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If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

So you are neither Christian nor Jew, since Deuteronomy 17, 1-5 clearly states that infidels must be stoned to death. Or let me guess, you are one of those Christians who never read their own bible?

IIRC, the following happened to South Vietnam: when the USA pulled out, South Vietnam was left alone against North Vietnam, China and URSS - one David against another David backed by two Goliaths.

That wasn't the real problem, though. The problem was that North Vietnam had more popular support. Even when both US and USSR were actively engages, there was a thriving Vietkong guerrilla underground in the South (which is only possible when popular support exists to provide housing, information, food etc), while no such thing did in the North. And, ultimately, it was Vietnamese tanks driven by Vietkong soldiers that rolled over Saigon.

The situation in Afghanistan is quite similar - most Pashtuns seem to be siding with Taliban these days. Besides, Taliban has its own Goliath - Pakistan (or rather ISI).

On the other hand, I am disappointed; some Slashdot user informed me that the current Constitution of Afghanistan punishes apostasy with the death penalty.

It doesn't quite say that. What it does say is:

Article 2 [Religions] (1) The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. (2) Followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law.

Article 3 [Law and Religion] In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.

Article 130 [Judicial Discretion] (1) While processing the cases, the courts apply the provisions of this Constitution and other laws. (2) When there is no provision in the Constitution or other laws regarding ruling on an issue, the courts' decisions shall be within the limits of this Constitution in accord with the Hanafi jurisprudence and in a way to serve justice in the best possible manner.

In practice this has been interpreted by the judiciary to mean that Sharia law as interpreted by Hanafi school is uniformly applicable, and overrides any secular law that is contrary to it. For apostasy, Hanafi prescribes death penalty for males, and imprisonment for females until they repent. On that basis, a court in Kabul sentenced one guy to death for converting. He narrowly escaped because western governments demanded that he be handed over to them, which Karzai did over the head of the courts, but the latter (up to and including the Supreme Court) weren't happy about it. Of course, this is also just one widely publicized case, which is why we know about it in the first place; it's hard to tell how many more people were in fact executed for apostasy, or indeed for other "crimes" punished by death in Sharia (e.g. adultery for married people), under the current Afghanistan regime.

By the way, their constitution also has this gem in it:

Article 149 [Islam, Fundamental Rights] (1) The provisions of adherence to the fundamentals of the sacred religion of Islam and the regime of the Islamic Republic cannot be amended. (2) The amendment of the fundamental rights of the people are permitted only in order to make them more effective. (3) Considering new experiences and requirements of the time, other contents of this Constitution can be amended by the proposal of the President or by the majority of the National Assembly in accordance with the provisions of Article 67 and 146 of this constitution.

So basically there's no legal basis on which it can get better with time - it would require a coup d'etat.

And how long did it take Congress to pass a law restricting freedom of speech? Your Constitutional rights were being broken by some of the very people who wrote them. Having a piece of paper that isn't followed does not make freedom.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Statutes_at_Large/Volume_1/5th_Congress/2nd_Session/Chapter_74

That you obviously bought the media spin that downplayed his association with the terrorist.

Barack Obama was born in 1961. The Weatherman underground disbanded in 1975. During many of their most active years 1967-1971 Obama lived in Indonesia. What exactly is the association that the media is failing to report?

As for Ayers not serving time, you were right about that one. As for not being punished he lost several of his best friends and spent years of his life in hiding, I'd say he was punished. In terms of some action now.. it was the escalating attacks by police in the late 1960s that led to the SDS forming a terrorist arm in the first place. I don't see any reason to want to start hostilities again. The police didn't want to go after the Weatherman because:
a) They could and they would have put the police on trial as well for their illegal activities.
b) Vietnam was over. The root cause was solved. America at that point wanted to go through a time of healing those wounds. The police need to maintain community support to do their other more important jobs effectively and siding with various factions had done damage to their effectiveness in the area of crime which is their primary function.

For some strange reason, the media eventually bought the spin that Obama attended the services for 20 years and had no idea he was supporting a black racist anti-semite, so the issue died rather quickly after Obama threw him under the bus.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy, and in some cases pain. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in the church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely—just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed. (Barack Obama, March 18, 2008 A more perfect union)

He denied having been present for some specific remarks.

