It'd be nice of we actually had an economy that really did operate through a true capitalist system. No system that supports businesses through subsidies using money drawn from public money, "IP" protections and the various other quasi-monopolies and other breaks and benefits that the larger businesses enjoy globally these days can legitimately be characterized as a capitalist system. Some strange form of socialism perhaps, but not capitalism.
Initially the monkey did not have a preference. After being forced to decide between two of the three colours, once more allowed free choice, it exhibited biased behaviour. There was evidence. The change was apparently due to the coerced choice between two equipotentials. People would rationalize this later, trying to explain why "blue" wasn't as good. I would guess that a pretty interesting case could be made that the ability to break such ties is an evolutionary advantage. At base, tie breaking could be critical to survival. Imagine. The predator is behind you. Ahead the path forks. You know equally good ways of escaping the predator are available down each path. But if you stop to try and work out which is best, the predator will eat you while you hesitate. Afterward, because you survived the chase going down one path rather than the other, you will prefer that path. There's a lot of reinforcement for that preference, even if none of it is logical.
There is an entire subfield of anthropological study that addresses the evolutionary status of religion. Contrary to the preconceptions of many religious people, sciences that employ evolution as a key paradigm don't discard religion as merely a mistaken idea. The difficulty is that religion really does not offer any usable insights into nature or cosmology. It is not a guide to important scientific knowledge. Nor, when it comes down to it, does it observably improve the ethics or morals of its adherents. We can't consider the events of spread of Islam, the crusades or the English civil war, modern Islamic terrorism or rightwing neo-Nazi terrorism, or many of the wars among Buddhists that affected Asia and derive ANY evidence that people would have been less violent without religion. There are a very few small sects such as the Society of Friends where we can point to an apparent general correlation between the adherents and an enhanced level of ethical behaviour. But it is questionable whether the correlation is due to the religious teachings, or to self-selection among adherents.
What religion DOES seem to do is to delimit and integrate extended groups and help members recognize each other. During periods of environmental and social stress it offers a degree of coherence that encourages "wise" generosity within the group. It may reduce conflict between group members. In smaller, traditional cultures, religion and culture were effectively coterminous. Small city states and village level societies had individual sects or secret societies that the members participated in. The modern Pueblo tribes are good examples of this. Once empires and multicultural nations begin to appear so does "revealed" religion. The modern major religions all have their origins here. You can argue reasonably that the spread of revealed religion is an attempt to integrate smaller societies into larger ones by forcing or persuading them to "convert." You will note that during recent declamations, our glorious leader GWB has employed terms like "crusade" to the detriment of our national interests overseas. At the same time, medievalists among the Muslims have been employing parallel language. It can be argued that religious missionaries conduct "warfare" at a level short of outright conflict [to paraphrase Keith Laumer]. It is probably no coincidence that the "six" accused of spreading HIV in North Africa were religious medical missionaries. They were almost casualties in an ongoing conflict that doesn't quite burst into flame most of the time.
What I am curious about is this: how many legitimate security threats have been stopped by the regulations in place now? We know they go after nursing mothers, girls with techno-trash style sense, sick people with serious, life threatening conditions, etc. I've also seen them stop people with jars of maple syrup, pickles and other substances, and once even an idiot muling drugs from Canada to Chicago. But, again, how many REAL terrorist style bad guys have we heard about them taking down? By my count, admittedly incomplete though it is, the number is very close to if not actually equal to zero. Then there are those really silly things like the "no-fly" lists. They check your name!! How many real bad guys are going to use their real names? I can just see it, "Name, please? Hmm? Oh, I'm Carlos the Jackal. Sorry, sir, could you step over here? You are on our no-fly list." Seriously, now.
Obviously, if even someone who knows about this can't recall the spelling in two adjacent lines, no one with less interest will either. "Hilbert" is far easier to recall.
