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If we really wanted to destroy them we should have sent them Reagan, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and one or two others.

I hate to break this to you, but we did send them Milton Friedman, and the Chinese are largely taking his advise. We, on the other hand, are not, which is probably the reason China is on the ascendant, and we are in decline.

But in the UK, if I'm not mistaken, the burden of proof lies on the accusedâ"that is to say, you have to prove that you're not being libelous (search the page for "burden of proof"). Asinine? Absolutely.

> Kipling's heart was in the right place. The problem was his notion that there is an
> innate hierarchy of race, which is factually incorrect. However, educated societies are
> clearly better than ignorant ones. They have less political turmoil, and their
> inhabitants are happier and live longer.

The US has become much more educated, on average, in the last 50 years. While people do in fact live longer, there is, if anything, more political turmoil, and I'd question whether people are happier.

Even the rise in life expectancy is not necessarily caused by the rise in the the general level of education.

What you have here is a correlation of various things like political stability, increased life expectancy, and happiness with education (and not a very strong one for happiness). Let's not mistake that for causation. For example, political stability can well cause a more educated society, all else being equal, since the investment in education might make less sense in the face of political instabiity.

> Education isn't an innate characteristic like race; anyone can receive an education

That's true in a strict sense, but it's not true that anyone can receive any education. The latter interpretation is the one that people tend to use, and the resulting mess in the US with college education being diluted so as to make it possible for everyone to have a college degree, is one corllary...

> and it is certainly the responsibility of the educated to ensure that everyone has
> access to education.

Fully agreed. That does not give them leeway to write off those who either will not or cannot take advantage of that access.

> There is nothing morally questionable about that notion.

There is something morally questionable about any elitism, no matter how well-motivated.

> Why are you bringing religion into this?

Because that's what the progressive movement is: a religion. It doesn't involve a father-figure God, but it has dogma, it has a priesthood, it has believers, it has fanatics, it has intolerance of heritics... the whole deal.

> Frankly, if you can't see the difference between the rigor of science and the dogma of
> religion, why are you on a technology-oriented site?

_I_ can see the difference. Most people apparently can't, and many have simply transferred their faith and fanaticism from religion to science. This leads to the adoption of scientific dogma which is NOT a good thing for science. The effect is most pronounced in the sciences where controlled experiments are difficult to perform (e.g. the social sciences). Science is very difficult to do well even in the best of circumstances, and if there is significant pressure to publish only certain results, then those are the results that will be published. See http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22237 for a good description of what can happen to corrupt the scientific process when money and political influence are at stake, as they always are in the social sciences. Note in particular the identity of the author, and the paragraph containing "It is simply no longer possible to believe..."

> Science allows us to have the kind of lifestyle to which we are accustomed.
> Religion has no produced a shred of tangible progress in our knowledge of
> the world.

Yes, which is why I find it worrisome when science takes on more and more of the trappings of religion.

> There are overwhelming reasons to trust science in situations religion can't handle

There are overwhelming reasons to assume that science might be right and religion is probably wrong in many situations. That doesn't absolve one of responsibility for double-checking the science if possible (a key part of the scientific process)! It also doesn't mean that any time science has an answer that answer is correct, which is what most people believe. Very few scientists believe this, of course, since the

Microsoft was playing a much broader role[laughs] than just doing software for this machine. I mean whether it is the keyboard, the character set, the graphics adapter, or even the memory layouts. I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit.

As far as I can tell, he didn't say 640k would be enough for anyone, and that problem was due to the processor only having 20 bit addresses. But Gates definitely is contradicting himself. It's like he wants to take credit for the memory layout until people hammer him on it, then says IBM did it.

As amusing as that "quote" is, it's an urban myth. ;)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15180#fn*

While everyone in the computer industry, and I would even go so far as to say, as a result - everyone in the world - owes Bill Joy a huge debt for his contributions to the world, I think it would be unfortunate if he were appointed to such an office.
And I find myself sad to say that.

