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Last year Reason had an interview with Neal Stephenson (author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, and other fine novels), where he was asked about the state of science in America. What he said resonated with me quite a bit:

The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world's richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.

For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It's no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you're living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Scalia is an originalist,as you point out, and since I am a conservative, yes, I think he's great. Supreme Court Justices who believe that the Constitution is a "living document" and that we ought to look at what the laws are like in other countries (!) are completely off-base.

If you believe this, you should read this article in "Reason" magazine, Antonin Scalia, Judicial Activist

If you are conservative, your non-activist Hero is Scalia, who believes that constitutions and statutes should be interpreted according to the words written in light of their meaning at the time they were written

First if you believe the USA Constitution means what it says and follow with the Federalist Papers in believing in a liberty and small government then you're talking about Liberalism and liberals. Scalia is pretty much a Christian Conservative translating the Constitution with a Christian bias:

How the conservative justice legislates from the bench.
Cathy young

With the Supreme Court back at the center of national attention, left and right alike point to Justice Antonin Scalia as the very model of the modern conservative jurist. President Bush has cited him, along with Clarence Thomas, as the sort of strict constructionist he'd like to see on the bench. Meanwhile, as the country debates whether John Roberts deserves to replace Sandra O'Connor on the Supreme Court, the left's greatest fear is that the president's nominee will turn out to be "another Scalia." For many liberals, the justice is a conservative crusader whose professed adherence to the Constitution is a cover for a social, religious, and political agenda of his own.

Commenting on Scalia's strongly worded dissent in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down state sodomy laws, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd blasted him as a black-robed Archie Bunker, "misty over the era when military institutes did not have to accept women, when elite schools did not have to make special efforts with blacks, when a gay couple in their own bedroom could be clapped in irons, when women were packed off to Our Lady of Perpetual Abstinence Home for Unwed Mothers."

Contrary to the caricature, Scalia has delivered some surprisingly "liberal" opinions over the years. In 1989, three years into his tenure on the High Court, he ruled with the majority that flag burning was a constitutionally protected form of expression. (Centrist O'Connor and liberal John Paul Stevens were among the dissenters.) More recently, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), Scalia joined Stevens in a dissent that went far beyond the majority opinion in arguing for drastic restrictions on executive power to detain terror suspects without due process. (His frequent ideological ally, Thomas, took the most pro-government position in a separate dissent.)

But Scalia's liberal critics have a point: His moral views have a habit of grafting themselves onto his constitutional philosophy. No one expects him to be a libertarian; he has stressed that his opposition to expanded federal power applies only to instances in which it is explicitly limited by the Constitution. But you might at least expect him to be oppose federal intervention within the parameters of his originalist vision. Or rather, you might have expected that until Gonzales v. Raich, this year's medical marijuana case.

Scalia voted to uphold the federal government's prerogative to go after medical consumers of homegrown pot, on the grounds that this activity supposedly affects interstate commerce. This ruling prompted Thomas to note in a caustic dissent, "If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything--and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers."

You could easily conclude that Scalia is a hypocrite willing to cast his principles of limited government aside in order to further his anti-drug social agenda. Writing in The American Spectator, John Tabin offers a different theory. Tabin points to a 2001 case, Kyllo v. United States, in which Scalia wrote the majority opinion siding with a convicted marijuana grower who contended that drug agents had engaged in an

Julian Sanchez, over at http://www.reason.com/ has an interesting article about the Camus and Sartre influence in Serenitty.

An excerpt: (full text behind this link.)

In Serenity, however, the central influence appears to be not Sartre but Albert Camus. The Operative, for example, is emphatically not some mere bounty hunter, but a true believer. As he explains at one point, "I believe in something greater than myself: A better world, a world without sin." He has no illusions, either, about the morally monstrous acts he must perpetuate in service of that end, acts he recognizes make him unfit to live in his own utopia. The Operative is a Moses who knows he will not reach the promised land he hopes to help make. He is, in other words, a perfect instance of the revolutionary mindset Camus describes in The Rebel, an anti-Marxist essay that was the catalyst for Camus' break with the (then) pro-Soviet Sartre. For the revolutionary, Camus notes, values are "only to be found at the end of history. Until then there is no suitable criterion on which to base a judgement of value. One must act and live in terms of the future. All morality becomes provisional."

Julian Sanchez, over at http://www.reason.com/ has an interesting article about the Camus and Sartre influence in Serenitty.

An excerpt: (full text behind this link.)

