Gee, why didn't the stupid staff of Ecuador's London embassy think of this briliant plan? Could it be because, unlike you, they are aware of the fact that diplomatic immunity laws and customs do not mean that a host country's police are obliged to stand around while a diplomat breaks the law on that host country's territory?
The joke is actually the number of bozos on Slashdot who are repeating the fallacy that arrest warrants in European countries (including the UK) require charges. They do not now, nor ever have, required charges -- indeed, the _vast_ majority of arrest warrants have been issued without any prior charges. I respectfully suggest that you and others of your ilk actually read up on European and UK law instead making posts that do nothing except display your ignorance of the subject.
There is no such thing as unbiased journalism.
Was it really easier to make a living at music before the pre-napster days? I had some friends that formed a band and spend some time touring small venues in the pre-napster days, and they barely made enough money for food and gas. At least today they'd be able to make their own CD's to sell at shows, promote the band and publish their tour schedule online, and sell albums online to fans with no distribution costs (no need to sink thousands of dollars into pressing a big pile of CD's, then beg record store owners to sell them).
Maybe digital music makes it harder for studios today, but for the average musician, are things really worse?
Things are a lot worse for musicians nowadays than they were in pre-Napster days, but that's because there are significantly less venues for them to play in, and the rates which those that do exist pay for live music are lower than they used to be (actually lower, not just lower in real terms).
Of course, things are also a lot worse for all manner of retailers, manufacturers, and distributors of products that have nothing whatsoever to do with the entertainment industry. Most peoples' disposable income has been dropping steadily since 2007, and this combined with modern technology that lets them socialise, shop, and be entertained whenever and wherever it is most convenient for them means that they have less need to go out than was the case in the pre-Napster world, and less money to spend when they do. This has resulted in many of the venues that used to pay musicians having closed completely, or opted for cheaper types of entertainment such as DJs, Karaoke nights, etc. The few that still use live acts are therefore in a position of power where they can set their own rates and conditions, so it's by no means unusual for new bands who are starting out to not get paid at all, or be roped in to a "Battle Of The Bands" night where they actually pay the venue owner to perform.
So while the idea of selling CDs to fans and using social media to advertise gigs is fine in theory, a dearth of actual venues means that there are unilikely to be many gigs to advertise, and therefore few if any fans to buy those CDs.
It can be easily shown that survival of the species does mean saving lives. That's just by definition of the word "survival."
Survival of a species means survival of genes, not individuals. Individual survival can be detrimental to species survival if the number of individuals becomes too large for its environment to support, in which case the species as a whole can become extinct.
Note also that civilization is new in both human and evolutionary terms (around 10,000 years old), so the jury is still out on whether it turns out to be something that helps with our long term species survival, or ends up being something whose short-term benefits were achieved at the cost of the species as a whole.
Some points: (1) All figures in the article are from organisations who are known for their exaggerated estimates (the article itself says that the figures are "inflated"); and (2) even if that were not the case, the 115,000 figure is for primates, the vast majority of which will have been monkeys that are specially bred for the purpose to ensure that they aren't carrying any diseases which could effect experimental results. Chimps are very rarely used as lab animals because they are slow breeders, and sexually mature chimps (without which they cannot be bred) require special enclosures and trained handlers, because pissed off adult chimps that get loose tend to rip peoples' faces off.
It should also be noted that vivisection and animal research are not the same thing at all, although the organisations who produced the figures would like us to think that they are. Biologists, geneticists, gerontologists, congitive and behaviour specialist, and various other types of scientist publish a large body of research every year which based on animals, many (but far from all) of which are in labs, but the very nature of the research precludes harming the subjects, either physically or psychologically. Given the history of the sources, I doubt that they even tried to filter out these types of research from their figures.
You are forgetting that in a society where everything is communally owned, there is no need for organised violence to deal with uncooperative people. All they need to do is withdraw your right to access to the community's property (i.e. everything), because no matter how stubborn you are, helping a team to clean toilets for an hour a week will start look like a pretty pretty good deal after you've spent acouple of months living under a bridge and eating rotting food out of trash cans.
Communism (as described by Marx) is an entirely classles system in which there is no concept of personal property (everything is communally owned). An interesting effect of being classless is that states and governments cannot exist in a true communist system, because governments by their nature put some people above others, thereby introducing a separate class into a society that is by definition classless (i.e. everybody is de facto equal, not merely theoretically equal).
