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rainbow-on-rainbow color scheme.

Could be worse...

My mother's mother was Jewish, makes me of jewish descent, but as an atheist I don't care about religion, and obviously don't want to have parts of my body gobbled up by made up ghosts (AFAIC).

But yes, it's a token. And saying "Hasidic" was just to make a little stronger of a point. I did read a little while back that a former head of security service in Israel said that Haredim were more of a threat to Israel than Iran based on their ultra-orthodox behaviour within the country. I have a number of relatives living there, so I prefer Israel to stay safe, including from Haredim.

A year I spent in Israel I studied and worked, but no yeshiva for me, just learning some other culture.

might look like

The list of countries I can go to that are neither 3rd world shit holes, police states, or both is becoming vanishingly small.

Do you think you would help us out with a list of the actual tyrannies you see in action - with a few stipulations?

Terrorism is involves actual violence, such as murder or mass murder, or assisting those who commit violence. It does not consist of voting for the political parties out of power, demonstrations and rallies, writing op-eds, books, plays or poems against government policy or actions.

Guantanamo Bay has never held even 1,000 people ever as prisoners.

Pretty much all of the fights about Habeas Corpus have to do with prisoners held as enemy combatants under the law of war. The US held hundreds of thousands of German prisoners in WW2 and they didn't have any right to Habeas Corpus either. The rules of war are different from the rules under criminal or civil law.

The US only water boarded a total of three people, the most recent of which was almost 9 years ago. To the best of my knowledge it still water boards US pilots as part of their Escape and Evasion training.

Al-Awlaki was killed by a drone for joining Al Qaeda, assisting in planning attacks, and recruiting for them - not for legal dissent. There is no general right for Americans to take up arms against the US government to overthrow it by force of arms, or to otherwise engage in mass murder, or assist those who do. As a matter of war, there was no charge, conviction, or sentence needed under criminal law. He was treated no differently that other American renegades in other wars. He was treated no differently than the large numbers of men shot down en masse, as represented here by the Federal government in a previous conflict.

There is no right to private communications between terrorists who are planning to commit actual violence and their headquarters.

Walking through a metal detector, or a pat down before boarding a plane is not the same thing as not being allowed to travel.

As you can see below the line (-----), there are a constant series of ongoing arrests and convictions for plotted terrorist attacks.

Or perhaps you are worried about the tax code not being progressive enough, but that doesn't hold up either.

So now, what are all these tyrannies that you speak of? Did President Bush round up the Clinton voters? Did President Obama round up the Bush voters? Do people still worship or not worship in the belief of their choice? Do people still pick the school they will attend, or the profession they wish to pursue? Does the government mandate where people will live? Does the press no longer publish what it wants? Does the United States have a President-For-Live yet?

I'm willing to concede that government regulation continues to grow more burdensom - but that is not tyranny.

If the budget problem isn't address, that could lead to a real long term problem though.

Geithner: Why, no, our new budget does nothing to address America’s long-term fiscal crisis

---------------
FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 27, 2012

Denver: Man Arrested for Providing Material Support to a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization

Jamshid Muhtorov was arrested by members of the FBI’s Denver and Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Forces on a charge of providing and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, a Pakistan-based designated foreign terrori

How about recordings in clay? Tenser, said the Tensor: Pottery Recordings. Been covered here at some point, I'm certain.

This chart has already been torn apart on Junk charts. Basically their statistics and reporting are so vague as to make it worthless. But yes, you may be surprised ... lies, damn lies and statistics.

This graphic is worse than useless. Here is a good debunking of it from a stats focused blog I first saw it on.

http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/2012/02/a-data-mess-outduels-the-pie-chart-disaster-for-our-attention.html

what's more interesting is that the IPO might be auction-based, which means that facebook will net more of the raised proceeds than they might through a traditional IPO. investment banks typically make 7%-ish fees on IPOs for taking risk (they have a responsibility to make sure the share price rises and can lose money to prop it up), prepping the company for the roadshow, providing the syndication of institutional investors who pledge to buy initial shares (spreading the risk), and doing all the paperwork (like the prospectus, creating some legal/regulatory risk). with an auction, those fees would be reduced substantially (which is a good thing, from both a free-market and a social fairness perspective) since they wouldn't be providing the syndication or taking as much of the risk.

if the wealth gap keeps growing like it is

In the US that gap has been closing for a few years, and by one measure is back to the level it was around 15 years ago.