But...
Most people will remember that he has demonstrated a serious degree of pessimism prior in his Wired OpEd, "Why the future doesn't need us".

The debate this sparked result in Joy being quoted and interviewed many times. His decidedly dim view of unchecked technological advancement became quite clear.
He has openly endorsed the idea of an international body that would have oversight and could control scientific research and experimentation everywhere.

This was rebutted by Freeman Dyson shortly afterward, "The Future Needs Us!".

In Dyson's rebuttal he mentions Milton's speech, Areopagitica, which while an argument for free speech, has strong parallels with regards to scientific inquiry.

While it is frightening the long list of dangerous things that we can do to ourselves and the world, it is also _equally_ exciting and encouraging when these things are applied in a beneficial manner.
We have already experienced, for hundreds of years, a world where scientific inquiry was stifled by various organizations. And in fact, similar organizations today continue to threaten and have even succeed in pushing back research (ex. stem cell research).

It is difficult to see how Bill Joy, given his stated views, would help to bolster us forward both in terms of simple advancement and also with regards to our international competitiveness.

I agree with the core of your argument, that intelligence gathering in a theater of war is a totally different thing than on domestic soil. I have to disagree with a few other things, though.

A spokesman for General Hayden said, "At NSA, the law was followed assiduously. The notion that General Hayden sanctioned or tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face." Those of you who laugh at this comment and think you know everything about the illegality of NSA surveillance would be well served to educate yourselves a bit.

Some fairly educated gentlemen seem to think it was illegal. So do I, for what it's worth. In addition, I can say that I think it's wrong. Using the "extraordinary" threat of terrorism as a justification is absurd, when you rationally appraise the magnitude of that threat, and the administration did everything possible to avoid going about getting those powers the right way (they decided not to go to congress specifically because they didn't think they'd get approval). When even Ashcroft, the guy who helped push through the USA PATRIOT Act, says you've gone too far, it raises alarm bells.

"'This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law,' Turley said."

Indeed. And we don't condone or support that kind of activity, either.

I'm not sure how much evidence there is for that statement. I guess, for one thing, it depends on what you mean by "that kind of activity". It also depends on who "we" is (the CIA, the military?) or what you consider condoning it. We do carry out extraordinary renditions to countries that practice various kinds of torture (I'm not sure how one can compare them to Abu Ghraib). Not to mention things like the incident in Afghanistan where, "[a] CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets" (after which he died of exposure).

Now, realistically, we the public have little way to get an accurate idea of how bad things are. It's reasonable to presume we hear about some of the cases where they screw up and go further than was intended, but we probably don't hear about all of those, and we probably hear about very few of the rest, where they go just as far as intended. Rendition makes it even harder to determine what sorts of things we may, ultimately, be responsible for. So I won't claim to know that Abu Ghraib was run of the mill, but I think it's foolish to assume without evidence that it was so exceptional or "just a few bad apples".

Sorry, but no.

Straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/gatesivu.htm
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484

And part of the reason it's misattributed:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15180#fn*

He *implied* that 640k was a fair amount "for the time being" but that it would need to be significantly increased as technology proved more demanding. He never implied that "no-one will ever need more than 640k".

In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists--some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the "web-comic articles purge of 2006." A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sand castles." Another artist, Howard Tayler, said: "'Notability purges' are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors." Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: "Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you've destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face."

As the deletions and ill-will spread in 2007--deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, urban places, Web sites, lists, people, categories, and ideas--all deemed to be trivial, "NN" (nonnotable), "stubby," undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedic--Andrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia's history, told a Canadian reporter: "The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow." ...

Apologies to Mr Baker about quoting slightly more than my personal standard concerning fair use, but it couldn't be more pertinent to the discussion at hand.

