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Who's denying it? Not me, that's for sure. I was outed on slashdot a decade ago, and publicly 3 years ago. And you know what? Being outed was probably be best thing for me - I no longer have to worry about who knows and who doesn't. If anyone's heard the rumors and asks me, I tell them, then answer their questions. And now that brain scans have determined that various parts of the brain more resemble the target sex than the birth sex, even before starting hormone therapy, all the old lies about "choice", etc., can be put to rest permanently.

Choice quote:

In the 1990s, scientists began to compare these sexually dimorphic regions in the brains of transsexuals and the rest of humanity. Early work in this area required the examination of brains postmortem; recent studies use images of the living brain.

The results show that when individuals of Sex A—despite having the chromosomes, gonads and sex hormones of that sex—insist that they're really Sex B, the gender-affected parts of the brain typically more closely resemble what's usually seen with Sex B.

The article summarizes the situation quite well:

These neurobiological findings suggest that the APA hasn't gone far enough in changing its categories. The issue isn't that sometimes people believe they are of a different gender than they actually are. Remarkably, instead, it's that sometimes people are born with bodies whose gender is different from what they actually are.

Something to think about?

The concept that a person of some given behavior is more likely to be locked up if he/she is of some ethnic origin other than white European, say, a black person, in America is incorrect.

That's just incorrect. There is plenty of evidence, shown in study after study, that shows there is a disparity in sentencing between white people and various ethnic and racial groups.
http://www.sentencingproject.o...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... http://www.theguardian.com/law...
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live...
https://www.aclu.org/sites/def...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...
So maybe you want to start your reply again, armed with this new information?

Your position seems to be that unjust sentencing disparity caused by the race of the defendant is prevalent, that your numerous links contain statements that support that conclusion, and thus my position regarding preferential treatment is wrong. If, by posting all of those links, you mean to advance some idea beyond unjust racial sentencing disparity, you didn't say so.

But sentencing is only one element or the criminal process. Who is chosen to arrest is important as well, and that's what I just pointed out. The focus of law enforcement is the first element in the criminal justice process. I gave the example of leniency given to a peaceful crowd sitting on a porch selling crack. Sentencing, however unjust, has nothing to do with that.

It would be unrealistically unwieldy for me to rebutt all the contents of all those links. It wouldn't even make sense to read them. However, the studies I'm familiar with that express your conclusion (racial sentencing disparity in general) are flawed. Please pick one, or one concept from one, that you like, and I will address it.

The concept that a person of some given behavior is more likely to be locked up if he/she is of some ethnic origin other than white European, say, a black person, in America is incorrect.

That's just incorrect. There is plenty of evidence, shown in study after study, that shows there is a disparity in sentencing between white people and various ethnic and racial groups.

http://www.sentencingproject.o...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

http://www.theguardian.com/law...

https://www.law.upenn.edu/live...

https://www.aclu.org/sites/def...

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...

So maybe you want to start your reply again, armed with this new information?

97% vs 3% is not an equal debate.

Oh, what sort of consensus (hint: climate change propaganda) could we be thinking of here with this peculiar number? This may well be an "equal" debate, if the 97% wasn't actually 97%.

You look at the old primitive systems that were little more than a mannequin and a bad toupee and compare them to what we have now.

This app easily passes the Turing Test for CEOS http://projects.wsj.com/buzzwo...|34|37||1||1

If you add in an electric fan and a heater it's indistinguishable from your typical CEO or Politician.

"Ulrich Hackenberg, Audi’s chief engineer, and Wolfgang Hatz .. were put in charge of research and development at the Volkswagen group shortly after Martin Winterkorn became chief executive in January 2007."