RTFA. It was an information kiosk attendant. It was quite possible that the question asked seemed so off the wall, she decided it wasn't serious. It was her shirt after all, what ELSE would it be? We spend a lot of time justifying the way law-enforcement types think. They on the other hand do not spend much time worrying about how the innocent think or react. They are expected to assume guilt and let higher authorities sort it out later. I've been in a jury trial where a police officer asked a reasonable question, received a LOGICAL answer, and still arrested the guy because the answer sounded like a confession to the officer. Situation: narrow driveway, view out mostly blocked by houses on either side. Police edge up in cars staying out of site of back of driveway where a cock fight was held. Individual sitting on porch near front of driveway sees the cars and walks out to see what's up. Officer, who knows the guy, says, "So-and-so, what are you doing here?" So-and-so answers. "I came to look." Busted. Took the jury half a day to conclude there was a reasonable doubt about the communication sequence there. The long time hold out was a Christian Fundamentalist who thought Buddhists worshiped the Devil.
As far as real bombs go, I used to help my dad set explosives to take out stumps and boulders. It takes two wires, a cap, and ONE battery, and, if you want to get real fancy, a switch. We just touched the wires to the battery poles. If you are going for a remote detonation because you want to stay alive with all your limbs, you use a larger battery to overcome the drop in voltage.
The circuitry for a bomb worn by a suicide bomber is really simple. It's a switch. Push it on, go "BOOM", or for the really determined, let go (so called 'deadman switch') and same eventuality. There's no need for a circuit board of any sort, much less TWO batteries. Not to mention the guards apparently aren't trained to think, or to handle a real suicide bomber. If they were, the first thing they would avoid is pointing guns at suspected explosives!! Only the TSA would think anything else. What the student should have considered on her errand to meet the arriving friend was, "Airport. Pig-ignorant paranoia. Do I look strange enough to panic a bureaucrat?" Since anyone that looks in their mirror will see a face that will panic a bureaucrat, AND the TSA has to justify its budget somehow - after all, how many REAL threats have they protected the public from - the answer is always "yes." She should have left the fun stuff for later, but being an innocent, who thought she'ld give a laughable surprise to her friend, she forgot the most unstable substance in the airport is the brains running it.
There are laws in place that make it illegal to panic people in an airport. Humour concerning explosives, crashes, etc. is right out, in fact so is the First Amendment. The point is you are not supposed to do it deliberately or knowingly. This though was the equivalent of carrying a sign with the arriving passenger's name on it and the odds it crossed her mind that her SHIRT might be mistaken for a bomb are very low. Carrying a sign for the same reason, mark you, isn't illegal, even though sheet explosives can be carried in nice flat packages that look completely innocuous and could be easily mistaken for heavy cardboard. Think about that the next time you are in an airport. Which is more likely, explosive disguised as sign carried by "chauffeur" or a "suspicious" looking T-shirt with a circuit board openly displayed on the front?
It doesn't look like a frigging bomb. Any half-baked bomb maker would be embarrassed. Even if, by some stretch, it DID look like a bomb, that still wouldn't excuse officers of any form charged with public safety for the supreme idiocy of pointing a weapon at something they suspect is explosive. Think about it.
The level of reasoning and common sense in this episode is appalling at all levels. An MIT student, presumptively smart, but evidently with no common sense, doesn't realize that any high school dropout hired by the TSA is going to need new underwear when they see something "strange" - like a college student - or a nail clippers - but won't blink an eye at a lethally sharp plastic comb - and will jump all over her. She doesn't bother to consider, "it's an airport" - nobody from MIT in charge - IQs so low ants will trip on them scattered all over armed to the teeth, directed by bureaucrats who are required to have their IQs removed BEFORE being put in charge. I hate US airports, BTW. Ben Gurion any day. Israel actually has real security threats AND trained security personnel.
The TSA morons who decided to arrest her did so because she did what???? Clearly the "device" isn't a bomb, it lights up the paint - not putty - on her shirt, so it isn't even a "hoax device" as asserted by the Terminally Stupid [donkeys] that conducted the bust. AND, to cap it all, jackasses charged with airport safety pointed firearms at something they thought was an EXPLOSIVE!! Pointing guns at a - lets see here, "bomb" on shirt - suspected suicide bomber. This would be someone who has decided to die violently so lets all threaten her with death so she won't blow herself up. Oh yeah, I can see that working some place they have real suicide bombers. Let's all point weapons at her so that we will insure she blows up, even if she doesn't push the button herself. Reasoning like that will undoubtedly get either a Nobel nomination or a Darwin award. The responses were not appropriate, they weren't rational, they were dumber than dirt.
