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citation(s) needed. I've seen lots of cases. Most were dealing with prayer over the PA system or teachers or students leading prayers at sporting events and such. I've seen no bans on praying on your own. In fact there have been cases upholding the "moment of silence" in schools.

And of course we all know that if you haven't seen it, it doesn't exist. I'm wondering if your google finger is broke. Here is reference to one, here is another, and I won't bother linking to the others but I'll post the link to the same sites if your interested.
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=19256
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=19517
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=496&invol=226
http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/court/lamb_v_cent.html
http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/court/rose_v_rege.html
http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/court/boar_v_merg.html
http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/court/widm_v_vinc.html

And those are just some that were compiled at a couple site showing up in the first few results of the google search. And yes, a couple of those were dealing with prayer over the PA system in which the court rules it was allowed. At least two of the cases cited refereed to the use or the PA system at either football games or graduation ceremonies and echoed the same sentiments on when it's controlled by the school or student.

That's how they've tried to sell it, but it clearly says that this nation is under God (proper noun). If that doesn't profess a belief, not just in a god, but in a specific God, then you're going to need some serious evidence to back up your explanation of what it actually means. The court's decision was essentially an appeal to tradition and a refusal to consider the matter. The addition of the phrase was intended originally to distance our country from those godless commies in Russia.

So if I say God with the capitol G as a proper noun, I'm automatically preaching or endorsing a religion? I guess you were preaching too when you wrote your statement pointing that out. Do you see how ridiculous that sounds? And no, that's not a strawman argument, it's the basis of your argument completely and undistorted outside of the subject being stated.

As I mentioned earlier which doesn't have the lunacy of your contention, the phrase under God in the pledge is not a prayer or religion,"Thus, the pledge is an endorsement of our form of government, not of religion or any particular sect." as the courts said.

You are correct as I have already noted, the phrase was intended to distance ourselves from those godless commies. But what you are not seeing here is that our system of leadership and government (until relativity recently anyways) answered to a higher power. Be it the people, a god, or patriotism and the constitution in which all it's power is derived from the consent of the people. On the contrast, the godless commies decreed the state and their personal power to be the ultimate in much the same ways as the Roman emperors and the pharaohs of Egypt eventually declared themselves a god. There was no higher power then themselves to which the US was st

PS. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge that the first of your alleged quotes of Jefferson is pseudepigraphical proves that you're only interested in scoring "talking points" and not in actually having a reasoned discussion.

I'm not sure how proving the author of the quote wrong proves your point, but you're still wrong anyway. http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff0600.htm

"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. Memorial Edition Volume 3 Page 320

I hope that's cleared that up. I would have a reasoned discussion but your claim that each state is not a republic, and your insistence that any proof I provide is inadequate somehow is just ridiculous. And you're hung up on a Jefferson quote, which it turns out you're wrong about, again. All you really need to do is put it in google with quotes around it and look around a little, and not come back and tell me the quote was something I made up.

I'm not sure how you can read Tocqueville and then became a defender of FDR. I said Kant's critique of pure reason creates a lot of the theories that we use in litigation today, "a priori" being one of them, not that Kant created the system of government. Then you blast me for showing you some books, only to then... show me some books, all of which I've read, and sadly came away with something different than you. I suppose you believe then that the constitution is living and breathing? I can't say anything to convince you, but here's James Madison's take:

"...I entirely concur with the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution. And if that be not the guide in expounding it, there can be no security for a consistent and stable, more than for a faithful exercise of its power. If the meaning of the text be sought in the changeable meaning of the words composing it, it is evident that the shape and attributes of the Government must partake of the changes to which the words and phrases of all living languages are constantly subject. What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of the law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense. And that the language of our Constitution is already undergoing interpretations unknown to its founders, will I believe appear to all unbiased Enquirers into the history of its origin and adoption."
-James Madison

From: Writings of James Madison Oh ya, read the federalist papers!

