The real difference is that in a stand-in/sit-in the protestors aren't anonymous (pun not intended). It is far more effective if the group of people protesting have faces that the public can identify with. Otherwise the protestors are just a bunch of masked hooligans.

One of these days I want to get a bunch of my friends together and start printing our MP3s to see how long it will take all the various *IAAs around the world to start levying a tax on printer paper.

Who's with me?

I think this takes the concept of "heavy metal" music a little too far, don't you think?

My rule of thum for science and math is that you should learn at least one step further than what you absolutely need. The extra skills gained makes what you are doing seem less like magic and makes you feel less like just a cog in a machine.

As to the complaints about math being hard, students (and the public in general) needs to learn that life is hard and you won't always have someone there to hold your hand so suck it up and dealt with it.

And if instead the patent application had used 'chocolate donuts' as their example instead of 'comic books' the fact that this is a non-story would not change.

Yes, but when will they release pictures of the sun in Imax?

While I was watching the CLU scenes I felt that the slight un-realism to be purposeful. To me the slight rubberiness put CLU in the "uncanny valley" of visual effects where the almost-but-not-quite perfection puts us off, thereby making a statement about man trying to achieve perfection. Maybe I read to much into it but I appreciated CLU's inherent imperfection in the search for perfection.

For comparison I looked up what Encyclopedia Britannica charges for a year-long subscription and they ask for $103.48 US. Just in case anyone wants a comparison.

There is another effect that needs to be considered: the clean-room effect.

Consider someone working on a clean-room implementation of software. That person must be disallowed from viewing or experiencing the source code to a competing product. By viewing that code the developer may become in violation of copyright and/or patents that the original software contains. This is a serious concern in the software/hardware industry and shouldn't be dismissed lightly. Allowing the analysts to access the leaked data to may taint their conclusions when examining data.

So, to carry on with the barn door analogy, this is like closing the barn door after the horses have run away so your veterinarians and trainers can't go over to the neighbouring farm and see how the other farmer is training his thoroughbred racehorses.

But the difference is that the Pentagon Papers was the culmination of a study that was done by the military. What WikiLeaks released is raw data with no investigation, no analysis and no context. We aren't seeing how one cable was rejected because the sender was a loon or another needs to be taken in context of some other document. This is why comparing the Pentagon Papers to the diplomatic papers is laughable at best.

Great, now we have to worry about global warming on Mars!

Actually there are quite a few errors. At no time did the "journalist" have concrete confirmation that the youth has actually been banned, only his assertion that that was the case. Without followup, fact-checked information I am not going to expend any emotional response on this story.

Even by Slashdot's standards this story should not have been posted.

Instead of just making anything less than 'C' a failing grade, why don't we just completely redefine what the grades mean? For example:
    * F - the student has failed to demonstrate that they have the minimum knowledge taught in the course
    * C - the student has demonstrated that they have the minimum knowledge taught in the course
    * B - the student has demonstrated either exemplary knowledge (eg. >95%) of the course or minimal knowledge and have applied that knowledge outside of class (eg. a non-class assigned project)
    * A - the student has both demonstrated exemplary knowledge of the material covered in class and applied that knowledge outside of class

I'd be more impressed with grades if the above were used since I've run across more than a few people that got 'A's in college that were complete idiots when it came to doing real work.