The laws governing copyright, patents, trademarks and every other legal concept commonly lumped under the banner of "Intellectual Property" are all entirely different, and in most cases they are mutually exclusive. This makes using them in the aggregate as "Intellectual Property" legally meaningless if one is trying to state something concrete.

I disagree. The term "intellectual property" is a useful super-set for the group of sets "copyright", "patent", etcetera, that all result from different legislative approaches to the same goal: monopolising wealth by artificially restricting the use of information.

(of the "big three", I find trademarks the least offensive in this regard - the idea of a "maker's mark" at least began as an honest attempt to provide something useful to the citizenry, whilst copyrights and patents are rooted in their origins of censorship and extortion respectively)

What's more important, the claims of one sock-puppet or the actions of the person wearing both sock-puppets?

Completely untraceable transactions, physically divorced from the participants? Now where have I seen that before... oh.

GIFT.

What do you think criminals would do with completely untraceable transactions? What do you think organised crime would do? You might want to study the consequences of driving transactions underground during the Prohibition era.

I'd give it a year, tops, before our already-vaguely-representative government would be replaced by completely un-representative, un-traceable overlords.

Hmm. What's really more terrifying, some foreign wackos that could've been stopped by locking and reinforcing a door, or our own police force preying on the very people whom they swore an oath to protect and serve?

What? It was a _no-knock_ warrant, how would they have known there were any officers to impede?

... hmm. It occurs to me that the GP can be completely wrong about there being some grand conspiracy and yet still accurately describe/predict what happens.

Enough people, acting independently towards coincidentally similar goals, can look remarkably like a conspiracy from the outside.

And unfortunately cause the same problems.

Best to amend the system so that the effect is prevented/fixed regardless of the cause.

Editors: You could at least warn us that we won't be able to participate in constructive discussion of the featured article without paying.

Oh, the irony. Congratulations, you now have an idea of how the Michigan public were treated.

Uh, either way your "quickly try to estimate" idea still means you are staring into an atomic explosion. You should instead take cover immediately, thus covering both bases.

If they can get it down to a quarter-hour I'd be happy. Enough time to take that healthy walk after hours of driving, grab a bite to eat, etc. And if I wasn't doing cross-country, it probably means I've either repeatedly forgotten to charge the car at home or I've got bigger problems.

I had a dream once, where our first meeting with aliens involved a giant spaceship appearing over the capital and confiscating the White House in the case of "The Galactic Republic versus 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States, Earth".

I was much more interested in the cool giant spaceship and not the politicians complaining at their own civil forfeiture laws being used against them, but anyway...

... did you mean "tough" and "toughness"? If so, sadly, yeah.

... that second graph in the first link is interesting, regardless of whether any primary causes are anthropogenic or not.

... George Lucas?

Maybe my google-fu is weak today, I got nothing (but pages and pages of that Amidala quote). Please cite the original quote from the actual person?

MIRV = Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle. So each of those 1500 MIRVs carries multiple nuclear warheads. Need five mid-sized nukes to wipe out NYC? No problem. Ten for LA? Still no problem. One missile each, just program in your preferred detonation pattern for the warheads:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Here's a long-exposure photo of a single "Peacekeeper" missile dropping eight independent warheads (unarmed in this case):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

I had understood the US to have the most with some 6000, and other than western europe and Russia I didnt think anyone else had any.

From the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Russia and US have rough parity, then it's France/China/Britain, then Israel/Pakistan/India, then North Korea, in descending orders of magnitude.

http://bos.sagepub.com/content...