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Unfortunately, though, that's the same combination as my luggage.

Apparently so were these other people: Spaceballs, Diebold Voting Machines, The Virginia Lottery, and Cold War Generals,

The US also leads the world in patent development.

But on the other hand - what is to be expected from a country ruled by the legal departments of companies.

Some Unused and Probably Unusable references to lawyers by Heinlein. Another more interesting is Mass-murder of all lawyers in 1965 in one of his timelines as it appeared in the book Number of the Beast (p.378).

If you have a forum where governments can't track down and kill political opponents, you have a forum where nice people can't track down and hold liable nogoodniks who froth hate.

This must be repeated and understood. Like all tech, the Internet is a double-edged sword.

It is also worth noting that suppressing dissent is, unfortunately, not confined to the government; intimidation techniques are the frequent purview of many who seek to stifle free discussion..

Every study I've seen has shown that there is a statistical correlation between the levels of estrogen in the body, and the interest in math & science. The more estrogen, the less interested the subject becomes (for both boys and girls.)

I've not seen any such studies, and I'd be interested in reading them. Do you have any links? I tried searching scirus.com and only came up with links like this one and this one. (That is, not particularly relevant.)

Actually, using Google Scholar, I did find this PDF (from a law school professor) that suggests what you mention. From that article, I was able to use scirus to find this abstract (from the journal Neuroscience) which supports your position.

I guess it is somewhat indicative of the nature of the beast that although I've also published in Neuroscience, I've never heard of these studies.

I just finished reading John Stossel's new book (quite good, though not as good as his first). He has a section in it about the Congressional Record.

If you think the Congressional Record is an accurate account of what happens in Congress you are dead wrong. Congressmen use taxpayer dollars to manipulate the Record because there is nothing that says they can't. They insert bogus info, like "Congressman Bob Blowhard addressed the House with a commendation for the 4-H Club of Woohah, Oklahoma". Which never really happened but it makes Senator Blowhard look good with his constituents. They also change the words of what they really said on the floor to make themselves sound better.

Here is a blog post mentioning the problem Stossel brings up and a small excerpt

Carl

[Orin Kerr, February 27, 2005 at 1:56pm]

ACLU Approves Of Overwhelming Majority of Patriot Act: One of the odd things about debates over the Patriot Act is that even its harshest informed critics actually only oppose a very small part of the Act; the overwhelming majority of the statute is uncontroversial among the fairly small number of people who understand what's in it. As best I can tell, this has been a well-kept secret for the last 3+ years mostly for tactical reasons: If you want to get the public very worried about a topic to help advance your cause in future legislative debates, you can't very well admit that your objections are actually quite limited.

In light of that, it's good to see that ACLU President Nadine Strossen apparently has admitted that the ACLU approves of more that 90% of the Patriot Act. As live-blogged at Ex Parte, from a recent address by Nadine Strossen at the annual Federalist Society student symposium: "[ACLU President Nadine Strossen] notes that the ACLU only has a few objections [to the Patriot Act, covering] about 12 of the 160 elements of the Patriot Act." While it's too early to know whether this live-blogged report is exactly accurate, note that the statement echoes the view of ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romer in early 2004 that "much of the Patriot Act is neutral legislation for civil liberties," and that only "about a dozen provisions" are objectionable to him. If anyone has a transcript of Strossen's remarks or a video, please send it on to okerr [at] law.gwu.edu.

Putting all that aside, I don't want to dwell on constitutional analysis, because our view has never been that civil liberties are necessarily coextensive with constitutional rights. Conversely, I guess the fact that something is mentioned in the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean that it is a fundamental civil liberty.

Here's some more detail from Eugene Volokh:

The Volokh Conspiracy