I'm kind of guessing that this presentation was much more tongue-in-cheek, or a joke, than the article presents it. If not, it's really downright bizarre.
The PC in many respects has too many functions, and it does them too poorly. So there's all the reason in the world do look at different choices.
So I guess that's either lobbying for an array of specialty digital appliances, or handicapping computers so they can't do so many functions (i.e., be a generalized logical device). I mean, come on, that's the whole magic of computers. Call me a hobbyist or whatever, but you can pry my word-processing, spreadsheet-calculating, internet-surfing, game-playing, software-developing PC out of my cold, dead arms.
It's stuff like this that is making me more and more likely to completely disregard as rubbish any presentation that includes the phrase "computers need to be more intuitive and user-friendly"...
Well then, what the hell's the point of software patents? You haven't advanced any arguments as to why they (under your scheme) would benefit society or enhance innovation.
Your argument is incredibly incorrect. I had a hard-core computer professor who would say "computer science is just a branch of applied mathematics" and he was right. The whole basis for computer science begins with the Turning Machine... a generalized "do anything" device which we have in the form of electronic computers. Go ahead and patent that if you want, but software is just switch-combinations on the Turing Machine and not a legitimate technical invention in its own right.
And, of course, the Turing Machine patent would have expired about 30 years ago.
One time, a long time ago, Robert Heinlen (a first rate author) dared L. Ron Hubbard (a 7th -12th rate author) to start a religion. Hubbard, a certifiable wacko, decided it was a great idea.
Do you have a reference to this dare from Robert Heinlen? It's the first I've ever heard of it...
I'm afraid that your assertion that "people always find a way of circumventing those big companies" is utterly, completely wrong. To my view, you share a lot of Slashdotter's exasperating tendency to believe that the Internet is uncontrollable by corporations/governments, it's just not so.
Clearly Napster is being cracked down on by the RIAA. It was just the next weekend that they were sending out cease-and-desist orders to all "Napster-like services" and hosting ISPs (as reported here on Slashdot) -- including every one of the open products that you reference.
If they can't find all such services, the media companies can consolidate and buy ISPs until they can just shut down any server they don't like (in progress). If that doesn't work, they can convince CD and hard drive manufacturers to include built-in copy-protection (in progress). If the servers are offshore, they can have lawyers and diplomats "educate" those ISPs about how much bandwidth they're "losing" (in progress). If push comes to shove they certainly will receive search warrants, break down doors, and make high-profile arrests, hardware confiscations, and heavy fines (also in progress, esp. at certain university dormitories).
I have a huge fear that our decade-or-so Internet Nirvana will soon look like the 60's, in which a bunch of idealistic college students were absolutely convinced that the government couldn't stop a revolution based on the people's power, and look foolish for it in retrospect.
A couple things come to mind when I think about how WE would respond if we received a message of just this sort.
(1) Security. Could we trust it to not have malicious viruses if we actually compiled it and ran it? (Of course, this issue with ET communication has been brought up elsewhere.) Given absolutely no security to such a program the prudent course might be to not ever execute it (insert favorite MS joke here).
(2) Intellectual Property Rights. Given our current environment, what would be the IP status of such a communication? If a private corporation received it, could it be copyrighted or patented or even held as a trade secret (with respect to the location/wavelength of the message stream)? Could the method of decryption (can we imagine a race to decode the "obvious" encoding scheme for the sake of methodology-patenting rights)? It clearly wouldn't fall into the "physical laws of the universe" category which is unpatentable. Would there be a yet greater exponential explosion of patents out of the USPTO as corporate couriers run in every few minutes with a printout of the most recent program packet (not that they'd need to know what it did, e.g., DNA sequencing)?
By way of analogy, what sorts of ET societal environments might we be affecting in unintentional ways with an informational broadcast of this type?
how real-time games have taken over from their slower brethren, some of the consequences therein, and try to find the answer to that universal question - "why?"
I'd suggest that this "universal question" is analagous to the question "why have the talkies taken over from their silent-movie brethren?"
Who wouldn't prefer to have continually-progressing fun, instead of in bits and spurts that are locked into turn increments? Particularly if we consider the emergence of the internet, and the realization and possibilities of multiplayer interaction, then turn-based games suffer even more since they guarantee that some player(s) will be spending time simply waiting for the turn, and not playing.
It wasn't obvious 15 years ago, but real-time games are simply better material for computers -- it took us a while to realize it, since all (non-athletic) games were turn-based prior to the advent of computers.
