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P. How about a reassessment of copyright law in line with patent laws. Works must demonstrate true worth and value to society prior to achieve copyright protection...

Patents are supposed to be novel, non-obvious, and useful. However, as far as I know, to qualify as useful they don't actually have to be any better than, or even as good as, existing free alternatives. The Microsoft FAT patents cover a way of storing long file names that is arguably novel and non-obvious precisely because it is a needlessly convoluted way of doing something that had already been done. In any case, I don't want to see the copyright system based on the patent system, because I think the patent system is even more broken than the copyright system is.

If not for the rise of cloud computing, I would say scrap them both. The patent system only provides a net benefit in the areas of chemicals and pharmaceuticals (Bessen and Meurer, 2008), and I expect government research grants could do just as well. I'm not convinced copyright provides a net benefit at all, since for entertainment it seems to deliver form over substance, which I think we could do without, and for practical works, it takes mind share from free works. However, scrapping copyright would accelerate the shift to cloud computing, which is even worse than copyright.

Bessen, James & Meurer, Michael J. (2008) Patent failure. Princeton University Press. <http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8634.pdf>

If you are so sure it exists, just prove it

It's hard to prove that free will exists [...]

John Conway and Simon Conway, at Princeton IAS, did some work on this: Free Will Theorem. Depending on who you ask, their result is fairly obvious or quite deep.

Conway did a series of video lectures on the subject, see here here.

Can't dismiss money in this question. https://scholar.princeton.edu/... And who knows, maybe Americans can limit the way money influences politics? We should try that, instead of going around, whining with "who cares".

You might find this interesting.

oh just shut the f up.

Who is the bigot now?

bigot (a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own)

The point is to combat bigotry

Bigotry? What is that? Ah, dictionary to the rescue:

S: (n) bigot (a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own)

So, one "side" of this conflict wants people holding an opinion differing from their own punished.

The other wants to keep men out of women's bathrooms...

There are simply men and women. If, despite having been born with distinctive genitalia, someone considers himself to be of the opposite sex, then they suffer from a delusion:

a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary

My recent argument with one such person ended, when I asked him to define terms: what is the definition of the term "man"?

If you choose to reply to this, be sure to include your definition. And, no, do not try to imply some difference between "sex" and "gender" — they are synonyms (except when talking about grammar rules).

And, no, contrasting what you are vs. how you identify is bullshit too — unless you are prepared to treat this human as a cat, and this White woman as Black.

When I looked into that some time recently I believe for a visible red light laser you'd see significant dispersion after less than 10km

Actually we bounce laser beams off of the Moon to measure Earth/Moon distance on a regular basis.

I find the laser acceleration an engineering scale problem, and solvable for a very, very small probe.

However I do not see any way a very, very small probe can have enough energy to transmit a signal back to earth. Ultra-short pulse lasers are clearly the sanest way to transmit data between the stars, but we are generally talking about some of the largest lasers ever built by mankind with 10m telescopes. Not something a micro-probe could do.

I'm aware of that study. It's probably good science but it basically contradicts nearly all other recent studies of the Antarctic ice sheet. What is particularly telling to me is the data from the GRACE satellites. They measure changes in gravity due to changes in mass in the Antarctic ice sheet. The GRACE satellites show a net loss of 92 billion tons per year from 2003 to 2014. From a study published in April 2014:

The vast majority of that loss was from West Antarctica, which is the smaller of the continent's two main regions and abuts the Antarctic Peninsula that winds up toward South America. Since 2008, ice loss from West Antarctica's unstable glaciers doubled from an average annual loss of 121 billion tons of ice to twice that by 2014, the researchers found. The ice sheet on East Antarctica, the continent's much larger and overall more stable region, thickened during that same time, but only accumulated half the amount of ice lost from the west, the researchers reported.

To quote my reply to you above about the NASA study:

The GRACE satellites which measure changes in the mass of ice by changes in gravity disagree with the NASA study you cited. A study from 2015 found that Antarctica was losing a net 92 billion tons per year from 2003 to 2014 mainly from West Antarctica. I tend to believe the GRACE data more than others because it's a relatively simple way of measuring changes in mass on the Earth. The NASA study you cited was measuring changes in the elevation of the ice in Antarctica with satellites but the elevation measurements have a lot error in them and the study made modeled assumptions about how the ice compacted rather than observations (it's a difficult place to send observers to).

