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Research helps even if we currently lack practical application for it. A good example is the laser invented in 1960. Townes has spoken about the development extensively.

The first practical application would take several years from the announcement of the technology. Today, that research formed the basis for our modern communication and entertainment needs. They are used in medicine and manufacturing for a variety of uses. It took decades to get from the research phase to the small, affordable, commonplace use of lasers today. Furthermore, the initial development seemed to be a novelty more than something of practical value.

There's lots of talk and theorizing, but little research on the effect and influence of lobbyists. Thankfully, there is a large ten year study of lobbying, Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why (available at your favorite bookstore). There's a pretty good review of it at Miller-McCune. An excerpt:

The real outcome of most lobbying -- in fact, its greatest success -- is the achievement of nothing, the maintenance of the status quo. "Sixty percent of the time, nothing happens," says Frank Baumgartner, one author of the book and a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "What we see is gridlock and successful stalemating of proposals, with occasional breakthroughs. We see a pattern of no change, no change and no change -- and then some huge reform."

But those large reforms -- such as health care for 32 million uninsured Americans under President Barack Obama, the scheduled phase-out of the estate tax under President George W. Bush, and the normalization of trade relations with China under President Bill Clinton -- are far more often linked to a change in who inhabits the White House than to campaign contributions or K Street hires.

The weak link between money and policy change is counterintuitive but understandable, the authors say. The balance of power in Washington already hugely favors the rich. The status quo reflects the considerable advantages the wealthy have managed to secure in the law, down through the generations.

serious topics deserve serious consideration, so joking about it often is seen as ineptitude of the joker, no matter how smart or fair they really are.

"But it's also [the jester's] tendency to offer opinions or criticisms using witty or quirkily indirect means—or stunning candor—that would distinguish them from most ministers or advisers"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/640914in.html

Just as I know who is really going to attend this rally--a bunch college students and DC nerds from the surrounding area. Nothing wrong with that, but not so much by people who have to travel far, unlike Beck's rally.

I believe you will be surprised at the turn-out for this event. A cursory glance around the interwebs suggests many people are planning flights and road trips to attend. I guess we'll just have to wait and see, but I'm in Boston and I'm going, and at least two friends are coming with me. I've only gotten two responses to a craigslist posting so far, but I hope to organize a few more people along the way.

Funny you should mention that... the vaccine for whooping cough does not prevent the spread of whooping cough, it simply allows the immune system to destroy the toxin it produces that attacks the lungs, so you don't whoop.

False in two respects. First, it is not true that the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine only immunizes against the toxin. Second it is not true that immunizing only against the toxin does not reduce the spread of the disease. (hardly surprising that preventing a symptom--coughing--that spreads disease would reduce the spread of that disease)

"In other words Gatto is confusing effect for intention. The effect is that we're failing to teach our students history (or whatever), but teachers absolutely do NOT want that to happen. He's right about structural issues that can happen due to administrators or district policies, but your man on the ground, the person actually working with kids, absolutely wants kids to be higher level thinkers."

Well, if we can move past your medical diagnosis of Gatto's mental state, you have just restated his main point.

He never says teachers are all evil. Most of them are, like you say, well-meaning. What he says is that the system itself is evil in terms of the goals behind it and how it operates as a system (relative to our current needs -- he says it may have been a reasonable tradeoff when it was invented in Prussia in the 1800s).

To cite the most famous example of authoritarianism gone to extremes, was Nazi Germany filled with 100% evil Germans to make it work? No, most Germans were well-meaning people, and nice to their children and neighbors, very patriotic, and so on. It was the equivalent of some weird sort of social storm, and also a bit of a pyramid scheme. It was just the overall system that was insane from a human perspective (even granted it had some very nutty people at the top, but that's part of the problem too, how it got that way).
"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html
"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 his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."

So, sure, every aspect of school that does not work to the child's obvious benefit is "regretted", as you outline examples of how it is regrettable that how children are taught has no relation to how kids learn or how they need to learn to be active participants in a democracy.

But the end result is to turn schools into a form of prison at this point. Granted, children are not physically gassed or worked to death like in Nazi concentration camps (even if some do die from the mental equivalent, as demonstrated by the high teen suicide rate or even now the obesity rate, probably partly from stress).

As Gatto suggests here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"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."

So, really, you've just made Gatto's point. And perhaps you've reflexively done an ad hominem attack on him so you did not have to think about what he says in detail? S

Actually, it is possible to get more DR (in fact enough for most HDR applications) out of a single sensor, but you need two amplifier/digitizer chains. Typical sensors in DSLR cameras have at least 2 stops of DR that is lost after the sensor! Here is a good discussion of this.

Celestia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Universe_Atlas , http://astro.uchicago.edu/cosmus/projects/sloangalaxies/ , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe_Sandbox

self sufficient countries

It is called autarky I think.

Nazi germany pre-1939 tried it. So they used script internationally and only allowed trading with buddies. The script inflated quickly. We sort of know how that turned out.

Your history is off by a decade. The use of scrip in interwar Germany was in 1922, during the Weimar Republic, and scrip was in fact one of the workable responses to the hyperinflation of the official currency, not one of the causes of it.

