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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"Iron Sky is a 2012 Finnish-Australian-German[4] comic science fiction action film directed by Timo Vuorensola and written by Johanna Sinisalo and Michael Kalesniko.[5][6] It tells the story of a group of Nazi Germans who, having been defeated in 1945, fled to the Moon where they built a space fleet to return in 2018 and conquer Earth."

We have only three years left to get ready!!! :-)

Seriously though, the Nazis show what can happen when soulless bureaucracy gets out of control... And modern schooling was invented in Prussia and made possible the Nazi war effort built on people unquestionably following horrific orders...
http://johntaylorgatto.wordpre...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? ... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. ... A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. ... Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men -- but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."

And:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."

If you are going to correct someone, at least be sure you are right.

Negligence: A failure to behave with the level of care that someone of ordinary prudence would have exercised under the same circumstances. The behavior usually consists of actions, but can also consist of omissions when there is some duty to act

The Romans had willful negligence, which is called gross negligence in Common Law (English)-based legal systems and dolo (dolus) in Roman-derived legal systems.

So you are wrong, there is willful negligence! And in my opinion BP committed gross negligence because their engineers knew the possible consequences of their acts.

Copyright law is a social contract

So are all other laws. You are not beaten up on the way home, nor is your daughter raped, because our morals consider such actions evil, and our laws ban them. You are free to not associate with someone, who you consider an asshole, but you don't get to beat them up (or, as you'd put it, "revoke their privilege to live").

in return for having the work eventually enter the Public Domain

Which contract are you referring to? Who signed it and when?

the legitimate recourse to a creator breaking the social contract is simply to revoke his privilege!

So, Windows is not entering Public Domain as fast as you'd like — and you wish to confiscate it from Microsoft? Or is it the Justin Bieber's music?

The express purpose of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts

Whatever. You didn't create it, whatever it is, somebody else did. If you don't like the terms, under which he is willing to let you use it, then don't use it. Imposing your own terms instead is evil and tyrannical — it is not even the "slippery slope", it is the actual falling off the cliff.

The Jefferson's letter you linked to talks about inventions, and his opinion, that there is no "natural right" to them. I am not sure I agree, but software is not an "invention" (and music even less so) anyway, so that's not the topic here.

It may seem unreasonable to you, but you aren't the creator â" and so your opinion does not matter.

Of course my opinion (along with everybody else's) matters; it is only due to our collective consent that copyright law exists in the first place! Copyright law is a social contract whereby, in return for having the work eventually enter the Public Domain, the public grants special privileges to the creators. Creators only get the protection of copyright law because the public deigns them to have it.

The only legitimate recourse for you is to pretend the creation was never created

On the contrary, the legitimate recourse to a creator breaking the social contract is simply to revoke his privilege!

Yes, some uses are allowed by our very liberal reading of the First Amendment (I wish, we read the Second just as liberally, but I digress). Limiting everything else is fine â" as long as I am not legally bound to pay for/use the creation, of course...

You don't get to pick and choose which parts of the Constitution to agree with; all of it is the law of the land. It also must be understood in context, which is readily available from the writings of the Founding Fathers themselves (e.g. the Federalist Papers). In particular (relevant to this discussion):

• The express purpose of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts," not to bestow any sort of moral right or obligation to creators.
• The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is clearly and obviously to affirm the right of the People to (violently) oppose tyanny (including that imposed by their own government), because that's what the Founding Fathers themselves had just finished doing! As such, it is wholly inappropriate for the People to require any sort of permission from the State to keep and bear arms.

You simply aren't reading my posts. It's not "CO2 emissions aren't a concern"; it's "CO2 emissions aren't a concern if all you use is high school physics". It's all explained above.

Nobody here is only using high school physics. I just showed that my explanations of the greenhouse effect match that of Ray Pierrehumbert, author of Principles of Planetary Climate. (Just in case you've never heard of this textbook, it isn't a high school textbook.)

It's disappointing (but sadly not surprising after meeting Sky Dragon Slayers like Jane) to find that lgw can't or won't cite even a single peer-reviewed study of equilibrium CO2 climate sensitivities that he actually accepts. And, frankly, ocean acidification is pretty close to being high school chemistry. Does lgw dismiss ocean acidification like Jane and the Sky Dragon Slayers do?

At combustion-chamber temperatures, CO2 actually reflects infrared, vs absorbing it, which is a much more dramatic effect.

There are two way in which CO2 interacts with IR radiation:

1) It can absorb IR, becoming warmer, and in turn emit IR as a blackbody.
2) It can reflect IR.

The energy transferred by effect 1 depends on the temp of the CO2. The energy transferred by effect 2 depends instead on the temp of what's being reflected. As these are "4th power of temp" effects, the difference is critical.

If this is such a critical and dramatic effect, you should easily be able to cite peer-reviewed articles (other than G&T) supporting and quantifying it. Right?

Saying "but what about Venus" gets the physics wrong (and also implies that the Earth could somehow one day become like Venus, when there's no mechanism for that).

No, I've actually emphasized that:

"I'm not saying that the Earth will turn into Venus. That would be absurd. We have no reason to think that the 'runaway greenhouse' on Venus is even possible on Earth."

Rasmus Benestad and Ray Pierrehumbert agree:

"The Earth may well succumb to a runaway greenhouse as the Sun continues to brighten over the next billion years or so, but the amount of CO2 we could add to the atmosphere by burning all available fossil fuel reserves would not move us significantly closer to the runaway greenhouse threshold. There are plenty of nightmares lurking in anthropogenic global warming, but the runaway greenhouse is not among them."

CO2 plays a role in absorbing a small percentage of the IR that is not reflected (which is itself a small percentage of the heat loss from the surface), and becoming warmer. The increase in blackbody radiation from the warmer CO2 is trivial. Thinking of this as "look, simple physics at work here" gets it wrong.