In Serenity, however, the central influence appears to be not Sartre but Albert Camus. The Operative, for example, is emphatically not some mere bounty hunter, but a true believer. As he explains at one point, "I believe in something greater than myself: A better world, a world without sin." He has no illusions, either, about the morally monstrous acts he must perpetuate in service of that end, acts he recognizes make him unfit to live in his own utopia. The Operative is a Moses who knows he will not reach the promised land he hopes to help make. He is, in other words, a perfect instance of the revolutionary mindset Camus describes in The Rebel, an anti-Marxist essay that was the catalyst for Camus' break with the (then) pro-Soviet Sartre. For the revolutionary, Camus notes, values are "only to be found at the end of history. Until then there is no suitable criterion on which to base a judgement of value. One must act and live in terms of the future. All morality becomes provisional."

I confess to chuckling when I saw the mod. No, I did not ask anyone to mod you down.

Perhaps you may wish to take the time to consider the possibility that the modder did not think you "tore me a new one", and quite possibly found your post to be offensive and trollish.

You seem reasonably intelligent, so take some time to consider that you're not perfect and you're not always right, and other people might have views worth considering

I know this is not typical Slashdot behavior, but do give it a try.

Some practice in critical thinking might also be in order - maybe you'll learn some techniques to trounce me next time **and** get modded up instead of down. I would start with the fallacy files and then maybe check out "The Craft of Research". Not that I'm claiming I'm a great debater, myself. On the other hand, I'm not consistently getting modded down at this point.

BTW, I will concede that there's an argument that the funding situation is actually turning out better without Federal funding. I just don't believe that private funding is best in all situations.

Until next time, Mr. Geeste...

Excellence in teaching is treated by their "peers" as well as excellence from students is treated by their "peers" and it transcends to the workplace as well.

Here is a story about how paypal got to the way it is today. Basicly it's about the founders of paypal dealing with the .gov and lawyers so much and being put down by them that they finally just gave up.

Hell, even Ronald Reagan is starting to rotate a bit.

True story, in an interview with Reason, Reagan took the following stances (these are direct quotes):
1. "I don't believe in a government that protects us from ourselves."
2. "If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism."
3. "I disagree completely when government says that because of the number of head injuries from accidents with motorcycles that he should be forced to wear a helmet. I happen to think he's stupid if he rides a motorcycle without a helmet, but that's one of our sacred rights-to be stupid."
4. "I also think our greatest threat today comes from government's involvement in things that are not government's proper province. And in those things government has a magnificent record of failure."
5. "But, we start with those legitimate areas and then we go on and regulations just keep spreading like spores of a fungus until we find that they literally are taking away the rights of management to make business decisions with regard to their competition."
6. "I know of one particular drug firm, which just a few years ago, could license a drug with some 70 pages of supporting data. Today it takes that same company 73,000 pages for an additional drug. I know that there's been about a 60 percent drop in the development of new drugs in this country."
7. "You know, the Federal Government could have done it differently if the Federal Government did not at the same time want control."
8. " If you're going to have a tax the people should know what the tax is and the government should be able to tell them without the people having to go to the expense of figuring it out themselves."
9. "Well, government's only weapons are force and coercion and that's why we shouldn't let it get out of hand. And that's what the founding fathers had in mind with the Constitution, that you don't let it get out of hand."
10. "If they really want to put a referendum on the ballot, why don't they go out and say to the people, do you want to change this and make it so that a simple majority can increase that tax or do you want to make it that it requires a two-thirds majority of the legislature to change any tax?"
11. "Look-you've got a legislature that takes two-thirds to pass the budget, it takes two-thirds to pass an appropriation bill, a spending bill-so why shouldn't it take a two-thirds majority to say whether you're going to raise the taxes."
12. "But they are fools in thinking that business somehow is getting a special break. Who pays the business tax anyway? We do! You can't tax business. Business doesn't pay taxes. It collects taxes. And if they can't be passed on to the customer in the price of the product as a cost of operation, business goes out of business."
13. "So they'll tax business and the price of the product will go up and the people will blame the storekeeper for the rise in the price of the product, not recognizing that all he's doing is passing on to them a hidden sales tax."
14. "If people need any more concrete explanation of this, start with the staff of life, a loaf of bread. The simplest thing; the poorest man must have it. Well, there are 151 taxes now in the price of a loaf of bread-it accounts for more than half the cost of a loaf of bread. It begins with the first tax, on the farmer that raised the wheat. Any simpleton can understand that if that farmer cannot get enough money for his wheat, to pay the property tax on his farm, he can't be a farmer. He loses his farm. And so it is with the fellow who pays a driver's license and a gasoline tax to drive the truckload of wheat to the mill, the miller who has to pay everything from social security tax, business license, everything else. He has to make his living over and above those costs. So they all wind up in that loaf of bread. Now an egg isn't far behind and nobody had to make that. There's a hundred taxes in an egg by the time it gets to market and you know the chicken didn't put them there!"

