If we can navigate our space probes to Kuiper Belt objects using multiple slingshot maneuvers, I think our models of planetary motion are "good enough".

I disagree. I have been playing around lately with GNU Radio Companion, designing SDR (software-defined radio) tools using a cheap DVB dongle. The transformations of the signal into a human-digestible format is made very easy. I am a software engineer -- I have written a lot of code. But there is a certain class of problems that lend itself to flow-based programming. GRC is one. And ETL tools are another. That is not to say that one does not, from time to time, have to write one's own code block. I have done that for GRC and for some ETL tools. But for 99% of what I have needed, a simple flow graph was all that was required.

Personally, I prefer the term "Human Rights Management" since the free and open communication of ideas is a human right. This right extends to the public domain and to fair use. But it is much easier to swallow if we "manage" those rights, rather than just violate them outright.

The problem with virtually every DRM scheme I have seen pushed by industry is that they make no provision for fair use or for the limited terms of copyright. DRM is seen as a way to protect from the vagaries and limitations of copyright by silently removing "copying" as an option.

Here's an option: if you want to use DRM, you no longer get copyright protection. It becomes a trade secret.

I was hoping to find someone that mentioned this already and mod them up, but no one has as yet.

Source Control

Ask any software developer worth his salt and he will tell you that they use source control.

When programming for fun or profit, this is how I start:

1. Create the repo.
2. Create a test.
3. Write the code to pass the test.
4. Commit the code.
5. Go to step 2.

You may disagree about the rest (TDD), but step 1 stands. With all the great free source control tools available, there is no excuse for not using source control.

Absolutely we do! Where do you think all the misinformation comes from???

Ignorance is easy. Being that badly misinformed takes real effort.

I'm one step ahead of you.

As a Chicago tax-payer, if the CPL maker space continues beyond it's $250K start-up grant, it will not be free to me. I should also add that I am a member of a Chicago maker space. Someone always pays; whether donors or taxpayers or members.

I'm all for putting maker spaces in high schools. We called them "shop class" when I went to school. (BTW, get off my lawn!)

I am not yet convinced a maker space belongs in a library.

In an ideal world, many of the tips you mention would be fine and not produce any false positives. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world and users *WILL* receive e-mail from servers without proper PTF records, that don't know how to properly deal with greylisting (sending from multiple IPs or sender addresses, immediately bouncing on a 4xx response), from an IP that is on a blacklist... And god forbid you have any users, because they often will squeeze you from both ends: "I've *GOT* to receive this e-mail RIGHT NOW", but also: "Why am I getting so much spam?"

grep *CAN* take a bunch of patterns, we simply don't know if the user in question is using it in that way. Agreed though, if you are running egrep once for every pattern you are looking for, that is probably your problem and simply putting the patterns in a file and having egrep load the patterns from it via the "-f" flag will likely reduce this dramatically. However, doing many matches is still relatively expensive.