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global warming deniers.

The fact that you use the same language that is associated with the holocaust shows the irrationality of your side of the subject.

Really? First of all, I had no idea that Nazis were global warming deniers or accused others of it. Are you trying to Godwin the thread? Secondly, I use the phrase precisely. There are global warming skeptics (those who are truly undecided) and global warming deniers (those who are trying to spread FUD). There's a difference. You're the one who's being irrational by dragging in the holocause. Seriously, what are you thinking?

I see, so suggesting that a scientific theory might not be true is wrong?

Depends on one's motivation. I've suggested that the Schwarzschild solution to GR might be wrong, but I wasn't doing it in an attempt to spread FUD. Is it wrong to moderate someone as a troll when you suspect their only motivation is to spread misinformation?

You mean he actually proposed that a certain event might be occuring for different reasons than what you believe and cited his sources! Yes, that is quite unacceptable!

No, he proposed that several different events might be responsible, did enough research to cite sources, yet mysteriously didn't do enough research to know what was wrong with his sources.

Suggest that either it's too late to do anything about it, or that we can't do anything about it because others (e.g., China) won't do anything about it. The somewhat funny part is that these strategies actually work against each other, except for the main point - to sow confusion and doubt.

The more you try to shout down and silence people, the more it looks like you have something to hide. You'd be much better off just stating scientific fact linked from solid resources then subtly trying to compare people who don't believe in global warming to Nazi's.

Again with the Nazis? I'm not the one trying to Godwin the thread. How is that last point "shouting down" or "silencing people"? If I was trying to silence him, then why did I address every single last one of his points (see my response to him, where I also linked from solid resources)? (Seriously, where the heck are you dragging up this Nazi stuff from? Do you have a fetish or something?)

"Risk analysis" is a formal approach to what you are talking about.
To a lesser extent "Decision Science" and "Influence Diagram" are also attempts at tackling this type of problem.

Google scholar will turn up many papers in this area and I know that my school (University of Virginia in the Systems and Information Engineering department) has some active research in "Cyber Security" and related security planning.
http://www.sys.virginia.edu/risk/

The registration system, akin to "rubber stamping", was tried in the past and found to be a massive failure. http://etext.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH40/walter4 0.html Section IV on down describes the transition from the original patent system to the registration system. If you think the patent suits now are bad, imagine what it would be like with no oversight at all.

Buried fly wheels can be in vacuum canisters floating on magnetic bearings. Absolutely no servicing.

This reminds me, there was an earlier /. where people were talking about magnets decaying. And they'd have to: thermodynamics and all that. But I got to wondering how long it would actually take, and some googling later... http://howthingswork.virginia.edu/page1.php?QNum=1 235

"However, good permanent magnets demagnetize so slowly that the changes are completely undetectable. You might have to wait a billion years to detect any significant weakening in the magnetic field around such a magnet."

But the page has no references? Anyone have some better / more descriptive links? Or is this one of those "so obvious to the specialists that they overlooked the rest of us not knowing" things? :)

However, how many parents argue that we shouldn't be teaching Newton's theory of Gravity unless we also teach Einstein's? (Or, how many parents argue that we shouldn't be teaching the Schwarzschild metric without teaching one of the, um, Hocking metrics?)

I, for one, will just wait for Willy Wonka to finish the Phase III testing of his fizzy lifting drinks

He is arguing that there is no such (secure) algorithm which always answers (correctly) in every case (100% accuracy). His argument is perfectly fine: it's a routine and trivial application of Cantor's diagonalization method.

If you really disagree, I challenge you to produce such an algorithm forthwith.

Your changing the specification of the problem is analogous to removing the "not" in "This sentence is not true." and then claiming: Wow, no contradiction!

That would be an utter disaster. It didn't even work in Athens. Read your history. And I would suggest Democracy in America as well.

Your suggestion would be like asking for patches to the linux kernel from everybody in the world, and them implimenting at least one patch from everybody that submitted one.

Thirty to 40 years ago, there was a watchmaker at every jewelry store. That's not the case today.

Maybe this will help explain why.

