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Not true. He was a senior lecturer (which is essentially a professor) of Constitutional Law at U of Chicago.

"The government is created to advance certain goals"

No, the government is created only for the purpose of upholding and defending the rights of its citizens.

"How else do you interpret the words ``general welfare''?"

There are two main views to the general welfare clause, the Madisonian and the Hamiltonian. The Madisonian view is that all spending must be related to one of the enumerated powers; the general welfare clause is not an enumerated power in and of itself. The Hamiltonian view is that spending is an enumerated power and so does not need to be related to one of the other enumerated powers; however, spending must be general in nature and not favor any specific subset of the population. The latter view is more widely held today. In neither case do you find a view allowing for the ability to appropriate a segment of money to a specific segment of the population. Here is specifically what Hamilton said on the subject.

"If abolished those taxes would also be abolished, so general incomes would not rise."

The observed difference would be one less rights violation.

"Yes, more women believe in astrology then men -- but not by a huge margin. Women are a mere 5% more likely [rickross.com] than the population as a whole to believe in astrology."

Yes but women's belief in astrology and other non-logic based things is part and parcel of why superstition is still around, today women are MUCH more llikely to be religious then men are. Many churches are filled with women.

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/342557

No, the one people were concerned about was Mortal Kombat. It was the GTA of its day.

I agree 100% that arbitrary barriers are worthless. More often then not, it's the developers who believe so (I consider myself a SW Engineer not a Developer), who don't get work done, because they can't just evolve around problems as they come up.

Developer -> I've only ever programmed in (Insert Language Here), but I'm really good at it.
SW Engineer -> I use C for my embedded projects because of code size and performance, mostly C# for my windows applications because I get to re-use all these great MS libraries, and Frankly pretty much any time I need a quick and dirty tool for generating test scripts, or helping with Cadence I use PERL.

Look for people who evolve themselves to meet a problem, rather than try to make the problem fit their system. I'd say more often then not these people will have excelled time after time in seemingly unrelated jobs, versus the people who continue doing the same thing forever, 'til they become an obsolete commodity and are only good for complaining about outsourcing.

Most of the people I consider superstars are really just regular old problem solving engineers. These people can take any problem, and either find or build components to make it happen. I've known a *FEW* superstars who were ONLY software engineers. I'm sure that even those guys need some variety and support too though.

Honestly I'd say what's harder is retaining people like this, because they CAN always get another great job. It's probably more important that you give these people interesting, and varied work, make sure you don't overload them as they're already the most productive piece of your puzzle, and give them a strong supporting cast they can leverage to be even more productive.

At least that's what I think makes me a superstar, and has exemplified the ones I've worked with before. What makes me feel like I can say these things?

Some of my background:

Started at AMCC as an intern, basically a lab tech.
4 years at Qualcomm in my early days doing test.
http://vesicle.nsi.edu/nomad/segway/ -> Neural Simulation/Segway based Soccer Playing Platform
http://natural.uchicago.edu/~tgal/ -> Parsing and Analysis Tools for Affymetrix Gene Array Arabadopsis Sequencing
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-speechsc-mrcpv2-15.txt -> IETF Speech Recognition Protocol
Development from scratch and evolution of a couple of medical devices (Triage Wireless/Dexcom)

Currently I'm a couple years deep working at a semiconductor startup, where I've done some Digital Blocks for our ASICs, Design and Layout of our basic Electronics, and ALL of the embedded firmware, along with PC Software for in house, and external use. I truly believe, and have yet to be disproved, that I can just about solve any problem. Usually it's the time -vs- desire for elegance that's my weakness. I guess that's what management is for....right?

You really shouldn't make "police state" claims like that. If you think this is a police state, you obviously have no idea what a true police state is. Displaying such an obscene level of ignorance is probably not in your best interest.

You really need to stop trying to be snarky long enough to open your eyes. Here's some reading for you:

Naomi Wolf: Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
Milton Mayer: An excerpt from "They Thought They Were Free"

I've seen police states. I've had to pass through checkpoints and answer questions about where I was going, why I was going there and when I plan on being back. The US is not a police state.