The GRACE satellites which measure changes in the mass of ice by changes in gravity disagree with the NASA study you cited. A study from 2015 found that Antarctica was losing a net 92 billion tons per year from 2003 to 2014 mainly from West Antarctica. I tend to believe the GRACE data more than others because it's a relatively simple way of measuring changes in mass on the Earth. The NASA study you cited was measuring changes in the elevation of the ice in Antarctica with satellites but the elevation measurements have a lot error in them and the study made modeled assumptions about how the ice compacted rather than observations (it's a difficult place to send observers to).

Am I insane because I identify as a woman?

Ok, sorry, let me clarify this a bit. You are not "insane" — that's a loaded term anyway. But you do have a delusion:

a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary

(That "superior evidence", in this case, is your "biological sex".)

Either that, or, maybe, you have a lighter disorder of pseudologia fantastica.

I'm sorry, but I'm not buying into this subtle differences between "being" and "identifying as". For a man to "identify as" woman is just as (if not more!) delusional (or fraudulent) as for a White to identify as Black. Your "bilogical sex" makes you a man, by definition — which destines you to M-labeled bathrooms, whatever you are wearing.

it depends if you're talking about sex or gender

Nonsense. "Sex" and "gender" are interchangeable synonyms, the latter employed purely to avoid the erotic connotations of the former, when discussing things like grammar. Your attempts to differentiate between these terms may itself be symptomatic of the delusion.

Swaab and others have demonstrated sexual dimorphism in the brain

Any references to "scientific papers" can not, unfortunately, be given much credence — because of how sensitive a topic this is politically. For example, imagine that same "sexual dimorphism in the brain" argument used to justify the wage-disparity between sexes. Heck, you don't even need to imagine, just consider the fate of one L.H. Summers.

So, you are claiming, that some organs of your body disagree with others in identifying your sex (brain vs. genitalia)? Even if that were true, you are "fixing" the wrong organs... Which is, of course, your choice — just do not demand, the rest of society changes the language (and bathrooms) to accommodate it.

"Private corporations are people when it suits them best."

Well if the population wasn't so dumb about history and politics they could probably do something about it. But most people are hyper capitalist ra-ra-ra.

Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Manufacturing consent (book)

http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499/

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM

https://vimeo.com/39566117

Testing theories of representative government

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

Democracy Inc

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X

As Robert Heinlein wrote decades ago, "Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy".

On the flip side, if you want to conspire to make your kids lives easier than their peers by letting them avoid the challenge they would have getting a decent education in a public school...

Sure as a parent, there is a certain amount of shielding you want to give your kids (say if the local public school was infested with gangs, guns, drugs, etc.), but tracking your kids at an early age to an highly academic (or religious depending on your school) program might better serve your desires as a parent, than their interests as a life learner. There is also something to be said about exposure to diversity (in religion, ethnicity, income, etc) that is greater in a public school environment.

And if your goal is actually to send your kid to an "ivy-league" school, you might actually be better off with having them attend a public school because of the big-fish-little-pond effect. Not just an antecdoe, but actually illustrated by this study

Something to think about...

"Snowden fanboys are amazingly blind"

So are 99% of americans and their glorious oligarchic government.

Testing theories of representative government

Testing theories of american government

The USPTO can (and does) award patents for almost anything. The patent examiners aren't experts in every field and if they receive advice that an item, method, or process is unique and non-obvious, they will award a patent.

Yes, it would be ridiculous for modern patent offices to employ experts in every field. If it were even possible, it would be an incredible waste of talent.

But a patent is just a pretty piece of paper until you try to enforce it. Only then will the courts actually look at the merit of the patent and declare it enforceable or invalid.

I'm not sure about this. It could be different in different jurisdictions, but my understanding is that it is generally not the role of the courts when ruling on a patent infringement case to determine the merit of the patent (since, in theory, the patent office is supposed to ensure this), but rather only to determine whether the alleged infringing act does fall within the scope of the patent, and if so, what "damages" are legally owed.

