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Unfortunately the money has to come from somewhere. Shortly after WWII (which cost us $238B after inflation it would be about $5T) the highest tax bracket was in the 90% range. People got houses under the new FHA and VA loans, and new companies were created (though not as many as after the top marginal tax rate was reduced by the Johnson administration which Kennedy had been pushing for). Companies didn't move overseas to more favorable countries then, though I would concede that moving overseas would probably have been more of an involved process than it is today and that economic situations of the world were obviously different.

The current Iraq war, so far, has cost us $500B and the highest tax bracket pays something like 35%. That money has to come from somewhere, and unfortunately neither party is willing to actually decrease our deficit in any sort of substantial way, so now we're stuck with a national debt that is almost insurmountable.

We currently owe over $10T which comes out to about $37,747.83 per person in the US (population of 305,363,780 though this number keeps changing). That number also includes children. The average household size is 3.2 (I'll round it to 2 parents and one child). Now the amount to each tax payer (203,575,853 of them) owes is $49,121.74. The problem with that number is that it doesn't account for the people that are in retirement and not contributing to the tax system. According to the same population website, there were 37,191,004 people 65 and older in the year 2006 (we'll have to assume that they are all retired, though that's not entirely the case). Now the amount each tax payer owes is $60,101.63

The madness needs to stop someday. This whole "credit crisis" is all due to everyone living beyond their means (individuals, corporations, and government). We need someone to actually do the tough job of cutting spending so that we can all live within our means. We probably even need to cut back even more than that so that we can repay our debts. It is unfortunate that we live in an unjust world, and so the people who have lived within their means (like me, and probably many people on here) are hit with this credit issue just as hard as the people who were reckless with their money.

I will also state that tax cuts generally do contribute to the growth of the economy, but only as long as the burden of debt interest is under control. If we continue borrowing the amounts of money we are today, and our creditors decide that we cannot pay it back and stop lending to us, then no matter how good our economy is at the time it will decline sharply due to the lack of money in the market. One way to defend against that is to print more money, but that devalues the dollar and makes international trade more and more difficult which also affects the economy negatively.

So, with all that said, who has the most money? Rich people of course. What do they typically do with their money? Try to make more money, which is usually through investments, which help other large companies. Those large companies then probably employ more people. Is it fair to ask the plumber/electrician/factory worker to pay his/her share of the national debt when that amount is so much more of a percent of their savings than

Er, hacking is not illegal. The summary is confusing 'hacking' with 'cracking'.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_hacking_and_cracking

I remember their older work, Eidolon on Atari 800XL for example. Lucas arts was a very risk taking and adventurous company which invents things just like its founder has been once upon a time.

Check it to see what I mean
http://www.answers.com/topic/the-eidolon

Also look at how many platforms they supported before they became a MS DirectX puppet. Supporting that number of platforms in pure ASM (mostly) wasn't a trivial task.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

One day (sone of a lawyer) Michael Eisner is driving down the road in Florida and spots a daycare centre with a picture of Mickey Mouse on the wall. The same day a hoard of slavering corporate scumbag Disney lawyers go after the daycare for trademark infringement.

The Walt Disney Company forced three daycare centers (Very Important Babies Daycare, Good Godmother Daycare and Temple Messianique) in Hallandale, Florida, to remove five-foot-high murals of Disney cartoon figures from their walls under the threat of legal action.

The blockquoted text was copied from the linked web page... it's down the list if you want to check it... the page has all sorts of other interesting Disney trivia too. Wikipedia used to have references to this under the criticism section of the Disney article but for some reason it isn't there any more. However it is still in the answers.com article on Disney in the criticism section. Go figure.

The link quoted above is one of many if you search for it... and though it is in the 'conspiracies' section of the web site, it is something that really did happen. Besides the about.com article, I personally remember seeing this on the news the week it happened in the late eighties/early nineties; it was a national story. I remember well because I was pretty outraged at the time, and still don't have much liking for Disney or their products any more.

Anyway the bottom line is yes, the police could force the Mongols to take the patches off. I think it is a good tactic. They should use it on the other biker 'organizations' too. They're all a bunch of scum bags... though not quite as bad as corporate lawyers.

