The only possible objection to republishing laws is that there's an onus on Justia to keep their mirrored version of the statute up to date, or emblazon it with a message like

"this was the law as of xx.xx.2008 when we took this mirror copy - refer to http:// for an authoritative version"

Laws shouldn't published to derive income from the actual text of the law, it's not their function.

@2: exactly. I had two Activia live yogurts for dessert yesterday evening, and I nearly turned myself in to the authorities.

could someone clarify - is it illegal to go to an Apple store, hand over $155 for a Leopard DVD, and then install it on non-Mac hardware, or is it simply that Apple have no support obligations toward you if you do that - and if a software update breaks your Frankenmac in the same way updates tend to brick a hacked iPhone - then that's your luck out, buddy - but not actually something they could come after you in the courts about?

there was a particularly disgraceful incident where two of these Hobby Bobbies watched a drowning without intervening, following best practices in health and safety.

"... PCSOs have been well trained to overcome the natural human instinct to save a drowning child. Trained not to attempt something for which they had not been trained."

http://snipurl.com/24v48 [www.timesonline.co.uk]

Oregon claims copyright over the typesetting and numbering of the laws rather than the actual text of the laws themselves.

This robust legal argument was first used between Alice and the White Knight [Carroll,1865] to distinguish between a) the song, b) the name of the song, and c) what the name of the song is called.

This bag is part of a Maker project aimed at detecting the quantum goldfish tunneling effect.

It raises an interesting question though - is there a paying audience for such a thing?

Hopefully Apple treat it as an opportunity to have this company conduct free market research for me, and they scrutinize their success under the magnifying glass for a few months (before the legal team pulls the lens back and burns them to a crisp.)

To quote the authors response to a complaint:

“If you are good at the Internet, this book is useless”, adding that [the customer] simply should not have bought it.

It reminds me of a second hand bookstore I found in Edinburgh one summer that sold books like groceries -- you take what you want to the front desk and they weigh it and price it at £1.50/pound or so.

I think the RAND corporation is still king of the computer generated book, with their epic treatise,

"A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates"

ISBN/EAN: 0-8330-3047-7
(availabile in paperback for $90.00)

The British cattle in the Foot and Mouth outbreak were slaughtered due to the way international trade is set up modeling the prisoners dilemma.

eg. countries where Foot and Mouth is not endemic a) don't want to pay for vaccines b) use the fact their herd is not inoculated as a reason to ban imports from places where the disease occurs.

so although in prinicple we could have let the disease run its course and live with the loss in value of the meat, or deploy the proven vaccine and halt the outbreak that way - we then couldn't export beef to disease-free Europe or have a credible excuse to block cheap beef imports from Africa.

Hence the mass slaughter.

That is an idiot idea. Google "Pirbright Laboratory" for how the UK learnt about this the hard way.

---

Yep! It just got me with that message trying to post this comment.

I guess the "Text entered is wrong" is referring to a type="hidden" field in the form, and the error message is directed at the programmer rather than the person who is commenting.

Please could Boing-Boing provide an error message that is meaningful to the user, or save the comment and prompt to log-in again? "Text entered is wrong" is subliminal for "trash your apartment with a frying pan" and many of us mortals are falling foul of this insidious instruction.

I'm glad Sheldrake is OK and it sounds like he's going to make a full recovery, it must be terrible for anyone to get stabbed at random like that.

I'm not altogether surprised there was a schizophrenic in the audience at fringe "science" conference, though. I saw an interview with James Randy, who said part of the reason he's stopping his $10 million challenge for demonstrating E.S.P / psychic phenomena was because many of the applicants were just straight-forward mentally ill, and there's no sport in "outing" them.

There's a fine line between people who can't or choose not to intuit the difference between fantasy and reality in the context of a particular field and those who are generally two quarks short of a baryon.

Boeing might make powerpoints claiming running out of oil doesn't matter, they'll just rebrand as Soylent Airways ... but what do the Belgians have to say about it?

