What about your fellow humans, and their kids, you psychopathic nut?

Given how broadly the computer-crime laws are written, they're lucky they didn't get thrown in jail for that "advanced IP spoofing"...

For those wondering where it's from, here's an explanation from Per Egil Hegge, via this thread (in Norwegian):

In his book Katta i sekken, Kjell Ivar Vannebo writes that the origin is German, and comes from the fact that Germans often drank from a cup which was shaped like a shoe. Drinking over a shoe meant drinking too much. Later it became "low shoe", and the phrase was also expanded to include performing activity other than drinking, at a level far above normal or acceptable.

The title of that book, by the way, translates to "cat in a sack", but is not related to the English idiom "let the cat out of the bag"... instead it's the Norwegian version of the English idiom pig in a poke.

Nobody else gets to vote themselves a raise, create their own health plan, retirement, etc.

Um, that's pretty much how C-level executives work at large companies. They are nominally under the control of the board, who is nominally the elected representatives of the shareholders, but like with our elected political representatives, in practice they have quite a bit of unrestrained control over things like voting each other raises and approving golden-parachute contracts (formally on behalf of the shareholders who voted the board in, of course).

Back in February, IEEE Spectrum reported that Willow Garage was shutting down, which led to a rebuttal from WG in which they said that they were changing, not shutting down. I guess the change wasn't profitable enough.

It's true Bach didn't perform on a piano, though to be pedantic, the word clavier doesn't denote a specific kind of instrument. It's just a traditional name for keyboard instruments, and sometimes the piano is considered in the family. Bach himself apparently performed on both the harpsichord and clavichord, though his work is most associated with the harpsichord.

in hoc to

Off-topic pedantry: the expression's in hock to, originating from a Dutch word for a kennel or lock-up or prison, informally used to describe someone in debt. Not related to Latin hoc, meaning "this", and common in phrases like post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this, therefore because of this"), ad hoc ("for this [occasion]"), etc.

The Vatican's actually been somewhat ahead on noticing that particular issue and moving to other ones. I still don't agree with their other views, but I do think they were much better than the evangelical Protestants on realizing that opposing science was not an agenda that was going to be on the right side of history.

They used to rail against Copernicus and Darwin, but they've apologized for that and dropped the anti-science agitation, moving towards a cautiously pro-science position. That happened gradually over a few decades, but was cemented in 1996 with the Pope's unambiguously pro-evolution speech, "truth cannot contradict truth". His basic argument is that, if Catholic teaching is true (as he obviously believes), and if modern science is also a way of discovering truth about the world (as is increasingly obvious to everyone but religious fundamentalists), then setting up an opposition between Catholicism and science is internally incoherent. Instead, he argues, the job of the Church is to understand modern science and integrate it into its teachings, rather than oppose it.

The equations aren't actually in MathML; they're in TeX. They're converted to a version renderable in your browser on the fly via MathJax (a big pile of Javascript). In some browsers that will result in presentation MathML output (but not semantic MathML).

Better, the Caltech mirror version is up, and is on a solid pipe/server, so will probably stay up.

They have the agreement of the print publisher to produce this free online version. I'm actually somewhat surprised they got it; as the summary notes, they had to convince the publisher that having a free version available online wouldn't hurt print sales, which is often hard to convince publishers of.

The thank-you section of the page lists:

• Thomas Kelleher and Basic Books, for their open-mindedness in allowing this edition to be published free of charge

Since this is the 3rd comment on the post and all three comments are basically that, I would say the low-hanging fruit is rapidly being devoured...

What are they negotiating the turn-over of, from their perspective?

Iceland and Greenland both heavily restrict immigration, so unless you were born there, you probably cannot move there.

I don't think the intent is to argue that it isn't contravening the intent of the gag order due to a technicality, but rather to set up a constitutional challenge to the gag order. Compelled speech is reviewed at a higher level of scrutiny, so if the gag order actually requires you to affirmatively state things that you neither believe in nor are true, that would be a basis for challenging the gag order. You may still lose, but it would require violating a constitutional rule that thus far has been respected.