There was an interesting interview on Fresh Air yesterday about the racist origins of alcohol prohibition. Some of the motivations of prohibition proponents where to prevent:

• Germans and Jews who owned brewing companies from profiting
• Irish, polish, and other catholic immigrants from drinking
• And some strange concept in the south of drunk Black people in voting booths, which is why the KKK supported prohibition

And of course the politicians only cared about money, that never changes. Before income tax one of the largest federal sources of revenue was an excise tax on alcohol. The 16th amendment allowed a federal income tax, creating an alternate source of revenue that paved the way for prohibition. And again it took the allure of taxes from alcohol, now on top of the federal income tax, to repeal prohibition. The problem now, as you mentioned, is that there is an entrenched industry relying on the continued criminalization of drugs and a stigma that outweighs potential tax revenues.

January 1st our 15 year old security badge system started marking all badges as invalid. Couldn't fix it until we rolled back the system date.

Just 5 years ago there was a Blockbuster, Hollywood video, a local chain called Coconuts, and maybe six or seven of those small independent stores you mentioned within walking distance of my house. Every single one has since closed down. Now there is only one place that I'm aware of still renting movies - a Redbox kiosk in front of the supermarket.

I wish I could find statistics, but I'd wager there are precious few independent owners left. With digital distribution, mail distribution, and the extremely cost-efficient Redoxes, there's little room for them.

They have other revenue sources. Name changes, server transfers, now faction changes and soon race changes all cost extra, and they're not cheap. Put those and new game sales into the equation and factor in the cost of each expansion over its life cycle, and hell why not throw in merchandising and Blizzcon sales from tickets, pay-per-view, and internet streaming sales (yes they charge for each, and people pay it because it comes with a unique pet) averaged over a whole year and the figure becomes very hard to say, but could easily reach $120 million/month or higher.

HAL did not solve the problem directly. It was only by extension of creating HAL-2 that he was able to solve the problem. The fact remains that HAL-2 can accomplish a task that HAL cannot on its own, much in the same way humans can only solve certain mathematical problems by building computers.

Though your logic is sound, the statements assume some universal measure of cleverness. However, the intelligence it takes to build logic circuits is not the same as the intelligence needed to solve whatever instructions you send to those circuits. HAL-2 maybe be more clever in some areas than HAL and HAL maybe be more clever in other areas than HAL-2, and so there would be no more a logical contradiction than when humans build computers to solve problems that they cannot solve directly.

Someone needs to patent the patent troll business model and sue this guy for infringement.

In the reverse situation, the German bombings on historical sites in Britain were extremely accurate because they were using Baedeker travel guides. A very interesting (and at the same time very boring) programme recently aired on the BBC with a history professor using a Baedeker travel guide published in 1887 to take a modern tour of Britain. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hw3yr

Strings. Science over.