Five minutes twenty seconds is a clumsy way of saying 320 seconds, or five and a third minutes..... Mixed units are a disaster, whether in engineering or in stories. How much is a liter? Oooh... about one quart and 1 and a bit ounces....

Why not? Humans originated there - send the remains back home, don't leave them littering the rest of the planet....

You mean like completely re-writing UNIX and calling the result something else, therefore not derivative?

That was Piltdown, several counties away.....

Untrue - clouds are regions of atmosphere containing water droplets sufficiently small to stay suspended but sufficiently large to obscure vision - or scatter visible light. Water vapor is invisible, being water behaving as a gas mixed with the air. By analogy, cloud computing will allow you to hide where you do your computing; vaporware will be completely invisible. But of course it will cost more....

Having read at least one of the arxiv articles, it is clear to me that the authors have NOT detected magnetic monopoles, and don't actually claim that they have. They claim that a certain type of ordering in a very specific crystal at very low temperatures BEHAVES AS IF it was a magnetic monopole - it's an analogy at best. The energy required to trigger the effect is minute, so they can "see" lots of MMAs (magnetic monopole analogs [my terminology]), and hence study what would happen if lots of REAL MMs existed in some other situation. They confirm that setting up Maxwell's equations to include a monopole shows the same sorts of behavior as what they see. But a real, isolated magnetic monopole? Not this time......

Yes, from the author's point of view that is fair and reasonable. The problems arise when "rights" are held after an author is dead, or by persons/companies who are not the author. If an author does NOT recover the copyright when the publisher decides to stop making the book available for sale the author has lost all hope of any further rewards. Copyright law should surely make it obligatory for a copyright-holder to release the copyright, either to the author or to the public, when it no longer wishes to publish the work. In that way copyright law (a public policy) would protect the interest of the public, which has protected the rights of the copyright holder, once it no longer wishes to make the work available itself.