Really? Crossed the border lately? Flown lately?

Kimos or another French speaker can correct me, but don't you have that precisely backwards? The two syllable version (rhymes with "giraffe") is both proper American English and the French pronunciation; three syllables shows that you can't read French. (Maybe I'm wrong, and there's not a native French speaker around to ask, but the final 'e' doesn't appear to be accented.)

The more important part, how the brain can sublimate operating complex machinery so that it doesn't require conscious thought to operate, isn't explained here.

The vast majority of your brain is dedicated to nonconscious processing, and it's easy to imagine that a neural network could do these sorts of tasks. The mystery is how conscious thought operates at all.

The rest of your argument, however, is correct. There's a very nice paper by Beilock et al. (2002) that shows that experienced soccer players dribble better when distracted than when consciously focusing on the skill.

It doesn't matter if you do or not. What matters is that the framers did. John Locke's model of the social contract is the basis of American Government.

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch2s1.html

You're right. Unfortunately it will take tens of thousands of years.

See:

http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2005.fate_co2.pdf
http://www.ipsl.jussieu.fr/~jomce/acidification/paper/Caldeira_Wickett_2005_JGR.pdf

And yes, of course, as always, these studies are under debate.

You obviously haven't heard Dr. Paul's message. Spend an hour or so at freeme.tv to see what he's all about. Dr. Paul is a very entertaining and energetic speaker who really believes in the rule of law and the Constitution. His views haven't changed since at least 1988 (the earliest video I've found.) Some say he's out of touch with the GOP, and he says the GOP is out of touch with its core values.

If nothing else, after investigating his voting record and his political positions, you will agree that he is a respectable politician. He calls himself a constitutionalist... why not check it out, it's served the country well for a couple hundred years.

You might like this then. I found it linked in another /. discussion a while ago.

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Lawecon/WkngPprs_51-75/73.Lott.Shooting.Final.pdf

Consider that Lott and Whitley's paper was published in 2001. Levitt has since replied to critics (pdf) (Journal of Human Resources, 2004, 39(1), pp. 29-49) and refined his theory.

Note that the "lifenews" article you're referencing was published in 2006... 5 years after the study came out. A little late and ignoring a lot of developements in the field, yes?

The Changing Relationship between Income and Crime Victimization
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittTheChangingRelationship1999.pdf

Poverty, Inequality, and Crime
http://faculty.ncwc.edu/TOCONNOR/301/301lect07.htm

And my favorite example: Per Capita Income vs. Property Crime
http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/1015722

Not that it would be entirely on topic but you just remembered me of this guy who took high resolution pictures of the ISS, the Space shuttle, some spy satellite, and Mercury. He took multiple frames of the object of interest and selected the best for combining well here it is what he exactly did:

"Images of Mercury were obtained at 8 bits of resolution using exposure times of 16.7 ms at a rate of 60 frames per second and recorded on broadcast-quality videotape for subsequent data reduction. The images were sorted and selected based on maximum gradient of the planet's bright limb, co-aligned, and added in 16 bit space."

Here is a link:

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJ/journal/issues/v119n5/990240/990240.html

let me store it here so I don't forget it ;)

This method is used to reduce seeing which is random and capable of reducing that Mt. Wilson telescope aperture from 1.5m to some seeing limited aperture of maybe 10 to 20cm (my guess).

The pixelation problem is not that similar to seeing. I would think since each new larger pixel is the average of the same region in the original image it is somehow low pass filtered spatially. Recovering a part of the image would somehow make it necessary that the image information is stored in the time domain since you can't get it from that 2d single frame space. That high level view makes it again look like the seeing problem but with the seeing one gets some images which cover a large spatial bandwidth but have low dynamic range, while with the pixelation the spatial bandwidth is constantly low but the dynamic range in the image is constantly high.

Searching google gives me something about de-identification and how the simple methods here discussed are easily thwarted by face recognition software. I.e. the bad guy crosses the US border is photographed, later produces de-identified compromising images of himself. Then the blurred/pixelated image is fed into the face recognition program and compared to the border database - success should easily follow, because the facial features are still recognizable to the software.

