Now all we need is for Anonymous to hack Sony again, replace Sony.com with The Pirate Bay, and put up a torrent of the movie. Then the lulz will be complete.

Nah, that's no good -- we can't have Sony actually do something good; it'd be too out of character.

No, what really needs to happen is that Anonymous should hack Sony a second time, replace the Sony.com website with a copy of The Pirate Bay, and release a torrent of the movie there.

But to not show it because some third-world dictator pitched a fit is a different thing. That truly offends me. We should be showing it precisely because it pisses him off.

Exactly. But since the theaters dun goofed and Sony compounded their incompetence with a double-helping of cowardice, we need to compensate. Clearly, what needs to happen now is for Anonymous to hack Sony again and release the movie to Bittorrent.

Is stealing from the Public Domain by turning copyright into some sort of perpetual entitlement morally justifiable? Not really. In the end, someone is going around the rules of society for personal gain.

FTFY.

Since the experimental design involved artificially aging [only] the skin by exposing the mice to tanning, they probably don't know yet.

We could also fix it by simply making a rule that "malfunctioning" camera + complaint of misconduct = bullet between the cop's eyes.

Renewables have the problem of portability. Some like wind and hydro electric needs to be located in the proper areas where they can get a reliable energy from. Others like solar do not offer 24/7 support. Batteries do not have the energy density that we get out of fossil fuel, and takes much longer to recharge.

That's why the real future of portable fuel is synthetic fuel (preferably from carbon sequestration or renewable sources, not coal).

After the rocket program had been canceled, it was expected that the tower would be useless when it was completed four years later. Lo and behold, now that it's completed it is indeed useless.

Stop signs are not effective for traffic calming.

Yes and no.

It's more related to the time period in which those neighborhoods were built, and how they were built. Grid street patterns were normal before WWII, along with smaller houses (Victorians, Craftsman bungalows, etc.). "Subdivisions" didn't become common until the postwar era, when sprawling ranch houses with two-car garages and big yards were popular.

Not coincidentally, those postwar subdivisions were also getting built at the same time as the civil rights movement: at the time, black people were "blockbusting" in those grid-street neighborhoods, while the white people were moving out to the curved/cul-de-sac subdivisons to get away from them. In fact, the restricted number of subdivision entrances/exits, along with the higher housing prices (enforced in the zoning code by minimum lot sizes, which forced lower-density development) were, in part, tools to keep out those perceived to be undesirable.

I know a "50 something" retired guy whose hobby is archiving pirated music. He claims to have "more than 250,000 albums" on HDD's. Sounds impossible but maybe he means "songs".

Assuming 3 MB per song (in MP3 format) and 10 songs per album, on average, 250,000 albums would take up only about 7.5 TB. That's not too far-fetched: the whole thing could even fit on one disk!

and then what happens with they start trying to lay the hurt on them for listing pirate links (as it is almost impossible to block these witthout only showing sponsored content)

Hopefully, it would drive the popularity of peer-to-peer distributed search engines like YaCy or Seeks.

And you really want a wireless solution, either RF (Zigbee, for example) or carrier current (X10). Carrier current, these days, is probably no cheaper than RF, and RF doesn't have anywhere near the interference and propagation issues that carrier current does.

No, what you really want is a low-voltage wiring standard (which encompasses both power and control, so that you can directly drive LED lighting without having a bunch of 120VAC transformers everywhere). That way you could wire the house once and not have to worry about incompatible proprietary bullshit.

Doesn't your school have guidance councilors and an appeals process to make exceptions for issues like that?

Y'all need to go to a better school. At my college, several of the lower-level CS classes had special "X" sections that were more interesting and challenging, and let us avoid having to deal with the non-CS-majors who had no idea WTF they were doing.