sigh... you started out so good. but then you reached the exact opposite of the correct conclusion.

the $1 award was perfectly fine. while the couple was technically correct, there were no actual damages, and it was obvious they were just trying to suck from the google teat, wasting court time in the process.

the $750 per song awards are the problem here. minimum statutory damages are the problem here.

lawsuits are the problem here. so many of america's problems spring from the fact that we have gone stark raving mad with suing for this and that.

(hint: know one reason why health care is in such a shitty state? procedures cost gazillions of dollars, because malpractice insurance is unbelievably expensive. malpractice insurance is so high because, yep, everyone wants to sue their doctor and their hospital at any opportunity.)

yes, that is exactly what he is saying. oh, also, he is saying that the queen of france is in his underpants.

wait, what?

no, you are just a fucking idiot or a contrarian asshole, with a terrible straw man.

you can't put pictures of your house online, but then scream "privacy!!" when google posts essentially the same pictures. clearly you have already indicated that you are fine with the house being on the internet. furthermore, you CERTAINLY can't claim you actually want the pictures removed, if you never contact google in the first place to ask them to remove the pictures.

it is painfully obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that this was just a greedy couple trying to get rich quick, who had no actual concerns over the fact that google had images of their house. the judge rightfully called them out on it.

IANAPP (i am not a particle physicist), but...

an atom is more than 99% empty space, and the electron is so unbelievably small compared to the overall size of the atom (think .0001%), that even given a sheet only one atom thick, the electron still has a lot of free reign to move around, and could be said to be moving in 3 dimensions.

but when discussing the net motion of the electron, this is ignored, we are only interested in when it jumps from one atom to another, thus its movement is best defined as 2D or 1D in graphene sheets or tubes, respectively.

1D and 2D are appropriate in this situation. they are discussing the movement of subatomic particles (a fancy electron i think), not the sheet itself. In a sheet of graphene, the electron cannot move up or down, it can only move along the surface - thus, its movement is restricted to two dimensions. Presumably, once the sheet is rolled into a tube, the electron's options are reduced to 'move this way down the tube, or move 180 degrees in the opposite direction down the tube' which is limiting its movement to 1 dimension.

note that i didn't RTFA, but based on a previous poster's summary, I am pretty sure this is what is going on.

(please, no pedantry about how the electron's movement is not truly 1D or 2D, as it exists in a cloud that allows for some freedom of movement in all directions. Since we can never really know where the electron is anyway, I assume that for the purposes of doing the calculations involved, it is most effective to ignore the bouncing-around-in-a-cloud aspect)

there have been many proofs in this thread, as well as several good links to wiki. i see no need to repost them here. my reply was not meant to prove anything, merely to point out the error in your proof. namely, that you are begging the question.

also, subatomic particles have no bearing in mathematics. the limitations of the real world do not apply here.

if 0.999... is not equal to one... then please, answer me this: what is 1 - 0.999...??

Don't say 0.000...1, because that is a nonentity, and would show a remarkable lack of understanding of the concept of infinity. (hint... there is no 'last zero' that can then be followed by a one.)

see, here's your problem. you START OUT by assuming .999... is not equal to 1, and then use that to justify your proof. Circular reasoning, dude. Not gonna fly here.

There is no hair's breadth between the two, because they are the same number. The difference between the two is not "essentially" zero, it IS zero.

what you are talking about has nothing to do with pedophilia. for one, the correct usage of pedophilia only refers to young, prepubescent children. being attracted to post-pubescent adolescents, teenagers and such (individuals that have mostly finished the physical maturation process - broad hips and bust in women, broad shoulders in men), is called ephebophilia, and is completely natural.

modern society has seen fit to lump it in with pedophilia, and for some reason 18 is seen as a magical age where 'OK, now it's socially acceptable to be sexually attracted to this person' but has no basis in biology or (nonrecent) human society. from a biological perspective, we are PROGRAMMED to be attracted to individuals in the mid to upper teenage years, because they are most likely to bear healthy offspring. given the variation that can occur in individuals reaching physical maturity, it can be damn hard to differentiate between some 16 year olds and 20 year olds.

For countless thousands of years, females were being married and having children at ages that would cause modern society to cringe, oftentimes to much older men, and it was the norm. Of course, recent advances in women's rights has probably had a lot to do with it, as now a female is treated as a human being with rights, as opposed to a piece of property that was to be married off for a dowry and social standing. but i digress.

actual pedophilia would be the case of a significantly older individual taking advantage of their position of power to sexually abuse a young, prepubescent child who is either unable to stop the attacker, or is too young/confused/scared to make a decision on the matter. it is ALWAYS rape, because the child can never give true consent, because they simply can't really understand what is going on. this has been shown to usually cause significant mental trauma and long term effects to the child, who is often made to feel guilty and ashamed of the whole thing, possibly repressing the memories to cause a festering canker of mental scar tissue that will stick around forever.

so... yeah. your anecdotes about horny young preteens and teenagers humping each other in the closet or hitting on older individuals is hardly relevant to the issue of pedophilia.

don't get all self righteous, gmail has had filters forever.

the priority inbox is like the opposite of spam filtering. that is to say, it works AUTOMATICALLY. some people can't be assed to set up rules and filters and such, but this will do all the work for them.

so yes, it IS pretty amazing new technology. smartass.

that red stuff you see is not blood. it's meat juice. delicious, delicious meat juice. cells and proteins break down and mix with the water present to create built-in steak sauce. the blood was drained from the cow right at slaughter time - in fact, if you DON'T drain the blood immediately, it pretty much ruins the meat.

i can think of several interesting gestures for use on porn sites. heh.