NBC: Mitt Romney, tear down this ad. Yet NBC keeps running it, getting paid

US law on campaign contributions is very favorable to contributors, but there is a line beyond which a campaign contribution becomes bribery. Dodd probably just crossed it. The relevant Supreme Court decision reads "[A]ccepting a campaign contribution does not equal taking a bribe unless the payment is made in exchange for an explicit promise to perform or not perform an official act." It's one of those laws that requires proving criminal intent. Dodd's statement on national television probably provides that proof.

I am not going to generalise, but I can point at something specific: Former Mossad Head Says Haredim Biggger Threat To Israel Than Iran

The former head of the Israeli secret service said Thursday during an army boarding school reunion that while Iran should be prevented from becoming a nuclear power, its capabilities are still "far from posing an existential threat to Israel." "The growing haredi radicalization poses a bigger risk than Ahmadinejad," Halevy said, adding that "the ultra-Orthodox extremism has darkened our lives."

I think delivery of education itself is potentially going to be disrupted, something like discussed here

But I think the best solutions to student education will come from students. There is a contest (disclosure: I am connected with it) that is trying to encourage students to create tech (digital in this case rather than physical) that facilitates learning.

You get 5 days to contest it before payment processors are barred from doing business with you and search engines must stop acknowledging your existence. That alone is alarming to me.

Which is a provision after a take down notice had been ignored if you read the SOPA legislation.

Even worse, however, is the provision that gives immunity to those who take that action with just reasonable belief of infringement

I have mentioned this in my own post that I am not happy with lack of evidence required to process such requirements. However, I did already note it was slightly better in the way that it requires a judge to approve the action.

now of anyone who's ever gotten even a slap on the wrist for sending out abusive takedowns?

I have seen counter actions (sample1, sample2), in summary, yes.

DMCA is already abusive as hell in that fraudulent claims can be made and the only recourse the attacked individual has is a counter-claim that might not even get the content reinstated.

Which is not always the fault of the law it self. Content hosting providers such as Youtube do choose not to host content for some people after receiving complaints, regardless of legitimacy involved - people agree to these terms when they signed up for the service. This is a different matter, it's not the law preventing the content to be returned at this point.

There is no mechanism for holding those who abuse the system accountable.

Apparently there is, because I linked some examples.

In the face of all that, what about the response seems hyperbolic to you?

Only thing I found annoying about your post is completely ignoring the good the DMCA has given, portraying it in a purely negative fashion.

It has been used to protect copyright holders, even GPL software. It has given small companies and individuals an out to deal with issues that would otherwise require very costly lawyers for very legitimate issues that without would have only been achievable if they were a large firm with deep pockets.

I feel these are genuine issues that need to be resolved, that said, I still don't agree with PIPA or SOPA legislation's methods and I still don't agree with what many are regurgitating (mainly misrepresenting what is intends to do and then going about saying it doesn't do that, then further blatantly lying about how certain things won't work).

"3. On the whole, California takes in far more in federal benefits than it pays in federal tax. Unlike your analysis, which excludes broad categories of welfare spending, I look at gross flows of funds."

Could you please provide some sort of link or other evidence to back up your claims? Every bit of evidence presented on this thread has been that California and other blue states routinely carry the deadweight of the red states. Here is evidence of that, the first from a conservative outfit, the second from a liberal one:

http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/22685.html
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2004/09/red_states_feed.html

Do you have anything to back up your assertions, or are you just comfortable knowing that you're right, no matter what the facts say?

That's all federal spending, so yes, it's included. There's a net outflow from the state of California of $60 billion, or $2000 per capita. California, along with most productive (blue) states, subsidize the more needy (red) states. It's been this way for a long time. From the link in my previous post:

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2004/09/red_states_feed.html

States Receiving Most in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. D.C. ($6.17)
2. North Dakota ($2.03)
3. New Mexico ($1.89)
4. Mississippi ($1.84)
5. Alaska ($1.82)
6. West Virginia ($1.74)
7. Montana ($1.64)
8. Alabama ($1.61)
9. South Dakota ($1.59)
10. Arkansas ($1.53)

States Receiving Least in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. New Jersey ($0.62)
2. Connecticut ($0.64)
3. New Hampshire ($0.68)
4. Nevada ($0.73)
5. Illinois ($0.77)
6. Minnesota ($0.77)
7. Colorado ($0.79)
8. Massachusetts ($0.79)
9. California ($0.81)
10. New York ($0.81)

California currently pays 60 billion dollars a year more to the federal government than they get back in federal spending. That's three times their current budget deficit, or a net outflow of $2000 per year from every man, woman and child in the state. If there's a parasite here, it's the federal government and other states.

