The contrary view to the attacks of Hitchens and others of Mother Teresa deserves ahearing, too.

I know this is just a joke, but it did remind me of Tolkien's snarky letter to the Nazis in response to their demand he prove his Aryan extraction. In part:

Assuming your numbers are correct, lets say our solar radiation conditions are 10% of the best case. Then to provide all the electricity the U.S. needs, we'd have to cover 1.3333% of the total surface area.

Of course, we can choose the best available locations for each additional panel, so we can do a whole lot better than 10% of the best case. If we can only do half as well on average, the number comes down to .267%. And we can use at least some surfaces for their original use and for solar energy production (rooftop panels).

There are lots of difficulties between here and full solar power. I doubt we'd ever want all our electricity coming from solar power. And even .267% of the surface area of the U.S. is an enormous amount, and acquiring rights to that land would probably be impractical. But if we did need to do it, space wouldn't become the limiting factor for a long time. And if we could solve all of the other logistical problems--storage, distribution, manufacture, maintenance--we would have enough surface area to provide for the U.S.'s energy needs via solar. It just wouldn't be the best way to go about providing electricity.

"Consheepmers" was old the first time you used it.

Actually, public universities have very little power to restrict student speech on campus. See, for example, Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, where the Supreme Court required the University to fund a Christian magazine on the same basis it funded student-run secular magazines. Just a few years before that happened, the University tried to defund a conservative magazine. The argument was that commenting on the activities of NOW and other liberal organizations was an inappropriate "political" use of student activity funds; no one seemed take into account that the activities being commented on were funded by those same fees. That one didn't go to court, because of a media storm.

The fact that the students are in some sense "using" state-funded resources doesn't really provide a constitutional basis to restrict their private speech. If resource are made available for private student speech, a public university has very little leeway to favor one viewpoint over another--and this includes attempts to exclude entire topics in a supposedly neutral manner. This error has been repeated quite often in this thread, and it's one reason organizations like FIRE are needed: the public is woefully uneducated on this issue. For example, if a public university allows students to hand out flyers on the quad as a general matter, they can't really control the content of those flyers. And if they restrict the flyers to "official" university functions, they have to ensure that the definition of official is precise and hat they don't allow exceptions.

If that "privilege" is conditioned (by a state institution like a public university) on the content of the coverage, it would absolutely be a First Amendment violation. if the reporter could prove that the reason for denial of press credentials is the content of his reporting, he would win if he brought suit. It's not even a close question on the law; it's proving the necessary facts that might cause problems for such a plaintiff.

In this case, it's a closer question of law. On its face, the restriction is content neutral, and would probably be judged as a time-place-manner speech restriction. Those can be upheld, but they're typically upheld when the speech itself impinges on an important state interest. For example, amplified sound in the park interferes with the state's purpose of allowing citizens quiet enjoyment of the park. As long as the ban on amplified sound is content neutral, both on its face and in the manner in which it is enforced, such a restriction would probably be upheld. In this case, I think it would come down to whether the court judges the revenue from contracted media to be an important enough state interest to warrant such protection.

It's also possible that the court could view this as non-content-neutral, assuming it doesn't apply to tweets about things other than the ongoing event. Such a restriction would receive strict scrutiny, and likely be struck down because the state is conditioning privileges on a requirement that a reporter not engage in protected speech (which a tweet during a basketball game is).

I think the time-place-manner analysis is more likely, but I'd have to do some case research to be sure.

The judge laid out his reasoning about why the additions were false and misleading in the opinion. Rather than just call him wrong, and accuse him of "pretending," how about you provide some reasoning, analysis, or evidence that he was wrong. Otherwise, we're left with a bunch of facts and reasoning laid out in a logical fashion on one side, and some guy on the internet saying "Nuh uh!" on the other.

They added the warnings the agency asked them to. Do a bit of research before accusing people of lying. For more than two years, the packages have had strong warnings as required by the CPSC.

Wrong tense. They used to market this product as a toy for children. That recall you mentioned in your post? Guess what that was for: "The high powered magnets sets were labeled 'Ages 13+' and do not meet the mandatory toy standard ... which requires that such powerful magnets are not sold for children under 14." Oh, and the recall itself mentions that this was in the past: "Since March 2010, Buckyballs® high powered magnets sets were labeled 'Keep Away From All Children' and are not being recalled."

But not as children's toys: they have big warnings saying "keep away from children." You have to check-acknowledge reading the warning when you buy them from the site.

Defamation is a broad category that includes libel and slander. Libel is defamation that occurs in a persistent form; slander is defamation that occurs in a transitory form.

According to the complaint, Mann is suing for five counts of libel and one count of intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The term "half-life" is inherently non-linear. It is a means of measuring exponential decay. And it seems it was used correctly (that is, to describe non-linear decay)in the article: "That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on."

I wasn't saying it would be a problem. I was refuting the poster who implied that the half-life article was somehow incompatible with the mammoth-cloning article.

Why do they need to know? 10,000 years is roughly 20 half-life periods, so they should expect roughly 1-millionth of the DNA to remain.

You switch from Free (as in speech) to free (as in beer) halfway through your post, greatly weakening your point. The creation of all of that software was not free. It was, in fact, very expensive. People paid for it for various reasons: altruism, idealism, and, yes, to make a profit. Not to mention that the physical infrastructure, without which none of that software would matter, was (and is) very, very costly.

That's not to say I agree with ITIF's statement regarding DNT. DNT requests should be honored (although I don't think sites should be forced to serve those who select DNT). But I have no problem with sites advertising. In fact, I'm glad of it, because it means I've got access to Google, Slashdot, the Washington Post, many webcomics, and hundreds of other sites that probably would not exist otherwise.

I'm glad other sites can get by without advertising. Wikipedia survives on donations and not advertising (except for the self-advertising on the site), and so do a couple of my other daily-read sites. But I'd lose access to a lot of information without web ads.