The citizens of Oregon own the laws, the computers they were typeset on, and everything else the Legislature does or uses - unless the Legislature is funded by some other source which would make it unique among states (No - let's not get into the "funded by lobbyists" thread). They paid for them to be published; I should think they also have the right to have digital copies.

What I want to know is:

is the theme music for Aqua Leung by Jethro Teull?

@Jeff: I hope you're being facetious, and really aren't the culturally-deprived sort who wouldn't recognize Takuan's "rap/poem" as the Rev. Al Green's soul classic "Let's Stay Together".

(Note to moderators: in the paragraph above I do not intend culturally-deprived as a mocking phrase but rather as a description of fact; some people have been deprived of exposure to some of the better - in this case - aspects of American culture)

Dang it.. I just moved, 41 years ago, from the Pioneer Valley, and now two of my favorite creators show up!

If you have time, and you don't mind giving Six Flags some money: Six Flags New England, across the river in Agawam (my home town) still has one of the best of the old wooden-frame roller coasters around.

If you're really up for cruisin' around, the Berkshires would be a pretty sight; watch for Alice's Restaurant in Stockbridge and/or Arlo Guthrie. The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge is pretty nice too, as is the Red Lion Inn (ancient coach inn but a lonnng wait for lunch!)

Springfield is also the home of Dr. Seuss - who could be considered a science fiction author due to the fact that he invented a few never-heard-of species and peoples in his books along with incredibly advanced cleaning technology (The Cat In The Hat's "Voom")

Everyone should wesr dark blue jackets with large 'WC PS' (Wikimedia Commons Photo Shoot) on the back, crew cuts, and a black earbud in one. Women should have short no-nonsense hair, men should emulate DiNozo on the American television show NCSI.

Seriously, though - the photosynth idea is good. It would also be good to put these photos into an open-source or University graphics lab project to build 3-D models from 2-D photos. I once saw software from Paul Debevec that took a set of 3-D photos and build a realistic 3-D model from them. He is now at http://www.debevec.org/ but I am not sure he's still working in that particular area of graphics (and it got famous so he may not need the help, I'm just posting him as an example).

Think of the possibilities for open-source game development if there's a large open source of 3D models for major cities.

I'm sure, though I can't find it on his site, that this is the gentleman who made the incredible kinetic sculpture named "Celestial Balldergarten" which sits in the Philadelphia airport near the baggage claim. I watched, fascinated, for quite some time after I had arrived there one day.

Has anyone taken the open-sourced SL client and created something which will work on lower-end graphics boards? Until recently I had only the Intel graphics built into my motherboard - which SL states it will not work. Then, I needed to upgrade the board to handle a larger LCD monitor - but since I don't do much on the high-end graphics side (A mainframe tech-head, I tend to be command-line and keyboard oriented) I opted for the lowest-cost board which would do the job.

In my opinion, SL could benefit from allowing different clients, even if some of them are Clints and Brandies (see Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson)

Hmmm can they further this research and discover why so many women love 'Bad Boys' and/or "love" their abusers (who would certainly be considered toxic!) so much they won't leave?

The preponderance of blue and grey may have something to do with using these things at night and/or with sunglasses on.

I don't have a fancy in-dash stereo, but on my Pontiac Vibe (manufactured for GM by Toyota, it's basically a Matrix) the radio/CD has a red graphic LED display. I could not read the display with my previous set of sunglasses, that had a coating which blocked a lot of red.

I do wonder if they actually do usability testing for car interiors - it would be a good idea. The best would be to force the design engineers to drive around in that design for a month or two of regular day-to-day stuff. "Eating your own dog food" has incredible design-improvement powers.

There's another professor, Dr. Robert Rannie from Northern Illinois University, who is a member of SHARE an IBM user group I'm also a member of. For years he gave training at the conference for session speakers (especially first-timers) and his simple mantra works very well.

Tell them what you're going to tell them.
Tell them.
Tell them what you told them.

in other words, the introduction skims the topics you'll cover; you cover it; then you summarize.