You might do well to brush up on some facts:
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2004/09/red_states_feed.html

California is birthplace and home to giants like HP, Intel, AMD, Apple, Google, Cisco, EA, NVIDIA, Genentech, Lucasfilm, etc in the north, and Disney, Universal, MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros, United Artists, etc in the south. They're the capital of the tech world, the capital of the entertainment world, and the largest producer and exporter of food in the United States. The US needs them more than they need the US.

Unlike Quebec, nobody in California talks about secession. That's nothing other than sensationalist trash to sell papers. But if any state could secede from the US and remain a 1st rate powerhouse in this world, it would be California.

YES! Thank you! I really enjoy the fuck out of TED talks.... but you know... sometimes a year later its hard to remember exactly who said something and where I saw it.

TED talks are awesome, but every time somebody brings out this particular TED talk, I have to point out that it was a horrible talk. Her story is very interesting from the perspective of someone who suffered a stroke, but from a scientific perspective, it was all pseudosicence, and it needs to be disregarded despite her credentials.

Since I'm not even remotely an expert about neurology, I always thought that the talk drifted a little too often on the mystic side, but I was unable to pinpoint where the scientific part failed. Thanks for the references.

YES! Thank you! I really enjoy the fuck out of TED talks.... but you know... sometimes a year later its hard to remember exactly who said something and where I saw it.

TED talks are awesome, but every time somebody brings out this particular TED talk, I have to point out that it was a horrible talk. Her story is very interesting from the perspective of someone who suffered a stroke, but from a scientific perspective, it was all pseudosicence, and it needs to be disregarded despite her credentials.

Funnier still, vast majority Americans - including most Republican voters! - actually believe that the best way to distribute income is, essentially, "socialist" (i.e. what Americans themselves normally think as socialist). You just have to be careful to ask them without using that dirty pinko word:

The ideal wealth distribution chosen by the 5,522 people who took the online survey has the top fifth of Americans owning between 30 percent and 40 percent of the wealth. That means Americans believe the ideal distribution of wealth is that of Sweden. Moreover, 90 percent of Republicans share that belief. (Actually, 90.2 percent, as the survey coauthor, Prof. Daniel Ariely of Duke University, noted when we met to discuss his work.) The survey sample, with more than 10 times the 504 people often used in polls, is robust and credible. (For the report, see Doc 2010-21608.) The genius in the survey was to avoid questions using loaded terms like ‘‘estate tax’’ and ‘‘death tax.’’ Instead those surveyed were shown pie charts and asked what they thought was the ideal distribution of wealth and what they estimated to be the wealth distribution in America. They were not told that one of the pie charts was Sweden’s actual wealth distribution, but people gravitated to it like moths to a flame.

While COBOL supposedly got OO capability in 2002 acoording to wikipedia, I would bet most COBOL is rather straight forward procedural code that is easy to follow and understand. The 'java way' on the other hand is to encourage over-abstration to the point of absurdity. There is a joke hello world at http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2008/09/hello-world-in-java.html that really isn't far from the truth about how java programs are actually implemented by some coders. I seems some java coders think: Why just print a string when you could instead instantiate a new string-writer class implementing an abstract string writer factory with a text-writer interface? And instead of hardcoding a constant value, use an xml configuration file, even if you will never actually change the value.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-04y.html

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/06/the_economics_o.html

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_9_115/ai_n27050480/?tag=content;col1

http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/space-power/

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/episode/2011/01/08/january-8-2011/#Voyager+Launches+the+Third+Age+of+Discovery

http://www.economist.com/node/18897425

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high-frontier-redux.html

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/

Space Nutters generally also have an overabundance of blind, naive enthusiasm for almost anything vaguely sci-fi sounding, the limitless growth of the human species, that there will even BE a human species 100000 years from now, etc... But mention life extension research and all of a sudden they turn into the most rabid anti-technological, skeptical "don't mess with Nature" types.

We'll never understand biological processes that occur all over the planet and require little energy, but we'll have Martian colonies (entire COLONIES) and all the other space garbage that require stupendous resource-inputs for zero return, no problem.

Oh, and the absolute Bible for Space Nutters:

http://www.amazon.com/Millennial-Project-Colonizing-Galaxy-Eight/dp/0316771635/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323225862&sr=8-1

The amount of delusion and flat-out denial needed to believe in the claptrap that Space Nutters do makes it a religion to me.