Fascism is a political system in which the state is embodied in a leader who occupies the post for life; everybody who is not part of its elite or their cronies is entirely subservient to that state. This includes the military, police, and judiciary, who are controlled by, and and exist for the benefit of the state, and it is common for them to swear allegiance to their leader, not the nation in which they live. Being seen as infallible by the population is considered to be vital in fascist states, so they strictly control the information that reaches their citizens, and will use propaganda to shift the blame for any failures too big to hide onto others such as foreign powers, minorities in their own countries, or partially or entirely manufactured enemies.
Note that the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, North Vietnam, etc. were/are not, and never have been, communists, American propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.
Buses require a lot more energy to keep warm than cars though, because buses open their doors at two minute intervals (and on some routes, at 30 second intervals) , and leave them open while people faff around trying to find change that they could have sorted out while waiting for the bus, or when they were waiting in line for the dweebs in front of them to faff around trying to find change.
I fully endorse the above viewpoint, because as any loyal Daily Mail reader knows, Britain was an utter paradise on Earth before Johnny EU Foreigner turned it into a miserable dump out of sheer spite and jealousy. And to add insult to injury, Britain is the only country in the EU that actually implements all those EU rules properly: the rest of them just carry on as if political correctness legislation didn't exist, and health and safety laws only applied to places of work. They even sell curved bananas and apples that aren't all the same size, despite the rules clearly saying that they're not allowed to!
I'd say the use of fire was very obvious 125,000 years ago, because there's plenty of evidence to indicate that Homo Erectus was using it in a controlled way around 400,000 BCE, and and some evidence that they may have been using it even earlier (perhaps as early as 1.9 million BCE). We know Homo Erectus used fire both for cooking and firing clay pots, and they possibly had other uses for it that didn't survive the ravages of time (e.g. heat-treating wooden spear points to make them harder, etc).
It's actually quite hard to find anything that early Homo-Sapiens did (that we know of) that wasn't already being done by other variants of the same genus long before we appeared. And given the fact that Homo Erectus survived alongside Homo Sapiens for tens of thousands of years in Africa, we may well have learned to use fire and crafted stone tools (and perhaps other things) from them instead of coming up with such things independently for ourselves, because there doesn't seem to have been very much to differentiate Homo Sapiens from other genuses of Homo in the technological sense until between 30,000 and 40,000 BCE. That's when when we suddenly start to see things like cave art, and tools (both stone and bone) start to become more finely crafted and therefore distinctive from those of (for example) Homo Neandertalensis, whose tools had been pretty much the same as ours prior to this.
We have no idea why this big change took place when it did, but it's interesting to note that it happened in the same time frame as the decline, and then extinction of the other two surviving members of the genus Homo.
"Tell that to Geordano Bruno http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno [wikipedia.org] and all the others who were burnt at the stake for heresy."
Only one of the charges against Bruno concerned any his scientific views (specifically, the one about there being a plurality of worlds). All the others were about various non-standard theological ideas he'd been espousing, and his investigations into, and writings on several types of prohibited magical practices.
It should be noted that (a) Bruno's trial lasted for seven years, so this wasn't a case of him being railroaded to the stake on a set of trumped up charges and invented evidence; and (b) although the Catholic inquisition found him guilty of heresy, it wasn't them who burned him, or even asked for him to be burned (they actually petitioned for him not to be executed because he'd partially recanted), but Rome's secular authorities, who had legal jurisdiction over him once the trial had concluded.
"Scientists have recorded a decline in winter precipitation over the past 60 years in Spain"
There isn't any reliable Spanish national weather data (and little hard local data) prior to 1947, so there's absolutely nothing to compare these figures with to see whether they're anomalous or not. However, carbon isotope discrimination studies of charred grain from archaeological sites indicates that water availability in the Iberian Peninsula as a whole, and especially the drier parts of Spain, appears to have been in decline for about 7,000 years, and the extensive agricultural irrigation networks built by Iberians, Romans, and Moors in some parts of the country are also good indicators of how arid they were in antiquity. This study of flood distribution and frequency over the last thousand years indicates that periods of low and high flood occurrence in different parts of the country go in cycles that last for several centuries, and have a variety of climactic causes, thereby highlighting the fact that a mere sixty years of data isn't enough to be statistically significant without any longer term baseline information to measure it against:
" large parts of Spain are turning to desert right now [iberianature.com]"
Whilst this is both true and a demonstrable case of anthropomorphic environmental interference, most of Spain's problems with encroaching deserts have nothing whatsoever to do with global climate change, but are directly attributable to the (largely illegal) diverting of vast amounts of water to coastal tourist playgrounds, huge numbers of new property developments, and gigantic Andalucian agricultural projects, many of which are directly funded by the EU.
