You treat the expense as unnecessary: in that case you'd be right.
No...not really that. Let's say I planned to buy a car. I've got it in the budget--let's say for the sake of keeping it simple that I pay cash. Now orginally, I plan to spend $45K, but then decide to by one for $35K. I have still increased my spending for this year over the previous one by $35K. I can try the line on my S.O. as "guess what we saved $10K," but I don't think my S.O.'s going to be fooled into thinking I just cut our spending by $10K. To cut my spending might have meant that I sold my old car and took public transport or rode my bike, whatever. Or kept my old car another year and kept our budget the same as last year.
The main point is Washington likes to complain that spending's being cut because they want their budgets as large as possible. And part of the problem we inheritly have is, while we have a representative government, what the representative or senator in Alaska or Iowa wants funded affects those in Texas or Nevada and visa versa. Some states get back more than they put in, but I can't vote against their representatives. So as long as their state is passive and happy, they're going to keep in their representatives. And those congressmen and women are going to stay in office forever because there's no term limits to force them out.
That's because of this pesky thing called inflation.
Not really...at least right not....inflation is hardly running rampant. Inflation has averaged between 1.59% (2002) - 3.39% (2005) for the years 2000-2007. Not great, but not really a lot--especially if you're old enough to remember the double-digit inflation we went into during Carter's budget years (such as an average of 13.58% for 1980).
And inflation doesn't factor into everything. Take computers. You can buy a decent laptop for $600-$800 and a desktop for even less that that. The price of making the computer has gone down even while the computer's processor, hard drive size, etc. have all gone up and improved.
No, the reason Washington calls increasing the budget a cut is when they want to get the entitlement population up in arms that they won't be able to get their "fair share" and the mean old republican party is trying to take X away from them. (Unfortunately as we have seen, the republicans, who have been complaining for years about trying to be fiscally conservative fighting those 'spendthrift dems' started spending like drunken sailors once they had the majority. So neither party has been responsible with the people's money. And even more unfortunate, I don't think the people had demanded enough of that from the politicians. We're fat and happy when OUR representative brings home the pork products.)
Not giving handouts to those who have little is NOT the same as taking things away from them.
Oh somebody mod this simple statement up. They get it. That's part of the problem in Washington--a reduction in the increase in spending on something is called a CUT.
It's like planning to buy a $45,000 vehicle and then claiming I cut spending by buying a $35,000 vehicle. Nevermind the fact that I've increased my spend $35,000....
I think it would be great if Obama was elected president. It would send a great message to the rest of the world that Americans are a diverse, caring and accepting people.
Not electing Obama != Americans are not a diverse, caring and accepting people! Any more than saying because democrats didn't choose Clinton meant they were anti-woman. If Barack loses, it just means that the majority of Americans disagree with his changes in policy for America.
I think Obama's very talented and a great speaker. However, his policies, when he gets into the nuts and bolts of what he wants to do are very liberal and, IMHO, will be harmful to the country. YYMV and if Barack's your man, go for it. However, don't start by setting up the straw man that if Barack's not elected, it means we're a bunch of racist bastards.
The problem isn't simply the big Telco's. It's lack of real competition even in large areas. The Telcos offer satellite TV, telephone and DSL; Cable Cos offer their TV and phone services as well as broadband. But there's not many choices. For example, not far from Beaumont, Texas mentioned in the story is the much larger city of Houston. Recently Comcast came in and took over a lot of Time Warner, didn't really change anything except raising the prices. The cable companies come in and split up the territory so you've really only ONE company if you want cable and/or cable internet. Because of the pricing structure, if you've already got cable, you're probably going to find it more economical to go with them for your broadband. Your only other choices are DirectTV, which is ridiculously expensive, or the big bell AT&T's DSL. So far it seems to be the lesser of evils. They price by speed and don't seem to have any caps on the amount downloaded--for right now.