You mean like this woman who claimed these bullets hit her house:

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/images/2007/09/03/muslim_liar.jpg

And the media ran with that for a minute till someone noticed those were unfired cartridges.

...I'm seeing a blog. Is there an Advent calendar somewhere that I'm missing?

Actually the Cortex A9 found in Tegra 2 and Ti's OMAP 4 series are at the same clockspeed marginally faster than even the top end Atom cpus, IONised or not, even at their standard speeds the differences in performance are not that huge.

http://parisbocek.typepad.com/blog/2010/11/arm-outmuscles-atom-on-benchmark.html

You may want to listen to some of the more "contrarian" sources instead of business-as-usual la-la land. They have proven a lot more reliable lately.
The Automatic Earth and Energy Bulletin are good starting points. Once you've digested those you can go to more hardcore places like George Mobus's or Guy McPherson's blogs.

Religion is getting nuttier.

Today, evolution is an engineering technology. Watching vruses and bacteria evolve from generation to generation is routine medical research. Genetic engineering and some kinds of drug discovery are forced evolutionary systems. Most of the mechanics of the process are understood. It isn't mysterious any more.

At this point, denying that evolution is real is on a par with claiming the earth is flat. Yet religious denial of evolution has increased.

More religions are anti-education than 50 years ago. Some branches of Islam are explicitly anti-education. Now that's infected Judaism, too. Which is strange, after centuries of a strong drive in the Jewish community to achieve a good education.

in 25 easy steps:

at The Online Photographer

http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2006/01/us_coal_mining_.html

Coal mining deaths. Both in the US and China.

Yeah. Let's talk about coal mining deaths.

http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2006/01/us_coal_mining_.html

Nearly a thousand in the US since 1980.

Now let's look at China's track record over the last decade.

Nearly 53 THOUSAND people dead mining coal.

How many people have nuke plants killed again?

the standards have fallen far from where they were, say, 50 years ago. If you need proof, try reading a book written in the 1800s.

Actually, you may have provided some proof yourself by implying that content in a 200-year-old book proves that standards have fallen in the last 50 years--unless you're in your seventies, I suppose.

In all seriousness, though, I would like to see some proof that educational standards have dropped in the last 50 years

I somewhat agree with your point about material from centuries ago, though it seems to me that rote memorization was much more common in the past. Many of the questions on this purported "8th Grade Examination from late 1800's" are superficially impressive, but really amount to rather useless memorization:

Give the epochs into which U. S. History is divided.
Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall & Orinoco.

The arithmetic section I linked mostly consists of unit conversions, which are again superficially impressive. In 8th grade my classmates were covering conic sections, which are less "mechanical" than plugging numbers in to conversion formulas, and I would say they're more difficult. Oddly enough, in this UPenn catalog from 1852, conic sections were a junior level (in college) topic. To be fair, that catalog also lists basic calculus (I imagine the equivalent of Calc 1 and 2) in addition to a dizzying number of topics on history, philosophy, Greek, Latin, "natural philosophy", and chemistry.

Today, there's just far too much information to absorb. Learning how to understand things quickly as they come up is more important than memorizing small chunks of human knowledge, even if it's less impressive. Perhaps students in the past were more studious as well, though things aren't all bad.

"US Federal Appeals Courts ten years ago declared pepper spraying peaceful protesters to be an illegal violation of their 4th amendment rights to be free from excessive force and that officers who cause such felony assault are liable for their actions and do not receive protection of sovereign immunity as their actions are excessive use of force which the 4th amendment prohibits."
http://pathstoknowledge.net/2011/11/21/pepper-spraying-peaceful-protesters-is-illegal-excessive-force-so-says-us-federal-appeals-court or http://wp.me/ps3dI-1nW

"A Long Island woman Monday became the first Occupy Wall Street protester to file a federal civil rights lawsuit, accusing the NYPD of arresting her without cause at a Citibank branch after she closed her account in protest."
http://www.newsday.com/long-island/suffolk/ows-protester-from-li-sues-over-arrest-1.3337955

"The complaint in Carpenter v. City of New York, filed in the Southern District of New York today, alleges violations of the Fourth Amendment resulting from false arrest and excessive force. "
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/conlaw/2011/11/occupy-wrongful-arrest-and-police-brutality-lawsuits-begin.html

That's why you write your résumé like this.

so, you don't know what Wall Street is, or how to spell crony.

