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What of all the works that were removed from the public domain without any compensation whatsoever to the public, each time copyright terms were extended? Robbery!

A valid criticism. You should write to your representative and Senator. Let them know where you stand. Or better yet, start a Political Action Committee (PAC). By collecting $155,000 / year ($10 / year from only 15.5k people) your PAC could max out its contributions to the primary and general election campaigns of every incumbent (or their leading opponents) on the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet and the Senate Judiciary Committee. You may not get your way (especially if your message boils down to "copyright sucks!"), but you can be sure they'll listen. Taking a few steps of civic engagement would be much more positive (not to mention legal) than, for example, downloading the latest top-40 and claiming its justified because you have to go to the library, instead of Project Gutenberg, to get a Hemingway novel.

The propaganda is so badly done it should be obvious to any reasonably intelligent kids.

I thought it was cute. Then again, I'm a fan of Happy Tree Friends (although they usually suffer a lot more than they did here) and camp tributes to the silly educational movies of yesteryear. And there didn't seem to be anything untruthful in the video. The nuances of copyright were laid out appropriately, as were YouTube's general policies, which largely follow one of the DMCA safe harbor provisions (other than the potential ban for life, which is not a DMCA safe harbor requirement).

If you want another attempt to provide education on the web about copyright law and its implications, check out Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW? It is entertaining and educational, but it is targeted at an audience that is a little more aware of copyright issues than the audience of the YouTube clip.

I agree, actually. Duke has run the gamut of teaching OO languages in their first year classes for decades now, from C++ through java to who knows what now. As a consequence, I end up teaching independent study students who want to actually learn C before they take the required course in operating systems. Most of e.g. C++ relative to C is bloat, in my opinion (although of course, sigh, stating this out loud in Modern Times simply invites the compiler flamewar to begin).

Personally, I think the best way to teach programming to future computer scientists is indeed to start with a course that mixes a foray (at least) into assembler followed by C. The best description of C that I've heard in numerous discussions on the subject (many of them heated, of course:-) is that C is a thin veneer of upper-level language sensibility on top of naked assembler (sometimes with the assembler literally shining through with inlined code). If your goal is to teach somebody computer science as opposed to train them for a job as a poorly educated web programmer, starting from the ground up in this way teaches them about the processor, memory, registers, basic operations, devices and interfaces, and much more as they learn to program, and in the end will make them far more effective programmers who write far more efficient code. Working without the "safety net" associated with higher level compilers also teaches them (sometimes painfully) to be careful.

Naturally, I expect nothing but flames from those who have focused one OO languages for their professional careers or who have drunk the kool-ade, but I cannot help but finish by posting a link to a bit of humor:

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Beowulf/c++_interview.php

More than a bit of wisdom in this rather biting satire... I truly hope that Duke one day pays heed and returns to teaching its majors solid computer science starting at the very beginning and only later explores OO languages and concepts (and list oriented languages and concepts, and specialty languages and concepts and so on). And it is rather difficult to get more fundamental than C and still be considered a compiler.

rgb

>Shakespear was published under a regime of perpetual copyright.

Well, I'm no expert, but this guy from Duke says Shakespeare was written before the "Statute of Anne" or any other copyright law:

http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/2011/02/18/shakespeare-and-copyright/

Kevin Lacy should be investigated for being a narcissistic asshat and receive a letter telling him not to act like an asshat again.

A good engineer would be thankful and encourge people to come forward and question their work.

The very act of being an asshole can be dangerous.
What would have happened if LeMessurier wasn't willing to question his design after the fact?

http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/ce131/citicorp1.htm

It makes some comparisons a little easier. The distance you want to go is, in a sense, constant, while the amount of gas you use (aka the money you have to spend) is the variable. Some Duke researchers even got a journal paper out of it:

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2008/06/gpmfuqua.html

(That's a popular account; the original article is in Science, behind a paywall.)

The key comparison: going from 18 mpg to 28 mpg saves 198 gallons of gas over 10k miles, but going from 34 to 54 mpg (again, 14 mpg) saves only half as much (94 gallons).

Slashdotters are used to doing the math in their heads and probably don't much care, but for the less math-aware, having the constant of the distance they want to go in the denominator makes the math more intuitive.

It may have something to do with this. (I realize the article is not in metric units but the concept remains.)