What's been uncomfortable is watching AT&T that was split up from it's local phone service for being monopolistic. Then it's once again allowed not only to take back over the local SW Bell again, but grow even bigger and stronger, taking over DishNetwork satellite and Cingular wireless. A lot of people, I'm sure see it as convenient to get everything from one company in a bundle. But it essentially means for broadband or any other home entertainment you're just about down to two heavyweights. I like DirectTV for satellite, but I wonder how long they'll last before one or the other buys them out. Eventually you get down to one dominant company and then they can set prices or impose all the restrictions they want. Becasue the loser will either be unwilling or unable to lower prices to compete.
Then, we'll finally hear the complaints about there being a monopoly....
The problem was the investors were also greedy and yet didn't take the time to understand what they were investing in.
The companies thought they immune to the rules regular business had to follow. It all became a grand pyramid scheme: You set up on a shoe string, get people to advertise so you don't have to charge visitors and (add some pixie dust) = Profit!
Like them or hate them, Amazon did things right. I remember reading news where all the numbers wonks were shaking their head over Amazon's meager profits. Oh, they were making money all right, but they were smart enough to sink it back into their business. And, sure enough, five years later (the average time any other business takes to show a profit) they started making money hand over fist and haven't stopped.
The computer chain, Egghead, did something even more radical. They closed all their brick and stick stores down and went to a strictly on-line presence, New Egg. It ended up being a good risk, CompUSA and others had come along and Egghead's retail prices were too high to the superstores. Online, they didn't have to maintain the physical presence and they were able to reach a lot more customers with lower prices. Like Amazon, they also kept shipping costs down. Now it's CompUSA that is floundering and closing their stores.
Both of these companies have succeeded because they 1) Had something that appealed to broad number of people; 2) Were able to offer products at a discount--in some cases where there had been little or no discount; 3) Kept shipping costs to a minimum--why the catalog companies haven't been smart enough to follow suite, I don't know--they're going to go the way of the dodo bird; and most importantly 4) Have really good customer service. A person doesn't have the comfort of just walking in the door with a return or a complaint. There's a certain amount of trust you've got to have that you're not going to get shafted by whomever you buy something from on-line. And reports of bad service sprout like weeds.
Technically they didn't break into Comcast, they broke into Network Solutions. They're the weak link. I like to bash Comcast as much as the next, but it was a breakdown in security at Network Solutions that allowed them to get into Comcast's registar and repoint their URLs.
...finding out you're actually related to someone born almost 10,000 ago.
A thousand years seems a pittance when they were able to find a local history teacher was a relation to the "Cheddar Man" via mitochondrial DNA -- which is inherited unchanged on the maternal line. (BTW, that's a professor and a researcher at London's Natural History Museum, not the descendant, in the photo.)
The search for a descendant came about as, "Dr. Larry Barham, a Texas-born archaeologist at Bristol University, said the finding "adds to the evidence that Britons came from a race of hunter-gatherers who later turned to farming because they found it was to their advantage." Archeologists believe Cheddar Man, who lived during the Stone Age, was a hunter-gatherer.
Opponents of this theory argue that Britons are descendants of Middle Eastern farmers."
I think quite a LOT of this doom and gloom is coming from the media and those who want to effect a change in political parties this year. No, everything is not perfect, but it's not going down the drain either. The problem is when you have a lot of people talking down the economy, it has an effect. Every problem or belt tightening becomes another sign that the economy is going downhill.
One of the problems we're facing regarding the housing market is of our own making and the banks being able to create all kinds of ridiculous scams to otherwise qualify people that could not afford the house they were buying. Using an adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) or one of those interest only loans only works if the value of property continues to go up, as well as salaries. Eventually, however, the market corrects, the value goes down and the homeowner finds they owe more than it's worth just in time for the ARM to adjust upward. Then then owner gets fed up and walks out of the property.
We already went through a similar Savings and Loan crisis that cost taxpayer millions during the mid-80's - mid-90's when the housing market collapsed. And yet after bailing them out, nothing was put in place to make sure they couldn't invoke other predatory lending practices.
