Sure I'm already paying levies on blank media (€9 for a TB HD and €0.59 per DVD (yes that's 60% of the retail price)) here in Belgium.

However, it's still illegal to download or upload a song or movie.
The levy is just used to "compensate" for making copies of copyrightable material. Yes, for personal copies/backups of the data.

From the article of the original slashdotted article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/09/AR2010090907747.html)

"Shaffer's book was reviewed and cleared in writing by the Army Reserve earlier this year."

They did clear it. Afterwards they realized they forgot something and are paying for the damages of the first run.

They were always willing to cooperate but they already made the first run. It's just the DoD paying for the damages of forgetting to censor something in the book beforehand.

I'm counting a good part of my college education into those 10,000 hours. (comp sci & engineering)

I'll post the same thing here that I posted on Digg yesterday. This was the first month Telenet was offering an Unlimited (fair use) subscription (the previous download cap was 100GB). I'm sure many people tried to download as much as possible just to see if there was a hidden download maximum and if they would get capped at a lower speed. The real mass downloaders are on different ISPs that have offered unlimited for many years now. And FTA: Telenet has not posted this information as a complaint of what they have to deal with, but to give us "a better picture of what exactly is possible with this new way of surfing." FYI Turbonet costs 61 per month for 30 Mbps download & 1,25 Mbps upload speed. Fibernet is a bit more expensive for 50Mbps

I get up to 675KB/s download speed on my 6Mb/s connection (that's the maximum; when I'm downloading big files from a good server)

675 * 1.1 (ATM overhead) = 742KB/s = 5.94 Mb/s

Unfortunately when I upgraded to a 12Mb/s connection I remained capped at the previous speed because "I'm too far away from the central".

Replying to my own comment.

The minesweeper consistency problem is actually NP-complete. That problem consists of trying to find a mine-solution to the numbers on a grid.
http://www.claymath.org/Popular_Lectures/Minesweeper/

NP-complete (= NP hard + in NP) means: As hard or even harder than any other NP problem. (so they're the most difficult of any NP problem) if P=NP, then they're actually pretty easy to solve since it's in NP thus also in P. if P!=NP then they're the most difficult to solve of any NP problems, so there's no polynomial time solution. (or else every NP problem would have a P solution and thus P=NP) the unsolvablity of minesweeper has nothing to do with its complexity.

Yes, Korean law states that (in non legal terms): You may do what you want with what you bought.

Kespa (korean e-sports association) ran SC:BW tournaments for many years on LAN and Blizzard couldn't do anything about that. Now that they would have to connect to the blizzard servers to play, Kespa would need to have authorization to host tournaments (which they won't get because Blizzard has already chosen GomTV to organize the tournaments)

SVD-decomposition : my try (shouldn't it be SV-decomposition anyway?)

A matrix is a rectangle filled with numbers. An SVD, changes the matrix in 3 other matrices. The middle one has a hole bunch of zeros. The first and last one have the same numbers in different order. We can use those 3 matrices to do stuff easier than with the original one.

Let me know if he understands it.

But your permutations aren't equally likely!

Prob[boy,girl] = Prob[boy,boy] = 1/3

Prob[boy,girl] = Prob[Named Boy, girl]
but Prob[boy,boy] != Prob[Named Boy, boy]

It's the "you're wrong or you're right => 1/2" all over again.

It's been a while since I read the full article (and IANAPhysicist), but it was about a 1 kg laptop with a 1 liter volume. (don't think about a laptop, thing about a cube of energy that can calculate stuff really fast) Sure you could make a thousand of them and put them in a 1 m cube. And a billion of those to make a km cube, but that's only increasing the computations by 10^12 = 2^40, which would barely come close to breaking 1 AES-256 enrypted file in a a few days.

However, this is the absolute limit to computation. The computer already has an internal energy of E=mc^2 = 8.9*10^16J (for 1 kg) at 10^9 Kelvin.

Yes, but you can predict limits to the (currently accepted) laws of physics.

Ultimate Physical limits to computation, Seth Lloyd - Nature, vol 406, 31 august 2000 (hopefully not too outdated)

a quote from the article: "The ultimate laptop performs 5.4258 * 10^50 logical operations per second." (that's about 2^170)
You can definitely predict limits to computation. Even the most powerful machine would need a long time to go though all combinations of AES-256.

It's not necessary to switch liter/gallon and kilometer/mile. The necessary conversion is to express it in gpm instead of mpg (gallon used per mile travelled instead of mile per gallon)

The specific units only cause a constant factor.

That's certainly possible.

The big problem I believe is that there are so many different operating systems (Symbian, iPhone OS, Android...) that all have a part of the market. Being able to write a virus/find a backdoor to control 90% of PCs is very profitable. Just like there are not many people writing virusses for Mac OS or Linux, there are not many viruses for mobile phones (yet).