Or take a look at the list of quotes from the founding fathers on religion. http://skeptically.org/thinkersonreligion/id9.html

I don't know how to link a source but an article called "USING STATUTES TO SET LEGISLATIVE RULES: ENTRENCHMENT, SEPARATION OF POWERS, AND THE RULES OF PROCEEDINGS CLAUSE" has this to say: "both chambers of Congress appear to have come quite firmly to believe that the Constitution grants them the prerogative to abrogate by unilateral action any statutory provision that concerns internal affairs within the purview of the rules power. Their parliamentary guides are confident on the matter, stating that it “has been settled that Congress may not by law interfere with the constitutional right of a future House to make is own rules." The article can be found here: http://www.student.virginia.edu/~jalopy/PDFs/19-4/345-410.PDF

Is that, on page 5, the first recorded printed misuse of your in place of you're?

Just read it online: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG02/yeung/actioncomics/cover.html

The mass of an object approaches infinity as it approaches the speed of light. At the speed of light, an object's mass would be infinite, and the energy required to get it there would also be infinite. This is why the speed of light is the barrier that it is.

http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/mass_increase.html

In particular, this passage:

Einstein was so sure that momentum conservation must always hold that he rescued it with a bold hypothesis: the mass of an object must depend on its speed! In fact, the mass must increase with speed in just such a way as to cancel out the lower y-direction velocity resulting from time dilation. That is to say, if an object at rest has a mass M, moving at a speed v it will have a mass . Note that this is an undetectably small effect at ordinary speeds, but as an object approaches the speed of light, the mass increases without limit!

Pine works great with IMAP: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~csadmin/wiki/index.php/Setting_up_Pine_(Alpine)_for_IMAP_Gmail

When one of the top public universities already switched?

Email at UVa: Account Choices

Account choices:

- Students: Microsoft Live and/or Gmail

- Alumni: Gmail

- Faculty/Staff/Special cases: Exchange and/or CMS (former mail system)

It's probably cheaper to outsource e-mail providers, but UVA still maintains control of the @virginia.edu domain and forwards e-mail to Live or G-mail.

http://sol.astro.virginia.edu/~rsl4v/PSC/

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0BwFDuloZpz_BNWE1OTBmMjYtZTg5ZS00NDMxLTg0YzAtZjA3N2ZlYjBmNDdj&hl=en

You sound like those crazy sociology professors who get pissed at words like "manhole" and "mankind." It's part of the presentation style, relax.

Some of those professors are brilliant satirists: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

The quote originates from Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan". Though I agree about Dirk Gently.

Section 8: The Congress shall have power To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare...

Limited vs. Universal Powers

"I say... to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless: If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives." --Thomas Jefferson to Wilson Nicholas, 1803. ME 10:419

Quote by James Madison

"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature
of the limited Government established by the people of America."

I am sure I can find more but if this doesn't change your mind I doubt bringing the Founding Fathers back to life to explain it to you would help either.

Falcon

I don't care what "quotes" you have from the founders, I care about what they put into law .

The Founder's weren't stupid, they were perfectly clear about what they wanted in the Constitution and provided safeguards to ensure it functioned properly (The Supreme Court, for example, is the *ultimate* safeguard of which there is no going around).

It is completely improper to simply attempt to make up law as we go about (such as ignoring the "General Welfare" clause in the constitution) based on belief alone.

Congress should use all powers at there disposal to ensure the Welfare of the citizenry under it's care and should the matter truly be of legal question (such as if Health Insurance falls under the powers allotted to Congress), then *ANYONE* is free to take the matter as high as the Supreme Court if necessary to seek judicial relief.

These arm-chair constitutional/arm-chair historical "quarterbacking" of these matters is completely IMPROPER and short-circuits the very safeguards the founder's provided.

The avenue's of relief are there, you just need to be willing to do the leg-work AND USE THEM.

Can you point to one place in there where the federal government is given the power control health care and medicine?

Section 8, powers of the congress, first sentence: General welfare.

General Welfare doesn't mean what you think it does. I'll go ahead and copy and paste another post I made on it:

Limited vs. Universal Powers
"I say... to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless: If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives." --Thomas Jefferson to Wilson Nicholas, 1803. ME 10:419

Quote by James Madison
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."

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

Falcon

Section 8: The Congress shall have power To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare...

Limited vs. Universal Powers
"I say... to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless: If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives." --Thomas Jefferson to Wilson Nicholas, 1803. ME 10:419

Quote by James Madison
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."