Being a racist anti-semite is quite different from having one of the variety of kooky religious beliefs common in this country.

Black Nationalism is one of the variety of kooky religious beliefs common in this country. Its just one that's popular in the African American community and not the White Protestant community. So I don't see how this is quite different other than the specific community. As for anti-Semitism I don't see it in Wright. He's a strong anti-Zionist and anti-Colonialist but those views aren't uncommon among African Americans at all. If you limit yourself to Black Mainline churches it wouldn't shock me if those are the majority views.

Article 67. Citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, demonstration and association. The State shall guarantee conditions for the free activity of democratic political parties and social organizations.

Article 79. Citizens are guaranteed inviolability of the person and the home and privacy of correspondence. No citizens can be placed under control or be arrested nor can their homes be searched without a legal warrant.

See: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_North_Korea_(1972)

Now, compare that to the UK without a formal constitution or true bill of rights. Despite the flaws in the UK, I think there's a lot more freedom of speech, press, assembly, demonstration, association, and privacy in the UK than there is in North Korea.

"UN Treaty on the Rights of the Child ---
We unequivocally oppose the United States Senate’s ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child."
Even Iran implements it.

Mildly related, you probably read this a few days ago: http://mg.co.za/article/2012-06-28-germanys-muslim-jewish-leaders-team-up-to-fight-circumcision-ruling

Did someone say something about everybody 'knowing' he had no WMDs..?

"All the information pointing to no WMD"

That's discounting his evasive actions until he was on the brink of being invaded. It also discounts the general feeling that Iraq was not in compliance leading up to the threat of war:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/French_address_on_Iraq_at_the_UN_Security_Council :

"Progress like this strengthens us in our conviction that inspections can be effective. But we must not shut our eyes to the amount of work that still remains; questions still have to be cleared up, verifications made, and installations and equipment probably still have to be destroyed."

Out of the hundreds of examples, I give you one, which to me is enough to make the $100 price of Office worth it. Try this in LibreOffice:

Roger

* Create a multipage document eg 6 pages

1) Open LO Writer.
2) Hit CTRL+ENTER 5 times (to add 5 pages to the document)
3) Success!

* Try and select 3 pages worth of text using Shift-PgDn

1) Open LO Writer.
2) Copy the text from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum and paste it once or twice into your document.

Your document will now be about 3-6 pages long (assuming default fonts, etc..)

3) Use PgUp to go to the top of the document.
4) Press and hold SHIFT+PgDn until you have selected the entire document.
5) Success!

(I used LibreOffice 3.4.4 OOO340m1 (Build:402) on Ubuntu 11.10, but I expect these instructions will work on 3.5/3.6 on various Windows flavors as well)

If LibreOffice still isn't working properly for you, feel free to ask for help on the #libreoffice channel on Freenode or file a bug using the Bug Submission Assistant.

False. The UN Commander-in-Chief signed an armistice with the North Koreans and the Chinese back in 1953.

North Korea and South Korea are still at war with each other since South Korea wasn't a signatory to the armistice.

This is news? The current GOP pols are far to the right of that liberal Demagogue Nixon. The health care reform package that the current GOP is so outraged about would likely have been signed no further questions asked by Nixon as it's more conservative than what he was proposing at the time.

You sure about that?

That helps a little, but still doesn't really clarify completely what he did. I'll explain a little about what I know about the projectile problem and what I can figure out about what he might have accomplished here.

In the Principia, Newton poses three closely related problems. One is projectile motion under the influence of a frictional force that's proportional to velocity (book II, section I). Next he considers the case where the friction is proportional to the square of the velocity (book II, section II), and finally the case where it's of the form av+bv^2, where a and b are constants (book II, section III). Let's call these cases 1, 2, and 3.

Case 1 is pretty straightforward. The x and y motions are decoupled, and each of the motions is governed by a first-order, linear, inhomogeneous equation.

