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Ps when I assign results (blame) in order to chart things and see what really works, I blame Bush through 2009 - it was his budget in 2009, and mostly the effects of Bush policies. That's imprecise, but reasonably close. Trump's first budget will start October 1st.

I find it interesting to come up with some objective criteria, such as economic growth rate, then chart it out for different presidents. By deciding on the criteria BEFORE I know the results, I get a true measure rather than something cherry-picked. This is the first chart I did, nine years ago:

http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo...

Of course we know what happened right after that. It would be fair to say that based on economic growth, Bush Jr was the worst Republican President in recent history - the ONLY Republican President to leave the economy in worse shape than when he started.

Lots of things happen, for lots of reasons.

And economic policies have economic consequences. When you make it more expensive to hire people, fewer people get hired.

> Just because things happen in a temporal order doesn't mean they are causal.

Repeated experiments are good for seeing if two events are coincidence or if they are causal. Keep doing A and see if B keeps happening as a result. This chart was made before Obama was elected, but it does show 40 years of trying dem policies and trying republican policies:
http://bettercgi.com/tmp/clint...

You'll notice that economic growth has ALWAYS gotten worse under the EVERY democrat administration's budgets, and ALWAYS gotten better during every republican administration. When it happens every single time, that's not coincidence.

The chart was made just before Bush started spending like Ted Kennedy at a strip club, with the results you'd expect.

> It is a shame we have only your word that you didn't just, you know, make this all up. You cite no specific figures for any administration, or overall figures

Oh sorry, you don't know how to look up the economic growth rate? You could google "economic growth table" and find the numbers reported everywhere, but the canonical source is the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Here's a link.
http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTab...

For your convenience, here are the official BEA numbers labeled the name of which president did the budget for that year:
http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo...

That's a very interesting idea. I wonder what kind of responses that would get, if asked of thoughtful people. Not exactly what I had in mind, but very interesting.

I'll give you an example of something I did and try to apply it to your scenario. I wondered, are the policies of the democrats or those of the republicans better for the economy? I had an "opinion" (a guess), and I wanted to know what was actually better. We've tried both, so what would be an objective way to measure them and see which have worked better? I decided to chart economic growth under D presidents and under R presidents. I figured the president proposes and signs a budget for the next year, and the effects of that budget may not be fully felt for a couple of years, so accurate results needed some sort of lag factor. I decided I'd look at budget years, which are one year later than when they take office and leave office. In other words, Bush II would get the blame (or credit) for 2009, because he signed the 2009 budget. Obama's credit or blame would start with his first budget, 2010. Note that I did NOT look at the numbers before deciding on what criteria would be fair. I had no idea what the economic growth numbers for 2004 were, but Bush II was in office at that time, so he'd get the credit or blame for whatever happened in 2004. In other words, I chose criteria that I thought would give the right answer, not criteria that would support my opinion/guess. I did this back in 2007, and here is the chart:
http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo...
Of course the 2008 mortgage crash happened soon after.

So to apply that to your question, "do extremely long terms of copyright promote the progress of the arts and sciences?" You and I would probably guess "no". I bet there are some countries with short copyright terms, and we know there are some countries with long terms. Perhaps we could compare countries with short copyright vs countries with long copyright. Now we just need an objective, numerical measurement of "promote the progress of the arts and sciences". I can't think of a good one of the top of my head; perhaps you can. The best I can think of would be index of several numbers:
Nobel prizes received
Scientific progress should cause economic progress, so economic growth is an indirect measure.
???

I'd think we'd want to decide ahead of time how to weight those measurements, then put the numbers into Excel and click the button to generate the chart. If we do that, we'd then be able to make statements like:
Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years generated 40% more Nobel prize winning scientific advancements per capita
Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years generate 25% more literature per capita
Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years have economic growth 3% higher on average.

If you happen to do any such analysis, I'd be very interested in seeing the results. Only if you choose the criteria before knowing what the results will be, though - anyone can cherry pick statistics to support any conclusion they want.

The official data on economic growth can be found here:
http://www.bea.gov/national/xl...

A chart matching growth with president's budget's can be found here for 1964-2006. Not shown on that chart is 2008, which is
http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo...

Again, the numbers and chart don't tell us anything about fairness, social justice, or any other issues. It simply shows that "pro-business" republican policies have been good for the economy. This trend shouldn't be surprising - we'd expect government spending on assistance programs to increase with democrat presidents, and we'd expect business to do well with republican presidents. What I find surprising is the consistency - the fact hat growth got worse under EVERY democrat president between their first budget and their last.

As you indicated, the budget has to be approved by both congress and the president. For example, Reagan had to negotiate with the Democrats, who were in control of congress. Obama's party controlled both houses of congress at first, then the republicans controlled the house. What we can say is that the president, in signing a budget, has a significant impact on the how government funds are spent, and how much is spent. Each senator also has small amount of influence, but the president's influence is roughly the same as all of the congress put together, so the budget will certainly tend to reflect a president's priorities.

You might find The Linux Documentation Project handy. You don't need to know anything about kernel internals to use /dev/input/mice or any of the other devices represented in the /dev filesystem, though. All of the hardware devices in the system can be read and written from /dev , which also includes some pseudo devices such as /dev/random and /dev/null . See:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-...

In fact, I'm a full time programmer and sysadmin using Linux exclusively, and I've had exactly ONE case where I needed to look at kernel code. That's my one credit in the kernel changelog.

Aside from the hardware devices in /dev, most of the rest of the kernel is accessible from userspace via the /proc virtual filesystem. From there you can read or set all of the kernel parameters, get information about processes such as which fils they have open, etc. See:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-...

If you ever did need to program for the kernel itself, you do so via a module:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/...

My one credit in the kernel changelog and my one experience with kernel internals, was illustrative of something I've experienced before. I was having a problem with my storage crashing. I was using (abusing?) LVM snapshots, so after following doing what troubleshooting I could, I posted on the LVM mailing list. The LVM maintainer, who is the world's #1 expert on Linux LVM, has me check a couple of things and determined that the problem was likely in the raid module. He suggested I contact the raid devel list. The raid maintainer, who is the #1 expert on Linux raid, looked at it and came up with a fix to the code, which he asked me to try. That worked. I think it's so very cool that the two top experts in the world were so accessible to help me. It didn't cost me a dime. Try that with Windows - try getting the head of Microsoft's storage system programming team to personally assist you. I've found that after I read the documentation such as the appropriate page on tldp.org, the very best of the best Linux developers are always there to help me as long as I follow the advice ESR laid out in http://bettercgi.com/gpl/smart... . Some parts of that document are a bit tongue-in-cheek, or politically incorrect, but it sure does lay out exactly how to get help from very top people.

I think I'd rather use a test that just asks me to click on the hot women real quick.

http://bettercgi.com/images/face-turing-captcha.png

Most captchas were cracked 17 months ago.
It's time for something that's easier for humans and harder for computers. For example, these images have been tweaked such that the standard routines don't work:

https://bettercgi.com/sb5/