A French sci-fi author suggested that ants deliberately waged war on dinosaurs and killed them all (by invading their natural orifices and killing them from the inside) because their large size was detrimental to ant nests.
But frankly, I don't think new diseases would wipe out an entire order of life, all over the world, in all ecological niches, without wiping out other unrelated orders of life. In their hundreds of millions of years of existence, dinos had to fight off insects and diseases that were there before them, it couldn't just wipe them (and just them) off the face of the Earth in such a short time.
Ah goody. Another blow landed in the Puritans' War On Fun. Soon, we'll all be living as their god intended, with no frivolous distractions at all! What could be more satisfying? Having a syringe to stick into the annoying tornado of over-excitement who's ruining the party?
I mean, one with a liquid in it, not air to shoot in their veins;-)
It requires an absolutely tiny amount of uranium to run a nuclear plant, compared to the 10,000 tons/day that a 1GW coal plant uses. Uranium is rare, but you don't actually need that much *of* it. 95% of the fuel used in fission plants can be reprocessed. Coal producers are chopping off the tops of entire *mountains* in Appalachia;
"Disposal" isn't as big a problem as it's made out to be; reprocessing reduces the amount of waste produced tremendously, and storing a little waste for a time is a whole lot better than *not* storing it and dumping it into the atmosphere, as we're doing with coal. It's clean... compared to coal, therefore it's clean? What are YOU smoking?
There's plenty of alternatives to fuels, fossils or nuclear. Hydro power can supply a lot, solar here, geothermal there, wind where it's windy. We don't need one single solution that you pretend is clean because you compare it to the dirtiest thing in the world, we need to use resources intelligently.
All those dreams I had of being chased and then not being able to run, losing all the power of my usually very strong and quick legs. That's your subconscious saying "yeah? Well what if our legs DON'T work, what'll you do then, smarty pants?"
Yeah, because nobody was getting killed By Saddam! So killing MORE is ok then? Because someone else killed people, that means you are entitled to kill even more people now?
It was NEVER about Iraqi freedom, that's just the marketing of the war: CPA Order 17 is a law passed by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq reducing the power of the Iraqi government to pursue legal action against foreigners working with the CPA. Depending on interpretation, it either takes power away from the Iraqi government, giving it to the CPA, or it takes power from the Iraqi government and gives it to individuals claiming to work in the interest of the CPA. CPA Order 17 stipulated that "Contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal process with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or any sub-contract thereto"
Get it? They are ruled by foreigners, foreigners and those working for them are above the law, they just can't be prosecuted by the government. You call that freedom?
I just thought I'd attack the first cynical apologist for no good reason other than I don't like people like you. [...] What do you possibly feel you have added to the discussion, other than what we all already know? Anonymous pot calling the kettle black.
It really couldn't happen because it would violate more than a few international agreements.
So what? Answer me this: In America, who has sovereignty? We the actual citizens, or foreigners?
Who the hell do you think wrote those agreements in the first place!?
The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is an international agreement administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO) that sets down minimum standards for many forms of intellectual property (IP) regulation. It was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1994. Its inclusion was the culmination of a program of intense lobbying by the United States. The United States strategy of linking trade policy to intellectual property standards can be traced back to the entrepreneurship of senior management at Pfizer in the early 1980s, who mobilized corporations in the United States and made maximizing intellectual property privileges the number one priority of trade policy in the United States (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000, Chapter 7).
I was always sympathetic to the idea of bringing liberty to those overseas Which is why that emotionally potent oversimplification was used. Not because it applied, but because it would make you agree.
Why are they killing people? For liberty! We like liberty, so it makes it okay to kill people: it's for something we like!
You also need to factor in the public safety benefit of it working even if the electricity is out. A whole city that stays lit up during a disaster could be very beneficial. If the disaster is snow or ash: no light.
I dont care how much money they throw at the problem, if their storyline/plot are bad the movie is BAD. no amount of eye candy and pretty shots are going to fix it. LOTR did well Except that Transformer is nothing but eye candy, and Transformer did well, too. There's no business like show business. And they know the formula: Throw in pretty people with car chases and explosions, and the teenagers will come and give you money.