The main reason for granting patents is to persuade inventors to publish their ideas and in return they are given exclusive licensing rights for a reasonable amount of time. The publishing and sharing of new ideas is the good side of patents. The litigation necessary to challenge or defend a patent is the unfortunate bad side.

Yup. In the case of chemical and pharmaceutical patents, the good outweighs the bad, according to the research I'm aware of. All other fields, taken together, it was a case of more or less breaking even, until the arrival of software patents, when it became the bad overwhelmingly outweighing the good.

Bessen & Meurer (2008) Patent Failure

Dereliction of duty.

His job is to enforce the constitution, not to invent asinine excuses for letting the government violate our rights.

-jcr

Unfortunately, you are incorrect. A federal judge's responsibility is to rule in favor of established law and precedent. The only judges with the power to rule otherwise, without possibility of retribution of having their ruling overturned serve on the Supreme Court of the U.S., but even supreme court rulings can overlook 'stare decisis' (latin for the requirement that judges repect precedent, especially those of higher courts but originally for British common law as well). How else would the Dred Scott decision have been reversed and civil rights for black people and other minorities been established?

There is no means by which SCOTUS judges can be removed from office, but federal judges can be. And just as you may have come to suspect, federal judges can be removed by elected officials... which would seem to indicate that a political decision such as this one may be, are controversial and grounds for termination. One would hope that termination is only temporal and not corporal, but we're all aware that the espionage 'community' doesn't play by the same rules as we might wish. (Isn't that the way it plays out in all the spy movies?)

Theories of american politics

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of-democracy-america-tpm-interview

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

It's this same mistaken belief that tells you "high fructose corn syrup" is bad, when in reality it's because somebody is afraid of the name.

What do those goddamned egghead Princeton researchers know, amirite?

https://www.princeton.edu/main...

Also, those liberal smartypants over at the Journal of Clinical Investigation

More damning evidence against fructose emerged just last week in an important study from the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Researchers in California recruited volunteers to drink a glass of Kool-Aid with every meal for 10 weeks; half took their soft drinks sweetened with fructose, the other half with glucose. By the end of the study period, both groups had put on weight, but the subjects getting fructose had more visceral fat—the kind that adheres to our organs and is associated with heightened risk for atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes. The fructose group also showed higher levels of LDL cholesterol and lower insulin sensitivity.

Stupid, stupid scientists.

I mean, forget about the fact that High Fructose Corn Syrup tastes like ass compared to actual cane sugar. I need my goddamn Big Gulp and I need it now!

"Jet" means any stream of high-velocity low-pressure fluid... like rocket exhaust, or water, or air, accelerated in a ducted fan.

It's a jet device.

Americans, it seems, love their corporate overlords. That's the only explanation I can think of for something so absurd to be allowed to happen.

Poppycock. Oligarchy. Unless the elite are on board, good luck.

FYI, the Big Bang Theory isn't astrophysics.

Really? That's odd, I wonder why it's covered in this book and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and... etc.

Please learn a teensy tiny bit about the fields of knowledge you wish to dismiss.

Please learn a teensy tiny bit about the fields of knowledge you're discussing before you correct people.

This could be because an oligarchy can get its way, even when the majority doesn't support it's actions.

Paul Krugman leans negative about TPP. For this is not a trade agreement. It’s about intellectual property and dispute settlement; the big beneficiaries are likely to be pharma companies and firms that want to sue governments.
In a direct sense, protecting intellectual property means creating a monopoly - letting the holders of a patent or copyright charge a price for something (the use of knowledge) that has a zero social marginal cost. In that direct sense this introduces a distortion that makes the world a bit poorer.

Intellectual property: leaked text suggests very strong, even draconian IP regime on copyright, patents, pharma, etc.

Nowadays, you just motion capture it

I think they also use equations to calculate motion. Especially when you're talking about objects where the number of elements (e.g. hair) and other issues make motion capture difficult. And they're good at it. I recall several years ago an old DOS game (probably the last one I played) where the motion rendering was so impressive I felt like I was actually in the floating boat.

I find it rather ironic, that the same site, which shouts down any attempts to reason that an idea can be owned — and that using it without the owner's permission is illegal and immoral — would be so respectful towards other kinds of information.

