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Obama is finally paying attention to piracy? Just a few months ago he didn't care a whit about it. See:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1637109/obamas_somali_pirate_hostage_crisis.html

Oh, you mean "piracy"[sic] not piracy. Sorry, my bad. Now I understand why Obama is so concerned; guns and gonads are not involved in helping save lives where "piracy"[sic] is concerned.

The Christian Jesus:
Love for People Vs Self-righteousness worked through Wesley D. King to write that article, and thus confront bigotry, etc.

Wrong again, ILJOT, you might want to change your handle to something more appropriate.

I'd continue on, but my Lawyer Gonzo says we have enough material for a civil suit against you and will file a subpoena for Slashdot to release your account information and IP address.

Have a nice day.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/135709/benefits_of_boogereating.html?cat=51
http://straightuptruth.blogspot.com/2006/09/eating-boogers-is-like-really-grody.html
http://www.blogster.com/anaibendai/eating-your-boogers-healthy

The very concept of "Greenhouse Gas" is a hypothetical, not a principle. It has a number of flaws in the basic experimental basis on which the hypothesis rests. The observations in these experiments were conducted on gasses under pressure. Surely, you remember the simple P = nRT/V Pressure Volume Temperature stuff from Physics 101?

The Original Greenhouse gas experiments were conducted by putting suspected heavier than air gases in sealed bottles and exposing those bottles to the sun. The original experiments seem to lack important scientific controls.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/slideshow/25115/retesting_the_greenhouse_gas_theory.html?cat=58

This article makes far reaching 'guesses' without any hard science to back it up.

The leap from this to the change in male to female ratio was a total guess. This reads more like a sensational news story than any sort of scientific paper.

There certainly is room for debate over things like dolls. Some would prefer harder data, like penis size.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2045527/bisphenol_a_bpa_may_cause_smaller_penises.html

A larger group than "blind" will be visually-impaired... people who can probably see the book, but not the words. I'm facing such a fate myself soon. I came up with a similar idea, but as usual someone beat me to it. Just use your camera phone, and port some decent open-source OCR software to it.

In general, I'm not a fan of dedicated e-book readers. I think next year we'll see some killer multi-touch arm-based net-tablets with e-paper-like displays and battery life. I think the killer app will be the e-book reader. Twenty years from now, I'll be able to tell kids about the days when we had special devices for reading books, and that's what an e-book reader was, rather than a program. Remember when a "word processor" meant a dedicated and very expensive machine for editing text documents? Yes, I'm that old.

"Seeing no evidence of a conspiracy to erode our precious culture myself, it does come down to your credibility. "

Right I mean, who would consider massive rallies and marches of hispanics to that end with major media coverage evidence.

"You worry that you'll have to learn a new language and you don't want to bother. I don't either, but look at it realistically: to graduate college and get a real job, you need to speak english."

Not in Miami and I suspect not in California. There are areas like Miami beach where English is spoken primarily and a couple neighborhoods where both are spoken. But throughout the rest of Miami all the shop signs and clerks speak Spanish only. You can't find anyone willing to assist you in English already. Spanish is the default choice of language on all telephone menus and even for government services there. The reason? The immigration influx was massive and rapid enough that all the politicians and most government officials there are Cuban. Many don't think of themselves as American at all, they are Cubans in exile from their home.

From what I have heard something similar has happened in at least part of California and in the past decade the immigrants have rapidly begun to spread throughout the country. With enough immigrants there will be immigrant owned businesses providing support only in Spanish throughout the country just like there are in Miami.

Some interesting reading that shows a common theme:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/mexicoflag.asp

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/57772/protest_ends_with_mexican_flag_on_california.html

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=13863

http://across.co.nz/AlienRights07.html

Already done; but there is a downside

Until Pope Palpatine revised things, 'Baby hell' was "Limbo".