Source: July 1975 - Reason magazine
http://reason.com/7507/int_reagan.shtml

This reminds me of an interview in Reason (a libertarian mag) of slashdot favorite Neal Stephenson. Here's the relevant part:

http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.mg.neal.shtml

Reason: The Baroque Cycle suggests that there are sometimes great explosions of creativity, followed by that creative energy's recombining and eventual crystallization into new forms--social, technological, political. Are we seeing a similar degree of explosive progress in the modern U.S.?

Stephenson: The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world's richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.

For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It's no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you're living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we're coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it's going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be "worse." If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we'll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955.

It could easily be replaced by smaller non-government institutions, similiar to Underwriters Laboratories, or CSA.

As for us eating poison pills without the FDA, there are many countries without any sort of government drug protection racket like the FDA, and there isn't really a problem. Check out this article for an example:
http://www.reason.com/links/links020205.shtml

And even the horror stories you heard in school about before the US "government was protecting us" are mostly urban legend, or highly exasurated at best.

I stumbled across this and thought it was rather interesting. The article mentions a study by Richard Lindzen that was published in the March 2001 edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. That study can be found here.

I looked over the actual study but must admit that most of it is to technical for me. So, I will just have to trust the article that it isn't leading me astray.

It basically is summerized that the earth may be able to open up a "vent" that can release enough heat back into space to counter any effect that increased greenhouse gases may cause. High cirrus clouds are able to trap radiation and keep it from going back into space, thus heating the earth. When the temperature rises, the "vent" opens up and lets enough radiation back into space to cool it back down.

Yes, my city charges by the number and size of trash cans a person has. More trash cans == more money.

Ok, thanks. I asked because nowhere that I have lived charges for trash removal based on the amount of trash. Instead it's paid for through property taxes, and so is recycling.

Implemented properly, a recycling program is a profit generating activity for a city, thus either enabling the creation of other programs that would not be possible otherwise, or in the very least reducing the need for other forms of funding (i.e. even higher taxes)

I recall back when Michael Bloomberg was elected major of NYC after he entered office he stopped, or at least tried to stop the city's recycling saying the cost was too much. Shortly afterwards I came across an article wherein a recycling company in NYC said they'd pay to pick up the recycling. I don't know what happened about the offer. It seems to me that NYC would do most anything to reduce garbage, trash, seeing as how a barge filled with trash from NYC went up and down the east coast trying to find a place to dump it some years ago. And it wasn't the only one, Philadelphia had a similar problem, A global voyage to find a resting place for waste.

Now that our side is dominant and impleneting it's policies (mostly rolling back socialism in favor of classical liberalism) it is now the Democratic party yelling STOP! in an attempt to preserve their gains.

Towards classical liberalism? Really?

Since when is a $1.2 TRILLION Medicare spending bill (passed by Dubya) something that a smaller government would do?

The idea that Bush is any fiscal conservative at all is a bunch of cracksmokery.

You clearly don't read enough of the Cato Institute which called him a "Progressive President" or The Economist magazine or Reason magazine where Bush's spending record is concerned. Oh, and Bush's "lean budget" this year? It's "like being the slimmest sumo wrestler in the ring."

Soaring yearly budget deficits approaching 5% of yearly GDP are not the work of any "classical liberal"; those deficits -- as the great (and *real* classical liberal) economist Milton Friedman once wrote of deficits decades ago -- are nothing more than a tax increase on future generations. 90% steel tarriffs (ruled illegal by the WTO) are certainly not the work of any free-trading classical liberal (although to his credit, CAFTA is admittedly a nice step).

The very notion that President Bush is returning us to a more classical liberal -- a.k.a. moderate libertarian -- society is almost completely intellectually-bankrupt, whether we are discussing economics (as we are in this thread) or social policy.

We've hit Bush's economic leg, and find he hasn't one to stand on. Clearly Bush has little in the way of classical liberal leanings there (his Social Security reform aside, although even there, his plan will effectively discredit the value of private investment by greatly restricting the basket of investments into which people may invest). What about his classical liberal views on social policy?

He doesn't have a leg to stand on there either.

The real classical liberals would not have attacked a foreign nation unprovoked (Iraq), although they certainly would've fought back against the 9/11 attackers (i.e., we would have gone to Afghanistan, as we actually did). Classical liberals believe in the value of privacy; Bush does not. Classical liberals (usually) support private gun ownership; Bush supported the Assault Weapons Ban even though even the anti-gun Violence Policy Center's own leader said the AWB was of little value (the re-enactment of the AWB thankfully died in Congress, no thanks to Bush). The classical liberals of today -- like Milton Friedman -- support the legalization, or at least decriminalization of illegal drugs; Bush, like any conservative, opposes it (thanks to Ronald Reagan's promotion of the so-failed-even-some-Republicans-admit-it-now "war on drugs").