Your thought-experiment suffers from a sample size which is far too low to make it relevant: namely, one single solar system (or, nine planets, if you prefer to count that way). I don't how many would be relevant -- but it would certainly be on the order of hundreds or thousands or more solar systems.
It's like me looking at my apartment of 6 rooms and noticing that, as far as I can see, there's only a computer in my dining room. "This is suggestive," I might say, "that dining-room like conditions really are the only situations in which computers can exist."
I'm beginning to think that "loser pays" and penalties for frivolous lawsuits are looking like a better idea with every passing day. . .
I was also thinking about the problems with this policy myself this past weekend. Here, I think, is a more viable alternative: making the losing party liable for the MINIMUM that either party paid in legal costs.
Therefore, if Microsoft throws 15 lawyers at you and win, you're only liable for a small fraction of what they paid. On the other hand, you'd get everything you spent if MS is found in the wrong. You can gauge how much you want to spend defending yourself vs. the likelihood that you're doubling your own damages if your case is frivolous.
Who keeps modding this troll up in every discussion thread?
If one signs an agreement with a company giving them carte blanche over your free speech for the rest of your life, then you have noone but yourself to blame should you find yourself being asked to shut your mouth at some later date.
Here's a little snippet from the Declaration of Independence, cornerstone of the U.S. institution:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
I direct you to the phrase "unalienable Rights".
That is, that there are rights that cannot be taken away EVER by ANYONE, whether it be by a government, corporation, or contract. Among them is "Liberty". And that this seems "self-evident".
It made sense 200+ years ago, it makes sense still.
The most distressing part of this, to me (I mean, maybe I'm jaded towards stories about cops busting in on college students now) is how poorly-written the news article linked above from the Daily Kent Stater is. Now, I know, it's a student paper. I'm already familiar with how wildly divergent a news story can be if the journalist doesn't give a crap (or is pressed for time, etc.) But...
The news story doesn't ONCE even mention the name "Starcraft"! It's pretty obvious to us from the group's web site... but in the Stater article all it says is "a possible computer crime", "students set up a 'war-like' game", "the site includes a list of rules, rankings of members, allies and the enemies...", etc. Come on, couldn't they spare a single sentence to say "It's a game of STARCRAFT, one of the most popular online games since 1998 by industry juggernaut Blizzard"?
Cruddy media like that only serve to distort issues and panic people. Budding journalists: you've got to at least give a shit when you apply pen to paper.
A number of accumulation-type games ("Life", "PayDay", etc.) have players working basically in parallel, so the total sum can vary at game end. It could be argued that they're implicitly zero-sum in that some single person is ultimately declared the winner.
There's a lot of party games that can be played by a single team in an attempt to maximize the team score ("Password", "Taboo", etc.). I've got a group of friends practically addicted to playing "Taboo" in an attempt to see how high a score we can get in one turn.
And, of course, D&D or any other type of roleplaying game is evidenced by a group attempting to help each other advance in achievement level. (Assuming that you don't stipulate a static world and count all the monsters and unearthed treasures as "losses".)
Re:Been done here for ages, and it works.
on
The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 1
Its just a question of trusting the authoriteies. If they abuse this power, unlikely, you can just vote them out. That is what a democracy is for.
Well, amusingly (as I saw in a documentary a few weeks back), this was exactly the argument advanced by supporters of the US Constitutional Congress back in the 1700's, for why there was no need for a Bill of Rights. "Why do you need proctection for your rights? Don't you trust your own representatives?"
Rights aren't secured without explicit legislation limiting how power can be used against you.
The second argument is that one should be entitled to the product of their own mind...
My creating that product or idea and restricting its usage does NOT detract from your life, unless you take the fact that I generated that product or idea for granted.
The first argument is strong, but I'll take a moment to split the hair of this second argument. I believe it was Jefferson who said something about it being unnatural to restrict an idea once it has been uttered publicly.
A hypothetical example: Let's say someone writes a book which outlines a conspiracy on how to take over the government; it identifies phrasewords by which the elite conspirators will identify each other. Now, as the conspiracy based on this book progresses in real life, then clearly if I am prevented from reading or using this material, it detracts from my life. Ideas can be powerful, not merely entertainment.