Here's a confusing, but detailed explanation of why Christians can eat pork http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/574145/should_christians_eat_pork.html?cat=34

I'm not endorsing the author or the views, but it is an interesting read that I found quickly. New law vs Old law confuses a lot of folks. It's not highlighted well in the article, but the main difference is that Old was in place because it was right at the time and only applies to Jews. It was superseded by New law. Kind of like turning 18 and being covered by adult laws. Not combined, as some people try. i.e. The 10 commandments aren't a part of new law. Heck, technically you'd have to be Jewish and Christian to even consider applying old and new simultaneously. Christians still refer to Old testament because, hey, it's still got plenty of interesting theological stuff.

But, again, people get confused and try to mix the two and end up acting like jerks.

http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/cool-cars/cool-cars.htm http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1600586/california_will_not_ban_black_cars.html http://www.autoblog.com/2009/03/25/california-to-reduce-carbon-emissions-by-banning-black-cars/ Oh that reflective coating for the windows it blocks radio frequencies so anyone with a GPS / cell that doesn't support an external antenna connection will have to buy a new one so it will produce more waste.

Depends on the woman. I like funny, athletic men with very high IQs, who are preferably also very tall. I think anecdotal evidence and my dating history would back that up as the absolute truth. (They're incredibly hard to find, just so you know.) Not all women are game-playing bitches. Just most of them.

No shit. I like funny, big breasted gymnasts who are also mensa members. Very hard to find.

And as an addendum: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/150010/teen_smoking_in_america.html 23% of high schoolers smoke. That's uh, that's not good. That's 1/4 of high schoolers smoking...even if it's decreased, I'm not impressed.

there are people who cannot feel pain.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/915341/people_who_cant_feel_pain.html?cat=52

counterintuitively, it's not a good thing.

what would be a good thing would be partially desensitized to pain. that way you get the information ("hey, you should pull your hand off the stove burner") without the incapacitating effects.

If true, I don't know, you are free to cite rates of incarceration and crimes and the demographics involved, simply being an illegal alien doesn't necessarily translate into being a criminal.

Allow me to point you to the word ILLEGAL in your sentence above.

And it's never "just" being in the US "without papers." There's the fraud of giving fake names to cops, or on welfare documents, or on hiring documents. There's the massive amount of fraud involved in illegal aliens stealing social security numbers, which winds up costing people money in higher interest rates (when they run off on bills) and in damage to citizens' credit ratings.

And that's not even touching the fact that illegals make up almost 30% of federal prisoners, not to mention half of California's state prison population, and the fact that the membership of drug gangs like MS-13 is predominantly illegals as well.

Oh, and then there's the numerous number of illegals who jumped the US border to escape prosecution in Mexico...

Or how about the fact that more Americans have been killed by illegal aliens than in Iraq since 9/11?

Well?

My understanding is that lib(dvd)css2 is in a legal limbo -- despite a quick search on Google, I can't find a single citation to show that it is expressly forbidden. However, there are warnings about using it and similar technologies all over the net.

So what? If "they" (whoever "they" may be) don't know you are using it, who cares? Well, for instance, what happens when you carry your laptop on an international flight, and as you return to the country, Customs asks to search your laptop?

I might just be paranoid, but it's something to keep in mind.

This is going to mess up the content spinners and the paragraph swappers who are trying to either attract ads or build a link farm. Those who have well-build, informative, content-rich pages can sit back and watch the fun.

"Content Spinning" explained, kinda sorta

It doesn't matter to you that actors in their late 20s playing teenagers aren't actually convincing?

That's a rather subjective thing to say. Besides, if age were as objective as you seem to think it is, tell me - why, when buying alcohol or tobacco, do you have to show an ID? why not just install eye-level video cameras?

And on the subject of Summer Glau... she looks a whole lot younger than Jewel Staite yet if you look it up on wikipedia or imdb you'll see that she's actually a year older. But I suppose you, with your magical powers of discernment, knew that?

