The AHRA requires the use of SCMS however since the source of the music are CDs which have no SCMS, how would that work? As noted by the Diamond decision, these systems permit less copying than SCMS allows as music cannot be transferred from the drive.

Elliptical galaxies must have a lot of collisions as stars go about in perpendicular planes to each other. As there has to be a centrifugal force keeping the stuff from falling together right away, like in a vortex the spinning sets up a delay, and keep things from collapsing into each other, in the ellipsoid's vertical plane too, not just everything going about orderly in a horizontal plane.

As in is there a way to create absolute vacuum, pump out the electromagnetic field, or ether, or whatever you wanna call it? In the days of Toricelli they used to wonder whether absolute metaphysical void is philosophically possible, and the 760mm Hg mercury tube was their prime example of messing with such vacuum, and how it wants to suck on things, nature abhores emptiness, til someone came around and said no, it does not, what we got is atmospheric pressure pushing down on mercury, and vacuum not pushing down on it, and if you take your Toricelli tube up the mountain side, it will abhor the metaphysical void differently.

What you are missing is that ratings are assigned relative to the competition that existed when the rating was assigned. Go over to gamespot and check out the graphics of a game that got the top rating for graphics 8 years ago. Are those graphics still 10/10? Not even close. Go over to Amazon.com and search SD Cards by "Average Customer Review." Many of the top-ranked cards are little 8 and 16 GB cards that were rated up years ago.

And the speed of gravity may indeed be infinite, if it propagates through a medium that's empty, even empty of electromagnetic vacuum. Does that sentence even make sense? It's like saying vacuum has mass per unit volume, that retards gravity, like, if you put electrically charged obstacles in the way of light, such as a zirconia crystal of a fake diamond ring, it will slow light down, so putting a lot of sand or earth or metal in the way of gravity slows it down too? Or does gravity penetrate mass unimpeded to the mass right behind it. We know an electric field propagates only with the speed of light, and speed of light is impeded by electric charges in abundance in the way.

Hidden variables are the simplest way to kill a probabilistic model of reality. Like every time I think of quantum theory, I think of the randomness of Brownian motion, how 900 trillion molecules are smacking the pollen under the microscope from the left, 900 million plust 53 from the right, and that 53 is heavy enough to make it move. But luckily, by the time we found the random Brownian motion of lifeless particles, we already had the Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases, and its statistical rules, and the parameters, the rules, are not many in that model, but the actors are - 900 trillion of them at the same time. There may be a deterministic description to quantum theory, but you may have to come up with 900 trillion actors obeying simple rules, to accurately measure and describe at what localize point an electron wave function will decide to collapse on a screen from a double slit experiment. We have no way to measure 900 trillion different velocities and motions of things we don't even know what they are or whether they exist. By the way even into the 20th century there were prominent scientists, like Ostwald who denied the existence of atoms, and maintained that matter is continuous, and ascribed its success to just mere luck, and it will be a matter of time before we find something to disprove it as a valid theory, just like we abandoned phlogiston, caloric, vis viva, etc., but it's hard to hold such a view in face of an atomic force microscope today. We think atoms are real and Brownian motion is from 900 gazillion atoms smashing into each other at the same time. What stuff is there in vacuum, in emptiness, that acts like that? Vacuum, or complete physical void and emptiness, is definitely not empty, as far as I can tell. If it were, it would have a dielectric permittivity of zero, and the speed of light would be infinite.

There are various "dreams" of course, but the Gold Rush mentality has always been strong in US culture. Our current top marginal tax rates certainly support that assertion - average people pay dearly in real money to protect their fantasy future-self.

Any marketplace of infinitely scalable production is a lottery!

Before music recordings, if you wanted to hear music, somebody had to play it. A more popular musician could make somewhat more than an average musician - maybe substantially more - but the top handful couldn't entertain the entire planet singlehandedly. Now they can. The economy of agrarian farmers - where a 20% more productive farmer makes 20% more money - is over. Now it's winner-takes-all.

All the arguments based on classical economic theory only work if the assumptions of classical economics hold, particularly the assumption that there is a free market.

Amazon is arguing for its freedom to set prices it charges in its ebook store; that would be no concern of the publishers if we lived in a world where ebook users could simply buy books in non-proprietary formats from any Internet storefront they wanted. But we don't live in such a world. We live in a world where most ebook readers are controlled by Amazon and inextricably linked to its store. It wouldn't have been hard for Amazon to build the Kindle that way. Define some public book trading protocols, bootstrap the standard by building those protocols into the Kindle and Amazon's online store, and instantly the world is a better place for everyone except printers and bricks-and-mortar bookstores with no Internet presence. But Amazon didn't do that, because the Kindle is designed to tie the user to Amazon, the way the iPad is designed to tie the user to Apple.

So what we're looking at is a maneuver by Amazon to corner the market on books *in general* by killing off the traditional paper book trade. Preserving the ability to buy most books from someone other than Amazon seems like a legitimate reason to me.

Also, I seen a youtube video of a weird fluid, which under oscillations that resupplied the energy lost to friction, it grew tentacles, standing waves on its surface. Then you can ping ping these waves around.