I don't see how the the DMCA is useful to Apple here. Nothing they may have copyrighted is being copied. Quite the contrary. So, not even the anticircumvention elements of the DMCA should be relevant. About the only thing that looks likely to be a useful legal took is contract law.
They had control groups. The control groups were chipped too. They were using the RFIDs as a book keeping device for data collection and control. The cancer was noted empirically and independently of the research they were undertaking. The appearance of sarcomas developing physically around some of the chips looked like an observation worth reporting. It offered a new line of potential investigation.
The real reason religious fundamentalists think science is pseudo-religious is because too many "scientists" believe the advance of scientific knowledge is limited to the purposeful reporting of the results of studies guided by the scientific method. Too often we forget that Darwin wasn't out there conducting a lab experiment; he was in the REAL world, observing real things. The real essence of science is the observation that leads to a "that's odd" remark, or an experiment where the operator goes from "oops. The culture spoiled" to "that's interesting" like Fleming did. The results of experiments under controlled conditions are just half of science. The rest is the observation of things outside the experiment, things that could lead to entire new realms of empirical and experimental investigation.
It would be no surprise if the PTB at SCO were busy buying back shares to cover themselves from hostile moves. With the share price dropping like a rock, a hostile investor could own the company while they weren't looking and the next morning they'ld all be out of their jobs.
The fourth is violated by the same edict as well, but the real thrust is to prevent the use, or transfer of property, which is a Fifth Amendment issue, "...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." They are deprived of something without any evidence of due process, and going through the Treasury Department circumvents the "due process" that Justice invoke. If they decide after 10 years or so the whole thing was a mistake, the victim won't even get interest or back rent from the government.
You are quite right, just as in the 2nd, the independent clause is the one that protects the right to keep _and bear_ arms. The well regulated militia is dependent and probably a rationalization Jefferson provided to slide it past his federalist compatriots, "militia? Oh, yeah! We just finished fighting those redcoats didn't we?" Seriously, how many modern readers KNOW the difference in significance between a comma and a semicolon.
I doubt we know who the first woman poet was, but Sappho from the Aegean island of Lesbos, a classical Greek and female as well, was composing poetry long before Rome was an empire. Emily Dickinson is one the first important female American poets and ranked right up there Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by critics.
As far as literacy goes, look up the term "blue-stocking society" in the mid-19th Century. By the 19th it was a pejorative term, but, consider its antecedents. By the 19th c. it was fairly important that women be able to read and write and calculate. They generally managed household accounts, read to and educated children who were not sent to school, including sons, and in some cases managed businesses as well.
"Self-interest" might be a problematic concept. Its pretty clear we're interpreting the same behaviour differently. Also, there's still that lurking element of anthropomorphism. If you disregard caribou "motives" and consider the behaviour as a set of system "weights," my argument might be clearer. All of the caribou are probably weighting environmental factors equivalently including the necessity to eat, building muscle and fat. Evolutionarily, if you are a caribou that persists in eating while a wolf approaches - and you are the nearest caribou, the weighted odds of becoming wolf chow are greatest for you. The nearest caribou is at the greatest hazard and millenia of evolutionary selection have established a tropism to move away from potential hazards. But, if you move away then some other member of the herd is now at greater hazard, so it becomes evolutionarily positively weighted to respond if a neighbor responds. By tracking your movement and copying the direction, they maintain their relative security compared with that of whoever initiated that potential threat response.
The rules are very simple. One is, "move away from unidentified movement." Another simple rule is, "if your neighbor moves toward you, move away." Both of these require a third, "remain aware (of your neighbors and surroundings)." A little evolutionary fine tuning via selection and properties like how close an unidentified movement can be before you respond and proximity versus response intensity (a mile away-keep eating, 100 yards-move away, 20 yards-panic and run) are built into the genome.
