This headline from USA Today: “Federal forecasters predict a near-normal Hurricane season”.
As if normalcy is abnormal!
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/forecast/story/2012-05-21/hurricane-forecast/55185644/1
Archive for May, 2012
The US Fish and Wildlife Service now says that logging is good for northern Spotted Owls. Yes, you heard that right–the bird that is loggers love to hate for shutting down timber operations in old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest will actually benefit from resumption of logging. This is a common theme. When legal action by Heartwood shut down logging in National Forests across the midwest and northeast over threats to the Indiana bat, the Forest Service planned a timber sale (Buzzard’s Roost) to benefit Indiana bats.
US Fish and Wildlife Service 2012. Endangered and threatened wildlife and plants; Revised critical habitat for the northern Spotted Owl. Federal Register 77:14062-14165, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2012-03-08/pdf/2012-5042.pdf, accessed 17 April 2012.
I received a message in my inbox from Staples, Inc., asking me to review a product I buy fairly frequently. I went ahead and filled out the review form and wrote a two-word review and then clicked “publish”, but an error message came up to tell me I needed to agree to the user agreement. So I clicked on the user agreement (with a company called PowerReviews) to see if I would agree to it and found this passage:
“By transmitting product or service ratings or reviews (collectively, “Reviews”) to the Review Service, you hereby (a) irrevocably assign and transfer to PowerReviews all of your rights, title and interest, on a worldwide basis, including, without limitation, all intellectual property rights and moral rights, in and to such Reviews; (b) to the extent the preceding assignment and transfer is ineffective, grant PowerReviews an exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual and fully sublicensable and transferable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, distribute, publish, create derivative works from and publicly display such Reviews throughout the universe in any media…”
So you’re telling me I can’t publish my review on Venus, because it’s now owned by PowerReviews? I’m probably violating their intellectual property by publishing part of the user agreement. So sue me.
