> we will have to wait until 2051 before being able to use these works without restriction

Don't even think it. Every time Mickey Mouse approaches public domainhood, Disney lays more money on Congress and gets an extension, and they will certainly continue to do so, and Congress is certain to continue to do so. Copyrights are effectively permanent. That's what Eldredge was all about.

Ron Paul did not propose to "end student loans." He proposed to break the government monopoly on student loans that was put in by Obamacare. He suggests - and he is quite right in doing so - we return to having banks loan students the money. Not the government. The government monopoly is new and was put in place to extort additional funds from young people in order to help pay for vast boondoggle and government-employee program known as Obamacare.

> The only good reason to repeal ObawneyCare
> would be to replace it with what it should have been
> from the outset - a true, fair, comprehensive single
> payer system.

Oh, yes, that worked out real well for all the countries that tried it. Would you like to watch your kid choke to death for lack of a tracheotomy that would at least ease the kid's passing? A tracheotomy is a simple, trivial, cheap procedure that the Canadian bureaucracy refused a dying child because they decided the kid's life wasn't worth it. The parents had to find an American hospital to do the procedure, maybe not significantly extending his life but at least sparing him a more gruesome passing. Way to go, Single Payer.

"Single Payer" is code for "government run", and the government does too much too badly already. That is the nature of the beast. It can't be changed.

This idiot cannot get rid of his hard-on for more and more taxes. After whacking in the trillion and a half for Obamacare, now he wants another 2 trillion on top of that - and then he wonders why businesses are scared to expand?

Oh - and let me get this straight - the Democrats are going to "save Medicare" - which is already drastically underpaying doctors more than any other insurance - by taking more money out of it? That will save it for Seniors? And this $247 billion more in addition to the half trillion he has already hacked out of it for Obamacare? That's how the Democrats are going to save us from the Evil Republicans? This is what we need saving from!

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it!"

Laffer must be laughing in his grave watching Keynes spin in the next plot over.

> Now glaciologists are left trying to figure out how not
> understate the importance of the extent glacial ice
> melt, while at the same time correcting the error.

In other and simpler words - how to continue claiming global warming is proven in spite of yet another failure of truth on the part of the GW believers.

If an email leak showed you were doctoring your data about your planetary discoveries like the UNCC did, we'd thereafter doubt you too. If you were closing certain telescopes that didn't support your diamond planet theory expecting everyone to accept your skewed data like Nasa did with their rural data collection sites, we'd not just doubt you, you'd be convicted of fraud in public opinion - just like the climate "researchers" are.

If you were proposing to actually mine the planet, we'd assume you ARE a climate "researcher" trying to glom onto more funds.

...these objects represent some of the "dark matter" we are searching for?

I, too, eventually parted with my Byte and CC collection and bitterly regret it. To get my nostalgia fix, I use emulators. I have my Apple II, IIgs, MacSE (whose physical implementation remains in my attic), a Lisa (whose historical importance is very high, IMHO), an HP85, and IBM 1130 (the first machine I ever used in college), various Commodore machines including the C64, a Lilith (yes, I did do professional work on a Lilith, once), Digi-Comp I and II emulators and, of course, my Olivetti Programma 101 emulator of the first computer I ever touched, that I wrote myself. Oh, yeah - the Apple II emulators run Apple Pascal, and I have a CPM emulator running V4 of the UCSD System. How's all that score on the old nostalgia meter?

> I wonder what the toilet version of The Blue Screen of Death is.

The Brown Screen of Death.

...of the old joke about the worm looking out the bird's ass as they fly high in the sky...

"You wouldn't shit me, would ya?"

...just how alien these "people" really are. This is a liberal thing, it's something they've wanted to do for decades. Why don't people listen to them before electing them and realize just what they are voting for? I notice most people here think this is stupid, but it's part and parcel of the liberal mindset of fascist control over every aspect of human life - and I predict this post will be modded down "troll".

Apollo Computer was shipping the 64-bit PRISM workstation when they were bought by HP. HP killed the PRISM because they were going to do their own 64-bit architecture.

Digital was shipping the 64 bit Alpha machine when they were bought by Compaq which was then bought by HP. HP killed the Alpha because they were committing to Intel's Itanium.

So what happens? HP, the owner of two, market-proven, debugged and viable 64 bit architectures finds itself backing the loser, having killed both of the projects they bought and paid for.

And so, what is HP's 64 bit architecture in the end? The x86_64.

You've really got to wonder what kind of idiots were running the company.

The existing global warming people have vested interests in global warming and they have proved they cannot be taken seriously. The UNCC was caught fudging the data. That was bad enough. Their whitewash absolving the guilty of doing so does not make their data any more useful. Nasa was also caught screwing with their data, they were closing monitoring sites farther from urban areas, thereby allowing the heat island effect to skew their raw data. There is NO evidence of global warming, not one set of raw data is available to even suggest it is so. All of it comes from people whose methodology is either suspect (Nasa) or outright fabricated (UNCC). If you want to assert global warming credibly you need to amass the data anew and make the raw data available to peer review. If it's real, I'll be the first to support basing public policy on it. But I have reviewed both of the data sets used to claim global warming and neither of them should be trusted. It isn't science. It's politics. And money. Money for studies and equipment "proving" something people want to be true to justify taking resources away from others.