I am sure I can find more but if this doesn't change your mind I doubt bringing the Founding Fathers back to life to explain it to you would help either.

Falcon

We can't know what would happen if banks were fully deregulated

read a little history, young man.

Lets see, if I'm unhappy about the level of service of my current utility what are my options? Not a whole lot.

Exactly. They are beholden to the shareholders, not their customers. They're a monopoly and don't have to care about their customers. A lot of the financial mess we're in now is a result of businesses that aren't monopolies acting as if they were.

My utility company is owned by the city. If they piss me off I'll not vote for the incumbant mayor (an dthat's happened here before). As a result, we get cheap dependable power.

Or you know, how about allowing utility companies to actually compete for prices, service and security.

And how do you go about that? Have ten different power grids in your town with ten electric companies, all with their own poles and cables? Utilities are a natural monoploly and NEED to be heavily regulated. Actually, natural monopolies shouw be owned by the city or state. It's the only way they can be held accountable to the people who pay them.

For some reason, most history classes ignores this part, and zooms in on meaningless facts (such as dates) and the teachers almost never are concerned context, or the greater lessons learned, etc.

Are you referring to high school history class? Because the required undergrad history class I took didn't focus on dates and so forth, but the social implications of that history. Here is one of the textbooks for the class I had to take; I still have the paperback version.

I had one excellent history professor, he lambasted the history channel for their distortions and mistakes.

Well, I was in college before the History Channel existed, maybe college profs are acting more like HS teachers these days. However, in the US public school system, you seldom have historians teaching history, although in a university setting you always do. I haven't noticed any distortions in the history channel; but then, I'm no historian, but their accounts of events that happened in my lifetime seem accurate, and they do always have historians and other experts telling the history, almost always someone teaching or researching at a university.

I was amazed the other night when they were talking about extreme aircraft, the were talking about the SR-71. I was stationed at Beale in 1974-5 and they didn't get any of that wrong, and even said some stuff I thought was still secret (apparently not).

Real companies do not increase or decrease in value by 10% in a single day

Oh, really? I guess you weren't on the planet this time last year.

SCO crashed, luckily all by itself.

After all, it's not every author who decides to chuck the whole language and invent his own (I'm looking at you, Tolkien).

That's a poor example; I've read most of his stuff and most of the made up words were made up by others, with the exception of hobbits. But he didn't just make up the word, he made up the species he made up the word to coin.

How about Isaac Asimov? He made up the word "robotics".

How about Star Trek? How many slashdotters speak Klingon fluently?

How about Mark Twain? Have you ever read Huckleberry Finn?

Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her powwow shut off and leave the river still again; and by and by her waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn't hear nothing for you couldn't tell how long, except maybe frogs or something.

I picked it up from a book written in 1933 by Frederick Lewis Allen titled Only Yesterday -- An Informal History of the 1920s. Actually I usually use the word "normality" but I'd just finished re-reading the book and my fingers just took over.

I think you might be interested in this book. It was required reading in an undergrad general studies history class I took at SIU in the late seventies. This chapter tells of the real estate bubble in the '20s you mentioned.

I think you might be interested in this book. It was required reading in an undergrad general studies history class I took at SIU in the late seventies. This chapter tells of the real estate bubble in the '20s you mentioned.

"For if you yesterday treated us better than the [workers] you have had so long..."

Take a june bug, large and green...tie a string to it's leg and let him fly in circles. At the point where he starts to BLUR, that must be the speed of light. Figure the scale based on RPMs, etc the usual way.

SO: Speed of light: 34 mph!

Seriously: this standard stood for something like 700 years. Science: imperfect.

Wikipedia: Speed of light, history

Physics.virginua.edu: Speed of light

Worsleyschool: Measuring the speed of light

Early, scientific attempts to measure speed of light were very... Well... scientific. And quite accurate. In 1021 an Iraqi physicist realized that light has finite, variable speed that is slower in denser bodies.

In 1629-1667 there were several tries to measure how long it takes for light to move two miles. They all however got to the conclusion that it couldn't be measured because light's speed was so high and human reaction speed could not keep up

In late 1600s astronomers tried to find out the speed of light by observing the moons of Jupiter. They finally got pretty close to the actual value.