And pre-1939, the economy had an important slave labor component. Yah, a lot of people were immediately gassed, but for some reason the camps were next to big industrial plants, so if you were healthy, you got to work yourself to death.

Depends how you define 'pre-1939'. The Nazis didn't actually begin their work camp program as outright slavery - the Roosevelt administration was doing organised work programs during the 30s too. The Nazis did have pograms and mass arrests in the mid-30s, and ended up in an extremely nasty place, but they also had organised construction gangs which solved employment problems initially, and a lot of the worst descent into hell occurred as a result of war and in the occupied territories in Eastern Europe. At least I believe that is the contention of They Thought They Were Free.

The lesson being that war does nasty things to human morality, and total war totally so, and that if a country thinks it can control the social forces unleashed by war - especially self-initiated war, and most especially a war with fluid 'enemy' groups (like race or class) which cross over into civilian populations, it may well be making a mistake which will haunt it for generations.

And if you push self-sufficiency, then it may well be that you are pushing big time not nice.

This, however, I agree with. Self-sufficiency is not pretty.

OK, I just read the transcript here: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html

And I'm not saying I don't respect Eben Moglen, or what he says there. Sure, he lays out great ideas, ideas worth doing.

But he is still misguided. The war he is proposing to fight mainly with distributed home-based technology to ensure some privacy through encryption can't be won. As long as we have an economic system based mostly on greed (and also ignorance), everything he tries to do will fail, if only because, after he wins, greed will buy new laws from ignorant people and put him in jail, and then greed will go house to house and pull every one of those wall warts out, getting neighbors to turn in neighbors who have them ("If you see something, say something"), same as people with radios were turned in in various countries in WWII. See:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, But Then It Was Too Late"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

He should know that ISPs will be able to track down every one of those things in short order, if only by hiring a million people out of the 20 million or more unemployed in the USA to go house-by-house with blanket search warrants and portable packet sniffers looking for "unlicensed" equipment. And other countries will find the things even faster. So, his approach is, at best, a slightly delaying and confusing action. Greed and ignorance will win unless we directly address greed and ignorance (well, even addressing greed and ignorance indirectly and subtly may be OK, too. :-).

Do I have an alternative? Yes I do. As I outlined here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866
where I wrote the following paragraph:

As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach)
http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/genoaII.php
to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.

Now, might such a public intelligence system run well on a system of wall warts like he describes? It probably would. But it does not absolutely need them. So, while they may be useful, the conception of cooperative sensemaking and cooperative design of a better future is by far more important.

And here is a document I put together that decribes four heterodox economic alternati

Copyright existed, and should exist, to allow an individual to profit from their creation. It has not a damned thing to do with producing useful art

In reality of course the whole point of copyright was to promote works of art and scientific discoveries. In the US this purpose is even spelled outright in the Constitution where it reads: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.".

The Founding Fathers (Jefferson particularly ) were very uneasy about granting effective monopoly to authors at the expense of the general public and so they sought to allow it only if the general public benefited from such an arrangement more then it had to invest (in terms of enforcing such a law).

However, why are economists studying this and why is anyone lending the study credence?

Why wouldn't they? Do economists not understand mathematical models? Do they not understand statistics? They don't have a good grasp of how to properly stratify income groups? Or is it impossible for an economist to specialize in the area of education? I think a far more likely explanation is that you just don't generally understand economics.

In fact, did you even read his CV before making such a statement? Ofer Malamud is an education specialist.

Just a sampling of paper titles:

“General Education vs. Vocational Training: Evidence from an Economy in Transition"
“The Structure of European Higher Education in the Wake of the Bologna Reforms"
“Breadth vs. Depth: The Timing of Specialization in Higher Education"

I would address your snake-oil comment, but you apparently hold up sociology as more scientifically rigorous. I don't see much hope for you.

Three groups or cohorts of students were included in this study, with Cohort 1 followed for four years, Cohort 2 for three years, and Cohort 3 for two years (Table 2.2). Cohort 1 (ninth graders) included a total of 5,217 students, with 2,469 treatment students enrolled at high schools and 2,748 control students enrolled at high schools; Cohort 2 (eighth graders) included 5,436 students, with 2,578 at treatment middle schools and 2,858 at control middle schools; and Cohort 3 (seventh graders) included 5,392 students, with 2,547 students at treatment middle schools and 2,845 at control middle schools.

The Romanian study apparently successfully interviewed 858 families in two Romanian counties (Valcea and Covasna). With 1,100 children interviewed and some 1,800 survey sets. Just to put some perspective on how comprehensive each of these reports are. Couldn't get access to the other reports.

Personally I think we're still in a transition period and now that those homes have computers starting when the child is born (and whose parents had computers) we will start to see better parenting skills and regulation with computer usage. It could become just another carrot for the kid or even a method to teach the child proper time management (similar to the classic homework before TV law).

Um, the "lead poisoining" hypothesis is bunk, FYI.

But the rest of your post I agree with. If there is only one reason to oppose GM crops, it's the terminator crops feature.

I agree with your comment, but you might want use another introduction next time:

It reminds me of how the Romans brought in lead piping for their water. They thought it was great - water pumped to your home, the ultimate sign that you'd made it. An entire ruling class slowly poisoning themselves.