Global warming is not just a misunderstanding. It's a lie, an organized and deliberate lie by people with a proven vested interest in lying about it.

> You seem to imply that renewable energy cannot possibly provide humanity with enough energy

"Enough" energy? How much is "enough" energy? I assert that the more energy is available, regardless of source, the better life is for everyone. When you use the word "enough" you are stating unequivocally that there is some level of energy that is "enough" by your standard. And you have no such right.

> The only roadblock I see regarding renewable energy is the one of price.

Need I point out that price is precisely the limiting factor in making more energy available to everyone?
Blase' assertions that price should not be a factor is stupid, the more you drive up the price, the lower the standard of living becomes. QED. Desperate measures to push up the prices of available energy in order to make it less competitive with renewable energy simply reduce the standard of living. That doesn't bother rich people, only "normal" ones.

> if you end up concluding that renewables are indeed more expensive, I would still say so what?

And I say you are asserting that lowering the standard of living of others is acceptable, and I say that it is not. If renewables are so great, let them compete on an even footing.

> Also the Iraq War for instance was and still is
extremely expensive and still the US keeps on with it;

What does that have to do with anything? There was never a choice between spending that money on energy or on war. The war was justified on the basis of Hussein having weapons of mass destruction (satellite photos of thousands of dead Kurds prove that beyond any shadow of doubt) and on his behavior showing that he still did have such weapons - a subterfuge he admitted later was deliberate. The war in Libya has much the same justification, only Muamar hasn't killed as many of his own people and it is known he has no weapons of mass destruction, yet you don't bother to bring up that latest war.

>You don't believe in renewable energy and you have solid, compelling arguments that it is indeed a dead end - not "it's more expensive", I mean really, it's physically impossible;

Fact: The UNCC has completely destroyed the credibility of climate change. The original revelation of jiggering the data was bad enough, the whitewash that followed absolving the people from jiggering the data made them unsupportable. There IS NO EVIDENCE of global warming. All we have is a pile of data we know was manipulated by believers in climate change.

Fact: windmills destroy birds and are unsightly.

Fact: Dams can destroy entire ecosystems in their controlled rivers.

Fact: Solar energy requires vast areas for collection.

Witness the Massachusetts liberal fighting tooth and nail to stop their wind farm proposal. Even when we are talking truly "renewable" liberals are against new sources of energy. Your "renewable" bleating is a red herring.

> Or you don't believe in renewable energy by convenience and then you're really a motherfucking, asshole licking disgusting pile of stinking crap.

Oh, yes, the inevitable liberal end product. Rage, hatred, anger, and ad hominem attack when they have no real answer to the issue. You're a hater venting your spleen and you regard other people as below you and worthy of being manipulated or outright controlled. You have zero interest in improving life for anyone.

Food prices are rising because the gov't wants them to. We have diverted one of our major cereal crops - corn - to energy production. Low-value energy production, less energy produced than was consumed producing it in the first place. Net result: higher energy costs. Taxes and regulations on producing energy also raise energy costs. Energy costs drive the entire economy. It governs how food is produced, how far it can travel, what it costs when it gets there. So long as it is the official policy of the gov't that energy should cost more, the price of food will rise.

We have less farmland under cultivation than we've had in a generation. Yet we produce far more food. We use tax money to put base prices under many foods to keep them from becoming too cheap. We pay farmers NOT to produce food. Both of these make food more expensive.

Finally, despite all the foregoing, food is still produced in massive quantities, and continually drops in percentage of budgets dedicated to it. People starve now not because there is no food, but because it is the policy of some gov't - usually their own - that they DO starve. Even at the height of the last Ethiopian famine, donated food rotted at the docks because the Ethiopian gov't didn't want it used to feed people who didn't support it - which was most people.

Starvation is not caused by lack of resources. It is caused by policy. It is that simple. If we were "running out of resources" then the price of those resources would be climbing. Well, they are - but not because of the market, because of gov't policy. We tax, we regulate, we intervene constantly in favor of pushing up the price of every conceivable commodity. It is our only consistent policy, and it works very well. Yet the reserves of any resource you can mention - oil, coal, metals, rare earths, anything - are constantly expanding because higher prices make practical extraction of these resources from places not practical before. Our response to this is to ban access to these resources, thereby driving up the price of resources.

The world does not have a shortage of resources. It does not have too many people. What it has is too little freedom and too much gov't control. Governments do not make things more efficient, they do not produce wealth or resources. They are far less efficient than the free market, and they burn vast quantities of wealth and resources and produce nothing of profit for having squandered them. Case in point: the National Recovery and Reinvestment Act - which managed to prop up local gov't jobs using federal money. Jobs that are vanishing now that the money is gone. No new roads. No new sources of energy, no new sources of wealth have been created or developed. We haven't even seen a mild reduction in the rate of crumbling of our national infrastructure. That money - that wealth - a trillion dollars of it - simply vanished like so much smoke. Yet still we will pay for it - with interest - and assuming we eventually do pay it off - and that is by no means certain - it will cost far more than the trillion dollars spent to retire the debt. And still no wealth will be produced, and prices will rise as the debt and the cost to maintain it creeps into the marketplace, and again, everything - including food - becomes more expensive.

We have to work hard to create this much want and misery. It isn't easy or cheap to starve this many people. But, alas, it's the one thing our gov't is good at.