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anyway, it claims that CO_2 emissions are proportional to volume of fuel used, so that if a diesel is 35% more efficient than its regular counterpart, it will emit 35% less CO_2.
It also states that diesel emits "virtually no" carbon monoxide (CO).
NO_x (nitrous oxides) are supposed to be higher in diesels while the engine is new, but lower while the engine is old, so it all about evens out.
Hydrocarbons such as benzene are "much less" in diesels.

Maybe you could provide a reference for that, because I've always been under the impression that this was an urban legend. The constitutional purpose, of course, is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", not to enhance the public domain.

Then why didn't they last forever from the start? Why are copyrights secured for "a limited time" then? Before that SOB Bono wrapped himself around a tree, he was on record as wanting copyrights to last forever. My point was that you don't need patents if copyrights last forever. And anyway patents just cover "inventions". Infinitely extended copyright plus a large body of work and money to pay lawyers allows you to own all ideas period.

Various "similarity tests" can be employed and twisted if one owns a sufficiently large corpus of work. This is especially sinister when applied to music as the number of chord and note progressions that sound pleasant is limited. There is already a court precedent somewhere that says 4 notes of similarity suffices to establish a work as infringing. It would be very easy for any of current recording companies to abuse this into owning all Western music as most combinations of four notes are to be found in their libraries.

Also it would appear that Thomas Jefferson at the very least very much intended copyrights to be limited to prevent just such a scenario:

http://users.vnet.net/alight/jefferson.html

My A8V, AMD64 3200, oced to 2.4 Ghz, and 2x1G Ram, running Linux 86_64 and Mathematica 64, is TWICE as fast as my 2.8x2 Xeon oced to 2x3.15, 2G running Mathematica on either Windows or Linux. Not bad for $650 toy - MB+CPU+2G.

Benchmarks at: http://smc.vnet.net/timings50.html

It is also 10% faster than an FX53, 512M Ram, running Linux 86_64.

And yes, I care about stability especially when some calculations take a few days.

Well, there is always The First Church of the Easily Amused, another one of those internet religions with a virtual membership. (with many dead links)

In 1990, there were only three nations that had not converted to metric: Burma, Liberia, and the United States. (source: here)

It is however in US best interest to convert, as many of the other countries require all products to be manufactured to the metric system. If you would go to your local grocery store, you'd notice that some products are already done that way, especially if they have global nature. A good example of that would be the 2 Liter bottle of soda that is sold at the store. As that item is sold both in US and abroad, the manufacturing costs are lower if same measurement system is used. That's why the Liter is used. (to conform to requirements of other countries)

"Well it should be obvious to even the most dim-witted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology."

Professor Frink,
Inventor of the Frinkahedron, Springfield

Listen to this!

Of course governments are more dangerous than the criminals around us. They are, to begin with, usually better armed, and more unfeeling and callous.

The simple fact of the matter is that governments in this century alone have been responsible for the murders of over a hundred million innocent civilians -- a number that the "criminals" could not even hope to compete with, if the "criminals" are even anxious for the dubious honour.

In the United States, billions of dollars are stolen from citizens every year, BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, without any trial, in the name of preventing "crimes" which are explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, making these human rights "criminal" has become the leading cause of *real* crime, where one person harms another.

No wonder people are paranoid. Sometimes they really are out to get you.

There are many good people working in government, and quite a few bad ones as well. In all cases, they are only human -- even the good ones make plenty of mistakes. How much better if the U.S. government were to observe the Constitution which they pretend to respect? How much better if government were limited (as originally designed) so that abuses and mistakes were less likely to happen, and have less scope when they do happen? What a great idea! Why didn't Madison think of it?

Alan R. Light

Christian, Fiscally "liberal" and Socially "conservative"? Isn't there a contradiction in there?

If tax slavery and forced morality are Christian, then I'm a Juddhist Hindislam monk. (In other words, everything but.) But I figure this is likely to be a troll, though there are some people who actually believe in such things. Admittedly, "Me" may have been referring to friendly persuasion and non-coercive measures to promote a better social environment, in which case I heartily applaud him.

