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It's about balance of probaiblities, not reasonable doubt. The idea is simply that you create some evidence that you have own the copyright on the creation. Wikipedia tells me that The dutch government and UK patent and trademark office both suggest this method. The organisations that recommend against it seem to be the ones thta make money from copyright registration. (These are a better idea but probably more expensive)

Is it likely that someone posted themselves a special delivery package purely so that in the future they might decide to steal the copyright of an a yet uncreated work from someone else?

Look at it this way - I own the copright to this post. How would you present it to in a sealed envelope that shows you came up with it yesterday? Where are you going to find your pre-sent special delivery envelope? Do you have one spare? I certainly don't.

Are you going to pay for a forensic scientist to take samples of the glue used to seal the envelope, and hold the sticker in place, to prove that it's not just Pritt-stick'd down after unsealing it?

Nope. I don't have to. It's up to my opponents to prove that I did do that. "Might have" isn't enough in a civil case.

I remember reading some time ago about someone actually winning a copyright case over this. I wish I culd remember what. However, what I can tell you is that a self sent registered letter has been used as evidence of deception in a quiz show scandal. Why did the defendants not make the objections you've just made?

http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~zduric/WebPages/ITE%20Duric_files/v3_document.htm, for example.

For long time people in comp vision are working on more sophisticated things than traffic anything... Real time analysis of people and their intent is part of surveillance systems for long time now. Lost objects, suspicious behaviour... You name it.

Generating text, once computer "knows" what is happening, is high school programming project.

• The missing carbon
• Graph showing ice age with 12 times more CO2 than today.
• Polar bears
• Ethanol
• Ethanol again
• Climate cultist whack job from "Whale wars" believes quote We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.
• NASA's chief on global warming.
• The IPCC get their their asses handed to them in front of Congress in 1997. A personal favorite is this quote:

  The observed warming since the late 19th Century has only been 0.5 degrees Celsius, or less than one-third of the predicted value. Critics argued, as I did before this committee, that there would have to be a dramatic reduction in the forecast of future warming in order to reconcile the facts and the hypotheses.

  By 1995, in its second full assessment of climate change, the IPCC admitted the validity of the critics' position: `When increases in greenhouse gases only are taken into account, most climate models produce a greater mean warming than has been observed to date, unless a lower climate sensitivity to the greenhouse effect is used. There is growing evidences that increases in sulfate aerosols are partially counteracting the warming due to increases in greenhouse gases.'

  Let me translate this statement. It means either it is not going to warm up as much as we said it would or something is hiding the warming. I predict that every attempt will be made to demonstrate the latter before admitting that the former is true.

My links are getting old it seems. I have a folder full of them, but a lot seems to have been eradicated by the cult of climate change. Feel free to use this stuff in your next big flame war, but I think you'll find that arguing with these idiots is pointless. Your best bet is to put together a well reasoned, informative essay... then wait for a related story and top post. You may be marked troll, but it doesn't matter. People like myself who don't agree with /.s group think tend to read at troll +6 anyway. In fact, I would have never seen your response if you had not been marked troll above... anyhow, we'll mod you up if you're hit with -1 disagree mod.

The original plan was to base Java on Objective C, but as I understand it, the creators saw that widespread adoption of a brand new language was going to be an uphill battle, so they (wisely) chose to base the syntax on C++ to minimize the learning curve for the majority of existing developers, especially commercial developers.

Personally I would have preferred an Objective C syntax, but Java might have died a quick, obscure death were it not for the ease of transition from C++. Academic/technical ingenuity isn't worth much if no one ever uses your technology ... which kind of sums up many of Sun's issues.

As for the original Java interpreter, I've yet to see anyone write a faster one for a 486.

The first person broadcasting on a specific frequency in a specific area has the right to do so. Anybody who comes after that and interferes has to adjust the frequency they broadcast on or stop broadcasting.

