I think it is an alternative to string theory.

From http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=313565 :

Yes, but it is a lousy implementation of the WIPO Copyright Treaty. There were other competing legislation, and considering that U.S. law already complied with the entire treaty with the exception of one provision, I think it is fairly safe to say the DMCA goes far beyond being a mere implementation. The DMCA law dramatically expanded the scope of copyright law, conflicting with the first sale doctrine by granting copyright owners the power to dictate audience behavior, and going ridiculously far beyond copyright protection by giving owners the power to control access to intellectual property, whether a violation exists or not. You can read more about it in Taking A Bite Out Of Circumvention: Analyzing 17 U.S.C. Â 1201 As A Criminal Law by Jason M. Schultz. There is also a nice summary taken from a paper by Pamela Samuelson, Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to be Revised.

Not really since huge amounts of offensive content is readily available through Safari. I believe the true rationale for Apple's censorship policy is that it is easier to justify when claimed to protect the children, rather than just eliminating the competition or whatever threatens their bottom line.

Problem: classified information leaks to general public.
Solution: regulate the general public.

So if you loose track of your private information, just start a couple of those botnets to monitor the internets... never fails...

But what is the difference in weight between the thruster versus parachute landing systems?

Sure, the added complexity may not improve the odds, but ignoring the inherent risk new technology entails, how much of an impact on safety are we really talking about here? It would seem that this is the way forward considering how NASA has also been contemplating a similar approach with the Delta Clipper for quite some time.

It makes no sense to spin off OpenOffice before knowing what Oracle does to it. What I think most of us really care about is some reinvigoration in the OpenOffice project, which this change may help bring about.

If someone fired 6,000 rockets at me, I would be pissed of course. But I wouldn't retaliate through collective punishment, denying food and medicine to innocent civilians, evicting them out of their home and taking their land to build "settlements" to my compatriots, especially knowing that my country was created from territory unwillingly provided by the very same people. I think "out of proportion" doesn't mean what you think it means...

Then convolute further and use a mouse instead of a cat...

The anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA is based on the assumption that DRM works. It is much harder to defeat the DMCA if you ignore the fallacy of DRM because, then, legislators will keep believing it helps a large part of the US economy (that is, the media industry).

The DMCA states that you are not allowed to circumvent a mechanism that protects a copyrighted work even if circumvention is your only means of exercising numerous rights granted by law. Basically, it is in direct conflict with far older and established laws, and so you end up in court trying to resolve this contradiction, with one side having little money to pay for a lawyer while the other finances political campaigns to see their favorite laws enacted.

I felt the parent already made that point, but of course you are right - the better the technique, the greater the range of interpretation. Put differently, ones technique is just a means to an end, with the end being the interpretation.

Precisely. Basically, technique and interpretation are not the same thing. When a score indicates a mood, it is giving an emotional direction for the given interpretation; it is not, as I understand it, detailing how to produce said interpretation. For example, a piano performance would always be unique because each performance brings an interpretation unique for that moment.

With regards to oratory skills, I couldn't agree more. A friend once read a poem he wrote which I completely fell in love with. When I tried reading it, giving my best effort, all beauty conveyed that first time was all but demolished...

No, it is not like other countries...

You have a point, there is no comprehensive version numbering scheme that is universally accepted. I think you are also wrong as the issue is about the very well accepted beta, RC and final release scheme, not simply number sequences.

No number sequence, such as 8.10 or whatever comes to mind, is going to tell you that the release is a beta, RC or final release. However, outside developer circles, people are going to assume a final release, and that is precisely why one should label a version as beta or RC if confusion is to be avoided. Obviously, confusion was not avoided with 4.0, and again, not everyone keeps track of developer blogs and announcements.

Obviously, KDE 4.0 was barely a release candidate to end users, so one could at least have expected the RC label. Had it been "properly" named, I would find it hard to imagine distros like Kubuntu or Fedora shipping a first release candidate in the manner 4.0 was delivered. It would have been an embarrassment to them. Instead, KDE was embarrassed. Needlessly.

You must be confused... corporations have no morality. Whatever "morality" you see is just a another component of a larger ever changing corporate strategy. I could agree that corporations exhibit a tendency towards some set of values, but the word morality ascribes to them a quality that I find to be out of context.

You reap what you sow - except when you have limited liability, in which case you can sow something entirely different. Hard to construct a code of conduct based on right and wrong in the normal sense under those circumstances...