Then there are the companies who use this as an excuse to cut back. Believe it or not, I'm contracting for a large oil company who is in the process of laying staff off! I had hoped they would be hiring, but quite a few of the people I know are having to look elsewhere in the company or outside. It makes no sense with the amount of money they are no doubt pulling in right now, but it's cutting back and outsoucing.
I doubt CR is entering the gaming market, but only to test claims expressed or inferred that WiiFit is a viable exercise program.
Most game reviews are like book reviews, they're pretty subjective and it depends on the what you like, but there is a need for an unbiased look at a video game that's claiming to be a fitness product.
I disagree that you need a huge sample to test it out, just a diverse one. I suspect that while just about anything to get the couch potato off their butt would help, it's not going to be a subsitute for a regular workout or sending the kids out to play ball for a change.
I DO KNOW when someone takes food off of my family's table, tells me what kind of car I can drive or I have to spend my child's college fund to fill up my car because someone thinks (incorrectly, I might add) that a fuckin' caribou might be badly affected if we do the same thing in ANWR that we do in every state in the union, including about 7 miles away in Prudhoe Bay.
Hardly the same comparison. Dewey lost because everyone thought he had it sewn up and so didn't bother to go vote. Here we have the votes tallied and the only way that woman's going to sing is if she does something underhanded like getting the superdelegates to go her way despite Obama having the electoral advantage. Or getting Michigan and Florida primaries to count which, after breaking their own party's rules, got their voters tossed out.
Personally I think she's so desperate, she'd rather see Obama lose to McCain just so she could run again in 2012.
IANAL, but isn't this really like a case of trying to enforce a copywrite long after it's become generic? Like the word aspirin--it was once a trademark of Bayer, but because they didn't virgiously defend it's usage, it because a generic word not associated with only their company.
Likewise, this company has run around and found something that wasn't patented, got a patent and are now trying to enforce something they never even invented. Whomever gave this company a patent should be fired.
But seriously, I think some people with more money than brains are going to extremely disappointed with the results. A cat cloned at Texas A&M didn't look any more like the mother than a normally bred kitten would. It also had a totally different personality--which most people wanting a clone of a particular pet would be to get the identical personality. Clones at this stage are not carbon copies--I suspect there's a lot more to the breakdown of the genome than we know. Or perhaps...there's the soul factor....
But you find out your "career path" or the box HR sticks you in is Administrative. (As in Administrative Assistant or Office Manager.) Yes, you're lumped in with the secretarial force where the pay scale is minuscule. That's when you find title means nothing--it's what HR has you coded as. It's amazing how much web work is delegated to 'administrative assistants' or equivalent rather than IT.
True, but we have the ability to pretty much obiterate every species on the planet, except maybe cockroaches. We have (or should have) more resposibility. Animals hunt for food and survival. Many times in the past we hunted merely for trophys or in the case of the bison, to force the native americans to move to reservations or starve.
To ignore our responsiblity in this would be our folly and cause our eventual demise.
Not really, AVG's famous for false positives. One day the zip file is fine, the next it's infected with "x", the day after it's fine again, etc.
And I ugraded AVG to version 8.0 on my Vista laptop. Somewhere along the way, a log file got corrupted and Vista started doing system dumps and BSOD when it tried to run. Not sure what caused this but it is the first problem I've had with Vista. I had to uninstall and rollback the restoration point. I think it's okay agan, but I'm leary about trying to reinstall AVG.
Well, it would depend on WHY the species dwindled down to ~100. Was it because of natural selection or because man hunted them down to extinction. The latter was certainly the case with the American Bison and with the ongoing of whaling. And there is a case that, in a large part, man caused the Thylacine demise.
You might be able to use distant relatives to eventually create some sort of Thylacine cross. However the Thylacine is not related to either tigers or wolves though it went by the name Tasmanian Tiger or Wolf--it is closer in relation to the Tasmanian Devil. I can't think of why you want to rekindle another, LARGER carnivorous creature with a nasty temper.
This isn't a suicide issue. It's an abuse issue. There would be no suicide in this case without the willful, malicious intent to construct a false friendship created by a knowing adult.