Here is an example: http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2003/CMU-CS-03-119.pdf

I just can't find what you were talking about, and I'll come across who knows what if I try to find it myself:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf

cities with effective gun bans are the worst in crime, see DC and Chicago.)

Or see Hong Kong, effective gun control, low crime. Cities in the US with gun control have a hopeless problem preventing guns coming in from less-restricted parts of the country. Your examples could as easlily argue for national restrictions.

However those places where people are allowed to carry, even concealed carry, see drops in crime. See the University of Chicago study "Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns". Or take what happened in Florida after Liberalized Concealed Carry Laws were passed. The homicide rate in Florida dropped faster than the drop in the country after they were passed. And of more than 350,000 permits being issued only one person with a permit was convicted of homicide.

First of all, sorry for the tone I took before. These conversations piss me off.

The thing is, stealing from strangers is GOOD for the individual unless there is an outside force like the police to make it not so good (notice that thievery is frequent in many 3rd world countries without a strong police force). The thing is, however, that on the whole for the society, stability is good (especially since individuals do not have to then provide additional overhead for security). So, over time, societies that effectively prevent stealing will prosper at a greater rate than those that don't. One of the ways that these societies can prevent thievery is by implanting memes in their members brains (notice that you accept the meme "stealing is wrong" as the word of god, which, by the way, is another meme that has no basis in physical observation that you may have never acquired if you parents or preacher never told you to accept). If this goes on for long enough, it may become ingrained with brain structures that promote these memes (such as the way all human value fairness to a degree, as shown in certain experiments. See these pages for some information:

Thus, from an evolutionary perspective*, it becomes obvious that societies and biology manipulate memes and the weights in our judgment making process in order to provide for more stable civilizations. Absolute morals do not exist, however the absence of some rational stabilizing rules would make civilization unstable. Thus, kill and steal as you like, but society will come down on you. It's all a game and we should have not problem seeing it that way.

*By evolutionary prespective, I mean both physical and social structures.

I think you guys are missing the point. The void correlates with a cold spot within the CMB. The CMB is not supposed to have artifacts. It's supposed to be unrelated to the items between us and it. When you find a relation, that would tend to suggest that the CMB may have a more local source -- which actually threatens the primary proof for the Big Bang in the first place.

First, the Slashdot story only references a press release on Physorg.org, an organization that apparently exercises little oversight over the articles it runs.

That statement seems misleading (quoting) The study, "Consumer Antibacterial Soaps: Effective or Just Risky" appears in the August edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CID/ It is my understanding that CID is a well-respected peer-reviewed journal.

Physorg.org just copied a UofM press release. If you are offended by the standards at Physorg.org, you're welcome to read the original press release here: http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php? id=5990

Second, read this article by the same author, which says exactly the opposite of the present article: Antibacterial Cleaning Products and Drug Resistance.

Your logic appears to be flawed. But other posters have already commented on that.

NO development of drug resistance or Triclosan resistance has been shown as a result of use of Triclosan, apparently, although people have been speculating about that for at least two decades. There are some chemical pathways that bacteria cannot abandon.

You're appear to be setting up a straw man argument here. The article is just saying that soaps with Triclosan (quoting) are no more effective than plain soap at preventing infectious illness symptoms, as well as reducing bacteria on the hands. The conclusion of the paper is that (quoting) government regulators should evaluate antibacterial product claims and advertising, and further studies are encouraged. So, they're saying that it might be possible that manufacturers are claiming that the soaps do something they don't necessarily do, and that someone should probably check on that.

The sloppiness and over-valuation of the work suggests either: 1) The University of Michigan does not deserve our confidence, or possibly 2) Allison Aiello is allowed to be sloppy because she is attractive.

Oh puleeze.

I'm guessing your link to her profile page on our web server is the only reason your comment was moderated as "interesting".

Yes, Triclosan may not prevent bacterial or virus infection. But no one said it did. The purpose of Triclosan is to prevent or reduce skin fungal infections, and it does that very well, in my experience.

And what, pray tell, type of experience is that? Have you recently published in any peer-reviewed journals about these experiences of yours?