I've already explained complex factors like pressure broadening, which don't change the fact that CO2 warms the surface. For instance, how would surface temperatures change if all the CO2 in the atmosphere suddenly vanished? Sky Dragon Slayers have a simple (and wrong) answer: it wouldn't. What's yours?

Most of the heat transfer away from the surface of the Earth is by convection - radiative heat loss is a small effect by comparison.

I've explained that to a first approximation, convection establishes the lapse rate (the rate at which temperature drops with altitude in the troposphere). That estab

Actually, what really reduced crime was legalized abortion.

From "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," by John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt, appearing in the The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed signiZcantly to
recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion
legalization. The Zve states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines
earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade.
States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime
reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after
abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears
to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

If that is correct, still either the Cosby Show or banning leaded gasoline could have accounted for up to a 50% of the drop in crime.

The point is really that we don't nearly know enough to answer any of these questions. We can provide "best current thinking," but with only 1 actual sample (Earth) and no experience with GRBs, these are just guessitmates at best.

I can not answer about the deadliness of GRBs, but I think you will find those answers in Phil Plaits book "Death from the Skies!".

- How many civilizations might form on bodies with very thick atmospheres, far from their Suns? (Venus does not need a ozone layer to keep the UV out, and might be very habitable a few AU out.)

Yes, insulation is a good idea. But the planet will always radiate as a black body and loose energy, which has to be re-supplied by the suns radiation. The radiation drops with the square of the distance, so rather quickly. These considerations (make-up and size of planets) go into calculations for the habitable zone.

I can also imagine that a GRB comes with considerable photon pressure and might strip the entire atmosphere off a planet, or heat it to a point where it dissipates into space.

The threat model is ozone, not atmospheric stripping. With the hypothesized existence of Steppenwolf planets, I don't even think that the notion of a habitable zone is necessarily that useful, except as a guide as to where exobiologists should look first. The real question is, how many civilizations might arise on "Earth's" at 1 AU from their (G type) star, versus "warm Venus's" at, say, 2 AU. (Scale distances as necessary if you want to include other type stars, such as M dwarfs.) If this ratio is anywhere near unity, the "GRB==doom" hypothesis falls to the ground.

- How many planets might have very long rotation periods (years), so that the night hemisphere never is subjected to the daytime UV?

I think the rotation of planets around their own axis (spin) is not known outside the solar system. Generally, the spin is generated from formation of planets in the rotating protostellar disk, but interactions and changing orbits may modify the spin (Venus, Uranus).

Of course, but the real question is, how many life-bearing planets have a very long rotation period? My guess is, this is pretty rare, but pretty rare is still enough to invalidate the GRB==doom hypothesis.

- Are there rotation axis directions and orbital precession constants for planets that would keep GRB radiation mostly in one hemisphere, leaving the other to develop?

If you do not have the problem of heating and evaporation of the atmosphere I mentioned above, then yes, that is probably possible. For example if the GRB goes off from the direction of the spin axis ("below/above the solar system"). This may safe you from one GRB, but since GRBs come randomly from all directions it is not failsafe across many billion years.

- How many planets might have other special circumstances that protect their ozone (such as a lack of N2 in their atmosphere, or an ozone generating biology in their stratosphere, etc.)

Not sure. I think it is possible to come up with such scenarios as you stated, but it has to be shown that they are frequent occurrences to be relevant for changing the survival rate of complex life.

Exactly. To say that GRB==doom means that all of these possibilities must be very infrequent indeed, and I just don't see how we can say that at present. That makes me dubious about the hypothesis.

Granted from 2005: http://www.rense.com/general65...
"I had been stationed in Germany for two years while in the military, so I lit up, and commented about how beautiful the country was, and inquired if he was going back because he missed it.
"No," he answered me. "I'm going back because I've seen this before." He then commenced to explain that when he was a kid, he watched with his family in fear as Hitler's government committed atrocity after atrocity, and no one was willing to say anything. He said the news refused to question the government, and the ones who did were not in the newspaper business much longer. He said good neighbors, people he had known all his life, turned against his family and other Jews, grabbing on to the hate and superiority "as if they were starved for it" (his words).
He said he was too old to see it happen right in front of his eyes again, and too old to do anything about it, so he was taking his family back to Europe on Thursday where they would be safe from George W. Bush and his neocons. He seemed resolute, but troubled, nonetheless, as if being too young on one end and too old on the other to fight what he saw happening was wearing on him. ...
I have related this event to you in the hopes it will serve as a cautionary anecdote about the state of our Union, and to illustrate the path we Americans are being led down by a group of fanatics bent on global economic and military dominion. When a man who survived the fruits of fascism decides its time to leave THIS country because he's seeing the same patterns that led to the Holocaust and other Nazi horrors beginning to form here, it is time for us to recognize the underlying evil inherent in the actions of those who claim they work for all Americans, and for all mankind. And it is incumbent upon all Americans, Red and Blue, Republican and Democrat, to stop them."

What has really changed from the Bush years of great significance in that regard?

See also:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...
""What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."

Jews who moved to Israel seem to me overall to have interpreted "never again" in terms of who has the most guns. But there is another perspective on that, which is to think that "never again" should be about militaristic bureaucracy getting out of control. A culture like the USA (or Israel for that matter) can be full of guns and people who know how to use them, but still infested with militarist bureaucracy infesting every aspect of life (including via perpetual full-surveillance "schooling"). Like bureaucracy, humans have had a long association with fire, and fire is useful to warm our homes and cook our meals, but it is a terrible thing when it rages out of control.

That said, how should we behave when we are essentially t

See also the Donahue-Levitt hypotheses that legalized abortion reduces the number of ne'er-do-wells and hence the amount of violent crime. http://pricetheory.uchicago.ed...