That's essentially what Blackberry did with the Priv to make a "secure Android": https://www.reddit.com/r/black... (possibly related: early reviews are saying the Priv has performance issues, e.g. http://www.wsj.com/articles/bl... )

Male-to-female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus.
Kruijver FP1, Zhou JN, Pool CW, Hofman MA, Gooren LJ, Swaab DF.
Author information
Abstract

Transsexuals experience themselves as being of the opposite sex, despite having the biological characteristics of one sex. A crucial question resulting from a previous brain study in male-to-female transsexuals was whether the reported difference according to gender identity in the central part of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc) was based on a neuronal difference in the BSTc itself or just a reflection of a difference in vasoactive intestinal polypeptide innervation from the amygdala, which was used as a marker. Therefore, we determined in 42 subjects the number of somatostatin-expressing neurons in the BSTc in relation to sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and past or present hormonal status. Regardless of sexual orientation, men had almost twice as many somatostatin neurons as women (P The number of neurons in the BSTc of male-to-female transsexuals was similar to that of the females (P = 0.83). In contrast, the neuron number of a female-to-male transsexual was found to be in the male range. Hormone treatment or sex hormone level variations in adulthood did not seem to have influenced BSTc neuron numbers. The present findings of somatostatin neuronal sex differences in the BSTc and its sex reversal in the transsexual brain clearly support the paradigm that in transsexuals sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go into opposite directions and point to a neurobiological basis of gender identity disorder.

This is old news, with the research that led to this turn-of-the-century study being based on previous studies from the 1990s.

You can read a WSJ article that covers more ground in a simpler manner here. A more extensive treatment of sexual differentiation in the interconnections of the brains of transsexuals more closely resembling their target gender rather than their birth sex can be found here.

That transsexuals have brains that are more a match for their perceived gender than their biological sex is pretty much accepted as fact by most of the medical community. The only ones who still see this as controversial mostly have hidden agendas (religion, etc).

For decades, we've been teaching children that it's not a person's appearance that matters, it's their minds. Well, we now have proof that, in the case of transsexuals, this is especially true. Physical cause, not psychological delusion.

Think of it this way - if we were able to transplant your brain into a body of the opposite sex, you would still be the same person, and perceive that you now have the wrong body.

http://quotes.wsj.com/TWTR

volume of 8,107,527 today as I write this, meaning 8 million have exchanged hands just today.

That's what makes it public - what an IPO does - is that the shares are all theoretically publicly available. There's no extra secret stock going on here. It's not an extrapolated value because an angel investor dropped $10 million into a startup. It's the public stock price, which people are openly paying millions of times daily, multiplied by the number of public shares which people own and could sell if they wanted to.

If twitter really did dump almost 700M shares on the market it's unlikely they could sell them.

of course, it would likely drop. But they're not all owned by twitter. Twitter could issue more stock, or can pay its employees with stock, or whatever, and those would all negatively impact the share price. People who already owned shares would still own the same dollar value, but they might end up with more stock, like in a stock split.

But that's not the point, because people aren't doing that, and aren't willing to do that. Until people are literally willing to give away shares of twitter, twitter is actually worth a fuckton of money.

The best example of all is carrying "goodwill" as value. Remember when AOL wrote off $99 Billion ? Their "value" dropped, but absolutely nothing changed.

TSA agents continue to grope and oogle women through their clothing
http://www.globalresearch.ca/a...
http://time.com/3822487/tsa-se...

Bored people in the airline reservation system who pre-screen passenger names for security using, in part , known pictures of them continuer to amuse themselves by seating "twin strangers" right next to each other then laughing as the internet loses its shit at the crazy coincidence. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

On the other hand, the sea rise from the current warming trend will leave much of the coastline (where many people live) uninhabitable.

At about 3mm / year, we're looking at a foot per century, or a meter per millennium. That's easy to adapt to..

Umm, no. Your simple version of sea level rise is really good, as long as you don't take into account just how low much of the coastline is. That and tides. That and storms. That and the fact that rise and sometimes fall are not always the same everywhere - in some areas, land is rising as it rebounds from the last ice age. So new land is being created at the shoreline.

Even so the rise is not consistent per year. Hell, in 2010, the ocean levels dropped due to a combination of conditions:

http://www.scientificamerican....

Furthermore, taking current topographical maps and combining them with sea level rise data is bullshit anyway; most coasts are sedimentary, not rocky.

While I don't have the data on most coasts, that would be much worse than a rocky coast. As inevitable storms especially when combined with king tides, low barometric pressure and wind, can take that small yearly difference, and amplify the bejabbers out of it.

What's the odds of that happening? Ask the peeps in New Jersey and New York City about Hurricane Sandy.

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropoli...