• Many CS papers make motivational statements like, "The typical sensor network has...". That's complete BS. The authors have no accurate way of knowing what a "typical" sensor network is like. Because they've never seen a study that's sampled the world's sensor networks. They write papers that quietly confuse what's *really* typical with what the authors imagine would be typical. So there are two problems: (a) academic dishonesty in their writing, and (b) not facing up to the fact that they're guessing about the relevance of their paper, rather than actually having a well-grounded sense of relevance.

• A nearly complete lack of statistical sensibility for simulations and performance characterizations. Hey computer science researchers: how do you know how many repetitions of a simulation to run before you draw your conclusions? Why don't you draw error bars around any numbers in your graphs that represent averaging over multiple repetitions? If you don't have good answers to these questions, then I think it's quite likely that your conclusions are neither reproducible nor sound.

• Leaps of logic regarding models. I can't count (maybe because I'm rather dull ;- ) the number of ad hoc routing papers I've read that assume a circular-coverage radio model, and yet the papers make no mention of the fact that such a model is known to generally have have no connection to reality http://www.cs.virginia.edu/papers/p125-zhou.pdf. And yet the NSF keeps on funding this crap and not holding the researchers' feet to the fire. If there's peer review before these papers get into journals, it's an indication that even the reviewers don't care about or realize that the research described in such papers has no demonstrated connection to the real world. It's almost as though (gasp) computer science researchers have so much fun dreaming up protocols and programming simulations that they can't be bothered with the pesky work of checking their assumptions or validating their results.

"Let's say 70% of [research] sees the light of day . . . that's a good payback."

Quoted in a Wall Street Journal article.

And here is where you are wrong.

The idea that they need to know a "usefull" language within the first 2 years in university is a dreadfull misconception. They need to learn to think right and the language is nothing but a tool to help doing so. Dijkstra programming truths http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/e wd498.html have some good thoughts on the subject. Once a person can think right there comes a point where he/she can start using a "usefull language" in 15 minutes after reading the syntax description.

Further to this, both Ruby and Python are strictly object oriented and with built in memory management. You cannot really use them to teach students low level memory handling, pointers, internals of a hash or the like. These simply get lost in translation, though not as fully as with Java using which for teaching should be a criminal offence. The overall result is that you close whole areas of CS to students for no good reason and frankly I stop wandering why do we have biologists writing filesystems and mathematicians writing device drivers.

Go here and pull the illiteracy census results for 1840. link

Talk about cherry picking!

Connecticut apparently did have about 0-1% illiteracy but Delaware (chosen out of laziness as the next on the list) had 15% illiteracy.

Rich people have always been able to get educated, the thing about public education is that it is for everyone.

"The white paper has been yanked from Symantec's Web site"

Blackberry security overview

ExtremeTech has a plethora of application and synthetic benchmarks on QuadFX, including gaming and media-encoding tests."

Bleh. The benchmarks I'd really like to see are the ones geared towards scientific computing, like STREAMS and SPEC . Nowadays the Intel chips seem to score better on those "gaming" and "media-encoding" benchmarks, but that doesn't neccessarily mean that Intel FPUs are better for general scientic computing. (in fact, experience so far shows the opposite)

Btw, since you seem to be doubting that statement, I'll provide a nice link to my thesis for my Master's in Astrophysics (from Georgia State) as well as a link to my project for my Master's in Computer Science. Naturally, I also have a BS in Physics (from Georgia Tech), and I'm working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science. If you like, you can also read my dissertation proposal for the dissertation I'm currently working on.

This is not meant to impress you - just to point out that your skepticism is ill-founded.

Btw, since you seem to be doubting that statement, I'll provide a nice link to my thesis for my Master's in Astrophysics (from Georgia State) as well as a link to my project for my Master's in Computer Science. Naturally, I also have a BS in Physics (from Georgia Tech), and I'm working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science. If you like, you can also read my dissertation proposal for the dissertation I'm currently working on.

This is not meant to impress you - just to point out that your skepticism is ill-founded.

