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Sorry, couldn't find a nude one. http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/050211/chamber.standard.jpg

A manly image is all in the accessories, so attach these: http://www.bullsballs.com/

But not these: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28527841/

However, you might just consider gluing $100 bills on it: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5537017.ece

People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.

which seeks to be microsoft speak for Wikipedia killed encarta. First big victory for the open content movement.

I will miss there little maze trivia game whatever it was called. But then again, I guess I haven't used encarta in years, so maybe I won't really miss it.

I think I can confirm your guesstimate...

Also: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29895614/

I was thinking exactly the same thing. You put your stuff on somebody else's machine, in an environment that is by design exposed to the wild, wild Internet, and better yet the server URIs are advertised to the world because it is your hosts business model to advertise where the documents are (who could use them if they couldn't find them)... If people want to trust others with their important documents in that sort of a model, then it is business Darwinianism if critical documentation are leaked. And another thing, who knows if their personnel look through peoples documents for a laugh or just being nosey. Heck, government employees risk getting fired looking up personal data of prominent people when they run for office. If government employees will do that, why wouldn't people in data centres.

Personally, I don't trust any of my documents to others to take care of. I like my stuff behind firewalls and not sitting directly on the on ramp to the Internet (had to get a car metaphor in somewhere). Mind you, I think this type of model will continue at least for a while if not forever, no matter what happens. People growing up now-a-days don't think as much about what personal information they post on the Internet, why would they care if their personal documents are managed by someone else that they don't know (other than a corporate logo).

First, your "famous example" is based on faulty information - the lady in question already turned down the offer before her comment was posted. See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29901380/.
I'm not surprised that you assumed you had the details right when that erroneous version corresponded to your own preconceptions.

Even those who get turned down aren't likely to give you an objective opinion. They have nothing to gain by saying anything negative other than ensuring that they will never be interviewed again by your company.

I can see you have too much invested in your process to look at it from the outside. I have some friends like that: good solid people who can't reevaluate their ideas once they've made up their mind.

thought plants already cried for help when injured

and I think rocks can in a way....think piezoelectric effect.

ok, I deserve that.

But remember, if it looks fishy it probably is.

Case in point.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19074272/

I bet the Ibuprofin aspect was a lie added for news worthy-ness! Thats your rat, news-hounds!

Seriously, do you think anyone strip searches someone over ibuprofin?

If we had a picture of the situation, it would clear it up in my mind.... Nuf said. Break a pencil!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29863574/
"Come on, Serenity?" Colbert said on his March 10 show. "That's not a space module, that's a Glade plug-in."

hatemail in 3....2....1....

Okay, you actually want names of economists: Edward N. Wolff, Ajit Zacharias, and Thomas Masterson a the Levy institute just published a paper showing the Gini was up to 6.2 as of 2004 (a drastic increase). Robert Folsom, just published an article on it the other day. Peter Wallison is a vert well known economist and he's been writing articles and giving interviews about this for a decade. Did you want more names?

First, I didn't say whether I thought income disparity was increasing or decreasing - I simply questioned whether you could name an economist who said it was increasing and that it increasing would be a problem.

That said, I thought your list was kinda funny. Peter Wallison takes the stance completely opposite of you on regulation. In fact, so opposite that he helped Ronald Reagan develop proposals to deregulate financial markets. If he's correct about income disparity, are you sure he's not correct on deregulation? And if he's incorrect on deregulation, how can he be trusted about income disparity?

As for Edward N. Wolff, Ajit Zacharias, and Thomas Masterson of the Levy Institute of Bard College... If you had even bothered to read the introduction of their paper (assuming you meant this one), you'd notice that they actually disagree with you. From their introduction:

Economic disparities among population subgroups in the United States have, in some cases, undergone profound transformations over the last half century; in other cases, disparities persist. Official poverty rates among the elderly, for example, are now in line with overall poverty rates; in the past, the elderly were much more prone to poverty. Meanwhile, disparities between racial sub-groups persist in spite of some improvement.

