at-the-water-cooler.com

If Viacom, or anybody else for that matter, distributes information or content do they have intellectual property rights to the content? IMHO I would say they don’t, taken to the extreme (by asking the question of where is the line) AT&T could own the right’s to conversations between you and your friends; that sounds crazy. But, attorneys working for Viacom have sent a cease and desist letter to YouTube claiming – ownership? — of a  Christopher Knight(C) 2007, production! Telling the “copyright holder” to remove it from YouTube.

Hat tip: http://mashable.com/2007/08/30/viacom-infringement/

Viacom has stopped short of plagiarism, they don’t claim they created it, they just claim exclusive rights to it in other words ownership.

 Oh and if you are interested, Regal Cinemas, grabbed the rights to the Transformers movie based on this Arlington County Precedent

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While people are revising global warming calculations

NASA global warming temperature revision redux: How big is the problem?

There is a heat wave coming into southern California. The way I see it is us little tiny humans have about the same amount of control over the weather as the little ants that go after the trash cans. If all the humans jump at the same time the planet will not collapse, nor will the planet collapse if all the bugs jump at the same time (by both number and combined weight, bugs have more impact on the planet than humans). I don’t know if the planet is getting hotter or colder. But, I am far more certain that neither myself or the government can change the weather.

So we have two choices, we can get out of the weather by going inside or we can beat the heat by celebrating it, getting tans, eating ice cream.

This heat wave should be making its way across the country sometime next week.

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The vast majority of Americans are more astute on political matters. I think the myth about blonds being dump is a direct result of the media asking Hollywood blonds questions. Reality check — they are rich because of their looks not their brains.

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When I saw this story: Students lined up against wall, shot in head execution-style. I did notice one was not killed, but there was no description of the person police were looking for. But I had found the story on digg and at the time of the posting. I was posting on the fact that at that time a great number of comments from people where buried, many buried comments just pointing out that self defense would of been viable.

Well it turns out now that they found the person Hat tip polpundit.com follow up story “Illegal Immigrant Pleads Not Guilty in NJ Execution style Deaths”. So the reason for no physical description was political correctness.

>> Update: Police are offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case. — Think a drawing of suspect may have helped in the search

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The position the US has put itself into

China threatens the nuclear option
Will China shoot itself in the foot? Their threat is more threatening to them
Bush Slams ‘Foolhardy’ China Over Trillion Dollar US Currency Threat
China threatens to trigger US dollar crash
Uncle Sam, Your Banker Will See You Now By Paul Craig Roberts
In the Hole to China/the Dollar Under Siege…

China holds 40% of the US dept., while they are happy with the current status quo of having a lowered value of their currency to the US dollar; allowing them to build industry and sell product cheaply to the US — the value difference means their retail matches the US wholesale price - means Walmart sells imports not US made goods.

What they get from the current status quo, is not much profits but volume in their production. If they dump dollars the price of the US dollar will fall the price of imports in the US will go up. The lower dollar would make US products cheap for exporting, US labor would be cheap as viewed from other countries. But the bank s who hold dollars would increase interest rates in hopes of making the dollar attractive internationally IE if banks in Mexico gave a 50% interest rate I would consider opening a bank account in Mexico. But high interest rates would pull money away from companies — IE investors would choose between a stock which would bring a 10% return on investment or money with a guaranteed return.

The likely outcome would be a recession with interest rates and inflation being more important than cheap US labor. But the status quo is also putting pressure on US manufactures who can not compete against china on an unleveled playing field, causing them to not be able to make as much product and recess within those industries that China moves into.

If China presses the button, the imports to the US would stop. They would have a recession for manufacturing cheap cameras … their economy would see a drop in prices on imports and they would have to figure out a different use for their factories. Maybe they could go into the weapons business.

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you don’t know if the computer where you will be going has application software to open up, edit and use your documents. It would not be practical to take installations with you, nor in most cases legal.

Portal applications are programs that run from a file folder, and don’t need to be installed. They can be placed on a USB drive and by doing so become usable on any computer that the USB drive is stuck into; even internet cafes.

Open office has been configured as a portable application available at portablefreeware.com

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Soon (maybe) people who have been to war and had their view of reality turned upside down will be returning to the US. They are not the only people who are suffering from Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is a debilitating condition that follows a terrifying physical or emotional event.

Research has found rates of PTSD among adolescents ranging from 6.3% (in a community sample of older adolescents) to 29.6% (in substance-dependent adolescents receiving treatment, ages 15 to 19). And, among the substance-dependent adolescents, 19.2% currently had PTSD.

We as a society seem to have lost the will to maintain a safety net to rehabilitate people, we have historic amount of people in jail and they don’t seem to be Able to be rehabilitated into returning into society. Somehow we are going to reconsider how to help solve our basic plan on how to bring people back into society or the cost of having these people unproductive will only continue to increase.

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