Being that she had mental problems, we can't say (and the defense will no doubt argue) that there would be no suicide, but for this woman. She might have done so over something else.
OTOH, the preditor was an adult who was aware of the girl's problems (and obviously has some issues of her own) and was cruel enough to even say to the effect, the world would be better without you, that you're a horrible person. One could argue that this woman designed for this girl to kill herself.
However, I can't let HER parents go scott-free on this one either. What were they doing letting their mentally fragile daughter romp across the internet with little or no supervision! This could have just as well been a sexual predator and she would have been a perfect target.
The problem with this case is there's no real legislation--it's taken months of grasping at straws to come up with something to charge her with. So if they convict, what limits are going to be imposed on future defendant's speech? If I tell someone, "Oh go jump off a bridge" and they do so, will I be held liable? I think this woman is reprehensible, but we've got to be careful in going off willy-nilly setting new laws over a single, highly unusual and emotional, case.
Personally I would like to see this as a civil case where the woman has such a fine she'll never be able to repay it. That way a % of anything she makes for the rest of her life will go to a Megan Meier fund that helps at-risk teens or similar. That way EVERY time she got a paycheck or earned a dime she'd be forced to think of Megan and the lives she destroyed.
Perhaps it would work better if the parents were FINED when their kids cut class.
Of course, I don't feel all that benevolent toward public schools. Schools get paid $X by the federal government for each student that attends per day. The system doesn't seem to be working attendance performance (such as bonuses for perfect attendance, etc.) for the benefit of the kids, but for the enrichment of the school district.
Slashdot Mirror
You treat the expense as unnecessary: in that case you'd be right.
No...not really that. Let's say I planned to buy a car. I've got it in the budget--let's say for the sake of keeping it simple that I pay cash. Now orginally, I plan to spend $45K, but then decide to by one for $35K. I have still increased my spending for this year over the previous one by $35K. I can try the line on my S.O. as "guess what we saved $10K," but I don't think my S.O.'s going to be fooled into thinking I just cut our spending by $10K. To cut my spending might have meant that I sold my old car and took public transport or rode my bike, whatever. Or kept my old car another year and kept our budget the same as last year.
The main point is Washington likes to complain that spending's being cut because they want their budgets as large as possible. And part of the problem we inheritly have is, while we have a representative government, what the representative or senator in Alaska or Iowa wants funded affects those in Texas or Nevada and visa versa. Some states get back more than they put in, but I can't vote against their representatives. So as long as their state is passive and happy, they're going to keep in their representatives. And those congressmen and women are going to stay in office forever because there's no term limits to force them out.
That's because of this pesky thing called inflation.
Not really...at least right not....inflation is hardly running rampant. Inflation has averaged between 1.59% (2002) - 3.39% (2005) for the years 2000-2007. Not great, but not really a lot--especially if you're old enough to remember the double-digit inflation we went into during Carter's budget years (such as an average of 13.58% for 1980).
And inflation doesn't factor into everything. Take computers. You can buy a decent laptop for $600-$800 and a desktop for even less that that. The price of making the computer has gone down even while the computer's processor, hard drive size, etc. have all gone up and improved.
No, the reason Washington calls increasing the budget a cut is when they want to get the entitlement population up in arms that they won't be able to get their "fair share" and the mean old republican party is trying to take X away from them. (Unfortunately as we have seen, the republicans, who have been complaining for years about trying to be fiscally conservative fighting those 'spendthrift dems' started spending like drunken sailors once they had the majority. So neither party has been responsible with the people's money. And even more unfortunate, I don't think the people had demanded enough of that from the politicians. We're fat and happy when OUR representative brings home the pork products.)
Not giving handouts to those who have little is NOT the same as taking things away from them.
Oh somebody mod this simple statement up. They get it. That's part of the problem in Washington--a reduction in the increase in spending on something is called a CUT.
It's like planning to buy a $45,000 vehicle and then claiming I cut spending by buying a $35,000 vehicle. Nevermind the fact that I've increased my spend $35,000....