[disclaimer: I work for the University of Michigan School of Public Health, but I don't recall if have ever met Dr. Aiello in person]

I always wondered why people felt antimicrobial soap was worth anything. Here's why:

Bacteria have cell walls. Triclosan, as the summary notes, targets a component of the cell wall that is integral to survival. You know what else is integral to survival? The cell wall. You know what other component of soap targets the cell wall? Soap. Even small amounts of detergent will completely solubilize a cell wall. Imagine the concentration of detergent on your hands when you wash them, with soap.

No bacteria is surviving that, and if it is, it sure as hell is going to survive a tiny concentration of Triclosan.

Also, on a side note, the motion of -rubbing- one's hands together has been shown to contribute at least as much as the soap, to the killing of bacteria. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?i d=doi:10.1086/502183 has some interesting comparisons of hand washing techniques.

I'm aware there are video game ratings. Maybe you missed the part I wrote where I said, "holding vendors accountable for sales according to those ratings."

Actually, no. Your knowledge of such issues seem to be about as dated as your lack of knowledge of the fact that the ESRB has been around since 1994.

Really? Here are the first handful of hits in Google when you search for "are video games harmful?":

http://www.apa.org/releases/videogames.html

http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers /freedman.html

http://www.psychologymatters.org/videogames.html

http://www.psychologymatters.org/mediaviolence.htm l

http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/familyresources/a /vidgameviolence.htm

http://www.psu.edu/dept/medialab/research/vgviolen ce.html

You'd better get back to class there, professor.

opening [their idea] to the entire world to steal

Thomas Jefferson trumps you:

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. Source

The problem is, despite everything else, most people are comfortable. It takes a lot of uncomfortable people to get a good revolution. Downtrodden, completely depressed people. And it takes an organized, and charasmatic leader.

That's the thing, though: any government that has gotten that far out of control is almost certainly the kind where the people in it will do whatever it takes to remain in power.. If nuking a city or two is what it takes, that's what they'll do, as long as they really have the power to do it.

What, do you think third-world countries have a monopoly on power-hungry madmen? The amount of lust for power in each sitting president has more or less continuously grown over time, because as wealth continues to be concentrated into the hands of the few, it becomes easier over time for power-hungry spoiled rich boys to gain political power. Such people think of themselves as royalty, not as common people, and the real world is a sadistic enough place that it rewards such people with ever increasing money and power.

Not that i'm encouraging such a thing, but should such an event occur, unless the US were willing to nuke it's own people, it could very well succeed.

Yeah...a leader who can somehow manage to avoid getting himself killed despite all the crazy surveillance capabilities and other advantages the government he's attempting to oust has over him.

The Iraqis have two huge advantages over U.S. civilians:

1. They're a completely different culture and a completely different country, so it's much harder for the U.S. to infiltrate and destroy from within any "enemy" organization there.
2. The U.S. is attempting to (though not succeeding too much) look like the "good guy" while doing what it can to set up a puppet government. The U.S. has already achieved its goal there: to control the oil in that region. Not necessarily to the degree necessary to use it, but at least to the degree necessary to prevent others from using it. Our troops are there in order to make sure we don't lose that level of control.

If the U.S. government were as determined to exert its power as it would be if it were faced with its own demise at the hands of its people, I guarantee it wouldn't hesitate to smack its own population down hard.

Of course, that's assuming things got that far out of hand to begin with. It almost certainly wouldn't. Not because the population would be content, but because the population would be afraid of going up against a gargantuan enemy such as its government. This is how Hitler and his pals managed to keep Germany under their control during the entire time they reigned -- it took enormous effort on the part of the rest of the world to take care of that problem. How much success do you think they'll have against a country with 3 times the population and a huge arsenal of nukes? And there was comparatively little effort in Germany to do so from within, regardless of any desire to do so.

No, if there's anything that history has shown, it's that freedom is a fleeting thing, and the normal state of human affairs is for most of the population to be under the boot of a power hungry dictator, and that breaking out from under such power hungry madmen is an enormously difficult and unlikely thing, while finding oneself underneath that boot is an extremely easy thing. This is why despotic dictatorships massively dominate the landscape of recorded human history.

"Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke [...] and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something -- but then it was too late."

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

Certainly, if by "worked" you mean "fooled everyone into thinking it was capitalism", and if by "largely discredited", you mean "widely adopted as the prevailing American 'wisdom of the day'".

But go ahead and be just like the Germans: "They thought they were free."

Let's start with a Slashdotting of NASA...

• Scalable Dynamic Chimera Methods for Unsteady Aerodynamics is one of those packages mere mortals like us will have either no use for or will have to just drool over.
• Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes 3D is a nice Fortran-based CFD, requires some hefty paperwork to obtain, and may need you to use G95 rather than GCC's GFortran, due to compiler bugs.
• OVERFLOW and related CFD software.
• Three Dimensional Multi-block Advanced Grid Generation System is the component that actually lets you do a lot of the necessary grid work for CFDs.
• Viscous Upwind ALgorithm for Complex Flow ANalysis is the hardest of the CFD codes at NASA to obtain, but if you want to work on anything hypersonic, it's the best place to start. Do Not Use hypersonic airflows for CPU cooling.

• Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flash Simulator - well, you never know.
• Geant4, for the subatomic nuclear physicist in your life...
• Open Field Operation and Manipulation is a nice open-source CFD package.
• Parallel Basic Local Alignment Search Tool gives you a parallelized search engine for nucleotides and proteins.
• Stanford Exploration Project provides some nice parallel geophysics applications and tools.
• Tachyon Parallel Raytracer is a nice example of what you can do with parallelism and graphics.

• Kerrighed is an up-and-coming clustering system for Linux. I saw it demonstrated at SC|05 - and was less than impressed. It needed a lot of work at that point. However, it looks like it has improved a lot since then, and it would be unreasonable to not mention it.
• MOSIX is the second-oldest clustering technology to gain a fan following to rival Star Trek. It's very good, though hard to get if you're not in academia. Arguably for entirely fair reasons.
• OpenMOSIX was originally a fork from MOSIX but is now essentially its own clustering technology. Development is nowhere near the speed I'd like, it does need far more eyes, but is well-known and highly regarded. Moshe Bar is also one of the coolest developers I've encountered.

• DAKOTA is a program for profiling parallel applications and should be useful in telling you where you are gaining and losing.
• HPC Toolkit is another toolkit for profiling HPC applications.
• is yet another profiler for parallel software. Between this and the others I've listed, you should have more information than sequential programmers ever get to work with.
• Performance API is a facility used by most of the profiling software to provide an architecture-independent view of performance counters. I have it on good authority that some (now former)

While there are democratic ideals, the USA is a republic. The founders wanted to make sure that 'excess democracy' didn't take run things, fueled by people's passions. See Federalist 10 for more on the dangers of passions. That said, I'm not trolling, I do think that this 'piracy more serious' thing is humorous.

Wow. A graph showing murder rates per capita. I am overwhelmed.

How about instead of posting random links, you make an attempt to think beyond your own fears? Just because you're afraid of guns doesn't mean that fear is what's behind different murder rates.

Heck, without having the methodologies available it's not even clear those stats are comparable. Even presuming, for the sake of argument, they are you can see nations with much more restrictive gun laws have higher per-capita murder rates than the US.

Perhaps it's not the guns, but the other social factors ( like poverty, availability of mental health care )? And if it's not the guns... why focus on banning them, when that will do nothing to solve the problem? Unless you're just afraid of them, of course.

But if it's further reading you want, how about something from the university of chicago?

I don't think so. He is widely reputed to be a crude and insatiable womanizer, who screwed (or attempted to screw) every pretty girl who worked for him.

Show Notes: Cosmology 5
From Slackerpedia Galactica



Release Date: May 16, 2007

MP3

Dr. Michael Turner is one of the figureheads of the modern cosmological scene. In 1998, he coined the term dark energy and published a paper asking the provocative question Is Cosmology Solved? Quite Possibly! In it, he outlined a checklist of seven major issues that need to be addressed in the next decade in order to answer "Yes". A rhetorical exercise, he didn't actually mean cosmology could be solved so easily, it was more of a challenge to the field to take it to the next step (read his Conclusion section for more). So in this interview, about nine years later, we ask him about the status of the seven major issues and then he adds some new questions to the list.