It may have been. Curiously, the 1920s had a lot in common with the 1997-2007 era, with technology being popular and nerds were common. From Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's

That winter, however-the winter of 1921-22-it came with a rush. Soon everybody was talking, not about wireless telephony, but about radio. A San Francisco paper described the discovery that millions were making: "There is radio music in the air, every night, everywhere. Anybody can hear it at home on a receiving set, which any boy can put up in an hour." In February President Harding had an outfit installed in his study, and the Dixmoor Golf Club announced that it would install a "telephone" to enable golfers to hear church services. In April, passengers on a Lackawanna train heard a radio concert, and Lieutenant Maynard broke all records for modernizing Christianity by broadcasting an Easter sermon from an airplane. Newspapers brought out radio sections and thousands of hitherto utterly unmechanical people puzzled over articles about regenerative circuits, sodion tubes, Grimes reflex circuits, crystal detectors, and neutrodynes. In the Ziegfeld "Follies of 1922" the popularity of "My Rambler Rose" was rivaled by that of a song about a man who hoped his love might hear him as she was "listening on the radio." And every other man you met on the street buttonholed you to tell you how he had sat up until two o'clock the night before, with earphones clamped to his head, and had actually heard Havana! How could one bother about the Red Menace if one was facing such momentous questions as how to construct a loop aerial?

That book was required reading in a general studies history class I took in the late seventies, I still have the paper copy. Apparently my college wasn't the only one using that text, as the whole book's hosted at the University of Virginia's web site. It's a well written eye opener.

The USA corporate culture is getting bad, real bad.

That's why the economy went into the toilet and isn't likely to get any better very soon.

Employers were like that in the 1920s, too.

This reminds me of Richard Feynman's story Safecracker Meets Safecracker (.pdf) about the how he learned to pick locks. When he demonstrated how he could pick the lock on a big, fancy safe that belonged to a colonel at Oak Ridge, the colonel didn't make improvements to the locks on safes and filing cabinets, he simply ordered everyone to change the combinations on their safes and filiing cabinets if Feynman had been in their office.
---
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

They're gonna screw up before long...

Before long? It happened last fall; the Dow Jones lost half its value and now people are being laid off right and left, and states are going broke.

Of course, it wasn't just letting computers do stock trading, but the idea behind it was - short term selfish interest, lack of ethics (Bernard Madof was head of NASDAQ while he was bilking people with his ponzi scheme), and all around sociopathy and incompetence by business, political, and moral leaders.

The stock market isn't supposed to be a casino, it's supposed to be for long term investment.

Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

It was true that the worst of the panic was past. But not the worst prices. There was too much forced liquidation still to come as brokers' accounts were gradually straightened out, as banks called for more collateral, and terror was renewed. The next week, in a series of short sessions, the tide of prices receded once more -- until at last on November 13th the bottom prices for the year 1929 were reached. Beside the figures hung up in the sunny days of September they made a tragic showing:

[Chapter 13 page 4 has a table of high and low prices that gets screwed up copyinig and pasting]

The New York Times averages for fifty leading stocks had been almost cut in half, failing from a high of 311.90 in September to a low of 164.43 on November 13th; and the Times averages for twenty-five leading industrials had fared still worse, diving from 469.49 to 220.95.

The Big Bull Market was dead. Billions of dollars' worth of profits-and paper profits-had disappeared. The grocer, the window-cleaner, and the seamstress had lost their capital. In every town there were families which had suddenly dropped 'from showy affluence into debt. Investors who had dreamed of retiring to live on their fortunes now found themselves back once more at the very beginning of the long road to riches. Day by day the newspapers printed the grim reports of suicides.

The very same problems that caused the Great Depression (including land speculation and underregulation) caused our present economic meltdown.

Moosesocks is not focused on the larger and real issues.

A smart grid is indeed intended, and needed, to repair and enhance our electric grid. However, technical things cannot live in isolation from the real world.

In the real world technical things are tools and they can be used, as any tool can, benignly, or malignly. A smart grid will place an agent in everyone's home. If the homeowner controls the agent, I see no problem. If the utility controls the agent, it may create problems. But, if the government controls the agent, that is a problem. Politics is more subject to Murphy's law than any other sphere of human endeavor.