There would have to be court actions to resolve disputes

I know this is slashdot but if you had read the article I linked to you would have read where it said the courts were resolving the issue:
"For when interference on the same channel began to occur, the injured party took the airwave aggressors into court, and the courts were beginning to bring order out of the chaos by very successfully applying the common law theory of property rights--in very many ways similar to the libertarian theory--to this new technological area. In short, the courts were beginning to assign property rights in the airwaves to their 'homesteading' users."

If someone were to start broadcasting in an area on a frequency someone else was already broadcasting on the first person was able to sue those who were interfering and win the right to continue while those interfering had to stop.

or an agency could be created to manage the spectrum and license parts of the spectrum to people to radiate, the licensing fees would go towards the cost of managing the spectrum.

So only those with large bank accounts were able to broadcast? There is no need for the artificial limit to who can broadcast. There is no spectrum scarcity, The End of Spectrum Scarcity. There actually was no scarcity when licenses were first required and with improvements in electronics more and more broadcasters were able to broadcast.

• The Case For Liberal Spectrum Licenses: A T Economic Perspective[pdf]
• Questioning the Scarcity of the Spectrum: The Structure of a Spectrum Revolution
• Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)
• Optimal Abolition of FCC Spectrum Allocation[pdf]
  "Property Rights for Spectrum Markets"
  "Market allocation of radio spectrum was the policy recommendation of Coase (1959). Yet scholars who rst attempted to formulate the enabling mechanism of property rights in frequencies (Coase, Meckling, and Minasian, 1963; Levin, 1968; DeVany, Eckert, Meyers, O'Hara, and Scott, 1969; Minasian 1975) met with limited success. Experience illuminating how such markets would function was scarce. Today, however, data on spectrum rights regimes abound. One body of evidence comes from the U.S. experience with liberal licenses for cellular networks; another from countries that have adopted more general spectrum property regimes."
• The Wireless Craze, the Unlimited Bandwidth Myth, the Spectrum Auction Faux Pas, and the Punchline to Ronald Coase's "Big Joke": An Essay on Airwave Allocation Policy

The FCC needs to be redefined with a much clearer scope

No, the FCC needs to be abolished. It exists only to keep the mass media the mass media reducing competition. Put another way, it's centralized planning with the attending command and control mechanisms. There is no other reason for it to exist.

Falcon

The first person broadcasting on a specific frequency in a specific area has the right to do so. Anybody who comes after that and interferes has to adjust the frequency they broadcast on or stop broadcasting.

There would have to be court actions to resolve disputes

I know this is slashdot but if you had read the article I linked to you would have read where it said the courts were resolving the issue:
"For when interference on the same channel began to occur, the injured party took the airwave aggressors into court, and the courts were beginning to bring order out of the chaos by very successfully applying the common law theory of property rights--in very many ways similar to the libertarian theory--to this new technological area. In short, the courts were beginning to assign property rights in the airwaves to their 'homesteading' users."

If someone were to start broadcasting in an area on a frequency someone else was already broadcasting on the first person was able to sue those who were interfering and win the right to continue while those interfering had to stop.

or an agency could be created to manage the spectrum and license parts of the spectrum to people to radiate, the licensing fees would go towards the cost of managing the spectrum.

So only those with large bank accounts were able to broadcast? There is no need for the artificial limit to who can broadcast. There is no spectrum scarcity, The End of Spectrum Scarcity. There actually was no scarcity when licenses were first required and with improvements in electronics more and more broadcasters were able to broadcast.