Apparently that wasn't what they wanted to see, so they made up their own measurement, the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-being, or LIMEW for short. Not surprisingly, when the economics department of the second most liberal college in America makes up a unit for measuring income disparity, the measurement shows more income disparity than the traditional measurements. Just one catch - even their new measurement says the situation is improving overall. From their conclusion:

The LIMEW provides a different picture of disparities among population subgroups. According to the LIMEW, racial disparities decreased from 1959 to 1989, but then increased to 2000, while both EI and MI show a narrowing of disparities over the period. (All three indices show almost no change between 2000 and 2004.)

But it's almost irrelevant anyway, because the paper isn't measuring disparity between "rich" and "poor", but based on race, age, sex, marital status, education and some other factors along those lines.

I couldn't find the Folsom article you mentioned, but given his other work I'm a little skeptical that he's the economic authority you're making him out to be.

Ahh, but we're providing for the national defense by redistributing wealth.

That doesn't even make sense. Paying somebody for a service they provide doesn't fite the traditional definition of "redistributing wealth."

Umm, who says we should hand cash to the poor? That's not socialism. Socialism is taxing the people to provide services and industries by the government, instead of by the private sector. Redistribution of wealth comes in when we tax the wealthy at higher rates than the poor in order to pay for shared services. That is to say, when we

We have already seen Pluto from the ground. Adaptive optics rock that way. Here is an article with pictures.

Even more importantly, adaptive optics is a relatively young technology that is getting better. As the GP said, JWST is really expensive. JWST also won't be ready for launch for years yet. It doesn't make sense to pour massive money into a space telescope for visible light when we can already beat Hubble from the ground under some conditions, and we're getting better.

Note that, thanks to New Horizons, Pluto itself will soon be getting a better closeup than anything we can do from the ground or from Earth orbit, at least in the forseeable future.

This intervening is just part of a laundry list of documents regarding the case. If someone finds something specific about this phase of the trial, please chime in. Below is a copy and paste job of the original complaints. The guy is apparently up against fines up to $1 million dollars, so wouldn't it make sense to just settle and get back to school? That is what my parents would of said, and they would have paid (begrudgingly) up to $10k if there was anything near a 5% probability of me having to pay $1,000,000, the downtime from school, legal expenses, social problems, etc.

Unless this guy, a Professor of law at Harvard Law School, and his family are all actually delusional enough to believe he is not expected to have to pay such a $1,000,000 fine to share music with his teenage friends. You know, the same stuff that you and I did as kids because we had more time than money and we really liked the latest music or even some of that older music that we heard on the radio.

Why don't they just legalize music? Or at least decriminalize it.

-hackstraw

This case, like many others now before the Court, is one for
copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. Â 106. The Plaintiffs are
some of the nation's largest record companies. The Defendants in
these consolidated cases are individual computer users -- mainly
college students -- who, the Plaintiffs claim, used "peer-to-
peer" file-sharing software to download and disseminate music
without paying for it, infringing the Plaintiffs' copyrights.
Many of the Defendants have defaulted or settled, largely without
the benefit of counsel, subject to damages awards between $3,000
and $10,000.

Joel Tenenbaum ("Tenenbaum") is one of the few defendants
represented by counsel, Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law
School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He has
chosen to challenge the action through a Motion to Amend
Counterclaims (document # 686), his Opposition to the Plaintiffs'
Motion to Dismiss Counterclaims (document # 676), and a Motion to
Join the Recording Industry Association of America ("RIAA")
(document # 693), all of which will be heard on January 22, 2009.
Whether those counterclaims survive or not, he will proceed to a
jury trial in this Court currently scheduled for March 30, 2009.
While Tenenbaumâ(TM)s Motion to Permit Audio-Visual Coverage by CVN
(document # 718) is directed to all proceedings going forward,
this Order addresses only the proceeding on January 22, 2009,
where legal arguments on the motions above will be heard.
In many ways, this case is about the so-called Internet
Generation -- the generation that has grown up with computer
technology in general, and the internet in particular, as
commonplace. It is reportedly a generation that does not read
newspapers or watch the evening news, but gets its information
largely, if not almost exclusively, over the internet. See
generally Martha Irvine, Generation Raised Internet Comes of Age,
MSNBC.com, Dec. 13, 2004, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6645963/.
Consistent with the nature of these file-sharing cases, and the
identity of so many of the Defendants, this case is one that has
already garnered substantial attention on the internet.

