I'm sure he's familiar with it, this case has gotten a lot of coverage in those circles. Since you like his work, I'll direct you to someone from the same spectrum that I enjoy more. Radley Balko over at The Agitator is a great, award winning writer who is known for finding stories that deliver a swift kick in the... well, a punch in the stomach. This story about a forensics team that framed a man for murder in Mississippi won him some heavy awards and helped the innocence project free a few wrongly convicted men. Just be sure you take your blood pressure medicine before you read that story - it really is too much to handle if you take justice seriously. There's a couple-dozen more at the same magazine that can keep your sense of moral outrage exercised for days.
To bolster your point, check out what John Thompson has to say in his editorial in the NY Times. He just lost a case in the supreme court - so he can't sue the people who put him on death row, literally hours away from execution, by hiding evidence that he was innocent. No shit. Not only that, but even though they hid the evidence that he didn't do it and worked hard to make sure he'd be executed, nobody is ever going to be disciplined in any way - not even a letter of reprimand in their file. Nope, apparently nobody did anything wrong - at least as far as the state is concerned.
I'm surprised at your definition of a right, particularly with that handle.
Right to education would come under a right to free association (as in nobody should be able to prevent you from obtaining an education). Beyond that, there is a societal need to have educated members so they might choose to subsidize education. That's not the same thing as a right.
Rights are inherent in being a human. They are not granted to you by any outside entity. They can only be infringed upon (or not). Rights to speech, your own thoughts and opinions. To hang out with whomever you choose. To not be assaulted or to be secure in your possessions. These are all things that you have absent any gift from outside. In fact, it takes an outside application of force to remove or prevent the exercise of these rights.
Education? That requires somebody else to do something. Claiming that you have a right to an education means you have a right for someone else to teach you. That is not possible under the definition of a right - because I certainly have a right to not spend my time teaching you, and the same can be said for every other individual on the planet.
Information technology is the same thing - having a right to not be interfered with is not the same thing as having a right for somebody else to give you a computer, modem, network router, and connection to their network. Claiming this as a right doesn't make any sense. If that was a right, then you would be able to claim all of these things for free. Which means you claim a right to violate another person's rights in confiscating their property or time. This cannot be a right.
And wealth? Holy crap, what are you thinking? Do we all have the right to be NBA All-Stars too? Or how about the heavyweight champion of the world?
I think you completely conflated the idea of "it is something that is really important" with "it is a right". These are absolutely not the same thing at all. Food is really, really important. Way more important than education or information. You'll die without it. Food is not a right. Neither is shelter, water, transportation.... all of the necessities of life. These all require work to be done - somebody has to grow the food, or hunt, or gather, whatever. You can't just go grab food from someone who grew it because you are hungry. The same goes for money - you exchange your labor for money... nobody has the right to confiscate your money, any more than they have the right to force you to perform labor.
There's a completely separate question about what a society wants to come together and provide as basic services to all citizens - but that isn't the same thing as a right at all.
I haven't run the math on this example in many years, but you've hit on the nut of the answer. Due to foreshortening the hanger dudes see an 80m rocket inside for the (extremely brief) period that the doors are simultaneously closed. Due to time dilation the rocket pilot sees first one, then the other door close and open as the rocket moves through. They are never both closed at the same time from his reference frame. Extra cool points for the fact that the two ends of the hangar are connected by a building, but separated by relativistic effects due to the extreme speed. Weird.
(It also allows you to turn on multi-tasking for the app so I guess it can constantly determine how much time you've saved)... It says it uses GPS but I'm assuming it isn't calculating how much time is speeding up if you climb up some stairs
Does it explain how much the advertisers gain by getting continual updates on your position using your GPS?
It isn't just about math. These effects have been proven experimentally - just not by sending a human off to Alpha Centauri. Follow the references for more relativity fun. I personally find length dilation to be the most interesting and difficult to get my head wrapped around.
Fun thought experiment:
A 100m rocket speeds toward a 90m hangar building at.99C. As the rocket passes through the open doors of the hangar the operators of the building close both sets of doors while the rocket is entirely inside the building. This is possible because of the length dilation happening at the high relativistic speeds (the rocket is compressed to less than 90m from the view of the hangar).
But from the point of view of the ship, it is the hangar that is approaching at.99c. Therefore the hangar is foreshortened - even shorter than 90m - leaving more than 10m too much rocket hanging out. What do each of the door operators and the pilot of the rocket see happening?