Not to mention, the Constitution is really more of a guideline, anyway.

You jest, but Thomas Jefferson did expect that the Constitution wouldn't even last until his death, writing to James Madison, "Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years." Of course if you look at the whole document, that number is based on his estimate of a typical lifespan of 40 years, but the point remains. But then, given the amendments and the various interpretations over the years, perhaps we have done exactly as he expected.

Here's a letter from the 3rd President of the USA to the 5th President.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison
28 Oct. 1785

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.

That's the author of the Declaration of Independence writing to the "Father of the Constitution" and author of the Bill of Rights.

Of course during Jefferson's time there was no concept of welfare and hand outs to individuals from the federal government. They key word in the quote is near the end, LABOUR. The folks currently wanting more taxes on the rich want to give it to folks that DON'T want to LABOUR.

Taxes should be flat across the spectrum. You shouldn't get a break because you are extremely rich or poor. Besides, a flat tax is naturally progressive. If you make more, you pay more.

A flat tax is only "progressive" if you abuse the word to mean something else and completely ignore how everyone else is using the word progressive.

Here's a letter from the 3rd President of the USA to the 5th President.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison
28 Oct. 1785

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.

That's the author of the Declaration of Independence writing to the "Father of the Constitution" and author of the Bill of Rights.

Better still, let's not tax income or property. Since all money in the economy is eventually spent, let's simply tax consumption and fund our society that way. Everyone consumes - those that consume less will pay less tax.

How did this get modded up.
Everyone has a basic level of consumption: food, water shelter, clothing, transportation.
For the poorest, this basic level of consumption makes up most of their spending.

It's the difference between a 10% tax on 90% of your income or 1% of your income.
That's not progressive, that's not better, that's not fairer.
And the founding fathers thought it was dumb.

Some cultures were tolerant of homosexuality itself (even if they mocked it a bit), but none equated homosexual unions with marriage.

They were tolerant to the point of recognizing the unions; sanctioning and accepting them within society with the same deference as hetero unions.

What "equivalent of gay marriage"?

The roman equivalent of marriage; since marriage in 200 AD doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as marriage means today.

"With this man[1] Elagabalus[2] went through a nuptial ceremony and consummated a marriage [...]"

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/T...

[1] - Zoticus, a male consort of Elagabulus
[2] - Elagabulus, Roman Emperor, AD 218 to 222

And he was hardly the first or only, but at least this one is rather clearly and unambiguously documented as a "marriage", and not some other male-male relationship.

but it was always "hetero".

It really wasn't though.

Exactly. And the primary (if not the only) purpose of it â" always and everywhere â" was to rear children.

That would only be necessary in monogamous marriages within a Christian framework. It was plenty common for plural marriages to include marriages to both men and women.

And where did those children come from? Adoption? Surrogate mothers?

Additional female wives, concubines, consorts...

I fail to see, how a union of one male and one female must imply the former's ownership of the latter.

Those marriages you speak of for the purpose of "rearing children" were much more than that.

Those "Marriages" were contracts of chattel, duties, and obligations. (And the women was the chattel). The entire purpose of those "for the purpose of child rearing" marriages was not simply to bring a man and women together to produce children, but to establish the payment to the women's family for chattel rights to the woman and the joint offspring, define the amount of the payment, and to define terms for reparations to the 'buyer' if an offspring wasn't forthcoming. (including the return of the 'merchandise' and 'refund', perhaps even damages for time etc. To suggest that those elements are of "marriage" are any more or any less intrinsic to the transaction than the hetero nature of those contracts is simply nuts.

What cracks? The Piltdown man? It was debunked. Constant review and scrutiny is part of science. You make a name by discovering something new/.show someone else was wrong (with facts, not with assertions). With today's tools (DNA sequencing) etc. it wouldn't have taken 40 years.
Missing fossils? Missing evidence? WTF. Ask him to produce the arc of the covenant, etc. The important thing about evolution is: There is nothing contradicting it. Every newly found fossil matches the pattern. Never do we find a rabbit with a piece of a T-rex tooth in it . No one is claiming it is complete, that every piece of evidence is there, but there is no evidence against it. EVERYTHING independent line of evidence points to the same thing: geology was used to predict where one of the missing links could be found, and was indeed found (read about it here). Every scientist would love to falsify the theory of evolution. I know I would. What a way to make a name for yourself. But the theory of evolution is bolstered every day.
ERVs show that man and apes share a common ancestor. Learn about it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Tiktaalik, a transitional fossil was found at the predicted location. Read about it here: http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/...

Mims posits a Creator. Not zero creators. Not many creators. A (one) creator. The amount of evidence for that? Zilch. He has no qualms about that. If you want to spot a crack in a line of reasoning, there's one. And why does Mims give himself a free pass on a super powerful creator out of nothing but is stymied by photochemical system?

Every molecule has properties, such as a boiling point, a solubility in water etc. etc. Water vapor can form a variety of ice crystals (snow flakes). None of his electronic components did that (although resistors might self-align a bit).
Complex molecules exhibit more elaborate properties. The molecules he's so amazed about, like molecular motors? They self-assemble upon formation. They arise by transcription from DNA and translation from RNA. Not a single deity involved in that. If these molecules didn't have that property, the molecules wouldn't be there. All those molecular behavior in the end determine what you do. If you think a god is pulling the strings at a molecular level, then he can't hold you responsible for your actions.

Sure, none of Mims' electronic circuits has every self-assembled. But atoms and molecules have different properties than electronic components. They self-solder, i.e. react. And the universe is a gigantically big place (multiply the number of galaxies by the number of stars per galaxy) times a couple of planets. That's a gigantically erlenmeyer flask with a gazilion reactions taking place. Most of them leading to nothing special. I place my bet on a freak chemical event taking place leading to life in that chemical soup than a deity that self-raised himself as a super-von-munchausen.

