of subjecting myself to air travel (and TSA "probes") to reevaluate my decision to fly as infrequently as possible. Reading that validated my increased drive-radius and train utilization defaults.
The sad thing is that most likely this person believes the rubbish he emanates in his bureaucracy-vetted statements. The comments on the blog below the entry call out the doublespeak point by point in random order.
BEGIN EXCERPT
"If the TSO throws your liquids in the trash, they don't find you a threat."
If they didn't find (you) a threat, then WHY THROW THE FREAKIN' LIQUIDS IN THE TRASH?!?!?
at age 25. Seriously, this is not a concern of the average person, and those who do have it as a concern are free to take their business to other brokers who are more reserved.
If they want this to work, they'd better integrate the whole charging circuit into the CPU or people (me included) will cut their punk-ass enable line on the circuit board.
In fact, as I was going through college in the late '90s, my college was having a hard time rebuffing increasing numbers of "concerned parents" who were attempting to parent remotely through the college faculty and staff.
It's what happens to parents in a country where it's acceptable to say, break into fisticuffs over your kid's [sports, academics, whatev]
And we wonder why there are so many 30+ year old people living with non-dependent parents. They never have a chance to grow up and consequently don't want to.
...for anti-anti-competitive practices. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, "We are troubled by evidence of direct resistance to Microsoft corporate directives."
In other news, Microsoft is merging with the RIAA and MPAA to reform the Dutch East India Company. Pirates beware!
Add number of instance licenses sold to maximum population estimates of site license holders to the highest out-of-thin-air web or internally reported estimate of unlicensed instances add the results of rolling some chicken bones
Repeat until your number sounds psychologically significant.
But all that's ok. McDonalds still has them beat in the meaningless BS accounting department. They gave up at "Billions and Billions Served" though you can occasionally find one with a number in front of the billions. All things considered, i'd rather have the big mac than windows.
I grew up in DC. DC is one of the greenest (parkwise) cities on the country. The Mall was set aside by the federal government as a national recreation and assembly area. Meaning there is no assumption of local service. Beach towns, on the other hand are supposedly the opposite. Also, in DC you have choices. There are plenty of other parks. Go exploring and I'm sure you'll find a park that suits your preferred balance of activities and population. Personal recommendations include:
National Parks: Rock Creek Park, C&O Canal Towpath, including Fletcher's Boathouse Glover Archibold Park
City Parks: Anacostia River Park Battery Kimble Park, Most schools have city parks next to them: the park between Wilson High school and its neighboring middle school is a good example.
Beach towns in NJ (and other high-density states) thought up tagged beach access to try to keep the beach an enjoyable experience for those living in the town. Or at least to offset the impact of the influx of out-of-town beach-goers has on infrastructure and aesthetic. Keep in mind that the closest of these beaches are less than 20 miles from NYC and you can deduce that something had to be done in order for locals to be able to get a square inch of beach.
I don't know about OC, NJ, but a lot of towns close their beaches at night, mostly because of the town liability insurance impact. Here's a great way to double-whammy beachgoers at night: if you paid for your tag and are wearing it at night, the town knows exactly when and where to send the officer to ticket you. if you either didn't pay or paid and left it behind because you knew they'd track you, then you might get caught by the random sweeps and get two tickets.
Coupled with safety studies moving with the alacrity and paranoia of government. The impertinent child part of my personality says: "Gimme now!" However, the rest of me is grateful that the same kind of people that won't let the engine manufacturers lower the number of kevlar layers in their passenger-facing engine walls are involved. BTW: the frozen turkey engine safety tests are awesome. I wish someone at the FAA would put video clips up. http://www.airweb.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_ Library/rgFinalRule.nsf/0/97ba0ed6b1d5d18986256968 0047f07e?OpenDocument
Latency/jitter tolerance is greatly improved with larger window sizes in your network layer. Before the advent of the T carrier, coast to coast calls were essentially half-duplex because of the latency involved in analog reconstruction and retransmission every few miles. That didn't make them impractical, other than financially. The name of the game in such circumstances is "altering expectations."
As to the other passengers killing me, well those of us with capacity for enlightened self interest will simply be cognizant of the blab tolerance of our neighbors. Also, this might be more incentive for subvocal technologies, which would help with the level of claptrap in other public spaces.