I think this situation is broadly analagous to genetic ownership of plants which supersede and potentially replace "natural" crop strains. Or, the case of the Church of Scientology in the way they jealously guard their institutional writings. Or, generalized issues about access to information technology and the power differential across the "digital divide". A product/idea which causes older ideas to no longer be supported will harm me if I don't have access to it.
Federal civilian employment is now at 1.8 million, its lowest level since 1960. During the Clinton administration, it has dropped 19 percent. The reductions are unquestionably real.
Even if this is true, so what?
The "so what" is that this is largely the part that the executive branch has sway over, and the Democratic administration demonstrably worked to cut it down. Like I said, you're unwilling to give them credit for this project.
Gore's repeated statements that half of the benefit goes to the richest 1% is a flat-out lie.
Well, here's Jim Hines, University of Michigan Business School Professor attesting that the top 1% get 30% of the benefit, here . You can call the "half to 1%" phrase a flat-out lie if you must, but it's basically correct. Furthermore, your attempt at calling Bush's plan "progressive" is bewildering: the low tax bracket would go from 15 to 10 (a 5% reduction), while the high tax bracket goes from 39.6 to 33 (a 6.6% reduction). An extra cut for the most wealthy. That's documented here
For Greenspan's comments on real privatization, see http://www.senate.gov/~gramm/policy/grnspan.html
Your link doesn't have any comments by Greenspan on privatization at all! It's a PR piece out of Phil Gramm's office trying to make it look like Greenspan liked a proposal of his. The entirety of Greenspan's quote is this: "'Well, Senator, I react favorably to that sort of system,' responded Greenspan, adding, however, that he would want to see all the details before
endorsing such a plan."
Please cite examples of this. Federal spending as a percentage of GDP is at its highest level since World War II, and Gore's solution to every problem was even more spending and regulations.
That's easy, here's a few examples:
Gore initiated the National Performance Review. The 1993 report from his office asserts, "The answer for every problem cannot always be another program or more money. It is time to radically change the way the government operates--to shift from top-down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government that empowers citizens and communities to change our country from the bottom up." I'm sure you'll dispute the $108 billion that its analysis shows to have been saved by the federal government. The report.
The Committee on Governmental Affairs of the US Senate filed a report in 2000 analyzing the Clinton administration's "Reinventing Government Initiative". Among its findings: "Substantial downsizing of the federal workforce has in fact occurred--but substantial issues remain. Federal civilian employment is now at 1.8 million, its lowest level since 1960. During the Clinton administration, it has dropped 19 percent. The reductions are unquestionably real."
The report.
Did you sleep through the entire campaign? The only reason Gore even came close was by blatantly lying about Bush's tax cuts (the "over half the benefit goes to the richest 1%" bull***t) and Social Security reforms (it's a "risky scheme" to invest in money market funds, far safer to hand it over to the government and hope that when you retire they'll give you some of it back by taxing the hell out of your grandchildren.)
I wish I had slept through it! Come on, be serious with this stuff. Bush wants to cut taxes big time for the richest people, he's explicitly admitted that. And I can't believe anyone seriously would be willing to try the Social-Security-in-the-stock-market scheme. The whole point to Social Security is that it guarantees a certain payment, not some unknown speculative value! I suppose you need support for that as well... here's Al Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, on the subject:
Asked about the President's plan to put approximately one-quarter of Social Security funds into the stock market, Greenspan said, "Let me just say it's not so much a trade-off of benefits versus costs. I'm frankly just hard-pressed to find any benefits there are in doing it."
-- WH Bulletin, 1/20/99
"There is really no strong evidence to suggest any positive aspects of moving Social Security funds into equities," Greenspan, the chief architect of the government's last major revisions to Social Security 16 years ago, told members of the House Ways and Means Committee.
From the Washington Post.
One of my great frustrations is that the Right, as you call it, is still able to convince people that it fights for "a lot of personal freedom/liberty/power, thus reducing that of the government" just by saying it's so. It seems clear to me that the Right is just lying in this regard. The Right is always fond of tougher drug laws, bigger prisons, more spying technologies, fewer available abortion options, and less free access to the 'Net. The Left, exemplified by Gore, cut a record amount of beauracratic regulations and gets no credit for it. If the Right wants more people in federally-run prisons, and the Left wants more people in fedrally-run health care programs, I'll take the latter every time.
Look, I used to be a registered Libertarian myself. I could never vote for a Republican, because I just don't ever see them actually taking action to increase personal freedoms... just the opposite. And regardless of their rhetoric.