I do not foresee a man on horseback, or a legion of jackbooted thugs. However, there is always a danger that the American Experiment might miscarry. America's most perceptive critic long ago foresaw that possibility.

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, Volume II, Section 4: Influence of Democratic Ideas and Feelings on Political Society; Chapter VI: What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear:

I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. ...

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: ...

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I am not trolling. I am genuinely concerned that in our anxiety to solve an undoubtedly real engineering and economic problem, we will wind up opening a Pandora's box of things we may not be able to control and which may have a deleterious effect on us.

No, but history says you can extrapolate it twenty years into the future.

Business was booming when Warren Harding died, and in a primitive Vermont farmhouse, by the light of an old-fashioned kerosene lamp, Colonel John Coolidge administered to his son Calvin the oath of office as President of the United States. The hopeless depression of 1921 had given way to the hopeful improvement of 1922 and the rushing revival of 1923.

The prices of common stocks, to be sure, suggested no unreasonable optimism. On August 2, 1923, the day of Harding's death, United States Steel (paying a five-dollar dividend) stood at 87, Atchison (paying six dollars) at 95, New York Central (paying seven) at 97, and American Telephone and Telegraph (paying nine) at 122; and the total turnover for the day on the New York Exchange amounted to only a little over 600,000 shares. The Big Bull Market was still far in the future. Nevertheless the tide of prosperity was in full flood.

Pick up one of those graphs with which statisticians measure the economic ups and downs of the Post-war Decade. You will find that the line of business activity rises to a jagged peak in 1920, drops precipitously into a deep valley in late 1920 and 1921, climbs uncertainly upward through 1922 to another peak at the middle of 1923, dips somewhat in 1924 (but not nearly so far as in 1921), rises again in 1925 and zigzags up to a perfect Everest of prosperity in 1929-only to plunge down at last into the bottomless abyss of 1930 and 1931.

Hold the graph at arm's-length and glance at it again, and you will see that the clefts of 1924 and 1927 are mere indentations in a lofty and irregular plateau which reaches from early 1923 to late 1929. That plateau represents nearly seven years of unparalleled plenty; nearly seven years during which men an women might be disillusioned about politics and religion and love, but believed that at the end of the rainbow there was at least a pot of negotiable legal tender consisting of the profits of American industry and American salesmanship; nearly seven years during which the businessman was, as Stuart Chase put it, "the dictator of our destinies," ousting "the statesman, the priest, the philosopher, as the creator of standards of ethics and behavior" and becoming "the final authority on the conduct of American society." For nearly seven years, the prosperity band-wagon rolled down Main Street.

The book chronicles a real estate boom (like our generation had a few years ago) and the aforementioned stock market boom. The similarities between that time and ours, economically and sociologically, are astounding.

Give us another fifteen to twenty five years and our economy will be ok, most likely.

In view of what was about to happen, it is enlightening to recall how things looked at this juncture to the financial prophets, those gentlemen whose wizardly reputations were based upon their supposed ability to examine a set of graphs brought to them by a statistician and discover, from the relation of curve to curve and index to index, whether things were going to get better or worse. Their opinions differed, of course; there never has been a moment when the best financial opinion was unanimous. In examining these opinions, and the outgivings of eminent bankers, it must furthermore be acknowledged that a bullish statement cannot always be taken at its face value: few men like to assume the responsibility of spreading alarm by making dire predictions, nor is a banker with unsold securities on his hands likely to say anything which will make it more difficult to dispose of them, unquiet as his private mind may be. Finally, one must admit that prophecy is at best the most hazardous of occupations. Nevertheless, the general state of financial opinion in October, 1929, makes an instructive contrast with that in February and March, 1928, when, as we have seen, the skies had not appeared any too brig

Here is a trend for you. Trends based on broader markets are not so spectacular of course.

in search of non-existent over-the-count drugs

Non existent? Surely some mistake.

Justice [Clarence] Thomas also said Thursday's decision provided the nation's students a court-sanctioned hiding place. "Redding would not have been the first person to conceal pills in her undergarments," he wrote. "Nor will she be the last after today's decision, which announced the safest places to secrete contraband in school."