If, as the opinion prevailing here holds, "information can not be stolen" because you still have your original copy, what grounds are there to prohibit somebody else to share, what they know about you, with others? On that matter, will you also outlaw gossip?

The problem seems to be that if you *can* give permission then you will be coerced into giving permission.

Except the term coercion implies use of force. As long as you aren't forced to use a web-site despite your disagreement with their EULA, you can not complain of being "coerced".

In Firefox, I get nothing found for the first two and the last one tells me to use the start menu to check for updates.

Vis WSUS , you definitely can change the update server.

... You can't have a business without customers, you can't have customers if people don't have money, and they can't get money without wages or social security...

What we have here is the situation when corporate power, and the power of the financial elite, takes over all aspects of government policy. It transforms the entire consumer market based economy into the Tragedy of the Commons.

Every corporation aims to to fatten its bottom line, stock price, and C-Suite compensation package by reducing the wages of its labor force. It is a rational micro-decision, just as grazing as many sheep as possible on the commons is rational for the individual farmer, but it destroys in the long run the basis of the whole economy - a nation full of consumers with lots of money to spend on products. The majority of the increases in corporate profitability, and the source of the exploding CEO paychecks, over the last quarter century have come from holding wage payouts flat (or reducing them. Increased productivity stopped being linked to worker compensation a full 45 years ago, an entire working lifetime. As the proportion of wages that make up the economy fall to the lowest level since the Great Depression the engine that drives the growth of the U.S. economy is running out of fuel, now an anemic 2.38%, compared to the long term mean of 4.41%.

But hey, the CEOs are happy!

Wow. I guess with your reductionist theory, the evidence you presented, and ALL CAPS emphasis, I will have to concede. I guess this study from Princeton, and others like it, must be flawed, because it contradicts your theory http://www.princeton.edu/main/... . You win. Keep drinking your soda. I won't stop you.

States don't all get the same number of electoral votes. California currently has 55 electoral votes.
Here is the electoral map by county for the most recent presidential elections: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
Etc.
Yet all of California's votes went for the Democrat. People living in eastern California haven't voted for the Democrat since 1968. Do they feel represented or do they feel like the bastard stepchild of L.A. and San Francisco?

Probably, and if you have physical access to the iPhone you can increase the rate of memory errors with mild heat. This paper from 2003 is pretty interesting and I'm not sure why it hasn't led to a new class of jailbreaking / rooting exploits yet. (That I'm aware of, at least.)
http://sip.cs.princeton.edu/pr... :
"Our attack works by sending to the JVM a Java program that is designed so that almost any memory error in its address space will allow it to take control of the JVM. All conventional Java and .NET virtual machines are vulnerable to this attack. The technique of the attack is broadly applicable against other language-based security schemes such as proof-carrying code.
"We measured the attack on two commercial Java Virtual Machines: Sun’s and IBM’s. We show that a singlebit error in the Java program’s data space can be exploited to execute arbitrary code with a probability of about 70%, and multiple-bit errors with a lower probability.
"Our attack is particularly relevant against smart cards or tamper-resistant computers, where the user has physical access (to the outside of the computer) and can use various means to induce faults; we have successfully used heat. Fortunately, there are some straightforward defenses against this attack."

No one has genomic techniques to successfully create a protein from whole cloth.

That used to be true, but science marches on...

http://www.princeton.edu/main/...

They are instead considering the fact that their staff (with no decision on content) may not want to risk their lives over this.

Well, whether they are afraid of the terrorists or of their staff leaving over this, these editors definitely are cowards. By definition: coward -- (a person who shows fear or timidity).

We over-produce and waste most of what we do

Not the natural gas we do not...

I would think a bit of prudence would be in order.

Prudence is a virtue and is always in order. However, what that maxim has to do with fracking (or global warming) in particular, escapes me.

But our present system precludes all that.

Huh?

Right. If only someone had the vision to write (Economic) Science Fiction. . . (or maybe that's Fantasy writing right there. . . )

How about Asimov? With introduction by economist Paul Krugman https://webspace.princeton.edu/users/pkrugman/FDT%20intro.pdf

Of course some people accuse Krugman of being a a Fantasy writer...