As a final nail in his socially non-classical liberal policy: on free speech, classical liberals love freedom of speech -- they wrote the First Amendment after all! We would allow full, free, and unrestricted speech on our airwaves (with exceptions perhaps only for very-specific, very limited national security instances, e.g. disallowing the announcement of the procedures and launch codes for any of our nuclear missiles, though

1. http://www.reason.com/rb/rb060805.shtml

2. http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/policy/index. html#a3

First of all, it's not a monopoly. Private schools aren't illegal -- you can certainly choose to send your kids to a private school, and many parents do.

It's ironic that on /., where people complain, and rightly so, about the "Microsoft tax," one should find a proponent of the exactly analogous situation in education.

Second, not all parents can afford private schools. Are you going to deny education to those kids whose parents work for minimum wage and can't afford the tuition payments?

Products are denied to people who can't afford them every day. I take it you believe in the bogus concept of a "positive right," i.e. something that people supposedly can get by coercing others to give it to them.

Finally, bear in mind that being private is no guarantee of quality.

Agreed, but at least in a free market one has a chance. Monopolies have zero motivation to improve--vide this article in Reason about the massive deception public schools are perpetrating to avoid giving accurate information about how well they're doing.

You're on the right track, but you're missing the forest for the trees.

I'm one of those libertarians who'd like to see public education disappear. I agree that it isn't going to happen anytime soon. But improving the currect education system is just as much a pipe dream.

Education in the US of A is a political game, and the major players in the game aren't interested in giving students a good education. They're interested in getting more and more money pumped into the education systems. They're interested in getting teachers more money, and in getting more teachers hired. Whether or not Johnny can read is irrelevant except as a sound bite on why We Need More Money for Education.

And don't confuse the teachers with the teachers union. The education system is filled with genuine, caring teachers who do their damnedest to make sure that Johnny can read. And those teachers deserve to be paid for their efforts. But those teachers are just as much a cog in the machine as are the students, and the machine itself doesn't care about educating students.

And while many teachers do care and are trying to do their jobs, there are many teachers and many school administrators who are part of the problem, not the solution. They cheat and do whatever is necessary to make themselves and their schools look good. If you want to improve education, get the politics out of it. Our education system sucks, and it sucks because educating students is a side effect, not the point of the system.

It seems nobody on Slashdot has considered the other side of the coin . If the alternatives are (for example) Google offering a pitifully filtered search engine or the chinese government forcing it's own search engine on the people then what should google do? I realize that such censorship is unacceptable but change takes time so it would be better if the Chinese people could have at least some access to the outside world while people (i.e. everybody whining on Slashdot) actively fights for social reform in China. I'm sure I'll hear about how no accomadation is acceptable (most likely with many an invocation of Godwin's law) but Rome wasn't built in a day and it's apparent to me that nobody on Slashdot (myself included) understands the situation enough to say that American coporations should allow absolutely no censorship in China.

There is a fascinating article in reason magazine debunking the myth of DVORAK's superiority, and it's common use as a poster child for so-called 'market failure'.

http://www.reason.com/hod/mg062705.shtml/

There is benefit and then there is capitalistic value. I'm not sure why you are confusing feely-good stuff like emotions with what I am saying. I'm having trouble determining if you are simply trolling or do not know better.

As I recently read in "Reason magazine I believe, darn where's that tissue, that's a problem Randians have in understanding (not that you are one but she and they have the same attitude) that "feely-good stuff" can be a benefit. The article went on about how it can be very beneficial though.

As far as adding value, as long as it's needed, the less something cost a business given the same capabilities the more valuable it is. Now does the economy run around computers and the software they run other is it the other way? If the economy depends on computer systems to run smoother then the lower the costs more valuable they are, eg the higher the ROI is. However if the economy depends on the spending and revenue of hardware and software venders then I'd say there's a problem with the system. Actually I suspect the truth is somewhere in between the two positions and hopefully closer to the first.

The claim that the Liberation of Iraq killed "100,000" Iraqis is another example of the Left exaggerating a single study for political purposes.

But since we're going to talk about dead Iraqis, let's talk about the 500,000 Iraqi children Clinton and Albright allegedly killed by enforcing U.N sanctions against Saddam's regime.

If we're going to believe the hyperbole and hysteria generated by the Left and parroted by the MSM as fact, then we have to acknowledge that Bush is about 400,000 Iraqi deaths behind Clinton.

Don't we?

For one, the SCOTUS said only that a civil suit may not be automatically dismissed if there is a legitimate use, on the grounds that you should be allowed to present evidence demonstrating that the defendent promoted infringing use.