If [the jury] feel sympathetic to the plight of the defendant, they can take that into consideration during the sentencing phase if they wish.

No, they cannot. You fail on two accounts:

1) Juries do not participate in sentencing for non-capital criminal cases, except in a handful of states (and even then they don't set the sentence). The Duke Law Journal had a nice article http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?52+Duke+L.+J.+951 arguing that historical accidents contributed to the switch from English jury sentencing to modern judge sentencing.
2) And judges lost the ability to express sympathy for the plight of the defendant as consideration during the sentencing phase when the legislatures began passing "mandatory minimum sentencing" laws designed to take away that sympathy.

The version you found is not current -- it is of an early draft that kind of got lost when examining some of the technical details.

A current draft of the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the eventual book can be found here:

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/axioms.pdf

Forgive the occasional typos and so on.

rgb

Cox (who was a physicist at Johns Hopkins and published his theory originally in the context of an axiomatic approach to statistical mechanics) followed by Jaynes -- with extensive examples in both algebra and human words illustrating that this is indeed how we actually think -- provide us with a semi-quantitative ordinal basis for rank-ordering our degree of belief in networks of propositions, the self-consistently best way to determine at least approximately "best belief".

Note well that what Cox and Jaynes provide are the valid metaphysical and epistemological basis for knowledge. One simply cannot do any better, given our experience.

This interested me, and I did a some browsing on the web. If you, gentle reader, want to hear RGB's reasonings in more detail, he has it posted at http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Philosophy/axioms/axioms/.

This cave and this one sound perfect to start with. What do you think? Good places for hiding from daemons?

http://neuron.duke.edu/

is a good place to start. Has a lot of info about the high level ... at lower levels ... it would depend very much on what specific areas you're interested in.

you're an idiot.

We've discussed this on MetaOptimize.

Short answer: Download an empirical testing script like dieharder, and see if the encrypted output looks "random" under this battery of tests.

I was thinking especially about that one NY skyscraper; sitting on columns which are not in its corners, but between them.

The Fifty-Nine Story Crisis

It looks more like an insect.

http://www.biology.duke.edu/dnhs/pics/Cordulegaster_naiad_face.jpg

Correct me if that is wrong.

No need to correct you, this is exactly what I was saying. If you are into receiver theory, the ideal filter for your signal matches the shape of your signal. Or, crudely rephrased, if P(a)=0.1 and P(b)=0.9 then you allocate 10% of your resources to look for 'a' and 90% to look for 'b'. It only makes sense; in case of the ideal receiver it is also mathematically proven.

The number of terrorists in the world is a tiny, tiny proportion of all people, so the risk that Akhmed is bad is likewise tiny

That is true, and in a sane world we shouldn't care. However this is not a sane world. Besides, there are two factors that eat into your argument:

1. The risk is small, but the consequences are severe. This is why nuclear plants have containment domes, and that's why the Shuttle has three independent computers.
2. Passengers have nothing else to do, so their investment of time into watching for suspicious activity is not a loss.

In your analogy, it's like knowing that there is a one in a million chance that you will find your car keys under the bushes in someone's back yard, and if they aren't there they are forever lost. Are you going to nose around the backyard of some stranger because of that information?

Sure I would, if it is a life or death situation. Let me rephrase your own scenario:

"You are locked in a very large prison, for life. The warden tells you that he lost a key somewhere. You can walk anywhere within the prison. If you find that key you are free to walk out. Will you look for that key, as opposed to sitting on the bed in your unlocked cell until you die from old age?"

This is just another illustration of the principle that low odds alone are not a good reason to abandon some attempt. I probably won't look for a candy instead of a key - the gain is not worth the pain. But when people's lives are at stake they are willing to do far more than to glance from time to time at other passengers.

Profiling can make sense, but if all you have to go on is that the guy is named Akhmed, I hope you will hold your distrust and vigilance until you have a lot more than that to go on.

Nobody advocates preemptive beatings yet (since W left the White House.) But Akhmed will likely notice that many people are looking at him. Sucks to be him, and this isn't what I'd like to have. But too many of his compatriots tried to attack innocents. The best way to stop profiling is to stop breaking the statistical pattern.

The coolest one I've seen was on a girl who had the digits of e (2.71828183...) spiraling around her arm...