• The Case For Liberal Spectrum Licenses: A T Economic Perspective[pdf]
• Questioning the Scarcity of the Spectrum: The Structure of a Spectrum Revolution
• Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)
• Optimal Abolition of FCC Spectrum Allocation[pdf]
  "Property Rights for Spectrum Markets"
  "Market allocation of radio spectrum was the policy recommendation of Coase (1959). Yet scholars who rst attempted to formulate the enabling mechanism of property rights in frequencies (Coase, Meckling, and Minasian, 1963; Levin, 1968; DeVany, Eckert, Meyers, O'Hara, and Scott, 1969; Minasian 1975) met with limited success. Experience illuminating how such markets would function was scarce. Today, however, data on spectrum rights regimes abound. One body of evidence comes from the U.S. experience with liberal licenses for cellular networks; another from countries that have adopted more general spectrum property regimes."
• The Wireless Craze, the Unlimited Bandwidth Myth, the Spectrum Auction Faux Pas, and the Punchline to Ronald Coase's "Big Joke": An Essay on Airwave Allocation Policy

The FCC needs to be redefined with a much clearer scope

No, the FCC needs to be abolished. It exists only to keep the mass media the mass media reducing competition. Put another way, it's centralized planning with the attending command and control mechanisms. There is no other reason for it to exist.

Falcon

Kaggle, unlike prediction markets, is designed to deal with complex tasks where data modeling is required. For example, a prediction market can be used to get the crowd's view on who will win the Eurovision Song Contest. But Kaggle is asking contestants to forecast the voting matrix.

You can get similar coverage with a combinatorial market where the securities are themselves complex objects. Robin Hanson has a nice example (on paper) for how you could implement a prediction betting market. Among other things, Hanson's approach allows for conditional statements (if Greece gets the 2032 Summer Olympics, then Ethiopia gets the 2036 Summer Olympics). These things tend to have liquidity problems (the more esoteric the prediction, the less likely you are to find anyone to trade with) and Hanson's market does a fair job of addressing that problem. Having said that, I know of no working prediction markets with the desired level of complexity comparable to what you're doing with Kaggle. I imagine there are derivative providers would could sell derivatives of that level of complexity, but I don't know if there's a real market in that.

Glancing through your posts, I get the impression that you are associated with Kaggle. If so, I'd like to forward a few complaints. First, I registered on your site, but had to restart simply because the registration timed out on me (ok, I was writing an essay in my profile and taking a bit of time to complete that). If the registration process doesn't depend on the experience/education/expertise data to complete (I assumed at the time that there was a registration filter to weed out the riffraff), then it's probably better to hold off on that till later. Maybe the user could get reminders, if they haven't filled out the information.

Second, I have a few complaints about the sample competition. For usability, the links are invisible in a number of places. I couldn't figure out at first how to access the information for the Eurovision Voting competition (the links in the region just below "Submission Instructions: Eurovision Voting" are black font just like the text below). Also the submission template is too restricted. I refer to the line "Submissions with scores other than 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 or 12 will not be accepted." A real statistical prediction will have mixed values, for example, all 5's should be an acceptable entry (as should any numerical entry). That would mean according to my model, I have no information to provide on that row of votes. Given the scoring algorithm, I think you gain by removing this restriction.

Your comment gave me a random thought: Why aren't there any sellers of combined health+life insurance? The health payments could deduct from the life insurance amount, and the insurer would also have an extra incentive to keep you alive so that they don't have to immediately pay the life insurance amount.

Reminds me a bit of Robin Hanson's "Buy Health, Not Health Care" proposal: http://hanson.gmu.edu/buyhealth.html

Of everything in your post it's the expanding of the House of Representatives that I most agree with.

This web article, http://www.gmu.edu/depts/economics/wew/articles/08/PoliticalMonopolyPower.htm , explains more clearly than I could WHY we should do this.

My rambling point is this: Finding life on Mars doesn't mean that ET is out there, it means that there must be another reason that we haven't found ET yet. It means that the origin of life isn't the hurdle, but the hurdle must still exist, otherwise we'd be seeing or hearing our neighbors by now.

That (quite depressing) theory has been dubbed "The Great Filter" by Robin Hanson.

It's just sad. No one knows what a primary source is anymore.

Here is a good citation.

Also the AC above was right:

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/items/3749

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

GMU's endowment is only $54,955,028. Wikipedia had an extra 1 on the front for some reason (I fixed it.)