This is a fun use for all that math you learned to figure out relativity. Even though both frames of reference see things in entirely incompatible ways, both versions of the truth are entirely consistent via relativity.. Fun!
and what about latitude? You'd have to factor in the relativistic differences between sitting near the earth's axis of rotation and whizzing about at the equator. Surely that speed differential is bigger than your walking speed...
I thnk you're missing the point: if you don't have the knowledge to understand the science, then you must take on faith that those who do, a) do, and b) are relaying the correct information.
You could study for a decade or two in order to attain the same knowledge and verify it for yourself... but until you do that, your only option is to place your trust (and faith) in those who have already done that.
Yeah, and it is a stupid point. By that definition I have to take it on faith that Africa exists, having never been there myself.
... or repeating what the viewer just saw right before the last commercial break.
You just stepped in my favorite rant. This technique began appearing around a decade ago and now it seems like almost every "reality" show spends 10% of their time either telling you what you just saw before the break or what you'll see after the break. My wife loves this BTW. She doesn't have to pay as much attention.
It drives me up a wall. Thank goodness for Tivo. I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on the reality show crowd. The news media has been doing this since TV started covering presidential speeches. I love the way they come on immediately after the state of the union and tell me what he just said. With the advent of the "leaked" text of the speech they can spend the 30 minutes before the speech telling me what he's going to say, then spend an hour after the speech telling me what he just said. Brilliant!
This is TV. Compared to the Kardashians, they're geniuses.
Unless you use the universal scorekeeper - cash. Then the promiscuous hotties are the geniuses. I believe they each bring in more than the entire Mythbusters franchise. And yes, that could be a sign of the apocalypse.
Great example, but I'm not sure how much was rigor and how much was statistics fail. The student T-test is probably the most misused statistical tool on the planet. It is also often held up as the be-all end-all proof that your experiment is beyond reproach.
I once got into an argument with a few famous scientists at the Burly Earl pub near my lab over just this problem. A study that was getting some buzz was being bandied about at the table. I called bullshit on the whole thing. At first nobody was on my side, because the paper cited nice p values. Then I pointed out that the positive and negative controls on their experiment varied so much between runs that the negative control in one run was higher than the positive control in another. The money quote that changed the argument? "I don't care what your statistics say, if you have more than 100% variation between runs, you don't have an assay." That won me a beer. Well, they offered anyway. I actually took a free refill on my iced tea, but still...
25 years later we are still hearing arguments about the need for better understanding of statistics in science. I think it is beginning to get some traction, particularly the use of bayesian tools, but we are a long way away from wide acceptance. Any experiment that shows a very small effect that requires statistics to prove the validity of the effect should be examined very closely. This is exactly the sort of situation that is open to subtle experimental error that can go unnoticed. In the case of Fleischman and Pons they showed a small excess in heat. It would be very easy to have a systematic error in your calculations or measurements that resulted in a tiny error. That is why having others reproduce your results is so important. When they tried, nobody was able to reproduce the results of cold fusion.
We often see this effect at work in epidemiological studies - like the breast implant or power line scares. A single study shows an effect that requires measuring lots of cases. A very small change in the number of positives can look like a fairly large effect if the baseline is very small. Unintentional systematic errors can easily account for this kind of effect. Having others reproduce the results reduces the odds of this impact. In those cases (and many others), followup research failed to validate the initial study. It would be nice if the press knew this about the scientific process.
One example is the whole Archimedes Death Ray (which has been beaten to death). In virtually every experiment I've seen, they're eyeballing where the light is being reflected. That's pretty hard when you have a hundred lights doing the same thing. This page gives a simple, basic method to determine where your light is going, and if it doubled their consistency with the mirrors, the results would have been different. I'm sure the boy scouts have a training manual, too, if you're looking for a more formal source. I'm not even saying that the death ray would have worked. I'm just saying that their experiments sucked. And bad experiments give bad results.
If you had seen the follow-up you'd know that they modified their experiment by adding a fine netting in front of the mirrors to allow the "soldiers" to better aim their spots. This is a technical improvement on the method you suggest. They also increased the number and size of mirrors used. They learned from their experiment, listened to peer review and improved their methods. They performed additional experiments which gave similar results. They then published their findings publicly.
Exactly how is this not science? Other than the less-than-earthshattering nature of the questions they pose, they generally do exactly what research scientists at major universities do every day.
I'd say "scientist" is "someone who follows the scientific method" but that's just me.
