> Solar panels do require a lot of maintenance if you want good performance.
Compared to a small diesel plan? Definitely not.

> Look up how much energy is used to produce one square centimetre of a solar panel.
Energy parity is achieved quicker for solar panels than for nuclear power plants in some cases.
Accoring to this source by the German government, CO2 emissions of a nuclear plant driven by Uranium from South Africa
were higher than those of solar panels in 2007.
http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/analysen/2007/CO2-Bilanzen_verschiedener_Energietraeger_im_Vergleich.pdf
Don't underestimate the CO2 emissions for creating concrete (6% of world CO2 production) and of Uranium enrichment
and Uranium mining.

Solar has an annual improvement in efficicency in the order of 20% per year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Trade_Balance_1980_2011.svg

Authentication is something different, but the thread is about DNS. BIND, probably the same DNS that your IP-Hoster is running so it is likely proven that your laptop is playing nicely with it, is available for windows. The DHCP server in your router can tell all local machines that they should ask your local DNS to resolve addresses.

Or, you could add all your local devices IP numbers to the hosts file on all machines. For a small number of machines this should be feasible.

I am not an expert on authetification and file sharing, but Samba, LDAP, Kerberos, etc. are all available for windows.

Are you aware that you can run software on windows machines that is not provided by microsoft but by other vendors?

Only if you store the electricity infinitely. Most of the electricity is converted to heat pretty quickly. The solar panel has a lower reflectivity as most materials so actually placing a solar panel might increase Earths temperature.

> Why after 7+ years is it all of a sudden an urgent matter that needs to be resolved immediately?

That is exactly the main question that a judge ruling an injunction has to decide and I am pretty sure that the German court will decline the injunction on this ground.

But I still don't see on which ground a foreign court shall deny the right to have this question checked by a competent court. (No, the US court is not competent to decide this.) The questions really are independent. The result of the US law suit will have no legal consequences for the relationship of the two companies in Germany.
 

How can doing something legal be a threat? They had to file the patent in dozens of countries, pay patent fees in dozens of countries and they can sue in each and every of these countries.

The result of the dispute will be resolved in each country seperately and may differ from country to country and will only be binding for that country. The lawsuit will be irrelevant for the use of the patented technology in europe and vice versa. So why should that wait?

Also: I agree that the injunction will not be granted in Germany, so it is even less a threat. We are talking Microsoft here, not private persons who are scared of courts or are forvce to settle because they can't pay the lawyers.

But the same patent might be valid in one jurisdiction and invalid in another one. So essentially it is necessary to argue seperately in both jurisdictions.

Yeah, and by that time the injunction in Germany will be denied because Motorola did not take immediate action. Injunctions must be filed within a certain timeframe after detecting the violation. So the US judge is trying to overrule the German court which clearly is illegal.

You mean, like this:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/02/25/article-1253724-0876E885000005DC-28_233x368.jpg
?

> propose looting corporations, paychecks, and any other source of wealth to get government to pay for government freebies.
> Since stealing is therefore OK, why don't we steal from other countries rather than from US citizens?

I thought you are a democracy. So it's not stealing, it's doing something together:
"Hey, let's build a highway from New York to Los Angeles, none of us can afford it, so let's do it together and everybody - including cooperations - pays a small part."

Well, the US is doing some really expensive stuff that scandinavian countries don't do:

- fighting wars
- maintaining a massive amount of political police like homeland security
- keeping a large proportion of your population in prison (not only do those cost money, they also don't create wealth)
- having a space program
- paying interest rates because taxes in the past did not cover expenses (in Norway interes rates are an income to governement)

This might explain why taxes are higher in the US.

Essentially a society must decide how much money to spend and then taxes must be high enough to cover those expenses (and debt created by previous generations).

Fixed that for you.

Also please note: There is evidence that access to pornography (not necessarily child pornography) reduces the risk of someone molesting a child. (James D. Weinberg: Sexual Landscapes. S. 397ff)

The way to go is to use lossy compression formats based on 24 bit raw data with at least 96kHz sample rate.
Reducing the file size drastically from that starting point is possible without any reduction in perceived quality. But doing that by the way the CD does (e.g. removing half the samples and cutting of the lower bits) does a really bad job of distributing the error.

Especially a dynamic of more than 16 bits is important for classical music or movie audio tracks. If you have a 60dB dynamic in a track, the silent parts will be quantized to 6 bits on a CD. A dolby audio stream will at a medium data rate will have much better signal quality than the CD in cases like that.

Of course the worst thing to do is to convert it to CD format first and then add lossy compression later, as you get the worst of both worlds.

> Are you really claiming that there are more researchers legitimately investigating porn websites than there are horny frat boys who just want to jerk off in their dorm rooms
No. But I am claiming, that 1000 frat boys jerking of in their dorm do less harm, than one legitimiate research who can't do his work. If it were just porns, things would be easy. The point is, that in all sorts of areas administration tries to seperate useful from useless sites, but the people doing that have no way of knowing what will be required by their staff. (It might be porn for researcher X, a shopping site for researcher Y, slashdot for another one. I could imagine that access to warez websites has been important to the research of Lawrence Lessig.)
So instead they should concentrate on detectign and filtering malware and not filter based on content.

> More software companies who have not figured out a better way to deliver their product than emailing it to random employees than random employees who would install every "screensaver" emailed to them by a criminal? Really? Because that sure sounds pretty implausible to me.

This is a misrepresentation of the case I made. The E-Mails we trying to send are to engineers specifically designated to develop driver installers in cooperation with us. Yet, there was no official approved way of getting .exe files to them, they had to use trial and error to figure out a way to get past their system.
The random employee your are talking about should not have permission to install software in his system. But maybe they should have permission to receive .exe files to forward them to another employee with the correct permissions?

Yes. But there also is research on porn.

It is a long time that I have been to university, but I have similar trouble with customers. Our Engineers waste a lot of time trying to get software we developed for a customer to the customers engineers because any of the following occur frequently:

* dropbox is blocked
* .exe and .dll are not allowed in e-mail
* our hoster is in a class A net blacklisted by customers spam-filter
* we chose a file name that matches some regular expression deemed dangerous by their IT staff
* sftp is blocked
and so on, and so on

This is fine, if there is a clear procedure handling these exceptions. (e.g. if a researcher writing a paper on porn site can walk up to the IT appartment and get a list of sites opened for his computer within in minutes.) But ultimately these restrictions serve no real purpose and just waste a lot of money in the form of time lost by both IT, administrative and research staff.

Also, I wonder if research really works, if researches have to convince a censoring body that there request to access a site is legitimate before they can proceed with their research. (Yes sir, gamesexpert.com is not a sex site!)