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Tepples wrote (about singing around the campfire as jhines suggested): Then your problem will be with BMI and ASCAP and SESAC, when they bill you for singing copyrighted songs. The recording isn't the only thing copyrighted; the sheet music itself is subject to a monopoly.

I'm all for singing.

First of all, although many songs are covered by copyright (including, darn them, "Happy Birthday") many others are not. If I feel like singing a Handel aria while sitting around the campfire, guess what? It's in the public domain. BMI can kiss my behind if they want to collect royalties from me for singing "Verdi prati" from Alcina (first performed in 1735). Same goes for many folk songs and traditional tunes. Including Kumbaya, which you might or might not consider encouraging news.

Second of all, it is questionable whether the campfire scenario described even falls under one of the "exclusive rights" of copyright. I call your attention to 17 USC 106:

Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
. . .
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;

Note the word "publicly." The right to perform "publicly" is reserved to the rightsholder, but it says nothing about performing "privately." That is why you don't have to pay a royalty when you sing happy birthday to your 3-year-old nephew at a party at your brother's house. Or when you sing while gathered around the campfire with friends.

Perhaps they might be confused with the delicious hummus.

www.think.iq
www.mensa.iq
www.cantmatchmy.iq
ww w.200.iq (I want this one!!)
www.is-that-your-age-or-your.iq
www.drugs -poison-your.iq
Good business domain - www.test.your.iq

And, of course, even though I'm a Republican and tired of the Bush jokes:
www.bush.iq

[NB: Based on his SAT scores (640,640) GW Bush's IQ is about 132, while JFK's was probably about 119. Hope I'm not starting a troll war...]

Seriously, this will be an opportunity for the new TLD registry to be self-sustaining and even profitable very quickly. I hope they are given the new authority, and I hope that smart folks everywhere support it by registering their fave. It's a small but important symbol of the nation becoming part of the world community.

Source for IQ info: How to estimate your IQ based on your GRE or SAT scores, one of the pages on the IQ Comparison Site. Bush SAT Info from The Straight Dope.

Note to anyone who congratulates themselves on getting a better score than Bush: If you took the SAT since 1995, better take another look. In 1995 they adjusted the scoring of the SAT because your entire generation was scoring so much lower than all us old fogies!! Hah!!

This is a myth. From the The Straight Dope:

Contrary to what many think, the frequency at which microwave ovens operate, 2.45 GHz, is not tuned to the maximum absorption frequency of water. That frequency is actually closer to 10 GHz, and if ovens operated there, food would be heated even less inside, since the bulk of the radiation would be absorbed at or near the surface due to the short wavelength.

Nuclear power or not, as long as people insist on eating food, living life and having babies it looks like we're stuck with the greenhouse effect.

Even more frightening, a female chimp, weighing a mere 135 pounds and going by the name of Suzette, checked in with a one-handed pull of 1,260 pounds.

And the only reason that he was successfully prosecuted for that was because the IRS required that you report "embezzled or other illegal income".

So, if you *do* report your illegal income, you can't get nailed for income tax evasion (but you do get investigated by the FBI about where that illegal income came from), but if you *don't* report your illegal income, that's automatic tax evasion.

Straight dope has an excellent article on this :
The Straight Dope: Why do prices end in .99?

To extrapolate slightly from the article, just imagine the sales pitch as being able to buy the track "For under a dollar!", "For under a euro!", "For under a pound!", or even "For under a Dinar!". For a Kuwaiti Dinar, this is approximately $3.35 - eek!

Only to the latter the expression would probably be recognized as being expensive. To the rest of us who hover around relatively low values, it seems cheap either way. It's about the price of a mars bar at an airport (expensive in its own right, of course) - except that you'll enjoy it longer.

First of all, I shouldn't have said or agreed with the term, "environmentalist wackos", as if all were. So no, I don't agree with Rush Limbaugh.

Here are some citations about toxic chemicals in solar cell production. Granted, there are toxic chemicals used in almost any manufacturing process.

http://www.eere.energy.gov/solar/man_pro_implicati ons.html?print

http://www.pv.bnl.gov/art_168.pdf


Here are a few articles about the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of ethanol production:

http://www.fcpp.org/publication_detail.php?PubID=1 80

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/031128.html

From the sci.skeptic FAQ, here is a definition of "New Age" beliefs (so I am not the only one who associates the two):

http://home.xnet.com/~blatura/skep_7.html


Finally, I have no idea what the remark about chemistry is supposed to mean. Yes, I understand the tremendous amount of knowledge about chemistry that arose from the study of alchemy, but what does that have to do with your argument?