I'd say be nerdier than that and get a Feigenbaum number (or, in the same vein, a Bifurcation Diagram).

Taiwan = RoC: Republic of China
Mainland China = PRC: People's Republic of China...

And that doesn't even consider the eventual reunification that *both* sides desire. (although the desired terms are wildly different...)

You really open a can of worms with that one. You're right that a significant minority want unification if differences could be resolved, but this is not a common goal. For instance, my wife is Taiwanese, and she and her family do NOT want unification. The previously elected president Chen Shui-Bian was the first president in the current government not from the Kuomintang party but from the DPP, a party that is pro-independence. Even the current president from the KMT, Ma Ying-Jeou, likely does not want unification, but rather stronger economic ties. Most Taiwanese favor the status quo-- de facto political sovereignty without severing ties with China by formally announcing independence (source).

So, no, the factories are not moving within China.

"I made an estimate some years ago, when I appeared before a committee of the House of Lords, that we had published in this country since the Declaration of Independence 220,000 books. They have all gone. They had all perished before they were ten years old. It is only one book in 1000 that can outlive the forty-two-year limit.

Therefore why put a limit at all? You might as well limit the family to twenty-two children. "

Which is interesting, since, our problem now is the many many many works that have not disappeared, that cannot be used by new authors.

That and concept of corporate ownership which he didn't seem to really be concerned about (Disney).

http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/zoomcomic.html

Depends... Because even when doing this, you won't be using up a full blown 5 starters per year. You'll perhaps use one more over the lifetime of a car. I'm pretty sure that the environmental footprint of that one extra starter is going to be easily offset by the gas saved in the long run.

So, as a matter of fact, I also thought about the environmental impact but somehow I expected that to be self-evident. Seems it was not....

For the record: I did do the turn off/turn on thing for over a year (2008 to be precise) with my car. As of 2010, I'm still using that starter. Heck, it's still the same starter that came with the car in (February) 2000 when I bought it. Why did I stop using the technique? Gas got cheaper again and it is quite a lot of self-discipline if it's not done automatically for you. The times you turn it off and need to turn it on again after a second are especially frustrating. That said, on the routes you usually do, you get to know the lights and can usually anticipate when it makes sense to turn of the engine and when not. Fuel savings were real but with my car, really not in the "worth doing" it range. More like 0.2 l/100km, which translates (using 16000km per year, aka 10000 miles per year) to 32 litres saved per year.

Also, be very careful with the phrase "A fuel efficiency increase of 5 MPG is a few hundred bucks a year" because MPG doesn't work as you think it works. There is a reason I used a 20 MPG to 25 MPG increase: MPG "increases" are not linear (and which is why most other countries work with "consumption" using litres/100km). Consider a 15MPG car that suddenly does 20MPG. That's accounts 666 gallons versus 500 gallons.... That "5 MPG increase" is much more significant that the one used in my illustration. (Link you should read)

Now immigration status by itself is sufficient to ask for papers.

According to federal law, they are required to have those on them anyways. Immigration and Nationality Act, Section 264(e):

(e) Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d). Any alien who fails to comply with the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall upon conviction for each offense be fined not to exceed $100 or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.

As far as racial profiling: Yes, technically this law and the governors executive order prohibit racial profiling. In reality it's impossible to enforce this law without relying heavily on racial considerations. We know that driving-while-black is still a real problem in this country, and you want me to believe that the police won't interpret this law to give them license (or even require them to) profile?

Based on my own experience, most of the people claiming to have been "profiled" have, by their own conduct (and not skin color) already drawn attention to themselves. People who are not taught how to behave in stressful situations, especially the 10 basic rules, seem to crop up more in the latino, black, and "white-trash" communities - indicating it's an economic, not racial, thing.

You will note that the video I link above begins with a kid claiming he was "profiled", and maybe he was, BUT his own conduct made the situation much worse.

What we're going to have, most likely, is some dumbass who happens to be latino, may or may not be an illegal alien, will try to start a fight with the cops and then his lawyer will later scream "profiling" anyways. And when that happens, I'll have little sympathy in the matter, because I prefer that to watching the cops get gunned down by illegal aliens.

Translation Error says his works aren't infringing because he gets artists' permission. This is completely wrong. In a lot of cases, the original artist might not even own the rights. If he gets the copyright owners' permission then it could be infringing, but not prosecuted because of an agreement with the copyright holder.

