Your argument fails completely because sole-sourced != scarce != valuable != expensive. Henry Ford's Model T was available from only one manufacturer, but it was very inexpensive and valuable to its owners. One-eyed, three legged dogs are scarce, but only of value to a small number of people. Tickle me Elmo was scarce for a time, not because of the artificial constraints of trademark or copyright but because demand simply exceeded manufacturing capacity, it was very expensive, but never valuable in any intrinsic sense. Copyright (and trademark) allows the seller to set the price. but the marketplace still sets the value and that determines whether the product is common or rare. If you want to be free of progress (under any economic system), eliminate rewards to the creators and innovators. The Soviet Union was able to compete with the West on an Military Industrial basis and at the Olympics, but was largely devoid of nice consumer products because the Government rewarded the athletes, and arms innovators and manufacturers, and not the makers of washing machines or sanitary pads. I'm not arguing for the free market or for copyright, per se, so much as pointing out the logical fallacies in your argument.

Yeah go ahead and ignore the important part. I guess the inability to read three whole sentences is part of the gun grabber mentality. By the way, no justification is needed, it is a right.

You are correct, In Illinois the pump says "up to 10%"; the State mandates 10%, no less. So Illinois does have the highest ethanol content in the country.

Vietnam and Afghanistan have showed that "well regulated" is not necessary to win a war. So by your reasoning we no longer require close order drill for a proper militia. OTAH, If you diagram the sentence structure of the 2nd Amendment you will understand that the militia statement is superfluous.

Evil is correct. We have rights, stated clearly in the Constitution. If you want to take those rights from us there is one legal means to do so - amend the Constitution, any other means is subversive, illegal and evil.

The "well regulated militia" part is an introductory subordinate clause, as such it is completely unnecessary, and we needn't worry about its interpretation. The right is stated in an independent clause that stands by itself.

It seems to me that this data falls under one of the exemptions to FOIA: "Personnel, medical and similar files, disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, 5 U.S.C. 552(b)(6)" and/or "Records compiled for law enforcement purposes, 5 U.S.C. 552(b)(7)." Perhaps someone in the office that provided the information needs to review the procedure.

Averaging of data creates a new data set by reducing the number of samples, there is nothing inherently wrong with this assuming you realize that you can't actually have 4.6 people. This study substituted data from other sources, an approach that would probably yield interesting results if 10% of your data was from someone else's fish protein while you were studying human protein. I'm sure it would be close enough for government work. ; )

I am quite familiar with statistical methods, and I did not accuse anyone of bias. For you to have assumed my criticism held a bias shows your own bias. I said their methodology as described appeared to be faulty. How variations of about 2:1 in the estimated temperature rise constitutes "good agreement" is the part of the story I'm not familiar with. And please note this study lowers, not raises, the estimate for the current rate of change from the previous study.

They substituted data from other sources for the missing data and in the process they linearized the inflection point right out of the data. There is such a thing as too much data smoothing.

The 2009 study by Stieg concluded that the rate since 1987 is 0.8 +/- 0.06 C per decade. The Abstract claims, " The record reveals a linear increase in annual temperature between 1958 and 2010 by 2.4 +/- 1.2C," which equals 0.46 +/- 0.23 per decade (they are the ones who said it was linear, not me). This study says the current rate of temperature rise is 42% less than the previous study, even though it concludes that the rise over the last 50 years is greater. I tend to have more faith in the earlier study with its accelerated warming conclusion. The abstract doesn't agree with the article which states, "Much of the warming discovered in the new paper happened in the 1980s, around the same time the planet was beginning to warm briskly." Nor does it agree with the borehole data which shows a marked increase in rate of change ca 1990.

This current study shows temperature rises since 1958 about 2.7 times that previously estimated by Steig, et al (Figure 4 of abstract) for the West Antarctic Continent. Yet claims to be in good agreement with the borehole study, yet the borehole study claims to be (and is) in good agreement with Steig: "[33] Steig et al. [2009] and O’Donnell et al. [2011] used weather station and satellite data to reconstruct the temperature history of Antarctica over 1957–2006. Steig et al. [2009] found an average warming rate of 0.17 +/- 0.06C for the West Antarctic Continent, and of 0.23 +/- 0.09C/decade at WAIS Divide, which is in good agreement with our results." This doesn't match the current study's numbers very well.

This is the equivalent of Piltdown Man - deal with it.

Data is data and everything they added is not data, it is fabrication. They aren't researchers they are revisionists. You can't recalibrate a sensor and apply the correction after the fact as you don't know why the sensor lost calibration - was it a drift over time or due to a single incident? This sounds like really bad science, but it may just be really bad reporting.

Let some of those chiefs know that once the project gets underway they are likely to be relegated to indian status. Tell the lousy ones that they will be downgraded since there are other managers who are more capable, make it clear that they will be subordinate. If that doesn't shed enough dead wood then start telling the good ones that because of the importance of the project they are the ones who will be downgraded because they are more proficient in the lower level skill set. When you have the right number of chiefs, go to management and tell them who, by name, within the organization you need.

The SI system is less than sixty years old. There is no metric system in practice, there are metric systems. Most textbooks and technical references when I was in school were in the CGS system and I'm sure most haven't been changed to MKS in chemistry and many other subjects. Let's lose the calorie in favor of Joules, and use the Pascal instead of mm of mercury (torr), atmospheres, bars, grams-force/cm2, kgf/cm2 (kilopond, per square centimeter), and kg*m^-1/s^2, and let's see those speed limits in m/s please (km/h is not appropriate if errors are to be avoided). Until those bastard units and many others like them are banished, the "metric system" offers only a false promise to eliminate "mental or calculated conversions, prevent expensive and wasteful mistakes" as occurred in the loss of the Mars probe.

A brief google search reveals that you have overstated sales by well over an order of magnitude: In the third quarter of 2011 partners reduced supply orders and company dropped down manufacturing volumes to 10 000 per month; this measure helped Asus to avoid overstocking in the warehouses and not to participate in sales of the devices at giveaway prices as HP did with TouchPad and RIM with its Playbook.

This appears to be a case of willful ignorance on your part and your contempt is misdirected. Perhaps we should anticipate a similar 97% reduction in shipments of the Nexus 7 in the second quarter of its production as well?

No. No, you don't. When corporations can sit on a jury all will be lost.

Can you imagine how short the discussions on Anthropogenic Global Warming would be without "intelligent but intellectually dishonest commenters"? Granted, there'd still be the first post whores, the seriously off-topic racist and misogynistic comments, and a few clueless individuals discussing the heat output of their Rand McNally lighted globes.