It is a very subtle thing. The impact isn't so much a change in the interpretation of the law. Defendents, like Grokster, are still likely to win their cases, but they are now subject to a lot more expensive litigation than they were previously.

...without any copyright protection of digital content, they may be correct that new high quality content is likely to dry up....

This is "common knowledge" that is quite arguably wrong. See Creation Myths: Does innovation require intellectual property rights?

I know you're trying to be sarcastic, but you're 100% correct.

Here's an interesting article that discusses this topic.

From that article:

Today, the whole world benefits freely from advances in health technology that are driven largely by the allure of the profitable U.S. market. If the United States joins other nations in having more socialized medicine, the current pace of technology improvements might well grind to a halt

and

If the US adopts a nationalized health care system, taxes will have to double for pay for it.

Sounds like the private system actually is "way better"...

-bs

This is an interesting article showing some of the myths associated with Dvorak vs. QWERTY: http://reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.shtml

http://reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.shtml

The Study: The Fable of the Keys, By S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis

Some Commentary: Typing Errors, By Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis

2) Many people don't have enogh money to spend on sotware on Brazil. They can be pirates or use FOSS. Your analogy is right, but people are not forced to murder (and when thay are - legitimatee defense - the law don't declare them criminals).

Ah but some places are classifying those who defend themselves as criminals:

Self-Defense vs. Municipal Gun Bans

When Hale DeMar shot an intruder in his house, he may well have saved his children's lives. So why was he charged with a crime?

The article goes on about how he was charged, not with having a firearm or defending himself but because he used a gun for defense. Now I don't know how many have used a rifle for self defense in close quarters such as in a house but it can be get to be clumsy trying to. In close quarters a handgun is much more effective.

Asking the question in terms of "Gates, alive or dead?" in this forum, is engaging in a variant of Reductio Ad Hitlerum.

Clearly most of us would be happy if he didn't exist, right?

Gates eats food. I guess food is bad. He lives in a house. I guess houses (at least, houses that look like giant crappy convention center/shopping malls) are bad too.

Using Gates as the lead-in to an article is likely to lead to a flamefest.

If this passes we might have something to replace Social Security numbers as the primary key for credit agencies that won't be treated as both identification and a password.

Um, great. I can have a new number to worry about keeping private, except not only is it tied to my taxes and SS benefits (if there are any left for me), but also with my driving record and my ability to board an airplane. No, thanks.

Howsabout we put the money into actually securing airports instead?

It is hate filled people like you who are the problem.
_A Study of American Intelligence_ was considered the standard scientific thinking of the day when it was written. Carl Brigham broke with the then modern scientists 5 years after the book was written. He went out and specificly denouned the book and its ideas. He then went one to be one of the champions of denouncing eugenics.
Another thing about Brigham, he at least did not go around coping faulty work done by others and claim it as thier own.

Economists still tend to be, ahh, skeptical of his "gold bug" tendencies. In fact, we'd call anyone else who said the same things a crackpot.

Are you sure he's much of a "gold bug" though? Unabashed gold bugs (like Austrian economist Mark Skousen) would suggest just the opposite. (which is just as well, IMO, as I'm no gold bug either... but then, WTF do I know, I'm just an Econ. minor, heh (though I often wonder if I should've made it my major when I started university, rather than CS)...)

IMO, Friedman really has 2 personalities when it comes to political economy (i.e., his normative economics) - his idealist side, and his practical side.

His ideals are pretty clearly more libertarian than classical liberal; he once said in an interview in Reason magazine that he'd "like to be a zero-government libertarian" (like his son, David), but when asked why he wasn't one, he noted that it's not feasible.

But in practice -- when he's suggested alternate ways to fund public education (via a public/private choice using vouchers, even though his ideal is to completely privatize education), when he's suggested that the Fed be run a particular way (even though his ideal is to dismantle it), when he's suggested (as in (IIRC) chapter 9 of Capitalism and Freedom) that we do actually need some sort of social safety net (for which he proposed his negative income tax) -- some of the less-sane, more-extreme libertarians, e.g. Rothbard, criticized him as being a "statist". But really, his practical suggestions (which he sees as leading in the direction of his ideals) are more classical liberal than libertarian in nature. Hence the sometimes-confusing dichotomy...

Unlike in Friedman's ideal, I don't see the Fed as a terrible institution, despite some of its mistakes, such as their failure to elect a replacement chairman in the late 1920s after Benjamin Strong died (as my Monetary Policy prof. once described to us and to which Friedman partly attributes the exacerbation of the Depression). The ability to control inflation by controlling the money supply is awfully valuable, when it works (though given housing prices lately, I wonder what the *actual* total inflation rate is, rather than the more-often reported CPI of (currently) about 3%).

