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The Professor also has some awesome poetry sk1llz
from http://www.masscomm.loyno.edu/~dmyers/F99%20classes/City%20of%20Heroes%20Official%20Forums_TwixtThread.htm

Who dis Neeto wats his name?
Does he even play the game?
Does he have a dom or not?
Does he scratch yur palm a lot?
Does he cry and baitch and moan
When Twixt and heroes win the zone?
Romper bomper stomper boo
Neeto keeno icky poo.

Here I examine the semiotic form of some common and conventionally accepted notions of "bad play" ... I will, of course, not attempt to give âoebadâ any sort of formal definition

So he does a formal semiotic analysis of an undefined category of acts. Hmmm. Maybe getting an endowed professorship is easier than I thought.

the actual paper (word format, ugh).
the guy's blog

This appears to be Professor Myer's paper detailing his "Twixt" character and its actions: http://www.masscomm.loyno.edu/~dmyers/F99%20classes/Myers_PlayPunishment_031508.doc. As annoying as this kind of research is, it provides some significant insights into how people behave. Just look at the go-along-to-get-along attitude that is prevalent in most organizations. Individuals who try to "play by the rules" are ostracized, even to the detriment of the organization's mission.

The results of the experiment seemed to have been exceeded all expectations

This is why in Europe and Japan population is declining, and why, unless a new pro-family and pro-child secular ethos is created, religious people will be the ones keeping society going.

Oh, nonsense. The planet is well beyond its sustainable carrying capacity. Having fewer children is absolutely one of the best things you can do for the long-term health of human civilization; it is "pro-family" and "pro-child" to choose to have fewer, or even no, children.

Japan is crowded. A population decline means more land, more energy, more of every natural resource, per person. The population decline caused by the plague was one of the factors leading to the Renaissance.

Unfortuntely, we have an economic system based on the fiction that eternal growth is possible and desirable; so long as that unrealistic assumption persists, a stable or declining population will be seen as a problem.

A society with no children is a society with no future.

A society with a mildly declining population for a while is hardly a society with no children.

A society that uses up all its resources, is a society with no future.

If I were doing the study, I'd start with living DNA:

Are you sure you are not mistaking France with China ? I'll give you a couple hints. One is a democratic country and the other isn't. One has had people demonstrating in the street for just about any reason under the Sun, with the result that government policy on the issue generally changed, while the other had one demonstration in a big square that lasted for a month and ended in bloodshed.

Let us not forget The Terror brought to the French by Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution. Fact is is bloodshed is part of most political revolutions, luckily some of the USA's Founding Fathers worked to stop what bloodshed they could, Thomas Jefferson even defended some British soldiers in a court of law.

In case you hadn't noticed, the ground layer is covered with a layer of CO2, as evidenced by the tremendous amount of plant life on the planet.

However, you aren't taking into account the difference in atomic weight

Saying that CFC's diffuse easily, even under the thermal activity induced by the Sun, is like saying the Mississippi River can carry a brick from St. Louis to New Orleans.

Nope, you've got to be a troll. Nobody could be that ignorant/stupid and still be able to use a computer.

Jesus Lizard

Then think of the tee-shirt:
On the logo the lizard run from water to dirt and the text reads
NetBSD: It can run everywhere!

Mod the parent up for this good idea, since this is one of the main characteristics of NetBSD.

Copyright is a strict liability regime under which any infringer, whether innocent or intentional, is liable for infringement. This link is from an abstract of a paper arguing that this is bad policy. But it is the law; bad policy is not necessarily unconstitutional.

