No it didn't. Copyright originated as a monopoly granted to publishers to prevent other publishers from horning in on their action. From the very beginning, the actual authors were given short shrift indeed.

I'd really rather not. <shudder>

Or perhaps you were referring to the possibility for reducing crime again?

Boom. No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.

Looks like you hit a nerve. I think it was meant to be funny, but it was a little raw.

You listed one changed climate (Fertile Crescent->desert) and 5 weather events. And snarked about Ethiopia, which still has the same climate today that it did in the '70s, but still has loads of political issues that causes their food problems.

Benghal's population didn't recover in ten years, but Benghal's climate didn't change in 1770. Droughts that kill millions, of any species, are invariably weather, or the population that died wouldn't have existed in the first place, for lack of habitat.

In other words, you're not making a very convincing case.

Worse, the examples of both the destruction of the Fertile Crescent and the region which is now the Sahara Desert are examples of purely regional climate change brought on by overgrazing of destructive domestic species. The climate did change, but the cause was quite overt and the effects were not global. So your case is even flimsier.

Maybe history actually doesn't contain any examples of global climate change causing long term economic damage to humans. Humans as a species aren't old enough to have encountered that scale of disruption. Regional, sure. Volcanoes raising new islands (which disrupt ocean currents), massive species invasions (human-facilitated or otherwise), catastrophic flooding (the formation of the Black Sea), all have seriously disrupted regional climates. None of those things affect the global climate. The only major global climate change the human species has lived through was the onset and retreat of the most recent Ice Age, and humans were a footnote as far as their affects on the world during that time. Certainly it had little affect on the human economy. Stone Age economies don't amount to much.

Please confine yourself to references to the title of that book. Quotes from the text invariably give me the creeps.

Fuck I hate that book. I wish I'd never read it.

I've seen him respond to comments on one of his submissions. I stopped reading his spew some time ago, but I will occasionally read the comments because invariably somebody in the community will post a better, more insightful, more correct discussion of the topic.

But...

Yup.

Why would a fish choose a touring bike over a mountain bike?

The machine doesn't cost $100,000/year. It costs $60,000 once, and maintenance costs $100/year, and the up-front price just keeps dropping. Eventually it will cost less than a table and chairs, if it doesn't already.

That'd be a "hair's breadth," as in the diameter of a hair. I don't think rabbit exhalations have anything to do with it.

Carry on.

Sorry, yes, Eric. I have no idea why my brain found Josef in that slot in my memory and didn't even question it.

Most people don't know that ephebophile is a word. Including the Firefox spellchecker, I might add.

And highly suspect, considering the theoretical upper limit is 86%. The number of real machines that achieve that high a percentage of their theoretical limit is vanishingly small. Unless Josef Drexler has managed to perfect a nanoassembler that builds solar panels, that 85% isn't happening.

What I want to know is where is my plush mushroom hat? I've been gaming on PCs since the '80s and I never got my standard issue plush mushroom hat. I want my hat.

That much should be obvious when they claim a mass walrus haulout is bad for polar bears. That's just idiotic. As far as the polar bears are concerned, it's free lunch. A LOT of free lunch. This is going to cause a mild boom in polar bear population in the spring, because many mothers will be well fed this fall.

No, that's not. That's from us dumping massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer into watersheds, causing algae blooms, which suck all the oxygen out of the water. It has nothing to do with burning anything.