My physics is a little rusty, so please forgive me if I'm wrong. I think the law you're referring to is the Law of Conservation of Mass. As energy has mass and subatomic particles have mass, you can convert back and forth between them all day (good luck with that), and never violate it. In particular, Einstein's E=mc^2 is applicable here.
It was a surprise to me to find that the term 'matter' is actually poorly defined. At least according to Wikipedia.
Ah yes - I did mean conservation of mass, thank you.
I think most people use 'matter' to refer to the regular objects we interact with that are composed of atoms, and that's how I intended to use it in the above post. However, if I had my way, electromagnetic radiation would also be consider 'matter', because it's the same stuff, just a different form.
>> As energy has mass
Is that generally accepted, btw? Because I've always heard people talk about light as having no mass, and it never made sense, because that what I understood e=mc^2 to represent. I think it does have mass, it's just so minute (smaller than anything we know by such an order of magnitude that the speed of light squared is used to express it) that it doesn't seem like it.
I'm no expert, but my understanding is a little different. Its not that energy "has" mass but that energy and mass are two different forms of the same thing, i.e. they are equivalent. If some process is able to convert mass to energy then you could find out much mass you'd get but multiplying the energy by c^2 (hence E = mc^2).
You might want to check out tup. It uses the dependency tree in a fundamentally different way from make, in order to improve build times. http://gittup.org/tup/
I think the essay agrees more with your second statement than first -- that copyright is a trade-off between the public interest in using published works and an interest in encouraging publication through some kind of incentive system.
I have a morning ritual that involves an hour of preparation before doing anything else on a given day. I'd never even considered the proposal in this article, and I suspect others haven't either. As I can think of several situations in which I might try it out, I'm glad he wrote the article.
The exponential delay on the "reply" link's appearance means that sometimes the link is sometimes not present on the page. I believe that this reduces the ease with which someone can scan a thread, because it changes the layout and spacing of comments later in the thread.
My suggestion is that rather than not displaying the reply link, display greyed out text in its place that reads "reply", with hover text explaining why you cannot currently click it.
I don't know about converting. Just go to http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll and link to your new post from this one (unless there really is a way to convert it to a poll).
If I had to guess (which I do), I'd say you were down-modded due to the way you expressed your opinion, not that anyone necessarily disagrees with you...
It was a surprise to me to find that the term 'matter' is actually poorly defined. At least according to Wikipedia.