There was a pretty good example last month. I don't think any musician listening to the two songs would say one is copied from the other. Maybe inspired by, but not copied. Nearly every march has horns playing upbeats, a trio section, and a stinger at the end. That doesn't mean the estate of John Phillip Sousa should be suing every composer of marches who came after him.

But even when you are "copying" the nature of copyright law still stifles innovation of transformation. I arrange music for a wind ensemble at my church. In order to even do that, I have to get written permission from the original copyright holder, which isn't trivial in most cases. That's time I could be writing music instead of doing paperwork. Yes, I could write my own tunes, but a congregation isn't going to connect with original music like they do with something they've heard 50 times before.

Then you've got companies who make a business model out of publishing public domain works, copyrighting the edition, and then suing anybody else who tries to publish the same public domain work. Not just music either, but books and photographs, too. Granted, this isn't a rampant problem, but it's enough of a concern/annoyance that some people drop out of creative markets altogether.

Obligatory xkcd

Sorry. My ignorance of Twitter shows. My understanding was that unless you "follow" somebody, their post will not be pushed to your device. Yes, it's searchable, but so is everything else on the Internet. It's nothing that could have caused panic on the plane or otherwise terrorized large numbers of people. If anything seeing the guy taken away in handcuffs was probably more horrifying for the people on the plane, than if they had seen a random string of letters with no inkling of what it actually meant.

The problem with flat tax, and what most people seem to misunderstand about tax law, is that most of the confusion and difficulty filing taxes comes from figuring out what is taxable income. That doesn't get fixed with flat tax. There will still be rules on what is and isn't income, what you can and can't deduct. If you're a business owner, it doesn't make sense to say all of your revenue is net income. You can't just say all the money people take home in a paycheck is income either, because then people will hide it in other places. The wealthy already do this to some extent, hence the AMT. I guess you could remove deductions and credits, but that seems like a shitty thing to do, and most people would never go for it.

Boys have a high tolerance for failure, eh? Try telling my son that. His teacher asks questions that either have more than one right answer, but she'll only accept one answer (which polygon can you make out of two trapezoids?). Or sometimes she's just dead wrong (deer do not hunt for food). But if he doesn't get 100% on everything, he's completely heartbroken. We've tried telling him it's no big deal as long as he tried his best. We've tried telling him his teacher made an error. But he becomes completely inconsolable. Nothing helps. Poor kid.

Funniest typo all day.

WTF? Did you even read the article? They're harassing the CTO of a security firm because he dared to point out security flaws in airplanes. Cracking a joke on Twitter to your friends is not the same thing as threatening to bring down a plane. Just because he does private sector research instead of publishing for peer review does not mean he's not a researcher. I do R&D in my job, but it's all trade secret. Am I not doing research since I don't publish? I think the FBI out-assholed this guy by a long shot, and I'm surprised to see a comment like yours modded to +5.

His tweet was immediately followed by "There IS a distinct possibility that the course of action laid out above would land me in an orange suite rather quickly :)" So clearly not an actual threat. It's just the FBI being dicks at the behest of large corporations, because Airbus and Boeing don't like being made to look like idiots.

There is now.

Wait, what?! One of your prime examples in your argument is people with spending disorders. You can't seriously think that more people have spending disorders than have kids in day care? The argument you made was that money woes are caused by people spending poorly, which you back up with generalizations. That's not even up to the level of anecdote as far as data usefulness goes.

Here's another anecdote. I make more than enough money to live well. I do not buy new shoes until my soles wear out, and I don't buy anything that starts with a lowercase i. But even I would be pleased if my CEO cut his pay by 93% and used the money to bump my salary up even a modest amount.

I think that's the first time a tl;dr was longer than the original.

Also, calling a self-proclaimed caliphate "anarchic" is rather disingenuous.

Russian analyst urges nuclear attack on Yellowstone National Park and San Andreas fault line

A Russian geopolitical analyst says the best way to attack the United States is to detonate nuclear weapons to trigger a supervolcano at Yellowstone National Park or along the San Andreas fault line on California's coast.

The president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems based in Moscow, Konstantin Sivkov said in an article for a Russian trade newspaper on Wednesday, VPK News, that Russia needed to increase its military weapons and strategies against the "West" which was "moving to the borders or Russia".

He has a conspiracy theory that NATO - a political and military alliance which counts the US, UK, Canada and many countries in western Europe as members - was amassing strength against Russia and the only way to combat that problem was to attack America's vulnerabilities to ensure a "complete destruction of the enemy".

"Geologists believe that the Yellowstone supervolcano could explode at any moment. There are signs of growing activity there. Therefore it suffices to push the relatively small, for example the impact of the munition megaton class to initiate an eruption. The consequences will be catastrophic for the United States - a country just disappears," he said.

"Another vulnerable area of the United States from the geophysical point of view, is the San Andreas fault - 1300 kilometers between the Pacific and North American plates ... a detonation of a nuclear weapon there can trigger catastrophic events like a coast-scale tsunami which can completely destroy the infrastructure of the United States."

Full story

Considering that nuclear power is the safest form of power the world has ever known, I'd say it's worthy of recognition for offsetting carbon more than anything else. To borrow a phrase, "It's the energy density, stupid."

There's a reason why China has 30 nuclear plants under construction, while the US just approved its first new plant in 30 years.

...but they get our shit to space.

What if that is the gene to be allergic to poison ivy, and we just didn't think to check for that? There's no way to know that a gene doesn't just serve some rarely-used purpose. What if it increases your intelligence by 1%, or some other feature that is affected by hundreds of other factors, like weight or hairline. Or maybe that gene's function is being suppressed by some epigenomic thing. Even the GP's suggestion of making changes isn't a winner, either. If the gene has a subtle purpose, changing it isn't going to make any obvious changes.