And if so, what recourse if any is available for artists who are caught in this situation?"

You roll over and take it, and cross your fingers that somewhere down the line these groups attack someone by accident with the resources to fight back. It doesn't matter what's right and wrong. What matters is who has the most disposable money.

And both of you don't realize that the USA is going to drill and use every single drop as fast as they humanly can anyway. No matter what the best decision, no matter what the consequences, we all know that that's going to be what happens.

I think the root problem is that he's to goddamn stupid to use email. 'Trash' is not where you keep things. I can't understand why someone would think that.

Oh god, don't go there. When I was tech support for the government, I can't count the number of times someone would say they've had email sitting in the 'deleted items' folder for months, if not years.

Then they call us when the system is upgraded or reset or something, and Outlook is once again set to automatically delete everything in their deleted items.

Why in the WORLD would you think that 'deleted items' is a good place to save important emails?!? Honestly?!?

Yeah. I was kinda wondering why the conversion to imperial units.

Damnit USA, use real numbers like the rest of the world!

"cool", from what I saw in school, is defined by the jocks who smoke out back and hang out in a big group, and the cheerleaders who are sleeping with the jocks.

Never once have I heard of the "smartest" group being known as the "cool" group.

This. The whole 'impossible to fail' thing is the worst thing to ever happen to education around here.

A fail frickin' encouraged me to try harder in the classes I sucked at! Course, my parents actually helped as much as they could, and encouraged me and whatnot... so as per usual a lot of it comes down to parenting too.

But otherwise... there was a number of students in my grade that generally didn't care what their test score was, or if they failed something. A few were held back, a few dropped out, etc.

Hell, those guys would have LOVED the no-fail thing. That way their parents can say their kid passed, they go into the workforce with an unearned diploma, and they didn't show up for more than 3 classes.

I just had a terrible thought. Maybe that's deliberate. Maybe that's why companies nowadays are pretty much requiring university or college degrees to hire anyone. Because the diploma is worth less than toilet paper with this 'no child left behind' system, they can't rely on a high school diploma indicating someone is capable of learning, doing math, fractions, etc, etc. Those 12 years are entirely meaning less to a company looking for someone "good", so they have to kick it up a notch to university level to filter out the useless wastes of money that will do nothing but steal from the company. So for that, kids are forced into debt further and further, because everyone and their dog has to go to college after high school.

I hope to hell I'm just being paranoid.

Well, the alternative it seems these days is nepotism. Either know someone, or be related to someone, and you're in.

It sucks, but I don't see that changing anytime soon.

I'm debating whether they'd actually reward *everyone*. If only the top 5% are given awards, then I guess your 95% average just isn't good enough.

I think that if every single student is getting 95% average, they'll extremely quickly start looking at why it's so friggin' easy.

I've never understood this, but I grew up in the country. Where I was, your location on the bus was dictated by age. And you looked FORWARD to being at the back of the bus. Back seat was basically the grade 11's and 12's, and it worked its way younger until the youngest at the front.

That's exactly what I was figuring.

You have a handful of kids that are in the "smart" line. Generally speaking, all of the jocks, assholes, bullies, and whatnot will be in the "dumb" line.

Who do you think they're all going to pick on? Those smart kids better damn well hope they're built like brick shithouses, or got some serious connections to keep themselves from getting the shit beaten out of them daily.

There's also the problem that in schools nowadays, you have a metric ton of students per classroom. They'd have to be given these points based on measurable things, otherwise I can't imagine a teacher being able to monitor and distribute points fairly when there's a hundred kids or whatever in desks in front of them.

I like the idea of handing in early, or perhaps 90 on a test or assignment or something.

Course, it'd also have to be easy for the teacher to put points on (since even teachers can be useless and lazy, and a lazy one just won't bother giving out points), but basically impossible for the "really" smart kids to find a way to put thousands of dollars onto their account.

I can't find a source to cite it, but I've seen repeatedly posted on slashdot to refute this that the USA is already one of the largest producer of products on earth.

What the USA needs to do is stop friggin' spending. And tax a little bit! Taxes aren't evil... they kinda tend to solve problems like this.

Which is completely irrelevant, because every mower I've ever used or known has the capability of being turned off. Push mowers you could turn off and push to wherever. Riding mowers, I don't know of a single riding mower that does not allow you to turn off the blades while still keep travelling. I also don't know of a single person who just parks their mower in the exact spot they finished mowing the lawn.

Long story short, turn off the blades, move mower to wherever you want to store it.

Have every single cop wear a device that records what they do (headcam type thing, something like that) which also records sound, and have that uploaded to a remote server. If this recording is EVER turned off or blocked, anything anyone says against the police will be take with more weight than what the police say themselves.

This in itself invites problems, of someone trying to cover up said camera so that the cop's word doesn't count. Thus, the voice recorder should be separate, perhaps have one 'obvious' camera and one non-obvious one on the cop, and in general that means it's just one of the dangers of the job if the cop decides to stand still when someone's about to throw a bucket of paint on him while playing 'Thunderstruck' at 140 decibels to drown out the recorder.

But in general... have something on the cops to record what THEY do, and make it illegal for THAT to ever be tampered with. And make it publicly available instantly online, since y'know... we pay their bills and they're doing a public service so therefore everything they do should be visible by us.