At the same time, I got the corrected figure from the reference cited on Wikipedia, so it doesn't really discredit wikipedia, so much as prove you need to follow your sources, whatever you're reading.

http://eagle.gmu.edu/gazette/articles/9750
This article also puts the endowment as just reaching 50 million a few years ago.

Changing the voting system would be great, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking it would solve the world's problems. I'd like to think it will, but the the issue I think is much deeper and lies not in the election system, but in people.

Try making a list of all the issues you consider to be important. Then prioritize that list. If you can do that for even 5 issues, I'd say you're already way ahead of the majority of actual voters, let alone eligible voters. Most people pick only 2-3 issues that are really important to them. These can be easily prioritized, but once you get up to 5 or more different issues it becomes more difficult.

Now that you've made your list, try finding someone in government anywhere that agrees with you on those 5 issues. If you have taken the time to do that, you're already way ahead of the vast majority of voters, who typically don't look beyond the little D or R at the end of a candidates name. Some will look past that and find out what the candidate's position is on their 2-3 issues. But now you've looked at a bunch of politicians for 5 or more issues, so you're winning

Now, out of all the candidate's you've got in your list, you're going to have to spend even more time (and remember the law of diminishing returns) figuring out which one you disagree with the least on all of the other issues you didn't pick and didn't prioritize. Unless you are extremely lucky (or are in your list of candidates) it is highly probable that you will end up disagreeing with your chosen candidate on many issues. As a recap, you've gone through a lot more time and effort than probably ~60% of voters (Look for Vote by Party ID) who have also gone through more effort and than ~62% of the eligible voters and you still ended up disagreeing with your candidate the same as if you hadn't gone through all that trouble.

tl;dr: Changing the voting system is a step in the right direction, but until people are willing to deal with more than just sound bites and easy "us vs them" choices, it's not going to mean a whole lot.

Lame.
Try this, instead:
1) Require all government agencies, corporations, and charities to have totally open, publicly accessible financial books. No black budgets. This definitely includes the Federal Reserve.
2) Implement a single flat sales tax. People with more money buy more, and thus everyone pays fairly. Note that corporations 'buy' their employees, and so that tax would hit salaries and wages too.
3) Instead of voting FOR someone, only let people vote AGAINST someone. The candidate with the fewest 'no' votes wins. Only one vote per person, so spread them around wisely.
4) Let people buy health, not health care. http://hanson.gmu.edu/buyhealth.html
5) Fund infrastructure.

You should read some statistics. Unlike you, I do recommend that people read key documents from different players in the debate rather than just take the party line from Real Climate (which I believe was started by Mann and his colleagues).

You might be interested in Wegman's CV before suggesting his findings on the Mann et al. hockey stick were constructed politically. There's this interesting entry in his CV, for example: Appointed Chair of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, National Academy of Science, 2004. A separate NAS report also criticised the hockey stick, albeit in a more mealy mouthed fashion - not that you would know that if you only read Real Climate, which somehow translated the NAS panel's conclusions into a ringing endorsement of Mann et al.

Of course, I don't actually expect you to read any of this stuff, but other people following this discussion might be curious.

We can hope, anyway, that we're past the filter. Finding life elsewhere in the solar system would be undeniably cool... but for the above reason, it would also be unsettling.

Here's the original text.

But there's another post here which mentions its origins in the Fermi Paradox, so maybe it's from Enrico Fermi, originally.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Voter excitement, always up before a presidential election, is pushing registration through the roof so far this year - with more than 3.5 million people rushing to join in the historic balloting, according to an Associated Press survey that offers the first national snapshot.Figures are up for blacks, women and young people. Rural and city. South and North.

From Fox News.

Nearly half of newly-registered voters in Ohio are aged 18-29.

From fivethirtyeight

And you said:

56.8% of the voting-age population voted in 2008, up from 55.3% in 2004, but below 1960, 64, and 68 at 63.1%, 61.9%, and 60.8% respectively.