In his own field/related to his own field of electronics, genetic algorithms have resulted in very strange-looking antennae that are better than human designed ones. Yes, the algorithm was programmed. That is because antennae don't procreate, otherwise they could have evolved to look that strange yet be so efficient.

I liked the Q&A quite a bit. But I don't think he's a man to go to on evolution, as to take him serious there, he either has to present evidence for the creator he posits or provide evidence (like a rabbit bone with a T-rex tooth in it) that falsifies evolution. That's how it works. His work on ozone got accepted not because it was his strong opinion but because it was correct.

Interesting little factoid: in the 2008 elections, there was exactly ONE African amongst the Presidential candidates and their wives - Teresa Heinz Kerry. All candidates, and all the other spouses, were not African (as in, not born in Africa). In this case, the Ethiopian physicist is African, but not African-American. If you really want to learn about the differences, start with the economic disparity between African-born and American-born people of African descent. It's not racial background that matters, but culture.

The importance of transportation of information isn't new to the 21th century. It was important enough in the 18th century that the power to establish "Post Offices and Post Roads" is explicitly granted to the Congress in Article 1, Section 8. There were debates over whether the public should bear the cost of newspaper delivery[1]. They debated whether Congress should delegate the power to determine post roads or if they should hold it themselves because the importance of the exchange of information was of too great of an importance to be left to one person (the Postmaster General)[2).

The USPS is in dire financial straits right now mostly due to the requirement that they prefund pensions. The other major reason is due to loss of revenue due to the internet. They were the original institution tasked with allowing free exchange of information. The should be the municipal ISP. Give them control of the hardware.

The importance of transportation of information isn't new to the 21th century. It was important enough in the 18th century that the power to establish "Post Offices and Post Roads" is explicitly granted to the Congress in Article 1, Section 8. There were debates over whether the public should bear the cost of newspaper delivery[1]. They debated whether Congress should delegate the power to determine post roads or if they should hold it themselves because the importance of the exchange of information was of too great of an importance to be left to one person (the Postmaster General)[2).

The USPS is in dire financial straits right now mostly due to the requirement that they prefund pensions. The other major reason is due to loss of revenue due to the internet. They were the original institution tasked with allowing free exchange of information. The should be the municipal ISP. Give them control of the hardware.

Yeah, the threat that there might be someone with a gun would sure work as a deterrent for someone who plans to off himself in the end anyway...

Gee, I do wonder why you would use "in the end"...

If their goal were really only to simply "off himself in the end" they wouldn't shoot up schools or movie theaters. He'd just "off himself".

Because even you know it - it's not about "off[ing] himself". You used the term "off himself in the end". The end if WHAT?

Oh yeah, the shooting spree where they're invincibly massacring innocents.

Others being armed prevents that "invincibly massacring innocents" that's the entire point of the "off himself in the end".

Don't think so?

Too bad for you:

The study, “An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates,” conducted by Quinnipiac University economist Mark Gius, examined nearly 30 years of statistics and concluded that stricter gun laws do not result in a reduction in gun violence. In fact, Gius found the opposite – that a proliferation of concealed carry permits can actually reduce incidents of gun crime.

And it's not an isolated study, either::

Using cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992, we find that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths. ...

Go back to Fantasyland.

You assume that patents do anything to prevent MegaCorp from competing. You also assume that it is Joe Inventor filing most of the patents, and not said MegaCorp. In practice, neither of these things are true, and the primary beneficiaries of patent litigation are lawyers.

Patents are the right to squash competition. Competition in the ideal sense is a very efficient way to allocate resources. If one company is first to market, and a competitor makes a product which is "better, faster, and shinier," what exactly is wrong with letting the market decide who gets rewarded?

Your argument hinges on the role of patents in encouraging people to bring products to market, which is actually an orthogonal process. Patents are intended to promote the disclosure of ideas. All well and good, but maybe an automatic monopoly isn't necesarily the best way to accomplish either of those things.

There are two really big problems with patents. The first is that almost all knowledge is derivative of other knowledge. Certain persons with an excess of self-interest will argue that such a thing as originality exists in some distinguishable form. I submit that even for the invention of fire there was prior art, and every invention since then was either an incremental adaptation or based on some other preexisting knowledge. Keep in mind that the ones who add to our knowledge of the world are called scientists, not inventors.

The second problem is embodied in the phrase "intellectual property." Jefferson noted that there is nothing less suited to ownership than an idea. I could not possibly improve on his argument.

Patents are a granted right, not a natural one. You are as free to pursue financial gain by sweat of the brow or toil of the mind with or without their existence. I'm not, frankly, interested in pursuing a discussion of whether there is some better way to encourage inventors, but the discussion is not advanced by conjuring a trivial and misleading hypothetical situation, ignoring actual practice, and presupposing the necessity of some legal instrument unknown through most of human history.

It's doubtful that the Romans introduced much lead into the water. from http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~...:

...rain water is slightly acidic, having dissolved carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to form a weak solution of carbonic acid, which in turn reacts with calcium hydroxide to form calcium carbonate. which .Rome is situated on sedimentary calcareous soil, and the frequent cleaning of limestone encrustation (which accumulated approximately one millimeter per year) suggests that deposits of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in the pipes protected against corrosion and insulated against the introduction of lead into the water

The Roman Empire stretched far beyond Rome, just FYI, and they smelted a LOT of lead all over the place. The lead contamination they cause was not runoff from corroding pipes, it was from the actual smelters themselves. Lead used to be used for all sorts of things, pewter was a lead-clay mixture for example, and lead itself was considered almost as useful as gold in many applications. The point being that our civilization was not the first to use lead widely nor pollute widely, but many people who get worked up about the environment tend to not know much about history prior to the Industrial Revolution.