Case 2 is actually of more physical interest than case 1 for most real-world projectiles. For example, when you toss a baseball in air, its Reynolds number is about 10^4 or 10^5, and in that regime, a force proportional to v^2 is a pretty decent approximation. There is a well known closed-form solution for the one-dimensional subcase (I actually had a student a few years back who figured it out for herself, which was impressive), which is y=A ln[cosh(t sqrt(g/A))].

A hint is that this page has a photo of him holding up a large sheet of paper with his closed-form solution on it. The equation is clearly visible, and reads g^2/(2u^2)+(alpha g/2)[v sqrt(u^2+v^2) / u^2 + arsinh |v/u|] = const. The notation isn't explained, but clearly u and v are the components of some vector, probably the velocity vector. If so, then the constant alpha has to have units of inverse meters.

This makes me think that what he's solved is the full two-dimensional version of case 2. It can't be case 3, because besides g there is only the one constant alpha appearing in his equation. If you write down the equation of motion, a=F/m=(mg-bv^2)/m=g-(b/m)v^2, the constant that naturally occurs is b/m, which has units of inverse meters. It also makes sense that his solution has a hyperbolic trig function in it, since the y(t) for the one-dimensional version of case 2 has a hyperbolic trig function in it.

If my interpretation is right, then you should get a correct one-dimensional result from his equation when u=0. Unfortunately his equation blows up to infinity in that case, so I'm not sure how to extract any sane interpretation from it. By setting alpha=0, you should also get the case with zero friction. That does sort of make sense, since it says u is a constant, which it should be in that case.

It would be interesting to see if my interpretation is right by doing a numerical simulation and seeing if his expression really does seem to be a constant of the motion.

One thing to point out is that he may not have actually solved the full problem as set by Newton. He hasn't found the equation of the trajectory in closed form (which I think was what Newton was most interested in), and he also hasn't found the position in closed form as a function of time. (This is all assuming my interpretation is right.)

They abandoned that stuff out there on a rock in space.

Well ... that's the thing. What do you mean by "abandoned"?

I'm no expert on maritime law (which is what has been typically extended into space), but to my understanding while you're right that an abandoned ship is a free-for-all for any and all takers to salvage, the key to that is it has to be "abandoned", which is different from simply not doing anything with it for a given period of time - particularly for Government owned vessels (at least those used in on-commercial endeavors; see http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/org12-7h.htm "These laws establish that right, title, or ownership of federal property is not lost to the government due to the passage of time, or by neglect or inaction.") That's all aside from the explicit call for preservation of archaeological and historical objects (to "be preserved or disposed of for the benefit of mankind as a whole") that's part of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

That's even explicitly specified in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 "A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body."

So my understanding is that the remains of NASA vessels (as government-owned items) are *not* abandoned simply because they've been left on the moon or on the ocean floor, regardless of how much time passes. Rather, to be abandoned, there has to be an affirmative law or administrative decree which explicitly abandons them and removes them from the registry of government ownership.

Greek law article mentioned

references this directive (2001/29/EK or 2001/29/EC):

2001/29/EC

I'm no lawyer though...

Yes, heaven forbid your employees take 10 minutes off from their monotonous cubicle hellholes to communicate a little with friends and family. It's not like studies have shown that more worker breaks increase productivity or anything. Henry Ford actually told his workers to work less because they got more done.

The State of Bavaria holds the copyright? Can someone explain how the single state of Bavaria, to the exclusion of the other states that together formed the republic of Germany, came to hold the copyright in this work. Hitler's last will allocated his possessions:

What I possess belongs — in so far as it has any value — to the Party. Should this no longer exist, to the State, should the State also be destroyed, no further decision of mine is necessary.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Private_Will_and_Testament

"As the Supreme Court has observed, "[t]he United States frequently employs Armed Forces outside this country - over 200 times in our history - for the protection of American citizens or national security." United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 273 (1990). On at least 125 such occasions, the President acted without prior express authorization from Congress. See Bosnia Opinion, 19 Op. O.L.C. at 331. Such deployments, based on the President's constitutional authority alone, have occurred since the Administration of George Washington. See David P. Currie, The Constitution in Congress: Substantive Issues in the First Congress, 1789-1791, 61 U. Chi. L. Rev. 775, 816 (1994)"

