Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

That's great - I might plagiarize you and post that to him. I invited him to the Sift - but I don't think he is willing to face the star chamber.

Beyonce, I'm really happy for you, and I'mma let you finish, but Coldplay had the best musical group plagiarism of all time.

Exactly what I thought - this looks like a completely blatant 99% ripoff of Crimsonland, which incidentally looked a 100 times better while being a 2003 freeware(!) game. Plagiarism wtf?

Let's just be clear here that the free market solution to someone being poor and sick is for them to die. If you’re too poor for HBO, you go without watching True Blood. If you’re too poor for a MacBook Pro, you make due without one. And if you’re too poor for statins you get a heart attack. And if you’re too poor to get your heart attack treated you die. That would be what a free market health care system looked like -- like free markets in other things.

(I blatantly plagiarized that rant, but it's one worth repeating.)

I dedicate this video to you...

In reply to this comment by EDD:
Oh I'm so terribly sorry dear, I really didn't want to hurt your feelings, because I respect you immensely - as a personality, an auteur and an entertainer. I simply can't stand Dickens, the little whiny bitch.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
It really hurt my feelings when you downvoted my plagiarism of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, chapter 1.

Hahaha that reminds me of a quote from the classic movie, Orgasmo: "Never quote Dickens in my apartment again!"

In reply to this comment by EDD:
Oh I'm so terribly sorry dear, I really didn't want to hurt your feelings, because I respect you immensely - as a personality, an auteur and an entertainer. I simply can't stand Dickens, the little whiny bitch.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
It really hurt my feelings when you downvoted my plagiarism of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, chapter 1.

Oh I'm so terribly sorry dear, I really didn't want to hurt your feelings, because I respect you immensely - as a personality, an auteur and an entertainer. I simply can't stand Dickens, the little whiny bitch.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
It really hurt my feelings when you downvoted my plagiarism of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, chapter 1.

It really hurt my feelings when you downvoted my plagiarism of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, chapter 1.

The problem is that the journalists don't even read the papers they're writing about. I'll bet they plagiarize somebody's press release instead. And journalists almost never cite their sources in enough detail that you can actually trace it back to a specific scientific paper (again, probably because they read the press release instead).

Gore is a self-anointed figurehead in what I deem one of the biggest hoaxes perpetrated on the human race. He deserves to be targeted as he targets others. He was a "C" student who originally took environmental classes because they were easier. His crockumentary has been seen by many more people than have read Lomborg's tome, and "An Inconvenient Truth" has been soundly thrashed for numbers 1-6 listed (except perhaps for plagiarism).

It's simply telling that Gore won't debate, when infinite resources are at his disposal for such an undertaking.

The greenvangelicals are beyond reason on the GW issue and the politicians love AGW because it gives them the omnipresence of God without placing any moral authority higher than their own. At last they have a way to link all their schemes in a unifying "circle of life".

The sun is responsible for heating up the earth as well as other planets which have no SUVs as of yet. Man tried to create his own paradise via 'Biosphere II' and nearly suffocated the inhabitants. If they can't mix the proper ratio of gases in a bubble, do you really think these international goofballs can "fine tune" a planet's weather?

Man, this is never going to get sifted. Nothing happens in the video!

Also, why would you take the side of Bjorn Lomborg? Lomborg does not dispute the science of global warming at all. He believes it's happening and it's caused by man. He also believes it's so far gone that measures to stop it would need to be much more drastic than a carbon tax and the Kyoto protocol. But Lomborg thinks we need different long term strategies and that stopping global warming isn't as important as other things.

So, why is Lomborg the hero in this video? Because Gore is a democrat? Anything anti-Gore is good?

A debate format wouldn't be that useful anyway, especially with some media figurehead like Gore. This may shock you, but Gore is not a scientist! He's not really leading the science of global warming.

A much better way to look at this would be to look at the scientific community's reaction to Lomborg's book "The Skeptical Environmentalist". As it turns out, the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty cited The Skeptical Environmentalist for:

1. Fabrication of data;
2. Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation);
3. Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods;
4. Distorted interpretation of conclusions;
5. Plagiarism;
6. Deliberate misinterpretation of others' results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skeptical_Environmentalist

Tags for this video have been changed from 'plagiarism, whitest kids, I know, budweiser, beer' to 'plagiarism, whitest kids, I know, budweiser, beer, wkuk' - edited by Zonbie

Lets look at what Satriani claims that Coldplay has plagiarized.

The chords: The chords are mostly the same, but the last chord is different. The chord progression is also a very logical and common one and I think you can find many songs with similar chords.

The melody: The melody follows the well established musical principle of guide tones which is a logical melody to apply to the chords. The only similaritys are in the first short phrase, the rest can be atributed to guide tones. Furthermore, Satrianis phrasing is very different and ends up sounding very different. The first song that came to my mind when I heard Viva La Vida was this song which is much better match than Satriani's:



As for Chuck Berry vs. Beach Boys, the whole song was almost exactly the same in terms of melody and chords. Satriani's claim is based on only one phrase of a melody and some random chords...

Gopnik is presenting a straw man. First of all, if he bought the book the morning before the interview he certainly could not have read it carefully. Secondly, Dawkins does not dismiss the value of this art, rather he states:

1. Religion-associated art is not an argument for the truth of religion.
2. In certain periods of European history the church was the only institution paying for significant quantities of art, and if the artists had different patrons they might have produced equally good non-religious art. Clearly the artist for hire tailors his work to suit his patron.
3. Since good art can be produced without religion, good art that happened to be religiously inspired because of the time and place in which it was produced does not contribute to the value of religion itself and should not be abused as a reason for promoting religion.

It's likely that Gopnik (consciously or unconsciously) parroted views from people who also reviewed the book without carefully reading it, in the same manner that people say all sorts of crap about the bible that is unsubstantiated by the text. They plagiarize each other's interpretations without much attention to the source, and a myth about a book propagates that is only tenuously connected to the content of the book because the overwhelming majority is too busy or too lazy to read it thoughtfully.

I do like these small poems. Also enjoyed your posts on Chogge's profile, too.

In reply to this comment by jonny:
Politics all day,
Nothing but stimulus bill.
Sagging cheese content. *

*plagiarism