The calcium in the water was deposited on the pipes, which prevented the introduction of lead in the water: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html

Random late thoughts:

Society as a whole gains from having more people getting access to quality education, arts, tools, communication, etc...

The unlimited copies now made possible through the internet do change the game just like print did and allows us to elevate the society to a higher level.

I do want to see artists making a living if that helps them continuing to deliver great things for society.

But the gain from having culture cheaply available to all far out weights the lost to the artist.

I do think the network effect is also very much downplayed in this linked argument and that a lot of people I listen to and pay to see their concert would never be on my list if it wasn't for copying and the internet.

What it seems to be doing is spreading the wealth to smaller players, not destroying it, just like it was in the 50s before the big majors killed diversity.

I also don't think there is ever a direct link between artists being paid and the quality of their work.

Artists who are really passionate will still manage to produce their art form no matter what.

I'm hoping we'll find a way to encourage new talent, pay a decent wage to those well know who have contributed something worthwhile and still allow free copying of everything to everyone for the greater good...

I'd also suggest those books: Remix, Piracy and The Wealth of Networks.

Real Link
Sorry about that. O_o

The establishment of the chaplainship to Congs is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles: The tenets of the chaplains elected [by the majority] shut the door of worship agst the members whose creeds & consciences forbid a participation in that of the majority. To say nothing of other sects, this is the case with that of Roman Catholics & Quakers who have always had members in one or both of the Legislative branches. Could a Catholic clergyman ever hope to be appointed a Chaplain? To say that his religious principles are obnoxious or that his sect is small, is to lift the evil at once and exhibit in its naked deformity the doctrine that religious truth is to be tested by numbers. or that the major sects have a right to govern the minor.

If Religion consist in voluntary acts of individuals, singly, or voluntarily associated, and it be proper that public functionaries, as well as their Constituents shd discharge their religious duties, let them like their Constituents, do so at their own expence. How small a contribution from each member of Congs wd suffice for the purpose? How just wd it be in its principle? How noble in its exemplary sacrifice to the genius of the Constitution; and the divine right of conscience? Why should the expence of a religious worship be allowed for the Legislature, be paid by the public, more than that for the Ex. or Judiciary branch of the Govt

Were the establishment to be tried by its fruits, are not the daily devotions conducted by these legal Ecclesiastics, already degenerating into a scanty attendance, and a tiresome formality?

If any single person could be considered the best authority on the meaning of the Bill Of Rights that person would unquestionably be it's primary author, James Madison. He wrote Detached Memoranda explicitly answering some of your questions.

What about when congress opens its session with a prayer?

Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom?
In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative
...
The establishment of the chaplainship to Congs is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles

Sorry, but prayer led by military chaplain in a military-funded institution i.e. chapel is obviously establishment of a state religion.

Better also to disarm in the same way, the precedent of Chaplainships for the army and navy

Madison said both violated the Establishment Clause, and should not stand as precedent for similar activities. He described these two cases as "de minimis", basically meaning that they are relatively minor violations and that he had more important issues to deal with. Nonetheless it clearly demonstrates the sweeping intent of the Establishment Clause.

The theocrat-wannabes keep trying to reject "Separation Of Church And State" as some irrelevant invalid thing dreamt up by just Thomas Jefferson, but James Madison said the same thing:

Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion & Govt in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history.

Jefferson is indeed responsible for the particular phrase "Separation Of Church And State", but the principle behind that phrase was hardly some figment of Jefferson's imagination. Some anti-Separationists try to claim it was intended to be some sort of "One Way Wall" only intended to protect Religion from government, but the Madison quote above is quite explicit that it is also intended to be a wall protecting government from "encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies", protecting the State again

I wonder how often the opposite is true and people use Google and find that it suggests it is nothing to worry about and they don't go to the doctor?

Well, I was playing with my little daughter and suddenly her elbow was in terrible pain. I googled it and decided it was probably Nursemaid's Elbow. I did the suggested treatment (turning her palm up and flexing her elbow) and the ligament snapped back into place, and she was immediately better. A trip to the doctor or hospital would likely have taken the rest of the day and cost a lot of money. Yes, any nurse could have fixed it in two seconds, the problem is getting to see anybody takes hours.

So in my case, it did prevent us from going to the doctor, and that was a good thing.

I can see how empowering people is a pain in the butt for doctors and no doubt leads to occasional problems for patients who take too much into their own hands, but, too bad. Tech support has always dealt with ignorant know-it-alls, now doctors must, too.

Well, you may have gone a little far.

I was afraid you might have felt that way. Among the greater challenges to reform or political change is when folk have a hard time agreeing on what destination to approach while changing, and when in-fighting undermines solidarity. As an abolitionist I end up in a fair number of arguments against the 7-14'ers, but it sure would be nice if we could somehow pool our efforts so as not to Life-Of-Brian each other.

Among 7-14'ers, you sound pretty open minded so I'm happy to let you know my position a little better.

While I think it's possible that circumstances could result in it being impossible for there to be any possible copyright law that is better than no copyright law at all, in terms of the benefit to the public, which is the only valid metric, I don't think that we're currently in that situation. I'm happy to listen to arguments otherwise, though.