Precisely. They design experiments (whether good or not) to test hypotheses. The show documents the engineering that is done to conduct the experiments. That is how science is done.
I used to do work in soft tissue transplant research (honest to goodness NIH and NCI funded scientific research!). As a part of that work I built liquid nitrogen freezers, designed auto-plating robots, wrote database synchronization programs, did statistical analysis... lots of different "professions". But the actual task at hand was scientific research.
Now I apply those skills in the financial world. The questions I apply my skills to are no longer in the realm of "science", but I still bring a scientific mindset to the work.
The Mythbuster's task at hand is entertainment. In the course of that task they test various hypotheses. The tests they design are scientific experiments. The engineering they do during the implementation of those experiments constitutes the bulk of the show. The very large percentage of time spent preparing to do an experiment on the show matches my experience in actual scientific research. The education that Mythbusters provides in approaching a question scientifically is immensely valuable, even if it is incomplete.
As full evidence of falsifiable tests and sciencey goodness, the Mythbusters made a car with golf ball dimples to prove that giant golf ball dimples won't improve car mileage. This experiment promptly demonstrated a fairly large improvement in cruising mileage by putting large golf ball dimples on a car. That's science! (and cool too.)
the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), one of the oldest, largest, and most respected UFO investigation organizations in the world
Announcement: I have justed founded MELFN. The Mutual ELF Network is one of the oldest, largest, and most respected Elf investigation organizations in the world.
P.S. Basic level membership dues are $20 per year. Gold level supporter membership is $50 per year. Adamantium level Lifetime Believer membership is available for a one-time $2500 contribution, a portion of which will fund the purchase of investigative hardware.
-
I think I can get a few bucks more for my MILFN memberships.....
A quick read about the null hypothesis will help you dealing with these "science" trolls. The null hypothesis is the basis of scientific inquiry. Read up and you can formulate a null hypothesis for evaluating UFO phenomena as examples of extraterrestrial visitors. That should make everything clear to these "science" trolls - you can speak their language then and properly defend ufology. Devise a correct null hypothesis and then you'll be able to articulate how the evidence supports alien presence in a way that these trolls can't refute. That's how science really works....
I'm with you! I can't figure out how a shape can be illegal anyway. Tommy Chong got arrested for selling bongs, which are essentially blown glass vases with a stem in the bottom. How in the world a particular shape of glass tube can be illegal is beyond me.
Same goes for shapes molded in latex. No clue in this world as to how you could rule a molded piece of rubber as obscene and therefore illegal.
Nannies of every stripe need to get over themselves and let other people govern their own lives. If you are really interested in what the negative consequences of banning drugs look like, just head to the US/Mexico border. 50k dead in the drug war there - 100% attributable to prohibition.
The GPL3 is causing the same sort of "all or none" lock-in via legal instead of technical means. It is becoming very difficult to mix GPL3 software with commercial software.
Not really, it isn't: I've got Unreal Tournament 2004 installed on the very same PC I use to develop software with GCC, no problems installing either whatsoever.
That doesn't have anything to do with the "mixing" they are talking about. Neither does "not contributing back". The mixing has to do with having a product that is partially open source and partially closed source which results in an overall product that cannot be modified. The prime example is the Tivo. It was primarily open source, and they contributed code back to the community - but it had a proprietary binary that was designed to render the hardware and software inextricably linked. So even though they were probably the most open (to modifications) hardware manufacturer in history, they were not 100% open and that pissed off the GNU tribe. So they changed their license to disallow this type of integration.
The "liberty" that the GPLv3 crowd is talking about is not the liberty of a person, but the liberty of the code. The code in this world is metaphorically a rights-holding free man. It cannot be restricted in its liberty by any interactions with people in the future (add-ons, code contributions, etc). It is a confusing nomenclature because the rational for code liberty involves personal freedom to access and manipulate products derived from "free" code. It is a weird and entirely philosophical argument that has major impacts in the real world.
The BSD version of freedom has great successes, as does the GNU version - yet they are basically diametrically opposed visions of what "open source" means. There's a ton of middle ground in the "open" definition as well - major example: Apache. Then you've got versions of "free" that don't include source - like MS SQL lite, Citrix Xen, Opera, etc.
So although your point is well taken, they aren't worried about your liberty, they are worried about their code's liberty. In fact I believe that the majority of the GPL team would have a different emphasis on the import of personal liberty. They seem to have a more collectivist mindset.