But then, given that I've lived only a few years longer than through the Greenspan era and given that he seems to be described variously as either "lucky" or "skilled" (skill which doesn't necessarily follow in other Fed chairmen), my view is probably colored by their relatively very good performance of the last 20 years. I didn't live through the Fed's failure before and during the Great Depression, nor did I even live through the stagflation of the 70's...

I could really use some seed comments at the website :)

I'll see what I can do, when I get the chance... :)

Given my fairly-limited sphere of influence though (of all my friends I talk to regularly, only 3 are politically and economically-interested: 2 are libertarians and 1 is a borderline socialist (nevermind the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc.)), might I also suggest making your blog's presence known on a few other econ. and/or law-related blogs:

* EconLog -- Arnold Kling (MIT PhD) writes there and regularly gets a fair number of comments

* The Becker-Posner blog -- the Gary Becker and judge Posner blog...

* Bradford DeLong's blog -- not a classical liberal or libertarian. But a lot of people seem to read his so-called "reality-based" blog, so in the name of garnering traffic to yours, it might be

Here's what NCLB really is. Theoretically, kids in bad schools (i.e. ones where they are physically in danger) can take vouchers and go elsewhere. Teachers in affluent schools hate it because of the "ghetto" kids who would be brought in through the program. Teachers in poor schools hate it because they will lose students and feel threatened that they will become obsolete. They realize that the equalization of funding between rich and poor communities as a goal of NCLB is a myth. If the NCLB plan actually *did* work, it would merely force these underfunded "bad" schools out of existence. Or make way for corporate-funded learning institutions. Or any number of bad things.

Re:You've missed the point (Score:2, Interesting)
by lowrydr310 (830514) on Thursday March 17, @09:12AM (#11964442)

Is it possible for the Plaintiff (the spammers in this case) to be ordered to pay the Defendant's legal bills when they (the plaintiffs) lose the case?

IANAFL

It's possible, but I don't know how likely it is. The trial lawyers, being a very powerful lobby, have consistently opposed the idea. See http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/000199.html

June 14, 2003
Essay on loser-pays

The following essay was written circa 1999 by our editor and formerly appeared on the site's topical page on loser-pays.

* * *

America differs from all other Western democracies (indeed, from virtually all nations of any sort) in its refusal to recognize the principle that the losing side in litigation should contribute toward "making whole" its prevailing opponent. It's long past time this country joined the world in adopting that principle; unfortunately, any steps toward doing so must contend with deeply entrenched resistance from the organized bar, which likes the system the way it is.

Overlawyered.com's editor wrote an account in Reason, June 1995, aimed at explaining how loser-pays works in practice and dispelling some of the more common misconceptions about the device. He also testified before Congress when the issue came up that year as part of the "Contract with America". Not online, unfortunately, are most of the relevant sections from The Litigation Explosion, which argues at length for the loser-pays idea, especially chapter 15, "Strict Liability for Lawyering".

As other countries recognize, the arguments in support of the indemnity principle are overwhelming. They include basic fairness, compensation of the victimized opponent, deterrence of tactical or poorly founded claims and legal maneuvers, and the provision of incentives for accepting reasonable settlements. Sad to say, the American bar, though loud in proclaiming that every other industry and profession should be made to pay for its mistakes, changes its mind in this one area, demanding an across-the-board charitable immunity for its own lucrative industry of suing people.

Also in 1995, Rep. Chris Cox (R-Calif.) published a succinct defense of the loser-pays principle, terming it the "full recovery rule" and pointing out that it would improve the position of a large number of plaintiffs with meritorious claims who currently go undercompensated because of the need to pay their lawyers large sums which cannot be recovered from the opponent.

Author James Fallows of The Atlantic called the idea "overdue" and included it in his list of "Ten New Year's Resolutions for America" (National Public Radio).

The principle in other countries: .....

Go to http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/000199.html to read the rest of it.

An example from Overlawyered.com's "Loser Pays" archives (bold added):

March 15, 2005
"Doctor fights, wins; lawyers aren't swayed"

Dr. Zev Maycon has been sued four times in three years; he's been dismissed before trial each time, but has missed weeks of work as a result, to the

A modchip is not acting as a replacement part. It does not 'unlock' or permit operation of the console. The purpose of a modchip is to bypass the signing mechanism used to prevent you from playing pirated games.