It's doubtful that the Romans introduced much lead into the water. from http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~...:

...rain water is slightly acidic, having dissolved carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to form a weak solution of carbonic acid, which in turn reacts with calcium hydroxide to form calcium carbonate. which .Rome is situated on sedimentary calcareous soil, and the frequent cleaning of limestone encrustation (which accumulated approximately one millimeter per year) suggests that deposits of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in the pipes protected against corrosion and insulated against the introduction of lead into the water

The fourth Jefferson quote:

"To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, ..."

may not be one. It is found in a prospectus for a translation of Destutt de Tracy's 'Treatise on Political Economy' and may well be a statement of Tracy's views. If it does express the opinion of Mr. Jefferson, I'd be interested to know how Mr. Jefferson squared it with his unabashed support for progressive taxation, inheritance taxes, and other redistributive measures. From a 1785 letter to James Madison:

" I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind."

"Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right."

Communications is so critical that the US Constitution writes in the Postal service as part of it.

and interestingly 225 years later we are still arguing about the very same implementation details For example:

Col: Mason was for limiting the power to the single case of Canals. He was afraid of monopolies of every sort, which he did not think were by any means already implied by the Constitution as supposed by Mr. Wilson.

Sounds like exactly what happened when we began to "grant charters of incorporation where the interest of the U.S. might require" anyway...

There's a study of the motion of stars in globular clusters being done at Yerkes Observatory: http://astro.uchicago.edu/yerk.... They have an ancient refractor with a 40 inch lens. Now refractors have long since been replaced by reflectors in serious astronomy. But they were using this telescope because it allowed precise comparisons between pictures taken now and archival plates from a century ago, necessary to determine the slight apparent displacement of those stars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Also related:
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...

My satirical take on it all:
https://groups.google.com/foru...
-----
Dialog of alternatively a military officer and Hitler:
"It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here, here, and here."
"But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?"
"The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space."
"What about the nuclear bombs?"
"All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the oceans."
"What about the tanks?"
"The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world."
"I can't believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?"
"The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness."
"Well, send in the Daleks."
"The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with the rockets."
"Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades."
"We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters, solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason."
"But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?"
"They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots."
"I just can't believe this. We've developed the most amazing technology the world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?"
"Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance."
"How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong? ...
Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room ... now!"
[Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of engineers. :-) Then cue long tirade on how could engineers seriously wanted to help the German workers to not have to work so hard when the whole Nazi party platform was based on providing full employment using fiat dollars. Then cue long tirade on how could engineers have taken the socialism part seriously and shared the wealth of nature and technology with everyone globally.]
"So how are the common people paying for all this?"
"Much is free, and there is a basic income given to everyone for the rest. There is so much to go around with the robots and 3D printers and solar panels and so on, that most of the old work no longer needs to be done."
"You mean people get money without working at jobs? But nobody would work?"
"Everyone does what they love. And they are producing so much just as gifts."
"Oh, so you mean people are producing so much for free that the economic system has failed?"
"Yes, the old pyramid scheme one, anyway. There is a new post-scarcity economy, where between automation and a a gift economy the income-through-jobs link is almost completely broken. Everyone also gets income as a right of citizenship as a share of all our resources for the few things that still need to be rationed. Even you."
"Really? How much is this basic income?"
"Two thousand a month."
"Two thousand a month? Just for bein

Abstract: An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates. Like many papers published in academic journals you would have to pay to see the whole thing, although you can preview it.

You can read a news story about it here:

Study shows concealed-carry laws result in fewer murders

Similar work:

An interview with John R. Lott, Jr.

You may find this interesting as well.

Detroit police chief: More legally armed citizens deter crime

Just don't get us mass crucified.

Let's look at the opinion of another Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton:

the power to raise money is plenary, and indefinite; and the objects to which it may be appropriated are no less comprehensive, than the payment of the public debts and the providing for the common defence and "general Welfare." The terms "general Welfare" were doubtless intended to signify more than was expressed or imported in those which Preceded; otherwise numerous exigencies incident to the affairs of a Nation would have been left without a provision. The phrase is as comprehensive as any that could have been used; because it was not fit that the constitutional authority of the Union, to appropriate its revenues shou'd have been restricted within narrower limits than the "General Welfare" and because this necessarily embraces a vast variety of particulars, which are susceptible neither of specification nor of definition.

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_1s21.html

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

"And the amazing thing is that evolutionary biologists- given an older example of a species and a later example of a species can (and have) predicted what the bones between those two samples would look like and (this was cool for me) where geographically and in what layer of depth the intermediate specimen would be found."

A great example of that it Tiktaalik:

http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/searching4Tik.html

Bert

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after the 2000 Presidential election, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in the United States. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with the President, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Super-power status gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about -- we were decent people -- and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic American’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security."

But Then It Was Too Late

That's just being plain ignorant of history. At virtually no point in human history (including the US) was there a concept of privacy, openness or governmental transparency.

You may disagree with the reality of the world and wish for something different -- I'm sure most people do -- but pretending this is something new doesn't open the possibility of change because you're focusing on correcting a cause that doesn't actually exist.

Although, personally, I think its a whole lot less stressful to not worry about things that don't really impact me, always have been and always will be. On that note, I'm going to e-mail and call friends to arrange a barbecue because the weather is really quite spectacular today, and I don't give two shits what spooky government agency might be storing my call records or scanning those e-mails.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security."

But Then It Was Too Late

It is too bad that they considered preparation of wine to be a "necessary use of lead". Their choices being copper (brass) or lead, and copper acetate spoiling the flavor...

