My understanding is that things written into the constitution (or via amendment, such as the 2nd) are harder to change than laws. That's why amendments are rarely added or repealed, whereas run-of-the-mill laws change more readily with changes in technology/culture. Repealing the second amendment couldn't even be done by the supreme court, it would take 2/3 support in the legislative bodies as well as 3/4 support by individual state's legislatures. (Not that the drastic difference between laws and constitutional amendments really makes sense to me, but hey, *I* didn't write the dang thing...)

I think you misinterpreted what Justice Alito said - he *wanted* to hear the case; that sentence comes from his dissent. He would prefer to reexamine the laws which were written before a new medium was available (or at least widely available).

This is a great point. If you're going to do the mental gymnastics to translate a question (Is ___ possible?) to a threat, then you ought to be capable of *also* realizing this is a joke. Either take things at face value or don't; self-translating someone's sentence into a threat just for a prosecution is garbage.

And in 1985, John Crowley wrote a short story titled "Snow" with the same idea. A miniature recorder captures all the video (no audio, if I recall) but due to the recording method used to save space in the recorder, moments can only be accessed randomly. It's part of the collection "Masterpieces," edited by Orson Scott Card.

Until then, keep working, dammit!

I think it's more the extra energy costs that led to using scarring rather than regeneration. It's my understanding (having taken 1 biomaterials class) that scarring is also a relatively useful response in most situations; that is, it usually is a sub-par solution to the problem, but since it works the same everywhere on the body, that's an advantage. It can also happen far more quickly than regeneration, I would assume. Either way, this will be an interesting development to follow - who knows what side effects we'll find?!

Don't forget Fantastic Mr. Fox! I think that might have been my favorite movie of 2009, not just my favorite kids' movie, and definitely worth seeing if you missed it.

I'm not sure I follow. Nowhere in the article did it mention using first amendment rights, nor do I really think it applies here. It's not debatable whether people were posting copywrited songs; the debate is whether the site was actively encouraging this behavior and thus responsible enough to be sued.

Here's a work-around for ya: http://www.mactimes.info/2009/06/how-to-run-multiple-instances-of-vlc_06.html I don't use a Mac so I can't try it myself to make sure it works, but it might help.

The argument is that the use of deadly force is not allowed if the burglar isn't an immediate threat to the life of someone; and if you can't use deadly force yourself when they enter, you cannot do it through a mechanical device, either. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney (The legal briefs linked on the bottom will probably be more useful). Obviously this ruling is by-state, and I have no idea about non-US countries.

"The latest feat, being presented at a supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., doesn't mean the computer thinks like a cat, or that it is the progenitor of a race of robo-cats." See, this is why no one on /. reads TFA; when we do, we're habitually disappointed! I'd much rather blindly believe the summary...

If you catch something stationary while you move, you won't increase your momentum; nor will you increase your kinetic energy. I don't care how much you want it to be akin to tacking into the wind, it won't work.

Of course, on your little holiday everyone would be going that speed, so you wouldn't be disrupting the flow at all. In fact, you'd probably find that there'd be far fewer accidents that day, and every day if people continued to drive slower (increased time to react, etc). But most people don't care about safety; they care about convenience, so it doesn't matter.

I'm truly jealous. The CFD team is off-site, and most of the time they take 2 weeks to tell us they couldn't get a solution to converge, and request we try to simplify our setup to match their virtual one. Of course, there's always the possibility that we're just the group that's hard to deal with, and not them!

Maybe it's because I happen to be an experimentalist (and we're always at odds with the theorists/ computer simulation/ computational analysis groups) but shouldn't Cui and Cheng's names be attached with the summary? I mean, having the idea for a box that won't let light escape is great, but actually building it is far more impressive to me.