Problem is, what it was intended to do means sod all when it comes to determining what it actually does - the court won't hold you to the spirit, it will hold you to the letter.

Which is why the fine print exists in those other agreements. But it doesn't exist here beyond the wording of the GPL itself. So asking the creators of the GPL in this instance will get you nowhere because their opinion on the matter lacks any weight, its what the actual wording says which determines what you are beholden to. They dont get to have a second bite of the pie by saying "well, what we actually meant was..." - they had that chance when they wrote it originally.

No, the creators will tell you what it was intended to do, the court will tell you what it actually does. Potentially huge difference there.

You mean some selfish posters are ruining certain articles for others, who don't particularly mind if Bennett Haselton posts or not...?

If you don't like him posting, SKIP OVER HIS FUCKING POSTS. No one is requiring you to click on that link to read his post, SO DONT FUCKING DO IT.

Coming in here and posting drivel because you dislike him and his is nothing more than you thinking you own this fucking place and your opinions matter more than everyone elses - its as bad as the bullshit "bring back classic" posts which did the same - yeah, ruin it for everyone because you don't personally like it.

How about you go fuck yourself?

Im not missing anything of the sort, the post I was replying to was commenting that *Google* would be the one who had to verify that all the paper work was in place, when that is patently not true - they accept a declaration of compliance from the poster, and then they accept a declaration of infringement from a third party. Google doesn't verify anything at all, they let the two parties deal with it between themselves while hosting the video in a manner that conforms with the law (eg the DMCA allows for a counter claim from the poster to be made which allows Google to legitimately reinstate the video and not suffer any legal issues by doing so).

Google wouldn't verify anything in that scenario, they just receive legally binding declarations from both parties and then it moves upstairs in the legal process.

Why would Google have to do anything? If the producer wants it to be listed, they have to have all their ducks in a line - Google just has to remove it each time its shown that those ducks are not in line and put it back up each time the producer says they are.

Google doesn't have to check to see if those ducks are valid or not, they go by the assertion of the person putting it up.

Does that mean we can describe the Muslim invasions as a backlash against the prior Roman occupations?

Wow, that's quite a rewrite of history you have there...

So the fact that Peter James Knight was a fanatical Christian who strongly believed in the Bible and his faith, and was described during his trial as "obsessive, fanatical about certain matters [...] including your faith" means his action wasn't at all motivated by his faith...?

The reasoning is that natural gas releases less carbon than coal, so if we switch from coal to natural gas, then we'll reduce climate change.

Yes, I'm perfectly aware of that, and unlike you I know the science behind it. The problem is the next sentence of my post that you conveniently left out of your quote -- which is, if we don't actually reduce energy demand, we'll eventually run out of natural gas and have to burn the coal/oil anyway. So we just end up in the same place, just a few decades later.

Unlike you, GP is viewing the entire situation. You simply refuse to work your assumptions into both scenarios.

Also note my primary objection is to the beginning of TFS which implies we could STOP climate change by this substitution, which is in fact idiocy if anyone thought it true.

Let's imagine two scenarios:

1. Burn coal until coal becomes impractical, then switch to natural gas.

2. Burn natural gas (with declining use of coal due to current policy and economic factors) until that becomes impractical, then increase or switch back to coal.

If we don't actually "reduce energy demand," as you put it, we burn the same amount of carbon under either scenario. Yet the second scenario reduces carbon introduced into the system in the earlier years. If we do reduce "energy demand," by whatever means and at whatever time, there is a net carbon reduction.

Only your strawman is claiming that substition = solution. The rest of us are claiming that substition = mitigation. In any of the two scenarios where we dont burn until we "run out" of both resources, there is less carbon emitted by switching to natural gas. In the scenario where we do burn until we "run out" of both resources, there is a nominally greater amount of time for society and nature to adapt by using natural gas first. In the meantime we continue to develop and drive down the cost of other sources, to deploy those technologies, and to develop storage technologies to support personal and bulk transportation.

You claim that switching to natural gas is idiocy yet using natural gas is somewhere between neutral-to-improvement, is currently somewhat cheaper, and under a carbon tax would inherently be cheaper due to factors that you claim to be perfectly aware of. Yet science and economics be damned; you just want the biggest stick possible to force us to do it your way -- right now, all the way, regardless of cost, and "what storage problems?".

