The Geneva Conventions only apply when a state of war exists between a nation that has signed them and one or more sovereign countries. This is one of the reasons that modern politicians like to describe acts of bombing or invading somebody else's country as a "police action", "insurgency suppression operation", "humanitarian aid mission", or whatever other made-up name they can come up to avoid having to apply a bunch of inconvenient rules about wars that they agreed to abide by.

You cannot copyright a single binary number, but you can copyright a specific sequence of them, e.g. computer software, a movie on DVD, digital representations of text, digital photos, etc.

I don't know how things work today, but when I was a session musician from the late 1970s until the mid 1980s, standard artist contracts obliged them to produce around 50 minutes of new recorded material each year. This doesn't sound like much, but up and coming artists had heavy touring and promotional schedules, so they often had difficulty finding enough time to write, arrange, and record 50 minutes of music (which could take several months just to record). That's why so many acts had a brilliant debut album followed by a disappointing one: the first album had the best stuff they'd writtten up to then, recorded by people who had an advance on royalties, and could spend all their time arranging and recording; while the subsequent one was put together while they were touring and promoting the first one, so it had a couple of strong tracks that couldn't fit onto the first album, plus some other stuff that both the artists and record company reckoned was mediocre, but would have to do because there was no oppotunity to write anything better.

Cheap vat-produced meat will reduce the demand for farm-produced meat, but there will still be a significant number of people who are willing to pay extra for the real thing, just like they do now with items that have "organic" labels on them. That together with large list of industrial, medical, and consumer products which come from livestock will ensure that they will continue to be economically viable for the forseeable future.

Some orcas like eating other mammals, but the vast majority eat fish, and will ignore anything that isn't a fish. Mammal hunting orca are equally prey-specific (i.e. they ignore fish), and given the fact that there are no notable physiological differences between the groups, it is likely that prey preferences together with effective hunting strategies are learned at an early age, and become ingrained.

And while it is true to say that most (but not all) sharks will eat fish, there are several species that actively hunt other sorts of prey, e.g. the great white's known propensity for seals and sealions; the tiger-shark's love of sea turtles; and the grey/bull/whaler (same shark, different names) which seems to be an equal opportunity hunter that can move freely between fresh and salt water, and is responsible for the majority of shark attacks on humans.

Correct, if of course one's definiton of "forever" is a year, because the iPhone was launched in 2007.

The dark ages was a time of significant innovation, e.g. the wheeled, adjustable pough; water mills; the horse collar; draw plates for making wire; the blast furnace; pointed and ribbed arches; the flying buttress; etc., etc., etc.

Kepler, Newton and Galileo did not live during the dark ages. All were well known during their lives, but only Galileo got into trouble over his publications, and it was the way his book was written rather than its scientific content that got him imprisoned (it featured a dialogue between a thinly veiled version of himself as the wise know-it-all, who expounds at length to an idiot who is obviously based on the pope, thereby humiliating and annoying a man who had been his friend since childhood). Kepler's problems in later life were due to his connection with Calvinists, not his scientific work, and Newton, contrary to being crushed, did quite well for himself.

Common people didn't know about their works because they were published in Latin, so the few commoners who were literate were unable to read them.

Most craft knowledge was lost through illiteracy, not guild protectionism. Few European countries in the Middle Ages had literacy rates in excess of 3%, so the chances of craft practices being written about were remote, because those who were literate had no notable interest in them. And while it is true that some guilds became powerful, they only existed on a local level, and their power came from letters of marque or letters patent from rulers that gave them a monopoly on the practice of a trade in a particular town or city. Not being a member of the correct guild within a jurisdiction meant that it was against the law to do whatever it was that the guild controlled, so the members of the guild grew rich because there was no competition for their services.

It is not obvious because turning ideas into viable economic products is an aspect of the totality of innovation, not the entirety of it. So stenvar's question was completely correct, because while it is true that patents affect some types of innovation, they do not affect all of them, so they are not a regulation of innovation.

Gee, why didn't the stupid staff of Ecuador's London embassy think of this briliant plan? Could it be because, unlike you, they are aware of the fact that diplomatic immunity laws and customs do not mean that a host country's police are obliged to stand around while a diplomat breaks the law on that host country's territory?

The joke is actually the number of bozos on Slashdot who are repeating the fallacy that arrest warrants in European countries (including the UK) require charges. They do not now, nor ever have, required charges -- indeed, the _vast_ majority of arrest warrants have been issued without any prior charges. I respectfully suggest that you and others of your ilk actually read up on European and UK law instead making posts that do nothing except display your ignorance of the subject.

There is no such thing as unbiased journalism.

Survival of a species means survival of genes, not individuals. Individual survival can be detrimental to species survival if the number of individuals becomes too large for its environment to support, in which case the species as a whole can become extinct.

Note also that civilization is new in both human and evolutionary terms (around 10,000 years old), so the jury is still out on whether it turns out to be something that helps with our long term species survival, or ends up being something whose short-term benefits were achieved at the cost of the species as a whole.

Some points: (1) All figures in the article are from organisations who are known for their exaggerated estimates (the article itself says that the figures are "inflated"); and (2) even if that were not the case, the 115,000 figure is for primates, the vast majority of which will have been monkeys that are specially bred for the purpose to ensure that they aren't carrying any diseases which could effect experimental results. Chimps are very rarely used as lab animals because they are slow breeders, and sexually mature chimps (without which they cannot be bred) require special enclosures and trained handlers, because pissed off adult chimps that get loose tend to rip peoples' faces off.

It should also be noted that vivisection and animal research are not the same thing at all, although the organisations who produced the figures would like us to think that they are. Biologists, geneticists, gerontologists, congitive and behaviour specialist, and various other types of scientist publish a large body of research every year which based on animals, many (but far from all) of which are in labs, but the very nature of the research precludes harming the subjects, either physically or psychologically. Given the history of the sources, I doubt that they even tried to filter out these types of research from their figures.