...that we pipe our drinking water through it.

(Though, to be fair, the water that comes out of PVC pipes does tend to have a lot of DHMO in it.)

You'd be much more credible if you didn't have a habit of confusing 650,000 with 650,000,000.

You are aware that the ice core data in Gore's movie goes back about 650 thousand years, right? I ask because you mention "650 million" years five times in your post, and "half a billion" three more times, which seems to rule out a simple typo.

In recent years, scientists have extended the record back to about 800,000 years ago. If you've got CO2 data from 650,000,000 years back, there's a Nobel Prize waiting for you.

*Sigh*. China is not "kicking our asses". China is cooperating extensively with us by making lots of things for us more efficiently than we can, and both buying lots of things from us that we can make (or do) more efficiently than they can, and investing in our economy.

It's not a competition, and it's much closer to a $1,000,000,000,000-sum game than to a zero-sum game. Go read Paul Krugman.

it is only after visiting the link that slashdot will retroactively make all of the universe break.

Fixed that for you.

Usually-insightful judge thinks out loud on his blog, shows he doesn't "get" the Web, makes tentative suggestion to stretch copyright to cover paraphrasing and linking, is skeletonized by bloggers in under 60 seconds.

On the other hand, of course he's making economic arguments about copyright: the whole two-hundred-year-old justification for copyright is that we chip away a bit at my right to repeat what you wrote in hopes that it'll give you an incentive to write more and better stuff, which makes everyone better off on the whole. When copyright implementation doesn't lead to broad economic rewards, there's no justification for it.

The real WTF here is... wait, wrong site. What's actually wrong with Posner's post is that he just doesn't understand why newspapers are dying: it's because they suck. The reporters are ignorant and biased, the editors are worse, the readers have never been the ones really paying the bills, actual news-gathering has been declining for decades, and when they piss off a chunk of their readers, that chunk can go elsewhere for their news now. That the "elsewhere" is frequently of far better quality is just an extra stake through the heart.

Strictly speaking, that's true (and, in my opinion, a good thing.) But whether or not they should, judges do create an awful lot of law, either by coming up with new rules or by stretching their interpretations of existing legislation.

I used to work for a company which was forbidden (by the founder's wife, who also worked there) from employing the booth-babe tactic. So at one conference, we exploited some connection or other to set up a petting zoo--which turned out to be way more popular than the booth-babes: lots of attendees had their families with them, and heck, wouldn't you pet a baby tiger if you could?

Maybe a synthesis of the two ideas would be even better....