I was about to call nabsltd a liar, but he does secure the rights. It's not clear if he pays any money, but I'm going to trust nabsltd that it would be required. Here's a citation for everyone who says it's OK because he asks permission. No, he actually goes through the legal process to make sure he's covered.
http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?70+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+185+(spring+2007)
http://www.pauseandplay.com/weirdal.htm

jbengt is closer than Translation Error with the hint that an agreement might not avoid a legal fight.

In most cases, Weird Al is making fun of the song, a true parody. In a lot of cases, though, he is only covered because he secured the rights. A true parody has to mock the song, not just replace the lyrics. "Yoda" does not reference nor make fun of "Lola" just becuase the words are different. "Fat" is very clearly a parody of "Bad", even down to mocking the vocal stylings of Michael Jackson. This distinction is at the heart of the argument, and Weird Al is really a very poor example of the parody form since many songs fall way short of qualifying. It actually muddies the water rather than clearing things up, for the reasons listed.

I don't think Chuck DeVore has a leg to stand on, and his explanation is a backformation to try to escape justice.

For the Downfall videos, I believe the subtitles do parody the scene, very well, but I don't think it is fair-use parody. It is most likely infringing parody. Parody is not automatically fair use. Parody "is the use of some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author's works." (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.)

You can poke fun at Downfall without actually making any sort of comment on the work itself.

college sports players are the same and need to be paid for playing . . . .

Fixed that for you.

Seriously, how is this the same? College athletes are paid. They're paid with an education, and the cost of that education can be stratospheric. Take Duke, a big time basketball school in the Final Four. Tuition and fees, room and board, and other expenses add up to over $53,000 PER YEAR. http://www.admissions.duke.edu/jump/applying/finaid.html As another example, TCU, a big time football school, has annual costs of over $41,000. http://www.fam.tcu.edu/cost.asp How may 18 year old kids are worth $53,000 or $41,000 per year? That's $41,000 or $53,000 worth of education for every player on the team. How is that not enough? Most college athletic departments are in the red and don't pay for themselves. http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/mensbasketball/2010-04-01-coaches-salaries-cover_N.htm

College players get to go to school and don't have to pay for it. Most families can't afford to send their children to a college like Duke or TCU. Maybe the college athlete wins the sports lottery and gets drafted, or maybe he just gets a great education that opens a lot of doors. Either way, college athletes have nothing in common with interns who get paid NOTHING and get NOTHING in return for their time. No salary, no TUITION, no ROOM AND BOARD. Nothing.

It's pleasurable to have sex with your partner, it's hedonistic to have sex with everyone else. But then again, it's the nature of half of us, as shown by this chart

It's never that simple. In this article, "FAIREST OF THEM ALL" AND OTHER FAIRY TALES OF FAIR USE, the author analyses 60 fair use defenses using each of the four factors, and finds no obvious relationship... (The PDF version includes tables, photographs, and is better formatted than the html version).

That is not what the experts in education policy are saying. Here is a good link for info and discussions about what is appropriate, whether through Fair Use or the TEACH Act http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/2010/01/27/can-we-stream-digital-video/

Care to cite any of these?

Sure. Here's a few:

Richard A. Posner, An Economic Approach to Legal Procedure and Judicial Administration , 2 J. Legal Stud. 399 (June 1973).
John Leubsdorf, Toward a History of the American Rule on Attorney Fee Recovery , 47 L. & Contemp. Prob. (1984).
Thomas D. Rowe, Jr., The Legal Theory of Attorney Fee Shifting: A Critical Overview , 1982 Duke L.J. 651.
Thomas D. Rowe, Jr., Predicting the Effects of Attorney Fee Shifting, 47 Law & Contemp. Probs. 139 (1984)

But just search law journals and economic journals for terms like "American rule," "English rule," "loser pays," and "attorney fee shifting." You'll get thousands of hits. This is an extremely thoroughly studied problem whose roots go back centuries. It's also one with no clear solution, either theoretically or in practice.

Care to cite any of these?