Btw, since you seem to be doubting that statement, I'll provide a nice link to my thesis for my Master's in Astrophysics (from Georgia State) as well as a link to my project for my Master's in Computer Science. Naturally, I also have a BS in Physics (from Georgia Tech), and I'm working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science. If you like, you can also read my dissertation proposal for the dissertation I'm currently working on.

This is not meant to impress you - just to point out that your skepticism is ill-founded.

No, causuality is not an axiom. There are solutions of General Relativity that certainly do remove causuality - any closed time loop allows information to be generated from nothing, and effects without causes.

Just because you can remove an axiom it doesn't mean the axiom wasn't there. That was my whole point about Euclidean geometry vs. non-Euclidean geometry. Also, even in the "solutions" that _violate_ causality in General Relativity (which are not actually "solutions" in the strictest sense as they have self inconsistencies), they still _have_ causality. This was my point about removing only part of the axiom of causality, namely the "causality ordering principle" which is really more of a principle than part of the axiom of causality in the first place. (If pressed, I would state the "axiom of causality" as "all (spacetime) events have (natural) causes". The word "spacetime" is thrown in to get around the "first event" which would have been on the cusp of spacetime, if such an event exists. An alternate weaker axiom might be "most events have (natural) causes".) Also, of course, I should point out my own bias here. My Master's thesis involved "solutions" of GR that removed these violations.

We have agreed standards, such as statistical limits. Nothing is final, and nothing is certain. We may call what we use for such standards 'axioms', but that does not imply any kind of 'faith', just an agreed way of proceeding.

Hrmm. How familiar are you with axiomatic set theory? One of the axioms of set theory is (essentially) that 1+1=2. Also, are you familiar with Gödel's incompleteness theorem? Now, I'll agree that science's "axioms" are not as precise as axiomatic set theory, but they must necessarily be there. You cannot create any logical system without axioms. Now, if you want to define science as "skepticism" and argue à la Kant that we really can't know anything, well then that's not really much of a logical system and I guess its only axiom is that we can't really know anything. I imagine you could be even more agnostic than that and do away with even that axiom, but then you're not left with anything useful.

* Gemstone outlined the methods to be used on demonstrators at the Republican National Convention in Miami. These demonstrators were to be captured, drugged and held hostage in Mexico. Those people carrying out the plan included professional killers who had accounted for maybe twenty-two deaths between them so far. They came from the ranks of organized crime and could be trusted to do the job. Gordon Liddy presented this plan to the chief law enforcement officer of the United States [Attorney General John Mitchell.
Link

I've taken several courses in thermodynamics and several courses in statistical mechanics. After all, I also have a degree in astrophysics, and I can honestly tell you that this isn't rocket science, either. ;) Simply put, I understand statistical variance quite well. However, deterministic processes are supposed to be deterministic. Sure, it's possible that a bit in a computer will randomly flip (hence the reference to neutrinos, which are usually the humorously blamed party), but if bits flipped that often, then I'd NEVER be able to get the same results in my program that requires more than a billion synaptic events. (Have I not mentioned this program before?)

Let me put it to you this way: if I drop an egg a million times, will you argue that statistics mandates that there's no way the egg will fall every time?

I'm in my second year of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. One of my current CS classes is Software Development, and our final project is something just along these lines. Until now we've developed smaller programs under the guidance of our professor, like a simple photoeditor (Rhocasa, based off Picasa) and coded our own filters and the GUI. Our final project is an open-ended design in teams of 2-4, developed over the course of 5 weeks. We are using CVS and though the class has used Java primarily, we can choose any other language for development, provided we have a reason to deviate from Java (my partner and I are developing a Google gadget in C#, for instance).

I feel a project like this should absolutely be a part of a CS curriculum. It teaches critical team development skills, how to take advantage of modularity, and really get to delve into something that interests your team personally. My professor has done a stunning job of making our design problem sets interesting and challenging -- I don't feel like it's been the typical software class where the assignments are mundane, and you don't feel as if you've accomplished much upon completion of the work. The course site can be seen at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/cs205.

