Are you kidding? I give you the following argument: 1) Homo sapiens will have sex with ANYTHING. 2) Homo sapiens is a significant step up in attractiveness from homo neanderthalensis (as evidenced by Discovery's impeccable reconstructions of homo neanderthalensis). 3) Things like to do things that are more attractive than they are. 4) By 2 and 3, homo neanderthalensis liked to do homo sapiens. 5) By 1 and 4, I give you a pair of beings that want to do one another. I see no significant leap of faith necessary to conclude that sex was had.

You think that robots who developed secret malicious intent without our knowledge couldn't figure out how to remove their off switches?

Fools. FOOLS.

It's worth pointing out that this is not the "death of the campus computer lab". While ITC, UVa's university-wide information technology department, is going to be removing public computer labs, individual schools will still host their own school-specific computer labs. For instance, the McIntire School of Commerce will continue running four student labs for various important reasons that appear to be overlooked in Slashdot's summary. Here's a couple that came to mind in the brief five minutes' thought I gave this, so if anything turns out to be retarded, sorry:

1) Software: The school makes use of significant amounts of financial and otherwise business-oriented software which would simply be too burdensome for students to be responsible for purchasing and setting up themselves. It seems that this must be the case for other schools such as engineering and computer science.

2) Teaching Space: Labs are commonly used by professors in teaching classes which require technology-specific instruction or classwork which requires that users be capable of networking with one another over the local area network, such as trading simulation software.

3) Excuse Prevention: Students currently have access to virus and malware free computers 24/7. They cannot claim to be unable to complete their classwork due to personal computer failure. Not only is all of the necessary software accessable 24/7, but their data is capable of being stored on school network drives (which are accessable by the students from home) as well.

4) Reduction of IT Overhead: If students are required to make use of their home computers for their classwork, it seems as though the school will inevitably be required to service these home computers. This may be easily done for students who simply use Microsoft Office on Windows machines, but when school specific software is involved (and if anyone here has been in IT support for a business school, for example, they know all about the quality of business software out there...) it could quickly become a nightmare.

I'm actually interested to hear if anyone has coherent suggestions as to how musicians might make money without royalties from albums - or if anyone feels like the free download of music doesn't impact the royalties from these albums significantly, or somesuch.

You always read/hear people saying that the RIAA has a "fatally flawed business model", and I think that's true. It does seem like there's going to be very little in the means of defense of intellectual property in the future. However, instead of laughing and pointing at the RIAA, does anyone have good ideas for business models that take this into account and are still able to succeed? This will impact more than just the RIAA. What happens when scholars can't sell books because as soon as it's published, it's on the interwebs for free?

In short: How do people out there on Slashdot feel about the decline of intellectual property rights and does anyone have any good solutions to the problems that this would hypothetically (I'm open to these problems being non-issues, too, if someone can demonstrate it) plague those who depend on intellectual property for their survival?