I thank you for being able to comprehend such a possibility, and formally submit that we are there now.

There have been few times in history when the effects of Copyright law could really be compared empirically with the creative output of areas with zero copyright. One such time is the late 1700s, when Brittian had copyright and the rest of the world did not. Thomas Jefferson wrote his opinion on the subject, while the ink on the constitution was still dry, and clarified that he detected no less or greater creative output from countries lacking copyright law than from Great Brittian. It appears as though we chose to side with copyright from the beginning merely because it was a novel idea, and it might lead to greater creativity. I submit that whatever great creativity we have output cannot be reliably credited to the presence of Copyright.

Little data can be gathered beyond that point, as the Berne convention and others has forced the entire globe to honor our fragile IP system or risk rendering it meaningless. Since certain entities such as The Pirate Bay have had success flouting the Berne Convention, the balloon has effectively been punctured. Right now, today, any person on the internet can obtain high fidelity digital copies of every popular, copyright protected work for free, instantly, and conveniently. This may not be legal, but legal consequences are less likely to befall you than when you drive 5mph over the speed limit so that is of little consequence.

In spite of the fact that the availability and knowledge of Piracy has met a saturation point, the profits of multi-million dollar films remains secure. People will continue to pay for media they can get for free, so long as the price is fair to provide convenience and guaranteed quality with a little extra to express their patronage. So long as they are not forced into uncomfortable formats or hassling DRM.

Example. We discussed Avatar before, right? My wife wanted to watch it. I did not simply tell her it could be downloaded for free, she knows I'm a pirate and watches TV shows and many movies I download, even asks me to get things for her. I did not simply tell her I can download it, I told her I had already downloaded it. I pointed to the media center and told her she was two clicks away from watching it, and she still bought the DVD while she was out.

She's not a videophile, we've got a miserable video pipeline anyway (composite video through an analogue switch to a 27" 4:3 CRT) she even hates widescreen letterboxing because everything is made too small. No, she was just out and had to wonder if the copy I downloaded had hardsubs baked in it, so she conveniently grabbed the copy at Wal-Mart.

Then of course she got it home and it wouldn't play at all.

It is healthier for producers to accept that customers want media in whatever format is convenient, and after th

That need still exists today, and the principle behind it is still solid -- so solid in fact, that it's written into our Constitution as a specific right granted to the government. And you might recall, our founding fathers were quite stingy about giving the federal government much power at all even after the failure known as the Articles of Confederation. That speaks clearly to the need for patents and copyright.

Actually, not all the Founding Fathers were in fervent agreement about patents and copyright. In particular, Thomas Jefferson himself was very particular about giving any "dibs" on ideas. He believed that ideas cannot be owned, and still stated that it is not the right of any man to own an idea as far as it is without himself. It's hard to tell precisely from his letter, but it seems like he was not greatly fond of the idea of patents in any form.

Just because something is written into the Constitution does not mean every one of the signers agreed wholly with it. The US Constitution is an imperfect document formed by many imperfect men of different beliefs and opinions.

No need to imagine. This scenario has happened multiple times in history, for example with Taliban destroying Buddhist statues and Christians destroying pagan temples.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

Thomas Jefferson, founder member and director of USPTO.

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html

The current math curriculum my kids are using (which isn't anything magical - just the standard Houghton-Mifflin stuff) starts algebraic concepts in the 4th grade. Fractions get started up in 3rd grade. And, in general, many concepts are started much earlier than they once were. However, I'm not seeing any improvement in attention.

On the one hand, not adding math until later ages may have some merit - I'm not really sure. On the other hand, it may just be the ways in which that math is presented that's the real problem. Memorizing tables of basic arithmetic operations isn't likely to keep anyone's attention for very long, and yet it's still necessary to be able to do arithmetic if you want to be able to handle more advanced math [where advanced means algebra, trig, calc, linear, etc.].

I've been looking into this: http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/ The coolest thing I've found about it so far is that it has workbooks for the *parents* so that they can help their kids with their homework. Nice idea.

The founding fathers supported the patent and copyright systems, to promote industrial and artistic creativity. They understood that without a way to protect the intellectual creations, such as books, music, architectural designs, inventions, et al, there would be less motivation for people to spend the time, and energy, to create them.

I could argue against you here, but I cannot hope to be more eloquant than a founding father. :P

England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

- - Thomas Jefferson

13 Aug. 1813

That Thomas Jefferson fellow didn't know what he was talking about. Patents was in widespread use all over Europe since the 14th century. Patents was granted by the ruler(s), usually a king, and could be the right to for instance print the Bible (the right to print a book was usually divided in two patents, one for good looking books for the aristrocacy and one for barely readable, fragile, shitty books for the common people) or production of some other commodity, or use of movable type or use of some other invention. Patents had nothing to do with who created the idea/body of work to begin with. The idea that a creator should have some kind of rights started in the Netherlands, matured in France and became widespread in Northern Europe (with the exception of Great Britain) in the late 18th century. These rights were exclusive to the creator and his immediate heirs and didn't last after their death (they occasionally got murdered because of that). The creator/heirs could license the right to print a book or use an invention for a limited period or number of copies to somebdy else, but nobody could ever buy the rights for all eternity to anything. There were also a strong protection against somebody using something in a fashion that was against the original intentions of the creator, like doing rewrites in a book.

