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This doesn't come as a shock, especially to those familiar with the work of Delli Carpini and other researchers on the matter. But conflict, compromise, and coordination are learned habits and in modern America -- unlike, say, Renaissance Florence or colonial America -- there are few opportunities to exercise political habits in the public sphere. (When was the last time you attended a city council meeting? Checked your state and federal representatives' voting records? Read the Federal Register? And why would you, unless you're in a politically-related profession?) Basically, as politics has retreated from the public square to private corridors, we've fallen out of the habit of democracy.

On the other hand, ATITD offers its players a direct connection between politics and policy; it's a little hard to adopt the "Don't blame me, I didn't vote for him" line when your character is zapped out of existence by a single person, just as apathy was discouraged in early American democracy by the devolution of power to small towns and accessible state legislatures. So, there's a hopeful nugget buried in this: if you give folks a reason to vote, they'll remain politically engaged.

Cambridge Dictionary Online

Here is a link for people like I that didn't know what it meant.Jingoism

a thick rubber ring, often filled with air, which is fitted around the outer edge of the wheel of a vehicle, allowing the vehicle to stick to the road surface and to travel over the ground more easily

According to the dictionary I refer to, it is correct: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=361 14

he: 2 used to refer to a person whose sex is not known

It also says "they" can be used: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=824 49

they: 2 used to avoid saying 'he or she'

According to the dictionary I refer to, it is correct: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=361 14

he: 2 used to refer to a person whose sex is not known

It also says "they" can be used: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=824 49

they: 2 used to avoid saying 'he or she'

Think is an intransitive verb, meaning it doesn't take an object. Transitive verbs can be followed by prepositional phrases (think about that) or by adverbs (think differently). Adjectives can only modify nouns. In your examples both different and large are adjectives. So both think different and think large use incorrect grammar.

Other languages such as Spanish allow for implied subjects (tengo hambre vs. yo tengo hambre), in which both phrases are grammatically correct. However, there are no rules in English that allow for implied objects.

Yup, I'm a pedantic a href="http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?k ey=grammar*1+0">grammarian and damn proud of it.

No, it's not. Come on, that's a pretty basic. I suggest you at least help yourself to a good dictionary.

The balance between contract law and fair use exceptions is indeed the balance between individuals - ie contract law trumping all others and socialism - ie fair use removing private property for the good of the community.

And where exactly is the "individualism" when an corporation makes a contract? Corporations are about as anti-individualist as you can get. And the Constitution defines copyrights as limited rights that Congress may grant for the promotion of the arts; you don't own a copyright in the same way you own other private property.

It sounds like your political ideas come straight out of Ayn Rand alone; I suggest you broaden your reading a little...

No, it is stealing (as well as copyright violation.)

Webster's NewWorld Dictionary, 2nd College Edition
steal: 1. to take or appropriate (another's property, ideas, etc.) without permission, dishonestly, or unlawfully, esp. in a secret or surreptitious manner.

Cambridge International Dictionary of English
steal [cambridge.org]: to take (something) without the permission or knowledge of the owner and keep it

• The boys were charged with stealing bikes from a house in Summerhill Rd. [T]
  
• The number of cars which are stolen every year has risen considerably. [T]
  
• She came home to find she'd had her TV and video stolen (=someone had stolen them). [T]
  
• When the book was published we found that the author had stolen several of our ideas. [T]
  
• The firm is now accusing a small band of its former employees of stealing trade secrets. [T]
  
• They were so hungry they had to steal in order to eat. [I]
  
• He has been convicted of stealing. [I]
  

From these definitions, it is clear that the word 'steal' may be applied to the appropriation of ideas, trade secrets, and other non-physical assets (like copyrighted digital music.)

Cambridge International Dictionary of English
steal : to take (something) without the permission or knowledge of the owner and keep it

• The boys were charged with stealing bikes from a house in Summerhill Rd. [T]
  
• The number of cars which are stolen every year has risen considerably. [T]
  
• She came home to find she'd had her TV and video stolen (=someone had stolen them). [T]
  
• When the book was published we found that the author had stolen several of our ideas. [T]
  
• The firm is now accusing a small band of its former employees of stealing trade secrets. [T]
  
• They were so hungry they had to steal in order to eat. [I]
  
• He has been convicted of stealing. [I]
  

To test the theory, obviously you'd need a sample of the atmosphere. Although New Scientist mentions ESA's Venus Express mission, it doesn't say whether the mission would have the necessary equipment to check for life.

Only if you speak American English (as many people in the UK seem to be going!)

See this
And this

They both echo the Oxford English dictionary! (ie a US billion = thousand million , UK billion = million million)

As I said, it gets very confusing in the UK. Esp when accountants (who deal with trendy things and small numbers + always seem to talk in US billions) start talking to us Physics types (who use big numbers all the time and therefore always use UK billions)

> You're American right ...?
No :-)

Seriously, is upliftment a real word? I always thought it to be one of those pseudo-words that were popular in some parts of the world -- if you look closely at the Google results, you'll find quite a number of the 33k results to be from pages written by Asians/Africans. I wouldn't be surprised if upliftment was popular in `local' english (for some values of local) but it's hardly a standard word. On the other hand, the OED has over the past few years been very inclusive in its approach to including words from across the globe (jihad from arabic(?), thali from hindi, and so on) so who knows, somebody could have included upliftment as well.

