How about making school more enjoyable so that the students actually want to learn. I think lack of attendance is more a reflection upon the faculty than it is on the students.

I thought this would be something like that floating ball thingy that you're supposed to hit. Something based on the recent japanese flying orb thingy.

Almost think that the takeaway from this article is that 41% of websites in china are porn,

The guy committed an actual crime. In fact, I'm sure he'd be punished in the states had he done a similar thing here. Or were you saying that he could have gotten away if he'd paid a fine?

So they didn't break into your computer but cracking a router allows you access the internet from them. Any any bytes used by said hacker are paid for by the owner of the router. The hacker likely didn't ask for permission so... he's stealing bandwidth. Theft is still a crime right?

Even if the law was unfair and biased towards the wealthy, powerful party (it's not really, merely being misused here), it still fell to the jurors to let the fine pass. In this case perhaps it's not the government's fault (except perhaps in the poor eduction of the general populace as represented by the jurors) but the jurors'.

Doesn't this make linking to practically any website in the world illegal? If you look at the bottom of most web pages you see the copyright sign. If linking to copyrighted material constitutes infringement does this mean the end of hyperlinking for the internet?

I agree that we've always suspected that transcription isn't a high fidelity process. In fact, there is evidence that leads us to this conclusion (ex. the lack of a 'spell-checker' mechanism). However, just because we have evidence that points to an effect doesn't mean that it shouldn't be tested. The thing is, we've been surprised before. We've had evidence of other phenomena/behaviour should exist but when actually tested, it turned out that it was not as expected. For example, in the past it was thought that during ischemic events it was the lack of oxygen and nutrients that did the most damage, now it is known that reperfusion and the immune response subsequent to ischemic injury has a significant role in the damage done. As pointless as some of these experiments must seem, they still have to be run to test the conclusions of those other 'bloody' papers that the geneticists are reading.

On a side note, the genetic code is built in such a way that small errors here and there during the transcription process may not have a huge effect (64 codons represent ~20 amino acids plus a few stop codons).

and what kind of shots do i have to get when travelling back in time?

While I am a happy user of Openoffice.org and do recommend it for home users, I question whether or not it is ready for corporate deployment. The video, while obviously biased (and sort of unprofessional [slamming other products to make your own look good, really?]) does make some good points. Like it or not, the vast majority of people have grown up with Microsoft Office and any switch will incur efficiency costs due to the learning curve. In my view, OpenOffice.org was designed to be a 'home' alternative for Microsoft Office. For most users at home, especially those who use Microsoft Office almost exclusively for Word, OpenOffice.org is more than adequate. Excel, OneNote, and Access users might will usually find difficulties due to differences in equation writing etc.. Perhaps the ideal users for OpenOffice.org is the primary school, early secondary school students, whose main usage of Office suites are limited to document creation (eg, essays, papers, reports etc.). Those who dislike the compatibility issues may not realize that while Microsoft Office is the dominant software, this will always be an issue. Whenever a competitor comes close to realizing full compatibility they will introduce another 'upgraded' version of their document format. This will keep all others one step behind. Personally I believe that documents should be saved as HTML, but I don't really know what the real advantages of the .doc/.docx/.odt formats offer.