I don't think that's really the point on this one. It isn't an instance of saving the adorable but useless spotted whatever, which we've messed up by destroying its habitat or something. This is an instance of hungry people have eaten up almost all that tasty tasty tune (actually, I hate tune, but that's not the point) and what little is left is about to be rendered unappetizing or dead.

This is actually environmentalism in its most selfish (and thus, from a certain point of view, best) form: if you want to keep eating a species, you've got to take care of them.

If there has ever been a better case for a corporate death penalty, I can't think of it. They badgered the courts into defining corporations as legal people, fine -- their bed, they can sleep in it.

BP should be sliced up and sold as scrap.

This is either the worst joke, or the best troll, I've read all day. Can't tell which.

Stereotypes do not arise in a vacuum; I think our culture takes managers and their skills just about as seriously as those managers have given the culture reason too.

"Are government bodies not entitled to charge a nominal fee for services rendered?"

No.
Especially in this instance, as the service wasn't rendered. If you pay for Document X, the money doesn't go to the people who did whatever work went into that document, it goes to the reproduction office. All he's really done is take out the middle man. There's also that whole taxation thing...

The fact that you even wonder if it would be the same if it was "common" strikes a blow to your assessment that it actually sounded different. I'm sure good ones sound better than cheep ones, but all you convinced me of was that elitism has a note all its own.

And this is different than any other administration how, exactly?
(Not that everyone else doing it makes it OK now, just that the US government has sucked exactly like this for at least several decades, and probably longer.)

To my eye, this would be akin to the distinction between "assault," and "aggravated assault with a deadly weapon." Granted, both of my examples are violent, but I was trying to show a place where the law does in fact draw such fine distinctions. As opposed to rape, which is sort of the only word the law recognizes in terms of nonconsentual sex acts, with no grades of offense, at least as far as I know. Shoot, even flat-out killing someone has grades of offense, from accidental manslaughter through premeditated murder. Not that a rape is ever really accidental, but it would be interesting if it wasn't a binary legal switch.

Never mind all the crap that will get you on the sex offender list all by yourself without ever touching another soul, like getting caught pissing in an alley way.

No, it wasn't intended to predict anything in a scientifically rigorous manner, like predicting planetary orbits or something, so maybe a bad choice of words. Definitely more of a talking point.

That said, the equation was presented by Carl Sagan to some senator in a reverse manner, saying that if they knew N, they could predict L, which played nicely into the senator's anit-nuclear weapons view and thus secured funding for SETI. So its got that going for it, which is nice.

You're thinking of the Drake equation:

N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fl x Fe x Fi x Fc x L

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Without giving a lengthy description, at the beginning of the project that would grow into SETI, they asked more or less the same questions and decided that it really came down to, "What are the odds that after a given species invents radio, they invent nukes and destroy themselves?" The equation is intended to predict the number of advanced civilizations in the galaxy at any given time, based on a bunch of "educated guess," variables, like the number of planets that can support life, the number that actually do, the number of those that become intelligent, etc.

Which protoculture? The one that gets you high and drives your space fortress, or the one that brings sex back to your civilization?

Ugly? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? That thing looked AWESOME!
  (yes, I'm yelling. We're talking about the closest thing to a space fighter ever built)

Providing for his kids is all well and good. But I think most folks would agree that by the time the author's children are adults they should fend for themselves. And in this case, we're talking about the man's grandkids.

I dunno, was the slave good at casting fake rubber feet?

I think I speak for, well, a whole lot of people when I say, "Fuck 'em."