And then there are these cases:
31-Year-Old Poses as H.S. Student
Twenty-nine Year Old Neil Rodreick Poses as 7th Grader

But I guess their peers are just idiots, huh?

you are insane. and also very incorrect.

let's start with something really easy: job creation by presidential party. the numbers don't lend themselves to a nice pithy "party A good; party B bad" conclusion, but certainly the average shows that, on average, we as a country do better on jobs with Democrats in the head office than Republicans.
okay, maybe you don't like "job creation" as the employment metric (there are decent reasons not to). unemployment is more straight-forward to measure and the data comes in regularly and frequently; what's it tell us? try this analysis. i'll save you some reading, since i imagine that's a problem for you; the conclusion, on page 2, includes the punchline: "Over the past 34 years, Democratic Presidents have overseen periods when the unemployed became employed, and Republican administrations were characterized by an increase in unemployment."
alright, alright, it's not fair to focus only on "employment". there are other ways of generating wealth (although where that gets focused is an interesting question), and the employment numbers don't tell us as much about turnover as we'd like. how about some other metrics? well, this analysis is old enough that we don't get to poke at Bush II much, but the numbers are pretty conclusive over modern US history. "...since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3 percent annual total return on the S&P 500, but Republicans only an 8 percent return." c'mon, tell me there's a liberal bias in S&P. you'd have to also lump in the Dow (nearly the same numbers). focusing on congress is also pretty damning; the spread is less dramatic, but still statistically relevant.
perhaps the most important macro metric of all - real GDP - follows the same trend as the stock market, at least since 1930.
how 'bout regionally? well, at least up until the current collapse, New England has been growing substantially faster than the rest of the country (left two columns in this chart; right two aren't really relevant). note the increasing spread between New England and the national average, either by percent or absolute dollars, as it coincides with the blue shift in the region over the same time period.
the Republicans got a lot of traction in the last election cycle out of the "redistribution of wealth" phrase, which they're still pimping. but the reality is that modern Republicans are far more guilty of it. take a look at GDP vs. median wageduring the Bush II years. the nominal increase in the economy after the Bush II crash was all focused on the top slice of the economy - doing very little to stimulate overall economic growth and stability.

you make some pretty weird claims about migration. can you show any evidence for a mass migration from blue to red states? i can't find it. instead, the conventional cause for census shifts are taken to be birth rates differing by states (for a good time, compare to teen birth rates when Republican hacks keep talking about the moral center of Real America) and immigration rates differing by states in roughly the same areas. the net domestic migration numbers, which i think are what you want to look at, don't seem to indicate what you want them to, although i could only find back to 1990. since then, there's been a departure from the northeast, midwest, and pacific coast for the western mo

I don't understand your link between FDR and Jackson.

Jackson basically told the Supreme Court to get lost whereas FDR packed the court with those who would let him do what he wanted. That should be pretty easy to understand.

The treaty was signed and ratified in 1835 during Jackson's term, but the Trail of Tears didn't happen until 1838, after Jackson left office.

The Cherokee was sent on the Trail of Tears in 1838, but the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, and Seminole were sent away before them. The Choctaw was forcibly removed in 1831, the Seminoles in 1832, the Creek in 1834, and the Chickasaw in 1837. Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, so he was president during the removal of all these tribes except the Cherokee. I'm not sure about the others but when the Cherokee was forced the move the US broke a treaty with them. Okay, when the Choctaw was removed treaties were broken, and about 2500 died on their Trail of Tears. The Treaty of Indian Springs in 1825 which allowed the forcible removal of the Creek was never ratified by the Creek. And the Treaty With the Chickasaw, January 10, 1786 was broken with the forces removal of the Chickasaw.

there's little evidence in any case that Jackson's response was as harsh as you reported. What he is recorded to have said was much lighter, and basically that as the Supreme Court found Georgia's action to be unconstitutional, they could not force Georgia to comply; Jackson had no intentions of getting involved.

Okay so Jackson's remake may not of been as harsh as I made out, quotes I've read had him saying Marshall needed to get his own army, but it was bad still. And the decision was about the Cherokee removal:

"In 1831 the Supreme Court of the United States, in a decision rendered by Justice, John Marshall, declared the forced removal of the entire Cherokee Nation from their ancestral homes in the South Eastern United States to be illegal, unconstitutional and against treaties made. President Andrew Jackson, having the executive responsibility for enforcement of the laws had this to say:"
"John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can."