You need to learn what finance is about. See http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/10/a-note-prolegomenon-to-any-useful-discussion-of-modern-american-finance.html

Instead of firing people to pay out bonuses. why not do something simple like cut upper management salary by 50%

In the prosperous 1960s, CEOs made about 30x the salary of the average worker for the same company.

Today, it goes higher than 1000x.

Corporate profits are up, worker incomes are down. That is not an economic system that is sustainable.

George Mobus has a hypothesis about that.

Reminded me of this:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2005/09/yapping_about_m.html

In hardware form ... http://pocketables.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/10/27/sony_a810_hold.jpg

I came across this yesterday and found it interesting (comparisons of what Samsung's tablets looked like before and after the iPad came out)

The problem is that these troll pages pretend that there was only ever Apple and Samsung designing phones and tablets. That wasn't the case.

If I wanted to play the same game, I'd say that the iPad is itself designed from the rounded-rectangle tablet PCs that came before it, like this and the iPhone from the PDAs that came before it, like this.

Your questions (and those from others) bothered me. With as much business education and capabilities, I should be able to answer your questions better. However I type a reply and realize, I haven't really addressed the underlying fundamental question, "Where is that money going?" If the owners are pulling it out, then it has to go SOMEWHERE and usually there's taxable income. So at least the government benefits somewhat, however, their tax income isn't. One could say, "Loopholes", but given I'm only one step from the highest tax bracket and paying every penny, I'd love to know what those are. I'm a "3%"er and unlike Google, I'm getting hammered. I digress.

Then I hit, this article, "Labor's Share of Non-Farm Business Income," with this graph(it's below in the comments, which are all very insightful. I wish every on-line comment section was this civilized), and you can quantify clearly what is happening now, versus previous recoveries. To date, I've seen no explanations other than those who sound a lot like the politicians. "Blame Wall Street." "Blame the 1% Rich," etc. To me that's not meaningful because it's too close to false logic. This article shows that the difference is that clearly corporations are holding onto the profit more than at any other time in history. Now again, I don't agree capitalism has failed. If it was a failure, then why did it rebound EVERY other time. You can't define the majority by the minority in my opinion. So the meaningful dialogue is, "What changed?" You can't say people all of a sudden got greedy. Well maybe you can. But WHY did they get greedy when EVERY other time they didn't? We didn't invent greed in 2006. As I articulated in a different reply, you hand a company a $1 so that you can get $1.07 or more back (assuming 10 Yr T-Bills are paying 6%). Likewise, companies that have retained earnings (read: profits) should want to take the $1.07 THEY brought in to make ANOTHER $1.07 (or more). Holding onto it get's you $1.06 OR LESS (again assuming Tbills 6%) unless you start speculating, which no CFO worth a lick wants to do. I'll stop here but here is another article along the same lines, Income Redistribution: The Key to Economic Growth?.

What's the solution? NOT the government. If we rely on the government to be the watchkeeper of income distribution, than we will all suffer. To give an example, I read the Obama Stimulus Package being pushed through the Senate. It's been a few years so I won't have the numbers exact in spending, but I will have the percentages. For $30B in increased Food Stamps, they carved off $10.5B for "overhead." I'll let you define what that means to you, but apply it to income redistribution. If we're trying to take $15B from retained earnings sitting on the side (not investing or distributed to workers), do you want $5B spent by the government on "overhead"? No. You can regulate the behavior, but don't dictate it. For example, the government doesn't force you to buy a house, or have kids, but they do make your tax burden insanely easier (until you earn a magic number around $200k combined household) when you A) Get married w/ kids B) Buy a house. These are just ideas. Keep in mind during there are other contrary that might work as well. Under Reagan or Bush (can't remember) we lost deductions for credit card interest, and yet consumer borrowing skyrocketed.

So in summary, you're right. Although, your phantom corps sounds more like tin foil hat fodder, since the IRS or someone would love to catch someone being stupid with switching money around.

http://politicons.net/occupy-l-a-speaker-violence-socialism-will-be-necessary-to-achieve-our-goals/

Not just socialism, VIOLENCE. Not to dismiss it but there is also a clear anti-semetic vein going through the OWS crowd, with their "blame the Jews" chant.

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-blame-the-jews-hitlers-bankers-wall-street.html

Let see, Socialism, Blame the Jews, Charismatic Leader swepted into power ... where have I heard that before?

and many conservatives would agree with you.

Only if that were true. Facts though show Red States Feed at Federal Trough, Blue States Supply the Feed. Red (conservative) states get more of the money blue (big government) states pay the federal government.