It might be slightly more realistic to start with the actual area of land that is available for bio-jetfuel, and then project out how big the world air-fleet is going to be once we're over peak oil?

Do we believe that algae will be 167 times the efficiency of soya at capturing the suns energy, as opposed to "up to", and do the figures for algae (and soya) include the use of petro-derived fertilizers that have a similar availability as the oil they're trying to replace?

I'm sure it's great PR for Branson, and that asking these questions can be confused for unbridled negativity, but it actually matters we're getting this right before our governments start handing out subsidies to do crazy things that sound plausible but don't add up in the cold light of day.

According to the previous sensationalist newspaper article I read, they were planning to mix a strong cyanide solution and some acid rather than use explosives -- a plausible attack although I don't know whether it'd get the pilots.

The BBC is reporting 6/8 had recorded suicide/martyrdom videos --

In the UK it's a crime to plan attacks like this even if you get caught before you go through with it - so the accused do have a case to answer and it's right they're on trial.

This is a case of cover-your-behind, so if one of these things turns up in the hands of a "terrrist group or nation" then Fuji have someone identified as the fall-guy who did the re-exporting, separate from them.

I think it's a federal crime with five years in jail if you sell something that gets re-exported to a "terrist" blacklisted group or nation. Gotta love GW.

make him fly some more missions and ask him again.

...and they're trying to crank out a glueball.

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0954-3899/32/9/L01/g6_9_l01.pdf

@21: and the Department of Defence needs the G7 processor to ("steward") design the next generation nuclear warheads to do all that holocausting with!

Hopefully the ban is a tactic to get co-operation from IBM by the government agency, and it gets resolved either because it turns out no-one did anything illegal, or some individual did something illegal - rather than the whole organisation is rated equivalent to the worst member.

If we applied that logic we'd ban all Americans from ever visiting Europe because a couple of them started an illegal war based on false information, etc.

+ I wonder how well thought out the long-term consequences of that move are - The US government and military are probably too reliant on IBM products to simply refuse to do business with them indefinitely.

Who made this decision, did they ring round their colleagues in other branches of the government and check --

"hey, we're thinking of banning IBM contracts...

...yep, that's right, something that'll block your work too even though your bids and contracts could be entirely above board....

...Why? Because we're going to presumptively assume someone's pulled the wool over your eyes and your employees are taking bribes, just because we think that's what happening in our department

... Mainly to deflect the bad press from us.

... What's your opinion on that?"

Or is someone at the EPA/DHS being a hot-shot?

You entered the premises with an unlicensed photographic device at 9.20 AM, with the premeditated aim of taking pictures without proper license.

You then fled the scene once challenged. This is tantamount to admitting guilt for the Camden market arson attacks barely a month before.

... too bad you had to boast of your crimes on your "online forum". Citizen Doctorow: I am performing an internet arrest and reporting you to KEN LIVINGSTONE.

I'm glad you followed up on this story, these are the same people who until a week ago wanted to take biometric data and fingerprint each and every passenger before allowing them to fly, for purposes of counter-terrrism and 'mmigration

I think the government and corporations collecting lots of personal data is a very bad idea, not solely because I wear a tin-foil hat and think they're going to use it for some unspecified nefarious purpose, but because they're likely not competent to handle computer systems properly as evidenced by the baggage cock-up.

That's just a really sad story. Probably the kid was not seriously jeopardized, but the even so heartless of the TSA people, it's untrue.

The whole reason we employ human beings to do jobs is because they can (and should) use discretion and common sense in doing their job.

I was listening to Stephen Fry's potcast and he claimed he was forced to remove the plaster cast from his his broken arm before being allowed to fly to/from LAX! And your country is also harassing little kids, tampering with their surgeries and making them fear infections!

'merica is going insane guys. It's your country, FFS sort it out before it gets any worse.