Jackson had no intentions of getting involved.

That's right, Andrew Jackson was pretty well known as an Indian Fighter in Tennessee, his home state.

Falcon

Let it cool and coagulate and throw it in the trash.

How to Get Rid of Old Kitchen Grease and Cooking Oil

Sadly, the same people that complain about Octo-Mom's upcoming reality show are the same people that go to Youtube to watch stupid videos of teenagers doing stupid things,...

Actualy, in April 2007 the Pope decided that unbaptised babies do NOT go to purgatory. Good thing he's thinking of the children! There is no "Limbo", just purgatory according to Catholic dogma.

My point was that though he opposed them to begin with in the end Thomas Jefferson did support copyrights and patents because they could encourage progress in the arts and sciences.

Also Thomas Jefferson opposed the merchantilists and instead supported yeoman farmers. Here is a webpage about a disagreement between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, wherein Hamilton did support merchantilism. Jefferson even issued a warning about the corporate aristocracy, "I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of their country." In a letter to George Logan on November 12, 1816 he wrote: " We have already reached the point where the "moneyed corporations" no longer feel any need to "challenge" the government. They have already fully integrated themselves into it. The executive branch is already peopled by corporate men, the law makers find it nearly impossible to be elected without corporate financing and the administrators of the regulatory agencies (such as the SEC) are selected by an executive branch whose main concern is to avoid any threat to the corporate world's ability to act unilaterally and without serious regulation of any kind."

Falcon

The same way it has anything to do with studying the odor of pig excrement.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1509505/president_obama_addresses_nation_pork_pg6.html?cat=9

"Gee dear, should we just never buy any toys for our baby?"

"I don't know honey bun, perhaps we should just not buy a ChinaCo brand toy."

"Well, farty pants, it appears that - in addition to ChinaCo brand toys - we also have to worry about toys sold with the Fisher Price and Mattel brands, as well as toys not even made in China. Maybe you should just let me make the purchasing decisions from now on.

Nuts.

Here is the about page from the site you linked to. Essentially they publish anything from anyone.

The cause of Parkinson's is unknown. Furthermore, several of the details about Mr. Ali's brain anatomy described in the article could only be determined by dissection. AFAIK, an autopsy has never been performed on the *still living* former boxer.

Wikipedia has a list of famous Parkinson's sufferers here. You'll note that Mohammed Ail is not only the only boxer on the list but one of the few athletes. Most of the famous sufferers are artists, scientists, or politicians.

This article may be interesting for you.

Just out of curiosity, I just googeled for Muhammad Ali to find about his Parkinson condition.

It looks like his career choice was at least partly responsible for his brain damage: Article.

This isn't mentioned in the Wikipedia, by the way.

Makes you wonder if it is smart to glorify professional boxing.

I haven't received any memo. Tell us how they have solved the radiation problem.

Various groups are working on this. The radiation is largely charged particles, and so can be defected by magnetic fields. This British group was in the news about this 2 years ago and it seems to work well.

A shielded safe room would also be a good idea, for really extreme events. I thought that the ISS has one, but I cannot find a reference. SOHO and Stereo should be able to give adequate warning.

Why don't the fuckin commie pirates just plunder some where else, like to hell from where they came!!

Unfortunately, the US Congress keeps passing legislation that enables these fuckin commie pirates to continue to plunder out culture and destroy anyone who threatens their outdated business model.

Customers define the market, not the business.

I have one word for you: DeBeers.

But I do agree with your conclusion. A bailout is not the answer. The market (producers and consumers alike) should decide what will work. These grandiose plans always smack of a planned economy (read: thinly veiled socialism) to me. Honda and Toyota have proved that greater profitability is achievable without the need for a government bailout.

