The government asked for their assessment, and they gave the best prediction they could given the data they had. Nearly every other seismologist in the world would have given the same assessment. They are being sentenced to prison because they did not predict the quake, pure and simple. The lesson here is that if the Italian government ever asks your assessment on anything, the only valid response is "fuck off and die".

The submitter, pigrabbitbear, is the author/editor/whatever of the story. Everything he has ever submitted has been from motherboard.vice.com, and he even openly uses it has his contact link.

Yes there is. In most states all parties that get at least 5% of the vote in most states get the consolation prize of being recognized as major parties, and don't have to jump through ridiculous hoops to get their local candidates on ballot for the next 4 years.

In most states, if your party has 5% or so of the vote is the presidential election, then your party is recognized as an official party, and any local candidates you run for the next 4 years are guaranteed a spot on the ballot, and sometimes even in the debate. If you don't, then you have to collect signatures from X% of the population for every single local candidate you want to run. And deal with election officials that go out of their way to declare as many those signatures invalid as they possibly can to keep you off the ballot. Even if you get the signatures, you won't be included in local debates. The third parties have to invest all their resources just to get on the local ballot, and have nothing left for actual campaigning.

Furthermore, there is a large portion of the population that ignores elections except the presidential election. This is a great time to let the public know who your party is, what it stands for, and help shape the debate and issues that people are talking about.

You don't really get much improvement in per-unit cost by building 10 of something vs 2. The biggest factor in the cost even with just the first couple isn't the engineering but the testing and qualification. Most of that has to be repeated for every unit you build until you are creating enough to have confidence in the past performance and to fall back to statistical testing, or at least are building enough for automating that work to be economical. But you would need to be creating several dozen of them for that to kick in. Furthermore, construction is more expensive that you are allowing for at those low quantities since it's all is done by hand, by highly skilled labor. That won't drop by much until you get into mass-manufacturing quantities, hundreds at least.

So you would get minor savings, and at the loss of a huge amount of science. There is a reason that each of these probes is wildly different, and that is because the have wildly varying requirements. There is no one-size fits all suite of sensors. They will want different spectral ranges, different optics setups (detailed, narrow FOV vs wide coverage), different transmitter requirements (Horizon has much farther to transmit than MRO), all of which drives different battery requirements.

Finally, the point of science is to keep learning; to keep pushing things forward. You do that by sending probes with improved and/or different capabilities, not just more of the same. Sure we could have sent 3 more MERs (Spirit/Opportunity) for the cost of Curiosity, but we wouldn't have learned as much as Curiosity will be able to tell us.

No, the court ruled correctly. The law has a very specific definition of stored communications, and as such only applies to backups and transient copies, not long-term hosted data. It's a stupid definition, but that's congress's fault not the judge's.

None of the things you mentioned are criteria for determining whether something is fair use. They are examples given in the law, and were never intended to be an exhaustive enumeration of instances of fair use:

The real criteria for fair use follows that introductory paragraph:

This video easily passes those criteria.

No, that isn't the implication. Whether they are in violation of copyright or not depends on whether their drivers are a derivative work of Linux, and if so whether fair use would allow them anyway. Both of these things are decided by courts not by the copyright holder. The significance of his notification is in determining whether the infringement is willful or not, and thus eligible for stronger penalties.

To expound on Zak's comment, there are two types of copyright on music; one for the composition/lyrics/etc, and one for the specific recording. Terrestrial radio has to pay royalties for the former but not the later, while internet streaming sites (and satellite radio) have to pay both.

On the other hand the class of license that a terrestrial broadcaster has puts an upper limit on the number of listeners they can have, while there is no such fundamental limit on internet radio. Furthermore, your revenues should also scale linearly with the number of listeners if you have a sane business model. So it makes sense that internet streaming royalties scale linearly, the problem is that the rate is much too high. And it wouldn't have to be if terrestrial radio lost it's Edison-era exception, and had to pay full royalties as well.

The main point of the camera is to have firm information to give to the cops. They aren't going to waste resources doing an in-depth investigation over something like this. But if you can give them a license plate number and a picture of the guys, they are much more likely to deal with them. And if not you have everything you need to head to small claims court.

That is a strange criteria though, as 99.9% of the people using SHA3 and depending on it's security will use a software implementation. Practically the only people who deal with hardware implementations anymore are those trying to break a cryptosystem. Of course all the speed measures for the SHA-3 contenders (hw and sw implementation) are relatively small constant multiples/divisors of SHA2, so it really isn't a big deal from a security or convenience factor.

Looking forward to reading the final report.

American citizens don't deserve to loose the fundamental constitutionally guaranteed rights when they travel through another county. Nor do prisoners deserve to be loose their (more limited) rights because they are transferred into your county. It's essential that his abuses get national media attention, so the rest of us can know to stay out of Maricopa county until you guys (or the feds) finally get around to doing something about it.

Yes, and if people were perfect we wouldn't need any government at all. Heaven forbid we actually punish corporations for abusing their power in ways that are harmful to society. What a horrible law.

I played around with several, so I may have some details wrong but IIRC it was:
RedHat 4 -> Slackware -> Debian Woody -> RedHat 7 -> Mandrake -> Ubuntu -> Debian Squeeze

Of these, the two Debian install were the ones that stayed on my computer the longest, and I've pretty much settled on it now. It is rock solid, doesn't randomly break stuff with updates and has a great package manager and repository.

The RPM hell related to the early libc changes put me off of RedHat for a long time. I decided that if I was going to futz with that sort of stuff I might as well use a simpler distro that exposed you to it, hence Slackware, which was a nice learning experience. I'd really like to do a Linux From Scratch install one of these days to update my understanding of modern Linux ecosystem internals.

I wasn't thrilled with Mandrake. I chose it because it was supposed to have nice hardware setup wizards, but when I ran them they silently failed, leaving me with no clue of what happened, and leaving the system config files in an inconsistent half configured state. I had to read through the scripts line by line to figure out what they had done and undo the damage (or wipe and reinstall).

Then I got tired of building my own machines and decided to support Dell's step into the Desktop Linux world. Hence Ubuntu. Out of the box it worked great. But every single upgrade after that broke something. Usually the Intel graphics, sometimes the audio. I eventually got fed up with it and went back to Debian.