Yes, to be sure, there are some conditions in their letter that have dependencies: what relative use is the ability to put whatever device(phone, network adapter, etc.) on any vendor's network if there's only one network to choose from because the auction winner was not required to wholesale to other providers? Yes, you still get your Linux PDA on there, but you're still paying $$$ and getting your non-Brittany-Spears-of-the-week-video traffic slowed down to accommodate the vapid teenybopper who paid extra for the "content" from the network provider on top of the connection charge.
(no offense to those non-vapid teens out there. I was non-vapid as a teen also, but i know from experience that the vapid far outnumber us. BTW, it doesn't really get better.)
That said, I'm sure all of the conditions listed have a net benefit to Google. This seems to me to be a recognition that using legislation to enforce "Net Neutrality" is fighting evil with evil (and not to mention, doomed to failure evil.) So, Google identifies a once in a generation opportunity to be the hero by providing the "third pipe" the REA (http://www.usda.gov/rus/telecom/index.htm) and other groups are looking for, while ensuring that said pipe is tailored to its ad delivering, web crawling needs.
Seems to me like their needs (at least most of the way up the protocol stack) align with mine and most other/.ers.
It says a *minimum* of $4.6b. This is the reserve price of the spectrum. In fact there's a nice jab at the industry protectionism that brought about the reserve. Google is just saying that they're willing to ante up. Were there to be other bids, there is still ample room left in the letter for Google to bid.
it's narrow only if one's definition of "problems relevant to society" is narrow. Learning history, and conducting historical research is definitely a good thing because we want to avoid other people's mistakes. For example, studying late Etruskan dialects may conceivably provide insight into the way people of that era thought.
I know that even the ordering of a language varies dramatically and is the embodiment of a whole slew of background information on the culture that originated the language. An example from Julius Caesar: Omnnia Gallia es divises en partes tres... Which is "All Gaul is divided in three parts." Even from the perspective of modern romance languages the ordering is quite stilted. It is also very precise, even though the subject is one about which we know there is no hope of precision. I'm sure France had many more parts than three even in those times.
We (and the given researchers themselves) may be unaware of the relevance of their work to current concerns until others come along to utilize it.
However, there is tremendous potential for useless rehash if unlimited money is available for all people to take whatever flight of fancy they wish throughout their careers. In an imperfect world, this is what economics is for, to allow society to prioritize its efforts. Those who lament the state of research should also be lamenting the loss of the feeling of philanthropic obligation posessed by the wealthy in the past, for from their donations was much of the pure research of the past conducted. See my prior relevant post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=251175&cid=198 86945
Otherwise, I'm afraid that your work will have to either be an avocation or you will have to get wealthy from other endeavors before devoting yourself to your less economical interests. Such also has been tradition for as long as academia has existed.
The allocation of research funding is indeed a shambles, but then, so is academia. Academic politics are some of the worst and most vicious in the human experience. Often credibility in research communities is predicated on who your advisor is rather than the technical merit of your contribution. And while the pseudo sciences like sociology and paleo-whatever are the worst in this regard, in my experience it is a pervasive problem. That being said, like every problem there are several causes. One of the worst is the constant pressure to be a genius. Genius cannot be forced, though people constantly try or try to emulate genius closely enough to pass. It is the second group that causes the most trouble by abusing their sway in the academic world and by abdicating their responsibilities to quash competing ideas that are better than theirs.
Sorry, but i'm going to touch the stem cell bit because the recent history so clearly illustrates the failings of our current scientific politic. In my opinion, the root issue was the lack of sensitivity to the fact that embryonic stem cells (at the time) could only be collected by destroying a proto-human being. Many in that research community and their lay followers knew the issue would cause contention, but didn't care for a variety of reasons, like an "analysis" of the potential good versus the distastefulness of the means (and make no doubt, there is an element of religion to science in the popular domain, especially in health matters.) The two sides quickly polarized and several teams of researchers moved to various countries (mostly South American if memory serves) after Bush banned the funding of most stem cell research. The polarization was so complete that when methods were developed to extract some stem cells without obvious detriment to the embryo, it was to no political avail in the US. Had the researchers and their supporters been more sensitive and worked towards finding a way to diffuse the situation (say by concentrating on finding the way to not destroy the embryo early on) instead of getting nonplussed and giving the other side the bird, maybe things would have turned out differently.
And just because we imagine a research area to be clean, neat, and uninspiring of ethical dilemmas does not make it the case. Thus far physics research has been the source of our most destructive capabilities. During the Manhattan Project, we had no idea about radiation poisoning, and so many people died or were maimed during the course of that research. On the reverse side, nuclear weapon effects are vilified beyond the reality. Yes radiation is bad, nasty, and evil, but it does not make an area uninhabitable for 1000+ years as the conventional wisdom holds. People live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today, and those bombs are were far dirtier than those we have today.
