More Big Scare tactics. These articles belong in the Science Fiction category so far. We don't know what's going to happen, we've never been there before, but we're assured that it's going to be bad and only by taking and transferring hundreds of billions of our tax dollars to someone else who is more Progressive than ourselves can we save us all.
HA! (because Slashdot won't let me type: bullshit)
Back in 1975 we were supposed to be freezing by now. Anyone remember that?
Take this with with an equal grain of properly salted password hashes.

I'd want everyone to have a reliable lie detector sense. Then we might get honest politicians.

Sounds like Wookie problem resolution practices.

The publisher's problem is that this isn't some nut-job that can just be dismissed out of hand. Dale Askey appears to have the qualifications to know exactly what he's talking about here so they have to try and shut him up. But suing McMaster University over the personal blog of one of their employees personal blog opinions is way beyond reasonable -- although that's probably either were the money is, or that they hope to punish Mr. Askey by getting the university to fire him as him being too much trouble to keep onboard.

Under all circumstances the publisher is wrong here. The proper course of action would have been for them to line up equally (apparently) qualified academicians on their side of the argument and let the book-buying institutions decide for themselves. It would seem that both sides of the argument were already being hashed out on the blog, and now arrives The Streisand Effect in spades!

This is nothing more than outright theft of another person's intellectual property by gay and lesbian activists in the same way they have attempted theft of other terms. (I'll leave making that list of those terms to the reader since this is obvious /. flamebait already.) How long before they also demand to own gaymer.com because they deserve it more? This is nothing more than the slow and indolent attempting to steal from the smart and quick what the former couldn't come up with on their own and needed someone else to point it out to them. I support the person who got there first keeping the trademark that they legally acquired and SHAME ON THE EFF for getting involved in this! No soup for them this quarter.

One wonders if this is Environmentalism run amuck of putting out all fires until instead of number of small natural fires that don't do significant damage, the fuel builds up into inferno range that does great damage?

Or you could just clear the brush around your observatory regularly -- again if the Environmentalists let you. Australia is rather weird in this regard.
 

Good-old Gregorian January 1st
Especially when celebrated in Luna Park under the Sydney Harbor Bridge.
It doesn't get any better than that -- and it's warm there too on Jan 1.

Price?

It's the guns that are responsible for the shootings. Forget Constitutional rights, just ban them and problem solved.
It's the iPhones/Pads that are responsible for the spike in crime that makes me look bad as America's Mayor. Blame them, and the dead guy, and I'm in the clear. Without a doubt if there weren't all of these lovely iPhones and iPads all over the place criminals would stop stealing stuff altogether, so spake Mayor Bloomberg (S)*

*(S) = the Stupid Party affiliation.

Julian should just go, face Swedish justice (which I never hear as ever being particularly bad or unfair), do his time if guilty (I've never seen Swedish prisons on the world's worst list and it's hardly a life sentence that he's facing), and finally put all of this nonsense behind him. Assange tries to act like he is somehow above The Law and that rankles a lot of people just in and of itself.

I wonder how many Bitcoins I can mine with a few hours in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud?
Or maybe I can put my mining in as the idle loop of some of these new petaflop supers.

Julian Assange just doesn't know when to quit. Everyone is out to get him and he couldn't possibly be the reason for any of it.

Where is the single Make Everything Private Now and Forever button? I keep looking for it without success.

Or do only FB stockholders get that one--as long as they promise never to sell?

Yes, fortunately it isn't solar or other green energy powered. If it was green you could kiss another $50 million of our tax dollars gone on it.

All things considered, I'd rather have a 1000mpg car than a 1000mph car.