The English speaking countries took another path. They were obsessed by the idea of ownership. The right to use ideas/inventions/whatever could be transfered fully to somebody else or even be claimed by the person that first used the idea (like if a book publisher printed a book without the creators concent, before first print an author of a book had no rigths whatsoever and was as a rule screwed over) and the owner(s) of the idea got the exclusive right to use them long after the creator, creators heirs or the original owner was dead. There was no protection whatsoever of the creators against getting screwed by the buyers, this lead to secrecy and a very low level of technical and cultural development coming from the Anglosaxian parts of the world. On the other hand, as first use in a market almost automatically lead to ownership rights (within the Anglosaxian country), producers in GB and USA copied the inventions from the developed world, without paying any grants to the creators, and got the exclusive rights to use them inside GB or USA, this lead to a fast economic and military development of US and GB. The might of USA today wouldn't exist without extensive piracy of inventions made in the more developed parts of the world.

The founding fathers supported the patent and copyright systems, to promote industrial and artistic creativity. They understood that without a way to protect the intellectual creations, such as books, music, architectural designs, inventions, et al, there would be less motivation for people to spend the time, and energy, to create them.

I could argue against you here, but I cannot hope to be more eloquant than a founding father. :P

England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

- - Thomas Jefferson
13 Aug. 1813

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.

That describes... guess what?

Patents!

It’s very easy to prove that time is abstract. Time cannot change because changing time is self-referential. Why? Because velocity in time would have to be expressed as v = dt/dt, which is nonsensical. It’s that simple, folks. But I am tilting at windmills, I know.

The abstract nature of time is the reason that a time dimension is bunk and that nothing can move in spacetime, a revelation that always comes as a surprise to most relativists. But here it is from the mouth of a relativist:

“There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as “moving through” space-time, or as “following along” their world-lines. Rather, particles are just “in” space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle.”

From Relativity from A to B by Prof. Robert Geroch, U. of Chicago

By the way, physics is about to enter a revolutionary phase because Aristotle was right about motion.

Markets aren't rational?
People (especially people that think of themselves as being "smart") are prone to self-delusion?

But seriously, why would anyone hold on to the myth that markets are rational given the experimental findings of behavioral economics.

Oh that's right, it's the new religion to to keep the plebes down. Now excuse me, I have to cash my 30 million dollar bonus check for going bankrupt, because it's so hard to find such well qualified experts brain trust like me.

Math anxiety is turning out to be a much more complicated phenomena than one might thing. For example, there also was a very interesting study by Sian Beilock at the University of Chichago. Beilock showed that young girls who were exposed to female elementary school teachers were much more likely to develop math anxiety themselves than those not exposed to such teachers. See http://hpl.uchicago.edu/Publications/PNAS_2010.pdf. The exact consequences of Beilock's study are not clear. But combined with the study above, it seems to suggest that we need to do a better job with elementary school teachers. We need to either get rid of the school teachers with math anxiety or get rid of their math anxiety problems. Possibly some combination of both approaches may be in order: Improve the mathematical confidence of elementary school teachers whom we can effect and get rid of those we can't.

the cost of malpractice insurance at every level of healthcare is a major driver of the enormous cost

  Take a read Tom Baker's The Medical Malpractice Myth.

Ezra Klein also has a highlight/review of the book.

There's lots of climate-model source-code available on the web. Much of it has been publicly available for years.
Examples:

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/
http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/
http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/Projekte.209.0.html?&L=3
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5846/1866d/DC1
http://geoflop.uchicago.edu/forecast/docs/Projects/modtran.html

Now for all the skeptics out there -- those of you who have downloaded and tested any climate code, submitted patches, constructive suggestions, etc. to the code developers, please stand up and give us a shout-out!

Don't be shy or modest -- even if you've done nothing more than submit a one-line change to a makefile, let's hear about it!

He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

Say Rocket, that is a choice sig. Traced it down to it's source, which is equally choice.

Thanks fer the light! :)

Actually, that is up to debate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxing_and_Spending_Clause mentions "the broader view of Alexander Hamilton that spending is an enumerated power that Congress may exercise independently to benefit the general welfare, such as to assist national needs in agriculture or education, provided that the spending is general in nature and does not favor any specific section of the country over any other."

They give a citation from Alexander Hamilton, shown at http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_1s21.html

The USA's founding fathers are hardly homogeneous bunch of people, which almost makes "what the founding fathers meant" almost a moot point, especially if you simply refer to one or two people.
For the moment, let's disregard that and have a look at your quotes.

No let's not disregard the Founding Fathers. If it wasn't for them you wouldn't be enjoying your life as it is. They fought an overbearing and tyrannical government and wanted to make sure the government of the new nation would not become overbearing and tyrannical itself. And that was a homogeneous desire. There's no way around it. If they didn't believe it the then they would not have fought for independence. Instead they would have joined the Loyalists.

What they fought for was not a moot point no matter what you think.

The spending and taxing clause, however, is a fairly specific clause, it states how the Congress may attain money, and for what reasons.

