I recall hearing a snippet on the radio from http://www.creationmoments.com/ a few years back. I tend to avoid the evolution/creationism debate because I don't personally have the depth of knowledge to push one way or the other. But I'm interested in a real evolutionist's answer to how critters like the bombardier beetle evolved/survived to live in their present state.

I grabbed the meat of their transcript so we don't need to /. the site.

The bombardier beetle has a powerful and complex system for protecting himself from enemies. Glands within the beetle produce a mixture of two hydroquinone compounds and hydrogen peroxide. These chemicals must be held in separate chambers, because when they come into contact with each other they react. When the beetle is threatened, the chemicals are mixed in a third chamber where a third chemical is added and an explosive reaction takes place. This reaction forces the caustic solution out through a special "nozzle." The beetle is skilled in aiming this nozzle at its enemy.

If this system is missing any of its parts, it is more than worthless to the beetle; the chemicals alone are very dangerous. So this sophisticated defense system could not have evolved in stages. Imagine the poor beetle who evolved the ability to produce the chemicals but hadn't yet evolved the right chambers to mix them without blowing itself up. The first time he became alarmed, poof!-no more beetle at all!

Yet oddly, despite having just posted your first comment, your user ID number is in the 800k range. IIRC we're up to about 1.2M now, so your account itself must at least a year old, if not two or three.

Very astute observation. It's sort of like buying a new car, then getting so busy with other things that you don't have time to drive it. When you do get a chance to try it out years later, it looks two years old to the rest of the world, but still feels brand new to you. Still pretty sweet to be driving around in.

(mark me down for one gratuitous car analogy) re: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1147375&cid=27051659>

(Umm, you just triggered my "astroturf" alert. This is the only comment Slashdot has you on record for, so I can't get a grasp of whether you are real or not.)

I realize there's a required minimum number of posts before becoming real - for the moment, I can only aspire to be real with post #2 here.

I just wanted to stick my nose into the conversation to vouch for the effort that I know firsthand George put in to creating the image libraries that he sells in various forms.

From reading tfa & links, I got the impression that the individual embroidery sites were doing the right thing and pointing back to the vendor(s) where they purchased the artwork. To me, they're off the hook at that point. I wasn't always wild about the licensing agreements that were used with the clipart libraries & I don't support blanket scare tactics to weasel money from mom-n-pop embroidery shops, but I do think whoever is collecting the money for use of the clipart libraries ought to hand some portion of it over George.

I worked for George back in the mid-80s as he was shifting the sales of his clip art library from large corporate Videoshow users (General Parametrics) to the emerging desktop publishing market.

He had illustrators and computer artists on staff generating clip art from scratch. He paid our wages at times when I know he wasn't keeping up with his own personal bills. (banker in the front lobby waiting to collect a mortgage check)

If there are other matching images out there for free - great, the copyright shouldn't apply and the folks that originally sold those images for use should have an easy time defending themselves. And there really are boatloads of public domain clipart out there. On the other hand, if they can't point to a free source for that image - then they outta be ready to repay George for the all that he invested in creating that image.

It's not the end-user embroidery shop that's the problem - they're being legit, buying rights to use artwork from the real scumbags here - the folks that are grabbing art libraries from whatever source they can find and putting them up for sale as if they own them.