In order to establish some way to compensate copyright owners for digital home copying of their recordings and musical compositions, Congress created a compulsory licensing scheme. It is compulsory because the copyright owners must permit some digital (and unlimited analog) home copying of their works. It is a license because permission to make the copies is given through the manufacturers of the blank media and recording devices. Since it would be impractical to attempt to directly license millions of individuals, the license is a blanket license that lets all individuals make copies of all musical recordings (and the recorded musical compositions) within the limits of the Act. The Supreme Court recognized the market efficiencies of blanket licenses in the music industry in Broadcast Music, Inc. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. in that case the court referred to the blanket licenses for public performance rights. The Court noted that the blanket license developed out of the practical situation in the marketplace: thousands of users, thousands of copyright owners, and millions of compositions. Most users want unplanned, rapid, and indemnified access to any and all of the repertory of the compositions and the owners want a reliable method of collecting for the use of their copyrights. Since the fees collected from the manufacturers and importers are disbursed to the rights owners and authors, those fees for the license are royalties, i.e., payments to the owners of rights for permission to use those rights, and not taxes, i.e., monetary charges imposed by the government to yield public revenue. Those opposed to the system often incorrectly referred to the payments as taxes, perhaps in an effort to frame them in a negative light.

Well, yes. Blackmail is illegal.

On that note, here's an interesting paper on the subject of blackmail and its illegality:

The Crime of Blackmail: A Libertarian Critique

The thing is, is it truly blackmail that's being described here? Blackmail implicitly involves secrecy between the two parties, because it is the threat of breaking that secrecy which constitutes blackmail.

Ok so the title of this post is an eye grabber, I don't really know whether it's true or not. But I think the data points towards it being possible. Why do you say? Well, I kinda did an undergraduate thesis on it. Let me know if you want to see the paper.

Basically the theory is this: There are those who are born with perfect pitch or at least develop it VERY early in life, and then those who LEARN it later on. Are these two different mechanisms, then? Not necessarily. It's just that those with early "prodigy" perfect pitch have an extremely quick learning curve for discerning between tones. Why? Memory. They have a "permanent" set of tones to which they compare notes to in their head. For example, I play an F# on the piano, the person with absolute, or perfect pitch, compares it, knows what it is, and then can tell you without looking at the piano that it is indeed an F#.

So how on earth can you "learn" it? It's all in the comparison. Music students may be able to more "permanently" obtain these notes in their minds by frequent exposure / practice in relative pitch excercises. Some are faster that others, and this would explain the ones who have absolute pitch early on.

There is so much more on this, but that's at least where the data is pointing, and there is probably a LOT more research out there since my undergrad thesis (1996). Interestingly, I originally got interested in this because my roommate in college was Jason Marsalis, brother of Brandford and Wynton Marsalis, and he has perfect pitch (apparently from birth).

Vantage Technology Group, Inc.
... The vinyl record manufacturers who realized they were in the music reproduction business,
and not the LP record business, had the time to anticipate the CD's ...
www.vantagegroup.com/resources/ASPreview.asp?ID= 485 - 14k - Dec. 10, 2002 - Cached -

Any colour...as long as it's clear
... the tail end of the record boom, before cassettes really took off - around '86 or
'87 - we were working with a number of the vinyl record manufacturers to get ...
www.oto-online.com/jan01/colour.html - 24k - Cached -

[PDF] Consultation draft
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
Page 1. Towards an Electronic Commerce Strategy for the Merseyside Music
Industries Consultation draft Prepared by P. Fulwell November ...
musicbiz.loyno.edu/metrovision/documents/ digital_music_strategy.pdf -

pressing - ThesaurusDictionary.com :: All about pressing
... http://www.conexmetals.com/prod9.htm Independent Pressing - Vinyl Record
Manufacturers. Independent Pressing Company is a medium-size ...
www.thesaurus-dictionary.com/files/p/r/e/pressin g.html - 47k - Cached -

New Page 1
... Oh sure, it has already happened to the vinyl record manufacturers, but
this time it should be different. Its like if you want potatoes. ...
www.reprolabs.com/doi.htm - 4k - Cached -

Well from his perspectative anything in history could have been faked from the invention of the film camer on. Older events we have the word of historians such as Herodotus. This was also in Indiana in 1985 so I didn't have a lot of options.

Hey, c'mon. Gibson has been writing about a terrible and dangerous future for years now!

mmm, wait a minute, that was William! Maybe his brother? ;)