The core problem with deletionism is deletion itself. There is a certain totalitarian satisfaction available in the deletion of something one doesn't like. Furthermore, it's a complete failure to approach the situation from a systems theory perspective: the only viable long-term test of quality is to allow the stub to sit there and see what comes of it (if any accepted topic once existed at the same preliminary state within the spectrum of "doubtful", "outside chance", or "maybe never").

Worse, once a potentially viable stub is deleted, editors show up to make additions, and find history erased. Resurrect the article from scratch, it will likely be deleted again (with the added prejudice of the previous deletion(s)).

On the other side of the coin, there are many articles at Wikipedia below the standard that Google should be indexing. Perhaps there are only a million English articles at Wikipedia worth inclusion in the Google index.

Deletion is hugely problematic as an enforcement mechanism in a society built around consensus and incremental improvement.

The problem with having a large quarantine area of content not yet ready for prime time is that no one wishes to invest in vandal patrol over a vast wasteland where only 10% of the content is likely to graduate to core. Make it such that the only way for an IP-based user to arrive at these pages is type to the full name of the page in the Wikipedia search bar. Users who log in can set a preference so that links from core to non-core are functional. IP-based users would be regarded as full users during an article edit (the search box that precedes article creation and edit previews).

I've been contemplating whether the genius of Wikipedia consists of inverting the normal social order. In most human social structures, the peons are fenced off into sandboxes of the trivial, while the only the eminences and power-users can "submit" to

A thing to remember though is that the average cost of developing a new drug easily runs into hundreds of millions of dollars and that they need to make that back to stay in business.

This is why they struggle so hard, quote: " In 2001, the ten American drug companies in the Fortune 500 list (not quite the same as the top ten worldwide, but their profit margins are much the same) ranked far above all other American industries in average net return, whether as a percentage of sales (18.5 percent), of assets (16.3 percent), or of shareholders' equity (33.2 percent). These are astonishing margins. For comparison, the median net return for all other industries in the Fortune 500 was only 3.3 percent of sales. Commercial banking, itself no slouch as an aggressive industry with many friends in high places, was a distant second, at 13.5 percent of sales." (emphasis mine)

CC.

The Freeman Dyson article referred to in the article above is located at NYBooks.com. FTA:

Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.

the sense of democratic legitimacy is undermined if people believe that the rich are admitted to selective colleges and universities regardless of merit while able and deserving candidates from more modest backgrounds are turned away.

To make his case, he (Golden) has assembled an anthology of sordid stories intended to show how the rich rig the system to get what they want. It all reminds me of a story I have on good authority about a meeting at a New York City private school of high school seniors with their college counselor. The counselor, trying to help them prepare for their college interviews, asked what they would say about what special contribution they would bring to the college of their choice. "I'm very outgoing," said one. "I'm passionate about community service," said another. The discussion took an unexpected twist when one young man said, simply, "a library." "What do you mean, a library?" asked the counselor, a little taken aback. "Well, my dad said he'd give a library to whatever school I want to go to." Golden's book amounts to the charge that colleges are lining up to take Dad up on his offer.

Sure, I remember some years ago reading on New York Times that the money spent by the pharmaceutical industry on marketing and administration and not R&D was two thirds of the budgets. I cannot give you a link any more but have one another just here.

By the way, there are other reasons this drug exists, but I just realized that some people used to say the same about software development: no money, no good software.

R&D expenditures are far, far less than advertizing expenditures, and drug companies are making substantial profits and would do so even if drugs cost far less (Reference). If you know any physicians, ask them how often they are taken out to lunch/dinner at fancy restaurants, how often they get free vacations, how often they get tickets to luxury boxes at sporting events, etc, etc, etc.

>Where do you think the research for the next AIDS drug will come from?

Mostly funded by taxpayers, then handed over to Big Pharma, as usual.

"...the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH)."The Truth About the Drug Companies by Marcia Angell

"you do know that 79% of the tax burden is carried by the top 20% of income earners, right?"