Tom Caudron

[Citation Needed]

SAIC Motor this week opened a $425 million assembly plant here as part of an effort to lead China's growing market for domestic brands.
And it signed an agreement to buy bit player Etsong (Qingdao) Vehicle Manufacturing Co. Ltd and convert it into a plant that will begin building mini-vehicles by the second half this year, with an initial annual capacity for between 60,000 and 70,000 units.
GM has spent $263 million on this plant that will be used for manufacturing engines for the minicars that GM is selling in China.
"China is a natural" place to produce cars and components less expensively, Wagoner said in a interview in Shanghai, though he added that building GM cars in China for the US market would be a "relatively low priority".

As I said, donate to relevant charities. Our country donates more to charity than anyone so I'm sure it could easily be funded.

If this were enough all on it's own, why do we have problems of homelessness and poverty among the elderly now, with both charity and government intervention? Are you seriously suggesting that the only reason that charities that help these people are underfunded is because people won't donate as long as Social Security is around?

As to rest of your post, I fail to see how a society taking care of it's older citizens is a flaw in any kind of moral code that wants to be seen as anything other than savage greed. These people are the ones who worked to build the society you're living in now. Leaving them to beg for charity and hope for the best is an idea that mocks the very concept of a "moral code". If you find yourself in a position when you're too old to work that you don't need any financial help to live, great, say no thank you and don't accept it or donate it to someone who needs it, but to begrudge everyone else even a bare minimum of what they need to live day-to-day shows a lack of compassion and level of greed that I find profoundly disturbing.

Read the no frills version here.

That's right. Little Johnny can press his face into Miss Blackwell's breasts and all is well.

Actually, Miss Blackwell is likely to charge little Johnny with sexual harassment.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/103252/4yearold_suspended_for_hugging_teachers.html

... then yes. That is almost exactly what the GP is referring to.
With some Amazon's mTurk added over the Google layer.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/09/geeks-spot-foss.html

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/373893/internet_users_aid_in_search_for_steve.html

http://innonate.com/2007/09/09/is-this-steve-fossett-the-community-searches/

You can't use a credit counselor on a mortgage anyway. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/337823/credit_counseling_facts_and_faqs.html?page=4&cat=3

(snip) Or, maybe they want to remind people of a fish, that swims alone from the crowd with a brilliant display of features.

They better make it rated R for violence, then...

While we wait, if any of you should have a theory of your own, please share with the group.

My theory is that by always having 'beta' next to something, this ensures that anyone who uses their tools will always think they are using the latest and greatest.

Or, maybe they want to remind people of a fish, that swims alone from the crowd with a brilliant display of features.

Its not "foolish" its a fact. Perhaps you should google before calling people foolish, eh?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/01/040105071229.htm

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5576/obesity_and_poverty_the_poorest_of.html

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/correlation-between-obesity-and-poverty-health-people-2010-should-increase-attention-those-poverty-14046.html

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/469027

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/2/0/6/1/p20614_index.html

Not only that, look at Phelps' proportions (in which his arms span appear to be of a person of one height, his legs of another, his height another, and look at that rib cage, containing lungs that outstrip capacity of other swimmers who cannot hope to beat him on the return leg of the pool swim, even when he is not in first place until the LAST fraction of a second...):

http://peakoiljournal.com/topic/michael-phelps-freakish-physique-7359.html

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/956775/body_types_figure_into_olympic_champions.html

Now, some say he's freakish, while others argue his dimensions are not.

Fortunately, he apparently has no "keel fin" dimension/projections drag problems. If so, he would be too embarrassed to emerge from the pool...

OTOH, if swimming is rigged, then it might be proved by ripping off the swim head gear and looking for ear buds sending the instruction ("slow down JUSSST a bit... Phelps is on your tail... let him hit the Chronos buzzer pad first...")

Interesting point (and a bon mot: (p)rebuttal - I like that)!

Searching Slashdot with google shows this one:

      http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=68278&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=6250650

But most of the comments along this line are (p)rebuttals as you note - good insight.