So I'm to understand that for the three elections in the 60's, the voter turnout went down by 1.2 and then 1.1 points, and for the 2008 election voter turnout went up by 1.5 points. Notice the difference in turnout for 04-08 is the largest of the numbers you cite.

Voter turnout for the 1960, `64, and `68 election are the highest in recent memory. As long as we're picking elections arbitrarily why didn't you go with 1980, `84, and `88, when the turnout was 52.6%, 53.1%, and 50.1%? I suspect it's because doing so you would have torn your argument apart.

There are no mainstream free-market Austrian economists anymore

I don't know what you mean by this, but every economist still reads Mises and Hayek, and I haven't seen someone refute the Socialist Calculation problem identified by Hayek. There are minor differences between Monetarists and Austrians (and the more honest of both sides agree that inflation is a monetary issue but that can also inter-react with distortionary over-investment in sectors).

The Austrians are actually claiming that the housing bubble during a time of otherwise low inflation is proof of the Austrian Business Cycle versus Monetarist/Chicago business cycle models.

Here are six Austrian economists and also the Review of Austrian Economics.

It's called a "poor man's copyright," it involves only copyright, not patents, and it's a myth. The U.S. Copyright Office has a note on this. Don't waste your money, especially with the cost of Registered Mail these days.

As for the original submitter, he's likely safe as long as a "substantial" amount of University resources aren't used, and if there isn't an existing contract between him and the University (work-study, faculty/TA, or regular employee) covering intellectual property. My school has a similar policy. And what I found on the SUU site turned up this:

In the Southern Utah University Student Handbook, for instance, you will find the [...] Intellectual Property Policy.

Which seems to be listed here.

I never voted for Bush." But 51% of them must be lying, right?

39% are lying about whether they voted at all. Only about 32% of eligible voters voted for Bush ( 51% of 61% of eligible voter turn out). But, that's beside the point. I was not refuting our responsibility as citizens to elect public servants who represent our views. I was pointing out that your characterizations of Americans' "tendency to view everything 'religiously' rather than empirically," was depicting a small (although, over represented in the media) sliver of the American public.

the famous Fermi Paradox [wikipedia.org] tells us that we're alone in the galaxy.

I tend to agree with you that the Fermi Paradox is strong evidence that there are no space-faring civilizations out there. That doesn't mean that there are no civilizations like our own, it simply means that nobody like us survives.

Are you familiar with the concept of The Great Filter? Read this, I think you'll enjoy it. In summary, it makes the case that something prevents civilizations from becoming truly space-faring. That all species face this something, and they are all stopped by it. It could be that only very competitive species create technological civilizations (because those that aren't competitive are content to sit in trees and eat bannanas) and that competitiveness prohibits the kind of cooperation needed to build generation ships. It could be just that simple.

There's another option: take it as a starting point for discussion, and see where it takes you. For example, both Fermi's Paradox and the Drake Equation are relevant to the question of the Great Filter.

He's on the Congress' Financial Services Committee. He didn't get there by being stupid. (shrug). And if you still don't like him, then I suggest you read Walter E. Williams work. He's an economics professor at George Mason University in D.C. and he's no dummy either:

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew

BTW:

I always find it amusing that pro-socialists think "he's a weirdo" is a persuasive argument. Sorry but that doesn't really sway me to your viewpoint. ;-) Next time try a logical argument based on reason; I will listen to that. CONVINCE me that your viewpoint is the correct viewpoint. I won't listen to "he's a weirdo" non-arguments.

The formal name for that is the "Miracle of Aggregation" and is the ultimate answer to Plato's plan for "philosopher-kings": pure democracy would theoretically get the same results, because the ignorant will cancel.

But there's a difference between ignorance (correct average, but high standard deviation) and irrationality (low standard deviation, but average is far from correct). One economist I read, Bryan Caplan, argued that voters better meet irrational than ignorant so their errors don't cancel, in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter. It's not online, but you can piece it together from these papers: one, two, three, (MS doc warning)

***

Btw, is that what drives the anti-voting-corruption activists? The perception that elections don't turn out the way that people actually voted? Or just the principle of it?