Any professor who doesn't believe at least one course of a CS curriculum should include a design project like this from start to finish (not necessarily open-ended as mine) is putting their students at a big disadvantage, in my opinion.

IIRC, at least 2/3 of what you write should be your own conclusions, described in your own words, with the bulk of the rest expected to be comprise conclusions reached by others, but described in your own words. Direct quotations should not make up more than a very small part of any academic paper.

If you're writing a summary article (e.g., on the current state of data mining), then as little as 10% (or even less) could be your own conclusions. However, if you're writing about your own research, then you definitely want most of it to be your own conclusions. (The first paragraph of what you wrote, however, is spot on.)

IIRC, at least 2/3 of what you write should be your own conclusions, described in your own words, with the bulk of the rest expected to be comprise conclusions reached by others, but described in your own words. Direct quotations should not make up more than a very small part of any academic paper.

If you're writing a summary article (e.g., on the current state of data mining), then as little as 10% (or even less) could be your own conclusions. However, if you're writing about your own research, then you definitely want most of it to be your own conclusions. (The first paragraph of what you wrote, however, is spot on.)

Evidently, I look a lot like Tom Cruise. Well, actually, the first hit was Matt Stone, but with a much less flattering picture. Tom Cruise was 4th or 5th on the list, after Luke Wilson. Here was the picture I submitted. Naturally, I'm being sarcastic when I say it's flawless.

I've heard this logic before, and it sounds good. However, I can also cite cases where bigger is worse, and not just for a particularly bad design decision. Case in point, I was in an accident a little over a year ago involving a tractor trailer and my 1995 Honda Civic, traveling 70 mph down I-85 in Georgia. The tractor trailer clipped my back wheel, sending me out of control and hit me again on the driver's side door. My wife (in the passenger seat) and I managed to get out of our car without a scratch. Now, I'm not going to tell you that the semi-truck was worse off (mainly because it wasn't), but imagine what would have happened if we had been driving a tractor trailer. Most likely, it would have been a serious pile-up.

Now (as with your examples) this is just speculation and case-by-case analysis. In order to really understand, you have to look at the studies done. Studies find that people driving bigger vehicles are no more (or less) likely to be injured/killed than those in smaller cars. They are, however, more likely to kill others. Perhaps it's because they drive more recklessly (see "Why Things Bite Back"), or maybe it's just that those vehicles are designed worse. We can't really know. All we know is what the data tells us.

You'd be mistaken. See the slide on Texture Mapping.

Perspective divide is performed before texture sampling. This is necessary to get proper texture step sizes, for correct sampling of the texture onto the pixel.

Fractional pixel locations are also used in antialiasing.

Right, stealing was made illegal by the government. Thou shall not...

You don't think the ancient Hebrews had government? Yes, it was a theocracy but so what?

I'm also curious why you used "steal" rather than "commit adultery" or "have no other gods before me".

Laws are codifications of things people want.

Yes, in a monarchy the people are the kings and their families, not the rest of the populace.

Prohibition was driven by people and codified.

That's what the history books say (at least the one I read about the period), but my grandma was there, live and in person. She said the women jawboned it into law while the men were all in Europe fighting the Kaiser. "People" think copyrights should last two or three lifetimes- a few thousand media moguls and their bought and paid for congress, as opposed to the 300000000 other Americans.

I'm sure the British populace would, if put to a vote, repeal their stupid TV tax.

"The people" as in "all of us" as opposed to "a few of us" went away long before I was born, if it ever in fact existed.

A FIRST-CLASS REVOLT AGAINST THE accepted American order was certainly taking place during those early years of the Post-war Decade, but it was one with which Nikolai Lenin had nothing whatever to do. The shock troops of the rebellion were not alien agitators, but the sons and daughters of well-to-do American families, who knew little about Bolshevism and cared distinctly less, and their defiance was expressed not in obscure radical publications or in soap-box speeches, but right across the family breakfast table into the horrified ears of conservative fathers and mothers. Men and women were still shivering at the Red Menace when they awoke to the no less alarming Problem of the Younger Generation, and realized that if the constitution were not in danger, the moral code of the country certainly was.

http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal?_nfpb =true&_pageLabel=RecordDetails&ERICExtSearch_Searc hValue_0=EJ370876&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_ accno&objectId=0900000b80060cbb

http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/research/povertyre search.html#crucial

http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/madon/so cialpsychology280/extrareadings/Genes.htm

      http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Turk heimer%20psychological%20science.pdf

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.
-- Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782.