"Motives" in the sense of what we think of as "self-interest" and the individual making informed decisions on an action don't necessarily enter into the picture. That in fact is clear in the example of race track betting. Short of secretly altering the nature of the race through nobbling a horse or manipulating the fitness of riders and horses, the collective "intelligence" - if you will - of the bettors is capable of very accurately predicting the placing of every horse in a race. This is despite the fact that every bettor is trying to second guess the outcome and hopes to do better than the handicapped odds.
That is the really interesting aspect of swarm intelligence. Nothing in the nature of the individuals composing the swarm predicts anything about the capacity of the swarm entity itself.
I think you are suffering from a bit of anthropomorphism and idealism here. Members of swarms "behave" and their collective behaviour shows emergent properties that aren't discernible in ANY of the individual members. You can't legitimately characterize the behaviour of individual members as behaviour that "...has no benefit to the individual." Quite the contrary. It is probably harder to see this among insects where it is more difficult to discern individual self interest, but the example of herd behaviour among caribou threatened by a wolf is pretty clear. The article also includes a very clear example of human swarm behaviour in race track betting. In both of these instances the emergent behaviour is the product of self-interested actions. The caribou herd together and that herding benefits them all. The caribou remain aware of all the nearby herd members and their behaviour. Alerting behaviour signals through out the herd when just one senses a threat. Flight patterns are guided by those nearest the threat, who run away from it. That is all group behaviour predicated on self interested individual survival behaviour. The race track betting behaviour and its manner of collectively estimating odds without negotiation among individuals is similarly guide by simple self interested behaviour. It requires neither leaders nor common ideals for swarm-like properties to emerge in group behaviour, simply common individual goals.
...but simply saying "Well we called a random sample," doesn't cut it since you are dealing with self selection....
How does it deal with self selection? If you post a "survey" on the internet, the respondent's are very likely to be self selected and sensitive to the issue. If you post a query about Bush pardoning Libby on a Limbaugh website, you can readily predict the outcome. That is self-selection. If you have someone pull phone numbers for developers and create a blind list from which to randomly draw a sample and ask what platforms they develop for, there can be no self-selection except with respect to a willingness to be interviewed.
Without some lame form of silly public concern, politicians would generally need to do real work. Bogie men (and women I guess) are cheap, handy scapegoats that allow politicians to do trivial things that look like public protection and don't "cost" significant ammounts of votes. And, such "work" is laudably bipartisan as well as seeming to improve public safety without cost. Taxpayers are happy, voters remain satisfied. Meanwhile the berks in office can continue to loot public funds, conduct wars no one can make sense of and generally do what they please. Meanwhile the public feels snugger in their beds and can contentedly watch "reality" shows about pirates.
Democracy, privacy, and human rights are antithetical to the "free market". We either get to rule ourselves, or the corporations get to rule us....
Corporations are antitheitcal to the "free market." A true free market would be completely laisez faire, meaning that you and any other individual can enter into an agreement you both find beneficial. Corpations historically have been bitterly opposed to the free market - look at the RIAA, the MPAA, look at Microsoft, Novel, Sun, IBM and many, many others. The ideal of the corporation is the monopoly. They would prefer not to have competitors. The idea of patents and copyrights even stand in opposition to real free market ideals, since they confound the public and private spheres and also confuse knowledge and information with property. If you share something, say a song's lyrics publicly, copyright theoretically gives you rights to the contents of someone else's mind, since after hearing your song they are now a repository for your "property." Nothing that is capable of effecttively infinite, costless replication can be viable "property" since it is impossible for the owner to exercise real control of it, short of holding it close and secret.