I think it would be great if Obama was elected president. It would send a great message to the rest of the world that Americans are a diverse, caring and accepting people.
Not electing Obama != Americans are not a diverse, caring and accepting people! Any more than saying because democrats didn't choose Clinton meant they were anti-woman. If Barack loses, it just means that the majority of Americans disagree with his changes in policy for America.
I think Obama's very talented and a great speaker. However, his policies, when he gets into the nuts and bolts of what he wants to do are very liberal and, IMHO, will be harmful to the country. YYMV and if Barack's your man, go for it. However, don't start by setting up the straw man that if Barack's not elected, it means we're a bunch of racist bastards.
Why are you whining about the "big telcos" when it's Time Warner Cable proceeding with a bandwidth cap?
FWIW, TW is also happy to offer you phone service!
The problem isn't simply the big Telco's. It's lack of real competition even in large areas. The Telcos offer satellite TV, telephone and DSL; Cable Cos offer their TV and phone services as well as broadband. But there's not many choices. For example, not far from Beaumont, Texas mentioned in the story is the much larger city of Houston. Recently Comcast came in and took over a lot of Time Warner, didn't really change anything except raising the prices. The cable companies come in and split up the territory so you've really only ONE company if you want cable and/or cable internet. Because of the pricing structure, if you've already got cable, you're probably going to find it more economical to go with them for your broadband. Your only other choices are DirectTV, which is ridiculously expensive, or the big bell AT&T's DSL. So far it seems to be the lesser of evils. They price by speed and don't seem to have any caps on the amount downloaded--for right now.
What's been uncomfortable is watching AT&T that was split up from it's local phone service for being monopolistic. Then it's once again allowed not only to take back over the local SW Bell again, but grow even bigger and stronger, taking over DishNetwork satellite and Cingular wireless. A lot of people, I'm sure see it as convenient to get everything from one company in a bundle. But it essentially means for broadband or any other home entertainment you're just about down to two heavyweights. I like DirectTV for satellite, but I wonder how long they'll last before one or the other buys them out. Eventually you get down to one dominant company and then they can set prices or impose all the restrictions they want. Becasue the loser will either be unwilling or unable to lower prices to compete.
Then, we'll finally hear the complaints about there being a monopoly....
The problem was the investors were also greedy and yet didn't take the time to understand what they were investing in.
The companies thought they immune to the rules regular business had to follow. It all became a grand pyramid scheme: You set up on a shoe string, get people to advertise so you don't have to charge visitors and (add some pixie dust) = Profit!
Like them or hate them, Amazon did things right. I remember reading news where all the numbers wonks were shaking their head over Amazon's meager profits. Oh, they were making money all right, but they were smart enough to sink it back into their business. And, sure enough, five years later (the average time any other business takes to show a profit) they started making money hand over fist and haven't stopped.
The computer chain, Egghead, did something even more radical. They closed all their brick and stick stores down and went to a strictly on-line presence, New Egg. It ended up being a good risk, CompUSA and others had come along and Egghead's retail prices were too high to the superstores. Online, they didn't have to maintain the physical presence and they were able to reach a lot more customers with lower prices. Like Amazon, they also kept shipping costs down. Now it's CompUSA that is floundering and closing their stores.
Both of these companies have succeeded because they 1) Had something that appealed to broad number of people; 2) Were able to offer products at a discount--in some cases where there had been little or no discount; 3) Kept shipping costs to a minimum--why the catalog companies haven't been smart enough to follow suite, I don't know--they're going to go the way of the dodo bird; and most importantly 4) Have really good customer service. A person doesn't have the comfort of just walking in the door with a return or a complaint. There's a certain amount of trust you've got to have that you're not going to get shafted by whomever you buy something from on-line. And reports of bad service sprout like weeds.
Technically they didn't break into Comcast, they broke into Network Solutions. They're the weak link. I like to bash Comcast as much as the next, but it was a breakdown in security at Network Solutions that allowed them to get into Comcast's registar and repoint their URLs.
...finding out you're actually related to someone born almost 10,000 ago.
