I thought all of the "fifth-pleading" is supposed to occur during the Grand Jury phase so as not to bias the jury in the way you've just described.
Also, it applies to providing evidence others that also incriminates yourself. Like, you know about the murder because you were there doing drugs or something. That's why courts have immunity. afaik, once granted immunity, you must provide testimony/evidence or you can be held in contempt. (since the evidence you provide can't actually incriminate you any more.) but IANAL.
I was with you up to the news media comment. Perhaps I should remind of a little ship called the maine and the subsequent spanish-american war the fruits of which are with us to this day: guantanamo bay.
It has always been that search engines start to suck after a while, i suppose due to tailored sites. That is why we need many different search engines: to keep people from being able to reck any single site. When google first came about I think they even addressed the issue, claiming to change their algorithm every so often as whatever's current gets taken advantage of. Before the bottom feeders, google's results were spectacular. Hopefully either google will change their algorithm (doesn't have to be 'better' necessarily, just 'different') or something new will come around and we'll all just use that.
What I'd like to see next is searching the results, possibly with regex searches when the total page count is sufficiently low to not be overburdensome on their servers.
It wouldn't be boring to mention. There is a filmmaking device invented for just this sort of thing. It's called a montage.
They also make a lot of unproven conclusions based on evidence shown, but that makes sense since they're not actual scientists/engineers (though they should've included at least one PE on their staff). The 'suction from sinking ships' comes to mind: their experiment did not take into account effects of scale. e.g. their pool model, the tugboat, and a real ocean liner would all have different reynolds numbers, their experiments should've been altered to take this into account.
The chicken gun was a particularly bad example of this as the high-speed video showed exactly what they were claiming to disprove: the frozen chicken impact took place over a shorter time period and over a smaller area --- it did not "spread out as much" --- Since they noted that the total impulse was the same whether frozen or not, the conclusion is that the pressure exerted on a real window would've been greater for the frozen chicken. Whether the frozen chicken would break the window and the thawed chicken would not is a matter for more trials, but their experiment showed that it was indeed possible.
Also, they should consider more than one myth-historian. I vaguely remember at least one episode in which the myth as I knew it (and as found in snopes) was not the same as the one she described. Coincidentally, her version was easier to disprove. Certainly, being myths, there are more than one version out there, but i would expect a myth-historian to know of the more popular versions and at least have heard of snopes.
That being said, the show is good. It's fun to watch and makes people think about physics. It could be great---in addition to thinking about physics they could have good physics, by doing exactly what they do now, but with real scientists to guide the experiments. I expect that either Jamie & Adam are too narcisistic to allow additional experts or ---far more likely---Discovery doesn't want to spend much more money on this than they do on "remarkeably homogenous chopper-of-the-week" (or is that "the learning channel" I keep getting them mixed up because the programming has slipped so far into MTV land)
Total electrical power used by people on the earth: ~14 trillion kwh (assume all of this is used to do something in a building and that no other energy is used by buildings and that all electric power is generated by non-solar means: no solar, hydro, or wind power) 1.5*10 terawatt
Total people on the earth: ~6.5 billion ~2000 kcal/day = 100 W
total: 629 GW
Total insolation: 2*pi*(6378 km)^2 * 1400 W/m^2 = 357 petawatt
Temp of earth that emits this power:
~280 Kelvin
delta-T caused: 0.0003 C. delta-T if considering total human energy usage: 418 * 10^15 Btu / year = 14 terawatt => 0.003 K since if P = {const}T^4: dT = TdP/(4P)
So whatever the temperature of the earth is, only about.003 degrees of it can be accounted for by the industrial output of mankind. The effect on the temperature of the earth soley as a result of human energy usage is significantly smaller than as a result of solar variance. If man is to have an effect on the earth's temperature it must be by affecting the heat transport rates.
Plants do emit CO2, they emit it during aerobic respiration just like the rest of us. It's just that they also have a phase where they basically run that whole thing in reverse.
You don't need to know anything about cars or electronics, only about physics. specificaly that conservation of energy thing. If you are drawing more energy from the alternator, it must come from somewhere. If it is not coming from the engine in the form of increased load, then it must be coming from the battery in the form of draining it.
If you could draw any amount of current from the alternator without increasing the mechanical load then there would be no reason for gasoline powered cars at all: just power an electric drive with the alternator and bam, perpetual motion car!