Sure. Here's a few:

Richard A. Posner, An Economic Approach to Legal Procedure and Judicial Administration , 2 J. Legal Stud. 399 (June 1973).
John Leubsdorf, Toward a History of the American Rule on Attorney Fee Recovery , 47 L. & Contemp. Prob. (1984).
Thomas D. Rowe, Jr., The Legal Theory of Attorney Fee Shifting: A Critical Overview , 1982 Duke L.J. 651.
Thomas D. Rowe, Jr., Predicting the Effects of Attorney Fee Shifting, 47 Law & Contemp. Probs. 139 (1984)

But just search law journals and economic journals for terms like "American rule," "English rule," "loser pays," and "attorney fee shifting." You'll get thousands of hits. This is an extremely thoroughly studied problem whose roots go back centuries. It's also one with no clear solution, either theoretically or in practice.

Your idea has been stolen by the past!

Like this one?

http://www.duke.edu/~jwc13/beerlauncher.html

Watch as Mark Hosler discovers that it was indeed Bono and company who sued his band Negativland after they(U2) had attempted to blame it on Island Records.

Fuck U2!! These Guys Are From England And Who Gives A Shit!

http://realserver.law.duke.edu/ramgen/spring04/framedafternoon2.rm

If we are at the 1934 levels of average global temperature then why are none of the 1930s in the top ten warmest years? http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/2008temps

If global temperatures have been record for the last 150 years why are of the top 10 years from the last dozen years?

Apparently, 2009 is going to make it into the top 10.
http://www.zeenews.com/news581998.html

Also, the year 1934 isn't in the global top 10, it is in the U.S. top 10 warmest years.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/1934-hottest-year-on-record.htm

The Americans with Disabilities Act states that, "No individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of public accommodation."

This has kept a generation of lawyers employed by arguing over the definition of "public accommodation". The strict interpretation limits it to only physical places, which would rule out games. There have been many court battles over expanding the definition. This particular suit, if I read the various summaries correctly (IANAL), would be one of the more far reaching stretches of the definition and could have a significant impact on how much the ADA covers.

In short, it could fund an entire new generation of lawyers by expanding the ADA to an almost unlimited scope. Blind or not, I hope this guy goes down in flames.

For reference: http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?50+Duke+L.+J.+297

You can get arbitrarily good images of fixed (dead) embryos, but live imaging using any method is damn tough, and live 3D imaging at this resolution is, as far as I know, unprecedented. Motion makes it nearly impossible to do MR or CT 3D imaging. You can gate against the cardiac cycle to image a single animal, but nobody can yet gate against a fetal heartbeat in a mouse. I'm not even sure if that would be enough, because the maternal heartbeat contributes significant motion, too.

One of our doctoral students did a 3D atlas of the embryonic mouse using MR microscopy. These were fixed specimens, but they're isotropic (the same spatial resolution in all three dimensions), and nobody's come close to matching our resolution as far as I know. Part of her work was looking at cardiac septal defects, which you pretty much have to study in embryos, because they aren't compatible with live birth.

One drawback of OCT is that it fails if you have to go through much tissue. Mice are tiny enough to make this work possible, but I don't think there's any way you could do it in humans, short of inserting a source/detector into the uterus, which kind of spoils the whole "non-invasive" feature.

That's just... sad, really.

On the brighter side, I suppose you could now drive four DIVEs from a single PC.

Duke University may have Linux@Duke but the official user support by Duke IT is mostly still for Windows- even though a large number of students have Macs. From what I hear, at Duke Linux is primarily used by system administrators, not students. Also, Seth (that wrote Yum: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/yum_article/yum_article/node5.html ) is no longer at Duke, and he was the primary driver behind Linux@Duke.

Actually, this was one of my favorite things about using Linux at Duke. The Pharos client is just another piece of bloat that the typical Linux user hates, so why would you want it? Most distros these days come with some sort of CUPS configuration tool. Even the first time I set this up it probably took less than 5 minutes. Just follow the instructions:

http://www.oit.duke.edu/comp-print/printing/faq.php#faq-3

I've done this on Kubuntu and Fedora. system-config-printer makes this really easy. The only other thing I should mention is that by default, the username sent to the printer is your Linux login name. If you make your Linux login name the same as your netid, you won't have to type in a user name when you print.

While meta-analysis is often considered the poorest form of scientific evidence

HUH?!?!?!?!? Meta-analysis and Systematic reviews of RCTs are the top of the EBM pyramid. It is the best*** type of evidence there is.