Given that Blackberry market share is higher than that of the iPhone I wonder where you come up with this statement? Source

The network friendly appearance is due to the fact that it is not new and so RIM has learned a lot of hard lessons over the years that Apple is just now encountering with its partnership with AT&T.

The Blackberry is superior from a technological standpoint. The iPhone is superior from a UI standpoint. It's that simple, at least in my head.

You forgot the whole RIM vs NTP debacle.

Settlement reached in BlackBerry patent case
Research in Motion pays NTP $612.5 million; devices to stay on

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11659304/

Amazingly enough France doesn't have this problem because they recycle the waste.

Sorry, but reprocessing plants don't get rid of all waste. And they are plutonium factories. Prime terrorist targets. Do you think we'd let Iran have one?

Concerns have been raised about contamination both from processing, and from transporting waste to France's reprocessing center.

In point of fact, France has large problems with nuclear waste. The people in the region slated to be the waste dump are fighting it, oddly enough.

They have attempted to sweep the problem under the rug by shipping waste to Russia.

And we haven't even touched on the reactor safety issues of having a bunch of nuclear plants built by developing nations.

I know that many technophiles have a romantic attachment to nuclear power, to the idea of Mighty Science Harnessing the Power of the Atom. But its time to get over it.

I have yet to see any proof that we are running out of fissionable material.

You're unaware that the planet's supply of uranium is limited? Odd gap in your education, that.

Intel licensed x86 to AMD originally because Intel was unable to keep up with demand.

It wasn't so much that Intel couldn't keep up with demand, more that IBM's policy required that a second source be available just in case they couldn't.

AMD has now breached the license. Intel has no responsibility to keep AMD in business. Intel can get another foundry to make x86 CPUs. There's no law against being a monopoly.

No, there is no law against being a monopoly. There are laws against being an abusive monopoly however. Intel has been convicted of abusing it's monopoly status in Japan, has at least been accused of doing so in the EU. Maybe AMD could file a complaint in the USA also and have it successfully investigated. Once convicted of being an abusive monopoly the rules change.

Natural law is against being a failure like AMD.

In theory the UK monarch can veto any law parliament puts before him or her. In practice, vetoing rarely happens as it can lead to the removal of the monarchs head. Intel should be careful just how far they push this as states could just decide they are abusing their position and remove their right to x86 all together.

After all, folks there seem to be trying to catch up with Africa.

This is easier to read:

http://encarta.msn.com/media_461540296_761570026_-1_1/distribution_of_iq_scores.html

Danes with intercontinental-rocket-capabilities are indeed something that made me worried. But then I learned that it might be just the lack of women that makes Danes angry.

So, if you're female and single: do your part for world peace and spent some time in Denmark.

Gm needs to defend their position on the Volt.. not because of the cost of the tech, but because they took a progressive looking concept car... and made it look like the bastard child of a prius and an aveo. link.. requires flash.. click photo gallery

On the contrary, the facts of reality back it up perfectly.

Only if you're rooming on Endorphin with Chewbaca.

Is this your "evidence" - a bunch of free-floating notions, with no connection to actual events?

You mean connections like a whistleblower trying to warn the FTC for ten years but was completely ignored? Or Allen Stanford, the hedge fund manager that fled authorities for one day, turned in identical tax returns two years in a row without investigation?

The problem began with the Fed's move to artificially lower interest rates in the name of "affordable housing". Combine that with the implicit government backing of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which turned toxic assets into pure "gold" that could be traded as "securities", again in the name of "affordable housing". Combine that with community reinvestment plans from local/state and federal governments, which forced banks to accept loans from high risk individuals, again in the name of "affordable housing". These all came together to create a bubble that burst once interest rates went back up.

Typical wingnut misdirection. Our mess was caused by greed, by Fannie Maye, not by Freddie Mac, nor by minorities:

Federal Reserve Board data show that:

        * More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.

        * Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.

        * Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics.

And, once again since you ignored it the first time, maybe you'd like to explain how a 30 year old law turned a few hundred billion in mortgages blew up to over $60 trillion dollars in swap markets - more than the planet's entire GDP.

