Traffic control in the age of private automobile ownership is virtually impossible. In the last century, we moved from hand-built, slow-moving, one-off curiosities to mass-produced, mainstream, consumer death machines. Any 16 year old can legally buy a used car from a "dealer" down the street--a car that can go much faster than the speed limit on any road on the United States, can violate any number of traffic laws, and which can be used to maim or kill. All laws involving automobiles are therefore utterly futile and should be repealed.

While enforcement is easier when the line between "legal" and "illegal" coincides with the line between "technically feasible" and "technically impractical", it is not a strict requirement. Confusing social problems with technical problems generally leads to sloppy thinking and bad policy.

About a third of the human population lives less than 100 metres above sea level. Most live below 200 metres. (The median living altitude for humans on earth is given as 194 metres - 636 feet - in this 1998 paper; if anything, it's likely to have shifted downward in the years since, as the majority of the world's rapidly-growing, largest cities are coastal.) In any event, you weren't quoting 4000-foot numbers; you were quoting figures for outer space. Have you even looked at what you wrote, or the source that you linked to?

Dude. Just give it a rest. The original poster explicitly said "At 100% efficiency...". No one said that an ideal visible light source existed; the point was to put a hard floor on the power requirement.

While I admit that I have a certain morbid curiosity about how long you're going to keep trying to contort your comments so that you can be 'right', I figure that you're out of useful things to say now that you're struck your second I'm-a-super-duper-expert-and-can't-be-wrong pose in lieu of evidence. I'm going to go talk to people who are interesting, now.

When you say "work with", I really hope that you're not getting paid very much. Or that you pay a bit closer attention to your work when it's for money. Or that a grownup is checking your figures for you before you hand in your homework.

The original poster, Emperor Arthur, gave you the correct numbers in his very first comment. Since then you've screwed up twice in an increasingly ineffective campaign to persuade us all that you're smarter than everyone else, instead of thinking about the problem or looking up (confirming) the correct figures. First you forgot to acknowledge that a backlight doesn't need to outshine the infrared component of the solar spectrum. Then you went roaring off in a different direction, forgetting that the majority of ebook readers are used on the Earth's surface, and not above the atmosphere.

Seriously, when you're in a hole, stop digging.

Of course, since you read the article, you already know that that hypothetical scenario is irrelevant to the current case. In this instance, the technician who constructed the trap had been called out to service one of his previous installations; the owner of the vehicle complained that the trap wouldn't open. The technician drilled into the compartment and eventually managed to get it open. He discovered that the reason the trap wouldn't open was that it was stuffed over-full with cash: more than $800,000.

Not only did the technician repair the cash-stuffed trap, he later constructed three additional ones for the same client. Granted, the entire trap business in the U.S. operates under a sort of determined wilful blindness, but once you start drilling into million-dollar bricks of cash you really push the boundaries of plausible deniability.

Actually, it's plenty. The number of lost parcels should be, roughly speaking, a Poisson distributed statistic. If we assume a fixed rate of parcel loss, the number of parcels lost from any given batch of shipments should come in at that rate, plus or minus some noise. For this type of statistical distribution, the standard deviation from batch to batch is approximately the square root of the expectation value.

For 178 parcels (89 under each condition) the observed losses were 1 parcel (1.1%) for non-atheist packages, and 9 parcels (10%) for atheist packages. If we suppose that the actual loss rate is between those two extremes, we get a loss rate of about 5.5%, and an expected loss of 5 parcels per batch of 89 parcels.

The standard deviation for that batch size is the square root of 5, or about 2.2; the two observations that we have are both about two standard deviations away from the expectation value. The likelihood of pulling a random value this far from the expectation value by chance is about 5%; the likelihood of it happening twice is 5% squared: about 0.03%.

Feel free to twiddle with different expectation values and expected loss rates; you'll find the odds are strongly against these values coming up by chance.

Roughly 80 parcels and roughly 40 days' delay means that the mean was increased by about half a day. Discarding that one outlying datum, the atheist packages still would have averaged 2.5 days longer for delivery. Among the ones that were delivered at all....

Seriously.

So, 11% of ideas were so bad (either inherently, or the execution of their campaigns) that they didn't get a single pledge. You mean Kickstarter isn't just a faucet for the infinite pile of money stored in the magic cloud?

Taking the briefest of looks at the article, I see roughly 38,000 projects funded so far, and a shade under 50,000 not (or not yet) funded. That's a success rate of better than forty percent. (If you drop all of the egregiously dumb ideas, joke build-the-Death-Star campaigns, and other totally unfundable crap, that means that something like half of all the projects having any merit whatsoever are managing to get all of the money that they were looking for.) I had no idea that Kickstarter actually worked so well. Is this 'article' actually some sort of guerilla marketing move?