Their problem isn't with the "provide source" requirements. Version 3 was aimed squarely at Tivo and other commercial implementations. It is designed to be a "viral" license, requiring other components to become open sourced. Apple doesn't want to open-source OSX, so they quit using GPLv3 Samba code.
At that age no people would be around to watch the show, but some of our hominid ancestors could have taken their honeymoon at the Gibraltar Falls... maybe. Early bipedal hominids date to almost exactly that time period, maybe a little later.
A democracy... a real democracy... uses vote by eligible citizens for legislation.
Like California and Florida with their ballot initiatives. They provide ample proof that citizens can be brilliant and courageous and stupid and vindictive in the same way as elected representatives in the legislature. Even more so sometimes. For good or evil, I'd say that the evidence shows that direct democracy is more volatile than representative democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure he's familiar with it, this case has gotten a lot of coverage in those circles. Since you like his work, I'll direct you to someone from the same spectrum that I enjoy more. Radley Balko over at The Agitator is a great, award winning writer who is known for finding stories that deliver a swift kick in the... well, a punch in the stomach. This story about a forensics team that framed a man for murder in Mississippi won him some heavy awards and helped the innocence project free a few wrongly convicted men. Just be sure you take your blood pressure medicine before you read that story - it really is too much to handle if you take justice seriously. There's a couple-dozen more at the same magazine that can keep your sense of moral outrage exercised for days.
America isn't doing too well on 3, 5, 6, and 7.
To bolster your point, check out what John Thompson has to say in his editorial in the NY Times. He just lost a case in the supreme court - so he can't sue the people who put him on death row, literally hours away from execution, by hiding evidence that he was innocent. No shit. Not only that, but even though they hid the evidence that he didn't do it and worked hard to make sure he'd be executed, nobody is ever going to be disciplined in any way - not even a letter of reprimand in their file. Nope, apparently nobody did anything wrong - at least as far as the state is concerned.
I'm surprised at your definition of a right, particularly with that handle.
Right to education would come under a right to free association (as in nobody should be able to prevent you from obtaining an education). Beyond that, there is a societal need to have educated members so they might choose to subsidize education. That's not the same thing as a right.
Rights are inherent in being a human. They are not granted to you by any outside entity. They can only be infringed upon (or not). Rights to speech, your own thoughts and opinions. To hang out with whomever you choose. To not be assaulted or to be secure in your possessions. These are all things that you have absent any gift from outside. In fact, it takes an outside application of force to remove or prevent the exercise of these rights.
Education? That requires somebody else to do something. Claiming that you have a right to an education means you have a right for someone else to teach you. That is not possible under the definition of a right - because I certainly have a right to not spend my time teaching you, and the same can be said for every other individual on the planet.
Information technology is the same thing - having a right to not be interfered with is not the same thing as having a right for somebody else to give you a computer, modem, network router, and connection to their network. Claiming this as a right doesn't make any sense. If that was a right, then you would be able to claim all of these things for free. Which means you claim a right to violate another person's rights in confiscating their property or time. This cannot be a right.
And wealth? Holy crap, what are you thinking? Do we all have the right to be NBA All-Stars too? Or how about the heavyweight champion of the world?
I think you completely conflated the idea of "it is something that is really important" with "it is a right". These are absolutely not the same thing at all. Food is really, really important. Way more important than education or information. You'll die without it. Food is not a right. Neither is shelter, water, transportation.... all of the necessities of life. These all require work to be done - somebody has to grow the food, or hunt, or gather, whatever. You can't just go grab food from someone who grew it because you are hungry. The same goes for money - you exchange your labor for money... nobody has the right to confiscate your money, any more than they have the right to force you to perform labor.
There's a completely separate question about what a society wants to come together and provide as basic services to all citizens - but that isn't the same thing as a right at all.
I haven't run the math on this example in many years, but you've hit on the nut of the answer. Due to foreshortening the hanger dudes see an 80m rocket inside for the (extremely brief) period that the doors are simultaneously closed. Due to time dilation the rocket pilot sees first one, then the other door close and open as the rocket moves through. They are never both closed at the same time from his reference frame. Extra cool points for the fact that the two ends of the hangar are connected by a building, but separated by relativistic effects due to the extreme speed. Weird.
(It also allows you to turn on multi-tasking for the app so I guess it can constantly determine how much time you've saved) ... It says it uses GPS but I'm assuming it isn't calculating how much time is speeding up if you climb up some stairs
Does it explain how much the advertisers gain by getting continual updates on your position using your GPS?
