There's still the compulsory licensing option. Not a great option, but it works around your argument. Even if we take your MPAA argument to the logical extreme, they can't engage in total censorship at will. They can just make speaking expensive.

That's the point to good legal engineering: laws are written such that greedy self-interest tends to work toward the common good. It's a pity most laws aren't written that way....

The "hardline" is with respect to the 512(c) safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. That is, the "Neener neener, you can't sue our deep pockets" part. And in that, Google takes a very hard line indeed, since reinterpretations here could cost them tremendous amounts of money.

So if I'm reading this article right, it's actually about the MCR1 gene, which produces melanin in the skin and also interacts with the nervous system. That would imply a very strong correlation with redheads, since they usually don't produce melanin very well, but not a perfect one. Are they just using red hair as a high-correlation classifier for test subjects, when what they really care about is very pale skin?

Anecdotally, my wife has very red hair, but she also tans easily. (I'm the pale one.) Lithuanian and African-American ancestry interacted weirdly. I'd assume she has the normal MCR1 gene.

* No, I didn't have a real point. I'm just seizing the opportunity to brag about having a beautiful red-headed wife.

I'm in the same boat. Without a keyboard in front of me, I haven't the faintest clue what my passwords are. They typically look like line noise.

Back in '99, I took a month-long vacation and went backpacking for the duration. When I got back, I spend half a day trying to log back in before I had to give up and have everything reset. If they took away my laptop for a month, I doubt that I'd be able to comply with the hypothetical Judge's order.

I get similar performance after letting FF8 run too long, but my usage pattern is a poster child for the problems with memory and CPU bloat. I open lots of tabs, including Facebook and Gmail, and some heavy Javascript sites required by my job. I leave them open sometimes for days. My only plug-ins are noScript and the JRE. Under my usage pattern, FF often reaches a 400MB footprint.

Now add to that the fact that my home computer is a little MSI Wind U100. 1GB RAM, 1.6GHz Atom processor (2-stage pipeline), and the thrashing is unbearable. Eventually I have to give in and close / restart FF.

I credit most of my troubles to the heavy javascript sites, not FF. I suspect that Facebook in particular is caching massive amounts of data and actually claiming that it uses that memory. At some point I should compare to Chrome to find out, but that's a project from some day when I have the time.

That's what happened here in the USA. Remember, prohibition led to the rise of organized crime in the USA. When we repealed it, organized crime didn't go away - it turned to other illegal activities to survive. Rooting it out was a multi-decade process, still on-going, and a long way from complete. The situation isn't just analogous, it's almost identical: the Cartels have power, and they won't simply let it go. They'll try to hold onto it.

Regarding the assign operation inside the if condition: I believe Java flags it if you do that.

Close. Java doesn't allow implicit casts from int to boolean, even though they use the same data type in the JVM. The assignment "x=5" is also an expression returning the int 5, so that things like "x=y=5" will work. C/C++ treats all non-zero ints as the boolean value true, so "x=5" ==> "5" ==> true, so "if (x=5)" is "if (5)" is "if (true)".

In Java, that can't happen because 5 is an int, and the conditional expression must be a boolean. However, you can make this mistake in Java if you really want:

boolean a = true;
if (a = true) { ...; }

Mining in space will be important, but it's unlikely to be important or cost effective to get the materials back to Earth. Whatever is ultimately mined in space will likely stay in space to build things there.

Not so. It's easy to get things back to Earth once you get out there. Sure, it's very expensive to get there, but so long as you're prepared to stay for a long time you can amortize over the mission.

The delta-V you'd need to hit a 3-5 years delivery window from the asteroid belt to Earth would be pretty small. There's a small matter of the delivery being, shall we say, postage due. Bit of an, er, impact on the wallet. Not to mention the neighborhood. But it would get there!

Ah, I see it. You're quite right, and I see the point. Using pure set cardinality leaves the probability undefined, but this gives a workaround. I'd have some difficult reading to prove whether the original assertion is correct under measure theory, but I suspect it is.

And here's the poison pill to demonstrate how far I missed the boat: the same arguments I used apply to something as simple as picking a number x from [0,2] and computing the probability that x < 1. Obviously that's 0.5, but the technique I outlined would claim it's undefined.

I'm so glad I don't claim to make my living as a mathematician!