The idiocy is not only seeking to internalize the costs of fossil fuels, but seeking to reject any improvement in their use that is not a complete solution. The idiocy is thinking that people won't recognize that fact and call you on it. The idiocy is thinking that once the sciene is proven (which it is), everyone must automatically adopt your particular priorities and timetable because there are no value judgments involved (or only yours).

People rately cooperate with those who call them idiots. Until you have a comfortable majority -- which you do not -- you cannot afford to alienate those who are supporting relative improvements. So become perfectly aware of the sitatuion and stop engaging in equal idiocy yourself.

This is needed at the bar when pouring into a glass or pitcher.

By then it's far too late. This is about spreading out the active ingredient from the hops during the original mixinig, before brewing, so it can keep the ingredient from the fungi from loading up on carbon dioxide during brewing. By the time you pour, the opportunity for the hops to do anything but add flavor is long gone.

Good, we need more hate because we certainly need less life on this planet. Let's start with politicians and lawyers, first.

As long as you people insist upon trying to control what your neighbors do, weaseling out of paying your debts, cheating the people you do business with, and making up your own rules that totally suprisingly favor whatever side you're supporting at the moment, there will be politicians and lawyers.

The politicians are just doing what you tell them to do -- or more specifically, what the people who actually care are telling them to do. Those who sit on their ass writing meaningless missives of how it's all rigged against them without actually organizing their neighbors get what they deserve.

The lawyers are usually trying to prevent you from being screwed by the other guys. And before you retort that lawyers are encouraging the screwing, remember that our technological surveillance state is being created by the engineers and computer scientists -- not politicians using off-the-shelf parts. You're no better. Behave yourselves and lawyers won't have clients. Then there'll be less of them.

Don't remove the exemption, just exempt the people using the exemption from being able to frequent public areas without protective clothing (protective as in protecting others from them, not protective as in protecting them from everyone else).

Its illegal to be naked in most public places, its illegal to knowingly infect others with dangerous illnesses, so why shouldn't it be illegal to knowingly be in a public place when you are much more open to infection from dangerous illnesses and thus to infect others with them...?

Nearly all of what you say are valid points. But one carries a misconception:

By it's very nature of being a focused, collimated beam a laser does not affect anything in "the general direction" of the target - if it was not focused and accurate, it wouldn't be an effective weapon and might not even be dangerous.

That's SO not true. There are two issues here:
  - Forward (and back) scatter: A laser beam "leaks" light, primarily in the "general direction" of the main beam and, to a lesser extent, in the general direction of back toward the source. It's not a big percentage. But when you start out with kilowatts of colimated light it can be more than adequate to burn out a human eye.
  - Scattering (also specular reflection) from the target, or the cloud of gas that remains of the target. This can be a substantial fraction of the incident beam.

"Do not look at the beam or the target with the remains of your face."

Deuterium/Hydrogen (D/H) isotope ratio is significantly higher (more than three times, in fact) than that of water found on Earth.

Q: How do you separate heavy water from light water?
A: Distillation. Light water boils off / evaporates more easily, because the molecules are lighter, and leaves the heavier water behind.

Why shouldn't this be true of vacuum sublimation as well?

Leave a chunk of dirty ice orbiting the sun in a hard vaccuum for a few million years, with the water quietly sublimating away. Seems to me the result would be that last remaining chunk of dirty ice would have a substantially larger fraction of heavy water molecules than the water on the planet where the deep gravity well hangs on to the lighter molecules.

Is it enough to explain a 3:1 enrichment? No clue. But I'd like to see that the analysis was done and what the scientists' estimates were.

(Not to say they ignored it. The last time I raised a similar question about a scientific paper reported here it turned out that the scientists HAD examined the issue.)

This will cost us billions of dollars in the private and public sector,

who is this "us" he is talking about?

The taxpayers. It's a clear violation of the "takings" clause of the US Fifth Amendment (long since incorporated against the states and their subdivisions, including the City and County of Los Angeles.) This means, after a bunch of legal wrangling, the courts are very likely to rule that applying such a law against a pre-existing building is a "partial taking" and the government must make the owner whole, i.e. reimburse him for his costs of compliance.

The takings clause:

No person shall ... be deprived of ... property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

if the public good is really being served here by improving safety of citizens, why isn't the discussion framed more along these lines?

When it gets to the courts, it will be. Count on it.