How many songs or "incidents of infringement" did Sony claim Hotfile was guilty of? What did Sony settle for as the price per infringement. Knowing the price sets a negotiation point for anyone else in a similar situaiton.

If Sony claimed there were 800M bad files sent out by Hotfile and the settlement was $4M then when Sony knocks on Joe Publics door. Joe Public can say "You settled with a commercial infringer for 4/800 = 1/200 = 0.5cents a file. As I am not a commercial operation lets start the negotiation at 1/10th of that or 0.05cents a file."

Makes it hard for Sony to intinidate the public if the settlement cost is going to be less than an hours of lawyer fees.

So the cops pull you over, and as they are now allowed, they start poking around your phone. It clears itself.
You are going to have some nice vacation time.

Do we need this? Is there really a sizable market for people who must have the latest even if the current stuff is good enough?

So now we get to see how powerful the FBI and Japanese equivalent are at actually tracking down cyber criminals.

Tidal forces. This is the biggy, If you are in orbit deep in a gravity well with a steep gradient then the orbital velocities of things 1m up/down from each other are significantly different. The material stength of any object extending over that 1m has to resist that force.
Those forces will rip materials to shreds.

Think of your hands being pulled up, while your feet are pulled down. The further into the gravity well you get the more up and the more down the two pulls get.

The only way to avoid the tidal forces are a straight in drop. But you can't do that as all around the well is a swirling gas field that will push you into an orbit.

Looking at the US today, how can providing an incorrect call back number not lead immediatly to an FBI investigation?

Sure the general police don't really care because they don't understand this, but this is "interfereing with the operation of computer network" (yes the phone system does count as a computer network) and the phone network is a vital civil infrastructure. We know from past things interfering with a computer network, even a small scale private one, can actually lead to very serious charges. The phone networks is much more important (than some universities database accesses).

Or a request for the particulars on all people with concealed carry permits.

Can you make a request and get the state drivers license records in Washington?

Clearly China is looking to enforce the monopoly law, that there shall be one and only one state controlled supplier of any good.

More likely big lake burst events. There are known records of several of those. Each event would have exposed land and done a lot of silt movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

The failure to act on the warnings lies clearly on the people who fail to react to the warnings. This is a failure of the human social system to adapt to a limited resource. This is a classic tragedy of the commons example.

There are many factors at play
1. lack of education to undestand the science, pollution, basic tragedy of the commons problem
2. desire of profit or lifestyle, pretty much the strict commons problem, not willing to make a sacrifice
3. blind to the problem due to religious beliefs
4. plain old innertia to what is not preceived as an imminet threat

The science is clear even if we don't 100% understand all he dynamics, (we can't get 7 day weather right why should we expect 2 year, 5 year or 100 year predictions to be perfect).
The generation and acceptance of un-science is wrong.

So when someone buys a team at overvalue, the regular tax payer is on the hook for that overvalue.

Nice deal the rich have going, getting someone else to pay their bills.

Tell me what larger corporation concerned about information control is going to accept anything close to that?

I was at a supercomputing conference back in the 90's. There were wonderful reports on doubling the resolution of the grid and so on. Advances in the scale are all good.

The questions are
a) with the increase in detail of the simulations have we converged on a solution. That is do solutions at scale N and 10N match. If they do then the resolution and model are aligned for accuracy in the solution.
b) do the simulations agree with reality.

If a) and not b) then there is something wrong with the model that is not related to compute power or problem resolution, and no amount of compute power will fix it.

So has Microsoft stuck with a naming convention for more than 2 releases?

Looking at the program loader days --
        Windows 1.0
        Windows 2.0
        Windows 3.x
        Windows 95
        Windows 98
        Windows ME
- not really. 1.0,2.0 3..... was close

Now the real OS lineup -
Windows NT 3.1
Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 3.51
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000
Windows XP (full details)
Windows Server 2003
Windows Vista (full details)
Windows Server 2008
Windows 7 (full details)
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows 8 (full details)
Windows Server 2012

I would give them points for server 2003,2008,2012 if they were not spinning Vista and 7,8 at the same time.

Going to have to say they were doing ok with the NT numbering, but we know NT was not done by real Microsoft People, when the Real Microsoft (tm) got ahold of it, it became WindowsXP.