People like that who nave no other regards for other's property should not only pay to repay the destroyed equipment, but also pay to offset the time of the person they stole from and loss of income they caused.
Oh, sorry I didn't mention it before but it's clear after reading the other entries. Login is not a smooth process, which is why I don't use it. If it were smoother, I guess I would.
Dark Horse: I agree wholeheartedly. I stopped going to Boing Boing, which called itself a directory of wonderful things, when a guest poster posted an article on (forced?) castration. And Xeni? Pronounced Shenu? WTF is that? She is simply way too annoying.
Wes, there is a point where the word is cumbersome to pronounce. This is different then when someone wants to make the pronunciation "more efficient" by chopping a few syllables off.
The guy is a nutjob. If any if the words he is using were mistranslated or were translated differently, his magical calculations will not work. Now, match that up with the point that MikeCA made and we're not even sure that all the days since the New Testament was put together were kept track of accurately, let alone since JC's birth and/or death. Also, what about leap years? When we they start keeping track of those? In any case, I can predict with 100% accuracy that the world WILL end on a day that ends in a Y, that is unless we go all Turkmenistan and start renaming the days of the week.
Miss C. The National Association of Good Grammar is just one guy, just like it says in the SFGate article. So "this guy" has endorsed a convention that suits him because it is "easier to say" not because it is accurate.
The basics behind this are simple and awesome. If a change in an organism (or any reproducing thing) happens, there are three outcomes that matter to this line of thinking. The change can contribute to the ability of the resulting thing to be able to reproduce, the change can negatively affect the thing's ability to reproduce or the chance can have no (or close to no) measurable effect on the thing's reproductive success.
As these things live in a world where reproduction is not guaranteed, over time, changes will either help the population of things get larger as they reproduce better, lessen the population as the things reproduce poorly, or have no effect as the reproductive rate doesn't change.
Now, as things live in a world with finite resources and things eat other things, over time, a population of things will either die out, stay the same size or increase.
Noting this, it stands to reason that in most cases, evolutionary changes that hinder an individual's ability to reproduce, will die out in a population of things unless that change reoccurs often enough.
This means that successful mutations promote themselves by default, because unsuccessful ones die out through the lower reproductive potential they impart onto their owners. What survives are the individuals with changes that do not affect their "reproductive potential". But what thrives (over time) in the population are the changes that help the critters reproduce better.
It's a remarkably simple concept that plays out amazingly over generations in population biology and also maps over into other disciplines.
(Zav ducks, Zav runs, Zav hides)
http://vimeo.com/6651442
As these things live in a world where reproduction is not guaranteed, over time, changes will either help the population of things get larger as they reproduce better, lessen the population as the things reproduce poorly, or have no effect as the reproductive rate doesn't change.
Now, as things live in a world with finite resources and things eat other things, over time, a population of things will either die out, stay the same size or increase.
Noting this, it stands to reason that in most cases, evolutionary changes that hinder an individual's ability to reproduce, will die out in a population of things unless that change reoccurs often enough.
This means that successful mutations promote themselves by default, because unsuccessful ones die out through the lower reproductive potential they impart onto their owners. What survives are the individuals with changes that do not affect their "reproductive potential". But what thrives (over time) in the population are the changes that help the critters reproduce better.
It's a remarkably simple concept that plays out amazingly over generations in population biology and also maps over into other disciplines.
Happy New Year.
"is built an"??