There. Just because the school didn't find any drugs, doesn't mean there weren't any. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas just said she was concealing drugs in her underwear, and as we know, Supreme Court Justices are never wrong. Also, they are not fucking batshit insane and desperately in need of being put in a home for fucking batshit insane crazy whackos who play the race card when their misogyny is brought to light. Definitely not.

People who write legal documents usually leave much leeway to account for the unaccountable. If you look up the right articles of constitution or law, there's bound to be a section ascribing federal powers to "other areas not yet covered by current document"

And if you look at other early documents you'll see government was supported to be strictly limited in what powers it had. Repeatedly Thomas Jefferson wrote that the people have the power and that government is but a servant to the people, not their dictator. He "sought to establish a federal government of limited powers."

Falcon

I apologize if I've wasted your time thus far. It appears after all as though our view of the world and even our concept of how to apply "reason" in an argument are so dissimilar that we will not be able to agree on the matter of the merits of copyright vs. abolishment. I however won't call you a "whackjob" over this difference of opinion.

I believe you understand the material of my proposition, though you seem unwilling or incapable of discussing what consequences would actually arise. Specifically, you refuse to stray more than a single oversimplified step at a time out of the comfort zone of 20th century copyright model you have become accustomed to. You have made it clear that you are thrilled with the status quo, and deeply humbled by the depth and breadth of media produced today, which apparently would have been impossible unaided by the political power to force every citizen on Earth to sign the equivalent of an arbitrarily large number of convoluted non-disclosure agreements.

So I will agree to disagree on this specific point and leave you to your face full of oil. However, you have now taken the additional step of blaming all negative actions taken by our media industry squarely on downloaders. Apparently, your fair use rights and privacy are threatened by DRM and rootkits, and it's our fault even though we neither implemented this DRM nor coded the rootkits. You agree that innovation is being hampered in protocols such as HTML5, media storage such as blu-ray and transition such as P2P technology.. though the parties actually doing the hampering are innocent of wrongdoing, as Pirates have allegedly forced their hand.

This would be an example of our difference of view on entitlement. You are claiming that big media is entitled to encroach on their customer's property rights when the bottom line is at stake. Compulsory Trusted computing and global wiretapping are apparently justifiable evils when an artist's living (or more accurately, the bottom lines of companies who largely keep artists in financial bondage) are at stake. Damn you free-wheeling pirates for making such hard choices necessary! :P

Thus, I turn your criteria back on you good sir. If you wish me to stop "feeling entitled" to see and hear media which is already freely available to me, I demand that you provide evidence that what I watch on TV or listen to on my media player financially impacts content producers and furthermore that it hampers innovation. Allow me to clarify that corporate press releases where the **IA claims to lose $dice_roll billions of dollars per year are not evidence. Observing generic slumps in CD/DVD sales time correlated to the unquantified "rise in filesharing" are also several degrees of separation away from sane evidence. And the ship has sailed so far as thought experiments go as well, you who would ask Galileo to actually climb the tower of Pisa and measure that which is much easier to induce will be held to that same standard.

In fact, I am hard pressed imagining what form of evidence one could even present to support an argument as far fetched as this chestnut of yours. I happen to know the evidence doesn't exist because the premise is false; but still one ought to be able to imagine what form it would take were it hypothetically possible. The best idea I have would be this then: a single-blind experiment where I illicitly copy and listen to one song from a limited selection of artists you could establish a relationship with. Next, you measure which artist becomes impoverished (or at least financially burdened) by my free lunch and thus demonstrate the damage done by correctly guessing which song I've aurally pilfered. This is just a start, feel free to volunteer any alternate quantificational approaches you can craft.

Another point in your arguments that baffles me is that you no longer sound as though you are defending copyright as a mechanism to release work into the public domain. Your new

I've encountered bits and pieces of Unix hagiography for the last 15 years, and in all that time, I've internalized that "Multics sucks" (somewhere alongside the virgin birth), yet I can't bring to mind a single reason *why* Multics sucked. Were the Romans really so stupid as they are made out to be?

From Fernando J. Corbató's 1991 Turing lecture concerning one of Muttlix's early teething problems:

The decision to use a compiler to implement the system software was a good one, but what we did not appreciate was that new language PL/I presented us with two big difficulties: First, the language had constructs in it which were intrinsically complicated, and it required a learning period on the part of system programmers to learn to avoid them; second, no one knew how to do a good job of implementing the compiler.