Curiously, water may well NOT have been so much a conveyor of lead: between a preference for using terracotta and calcium carbonate deposits may have held lead-from-water to a minimum.

Of course, water was not so much for drinking, in those days...

It's difficult to determine. It might curb some criminal behaviour, for example dumb and inexperienced criminals would be less likely to survive. However, it seems likely that criminal behaviour would adapt to the new circumstances. For example, the criminals might shift to taking their victims by surprise more often, and shooting them more often to prevent their victims from using the weapons they are presumed to be carrying. It's quite possible that if more people were carrying concealed weapons that more people would be injured during the commission of crimes with no real impact on the underlying crime rate. It's also possible that crime rates for "crimes of passion" (where the comitter isn't thinking straight), would go up since the means to cause serious damage and/or death are always at hand.

Overall, I actually doubt that gun ownership rates and concealed carry rates have any significant impact on crime rates. I think the largest impacts come from culture, heavy metal contamination (especially lead) rates and policing strategies.

How sure is "pretty sure"? Is it sure enough to include some studies, or a source for numbers, or...?

I found this blog post from somebody who put together some related numbers. It doesn't exactly relate to the carbon costs of farming the food and collecting/refining the gasoline, but it discusses the carbon mass per unit distance emitted by the various modes of transportation.

Here are the interesting numbers. CO2 produced per 3.2 km of travel above what is produced by breathing at rest:

By car: 0.88 kg CO2
Walking: 0.039 kg CO2
Riding a bike: 0.017 kg CO2

So traveling by car produces 51 times as much CO2 emissions than biking. As I said, that doesn't include the carbon cost of farming, so I found this study showing that producing food produces 2.778E-7 tons of CO2 per kcal. Going back to that bike ride, the 3.2 km bike ride consumed 49 kcal more than resting, and the amount of CO2 produced from farming/etc. operations for 49 kcal of food is 0.014 kg of CO2. So it nearly doubles the CO2 produced to ride a bike, to .03 kg, but driving a car still produces 28.75 times more CO2. And that doesn't even account for the cost of getting the fuel - it's only tailpipe emissions. Even carpooling, say with five people in the car, produces more CO2 than each person individually riding a bike.

(Please let me know of any errors I've made. I don't claim to be infallible.)

One research paper that I have read on the subject (because it didn't require a subscription to a pschology journal) can be found here. It is more of a survey paper than it is original research, so there are over 200 references in this 17 page paper if you want to read more. I just browsed through it again just now, and there is plenty of material on why humans anthropromorphize:

While attempting to gain this familiarity and competence, children attribute intentions and causal agency widely to the simplest and most abstract of onhuman stimuli. Because ascribing these mental characteristics aids children’s attempts to make sense of a wide variety of stimuli, those who have not yet attained a full sense of competence with their environment should be particularly likely to activate anthropomorphic representations and less likely to subsequently correct or adjust those representations. Anthropomorphism should therefore be especially helpful in these early stages of life as a means of reducing uncertainty. -- (Epley, Waytz & Cacioppo, 2007)

Sadly there are many examples that deal mostly with children, but that is the easiest way to deal with the topic without overtly criticising beliefs that even adults still hold onto. It is much better to discuss why believing that a ball has feelings is silly than talk about why thinking the existence of the universe has existential meaning exists is silly.

You can also find numerous books written on the subject. Just look for any book trying to investigate why humans have a need for religion and it will almost certainly bring up this topic.

So many questionable assumptions in your post... If you are referring to US American history around the time of the American Revolution, quite a bit of the Colonial population fled to Canada to remain under the rule of the British Crown (as "Loyalists"). Canada got rid of slavery about 40 years sooner than the USA, never had a terrible Civil War, treat their indigenous people better, and now have universal health care. In many ways, the British were more socially advanced than the rough colonists. See also:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_(American_Revolution)

Of those people who stayed in the American Colonies, at least one of his own officers (Colonel Lewis Nicola) asked George Washington to become their new King, but he refused.
http://www.pbs.org/georgewashington/classroom/rule_of_law2.html

The major reason for the Colonies' revolt was banking policy -- that the British wanted to prevent American colonies from issuing their own currency, which caused an economic depression in the Colonies. so, a bad economy and high unemployment caused the revolt more than anything else. The reason the British wanted to do this was to collect more revenue to pay back debts incurred for the recent war with France over western territories. So, the end result was that the American colonists got the French territories without having to pay for the war that took them from France (and the natives). Both Britain and France were destabilized by such war debts, although France was worse off, leading towards the French Revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War
http://www.chicagofed.org/webpages/publications/economic_perspectives/1981/ep_mar_apr1981_part4_wood.cfm
http://www.kamron.com/Liberty/colonial_script.htm

As for US interventions abroad since, most were just to ensure profits to specific wealthy investors, according to Marine Major General Smedley Butler:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

On the partisan politics of this disclosure and the Verizon one. Conservatives now are blaming Obama and Progressives. Liberals blame Bush and Republicans. Congress says it has been going on for seven years, so why worry now? What a mess. Somehow I don't feel much is going to change from this revelation though, because, to anyone paying attention, it is not that unexpected. Carnivore and Echelon did similar things over a decade ago, plus they are supposedly arrangements by US agencies to exchange data with other countries that can spy on US citizens without issues.

As is suggested here, gradual changes are rarely resisted:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in

An interview with John R. Lott, Jr.

Once again an anti-gun nut misses the point. Well, more than one actually.

Your recap is backwards, the leading point in that summary is that Bloomberg founded Bloomberg. Jon Stewarts comment would apply to a number of things Bloomberg has done in New York City, not just the soda ban. He has kept himself busy, banning this and that.

The city especially, but also the state, have fairly strict gun laws, but it doesn't help much. It is likely the reverse.