You mean those folks that hold the vast majority of the assets? Sure just cherry pick a single statistic from a single source and proclaim 'look what I know, you dip shits didn't know this did you, huh, huh?'. Look the issue here is just how out of balance things can get EITHER way before it breaks the system. The balance right now grossly favors those at the top of the economic food chain. If it continues to the point of breakdown just what do you think the fate of the top x% will be? In the end it is in everyones interest to not break the frickin system.

"Maybe for once we should stop being partisan"

Yea, thats rich, considering the drivel to from the "conservative" party I have listened with great restraint, and admittedly often with amusement, for most my life. Can you make a clear argument just using common sense instead of falling back on a single cherry picked statistic form BillO's list of "facts" to throw at a liberal---remember you have to use this word in with a dirty slur pretext or voice. Don't take this to mean I am a just another sheep in the Democratic flock, which in contrast to the Republican flock, is actually more like a herd of cats anyway. I will say I like many others are sick of the "good cop - bad cop" routine the two parties have used so successfully for so many years. So exactly whose drivel is it you like best? Oh thats right you like to quote the "fiducially conservative ones", hehehe, yea.

Wabi-Sabi
Matthew

read...

http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2 007/20070206/default.htm

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f5e905ce-69d8-11db-952e-00 00779e2340.html

http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/povert y_and_inequality/index.html

http://www.chicagofed.org/economic_research_and_da ta/wp_abstract.cfm?pubsID=732

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2003/03may/may03 interviewswolff.html

http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?st ory_id=7055911

http://ideas.repec.org/a/ecj/econjl/v112y2002i478p c68-c73.htm

http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/0704tilly .html

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18995

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB11418244330 8492484.html

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/71954e1a-ad43-11da-9643-00 00779e2340,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http% 3A%2F%2Fnews.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F71954e1a-ad43-11da -9643-0000779e2340.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fne weconomist.blogs.com%2Fnew_economist%2Fpoverty_and _inequality%2Findex.html

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/

The God Delusion is an ill-conceived, poorly researched, unscientific tirade that has actually embarrassed a lot of atheists who now don't want to be associated with Dawkins.

If you genuinely think Dawkins makes some good arguments, I suggest you read some of the criticism and then draw your own conclusions once you've evaluated all the claims and evidences presented.

• PDF review from a Christian perspective.
• NY Times extensive review of the book.
• Christians in Science links to articles on Dawkins.

I can't believe anybody would cite Crichton as some kind of authority on science and policy. He's an opportunistic pulp fiction writer at best and a disingenuous propagandist at worst. Biotechnologists have had to defend their work from the unreal dangers portrayed in Jurassic Park. Nanotechnologists have had to defend their careers from the falsehoods of Prey. Non-xenophobes were stuck defending the Japanese in Rising Sun. And now, climatologists are forced to defend their science from the spin and outright lies in State of Fear. Crichton is a one man show in overhyped doom-mongering and crap pseudoscience. Serious people ignore him.

See for example here or here

Novelist Michael Chabon has addressed both the idea of the death of childhood's 20th-century "golden age" and the role therein both of the electronic media and the at times crushing boredom of the era. He has also, for that matter, written about the work of Philip Pullman.

The AT&T case at issue is believed to relate to the warrentless surveillance of the content of phone calls between people within the US and people overseas. This is governed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It states:

"(1) Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year if the Attorney General certifies in writing under oath that--

...

(B) there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party;"

A "United States person" is a citizen or resident alien. It goes on to state other conditions. There is no evidence that any of these conditions (either excluding US persons or submitting of the oath of certification) have been followed in this case; therefore, the program is in violation of the law. Usually people call this "illegal".

Now, you could say it's "perfectly legal" in the sense that this seemingly clear violation of the law may be construed to be an exception under a radical interpretation of law held by a few appointees of the administration. Usually, though, a few people with vested interests offering a controversial argument that an action may be legal would not be termed, "perfectly LEGAL."