Mythbusters did not prove it false. They showed one case where it was false. I think they're fun to watch, but their "scientific method" leaves much to be desired. giving me things to bitch about, making them even more entertaining:)
In the episode of which you speak, they had two different cars and two different drivers and they only ran the course once. If they'd done several trials and switched drivers a couple fo times, and rotated the tires between cars after each run, then maybe they'd eliminate enough of the variables to make a statement of any confidence.
(a few pounds of underinflation on the tires on one car could've explained the discrepancy they saw) what about alignment, tire wear etc.?
Not only does the AC keep you cooler, but it also doesn't muss your hair.
contents of compressed gas air duster (office depot variety): 1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane (from quick google search)
contents of R134a recharge canister (avail at autozone and Kmart even) 1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane (from the label on the partially discharged canister I happen to have lying around)
There are more warnings on my can of "refrigerant" than on the "air duster" though. (and it has to be the same pressure too, whatever pressure brings the boiling point to room temp) One of those is that I am not supposed to discharge the car AC into the atmosphere: i'm supposed to take it to a garage which collects the refrigerant for proper disposal/storage/whatever.
side note: It's cheap, easy and fun to recharge the refrigerant in your car's AC. Unfortunately, most of the problems that can be solved by a quick recharge have an underlying cause that necesitates replacement of one or more componants anyway. This requires a complete bleed down and flush anyway, so you might as well take it in for service unless you feel like doing all of that yourself. (don't forget to add lubricant when you replace everything, the compressor will thank you)
In aggregate, it must be a ripoff: the insurance companies that do not profit cannot survive. So knowing that your risk/reward ratio is less than one, why would you buy insurance at all instead of just socking the money away just-in-case?
Well the reason seems to be: you could get in an accident and need the money at any time, including after the first couple of payments, but you're only going to have saved enough close to the end of the socking-away period.
Well once your personal liquid assets sufficiently exceed the minimum insurance level, shouldn't you be able to use those as collateral against actually buying insurance purposes?
same thing for health insurance: you shouldn't be using insurance to pay for expected recurring expenses, like visits to the doctor. If you need a yearly physical, and you pay yearly insurance for it, you're just playing a shell game which by design cannot benefit you.
I was on a highway once, had just turned on and needed to be in the left lane for a left-hand turn fairly quickly, so I accelerated up to highway speed the and made my way left, one lane at a time and checking each time to make sure. The last two lanes contained: 1 van moving a little slower than me and slighly behind and the far lane: 1 motorcycle, quite far back but rapidly closing. I must've underestimated the bike because it was closer than I expected when i checked for the final lane change. My turn was approaching rapidly though and I didn't want to slam the brake in front of the van (I would've had to slam hard to execute the change "safely") the other choice was to accelerate a bit, pass in front of the bike and slow down in the turning lane leading up to a light. This plan seemed required the least amount of accelerating so I chose it. While in the lane before the turning lane, the bike closed to my bumper.
Well it turns out it was a bike cop. There is a light, so I'm stopped in the turn lane when he pulls up *between* me and the car to my right and says, "Do you know what the speed limit is here?" "50" (i'd been going 50, so it seemed a safe bet.. turned out to be 45) "Well it sure as heck isn't 65" I don't know where he got the 65 number from. HE was going much faster than that and it took half my nerve to keep from saying, "Well you shouldn't have been going that fast then" but I know if i had, my seatbelt would have mysteriously been unbuckled and i'd probably turn out to have a broken tail light.
So the light turns green. (my light. the turning light. of a 10 lane highway +2 turning lanes) the cop then drives between the lines of traffic and drives straight across the intersection.
And to augment your statement about not speeding, they get you both ways on that one. Many states have a "reasonable and prudent" clause in their speeding laws. It means two things: 1) if conditions are poor, you should be driving at a reduced speed. regardless of what the number on the sign is. They can ticket you for this. 2) (and this is the tenuous one) you can get out of a speeding ticket if you truely are 'going with the flow of traffic', but I don't think that's ever worked and it's got another edge to it: they can ticket you for driving too slow if the 'flow of traffic' is speeding.
So really, you simply can't win. Pay the nice man his protection money.
I saw a documentary about that once, the ironically named, "little geek" prevented an interspecies war precepitated by a larger autnomous vehicle with strapped to a MIRV which would've been remarkeably one-sided against us. Funny thing is, the oil company turned out to be the good guys. The most important lesson learned was: If your wife who you're falling back in love with drowns herself to go into hypothermic shock for the purpose of surviving a trip from the damaged minisub to the main complex without a suit the defibrillator, adrenaline and oxygen will do nothing. The thing to do is slap her around a bit and yell at her. Do this right away, the other "first aid" simply wastes time during which brain damage can occur.
