Can I move it up to Friday? I have a false memory that I really screwed some things up last Thursday and I'd love to believe that they didn't really happen.

Absent a time machine, you can't rule out the whole thing created more than a few decades ago. For that matter, you can't rule out the entire thing being created a few minutes ago.

And even if you had a written account from 11,000 years ago, how would you verify it? There are pictorial accounts dating to over 30,000 years ago, in cave paintings; these don't seem to stop YECs any more than the rest of the evidence.

... and I should get at least partial credit for reading the hash.

Indeed, this is just so. And you can't copyright "functionality"; that's akin to copyrighting a concept, which is not what copyright is about. Copyright is about protecting implementations of concepts, and those are still protected. But a programming language requires a rigid codification of the concept itself.

Oracle's response made me chuckle a little...

That's really immaterial to the reasoning for why an APIs aren't protected under the Copyright Act in the first place. It would be relevant if "interoperability" were a defense against copyright infringement, but it's not, since the item in question wasn't protected in the first place.

Just because my implementation of fopen() breaks programs that depended on your implementation of fopen() that doesn't suddenly mean that your declaration of a function called fopen() is protected and my identical declaration is infringing. This would imply that copyright infringement claims based on APIs would suddenly be dependent on some kind of compatibility test.

And on that note, it was that last line that made me chuckle. Brings to mind something about ships and sailing, or barn doors and horses.

The mean human IQ at a particular time and place (IQs for given test results have been adjusted downward several times because people are in general becoming more educated [which some people assume means smarter for some reason but hey]).

Point being -- relative to a universal scale incorporating all possible intelligence values (not just those attainable by living humans) 100 IQ is probably pretty stupid... but so is 180 IQ. :)

Sorry most of us are not on board with just letting people fucking die on the steps of a hospital because they failed an insurance/credit check, and never will be.

That's what you meant, right? Obamacare is a long sight from actual socialized medicine, but our system of treating people in emergency rooms results in de facto socialized medicine, just excessively expensive.

Normally this is where I say "may you be subject to the world you wish for", and wonder aloud if your last words before dying of a heart attack after being laid off and not being able to afford COBRA would be "at least I got to drink soda in large containers". But you know what? Even despite this sociopathic bent contrary to the nature of human beings as social animals, I would still want the ambulance to come for you, and would gladly pay my portion of the bill.

Yeah, he was only buzzed.

I hope to hell they do -- by doing all the useful work in LEO that will enable it, like orbital refueling depots or even shipyards. Getting to LEO is what needs to be handed off.

If we can make access to LEO routine and cheap (relatively speaking), and allow NASA to develop LEO capabilities instead of wasting all their money on pork launchers so they can start their missions from components launched to LEO on commodity rockets, then we can make getting to the Moon trivial, and Mars easy enough that it's conceivable to do without stopping all other NASA work.

This is my dream, and it could happen. Crazy.

Why wouldn't I? Just to pile on the "My anger about manned exploration causes me to not understand what's going on today" theme? If nonsense and angry tangents is a "good moment', then what's "bad"?

Roughly speaking, there are three levels of "greenness", for lack of a better word. "Off the grid" means you're totally self-sufficient; probably solar during the day stored to batteries for night, combined with ultra-efficient stuff. "Net zero" means you self-generate a surplus of power sometimes and a deficit others, selling your excess to the power company and buying your need.

Not really. First, being off the grid typically isn't a choice people make when they have the option of being on the grid. It's usually what people do when they live in remote areas where the grid simply doesn't reach. And anyway, being off the grid is normally less green than being net zero and on the grid. Most people who are off the grid are under capacity for their needs, and typically they make up for that by running a generator sometimes -- which is very bad environmentally. (Battery systems that let you store energy in the day for use at night are extremely big and expensive, and I don't know how common they are in real life. They require maintenance and are dangerous if not properly maintained. I suspect that a gigantic battery is not likely to be very green, either. You have all those chemicals, which have to be disposed of when the battery reaches its end of life.) On the other hand, if they have excess capacity, that's energy that's being wasted rather than going to people who are on the grid, so again it's less green than being on the grid. And it's essentially impossible to have an off-grid system that has exactly the right capacity for your needs. That's because energy production varies dramatically from day to day and month to month due to clouds and the height of the sun in the sky.

On-grid photovoltaics are actually really nice environmentally, because they produce the most power on hot, sunny days, which are exactly the days when a lot of people are using air conditioners. The solar energy helps keep the electric company from having to fire up more generators and feed more fossil fuels into them.

Here is an article that touches on how some of this plays out in real life.