Okay, time for a list of modchip uses:

- Playing unofficial/unlicensed software (ex: Game Enhancer, which was almost definately first developed with the help of a modchip, since absolutely ZERO Sony code or patents were used to complete the software)
- Using unofficial devices (ex: New max memory devices made by Datel)
- Cheating devices (ex: Game genie by Galoob)
- Playing backups
- Bypassing region protection

These are all locks placed on the device by the manufacturer in an attempt to stop the usage of third party items, such as:

1 - Third party discs not authorized by the console manufacturer
2 - Third party software not authorized by the console manufacturer
3 - Third party hardware not authorized by the console manufacturer
4 - Authorized software from the manufacturer that was not intended to be used in your country

As far as I know, in all three situations, doing those things is legal. It is legal for me to put Maxell media in an HP burner (item 1), it's legal for me to install Windows XP to a Mac (item 2), it's legal for me to use a non sony DV tape in my Sony DV camcorder (item 3), and it's legal for me to watch a PAL videotape in the USA (item 4).

Now, for some reason, the person who built the device decided for me they didn't like items 1 - 4. So they built the device not to allow this. Now this law says such locks are illegal. And since the actions were legal to start with, where's your beef?

That someone might do items 1 - 4 with an illegal intent? Yeah, they could. In fact, you could install a pirated Windows XP on a Mac using an emulator. Does that make the emulator illegal? You could copy a copyrighted gameboy game into a blank flash memory cartridge and play it on your gameboy. Does that make computer memory illegal?

This is no different than banning box cutters on airlines because you think a terrorist is going to slash your throat with one. You're using an (extremely poor) band-aid to cover up what is a societal problem that already has PLENTY of legal recourse against the act, and you are inconveniencing and embarassing people as you do it. It's nasty and wrong, and, quite honestly, it makes me, as an outsider, afraid to enter your country. It's no different than trying to ban chewing gum just because someone might stick it under a desk.

[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.

Yes, you do. Consider the ten undergraduate programs at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, including journalism, media management or mass communications.

The requirements for getting licensure vary from state to state. There are states which require degrees, states which require tests, and states which don't require anything. In New York City, for example, they're called "press credentials," and one can only acquire credentials if 1) one has had them previously, 2) works for an established news service, or 3) takes an exam. In fact, if you knew much about the media, you'd know that these passes were used to prevent minority journalists from succeeding quite frequently, and more recently were used to shut Michael Bloomber's electronic newspaper out of most every significant political event in Washington DC, despite his long-established career.

Wow, indeed. Just because you're not aware of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist, even if you know of a phrase which sounds superficially similar. Doesn't it bother you to be so presumptuous?

Agreed. Gun control was the Klan's favorite law.

It has always surprised me that so many blacks are Democrats, when Democrat-backed abortion and gun policies have disproportionately harmed blacks. It's like cooperating in your own demise.

This isn't a new precedent (Score:1)
by boohiss (804985) on Thursday March 03, @11:06AM (#11834619)

Everyone's favorite congressman, John McCain, and his buddy Feingold already got that awful Campaign Finance "Reform" law passed, which effectively abridges free speech.

But, that's only supposed to affect rich lobbyists and media conglomerates! It can't possibly apply to us as well!

...Sen. John McCain's recent outburst at billionaires meddling in politics is starkly at odds with his feelings from a few years ago.

In a 2001 Wash Post article about the founder of Monster.com's interest in gun control, McCain was strongly supportive:

For McCain, [Andrew] McKelvey's willingness to devote millions of dollars to influence lawmakers on issues such as gun control is something to be lauded rather than criticized. "I'm glad a guy with a billion dollars, or two billion dollars, wants to spend is money on an issue he feels strongly about," McCain says.

Although this doesn't have to do with the article exactly, the article did encourage me to news.google.com search John Gilmore to find out more about him.

I came across something that led me to http://www.reason.com/0308/fe.bd.suspected.shtml.

What caught my attention in the above article is the below. My comment is that poor people are going to go for the supermarket loyalty cards because it's cheaper to pay 50% of the price rather than the full price for certain items. Why pay $6 per gallon of milk when you can get it for $3? One word of advice, if you can, leave your last name and house number off the form you fill out. At least that way, you remain a bit anonymous and the store gets their demographical information still, assuming that's what it's for.

From article I found: The popularity of supermarket club cards that collate permanent records of your grocery spending just so you can get 12-packs of Diet 7-Up on the cheap.

And since we just recently had a story about typing recently, I'll suggest these folks update their web site and scrape away the BS. To wit:

>>And even those who do touch type do
>>so with a letter layout that was
>>specifically designed to slow down typing
>>so the first mechanical typewriter keys wouldn't
>>jam.

*sigh* No, no it wasn't.

>>The Dvorak lets you type faster

*sigh* No, no it doesn't.

And since we just recently had a story about typing recently, I'll suggest these folks update their web site and scrape away the BS. To wit:

>>And even those who do touch type do
>>so with a letter layout that was
>>specifically designed to slow down typing
>>so the first mechanical typewriter keys wouldn't
>>jam.

*sigh* No, no it wasn't.