Dr. Turner is one of the nicest people we've ever interviewed. We think one can tell from listening to him.

* His original 1998 paper


This is the 5th interview in our series of interviews from the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics.

Here am I, answering to myself...

I was able to access TFA, and it is a mp3. But it has a link to the original article.

The most complete argument was made by John Lott in his book "More Guns, Less Crime".
Here's a summary/interview published by the University of Chicago Press.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/493636. html

His Wikipedia entry is disputed as not being neutral, but it's gun politics, so I expect nothing less. My favorite quote about it is this: "I agree with the previous poster. This article seems wildly unbalanced, and consists largely of string quotes of criticisms. Even Hitler has a more balanced entry. - --ozoneliar - 12 March 2007"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott

...because Scavhunt often has extensive typographic needs. Consider the 2006 list--upside-down text, non-roman scripts, fractions and greek letters aplenty. TeX is clearly the tool of choice.

Oh, you can get into some really deep philosophical discussions on the nature of property. In the US, for example, each State generally determines what property is and who can own what, etc. Obviously, they typically accept what was considered private property at Common Law at the time of the American Revolution, which in turn came about through centuries of development between "what I can grab and keep others away from by sword-point" and "what the King allows me to have". Obviously, Locke began to figure in later on too.

Lockean property rights basically come down to "What I earned is mine, and I can do whatever I want with it." And that concept works pretty well with material goods. Resources are scarce and finite. If you give that finite resource to someone else, you're deprived of it and the labor you put into it.

So called "intellectual property" doesn't fit the bill. Once the resource is "created" (e.g., thought up and put into practice), it is essentially unlimited and infinite, subject only to marginal costs to implement it (such as printing a book). Giving the resource to someone else doesn't deprive the original person of the resource either; once you have an idea, you don't lose it. What's more, once someone else has it, you can't deprive them of the idea. It makes it difficult to put the same restraints on IP as real property.

Thomas Jefferson's letter to Isaac McPhearson is a nice, short read that highlights the 'pecuiar nature' of ideas.

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/issue s/ApJ/v659n1/64492/brief/64492.abstract.html

Or maybe, it just shows that you can compare anything to anything, if you carefully choose only the aspects that sorta superficially support your idea, do a lot of sophistry to make them look even more supportive, and keep your fingers crossed that noone notices all else you've ignored.

Allow me to start by mentioning my bias, I liked the book, took classes from Steve Levitt, and worked for him for a while during and after college. It may help to know that those gimmicky "comparisons" really were not a part of Levitt's academic papers which the book is based on. Here's a bit of background on Freakonomics, basically Levitt writes a ton of clever papers that win him some recognition. Dubner took these papers and simplified them to try and make them accessible to the non-economic public. Sure, stylistically, there's issues that I have with it as well (and these are issues I have with virtually every pop-science book out there). But I feel as if you've belittled the book's content based on some style choices designed to draw the reader in.

Perhaps I've misunderstood your point, but gimmicky comparisons aside, there's a lot of well thought out content to that book that shouldn't be outright dismissed or characterized badly due to some tasteless introductory paragraphs.

There is this wide belief that removing guns will somehow make the community more susceptible to external gun attacks. (This is FUD, and extensively disproven in other countries.)

Link to at least one of the many the extensive studies that disprove this, please? Certainly the Jewish community in Germany of the 1930's and 40's suffered under all kinds of external attack after they were forbidden to own firearms.

which aren't required to hunt deer for example.

Who cares about deer hunting? Worrying about "hunting rights" (whatever that is) did nothing to protect these 33 students. This is about the right to self defense without being forced to depend on an ineffective, and/or inept police department.

The strongest upside to this is that you can't massacre a crowd with a knife in the same way that you can a semi-automatic weapon.

