One might also note that the PS/2 port is electrically compatible with the old AT keyboard that debuted in 1984, on a system with a 6MHz 8086.

Additional things that one might note:
- the AT keyboard debuted in 1984 as part of the IBM PC/AT system, which was based on the 80286, though some 8086/8088-based PC- and XT- compatibles got BIOS updates that allowed the AT keyboard to be used on them
- with the advent of USB, fewer and fewer desktop PCs over the past decade have been including PS/2 ports, with inclusion on laptops now approaching zero

I thought if one is using 10secs (I'm unsure if there is a real number or duration) of any video, song, or literature it is not 'reproducing' or distributing IP or copyright, but Fair Use, and therefore not against a civil or criminal law.

Fair Use is about HOW a copyrighted work is used, not simply HOW MUCH of it is used.

If the source material is readily identifiable, and it is not clearly apparent that the re-user is engaging in a protected action like academic study, critical review, or parody, then the odds are pretty good that in the eyes of the law it will be considered a derivative work, and a copyright violation if not properly licensed.

Adding the video aspect of this work actually makes it MORE likely that the source material will be identifiable. You probably wouldn't be able to tell from 2-second audio-only snippet that a drum pattern was originally performed by Bernard Purdie, but when the audio is accompanied by the video footage of him actually playing it in one of his instructional videos, it gets a lot more identifiable.

The same could be said of the guy working at the QuikyMart. Do you treat them with the same 'respect' that you do the police?

'Respect', in sociological terms, is little more than acknowledgement of a power differential. It is irrefutable that at the moment when a police officer has stopped a citizen on suspicion, the police officer wields a lot more power.

The alleged drunk driver refused a breathalyzer test at the time, which some people consider an admission of guilt.

I dunno about "some people", but at least in the state I learned to drive in, it is written into law that refusing a breath test carries similar penalties as DWI.

Throw and equivalent amount of money at REAL RAM, such that your machine never swaps and everything will run much better.

This approach works, but only up to a point.

Sure, a system with a 64-bit address bus is theoretically capable of addressing 16 petabyes of RAM, but how many motherboards do you know of that have more than six or eight DIMM slots? I don't think they make 2-million-terabyte DDR3 sticks, yet...

This study would have carried more weight if it had included PostgreSQL and IBM's DB2. These two databases do more serious work than MySQL although many believe MySQL is more widely deployed.

"Study"? This is a book review.

Thanks for getting the "WHAT ABOUT POSTGRES" comment that must accompany every Slashdot story submission that mentions MySQL out of the way early, though.

There is no accuracy in coffee that expensive coffee is closer to than Sanka is.

Who says 'accuracy' is a desirable quality of a musical recording?

Certainly not the musicians who "punched in" re-takes of passages where they were unhappy with their first performance, or the producer who demanded that the singer's performance be processed with autotune, or the engineers who applied reverb, compression, and EQ to each recorded part individually, made volume adjustments to everything during mixdown, and then applied more compression and EQ to the finished product, or the CD duplicator that took the 48kHz/24-bit master DAT and transcoded it down to a 44.1kHz,16-bit master...

And don't tell me Fox doesn't know this, their syndication of The Simpson all through high school at 5 & 5:30 on weekdays was very popular.

It's worth pointing out, if it's not already clear to everyone, that daytime scheduling of syndicated content is done by the affiliate station, not by the network. So you may have got a double-dose of The Simpsons at 5:00 and 5:30PM watching Fox 5 WNYW in New York, but a viewer watching Fox-affiliated My13 KCOP in Los Angeles might only get a single episode, at 6:30PM.

"If J.J. Abrams' reboot is successful (and the latest trailer suggests it will be!) perhaps we'll see him involved with a new Star Trek TV show with the style and impact of Fringe or Lost."

Oh, you mean it will start off with a compelling premise, but it will eventually become clear that the writers are just making shit up as they go, and soon everyone (Abrams included) will have given up on it and moved on to the next new, compelling premise?

, a Wiley Interscience Publication. Xeroxing the articles under fair use from the library was free for me.

The Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Moment came when I checked online to find out how much it would cost to subscribe to [the Journal of Applied Polymer Sciences]. I thought someone misplaced a decimal point: $23,245 a year is the institutional subscription rate!

Sounds like an equilibrium of supply and demand to me.

Let's say that the JoAPS has five fulltime employees, plus another five people at Wiley Interscience whose duties are split among all their journals. It could easily take half a million dollars a year to keep the journal running. At their current rates, they'd need 20 institutional subscriptions just to break even.

If they sold the journal at a more typical newsstand rate, say $5/issue, how would they make money? Let's see, that would be 20 institutions at $60 a year, plus let's say another 50 institutions that decide to subscribe since it's affordable, plus ten independent polymer science hobbyists such as yourself... hmm, almost 1% of their expenses. I guess there would have to be some layoffs.

As I understand it, New York State already has a tax rule on the books that the customers residing in state should be taxed on downloads when the company delivering it maintains a "digital warehouse" in the state...

"I'm a library worker, so I get lots of questions about our collection when I'm out in the stacks. I'd love to be able to access our online catalog and give patrons more comprehensive guidance without directing them to the reference desk."

Okay, but how does your supervisor feel about that idea?

A reference librarian's entire job is to help patrons find relevant information, and they had to earn a graduate degree in the field in order to get that job. A "library worker", who has been tasked with re-shelving books in the stacks, is not a capable substitute. Even if he/she has a wifi-enabled PDA.

I've worked as a page myself, I know that patrons will always approach the first member of the library staff they spot. But when somebody has a reference question, the only appropriate response is to direct them to a reference librarian for assistance

Every slashdot user can divide 65 TB by the size of a DVD. Unfortunately, full-length movies are NOT a standard measure of storage space. Least of all on slashdot in the context of file-sharing.

Um, why not?

If the allegation is that this server (farm) was used primarily for distributing full-length movies, why would the data NOT be quantified in terms of the number of full-length movies?