It's been estimated that there are over half a million illegal water boreholes in Spain, some of which are of considerable size, and they're doing tremendous amounts of environmental damage. One example of this was the complete drying out of the Doñana river, reservoir, and areas of its marshes / wetlands in 2005, which a number of both international and Spanish studies have shown was entirely caused by the large number of illegal boreholes (over a thousand of them) drawing water from it. This is an important habitat area for (among many other animals and plants) the severely threatened Iberian Lynx.
NB: global climate change has recently become the fashionable excuse for Spain's problems, largely because it's a convenient political scapegoat for the real causes, i.e. the fact that successive governments have done absolutely nothing to either prevent or alleviate the problems that are directly attributable to property developers, large-scale intensive farming (as opposed to more traditional farming techniques, which are actually suffering because their water supplies have been diverted elsewhere), industry, vandals who deliberately cause large numbers of forest fires, and industry from damaging the environment in countless, and unfortunately, in many cases now irreparable ways.
"SOME biologists and neuroscientists will always be around who say what you want. If you can show that the mainstream opinion is against me, I'll happily concede the point, and thank you for enlightening me, but I doubt it."
Some studies of insect locomotion (which was where this discussion started) which use experimental data, modelling, or a mixture of the two to show that a great deal of locomotion sensing and control happens either in the limbs themselves before they reach any nerve centres, or in the thoracic ganglia. Nerve stimulation experiments have also shown that the characteristic "dual tripod" gait of hexapods is a mechanical oscillatory cycle that runs automatically when single nerves in the brain or mesothoracic ganglia are stimulated. The same is true for wing beats (which is some types share both muscles and central ganglia with the legs), which will cycle repeatedly when nerves in the thoracic ganglia are stimulated. The notable similarity in the data gathered from not only animals of the same species, but but those of different but closely related ones indicates that these movements are produced by a fixed "hardware" pattern generator, similar in principle to the electro-mechanical sequencers used in dishwashers and washing machines before microprocessor control became common:
(Note I apologise in advance for some of these only abstracts. Full scientific papers and book texts are hard to find on the web):
http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/82/1/512
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/45436/abstract
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v283/n5749/abs/283768a0.html
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/109692463/abstract
http://www.cell.com/biophysj/abstract/S0006-3495(65)86706-6
"Oh really? You read it's mind then?"
There is absolutely no evidence that insects have anything that fits the description of a "mind" to read. Note though that some spiders may well have minds, e.g. Portia labiata, which displays a level of intelligence that makes many small mammals look like warm-blooded morons.
"Humans are predictable too. Doesn't mean they're not intelligent. They're just creatures of habit."
Humans are predictable en-masse, but not individually. Most insects on the other hand are entirely predictable individually, i.e. they always react in precisely the same way to the same sets of stimuli as another insect of the same species.
"Well, Jellyfish ARE pretty dumb, you know. The most complex behaviour I know of is in Box Jellyfish, which use simple visual contrast to avoid obstacles."
All jellyfish are sensitive to a variety of external factors such as light, orientation, water currents, temperature, and a variety of types of touch, so they're by no means as unsophisticated as you're trying to make out. It's notable that you avoid trying to deal with echinoderms, which like most animals with radial rather than bilateral symmetry, also lack central nervous systems.
"A kid's home robot project could probably outsmart it."
Which proves what, precisely? I had a clockwork beetle when I was a small child that walked with a dual-tripod gait and changed direction when it bumped into things, but that doesn't prove anything whatsoever about real insects.
"Nothing about that is disproportionate to what I'd expect from a simple nerve net, vs. what I'd expect from more intelligent creatures with complete, well developed brains."
You are transparently and obviously avoiding answering the question I asked, which I will repeat: where does the software that allows jellyfish, echinoderms, and other creatures without central nervous systems to interact with their environments in a variety of ways reside?
"This only backs up my argument that flies have more complex brains, and so more complex behaviours."
What this actually does is display a desperate and transparent attempt at building a straw man because you can't back up your original claims, which were: (1) walking around without falling over or bumping into things requires intelligence; (2) flies are running software; and (3) that fly preening behaviour is intelligent.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
