And the funny part is, even if everything you say is accurate, it'd STILL be an improvement over how the Republicans had been running things!

The simplest theory that accounts for this data is that every time Russia's government structure changes, things get worse.

Can't argue with Occam's Razor!

Not to mention, that there are two tried and true methods for working around overrestrictive copyright laws:

• Create and use material following an open source model; the more onerous copyright becomes for people, the more attractive stuff like Creative Commons becomes.
• Pirate stuff. Yeah, some people will whine about ohhhhh, you're breaking the law; but when chances of being caught are very low and the media cartels are aggressively ceding the moral high ground to the pirates, who gives a crap? Send a few bucks anonymously to the artist if you want, it's more than they ever would have gotten from the cartels if you'd bought legit.

Now, patents are a different matter...

I've long wondered--what is it that academic journals DO, precisely? They don't seem to provide any services that a vanity press couldn't do better and cheaper.

Is there something I'm unaware of that they merely overcharge massively for, or are they actually the complete and total parasites that they sound like?

DRM still has the awkward flaw of giving the user both the key and the lock and hoping that they won't figure it out.

Modern encryption is computationally intractable for solid, mathematical reasons, but that doesn't really apply to smoke and mirrors DRM schemes. The keys and everything else are in there, and a university probably has better access to stuff like high-end hardware analysis tools vs. your average basement-dwelling w4r3z guy.

Don't forget the classic Douglas Adams quote!

A bit of both. In my experience they have a tendency to sensationalize and inflate stuff that's mostly fringe or highly speculative. It's mostly a matter of tone and focus, though, they're still well rooted in actual science. If you want day-to-day news on solid scientific work, probably better off elsewhere. For coverage of interesting new ideas or possibilities in science, they're great. Just don't be disappointed if the ideas they cover don't end up working out.

More likely he's thinking of something along the lines of "maintaining referential transparency". That is, the only sense of identity a variable has is its value, not its storage location, meaning that complicated data structures can't be altered, only used to construct new, different versions.

This incidentally makes multithreading alot easier, too. :)

Not that difficult, really. The main problem is sequencing, which is provided by things like function composition. The problem is the unwieldy nature in languages like Scheme of specifying sequencing using pure functions, while also handling data that doesn't require sequencing; but this is a syntactic problem, not a practical one.

The issue is handled admirably by the language Haskell, using a mathematical construct called a "monad" to allow an elegant way of handling sequencing--even a syntactic sugar "do" notation that looks vaguely imperative--while remaining 100% pure, unlike Scheme.