1. Define the question

2. Gather information and resources (observe)

3. Form hypothesis

4. Perform experiment and collect data

5. Analyze data

6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis

7. Publish results

8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

#3 coupled with #6 is entirely subject to what doctors call the placebo effect. Should it happen? No. Will it happen? Yes. Will it all work out in the end? Probably. My point is that when you introduce humans with egos into prediction, you never can completely weed out *subjective* POV. And when you introduce #8, making it a process, usually what you get is a bunch of scientists fighting.

Or how about this, Religious people claim God is infallible, you claim they are false and point to people claiming to be believers in God while generally being hypocrites. I postulate you can find the same in followers of "infallible" scientific method. If you are allowed to divorce Hwang Woo-suk from science, Can I not divorce all "Christian" Hypocrites from Christianity?

I do not defend any "Christian" dabbling in politics. (John 18:36) I do not try to coerce anyone. I will engage in respectful conversation of opposing POVs. If I offend, I will stop. Let me know.

I never argued against stem cell research, read before you reply. I wholeheartedly support advancing adult stem cell research as it has produced viable therapeutic results whereas embryonic stem cells are only useful currently as a research tool, as all embryonic therapies have failed in testing and it is monstrous to use the sacrifice of humans to advance science.

Doctors in aggregate gravitate towards where the grants and higher paying careers are. Fertility treatments are usually preformed on women over 40 years of age by a trained GYN/OB and require intensive treatment for months sometimes for years before they are successful in implementation and gestation. An OB/GYN trained in fertility treatment can make a far greater amount of money than an OB/GYN doing preventive care like pelvic exams, pap smears and the like can. This all started because of laws guaranteeing fertility treatment that started passing in the 1980's in Britain and the US.

As the American population has gotten older more and more money is spent on geriatric medicine and less and less on pediatrics. For the first time since the early 20th century the United States is experiencing a dramatic uptick in stillbirths, maternal death and severe birth defects due to the advanced age of the mothers being increased due to the advancement of fertility treatments.

It's interesting to note the near exponential shape of the graph pre dot com bust era, and how the exponential part resumes around 2005.

Oh for Pete's sake, learn how to switch the chart to log scale. It wasn't exponential growth.

The chart would be much better if it allowed you to see the numbers adjusted for inflation. Charts using nominal values for money are almost uniformly useless if not downright misleading.

Also, note to parent: salting your text with words in ALL CAPS makes you look like a lunatic, not like someone who is adding proper emphasis to your posts. Learn how to use the following tags:

<i></i>

Cheers.

Classical economics cannot explain what is happening right now. It's without precedent. There is a little graph I would like to show [msn.com] you...

Try looking at that chart in log base 10 format which will provide an apples to apples comparison. The dip in 1929 was MUCH bigger percentage wise than the one we are experiencing presently. Furthermore despite tremendous volatility we basically find ourselves in a decade of more or less flat growth. The DJIA is at roughly the same levels it was 10 years ago. This HAS happened before from the late 1960s to the early 1980s where the stock market remained flat for nearly 20 years.

You are also missing this, without which the current drop would look a lot more like the crash in 29, possibly worse. Had the Federal Reserve not propped up all the failing banks they would all have most likely declared bankruptcy within a month. Where do you think the dow would be had that happened?

Here is a list of DJIA companies that would now likely be bankrupt had the government not interviened:BOA,Citigroup,GM,JPMorgan Chase

That is over 10% of the companies in the DJIA that would now be bankrupt, in the span of a few months.

The difference between now and 1929 is not the scale of the drop, but the magnitude of the governments intervention in the market.

>There is a little graph I would like to show you...
I thought you might be full of shit -- after all, your graph doesn't even show the '29 crash! -- so I went ahead and checked your parameters and noticed your graph isn't logarithmic, as is the norm for these types of financial charts. Changing to a logarithmic view shows this. Draw your own conclusions.

>There is a little graph I would like to show you...
I thought you might be full of shit -- after all, your graph doesn't even show the '29 crash! -- so I went ahead and checked your parameters and noticed your graph isn't logarithmic, as is the norm for these types of financial charts. Changing to a logarithmic view shows this. Draw your own conclusions.

There is a little graph I would like to show [msn.com] you...

Interesting, but a little misleading. You can't even tell there was a 1929 bust using that graph. Try the log version for a more realistic look.

"You shall not plot exponential processes against linear scale!"