The DPRK are at war with South Korea. The cease-fire is a condition of the Korean Armistice Agreement between them, which is monitored by the UN United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission, of which (surprise!) we are a permanent member. Between the authority granted us by the Armistice, UN Security Council Resolution 84and the Mutual Defense Treaty, we are allowed to respond militarily - excuse me, "act to meet the common danger" - to any violation of the cease-fire. And according to the DOJ, we can just say "national security! booga booga!" and send in the Marines whenever we like. What, exactly, is the difference?

Slavery was undoubtedly a significant issue with the politics of 1860, and it was the election of Abraham Lincoln from a political party whose primary tenant and justification for existence was to promote the abolition of slaves throughout America that provided the spark which started the U.S. Civil War. It seems doubtful that South Carolina would have seceded had a Democrat been elected in 1860, but that is alternate time line stuff that we simply won't know what would have happened. Then again, Lincoln didn't even get the majority of the popular vote in 1860... just under 40% of the vote in fact.

I agree that there were people in the Confederate Army like Robert E. Lee who were loyal to the government of the state from which they were from, and that there certainly were many other factors too. But the point remains that slavery was the big issue, and in the Articles of Secession by South Carolina, slavery is perhaps the most prominent of the several reasons for justification the secession from the federal union. BTW, I love this document as it does address a number of issues in American constitutional law that hasn't really been resolved either legislatively or judicially and in particular points out some glaring weaknesses in the American federal constitution. While not named explicitly in the document, it also mentions that the election of Abraham Lincoln was another chief reason for secession because it was felt that they as citizens of South Carolina would no longer be capable of exercising their "rights" to hold slaves.

Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail, which could allow you go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying – without the pat-down. As we speak, routes in California and the Midwest are already underway.

Excerpt from Barack Obama's Third State of the Union Address. Emphasis added.

Our politicians aren't stupid. They may make plenty of decisions you disagree with, but they are well aware of this fact. The White House never had any illusions that the TSA was not a national embarrassment.

The rover's aren't like the Deacon's Masterpiece, where every component reaches end-of-life at exactly the same time, the mission life was dictated not by component life but environmental factors. As I understand it, the relatively short life-rating was based largely on power availability. From all previous Mars landers, it was expected that the solar panels' output would drop to useless levels within a couple months of landing. And although they surely had some ideas on how to get the rovers to survive the Martian winter, they certainly weren't going to make that a mission requirement. The mission life wasn't a matter of the rated life of the motors, or the computers, or of the fatigue life of the chassis. You couldn't have really made them cheaper and still had a usable rover: a strut with a fatigue life of only a few months' driving probably may have snapped on impact, a 1-year motor would have been more or less the same size and weight, a 1-year computer would have been identical to the computer they've got.

And, really, why would you want to shave everything down to such a short life: it's not like you could have saved much money for the taxpayer - the component cost of the rovers is only maybe 1/100th the total cost of the mission. Most of the cost is in getting the rover to Mars in the first place, followed by having a full-time staff of dozens or hundreds designing, testing, and running the thing.

(The earliest I can think of is the suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War.)

The earliest prominent example was 1798, with the Sedition Act. Set to expire the day before John Adams left office, it was used by Federalists to punish journalists and even a Congressman who wrote mean things about the Federalist government.

This is a pointless question to ask an anonymous coward, but would it be safe to say, then, that you are against the proposed state of Palestine?

Just for reference, I found the Palestinian constitution here. I remember that it used to (or, perhaps, I remember a later draft) a more prominent statement right in the introduction, but even in this draft, Article 4.1 reads:

Islam is the official religion in Palestine. Respect and sanctity of all other heavenly religions shall be maintained.

For the sake of comparison, the Israel declaration of independence goes even further, stating Israel is a Jewish state, with complete equality for non-Jews. Still, it is the main focus of the "illegitimate" claims, which somehow usually come from people who think that a Palestinian state would be a great idea.

