Of course the earth has gotten hotter; of course human activity is the major cause; of course we must fix it.

BUT, I cannot abide people who write statistical summaries (even non-false ones) for shock value. Sure, 2011 was "the 9th hottest year out of the past 130", but it's also true that 2011 was cooler than 9 of the past 14 years.

Tired as I am of trying to enlighten fools, I still say we should stick to the heart of the statistics and eschew convenient sophistry. We'll leave that for our opponents.

Mod parent up! Only a partisan would measure a nation's annual energy consumption in "quadrillion Btus". It's like measuring an oil spill in pints.

This is slashdot. Around here, you can't conflate percent of "domestic crude oil production" with "percent of U.S. energy production" (let alone consumption!) and not get called on it. Can you?

Ah, heck with it! Let's slip down to the pub for 2.98 millibarrels of domestic light sweet lager.

Laws mostly control people. If you give a person (cloud provider) control over your data, you have just subjected your data to every set of laws that has a hold over that person. In today's example, MS has most of its assets in the U.S., so MS will do with your data what the U.S. says. Duh.

Precious few service providers will undertake to protect you when it means losing their own assets, personal freedom, or even just right-to-do-business. Show of hands, now: who really thought they would?

The Others take me, I was surprised that a Lady of her station knew that name. Much less, understood what it was.

Every time that we hear about another incident like this, it turns out badly for the school (and for the student, since later vindication never makes up for years of trouble).

So why don't school officials stop doing it? Do they know that there are hundreds of such cases each year where the intimidation wins early and the media never hears of it? No, more likely, they are just ignorant of the dozens of school officials who have lost jobs and elections for trying this.

Some one needs to write a Continuing Education unit on Media Relations and Student Rights for these losers.

What the original suspect may have done is IRRELEVANT to whether destroying the recording / assaulting the recorder is OK. That stuff is never OK.

Either the recording shows cops doing their job right, in which case destroying it would be unproductive, or it shows cops doing wrong, in which case destroying it would be a cover up.

Destroying the recording is always wrong.

Why now? Why not in 2002? Why not in 2005? Why not in 2008?

From TFA: "Mr. Keller, a member of the committee, said the project "is coming late to the party." . . . "There is no practical plan for getting it started.""

All the new ruling has done is to set "the party" back 9+ years.

From TFA: "Since no one else would be able to obtain a license to those [orphan] books, Google would have a de facto monopoly on millions of texts."

I can't believe that this FUD persists 6 years after the lawsuit began it. In fact, anyone could have started their own project at any time and scanned those books. There was never anything Google could have done to stop them. Google's project wasn't a monopoly, it was just first.

My, how eleven and a half years just fly by in this middle Earth.

Ooo! Ooo! I want more selective phone choices! I, for one, welcome our new, more selective, corporate carrier overlords!

(But seriously, if WE can't manage to say "fewer / less / limited / restricted / a paucity of / really crappy / sh!ttast!c" when we mean it, then the truth is already lost.)