In any case, y'all might benefit from a few links:

• Advocates for Self-Government has a nice little test to determine your political tendencies. They chart it for fiscal and social beliefs. "Me" would probably an Authoritarian by this reckoning. The main problem with Authoritarianism is that it requires real flesh-and-blood humans to make those decisions for everyone else, and even if you managed to get honest people into office, they still would not have the necessary local knowledge to make those decisions. The result is generally tyranny.
• Might as well plug my site, The Libertarian Party of Union County, (N.C.). Okay, y'all know where my sympathies lie.
• Since the subjects of God and Freedom have come up, you might enjoy God's Free Men and Women. Not exactly mainstream, but noteworthy for their belief that God wants Freedom for his people, a belief that does have significant backing in the Bible. ;-) ;-) ;-) (Most religions have this, but unfortunately, the folks who come along after the founder, generally whittle this down to virtually nothing.)
• For something a bit less controversial, I recently came across Echoes of Gideon which made a point about the story of Gideon that I had not heard before - that the bit about the men being chosen who drank by cupping water with their hands was because those who lapped up water had gotten used to this method because they were used to bowing down to idols.

Alan R. Light

The problem with Intellectual Property is not that it exists, if only as a legal fiction, but that it is too restrictive and becoming more restricted. Copyright is now "Life of the Author plus 70 years", though it is difficult to conceive how copyright protection for such a long time is likely to increase an author's willingness to create, while it does profoundly restrict new works, and is even sometimes used for censorship. In that sense, the author is right.

There are also some fairly good arguments that Intellectual Property ought to be done away with entirely. In either case, it would behoove our society and culture to reduce IP terms instead of extending them towards infinity.

See this page of mine for a fair amount of information on this topic.

Alan R. Light
Monroe, North Carolina

I have some simple logos available at my web site, and even have them in .png format for those of you who don't want to use GIFs (also available). It's a little hard to download the .png files from Netscape (I'm using 4.5), easier from IE 4.0, and neither handle them as graciously as GIFs, but both will display them when included in HTML code.

As for the comment that "Open Source Books" doesn't quite make sense, well, I tend to agree, but Eric Eldred does make a fairly good argument for it. Personally, I'm using Liber which is Latin for both "freedom" and "book".

Regardless of what you call it, though, please get involved now, before it is too late.

Australia and Canada are considering taking the lead of the U.S. and Europe: Please try to stop it now while you can. One of my logos, incidentally, features Henry Lawson. Perhaps I will do another one with Robert Service, both authors whose works I have put online. Many of Service's later works are still under copyright. Lawson is a prime example of how copyright benefits publishers rather than authors. He sold his early works outright before he understood that he could get royalties, and died broke, despite being a best-selling author -- so well loved that he once appeared on the Australian $10 bill. A strange irony, that.

There is much that can still be done, if only there is sufficient public awareness. You can bet that the big media won't get involved. Some of them are the ones behind this assault on our basic freedoms.

Alan R. Light

I have some simple logos available at my web site, and even have them in .png format for those of you who don't want to use GIFs (also available). It's a little hard to download the .png files from Netscape (I'm using 4.5), easier from IE 4.0, and neither handle them as graciously as GIFs, but both will display them when included in HTML code.

As for the comment that "Open Source Books" doesn't quite make sense, well, I tend to agree, but Eric Eldred does make a fairly good argument for it. Personally, I'm using Liber which is Latin for both "freedom" and "book".

Regardless of what you call it, though, please get involved now, before it is too late.

Australia and Canada are considering taking the lead of the U.S. and Europe: Please try to stop it now while you can. One of my logos, incidentally, features Henry Lawson. Perhaps I will do another one with Robert Service, both authors whose works I have put online. Many of Service's later works are still under copyright. Lawson is a prime example of how copyright benefits publishers rather than authors. He sold his early works outright before he understood that he could get royalties, and died broke, despite being a best-selling author -- so well loved that he once appeared on the Australian $10 bill. A strange irony, that.

There is much that can still be done, if only there is sufficient public awareness. You can bet that the big media won't get involved. Some of them are the ones behind this assault on our basic freedoms.

Alan R. Light

This is hardly an isolated incident. I.P. rights are being lost across the board, and very seldom are the creators themselves profiting from it. It is, in fact, kind of difficult to see how a creator profits 70 years after their death. All the stuff about author's rights is a smokescreen for large corporations, who, never mind even their own long term interests, smell money and go into a feeding frenzy. It will take a concerted effort to stop them.

Some of us in the etext community are hoping to get something started. See my page at http://users.vnet.net/alight/liber.html for some links and information on the subject. I will try to add some stuff about patents soon. (So far it's mostly about copyright.)

Among other things, note that Eric Eldred is suing the Justice Department to prevent them from enforcing the most recent unconstitutional copyright law. Can't remember the link but it's on my site.

Alan