Shachar

It might be natural evolution a lion eating you... but that doesn't mean we should let it happen

What do you suggest, killing all the predators in the world? Where I live now we are overrun with deer because people thought it was a good idea to drive the wolves and mountain lions out of this region. Deer hunting is now viewed as a form of population management.

lets say people are getting robbed on the park. What is your advice? Don't go to the park?

We send the police to the park to protect people. Do you want to have police officers in your home, making sure you do not commit copyright infringement? I suppose borrowing the North Korean approach to Internet access is the next logical step from borrowing the Chinese.

It's easy to say that walking on the streets doesn't cope with our modern world anymore.

Except that nothing has changed in the past 40 centuries. City streets have always been dangerous, and we have always had police officers / soldiers / law enforcers patrolling our streets. This is done to increase the freedom of people living in cities, unlike SOPA/DMCA/etc. which are designed to curtail your freedom.

The fact that people can break DRM easily doesn't mean that every piece of software should be given away for free and that there should be no punishment for people illegally profiting from other people work.

Yes, how terrible it is to profit from other people's work...

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto

I for one like the old business model of paying for an application... you will find out that free applications nowadays are very, very annoying

You are talking to someone who writes all his publications using LaTeX, with Emacs as a text editor, on a GNU/Linux OS. What was your point again?

basically... there should be ways to punish these "smart S's" who earn money from sharing other people works for free

Interesting business model...

Ah, I just checked, wondering what sort of 'national security' exceptions that 'transit passage' has. Here it is, folks:

Article 39: Ships and aircraft, while exercising the right of transit passage, shall: (b) refrain from any threat or use of force against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of States bordering the strait, or in any other manner in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations;

So yeah. Iran does, indeed, have a perfectly valid reason to deny US ships passage through the strait....because we keep threatening (in violation of international law) to attack their nuclear weapons productions. (Strangely, it reads as if they can keep us out of the Oman side, also...that can't be right. I suspect that it means Oman could also keep us out, if it wanted, because we threatened Iran. Iran can't keep us out of Oman!)

There's an idiom about chickens and roosting that is apt here.

Here's the section on transit passage.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

John F Kennedy, 13 Mar 1962,
Address_on_the_First_Anniversary_of_the_Alliance_for_Progress

Yeah, well we all know what happened to HIM.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

John F Kennedy, 13 Mar 1962, Address_on_the_First_Anniversary_of_the_Alliance_for_Progress

"No, you can't have nuclear power to supplement your poor excuse for oil refinement. Oh, and we're going to punish anybody that tries to help you get better at harvesting oil." It's quite the kick in the dick, isn't it? It's almost like we're trying to get Iran to act up...

The center laments that works published in 1955 aren't being released. But in fact, the public domain won't expand at all, except through explicit renunciation of copyright.

Here's why.

Works published before 1923 are in the public domain.
Works published between 1923 and 1963, provided that the copyright has been renewed, are copyrighted until 95 years after publication-- 2018 at a minimum.

You might expect that the works of Virginia Woolf, for example, would be freed from copyright,as it has been 70 years since her death in 1941. But her post 1923 works will not enter the public domain until 2019. Provided, of course, that the copyright terms are not further extended in to the far future.

...he just bought the patent from two Toronto inventors. (wikipedia.org)

Read on:

Thomas Edison obtained an exclusive license to the Canadian patent. Thomas Edison developed his own design of incandescent lamp with a high resistance thin filament of carbon in a high vacuum contained in a tightly sealed glass bulb which had a sufficiently long service life to be commercially practical.

Historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.

Another historian, Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he developed an entire, integrated system of electric lighting.

The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting.

Incandescent light bulb

Perhaps this will give you a small taste of Edison's achievement:

Much is said about the subdivision of the electric light by certain gentlemen, who hope to distribute it throughout our houses from one central [source] and furnish it cheaply and abundantly in our cities. I am one of those who do not believe in the impossible, but I say that, with our present knowledge, this problem is unsolvable. Sir William Armstrong can only keep thirty-seven lamps going ; Lane- Fox could only show twelve lights ; Professor Adams could only produce from the most powerful dynamo-electric machine, by calculation, one hundred and forty lamps. Where is the subdivision ?