I'm sure that astrologers at one time provided much of the basis of astronomical observation, but I think astrology is ridiculous. Again, so what?

I see a bright future for the Star Wars prequels. Unfortunately, it's a more distant future than one year away.

Wait 20 years or so. The original trilogy will continue to be seen as a seminal work, and the "prequels" as a bastardized ripoff. Eventually, Lucas will die, or otherwise give up the franchise (maybe Michael Jackson can trade his Beatles songs for it).

Then, finally, someone can remake parts I through III the way they should have been done in the first place. No midchlorians, no virgin birth, no Jar Jar. Special effects that compliment the story, instead of overshadowing it.

Some future screenwriter and director will have the opportunity to give us back the thrill we had in the '70s, when we saw the original Star Wars in a non-multiplex theater, and were in awe. We who were preteens will be in our 50s... it won't be too late.

Something to look forward to! Just not in 2005.

> We have plenty of corn ( and soy ) to make ethenol to drive our cars and trucks..

Do I get more energy out of ethanol than it takes to produce it? According to this guy, I do not.

The thing that really bugs me about ethanol, biodiesel, etc is that they are really inefficient versions of solar power. I'd like to see "direct" solar power in some form. Photovoltaics probably aren't going to cut it, I think we need to develop some plants that have wires coming out of them or something ;-)

It can be done. Theoretically, at least. But keep in mind that in some applications, pretty extreme manoeuvers are flown regularly. Take Parabolic flights for example.

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mhear.html

Actually, according to this
most of the measurements in the Fahrenheit scale are completely arbitrary and just a bunch of fudge factors.

And you'll node that 0 is NOT freezing point of water in Fahrenheit.

But then again, most of the older Imperial measures are based on the length of someone nose, the distance from London to Paris, or a whole bunch of arcane stuff that seemed like good ideas at the time.

Nah, olds. This was in the Straight Dope years ago.

Bush's STATED philosophy of 'comunitarianism' is highly correlated with fascism when compared with semiotic analysis.

I think that you mean semiidiotic analysis. That is the only sort of analysis that would produce that correlation.

The Bush family ARE Nazi war profiteers and benefited from slave labor during WWII.

A bald faced lie.

Bush uses unjustifiable unilateral military operations to increase shareholder value for his political contributors.

Around 60 (sixty) nations played a role in the "unilateral" military operations in Iraq. That isn't unilateral anymore, just to state what should be obvious. That is getting close of 1/3 of the countries on the planet.

The war against Iraq was completely justified by numerous Security Counsel resolutions, Iraqi attacks on US military forces, and numerous other acts. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is unjustifiable. Actually, the justification must have been fairly strong since about 60 countries assisted the military effort in some way.

Bush uses racial scapegoats to polarize the population.

That is false. There is no racial scapegoating at all. We were attacked by followers of a particular extremist Islamist ideology, not by any race. And, since they take credit for the attacks themselves there is no scapegoating going on.

The people responding with a knee jerk "NO!" are deluding themselves, are directly profiting from the administration's gross mismanagement or are simply weak minded sheep who cannot differentiate patriotism from adherence to the ideology of those who would undermine the constitution.

It is interesting that you choose to use the term "weak minded sheep." I don't see any signs of independent thought in your post. The only thing I see is a simple regurgitation of specious charges from the left. You didn't even bother to drop the ones which are both absurd and easily disproved.

Bush is traitorous. The "Bring it on" comment was without a doubt the ONLY time in U.S. History a president has INVITED attacks on members of the U.S. Army.

Let me see if I can reconstruct your thinking.... The President says, "Bring it on," the terrorists come out of hiding to attack, at which point we kill as many as 60 a day, and the President is a traitor? The President would only be a traitor if he wanted the US to lose, but you have helped prove that isn't so. The President goaded them into leaving their safe havens to attack us, thus exposing them to our military power. When you simplemindedly call traitorous is in fact a brilliant piece of "strategery." My goodness, you must feel lonely.