Furthermore, it's amazing that you think CNN is a leftie lapdog. Did you see the live inauguration coverage this weekend? It's apparent they fawned over Bush's ceremony, dismissing and even muting out the protestors in DC during the parade footage.
Frankly, I've always thought that the critical weakness of the Left is its inability to really lie without shame. In this regard it will always be at a tactical disadvantage.
That said, I'd like to suggest a simple technological solution to the potential global warming problem. Disperse sufficient fine particulate matter into the upper atmosphere to reflect about 1% of the sun's light.
Hmmm... are you a programmer? If so, I'm left wondering how you go about debugging. Do you just randomly disperse a few thousand ASCII characters into a source file and hope it compiles?
Method and apparatus for path name format conversion: Separation of pathnames into their components.
If there's any item on this list that's a joke someone slipped by the examiners, this is it. The technical claim describes in excrutiating detail what's involved in "converting at least a portion of the ASCII path name... and sequentially writing said unparsed string, character by character, into said buffer..."
I wonder what else is in my 1990 Turbo C++ "stdlib.h" library which is now a patent violation?
I saw the documentary you mention a while back (on either TLC or the Discovery channel). Frankly, I thought it was pretty ludicrous when I saw it.
I'll grant your points #1 & 2 & 3 & 6 (that the sphinx is older than the pyramids, and that the pyramid shape shows up on different continents), but don't find anything remarkable about them.
#5 I've not heard of ever before... I'd be interested in hearing a reference and how such a picture of "proto-Antarctica" is more than just a squiggly circle.
#4 I recall from the show you mention. The presenter showed some uncolored stone statues in South America. To me, they looked obviously Polynesian. When he said that they had to be African blacks, I was flabbergasted.
Slashdot Mirror
The PC in many respects has too many functions, and it does them too poorly. So there's all the reason in the world do look at different choices.
So I guess that's either lobbying for an array of specialty digital appliances, or handicapping computers so they can't do so many functions (i.e., be a generalized logical device). I mean, come on, that's the whole magic of computers. Call me a hobbyist or whatever, but you can pry my word-processing, spreadsheet-calculating, internet-surfing, game-playing, software-developing PC out of my cold, dead arms.
It's stuff like this that is making me more and more likely to completely disregard as rubbish any presentation that includes the phrase "computers need to be more intuitive and user-friendly"...
Well then, what the hell's the point of software patents? You haven't advanced any arguments as to why they (under your scheme) would benefit society or enhance innovation.
And, of course, the Turing Machine patent would have expired about 30 years ago.
Do you have a reference to this dare from Robert Heinlen? It's the first I've ever heard of it...
Clearly Napster is being cracked down on by the RIAA. It was just the next weekend that they were sending out cease-and-desist orders to all "Napster-like services" and hosting ISPs (as reported here on Slashdot) -- including every one of the open products that you reference.
If they can't find all such services, the media companies can consolidate and buy ISPs until they can just shut down any server they don't like (in progress). If that doesn't work, they can convince CD and hard drive manufacturers to include built-in copy-protection (in progress). If the servers are offshore, they can have lawyers and diplomats "educate" those ISPs about how much bandwidth they're "losing" (in progress). If push comes to shove they certainly will receive search warrants, break down doors, and make high-profile arrests, hardware confiscations, and heavy fines (also in progress, esp. at certain university dormitories).
I have a huge fear that our decade-or-so Internet Nirvana will soon look like the 60's, in which a bunch of idealistic college students were absolutely convinced that the government couldn't stop a revolution based on the people's power, and look foolish for it in retrospect.
(1) Security. Could we trust it to not have malicious viruses if we actually compiled it and ran it? (Of course, this issue with ET communication has been brought up elsewhere.) Given absolutely no security to such a program the prudent course might be to not ever execute it (insert favorite MS joke here).
(2) Intellectual Property Rights. Given our current environment, what would be the IP status of such a communication? If a private corporation received it, could it be copyrighted or patented or even held as a trade secret (with respect to the location/wavelength of the message stream)? Could the method of decryption (can we imagine a race to decode the "obvious" encoding scheme for the sake of methodology-patenting rights)? It clearly wouldn't fall into the "physical laws of the universe" category which is unpatentable. Would there be a yet greater exponential explosion of patents out of the USPTO as corporate couriers run in every few minutes with a printout of the most recent program packet (not that they'd need to know what it did, e.g., DNA sequencing)?