#47 - another random power is that all wild swans in the UK belong to the monarch.

"The mute swan has been a royal bird since at least 1186 and was formally assigned royal status in the Act of Swans in 1482. Under the act, any other owners of swans were required to mark their property by way of a succession of nicks in the birds beaks.

Today, the Queen still has ownership of all swans in the UK except in one small corner of the British Isles - the Orkney Isles."

There are a few institutions that retain a royal permission to serve swan at annual feasts, otherwise it can't be eaten.

What's with the backdrop? Is trying to say he's had enough and he's jumped the shark? It was good while it lasted.

This is priceless - Dorris Lessig being informed she won the Nobel prize for Literature on the way home with the shopping. She's not impressed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuBODHFBZ8k

"Teleportation doesn't exist yet"

This is the same Kimble who shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for building a photon teleporter, right?

What they mean by teleportation is a way of side-stepping the uncertainty relations in quantum mechanics.

Suppose: You want to teleport something as basic as a single electron or a single photon from A to B - if you could measure with exact precision, you could take your particle at point A, measure it and take a new particle at point B, and set it up in the exact same state, then effectively you've teleported particle A.

In fact, that scheme falls at the first hurdle because quantum uncertainty prevents you even in principle from making the exact measurement on particle A - you cannot get enough information from your measurement to know how to set up particle B to reproduce all the properties of A.

Kimble is talking about a way to get round that problem, which is that you take a joint measurement on your unknown particle A and a particle C, which you setup to your specifications.

The result of the joint measurement tells you nothing about particle A, but it does tell you how to transform particle C into the exact same state as particle A, without having to ever know what the state of A was.

The teleporter sends particle C and the result of the joint measurement, and the receiving end uses the information to transform C back into A precisely.

That is retarded on so many levels. If you're going to make drugs illegal, then you should let the cops arrest people for using it.

If you smell some burnt marijuana, you can infer that they've probably got a bag of it and they're going to burn some more in a minute.

Scientology is an expensive indulgence, it promises spiritual riches but I'm not sure it delivers.

I think it's interesting that James Randi stopped offering his $10 million for "demonstrating psychic powers" because many of the applicants were basically undiagnosed schizophrenics and outing/humiliating them did nothing to help anyone.

I suspect someone with a ready stream of income who can afford to pay the dues or who has the self-confidence to say "No" won't come to harm being a Scientologist.

I suspect there are some already disturbed people who are drawn to Scientology when things are going wrong for them personally, and that's where they are when they crash.

Probably the Scientology view of psychiatry has an appeal if you have ever been committed to a psychiatric hospital against your will or are being made to take neuroleptic medications with their attendant unpleasant side-effects.

Can these Anonymous protests be turned into something positive?

I would be amazed if 1000's of people would spontaneously organize nationwide protests for better provision of mental health care, which is the fault-line that Scientology was exploiting in the cases where things went wrong.

The problem with this is false positives. You could probably get 3 micrograms of cannabis on your clothes just by sitting in the same bus / taxi / airplane seat as someone who'd smoked that drug earlier in the day. It's practically invisible to the naked eye.

People can smoke cannabis legally in Holland, some places allow it on prescription, other places don't get too uptight about it because the police have better things to do with their time than chase small-time drug users. Going through an airport you're going to be exposed to traces of drugs.

It's quite likely the man just dressed or acted `inappropriately' when he turned up at the airport in Saudi Arabia, and the police said "we don't like the look of this one" and then perhaps ran, perhaps fabricated some test results to justify their opinion.

How many people have been exonerated by these "drugs tests"?

mod_ssl. that is all.

well it's either the prelude to world war III or some shifting of the sea bed. Have there been any underwater earthquakes?

Congrats!

Most of the implementation will take place after the next general election in the UK. If you're from there, vote for a party that will abolish this scheme.