* woosh *

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_is_babby_formed_How_girl_get_pragnent

Words have meaning. Look up the difference between cue and queue.

Words have meaning. Look up the difference between cue and queue.

It is when a new license costs $0.00. Other than deployment costs, there's no reason not to upgrade frequently.

There is always risk involved when upgrading or deploying systems. Businesses don't upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. They will weigh the risks against the benefits and proceed if there is a clear advantage to upgrading. Like the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The cost of licenses can be minuscule compared to deployment costs, so much so that many licenses might as well be $0.00. Deployment costs can be some of your largest costs. How many people will it take to upgrade? What is their cost per hour to the business? Multiply that by the number of people involved. Have you deployed on an identical test system and tested your software to ensure that it will continue to function as required on the new production system? Do you have test scripts so that you can validate that it performs as required? Will you have to make changes to software or hardware to accommodate the upgrade? Will you need to update your documentation? What is your contingency plan should the upgrade fail? What will be the cost to the business if the system is unavailable outside of the deployment window?

Some systems, like SAP, may take years to be deployed throughout an organization. Your favorite distro might reach the end of support before deployment even completes. For other systems, your time line for product upgrades and support may not be entirely within your control. What if your system is part of a product that needs approval from the FDA? With five years of support you may have eaten up three years of that during product development and FDA approval, leaving only two years of support for the OS on your products. That could leave you with a short product lifecycle or mean that you have to perform significant upgrades in the field.

Other operating systems, such as Solaris, Windows, AIX, and HP-UX are supported for 10 and sometimes 12 years. The only saving grace for these enterprise Linux distros is that the source is available. But when the five years are up, then what? Will you still be able to pay Red Hat or Canonical to support your end-of-life Linux distro? What if they have made a business decision not to support end-of-life distros no matter what? If they will support it, it's safe to assume that your support contract will cost more than it did during the previous five years. And if you go somewhere else and hire some linux experts to support your distro, they won't have access to the information that the distro creators have. They won't have the documentation about why certain patches were applied, or specific changes were made, or other internal decisions. You better hope that your new support company is very careful and thorough.

So then, would it have been a better investment to pay for Solaris and 10 years of support, pay for 10 years of Linux support, or pay to upgrade your systems every three to five years? I don't know. It depends on your goals. Clearly Wikipedia likes to move faster than the average business. They seem to be continually upgrading their wiki software and like staying on the leading edge. From reading about their server setup, they appear to have a lot of redundancy and can reduce their risk when upgrading. Three to five years of support for their operating systems is probably sufficient for their needs. But don't let that lull you into thinking that five years is long term.

So does that make the victims of such scammers cybernetically carrion? As in "brain-dead"? Because that makes way more sense in the face of such a silly buzzword.

All this means is, the human species will evolve in unison, rather than splintering off into different daughter species. How is this a bad thing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture

http://www.answers.com/topic/heterosis-1

"The Japanese military, deeply engaged in the seemingly endless war it had started against China in mid-1937, badly needed oil and other raw materials. Commercial access to these was gradually curtailed as the conquests continued. In July 1941 the Western powers effectively halted trade with Japan. From then on, as the desperate Japanese schemed to seize the oil and mineral-rich East Indies and Southeast Asia, a Pacific war was virtually inevitable." here.

"Japan had to import steel and oil from the US, or get it from Southeast Asia and Pacific. The US protected the Pacific, and would not sell them the steel and particularly the oil, Japan needed. They found themselves at a point of no return- either attack the US while they still had oil to use, or in a year their navy would not have enough oil to fight. They decided not to give up their dream of possessing the resouces of East Asia/Pacific area, so found no way out but to attack the USA." more here.

"When France capitulated in June 1940, Japan moved into northern French Indochina. And though the United States had no interest there, we imposed an embargo on steel and scrap metal. After Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, Japan moved into southern Indochina. FDR ordered all Japanese assets frozen.

But FDR did not want to cut off oil. As he told his Cabinet on July 18, an embargo meant war, for that would force oil-starved Japan to seize the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies. But a State Department lawyer named Dean Acheson drew up the sanctions in such a way as to block any Japanese purchases of U.S. oil. By the time FDR found out, in September, he could not back down.