Modern particle physics is not without ethical issues either. The newer accelerators caused some physicists to have concerns regarding various potential disastrous outcomes from their use. They were taken seriously enough to get a committee to look at the issue, whose report can be found at: http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/disaster.htm
Obviously they found that the device was safe. For various values of safe and various values of considering all variables. Since some of the potential outcomes included the destruction of the planet at a minimum, was it ethical for them to proceed? In the past, wars have been fought over less. So, in the unlikely event that say the government had decided it was too risky, and the closest "safe" alternative was for instance the moon, how much of an uproar would there be about the government interfering in science? From the tenor of most/. discussions on science my guess is quite a lot.
The point is that physics deals with how the universe around us works. Some of those mechanisms are known to be inimical to human life in close proximity. Others are unknown, but I'd bet ther
In the 1990s they had a web store, but the ?legitimate? fears of dirty bombs caused them to require a NRC license for radioactive isotopes. The only requirement for stable isotopes is that you show you have a documented health and safety procedure for handling materials that could be dangerous to your neighbors. So, incorporate yourself and go get those isotopes!
Raising the bar how? By stating things that way, you infer that the position of unfettered research is somehow noble, which in fact is a dubious position.
Spin = presenting the discussion in terms favourable to your position, usually employing loaded words.
The gist of the unfettered researcher's argument is "I should be able to take grant money and do whatever I want with it, free of any ethical or moral standards."
The scientists in CS Lewis' Space Trilogy describe the archetype quite succinctly. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a cogent poem on societal progress as well.
"...Whoever said that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always a step in the right direction? When, in this unlighted cave, the next step may well be the downstep into the abyss... We are like disbalanced boulders rolling downhill crushing beneath us many delicate green springing things whose intention it had been to grow."
The unreferenced parts of the discussion include things like the origin of the money. This is important on several levels. The objective of research is to solve problems relevant to society. As a counterpoint, there aren't too many underwater basketweaving research institutes. Is it unfair to the basketweaving research community that their research is not socially relevant and thus is underfunded? Additionally, most research is funded by companies with a profit-rooted goal in mind or by the government. The reflexive argument by the offended taxpayer (who you scoff at) with this in mind is "The government stole this money from me through taxation and uses it to fund work that I find reprehensible." A more loaded argument would take the form of "So if you were to want to conduct low survivability experiments on institutionalized people, I should fund that too?"
The thing you ignore is that we as a society have been steadily improving the quality and consistency of our ethics. No, we're not perfect, but we no longer use federal tax money to pay for the torture of the mentally retarded in the name of science. We did this as recently as the 1960s. This was a deep blow to those espousing unfettered research at the time.
Setting moral and ethical standards is the job of the whole culture. No profession has ever been able to effectively self-regulate. Researchers are no exception. Some of the more recent restrictions on research are reactions (in some cases perhaps overreactions) to real or perceived failure of researchers to adhere to the societal mores.
Is that our government's research priorities are changing and so are its policies. There are huge amounts being spent on defense research, even in colleges, that comes with International Traffic in Arms Regulations(ITAR) strings on the money. These sorts of strings are designed to minimize and dilute the body of research in the public sphere (i mean prevent technological weapons from being exported).
The ITAR bit is just the most socially relevant of the new round of restrictions and "chilling effects" being levied on American researchers. There are others, like politics, etc. as already mentioned.
On another note, it is not true that America is the worst offender here. Try doing any research not possible in America in say, an Islamic theocracy, like Iran.
The main point is that article quantity may not be a valid measure of the amount of research occurring.
oh yeah, and neither PBS nor BBC, nor A(ustralia)BC, nor others that are qualitatively good are *RUN* by the state. PBS is a particularly bad example on your part because they receive many private contributions from people and charitable institutions. See my first post in this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
of subjecting myself to air travel (and TSA "probes") to reevaluate my decision to fly as infrequently as possible. Reading that validated my increased drive-radius and train utilization defaults.
The sad thing is that most likely this person believes the rubbish he emanates in his bureaucracy-vetted statements. The comments on the blog below the entry call out the doublespeak point by point in random order.
BEGIN EXCERPT
"If the TSO throws your liquids in the trash, they don't find you a threat."
If they didn't find (you) a threat, then WHY THROW THE FREAKIN' LIQUIDS IN THE TRASH?!?!?