Nobody's book is so incredible that people would buy them no matter what the price. If my only way to get Shakespeare was to pay a ten thousand dollar license fee I'd find a way to do without.

You really shouldn't assume that anyone who disagrees with you does so because they're stupid. Publishers know their marginal and fixed costs and certainly have a pretty good idea of the price elasticity of their books. The situation is more complicated than you know.

You can't compare Hachette to Valve, because Valve owns the whole Steam ecosystem, and delivers its services to users' commodity PC hardware with no intermediaries (other than Internet service). In the case of Hachette v. Amazon, we're looking at a situation where Amazon owns the point of sale, and has more control over the users' devices than the user himself has. And yes, you can read ebooks on a PC but few people will want to do that. And yes you can download ebooks in non-proprietary formats like epub from sources other than Amazon, convert the format to .mobi, and use file transfer to move the converted file onto the kindle; but that's a significant barrier for most people.

So what we're looking at is a move by Amazon to take control of the book market in a way it cannot as long as paperback and hardback sales remain strong. Amazon *looks* like a friend of the consumer because they're calling for lower prices. If they get what they want, then ebooks may well make a significant market share headway against paper books.

You might think that's fine, but it's not *generic* formats and *commodity* hardware we're talking about. It's formats and hardware controlled by an inextricably linked to *one* company. And that may mean lower prices today, but what will it mean ten years down the pike when Amazon corners the market on books?

I'd be interested in your source for this particular tidbit, particularly how it shows blacks are any worse than whites in this regard.

I went to high school with a lot of tough white guys from South Boston and Charlestown in Boston, back when Whitey Bulger was still a big deal in Southie. Let me tell you most of them didn't see intellect as their path into the middle class. A few did, but not many. I've also worked with PhD scientists who were black and came from urban black neighborhoods. You get a mix of attitudes everywhere, whether it's in a black ghetto or white ghetto or a middle-class white neighborhood, but usually being academically advanced doesn't make you popular unless you live in town with a big Jewish population.

Speaking of Whitey, his people used to spread the myth that he kept drugs off the street in Southie. In fact he was kicking the Italian mob out of Southie so he could have the drug trade all to himself. Whitey wasn't a hero, he was a parasite. So why did people believe the lie? Wishful thinking. The people who got education and became professionals moved out of the neighborhood, so the one example of guys who rose in life that you saw every day were the mob. And you had to hope they were good lads at heart, because they had the neighborhood by the balls.

There's often a "we're all in this together" thing going on in poor, downtrodden neighborhoods. Part of that is a resentment of anyone who acts like their above the rest, and that includes people who flaunt their education or sophistication. But that's because intellectual accomplishments don't seem to be within the reach of everybody. You don't get that attitude in cultures which believe in self-improvement.

So let's *not* talk race. Let's talk education and economic opportunity. If people have a way up, see that way, and believe they can do it, they will rise.

I too am an elemtary bozo. And so are you.

Why combine the beams to see which path the neutrons took? Why not measure them individually? Because then you don't get the self-interference effects of the electron double-slit experiment. If you block either hole, it's easy to see that each electron wave-packet went through the other one. But if you keep both holes open, each wave-packet electron goes through both holes, and arrives at the screen in a self-diffraction pattern, with highs and lows in probability or abundance amplitudes. I.e., the modeling of the electron as a "particle", as a dot, as something limited in extent in space, is not correct, it does spread out, though I don't know if it spreads out to a mile, if that's the distance between the holes, or across the galaxy, it may be like a sound wave only spreads out to openings on a wall within a limited range, and the range, or amplitude of the unparticleness spread all over the place is limited to the nearby neighborhood, and not halfway across the globe, let alone the galaxy. But soundwaves get absorbed as thermal friction, while electrons live in an undecaying medium, and don't have a half life. So how far do the electrons spread out, halfway across the galaxy? With sound waves, in absence of decay, absence of friction, or light waves in absence of absorbance, there is an inverse square drop in amplitude vs. distance, and I assume this be the case with all waves, as the surface of a sphere is inverse square, it's where the term comes from, and such a rule represents conservation of something when it goes from a 1 cm radius to a 10 cm radius, if spherical, its amplitude as a wave drops as inverse square, but when confined to a reflecting waveguide, the aplitude is constant. Electron microscopy probably shows that electrons behave like other waves of sound, light, etc., and something is conserved, and they follow the inverse square law in a sphere, and a consant law if you can make a waveguide. So the electron self diffracts, and maybe these guys didn't have a neutron-screen to observe the diffraction effects, but a single neutron probe somewhere, so when they were expecting an increase in something, they measured a decrease, as the patterns get a little more complicated with diffraction, based on path length. They need a neutron "display screen", and even if they can't get 800x600 SVGA pixels, maybe 24x24 would be nice. That's a lot of neutron detectors. So even 2x2=4, 3x3=9 or 10x10=100 is better than just 1.

I think its the other way around, the dyed water has a ferromagnetic molecule whose color is sensitive to the applied magnetic field, but the distilled water lacks such a complex additive, and is not sensitive.