Language and meanings is malleable, and much of if it is metaphorical at heart (sic!). Words (phrases, all utterances, really) have a central meaning and a multitude of non-central meanings. I would argue with great confidence that your sentences rely on non-central meanings of the word, which are nonetheless easily derived from the central meaning because people are very good at it.

In the end, whether or not copyright infringement "is" stealing depends on your definition of the word -- obviously! Whether it "is" stealing is also irrelevant: in the end, copyright infringement is copyright infringement, and our treatment of it should be based on its characteristics, not on some kind of analogy or categorization.

Could be interesting to compare it to the previous poll "Distance from birthplace? ". http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1260&aid=-1

That's great. Meanwhile, those of us with more interesting hobbies use a computer or buy a map.

You forgot the Xenophobic-Egalitarian distinction, and/or the Nationalist-Internationalist one. Otherweise, I'm not sure how you're going to represent the extreme-right (in old-fashioned terms) PVV, who after all got 15.5% of the votes the last time around.

We have very strict social rules about sexual behavior and we still end up with carelessly conceived children. We have extremely harsh rules about drug use, and drug-related crime and addiction are still a problem.

That said I see where you are coming from and it's something to keep in mind: what are the externalities of freedom X in comparison with strict regulation of X?

Don't you usually feel it when an elevator goes up or down?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population%20density%20of%20UK%2C%20Japan%2C%20US

You can keep talking about "act of war" as if that meant anything, but the legality of the situation remains as I described it. I made no comment about the economic sanctions imposed by the British.

So you think unless the US has signed a bilateral treaty with another nation, it's free to violate that nation's sovereignty? And vice versa? That's not how things work.

The area of an embassy is not the sovereign territory of the respective country. It is however protected by international treaties. I'm not sure what happens when this treaty is broken, the treaty itself doesn't spell it out (you can read it yourself, it's only 16 pages), but I'm pretty sure that you'd need to make a case in an international court. In any case an attack itself is not just cause for a war, it's also not a proportional response. I'm not sure what you think an "act of war" is, but not every act of agression is legal grounds for a war.

While those are great photos, they are still tiny: reducing the image size can appear to dramatically improve image quality. It's hard (for me, anyway) to tell if the shooting conditions were that difficult, e.g. how bright the interior of the instrument or the outsides in the other shot are -- of course, that may just be testament to the quality of the shots! The iPhone won't take photos with a small depth of field like in the sphere photo, though most compacts won't either under non-exceptional circumstances, so I guess that's a moot point.

Also, aren't Canon (S90, S95, S100) and Panasonic (LX3, LX5) pretty much the ones who've been getting the larger-sensor-compact thing started? And those have been available for years, now, 2008 for the LX3 if you're considering it compact.

Beautiful images... in thumbnail sizes... if the lighting is generous.

They are better than nothing in a spot, but if you're expecting to take photos, say on a trip or family photos, a good compact P&S will give you a better shooting experience and far better results, while still being pocketable. A decent compact with at least some manual settings is also a much better way to learn the basics than a smartphone camera.

I didn't like the article, either, it raises many issues but doesn't seem to deal with any of them in a sufficient way. But calling for energy efficiency is hardly neo-malthusian, it's just common sense. Every strategy towards a sustainable energy economy I'm aware of requires significant improvements in energy efficiency. The good thing is that there are still lots of low hanging fruit when it comes to improving efficiency: huge amounts of energy used to heat up or cool down housing can be saved by improving isolation, for example. Or just think of the transportation sector, both bulk as well as personal transportation.

If it were just up to the western world, reducing the overall energy consumption should be incredibly easy. I'm pretty sure it's already stagnated in Europe; for Germany, it has remained constant at around 14000 PJ since the 90s. Unfortunately, that's where his point about sharing finite resources equitably among nations comes in -- we need to reduce our consumption while simultaneously allowing for an increase in developing countries, while desperately trying to prevent their per-capita energy consumption from coming anywhere close to our (soon: historic) extremes.

Also, the Bulletin isn't a pro-nuclear shill publication. While I can't rule out that they have an overall pro-nuclear energy bias, they're most famous for covering issues of nuclear armament and proliferation (the clock thing). I briefly looked at the nuclear energy articles and they didn't strike me as particularly partisan; they have a moderately optimistic article about the recent German commitment to phase out nuclear energy, which I'm pretty sure marks them as anti-nuclear fringe in US terms.