The formal name for that is the "Miracle of Aggregation" and is the ultimate answer to Plato's plan for "philosopher-kings": pure democracy would theoretically get the same results, because the ignorant will cancel.

But there's a difference between ignorance (correct average, but high standard deviation) and irrationality (low standard deviation, but average is far from correct). One economist I read, Bryan Caplan, argued that voters better meet irrational than ignorant so their errors don't cancel, in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter. It's not online, but you can piece it together from these papers: one, two, three, (MS doc warning)

***

Btw, is that what drives the anti-voting-corruption activists? The perception that elections don't turn out the way that people actually voted? Or just the principle of it?

The formal name for that is the "Miracle of Aggregation" and is the ultimate answer to Plato's plan for "philosopher-kings": pure democracy would theoretically get the same results, because the ignorant will cancel.

But there's a difference between ignorance (correct average, but high standard deviation) and irrationality (low standard deviation, but average is far from correct). One economist I read, Bryan Caplan, argued that voters better meet irrational than ignorant so their errors don't cancel, in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter. It's not online, but you can piece it together from these papers: one, two, three, (MS doc warning)

***

Btw, is that what drives the anti-voting-corruption activists? The perception that elections don't turn out the way that people actually voted? Or just the principle of it?

Yeah, but you basically had to know that subscription rates were either going to go up rather steeply or they were going to have to introduce ads. Actually, though, adjusted for inflation, rates have pretty much stayed the same or actually fallen over the last 10 years while they have actually added more channels and more services, such as DVRs, digital picture and sound, interactive program guides and the ability to pay from your cable box (no more sending checks in the mail or stopping by at the cable office -- ever!)

I know I sound like a spokesman for the cable industry, but I'm not. Really. I don't even own any stock in cable. I'm just very, very satisfied with my service.

The only thing that really ticks me off is that I can't use my own box. It'll be very itneresting to see how this plays out.

You are assuming 100% of US citizens vote. If you look at the 2004 general election, total voter turnout, including absentees and overseas voters, is 60.93%. So 30% is darn near half of that, which is what the final tally was.

I think the best TED talks have been Steven Levitt talking about crack dealer business, and Paul Collier on the Bottom Billion.

All the technology in the world isn't going to fix developing countries where the laws, regulations, and corruption will keep the economies from growing to the point where the technology can be used efficiently. Once those barriers are gone, it isn't like people are stupid, they'll immediately use the appropriate needed technologies.

I suggest:

Michael Walker talking about his work on the Economic Freedom of the World index, and how economic freedom correlates with GDP, life expectancy, and other variables.

Karol Boudreaux from GMU's Mercatus Center talking about African governments bear much responsibility for driving formal-sector entrepreneurs out of the housing market and for driving their citizens into slums.

Robert Anderson on his book Just Get Out of the Way: How Government Can Help Business in Poor Countries.

Tyler Cowen form GMU on almost anything in economics: the future of culture in a globalized world, How to Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist, and much more.

Don Boudreaux from GMU about the issues he has interviewed people for on Econtalk: car salesmen, signaling through educational diplomas, whether the gold standard is a good idea, challenges in health care, and much more.

Arnold Kling on Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care

Or a Nicholas Stern versus William Nordhaus debate on global warming costs versus benefits and their viewpoints on appropriate discount rates for the calculation?

I saw the lead author, George Donahue, give a lecture (Air Transportation: A Tale of Prisoners, Sheep and Autocrats) on his research last year. He's a very engaging speaker; I hope he's an equally good writer.

The Center for Air Transportation Research, of which Donahue is the director, has a long list of free, online publications here on topics related to this book.

I saw the lead author, George Donahue, give a lecture (Air Transportation: A Tale of Prisoners, Sheep and Autocrats) on his research last year. He's a very engaging speaker; I hope he's an equally good writer.

