I stand corrected. Thank you.

Exactly--and there are even some things that probably couldn't be translated into another language at all at one point or another in a given language's evolution. Consider that "snow" as a concept to a Tahitian islander in the mid-1700s probably would have been complete nonsense as would "ice"... water is always wet... and what does "frozen" even mean?

If not for the colder parts of our planet, our understanding of chemistry might have lagged for thousands of years.

VUE - from http://vue.tufts.edu/ might be a helpful mix of directory tree and mindmap. It allows for content tagging and linking (local or on the Internet). Search by hierarchical (or not) ontologies is possible.

This has bugged me for a while--creatures on earth with copper blood don't bleed green (you end up with a blue tint--think certain kinds of seafood). ...

I think that I would fair fairly well, as the microbe in question would have only a small amount of resources to colonize me. Arsenic based life requires a substantial amount of arsenic to exist--same with sulfur based life or anything else (though there is much more free sulfur available than arsenic in the earth's general environment). This reference may be helpful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_on_Earth#Abundance_of_elements_in_the_Earth (there's also a section on the human body on this page).

I am happy to live on a planet where carbon is one of the most abundant elements--it means I have to put up with carbon-based bugs, but then, I am used to most of those I am ever around.

:) - which apparently can't go by itself in a response because it isn't sufficient to past the "cat got your tongue?" filter.

Good documentation is important. Firing with cause does happen and should, unfortunately, happen in some cases. Letting someone go for repeatedly making inappropriate remarks to clients or for repeatedly playing costly pranks on other staff (depending on the business and the work environment), among others, are reasons that, if you have documentation of individual events, firing with cause happens. General laziness could also be a cause, provided there were concrete examples of failing to fulfill a job description.

Why would a company bother? Unemployment benefits come out of a "tax" paid by the individual company--when the unemployment benefit account for a company is depleted when someone is let go without cause, they have to pay into it again. If someone needs to be fired, firing him or her with cause is the best way to ensure the financial stability of the company IF you have documentation.

By your own description, Canada is the country for those who (in a good way--escaping slaves or a bad one--deserters [there was the route of conscientious objection, but many who fled to Canada did so because it wasn't a matter of 'no war' but a matter of 'this war'] or a neutral one--general political/other dissidents) left the U.S. This is, of course, over simplifying things.

Sure they would--dedicated netflix boxes or something that are marketed to the MPAA and co. as "tamper resistant" (just use different screws like apple and since the CEO's won't be able to get into their gift netflix boxes, they'll assume no one else ever will either). From there, you have a contract drawn up that gives the various companies a penny more per film and voila, p2p netflix.

If you have lots of money and a significant constituency, of course the Constitution means something. Let's check Amazon on that:

1. Lots of money? Yes. Market cap of some $88 billion (U.S.) at the end of Q1 2011.(http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Amazon.com_(AMZN)/Data/Market_Capitalization) - yes, I realize that market cap is only part of the equation, but this still makes it a heavyweight.

2. Significant constituency? Yes. It is the 5th ranked site in the U.S. with the largest impact on people who have money too (age 35+) -- (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/amazon.com).

I ask the above question because I didn't start using Dropbox because I thought it was secure--I have class notes for teaching and notes for my personal studies in my account and these are for the most part publicly available anyway. I signed up because I was tired of having to fish out my backup CDs when my hard drives died on me (I still do a local backup though) and this part of their service is visibly not a lie and has saved me on at least two occasions in addition to the ease of sharing said notes with students when the file size is too large for our school's hosting service.

Did they lie to me about securing my data? Technically, yes, they did. Was this a factor in signing up with a cloud-based data storage service? Absolutely not. It never even occurred to me that they would actually secure my data to my level of satisfaction even with the claim that it was secure. It was in the cloud and accessible by whichever script kiddy wanted it. Since this was my operating assumption going in, I can't say I'm surprised that Dropbox has been caught in a lie, nor am I concerned (lying seems to be endemic in our society, unfortunately, but I've grown enured to it). On the other hand, now that they've been caught, I am interested in how they will respond--this could impact my use of their service.