I would say that the car industry had failed if listening to the wrong radio station - tuning 92.3 instead of 92.5, say - allowed a malicious broadcaster to arbitrarily incinerate the contents of my trunk or assume remote control of my vehicle.

Moreover, you really couldn't even be bothered to do a simple Google search before you shot your mouth off, could you?

In a way, you're actually making Schneier's point. Posting a snarky Slashdot comment is easy and instantly gratifying; doing the least bit of research is a little bit harder and doesn't pay off immediately -- so you can see which happens more often.

As an aside, I'll note that something doesn't have to be illegal for it to be ethically questionable. "Not forbidden by law" and "not wrong" are categories that generally have some mutual overlap, but should not be conflated. From a technical standpoint, I believe sociologists and psychologists refer to individuals who define their personal morality solely by what is or is not illegal as "assholes".

[citation needed], please. I assume that you can actually show some real examples of first-edition hardcovers with preprinted "bestseller" covers, right?

A common formulation I see on covers is "By the bestselling author..." or "By the bestselling author of Foo...", both of which can be true before the book is printed.

Another option is to print a "bestseller" dust jacket for the second print run. (In principle, the dust jackets on the original first editions could even be replaced with the "bestseller" jackets, but I doubt that anyone goes to the trouble.)

Another variation is to affix a "bestseller" sticker to the cover of the first edition, after the book makes the bestseller list.

Yet another possibility is that the hardcover made its bestseller list, allowing the first print run of the trade paperback or mass-market paperback editions to bear the "bestseller" tag.

This is a cute idea, but I suspect it would be doomed to failure unless one is living in, say, a dorm at MIT or Caltech. Such a letter is going to at best confuse, and at worst scare the hell out of, any of your older, less technology-savvy, or limited-English-speaking neighbors.

And honestly, one wonders how many poorly-secured access points there really are in the neighborhood, if the criminal is willing to go to so much effort to steal wifi from the Slashdot poster posing this question.

In Adam Turner's article (on which the blog post linked in the Slashdot summary is based) Microsoft declares that " If the customer has a system crash, they are allowed to reinstall Office on that same computer..." but with the caveat, "No, the customer cannot transfer the license from one PC to another PC." Sounds like I'm allowed to upgrade my computer, and I'm allowed to replace broken parts...I just can't "transfer" the license between PCs.

Who knows the way to fix an old Fiat?

Step 1: Raise hood.
Step 2: Turn the radiator cap counterclockwise until fully loosed.
Step 3: Lift radiator cap straight up, at least six inches.
Step 4: Remove old Fiat from under radiator cap. Replace with new Fiat.
Step 5: Screw radiator cap back in place.
Step 6: Close hood.

Clearly, the solution in this situation is similar. Disconnect your mouse. Replace the computer underneath. Plug in a new computer. The license, obviously, transferred with the Theseus-mouse.

The story linked from the Slashdot article mostly just summarizes Turner's already-concise (but still more-detailed) article, and wraps it in a different set of ads.

Almost almost right... In the article at the top of this discussion, the least restrictive (that is, the most permissive) license choice given was CC-BY. It - and indeed, all three licenses listed - require that attribution be preserved as a condition of reuse. That said, I'm on board with most of the rest of your comment. If we look at how most scientists expect and hope their published papers to be used, then even the no-derivative-works, non-commercial-only CC-BY-NC-ND license works just fine.

The need for appropriate attribution of others' work and ideas is already very deeply rooted in the sciences. In writing a paper for publication, one very seldom needs or wants to directly copy more than a few words from another author's work. Such limited, clearly-attributed, de minimus copying is already considered permissible, desirable fair use even when drawn from entirely non-free works.

Further, copyright doesn't cover ideas, but only their specific form of expresssion, so paraphrasing of descriptive material in non-free works is generally non-infringing of copyright--but still requires proper attribution for the purposes of academic publishing. Similarly, copyright doesn't protect simple facts (the mass of the proton was measured as such-and-such) but again academic publishers will expect such claims to be properly attributed.

A professor giving a lecture, or a scientist giving a talk at a conference, may lift figures wholesale from other authors' non-free work, as long as appropriate attribution is given; this sort of 'remixing' into a derivative work is taken to be fair use in an educational setting. (About the only place this bumps up against copyright issues is where this sort of material gets bundled into courseware packs that are sold by a university or other publisher.)

The writer of a review article may occasionally seek permission from another author to reprint a figure, but generally such material is included by reference to the original work, rather than by direct copying. Partly this is for the prosaic and increasingly-less-relevant purpose of limiting the length of printed papers, and partly this is for the entirely noble and worthy purpose of encouraging a reader to review a figure in its full context.

In truth, the expectations of the academic and scientific publishing communities regarding proper attribution and avoiding plagiarism already impose more stringent (but still generally reasonable) restrictions on most reuse of published papers than any license. For the purposes of disseminating and reusing scientific knowledge, it is far more constructive for papers to be gratis than libre.