That's reasonable when you consider

a) you'd be hard pressed to spend 500EUR/$1000 in any airport cafe.

b) there is a stream of people arriving at the airport fresh off a plane, who are carrying 500 EUR notes and who want it changed into something smaller.

if they accepted those they'd have to hold an enormous float in the till.

Apple has an interest in the film business through Steve Jobs being on the board of Pixar. Apple isn't about to make piracy easier than necessary and eat into its own profit margins.

The MacBook Air $99 external DVD drive is cheaper than the $200 external drive to the MacBook Pro, though both pieces of equipment provide the same functionality. Hence, the $99 drive is locked by design to the MacBook Air, to prevent Apple cannibalizing its own sales.

eg. IBM invented concept of RISC processors and then sat on the idea because they realized it would cannibalize their existing, quite profitable systems, and it took ARM to come along and actually commercialize RISC technology successfully.

I expect DTrace can be unhacked by people with the inclination to do so.

Apple's "pay $20 for iTouch upgrade while iPhone gets a similar upgrade" free is pretty dumb also.

Look at the HMRC website and see if you can find a coherent policy on data encryption.

One document they have says they only accept WinZip self-extracting .EXE's, another says they'll take WinPT -- a version of PGP.

Neither of those cases handle companies whose information is on mainframe computers, which accounts for employees from large businesses.

There isn't a coherent policy.

What we desperately need is encryption implemented as a layer beneath existing applications, so that the entire staff of the UK government + public sector can be brought onto a "safer" system with minimal training expense.

AND: A key-management system that prevents key loss and enforces policy, or at least flags up cases where policy might be being broken.

eg. no one person needs to download the entire HMRC database. A person can't realistically assess more than one record every minute 9-5, so a system that limits the number of records any one account can retrieve to a sensible number would prevent all 25 million records being retrieved in one go.

The reason we had a 25 million record hemorrhage was because it was *quicker for the guy on the shop floor* to dump the entire database than to select a random subset and send that, which was actually what was asked for in the first place.

Queries run in aggregate would not need a rate limit imposed, but would need some noise adding to prevent personal data being identified by making aggregate queries that differed by just one record and subtracting.

The mechanics of encryption is well understood. I've got AES-256 on the command-line in linux with a simple sudo apt-get install.

Key management is what is preventing large scale implementation.

Suppose the UK police have a court order to look at some data you hold as evidence, say on one of your employees or your customers - but your business has lost the key to that data.

Then you are held liable for obstructing justice.

so if I shot a cop with a taser and he happened to die from a heart-attack on the spot, that'd be OK? They wouldn't try to put me in the chair for killing a cop?

Discount all the "extenuating circumstances". Some people have heart conditions or drug addictions and are going to be killed by tasers.

How many times is a taser fired and the person lives, versus how many times it's fired and the person dies of heart attack? Is it 1%? 3%?

If I did something to someone that I knew beforehand had a 1% risk of killing them, and then they died, and what I did was unnecessary, I bet the jury would convict me for manslaughter.

I don't see the cops should get treated any different.

VOGONS!

more endohedral snake oil : http://www.vc60.com/english/index.html

Tsck! You can already buy Nanotech enhanced C60 Beauty Cream!

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/84/8413sci3.html

It's pretty suicidal mission for the Iranians to be sent on -- "Boys, we want you to go and taunt this US warship and see if they'll take a pot-shot at you.".

We could do without another war.

It should illegal to send any encrypted data, unless the encrypted stream contains the session key encoded with AT&T's and the NSA's public key, so that they can decrypt any given stream and check it for copyrighted content or terrrrism.

That whole "presumption of innocence" and "free speech" thing is a load of liberal bulls**t anyway.

The best thing is, these schemes are already in existance. Google "differential work factor cryptography"

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5764772-claims.html

Replication, Replication, Replication.

