'nuff said.

It will be cool if the experimental permit works.

I can't decide if the question is about what punishment he should get as opposed to what punishment he's likely to receive. Legally I think they could go for the death penalty. I hope they don't.

Slashdotting + Ad click revenue => $$$

The actual "FA" is here, with images. Gigan, et al. say, "opaque materials."

John Mauchly, who knew a thing or two on the subject, made the same observation in a conversation that touched on the issue. It wasn't so much that Babbage was pushing the day's technology too far, he just never froze his design.

I bought a new battery for my Vaio laptop. Since it wasn't the exact same model (A/B instead of A in the part number suffix), a BIOS upgrade was necessary. The instructions included the appropriate warnings about not turning off the computer until completion. It got to what it said was part way through its verification phase and hung...and hung and hung. Even the power button stopped working. I was lucky that someone had the same model in the shop so I was able to get my data off the internal RAID0 drive pair.

I, too, find $9 million to be pretty unimpressive given the supposed potential in this kind of crime. It sounds to me like the system worked pretty well.

As for the first point, we're *almost* able to detect life on extrasolar planets. All we need are spectra that show a lot of Oxygen or other gasses that don't appear in quantity without something like life to maintain them in quantities that are out of equilibrium with respect to geological processes.

I totally agree with the SETI signals point. The only thing we'd be able to detect would be a "We're Here!" signal. Non-directional broadcasts are just way too expensive. It's also likely that electromagnetic communications would use some sort of spread spectrum technique to avoid difficulty with all the random absorbing material in interstellar space.

And there's cause to hide. If the Galaxy actually is crowded.