Falcon

A tribe . . . of one? http://gocomics.typepad.com/tomthedancingbugblog/2011/08/a-tribe-of-one.html

Here's what TTimo has to say about it:

http://ttimo.typepad.com/blog/2009/09/id-software-and-linux.html

The line you're looking for is the last one:

"It is likely i will be involved with idTech 5 in the near future, I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done."

This post is from 2009 but I think it was posted after id was sold to BethSoft. Let's hope he succeeds in convincing his bosses.

The height of the current interglacial was about 8000 years ago. Temperatures have been (very) slowly dropping back down since then - until recently that is. The magnitude of the current changes in the arctic are very troubling, and the rate of decrease is accelerating. The following graph shows that arctic summer ice was fairly steady at 16,000,000km^3 up until the 1990's. We are now down to 4,500,000 km^3 : http://neven1.typepad.com/.a/6a0133f03a1e37970b014e885c65ac970d-pi

This has led some to characterize this as an arctic death spiral.

Data is available here:http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/data/

I read a study/survey a few years ago that showed the average lawyer made about $60,000 per year, while the same year the average sysadmin made about $62,000. Prices for both are up now, but I wouldn't be surprised if the ratios are about the same.

Also IIRC during the Microsoft antitrust case the MS attorney David Boies' standard billing rate was cited as $600 per hour, for one of the top litigation lawyers in the US. That was a while back, of course, and I could be completely wrong. According to an article I was just looking at, partner billing rates at many firms are set artificially high to prevent anyone from hiring them on an hourly basis. Quote:

Noted litigator David Boies (formerly partner at Cravath and now principal at his own firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner) criticized the rates in a quote in the article:

        Frankly, it's a little hard to think about anyone who doesn't save lives being worth this much money," says David Boies, one of the nation's best-known trial lawyers, at the Armonk, N.Y., office of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP.

    Another lawyer, Steve Sussman (who often handles high-stakes contingency matters), explains that the hourly fee of $1,100 is intended in part to discourage anyone from hiring him on an hourly basis.

... pet peeve - Internet articles that are not dated. I finally found a posted-by date at the bottom, of 2007.

The Patent Pool isn't to kill WebM, it is to protect those who choose to use WebM from litigation.

Sure, but protection from whom? From themselves perhaps?

'The president of the FFII has brought to people’s attention this good report from The Prior Art blog, saying that “MPEG-LA’s CEO Larry Horn also heads MobileMedia, a patent troll holding no less than 122 patents bought to Nokia and Sony” '

George W. Bush's plan involved defaulting on the trust fund ($1.6t then, $2.5t now) to finance a huge tax cut for the upper brackets. Everyone else would have had a "private" account, while paying to cover the deficit for current recipients. His estimated 4.6% real rate of return (before taxes to cover the deficit) was optimistic.

You have to be a patent troll to get his attention. Besides, he has enough on his plate. http://texaslawyer.typepad.com/texas_lawyer_blog/2011/09/state-bar-of-texas-sues-attorney-general-greg-abbott-over-open-records-decision.html

US energy consumption is falling even where it concerns oil, that's due to the inflation and thus higher prices in dollar amounts, though measured in gold, the oil is cheapest in history.

September 2009 â" Current (US Population 307,006,550)
Total input to refineries 14,600,000 Barrels per day
Total Imported Crude and products 11,721,000 Barrels per day
Total Imported Crude 9,223,000 Barrels per day
Total Domestic Oil Production 5,444,000 Barrels per day
Gasoline Consumed 8,779,000 Barrels per day
Diesel Fuel Consumed 4,099,000 Barrels per day

September 2004 - 5 years ago (US Population 293,045,739)

Registered vehicles: 243,010,539 Passenger Cars: 136,430,651 Comm Aircraft: 8,186
Total input to refineries 15,254,000 Barrels per day
Total Imported Crude and products 13,438,000 Barrels per day
Total Imported Crude 9,697,000 Barrels per day
Total Domestic Oil Production 5,062,000 Barrels per day
Gasoline Consumed 7,993,000 Barrels per day
Diesel Fuel Consumed

Also here is a graph of per-capita consumption.

It's not a surprise that energy consumption is falling in USA, as the population has less and less that it can spend because less and less is produced domestically. Same thing that is applied to oil can be extrapolated to all other forms of energy.

This article has a list of things government could do that Adam Smith advocated in the Wealth Of Nations, including regulation of institutions and markets, copyright, patents, education, restrictions on interest for borrowing, health care and export taxes. Adam Smith was not particularly laissez-faire in the libertarian sense at all.