Popular Science Monthly/Volume 19/July 1881/Recent Advances in Electric Lighting

The system that emerged from Edison's lab included practical designs for generators, mainline distribution systems, home wiring standards, switches, sockets, fuses, training programs for linesmen and electricians.

Essentially everything you would need for wiring a city without burning it to the ground or electrocuting half the population.

If you're feeling so inclined, you could provide the lawyers with a knife. As long as it's blunt.

What was that creepy-fun film I saw a while ago ... ? 127 Hours.
Picture the same general situation, but with much less appealing characters without redeeming features. And a blunter knife.
Making them drink their own piss wouldn't be a bad idea either.

Hey, this is beginning to sound good! Something useful to do with lawyers. Or we could use them for street lamps, I suppose.

When the Antarctic treaty expires in the near future, then the ball will really go up for grabs since suddenly it'll be legal to declare Antarctica sovereign territory and to go after it's natural resources.

When does it expire? The Wikipedia article and the 1959 treaty make no mention of this.

In reality, this already exists in the US. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526 mandates that information cannot be classified merely for the sake stopping embarrassment. Also provides provisions for declassification of information and that publishing leaked information does not declassify it and is therefor punishable by law.

To comply with copyright legislation in various countries, Digital Audio Home Recorders will only make recordings on CD-R and CD-RW discs bearing the appropriate 'audio' logo. These discs are subject to levies which are payable to the relevant copyright protection associations.

-- http://www.mam-a.com/audio_technical

One can use a computer or other device to copy an audio CD onto a data CD/R, but to do so legally, you must use the special Audio CD/R media.

The only experience the Founders had in this regard was history, the disastrous self-destructive "direct democracy" you mention earlier as having been invented two fucking thousand years ago. Maybe you skimmed that section of history -- the original Greek Democracy experiment was considered a catastrophe because the mob ran away with the government.

Calling it "experience" is going a bit far, since they were relying on two-thousand year old stories, as recounted by the winners. (Plato and Aristotle hated democracy - their texts have survived, but very little from the democrats. What there is, is worth reading.)

Even then, Greek democracy was not totally considered a disaster. It was also considered a golden age of culture and enlightenment, the place where all the ideas that were resurrected in the renaissance were first born. Even the ideologues they cherished, such as Plato and Aristotle, could hardly have done what they did without the possibilities democracy opened up.

Our old leaders were just very reluctant to connect that success with democracy, since they were themselves men of unusual power and money - oligarchs. And, would they like to think, unusual wisdom, and unusual suitability to rule others (to their own best interest).

The anti-democratic prejudice in the constitution (which came from elitist ideology, not experience), was gradually weakened through US history - especially it took a fatal blow in the civil war. It would probably be better to keep going than to try to take history back 150 years.

Not to mention that the hypocrites who wrote that amendment turned around just a few years later made speech critical of the government illegal. Why should the NY Senate be blamed if they are just following in the footsteps of the founding fathers?

FYI, in Germany it's never been like that. The oldest German copyright law I could find is the one of the North German Confederation of 1870 which specified a term of life plus 30 years. Some of the individual German countries may have had copyright laws before, though. But without a united German state or any of the modern copyright agreements, these were mostly ineffectual.

Source (in German)

Hell, I'm not even American and even I know this was basically laid out by Woodrow Wilson as a GOAL back when he was kicking about.

Let us go back and distinguish between the two things that we want to do; for we want to do two things in modern society. We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. You cannot train them for both in the time that you have at your disposal.

source

Hey the concept is only 102 years old, as far as american politicians are concerned..

I know that's the common belief, but that's not technically accurate. It is not "illegal" to not buy health insurance. You might be subject to a surtax that's basically the same as the premium, if you don't. I say "might" because there are exemptions.

For the boring details: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/H.R._3962/Division_A/Title_V/Subtitle_A/Part_1/Subpart_A#Sec._501.

Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", Section VI, Lines 1-2:
1. Sun Tzu said: Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.
2. Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him.