And where is health or medical care mentioned? Hint, nowhere. And as I already said you can't use "General Welfare" either. If you don't like it try to amend the Constitution. I bet you and those like you don't try because you fear the people will not consent to it. So instead you use back doors and "vague phrases", which when written had specific meanings.

Guess what Nanncy Pelosy said when asked "Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?" Her answer was "Are you serious? Are you serious?" Just goes to show what she thinks of the USA Constitution. it's TP to her. And unlike you she never even mentions "General Welfare". I wonder why, perhaps because she knows it won't work.

But he is actually one of the people, which were for a more limiting meaning of the law. For a different point of view, may I refer to Alexander Hamilton

Yes let's look at what Hamilton said. His writings, including the Federalist Paper, showed he had a narrow view of the phrase General Welfare. In Federalist 83 he wrote "This specification of particulars [the 18 enumerated powers of Article I, Section 8] evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd as well as useless if a general authority was intended." In the Federalist Paper 78 he writes "No legislative act ... contrary to the Constitution can be valid. To deny this would be to affirm that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid." Of course Alexander Hamilton wasn't consistent in his approach to government. In the Federalist Papers and other early writings Hamilton advocates a small and limited federal government but once he became president he sought to expand his power.

Of course even if Hamilton had been for an expansive General Welfare clause all along that's still your one Founder pro expansive versus my two Founders pro limited government. As the page The General Welfare Clause: The Two Most Abused Words in the Constitution.

Falcon

> Quite simply the USA's Founding Fathers didn't mean for "general welfare" to be used to get around the limits of the Constitution.

The USA's founding fathers are hardly homogeneous bunch of people, which almost makes "what the founding fathers meant" almost a moot point, especially if you simply refer to one or two people.
For the moment, let's disregard that and have a look at your quotes.

The problem is, we were arguing about what the limitations of the Constitution are. Thomas Jefferson's only states, that universal rights granted in the constitution should not be constructed to circumvent specific limits imposed. For example, signing an international treaty, which abolishes Habeas corpus. The spending and taxing clause, however, is a fairly specific clause, it states how the Congress may attain money, and for what reasons. So, can you provide a similar specific law, which actually limits congress from enacting such a law?

From my understanding, James Madison is not arguing against general welfare, or levying taxes for that purpose, but the actual execution of welfare through the federal level:

> If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare [...]

Congress is not actually meant to spend the money directly, without check and balances. Probably, from his point of view, the states should take care of the actual spending.
But he is actually one of the people, which were for a more limiting meaning of the law. For a different point of view, may I refer to Alexander Hamilton.

"Look, I believe in evolution, but never has there been found a parent species to something alive today. In other words, scientists can not point at any two distinct species, living or extinct, plant or animal, and say that this species evolved directly from that one."

Of course not. That's kind of like pointing to two leaves on a tree and saying one leaf came from the other. It doesn't work that way. They are both on the terminations of the branches, and the node where they branched into two is in the past. Ordinarily, the common ancestor is long dead. The nice thing with these E. coli is that the researchers kept a portion of the ancestral population intact, and the specimens are clones, so while not the actual ancestor of the lineage that kept going, they are genetically identical.

There are plenty of fossils that are close to branch points, and as more fossils are found there are still plenty of gaps left, as there always will be, but the changes necessary to span those gaps get smaller and smaller as the sampling improves. For example, Anchiornis was just discovered in the last couple of years, and a new specimen described a few weeks ago. Dinosaur? Bird? It's rather arbitrary to decide. It's either a wing-clawed, long-tailed, toothed bird like no modern bird, or it is a flight-feathered, gliding dinosaur. As if they were the leaves on a tree, birds and reptiles look distinct now, but follow the branches back far enough and they get mighty blurred together. This is hardly an isolated example.

There are fish that look so tetrapod-like that when the skull was initially found separately they thought it was a tetrapod. Then workers found the rest of the body and realized it was a fish. There are other tetrapod-like fish, such as Tiktaalik . But go back 100 years and these species weren't known at all.

I really don't know what more skeptics are expecting. Perfection? It won't happen. It's not like we'll ever have every twig on the tree. Good fossils are rare. But the statistical pattern with increased sampling is quite robust.

Randomized, controlled trials have shown the effectiveness of flu vaccines, contrary to the claims of the article. (Example: Wilde et al., "Effectiveness of Influenza Vaccine in Health Care Professionals.")

In addition, research into mortality reduction already takes into account comorbid conditions and age. (Example: Nordin et al., "Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness in Preventing Hospitalizations and Deaths in Persons 65 Years or Older in Minnesota, New York, and Oregon: Data from 3 Health Plans.")

The article is at best poorly researched and at worst intentional FUD.

One of the options the year I applied was: "Have you ever walked through the aisles of a warehouse store like Costco or Sam's Club and wondered who would buy a jar of mustard a foot and a half tall? We've bought it, but it didn't stop us from wondering about other things, like absurd eating contests, impulse buys, excess, unimagined uses for mustard, storage, preservatives, notions of bigness . . . and dozens of other ideas both silly and serious. Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard."

Chicago is known for being wet, cold, windy, and expensive.

Actually, Chicago in the summer is know for being miserably, even deadly, hot.

