Given the topic of this article, your sig just got rather scary.

I am actually disappointed that Google settled at all. I was hoping this issue would end up going to trial, where we could have had a frank examination of the absurd copyright system. If the purpose of copyright is to provide incentive to creators, than orphaned works should logically fall into the public domain, since their creators no longer need incentive from them. This is actually no different than the property model we use for copyright: abandoned property (such as a shipwreck) no longer has ownership and can usually be claimed by someone else.

But instead, Google opted to settle. This was the smart business move, since they can now move forward with their database, and it may yet prove valuable as a public perception precedent, but it did nothing to solve the underlying problem of unfair copyright enforcement.

The people complaining are the university libraries, who previously had the monopoly on this material. These books will not only be available in Google's database, they will also be available in dead tree format at your friendly neighborhood library.

Google is not creating a monopoly, they're breaking one up.

That may be true, but the hope is that this settlement can be pointed to in future cases, streamlining the process of getting a license. A new company XYZ, Inc. can negotiate a license from the publishers more easily by pointing to Google's license as a template, allowing XYZ, Inc. to go scan orphaned works. Or university libraries, who have paper copies of the books in question, can more easily negotiate licenses to scan them and make them available on the university website.

Google is big enough, with enough muscle, that they can push the legal system in this country pretty hard. Considering where they stand on copyright and making information available to the unwashed masses, I would say only good can come out of their efforts in the long run.

While I am typically a CLI mplayer guy (even if opening a movie from a graphical file manager to fullscreen), I have to say that SMPlayer is a fantastic front end GUI. I recommend SMPlayer to even my most clueless Windows user friends.

You're not "surrendering your data" any more than you would be if you hired Acme Outside Contractors, Inc. to run your infrastructure.

Businesses using GMail would actually be using Google Apps, which operates contractually the same as any other IT contractor, with all the legal requirements for non-disclosure that entails and an enterprise-level SLA.

This is not a free service, because of the aforementioned legal/SLA requirements. But it is certainly cheaper than running your own Exchange server and gives your employees more features and better usability than Outlook. If your only reason for opposing it is some vague aversion to storing your data on iron you don't own, then you need to come join the rest of us in the 21st Century, where outsourcing, contracting, and offsite storage are the norm and contractual requirements for proprietary data storage are built into every vendor agreement. Google Apps is no different in this respect; it's just another contracted vendor, albeit a vendor with kick-ass software and 3 nines uptime.

Does it count as an April Fools' story if it's just reporting on someone else's April Fools' joke?

The philosophical question of the day...

Yeah, but the flood theory does.

*rimshot*

The computer you're typing on, the principles behind the electricity and the circuit boards and the plastics and the manufacturing... are all products of the scientific method. Every single human advance that allows you to spend your days doing something other than sitting in the jungle naked waiting to be eaten by a big cat are the result of the scientific method.

The scientific method produces theories that make correct predictions about the world around us. Theology does not. Simplistic philosophical talking points like "Truth" have nothing to do with it, and maintaining that robust scientific theories that make such correct predictions are just "opinions" is hand-waving at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

The fact that you and I are even able to converse about this subject over an electronic network is a direct result of the discoveries of science. Theology may give emotional comfort, but it is not, and never will be, in the same realm as science. Don't drag rational thinking people into the navel-gazing fairly tale world of theology.

Yes, my mistake, it was the Babylonians/Sumerians.

The meter has been based on many things, each as arbitrary as the last, including the circumference of the Earth, the length of a pendulum with a 1 second period, two different prototype bars (one of brass, one of platinum), the wavelength of a krypton-86 atomic emission, and the speed of light in a vacuum.

And yes, Anders Celsius created a reversed scale which was promptly set straight upon his death. The term "centegrade," although used interchangeably by some people with Celsius, is considered obsolete by the Bureau of International Standards. The correct term is "degree Celsius," and has been since 1948.

None of this changes how arbitrary all of these measurement units are, making a holy war about whether Imperial or Metric measurements are better all the more wearying.

Cow tipping just got a whole lot more interesting.

The usage of tons vs. pounds is usually for effect. There are 2000 lbs in a ton, so 123,000 lbs would be 61.5 tons. But most people, unless they work in an industry that deals with very large weights of things, don't have any concept of a ton, and plus, adding "millions" or "thousands" to the end of a number makes it sound big and exciting.

The following is not directed at fantomas, but at the other metric-heads in this thread...

It's also interesting that you would bring up the metric ton (or tonne). This unit is descended from the centuries-old unit of tun, relating to the weight of a cask of wine. It was standardized as 1000 kg, because it's much less silly to say "ton" than to say "megagram", the official metric equivalent.

I always found it amusing that Europeans who think metric is The One True Way seem to prefer using another totally made up unit (metric ton) instead of following the metric system (megagram) because it's easier, and that's the way they've always done it.

All units are inherently arbitrary anyway, and there is no way you can ever get around conversion factors (1 ml of water weighs 1 g, but only at 25 C; at other temperatures, or with other substances, there is some conversion factor). The best units for any given situation are the ones that are the easiest to think in for that application, the ones that are easiest to estimate in. I maintain that Fahrenheit is best for weather because a cold day is 0 and a hot day is 100, whereas Celsius is best for lab work because 0 is freezing and 100 is boiling (for water), and Kelvin is best for physics because the 0 point is based on molecular motion. The meter is based on what, the speed of light? How often do we encounter such a thing in everyday life? That fact makes it just as arbitrary as the foot, or the yard. Besides, multiples of twelve are much easier to divide into meaningful, whole number fractions than multiples of ten, which is why the Arabians chose 12 and 60 as the basis for measuring time. I notice the metric-heads have no trouble calculating or estimating time in day-to-day life, even though it is not based on the One True Decimal System.

Just because it's easy to multiply by 10 does not make the unit any more useful or meaningful for a given application. It's all still based on completely arbitrary standards we, as human measurers of our decidedly disorderly world, have put in place to make sense of things.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Ten seconds on Google would get you to Title 14, Part 36 of the Code of Federal Regulations, "Noise Standards: Aircraft Type and Certification". All airplanes built in the United States are certified to this standard. Europe (EASA) has very similar regulations, and most of the other national regulatory bodies in the world pattern their regulations off of the FAA/EASA regulations.

Wait, what? Are you seriously implying that 9/11 was the FAA's fault? Citation please.

Please point me in the direction of some of these "well documented ... effects."

Light rail is awesome, and has nothing to do with the FAA.

Ok, but your ticket prices will go up.

Also, you asked for quieter and more efficient aircraft, so here you go.

The FAA's job is not to make the airlines profitable. It's to make them safe.

Translation: 250G ought to be enough for anybody.