Encarta can't locate ``upliftment'' (though I know it's hardly the final answer); but then neither does the online cambridge dictionary or dict.org or dictionary.com (which searches through quite a few dictionaries). My old dogeared copy of Oxford Concise also doesn't have the word.

I don't have a subscription to the OED Online, so I can't go to the ultimate authority :-), but please, if you can give me a citation, I'd be very glad (contact info here).

In that spirit, I offer 10 to 1 odds on 10,000 that by 2050, we will not have more than 1,000 people living on two planets other than earth. Someone else puts up $1000, I put up $10,000. If we have two planets colonised by the definition above, they win, if we don't, I win.

The first paragraph exposes the falacy of this article.

1. Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years
2. if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week.

Environmentalists have been predicting imminent doom for over 50 years. The Skeptical Environmentalist

These are the same folks who predicted that the world would run out of food by 1980, then predicted we'd run out of oil by 1985.

And of course Thomas Malthus predicted imminent mass starvation in the early 1800s.

In the 1970s, they predicted:

"The world as we know it will likely be ruined before the year 2000
and the reason for this will be its inhabitants' failure to comprehend
two facts. These facts are (1) World food production cannot keep pace
with the galloping growth of population. (2) 'Family planning' cannot
and will not, in the foreseeable future, check this runaway growth."

"Agricultural experts state that a tripling of the food
supply of the world will be necessary in the next 30
years or so, if the 6 or 7 billion people who may be
alive in the year 2000 are to be adequately fed.
Theoretically such an increase might be possible, but it
is becoming increasingly clear that it is totally
impossible in practice."

Except, here we are in 2002 and those 6 or 7 billion people are eating better than any of their ancestors in all of human history, even in the poorest countries.

For more info, see The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon, and The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg.

I quote from the websites "about the author" frame.

"Bjørn Lomborg, Ph.D., associate professor in statistics, Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark, is a concerned environmentalist, a former Greenpeace member, a left-wing sympathizer who is vegetarian because he does not want to kill animals. When Lomborg started investigating the statistics behind the current gloomy view of the environment, he was genuinely surprised. As the facts clearly pointed towards an ever-improving world, he published these statistics as four lengthy articles in a leading Danish newspaper, unleashing the biggest post-war debate with more than 400 articles in all the major papers.

Academically, Lomborg has published internationally in the fields of game theory and computer simulations. He is a member of the Learned Society of Aarhus and the American Political Science Association. He participates frequently in public debate, in TV, radio and in the papers. Lomborg has also been offered a tenure-track position at UCLA. Furthermore, he has held lectures on the book widely in Denmark, Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. "

The point is, that we are NOT abusing our environment. Yes there are abuses, but in aggregate, we are in fine shape.

The military is hardly the primary source of funding for this research. Think DOE. The military's bottomless trust fund certainly makes barons out of its contractors, but few if any of those are pursuing global warming/climate change inititiatives. In any case, I'll suspect the profit motive when a climatologist runs me down in a Escalade. Maybe I'm too old, but my peers all drove bicycles.

Wow. You managed to almost completely miss the point of what I said, and instead responded with a rant about military spending. Admittedly that was not the best analogy, but still.

What the folks with an IQ greater than their shoe size probably realized from my post, is that I was pointing out the conflict of interest between supposedly objective scientists and the need to get funding for their research. That money doesn't fall from the sky you know. And to get funding, you have to sell yourself/your research. So naturally, it's in the climate researchers best interest to talk big about global warming, even in the face of dubious evidence, to get that next grant. Get it now?

An example: The CFC's emitted as propellant and leaked as coolant nearly wiped out the ozone layer. Enforced by international treaty, we changed the chemical compounds used for these purposes to a similar, but benign cousin of CFC's and we are now making progress undoing that damage. In terms of global warming, raising the CAFE standards would be a major step in the right direction.

Nevermind that the ozone hole is a naturally occurring phenomenon. And you carefully avoided answering the question. Good work.

With respect to the CAFE standards, rubbish. Show me a study supporting that assertion.

I'm tired of hearing this "junk science" rap. It's entirely too much like Dubya's "fuzzy math". If you're willing to dismiss an enormous field of study, and each of its thousands of scientists in a single, trite phrase, you're not part of the discussion. Show me some valid, non fossil fuel industry sponsored research that counters research published by the likes of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Skeptical Environmentalist. Just the first example that pops into my head. Note, this man is an environmentalist, who after researching for a pro-global warming book, found out that the facts just don't stand up to reality.