This attitude does show up in places other than Slashdot, though. Here's a couple:

      http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/655841/using_gimp_to_edit_images_as_good_as.html

      http://grimthing.com/archives/2007/01/11/Gimp_vs_Photoshop/

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/870875/toyota_plans_to_shut_san_antonio_plant.html

As of now, Tundra's are also being manufactured in Princeton, Indiana. Toyota plans to shift the production of the Tundra completely to San Antonio by November. There is a plan underway to have that plant be the production hub for the Toyota Highlander which is originally produced in Mississippi. The Mississippi plant will then be the new site for the highly demanded Toyota Prius. Toyota hopes that moving the production of the Prius will help with the increased demand of the gas-saving hybrids. There simply aren't enough to go around right now. A $23,000 Prius can be sold on Ebay today for almost $35,000. Americans want this car and Toyota is determined to bring it to us.

Emphasis mine.

The Japanese were NOT about to surrender. It's a pride thing. Anyone in Japan's position who had the word "surrender" in their vocabulary WOULD have, but their military leaders pretty much didn't until they experienced the "vaporizing a cuple[sic] of important population centers" and realized that they would lose what they took through their early war action, period. Moreover, Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually weren't huge population centers... they were much more industrial centers, with a lower civilian population than MANY of the other targets that could have been hit.

Read a history book sometime, rather than sound bites. As well as books from BOTH sides of the Pacific. It might open your eyes.

50 Cent is a great example...in addition to his "gold plated house" and other high-priced tchotchkes, he had the foresight to buy a 10% stake in Glaceau. When Coca-Cola bought it out, he netted a cool $400 million.

Boycott's are one of the few legitimate (and occasionally successful) tools of protest available to the individual. "Vote with your wallet" as I've been told. Although the dollar is getting lighter every year, it still carries more weight than any other paper ballet I'm aware of.

It went beyond the scale of just an individual obviously, but to demonstrate how effective they can be boycotts were one of the primary tools used in our our Revolution.

Everything looks obvious in retrospect.

But you aren't patenting an idea. You are patenting a workable implementation of that idea.

It doesn't matter that Dick Tracy has a two-way wrist radio in 1946 or Maxwell Smart a shoe phone in 1965 - even when the theatrical prop sells for $39,000 on eBay.

What matters is that your work contributes to the evolution of a real-life cellular phone and cellular network.

> Nope, that's impossible. If you're uploading at a faster rate than you're downloading, you would be uploading data you have not yet downloaded.

Wrong. I'd be sending the same bits of the file to more than one computer.

If you have one lone, slow, seed with lots of peers trying to download from it and you have a decent connection, you can easily have a ratio greater than one while waiting for the seed to finish seeding a complete copy. This scenario is common enough, in fact, is the entire reason for the "initial seeding" mode found in some torrent clients.

While you're correct that many lines are asymmetric, that still doesn't come into play unless you're downloading faster than you're uploading. You may be used to large torrents where you can peg your connection (and those certainly do exist), but with small ones, you won't be able to download anything all that fast. It's perfectly possible to get stuck with a slow download when there's just one seed. If there are enough peers, your upload should be more than enough to outmatch whatever pathetic connection the lone, slow seed has.

In other words, I know that you are incorrect from experience, because I have done this.

Finally, I should point out that while you download random, comparatively rare blocks with BitTorrent, your computer is very capable of knowing where the pieces fit together. You often get the entire block from just one source, and blocks are contiguous. That is, the bits inside them are one solid piece, rather than being randomly distributed throughout the file. If they weren't, it would take a lot more data to know where to put those bits and nobody wants to add overhead like that.

> Show me one case that holds the sharing 32 seconds of a song constitutes infringement and I'll agree

I can do better. Here's a finding of infringement for a few notes:
Bright Tunes Music Corp. v. Harrisongs Music, Ltd., 420 F.Supp. 177 (1976)

Silence has also been copyrighted. You can't make this stuff up. The laws are so bad, I don't put anything past the courts these days.

- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

The next revolution won't be in the model of the American Revolution. It will be in the model of Cuba and Ireland. It will be guerrilla and the pocket-pieces will definitely help.