>>The Dvorak lets you type faster

*sigh* No, no it doesn't.

"I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries [sic]. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world's richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil. For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It's no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you're living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering. It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture. Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we're coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it's going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be "worse." If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we'll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955.

And yet FedEx and UPS are both legally prevented from handling first class mail. Plus the USPS has all sorts of government provided perks, such as immunity from most OSHA regulations. It's not real competition. Think first class postage would cost as much as it did if FedEx and UPS could compete in that market?

FYI an update to the Callahan story:

Here's the conclusion

As humanity's biotechnological prowess increases, we will confront again and again the question of what, if any, limits should be placed on research that mixes human and animal genes, cells and tissues. The main ethical concern about such research is not the creation of improved and useful animals, but the risk of producing what would be, in effect, diminished human beings.

-bs

IVF isn't controversial at all.

I say, "What rock do you live under?"

And tax money goes towards a lot of controversial things, anyway. It goes towards animal testing, which is a hell of a lot more controversial than taking eight cells that happen to be human that were left over from IVF.

Animal testing is more controversial than stem cells? Have you been spending all of your time at PETA meetings?

If you can't make a distiction between human life and animals, then I feel for you. BTW, there's more than one source for stem cells, including abortions and fetuses created specifically for that purpose. But, I guess I'm the "idiot".

I don't know where the boundary of 'human' is but it sure as hell isn't eight or sixteen or thirty-two cells sitting in a test tube.

So where is it? Before implantation? After implantation? Birth? After the cord is cut? Once the kid stops breast feeding?

Stop perpetuating myths.

Dvorak made up that story as marketing for the keyboard design he hoped to profit from. And, could they have made that new keyboard any uglier?

Disclaimer: I am not a self-defense expert, but I have read many books and articles, and taken classes.

you're more likely to have your gun pointed at you than you are to point it at someone else.

References, please. You are probably thinking of the Kellerman study, but that has been discredited. The Lott study shows that firearms tend to prevent crime.

If someone knows you and wants to kill you (ex-lover, family member, etc), it's trivial to pick your front door lock, calmly get your gun, and kill you.

References, please: how often does this chilling scenario actually play out in real life? And how often does the attacker simply bring his own firearm? (And how often does he simply bash in your sleeping head with a crowbar?)

If, on the other hand, it is a burgler, you're far more likely to survive the incident unscathed if you just feign sleep until the person goes away.

According to what I have read, most burglars try to only enter homes that are empty. The burglars who are willing to enter occupied homes are the dangerous ones, and I don't think "feign sleep" is the best plan to handle the dangerous ones.

If you go for your gun, you are far more likely to get shot, beaten in transit, or otherwise permanently injured.

If a burglar enters your house, do not take the gun and go looking for the burglar. Retreat to a "safe room" (usually the master bedroom) and lock the door. From the safe room, call the police. If the bad guy breaks down the door to your safe room, shoot him. If he stays out of the safe room, leave him to the police.

You should of course have a flashlight, and a cellular phone, in the safe room.

If you have kids, a smart gun is the only way to have a gun in the house anyway.

If you have kids, the only way to have firearms in your house is to have a secure gun safe and to lock up the firearms in it. You might also choose to have a fast-opening mini-safe with one handgun in it next to your bed, if you think you might need a handgun quickly. (I suggest you "harden" your defenses so it will take longer for a bad guy to get into your house; if a bad guy can enter your house in seconds, that's a problem.)

"Trigger locks" are a bad idea and are not a good alternative to a safe. If you have kids, get a safe. And bolt it to your floor or your wall.

Don't tell me that you're going to unlock your gun cabinet, unlock your ammunition cabinet, and load your firearm while someone is charging at you with a crowbar.

As I said, "harden" your home so that the bad guy cannot get in too fast, and lock yourself in to your safe room. There is no reason why you cannot store a ready-to-use defensive firearm in the gun safe. You might choose a pistol with a loaded magazine but without a round chambered; it will just take racking the slide to make it ready to shoot.

If you really want to protect yourself and your property, install an alarm system and perimeter cameras.

An excellent suggestion, and one I endorse. That way if a bad guy ever breaks in to your house wanting to kill you, the loud scary noise might convince him to go away, and will wake you up so you can secure yourself in the safe room and call the cops. If the bad guy breaks down the door of your safe room, you will be awake and ready for him.

If you think that an alarm system, by itself, will in some way keep a bad guy from harming you... well, how? Maybe if you live right next door to a police station.

Actually, most burglars would simply skip your house and find another one without a burglar alarm. I'm a big fan of burglar alarms. But if some guy gets it into his head that he wants to enter your house and cause mayhem, the alarm won't stop him.

Let whoever it is take whatever it is they want, then nail them