Tokyo was now split between a War Party and a Peace Party, with the latter in power. Prime Minister Konoye called in Ambassador Joseph Grew and secretly offered to meet FDR in Juneau or anywhere in the Pacific. According to Grew, Konoye was willing to give up Indochina and China, except a buffer region in the north to protect her from Stalin, in return for the U.S. brokering a peace with China and opening up the oil pipeline. Konoye told Grew that Emperor Hirohito knew of his initiative and was ready to give the order for Japan's retreat.

Fearful of a "second Munich," America spurned the offer. Konoye fell from power and was replaced by Hideki Tojo. Still, war was not inevitable. U.S. diplomats prepared to offer Japan a "modus vivendi." If Japan withdrew from southern Indochina, the United States would partially lift the oil embargo. But Chiang Kai-shek became "hysterical," and his American adviser, one Owen Lattimore, intervened to abort the proposal.

Facing a choice between death of the empire or fighting for its life, Japan decided to seize the oil fields of the Indies. And the only force capable of interfering was the U.S. fleet that FDR had conveniently moved from San Diego out to Honolulu. " more here.

"Japan, hoping to capitalize on Germany's success in Europe, made several demands, including a steady supply of oil, from the Dutch East Indies; these talks, however, broke down in June.[79] In July, Japan seized military control of southern Indochina since it would not only put her in a better position... ( ... ) ... The United States, United Kingdom and other western governments reacted to the seizure of Indochina with a freeze on assets, while the United States (which supplied 80% of Japan's oil) responded by placing a complete oil embargo. Thus Japan was essentially forced to choose between withdrawing from Asia, or seizing the oil she needed by force; the Japanese military did not consider the former an option, and many officers considered the oil embargo an unspoken declaration of war. The Imperial General Headquarte

c) If you think that by typing "skeptical" (mirroring the OP) was bad, then you miss the point.

I agree with everything you said (other than you didn't recognize the parent as being an obvious troll...don't feed the trolls, man). However, skepticism is an accepted spelling, and is in fact the most common spelling in the United States based on my experience.

Could you please elaborate with specific references?

How about the constitution?

http://www.answers.com/topic/specific

See http://www.answers.com/analogy

Right, that page agrees with me. The operative word being 'similar'.

Are you really denying that punishment has no deterrent effect?

No. I didn't make any general statements about punishment and deterrents. I said that suggestion won't work.

Where do you think the advertising revenue for spam comes from? That's right: sales!

Wrong. It comes from somebody having something they want to sell. They don't pay the spammer after the sales are made. They pay him/her to send x number of messages out. That's it. It's just like advertising in the New York Times.

Killing people buying stuff from spam, besides being a patently dumb idea, won't do one thing to stop it. You need to understand what a problem is before trying to solve it.

Uh, no, that's nothing like what I said at all.

See http://www.answers.com/analogy

Are you really denying that punishment has no deterrent effect?

Where do you think the advertising revenue for spam comes from? That's right: sales!

Intensive purposes.

Idiot.

Ummm... no, it is not:

Another example of the oral transformation of language by people who don't read much. "For all intents and purposes" is an old cliché which won't thrill anyone, but using the mistaken alternative is likely to elicit guffaws.

See also this article, or this one.

Your PC is 200-300 watts (another 150-250 if your monitor is a CRT), but your laser printer is 2,000 watts.

If my laserprinter was 2kW, I wouldn't have to heat my home.

I think your number is a bit high. Wikianswers says a laser printer uses 400 to 750 watts. (and, of course, we know that any website with the name "Wiki" in it has to be accurate, right?)

Then upgrade the backbone. Instead of limiting the speed for end users, invest in the backbone and eliminate the clogging. I'm guessing Japan doesn't have that big of a problem with the backbone though. (neither does Sweden it would appear, I can easily reach 100 Mbps if I download directly from someone else on a 100 Mbps connection within Sweden)

Its a lot easier to upgrade infrastructure in a smaller place then it is in a bigger one. Sweden and Japan are small assed nations compared to the USA, so the cost of long haul fiber would be cheaper for those nations, then it would be for the USA.

