The cruise portion of the flight can be handled by autopilot, 98% of the time. Landing is a totally different matter. Landing is HARD. During my first flight lesson, I flew figure eights at altitude. I never could manage to learn to land safely. Landing requires a skilled pilot.

Also, while 98% of the cruise can be handled by the autopilot, there's another 2% that can't. Shit happens, just like with any other activity, and when shit happens aboard an airliner you want a good pilot handling the situation.

Taking off is the other dangerous part. If you've flown a few times you've probably felt turbulence, when the wind blows the plane up and down. If you're at 30,000 feet and a downdraft pushes you down 150 feet it feels like going over a hill. If you're 120 feet off the ground when you drop, you're dead.

For most of the books Google did, yes. They are either public domain or Google has the publisher's permission. For the others, unless there are facts I'm not aware of, I don't suppose that would be legal. However, I haven't read the entirety of the court's opinion. It's quite likely there was a reason the court ruled as it did - some matter of fact or law not mentioned in the page or two we read from the 30 page opinion.

I love a good story about government ineffectiveness.
Unfortunately, this particular story is bull. Their conclusions are based on "meta-analysis of 400 studies over 60 years", not an analysis of the TSA's current procedures. They looked at studies on whether college students can tell when reach other are lying.

The TSA has some problems for sure, but this article doesn't address those.

Generally, you CAN copy a whole book, it isn't necessary to claim you only read a few pages.
You can copy it and read all of it, or copy a whole album on tape and then listen to the whole album.
What you can't do is sell whole copies.

Yes, that's a three sentence summary of 100 pages of law, so of course there are more details than that.

> I don't mind people who did both processes getting a fair return but we need to decide what a fair return is.

It's 9.8%. Over the long term, they'll average 9.8% per year and there's nothing we can do to change that.

Suppose for a moment that there was a very high return. Let's say 50%.

Microsoft and their Bing divison, along with Amazon and others would be watching that and thinking:
      We have $50 million dollars to spend on our next project.
      We can either spend that on developing a game console, with an expected return of 2%, or
      on digitizing books, with a return of 50%.
      Fire up the digitizer!

People generally invest in the type of projects that are getting the best returns. So due to the 50% return, you'd have Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all offering different versions of the service. Maybe Microsoft would have no ads, but it would only work in IE11 on Windows 8.1.
Amazon's would be similar to Google, but with fewer, more obtrusive ads for full books that float over the digital pages.

With two competitors, Google's return would decrease. Specifically, new entrants keep coming in with different (better, cheaper, etc.) versions as long as the return is higher than other projects. It turns out that "other projects" return 9.8%, on average. So anything with a risk-adjusted return higher than 9.8% draws competitors.

If money goes IN to lines of business where it'll make more than 9.8%, where does it come FROM? From shutting down (or foregoing) operations that make less, of course. Any business with a risk-adjusted return less than 9.8% has some providers leave the market for greener pastures.

With the competitors close, their market share goes to the remaining competitors, so the remaining people get increased returns. Specifically, competitors keep leaving and the return keeps increasing until the return is as good as other options - about 9.8%.

So that's what you end up with - in the long term, any industry in the US has a risk-adjusted return of about 9.8%. Some, like oil or farming, are subject to high volatility - good years and bad years. Exxon for example is affected by oil prices, so it goes up and down. Exxon averaged 11.62% over the last 10 years, 7.86% over the last 15 years - everything swings up and down around that 9.8% mark.

You can legally do the same. Just the summary alone mentions two key considerations:

Google allowed readers to see just a couple of pages, excerpts.
That did not compete with sales of the full book, but rather increased the author's sales of the books by helping people find books they might like to buy.

The opinion has another 20 pages looking at the various factors involved.

The SUMMARY tells you no. Two key facts were that a) entire books are not available, you can only read a couple of pages and b) it doesn't compete with full copies, but rather increases sales of full copies by helping consumers find books they are interested in.

Your opinion isn't necessarily unreasonable, but the point is that if the first judge disagreed, she couldn't very well appeal the decision, could she?

Estimating it takes on average four months to get a court date, she's 7 months along at the first hearing. When the appeal hearing occurred, the baby would be two months old. If she "wins" the appeal, does that mean she kills the 2 month old infant? Obviously not, so there would no effective appeal. That's the point of my post.

> The father certainly should be involved in any kind of decision like that

Funny you say that, while saying that regardless of the facts, he has absolutely zero right to even alert the judicial system to what's going on.

> where women are still treated by many of the old-thought people as property, possessions, and pawns to manipulate and direct as they choose.

But you insist on treating babies very lives as property to be destroyed at whim? Odd.

In my personal opinion, facts matter. Let's say we have a typical happy family of four. White picket fence
and all that. Their third child is due in one month. Then she falls back into smoking crack cocaine, the
nemesis she thought she had defeated fifteen years prior. In that factual situation, I believe dad has a
duty to protect his children.

The GPL licence, the Apache license, CCa, and just about anything but the WTFPL have restrictions on redistribution. Typical restrictions include:

If you distribute, you may not further restrict others from doing the same.
If you distribute binaries, you must distribute source.
If you distribute, you must acknowledge the original author.

Suppose a couple wanted to have a baby. They spent a year planing for a baby and trying to get pregnant. They get pregnant and they are decorating
the nursery, etc. Then, three months pregnant, she changes her mind and wants to kill the kid and go back to partying all night like she did in college.
Pretty quickly, it's going to be too late to appeal a decision either way.

Similarly a release of information case, such as this one. Once DHS has been forced to release the document, they can't effectively appeal to unrelease it.
In this case, "left the door open for the agency to appeal the ruling" means they have 30 days to appeal BEFORE they have to release the document.

DHS was granted 30 days before they have to release the document, to allow time for an appeal.

You can always appeal, but it sometimes an appeal would be pointless because it would be too late.
In this case, plaintiff wants a document released. Normally, that would mean the document would be released immediately.
How do you appeal a decision to release a document AFTER it's been released, though? Plaintiff is going to publish the information.
If DHS wins the appeal, would plaintiff be ordered to unpublish it?

In such cases, a court will grant a "stay", meaning everything stays as it is until the appeals court gets the case or time runs out.

> do want to necessitate giving some experimental medicine to 10,000 people before assessing whether it's a good idea or not?

Yes. Before giving it to a million people, we should run statistical calculations on the first 10,000 to better asses safety and efficacy.

Oh, you meant as opposed to a trial with 200 people. But that's a false dichotomy. You run run stats on the first 200 to see whether
or not it's likely safe, then run stats on 10,000 to confirm it. Which is to say, you'd wait until you managed a smaller P before announcing a conclusion. In the meantime, with a P of 0.05, you'd label it as a tentative conclusion, a likely theory.

It sounds like you have a clue about statistics. Do you know of a good forum to ask a fairly involved statistics question? I have a set of measured variables A-E which all tend to indicate the likelihood of X. The relationships are a bit complex and unknown, though, so I need help with how I should analyze the historical data in order to come up with parameters to use in the future for making "predictions" of X based on known values of A-E.

Thirteen hours ago you said it means "without god". That's what you said. You said that meaning has been the same for thousands of years. Now, you seem to have changed your mind. Time flies.

No. The phone I'm typing this on is not like the Slashdot server cluster. That's client-server, like most internet activity.

Slashdot.org and CNET.com are peers. Note they don't communicate, there's no peer-to-peer communication.

Sure some elements of the infrastructure involve peer communication.