Really, that's all ACORN was doing? Ken, you are incapable of seeing the reality that's in front of your face. How has the middle class done under the boot heel of Barack Obama and the ACA? http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

You actually linked to the WSJ as though a Rupert Murdock publication is credible? Christ, if you're to slam the NYT (and deservedly so) why is it that you don't apply the same credibility standards to your own bullshit? Oh, right, because you're a partisan moron. Well, they say GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out) and I want to commend you on proving that point.

By the way, I read the article - er, hit piece - and then went out to find out what happened. Yes, four people were indicted but how many were actually charged? Do you know? Did you bother to see if anyone was charged, tried or convicted?

No? Why am I not surprised.

And as to how the middle class is doing, the answer is terrible.

Let's see,The Bush tax cuts were extended, putting the burden of paying for this country on the Middle Class, labor has been repeatedly attacked (but you probably think what the conservatives have done in North Caroline to the education system is wonderful) and minimum wage, which should now be somewhere around $21.50 if we had kept parity to where it was when I was a kid, is still well below $10.00/hour.

Awesome job Republicans, you have fucked us all up the ass but on the good side, at least the federal government wasn't forced to pay for condoms, resulting in a drop in our deficit spending.

Really, that's all ACORN was doing? Ken, you are incapable of seeing the reality that's in front of your face. How has the middle class done under the boot heel of Barack Obama and the ACA? http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

> Sadly you don't even need to disagree. A statement of fact taken the wrong way counts as harassment.

That's pretty much the way anyone smarter than a potato expresses their bigotry. They cherry-pick facts to justify their attacks and lie by omission. Look at trump with his claims about mexicans. There absolutely are mexicans in the US illegally who are murderers, rapists and drug dealers - because no group of a million+ people is without criminals. But the fact is that illegal immigrants have less rates of crime than natives.

So your statement would be more accurately written:

"Sadly you don't even need to disagree. A lie of omission taken the intended way counts as harassment."

Those rating agencies have been given a special position by the government. For example, as this article mentions, the Fed will only accept assets as collateral if they carry high ratings from S&P, Moody's and Fitch. Even an SEC Commissioner admits that the credit rating agencies have acted like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other companies that dominate the market because of government actions.

In a free market, poor credit rating agencies would go away, because if they lose the trust of investors, there is no longer any reason for companies to use those credit rating agencies. The reason that the big three know they have nothing to worry about is because they know the SEC and the Fed will continue to grant them special status.

Giving away everything and adding 18 trillion to the gov't expenses in a decade. How is that going to benefit the country?

Not sure if troll or serious ocean dumpings been done already:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Any time gambling gets mixed with sports you have a mechanism where cheating can get you money. Whether it's the 1919 Chicago "Black Sox" or one of these point shavers gambling always has the potential to lead to sports cheating.

... Which makes you wonder why the US professional leagues have invested their own money in fantasy sports gambling sites.

Since Ben Carson isn't actually a legislator, I think you're supporting my point.

To be fair, we do have a very few contemporary counterexamples to my cynical comment:

The retirement of Rep. Rush Holt (D., N.J.), who for 16 years was the House’s resident astrophysicist, represents the latest in a string of departures by members trained in the sciences.

His exit leaves Reps. Bill Foster (D., Ill.) and Jerry McNerney (D., Calif.) as the only remaining members who hold doctorates in the natural and hard sciences out of the 535 senators and representatives in the 114th Congress, according to the Congressional Research Service.

One caveat: this information is taken from that liberal rag, The Wall Street Journal, which is probably just parroting "reality's well-known liberal bias".

Except that that was a lie.

Rice didn't use a public email server, and Powell by all accounts had a public mail account, and a State mail account that he used.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/...

Rules and Regulations dictated from on high by some collection of bureaucrats—whose greatest achievement was to convince even dumber people to cast "votes" for their election to office—are always going to be a fantasy.

I like to breathe. It's something I do every day. I'd like to breathe clean air, thank you. If you want to pollute, don't do it in my air

Volkswagen's problem was not that there wasn't technology available to clean the NOx out of the diesel emissions. Their problem was after deciding to license the clean diesel technology ("BlueTec") from Daimler, the CEO got pushed out and replaced by a new CEO who cancelled the deal and made a deliberate decision not to license BlueTec. This was because their engineers claimed that they could solve the problem using their own technology, turbocharged direct injection (TDI). http://www.wsj.com/articles/vw...

They were wrong.

So, the answer is that the technology was there, but Volkswagen had made a decision not to use it.