I would say that you, like many on the left, have Misunderestimated President Bush.

Lets see...

Directly observe quantum behaviour of [something].

"Hmm...that's impossible according to my everyday experience."

Well, let's propose some fantastical explanation for this phenomenon.

See, that proves it! My wacko explanation must be right. No? Do you have a better explanation?

Of course you don't. Unless you understand quantum physics, and then you're hard pressed to explain it to anyone who doesn't.

The problem here is that on the scale in which we spend most of our lives, we simply do not observe quantum phenomena.

Trying to explain quantum effects within a classical paradigm is futile.

Lack of an easy explanation for something does not prove the assertion "It's magic, then.".

And while it does not prove "parallel universes" (buddy with the laser never did define "parallel universe"), it provides for good entertainment: Scrhoedinger's cat

That's actually a common misconception that's been the source of quite a few jokes. What's causing the s/f confusion with most people is that in certain words Middle English used a "long s" similar to the German "ess-zet". It looked sort of like a lower case f except the crossbar is only on the left-hand side.

The Straight Dope tells the story.

Actually, I majored in physics.

Re-read my post. Hydrogen, like gasohol, is a negative net fuel. Which means it takes more energy to make the fuel, than you get out of burning it. Same as Gasohol, which is produced from corn.

Hydrogen is just the New Gasohol, politically. Gasohol is a huge piece of pork barrel spending that mostly lines the pockets of Archer Daniels Midland(ADM) and to a much lesser extent corn growers...to the tune of $1.4B+/yr since the early 70's.

...what was actually found there...

green cheese?

I don't know what kind of half-assed bottling Coke does where you live, but the can should make no sound when shaken.
And Tapping the top of a Can does nothing that time can not do by itself.

but as you well know, blimps are evil.

Since the corn farmers of Iowa have made ethanol a political litmus-test for presidential nominees, the American people have been stuck paying huge amounts (something like $30 for each $1 of profit earned by ethanol sales) to provide "corn welfare" benefits. Do you really think that such a powerful lobby will allow imports of a cheaper type of ethanol?

Expect to hear planted stories about the unhealthiness/antienvironmental harms of the "new" ethanol, followed by urgent Congre$$ional action to shut off the flow of cheap foreign ethanol (and amend such a ban to include Americans who might get the idea of making ethanol from products other than corn). This isn't tinfoil-hat stuff, just the depressing reality of democratic politics: when the public isn't interested in an issue, naked interest-group politics takes precedence.

From The Straight Dope

Schroedinger, Erwin! Professor of physics!
Wrote daring equations! Confounded his critics!
(Not bad, eh? Don't worry. This part of the verse
Starts off pretty good, but it gets a lot worse.)
Win saw that the theory that Newton'd invented
By Einstein's discov'ries had been badly dented.
What now? wailed his colleagues. Said Erwin, "Don't panic,
No grease monkey I, but a quantum mechanic.
Consider electrons. Now, these teeny articles
Are sometimes like waves, and then sometimes like particles.
If that's not confusing, the nuclear dance
Of electrons and suchlike is governed by chance!
No sweat, though--my theory permits us to judge
Where some of 'em is and the rest of 'em was."
Not everyone bought this. It threatened to wreck
The comforting linkage of cause and effect.
E'en Einstein had doubts, and so Schroedinger tried
To tell him what quantum mechanics implied.
Said Win to Al, "Brother, suppose we've a cat,
And inside a tube we have put that cat at--
Along with a solitaire deck and some Fritos,
A bottle of Night Train, a couple mosquitoes
(Or something else rhyming) and, oh, if you got 'em,
One vial prussic acid, one decaying ottom
Or atom--whatever--but when it emits,
A trigger device blasts the vial into bits
Which snuffs our poor kitty. The odds of this crime
Are 50 to 50 per hour each time.
The cylinder's sealed. The hour's passed away. Is
Our pussy still purring--or pushing up daisies?
Now, you'd say the cat either lives or it don't
But quantum mechanics is stubborn and won't.
Statistically speaking, the cat (goes the joke),
Is half a cat breathing and half a cat croaked.
To some this may seem a ridiculous split,
But quantum mechanics must answer, "Tough @#&!
We may not know much, but one thing's fo' sho':
There's things in the cosmos that we cannot know.
Shine light on electrons--you'll cause them to swerve.
The act of observing disturbs the observed--
Which ruins your test. But then if there's no testing
To see if a particle's moving or resting
Why try to conjecture? Pure useless endeavor!
We know probability--certainty, never.'
The effect of this notion? I very much fear
'Twill make doubtful all things that were formerly clear.
Till soon the cat doctors will say in reports,
"We've just flipped a coin and we've learned he's a corpse."'
So saith Herr Erwin. Quoth Albert, "You're nuts.
God doesn't play dice with the universe, putz.
I'll prove it!" he said, and the Lord knows he tried--
In vain--until fin'ly he more or less died.
Win spoke at the funeral: "Listen, dear friends,
Sweet Al was my buddy. I must make amends.
Though he doubted my theory, I'll say of this saint:
Ten-to-one he's in heaven--but five bucks says he ain't."