How many people died of gun crime? Isn't the proper metric how many people died of crime? Or do you think that all people killed with knives or hammers go to heaven, while those shot dead go to hell? Isn't the proper strategy to reduce crime? Or is the total number of murders OK as long as the proportion of one means of murder is changed in relation to another? Dead is dead, isn't it?

There is no sound in space. To pretend that there is, the density, temperature, and atmospheric pressure would make it vary greatly. So really this is just made up bullshit.

Um, no. There really was sound in the early universe, which was much denser than the universe today. Perhaps you should educate yourself a little before you start calling stuff "made up bullshit".

Another interesting journal article about rod behavior in dichromatic individuals: http://macboy.uchicago.edu/~eye1/pdf%20files/large%20field%20tri%20josa%201977.pdf

It appears that under specific lighting conditions, most deuteranopes CAN reliably distinguish between deep saturated red and pure green, even after controlling for relative brightness. The catch is, the color has to fill their field of vision, and they have to study & contemplate it in relatively dim light. In other words, they can't look at a blinking RGB LED on a dashboard and reliably figure out whether it's blinking red or green, but if they spent 15 minutes sitting in a dim room with black walls, then walked into an equally dim bathroom with vivid red or vivid green walls & floor (with brightness adjusted to a level that should, in theory, make the walls look "dark brown" regardless of whether they're red or green), the likelihood that they'd correctly identify them as red or green is greater than random chance would suggest. The explanation is that large areas of color would involve rods, but small areas would use foveal vision (which normally lacks them). I'm pretty sure this article influenced the other one I cited.

So, despite evidence like this, why does just about everyone take for granted that deuteranopes and protanopes have literally ZERO ability to discern red and green, ever, period, end of story? The partial limiting factor is cultural and cognitive... most people don't question the universe around them and feel compelled to constantly analyze and probe its boundaries. If an authority figure (like a doctor) tells them as a child that they can't tell the difference between red and green, and that everything they see is supposed to be blue, white, or yellow... most of them will take it at face value. Especially when they themselves notice that "red" sometimes looks distinctly different from green in their peripheral vision, tell someone like a doctor, and get smacked down & told they're just imagining things because it's impossible.

It's the colorblind engineers who start pulling out the lasers and studying them to see for themselves where the exact boundaries lie, and spend hours in dark rooms comparing the dim glow from a half-dozen $25 supersized infrared security camera floodlights from China to the dim green light from an Indiglo night light (a somewhat new phenomenon... up until a couple of years ago, there was no such thing as a source of 850nm infrared light that was cold enough to not act like an incandescent light, and bright enough to tickle just about everyone's cones enough to notice... if they were visible light, they'd be *blindingly* bright).

There's also another interesting twist to all of this... I haven't seen it officially documented, but if a rare deuteranope with foveal rods could end up passing for a somewhat odd anomalous trichromat, it seems like there's ALSO the possibility that a slightly less rare chromatypical trichromat who ends up with foveal rods might (emphasis on "might") end up with some degree of tetrachromatic color vision, too... and that most chromatypical trichromats might actually be able to learn to distinguish between "identical" metamers that are subtly different using their peripheral vision in dim lighting. It would be an example of some ability that's always been there, but nobody has ever really thought about, studied, or noticed because it would be so minor relative to their normal color vision that they'd only even become aware of it as a possibility after lots of personal experimentation and self-analysis. Of course, this would mean a tetrachromatic woman with foval rods might be able to experience pentachromatic vision under the same circumstances.

Anyway, fascinating stuff. :-)

I don't think you're understanding the analysis of the data. I did take in account that lead affects children much more than adults -- my argument was that there would be the same 15-20 year lag before the effects could be reflected in crime statistics. The thing is, once that 15-20 year time is accounted for, one would assume that crime would gradually fall as lead removable was a gradual process. Legalized abortion, however, was immediate. And the dip in the crime rate was sharp, and immediate, in that 15-20 years after Roe v. Wade.

I too question the validity of most large statistical analyses, especially when one is attempting to draw conclusions about society. But Levitt and Donohue are extremely thorough in their research and they do analyze many of your concerns. At this point, to address most of your retorts, I would just be quoting their research.

Here is the full paper, you should find it interesting.

You'll notice that, as you should have concluded from my post above, that it's not just a matter of being poor. It's not just a matter of being unwanted. It's when those two problems overlap that a child becomes destined for a life of crime. Wealthy people have less abortions because 1) they can afford birth control/contraceptives 2) they tend to be more intelligent. Police corruption and selective enforcement is an issue, but we're talking about things like murder and assault. I don't think I need to pull up any statistics for you to believe that murder and assault occur on a much smaller scale among the wealthy than the poor.

Remember, the argument isn't that legalized abortion is the only factor responsible in reducing the crime rate. The argument is that legalized abortion was responsible for the massive dip in the crime rate during the 90s. Some of the ideas you mentioned can be dismissed off-hand. The 'war on drugs' was the cause of much violence violent crime and has been deemed a failure by anyone with half a brain, the winding down of the 60s cultural revolution can be dismissed because (and I probably should have specified) we're mainly looking at violent crime, not just crime (although both decreased, violent crime was deemed the more important statistic). It's questionable whether ADHD is a real mental disorder, and I haven't seen any indication that those diagnosed with either ADHD or autism commit violent crimes at a higher rate than anyone else.

The real question is what can we do to bring down the crime rate further, assuming we still feel it is unacceptably high.

It will remain an unanswered question if we reject the best explanations for crime with the most evidence because they're not politically correct or, in your case, because we make the claim that these things are unknowable. The problem with statistics is that they are often used without taking enough variables into account -- such as the lead/crime correlation. When they are used comprehensively, as in Levitt and Donohue's research, they can be enlightening.

Evolution can't tell me what conditions to subject rats to so that I end up with something that isn't a rat. And it can't tell me how many generations it'll take.

