I agree that he had no business doing what he did, but that hardly justifies an eight month prison sentence when no harm was intended and it is highly questionable that any harm was done.

Some of the prosecution's and judge's justifications for this sentence are so vague or muddled that they're troubling. For example, the prosecutor claimed that Mangham had "stolen" "invaluable intellectual property" by downloading Facebook source code. It's hard to see how anything can be stolen if (a) the owner is not deprived of its use and (b) the possessor of an admittedly improper copy does nothing with that copy to infringe on the interests of the owner other than *possess* it. If that is not theft under UK law (which I'm pretty sure it isn't), the prosecutor has no business characterizing the crime as such. Furthermore the prosecutor seems to hold a very peculiar notion of what constitutes criminal intent:

The *criminal intent* here was the defendant desire to improperly accessing Facebook's computers. Whether he was determined or ingenious is neither here nor there, since the defendant never claimed he stumbled on Facebook's systems by *accident*. The prosecutor is attempting to emotionally *color* the defendant's actions as theft, without actually having to *prove* any theft occurred.

As for the $200,000 Facebook supposedly spent on this, it's questionable if that can be characterized as damage the defendant did to Facebook, especially if this figure represents some kind of internal expense accounting. Looking into hacking attempts is a routine function.

The probably don't have a lot of experience with this education thing. Change can be unsettling; they're probably uncertain what goes on in these new-fangled "classrooms". Under the circumstances it's quite understandable that they'd turn to the comfort of something more familiar to them, like broadcast television.

Well, Microsoft already *has* a tablet-ready operating system that will run desktop applications. It's called Windows 7. I happen to have a Lenovo S10-3t, a netbook that converts to a tablet. The bundled apps that take over the screen work ok -- except that the device itself is too fat and heavy to use as a tablet for long. The biggest problem with Windows 7 is that provides an approach for controlling desktop apps on a touchscreen that almost works, but which is throw-the-damn-thing-against-the-wall frustrating. I think *adding* UI features to run desktop UI apps on a tablet is inherently futile. App UIs have to be redesigned from the ground up for tablets.

What Microsoft has to do to make people sit up and take notice is produce a version of Microsoft Office with an appropriately tablet oriented UI. Since an office app is at best marginal without a keyboard, someone needs to manufacture a decently thin and light tablet with a an optional wireless keyboard. That should be an affordable addition. Bluetooth keyboards for iPads are dirt cheap; I bought my wife one that snaps over her iPad2 to double as a protective case for something like $35.

A typical word processing document has more content than will fit on the screen. Handling that efficiently and effortlessly presents a challenge to tablet UIs.I'd say tablets are the clear winner for content that readily fits on a screen (e.g. movies) and just as good as desktops for content in which navigation to distant parts of the document are infrequent (e.g. ebooks). But desktop UIs have a killer feature when it comes to navigating to distant parts of a document: the humble scrollbar. Scrollbars are going out of style because they don't work well on tablet UIs. The mechanisms for scrolling through content on tablet UIs work, but they're much less precise and convenient, unless there's a way to differentiate areas by content (e.g.. the scrolling mechanism in iOS for the contact list, which works impressively well for a solution that doesn't use a keyboard).

So a tablet version of office, running on a tablet with a wireless keyboard, would still be a little awkward. I think that could be fixed by having a scroll wheel type control on the keyboard, and some kind of on-screen feedback widget that would pop up in response to show you how far you are scrolling into a document.

It's not that figuring the line is so hard. It's getting the law to reflect that knowledge.

Where have you been for the last 20 years?

And can I move there?

Sandra Postel is saying that grain-fed beef takes 5300 liters of water per pound (oh, the units! liters per pound?), as opposed to grass fed beef which just requires rainwater.

I'm glad you quoted TFA, because I actually know Sandra; it reminds me I need to drop her a line.

It's quite easy to imagine us using *much* less water in growing our food, and coincidentally spending a lot less money to produce it. It's just hard to do that without changing what we eat.

