Every generation has had its share of apocalypse. Perhaps on this single pale blue dot we could promote pacifism as the ideal and agree to just not kill each other over the ideas in our head. Respecting differences and promoting the good of all - undivided, is more scalable than bickering and bloodshed?

Ah, so that is the religion you would like to see. I can respect that (even while thinking it unrealistic).

Unfortunately, the religions we do have on this earth do not aspire to or approach such idealism. Not the major ones, anyway (how many followers does Taoism have?).

scientists, in general, do not have strong views against religion. Scientists are used to politely disagreeing with people that do not share their views, and having their views challenged and proven wrong.
it is the uneducated that have complete certainty in their opinions want to kill everyone that disagrees with them.

That's a rather uneducated view of scientists. Speaking as a scientist (physicist, in particular), scientists can be a contentious lot, in matters they care about. It may be that a lot of scientists just don't care for religion, but that's not to say scientists are somehow natural pacifists.

You don't have to go far to find examples of educated scientists who have been responsible for many deaths, out of religious or nationalist zeal, from Maj. Hasan (to the extent you consider psychiatry a "science") to the physicists at Los Alamos at the end of World War II.

Scientists are not angels. They are human, who are no better than the general population.

I'm also willing to bet that people in hard sciences, like physics, chemistry etc are far more likely to be atheists than for example sociologists or historians.

As a practicing physicist, I'd be willing to bet against that.

Aside from the fact that academics do tend to be less religious for whatever reason (just as they tend to be more liberal for whatever reason), I don't see why physicists or chemists would be more likely to be atheists than historians, psychologists, or biologists.

For one, most of our work does not contradict religious doctrines—in fact, the Catholic Church was very happy about Big Bang theory when it was proposed—or deal with anything religious, meaning whether you believe in a god or not should have no impact on whether you can perform the necessary work, experimental and theoretical.

In another, if you believe there is this hostile environment in the academia for believers, in hard sciences, your work at least can be judged by relatively objective standard (i.e. is the experiment reproducible? does the theory predict verifiable experimental results?), meaning believing scientists have better chance of surviving in physical sciences.

I mean, "let there be light", isn't it a lot like what we envision the Big Bang to be? On a level that a more "primitive" human could understand?

Heh. Or the ancient Greek theories of atoms? In beginning his lecture series, Richard Feynman says that if he could pass on one piece of knowledge to some post-apocalyptic world, it would be this: "everything is made of atoms". So you could imagine a scenario of where ancient, advanced human civilization (or God) did just that, except it all got garbled and wasn't useful for anything until alchemists started cataloging elements.

But ... this is at best a creative revisionism, or a highly entertaining speculation. Although one in which authors such as Orson Scott Card engage in, in his series on Biblical figures.

Religion covers evaluations such as: "Is it a good idea to develop weapons of mass destruction?"

Hardly.

Geopolitics and realities of war answers those questions, and at least if our experience of last 60 years say anything, in the affirmative (do you really believe 20th century would've been more peaceful if U.S. didn't develop nukes by the end of WWII?).

As a believing physicist, I really can't see how religion answers "is it a good idea to develop weapons of mass destruction". Since no figure in Bible built nukes or any such things, no lessons can be drawn from anywhere. Killing in itself is rather an ambiguous practice, as personified in David (a good king whose good deeds were mostly in the battlefield, and yet, forbidden from building the temple because he shed blood). So, unless you somehow perceive yourself as God in building these weapons of apocalypse, all but extremely pacifist religions (Hinduism and Buddhism, perhaps?) are silent on this question.

The problem is with more with scientists (or pseudo-scientists, a.k.a. "social scientists" like psychologists) who present the frontiers of research, where "facts" change from year to year as settled science. There is a core of settled science that will not change in the next few millennia, such as Newtonian mechanics (plus special and general relativity, just because GPS system will have hard time working unless these are accounted for) as damn good approximation to every day experience, and no member of public, no matter how "ignorant" they are, will dispute them.

Scientists should be honest about when their theories and hypotheses are far from proven (and proof, in last century's scientific standard, consists of producing verifiable predictions that no one would've guessed absent the theory; the more the verifications under more varied scenarios the better) and hold their ground only when they know that the ground they stand on is solid.

Instead, when they try to beat over the public's head with their latest theories and yet unverified predictions, changing their story every few years, they only lose the public's confidence.

By the way, belief isn't static either—there is a horde of theologians who would be aghast at hearing such a thing (and how do you explain gay and women bishops getting ordained, if belief were truly static). The difference between leaders of beliefs and "leaders" of science is that leaders of belief focus on the unchanging core of truth (or "truth", if you prefer), such as existence of a just God (which is, at least, unfalsifiable), while "leaders" of science are constantly distracted by the latest fads.

