In fact, the challenge list is defunct, the challenge having been canceled by RSA. The challenges are still scientifically interesting, so to call them obsolete is factually inaccurate.

You need to address this to the authors of the paper itself, since dtmos didn't "write" a "summary" so much as directly cut & paste from the paper's first paragraph. Yeah, yeah I did RTFA, what was I thinking...

The owner of the copyright has the *exclusive* right to make derivative works...I realize the slashdot crowd doesn't agree with all that, but it is the existing law.

Apart from the first statement being simply untrue (there are a number of uses permitted without the copyright holder's permisssion), it is also completely irrelevant - this case is not about copyright, it's about trademarks. I know the fudmongers want us all to be seduced into the "information is property" paradigm, but copyrights and trademarks (and for that matter, patents and trade secrets) are not the same thing at all, and blurring the distinctions between them does nobody any good. Before you go berating us all in your role as AC law expert you might want to get a better understanding of the law yourself.

B0 should be 0.75 m^2 right?

It depends on whether it's a French or a Japanese B series

A metric pizza would have a circumference of 1 meter

More likely metric would follow the pattern of paper sizing, so an A0 pizza would have an area of 1 square meter (for a diameter of ~ 113cm), an A1 pizza would be 0.5 square meters (diameter 80cm), A2 would have half that area and so on. A typical pizza would be A4 : an area of one sixteenth of a square meter, so a diameter of close to 30 cm.

Then there's the B series, which works in the same way, but starting from B0 having an area of 0.5 square meters, and with the inclusion of anchovys.

The same can be said of The Times in the UK. One of Britain's longest running papers and holder of all sorts of semi-official roles (newspaper of record, for example) it was bought by Murdoch in the '80s. Many of it's best editors were replaced or quit (highly respected Robert Fisk, for example, resigned because of political censorship), and it's focus shifted onto more popular subjects (celebrities, sport, etc).

It has also always backed Murdoch's candidate-of-choice in elections; during his support for New Labour it made many attacks on the Tories, and since Murdoch started backing the Tories again their focus has swung back the other way (although they're more natural Tory supporters anyway, so at least we're back where we started).

And let's not even get started on The Sun...

There's an obvious money-trail here and a lot of people smell a skunk

So obvious yet you apparently can't actually see it - the denialist industry has considerably more resources behind it than the academics and research scientists. A few piffly grant monies versus the vested interests of the current energy industry? Those avaricious scientists are clearly prepared to invent any kind of lie or distraction to maintain their current position of wealth and power eh?

That figure is the alleged cost of upgrading the security of these systems after the attack, not the result of any 'damage' that he may have caused

I think you're probably right that this represents a subsequent upgrade. Note that the article linked from the earlier slashdot piece actually claims he caused almost a billion dollars worth of damage!

[that he is an Asperger's sufferer] has NOTHING to do with this issue.

Except that his condition was the central issue in his judicial review so it has plenty to do with this. I was initially going to write "alleged Asperger's sufferer" - would that have made you happier?

But if a serial mugger chooses the wrong victim and gets kicked to death then so be it.

In most places, the would-be victim would then be up on a manslaughter charge, which I think is not the analogy you were shooting for. Maybe try something with cars?

Afghanistan is the most mined country

Afghanistan comes in 4th according to this source. I was a little surprised that Egypt tops that list.

[I] see this as a stop gap for data that I don't want to degrade...I'd love to be able to scan [30 years of photos] and store them semi-permanently

We already have stop-gap semi-permanent storage - you simply copy that multi gigabyte archive onto each new computer as you upgrade. The huge pain in the ass is not keeping files longterm, it's the effort of scanning all those photos in the first place.