Do you need a quick physical geography lesson to see this?

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_surface_area_of_Japan
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sw.html
http://open-site.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/

Can you afford to help run high capacity and long haul fiber optic cable from Annapolis, Md to San Francisco, Ca so everyone can be all happy and content with their broadband? As well as to connect each and every house hold in the US to be able to use this new High Capacity and long haul fiber back bone network? I dont think you can, so please stop sounding like you are smart, because quite frankly you are not.

Moderates are definitionally people who have no principles.

What a load of crap. definition of moderate or another Moderates are "definitionally" people whose views and principles aren't extreme. That doesn't necessarily mean they have no principles. Now, some "moderate" politicians may fit your definition because they're trying to make the most people happy to get elected, but it's not at all impossible to be moderate and principled. Your argument is one promoted by the extremists who want to make themselves appear palatable when their positions aren't.

I think you're confusing folks who aren't on one end of the artificial and absurd left-right scale with people who are always equivocating on policy.

No, you are. And being one of the former, I take offense at being lumped in with the latter.

Name a few tangible, verifiable predictions that Intelligent Design makes besides just arguing that evolution isn't sufficient to explain X.

There is work being done to calculate specified complexities (and entropies) for systems and subsystems. Once this is done, then one could work out the math to determine the threshold between 'designed' and 'not-provably-designed' and test it on known quantities (i.e., designed and non-designed objects). One can also look at the entire field of forensics as a data point--we are pretty good at determining if deaths are accidental or 'designed' (and if designed, even 'who done it').

Your second "method of knowing" is great on its own, but what you forget is that it also has to be grounded in physical reality, otherwise you're just much adieu about nothing. One could come up with an incredibly complex, self-consistent logic set that doesn't mean anything because it's not based on anything in reality.

Incontrovertible axioms were assumed.

As for your third method of knowing, "spiritual senses, well, you just assert as much with nothing to back it up.

Yes, I agree that the existence of these senses is neither proved nor provable. That piece of knowledge I can only give from personal experience. YMMV.

Also, define "spiritual". And define "higher" as in higher truths. And how can you know there is knowledge and truth that we simply can't, no way, no how, discover if we.... can't discover it?

I was using spiritual, higher, and meta-physical interchangeably (though there are subtle distinctions). You need to fully understand Godel's theorem and the philosophical implications of it before you'll understand how I 'know' this truth exists. But, suffice it to say that the piece of knowledge which says that 'we can't know some things' happens to be one of the pieces of knowledge that we can 'know'. ;-)

See:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/Godel/implic.html

and specifically this quote is rather interesting:
"If truth can outrun provability, reality can outrun knowledge."

[although, I would modify it a bit to: As truth outruns provability, so reality outruns knowledge].

If you want to understand the math before diving into the philosophy, I'd recommend Nagel's & Newman's _Godel's Proof_.

Calling Secular Humanism a religion is at best a bastardization of the meaning of the word religion. Despite popular claims, the Supreme Court never ruled that secular humanism is a religion. It was only stated as such in a dicta footnote, which is not a binding rule. By its very nature, the secular in secular humanism makes it pretty obvious that it isn't a religion..

Well, it certainly fits the 4th definition given here (if not any of the first 3): http://www.answers.com/religion

and has very well-defined 'tenets' (i.e., doctrine).

Saturn was more faithful than Zeus in the mythology, it makes sense that it would have had its ring for a while.

To be fair, it is easy to be faithful when you have 1000's of wives.

What's common? DWI? Oh, you probably meant "come on", which has a completely different meaning. Words are spelled the way they are for a reason, kids. It's so we can communicate!

Um, no, sorry.

Unlimited: Having no restrictions or controls

If they say it's unlimited without telling you there are limits, and then they put a limit on anything , then they are ripping you off. It doesn't matter at all what limits there were 10 years ago, unlimited doesn't just mean one limit has been removed, it means all limits have been removed.

I didn't see any mention of random bits being changed in the article.

Not to mention that, IMHO, 'anonymizing data' is not the same as 'making the data anonymous'.
Anonymizing data = preventing it from being personally identifiable
Anonymous data = scrubbed of all context

http://www.answers.com/anonymous
3. Having no distinctive character or recognition factor

You can anonymize data and still retain geographic and/or demographic data.