As a Kindle 2 owner who just had his Kindle updated to 2.5 firmware (which has this feature), I can tell you that this feature is off by default. In order for Amazon to actually share your highlights (of course, who knows if they're collecting it silently in the background; it's their system after all), you have to actively turn on this feature.

I've also seen Kindle for iPad. I don't recall whether this feature was on by default, but it is rather prominently displayed on their relatively simple options menu. If you have privacy concerns, it's fairly simple to turn it off.

These aren't people on a 3 year HW replacement cycle and don't care about power so they're not going to go out and jump for another machine.

Even if they were, netbooks have been out for only 3 years or so. The people replacing their first netbook would be early adopters, which aren't really huge crowds, unless they happen to be Apple fans.

Oh, I don't know. Asus's Eee line (the original netbook, unless you count OLPC whose design has been around for a while before Eee came out) is still designed and sold along the same line: cheap ($350 for most models), small, and long battery life. Given that this is, what, third year since first Eee came out, perhaps you can blame lack of innovation for drop in netbook sales, but I wouldn't blame manufacturers of losing their ways.

I personally blame U.S. climbing out of recession. Someone I personally know was looking for a small laptop recently and instead of a cheap netbook, he decided on a full-fledged notebook (same size, but with dual-core processors and more RAM, I think). But maybe the actual data doesn't support this hunch ... (esp. if notebook sales are more or less the same).

No, it is a Slashvertisment, just for GNU Octave, rather than MATLAB.

Identity theft? I think they need to bring Tina Fey up on that charge!

The only question is, who'll be charged for what: Tina Fey, for impersonating Sarah Palin; or Sarah Palin, for impersonating Tina Fey.

What if you are a citizen but speak accented english, or you prefer to speak another language. A cop suspects you are an immigrant and demands immigration papers. Does the cop detain you at that point?

You can just say, "I am a U.S. citizen." You will be surprised how little documentation you need to prove your assertion that you are a U.S. citizen, or rather, how willing government officials are to believe you when you make that assertion. It's only when you cross borders you actually need some documentation, and at least 6 years ago or so, U.S. citizens coming from Mexico needed little more than a driver's license (itself not actually a proof of citizenship) and their word that they are U.S. citizen.

This attitude does come with a severe potential penalty though, if you are, in fact, not a U.S. citizen. For one, you can forget about ever becoming naturalized—one of the questions they ask you during the naturalization process is if you've ever lied about your citizenship to government officials (and if you lie during your naturalization process, your citizenship is forfeit when the lie is discovered later ... I'm not sure if there's a statute of limitation, but the way I understood it you were never a citizen if you perjured yourself in the naturalization process).

And, you know, THIS story is about someone changing a song for satire, which is still illegal, so, you know, you lose again, you limpdick fuckstained cuntflap.

I have never argued against that, although I am perplexed why parody is fair use while satire is not, and I would be happy to see satire covered under fair use as well (provided that the use of work was substantially transformative). But that's legally unexplored ground, and I will not be able to make an as strong an argument as I could with compulsory licensing, which is based on (at least) a century of copyright laws (to borrow a well-known politician's wording on a completely different SCOTUS case). So I didn't go there.

What I did argue against (and you can look back at my specific blockquoting of your original post) was your quoting examples of perfectly legal and normal actions as some kind of Republican corruption/unlawfulness/asshattery.

In any case, as you are proving to be a completely irrational opponent in a rational argument and I have made all the fact-based arguments I (or really, anyone who's not just out to call names) could possibly make, this will be my last post on this thread. I hate going in circles.

And if one reads the Wikipedia article (first hit), you'll find that Chucky has no chance in hell in this case:

And if you will read my post, you'll find that I wasn't talking about Chucky. I was specifically talking about the issue with the McCain campaigns use of some songs (which clearly fell under compulsory licensing, because they were just playing a music to Gov. Palin's entrance), and the reason I was talking about that particular case is because OP brought it up—and I happened to remember that case well from 2008.

I make no contention that Chucky's use is covered by compulsory licensing—compulsory licensing was never designed for making derivative works (although if one were proposed for some types of derivative works, I would gladly support it). I only disagree that somehow Republicans (or Democrats) habitually "steal music" in defiance of U.S. copyright law.

Read it and get back to me when you actually understand it. If you can explain how it applies in this case, I'll be pretty impressed.

I didn't say it applied in this case. I said it applied to the McCain campaign case (one of the cases of Rethuglikkkans "stealing music", I suppose, at least according to you), where they simply played some song to the entrance of Gov. Palin.

But if you can understand the above sentence, given the reading comprehension you've displayed so far, I'll be pretty impressed.