Don't know why but all I can think about is Terran camping with siege tanks and MMM after reading that.

Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", Section VI, Lines 1-2:
1. Sun Tzu said: Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.
2. Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him.

Since it was published before 1923, it's already in the public domain. See the footnote at the bottom of the wikisource page for the poem, and then you can follow the links from there if you care to read more.

Seems to me reading the Torrent description, gmaxwell_
was just looking for a way to pass these scientific publications
to the public for quite sometime now.

That "Aaron Swartz" was arrested (for whatever reason) for downloading
files from "JSTOR" was was the straw broke down all barriers for gmaxwell_.

And I for one appreciate gmazwell_ torrent or will 4 hours to 3 weeks from now.

I understand they are poorly OCR'ed PDF's that need working on.

"samwilsonau at 2011-07-22 09:17 CET:
  The Wikisource project relating to these is http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:WikiProject_Royal_Society_Journals
(if anyone's looking for some fun proofreading!)."

There is now a Wikisource page setup to help publish this material:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:WikiProject_Royal_Society_Journals

They gave Bush these powers with Card Blanche, and he put us into two war fronts, one of which he should be prosecuted for. (Iraq) Obama uses it for legitimate purposes and they flip flop like a fish out of water.

Last I checked, Bush got approval for his little wars. He lied a lot to get it, but he still took the effort.

In the mean time, I hope Obama can hold the course. This a break for the free world and a chance for Democracy to break out in the Middle East.

Are you serious? You do understand that rebels are violently racist (look up all the stories about lynchings and expulsions of Black Libyans from regions controlled by the rebellion), and a good chunk of them are Islamist fundamentals. What more, al-Qaeda has already signed up to fight on their side, and some of the people now being supplied by weapons and provided air support by NATO in Libya are the same people who have shot at NATO soldiers in Afghanistan a few years ago.

I have no doubt that once rebels, with NATO air support, finally steamroll over the last loyalist strongholds, we'll hear a lot about how the new Libya will have become the shining beacon of democracy and human rights - just like it happened in Afghanistan. Of course, if you actually go and look it up, "liberated" Afghanistan is still a theocracy where "apostasy" is punished by death, other human rights are pretty bad even by the letter of the law, and where most of the society simply disregards the written law in favor of the customary one which is misogynistic and pedophilic in practice.

Why do you think "democracy" in Libya will be any better?

provide as much aid as we can - including helping to draft a secular constitution.

We didn't do it in Afghanistan, despite the fact that the country is de facto under our military occupation. What makes you think we would be able to do it in Libya? More importantly, do you seriously believe that we could do so over the desire of the locals in rebel areas to have an Islamic republic (which seems quite likely)?

"Humans suffer. Animals suffer. My morality seeks to minimize unnecessary suffering. The logic is very simple. There is no divide on this point, just sound logical consistency."

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall."

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays:_First_Series/Self-Reliance

"Actually, I'm absolutely repulsed by the suffering that occurs in nature, including that which is inflicted on animals by other animals. Ideally I would like to stop this suffering too. Currently however, the immense difficulty in achieving this makes it untenable, but I believe that in the future with further technological and other advancements it may become viable."

okaaay

the weight of reality, of hundreds of millions of years of natural reality. and you do not wish to learn from it. you wish to change it. you are a speck of dust that understands not one bit of the reality you live in, but you seek to reverse it, because it offends your simple-minded sense of "consistency"

you are an absurd, arrogant little bit of nothing, without the slightest understanding of your relation to the real world, and worse in your attitude towards it than the worst polluting, natural environment destroying selfish fool. at least he just wants to consume and not think about his consequences. you? you see the natural world, are offended by it because of your silly little infantile ignorant feelings, and therefore, you wish to destroy all of it! why? because are animals are cute and shouldn't cry. ha!

what an insufferable asshole you are

know the natural world for what it is. let it teach you the way of the world, reality. or crawl back to suburbia where animals are cute stuffed plush toys or coddled genetic derivatives of canines or felines or dancing happy feet or kung fu pandas or other farts of whimsy. and just please, coddled suburbanite: please shut the fuck up about that which you wish to remain ignorant of and yet still condemn

you are an ignorant arrogant fool

I can recommend Ryles Concept of mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Mind http://www.scribd.com/doc/7003453/Gilbert-Ryle-The-Concept-of-Mind

Late Wittgensteins philosophical investigations or Quine, especially his: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_What_There_Is is also brilliant, and makes this confusions go away.