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;... whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.
-- Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789.

Interestingly, because fashion designs in Second Life fall within the bounds of copyright, they are more protected than fashion designs in real life. Because real life designs are considered a "useful article," they fall under patent law rather than copyright law. Since patent law moves so slowly, designs wouldn't be protected under patents until after they're no longer worth protecting. Because computer code is not held to be a "useful article" (I have no idea why clothes are and software isn't... *shrug*) fashion designers who design virtual clothes can copyright their designs and sue infringers. I'd be kind of curious to find out what would happen if a real life designer started creating copies of their own work in Second Life and then attacking other real life copiers for making derivative works from their virtual copyright. The outcome would likely be the court deciding that the Second Life designs were similar to paper designs, making no difference to the current regulatory scheme. It's an interesting question nonetheless. (If you're interested in the topic, there's a paper on the topic here: http://www.law.virginia.edu/pdf/faculty/sprigman_p iracy.pdf)

Getting a BA in Physics and Mathematics is relatively easy. You only need 3 300 level physics classes and 6 300 level math classes.
http://www.phys.virginia.edu/Education/Programs/Ma jorBrochure/
http://records.ureg.virginia.edu/preview_program.p hp?catoid=7&poid=788

Getting a BA in Physics and Mathematics is relatively easy. You only need 3 300 level physics classes and 6 300 level math classes.
http://www.phys.virginia.edu/Education/Programs/Ma jorBrochure/
http://records.ureg.virginia.edu/preview_program.p hp?catoid=7&poid=788

Yes, we test all unique combinations (Which can be measured via a MCDC structual coverage analysis). It was an example of one test input/condition out of the set. Actually, the conditions that drive the expected result are a little more complicated than provided.

The point is, however, that the actual implementation code was not written first. The test was written first, which essentially builds the implementation API from the perspective of the tester, who hopefully is driving a test via a requirement of some kind. One of the effects of this is clean, cohesive API's which makes for a nice architecture. Anyone who has done time in the test realm usually becomes more consciousness of the API for modules and ends up being a better software architect.

So yes, the test was not a great test as illustrated, but perhaps you missed the point? Or just busting my balls, which is fine too! :)

I have written some small programs, and a stack of humanities papers (mostly in history and political science), and in my experience the two are analogous in nature. A program takes input, performs logical operations on it, and spits out output; an essay (roughly speaking) takes facts as input, performs logical operations on it (eg x was doing y because of z; since z is no longer a factor, y will no longer be done by x), and spits out a conclusion which - if the paper is a good one - can be treated as a new fact. A humanities paper should, above all, clearly set out its scope, initial assumptions and definitions; if this is done, then it is perfectly possible to have an airtight case. The assumptions themselves are, of course, open to debate, and a paper with a too-limited or too-broad scope will be either hopelessly academic or - in your words - wishy-washy. Definitions can be counterintuative to the uninitiated, but no matter what they say, it is sufficient that they are clear (eg you can define the word 'or' to mean 'and' & define 'and' to mean 'or', then write: "I want meat or potatoes and rice or beans").

Try reading this paper (Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone") to see what I mean: some parts of it are debatable, but it cannot be said to be 'wishy-washy': it makes its argument; it is up to you to accept the argument or not. If you have more time on your hands, read Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan": it begins with the simple assumption that humans want seek out pleasure and avoid pain; from that, Hobbes builds an entire theory of government. Audatious, questionable, but also exciting and stimulating - and, in parts, applicable to the actual running of government.

mmm well I got to admit I don't find it "really..very easy" to read Chaucer and some of the concepts require a bit of reading to comprehend as far as I understand from what my teachers said - check out "gentillesse" as a concept in The Franklin's Tale - it really is culturally loaded and watching a few Hollywood films isn't going to explain it well:

1515: And in his herte hadde greet compassioun
1516: Of hire and of hire lamentacioun,
1517: And of arveragus, the worthy knyght,
1518: That bad hire holden al that she had hight,
1519: So looth hym was his wyf sholde breke hir trouthe
1520: And in his herte he caughte of this greet routhe,
1521: Considerynge the beste on every syde,
1522: That fro his lust yet were hym levere abyde
1523: Than doon so heigh a cherlyssh wrecchednesse
1524: Agayns franchise and all gentillesse;
1525: For which in fewe wordes seyde he thus --
1526: madame, seyth to youre lord arveragus,
1527: That sith I se his grete gentillesse
1528: To yow, and eek I se wel youre distresse,
1529: That him were levere han shame (and that were routhe)
1530: Than ye to me sholde breke thus youre trouthe,
1531: I have wel levere evere to suffre wo
1532: Than I departe the love bitwix yow two.

I am not vision impared, but I have also run across several other sites with thousands of free online classic stories. They were most likely not set up specifically for vision impared people. These are the websites that I have run across:

• Project Gutenberg
• Arthurs Classic Novels
• University of Virginia Library's Etext Center
• Baen Free Library
• Planet PDF Free PDF eBooks Archive

Yeah, I could have posted a link to the full thing, but the BASIC comment was the relevant part.

Hey man, but the thing is Microsoft didn't come up with anything new. Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Japanese-English Dictionary Server has that trick down for Japanese...am pretty darn sure someone out there has it down for English :) Just type in a Japanese verb in the "Search for Verbs in the Dictionary" link, and then choose the [V] on the word you want conjugated. There are also some other nifty choices, is Microsoft going to patent those next? :) Here is the University of Virginia mirror: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/wwwjdic/ To be honest with you, there are literally dozens of extraordinarily useful and free Japanese language resources on the internet (in English, even).

I would disagree that conjugation is completely unnecessary for language, because obviously so many people have learned how to do it effortlessly in so many languages... But I love your example, If conjugation be necessary, then this sentence are completely not understanding to anyone. It fun being for trying to speaking like that making yourself sound moron being :) I shall returning!! Sleep into to going hopeful becoming great day yourself towards become please! :)

It 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.

It is UCLA. I'm pretty sure the field doesn't matter, but it was math (not even an engineering postdoc). According to an outdated Salary average* for instructional faculty. I think "Instructional Faculty" from the survey are different than tenure track positions, which would only make more (but they might be the same, I didnt read thier fine print). In case you do not want to click the link, in 2001 the average UCLA prof made 93k.

Of note, UCLA is not in the midwest. RA positions across the nation (at least in the 1999 era) all paid somewhere between 11k to 15k. Postdoc salaries are more geographically weighted (because there were Los Angeles companies in 2001 paying engineering PhD's 90k to start, something you won't find in Lincoln Nebraska).

*Link (found from a quick google search): 2001 salary survey

The South had huge populations, but incredibly small populations of eligible voters (White Land owning men).

Eligible voters were whoever each state said they were. Apportionment of representatives (and thus electors) was based not on voters but on the free population plus 3/5 of the slave population. In 1790, the greatest proportion of slaves was 43%, in South Carolina, before the 2/5 discount. In total, slaves accounted for 12% of the population for purposes of apportionment.

Now, let's look at states that really did have small populations. In 1790 there were 15 states. The smallest third (Delaware, Rhode Island, Kentucky, Georgia, and Vermont) accounted for 9% of the population and 21 of 135 electors. Delaware, Kentucky, and Georgia had significant slave populations, but Delaware had the minimum three electors anyway. I think Kentucky's fourth elector was probably deserved on the basis of free population alone, but I'll throw it out along with Georgia's. That leaves 19/135, or 14%--a 48% bonus.

Don't take my word for it; check the census data for yourself.

Ironically, the electoral college is one of the last vestiges of Slavery with any weight in the Constitutions.

It's no more a vestige of slavery than the bicameral legislature; the apportionment of electors was based on the apportionment of representatives. If the EC is a vestige of anything, it's federalism... like the bicameral legislature.