"Proud" (though misspelled)

http://www.answers.com/prod

http://www.answers.com/topic/wendy-s-international?cat=biz-fin

These new products and the phenomenal success of the "Where's the Beef?" campaign catapulted Wendy's to a record $76.2 million in earnings in 1985.

The new products, by the way, were a salad bar and chicken sandwiches (and one of the commercials in the "Where's the Beef?" line included one called "Parts is Parts" referring to the chicken parts used in competitors' chicken products). The next year Wendy's almost fell apart because management was trying costly changes that didn't make much sense for a fast food restaurant, and eventually Dave Thomas came back to turn things around.

Really, I think you'll find that quite a few people that were actually alive (even fairly young like myself at that time) know that it was a Wendy's ad.

You yanks know WW2 as this war that happened somewhere else, you had a one or two hundred thousand soldiers total, and generally it mostly happened to somewhere else.

My country's war dead were more than 400,000; the total number of troops the U.S. committed to the war effort was more like 16 million.

I am not one of those Americans who likes to claim a lot of credit for what my ancestors did 60 years ago, but it's clear that your idea of how World War II affected America is as far off as many Americans' idea of how the war affected Europe.

That said, I would agree with the basic point of what you said; American casualties were less than a tenth of German casualties, and the U.S. didn't get split in half for 50 years. And most Americans do underestimate the cultural impact of that aftermath.

In case you are being obtuse by accident, in current common usage, when referencing a number, 'scores' generally means 'many'.

Definition 7:

http://www.answers.com/score

Or, they might have just had a smart guru. Or, perhaps all the people who ate the cattle died of starvation. If you read the definition of superstition, it would discount your theory as it would be based on the laws of nature. Of course, it just killed part of mine too. But, that's life.

Generally speaking though, grain production produces more food than cattle production.

back at ya

http://www.answers.com/joke

uhmm..."For all intensive purposes"???
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_the_saying_'all_intents_and_purposes'_or_'all_intense_purposes'

Take your picks
Animals
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070403165056AAMX3zI

Adjectives
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_adjectives_begin_with_x

We burn faggots around here.

I was in the "building web libraries" business back then. I can tell you that search wasn't necessarily that bad, you just had to pay for it .

Though I have to tell ya, when matahari came out, we couldn't believe how good it was compared to altavista and all the rest. And the looks on our client's faces when we said we used an "offline search bot" was priceless. The money that come out of their pockets wasn't too bad either!

Ciao,
Dcobbler

[so do they] relinquish rights to the stuff that may have been created before the update?

No, they said that this change would be applied retroactively.

...right, and since "retroactively" means "Influencing or applying to a period prior to enactment", that would make the answer yes, not no. How did this get moderated informative?

I think it's a mute point

Really? A mute [sic] point? As opposed to an obnoxiously loud point? Did someone sleep through 9th grade English?

Open Source is now used as a weapon in corporate competition.

Why does IBM spend money to release Eclipse? To hurt Sun. (What does an Eclipse do to a Sun?) To make it more difficult for Sun to earn money off of Java. (You can commoditize something to prevent it from becoming your rival's money making product.) At the same time, the software is an economic complement to things that IBM sells. (All manner of middleware and corporate consulting, mostly the latter. A great IDE and other tools encourages more in-house corporate development. More opportunity to sell stuff like consulting and middleware.)

For more than a hundred years, critics have remarked on the incoherency of using literally in a way that suggests the exact opposite of its primary sense of "in a manner that accords with the literal sense of the words." In 1926, for example, H.W. Fowler cited the example "The 300,000 Unionists ... will be literally thrown to the wolves." The practice does not stem from a change in the meaning of literally itself--if it did, the word would long since have come to mean "virtually" or "figuratively"--but from a natural tendency to use the word as a general intensive, as in They had literally no help from the government on the project, where no contrast with the figurative sense of the words is intended.

Emphasis mine. When does a particular usage of language become part of that language? A hundred years is more than enough for me. I think "when all the original critics are dead" is a good enough time frame for language change.