Arguments from authority are an important part of informal logic. Since we cannot have expert knowledge of many subjects, we often rely on the judgments of those who do. There is no fallacy involved in simply arguing that the assertion made by an authority is true. The fallacy only arises when it is claimed or implied that the authority is infallible in principle and can hence be exempted from criticism. - http://www.princeton.edu/~acha...

Saying that an authority is probably correct is not a logical fallacy. In fact, it is probably correct.

Just my two cents, as someone who spent 15 seconds reading a bit from the articles:

Cent #1:

That being said, i just wonder if it possible to trigger this bug from a high level language (e.g. matlab) or the JVM [...]?

I suggest you speculate.
Maybe even do some original research.
Whatever you do, by all means, do NOT read the first paragraph of the second paper that the summary refers to. If you did that, you would read this...

We present an experimental study showing that soft memory errors can lead to serious security vulnerabilities in Java and .NET virtual machines, or in any system that relies on type-checking of untrusted programs as a protection mechanism. Our attack works by sending to the JVM a Java program that is designed so that almost any memory error in its address space will allow it to take control of the JVM. All conventional Java and .NET virtual machines are vulnerable to this attack.

... which directly answers your quoted question. You could learn from someone else's work, instead of repeating the work yourself. We obviously can't tolerate such efficiency.

Cent #2 (since, I did say, I'm offering you my two cents...):
Let's look at the rest of your post.

you can try to
a) manipulate the host kernel directly (that would be nearly undetectable)
b) manipulate private keys in other VMs or the host
c) manipulate other VMs memory
d) communicate between VMs

Hmmm... or, e), you could try to subvert security systems. You could elevate, getting permission to do things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. You could effectively modify any physical bit of RAM. I'd love to take credit for this novel idea, but in truth, this is exactly what the security researchers indicated in their summaries.

As terrible as your theoretical attacks a), b), c), and d) all sound, all of those are clearly possible if you subvert the security system that is designed to prevent people from doing those things. If e) is accomplished (meaning that security becomes entirely ineffective), then all physical memory can be written to (by the attacker). So, as dramatic as your ideas may sound (because each one of those issues do appear to be very serious problems), I think you actually may be understating the case.

The problem is not Bush or the GOP. The CIA has always been like this. This is what the CIA was made to do. From the beginning one of its primary missions was to be able to conduct high-stakes interrogations in total secrecy with no oversight. What did people expect to happen?

Leaving marks or not is a choice for any half-way competent torturer. Being brutal without leaving marks is something which was first developed around 1920 and which has been refined since then. England, France, and the United States have led the world in this, and various governments around the world have been quick to learn from their examples. The reason is, of course, to mislead people like you into believing that torture is not torture.

See Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali.

Everything to do with war and resource extraction is a dirty business.

Everything, where the payer and the decision-maker are different entities is a dirty business. Fixed that for you... For example, just about anything tax-paid — whether it is road-construction or software-writing — is a dirt-magnet...

I think you can call that profiteering.

No, you can not.

or racketeering

Nope

And, before you ask, it is not "terrorism" either...

Everything to do with war and resource extraction is a dirty business.

Everything, where the payer and the decision-maker are different entities is a dirty business. Fixed that for you... For example, just about anything tax-paid — whether it is road-construction or software-writing — is a dirt-magnet...

I think you can call that profiteering.

No, you can not.

or racketeering

Nope

And, before you ask, it is not "terrorism" either...

I can thoroughly recommend The New Science of Strong Materials or Why You Don't Fall through the Floor by J.E. Gordon, which even has a positive review by Bill Gates.

Finding something that is:

• Hard
• Tough
• Light
• Cheap
• Transparent

is challenging. Sapphire gets a pass for Hard and a (mostly) Transparent.

"A hole is a mobile positive charge with mass similar to the electron mass."

Actually, a hole is "the lack of an electron at a position where one could exist in an atom or atomic lattice." (See https://www.princeton.edu/~ach...)

A hole is like a bubble in a liquid. To say it has mass may help in the math, but it's a conceptual mass. A hole is in a very real sense a vacancy in the electron shell, left behind when an electron is excited away from the atom.

Further, there is actually quite a bit of evidence that HFCS is NOT the same as other sugars. Industry critics dispute those studies, but they exist.

