computation (and frequent re-computation) of routing tables. This was a major contribution to the good survivability that the ARPANET had, in the face of significant destruction - even by a nuclear attack. Such auto-routing was technically quite challenging to construct at the time. The fact that it was incorporated into the early ARPANET made many believe that this had been a design goal.

The ARPANET was in fact designed to survive subordinate-network losses, but the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks. About the resource scarcity that spurred the creation of the ARPANET, Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965â"1967), said:

The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried.

Which agrees nicely with what I said in my earlier comment.

You then went on to say:

No, they weren't the only place with money. But ARPA was founded in 1958, and it wasn't until 1973 that they were required to only spend money on defense-related projects. Before that, they had a habit of giving money to all sorts of interesting projects. JCR Licklider, an obscure, yet tremendously important person in computing history, wanted to build computer networks and was a higher-up at ARPA in the 60's. His successor was Ivan Sutherland, who should need no introduction, and Sutherland brought in Bob Taylor, who finally got a network funded and built. Since you like Wikipedia, here's a passage from Taylor's entry:

Among the computer projects that ARPA supported was time-sharing, in which many users could work at terminals to share a single large computer. Users could work interactively instead of using punched cards or punched tape in a batch processing style. Taylor's office in the Pentagon had a terminal connected to time-sharing at MIT, a terminal connected to the Berkeley Timesharing System at the University of California at Berkeley, and a third terminal to the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California. He noticed each system developed a community of users, but was isolated from the other communities.

Taylor hoped to build a computer network to connect the ARPA-sponsored projects together, if nothing else to let him communicate to all of them through one terminal.

When ARPA got out of the business of spending money on interesting work, the National Science Foundation was supposed to pick up the slack, but this never happened. While I can understand how some people might cast aspersions on projects that used military funding, even if they're not meant for military applications, the money spends well enough.

No it wasn't; that's just an urban legend. The ARPAnet was a way of allowing researchers to share resources. Thus, a user in San Francisco could use a computer in Los Angeles, and wouldn't even need a new, dedicated terminal to do it. Its resilience has more to do with the poor state of telecommunications at the time demanding it, and certain design features that allowed for a useful combination of efficiency and flexibility.

As for why it was funded by DARPA, that was where there was money.

And that's precisely why YouTube is the go-to place even for a lot of copyrighted content: they're willing to play ball with the copyright holders (and arguably, roll over and play dead). That gives them access to a broad array of copyrighted content (like music videos) while ensuring that some revenue ends up in the hands of the copyright holder (if not the artist) by keeping out the copies.

Other sources will always be patchy; YouTube will be the go-to source. Even for material they don't wish to host on YouTube, many people will go searching there for it first, and they can provide an advertisement (such as a trailer) that links them to their own preferred site to buy/rent the content.

Others can try to break into that game by playing nice with the big studios, which heavily promote their own content and that drives a lot of eyeballs. But most people don't want to distinguish between that and the cat videos; it's all just entertainment. So unless that player is willing to put in an enormous effort duplicating YouTube's work, it's going to be a tough game to get started in.

Thanks /. for removing the - from my comment!

It may be people at work were kidding me: However, apparently it is common to drive into the sea at Talinn.
http://www.topgear.com/uk/phot...
http://www.bencoombs.net/page7...
As for temp:
Helsinki Airport recorded a temperature of 34.0 C (93.2 F) on 29 July 2010 and a low of 35.9 C (33 F) on 9 January 1987. - so maybe I'm thinking with wind chill.

I had the great pleasure of staying in Helsinki for Dec/Jan - love the Finns. It finally got down to -44 or so and there was much celebration at work as the gulf had frozen over and the booze run to Tallinn could be done by car. I gratefully declined the invite to go along for the ride.

As I understand it, they usually report peak wattage rather than total energy production. It doesn't produce anything at night, and less most of the day. So the price per actual generated kWh may be closer to 10 or 12 cents. Which happens to be right around the national average, though considerably less than most of California.

In the end, I don't think it's purely a price thing. They're hoping to have a positive impact on the world as well. But if they can do it while netting about the same price as they would have spent anyway, or even a slight bargain, that makes it a no-brainer. If it's slightly more, it's still well within their total corporate goals.

Strictly, the GP did say "ship guns". The Paris gun was a rail-mounted gun. You can go bigger when your supply lines don't have to float along with you.

Plus, you can use the entire planet for recoil. I wonder how badly the Paris gun would rock a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

Yeah, I know. I'm not happy about it, and I'm not going to use it, but I will not correct anybody using it the new way.

My teeth still clench when I hear "X and I" in the objective case, but it's not worth complaining about, either. I will, however, complain about "literally" being used as a general intensifier. I know it has a long history, but there are still real-world cases where it's unclear which definition is meant, and that's a genuine problem.

"Comprised" has become spoiled, to use the lexicographer's term for it. The proper use of it ("The USSR comprised 15 republics") sounds pedantic. Improper use ("Salt is comprised of sodium and chlorine") is lame, because the word "composed" is so similar and unarguably proper. At best, they're synonyms; at worst, that redundancy looks foolish.

So it ends up being not used at all in formal speech until it has completed its turn to its new meaning. And that new meaning is going to be a slightly prissy-sounding synonym for "composed".