So, perhaps, not the best suited language for systems programming?
From Wikipedia:

The goal of PL/I was to develop a single language usable for both business and scientific purposes.

Doesn't that vision give your average PHB a throbbing chum? If simplicity is hard, let's scale up the mediocre talent and do sameness instead.

PL/I was designed by a committee drawn from IBM programmers and users drawn from across the United States, working over several months.

No sociology experiment from the 1960s was complete without confederates in white shirts. The free-love hippies managed to sneak into the language promiscuous data type conversions.

Dijkstra summed it up in 1975 with his monograph
How do we tell truths that might hurt?

PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

God, I love this guy. He's the patron saint of annoying the hell out of people by always being right, and putting a fine point on it. Same monograph includes another famous zinger:

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past.

From Myths about Multics

We wrote 3000 pages of the Multics System Programmer's Manual first, while waiting for the PL/I compiler.

That should strike a painful nerve in anyone who tried to adopt the C++ STL in 1994.

Ouch. Shipwrecked on the beach of half a programming language, fondling your monads.

Not half surprising that Thompson ended up carving his own canoe with a pen knife to escape.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/toc_indx.html

It is more likely than you think.

When government keeps getting bigger and bigger, it starts to behave and act more like Big Brother than our founding fathers.

The government that governs least, governs best. Whomever said that be it John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, or Napoleon.

It seems at least in fiction, there is a way to fight the UKian Big Brother but I wouldn't advise it to UKians, least if they don't want to get arrested. :)

1. Nicolaus Copernicus "On the Revolutions of [the] Heavenly Spheres" (1543)

2. Galileo Galilei "Dialogues [or Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations] Concerning Two [New] Sciences" (1638)

3. Johannes Kepler Book Five of "Harmonies of the World" (1618)

4. Sir Isaac Newton "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (1687)

5. Albert Einstein "The Principles of Relativity: A Collection of Original Papers on the Special Theory of Relativity" (1922)

I am not certain how easy it is to "capture" HTML to read on the Kindle later but here are some decent translations in English if you want them.

That scares me. BASIC was designed to be a teaching tool. Now people are using Microsoft's version of it to write business-critical systems. I support these kinds of systems for a living, and it is rare for any of them to live beyond five years. Most fail not because of flaws in VB itself (though there are plenty), but because of poor programming practices, which VB tolerates and encourages in a way that most other languages do not. Perhaps Dijkstra was correct that "[i]t is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." A language forgiving of mistakes may be useful as a teaching tool but it is not necessarily the right thing to base our economies or livelihoods on. Minix is not nearly as bad as BASIC, but it remains to be seen whether it can be adapted to the needs of high-security environments when that was never its design goal to begin with.

Does it make sense to pay someone millions of dollars to play a game or pretend to be someone else in front of a camera while millions are losing their homes and jobs?

Yes, since in hard economic times, people still pay for entertainment. Most famously, Hollywood made money during the Great Depression. ("Throughout most of the Depression, Americans went assiduously, devotedly, almost compulsively, to the movies.")

Baseball ticket prices? Let me quote from your link:

Meanwhile, some bloggers and fans always ask why, and for that, we turn to the market. The Yankees are selling tickets at a face value of $250 per, and they're selling out the stadium. Tickets for premium games sell on StubHub for well over that value. The market, in other words, can afford it, and the Yankees are just trying to capture their revenues.

So in conclusion, you don't know what you're talking about.

In the terms of THIRTY years of being on a fiat currency, ten of that favors fiat currencies.

It is still a losing score.

Blame business. not just big business. Small business, big business, medium business, serious business

Business was already there, the difference is fiat money.

No, not the foaming at the mouth type history, the Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Genghis Khan, Catholic Church + various protestant churches, Islam, Communism, Nazism, etc, etc type history.

These were always at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun. That's how you control people, by threatening them with *death* not controlling the gold supply.

It is said that war is politics by other means. All empires seek to control the money supply and most of those were based on a desire to control trade. Even today, war is intimately tied to finance anyway, so your point doesn't make any sense.

When what we see now was warned about by Thomas Jefferson, doesn't that make you at least a little suspicious?