There's a lot more to do beyond Planck on polarization, but you're right that primary intensity anisotropies in the CMB will essentially be done by Planck. There are lots of secondary anisotropies, such as the SZ-Effect, on smaller scales to be done at higher resolution, though, and instruments like the SPT are doing exactly that.

so i must be insane, or the whole lot of you are ignorant of what a magnetic field is

I'd like you to consider the possibility that it's neither of the above. I recognize your signature and remember you making many good posts in the past. I don't think you're crazy. I just think you don't understand the theory of electricity and magnetism very well.

Electric fields also begin and end at particles. And there are electric dipoles, just like there are magnetic dipoles. Why should magnetism only have dipoles and not monopoles like electricity?

Just as electric dipoles are made from positive and negative electric monopoles (charges), there is no reason magnetic dipoles can't be made from opposing magnetic monopoles. Electric monopoles are definitely MUCH easier to observe in nature, but that doesn't mean there are no magnetic dipoles.

Did you know that observers in different reference frames will disagree about the strength of electric and magnetic fields? Electric and magnetic fields vary (in a coordinated way) under Lorentz transforms. That is, what looks like a pure electric field to one observer might look like a combination of electric and magnetic fields to an observer in a different reference frame. Putting it differently, eletricity and magnetism are two aspects of a single force called, creatively enough, the electromagnetic force. That's a reason to believe that magnetic monopoles might exist.

Additionally, electric charge is observed to be quantized in nature. All free particles observed so far have charges that are integer multiples of the electron charge. Quarks are believed to have charges that are +/- 1/3 or 2/3 of the electron charge, but free quarks have not been directly observed, and in any case, even if the basic unit of charge quantization is 1/3 of the electron charge, charge is still quantized. And in the theory, the existence of magnetic monopoles automatically leads to charge quantization. That's a big reason many very smart folks with Ph.D.s in physics have been looking for magnetic monopoles for some time.

I remember a magnetic monopole detector that was sitting in a garage-like bay at HEP, the High Energy Physics group's building, at the University of Chicago in the late 1980s. I believe it was something Henry Frisch had set up really cheaply, so the risk was low, and the potential return enormous. Think of it as a low-budget HEP nerd experiment in Chicago. If you look at Professor Frisch's CV, you'll see that he's written a bunch of papers about magnetic mnopoles and their detection.

Only tangentially related: it has been 20 years, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but seeing Frisch's hair that white was a bit of a shock. Probably because of what it implies about my own age.

To begin with, you can always make money on your idea with first mover advantage. What most patentees want is to have residual income from their work, you know, like multilevel marketing. In other words, they should be able to sit back, relax and watch the checks roll in. Patents have a strong tendency to replace R & D efforts, especially in large organizations (see Bessen and Hunt, 2004).

The problems with patents are many, but mainly attributable to the fact that human insecurity and greed get in the way. The book, "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Michelle Boldrin and David Levine, details an incredibly unflattering history of our many attempts to get it right with both patents and copyrights. And Thomas Jefferson, one of the framers of our Constitution, had serious reservations about patents, almost 200 years ago. His observations still hold true to this day.

The same problems seen then, are seen now. No one can say for sure what is patentable. Lawyers will always write claims so broad it takes a court to figure it out. And patentees will always seek stronger enforcement without providing a clear way to give notice to everyone that they own a particular idea. Worse, they devise submarine patents to let others work until there is enough money to sue for. The only cure is to remove patents altogether and watch innovation take off (inventors would rather tinker than to search for patents). As far as I can tell, the notion that "patents encourage innovation" is an assumption made by economists and nothing more. There are no studies that show conclusively, that patents actually encourage innovation. None.

The fugitive fermentations of a brain belong to no one and are shared by all once divulged, for their inspirations come from all of us. Patentees need to read up on the word Ubuntu, which means I am me because of all of you. And considering the size and quantity of problems facing the human race, cooperation and collaboration is a lot more important than claiming the prize while our Earth dies.

So there.

It's actually pretty well documented that patents retard progress. The extent of retardation depends on which studies you read. And a not so familiar example is James Watt. I say he was not so familiar because when I went to high school, he was painted as the hero who started the industrial revolution. What they didn't tell me in school was that Watt pretty much spent the entire 17 year life of the patent in litigation. Real advances in the steam engine weren't introduced until after the patent expired.

Given what I know now, I can't see how patents can be justified in a free market economy. It's government protection no matter how you slice it. Even free market Thomas Jefferson referred to patents as an "embarrassment".

The "daydream" part is that people are mighty resistant to changing their priorities. Consider US energy consumption -- we could make substantial changes in very little time, if we simply changed our diet (eat less meat; replace mammal meat with bird meat). No money investment required in buying a new fuel-efficient car, no time/skill/exercise investment required in using a bike to get around instead of a car). Just change your diet -- it would make a huge difference. All the energy spent on producing nitrogen fertilizer to grow corn to grow beef/pork, gone. All the GHGs from that energy, and all the GHGs from the fields, and all the GHGs from the animals and their manure, gone. My understanding is it is of the same magnitude as replacing an SUV with a small car, for each person that does this. See http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~gidon/papers/nutri/nutri.html

If changing priorities were easy, then we could easily set ourselves on a path to not needing to worry about greenhouse gasses -- do the diet change, change building codes to mandate better-insulation in new construction, quit buying oversize cars, get serious about bicycle infrastructure. Not risky, not rocket science, not really a cut in your standard of living, either, but different enough that we've got plenty of resistance to doing it. If you'll notice, lots of research is devoted to finding ways to save energy that don't require that "ordinary people" do so much as lift a finger.

