Absolutely true. Canids and felids in particular hunt more for sport than for food. Wolves have been observed having all sorts of fun killing an entire flock of sheep. Foxes hunt and kill mice and birds without eating 'em. And I used to have a cat who did nothing but hunt gophers all day long; within 3 years he'd completely exterminated them in my neighborhood.

Incidentally my neighbor runs a twice-weekly foxhunt, tho the usual quarry is coyotes (mostly chasing, they usually don't shoot 'em). The local coyotes have gotten so into being chased by dogs that they come down to the kennel the night before a hunt and get the dogs all riled up and ready to go.

Female dogs that have never had pups will often kill puppies. Presumably fewer of someone else's offspring means more resources when you have your own.

[This is a consistent enough behavior that I warn clients in no uncertain terms to never ever leave the new puppy alone with the adult dog, most especially the spayed female adult dog.]

Dogs, cats, chickens, horses, various fish, some insects...

Hmm. Maybe it's just a living organism thing.

Another scheme by the labels is to sign up promising bands who are seen as competitors... and now that they're locked into a contract, they're never let produce an album. So basically they're eliminated as potential competition for the money-acts.

See also

Researching the "Rape Culture" of America
by Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers

http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/facul...

The whole "needles in the eyeball" are just a stepping stone to something truly amazing.

Indeed. I was severely nearsighted all my life, after the cataract surgery I no longer need corrective lenses at all, not even reading glasses and I'm 62. My vision in that eye went from 20/400 to 20/16. Truly a miracle.

BTW, my retina surgeon said that my retinal detachment was a result of being so nearsighted; a nearsighted eyeball isn't perfectly round like a normally sighted person's eyes.

Killing a non-competitive industry

What's non-competitive about it? You think other tax jurisdictions aren't playing the same game?

But in the long-term, a more competitive and stronger industry will emerge.

Or it will nestle somewhere else where it can squeeze the local government for some concessions. I'd rather the jobs be in Canada than elsewhere. The candian content regulations provide some unique leverage over the industry. The tax breaks are the carrot... and the canadian content regulations (that they qualify under if its produced significantly within canada) is the stick.

Just as the US and Canada should never have rescued the auto-makers when they imploded

I agree they handled it pretty poorly, but letting it collapse would have been stupid too. The country would not be better if all those jobs, and supply chains, and the service industries supported by that industry had all collapsed like a string of dominoes. Sure the market would have corrected itself and sorted itself out after a 'great depression', but millions of people still have to eat in the meantime. That's a huge drain on the economy, and an incubator for crime and even real civil unrest. Far better to prop up the industry up with bridge financing then to put them all on various welfare programs.

They handled it poorly though. Those who were responsible for manufacturing the crisis should have been reduced to poverty.

JSON is a pretty significant force behind modern Web design. Without it, the Web would still be a pretty static place.

Nah, we'd just be putting actual XML in our XMLHTTPRequests instead. (All JSON does is represent the same data as the XML would, in a less verbose format.) We'd still have all the Asynchronous Javascript And XML.

It would be better... if you could program [Objective C] on something other than a Mac.

You can!

"the Commission" (caps? should I say it in an evil accent or something?)

I was referring to it as a proper noun ("the [Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications] Commission"), not as a generic commission.

What part is untested? How about the whole thing? Theoretically, it's not that difficult. We won't know about practical difficulties until we actually try it.

You think Project Orion is the solution to interstellar travel? Look, guy, space is big. Mind-bogglingly big.. You may think it's a long way to the chemist's/drug store, but.... If we can get a spaceship going at three thousand kilometers/second, it'd take centuries to reach the nearest star. You may want to calculate how much energy it would take to get something going that fast, and consider the size of a self-contained habitat that will function for centuries.

The characteristic of most deserts is not that there's a lot of salt water, but that there's not a lot of water no matter what. Granted, there are deserts that run into oceans or seas, but there's a whole lot of desert terrain that isn't. The reason why they tend to get an unusual amount of solar power is that they don't get the clouds or precipitation. So, why would we want desert-based desalinization plants?

but don't try anything too clever. Otherwise some cop will get a gut feeling or a hunch and the minute he's officially taken off the case you're toast.

You know it. And from watching things like Bones and CSI:Miami I know that not only do they investigate every case like its the only thing they have to do with their time, but that money is also generally no object. And if you are really unlucky, the laws of physics will turn out to be fairly flexible to.