You're comparing apples to oranges. Petty thieves aren't the ones carrying out massacres, anyway. Someone bent on killing a large quantity of people obviously wouldn't choose a knife. You can't, however, pass enough legislation to outlaw all possible combinations of household chemicals that could conceivably be used to make Improvised Explosive Devices. The killer at VT committed suicide afterwards, anyway. He could have just as easily strapped a few IED's to his body and blown up a few floors of building instead of shooting off firearms -- the result would be the same.

This contrasts to a situation where excessive weaponry is freely commerced, where an enraged person has easy access to a high-end weapon, which allows them to quickly carry out a massacre.

Sorry, but your argument completely falls apart when one considers the gun politics of Switzerland, where large quantities of people have ready access to *full-auto* weapons, and yet the kind of carnage you allude to is not common. Clearly there is something else wrong with current American culture other than availability of firearms.

Um, no. See for example the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Espionage Act of 1917. Also Senator McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s.

There was well-documented torture by the Chicago police less than twenty years ago (although it was illegal by then). Prior to the Miranda case, "police interrogation practices . . . were considered by many to be barbaric and unjust. Coercive interrogation tactics were known in period slang as the 'third degree.'" That was in 1966, and the Supreme Court narrowly (5-4) held that the police were required to inform a defendant that he had any rights whatsoever.

The Bill of Rights has indeed existed for a long time. It has only been over the last 50-60 years, though, that the rights in that document have evolved into what we consider them to be today.

...in your opinion. The point is that evidence is evidence, and your statement wasn't backup up by anything, even a "hand waving" statement to the effect that evidence shows that video games don't cause such problems. Anyway, for your satisfaction : see here. Just evidence, I'm not claiming it's good evidence, but it's better than making statements out of a vacuum, as you are prone to.

And stop calling christians stupid and irrational: it's a generalisation. Some are, some aren't. But all atheists are irrational, which doesn't include you.

it looks like ironic is defined as ironical. Lol.

http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?action=search&word=ir onic&resource=Webster's&quicksearch=on

There are a couple of cool success stories involving guerilla marketing by Nike and Mountain Dew.

This is a favorite topic of Thomas Frank, author of the aptly-named "Conquest of Cool".
Publisher's promotional page here.

I am not affiliated one way or another, I just enjoyed the book, along with some of his others.

Looks like the 10 year visionary project paid off right at the end. Long term financing was required along with faith in the project's people.

http://flash.uchicago.edu/website/research/gallery /home.py

for all alternative OS users out there.

Some researchers actually do bother: http://manticore.cs.uchicago.edu/

First: I didn't say everyone who has an unpopular theory does not get funding. Don't misquote me.

If you think it is easy for researchers/scientists to get funding for unpopular ideas, especially when a great majority of the scientific community is calling you down, then you are very naive. Most of the time great scientists are not just great because of their ideas, it's also because of the adversity they went through to get those ideas accepted. Which often didn't happen till many years later. e.g. Einstein's special relativity theory was not accepted for years (and he didn't receive a Nobel Prize for it either). His work on it was not funded by anyone... he originally wrote it and many other papers in his apartment in Berne CH. The ones who persevere do so because they find other ways and other people to fund their work.

Here are some I found with little or no effort:

• Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar - This University of Chicago page indicates he moved to Chicago because of the intense ridicule he received in England over his theory... about the existence of black holes. Maybe not a lack of funding, but when it is bad enough to cause you to move to a different continent...
• Robert Goddard - rockets... look up Wikipedia and check out the "criticism" section.
• Lynn Margulis - I read somewhere the NSF even denied funding her before.
• Galileo
• Einstein - In 1933 Planck had to ask for Einstein's resignation because of Einstein's criticisms of the politics of Germany at the time (read Einstein: A Life by Denis Brian). The same year Philipp Lenard who always disagreed with Einstein used influence with the nationalists to finally drive Einstein to stay away from Germany. Granted it was a good thing, but it is still a good example of what can happen to anybody prominent, not just scientists, if you don't fit in. Thank goodness he didn't fit in.
• How about embryonic stem cell research

Yes, they all had funding. But the point is that life is made very tough if your 'peers', or even just one prominent person, castigate you.

"Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as 'conceptual necessities,' etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors."
- Einstein