And this makes no sense. It is also inconsistent with the use of the term "dwarf" in astronomy, where dwarf stars are still stars, and dwarf galaxies are still galaxies.

If Earth were in Pluto's orbit, it would not clear that orbit of other KBOs. And the requirement that an object "clear its orbit" to be a planet is arbitrary and does not have consensus among astronomers.

If this isn't being blown out of proportion much, then the worst potential consequence I've thought of so far is political dissidents having their network exposed.

Pine works great with IMAP: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~csadmin/wiki/index.php/Setting_up_Pine_(Alpine)_for_IMAP_Gmail

Um... only F-16 in the current Air Force inventory is single engine... and it costs more to maintain than does F/A-18...

Yeah, yeah. What percentage of people in the sixties do you think called themselves hippies?

Being of that era, I have to call bullshit on a cheap meme. It's like blaming George Bush on the Greens on 20 years and about the same percentages.

The right to bear arms? Bring in the bears, I'll take five arms please!

This notion set off a massive warning bell in my head. Nothing could be worse than something once finished which gets re-written into something 8 times longer, or something written specifically for length in the first place. Exhibit one: Moby Dick. Exhibit two: much of Charles Dickens. If this is true you've probably convinced me to never read Foundation, or at least to track down the original short stories rather than trudge through a novelization of a short yet clearly complete, cerebral, and influential story.

+1
I used KDE4 packages for debian lenny for a long time and it rarely crashed ! At the same time Kubuntu's officially released packages crashed . They better get packages from debian unstable :)

Copy rights don't exist -- they are complete legal fictions, currently designed to make sure the Disney Corporation can keep profiting from any configuration of 3 intersecting circles.

The only valid concern here is attribution rights, which are natural in a social sense, and act as a consumer protection against fraud. Plagiarism is usually defined more in terms of proper attribution than "copying", because uses of the terms with the root "copy" are so ambiguous and problematic (esp. in the digital age) as to make it unusable in enforcement, even when limited to enforcement of social norms. Quotes, citations, footnotes, bibliographies, and now hyper-links are all valid methods to lend attributions to originating sources. None of these attribution methods were used in this case, which makes finding of fault very simple.

Please don't let this debate devolve into "fair use" definitions, which are still ambiguous after centuries of contradictory court findings. Defining fair use as less than 140 characters, a few sentences, a chorus, a bar, a frame, an act, or a page are all equally subjective and ambiguous. The variety of potential valid reuse contexts are just far too great to simplify by numerical means. Copyright laws in the U.S. have always been in conflict with the First Amendment, and "fair use" has never been a sufficient work-around.

Let's talk about attribution rights and forget the copy right fiction.

I think the point is whether or not a distinctly new work is created by the use of the previously created material. I disagree with the Verve outcome because the song uses an excerpt from "The Last Time" recording to a create a new work that any reasonable person would never mistake for being by The Rolling Stones. When Disney lost their copyright defense against "The Air Pirates" it was because despite visual similarities, their were too many differences between them for one to be mistaken for the other. No one could read a Disney comic and think it was The Air Pirates. If Helene Hegemann were a student and plagiarized another person's work to save herself the effort, or to demonstrate a false knowledge of the material, that would obviously be wrong. However, it seems that she created a new work with a legitimate right to exist in its own right, as determined by both sales and acclaim. Many songs which use samples are also unique works, as any fan of Hip-Hop or Beck or the Beastie Boys would tell you. Requiring permission to use an excerpt or sample runs the risk of denying the rest of us the resultant work, should permission be denied or be prohibitively expensive. I personally quite like DJ Dangermouse's "The Grey Album", and could never mistake it for The Beatles or Jay-Z, but yet it is an illegal work nonetheless. I think the Hip-Hop genre as a whole was much better before samples had to be cleared. If a work is entirely plagiarized, it would likely prove redundant (such as with a plagiarized term paper on a generic topic) and be forgotten anyway. Her book doesn't seem to fall into this category.

Except that in most of the U.S. the old dusk active mosquitoes have been replaced by the invasive Asian tiger mosquito, which bites all God-dammed day long. Where does the line for these lasers start. I want at least two of them. I'll wear a welding mask when I have to go outside.

That is the argument that is often dismissed by people arguing *against* Apple - if you price up a Mac on features/price as was often the case - firewire, built in wireless, bundled software, gigE, bluetooth KB+mouse, webcam then the argument was always turned to bottom line price (back in the days before pretty much everything shipped with all those pieces on the motherboard as extra gravy - Apple were one of the first to ship computers with ethernet and wireless as standard, for example, and include FW even on the lowest models).

Not saying it's a bad argument - I'm sure that a tablet PC + netbook that share the same screen will have more features than the iPad, which is not even a tablet, but it cuts both ways. I can't imagine that it's going to be cheap though.

Sure, teach religion in religion class and science in science class.

That depends on the rocket.
The Redstone, Thor, Jupiter, Atlas, Delta, Saturn IB and the first stage of the Saturn V all used what is basically jet fuel. The USSR used liquid fueled rockets on subs and yes they did a few issues with that.
BTW the Navy was going use the Jupiter on subs but they decided that solid fuel was the way to go for the reasons you gave. In that case it wouldn't be the fuel so much as all that LOX and fuel together.
I do agree that there is a difference but If I had not included that statment you know that somebody would say, "What about the Regulus, Harpoon, and Tomahawk? They are liquid fueled."
And I really didn't want to deal with that today.