--CECIL ADAMS

see: The Sraight Dope

The sound a Maglev train makes may be considered "disturbing" by humans for the same reasons that the sound of nails-scratching-on-a-blackboard is.

Thank you, Cecil.

---anactofgod---

'merkins (capitialization as per your bias...) is not the same as merkins!

"Hear, hear."

Austrailia terrifies the hell out of me. Not only for its modern animal nightmares, but the fact that Aboriginees also had to deal with marsupial cats, descendants to the saber tooth tiger!

Crash Bandicoot should be a banned export...

For anyone wondering, the Straight Dope has the answer, as usual.

You're of course free to continue calling cetaceans fish and believing in brontosauri that never existed (they were a shoddy/fraudulent paleontologist's chimera), but just because you think you shouldn't ever have to learn anything new after grade school doesn't give you the right to criticize others for showing more intellectual flexibility.

Nope.

I cite Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, font of all knowledge, to say with authority:

The tomato is botanically a fruit.

Brontosaurus never existed.

And you can blame the Greeks for the continent thing.

That Cecil! Is there anything he doesn't know?

-Carolyn

I cite Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, font of all knowledge, to say with authority:

The tomato is botanically a fruit.

Brontosaurus never existed.

And you can blame the Greeks for the continent thing.

That Cecil! Is there anything he doesn't know?

-Carolyn

I cite Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, font of all knowledge, to say with authority:

The tomato is botanically a fruit.

Brontosaurus never existed.

And you can blame the Greeks for the continent thing.

That Cecil! Is there anything he doesn't know?

-Carolyn

I cite Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, font of all knowledge, to say with authority:

The tomato is botanically a fruit.

Brontosaurus never existed.

And you can blame the Greeks for the continent thing.

That Cecil! Is there anything he doesn't know?

-Carolyn

This might interest you: "Why does the alarm clock snooze button give you nine extra minutes, not ten," from The Straight Dope.

In the sweepstakes for legislative stupidity, I always like to play this card. The bill House Bill No. 246, Indiana State Legislature, 1897, reportedly set the value of pi to an incorrect rational approximation (ie. "3").

The "creator" of this new value of pi listed as it advantages that it was much easier for school children to use. He even went so far as to offer the new value of pi at no charge to Indiana for use in their school books, however all others would be charged a royality!

Here is a link, but a better link is here,

The second statement in quote from parent is false: there are significant pertubations in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, and also in Pluto's orbit.

No, there aren't.

What's more this has been done 4 years ago more here

Before I get mail...

The Straight Dope covered this subject in an interesting (but not completely conclusive) article.

One interesting tidbit -- he mentions a study that found that while monkeys with their eyes sewn shut and untouched monkeys (oh, to be in the control group!) did NOT develop any vision problems, monkeys with their eyes sewn partly shut -- so they could only see dimly -- became myopic.

That seems like a pretty good hint that you might want to take breaks from the monitor. As other posters have noted -- it's a good idea to refocus your eyes on objects at other distances frequently during the day, and this should help avoid the eyestrain (and the other problems you might not notice for a while...)

You might not be able to run a P4 and a subwoofer, but you could easily light a room (LEDs), or power a small radio I would imagine.

Cecil Adams has the Straight Dope on what these things do when they work.

