That "link to the original source" leads nowhere; try this one: http://digg.com/d1pFFA.

You can rant, split hairs, and self-justify all you like, but the fact remains that piracy is theft. People talk about the length of copyright, arguing that it should be only twelve years, as if that were an issue in the Pirate's Bay trial. Riiiight. The game you stole last week was more than twelve years old, right? The movie you stole was made before 1997?

It's possible that the term of copyright IS too long, but that's not what's at issue in the Pirate's Bay trial, and pretending that it is is a transparent attempt to obscure the fact that the theft of much more recent works is taking place.

Calorie-free chocolate may help some, but I think the professor overlooks an important fact: the melting point of chocolate is precisely the same as the temperature of the human mouth. One of the reasons for chocolate's popularity is its texture, and no inhaler can ever give you that.

*laugh* It's true -- I am; I joined all of about three days ago.

I used to be a Social Psychology professor, and I would hammer on "correlation is not causation" -- with all kinds of obvious and silly examples -- all semester, and at the end of three months, some students STILL hadn't gotten it.

I'm glad I'm not the only voice crying in the wilderness, though. :-)

I find it interesting that the author of the BBC article is assuming that the male chimps are trading meat for sex. The original article goes on to state that female chimps don't hunt, so they can't obtain meat on their own. When the male chimps donate meat to the female chimps, they don't just get more sex, they also increase the chances that the female chimp will take in enough protein and calories to bear a healthy baby.

Humans look at the male chimp's giving the female chimp meat as "trading" meat for sex, but there are a lot of other constructions that could be put on that behavior. He could just as easily be trying to assure that his offspring will be healthy. Or trying to assure the health and well-being of a female that he's come to care about.

The original article says that people had tried to find meat-for-sex exchanges in chimps before and failed, because they didn't give the animals enough credit for long-term planning. They looked to see if Chimp A gave meat to Chimp B, then had sex with her two minutes later, and they didn't find that. The current researchers succeeded because they took a longer-term view and counted meat-giving and sexual activity over time. But it's possible that they're still not giving the animals enough credit -- what if the meat-giving isn't trading meat for sex but is something else entirely?

Observations of primate behavior will never tell us anything until we learn to just report what we see the animals doing, then think of every plausible reason why they might be doing that, rather than assuming that the animals aren't capable of doing what we do.

Damn. I'm sorry Christopher Reeve didn't live to see this -- he spent so much of his time fighting to promote research on paralysis, and this is such an exciting development.