Fixed that for you:Dow Jones on log-scale.

Obviously '29 was worse (so far).

It's without precedent. There is a little graph I would like to show you...

Just hold on for a second. Here's the same plot on a log scale, which is really more fair when comparing growth rates. Doesn't look quite so unprecedented now, does it? In fact if you look over near the left of the chart, ohh, about 1928 or so, something even worse happened. Now if only there were some way to adjust the whole thing for inflation.

It's without precedent.

[citation needed]

You didn't LOOK at the graph, did you? That's my citation.

This is the last 2 years, with that "almost completely VERTICAL" drop.

This is a 2 year span at 1929, that little tiny blip on the left of your zoomed out chart. Notice how it's actually more vertical than the current drop?

This is your chart, redrawn to have a log scale vertical axis instead of linear. It looks like "now" is roughly comparable to 1938 or the early 1970s.

It's without precedent.

[citation needed]

You didn't LOOK at the graph, did you? That's my citation.

This is the last 2 years, with that "almost completely VERTICAL" drop.

This is a 2 year span at 1929, that little tiny blip on the left of your zoomed out chart. Notice how it's actually more vertical than the current drop?

This is your chart, redrawn to have a log scale vertical axis instead of linear. It looks like "now" is roughly comparable to 1938 or the early 1970s.

It's without precedent.

[citation needed]

You didn't LOOK at the graph, did you? That's my citation.

This is the last 2 years, with that "almost completely VERTICAL" drop.

This is a 2 year span at 1929, that little tiny blip on the left of your zoomed out chart. Notice how it's actually more vertical than the current drop?

This is your chart, redrawn to have a log scale vertical axis instead of linear. It looks like "now" is roughly comparable to 1938 or the early 1970s.

Classical economics cannot explain what is happening right now.

Because if it could, it would also have predicted it, and "they" could have used that knowledge to prevent this mess.

Or maybe it's more a case of "I want to believe", where we had a "new economy" that didn't follow the old well-known rules.

It's without precedent.

[citation needed]

There is a little graph I would like to show you...

Are you seriously trying to claim that the stock markets have never crashed before?

Classical economics cannot explain what is happening right now. It's without precedent. There is a little graph I would like to show you...

      It's interesting to note the near exponential shape of the graph pre dot com bust era, and how the exponential part resumes around 2005. Now, imagine the impact on everyone with money to invest, from corporations to banks to retirement and pension funds faced with a choice. You can earn 4% or less, per annum, in bonds or (LAUGH) CD's, etc. OR you can put money on the stock market. That's one hell of an "opportunity cost" if you don't - because everyone else is making out like a bandit. The stock market is unstoppable.

      In fact, the only OTHER "safe" place to put your money is real estate...

        Both of them went bust at roughly the same time. Co incidence? No, they were intertwined from the beginning, because they were the "safest" "surest" bets, and that's where all the wealth was going. So according to supply and demand, if too much money was chasing these "goods", the price moved up accordingly. However these two retracements have wiped out the present AND FUTURE wealth of most of the nation, because everyone was BANKING on the fact that their stocks, 401(k) or home was going to see them through retirement. Welcome to reality - the money is gone (because the demand is gone), and we're not finished yet. The graph still points STRAIGHT down. Something HUGE has to happen to change that. Most people thought it would be a new president, but now we know that's not the case.

Your lap dances link goes to Rocky Mountain News. Did you know yesterday was their last day in print, a couple months short of 150 years in print? (FWIW the link still works, for now.) Back in the 80s I went to school in the area and remember them as the state edition most subscribed. I hadn't thought of them in years until yesterday, but it's still sad to know they are gone.

The name and news archives remain "for sale". The paper didn't convert fast enough to electronic, I suppose. They had an electronic edition as most do now, and I suppose it's possible someone will buy the name and take it online-only, but it would appear to have been too little, too late. Now it's only the Denver Post.

Fittingly given where people are getting their news now, I read it on MSNBC.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29412240/

Here's the Google on the RMN, with the top stories now on their closure:

http://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&hl=en&q=%22rocky+mountain+news%22

Only if you're trying to make the argument that humans guided the evolution of humans. It's about as logical an argument as I've ever heard from the ID crowd, but it's still pretty stupid.