Attorney General Gonzales has argued that either a) Congress gave the executive the extra authority for this program under the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Afghanistan or b) FISA is unconstitutional. (a) seems like a strange argument given that Gonzales has said elsewhere that they did not ask Congress for permission specifically becuase they feared they would be denied. (b) requires a very extreme interpretation of presidential power (essentially that the executive can break any law passed by Congress as long as they say it's for the war on terror). Anyway, if you're really interested in why Gonzales arguements are bogus, don't take my word for it, check out what this collection of eminent legal and constitutional scholars had to say.

But here is also an email from gates: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15180#fn*

Yeah, well let's all trust Bill about what he said, because no one could possible forget the most important quote that has been attributed to them in their entire life.

The reason I didn't bother posting any links, is partly because somebody already posted a link to a wired article (http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,1484,00 .html) and partly because I assumed that everybody knows how to use google.

But here is also an email from gates: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15180#fn*

I unfortunately can't find the original interview that i recall where he stated it most clearly, but does this matter? Surely it's the roll of the quoter to include the reference of where they're quoting from?

If you are at all interested in this topic, and have the time, I strongly urge you to read Thomas Powers' article "The Biggest Secret" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18730 in the New York Review of Books.

I hope the kid making this game doesn't go too far "representing" Africa. The place has some major challenges (AIDS for example), and they are complex: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/9

I refer you to the following article - moron:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18650

Two of the larger examples I would point out are Howard Dean and Micheal Moore.

Two days ago my roomate asked me what I thought about Bush's quote, "It's just a G*dd@mn piece of paper". When I said I suspected that was a hoax, since I doubt any politician in this country would be foolish enough to say something, she wouldn't believe me, because to her and her friends it was just a confirmation of what they believe to be true (that Bush would say something like that). Five minutes later with Google showed that every article about that was linked back to one blogger, who never linked his article.

Weiner was a classic prodigy; spoke Greek and Latin by age 5; he graduated Tufts at age 14, had his PhD from Harvard by 19. Weiner said that the Prodigy syndrome is something a parent, frequently the father, does to a child. It involves bing very demanding, and vary very sparing of praise. Weiner said it got him a 5-year head start in his research, but cost him his whole childhood. He said he would never do that to his own child (though apparently he was a relatively demanding father). Weiner also said he believed the prodigy syndrome could be worked on most kids; that there was nothing exceptional about himself. He also mentions some tragic prodigies he knew personally who burned out and stopped trying.

My first point is this: don't confuse having a pushy parent with being really smart. The difference will not show up until one gets beyond regurgitating book learning and into original research. My second point is this: don't steal anyone's childhood; they are irreplaceable.

We run The New York Review of Books on OpenACS which does a nice job for the sorts of things an online publication needs.

China's Psychiatric Terror

At its triennial congress in Yokohama last September, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) overwhelmingly voted to send a delegation to China to investigate charges that dissidents were being imprisoned and maltreated as "political maniacs" both in regular mental hospitals and in police-run psychiatric custodial institutions known as the Ankang. (The word literally means "Peace and Health.")

The psychiatrists who staff these institutions, Dangerous Minds shows, tend to assume that their patients are mad because of their political beliefs or actions. The diagnoses made in both the political dissident and Falun Gong cases, ranging from "delusions of reform" to "paranoid psychosis," are highly reminiscent of the long-discredited label of "sluggish schizophrenia" that the Soviets used to apply to their dissidents and religious nonconformists.

Martin Gardner says that the superultimate question is: Why does the universe exist?

Or, put another way: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Perhaps this is more of a philosophical or metaphysical question, but I think it fits in well with the great scientific questions.

If you think about it, you'll realize that things would be alot simpler if nothing existed at all. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? It's a pretty overwhelming thought -- a good reminder that we still don't know much about the fundamental rules of nature. As Gardner said, "the night is large".

Your "designed" coment implies you do not believe in god. Thus where exactly do ethics come from? I would argue they are based solely upon a social contract. I.E. I give up the "right" to kill you with the expectation that you give up the "right" to kill me.