That's a fallacy, appeal to a higher authority.

No, it's saying that if the process of taking the people's wealth through a cycle of inflation and deflation was predicted as a scam 200 years ago, when it now happens it is extremely naive to put it down to incompetence rather than malice.

Further more, further investigating the nature of that quote reveals that he called into question the ability for our nation to keep a steady stream of competent economists to keep the thing afloat.

Well, I didn't quote him, but here are a few: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1325.htm
"That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied. --Thomas Jefferson to Josephus B. Stuart, 1817. ME 15:113

"Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:276

"It is said that our paper is as good as silver, because we may have silver for it at the bank where it issues. This is not true. One, two, or three persons might have it; but a general application would soon exhaust their vaults, and leave a ruinous proportion of their paper in its intrinsic worthless form." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:426

You took me out of context

There is no context in which your statement "The crash has nothing to do with money supply" is correct.

Action Comics #1: Page 12

I was thinking of him beating people to talk that one time, but that'll do nicely.

Action Comics #1: Page 12

I propose a 278% tax on all history books.

Why? Nobody reads them anyway!

...unless you read the wikipedia on Thomas Jefferson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
There are none of Thomas Jefferson's patents on the page. In fact it doesn't even mention his involvement in the patent act of 1790, http://etext.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH40/walter40.html

He invented a Moldboard Plow Of Least Resistance, Wheel Cipher, Portable Copying Press, and an improved polygraph for copying handwritten text.
http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/classes/tcc313/200Rprojs/jefferson_invent/invent.html

...unless you read the wikipedia on Thomas Jefferson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
There are none of Thomas Jefferson's patents on the page. In fact it doesn't even mention his involvement in the patent act of 1790, http://etext.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH40/walter40.html

He invented a Moldboard Plow Of Least Resistance, Wheel Cipher, Portable Copying Press, and an improved polygraph for copying handwritten text.
http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/classes/tcc313/200Rprojs/jefferson_invent/invent.html

I don't know about ATI/others, but NVIDIA graphics cards have only recently been able to do calculations in double precision (CUDA 2.0 was released ~August 2008). The current hardware implementation doesn't even take full advantage of the architecture (good explanation here: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~csadmin/wiki/index.php/CUDA_Support/Enabling_double-precision#Performance; that kind of accuracy seems not to have been needed before).

Jeff was against standing armies... (Scroll down a bit...) http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1480.htm

Modern dimmers aren't resistive.

It's not very sexy, but it's fascinating and readable. I remember coming across it in Dillons bookshop, not knowing the name, and flicking through. Half an hour later, when I realised the time, I knew I had to buy it! Other books go into more exhausting detail (Knuth in particular), or cover a wider range (Knuth again!), or more modern ideas or languages. But Sedgewick is a great read, and I've been through it several times.

It covers all the basics (maths, searching, sorting, strings, graphs, and touches on FFTs and hardware and optimisation), and gives enough detail that you could go off and write some programs yourself. But more importantly, it explains them: how each algorithm works, what it's trying to achieve, how it behaves, and why. And it's because it explains the ideas so well that I'd recommend it. After every section I felt I'd learned something -- not because I had to, but for the sheer pleasure of understanding something new and interesting.

Other recommendations: Effective Java (a staggering amount of insight into the language), Thinking in Java (by someone who understands that language is more than just syntax), Deep C Secrets (again a pile of insight, interspersed with anecdotes and some rather off-the-wall diversions), Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls (problem-solving in bite-sized chunks -- a little dated but still interesting). Plus I've already mentioned Knuth. K&R is well done, though narrow in scope. I find Design Patterns useful, but more for clarifying things I've already seen than for learning new things. I've never actually read The Mythical Man-Month, but people I respect mention it, so I'm sure it's well worth reading too!

Of course, times being what they are, especially in this field, a lot of interesting stuff is on-line. Some hat should go without saying hereabouts include the latest Jargon File, some of Eric Raymond's books, and more online documentation and archives than anyone but Google can cope with.

Other interesting articles include The Programmer's Stone, a guide to writing Unmaintainable Code, The Ten Commandments for C Programmers (annotated edition), Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, What Colour are your Bits?, and Guy Steele's Growing a Language.