Umberto Eco (best know for his novel "The Name of the Rose") is a professor of semiotics. (Semiotics could be defined as the study of symbol systems and their interpretation, or a better definition). "Symbol systems and interpretation" - sound familiar? Our dear Professor of Theobiology is all about finding 'hidden meanings' and 'concealed connections'! Pokemon=evolution! chmod+base 8=satan! Steve Jobs' reality distortion field "mind control"(hmm, maybe he has a point on that last one... ;^) )

In his novel "Foucault's Pendulum" he tells the story of a publishing house editor who gets way in over his head working on a project on books on the occult. He and his friends keep finiding more and more wild connections between elements that at first seem unrelated, but when put together form a wild web. (If you read it, don't get bogged down in the hundreds of names, most aren't that important) Because the characters are willing to form connections between things that aren't really proveable, their world turns into a madhouse of hidden meanings and sinister powers. Sound familiar? Our dear Professor of Theobiology lives in just such a world.

For a more in depth (but not too dry) look at how and why connections between ideas should (and shouldn't) be made, look at Eco's essay "Interpretation and Overinterpretation" (A little more at this link). Basically, Eco is reacting to the excesses that can take place in the academic world.

This brings us back to our Professor of Theobiology. In "The Name of the Rose", Eco used the conflict between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance to illustrate the distinction between two different modes of thought. The medieval monks were trapped in their way of thinking - full of hidden meanings and sinister connections. In contrast, the protagonist used reason and science to deal with the problems at hand (a series of murders).

All in all, it's rather frightening that here in the 21st century we're still trying to deal with the Taliban and our Professor of Theobiology.

Why not? Here's a book on the subject.

Oracle chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson ... suggested that everything depends on what your definition of "unbreakable" is.

break (DAMAGE)
verb
to (cause to) separate suddenly or violently into two or more pieces, or to (cause to) stop working by being damaged
(Cambridge online dictionary)

She appears to have a good point there; I don't suspect that Oracle database servers will start to separate violently into two or more pieces when this is exploited, and they probably wont be damaged to the point where they stop working either.

I have heard many people complaining about this song, and I think it is misundrestood.

The ironic part aren't the examples. The irony is implied in the chorus part:

"Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything's okay and everything's going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out when
You think evertyhing's gone wrong and everything blows up In your face"

Basicaly it says that sometimes when you expect things to go right, they go awfully wrong, and vice versa. That's exactly the definition of irony

The guy stated: "I like spam" not "I like my spam". And there's no mention of liking spam that he signed up for. Do you read the posts before you reply, or just pick out one or two random words then write a response to what you think the person meant? p.s. Look up threat in the dictionary. I didn't make any kind of a threat, only suggested that if he likes spam, I have plenty i can share with him, if he's not just being contrarian.

Except for some people who think choosing an operating system of importance equivalent to choosing a religion most of us don't care what OS we use. Instead most people care about what apps they can run on a given OS. My favorite apps/tools are Emacs, Perl, Internet Explorer, WinAmp, ICQ, ssh, bash, grep and Word. Windows runs all of them with the least amount of hassle and that's why I use it. This is true for most of the computer users in the world, the OS that the app happens to run on is incidental.

I used to think that linux on the desktop wasn't a goal worth persuing at the moment - then I realized every Windows/Office purchase is money for Microsoft to use on its quest to eliminate linux.

Short of acquiring a genie and using their three wishes to wish away Linux, Open Source, and college classes on operating systems there's no way that anyone can eliminate Linux. Most reasonable people realize this (including Linus) and rightfully don't see Linux vs. Microsoft as some sort of war that should be won at all costs.

I'm sorry, but I believe you are mistaken. The Cambridge Dictionary [cambridge.org] has no listing for toleranse.

Tardy:

tardy (adjective )
FORMAL
slow or late in happening or arriving
Dinner was somewhat delayed on account of David's rather tardy arrival

Even though he was the creator of the big-bang theory, he later rejected his own theory.

Details here

definition of can't from www.dictionary.com:

"can't \Can't\ A colloquial contraction for can not."

Colloquial means that it is used in conversation, but is not valid English.

Heh, at least he/she knows how to spell arbitrator correctly. You know, he/she was right, "By your own words you will be judged." I judge you to be a dumbass.

Here's a link to help you out.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/

Then, the lawyers and other rent-seeking non-productive leeches upon the economy would have to pay a royalty. The more they profit from pain and misery, the more they have to pay. (Before you mod me down for trolling, please go to you library and try to find Black Hole Tariffs and Endogenous Policy Theory)

But to whom? A collective of their victims? To fund community media outlets like Public Access Television or Pacifica Radio? RMS?

nebula noun [C] SPECIALIZED
a cloud of gas or dust in space, appearing either bright or dark
nebular adjective SPECIALIZED

From the Cambridge International Dictionary of English:

-wise
relating to
What shall we do foodwise - do you fancy going out to eat?
Moneywise, of course, I'm much better off than I used to be.
What do we need to take with us clothes-wise?
We were very lucky weather-wise yesterday.