There's a queen of canada? Or do you just take the Queen of England and call her the Queen of Canada (kind of like prince charles is Prince of Wales.. shouldn't he be prince of England if his mum is the queen?)
The only titles of nobility I recognize are Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon and Radon. And I don't count Radon since it's only temporary.
I think what he's asking is, what if game developers decided on a "standard system" and coded one path directly to that, while using the abstraction layer for everything else. If you had the standard system, you could run the game in "console" mode and take advantage of all those optimizations.
The different software houses could update the specs every 18 months or so, but use the 'reference systems' to allow their software to either 1) run on older hardware or 2) run much much better on current hardware. There could be a couple of competing standards, but the reference systems would have to be announced when the reference hardware is state-of-the-art even though they'd probably actually be used when the reference hardware was "doesn't-quite-need-an-upgrade-yet" so people could buy state of the art systems, but still get some use out of the machine as it aged.
Of course, this assumes that the primary use is as a gaming PC...
What makes you think they planned on the child? From other comments, it sounds like mom could've been old enough for him/her to be unexpected. Regardless your feelings on abortion, would you suggest that they abort rather than raise a miracle baby just because there's a chance dad might not be around much longer?
I used Opera a couple of years ago. It used up way too much screen real estate with the buttons, ad*, tabs, and, I think two toolbars that I never used but had some purpose. The actual webpage I was trying to look at was like two thirds the height and if I resized the width, the toolbars took up MORE space.
What caused my switch to firefox was that I could turn off EVERYTHING. Not only can I delete all the tools on the bookmark bar, I can put bookmarks on the address bar and get rid of the bookmark bar altogether. I can turn off tabs. I can turn off the address bar if I want, and I can put the address wiget in the title bar before I do it, freeing up even more space.
*I understand that the ad was there because I was using the free version, it wasn't that obtrusive on its own, but added to everything we were talking about real space. Does the pay-version have the space for the ad, just empty?
You would create a voltage divider network. The analysis for which goes like this: The current through any loop in the circuit is constant (e.g. the same current would be going through both the dogs, but the voltage supply would "see" a higher overall resistance so the total current would be less than in either case.) The current is the same through each of the dogs and the resistance (or at least the relative resistance) is known. The voltage can then be calculated from ohm's law: Vgen = IRgen and Vbpark = IRbpark.
then insert the following after the next paragraph:
The power dissipated is P=VI, in the case of the series connected dogs becomes P=I^2*R, since the current is the same through both dogs, the dog which dissipates the greatest power is the dog with the highest resistance.
Long posts like this are hard to edit, why doesn't slashdot allow limited editing capability?
Before you sign anything, Talk to a lawyer. Make sure they deal with contract disputes regularly. It's true that lawyers charge outrageous fees for their services, but in this case it's worth it since "the contract never expires" and "everything you do belongs to them" FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE? How much would you pay a doctor to cure a bacterial infection? or a mechanic to fix your transmission? If it's as big a part of your life as a contract, you should be be willing to consult a specialist to make sure it's set up well.
Slashdot is a bunch geeks who are good with technology, but that doesn't make any of us legal experts in any way shape or form. I am sure that you can hammer out a mutually acceptable agreement if you get some legal muscle working on it.
Also, GPL is communism. In fact, it is a case study in the conditions for successful communism. I believe its success is based on the fact that its resources are not diminished by freeloaders. It has only one way to go: up. This implies that communism could work in an economy in which scarcity has been eliminated.
Is there any real difference between rollbacks and simply extending the levels further upward? If you add 3 levels or roll back 3 levels, it still means the same thing doesn't it? Is there any real difference between say.. level 32 and level 33? IMO, MMORPGS are depressing in that respect, you're always just weak enough that you won't be satisfied with the equipment you've got. By the time you've killed enough monsters to have nice armor, you advance a level and your armor's useless again.
It's like they just changed a few letters and kept on going. What the heck is pure Emu oil and why should it be good for me? Why is it so important to emphasize "pure"? are there imitation emu oils? How do they render it from those poor flightless birds? How can they expect people to continue to fall for the same old gag?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually that whole freedom for security qoute is much older than franklin. IIRC it comes from an english parliament member in the 1500s.
I thought all of the "fifth-pleading" is supposed to occur during the Grand Jury phase so as not to bias the jury in the way you've just described.