In fact, Jefferson wouldn't have gotten elected if not for the Electoral College.

Practically meaningless, since most states appointed electors back then.

My largest concern for the Electoral college is the sense of "my vote doesn't count", and the fact that we've devolved into two parties and that's it.

Plurality voting inherently encourages a two-party system; if anything, the EC should increase support for third parties in 'safe' states.

Low-population Tennessee and Kentucky were admitted in the 1790s.

As of the first census (1800) after their admission:

Kentucky: 220955
Tennessee: 105602
(both higher than Deleware, at 64273)

A market economy where the government's only function is to protect the individual rights of its citizen and nothing else is the best form of governance. This is the only way to bring about the greatest innovations, in the shortest time. This brings about fastest progress and hence benefits all the members of such a society the most.

In other words, Anarcho-Capitalism. If it's such a great idea, why not just shout it out in the first place? Possibly because anarcho-capitalism has already been refuted?

A democracy neither ensures that citizen are given only individual rights, nor that they are ensured. Also democracies allow inferior candidates to become presidents. And even worse, allows them to make spurious laws, and even more spurious laws setting back Amreican and human progress by many years.

Ironically, I'm 99.9% certain that you wrote this statement from a democratically governed state, and 95% sure that it's the United States. In the links you cherry-picked, you apparently you choose to willfully ignore the Constitutional amendments (Bill of Rights, 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, and the 19th Amendments) that expanded the rights of United States residents (not just citizens) to levels unprecidented in human history. Without child labor laws, you may not have had the opportunity to pick up the education and time to write your arguments. Without the laws enacted after the great depression

You are absolutely right that democracy does sometime depress individual rights and choices, nor does it alway ensure indvidiual rights, and it allows people to make bad laws -- because it all involved human people making decisions, and humans will make mistakes. Yet Anarcho capitalism gives people even *more* freedom to make mistakes, and relies even more heavily on individual choices on governance. Your implicitly assume that under Anarcho-Capitalism everyone will magically make the correct decisions, yet you undercut that very argument by showing how dumb people can be.

Wrong. In a market economy there can never be a monopoly "by definition". There can only be very very good competitors who have deservedly got a very high proportion of market

Okay, time for a mirror argument: "Wrong. In an unfettered market economy, monopolies inevitably occur. Furthermore, since being mean, unethical, and a cheater makes a market entity more efficient, there can only be mean, unethical competitors who have lied, cheated and stolen to undiservedly get and maintain a very high proportion of the market."

Do you think if Microsoft prices its Windows software at 2000$, that any customer would still not get Ubuntu on their machines?

Uh, yes. Have you been to your local Fry's/Best Buy/Circuit City lately? Microsoft office currently retails for ~$350.00, and Windows XP Professional costs ~$200.00. That's no $2000, but $500.00 is significantly more than what Ubuntu's retail price is (free). I have yet to see a mass migration to Ubuntu, so I fail to see where you are making a significant argument.

Furthermore, I reject your implicit assumption that all markets behave like the software market (low initial resources and capital required). There are numerous markets (water, electricity) that lend themselves to natural monopolies. ...Or should we rather give the sprinters (even if there is only one) to run full steam ahead towards the ribbon, and let other people who are cannot compete in sprinting with Olympic sprinters, to do whatever they can do best.

Absolutely. Which is why we don't have a rule to allow the person who wins the shot-put event to get a head-start in the 100-meter dash. Through bundling and other market advantages monopolies gain a similar unfair advantage that ultimately stymies comp

Those devices have been around for years. http://phun.physics.virginia.edu/demos/nail_bed.ht ml

It's important to note that the SBC was basically taken over a number of years back (see section V: "Issues and Controversies"). It used to be more moderate, but some folks in high places (who incidentally have lots of money) tipped the right scales to make it a hard-line fundamentalist group.

The same tactics are now being used against Methodists and the United Church of Christ. Once I listened to the episode linked there, a lot of things became clear to me with regard to American politics and the Church.

