Am I the only one that read the statement? It seems to me that they are collecting information. In fact McDonald's doesn't deny they attacked him, they only state that their employees denied it. It's an important distinction. Their employees are quite naturally saying, "We're innocent!" while Mann's saying "They're guilty." Mann provided proof that one of their statements - namely that they didn't damage any of his property - is incorrect. But it doesn't seem McDonalds, as a whole, is calling Mann a liar. Here's the statement:

We share the concern regarding Dr. Mann’s account of his July 1 visit to a McDonald’s in Paris. McDonald’s France was made aware of Dr. Mann’s complaints on July 16, and immediately launched a thorough investigation. The McDonald’s France team has contacted Dr. Mann and is awaiting further information from him.

In addition, several staff members involved have been interviewed individually, and all independently and consistently expressed that their interaction with Dr. Mann was polite and did not involve a physical altercation. Our crew members and restaurant security staff have informed us that they did not damage any of Mr. Mann’s personal possessions.

While we continue to learn more about the situation, we are hearing from customers who have questions about what happened. We urge everyone not to speculate or jump to conclusions before all the facts are known. Our goal is to provide a welcoming environment and stellar service to McDonald’s customers around the world.

Interesting that your quotes comes from "Airplane!", a movie starring Leslie Nielsen.

Whoops. Allow me to correct my own post. Not all of the Higgs particle's mass is from the Higgs Field:

In particular, as you can see in Figs. 3 and 7, the Higgs particle itself does not get all of its mass from the non-zero Higgs field — and the strength of its interaction with itself is not directly related to its mass. [There is a correlation, but not proportionality.] This is not unusual.

I wonder how it gets the rest of its mass? That's a good question.

The DVD-CCA (an organization run by the motion picture studios) sued Kaleidescape for making a personal server where you could upload your DVDs and then play them anywhere in your house. Kaleidescape won their suit, fortunately. Of course the DVD-CCA isn't the RIAA; however, I feel they are cut from the same cloth.

I concur. The export restrictions are frankly ridiculous in this case. If they wanted to, the Iranian government could just send someone to US to download Google's software for free. If Iran can import centrifuges to purify Uranium, they can surely use proxies to download the software directly too (spoofing their country of origin). It's probably a face-saving gesture for he more "senile" members of congress.

Indeed, Google says they worked with US government officials before releasing the software with these restrictions according to TFA. They believe that releasing the software to Iranians will help promote the flow of information and help them exercise more freedom of speech and assembly, as shown in during protests of the 2009 election in Iran. Someone in the US government probably thinks so too.

Wasn't that part of the plot to one of the Star Trek movies?

I agree with your second part. Challenging anyone's worldview is always a good thing. Whether they are Christians, Havasupai, or even athiests, challenging people with evidence contradicting their ignorance is a good thing! It keeps society from stagnating by encouraging free thinking!

That's not actually true. Take a square apiece of paper. Draw a straight line parallel with one side in the middle. Then tear the paper perpendicular to the line from one side to the line. Now pull one side of the tear over the other. See how the paper bends into a cone? That's what gravity does. It causes "space" to not be flat just like that. However, look what happened to your line. Now it curves around toward the direction of your tear. So it is the geometry of the paper that causes the gravity. It isn't about anything rolling downhill, or about there being another type of gravity pulling everything down a rubber sheet. Instead, the shape of surface causes anything going in a straight line to be deflected towards that tear. And why does your object tend to go in a straight line? Because of Newton's first law, of course!

Read my post in context with the parent to which I was responding. Original poster used the term "fucking barbaric" to describe a country that executed drug users and I was suggesting they thought a little more about their posting.

Agreed my language should have been more carefully chosen. I completely agree the issue is more nuanced than a short response can provide however felt it would be mostly lost on the original poster, hence decided to give them a blunt response to get them thinking about what they'd written. Perhaps I shouldn't have jumped back at a troll...

Clearly you are more capable of a more rational debate and it would be more pleasant to have a decent conversation and discuss the issues with you rather than User Jaysyn.The issues are indeed complex.

I'd note though that the State of Texas- a part of the USA - apparently still reserves the right to execute under 18 year olds and President Obama has promised to review the failure to ratify the Convention (Ref.)

regards.

I think that it is very strange to defend a blunt response if it can easily be shown to be incorrect. For example, I could call you "fucking barbaric" for murdering children too, but that would be incorrect and certainly unjustified. At very least, your outburst makes you look very silly to me. The context doesn't compare the US to anyone, and the post doesn't imply the author is from the US at all. So your remark about the US is certainly off-topic and not supported by the context.

Your reference from wikipedia is probably incorrect. The citation in wikipedia for the remark, that Texas reserves the right to execute 17 year olds (Texas's previous limit), does not mention Texas at all! I did a search for texas in that article and got nothing, so (unless my browser is malfunctioning) that wikipedia statement seems baseless to me. So I will edit out that reference from the article.

Furthermore, Texas cannot overrule the US constitution, and the supreme court has already ruled on the matter. There was a case mentioned in the wikipedia article where they tried to overturn the ruling in Alabama, but that went nowhere (and rightfully so). So that reference that you cited can not support your argument in any case whether true or not.

Finally, Obama is a politician. He cares a lot about symbols, as shown by his public reasons for "firing" a CEO. I repeat that: he forced a person to retire from his job because Obama wanted to emphasize a point. Doesn't matter if it was justified for other reasons or not - that was the reason suggested by the man himself. Obama also recently suggested a world without nuclear weapons, though there are many reasons that is currently unrealistic. Obama declared it probably won't happen in his lifetime, in fact! So the point of mentioning that goal was also symbolic. The UN Convention is also a symbol. So Obama's support of ratifying the convention is not surprising, but also not a sign that he thinks it is realistic or even possible in the near future. Of course I could be wrong, but I think this is the likely conclusion.