If you weren't so quick to criticize people who oppose your views you would have put a little more thought into your answer. This experiment is the same thing as intelligent design. An entity of a higher power (not of the same power as the creation) creates an organism of some capacity then lets evolution take over. AEGIS never said it had to be human, just a living organism, or in this case they start out with some chemicals.

First, I don't believe in intelligent design per se because that is just candy-coating it for the elitists who talk down to people who have dissenting opinions. I prefer creationism over evolution not the least of which because there are so many assumptions made with evolution. To add to the list of absurdities in support of evolution we have from Thursday on MSNBC.com an article about a new footprint discovered which is supposed to be human. A photograph is on the webpage and when I looked at it I was reminded of what Harrison Ford says to the "leader" of the Temple of Doom near the end of the movie: "You've got one vivid imagination".

Second, is it even correct to ask how the chemicals enabled evolution? Why not go so far out on a limb that it breaks under our (mankind) massive ego and assume that evolution had to create the chemicals first?

Third, I hate when people say something is working as designed but describe the process as evolving. Evolution from a biological perspective does not include any design whatsoever so a scientist designing chemicals to self-replicate is not evolution; it does not evolve. As soon as a higher power (man, God) is involved evolution no longer is applicable. Applying the term "evolving" to an IT system does not instill confidence in me because the connotation is no design was involved in the creation of the IT system.

By the way, good job of not coming off as elitist.

Eugenics is generally defined as selective breeding based on human characteristics.

Show me one dictionary definition wherein force or laws are used to select those human characteristics. Here, I'll help with a link to a bunch of dictionaries, OneLook, I'll even include the link to eugenics.

I'll admit I didn't check all of the definitions, but I did check the first 5 and none of the said anything about the use of force. The closest is the first one which does say permitting reproduction, from MSN Encarta which says "selective breeding as proposed human improvement: the proposed improvement of the human species by encouraging or permitting reproduction of only those people with genetic characteristics judged desirable. It has been regarded with disfavor since the Nazi period."

I only said it was closer to abortion, not that it was abortion. Both abortion and whatever this is both involve fertilized embryos. The similarity ends there.

That's right the similarity ends with both involving fertilized eggs, so why did you compare it to abortion?

Not defined by me. Defined by various online dictionaries, medical texts, and Sir Franis Galton himself. How you and others define it is irrelevant and incorrect.

Not how I define it but how all those dictionary definitions I linked to above define it.

Did you even look up the definition or just arrogantly assumed you were correct? Spot checking onelook has entries that all support my statement that eugenics exclusively involves selective breeding and therefore the actions of this company don't meet it.

Check what I say above. Quite simply when parents pick a fertilized egg they are selecting it. Don't believe me, check this thesaurus select: "Definition: pick out, prefer from among choices". Of those 9 definitions you provide only 4 say anything about the discouraging unfit people from reproducing and encouraging those who are fit. Those are Encarta, Cambridge, InfoPlease, and SFF.NET That's less than half.

I got tired at this point, but needless to say it seems that the vast majority of online references prove that I am correct

I too am tired of this, so I'll end after one more statement. Four out of nine references is not a "vast majority" of references, that's not even half.

Falcon

That has a sexy ring to it. More seriously, I dislike NASA's tendency to name every little thing with pompous names. Just look at what they are calling the local terrain around the Mars rovers (eg, the "Columbia Hills").

"resistance is futile, you will be assimilated"

i think slashdot needs to update its icons

the borg bill gates icon is threatening only circa 1996. microsoft of 2009 is on a real decline

meanwhile, the company of all-domination in 2009 is obviously google. we need a remake of the google icon for slashdot to include the borg cube

and the microsoft icon should be remade with just a non-borg bill gates holding a jar of mosquitoes

It is nice to be able to say that that's all eugenics means but it isn't accurate.

No. It is accurate. I am working with the accepted definitions from various online dictionaries. I cannot find a single one that does not have the limitation of selective breeding.

And the parents that use this clinic are selecting which fertilized eggs will be used. No government is dictating which eggs they can and can not use.