Jeez Louise...
~EdT.
at age 25. Seriously, this is not a concern of the average person, and those who do have it as a concern are free to take their business to other brokers who are more reserved.
and there were only like 1000 people who would chip your playstation a few years back, too.
If they want this to work, they'd better integrate the whole charging circuit into the CPU or people (me included) will cut their punk-ass enable line on the circuit board.
Star Trek: Chasing Khan
Directed by Kevin Smith
"You were ***ing on my command chair." (Reiterating from prior post above) "Nothing good can come of this."
In fact, as I was going through college in the late '90s, my college was having a hard time rebuffing increasing numbers of "concerned parents" who were attempting to parent remotely through the college faculty and staff.
It's what happens to parents in a country where it's acceptable to say, break into fisticuffs over your kid's [sports, academics, whatev]
And we wonder why there are so many 30+ year old people living with non-dependent parents. They never have a chance to grow up and consequently don't want to.
Nothing good can come of this.
...for anti-anti-competitive practices. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, "We are troubled by evidence of direct resistance to Microsoft corporate directives."
In other news, Microsoft is merging with the RIAA and MPAA to reform the Dutch East India Company. Pirates beware!
Add number of instance licenses sold
to maximum population estimates of site license holders
to the highest out-of-thin-air web or internally reported estimate of unlicensed instances
add the results of rolling some chicken bones
Repeat until your number sounds psychologically significant.
But all that's ok. McDonalds still has them beat in the meaningless BS accounting department. They gave up at "Billions and Billions Served" though you can occasionally find one with a number in front of the billions. All things considered, i'd rather have the big mac than windows.
...but I thought it had more to do with the computer fudging the randomness of the virtual cards or informing the computer player thread of my cards.
But that's why you should only play against people, not the casino's machines.
to me, computer poker machines == slot machines
I grew up in DC. DC is one of the greenest (parkwise) cities on the country. The Mall was set aside by the federal government as a national recreation and assembly area. Meaning there is no assumption of local service. Beach towns, on the other hand are supposedly the opposite. Also, in DC you have choices. There are plenty of other parks. Go exploring and I'm sure you'll find a park that suits your preferred balance of activities and population. Personal recommendations include:
National Parks:
Rock Creek Park,
C&O Canal Towpath, including Fletcher's Boathouse
Glover Archibold Park
City Parks:
Anacostia River Park
Battery Kimble Park,
Most schools have city parks next to them: the park between Wilson High school and its neighboring middle school is a good example.
Beach towns in NJ (and other high-density states) thought up tagged beach access to try to keep the beach an enjoyable experience for those living in the town. Or at least to offset the impact of the influx of out-of-town beach-goers has on infrastructure and aesthetic. Keep in mind that the closest of these beaches are less than 20 miles from NYC and you can deduce that something had to be done in order for locals to be able to get a square inch of beach.
I don't know about OC, NJ, but a lot of towns close their beaches at night, mostly because of the town liability insurance impact. Here's a great way to double-whammy beachgoers at night: if you paid for your tag and are wearing it at night, the town knows exactly when and where to send the officer to ticket you. if you either didn't pay or paid and left it behind because you knew they'd track you, then you might get caught by the random sweeps and get two tickets.
Coupled with safety studies moving with the alacrity and paranoia of government. The impertinent child part of my personality says: "Gimme now!" However, the rest of me is grateful that the same kind of people that won't let the engine manufacturers lower the number of kevlar layers in their passenger-facing engine walls are involved. BTW: the frozen turkey engine safety tests are awesome. I wish someone at the FAA would put video clips up. http://www.airweb.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_ Library/rgFinalRule.nsf/0/97ba0ed6b1d5d18986256968 0047f07e?OpenDocument
Latency/jitter tolerance is greatly improved with larger window sizes in your network layer. Before the advent of the T carrier, coast to coast calls were essentially half-duplex because of the latency involved in analog reconstruction and retransmission every few miles. That didn't make them impractical, other than financially. The name of the game in such circumstances is "altering expectations."
As to the other passengers killing me, well those of us with capacity for enlightened self interest will simply be cognizant of the blab tolerance of our neighbors. Also, this might be more incentive for subvocal technologies, which would help with the level of claptrap in other public spaces.
VOIP on your laptop or perhaps iPhone, etc.? mmm... no more at&t/sprint airphone taunting me from the seatback in front of me.
I just wish they'd make some more Unlicensed NLOS (non-line of sight) BW.