On the subject of the second article, I live in downtown San Mateo myself, and am surprised that so many buttons are non-operative. But some that I use do indeed provide a longer time to cross. They also will give you the walk signal, while if you don't press the button, you don't get it. So many of these buttons in downtown San Mateo do actually do something. My guess is that most of the downtown ones don't do anything, but the ones along El Camino Real (one side of downtown) do actually work.

You had it almost right there, just that once, with 'viruses'. Check it:

There is one more common English -us word borrowed from Latin that doesn't follow any of the rules above: virus. To the Romans a virus was a dangerous or disgusting substance, anything from snake venom to body odor. Ancient grammarians couldn't agree whether the word was a third-declension noun, a fourth-declension noun or in a class by itself, but the one thing they could agree on was that it didn't have a plural form. Ever. To the Romans, it was a mass noun, not a count noun. That hasn't stopped English writers from inventing pseudo-Latin plural forms to cover the modern countable senses of the word. Viri is formed on the false assumption that virus is a second-declension noun. (Viri in fact is the plural of Latin vir, "man".) Virii is an even worse mistake. Only Latin nouns that end in -ius form the plural with -ii. There are no really common English plurals in -ii other than radii. That hasn't stopped people from trying out such atrocious forms as virii and penii. Virii would be the plural of virius, if such a word existed in Latin. Other suggested plurals include virora, vira, virua, and vire. For more on the debate, see http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html. The one inescapable fact is that in classical Latin, there was no plural of the word. In English, the only correct plural is viruses.

You can find the whole article here. Now you can just use the word 'viruses' all the time, and not sound like the literary equivalent of an out-of-tune piano.

To be clear, (and since I can't see the original I can only go by the style of the other Apple ads), the issue is not copying of the recorded material, since the ad uses another artist to sing the song with us assuming that they are listening to the recording on their iPod. So, the copyright in question is not the recording, but the songwriting copyright. Still a legal issue, although different from sampling. Unbelievable that a professional ad agency would not have iron-clad clearance for something like this before broadcast (and maybe they did, which means Eminem loses). And, rights for a cover tune would most likely be substantially less than using the original song (which is why cheap TV shows use cover artists instead of the real recording), and certainly a lot less than an endorsement deal.

This would have been funnier if they used a Beatles song, because than they would be sued by Michael Jackson.

Not quite.

But is the sugar green?

Why would pubic wigs shop at Walmart?

Putting aside any military/war/ethics concerns, there are several interesting civilian benefits that jump out from the article:

* "But [burning fat] for extended periods can produce toxins and can dial down the amount of energy the brain receives. Darpa wants to see if there are ways to burn fats without the side effects."

There's a mega-million-dollar industry in burning off fat, mostly by ingesting snake oil products. Obvious spinoffs here.

* "Mitochondria supplies energy to the cells; the agency would like to see if the powerhouses could be temporarily increased."

Again, weight loss... but beyond that, aren't there metabolism-related illnesses that this would help cure?

* "Increased body heat can boost the production of certain proteins, and these can trigger apoptosis -- programmed cellular death. Darpa wants to find a way to control these proteins..."

Programmed cellular death is the two-edged sword of middle and old age. If it doesn't happen at all, you can get cancer. But if it happens faster than cellular reproduction, you get aging. Any research into this topic will help on both counts.

* "...anaerobic metabolism produces lactic acid -- which is why you feel your biceps burn after lifting dumbbells. Scientists wonder if production of the acid can be slowed or dissipated quicker."

This sort of advance would be snapped up by athletes, but you can also imagine the benefits for others who exert themselves regularly -- from firefighters to construction workers. And exercise is another way to lose weight... though it's laziness, not muscle pain, that keeps *me* from working on my spare tire.

* "And the agency is looking at nutraceuticals, natural products and traditional nutritional supplements to give the body what it requires when there's no food around."

Well, that sounds like the meal-in-a-pill that's been bounced around for a hundred years, from the World's Fair to Willy Wonka. I hear they still have problems with the blueberry dessert.

And speaking of dessert...

* "...$900,000 grant to examine the effects of echinacea and other plants. He believes extracts from the herb can be added to rations -- and that should give soldiers an extra oomph."

Be careful with those herbs... the military wants to eliminate the need for food, but some herbs are known to cause the opposite effect!