Shoot, I thought it was a Burma Shave revival, but no follow-on signs....

Just curious - are there ads?

Atom! The Atom syndication format is not only XML, but an Internet RFC exists for it, making it pretty much a "standard". Export to Atom, import from Atom. That handles the content issue, only, though it can also address the URL scheme issue as we should expect the Import tool to deal with that. The various template conversions I'm not so sure about, though I believe it could be done.

Perhaps I'm oversimplifying this in my mind, but, since DTrace runs on x86 hardware, and since DTrace is available for *nix variants on x86 hardware, and since OS X is a *nix variant, wouldn't it be fairly easy for someone else to port a different DTRace to OS X and defeat this?

Cory - no mention of "The Roads Must Roll"?

@Boinkboink3000: I disagree that Wikipedia's point is anti-expertise, rather I think the point is more to harness the collective effort of thousands, including experts should they choose to contribute.

@all: In general, what Google seems to be saying (to me) is that authors should get credit for their articles. They should also get blame for bad ones. The Web, in general, is still in the throes of evolving the so-called "reputation economy" where certain author's or creator's content is valued more (not necessarily in an economic sense) because that person or group of persons has a reputation for providing accurate or quality content.

So, why not? Why not invite all these people by for some egg nog? The worst they could do would be to say 'sorry, I've got other plans'.

@Cory (sorta)

The copyright fight is beginning to remind me of A.E. Van Vogt's SF short story "The Weapons Shop" where the only sane thing to do is to ignore the law.

Someone at Wal-Mart read "The Long Tail" and realized that they could benefit from infinite shelf space and by making it easier for customers to buy things, which of course makes it easier to sell things.

This is one of those (rare? but I don't have numbers to back it up) cases where business advantage actually benefits the consumer.

Holy Avogadro Guacamole, Batman!
Great reference!

How about a DRM-based payment system?

When the content gets revoked, you revoke your money: a message is sent to the bankers to let them know the little electronic bits you gave to the company are no longer worth anything.

The lawyers say "the value of a thing, is what that thing will bring". Therefore, if the value of the content is zero, it should bring zero, shouldn't it?

Now, let's crawl up the arm, Alvin.
Alvin? Alvin! ALVINNNNNN!

Forget the mashups, I want shares of Harriman. Preferably backed by acres of lunar real estate.

Without wanting to start any religious arguments (so please don't): atheism for some people is as much a matter of faith as religion is - people take it as an article of faith that a god does not exist, without any proof.

I am an agnostic: I don't know, one way or another.

One of my favorite bumper stickers (seen around town, I don't have one unfortunately) read "Radical Agnostic: I don't know and you don't either!"

Um - the link leads o a site that's NSFW (at least, my work)..

I've heard that Ted Stevens is an investor in Row 44 and that Row 44's technology involves a very long Internet tube connecting the plane to the ground over the entire flight path, with special "gold-level" service when flying to the island served by the Bridge to Nowhere.

Perhaps this is like the statutes here in Florida? The information is owned by the public, however one company copyrighted the formatting of their electronic version. I believe that's been resolved now in favor of us, the citizens, since you can search statutes online now - but it could be a similar thing. The case to make is that the public of the US has already bought and paid for that database, through our tax-supported creation of it.

Does anyone else thing that there are no real policies and procedures for these TSA folk, and that each airport's TSA office is run in a different way - but you can't know what way, because it would "compromise security" for you to know what's going on?

It sounds to me like the LAX TSA office is run by Skroeder (if you've seen the movie you'll understand) or the Chicago SWAT team from the Blues Brothers movie "hut! hut! hut! hut!"

Oh, man....

I saw this car at the Miami Auto Show somewhere between 1968 and 1970. I was fourteen or fifteen, that age when most teenage males lust for two things only - and you could get into the show to see the cars easier than the shows to see the live nude girls!

It was really cool at the time.

Here's a link to what it looked like.

I never missed the comments much.. and the site seems slower. Is that because it's being commented to death?

The design is not bad, but the other one seemed more fun somehow.