That's a good point. I think everyone being sold on Perl 6 fixing Perl 5's issues and then ... not ... left us all with the impression that Perl 5 has issues that would never be fixed, to which we all reacted as one would expect and abandoned it for something else nice and shiny. With their own problems that will never be fixed.

Oh god. I just got the image of Rails written in Mono. Pardon me while I stumble around feeling for the mind bleach.

So, that's an interesting question. Initially, yes, gasoline would be required. But as the technology got better, a lot of those large earth movers would start to see thorium power plants in them and thus we'd have "free" mining. In short, as we get more and more, we'll use less and less oil. Yaaaay!

And to those looking for said cached copies: http://web.archive.org/web/20101023072550/http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/congratulations_google

I don't believe this law actually says what TFA says it does. Read it. The para in particular is under a subhead of "Investigation companies" and, elsewhere, I've seen the shrill explanation that the State might decide that the troubleshooting process is "investigation" or that merely seeing the data constitutes "investigating." I don't think that's the case and, as the owner of a PC shop who was considering going into forensics only to trip over this, I've actually consulted several lawyers about it already.

I think this is a grand publicity stunt perpetrated by a PAC and a couple of tag-along PC shops. Read the Institute for Justice's PR piece about this. At no point does it explain the legal reasoning; it just states the story as though it's established fact. Notice also that none of the shops in their lawsuit have actually been told that they need a PI license; they are all "concerned" that the state "might."

Even better, notice that the Inst. for Justice is taking this opportunity to open a new branch in Texas. This, really, is just their PR blast announcing that fact, and they've dreamed up this crazy talk to make it bigger news.

It's a PR stunt, plain and simple, and a piss poor one at that. And the PC shops going along with it should be horribly, horribly ashamed of themselves for taking part.