I really hope that this isn't an apology for Hillary.

If it's an apology, it would be for more than Hillary. Colin Powell also used a private e-mail for state-department business.

The worst part are all the relatively smart people who are excusing this, simply because she has a (D) after her name.

Colin Powell does not have a (D) after his name.

"A modern computer without Cobol and Fortran is like a chocolate cake without the ketchup and mustard"

As Scott Colvey, a writer for The Guardian wrote in 2009, ''Cobol is to business what the combustion engine is to motoring: it has been around so long, and installed in so many places, that doing something different would be impossibly costly.''

Eighty percent of the world's daily business transactions rely on a 59-year-old programming language called Cobol, short for "Common Business Oriented Language." Global commerce depends so much on Cobol that if its' 220 billion lines of installed code were mysteriously erased business would be catapulted back to the "B-Commerce" era.

As in "barter."

If you run hardware long enough, it breaks. If you run software long enough, it works. Cobol works. As the CIO of a Fortune 350 firm who requested anonymity because he didn't want to be associated with a story about Cobol, told me, "Cobol is the most extraordinarily efficient programming language ever written."

Cobol Is Dead. Long Live Cobol!

[Oct 2. 2014]

This is only true if you don't count the tax bills that the government forgave. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

So in terms of what we lost from GM alone, the bill is closer to $60 billion. To prop up their unions, instead of letting another company come in and run them better. What a deal.

Because the threat of the government coming in and demanding everyone install a government approved backdoor on their encrypted data is real.

Has happened, and been demanded, by democracies before...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/vw...

That article explains a lot.

So, VW hired a top engineer away from Daimler to revamp the VW line. He brought in clean-diesel technology ("BlueTec") licensed from Daimler, but the engineers at VW hated the idea of licensing technology from a rival, because they said they could do just as good with the turbocharged direct injection designs that they'd been working on for years. Nevertheless, VW went through with an engine design with the licensed BlueTec, made a prototype engine... and then the CEO got pushed out, the chief engineer got pushed out a month later, and the new CEO put the engineers who'd opposed licensing outside technology in charge of making a new VW clean-diesel engine and cancelled the license from Daimler. So, they had essentially doubled down on the bet that they could do just as good on efficiency and NOx emissions without licensing the Daimler BlueTec, And right as they did that, the new CEO announced ambitious targets for selling clean diesels in the US.

The story is beginning to make a bit more sense now.

Assume much? When you're an Engineering Company I think the title of Engineer goes a little higher up the chain than a peon developer.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/vw...

Absolutely!

As a (software) engineer and manager of (software and hardware) engineers, as well as someone who works for a supplier to Audi and who knows first hand how VW / Audi work, I'm getting a bit sick of all the "we engineers are white knights in shining armor / all managers and sales & marketing people are worse than the devil himself" crap that we're reading in these /. discussions. That is NOT how the world works. There are badly unethical engineers, including some in "purely engineering" positions (I could name some by name), there are ethical.managers, and not every decision is approved all the way up to the C level (and certainly not verified by the C level). [Important: I'm NOT saying that the C level people are not ultimately responsible, but I am saying they don't know 10% of what is going on on the factory/engineering floor and also that they cannot know it all.]

Consider also this: In an engineering company, almost every unethical manager started his career as a lowly engineer. I ask the both the naive as well as the hypocrites on this forum to explain how that engineer/manager switched ethics on the day of his/her promotion.

Assume much? When you're an Engineering Company I think the title of Engineer goes a little higher up the chain than a peon developer.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/vw...

Think a little bigger:

"The two men, Ulrich Hackenberg, Audi’s chief engineer, and Wolfgang Hatz, developer of Porsche’s Formula One and Le Mans racing engines, were among the engineers suspended in the investigation of the emissions cheating scandal"

I doubt these gents have been software engineers for a long time.

Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/vw...

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/02/as-google-becomes-alphabet-dont-be-evil-vanishes/

Right, especially since we just found out that Coca-Cola has been found to be paying the Nutionists Association to look the other way on sugary drinks.

Yea, he had you with the "don't bash" bit. Then he took the mask off.

You should have been waken up indeed.

What on Earth do corruption charges have to do with truth in advertising laws?