Contractarianism makes for a poor ethical system, since it cannot cover children or the mentally infirm (except as indirect recipients of the sentiments of contractors). And it means that numbers determine morality - if enough of us agree that persons of a certain skin tone, or gender, or religious belief, aren't worth, we just agree to a contract that excludes them. Might makes right.

Supernaturalism, of course, is even worse, since the existance of god(s) is doubtful, and their desires ever moreso.

Non-supernatural ethical theories include utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism, and the rights view. Rationalism - "act as if your will were universal law" tells me how I should behave in light of my own values, but doesn't inform what those values should be. Its problems are described well in this Wikipedia article.

For an introduction to the rights view, especially as applied to animals, I suggest the work of Tom Regan (two different links there).

For utilitarian perspective on animal issues, Peter Singer is the go-to guy (two different links there).

Only those social contracts which are beneficial to both parties tend to survive.

Racism, sexism, and other abuses of the weak by the powerful have survived quite well over the centuries, largely due to social contracts amoung power-holders that excluded everyone else.

Not to defend either, but you do realize that many laws are cultural and vary from place to place. There are cultures where polygamy and polyandry are an accepted norm. Is their lifestyle immoral? Only BY YOUR standards, not theirs.

First, I have no argument with honest polygamy or polyandry. I identify as polyamorous. Infidelity is different - it means lying or breaking an agreement. If I have two lovers and tell them they are the only two, and then take a third without telling them, that's unethical.

Second, law (institutionalized social norms) is orthogonal to ethics. So are mores (non-institutionalized social norms). Yes, I will state that regardless of law or mores of any given culture, rape is unethical.

What about medical experiments? If 1000 dogs needed to die in order to learn some new technique to save 1000 people, is it worth it?

The lives of those dogs are not ours to take.

If one person needed to to die in order to learn some new technique to save 1000 people, is it worth it? I'm sure that we could learn a lot by vivisecting a few children.

Yes, they're admirable in their gender discrimination, and the fact that more than 40 per cent of their employees can't afford the cheapest health insurance program they offer to their employees.

You may think it's an American success story, but there's a growing number of people who think that's not the success story they'd like America to have.

Opressing those with little option has never yielded long term success. That's at least up to today, if you check through some history books. It tends to be a matter of time until the back breaks. You may be able to prolong the inevitable but the underlying problem is that if you let things go too far, the change will be rapid, uncontrollable, often destructive to the existing establishment and sometimes violent.

Most people would prefer controllable change, rather than a model where "rules" are pushed to the limits until the system breaks down.

Oh, dear. The "Roosevelt knew it was coming and deliberately did nothing" conspiracy argument. I'm afraid it's nowhere near as paranoid as you make it out to be. I suggest you try reading a serious history, like Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept, rather than conspiracy-theory nonsense.

Or read this exchange from the New York Review of Books Letters column, between Gore Vidal (a novelist who dabbles in conspiracy theory) and David Kahn (a serious historian who wrote, among other things, one of the definitive histories of cryptography):

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14238

You could argue that the Japanese were "pushed" into a confrontation with the US, because the US cut off their supply of American oil in July, 1941, in response to Japanese troops moving into French Indochina. But only if you think that continued Japanese military expansion in China and Southeast Asia was somehow inevitable -- or justified.

The Japanese government could have their halted their expansion, of course; but they decided to continue. In order to do so, they needed access to oil, rubber, and other critical military supplies, so they planned to conquer Indonesia and Malaysia. In order to prevent the US from interfering in this expansion, they planned a series of attacks and invasions to knock out the US presence in the western Pacific and take out the US navy.

The Japanese were certainly not suckered into attacking Pearl Harbor; they carefully planned it, based in part on the earlier success of the British carrier aircraft in attacking the Italian naval base at Taranto in the Mediterranean (something the US ignored). Japanese military leaders started debating and planning war with the US in mid-1941; they had made the decision for war by the fall.