Hey guys, Godwin's law.

http://xkcd.com/261

actually... I take it all back ... I misunderstood what they're doing. They use the laser as the brush to write the pattern with, they have a TV camera that looks for where the laser beam lands and software that turns on the corresponding pixels on the regular projector. I thought they'd hacked the projector to run the laser beam through the projector optics, but no.

so: the beam is not dispersed

and: it really will blind anyone in the building if they happen to look out before they could blink

....That equipment needs to be confiscated before they blind someone.

bummer.

Their site listed the laser as being a 60mW CW "super illegal" green output. The full power of that beam would blind you before you could blink, if you shone the beam in your eye before it went through the diverging optics.

but: They're spreading out that 60mW beam over ~100 square meters on the front of the building, which is ~1 million square centimeters.

so: The power that someone in the building looking out the window is going to be exposed to is about 60 nanowatts per square centimeter.

and: The maximum safe exposure to a visible laser (in round terms) is 1 milliwatt per square centimeter.

so: There is a safety margin of about 10,000 in what they're doing.

....

I thought MAKE is meant to encourage people to go out and try things themselves, and to be informative. The Graffiti video explains precisely nothing about how to make one of these things, and it doesn't even go into how to check if what they're proposing to do is safe or not, hence the discussion we're having above.

MAKE's normally interesting, but this edition was too dumbed down -- perhaps it's the new year and so they're running repeats??

My guess is that the laser beam is being rastered across the building in order to form the projection, so that if you are looking out of a window, the beam is only pointed at your eyes for a time equal to the area of your iris divided by the area of the building front, and that's going to be enough to cut the dose to a 'safe' level.

I wouldn't advocate testing that theory by looking out the window through a pair of binoculars though.

It's good to hear a politician who knows the difference between criminal and civil law.

In two or three years Inkscape and Gimp will be polished enough to ditch Adobe altogether, Octave will vanquish Matlab and OpenOffice will dispose of MS Office, and we'll be in the position where most tasks will be as simple to accomplish with open source as with closed-source software.

Bring on the day. Allegedly, IBM is toying with the idea of dropping Windows from its employees workstations in the next upgrade cycle.

I love Gerry Adams take on the whole affair: he's someone who might rightly be considered a terrorist threat - heading the political wing of the IRA

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/aug/24/travelnews.g2

Fields metal (Bismuth/Gallium/ teaspoons are neat also.

#35, #41, Skeeter, you need to adapt your model a bit, eg. to make money you need to be selling the tickets and staffing the bar + making live recordings from the shows if you're recording at all.

Next, we bring you:

Pasta Blaster!!

Batrachomyomachia-- The War of the Frogs and the Mice?

Ten or fifteen years ago, CDs were a commodity since it wasn't practical to copy music at home. The record companies did actually perform a useful job in duplicating high quality sound recordings in a way people couldn't do for themselves. Now we've all got the ability to duplicate audio at our fingertips the record companies are redundant. That's just simple economics and a pattern that repeats throughout history.
Prosecuting people for ripping music to computer is not a million miles away from the practice in the middle ages of prosecuting the people who translated the Bible from Latin to English ... the middle men never like being cut out of the loop.

Borough Market Rocks! + did you see the space invaders someone has tiled into the bridge near Southwalk Cathedral?

This is the one failing on the capitalist system; it's OK to do that, and there is no upper bound on individual Greed or short-termism from the people at the top. (ok, there is no explicit bound on the greed of the people at the bottom either, though their ability to cause damage is somewhat limited)

I think the credit crunch could be explained in much the same way -- it made financial sense on an "individual scale" for all of the people involved in setting the targets, and for the people handing out the loans to be hitting this years target, collecting this years bonus and "growing ahead of the market", even if it might result in disaster at the large scale somewhere down the line.

The society that we've engineered with high employee mobility means that most people and most firms don't consider the future too seriously, because they'll be working some place else by the time the shit hits the fan, or will have collected a handsome payout to insulate them from the effects.