The whole issue has nothing to do with artists and everything to do with corporate business. One small change in copyright law would completely eliminate much of this. Rewrite the law so that copyrights cannot be sold or inherited and instead reside with the artist for the artist's lifetime. Artists can license rights, possibly even exclusively, so a corporation can make money if so inclined, but the license cannot be perpetual. Allow no organization to own a copyright, since by definition organizations are incapable of creative work - a business or arganization can fund it, but because a business is a fictive individual, bar it from ever being able to claim a copyright. Better yet get rid of the idea of applying the same rights to corporations that individuals have.
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It'd be nice of we actually had an economy that really did operate through a true capitalist system. No system that supports businesses through subsidies using money drawn from public money, "IP" protections and the various other quasi-monopolies and other breaks and benefits that the larger businesses enjoy globally these days can legitimately be characterized as a capitalist system. Some strange form of socialism perhaps, but not capitalism.
As far as democracy goes, Jefferson would weep.
Initially the monkey did not have a preference. After being forced to decide between two of the three colours, once more allowed free choice, it exhibited biased behaviour. There was evidence. The change was apparently due to the coerced choice between two equipotentials. People would rationalize this later, trying to explain why "blue" wasn't as good. I would guess that a pretty interesting case could be made that the ability to break such ties is an evolutionary advantage. At base, tie breaking could be critical to survival. Imagine. The predator is behind you. Ahead the path forks. You know equally good ways of escaping the predator are available down each path. But if you stop to try and work out which is best, the predator will eat you while you hesitate. Afterward, because you survived the chase going down one path rather than the other, you will prefer that path. There's a lot of reinforcement for that preference, even if none of it is logical.
What religion DOES seem to do is to delimit and integrate extended groups and help members recognize each other. During periods of environmental and social stress it offers a degree of coherence that encourages "wise" generosity within the group. It may reduce conflict between group members. In smaller, traditional cultures, religion and culture were effectively coterminous. Small city states and village level societies had individual sects or secret societies that the members participated in. The modern Pueblo tribes are good examples of this. Once empires and multicultural nations begin to appear so does "revealed" religion. The modern major religions all have their origins here. You can argue reasonably that the spread of revealed religion is an attempt to integrate smaller societies into larger ones by forcing or persuading them to "convert." You will note that during recent declamations, our glorious leader GWB has employed terms like "crusade" to the detriment of our national interests overseas. At the same time, medievalists among the Muslims have been employing parallel language. It can be argued that religious missionaries conduct "warfare" at a level short of outright conflict [to paraphrase Keith Laumer]. It is probably no coincidence that the "six" accused of spreading HIV in North Africa were religious medical missionaries. They were almost casualties in an ongoing conflict that doesn't quite burst into flame most of the time.
It's an interesting issue.
What I am curious about is this: how many legitimate security threats have been stopped by the regulations in place now? We know they go after nursing mothers, girls with techno-trash style sense, sick people with serious, life threatening conditions, etc. I've also seen them stop people with jars of maple syrup, pickles and other substances, and once even an idiot muling drugs from Canada to Chicago. But, again, how many REAL terrorist style bad guys have we heard about them taking down? By my count, admittedly incomplete though it is, the number is very close to if not actually equal to zero. Then there are those really silly things like the "no-fly" lists. They check your name!! How many real bad guys are going to use their real names? I can just see it, "Name, please? Hmm? Oh, I'm Carlos the Jackal. Sorry, sir, could you step over here? You are on our no-fly list." Seriously, now.
Obviously, if even someone who knows about this can't recall the spelling in two adjacent lines, no one with less interest will either. "Hilbert" is far easier to recall.
Sorry,
RTFA. It was an information kiosk attendant. It was quite possible that the question asked seemed so off the wall, she decided it wasn't serious. It was her shirt after all, what ELSE would it be? We spend a lot of time justifying the way law-enforcement types think. They on the other hand do not spend much time worrying about how the innocent think or react. They are expected to assume guilt and let higher authorities sort it out later. I've been in a jury trial where a police officer asked a reasonable question, received a LOGICAL answer, and still arrested the guy because the answer sounded like a confession to the officer. Situation: narrow driveway, view out mostly blocked by houses on either side. Police edge up in cars staying out of site of back of driveway where a cock fight was held. Individual sitting on porch near front of driveway sees the cars and walks out to see what's up. Officer, who knows the guy, says, "So-and-so, what are you doing here?" So-and-so answers. "I came to look." Busted. Took the jury half a day to conclude there was a reasonable doubt about the communication sequence there. The long time hold out was a Christian Fundamentalist who thought Buddhists worshiped the Devil.