The US expected that a Japanese attack would most likely come in the Philippines; in part, they simply didn't think the Japanese capable of something as audacious and difficult as a long-range, carrier-based attack on Hawaii.

(Leaving aside all this, may I point out that if you are "suckering" someone into attacking you, you do this in order to ambush them when they make the attack, not let them go ahead and destroy most of your fleet?)

Trying or not (and some certainly were) there's little doubt that Nazi scientists were a long way from the bomb. Indeed, due to a widely circulated (and accepted) mistake in a calculation about the mass of Uranium required for a chain reaction, many believed it impossible.

There are transcripts and tapes of British debriefings at Farm Hall after captured German scientists were informed about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most express complete incredulity that the US scientists had succeeded.

Trying or not (and some certainly were) there's little doubt that Nazi scientists were a long way from the bomb. Indeed, due to a widely circulated (and accepted) mistake in a calculation about the mass of Uranium required for a chain reaction, many believed it impossible.

There are transcripts and tapes of British debriefings at Farm Hall after captured German scientists were informed about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most express complete incredulity that the US scientists had succeeded.

Trying or not (and some certainly were) there's little doubt that Nazi scientists were a long way from the bomb. Indeed, due to a widely circulated (and accepted) mistake in a calculation about the mass of Uranium required for a chain reaction, many believed it impossible.

There are transcripts and tapes of British debriefings at Farm Hall after captured German scientists were informed about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most express complete incredulity that the US scientists had succeeded.

Trying or not (and some certainly were) there's little doubt that Nazi scientists were a long way from the bomb. Indeed, due to a widely circulated (and accepted) mistake in a calculation about the mass of Uranium required for a chain reaction, many believed it impossible.

There are transcripts and tapes of British debriefings at Farm Hall after captured German scientists were informed about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most express complete incredulity that the US scientists had succeeded.

Trying or not (and some certainly were) there's little doubt that Nazi scientists were a long way from the bomb. Indeed, due to a widely circulated (and accepted) mistake in a calculation about the mass of Uranium required for a chain reaction, many believed it impossible.

There are transcripts and tapes of British debriefings at Farm Hall after captured German scientists were informed about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most express complete incredulity that the US scientists had succeeded.

Trying or not (and some certainly were) there's little doubt that Nazi scientists were a long way from the bomb. Indeed, due to a widely circulated (and accepted) mistake in a calculation about the mass of Uranium required for a chain reaction, many believed it impossible.

There are transcripts and tapes of British debriefings at Farm Hall after captured German scientists were informed about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most express complete incredulity that the US scientists had succeeded.

The idea of a space ship that would have design flaws, or push the limits of their design, was not commonly entertained.

How very true! Indeed, it was because of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon that the gargantuan design flaw named "Space Shuttle" came into being.

If those scifi serials hadn't taught a young Richard Nixon that spaceships were meant to be flown by men, we wouldn't have had this expensive albatross diverting so much money from real advancement.

I read a lot of magazines and newspapers online. When I'm in the US I buy most of them in paper form (including the NYT every day) but I'm in Europe most of the time and the online versions are the only reasonably fresh way to get the content I want.

I actually have paid for an online subscription to the New York Review of Books but it was a bit pricey.

What I would like to see is one place where I could pay a single price and select several online content sites to subscribe to. Even if each one has a separate price, I still want one place to handle the subscriptions. I think the hassle barrier is higher than any (reasonable) price barrier. I should have one account that gives me access to several journals.

I would happily pay US$50/year for combined unlimited access to the NYT, the NYRB, the New Yorker, and Artnet Magazine. (Most of that content is currently free.) But I'm not going to bother with four separate subscriptions.

And I really don't think a micropayment or other per-article payment scheme will ever work. The fact that Fark makes money should be a pretty strong hint (and they're not even selling content per se, just better access to their site).

Slightly off-topic aside: if we all use Firefox now, why the continuous grumbling about the NYT Free Reg Req? Whenever the cookie expires on my completely non-personal account, the Fox just logs me back in.

