Hey folks! Just to clarify: I said that the UK would renegotiate its relationship to the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive) and Iain (reasonably enough, given the noisy room) heard OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). Just a minor clarification, but I'd appreciate an upvote so confused people see it.

Well, to be fair, once a company is in the MS user pool, it is very hard to get out as MS Office is the norm in business. Now, the rent vs own is an interesting take on it. Most large businesses would rather not "own" software as it is often an asset that they have to track, amortize, and depreciate. Renting, or more ideally, annual licensing fits the fiscal year budgeting process much better. So having this as an option really fits the customer's business models better. However, for many companies, having your internet connection go down and losing the ability to function is far too much risk, so "owning" is the more prudent option. So long as MS offers both options, then they are addressing probably 90% of the market. Not really a big deal that they lost subscribers if people are still within the MS Office pool, but if it is a zero sum game (likely saturation) of Google docs vs Office 365 vs OpenOffice vs Other, then it becomes more of a question of whether "3rd party" office programs are slowly climbing their way to corporate acceptability. Having what I consider very few improvements, if any, since Office 2010, competition would be welcome to churn real innovation.

I'm a UK taxpayer and I conduct a lot of business with the US west coast. Presently, we're 8 hours apart for most of the year, and that means that I can *just barely* squeeze in a conference call with Californian colleagues (I'm co-owner of boingboing.net and all my partners are in LA and San Francisco) and still get out of the office in time to get my daughter from day-care and get home for dinner.

If the timezone difference goes to 9 hours, I'm buggered. The additional hour will have a direct, negative impact on my net income, as it will either require me to participate less in these transatlantic ventures (for example, it would probably mean no more freelance assignments for US editors, all of which generate UK taxes) or hire expensive babysitters to fetch the kid from day-care (something I also would rather not do for sentimental reasons having nothing to do with the economy).

I'm the Boing Boing editor who posted the image that the OP claims violated the Creative Commons license.

Read the OP closely: he's not saying that it was *his* image I took -- rather, that he was affronted on behalf of the photographer.

Except that the photographer in this case is my friend and colleague Jennifer Trant, and I used the photo with her permission, and then reproduced the entire CC license so that other people would know what terms they could use it on.

So, anonymous poster: how about the next time you decide to smear someone for infringing Creative Commons in the name of defending someone's copyrights, you actually make sure that the creator hasn't authorized the use?

Fair enough, although I'm a little surprised when you say there's no statistical difference between genera. We haven't previously encountered such a strong negative reaction to the "wingbeat hypothesis," but it's obviously an issue. As a physicist, I appreciate the comparison to perpetual motion machines, and have no desire to make unsupportable claims. I'll point our more mosquito-knowledgeable folks (yes, we do have some involved) at your post and references.

As the lead inventor of this particular piece of bogus technology (Tom N. worked on the project under my direction) I'll politely disagree. Of course, popular articles oversimplify -- we don't expect to be able to identify the species of a single mosquito on the wing with 100% accuracy. We can, however, measure the frequency at which an individual mosquito flaps its wings, and, on average, that differs from species to species, and differs quite a lot between males and females of a given species. So we can indeed tell individual males from females, and with wingbeat frequency and other data we expect to be able to get a pretty good statistical estimate of the population distribution among species in a given area. And indeed, we are very interested in applications of the system, without the killing mechanism, to collect data on insect populations.

Scientific programming using Monte Carlo methods requires reproducibility based on some initial seed so that an analysis can be reconstructed. A good example of this is benchmarking a code for changes in compiler options. If the code is widely distributed, then a large set of random numbers is not as easily distributed as a Twister or other method. Also there would be problems with acceptability of the results of such a code if a developer were to distribute the code with a specific input and set of random numbers. The temptation to cherry pick results would be too high. For security purposes, where a one-time-pad approach is ideal, a truly random number is fine.

I don't particularly buy the authors approach though, because semiconductor physics is full of things that seem random at the moment, but then turn out to be entirely predictable once a suitable model is found. Sun Microsystems found this out years ago when they tried to base a random number generator based on the rate of soft failures from memory chips. They were using Boron as a dopant, which has a high probability of absorbing neutrons and decays with an alpha particle (He +2 atom), causing a hardware error. They claimed they had a perfect random number generator until they saw that the randomness was dependent on the location of the chips. Denver has more cosmic radiation than Miami, thus the randomness was actually Poisson (as are most things nuclear). The method was thus vulnerable to an attack based on the mean number of failures, which could be determined by knowing the physical location of the device.

Not unrealistic! There are a number of battery powered aircraft (that even hold people!) being manufactured today. Still kinda experimental, but getting much better. For starters, check out:

http://www.yuneec.com/
http://www.electraflyer.com/
http://www.pipistrel.si/planes/35

Yes, the energy density of the best batteries are about 5% that of gasoline (not 1%) but a gasoline engine is only about 20% efficient at converting chemical energy to mechanical. An electric motor is more like 90%. It's no where near equal, but definitely usable.

... but my VT102 terminal only has the one and the APL compiler doesn't understand a \t.

Mantis shrimp eyes would be f-ing cool!