As far as real bombs go, I used to help my dad set explosives to take out stumps and boulders. It takes two wires, a cap, and ONE battery, and, if you want to get real fancy, a switch. We just touched the wires to the battery poles. If you are going for a remote detonation because you want to stay alive with all your limbs, you use a larger battery to overcome the drop in voltage.
The circuitry for a bomb worn by a suicide bomber is really simple. It's a switch. Push it on, go "BOOM", or for the really determined, let go (so called 'deadman switch') and same eventuality. There's no need for a circuit board of any sort, much less TWO batteries. Not to mention the guards apparently aren't trained to think, or to handle a real suicide bomber. If they were, the first thing they would avoid is pointing guns at suspected explosives!! Only the TSA would think anything else. What the student should have considered on her errand to meet the arriving friend was, "Airport. Pig-ignorant paranoia. Do I look strange enough to panic a bureaucrat?" Since anyone that looks in their mirror will see a face that will panic a bureaucrat, AND the TSA has to justify its budget somehow - after all, how many REAL threats have they protected the public from - the answer is always "yes." She should have left the fun stuff for later, but being an innocent, who thought she'ld give a laughable surprise to her friend, she forgot the most unstable substance in the airport is the brains running it.
There are laws in place that make it illegal to panic people in an airport. Humour concerning explosives, crashes, etc. is right out, in fact so is the First Amendment. The point is you are not supposed to do it deliberately or knowingly. This though was the equivalent of carrying a sign with the arriving passenger's name on it and the odds it crossed her mind that her SHIRT might be mistaken for a bomb are very low. Carrying a sign for the same reason, mark you, isn't illegal, even though sheet explosives can be carried in nice flat packages that look completely innocuous and could be easily mistaken for heavy cardboard. Think about that the next time you are in an airport. Which is more likely, explosive disguised as sign carried by "chauffeur" or a "suspicious" looking T-shirt with a circuit board openly displayed on the front?
It doesn't look like a frigging bomb. Any half-baked bomb maker would be embarrassed. Even if, by some stretch, it DID look like a bomb, that still wouldn't excuse officers of any form charged with public safety for the supreme idiocy of pointing a weapon at something they suspect is explosive. Think about it.
The level of reasoning and common sense in this episode is appalling at all levels. An MIT student, presumptively smart, but evidently with no common sense, doesn't realize that any high school dropout hired by the TSA is going to need new underwear when they see something "strange" - like a college student - or a nail clippers - but won't blink an eye at a lethally sharp plastic comb - and will jump all over her. She doesn't bother to consider, "it's an airport" - nobody from MIT in charge - IQs so low ants will trip on them scattered all over armed to the teeth, directed by bureaucrats who are required to have their IQs removed BEFORE being put in charge. I hate US airports, BTW. Ben Gurion any day. Israel actually has real security threats AND trained security personnel.
The TSA morons who decided to arrest her did so because she did what???? Clearly the "device" isn't a bomb, it lights up the paint - not putty - on her shirt, so it isn't even a "hoax device" as asserted by the Terminally Stupid [donkeys] that conducted the bust. AND, to cap it all, jackasses charged with airport safety pointed firearms at something they thought was an EXPLOSIVE!! Pointing guns at a - lets see here, "bomb" on shirt - suspected suicide bomber. This would be someone who has decided to die violently so lets all threaten her with death so she won't blow herself up. Oh yeah, I can see that working some place they have real suicide bombers. Let's all point weapons at her so that we will insure she blows up, even if she doesn't push the button herself. Reasoning like that will undoubtedly get either a Nobel nomination or a Darwin award. The responses were not appropriate, they weren't rational, they were dumber than dirt.