Evidence-Based Clinical Practice Resources

***: Meta-analysis and Systematic reviews of RCTs fall squarely under the garbage in/garbage out principle.

After all the Miller/Urey experiment in 1953 showed that amino acids can be produced fairly easily if a few simple conditions are met.

Carl Sagan demonstrated this experiment.

"Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts."

Instead it only supports what Dr. Pilcher says in the article:

"The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare."

In other words, it's just saying that amino acids are not that rare. If they're not that rare, why can't Earth have made them on it's own?

After all the Miller/Urey experiment in 1953 showed that amino acids can be produced fairly easily if a few simple conditions are met.

Miller took molecules which were believed to represent the major components of the early Earth's atmosphere and put them into a closed system

The gases they used were methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), hydrogen (H2), and water (H2O). Next, he ran a continuous electric current through the system, to simulate lightning storms believed to be common on the early earth. Analysis of the experiment was done by chromotography. At the end of one week, Miller observed that as much as 10-15% of the carbon was now in the form of organic compounds. Two percent of the carbon had formed some of the amino acids which are used to make proteins.

Maybe comets and meteors with amino acids were hitting earth as well. But finding them all over space also strengthens the idea that they're not uncommon to produce, and therefore also strengthens the theory that Earth could have produced them by itself. Either way seems like a guess to me.



Fun fact for the day: The Murchison meteorite which fell in Australia in 1969 also contained common amino acids such as glycine, alanine and glutamic acid as well as unusual ones like isovaline and pseudoleucine.

I'd say that if you can stick a DVD in, click one button, and have it backed up, their measure does not effectively control access.

And you would be wrong. This argument has already been tried in the 2600/DeCSS case, and the judge called it "indefensible".

hh... to quote a sage I read once: "clean your food"

you quite happily ignore the fact that those poisons CAN'T be broken down by nature, and ergo : acummulate in nature and our bodies. how long can we afford THAT ? also see, for example : http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/pest/effects.html

If you want to quote big speeds against something, that should be something *near* you, something that runs the risk of crashing. 17000 mph against the earth that's hundreds of miles away is totally meaningless.

Now, if you want to quote some "absolute" velocity, then the only reference that can be considered valid, according to Mach's principle would be against the "fixed distant stars", which means cosmic microwave background.

Then we can say we are all moving at 370 km/s towards the Virgo constellation (note the link says the whole Milky Way galaxy is moving at 600 km/s towards Centaurus but we have to subtract the speed of the earth relative to the galaxy as a whole. Longer explanation here).

http://www.cs.duke.edu/~nikhil/.fnano09/u34bu3r/Self-AssembledDNANanostructures/PDF/For%20Review/E00-668912817.pdf

Yeah, fuck you Nature.

What I said before:

While I support embryonic stem cell research, I don't support taxpayer money supporting it. Reduce taxes and let those who want ESC research donate money.

While I do no support government funding of research I don't oppose it either. I'd rather government reduce tax and let others pay for research. Only as a last effort should government fund research. But when government does fund it then the research should be open sourced so anyone could use it.

There is very rarely any corporate funding for something that CAN'T BE PATENTED

Corporations aren't the only ones that fund research. Universities fund research as well. So do charities and non profits. Others fund St Jude's Children's Research Hospital, which then funds research. Before he died Danny Thomas put his heart and soul into starting and supporting St Jude's, as does his daughter Marlo Thomas.

Falcon

It seems impossible to have any reasoned discussion about carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased from 290 ppm in pre-industrial times to 365 ppm today and that increase is NOT having a significant effect on climate.

Oh really?

In the 'global warming' scenario, short wavelength radiation from the sun passes through the atmosphere and warms the earth. The warmed earth then re-radiates long-wavelength infra-red radiation back into space, or at least tries to but is allegedly stopped by carbon dioxide. So...what's wrong with this? CO2 absorbs infra-red radiation in only a narrow wavelength band and it will not absorb any infra-red radiation with a wavelength outside of its absorption band. There is already far more CO2 in the atmosphere than is needed to effectively absorb ALL infra-red radiation in the CO2 absorption band. (A much bigger absorber of infra-red radiation in the atmosphere is...water vapor...but that's another movie.)