You should have been waken up indeed. Also Xiaomi is currently being promoted by Chinese leaders (e.g. Premier Li Keqiang) as a star entrepreneur to encourage more hi-tech start ups along with Alibaba.

Germany is starting a criminal investigation of the former CEO : http://www.wsj.com/articles/ge...

They might be protected in teh US, but german politician and other german firms are hating right now to be associated with cheaters. Germany is a big exporting country. And VW is making them look very very bad. I am just guessing and a bit making a CT here but I would say the german prosecutor WILL have carte blanche to investigate this thoroughly and show the world they will not stand for it. Thus protecting the rest of their export industry. I am betting within a few month indictments will start falling onto folks at VW and associated.

Speaking of loopholes and the WSJ paywall, you can actually get around it by Googling part of the URL.

This is the WSJ URL: http://www.wsj.com/articles/vo...
Google this: volkswagen-may-not-face-environmental-criminal-charges

Then just click the first link for WSJ. I assume they are blindly checking the referrer. I have tried this on various other news sites that paywall with success.

I briefly read the article though, nothing particularly useful.

None of which explain what exactly is the loophole. "There's a loophole there" - is all I could get. the WSJ article is paywalled. Any ideas? IANAL so, to me, it's a mystery.

Yeah, basically "the clause in the act indemnifies car manufacturers against criminal penalties". A non-paywalled linked with a bit more info: http://www.wsj.com/articles/vo...

"the clause in the act indemnifies car manufacturers against criminal penalties". A non-paywalled linked with a bit more info: http://www.wsj.com/articles/vo...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/fo...

The CEO may get $66 million dollars for leaving...

I think you might have missed the point... :)

http://america.aljazeera.com/a...

It was also ruled legal. So, what now?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07...
http://www.nationaljournal.com...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

The Supreme court will now have to rule, so we will see.

Was there a punishment when GM recently had a major oops?

Sept. 17, 2015: GM will pay $900 million to settle the U.S. Justice Department case, which charged GM with wire fraud and scheming to conceal a deadly safety defect from U.S. regulators, according to a criminal information filed by federal prosecutors ..... GM separately Thursday said it planned to take a $575 million charge in the third quarter for settling nearly 1,400 lawsuits arising from the defective switch.

An $18 billion dollar fine for ... misleading customers with respect to the true performance of their cars? Really? How many people lost their jobs over this? How many people were actually materially affected by it?

The fine BP faced for the Macondo (Deepwater Horizon) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was $18.7 billion -- pretty much identical. The environmental impacts of that incident and its ramifications in terms of real human suffering were far, far greater than this. Shouldn't that be part of the calculus in determining a penalty?

Either VW's fine is too large or BP's was too small, but the scale and significance of the offences involved are just not comparable.

Using the calculations most investors use, they earned 7 cents per share in each of 2015-Q1 and 2015-Q2. See:
http://quotes.wsj.com/TWTR/res...

By GAAP they lost a little bit. GAAP treats certain payments to stockholders as "expenses". Most analysts call it "profit" when investors get paid.

Speaking of reactionary, what hard data do you have that you and the home environment is better suited for teaching your child? Are you a teacher yourself and do you have the qualifications needed to give your child a well rounded education? What about social environment? How do you teach teamwork?

I do know that he's less likely to get arrested for something silly

http://www.wsj.com/articles/fo...

You figure that getting arrested for wearing too much perfume is a good idea?

Or a student in Wisconsin who was arrested for theft when a classmate shared a Chicken nugget with him? The sharing friend was on a food assistance program, so the kid he gave the nugget to was somehow stealing.

All of this business of giving children criminal records for things that teens do every day, that aren't crimes at all, is draconian and horrifying repression - and sounds more like North Korea than the USA.

And perhaps you might answer how well rounded an education a child can get from jail. Or even if it matters, because with the kooks who want all children tried as adults, they will have a very big problem getting good jobs.

With all that, to answer your question - I have no doubt at all that if I educated my own child at home he or she wouldn't be arrested for some dumbass crime like wearing too much perfume, and if a science experiment went wrong, I wouldn't charge them with a felony.

Here's an interesting statistic from the article:

Over the past 20 years, prompted by changing police tactics and a zero-tolerance attitude toward small crimes, authorities have made more than a quarter of a billion arrests, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates. Nearly one out of every three American adults are on file in the FBI’s master criminal database.