Then, when you're done with that, (no cheating by skipping John Galt's 103 page long speech on objectivism) you might want to head over and read this article at the New York Review of Books, including these paragraphs:

These laws mean that drug companies no longer have to rely on their own research for new drugs, and few of the large ones do. Increasingly, they rely on academia, small biotech startup companies, and the NIH for that [7] At least a third of drugs marketed by the major drug companies are now licensed from universities or small biotech companies, and these tend to be the most innovative ones.[8] While Bayh-Dole was clearly a bonanza for big pharma and the biotech industry, whether its enactment was a net benefit to the public is arguable.

This is an industry that in some ways is like the Wizard of Oz--still full of bluster but now being exposed as something far different from its image. Instead of being a engine of innovation, it is a vast marketing machine. Instead of being a free market success story, it lives off government-funded research and monopoly rights

Explore his other books and the websites built by his company, Ars Digita (eg the elegant NY Review of Books site). Research the tragedy of Ars Digita, via Google I guess. Somewhere in here there used to be a long rant about how the venture capitalists got their toes in the door and proceeded to destroy the company, which was a very idealistic and efficient company that did just what you ask-- look for alumni or fans.

actually, I think it's the minority, don't forget that they're completly brainwashed to love their leader.

This does, sadly, have a lot of truth to it. Nick Kristof of the NY Times had a review of Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin, detailing how North Koreans bribe their officials in order to get jobs in Siberian labor camps because even that is better than what they have going on in their own country. Still, in a closed society like North Korea's, a lot of people really don't know of anything better than the misery they live in. Sad but unfortunately largely true.

It is truly a sad day for those who support the Jeffersonian ideal of democracy when a regime that supports torture, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17230 and ignores due process of law is supported by so many Americans.

By the way, I am an American who served for nearly six years as an officer in the USAF.

Most research money does not come from federal grants....The reason the drugs cost so much has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of marketing. It is almost entirely due to the cost of research and developmen

Care to back that statement up with some numbers? Because Marcia Angell, who was editor of The New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, disagrees with you and agrees with the poster. She's just published The Truth About Drug Companies . The core thesis of this book is that Currently Americans spend a staggering $200 billion each year on prescription drugs. As Dr. Angell powerfully demonstrates, claims that high drug prices are necessary to fund research and development are unfounded: The truth is that drug companies funnel the bulk of their resources into the marketing of products of dubious benefit. Meanwhile, as profits soar, the companies brazenly use their wealth and power to push their agenda through Congress, the FDA, and academic medical centers...Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective.

If you're looking for more than the book blurb, The New York Review of Books has a footnooted, condensed version of the book's argument, noting:

In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of th e pharmaceutical industry. It is mainly because of this resistance that drug companies are now blanketing us with public relations messages. And the magic words, repeated over and over like an incantation, are research, innovation, and American. Research. Innovation. American. It makes a great story.

But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies--dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States. (In 2003, for the first time, the industry lost its first-place position, coming in third, behind "mining, crude oil production," and "commercial banks.") The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D.

Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

and

At least a third of drugs marketed by the major drug companies are now licensed from universities or small biotech companies, and these tend to be the most innovative ones.

Bill Gates has been around for a while too, but that doesn't make his "nobody will ever need more than 640k memory" statement come true.

Of course, but I feel the need to point out that Gates never said that.

I would take Paul Graham as a solid reference for eg. LISP. But his argumentation for why Python developers are smarter than developers for language X is subjective and unfounded at very best.

Subjective, yes, but not in any way unfounded. Graham has a long history of working with very, very smart programmers (and is one himself), so it behooves people who care about what smart programmers think to listen to his opinions. Which is not to say that he's going to be right about anything you quote him on -- although I happen to agree with him vis a vis Java -- but that his opinion is, by virtue of his experience, weightier than, say yours (or mine.)

'jfb