Also, it applies to providing evidence others that also incriminates yourself. Like, you know about the murder because you were there doing drugs or something. That's why courts have immunity. afaik, once granted immunity, you must provide testimony/evidence or you can be held in contempt. (since the evidence you provide can't actually incriminate you any more.) but IANAL.
Hell freezes over pretty much every winter ...An entire town devoted to selling jokes about its name. amazing.
I like "Politics is Hollywood for the Ugly" but I forget where it comes from.
I was with you up to the news media comment. Perhaps I should remind of a little ship called the maine and the subsequent spanish-american war the fruits of which are with us to this day: guantanamo bay.
Not true. The "assault weapons ban"* expired this year. You could buy a brand new one if you can find someone to sell to you.
*oddly named as the weapons banned had never been used in an actual assault
It has always been that search engines start to suck after a while, i suppose due to tailored sites. That is why we need many different search engines: to keep people from being able to reck any single site. When google first came about I think they even addressed the issue, claiming to change their algorithm every so often as whatever's current gets taken advantage of. Before the bottom feeders, google's results were spectacular. Hopefully either google will change their algorithm (doesn't have to be 'better' necessarily, just 'different') or something new will come around and we'll all just use that.
What I'd like to see next is searching the results, possibly with regex searches when the total page count is sufficiently low to not be overburdensome on their servers.
It wouldn't be boring to mention. There is a filmmaking device invented for just this sort of thing. It's called a montage.
They also make a lot of unproven conclusions based on evidence shown, but that makes sense since they're not actual scientists/engineers (though they should've included at least one PE on their staff). The 'suction from sinking ships' comes to mind: their experiment did not take into account effects of scale. e.g. their pool model, the tugboat, and a real ocean liner would all have different reynolds numbers, their experiments should've been altered to take this into account.
The chicken gun was a particularly bad example of this as the high-speed video showed exactly what they were claiming to disprove: the frozen chicken impact took place over a shorter time period and over a smaller area --- it did not "spread out as much" --- Since they noted that the total impulse was the same whether frozen or not, the conclusion is that the pressure exerted on a real window would've been greater for the frozen chicken. Whether the frozen chicken would break the window and the thawed chicken would not is a matter for more trials, but their experiment showed that it was indeed possible.
Also, they should consider more than one myth-historian. I vaguely remember at least one episode in which the myth as I knew it (and as found in snopes) was not the same as the one she described. Coincidentally, her version was easier to disprove. Certainly, being myths, there are more than one version out there, but i would expect a myth-historian to know of the more popular versions and at least have heard of snopes.
That being said, the show is good. It's fun to watch and makes people think about physics. It could be great---in addition to thinking about physics they could have good physics, by doing exactly what they do now, but with real scientists to guide the experiments. I expect that either Jamie & Adam are too narcisistic to allow additional experts or ---far more likely---Discovery doesn't want to spend much more money on this than they do on "remarkeably homogenous chopper-of-the-week" (or is that "the learning channel" I keep getting them mixed up because the programming has slipped so far into MTV land)
Ok, back of the envelope time.
.003 degrees of it can be accounted for by the industrial output of mankind. The effect on the temperature of the earth soley as a result of human energy usage is significantly smaller than as a result of solar variance. If man is to have an effect on the earth's temperature it must be by affecting the heat transport rates.
Total electrical power used by people on the earth:
~14 trillion kwh
(assume all of this is used to do something in a building and that no other energy is used by buildings and that all electric power is generated by non-solar means: no solar, hydro, or wind power)
1.5*10 terawatt
Total people on the earth:
~6.5 billion
~2000 kcal/day = 100 W
total: 629 GW
Total insolation:
2*pi*(6378 km)^2 * 1400 W/m^2 = 357 petawatt
Temp of earth that emits this power:
~280 Kelvin
delta-T caused: 0.0003 C.
delta-T if considering total human energy usage: 418 * 10^15 Btu / year = 14 terawatt => 0.003 K
since if P = {const}T^4: dT = TdP/(4P)
So whatever the temperature of the earth is, only about
Plants do emit CO2, they emit it during aerobic respiration just like the rest of us. It's just that they also have a phase where they basically run that whole thing in reverse.
You don't need to know anything about cars or electronics, only about physics. specificaly that conservation of energy thing. If you are drawing more energy from the alternator, it must come from somewhere. If it is not coming from the engine in the form of increased load, then it must be coming from the battery in the form of draining it.
If you could draw any amount of current from the alternator without increasing the mechanical load then there would be no reason for gasoline powered cars at all: just power an electric drive with the alternator and bam, perpetual motion car!