Interpretations aside, "Thou shalt not kill" is unambiguous. Deuteronomy 20:10-15
10 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the LORD your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
I've often heard left-handedness attributed to development conditions in the womb, but is it suspected to be one of these random DNA mutations, or to some higher-level effect on the brain? I think that the genetic origin of handedness is greatly exaggerated.
I used to hate being asked if I was right or left handed as a child. I'm not. I use both hands, you weird adults. Of course, I was taught to use only the right hand to write, so I'm right handed, but I often get "oh, you're left handed?" comments from people who see me use my left hand for mundane tasks (grabbing a folder on a desk at work, or holding a fork).
The amphetamines used by pilots are very slow-acting (by amphetamine standards) so they don't produce quite as much of the "jittery high" that is usually associated with their more common forms. [...] I'd much rather have pilots with nukes alert at the end of a 20-hr flight than dozing off.
mourning at a ceremony for the four soldiers killed by US "friendly fire" in Afghanistan. A US F-16 dropped a 227-kilogram bomb on the men while they were taking part in a live-fire training exercise near Kandahar.
The other reply mentioned the part about how this is (or might be) satire and a cereal box is not. That leaves your claim that having an entire work of satire on one subject is different, as far as these laws are concerned, from one section of a larger work covering many topics. Why do you think that makes a difference? Why would it be OK to have only one chapter of satire about His Chuckness, but a cause for civil action if the whole book is about him? The collective internet oneupmanship of the Chuck facts is satire, but repackaging those and selling them is not satire. Making satire is protected, but taking someone's satire about someone else and selling it is not, IMO.
Otherwise outlets such as The Onion, SNL, and The Daily Show (as well as many others) couldn't do what they do for long. Again: Those don't publish books entirely about one person. Those cereal boxes don't use Olympic athletes without their consent, and you don't sell books about living people selling their name for money without their consent. He's peddling those Chuck facts for campaign money, they can't dilute his brand like that.
Weird Al Yankovic makes money by parodying other artists; but the key concept is he does it, by creating the parody himself with his own sick-warped genius; He doesn't steal other peoples parodies. He also contacts the parodied before going ahead with publication: Does Al get permission to do his parodies? Al does get permission from the original writers of the songs that he parodies. While the law supports his ability to parody without permission, he feels it's important to maintain the relationships that he's built with artists and writers over the years. Plus, Al wants to make sure that he gets his songwriter credit (as writer of new lyrics) as well as his rightful share of the royalties.
What do the original artists think of the parodies? Most artists are genuinely flattered and consider it an honor to have Weird Al parody their work. Some groups (including Nirvana) claim that they didn't realize that they had really "made it" until Weird Al did a parody of them!
This is, basically, no different than The Onion including an actual image of Steve Jobs in a fictional article about his latest device conquering the world. It's satire, and Jobs' image is a part of it. Here, the name and image of Chuckles is inextricable from the satire, so it shouldn't be an issue. I don't think so, because the Onion doesn't publish an all-Jobs book. They're using his name and likeness for profit, the fact that they are also using humor doesn't make a difference, IMHO, IANAL, BYOB.
if growing up the way past generations did was totally fucked up, and is something we must protect the kids from at all costs, then those who grew up in that fucked up way are the last ones you should entrust those decisions to. I think the ones trying to do this grew up without transistors. This intertubes thingamajigger scares them, and they want it off their e-lawn.
Slashdot Mirror
... but does it run linux? The universe even has multiple beowulf clusters running linux...The universe rocks!
A French sci-fi author suggested that ants deliberately waged war on dinosaurs and killed them all (by invading their natural orifices and killing them from the inside) because their large size was detrimental to ant nests.
But frankly, I don't think new diseases would wipe out an entire order of life, all over the world, in all ecological niches, without wiping out other unrelated orders of life. In their hundreds of millions of years of existence, dinos had to fight off insects and diseases that were there before them, it couldn't just wipe them (and just them) off the face of the Earth in such a short time.
I mean, one with a liquid in it, not air to shoot in their veins
Probably 0. Who do you think goes to that website to find the info that my clueless windoze using acquaintances need?
