Actually, the reason nuclear power isn't "clean" at the moment is because all the commercial power-producing reactors have been built with the overriding purpose of -not- producing anything like weapon-grade plutonium.
The biggest objection to breeder reactors is that they produce or "breed" fissionable material under normal operating conditions. Ideally in a breeder reactor this material would then be used as fuel to produce more energy and less highly-radioactive waste, but objectors like to note that it could be extracted and used in weapons instead.

I think the point being made is: the photographs were created with the intention of being as faithful to the original paintings as possible without adding any new creative input. Doing that in photography is hard work, an incredible amount of time and expertise goes into the setup for the picture.

In the US, such a faithful duplication of a work that is in the public domain is also considered part of the public domain. The point isn't that the duplication was necessarily easy to perform, but that the duplication was performed with the minimum possible amount of new creative input so as to remain as faithful to the original as the duplicator could manage. This doesn't mean that any image that incorporates source material from the public domain is automatically impossible to copyright, but it does mean that in order to copyright it the new work would have to be something other than a maximally-faithful reproduction of the original.

You're right, the creation of the copies likely involved a significant expenditure of time and effort and requires a great deal of skill. However, in the US, the amount of effort required to do something has never been part of the test for whether a work can be copyrighted.

The fact that the portraits are in the UK, and the work was done by a UK photographer at the behest of a UK organization means that, in the UK, those works may be considered copyrighted. However the contention thus far has been: in the US they're not considered copyrighted.

and resemble... look like, butterfly. Bird.

It's nit-picky to be sure, but all modern handguns that I'm aware of are rifles (rifled barrel) as opposed to smooth-bores (no rifling). That said, the usage of "rifle" in common speech has come to mean "long barreled firearm intended to be fired from the shoulder".

Sorry, I must be new here. :)

Joking aside, I had noticed that the other responses to your argument basically break down to "people are too lazy to grow their own, of course they'll pay for it." Which really didn't answer your main point, or make a lot of sense when you compare the opportunity costs once illegality is no longer an issue.

The counterpoint to that argument would be: if would-be users of marijuana are no longer spending 1 billion dollars a year on it, then they will spend that billion elsewhere. If that elsewhere is industries that are taxed then, regardless of the feasibility of taxing marijuana sales, there should be a net increase in state and federal tax dollars. If, on the other hand, people continue to chose to purchase their marijuana and those sales are taxed as would be any other industry then we will see an increase in tax dollars from that source.

So yes; if you can just grow it you won't pay $3500/lb for it. Instead you'll take the money that used to go to your purchases of marijuana and spend it on snacks or big screen TVs.

Oh yeah, well I'm... I mean I know an American Perl Programmer. I... I mean he can even type illegibly!

One more agreement here. I use it for nearly all my programming regardless of language, and for all of my note-taking. My only regret is that it doesn't have a native Linux or OS-X port.