Evolution explains why animals in different conditions and are separated diverge. How fast it happens is dependent on several factors. Environmental factors can cause more mutations. Reproduction and mortality rates are a factor. It also explains why classifying species in the first place is so hard. When exactly do you have something that isn't a rat?

Evolution can't tell me where to dig to find a creature whose bones are part way between a form believed to be a descendent[SIC] of another. And it can't reliably tell me what those bones will look like when I do find them.

But it does.
Posted anonymously because I don't care if you reply.

If you want to become a professional software developer as opposed to being locked into IT support, the Masters program at the University of Chicago sounds ideal for you. It is specifically designed for those with little or no formal programming experience before beginning the degree.

Unfortunately, that blog post is merely pointing out some differences, but then goes on to make an equally weak argument for the opposite case.

Here is a reference from the University of Chicago suggesting that increased imprisonment does reduce crime rates:

http://crimelab.uchicago.edu/page/incarceration

(Steven Levitt: The Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates, Quart. J. Econ., 1996)

"While calculations of the cost of crime are inherently uncertain, it appears that the social benefits associated with crime reduction equal or exceed the social costs of incarceration for the marginal prisoner."

Dallas Semiconductor once had a product called the "Crypto iButton", a small Java CPU + a hardware RSA engine and tamper-resistant memory. With appropriate plugins you could set it up as a security device in your browser and then authenticate remotely using SSL client certificates (with the private key never leaving the iButton).

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~dinoj/smartcard/javaring.html

Although novel interpretations are always quaint, certain definitions are always helpful, e.g. how pretty much all males in New York are members of the militia: (from N.Y. MIL. LAW 2 : NY Code - Section 2: Militia of the state; division and composition)

2. The unorganized militia shall consist of all able-bodied male
    residents of the state between the ages of seventeen and forty-five who
    are not serving in any force of the organized militia or who are not on
    the state reserve list or the state retired list and who are or who have
    declared their intention to become citizens of the United States,
    subject, however, to such exemptions from military duty as are created
    by the laws of the United States.

This goes hand in hand with the acknowledgement of the people's right to bear arms in N.Y. CVR. LAW 4 : NY Code - Section 4: Right to keep and bear arms:

A well regulated militia being
    necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to
    keep and bear arms cannot be infringed.

My reading of that compound sentence is that the first part is a statement of fact, and the second a reminder of the people's right.
I think I'm in pretty good company reaching that conclusion, e.g.:

1. Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, Declaration of Rights:

   XIII. That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.

2. House of Representatives, Amendments to the Constitution:

   Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins. This was actually done by Great Britain at the commencement of the late revolution. They used every means in their power to prevent the establishment of an effective militia to the eastward. The Assembly of Massachusetts, seeing the rapid progress that administration were making to divest them of their inherent privileges, endeavored to counteract them by the organization of the militia; but they were always defeated by the influence of the Crown.

3. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution:

   The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

Although novel interpretations are always quaint, certain definitions are always helpful, e.g. how pretty much all males in New York are members of the militia: (from N.Y. MIL. LAW 2 : NY Code - Section 2: Militia of the state; division and composition)

2. The unorganized militia shall consist of all able-bodied male
    residents of the state between the ages of seventeen and forty-five who
    are not serving in any force of the organized militia or who are not on
    the state reserve list or the state retired list and who are or who have
    declared their intention to become citizens of the United States,
    subject, however, to such exemptions from military duty as are created
    by the laws of the United States.

This goes hand in hand with the acknowledgement of the people's right to bear arms in N.Y. CVR. LAW 4 : NY Code - Section 4: Right to keep and bear arms:

A well regulated militia being
    necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to
    keep and bear arms cannot be infringed.

My reading of that compound sentence is that the first part is a statement of fact, and the second a reminder of the people's right.
I think I'm in pretty good company reaching that conclusion, e.g.:

1. Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, Declaration of Rights:

   XIII. That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.

2. House of Representatives, Amendments to the Constitution:

   Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins. This was actually done by Great Britain at the commencement of the late revolution. They used every means in their power to prevent the establishment of an effective militia to the eastward. The Assembly of Massachusetts, seeing the rapid progress that administration were making to divest them of their inherent privileges, endeavored to counteract them by the organization of the militia; but they were always defeated by the influence of the Crown.

3. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution:

   The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

Although novel interpretations are always quaint, certain definitions are always helpful, e.g. how pretty much all males in New York are members of the militia: (from N.Y. MIL. LAW 2 : NY Code - Section 2: Militia of the state; division and composition)

2. The unorganized militia shall consist of all able-bodied male
    residents of the state between the ages of seventeen and forty-five who
    are not serving in any force of the organized militia or who are not on
    the state reserve list or the state retired list and who are or who have
    declared their intention to become citizens of the United States,
    subject, however, to such exemptions from military duty as are created
    by the laws of the United States.

This goes hand in hand with the acknowledgement of the people's right to bear arms in N.Y. CVR. LAW 4 : NY Code - Section 4: Right to keep and bear arms:

A well regulated militia being
    necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to
    keep and bear arms cannot be infringed.

My reading of that compound sentence is that the first part is a statement of fact, and the second a reminder of the people's right.
I think I'm in pretty good company reaching that conclusion, e.g.:

1. Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, Declaration of Rights:

   XIII. That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.

2. House of Representatives, Amendments to the Constitution:

   Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins. This was actually done by Great Britain at the commencement of the late revolution. They used every means in their power to prevent the establishment of an effective militia to the eastward. The Assembly of Massachusetts, seeing the rapid progress that administration were making to divest them of their inherent privileges, endeavored to counteract them by the organization of the militia; but they were always defeated by the influence of the Crown.

3. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution:

   The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.