If we were faced with an agricultural water crisis in the US, we could easily fix it by eating less beef -- at least beef that wasn't grass-fed. So I think that this problem might be naturally self-limiting in North America. As we approached the limits of the water available, the price of the most water-intensive foods would go up, and demand would shift to more water-efficient foods.

The problem would solve itself, if we don't *try* to solve it. But the problem is that we *would* try to solve it. We'd invest public money to find ways of keeping the price of beef low, rather than letting the rising price of beef curb beef consumption. We might undertake massive public-works projects to divert water to the supply-chain of beef production. It's not that reducing the price of beef is an inherently bad thing to do, it's that costly beef isn't really a problem if there's enough capacity to produce food in general. Treating it like a problem is a waste of time, effort and money. Perhaps worse, most of the things we could do to fix the bogus "problem" would create real problems. Subsidizing beef will exacerbate the water shortage and strain public budgets. Diverting water will damage ecosystems and livelihoods dependent on them.

Actually Paul Hawken, one of the founders of Smith and Hawken, had a somewhat similar idea, only it was a bit more self-regulating. He suggested that many things we buy then throw into the waste stream could instead be leased, ultimately from the manufacturer.

Take a laptop. A typical laptop lasts about three years, maybe five. But suppose you didn't buy the laptop, you leased it under an arrangement where the manufacturer is obligated to take the actual physical laptop back and pay for its disposal. This *internalizes* the cost of disposal for the manufacturer. It's no longer a cost somebody else has to worry about, so dealing with the cost of disposal becomes a concern in the design of the product.

As a result a manufacturer might choose to use an easily recyclable material for the laptop body, say aluminum instead of polycarbonate. The manufacturer would better be able to recycle polycarbonate too. Polycarbonate products are labelled with a "7" which means "other"; this makes it tricky to recycle in the waste stream because it's mixed in with other miscellaneous plastics; when returned to the manufacturer the materials would sort themselves.

We can add the warranty angle to this too. You wouldn't need a warranty; if a device became unusable because of a defect, you'd return it to the lessor who'd have to refund you the balance of your lease. Not having to deal with returns is a major incentive for making quality products. Back when telephones were leased, they were built like tanks.

Hawken's idea is one of those interesting one that *could* work in some conceivable world, but it's not clear how we'd go about transforming the current world in to one of those.

Well, look. The SLS program is projected to cost 18 billion in design costs through 2017, and an additional 23 billion to achieve four launches by 2025, with the full 130 metric ton capability coming some time after 2030.

Elon Musk says he can have a *150 MT* heavy launch vehicle ready in *five years* at *fixed price* of 2.5 billion, with a per-flight cost of around 300 million. And thus far SpaceX has shown it isn't just blowing smoke.

So why the heck are we taking only 175 million away from SLS? Why don't we give the private contractor *500 million a year* in return for a for a reasonable shot at getting the job done thirteen years sooner? Because this is not about getting job done. It's about keeping the spending on the program high for the indefinite future.

If SpaceX succeeded in building a heavy launch vehicle in five years for 2.5 billion, it's not going to be possible to even *pretend* to justify spending a couple of billion dollars per year over the next seven to twelve years on a system that will cost more to operate.

I never said that Webb won't be worth the money. What I said is that if we'd been realistic about the Webb's budget from the program's inception, it would *already* be launched, and *at less cost* than we'e already put into it.

We're in the classic "sunk costs" scenario now. I don't want to see the program cancelled, but in all fairness to the people who do want to cancel, the history of the project does not exactly inspire confidence in the project management's ability to deliver *anything*. In 2002 we were eight years away from launch; ten years later we're still six years from launch.

What I've heard seems to imply that we're over the hump; I hope that's so. But six years is a long time, and projects that are horribly late have a nasty habit of springing last-minute surprises. This program has put us in a high-risk, high-stakes situation. If the launch date slips again, or the price goes up again, it's going to be politically impossible *not* to cancel it. Then we won't have Webb *or* the other science that we've cut to feed Webb's out of control budget.