"This is contrary to law and sound economic policy" means ( "This is contrary to law" ) AND ( "This is sound economic policy" )

No, it doesn't. That would be written, "This is contrary to law and is sound economic policy." (More likely, it would be written, "This is contrary to law but is sound economic policy.")

When written correctly, with the Oxford Comma in place, it would have the intended meaning

There is no place for the serial (also known as "Oxford" or "Harvard") comma in that sentence, since where it is used at all, it is used in separating the final item in a series of 3 or more.

Nor would commas separating the elements do anything to tell you whether the common portion of the list ended with "is" or "to" and whether the first element started with "contrary" or was just "law".

If one was especially concerned about avoiding potential confusion of the meaning, one could rewrite the sentence as "This is contrary to both law and sound economic policy", but while that would be more explicit, it is unnecessary, but in any case throwing superfluous commas into the sentence doesn't help anything.

It is one thing to pedantic. It is something worse to be pedantic and wrong.

Health costs are not paid for out of nothing. If a person's living expenses exceed the value of what he produces, he is a net burden on society. He then lives either on charity or theft (one form of theft is getting support from the government.)

And since you are getting support from the government right now, for example in the form of using the Internet which was invented by it, what does that make you?

Superstition is what keeps humans backward. It plays to their most degenerate desires for controlling others on a mental level. It is based on falsehood, and should be constantly scorned and ridiculed in order to reduce the number of new converts.

So, your grand strategy for fighting religion is to simultaneously give the adherents something harmless to feel martyrs over and make the whole thing seem like a cool, dangerous counterculture to potential young recruits?

It takes 15 Terawatts to power the world and each fission reactor apparently provides about 1 gigawatt, so to furnish 50% of the world's energy needs of today with nuclear, we'd need to build 1 billion nuclear fission reactors.

Um, what? One terawatt is 1000 gigawatts, so by your numbers we could cover the world's entire energy need with 15,000 nuclear reactors.

Where on Earth did you get the "1 billion" from?

My first guess of how this fire happened is that someone had done some welding in a compartment and something caught fire. Usually the Navy is pretty good about removing flamables in the area. They even go so far to have a "fire watch" for several hours after the welding was done to ensure that nothing catches fire. it will be interesting to hear what the root cause is.

That's standard procedure for welding (mandated by the insurance companies). And welding could well still be the root cause: in one place I worked, a fire broke out after smoldering unnoticed for over eight hours.

Or it could be a short-circuit and we just got lucky that it occurred on a drydock rather than at sea. Or *drumroll* terrorism.

*Cough* *Cough* dimensions of 1:4:9 - the first three integers squared.

There is no "first integer". Perhaps you meant the first three nonzero natural numbers?

That's not smart. That's dishonest.

In what way is it dishonest? Where is the deception? Or did you perhaps confuse not meeting your unrealistic expectations with lying?

Nobody forces no one to take a minimal pay job.

Nobody forces no one to offer minimum wage. But economic circumstances - offshoring of real jobs and the plague-like spread of McDonald's, Wal-Mart and their ilk - do indeed force plenty of people to take minimum wage jobs.

You take a job, and you accept the pay, you do the job (I talked from experience since I've flipped burgers for minimum wage.)

You offer minimum wage, you get what you pay for. And your job history of burger flipping is irrelevant to the discussion, unless you are suggesting that the world owes you a debt for your presumably heroic job performance there, and unrelated third parties should thus do more than you pay them for.

What the hell is wrong with you people that you think your duty to do your job is a function of the hourly wage you so willingly accept?

What the hell is wrong with you people that you think you can pay minimum price and get top quality? Are you really so full of yourself that you think a peon who doesn't give his everything for a few crumbs off your table is being "dishonest"? Or are you yet another libertarian defending the right of the powerful to abuse the weak in the name of freedom?

This sounds like going back to a variation on self-signed certificates.

Its not. Its a verification scheme orthogonal to certificate chains which can be used either alongside traditional certificate chain verification or without traditional certificate chain verification. It is compatible with self-signed certs, but equally compatible with CA-signed certs. Ideally, you'd use it with CA-signed certs, since CA-signed certs -- though they have known problems -- are better than nothing (unlike self-signed certs) on a first connection with no prior information, but after that TACK pins are useful to detect later CA-assisted shenanigans.

If you want a PKI based on signing certificates by CAs, the CAs need to be entities whose primary income does not derive from signing certificates.

No, what you need is an effective mechanism to detect and revoke trust in nefarious CAs. If CAs aren't trusted, they are of no value to potential clients, and thus the stream of income from signing certificates dries up. The problem isn't that CAs derive income from signing certificates, the problem is that there is no effective accountability mechanism that imposes sufficient consequences to make it so that improperly signing certificates reduces the marketability of that CA's signing services.

Or, the judge could consider 9 lines out of many thousands of lines in the original work as de minimis copying and admonish Oracle for bothering the court with trifles.

First, that's completely unrelated to the API issue [the 9 lines are implementation that was copied, not API], and, second, the judge already ruled (order dated May 10) against Google's motion asking for a judgement as a matter of law that rangeCheck was non-infringing that asserted a wide variety of arguments, including the de minimis one.

When it comes to damages they'll be lucky if they receive a sum which pays for their legal expenses.

Based on other similar cases by kinds of issues, length of trial, and counsel involved, estimates of Oracle's trial costs I've seen have been in the range of millions and possibly at over $10M. Unless they win the API copyright issue or get the patent verdicts reversed on appeal, the maximum damages they can get (since only statutory damages would then be on the table) would be $150K. So, yeah, they'd be lucky to get anywhere close to their legal costs out of this.