Actually, ESPN forces cable companies into an all-or-nothing situation: either all their customers pay for ESPN, or nobody gets to watch it. They are doing the same thing to ISPs, so it is not as if moving everyone onto the web will somehow help us escape this practice.

Yes. And when advertising dries up and it costs $200 per customer, the cable companies will nearly simultaneously tell them to get bent. They can get away with it now (barely) only because the cost is not insanely high.

The last time California made a labeling law, the soda vendors changed their formulation. I see no reason why the reaction to this proposal would be any different.

Besides, knowing California, the law will probably require a prominent label that says, "Warning: This product contains genetically modified food. Some genetically modified food is known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm."

The downside is channels like SciFi will no longer exist.

It is far more likely that it would still exist, but would air more reruns and less new content. I wouldn't expect the older sci-fi reruns to be significantly more expensive than any other old TV show or movie, and it doesn't take a big audience to make airing such content profitable.

In fact, if Sci-Fi (I refuse to call it SyFy) aired a wider variety of older content, I think it might attract a wider audience. Its biggest problem is that it doesn't have a lot of variety, focuses too much on what I would argue crosses the line into horror, and generally isn't interesting to the average viewer, even among people who enjoy science fiction.

Then cable and satellite channels will no longer be subsidized by ads and will get more expensive.

Perfect. Then the cable companies will be forced to offer many of their more expensive channels a la carte, and I'll no longer have to subsidize all the folks who watch networks like ESPN that I don't care about.

Even better, we, the subscribers, will have more of a voice when it comes to the content, and it will no longer be profitable to do stupid crap like airing wrestling on the Sci-Fi channel just to bring in more ad revenue.

I fail to see the downside here. Instead of hidden costs that we pay by buying products from companies who have to make up for all the money they spent on ads, we'll simply be paying those fees directly to the entertainment companies. In the long run, the cost should be about the same; it will just be easier to see the bottom line.

... that you're correction

*whimpers and crawls into a corner*

Unless you wear string bikinis, most folks have plenty of skin that never sees the sun. That said, I would expect a cheek swab (the mouth variety) to be a more common way to get those cells.

On the contrary. What we have here is a situation in which legal precedent (case law) changes the traditional interpretation of the law significantly. Where the law allows, rulemaking by the Library of Congress can also define the interpretation of the law. Although strictly speaking, neither of these change what is and is not illegal, in effect, both do.

If you have been doing something that has been presumptively legal for decades and is determined to be illegal as a result of a court decision interpreting the law in an unconventional way, it is perfectly reasonable for Congress to make a clarification in the law to indicate that the action in question is not (and retroactively was not) illegal. This happens all the time when the courts make dubious decisions.

If 10.4 was certified at all, it would have been on Intel only. Most of the UNIX '03 conformance changes didn't happen until 10.5. 10.5 and 10.6 are both certified. I'm not sure what the status of 10.7 is. Either way, the hard part is achieving conformance in the first place; paying the fee is the easy part.

17 USC section 507 says that there's a three-year limit. In practice, AFAIK, this means that you can't sue for damages for earlier infringement. This does not mean that you cannot sue and obtain a permanent injunction against continuing infringement, or damages for recent/future infringement.

At the levels of radiation involved at Chernobyl, I suspect that no radiation protection that existed at the time would have helped prevent most of the deaths. Traditional hazmat suits predominantly are intended to prevent inhalation and direct contact with radioactive materials when operating in areas of moderate contamination, and to allow for rapid washing of the person after exposure. When you have people dying from exposure to as much as 16 grays, no thin piece of rubber is going to make much of a difference, and even a lead apron will only go so far.

To be fair, some of the long-term deaths from cancer might have been avoided with better radiation protection, even with the limited technology available at the time, but it would have still been a disaster, and most of the people who died would probably have died anyway. Newer technologies, such as Demron, might have helped, but that wasn't invented until almost 16 years after the Chernobyl disaster.