I met up with some friends from college and was told about a guy who'd be joining us later, whose name we'll disguise by the epithet "filthy Rich" - for allegedly hiring himself a prostitute for valentines day.

anyways, this guy shows up and after a few beers is bragging about his new job as MD of a woodworking firm in the North of England, he's expounding his plan to sell the land under the firm and lease it back, then lay off the staff over the course of a year or so and convert the premises into a housing development because he'll make more money that way.

Perhaps he was just hamming it up and perhaps he would be stopped if he tried it, but it didn't fill me with joy about the prospects for our industries or the calibre and vision of our business leaders.

I'm not sure what the sane response to this is, expect perhaps to work in the public sector or to find or found a company that is not headed by a bunch of immoral hypocrites? I've never considered myself a Communist before but a little purge could be just what's in order. Pour encourager les autres.

the tot is in the pot!

Even if that green laser doesn't permanently blind, doing something that might dazzle a pilot while they're flying an aircraft is making an accident more likely and for no good reason. That laser should be confiscated and the kid should be made to think about how his actions could affect other people.

Cory, these disclaimers and EULA's are meaningless until they (or you) try to get the courts to enforce or uphold the terms. No court would accept that your email disclaimer is binding, whereas a court might would accept that you agreed to the terms of the website when you submitted the letter of reference.

@7 It's a civil liberties issue because this only operates with government complicity - the law in England requires you to register your data with the DVLA, and the DVLA are apparently selling on that data at £2.50 a throw so these sharks can operate and find out who to send the demands to.

http://www.creativecarpark.co.uk/

Interestingly, searching on www.companieshouse.gov.uk, the company is overdue on it's corporate tax declaration, and in 2006 claimed to have an income below the level where it needed to make any audited filing. I think the director could be struck off for fraud quite easily with some digging.

Is the firm who is trying to apply these charges licensed to do so in any way? eg. do they give a professional association and license number with the demand?

I don't see that a TV camera / digital numberplate system could reliably identify people with disability permits and exempt them, which is a condition for being licensed.

I've asked my brother who is a UK lawyer about this... My gut feeling is it's total nonsense to the point of being fraudulent - sending people invoices for things that don't exist in the hope that they'll pay is a well known scam.

Law courts exist to protect people from abuses, not assist in carrying them out and the judges know this.

I think the virtual-clamping firm will change tactic and attempt to settle the case before it gets to court.

So far it's a non-story. What it should say is:

"Here is a list of the torrents you downloaded to reach the 75% of 75Gb point, we're sending it to the RIAA along with your home address and a recent photo we have of you. Press OK to acknowledge. Have a nice day."

THEN I'll accept you bellyaching about it.

Ideas don't change, people do.

I think Texas needs to instate an anti-ignorance policy.

There's an automatic camera suspended from the ceiling over the middle of Old Street tube station. It pivots round every 20 seconds or so, and my first reaction to seeing this was "ZOMG, THEY'RE MONITORING MY EVERY MOVEMENT ON CCTV."

Then looking a bit more closely, I saw that it's actually a laser range-finder picking out little mirrors planted in the wall of the tube tunnel, one by one. The correct response was thus "ZOMG!! SUBSIDENCE!!1!"

(correct me if I'm wrong, but) there's no reason to think that security seal is related to anti-terrorism specifically.

It's more likely to highlight casual vandalism -- in case some drunk people decide to open the cabinet one night & nick the fire extinguisher.

Prion diseases develop slowly (it takes years) and the disease is progressive and irreversible - whereas thankfully most of the sick workers are reported to be on the mend. They're responding to treatment that assumes it's an autoimmune disease rather than prions.

My random guess is, if you breathe in aerosolised nerve-cell splatter, some of the material can get right into the bloodstream across the alveolae without first being digested or stewed in stomach acid, and that foreign material is provoking an autoimmune disease similar acute MS.

Eating rare meat doesn't cause autoimmune disease ... the other carnivores on the planet do without cooking entirely & they're none the worse for it.