Mythbusters did not prove it false. They showed one case where it was false. I think they're fun to watch, but their "scientific method" leaves much to be desired. giving me things to bitch about, making them even more entertaining :)
In the episode of which you speak, they had two different cars and two different drivers and they only ran the course once. If they'd done several trials and switched drivers a couple fo times, and rotated the tires between cars after each run, then maybe they'd eliminate enough of the variables to make a statement of any confidence.
(a few pounds of underinflation on the tires on one car could've explained the discrepancy they saw) what about alignment, tire wear etc.?
Not only does the AC keep you cooler, but it also doesn't muss your hair.
contents of compressed gas air duster (office depot variety):
1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane
(from quick google search)
contents of R134a recharge canister (avail at autozone and Kmart even)
1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane
(from the label on the partially discharged canister I happen to have lying around)
There are more warnings on my can of "refrigerant" than on the "air duster" though. (and it has to be the same pressure too, whatever pressure brings the boiling point to room temp) One of those is that I am not supposed to discharge the car AC into the atmosphere: i'm supposed to take it to a garage which collects the refrigerant for proper disposal/storage/whatever.
side note: It's cheap, easy and fun to recharge the refrigerant in your car's AC. Unfortunately, most of the problems that can be solved by a quick recharge have an underlying cause that necesitates replacement of one or more componants anyway. This requires a complete bleed down and flush anyway, so you might as well take it in for service unless you feel like doing all of that yourself. (don't forget to add lubricant when you replace everything, the compressor will thank you)
In aggregate, it must be a ripoff: the insurance companies that do not profit cannot survive. So knowing that your risk/reward ratio is less than one, why would you buy insurance at all instead of just socking the money away just-in-case?
Well the reason seems to be: you could get in an accident and need the money at any time, including after the first couple of payments, but you're only going to have saved enough close to the end of the socking-away period.
Well once your personal liquid assets sufficiently exceed the minimum insurance level, shouldn't you be able to use those as collateral against actually buying insurance purposes?
same thing for health insurance: you shouldn't be using insurance to pay for expected recurring expenses, like visits to the doctor. If you need a yearly physical, and you pay yearly insurance for it, you're just playing a shell game which by design cannot benefit you.
I was on a highway once, had just turned on and needed to be in the left lane for a left-hand turn fairly quickly, so I accelerated up to highway speed the and made my way left, one lane at a time and checking each time to make sure. The last two lanes contained: 1 van moving a little slower than me and slighly behind and the far lane: 1 motorcycle, quite far back but rapidly closing. I must've underestimated the bike because it was closer than I expected when i checked for the final lane change. My turn was approaching rapidly though and I didn't want to slam the brake in front of the van (I would've had to slam hard to execute the change "safely") the other choice was to accelerate a bit, pass in front of the bike and slow down in the turning lane leading up to a light. This plan seemed required the least amount of accelerating so I chose it. While in the lane before the turning lane, the bike closed to my bumper.
Well it turns out it was a bike cop. There is a light, so I'm stopped in the turn lane when he pulls up *between* me and the car to my right and says, "Do you know what the speed limit is here?"
"50" (i'd been going 50, so it seemed a safe bet.. turned out to be 45)
"Well it sure as heck isn't 65"
I don't know where he got the 65 number from. HE was going much faster than that and it took half my nerve to keep from saying, "Well you shouldn't have been going that fast then" but I know if i had, my seatbelt would have mysteriously been unbuckled and i'd probably turn out to have a broken tail light.
So the light turns green. (my light. the turning light. of a 10 lane highway +2 turning lanes) the cop then drives between the lines of traffic and drives straight across the intersection.
And to augment your statement about not speeding, they get you both ways on that one. Many states have a "reasonable and prudent" clause in their speeding laws. It means two things:
1) if conditions are poor, you should be driving at a reduced speed. regardless of what the number on the sign is. They can ticket you for this.
2) (and this is the tenuous one) you can get out of a speeding ticket if you truely are 'going with the flow of traffic', but I don't think that's ever worked and it's got another edge to it: they can ticket you for driving too slow if the 'flow of traffic' is speeding.
So really, you simply can't win. Pay the nice man his protection money.
I saw a documentary about that once, the ironically named, "little geek" prevented an interspecies war precepitated by a larger autnomous vehicle with strapped to a MIRV which would've been remarkeably one-sided against us. Funny thing is, the oil company turned out to be the good guys.
