So the Beezer won't collect taxes, eh? So how come I get charged taxes on everything I buy from them, even if it's shipped from outside my state (NY)? In terms of fairness, if you support sales taxes, you should support, say, collecting them on cigarette sales to non-Indians on Indian reservations. Find me a coffin nail puffer who supports THAT.

The Goldberg Variations is of course PD. The International Music Scores Project/Petrucci Music Library has half a dozen versions freely available at http://imslp.org/wiki/Goldberg-Variationen,_BWV_988_(Bach,_Johann_Sebastian)

Well > 16, plus 40 watt fuses on my two pitiful 15 amp lines, plus a stash of pennies to put behind them as necessary or convenient.

One of the first case reports you read in law school is Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Co. A rubber ball with a tube sticking out of it was filled with carbolic acid, and the user/victim put the tube up his/her nose and breathed the fumes. This produced a strong flow of mucus, which was advertised to wash out flu germs. (This was during the 1889-90 flu pandemic.) For more than even a lawyer would be interested in, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_Company.

I tried that. When I looked away from the central dot and concentrated on the objects in the ring, I could see one or a few of them changing, but still couldn't get the overall effect of all of them changing, as I did when the ring was stationary.

Oh, I hope so.

Since archaea (the oldest life forms) were absent in the layer where these life forms were found, it suggests that there was a "second creation" of life. If so, they should have a separate form of DNA (or the equivalent). . . .

I use Citibank, which collects all your accounts on one page. Going back about a year is very easy, and you get PDFs of the front and back of all checks. However, you get only payee and amounts of credit card transactions. Getting older transactions requires repeatedly clicking "show more" links, and anything more than a couple of years old requires an email request, which takes between one and two days. Their tech service is very good, particularly at the first escalation level.

IAAL. Under the Constitution, Congress passed statutes to give authors copyrights for a limited term. This statutory copyright protects authors against unauthorized duplication of their PUBLISHED works -- that is, physical copies that humans could read. When the player piano was invented and popular tunes appeared on piano rolls, composers sued under the copyright statute. They lost because you couldn't put a piano roll on the music stand and read off the tune. Therefore, the music had never been "published." Instead, composers had to use the common law (non-statutory) right to prevent copying of their unpublished works. The common law copyright was more difficult to sue on, but it was perpetual. When cylinder and then disk recordings appeared, the courts applied the player piano rule, since you couldn't listen to a record by looking at the grooves. Common law copyrights continue to exist under American law (though this is abolished and covered by statutes in England, where the recording was made). A further complication is that each state can determine the length of copyrights of unpublished materials. New York courts hold that it is perpetual. Congress overrode state common law copyrights and brought new music copyrights into the statutory system as of 1972. However, pre-1972 common law copyrights were brought into the federal statutory system only as of February 15, 2047. Thus when Naxos reissued Yehudi Menuhin's famous 1932 recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto, this was held to violate the common law copyright of the original issuer (Columbia Records). For more than you ever want to know, read Columbia Records v. Naxos, http://www.law.cornell.edu/nyctap/I05_0027.htm

IAAL. The Fifth Amendment requires compensation for private property taken for public use. Internet bandwidth is not private property. It belongs to the government and is licensed out. The government is free to limit that license by, for example, requiring large licensees to carry traffic for smaller entities that can't afford to bid on the bandwidth. Further, the Fifth Amendment position has been rejected by the courts, which have routinely upheld severe zoning restrictions that decrease the value of private property.

My latest computer came with Win7 64 preinstalled. That way the maker (HP) could tout 6 Gb of RAM. This is undoubtedly the reason for the 50% figure, particularly since people who think about using the 64 bit version will read the tech publications, which warn of problems with 64 bit software.

IAAL. When SCOTUS takes a patent case, they're like a bull in a china shop. They're not engineers or patent lawyers, so they undo a lot of stuff that has been carefully worked out by the Patent Office and special patent courts. That said, the area of non-device patents has grown enormously over the last few years, and there was a great need to set some ground-rules to cut back on overreaching claims while giving people with new ideas a chance to make a profit from their innovations. In my view, Bilski is a monster (and necessary) bitch slap for methodology patents, which had gotten out of bounds. (IMO, the next one will come on copyright overreaching.) The Supremes deliberately left the opinion vague to let the experts work out the details.

So what's the natural console input? From the Altair on, it's been front switches and indicator lights, operating, of course, in octal. Real men don't use mouses.

The U-2 can reach 70,000 feet, compared with the 474's 40,000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2 There should be U-2s available now that they've been retired. Assuming it has enough payload capacity to carry the SOFIA, more resolution would be available.