Sorry, but you should really start reading peer-reviewed research and stop listening to viscounts. First off, for something to be a greenhouse gas, it *needs* to be selective on what it blocks. An optimal greenhouse gas is *transparent* to light in the visible and near-IR spectrum, and *opaque* to far-IR. You need to let the sun's energy in (mostly visible and near-IR) while making it harder for what the Earth radiates (mostly far-IR) out. A gas that blocks everything evenly is not a greenhouse gas.

Secondly, your argument is akin to saying that if a reflective blanket keeps 95% of your heat in, putting another reflective blanket around you won't help much. Earth is not a simple physics problem with a surface, a single one-pass medium, and an energy input. Light is constantly absorbed and re-radiated all throughout the atmosphere. The upper layers are colder than the upper layers. The higher the absorption of far-IR, the slower energy can transfer from the lower layers to the upper layers; the lower the absorption of near-IR and visible, the faster energy can transfer from the upper layers to the surface (or even straight to the surface). In short, until a 10-meter or so column of atmosphere can absorb 95%, increasing CO2 levels is a *major* impactor on surface temperature.

Lastly, water vapor is 100% feedback, not forcing. Water vapor has a tiny residency in the atmosphere (days), while CO2 has a long residency (hundreds of years). Any disequilibrium in water vapor is rapidly remedied. Now, on *geological time scales*, CO2 is feedback, mostly to Milankovitch cycles. But that's on the scale of tens of thousands of years.

The effect of increasing CO2 concentration is therefore only to cause absorption to occur at a slightly lower altitude in the atmosphere and after carbon dioxide absorbs infra-red radiation, it quickly collides with nearby, and far more abundant, oxygen and nitrogen molecules, transferring heat to them. These then re-radiate heat out into space.

Wow, was the person you read that from a comedian or just an idiot? CO2 is perfectly capable of radiating IR. *All* objects in the universe are. It doesn't matter whether it's CO2, O2, N2, or what. There are different spectral lines (rather than a perfect blackbody), but it's not a practical distinction. The energy can be radiated in any direction -- up or down. It's almost invariably reabsorbed unless it's in the outermost fringes of the atmosphere. As mentioned before, the more transparent the atmosphere is to "incoming" radiation types, the faster solar energy can migrate to the surface. The less transparent it is to "outgoing" types, the slower far-IR energy can migrate away from the surface. I can make you a drawing or a rudimentary python script to illustrate this concept if you're still having trouble with it.

So...if carbon dioxide is not changing our climate, what is? Look to the Sun

Who cares about U2 anyway!?!? Seriously, I hope they only have 8,000 listeners in the whole world but even then that's too many.

Why?

You see U2 sued the living bejesus out of the band Negativland over some utterly silly shit and U2 denied it for the longest time but then a few years ago U2 got caught in a lie. The link is to a conference in which one of Negativland's members happens to find the very person who gave a copy of their album to U2, a manager for REM. Yeah, lie to us some more Bono.

Comin' to you from #1 Bimini Road, in beautiful downtown Atlantis, where you might see the jellyfish jammin' with the salmon.

Don't step on my funk! Let's go wiggle 'em out, sucka!

Your comment suggests that Hearst's trademark rights will be extinguished by copyright expiration, and that is not the case.

No, what I am suggesting is that the courts have made a clear distinction between copyright and trademark use

While Hearst may have a valid trademark for any specific brand of item aka Popeye brand T-shirts, they can not stop anyone from producing a t-shirt with the image of Popeye on it! In this case, they have a valid Popeye trademark, but their Popeye copyright rights *have* been extinguished. Confusing the two to some how extend protections is what the high court has clearly delineated against.

Well I don't think that's actually what happened. You say the price of gas "was up" and travel "plummeted"; but I would say that the price of gas "skyrocketed" and travel "was down slightly".

I'm not an economist, but my only econ class taught me about "elasticity of demand". For gasoline, demand is very much not elastic, which means that if the price goes up or down, demand will only change a little bit. The price of gas had to go way way way up before driving habits changed. Remember ten years ago when gas was $1.30? Gas had to *triple* in price before driving decreased, and driving decreased by under three percent.

Reference

But still, even if it were true that a gas tax hike would result in less driving, we could have a spirited discussion about whether that was good or bad.