I understand that this is one of those topics that the Pop Skeptic community has taken under its wing, but not because of evidence one way or the other.

Bocarsly, M. E. "High-fructose Corn Syrup Causes Characteristics of Obesity in Rats: Increased Body Weight, Body Fat and Triglyceride Levels." NIH.gov. National Institutes of Health, Nov. 2010. Web. 16 June 2013

https://www.princeton.edu/main...

Havel PJ (2005). "Dietary Fructose: Implications for Dysregulation of Energy Homeostasis and Lipid/Carbohydrate Metabolism". Nutrition Reviews 63 (5):133–157.

Dufault R, LeBlanc B, Schnoll R, Cornett C, Schweitzer L, Wallinga D, Hightower J, Patrick L, Lukiw WJ (2009). "Mercury from chlor-alkali plants: Measured concentrations in food product sugar". Environmental Health 8: 2. doi:10.1186/1476-069X-8-2. PMC 2637263

  LeBlanc BW, Eggleston G, Sammataro D, Cornett C, Dufault R, Deeby T, St Cyr E (26 August 2009). "Formation of Hydroxymethylfurfural in Domestic High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Its Toxicity to the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera)". Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 57 (16): 7369–7376. doi:10.1021/jf9014526. PMID 19645504.

And, BTW, Kessler doesn't have much good to say about the food industry, and putting sugar in everything. If you don't believe Kessler, you can also listen to this Robert Lustig, who also has a law degree and a medical degee, like Kessler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It's a long video, but it changed my life. Mark Hyman also helped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... When I realized how addicted to sugar I was, I was able to treat sugar like a highly addictive substance, and overcome my addiction. I gave it up in May, and feel better than I ever have since I was a kid. I no longer have heart burn or attacks of the blues. I have more energy, better concentration, and I've lost 20 pounds.

http://www.princeton.edu/main/...

I have puzzled about this myself for a long time. I have come up with two possibilities for why there might be a difference. First, speed matters when forming addictive behaviors. It doesn't matter that cocaine and crack cocaine are the same chemical. It matters that crack goes into your system much faster because it is smoked. I learned in my first year psychology course in college that people taking cocaine reported feeling the highest not when they had the most cocaine in their system, but when the level in their bloodstream was rising the fastest. THAT is when they feel high, and that is the feeling they crave. Rate of change into the blood stream is addictive. So, even though the metabolism may first break down sucrose into fructose and glucose, that speed difference might be akin to the speed difference between cocaine going in your nose or in your lungs. It might be just enough of a difference to make you more obese than sugar, over a long period.

Second, I have heard that HFCS is not merely fructose and glucose. It also has impurities from the process of making it, specifically enzymes that convert starches in corn to fructose. You are eating those enzymes with HFCS. Might it not affect your metabolism? Don't rush too quickly to ideological conclusions based on assumptions. Real world testing does matter.

Anyway, I gave up sugar and HFCS in May. I began to think of them as the addictive equivalent of cigarettes (which I quit ten years ago). Cutting back doesn't work, and never worked for me. Cold turkey is the only way to deal with nicotine, and now sugar. Since May, I no longer have heart burn, I have more energy, better concentration, I don't get the blues very often, and I have lost 20 pounds. From the way my body feels today, I *know* I'm going to live longer.

Are more interested in discovering new things or proving old things wrong, than trying to make friends with everyone.

That is quite possible. However, I would like to point out that scientists are rated as some of the friendliest, or warmest, people. If you look at the diagram in the article, it lists about 45 jobs (I wasn't too careful counting). Scientists appear to be in 13th place.

The laffer curve is a fictional construct of corporate greed.It is laughed out of any conference of economists for it's absurd leaps of faith and lack of supporting evidence.

https://www.princeton.edu/~rvd...
http://scienceblogs.com/goodma...
http://business.time.com/2012/...
http://www.theguardian.com/bus...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/L...
http://economistsview.typepad....

attribution (naming the author, the license, and so on)

You're wrong, it means something different! (Jokes aside, I don't think that the astronaut definition came from Wikipedia - unless your Google displays something else than my Google does, which happens to be a Wordnet entry.)

Actually...that might well be the case! I've seen stories trying to debunk this study but it sure looks solid from my perspective.