The rover loses 30% of its value as soon as you drive it off the lot. And if NASA tries to trade it in I bet a lot of "damage" will be discovered to drive down the price.

As long as robots are forbidden from filing sexual harassment complaints, then I say go for it!

> As long as we can still manage servers while sitting at our desks, I say go for it.

As long as I can sit at my desk eating Doritos(tm), not engage in any sort of physical activity, and never have to go outside into the bright sunlight, then I say go for it!

I used to have an N900 running Maemo with "true multitasking". A poorly-written app in the background (like Firefox with the "full Web experience" of Flash) would run down the battery in two hours. But at least I could use top to find the problem and kill -9 it.

Now I use Android where apps are specifically written to be aware of my battery.

How many times have we seen 'redacted' legal documents as a PDF with black bars overlaying the text? (See Groklaw for past examples.)

1. Open the PDF in Acrobat Reader.
2. Select All
3. Copy
4. Switch to text file editor (not Edlin!)
5. Paste
. . . .
6. Profit?

Does this demonstrate a failure in understanding information security?

Mounting things to light poles is 10,000 times more practical.

> any lawyer worth his or her degree will slap them with a defamation lawsuit.

Assuming your family doesn't stone you to death first. Remember, the pr0n from Prenda Law's clients is gay pr0n. Since Prenda has accused your IP address based on their slipshod investigation, then you must be guilty.

Watching the Prenda pr0n means you downloaded it and thus committed copyright infringement. The only way to obtain Prenda gay pr0n is to download it, as Prenda's clients do not offer their gay pr0n for sail. The fact that Prenda sends you a settlement letter doesn't mean you are guilty, it is merely an accusation based on a slipshod "investigation". Of course, if you don't pay, all your family and neighbors will be contacted for further "investigation" to ask them if they know anything about you downloading the gay pr0n of Prenda Law's clients.

The six figures he's talking about comes from the statutory damages for copyright infringement. (Not that you're guilty, but just merely accused. But hey, isn't it just cheaper to settle for a few thousand bucks rather than spend much more fighting it in court, and potentially losing, meaning a judgement against you for six figures?) Plus you don't want your family and neighbors finding out you may watch gay pr0n and thus they stone you to death.

> I am not ashamed to admit I watch porn.

Just FYI . . . for those following along with the Prenda fiasco, the Prenda pr0n is all gay pr0n. Yes. Seriously.

People who are merely accused by Prenda risk having their relatives told that you watch gay pr0n, so that your relatives would stone you to death, even if the Prenda accusation turns out to be untrue.

> An absurd TLA overloading.

To be more concise, simply say: ATO. (ATO = Absurd TLA Overloading.)

Of course, the text-to-speech program isn't illegal, but redistributing the copyrighted text is. The copyright holders recognize that the only remotely-feasible way to stop illegal distribution is to make it difficult to make copies. That means that legally accessing the work becomes collateral damage, but that's perfectly acceptable to a special-interest group like the MPAA. They're not interested in helping the blind. They're interested in helping copyright holders.

Actually they don't even appear to be interested in helping "copyright holders". Since they have been caught at least once enguaging in movie and software "piracy". The only people they are really interested in helping are their members.

There is evidence that it is fossil fuel related. The concentrations of different isotopes of carbon are shifting. Fossil fuels don't have much Carbon 14 in them, since they haven't been exposed to the atmosphere for a long time.

AFAIK nobody is measuring and recording the isotope ratios of fossil fuels as they are extracted. Volcanic emissions, including hydrothermal vents in deep ocean, are also likely to be very low in C14. If anything coal would be most likely to contain C14, given a source of neutrons, since solid carbon is a good neutron moderator.
Oxygen isotope ratios in water are affected by temperature. What effect does temperature have on carbon isotope ratios in carbon dioxide?
In the recent past carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has followed average temperature, with a delay of a few hundred years. Even if it can be demonstrated that human activities have had an effect on the isotope ratio, then that dosn't in itself show that these have made any difference to the concentration. There is much more carbon dioxide in the oceans than in atmosphere. More entering the atmosphere from other sources may simply equate to less entering the atmosphere from the oceans.
The fundermental problem is that we have no way of knowing what either concentration or isotope ratio of carbon dioxide would "naturally" be now. Moreover climate models predicated on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration have failed to predicted anything. Thus "geo-engineering" involving attempts to manipulate the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere is likely to be a complete waste of time. Even if something was done to actually reduce either carbon dioxide emitted by human activities or its concentration in the atmosphere. So far "green" methods have at best made no difference to human carbon dioxide emissions. About they only thing they appear to be good for is wasting money!

All the worlds plants took a collective sigh of relief. CO2 has been so low for so long, it was like hypoxia for plants.

Probably not that much relief. The optimal level for plants appears to be in the 1,000 to 2,000 ppm range. Thus 400 ppm is "too low" and still close to the 200 ppm lower limit. For animals, including humans, "too high", would appear to be greater than 5,000 ppm.
Yet there are those prediction ecological disaster at more than an order of magnitude lower.

The 800,000 year level comes from testing of air pockets locked in glacial ice. Seriously, is it that hard to try and understand something before speaking stupid things?

If these trapped air pockets formed within minutes then remained hermetically sealed until humans looked at them then it might make sense to compare them with modern measuring instruments. Since this is obviously not the case such comparisons are, at best, "apples and oranges". (Things get even worst using "proxies" which equate to rough averages over periods from decades to centuries.) That's before even considering precision, accuracy and signal to noise ratio of any of the data.

For years, we have had a cut-out in ITAR 121 that applies to Open Source, it is due to a lawsuit that Phil Karn brought against the Federal Government. Thus, you can implement with impunity, and export to anywhere, as long as it's Open Source.