The problem is that you only hear non quietistic solutions since the quietistics ones are, well, quiet :)

Seems especially targeted to French people...

'The king of France is the most powerful prince in Europe. He has no gold mines, like his neighbour the king of Spain, but he has greater riches because he draws them from an inexhaustible mine—the vanity of his subjects. He has undertaken and carried on great wars without funds except titles of honour to sell, and, through a prodigy of human pride, his troops have found themselves feared, his fortresses built, his fleets equipped. -- Montesquieu in Persian Letters, 18th century

15 times that farm's quota

Not quite. The law that you are referring to (passed by the Politburo of the Ukrainian Communist Party, which at the time was led by an ethnic Pole) stated that if a farm failed to meet its quota, the farm could be subject to fines of up to 15 monthly quotas of meat. Even if government agents decided to apply the maximum penalty and to seize the fine immediately, in theory the farm would still be left with grain and vegetables.

I continue to conclude: It's not Chernobyl. When all this began I said a worst case would be one or more Tsar Bomba equivalents. We now know it is far less than that. It does not appear that the entire mess will equal one Chernobyl.

Rubbish, Tsar Bomba's fall out is measured in kilograms, Chernobyls around 10's of tons. Due to the spent fuel pools there is approximately 30-40 years worth of spent fuel at Fukushima and we could be looking at around 800-1000 tons of plutonium assuming a 10 year refueling cycle. Great that it didn't blow up however the release of radionuclides will continue to occur until all the leaks are repaired. The question is how this will be achieved. Chernobyl released it's radionuclides into the air and all over the land because it was land locked. It seems that because Fukushima is releasing its radionuclide yield into the ocean that this is somehow less concerning. Let's do and see the science and asses the actual damage based on that, not hyperbole.

There are debates about "extra" cancer cases caused by nuclear power, but I know of no proof that there have been any.

The claim can be made for two reasons. First at TMI the science wasn't even done. Dr Carl Johnson, an expert in radiation related diseases asked the NRC and DOE to do a survey to look for some of these elements in the respirable dust around TMI after the accident and they refused. So if the authorities *refused* to take measurements on which to base long term cancer studies can be based, how can a supposition be made about how many lives have been lost due to increased cancer rates?

It can be best summed up by this 2004 quote of Dr Michael Fernex formerly of the University of Basel who worked for the WHO;

"Six years ago we tried to have a conference. The proceedings were never published. This is because in this matter the organisations at the UN are subordinate to the IAEA. Since 1986 the WHO did nothing about studying Chernobyl. It's a pity. The interdiction to publish which fell upon the WHO conference came from the IAEA. The IAEA blocked the proceedings; the truth would have been a disaster for the nuclear industry"

Here is the actual text of the agreement. However the UNICEF report "Human consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident" summarised it neatly;

"Life expectancy for men in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, for example, is some ten years less that Sri Lanka, which is one of the twenty poorest countries in the world and is in the middle of a long drawn out war"

Maybe Pournelle is just to lazy to look and since cancer takes years to gestate I think it's premature to understand the damage done to the Japanese populace by Fukushima.

the Chinese are moving toward both. The United States is moving away from both. The results are predictable.

Absolutely predicable. If they make the same tragic organisational mistakes that every other country has made then we will see an accident on the same scale. It's difficult to believe that the Chinese will succeed where the UK, USA, USSR, Germany and now Japan has failed.

Of course the plant was older and scheduled for retirement to begin with.

Of course this is completely irrelevant and actually should have promoted investment in *ensuring* the plant wouldn't fail. The activated isotopes inside the reactor, or CRUD (Chalk River Unidentified Deposits - look it up), will be leaking into the Pacific if the reactor vessel is as breached as it appears to be. I suspect we are just at the