The most important lesson learned was: If your wife who you're falling back in love with drowns herself to go into hypothermic shock for the purpose of surviving a trip from the damaged minisub to the main complex without a suit the defibrillator, adrenaline and oxygen will do nothing. The thing to do is slap her around a bit and yell at her. Do this right away, the other "first aid" simply wastes time during which brain damage can occur.
There's a queen of canada? Or do you just take the Queen of England and call her the Queen of Canada (kind of like prince charles is Prince of Wales.. shouldn't he be prince of England if his mum is the queen?)
The only titles of nobility I recognize are Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon and Radon. And I don't count Radon since it's only temporary.
I think what he's asking is, what if game developers decided on a "standard system" and coded one path directly to that, while using the abstraction layer for everything else. If you had the standard system, you could run the game in "console" mode and take advantage of all those optimizations.
The different software houses could update the specs every 18 months or so, but use the 'reference systems' to allow their software to either 1) run on older hardware or 2) run much much better on current hardware. There could be a couple of competing standards, but the reference systems would have to be announced when the reference hardware is state-of-the-art even though they'd probably actually be used when the reference hardware was "doesn't-quite-need-an-upgrade-yet" so people could buy state of the art systems, but still get some use out of the machine as it aged.
Of course, this assumes that the primary use is as a gaming PC...
What makes you think they planned on the child? From other comments, it sounds like mom could've been old enough for him/her to be unexpected. Regardless your feelings on abortion, would you suggest that they abort rather than raise a miracle baby just because there's a chance dad might not be around much longer?
I used Opera a couple of years ago. It used up way too much screen real estate with the buttons, ad*, tabs, and, I think two toolbars that I never used but had some purpose. The actual webpage I was trying to look at was like two thirds the height and if I resized the width, the toolbars took up MORE space.
What caused my switch to firefox was that I could turn off EVERYTHING. Not only can I delete all the tools on the bookmark bar, I can put bookmarks on the address bar and get rid of the bookmark bar altogether. I can turn off tabs. I can turn off the address bar if I want, and I can put the address wiget in the title bar before I do it, freeing up even more space.
*I understand that the ad was there because I was using the free version, it wasn't that obtrusive on its own, but added to everything we were talking about real space. Does the pay-version have the space for the ad, just empty?
The paragraph after the "code" should read:
You would create a voltage divider network. The analysis for which goes like this: The current through any loop in the circuit is constant (e.g. the same current would be going through both the dogs, but the voltage supply would "see" a higher overall resistance so the total current would be less than in either case.) The current is the same through each of the dogs and the resistance (or at least the relative resistance) is known. The voltage can then be calculated from ohm's law: Vgen = IRgen and Vbpark = IRbpark.
then insert the following after the next paragraph:
The power dissipated is P=VI, in the case of the series connected dogs becomes P=I^2*R, since the current is the same through both dogs, the dog which dissipates the greatest power is the dog with the highest resistance.
Long posts like this are hard to edit, why doesn't slashdot allow limited editing capability?
Before you sign anything, Talk to a lawyer. Make sure they deal with contract disputes regularly. It's true that lawyers charge outrageous fees for their services, but in this case it's worth it since "the contract never expires" and "everything you do belongs to them" FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE? How much would you pay a doctor to cure a bacterial infection? or a mechanic to fix your transmission? If it's as big a part of your life as a contract, you should be be willing to consult a specialist to make sure it's set up well.
Slashdot is a bunch geeks who are good with technology, but that doesn't make any of us legal experts in any way shape or form. I am sure that you can hammer out a mutually acceptable agreement if you get some legal muscle working on it.
Also, GPL is communism. In fact, it is a case study in the conditions for successful communism. I believe its success is based on the fact that its resources are not diminished by freeloaders. It has only one way to go: up. This implies that communism could work in an economy in which scarcity has been eliminated.
Is there any real difference between rollbacks and simply extending the levels further upward? If you add 3 levels or roll back 3 levels, it still means the same thing doesn't it? Is there any real difference between say.. level 32 and level 33? IMO, MMORPGS are depressing in that respect, you're always just weak enough that you won't be satisfied with the equipment you've got. By the time you've killed enough monsters to have nice armor, you advance a level and your armor's useless again.
It's like they just changed a few letters and kept on going. What the heck is pure Emu oil and why should it be good for me? Why is it so important to emphasize "pure"? are there imitation emu oils? How do they render it from those poor flightless birds? How can they expect people to continue to fall for the same old gag?