The Center for Air Transportation Research, of which Donahue is the director, has a long list of free, online publications here on topics related to this book.

I saw the lead author, George Donahue, give a lecture (Air Transportation: A Tale of Prisoners, Sheep and Autocrats) on his research last year. He's a very engaging speaker; I hope he's an equally good writer.

The Center for Air Transportation Research, of which Donahue is the director, has a long list of free, online publications here on topics related to this book.

Well, you might want to review a bit of history...
In 2005, DARPA started a program called Biologically-Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) that managed to pull in a fair number of the top cognitive psychology/computer science/cognitive neuroscience researchers who study computational modeling of cognition (particularly those who lean towards a Newellian "Unified Theory of Cognition" approach). They got everyone excited, got them together in collaborative groups spanning multiple universities and multiple theoretical approaches, and then... walked away.
The memorial service, er, afterparty, er, resurrection (such as it is) is happening here:
http://binf.gmu.edu/~asamsono/bica/

The Drake Equation doesn't tell us everything. For starters, there's the Fermi Paradox. More interesting, imho, are the questions raised by the Great Filter -- namely, are the hard challenges ahead of us, or behind us?

If Hawking says he thinks life elsewhere is likely, then that implies a certain degree of pessimism about our future chances.

The argument isn't that blacks are genetically predisposed to committing crime. That is a strawman and it unfairly preempts any discussion on genetic differences between races.

The argument is that groups of people who share relatively close genetic markers will share the phenotypic traits defined by the DNA. Identical twins share identical DNA, so they look and behave very similarly to each other. Not only their physical attributes, but also their mental attributes and temperament come from the sharing of DNA. Similarly, children will share traits (both physical and mental) with their parents.

As anthropological history shows, humans have lived in relatively small groups and intermarried amongst relatives for most of history. In small closed societies, specific traits become more prevalent. White skin, curly hair, bone density, height, nose shape, and yes, intelligence. These differences are real and specifically linked to the history of our genes. There is no "genetic lottery". You get the genes that your parents have, and they got theirs from their parents. The only lottery is to which parents a person is born, and except in the most colloquial of terms such a thing can hardly be called chance.

Since intelligence is one of biggest factors in societal success or failure, even a slight advantage is enough to propel one person higher than another (even at the microcosmic scale of a university classroom, the smartest students are easily identified over the lower tiers). As humanity progresses towards modernity, the impact of intelligence is much greater than in primitive hunter-gatherer societies. A group with a high average intelligence will gradually (perhaps suddenly) outperform a group with low average intelligence.

This is not to say that average group intelligence applies to any particular individual within the group. As with any distribution there are outliers on both sides of the average. An above average individual in a lower average group could definitely outperform a below average individual from a high average group. The overlap is significant. However, looking at the groups as a whole, the tendency of the high average group to outperform the low average group is consistent.

Nurture, education, and nutrition play very significant roles in the underperformance of certain groups, but to discount genetics as a factor of intelligence and thus also societal success just because it seems racist is to be putting illogic and superstition above science.

Why should we study this? What good could come out of finding a certain group sufficiently deficient? The most obvious is to find ways of structuring society to maximize their potential. By pitting underachievers against overachievers, the result is reasonbly guaranteed to fall in favor of the overachiever. If the alternative to repeated failure is crime, then the underachiever is very tempted by the easier path of crime.

It's Science

You can also read the first chapter of Snow Crash here. The first few chapters are Awesome with a capital A. The rest of the book is good too but the first 50 pages are astounding.

It is astonishing just how fast Laissez-Faire and deregulation causes unrestrained capitalism to self destruct. We'll have gone from reasonably well-regulated, stable Social democracy with an acceptably egalitarian income distribution in 1970 (Life wasn't perfect, but it arguably better in many ways than it is now), to ground zero triggering of a full blown world economic crisis in less than 40 years.