By way of analogy, what sorts of ET societal environments might we be affecting in unintentional ways with an informational broadcast of this type?
I'd suggest that this "universal question" is analagous to the question "why have the talkies taken over from their silent-movie brethren?"
Who wouldn't prefer to have continually-progressing fun, instead of in bits and spurts that are locked into turn increments? Particularly if we consider the emergence of the internet, and the realization and possibilities of multiplayer interaction, then turn-based games suffer even more since they guarantee that some player(s) will be spending time simply waiting for the turn, and not playing.
It wasn't obvious 15 years ago, but real-time games are simply better material for computers -- it took us a while to realize it, since all (non-athletic) games were turn-based prior to the advent of computers.
It's like me looking at my apartment of 6 rooms and noticing that, as far as I can see, there's only a computer in my dining room. "This is suggestive," I might say, "that dining-room like conditions really are the only situations in which computers can exist."
It might be helpful to post Sen. Hatch's music site here: http://www.hatchmusic.com/
I was also thinking about the problems with this policy myself this past weekend. Here, I think, is a more viable alternative: making the losing party liable for the MINIMUM that either party paid in legal costs.
Therefore, if Microsoft throws 15 lawyers at you and win, you're only liable for a small fraction of what they paid. On the other hand, you'd get everything you spent if MS is found in the wrong. You can gauge how much you want to spend defending yourself vs. the likelihood that you're doubling your own damages if your case is frivolous.
If one signs an agreement with a company giving them carte blanche over your free speech for the rest of your life, then you have noone but yourself to blame should you find yourself being asked to shut your mouth at some later date.
Here's a little snippet from the Declaration of Independence, cornerstone of the U.S. institution:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
I direct you to the phrase "unalienable Rights". That is, that there are rights that cannot be taken away EVER by ANYONE, whether it be by a government, corporation, or contract. Among them is "Liberty". And that this seems "self-evident".
It made sense 200+ years ago, it makes sense still.
The news story doesn't ONCE even mention the name "Starcraft"! It's pretty obvious to us from the group's web site... but in the Stater article all it says is "a possible computer crime", "students set up a 'war-like' game", "the site includes a list of rules, rankings of members, allies and the enemies...", etc. Come on, couldn't they spare a single sentence to say "It's a game of STARCRAFT, one of the most popular online games since 1998 by industry juggernaut Blizzard"?
Cruddy media like that only serve to distort issues and panic people. Budding journalists: you've got to at least give a shit when you apply pen to paper.
There's a lot of party games that can be played by a single team in an attempt to maximize the team score ("Password", "Taboo", etc.). I've got a group of friends practically addicted to playing "Taboo" in an attempt to see how high a score we can get in one turn.
And, of course, D&D or any other type of roleplaying game is evidenced by a group attempting to help each other advance in achievement level. (Assuming that you don't stipulate a static world and count all the monsters and unearthed treasures as "losses".)
Well, amusingly (as I saw in a documentary a few weeks back), this was exactly the argument advanced by supporters of the US Constitutional Congress back in the 1700's, for why there was no need for a Bill of Rights. "Why do you need proctection for your rights? Don't you trust your own representatives?"
Rights aren't secured without explicit legislation limiting how power can be used against you.
But, your example is nonetheless a good one for demonstrating the flexibility of the Mac.
The first argument is strong, but I'll take a moment to split the hair of this second argument. I believe it was Jefferson who said something about it being unnatural to restrict an idea once it has been uttered publicly.
A hypothetical example: Let's say someone writes a book which outlines a conspiracy on how to take over the government; it identifies phrasewords by which the elite conspirators will identify each other. Now, as the conspiracy based on this book progresses in real life, then clearly if I am prevented from reading or using this material, it detracts from my life. Ideas can be powerful, not merely entertainment.
I think this situation is broadly analagous to genetic ownership of plants which supersede and potentially replace "natural" crop strains. Or, the case of the Church of Scientology in the way they jealously guard their institutional writings. Or, generalized issues about access to information technology and the power differential across the "digital divide". A product/idea which causes older ideas to no longer be supported will harm me if I don't have access to it.
Even if this is true, so what?
The "so what" is that this is largely the part that the executive branch has sway over, and the Democratic administration demonstrably worked to cut it down. Like I said, you're unwilling to give them credit for this project.
Gore's repeated statements that half of the benefit goes to the richest 1% is a flat-out lie.