Tiktaalik says suck it. Or did you mean hominid fossils? OK, here, here, and here.

The free market does a piss-poor job of dealing with external costs (those not paid by the consumer), and the government is the appropriate mechanism for connecting the costs back to the people who create them. The problem, in this case, is that the government is imperfect and got more or less hijacked by the farm lobby (and this is hardly the only time this has happened).

A better approach would simply be to impose a GHG tax -- taxes on the various gasses, for the various industries that produce them. According to the work I've read by Pimentel, that would probably kill corn ethanol, because fertilizer would get much more expensive. There's a chance they could thread the needle by using the sugar-depleted byproducts to feed cattle, which would in turn be less gassy, and which would reduce their GHG tax.

For some discussion of food production (which gives some idea of the GHG production of farming corn), see Eschel and Martin, Diet, Energy, and Global Warming

Not Swiss!
It is a more flexible language spoken here.
Money law applies, actually.

Some 15 months ago Bill came In Athens - Greece, gave a lecture on innovation [Microsoft's vision on the future of technology] as he put it.

At the same time and roughly through the same procedure ( no public bidding process) a 70,000 win OS + office licenses agreement was signed, between Microsoft and the Greek Minster of Economy at that time, Mr Alogoskoufis.

The motivating benefit has been 50 Visual Studio licenses for as long the contract lasts, plus an innovation portal. In other words 667.49 x 50 = 33,374,5 euros and a portal for 9 to 36 million job, since unit prices remained unclear, pending a additional agreement.
Could you deal better?

http://hellug.gr/ reacted (among many others notably), but not effectively.

Full coverage (in Greek): http://www.ffii.gr/ms-gov-agreement
The agreement (in English): http://sandbox.cs.uchicago.edu/blog_el/files/SPA.en.pdf

Apparently I'm still an idiot, since I've been pointing out for well over a decade that all plastics leach toxic chemicals into whatever is stored in them.

If that happens to be food or drink, than it's not a good thing for the consumers.

It started in 1963 with two female researchers (can't find my sources right now), who presented information that the plasticizers in soft plastic containers leached into the contents, and they were laughed at and not taken seriously.

You need some serious study of the history of toxicology, because a common theme throughout that history is that the "messengers" are almost always "shot" for years before the common mind awakes to the realization that whats been said is actually true, disruptive as it may be.

And if you can open your mind enough you also might want to read this: Chemical Safety Bibliography -- Risk assessment and management and Chemical Exposure and Human Health, C. Wilson, McFarland.

Sticking a tracking device on a car is hardly "damage." (I'm making the bold, and possibly unwarranted, assumption they just used a magnetic unit.)

No, but it would still be considered a modification, I believe.

Also, if the police follow your car in a chopper, they most certainly can track your vehicle's whereabouts on private property.

Yes, but the chopper is unlikely to be peering in your windows. The police in the car can see that your car has entered the property, but they are not allowed to enter your private property or perform surveillance that does not occur within plain sight of the street.

I would file this kind of surveillance under the "reasonable suspicion" (no warrant needed) standard (used for traffic stops, stop-n-frisks, etc.) vs. the "probable cause" standard (warrant required). This would preclude the ability of placing a tracking device on the car of every citizen.

I would as well, if it didn't require the police to physically modify a person's private property. Even if the GPS unit used a magnet or double sided tape to attach to the car, for the length of time that the unit was attached, it physically modified the car under the strict definition of the word (as generally used in legal terminology).

From Webster's Dictionary

Modify:

1. To change somewhat the form or qualities of; to alter somewhat; as, to modify a contrivance adapted to some mechanical purpose; to modify the terms of a contract.

Wow, that article is so convincing (not). It asserts over and over again that Americans tolerated piracy early on with roughly zero references to back up that assertion.

However, I do have some references that I can cite that refute that assertion:

First, let's start with the US Constitution:

Article 1, Section 8, Clause 10

"To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;"

If the people were so enamored by pirates why did they write a clause to explicitly give Congress the power to punish pirates?

Also, back in that period of time one source of great animosity was towards the British practice of commandeering American merchant vessels at sea and forcing their sailors to join their navy.

Kidnapping and ransoms for sailors was never tolerated in the US.

If these pirates are 'nation builders' then why do you see comments like this by other Somalies:

"It is a good start," said Yasin Mohamoud, a technician in Mogadishu. "Since the pirates arose in our seas, skyrocketing inflation has hit our country."

"It would be good if the American navy would destroy the rest of them," he added.

From this article.

And when the 'nation builders' are boarding any ship regardless of how far away they are from their coast and regardless of their cargo (like the recent attempt of hijacking the US shipment of food aid to impoverished Kenya hundreds of miles from the Somali coastline) then there's really no moral leg left to stand on. They are now no more than a band of organized criminals at this point solely interested in making money (and have said that they are only interested in making money).