If you magically make the voting machines 100% secure, attackers will target the infrastructure that transmits, stores, and counts the votes.

I believe Chromium also excludes Google's software update functionality.

Slightly off-topic, but am I the only one that thinks the word "cyber" is a silly 90's throwback?

This blog does a great job a ripping Campbell's "The China Study" apart. http://rawfoodsos.com/the-china-study/. The short story is he warped his representation of the numbers to make meat look worse then it is to reach conclusions that not even his academic papers support. I agree that the problem is the western diet, but not because the western diet contains large amounts of meat. I've tried my best to read about this topic with an open mind and I've come to the conclusion that we have two major problems in our western diets that is killing us. 1) Too much sugar. See "Sugar: the bitter truth" and 2) Too much Omega-6 compared to Omega-3. This can be partly tied to meat consumption as corn feed beef is much lower in Omega-3 then grass feed beef is. Cut out the soda and eat good quality meat and you will avoid most of the modern health issues

Okay, so TimSort.rangeCheck() was allegedly copied from java.util.Arrays.

Aside from the obviousness issues, this fact would make it slightly more sensible to use rangeCheck() for a copyright infringement case, except for the fact that java.util.Arrays was provided by Sun under the GPL v2. The GPL was written to encourage copying and modification.

The worst I could say about Google allegedly copying this code is that they re-licensed the GPL rangeCheck() method to Apache 2.0, which you can't really do; the combination of GPL code and non-GPL code would be a GPL end product. Regardless, I still don't see a billion dollar damage claim.

Wow, you're right, that's completely insane. Look at the revision history of TimSort.

How can Oracle claim copyright damages on a file in Java's source code that is Copyrighted in 2009 by Google?
Why hasn't Google tried to nullify the copyright claim on this file on the grounds they they wrote the code and that they themselves own the copyright?
Why would Oracle make an issue of this file if the case for infringement is so weak?

None of this makes any sense to me whatsoever. I feel like I'm missing something; Oracle can't be this outrageous and Google's lawyers can't be this dumb. Can someone clarify?

What's amusing is that the 9 lines in question don't even implement the algorithm; they perform a quick sanity check before the real computation starts. Is this really the best they have? Couldn't they have found more creative lines of code to be infringing on a copyright?

Anyway I've been looking some stuff up. TimSort was originally written into Python by Tim Peters in 2002 (BSD-style license). If I'm not mistaken, that would mean that Sun wrote a trivial check as part their own re-implementation of someone else's work, and are claiming massive copyright damages on it. If Oracle wins that, that's one hell of a precedent.

I presume the 9 lines in question refer to TimSort.rangeCheck().

Have you ever looked at it? If I had to implement that method, I probably would have done it the exact same way.

60/2 = 30
60/3 = 20
60/4 = 15
60/5 = 12
60/6 = 10
That's why.

This is covered in the Tao Manifesto. tau*r^2/2 is more consistent with other formulas that are the result of integration. For example Distance fallen is g*t^2/2, Spring energy k*x^2/2, and Kinetic energy m*v^2/2. Think of it this way 1/2 was there but got canceled out by the 2 in 2*pi.

Quadratic Forms