Well, here's Jim Hines, University of Michigan Business School Professor attesting that the top 1% get 30% of the benefit, here . You can call the "half to 1%" phrase a flat-out lie if you must, but it's basically correct. Furthermore, your attempt at calling Bush's plan "progressive" is bewildering: the low tax bracket would go from 15 to 10 (a 5% reduction), while the high tax bracket goes from 39.6 to 33 (a 6.6% reduction). An extra cut for the most wealthy. That's documented here
For Greenspan's comments on real privatization, see http://www.senate.gov/~gramm/policy/grnspan.html
Your link doesn't have any comments by Greenspan on privatization at all! It's a PR piece out of Phil Gramm's office trying to make it look like Greenspan liked a proposal of his. The entirety of Greenspan's quote is this: "'Well, Senator, I react favorably to that sort of system,' responded Greenspan, adding, however, that he would want to see all the details before endorsing such a plan."
That's easy, here's a few examples:
Gore initiated the National Performance Review. The 1993 report from his office asserts, "The answer for every problem cannot always be another program or more money. It is time to radically change the way the government operates--to shift from top-down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government that empowers citizens and communities to change our country from the bottom up." I'm sure you'll dispute the $108 billion that its analysis shows to have been saved by the federal government. The report.
The Committee on Governmental Affairs of the US Senate filed a report in 2000 analyzing the Clinton administration's "Reinventing Government Initiative". Among its findings: "Substantial downsizing of the federal workforce has in fact occurred--but substantial issues remain. Federal civilian employment is now at 1.8 million, its lowest level since 1960. During the Clinton administration, it has dropped 19 percent. The reductions are unquestionably real." The report.
Did you sleep through the entire campaign? The only reason Gore even came close was by blatantly lying about Bush's tax cuts (the "over half the benefit goes to the richest 1%" bull***t) and Social Security reforms (it's a "risky scheme" to invest in money market funds, far safer to hand it over to the government and hope that when you retire they'll give you some of it back by taxing the hell out of your grandchildren.)
I wish I had slept through it! Come on, be serious with this stuff. Bush wants to cut taxes big time for the richest people, he's explicitly admitted that. And I can't believe anyone seriously would be willing to try the Social-Security-in-the-stock-market scheme. The whole point to Social Security is that it guarantees a certain payment, not some unknown speculative value! I suppose you need support for that as well... here's Al Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, on the subject:
Asked about the President's plan to put approximately one-quarter of Social Security funds into the stock market, Greenspan said, "Let me just say it's not so much a trade-off of benefits versus costs. I'm frankly just hard-pressed to find any benefits there are in doing it." -- WH Bulletin, 1/20/99
"There is really no strong evidence to suggest any positive aspects of moving Social Security funds into equities," Greenspan, the chief architect of the government's last major revisions to Social Security 16 years ago, told members of the House Ways and Means Committee. From the Washington Post.
Look, I used to be a registered Libertarian myself. I could never vote for a Republican, because I just don't ever see them actually taking action to increase personal freedoms... just the opposite. And regardless of their rhetoric.
Furthermore, it's amazing that you think CNN is a leftie lapdog. Did you see the live inauguration coverage this weekend? It's apparent they fawned over Bush's ceremony, dismissing and even muting out the protestors in DC during the parade footage.
Frankly, I've always thought that the critical weakness of the Left is its inability to really lie without shame. In this regard it will always be at a tactical disadvantage.
Hmmm... are you a programmer? If so, I'm left wondering how you go about debugging. Do you just randomly disperse a few thousand ASCII characters into a source file and hope it compiles?
If there's any item on this list that's a joke someone slipped by the examiners, this is it. The technical claim describes in excrutiating detail what's involved in "converting at least a portion of the ASCII path name... and sequentially writing said unparsed string, character by character, into said buffer..."
I wonder what else is in my 1990 Turbo C++ "stdlib.h" library which is now a patent violation?
I'll grant your points #1 & 2 & 3 & 6 (that the sphinx is older than the pyramids, and that the pyramid shape shows up on different continents), but don't find anything remarkable about them.
#5 I've not heard of ever before... I'd be interested in hearing a reference and how such a picture of "proto-Antarctica" is more than just a squiggly circle.
#4 I recall from the show you mention. The presenter showed some uncolored stone statues in South America. To me, they looked obviously Polynesian. When he said that they had to be African blacks, I was flabbergasted.