A thousand years seems a pittance when they were able to find a local history teacher was a relation to the "Cheddar Man" via mitochondrial DNA -- which is inherited unchanged on the maternal line. (BTW, that's a professor and a researcher at London's Natural History Museum, not the descendant, in the photo.)
The search for a descendant came about as, "Dr. Larry Barham, a Texas-born archaeologist at Bristol University, said the finding "adds to the evidence that Britons came from a race of hunter-gatherers who later turned to farming because they found it was to their advantage." Archeologists believe Cheddar Man, who lived during the Stone Age, was a hunter-gatherer.
Opponents of this theory argue that Britons are descendants of Middle Eastern farmers."
Talk about tracing your family tree!
I think quite a LOT of this doom and gloom is coming from the media and those who want to effect a change in political parties this year. No, everything is not perfect, but it's not going down the drain either. The problem is when you have a lot of people talking down the economy, it has an effect. Every problem or belt tightening becomes another sign that the economy is going downhill.
One of the problems we're facing regarding the housing market is of our own making and the banks being able to create all kinds of ridiculous scams to otherwise qualify people that could not afford the house they were buying. Using an adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) or one of those interest only loans only works if the value of property continues to go up, as well as salaries. Eventually, however, the market corrects, the value goes down and the homeowner finds they owe more than it's worth just in time for the ARM to adjust upward. Then then owner gets fed up and walks out of the property.
We already went through a similar Savings and Loan crisis that cost taxpayer millions during the mid-80's - mid-90's when the housing market collapsed. And yet after bailing them out, nothing was put in place to make sure they couldn't invoke other predatory lending practices.
Then there are the companies who use this as an excuse to cut back. Believe it or not, I'm contracting for a large oil company who is in the process of laying staff off! I had hoped they would be hiring, but quite a few of the people I know are having to look elsewhere in the company or outside. It makes no sense with the amount of money they are no doubt pulling in right now, but it's cutting back and outsoucing.
You know, troll-boy, if you'd spelled "copyright" correctly, you might have had me.
Huh...and all this time I thought trolls were the ones who didn't have anything better to do but correct other's spelling mistakes.....
And that's MR. Troll Boy to you.
I doubt CR is entering the gaming market, but only to test claims expressed or inferred that WiiFit is a viable exercise program.
Most game reviews are like book reviews, they're pretty subjective and it depends on the what you like, but there is a need for an unbiased look at a video game that's claiming to be a fitness product.
I disagree that you need a huge sample to test it out, just a diverse one. I suspect that while just about anything to get the couch potato off their butt would help, it's not going to be a subsitute for a regular workout or sending the kids out to play ball for a change.
I DO KNOW when someone takes food off of my family's table, tells me what kind of car I can drive or I have to spend my child's college fund to fill up my car because someone thinks (incorrectly, I might add) that a fuckin' caribou might be badly affected if we do the same thing in ANWR that we do in every state in the union, including about 7 miles away in Prudhoe Bay.
Guess how I'm voting?
Unfortunately there's not a dime's difference between the candidates there. McCain ALSO opposes drilling in ANWR. He even went as far as comparing it to drilling in the Grand Canyon, i.e., a national treasure.
"Dewey defeats Truman"
Hardly the same comparison. Dewey lost because everyone thought he had it sewn up and so didn't bother to go vote. Here we have the votes tallied and the only way that woman's going to sing is if she does something underhanded like getting the superdelegates to go her way despite Obama having the electoral advantage. Or getting Michigan and Florida primaries to count which, after breaking their own party's rules, got their voters tossed out.
Personally I think she's so desperate, she'd rather see Obama lose to McCain just so she could run again in 2012.
IANAL, but isn't this really like a case of trying to enforce a copywrite long after it's become generic? Like the word aspirin--it was once a trademark of Bayer, but because they didn't virgiously defend it's usage, it because a generic word not associated with only their company.
Likewise, this company has run around and found something that wasn't patented, got a patent and are now trying to enforce something they never even invented. Whomever gave this company a patent should be fired.
...will some of them turn out really dumb?