I hate to be a grammar nazi, but it's a dessicant bag that you want, not an ANTI-dessicant bag. An anti-dessicant bag would do the opposite of what you want.

Secondly, if a dessicant bag gets soggy, that would mean that your capsule wasn't sealed as well as you thought, so it wouldn't matter that much whether you had one or not. A small dessicant bag is plenty for a relatively large volume of air, until you start getting to where you're exchanging that air from inside the container to outside of it.

"It looks like they want to wrap-up this investigation and blame [the collapse] on normal office fires," said Gage during counter-conference.

Normal office fires? What the fuck is that guy smoking? This was not "normal office fires"

Oh, I get it, he's got an /agenda/. It's a crackpot agenda though.

Crackpots are the most annoying of all, because not only are they wrong, but their untested gedankenexperiments are so wrong you don't know where to start pointing out the wrongness.

"No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified."

But then this is some reason for Gage to think that the sulfur was part of the mystical "thermite" which contains no sulfur in its composition.

And he calls himself an engineer.

I'll tell ya what the source was. The sulfur was in the steel when it was manufactured. Please go look up AISI steel grades.

http://www.answers.com/topic/aisi-steel-grades

OMG! STEEL HAS SULFUR IN IT! AND PHOSPHOROUS! AND MANGANESE! AND MOLYBDENUM! AND COBALT!

Fucking retards

Making steel is like making brownies. There are recipes for all the grades and they have different elements.

"400 architectural and engineering professionals"

Just because it says PE next to your name it doesn't mean you're smart. It means you passed a test. I know of one engineer that totally bought into the bullshit over on Stormfront.org. Seriously.

Richard Gage is to architects and engineers as Jack Thompson is to attorneys.

Someone should seriously look into taking away his stamp.

--
BMO

* Charge them rent for the use of your property, sending an invoice monthly. When they don't pay (who knows? a big enough A/P department might), report them to the credit bureaus. When they raise a stink about having to deal with that, offer to sell them the small patch of property for whatever the going rate is per-square-foot in your locale and maybe add a bit of padding for negotiations room.

* Use that spot to build your brand new compost pile. Build a large wooden box big enough to contain the thing, then keep it filled with manure (and when applicable, the 'dog bombs') and your grass clippings. Claim that the heat it generates is perfect for generating high-grade manure, and that you're only recycling otherwise wasted energy.

* Send them a bill for the years (or even decades) of landscaping (even just mowing) you've had to do in the spot the box now occupies. Also send them a bill for any and all landscaping you've done to hide the damned thing.

* Front Yard? Bolt your mailbox to it. Hell, offer to bolt your neighbors' mailboxes to it.

* Plant a tree next to it... the biggest one Home Depot has. The roots will eventually (within a couple of years) destroy the thing from underneath, and most towns now have 'green laws' that prevent a utility from cutting down or even harming the tree. They move, you win.

* Do what I did... buy a house in the back of a "flag lot" (just pick one with enough land around and in it so you don't feel crowded). No utility easements back here, folks. When Verizon showed up to drop in fiber, the only impact I saw was a long, skinny line of spray-paint at the front of the driveway. the neighbor up front OTOH got a shiny new box in his yard (which explains where a lot of these ideas came from).

/P

http://www.answers.com/topic/my-heart-bleeds-for-you

A queue is a line, or the act of getting into one. A cue(2) is the act of telling someone to start. Homonyms are fun, kids!

Sorry, that's one that always gets me.

Anyway, back on topic, it really bothers me that so many people are against nuclear power. Yes, it's a "limited" supply, but given the amount of nuclear material that we have, we could generate electricity for a LONG time while making wind power worthwhile without being so dangerous, and figure out a way for solar panels to not be so toxic. Yes, you have to be careful with nuclear material, but with a properly designed and maintained reactor (including re-processing of fuel to make it reusable), you can have a plant that provides a lot of power with a very, very small environmental footprint. Much better than the current crop of coal and oil fired powerplants that are the only other option to hydro at the large energy scales we need to keep up with demand.

A queue is a line, or the act of getting into one. A cue(2) is the act of telling someone to start. Homonyms are fun, kids!