I hate to break it to you, but no, we didn't. Last I checked, Marx wasn't a big advocate for totalitarianism.

Yes he was. Observe his attack on what he called "bourgeois freedom"; freedom of speech, religion, and property:

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/museum/marframe.htm

The math is not that simple for most states (including California), where *all* the electoral votes go to the candidate who gets the plurality of votes in the state. There are other states (Maine and Nebraska currently with 9 total electors) that divide up their votes based on the percentages of the votes received.

I'm too tired to do the math right now, but I guess my point is that it doesn't really require 60 CA votes to "cancel out" a Wyoming vote, since CA is winner take all (just like Wyoming). One could argue that a California vote carries much more power (when you vote for the winner), since you have a much larger overall impact on the election (55 electoral votes vs 3). However, for the loser, your vote counts for nothing (and there are a whole lot more votes in CA that count for nothing than there are in Wyoming). Also, you need to consider the voter turnout statistics. CA voter turnout was 60% in 2004, compared with 65% for Wyoming, which also changes the percentages.

I just re-read this, and while it made sense in my head, I guess it's too late to get it into usable words. Oh well.

I'd say the question of ETI is not only inherently interesting, but important as well, since it has direct implications for our continued survival as a species, and even what we should do to maximize our chances.

I'll take species survival over a lot of things, including a cure for cancer.

Pentagon tried just this in 2003 — use the method to predict terror attacks. The Congressional outcry about "trading in blood" was such, that the program was scrapped shortly after being announced...

Quoting from MSNBC report:

The Pentagon Tuesday agreed to abandon the plan, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman said, after Senate Democrats Monday blasted the plan as nothing more than state-sponsored "gambling on terrorism."

Or read Wired (here or here ) or worked at Rand.

Besides, looking for ETI is important, too.

I agree completely, though -- whatever happened to doing things because they're fucking COOL? Aren't we supposed to be nerds, here?

The search for extraterrestrial life has dramatic impacts on our own continued chances for survival as a species. As such, I'd say it's an inherently important problem. I'll take almost any amount of help to species-level survival over cancer drugs.

Note also that a null result is not the same as no results. Both a null result (failing to find ETI) and a positive result (finding it) convey useful information.

There may be other obstacles to us finding another civilization, you know. The heat death of the universe isn't the one I'd worry about.

What the states pay a professor is not much compared to what they could be earning in the field so he really has no choice.

My response was to my opponent's actual position, as he/she wrote it. I am under no obligation to figure out his/her unwritten positions, which he/she might hold, which somehow temper or put in another light their message.

Your post criticized libertarians *in general* with little apparent knowledge of what libertarians *in general* believe.

As it was written, the message bemoans all regulation without exception.

No, it bemoans licensure *aimed at limiting competition with politically-powerful groups*.

To which I responded.

You responded with a long spiel about libertarians in general, only tangentially related to the issues I raised.

True, these things occur. And that is a failure of governance, to address which is the responsibility of the citizenry in a functioning, sane, modern state. I will not argue with you that, as it stands, the US government for example, is not being essentially subverted by the same very jerks it is supposed to protect the US citizens against. But this failure stemms from the general apathy and dis-interest of the general populace of their own goverment and their unwillingess to do anything to improve its operation.

Kind of. Remember, it's the *interested* citizens *who are voting for these bad policies* in the first place. It's the active voters that buy into the "OMG people will die if doctors don't get umpteen years of unrelated education" line. Suggesting that we vote out these policies misses the point. It's like saying, "You don't like pollution? Quit burning fuel." My individual pollution doesn't make a difference! Well, asking that voters reduce their "political pollution" is flawed for the same reason. People can afford to "vote with their hearts" rather than their minds, because it is costless to them to do so, just as my individual pollution is costless to me.

(This is the thesis of the recent book The Myth of the Rational Voter, summarized here.)

Are there systems that avoid these "problems of governance"? Yes. But they don't give each person a vote on how the law treats doctors ;-)