But seriously, I think some people with more money than brains are going to extremely disappointed with the results. A cat cloned at Texas A&M didn't look any more like the mother than a normally bred kitten would. It also had a totally different personality--which most people wanting a clone of a particular pet would be to get the identical personality. Clones at this stage are not carbon copies--I suspect there's a lot more to the breakdown of the genome than we know. Or perhaps...there's the soul factor....
He gives ambulance chasers and shysters a bad name.
A pettifogger
But you find out your "career path" or the box HR sticks you in is Administrative. (As in Administrative Assistant or Office Manager.) Yes, you're lumped in with the secretarial force where the pay scale is minuscule. That's when you find title means nothing--it's what HR has you coded as. It's amazing how much web work is delegated to 'administrative assistants' or equivalent rather than IT.
True, but we have the ability to pretty much obiterate every species on the planet, except maybe cockroaches. We have (or should have) more resposibility. Animals hunt for food and survival. Many times in the past we hunted merely for trophys or in the case of the bison, to force the native americans to move to reservations or starve.
To ignore our responsiblity in this would be our folly and cause our eventual demise.
Not really, AVG's famous for false positives. One day the zip file is fine, the next it's infected with "x", the day after it's fine again, etc.
And I ugraded AVG to version 8.0 on my Vista laptop. Somewhere along the way, a log file got corrupted and Vista started doing system dumps and BSOD when it tried to run. Not sure what caused this but it is the first problem I've had with Vista. I had to uninstall and rollback the restoration point. I think it's okay agan, but I'm leary about trying to reinstall AVG.
Well, it would depend on WHY the species dwindled down to ~100. Was it because of natural selection or because man hunted them down to extinction. The latter was certainly the case with the American Bison and with the ongoing of whaling. And there is a case that, in a large part, man caused the Thylacine demise.
You might be able to use distant relatives to eventually create some sort of Thylacine cross. However the Thylacine is not related to either tigers or wolves though it went by the name Tasmanian Tiger or Wolf--it is closer in relation to the Tasmanian Devil. I can't think of why you want to rekindle another, LARGER carnivorous creature with a nasty temper.
The Thylacine ate my baby!
and the website is already slashdotted so you can't blame me for not having RTFA (RTFF?).
So, does that mean we just censored something?
This isn't a suicide issue. It's an abuse issue. There would be no suicide in this case without the willful, malicious intent to construct a false friendship created by a knowing adult.
Being that she had mental problems, we can't say (and the defense will no doubt argue) that there would be no suicide, but for this woman. She might have done so over something else.
OTOH, the preditor was an adult who was aware of the girl's problems (and obviously has some issues of her own) and was cruel enough to even say to the effect, the world would be better without you, that you're a horrible person. One could argue that this woman designed for this girl to kill herself.
However, I can't let HER parents go scott-free on this one either. What were they doing letting their mentally fragile daughter romp across the internet with little or no supervision! This could have just as well been a sexual predator and she would have been a perfect target.
The problem with this case is there's no real legislation--it's taken months of grasping at straws to come up with something to charge her with. So if they convict, what limits are going to be imposed on future defendant's speech? If I tell someone, "Oh go jump off a bridge" and they do so, will I be held liable? I think this woman is reprehensible, but we've got to be careful in going off willy-nilly setting new laws over a single, highly unusual and emotional, case.
Personally I would like to see this as a civil case where the woman has such a fine she'll never be able to repay it. That way a % of anything she makes for the rest of her life will go to a Megan Meier fund that helps at-risk teens or similar. That way EVERY time she got a paycheck or earned a dime she'd be forced to think of Megan and the lives she destroyed.
Perhaps it would work better if the parents were FINED when their kids cut class.
Of course, I don't feel all that benevolent toward public schools. Schools get paid $X by the federal government for each student that attends per day. The system doesn't seem to be working attendance performance (such as bonuses for perfect attendance, etc.) for the benefit of the kids, but for the enrichment of the school district.
Close your eyes and think of England.
Better yet think of (Robert) Englund