Sorry, that's one that always gets me.

Anyway, back on topic, it really bothers me that so many people are against nuclear power. Yes, it's a "limited" supply, but given the amount of nuclear material that we have, we could generate electricity for a LONG time while making wind power worthwhile without being so dangerous, and figure out a way for solar panels to not be so toxic. Yes, you have to be careful with nuclear material, but with a properly designed and maintained reactor (including re-processing of fuel to make it reusable), you can have a plant that provides a lot of power with a very, very small environmental footprint. Much better than the current crop of coal and oil fired powerplants that are the only other option to hydro at the large energy scales we need to keep up with demand.

Not even trying to be funny but honestly, in no other country than USA would this be among the first things people think.

That's because we have the highest number of lawyers per capita of any country in the world. They have to earn a living somehow which is most unfortunate for us non-lawyers.

Interesting -- thanks for the info on copyright law! The law on sound recordings really sounds like a horrible muddle.

It looks like the site is dead now. I'm getting a 508 error. Here is the google cache of his main page. Most likely he went over his webhost's quota due to the slashdot effect, or maybe his webhost already got a DMCA takedown notice, since most of the music on his page was actually still in copyright and still commercially available. As an experiment, I picked the following random sample of seven tunes from his page (scrolling down the list, and taking one line per screenful):

A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND Muggsy Spanier COMMODORE 1504B 12in
A THOUSAND KISSES International Novelty Orch VICTOR 19351-A
AFTER YOUVE GONE Turk Murphys Jazz Band GOOD TIME JAZZ 39
ALL THE CATS JOIN IN Roy Eldridge DECCA 23532-A
AND HER TEARS FLOWED LIKE WINE Ella Fitzgerald DECCA 18633 A
ARTISTRY IN RYTHYM Stan Kenton CAPITOL 159
AWAY OUT ON THE MOUNTAIN Jimmie Rodgers VICTOR 21142-B

The Muggsy Spanier tune dates to the 50's, is still in copyright, and is available on a 2006 CD reissue. "A Thousand Kisses" was recorded around 1924, so it's probably still copyrighted, but it doesn't seem to be commercially available now. "After You've Gone" was recorded in 1947, it's still copyrighted, and it's still commercially available. "All the Cats Join In" was recorded in 1936, is still copyrighted, and is still commercially available. "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine," still in copyright, still available. "Artistry in Rhythm", ditto. "Away Out on the Mountain", ditto.

The claim in the slashdot summary that the music is out of print is wildly misleading, since 6 out of 7 songs from my sample are commercially available. The Wired article's statement that "The copyright situation surrounding some of these songs is as murky as their sound quality" is likewise pretty silly -- it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that recordings from the 1950's by famous jazz artists are still in copyright.

The "cattle industry" is essential to the ecology of places like the American West, where they replaced the critical role of vast herds of wild bison. A major percentage of the American cattle herd is raised on the range, marginally arable land, where bison used to roam.

While this was true 50 years ago, it is no longer true now. Today, most cattle are raised in huge pens and force fed dent corn. To produce enough cheap corn, cattle ranches have become major corn growers as well.

From http://www.answers.com/topic/beef-cattle-feedlots:

...many cattle feeders in the plains states transformed the grazing land surrounding their feedlots into farmland that grew grain to feed the cattle, increasing the efficiency of their operations and decreasing the need to buy grain from the Midwest.

*Note: On Slashdot you often see the statement that patents are a state sanctioned monopoly.

It's not just /.ers who call patents monopolies, economists and politicians do too. Monopolies: "Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service". Patents give the owner exclusive control of the invention. "Economists, beginning with Adam Smith - a friend and teacher of James Watt - have carefully documented the problems of monopoly." This is about a patent. "The Patent Controversy in the XIXth Century" [doc]: "Whether justice required that society reward an inventor for his services; if so, was a patent (i.e. a temporary monopoly) the fairest means of reward?" From Findlaw: "What Do You Have When You Have a Patent and Is There Any Risk?"
"If granted, a patent gives you a 20-year monopoly on selling, using, making or importing the invention into the United States. Your patent gives you the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention in the United States."

Falcon