So in reality, you are asking a really fucking stupid question. In a "school" system designed to turn children in to criminals - I'm saying that the system can't provide any good education at all. I'm not capable of that poor a job.

The titles of both the submission and TFA promised to explain, why it matters, but contain nothing but evidence of the test taking place.

Ok, suppose Israel did, in fact, test a nuke in 1979 and remained nuclear-armed ever since — for over 35 years. Why does it matter today?

I could offer some suggestions of my own — quickly to be denounced as "troll" and "flamebait" by the dimmer part of the audience — but neither the write-up nor the article deliver any of theirs.

A sloppy piece of propaganda to help Obama close his disastrous deal with an evil regime.

We could spend less than 1% of our GDP on defense and still have a larger military than most countries out there.

Thanks for making my point.

Second, what infrastructure? Be specific.

Is "public" a specific enough modifier for you?

I was a truck driver for years, and if you're going to mention highways and bridges - don't bother. You're wrong.

I don't find your personal anecdotal experience very compelling. I find multiple reports from credible sources far more convincing.

We are responsible for quite a few things, military-wise...[blah blah blah]

I asked for accomplishments, not responsibilities. Care to try again?

Did you even read that link?

No. Why would I? All I did was accurately observe that you didn't add anything to the discussion.

I defined "threat" by the only measure it should be defined: based on the actual reality of the situation [...] Is that the reality? Yes.

Uh huh. Another prick on the internet who claims to know the true reality of the situation.

We face a much larger threat from people who can't use their brain properly.

I assume that would that include people who claim that North Korea "shot a missle over Japan", right?

Actually, Americans (assholes or not) do own the roads they drive on.

Not if they're living in the State of Indiana, which has leased its toll road to a foreign company. "Australia’s IFM Investors has agreed to a $5.725 billion deal to operate the 157-mile toll road that runs across Indiana between the Ohio Turnpike and Chicago Skyway for the next 66 years."

But these companies focus exclusively on drugs that can be sold at high prices to large populations

The FDA created incentives for Pharmas to pursue orphan drug indications and guess what? Pharmas pursued orphan drugs: http://blogs.wsj.com/pharmalot...

Specifically, there were 467 requests for orphan designation last year by the pharmaceutical industry, which represented a nearly 35% increase from 2013, and 293 drugs were granted orphan status by the FDA Office of Orphan Product Development. This amounted to a nearly 13% increase. Ultimately, 49 orphan drugs were approved by the agency, up 53% from 2013. A designation, by the way, means the FDA has decided a drug qualifies for orphan status.

The article:

Most of this anecdotal evidence ends up going nowhere, because there is no easy way for overworked physicians to post and aggregate such possibly random, but occasionally very significant observations. The possibilities here are enormous, because so many of these drugs are already generic, and they have already been approved by the appropriate authorities. Such “off label” uses of very inexpensive, repurposed drugs can be immediate, and lifesaving.

Be very careful what you wish for. For one thing, as you can read everywhere, the aggregate of anecdotes != data. It is very hard to separate the signal from the noise, especially when you are desperate to see a signal in the noise. Andy Groves is infamous for not realizing this and many other differences between the semiconductor and the pharma industries.

For another, if the open source effort succeeds in datamining a possible new indication for a generic drug the prime beneficiary will be (Surprise!) the most predatory pharma companies. Exclusive marketing rights don't start or end with a patent. In the US, you can get exclusive rights by running a trial that finds a new indication for a generic drug. So while the open source folks are begging on GoFundMe, some outfit like URL Pharma will have looked at the open source data, run a trial, gotten approval, and run up the price on the drug 1500% while preventing anyone else from selling it for at least three years. See: Colchicine

Big Pharma is both much more asinine and much more useful than folks give them credit for.

And the state Supreme Court just ruled that charter schools are Unconstitutional in Washington state.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/wa...

If one re-defines the cost of energy to include things like the impact on the environment, the relative cost of fossil versus other fuels changes

You are exactly right. The key to allowing the market to function optimally is to include these costs. The market will find the optimal solution once the costs are included.

Regarding kick-starting emerging technologies, there is possibly a place for that, but probably not for solar or wind. These are already becoming competitive without government incentives - http://www.wsj.com/articles/ne....