• MSN Encarta: "selective breeding as proposed human improvement: the proposed improvement of the human species by encouraging or permitting reproduction of only those people with genetic characteristics judged desirable. It has been regarded with disfavor since the Nazi period."
• Merriam-Webster: "a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed"
• Cambridge: "the study of methods of improving humans by allowing only carefully chosen people to reproduce"
• Websters: "the movement devoted to improving the human species through the control of hereditary factors in mating"

Only the first one says parents may not be self selecting, though it does say eugenics is looked on unfavorably since the NAZIs.

Falcon

Steve Jobs became the largest shareholder of Disney almost by accident when Disney bought Pixar, so in a manner of speaking he actually fell into being the largest Disney shareholder; he wasn't actively seeking to become the largest individual Disney shareholder.

It occurred with Steve Jobs knowledge and cooperation. Or maybe I used my pixar magic to photoshop Steve Jobs next to the CEO of Disney. It would have been easy given the black background between them. Had Steve not become such a large shareholder willingly, he would have - could have - easily divested himself of Disney long, long ago. This is not like a child that inherited a fortune. That stake materialized and is maintained by deliberation.

While I don't at the top of my head remember any cases of convictions for *fucking* an equal-aged partner, there's this little gem from January 15th; http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28679588/

Summary: six Pennsylvania high school students are facing child pornography charges after three teenage girls allegedly took nude or semi-nude photos of themselves and shared them with male classmates via their cell phones. The female students at Greensburg Salem High School in Greensburg, Pa., all 14- or 15-years-old, face charges of manufacturing, disseminating or possessing child pornography while the boys, who are 16 and 17, face charges of possession,

So yeah, it's not just theorethical; there's *actual* teenage girls being criminally charged with production of child-porn, for the crime of taking explicit snapshots of THEMSELVES. And actual similar-age boys ("classmates") being charged with posessing child-porn after having received the pictures from the girls (as MMS-messages)

It's so stupid it's almost hard to believe, but there you go.

http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/topstocks/archive/2009/02/17/chrysler-takes-away-clocks-lightbulbs-decorations.aspx -- Chrysler has taken down the clocks in its headquarters to save money on batteries.

I would guess that the stimulus boosts the battery industry EXACTLY as much as Chrysler's cutbacks hurt it.

"I'd hate to break it to you, but the 2nd amendment as imagined by the Republican party doesn't exist."

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but certainly the Supreme Court agrees with the interpretation that there is a constitutional right for people to own handguns (and certainly long weapons as well). I think the 2nd amendment is worded pretty plainly; it seems like wishful thinking to say that it legitimizes weapons only for the militia; if that was the correct interpretation, it wouldn't be necessary to have the amendment if you really think about it.

Anyway, here's but one of the links. I'm sure you're aware of it:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25390404/

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=the+pirate+bay

They tried that already, by trying to buy a small island (tried twice actually), and starting their own country. Neither attempts succeeded.

I'm by no means up-to-date on the laws of all ~260 countries or whatever, but I don't think there is anywhere that is entirely "safe", there may be a few where it is legal, or at least not illegal to do what they do, but that same country probably wouldn't be the best place to do their business for other reasons (mobs, poor internet, low food, weather, etc), or is easily influenced by anyone with money, status, popularity negating any "safeness" there may be.

I'm Canadian, and we have some of the laxest laws regarding P2P:
File sharing legal in Canada
Canadian Police Tolerates Piracy For Personal Use

And Torrent sites such as IsoHunt, moving to Canada... however, on the contrary:
Court in Canada Shuts Down Torrent Site

And it seems to be leaning more and more in that (downward) direction, so what may be "safe" now, may not be in 6 months.

Personally, I have zero problem with TPB, MiniNova, Demonoid, or any of the rest... they are by far the wrong targets to be going after, you may as well go after Google, Yahoo, or even Microsoft (Windows XP Torrent) as they all contain links to torrents to copyright/illegal torrents as well, and much like Torrent servers, they do not contain the actual files, but just the torrent, which is basically a glorified network file shortcut, and although I hate to say it, targetting Axxo, FXG, etc would make more sense, but still far from proper sense.

Fix the pricing, and "artistic/personal use" limitations, and everyone would pretty much get along fine, even though there will always be "illegal" torrents/files on the interent, no matter how many ways you try and stop them.

Better hope you don't do online dating, Mr. Knarr.