Yes, to be sure, there are some conditions in their letter that have dependencies: what relative use is the ability to put whatever device(phone, network adapter, etc.) on any vendor's network if there's only one network to choose from because the auction winner was not required to wholesale to other providers? Yes, you still get your Linux PDA on there, but you're still paying $$$ and getting your non-Brittany-Spears-of-the-week-video traffic slowed down to accommodate the vapid teenybopper who paid extra for the "content" from the network provider on top of the connection charge.
/.ers.
(no offense to those non-vapid teens out there. I was non-vapid as a teen also, but i know from experience that the vapid far outnumber us. BTW, it doesn't really get better.)
That said, I'm sure all of the conditions listed have a net benefit to Google. This seems to me to be a recognition that using legislation to enforce "Net Neutrality" is fighting evil with evil (and not to mention, doomed to failure evil.) So, Google identifies a once in a generation opportunity to be the hero by providing the "third pipe" the REA (http://www.usda.gov/rus/telecom/index.htm) and other groups are looking for, while ensuring that said pipe is tailored to its ad delivering, web crawling needs.
Seems to me like their needs (at least most of the way up the protocol stack) align with mine and most other
It says a *minimum* of $4.6b. This is the reserve price of the spectrum. In fact there's a nice jab at the industry protectionism that brought about the reserve. Google is just saying that they're willing to ante up. Were there to be other bids, there is still ample room left in the letter for Google to bid.
it's narrow only if one's definition of "problems relevant to society" is narrow. Learning history, and conducting historical research is definitely a good thing because we want to avoid other people's mistakes. For example, studying late Etruskan dialects may conceivably provide insight into the way people of that era thought.
8 86945
I know that even the ordering of a language varies dramatically and is the embodiment of a whole slew of background information on the culture that originated the language. An example from Julius Caesar: Omnnia Gallia es divises en partes tres... Which is "All Gaul is divided in three parts." Even from the perspective of modern romance languages the ordering is quite stilted. It is also very precise, even though the subject is one about which we know there is no hope of precision. I'm sure France had many more parts than three even in those times.
We (and the given researchers themselves) may be unaware of the relevance of their work to current concerns until others come along to utilize it.
However, there is tremendous potential for useless rehash if unlimited money is available for all people to take whatever flight of fancy they wish throughout their careers. In an imperfect world, this is what economics is for, to allow society to prioritize its efforts. Those who lament the state of research should also be lamenting the loss of the feeling of philanthropic obligation posessed by the wealthy in the past, for from their donations was much of the pure research of the past conducted. See my prior relevant post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=251175&cid=19
Otherwise, I'm afraid that your work will have to either be an avocation or you will have to get wealthy from other endeavors before devoting yourself to your less economical interests. Such also has been tradition for as long as academia has existed.
The allocation of research funding is indeed a shambles, but then, so is academia. Academic politics are some of the worst and most vicious in the human experience. Often credibility in research communities is predicated on who your advisor is rather than the technical merit of your contribution. And while the pseudo sciences like sociology and paleo-whatever are the worst in this regard, in my experience it is a pervasive problem. That being said, like every problem there are several causes. One of the worst is the constant pressure to be a genius. Genius cannot be forced, though people constantly try or try to emulate genius closely enough to pass. It is the second group that causes the most trouble by abusing their sway in the academic world and by abdicating their responsibilities to quash competing ideas that are better than theirs.
/. discussions on science my guess is quite a lot.
Sorry, but i'm going to touch the stem cell bit because the recent history so clearly illustrates the failings of our current scientific politic. In my opinion, the root issue was the lack of sensitivity to the fact that embryonic stem cells (at the time) could only be collected by destroying a proto-human being. Many in that research community and their lay followers knew the issue would cause contention, but didn't care for a variety of reasons, like an "analysis" of the potential good versus the distastefulness of the means (and make no doubt, there is an element of religion to science in the popular domain, especially in health matters.) The two sides quickly polarized and several teams of researchers moved to various countries (mostly South American if memory serves) after Bush banned the funding of most stem cell research. The polarization was so complete that when methods were developed to extract some stem cells without obvious detriment to the embryo, it was to no political avail in the US. Had the researchers and their supporters been more sensitive and worked towards finding a way to diffuse the situation (say by concentrating on finding the way to not destroy the embryo early on) instead of getting nonplussed and giving the other side the bird, maybe things would have turned out differently.
