Actuaqlly, according to DC comic book history, he was born in Kansas. The spaceship that the Kents found was considered an artificial womb, and in at least one comic book storyline, the Supreme Court ruled that he was born when he left the spacecraft.
> They aren't recognized in any US courts.
I'm afraid they are: the Supreme Court ruled that it's up to individual jurisdictions.
"Truth, Justice, and the American Way" made me think of Superman's decades long heroic ideal of justice, and overwhelming power deployed in the most postive and helpful ways possible. Interestingly, Superman renounced his US citizenship because it "wasn't enough anymore".
To the best of my limited historical knowledge, the number of dead was raised considerably after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, which included roughly half of those 30 million estimated deaths, lied about their population and economy both during and after the war. This came out in historical records made available with less political and propaganda control after the fall of the Soviet Unioin.
This sort of thing is precisely what the "Fair Use" excemption in copyright law is for. How can there even be a legal question about this, at least in US law for Random House?
Microsoft has done this before, when they provided covert support to SCO's fundamentally fraudulent lawsuits against Linux users. Rather than fund the SCO Group directly, they encouraged their business "partners" to buy from SCO Group, which kept the company afloat. It was a qu8ite "win-win" strategy for Microsoft. The lawsuits hurt business for many freeware and open source projects, especially Linux based projects. If SCO eventually failed, the nominal owners of a major UNIX distribution would go bankrupt, and their partners who wanted non-Microsoft tools would get them from a company that had collapsed. And the lawsuits from the SCO Group went on much, much longer and caused far more damage to Linux vendors than would have been possible without some outside funding. Doing the fiscal support through partners reduced any legal obligation or risk to Microsoft from their sponsorship.
These details all used to show on www.groklaw.net, whose thoughtful legal analyses and detailed reporting are missed by many.
Except when they _are_ granted There are many mixed software/hardware patents, especially in the UK where the EU policy is applied inconsistently or even violated. Software patents also keep being considered in negotiations on international patent law with the USA.
Wikipedia has some good links and discussion of the issue, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S....
Yes, perhaps you should read the "About" page at https://www.coinbase.com/about where they describe themselves as "a bitcoin wallet and platform where merchants and consumers can transact with the new digital currency bitcoin". So they've blurred the lines between a pure 'merchant service' and a bitcoin wallet, just as I described.
Being "professional" does not mean a company is legal or ethical, anymore than being rich does. Silk Road and MyCoin were "professoinal", and quite well known, and now are facing various well earned criminal prosecutions. Being bitcoin based did not make them criminal, but the bitcoin sub-economy doesn't have the historical regulations and protections real currency has, so the abuse is very real and not surprising at all.
Many cities have had problems with E. Coli contamination in their water supplies during flooding in the spring, and many farm districts have had water contamination as larger agribusinesses are careless with runoff water from larger fertilized croplands, and large grazing areas. It's a serious problem for low-rent districts near large, high yield farms that become careless when reducing costs and seeking higher profits. Areas that experience hurricans fairly frequently, such as Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, and others have had problems after destructive hurricanes.
The general availability of high quality drinking water is not a given, especially if you're poor.
It's not that modern: "Maize" was raised in Mexico at least 2500 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
In most of the world, "corn" can mean any cerial crop, including wheat It makes the old phrase "eating your seed corn" more meaningful, since the "seed corn" would include wheat, barley, rye, and oats, and any other bread or beer making crops.
Discarding the very idea of software patents would be better, but I don't see a lot of EU acceptance of that idea.
I'm actually in favor of lowering the US drinking age, at least to allow consumption with family at home. College drinking was much less of a _surprise_ when I went to college, and the binge drinking I see among college students unaware or rebelling against their parents is appalling. A "small beer" with dinner in places where the water was untrustworthy, or a sip of champagne to toast with on New Year's Eve with family, was part of growing up.
That the photograph is color, able to distinguish the different shades of Pluto and Charon, is _wonderful_ and an exciting hint of more data to come. I'm delighted by the new theories that Pluto may have a subterranean ocean, much like Europa, in recent science essays I've read. The idea that a planet as remote and as poor in solar energy as Pluto could host life in such an ocean is even more amazing, and this new probe could reveal the pre-requisites for life as we know it to exist even on Pluto.
It's wonderful to live in times with such evolution of science and knowledge. I must applaud NASA for realizing that this mission was worth the time and effort and funding to launch it.
Or, that the specs meant something very different to the developers than it did to the client. And the client then had to adjust the specification to get the developers to do the work _they actually agreed to do in the first place_. I've been encountering this especially with outsourced projects lately, where "QA the system" means "QA the whole system" to most systems or management personnel, but to the 3rd party QA team it means "test just the new feature". Then when the new feature reaks or hinders another longstanding features, _which should have been reported by QA_, the developers are faced at the last minute with a mad resdesign task that affects _both_ systems and is not stable, to boot. But it passes the very limited test specified to pass that specific bug report, so it is accepted and goes into production.
It's been a difficult few weeks trying to clean up after several messes like that. It pays the bills to do this work, but it's very frustrating to have to clean up _after_ you waned developers and QA of the risks they were taking with the "test only the new feature" approach.
I'm afraid I do understand it. The whole point of the "merchant services" apps are to allow the merchants to handle payment in Bitcoin. I'm staring right at 20 or so "merchant services" for precisely such use at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How....
Many of the apps seem to be horrible, and send far too much information to central money exchanges, many including online wallet systems, which should not be trusted. The overlap of such tools with online wallets is as unsurprising as in-store credit cards, and I'm afraid that due to their novelty and lack of regulatory awareness many are quite flawed if not outright corrupt.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