I don't see how the the DMCA is useful to Apple here. Nothing they may have copyrighted is being copied. Quite the contrary. So, not even the anticircumvention elements of the DMCA should be relevant. About the only thing that looks likely to be a useful legal took is contract law.
They had control groups. The control groups were chipped too. They were using the RFIDs as a book keeping device for data collection and control. The cancer was noted empirically and independently of the research they were undertaking. The appearance of sarcomas developing physically around some of the chips looked like an observation worth reporting. It offered a new line of potential investigation.
The real reason religious fundamentalists think science is pseudo-religious is because too many "scientists" believe the advance of scientific knowledge is limited to the purposeful reporting of the results of studies guided by the scientific method. Too often we forget that Darwin wasn't out there conducting a lab experiment; he was in the REAL world, observing real things. The real essence of science is the observation that leads to a "that's odd" remark, or an experiment where the operator goes from "oops. The culture spoiled" to "that's interesting" like Fleming did. The results of experiments under controlled conditions are just half of science. The rest is the observation of things outside the experiment, things that could lead to entire new realms of empirical and experimental investigation.
It would be no surprise if the PTB at SCO were busy buying back shares to cover themselves from hostile moves. With the share price dropping like a rock, a hostile investor could own the company while they weren't looking and the next morning they'ld all be out of their jobs.
J
The fourth is violated by the same edict as well, but the real thrust is to prevent the use, or transfer of property, which is a Fifth Amendment issue, "...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." They are deprived of something without any evidence of due process, and going through the Treasury Department circumvents the "due process" that Justice invoke. If they decide after 10 years or so the whole thing was a mistake, the victim won't even get interest or back rent from the government.
You are quite right, just as in the 2nd, the independent clause is the one that protects the right to keep _and bear_ arms. The well regulated militia is dependent and probably a rationalization Jefferson provided to slide it past his federalist compatriots, "militia? Oh, yeah! We just finished fighting those redcoats didn't we?" Seriously, how many modern readers KNOW the difference in significance between a comma and a semicolon.
You can always spot the administration weenies. That AC was probably Carl Rove.
... But judges have to pay income taxes too. Think about it.
I doubt we know who the first woman poet was, but Sappho from the Aegean island of Lesbos, a classical Greek and female as well, was composing poetry long before Rome was an empire. Emily Dickinson is one the first important female American poets and ranked right up there Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by critics.
As far as literacy goes, look up the term "blue-stocking society" in the mid-19th Century. By the 19th it was a pejorative term, but, consider its antecedents. By the 19th c. it was fairly important that women be able to read and write and calculate. They generally managed household accounts, read to and educated children who were not sent to school, including sons, and in some cases managed businesses as well.
"Self-interest" might be a problematic concept. Its pretty clear we're interpreting the same behaviour differently. Also, there's still that lurking element of anthropomorphism. If you disregard caribou "motives" and consider the behaviour as a set of system "weights," my argument might be clearer. All of the caribou are probably weighting environmental factors equivalently including the necessity to eat, building muscle and fat. Evolutionarily, if you are a caribou that persists in eating while a wolf approaches - and you are the nearest caribou, the weighted odds of becoming wolf chow are greatest for you. The nearest caribou is at the greatest hazard and millenia of evolutionary selection have established a tropism to move away from potential hazards. But, if you move away then some other member of the herd is now at greater hazard, so it becomes evolutionarily positively weighted to respond if a neighbor responds. By tracking your movement and copying the direction, they maintain their relative security compared with that of whoever initiated that potential threat response.
The rules are very simple. One is, "move away from unidentified movement." Another simple rule is, "if your neighbor moves toward you, move away." Both of these require a third, "remain aware (of your neighbors and surroundings)." A little evolutionary fine tuning via selection and properties like how close an unidentified movement can be before you respond and proximity versus response intensity (a mile away-keep eating, 100 yards-move away, 20 yards-panic and run) are built into the genome.