It requires an absolutely tiny amount of uranium to run a nuclear plant, compared to the 10,000 tons/day that a 1GW coal plant uses. Uranium is rare, but you don't actually need that much *of* it. 95% of the fuel used in fission plants can be reprocessed. Coal producers are chopping off the tops of entire *mountains* in Appalachia;
"Disposal" isn't as big a problem as it's made out to be; reprocessing reduces the amount of waste produced tremendously, and storing a little waste for a time is a whole lot better than *not* storing it and dumping it into the atmosphere, as we're doing with coal. It's clean... compared to coal, therefore it's clean? What are YOU smoking?
There's plenty of alternatives to fuels, fossils or nuclear. Hydro power can supply a lot, solar here, geothermal there, wind where it's windy. We don't need one single solution that you pretend is clean because you compare it to the dirtiest thing in the world, we need to use resources intelligently.
It was NEVER about Iraqi freedom, that's just the marketing of the war: CPA Order 17 is a law passed by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq reducing the power of the Iraqi government to pursue legal action against foreigners working with the CPA. Depending on interpretation, it either takes power away from the Iraqi government, giving it to the CPA, or it takes power from the Iraqi government and gives it to individuals claiming to work in the interest of the CPA.
CPA Order 17 stipulated that "Contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal process with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or any sub-contract thereto"
Get it? They are ruled by foreigners, foreigners and those working for them are above the law, they just can't be prosecuted by the government.
You call that freedom?
[...]
What do you possibly feel you have added to the discussion, other than what we all already know? Anonymous pot calling the kettle black.
So what? Answer me this: In America, who has sovereignty? We the actual citizens, or foreigners?
Who the hell do you think wrote those agreements in the first place!?The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is an international agreement administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO) that sets down minimum standards for many forms of intellectual property (IP) regulation. It was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1994. Its inclusion was the culmination of a program of intense lobbying by the United States.
The United States strategy of linking trade policy to intellectual property standards can be traced back to the entrepreneurship of senior management at Pfizer in the early 1980s, who mobilized corporations in the United States and made maximizing intellectual property privileges the number one priority of trade policy in the United States (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000, Chapter 7).
Not because it applied, but because it would make you agree.
Why are they killing people? For liberty! We like liberty, so it makes it okay to kill people: it's for something we like!
There's no business like show business. And they know the formula: Throw in pretty people with car chases and explosions, and the teenagers will come and give you money.
10 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the LORD your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
I used to hate being asked if I was right or left handed as a child. I'm not. I use both hands, you weird adults.
Of course, I was taught to use only the right hand to write, so I'm right handed, but I often get "oh, you're left handed?" comments from people who see me use my left hand for mundane tasks (grabbing a folder on a desk at work, or holding a fork).
The amphetamines used by pilots are very slow-acting (by amphetamine standards) so they don't produce quite as much of the "jittery high" that is usually associated with their more common forms. [...] I'd much rather have pilots with nukes alert at the end of a 20-hr flight than dozing off.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1956983.stmmourning at a ceremony for the four soldiers killed by US "friendly fire" in Afghanistan. A US F-16 dropped a 227-kilogram bomb on the men while they were taking part in a live-fire training exercise near Kandahar.
Making satire is protected, but taking someone's satire about someone else and selling it is not, IMO.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1tatiU2ha0
;-)
Vivaldi spring, happy easter everyone
Those cereal boxes don't use Olympic athletes without their consent, and you don't sell books about living people selling their name for money without their consent. He's peddling those Chuck facts for campaign money, they can't dilute his brand like that.
Does Al get permission to do his parodies?
Al does get permission from the original writers of the songs that he parodies. While the law supports his ability to parody without permission, he feels it's important to maintain the relationships that he's built with artists and writers over the years. Plus, Al wants to make sure that he gets his songwriter credit (as writer of new lyrics) as well as his rightful share of the royalties.
What do the original artists think of the parodies?
Most artists are genuinely flattered and consider it an honor to have Weird Al parody their work. Some groups (including Nirvana) claim that they didn't realize that they had really "made it" until Weird Al did a parody of them!
They're using his name and likeness for profit, the fact that they are also using humor doesn't make a difference, IMHO, IANAL, BYOB.