And just because we imagine a research area to be clean, neat, and uninspiring of ethical dilemmas does not make it the case. Thus far physics research has been the source of our most destructive capabilities. During the Manhattan Project, we had no idea about radiation poisoning, and so many people died or were maimed during the course of that research. On the reverse side, nuclear weapon effects are vilified beyond the reality. Yes radiation is bad, nasty, and evil, but it does not make an area uninhabitable for 1000+ years as the conventional wisdom holds. People live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today, and those bombs are were far dirtier than those we have today.
Modern particle physics is not without ethical issues either. The newer accelerators caused some physicists to have concerns regarding various potential disastrous outcomes from their use. They were taken seriously enough to get a committee to look at the issue, whose report can be found at:
http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/disaster.htm
Obviously they found that the device was safe. For various values of safe and various values of considering all variables. Since some of the potential outcomes included the destruction of the planet at a minimum, was it ethical for them to proceed? In the past, wars have been fought over less. So, in the unlikely event that say the government had decided it was too risky, and the closest "safe" alternative was for instance the moon, how much of an uproar would there be about the government interfering in science? From the tenor of most
The point is that physics deals with how the universe around us works. Some of those mechanisms are known to be inimical to human life in close proximity. Others are unknown, but I'd bet ther
You can get both stable and radioactive isotopes from the department of energy.
2 b.html
http://www.nuclear.energy.gov/isotopes/neIsotopes
In the 1990s they had a web store, but the ?legitimate? fears of dirty bombs caused them to require a NRC license for radioactive isotopes. The only requirement for stable isotopes is that you show you have a documented health and safety procedure for handling materials that could be dangerous to your neighbors. So, incorporate yourself and go get those isotopes!
Raising the bar how? By stating things that way, you infer that the position of unfettered research is somehow noble, which in fact is a dubious position.
Spin = presenting the discussion in terms favourable to your position, usually employing loaded words.
The gist of the unfettered researcher's argument is "I should be able to take grant money and do whatever I want with it, free of any ethical or moral standards."
The scientists in CS Lewis' Space Trilogy describe the archetype quite succinctly. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a cogent poem on societal progress as well.
"...Whoever said that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always a step in the right direction? When, in this unlighted cave, the next step may well be the downstep into the abyss... We are like disbalanced boulders rolling downhill crushing beneath us many delicate green springing things whose intention it had been to grow."
The unreferenced parts of the discussion include things like the origin of the money. This is important on several levels. The objective of research is to solve problems relevant to society. As a counterpoint, there aren't too many underwater basketweaving research institutes. Is it unfair to the basketweaving research community that their research is not socially relevant and thus is underfunded? Additionally, most research is funded by companies with a profit-rooted goal in mind or by the government. The reflexive argument by the offended taxpayer (who you scoff at) with this in mind is "The government stole this money from me through taxation and uses it to fund work that I find reprehensible." A more loaded argument would take the form of "So if you were to want to conduct low survivability experiments on institutionalized people, I should fund that too?"
The thing you ignore is that we as a society have been steadily improving the quality and consistency of our ethics. No, we're not perfect, but we no longer use federal tax money to pay for the torture of the mentally retarded in the name of science. We did this as recently as the 1960s. This was a deep blow to those espousing unfettered research at the time.
Setting moral and ethical standards is the job of the whole culture. No profession has ever been able to effectively self-regulate. Researchers are no exception. Some of the more recent restrictions on research are reactions (in some cases perhaps overreactions) to real or perceived failure of researchers to adhere to the societal mores.
Is that our government's research priorities are changing and so are its policies. There are huge amounts being spent on defense research, even in colleges, that comes with International Traffic in Arms Regulations(ITAR) strings on the money. These sorts of strings are designed to minimize and dilute the body of research in the public sphere (i mean prevent technological weapons from being exported).
The ITAR bit is just the most socially relevant of the new round of restrictions and "chilling effects" being levied on American researchers. There are others, like politics, etc. as already mentioned.
On another note, it is not true that America is the worst offender here. Try doing any research not possible in America in say, an Islamic theocracy, like Iran.
The main point is that article quantity may not be a valid measure of the amount of research occurring.
oh yeah, and neither PBS nor BBC, nor A(ustralia)BC, nor others that are qualitatively good are *RUN* by the state. PBS is a particularly bad example on your part because they receive many private contributions from people and charitable institutions. See my first post in this thread.
Uhh... just look at the quality of reporting on Pravda during the Soviet rule, or even today...
How about Xinhua for current news and opinion?
mmm... Propaganda... yummy.