"Motives" in the sense of what we think of as "self-interest" and the individual making informed decisions on an action don't necessarily enter into the picture. That in fact is clear in the example of race track betting. Short of secretly altering the nature of the race through nobbling a horse or manipulating the fitness of riders and horses, the collective "intelligence" - if you will - of the bettors is capable of very accurately predicting the placing of every horse in a race. This is despite the fact that every bettor is trying to second guess the outcome and hopes to do better than the handicapped odds.
That is the really interesting aspect of swarm intelligence. Nothing in the nature of the individuals composing the swarm predicts anything about the capacity of the swarm entity itself.
I think you are suffering from a bit of anthropomorphism and idealism here. Members of swarms "behave" and their collective behaviour shows emergent properties that aren't discernible in ANY of the individual members. You can't legitimately characterize the behaviour of individual members as behaviour that "...has no benefit to the individual." Quite the contrary. It is probably harder to see this among insects where it is more difficult to discern individual self interest, but the example of herd behaviour among caribou threatened by a wolf is pretty clear. The article also includes a very clear example of human swarm behaviour in race track betting. In both of these instances the emergent behaviour is the product of self-interested actions. The caribou herd together and that herding benefits them all. The caribou remain aware of all the nearby herd members and their behaviour. Alerting behaviour signals through out the herd when just one senses a threat. Flight patterns are guided by those nearest the threat, who run away from it. That is all group behaviour predicated on self interested individual survival behaviour. The race track betting behaviour and its manner of collectively estimating odds without negotiation among individuals is similarly guide by simple self interested behaviour. It requires neither leaders nor common ideals for swarm-like properties to emerge in group behaviour, simply common individual goals.
...but simply saying "Well we called a random sample," doesn't cut it since you are dealing with self selection....
How does it deal with self selection? If you post a "survey" on the internet, the respondent's are very likely to be self selected and sensitive to the issue. If you post a query about Bush pardoning Libby on a Limbaugh website, you can readily predict the outcome. That is self-selection. If you have someone pull phone numbers for developers and create a blind list from which to randomly draw a sample and ask what platforms they develop for, there can be no self-selection except with respect to a willingness to be interviewed.
Without some lame form of silly public concern, politicians would generally need to do real work. Bogie men (and women I guess) are cheap, handy scapegoats that allow politicians to do trivial things that look like public protection and don't "cost" significant ammounts of votes. And, such "work" is laudably bipartisan as well as seeming to improve public safety without cost. Taxpayers are happy, voters remain satisfied. Meanwhile the berks in office can continue to loot public funds, conduct wars no one can make sense of and generally do what they please. Meanwhile the public feels snugger in their beds and can contentedly watch "reality" shows about pirates.
See Groklaw regarding the SCOX v. World and dog lawsuits.
The point the parent makes here really is core to "troll" vs. "non-troll."
Corporations are antitheitcal to the "free market." A true free market would be completely laisez faire, meaning that you and any other individual can enter into an agreement you both find beneficial. Corpations historically have been bitterly opposed to the free market - look at the RIAA, the MPAA, look at Microsoft, Novel, Sun, IBM and many, many others. The ideal of the corporation is the monopoly. They would prefer not to have competitors. The idea of patents and copyrights even stand in opposition to real free market ideals, since they confound the public and private spheres and also confuse knowledge and information with property. If you share something, say a song's lyrics publicly, copyright theoretically gives you rights to the contents of someone else's mind, since after hearing your song they are now a repository for your "property." Nothing that is capable of effecttively infinite, costless replication can be viable "property" since it is impossible for the owner to exercise real control of it, short of holding it close and secret.
The whole issue has nothing to do with artists and everything to do with corporate business. One small change in copyright law would completely eliminate much of this. Rewrite the law so that copyrights cannot be sold or inherited and instead reside with the artist for the artist's lifetime. Artists can license rights, possibly even exclusively, so a corporation can make money if so inclined, but the license cannot be perpetual. Allow no organization to own a copyright, since by definition organizations are incapable of creative work - a business or arganization can fund it, but because a business is a fictive individual, bar it from ever being able to claim a copyright. Better yet get rid of the idea of applying the same rights to corporations that individuals have.