Movie companies do go out of business, see MGM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM imploding violently. It is just rare as most companies make enough money to still run. Please do not say all companies cheat or use shells, the reason why only making 20 million on say a 10 million dollar film is bad is the way investors work. In a movie you need to pay for Advertising, Actors and Investors. Investors get first cut of the profits, then Actors/Directors, and finally you pay off the ad budget in accounting. Its a simple way of accounting for all the expensive, budgets are separated into pure costs (say 10 million), then bonuses/percentages of gross, and finally paying off separate fees (Ads, legal, the electric bill, etc) I am an accounting minor, so they make us learn all of these horrible things, but they make the world go round. Copyright is too long though, blame the Mouse and International Copyright expanding, leading to a perfect storm of CC being needed to prevent the total loss of copyright for anyone under 82 years old.

Yea, I don't buy that political bs distinction. It is a completely none-derogatory and officially used term used throughout Indian / Native America / guys that got here first groups.

I know certain political groups would like to make "Indian" the "n" word, but it is not. Now, asserting that I am somehow less of a "native" than someone's else, even though my family has lived in the Americas for the last 350+ years is offensive. If that is the case, then strictly speaking there is no such thing as a "native" American.

But, not really too interested in getting in to that discussion at the moment.

Yea, you are going to want to spend some time digging through all the supreme court rulings in that last 40 years or so regards Indian treaties. Granted, the Indian treaties are a very different legal animal from say treatise over copyrights with other countries, but treatise do in fact carry more weight than the constitution in at least very important cases.

If you are not up for the time to do that here is the basic legal theory upheld by the supreme court on the subject (and I am sure there are better ways of putting it):

The territory that the U.S. occupies was found by recognition of a set of treaties that in many cases predate the territorial space of the United States. Thus, the existence and enforceability of those treaties makes everything else contained in the constitution possible. The most important of which is the territorial definition of the U.S., along with lots of nice things like mining rights, water rights, hunting rights, and so on.

For example, this is why Indians have casinos and the individual States in most cases can not really do a whole lot about it. Essentially, most of the United States is under some sort of lease to another government, and if you ignore those "rental" agreements the whole legal mess called the U.S. starts falling apart. Even when the U.S. breaks those treatises, they still have to pay up in court for the damages. One that comes to mind would be things like the Black Hills land claim at the moment. There are hundreds if not thousands of other rulings, and why the U.S. government tends to get its rear eventually handed to them in a court room over breaking those treatise sooner or later.

Let me see if I understand their methods. If we take some sort of statistical sample with trees common to the deserts in Africa (let's say two Beatles named Ringo and Paul live in all of them), we can also determine the number of species on Earth? What happens if we pick a tree species where no Beatles or any species lives? Hell, what if we start with a desert with no trees or life at all? How about the poles? How many Beatles live in them apple trees?

The statistical likelihood of BS seems very high.

On some level, that crapware makes the conversion to Linux all the more appealing because if a company would have to say spend 1 million dollars to convert the crapware, they can then afford to do it because they are not spending money on the OS and other software.

Long live the crapware!!!

Most of the paying customers out there are told what to buy by the IT department, that now a days likly has more than a few closet FOSS people.

BP in one of its early environmental impact statements filed with the U.S. government gave something like 600,000 barrels a day as a worse case before the well was drilled.

So, relax everyone. It is only able to dump 600,000 barrels of oil a day according to BP.

Uh, actually look at things that are sent out at this model. Pay Per View events are NOT cheap, at around 24 USD a pop, and they are subsidised by ticket sales (see the Wrestlemania events, or Mixed Martial Arts matches. For the vast majority of televised events , people would not be willing to pay 24 dollars (what happens when you remove that ad revenue) for them.

I have seen beaver dams in the over 1/2 mile in length range in southern Canada / Northern MN ( the tops are often used as parts of hiking trails ). All I see are sat and airplane photos. Has anyone hiked out to take on the ground photos of the dam and measure it? Links please, if you got some?

I have been flamed more than a few times around here for suggesting Computer Science has not got a clue what they are doing when it comes to AI. Philosophy has been at this problem and more for the better part of the last 400+ years (more like a 1,000 years) in a serious way. The stock b.s., I get from the science fiction fan boys is that somehow natural language is a problem that can just be brute forced as if you were trying to figure out the password you forgot to your email account. Good luck with that.

By the way, language "recognition" by a computer is likly the easy part of the problem for AI researchers to crack. It is still not going to yield any real AI, just better cars and toasters.

I recently went through my email stats to see what IP's where sending email that was being rejected the most. I found only about 10 ip's in countries I have never had a reason to deal with composed about 70-80% of the waisted rejected email (thousands of emails each). I then either banned the country or the ip address. Not so much a solution, as saving some resources.

     

I seen a lecture where Stephen Hawking told everyone not to worry about falling to black holes because you will come out the other side. Nice guy and all, but I am not so sure about how sound his advice is on certain things.

The Chilean government and most airlines avoided flying around a volcano in Southern Chile a couple years ago. They did not however restrict small planes. In the course of about 4 months, 3 small planes crashed including a military flight. They were all prop planes with more than one engine. No one every officially linked the crashes to the volcano, but it was definitely outside the statistical norm for crashes in the area (like one every 2-3 years normally).

I worked as a teacher in China a couple years ago and was only paid $350 US a month, plus housing, and still managed to save money. So, that is not exactly slave labor wages by Chinese economy standards at $0.50 x 15 hours a day = $7.5 a day. That is something like $180 US a month. The working hours suck by western standards, but that is fairly normal working hours in China.

Also I don't buy that photo. When I was teaching at the University, I would go in to a room and there would be like 50 students all sleeping between classes. It is not unusual for Chinese workers to catch a catnap on breaks, because they work long hours.

I taught research writing at a Chinese Agricultural University for a year. I am not even sure where to start about the plagiarism.

Kids would bring in things so obviously stolen that the authors name was still in the text.

Chinese react to public shame and to threats well. I likly would not have been allowed to use most of the tactics in the States or Europe. I did finally get them to write real papers after almost a year (even if they were mostly bad), and reference their sources. I just told them, "this is how we steel others ideas in the West."

I also learned a thing or two about how Chinese view theft of ideas. For several thousand years, copying famous work was a sign of respect. After all, it is all "owned" by the Emperor or the States anyway. In a sense it is all public property, and copy rights means you have a right to copy.

Now, that is fine in the old days, but not in a modern China. At the University I was at, they were doing things like genetic engineering knew super strains of rice. There was no rigid testing going on. Students were all but being encouraged to take it home to their families to plant in the rural areas. Other foreign researchers told me how labs and experiments were contaminated in all sorts of different ways; yet, everyone was being pushed to publish. Publishing was the end, and not the means to science for many of them.

After what I seen, I am certain sooner or later we are all going to pay the price for China's great experiment with Science.