Downloaders know what the perfect price for music is. It's free. The perfect price for film is also free. Money will be made through product placement and advertising.

I'm not so sure about that. If the user experience of watching a film is negatively affected by product placement and advertising, I may not even want to watch it. Free or not, if customers don't watch it, corporate sponsorship of the film won't provide the sponsors sufficient return on investment. A film made with eggregious product placement is not the same script filmed without product placements. For example, the magic of the second and third Matrix films was destroyed for me because of the annoying Cadillac, Ducati, and Samsung product placements.

Admittedly, I am probably more averse to over the top product placement than most moviegoers. However, if movies become essentially funded by brand corporations, their quality is bound to suffer. I suspect that there are quite a few consumers who are willing to spend money in order to avoid advertising. We already see this online, where companies offering services via the Web frequently have tiered pricing. Free with advertising or paid with no advertising? Take your pick.

If a content provider is able to deliver something that satisfies the consumer in a way that the free version does not, there is certainly a place for paid content. I can download the contents of The Wind in the Willows in PDF form, but I prefer to read books in the traditional dead tree format, so I'll probably buy it either at Amazon or at my local bookstore. Similarly, I can obtain the song "Still in Hollywood" by Concrete Blonde via a P2P network for free, but I'm not interested in opening up my computer to potential security problems, I don't like getting content from unreliable sources, and I know that even in the screwed-up RIAA-controlled world we live in, at least when I pay iTunes, the Concrete Blonde artists are at least getting something, however small the amount. iTunes also provides recommendations, staff picks, and other tools that provide value over a free service.

It seems to me that in the future there will be a wide variety of methods to access professional content, be it music, movies, games, or other forms of electronic entertainment. The RIAA/MPAA folks are used to having a stranglehold on distribution, but they're going to have to get used to a wide variety of forms of distribution, in order to accomodate a consumer market that is much less concentrated than it used to be. Some folks will still want to listen for free to the latest bubblegum pop via terrestrial radio. Some people will want high-bitrate downloads from an online music service, and will pay to get higher quality. Other consumers will put up with the vagaries of P2P networks and will get their music and movies that way. Your idea for advertiser-supported movies will likely catch on as well, and we may start to see differential pricing at the movie theater. Want to watch the latest Toyota-sponsored flick? Go to screen 1. Want to take in the latest Woody Allen movie? Screen 2 is for you.

My beef is not with scientists who publish papers in support of the theory that the current warming trend is anthropogenic, but rather the radical environmentalists who parrot this without understanding the science, and intentionally simplify the issue to win this argument because it coincides with their worldview. I think the problem with the public discourse on global warming, if it can even be called that, is that people look at it as a political battle to be won, rather than a scientific problem to be solved.

You know wrong. From here

Galileo worked on his new book, which he intended to call "Dialogue on the Tides", from 1624 to 1630. He was warned as he completed the work that that title seemed to imply he really held the view that the earth was moving, so he changed the title to Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World-Ptolemaic and Copernican. As usual, Galileo spared no-one in the book. He mocked the pope himself, by putting Urban's suggestion (see above) in the mouth of Simplicio, then dismissing it contemptuously (Reston, page 195).

The book was published in March 1632 in Florence. In August, an order came from the Inquisition in Rome to stop publication, and Galileo was ordered to stand trial. Apparently, someone-probably Scheiner, now living in Rome-had shown the pope the unsigned memo from the 1616 meeting, forbidding Galileo even to describe the Copernican system. Galileo was not too upset at the thought of a trial, because he held a trump card-the affidavit from Bellarmine. At the trial, Galileo said he had no memory of being forbidden to teach, and no signed document could be found to support the unsigned memo.

The trial did not address the scientific merits of the case, it was about whether or not Galileo had disobeyed an official order. It was suggested that he admit to some wrongdoing, and he would get off lightly. He agreed to tone down the Dialogue, pleading that he had been carried away by his own arguments. He was condemned to indefinite imprisonment, and, after some negotiation, was confined to his villa until his death in 1642. During this period, he wrote Two New Sciences, a book on the strength of materials and on the science of motion.