I think the classic phrase is, Reiser's razor.

That's correct. First, about half of it is exported, and 80% of the rest is animal feed. What remains is used mostly for starch (not all of it for eating). The sweet corn eaten in corn form is a tiny fraction.

The arguments for a very short copyright were all out there in 1841, in a powerful speech to the British House of Commons by Thomas Babington Macaulay:
http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm

Every single argument is still valid today.

Good point about medical research: that is a sizable exception. The difference with the model prevalent in the US is that those organizations typically collect many small donations, as opposed to large single endowments by wealthy donors.

Here, I think "Western institutions" should be understood as "mainly in the US, and to some extent the UK and the English-speaking world". To the best of my knowledge, in all other countries the situation is closer to that in Japan than in the US: the bulk of academic research is performed by public institutions using public funds.

You might want to try Mageia 2 when it comes out. They (Mandrake - Mandriva - Mageia) have had consistently good KDE support since the dawn of time (1998).

Which tells you that people who most dislike evangelicals don't know much about them. It's a very common pattern, to be honest.

Easy: because they are client states of the US.

That won't work: most textbooks are printed in China these days. And of course you can just forget about the globe.

I suspect that liking pink is innate to boys and girls alike. I have seen little boys (less than 3yo) go for bright pink objects over any other color. I am led to assume that pink just feels like a vivid, yet soft and pleasant color to us - that is, before we males duly acquire proper male tastes, and grow a strong, healthy distaste for it.

That said, I am quite convinced that there are, on average, innate psychological differences between men and women. It's just that these differences are much less pronounced than the differences between conventional male and female behaviors, and can only be appreciated in a fuzzy, statistical way, not with statements of the form "men prefer A, women prefer B".

Yup, the amount of atheist bigotry and unpleasantness here is incredible. Now in their defense, these people are probably Americans who endure a lot of religious bigotry in their daily lives. They are just trying to fight back, but this doesn't really help at all.

Actually, some of the more reasonable /. readers would probably find this a lot less objectionable if it was a case of Microsoft making money by selling Microsoft products.

I have lived in the US and I would never lump Americans together as imperialists. Actually, I wouldn't dream of lumping them together as *anything*. Not a clever thing to do with Americans.

OTOH, the US as a country - meaning the elected government - has imperialist policies and attitude, and has had them for a while now. It is up to US citizens to decide whether they care. In recent decades, the response has been underwhelming.

That is true of natural rights. But we live in societies where we have elected to grant ourselves many rights that are human constructs. The right to elect our leaders, for one, requires others to do things for us. Maybe you consider that you have a right to basic personal safety, which requires people to maintain a form of law and order.

Or maybe you are the sole inhabitant of a nation-island, in which case I take my comment back.