篇 20
UK Urged to Update Copyright Laws
The UK is currently using copyright laws that are more than 300 years old.
Ministers in the United Kingdom are being urged to modify copyright laws to allow users to be able to legally rip CDs and DVDs for personal use. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) wants users to have a “private right to copy” digital content. The IPPR acknowledged that the music and film industries are justified in battling illegal file sharing. But the IPPR argues that making copies for personal use does not have significant impact on copyright holders.
Millions of Britons are violating current copyright laws by ripping CDs onto their MP3 players and /or PCs. Currently, Britons are violating an outdated 300-year-old law when copying CDs and DVDs. The British Phonographic Institute has already stated that it will not pursue its rights to bring private copying cases against users if the copying truly is for private purposes only.
An independent research study reports that around 59 percent of Britons believe copying CDs and DVDs to other devices is legal. The chairman of the culture, media and sport select netmittee inquiry admits that he and his children are in violation of the law. “My own view is that the current laws are unsatisfactory as it is difficult to say to consumers that this bit of the law matters and this bit doesn’t matter,” Conservative MP John Whittingdale said.
篇 21
A Growing Number of American Men Get Alimony
Across the country, a growing number of divorced men are getting alimony from their former wives. While far more women receive alimony than men, divorce lawyers estimate that 5% to 10% of their male clients now get such payments, up from only 3% five years ago.
Men seeking financial support from the rich and famous ex-wives have made headlines in recent years. But the ranks of ex-husbands getting alimony from their former spouses now are as likely to include the guy around the corner who gets a monthly check from an ex-wife whose bank account is fatter than his.
“Women are getting better, higher-paying jobs at the same time that men’s wages are decreasing,” says Kathryn Rettig, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, explaining why the number of men receiving alimony is increasing. She adds， “If women want equality under the law, they have to take the responsibility for supporting dependent spouses.”
Like women, men are being awarded alimony for a few years as netpensation for putting their wives through college or graduate school or for following transferred spouses around the country. And, like women, men are persuading judges to award them alimony indefinitely if they are sick or disabled or have stayed home to raise children. In out-of-court settlements, high-innete women are even agreeing to pay alimony to their ex-husbands instead of giving them some property because alimony is tax-deductible.
篇 22
Rainbow
I wonder if there is any girl or boy who does not like to see a rainbow in the sky. It is so beautiful!
There is a fairy tale saying whenever you see a rainbow you should run at once to the place where it touches the ground, and there you would find a pot of gold. Of course, it is not true. Neither could you find the pot of the gold, nor could you ever find the rainbow’s end. No matter how far you run, it always seems at a great distance.
A rainbow is not a thing which we can feel with our hands as we can feel a flower. It is not solid, for it is only the effect of light shining on raindrops. The light from the sun shines on the rain as it falls to the earth. The raindrops catch the sunlight and break it up into all the wonderful colors which we see. It is called a rainbow because it is made up of raindrops and looks like a bow.
That is also why we can never see a rainbow in a clear sky. We see a rainbow only during showers or storms, only when there is still rain in the air and the sun still shines brightly through the clouds. Every rainbow has many colors which are arranged in the same order. The first or the top color is always red, next netes orange, then yellow and green, and last of all the blue and deep blue or violet. A rainbow is indeed one of the wonders of nature.
篇 23
Gratuitous Gratuities
Everybody loathes it, but everybody does it. A recent poll showed that 40% of Americans hate the practice. It seems so arbitrary, after all.
In America alone, tipping is now a $ 16 billion-a-year industry. Consumers acting rationally ought not to pay more than they have to for a given service. Tips should not exist. So why do they? The conventional wisdom is that tips both reward the efforts of good service and reduce unnetfortable feelings of inequality. The better the service, the bigger the tip.
Such explanations no doubt explain the purported origin of tipping. In the 16th century, boxes in English taverns carried the phrase “To Insure Promptitude” (later just “TIP”). But according to new research from Cornell University, tipping no longer serves any useful function.
The paper analyses data from 2,547 groups dining at 20 different restaurants. The correlation between larger tips and better service was very weak: only a tiny part of the variability in the size of the tip had anything to do with the quality of service. Customers who rated a meal as “excellent” still tipped anywhere between 8% and 37% of the meal price.
Tipping is better explained by culture than by economics. In America, the custom has benete institutionalized: it is regarded as part of the accepted cost of a service. In Europe, tipping is less netmon. In many Asian countries, tipping has never really caught on at all.
How to account for these national differences? Look no further than psychology. According to Michael Lynn, the Cornell paper’s co-author, countries in which people are more extrovert, sociable or neurotic tend to tip more. Tipping relieves anxiety about being served by strangers.
篇 24
Football Team’s Only Game Was Drugs
They looked like a real football team — with snarling coach included. But the 10 men arrested at the weekend in Spain’s southern province of Cadiz were not going to play a match, despite their yellow and blue kit. They were drug traffickers who used their footballs, knapsacks and club strips, emblazoned with the team name of a local town, Guillen Moreno CF, as a ruse to fool border police as they passed from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, in North Africa, to Algeciras, on the southern Spanish mainland, a police spokesman in Cadiz said.
The fake team would usually cross the Straits of Gibraltar into the province of Cadiz on Saturday afternoons with the hash tucked beneath their jerseys and stage a drama to enhance their credibility before border agents. The supposed manager, 49, would carry a roster in his hand and continuously bark at the young men “Everybody pay attention, everybody stay right here!” and “Come on, follow me!”.
The players would cross back to Ceuta on Sundays after the fictional match and actual drug sales in Spain. Police do not know how long the fake season lasted before a tip spurred an investigation. The game ended when officers stopped their cars in Cadiz and found a total of 16kg of hash hidden beneath the men’s strips in little pellets taped to their bodies.
篇 25
Sleep
Sleep is a part of a person’s daily activity cycle. There are several different stages of sleep, and they too occur in cycles. If you are an average sleeper, your sleep cycle is as follows. When you first drift off into slumber, your eyes will roll about a bit, and your temperature will drop slightly, your muscles will relax, and your breathing will slow and benete quite regular. Your brain waves slow down a bit too, with the alpha rhythm of rather fast waves predominating for the first few minutes. This is called stage 1 sleep. For the next half hour or so, as you relax more and more, you will drift down through stage 2 and stage 3 sleep. The lower your stage of sleep, the slower your brain waves will be. Then about 40 to 60 minutes after you lose consciousness you will have reached the deepest sleep of all. Your brain waves will show the large slow waves that are known as the delta rhythm. This is stage 4 sleep.
You do not remain at this deep fourth stage all night long, but instead about 80 minutes after you fall into slumber, your brain activity level will increase again slightly. The delta rhythm will disappear, to be replaced by the activity pattern of brain waves. Your eyes will begin to dart around under your closed eyelids. This period of rapid eye movement lasts for some 8 to 15 minutes and is called REM sleep. It is during REM sleep period that your body will soon relax again, your breathing will grow slow and regular once more, and you will slip gently back from stage 1 to stage 4 sleep — only to rise once again to the surface of near consciousness some 80 minutes later.
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