What a gobsmackingly stupid idea.

I've got a Western Digital 250Gb drive from a few years ago that I am planning to upgrade as it's nearly full. Guess which company I'm not getting that upgrade from?

I've no use for a storage device that will decide on it's own behalf what is or is not acceptable content. Western Digital can't presume to know whether I'm infringing a third party copyright by storing a given MP3 file, or whether the file is specifically CC licensed, or whether I recorded it myself?

It's deceptively marketed as being able to store up to 250,000 MP3 files (* will not operate correctly with MP3 files)

Western Digital realises it's got around five years to a decade to extract money from Hard Drive sales before they're made obsolete by flash storage, energy costs and MRAM, right?

Are there no be shareholders or employees at Western Digital who want to keep their company profitable and avoid a public relations melt-down?

Why bother with any pretense of due process?

After all, the US has got a very favourable extradition treaty with the UK and it can lawfully demand the extradition of wanted people.

If the US is going to cut corners in bringing people to trial, the proceedings have no legitimacy.

The whole "Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs" (HMRC) data debacle makes me angry. The original request from the National Audit Office was for *100 records* at random for auditing purposes.

The noob at HMRC didn't know how to select 100 records at random out of a database with 25 million entries. HRMC estimated it would cost them £5000 in consultant fees to have someone say they needed to type:

"SELECT * FROM TABLE HMRC_UK ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 100 INTO 'noob.txt';"

so instead, HRMC sent the *entire* database to pass the problem of selecting 100 rows to the National Audit Office. This is bullshit on so many levels.

The person at HMRC was paid £14K a year according to the Daily Telegraph, so that £5K cost ~= 5 months of salary. Even by hand, selecting 100 records will take an afternoon?

The annoying thing is this slip-up will be a carte blanche for IT vendors to sell new "data protection enhanced" database products on mainframes, and fill government offices with TPM-enabled PC hardware, at enormous taxpayer expense and inevitable project overrun.

All that's needed is a baseline competence.

I agree with Greyhame above - most people want broadband over dial-up, and 8Mb/s over 2Mb/s etc. because of the responsiveness.

The typical household wants pages that load quickly for the time that they use their web-browser / email, rather than to potentially transfer 8Mb/s of data 24/7, 365 days a year, which is what BitTorrent could attempt to do.

The solution I'd prefer to see is a service that degrades based on total bandwidth transferred - serve up the first 1Gb a day at full rate, then progressively throttles back to something that the network could sustain 24/7, in order to prevent people who leave BitTorrent running from causing congestion.

That keeps the neutrality aspect - only total bandwidth is counted - and protects the system against overload.

The other thing that's needed is to make it explicitly clear what is and is not permitted in the contract that comes with the Broadband service. Most firms sell "unlimited" bandwidth packages, even though that can't really be the case.

The purpose of the SFWA is to promote Sci-Fi writing rather than sue emerging authors, right?

Why don't they run competitions with categories for "most original sci-fi" for completely new ideas and "best rewrite on an old motif" for people who do want to adapt Azimov and the like?

Threats of legal action, whether idle musings or not, are against the spirit of a creative organization. Surely the fact that people want to make derivative works based on Azimov is a `Good Thing', showing what he said was actually relevant?

eg. The estate of Jorge Borges isn't suing Paolo Coelho over "The Alchemist" or "The Zahir" though arguably they're expansions around Borges' short stories - Coelho includes his own creative efforts and people know to read Borges to get the original deal...

A logical explanation, Captian...A bit more investigation reveals that Burt Andrews is involved with a website that competes with Scribd, and he is following the old-fashioned way of doing business in America; "Sue thy competitors" rather than "compete on merits".

Surely no one person can can both run a sci-fi writing website and direct the SFWA to sue one of his competitors, while pretending to have integrity and impartiality?

Why are the SFWA allowing their organisation to be subverted to promote one business over another?