It isn't just about math. These effects have been proven experimentally - just not by sending a human off to Alpha Centauri. Follow the references for more relativity fun. I personally find length dilation to be the most interesting and difficult to get my head wrapped around.
Fun thought experiment:
A 100m rocket speeds toward a 90m hangar building at .99C. As the rocket passes through the open doors of the hangar the operators of the building close both sets of doors while the rocket is entirely inside the building. This is possible because of the length dilation happening at the high relativistic speeds (the rocket is compressed to less than 90m from the view of the hangar).
But from the point of view of the ship, it is the hangar that is approaching at .99c. Therefore the hangar is foreshortened - even shorter than 90m - leaving more than 10m too much rocket hanging out. What do each of the door operators and the pilot of the rocket see happening?
This is a fun use for all that math you learned to figure out relativity. Even though both frames of reference see things in entirely incompatible ways, both versions of the truth are entirely consistent via relativity.. Fun!
and what about latitude? You'd have to factor in the relativistic differences between sitting near the earth's axis of rotation and whizzing about at the equator. Surely that speed differential is bigger than your walking speed...
I thnk you're missing the point: if you don't have the knowledge to understand the science, then you must take on faith that those who do, a) do, and b) are relaying the correct information.
You could study for a decade or two in order to attain the same knowledge and verify it for yourself... but until you do that, your only option is to place your trust (and faith) in those who have already done that.
Yeah, and it is a stupid point. By that definition I have to take it on faith that Africa exists, having never been there myself.
Ok, I gotta back you up on this one. The Green Hornet product placement was horrific. Hopefully not a harbinger of things to come.
... or repeating what the viewer just saw right before the last commercial break.
You just stepped in my favorite rant. This technique began appearing around a decade ago and now it seems like almost every "reality" show spends 10% of their time either telling you what you just saw before the break or what you'll see after the break. My wife loves this BTW. She doesn't have to pay as much attention.
It drives me up a wall. Thank goodness for Tivo. I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on the reality show crowd. The news media has been doing this since TV started covering presidential speeches. I love the way they come on immediately after the state of the union and tell me what he just said. With the advent of the "leaked" text of the speech they can spend the 30 minutes before the speech telling me what he's going to say, then spend an hour after the speech telling me what he just said. Brilliant!
This is TV. Compared to the Kardashians, they're geniuses.
Unless you use the universal scorekeeper - cash. Then the promiscuous hotties are the geniuses. I believe they each bring in more than the entire Mythbusters franchise. And yes, that could be a sign of the apocalypse.
Great example, but I'm not sure how much was rigor and how much was statistics fail. The student T-test is probably the most misused statistical tool on the planet. It is also often held up as the be-all end-all proof that your experiment is beyond reproach.
I once got into an argument with a few famous scientists at the Burly Earl pub near my lab over just this problem. A study that was getting some buzz was being bandied about at the table. I called bullshit on the whole thing. At first nobody was on my side, because the paper cited nice p values. Then I pointed out that the positive and negative controls on their experiment varied so much between runs that the negative control in one run was higher than the positive control in another. The money quote that changed the argument? "I don't care what your statistics say, if you have more than 100% variation between runs, you don't have an assay." That won me a beer. Well, they offered anyway. I actually took a free refill on my iced tea, but still...
25 years later we are still hearing arguments about the need for better understanding of statistics in science. I think it is beginning to get some traction, particularly the use of bayesian tools, but we are a long way away from wide acceptance. Any experiment that shows a very small effect that requires statistics to prove the validity of the effect should be examined very closely. This is exactly the sort of situation that is open to subtle experimental error that can go unnoticed. In the case of Fleischman and Pons they showed a small excess in heat. It would be very easy to have a systematic error in your calculations or measurements that resulted in a tiny error. That is why having others reproduce your results is so important. When they tried, nobody was able to reproduce the results of cold fusion.
We often see this effect at work in epidemiological studies - like the breast implant or power line scares. A single study shows an effect that requires measuring lots of cases. A very small change in the number of positives can look like a fairly large effect if the baseline is very small. Unintentional systematic errors can easily account for this kind of effect. Having others reproduce the results reduces the odds of this impact. In those cases (and many others), followup research failed to validate the initial study. It would be nice if the press knew this about the scientific process.
One example is the whole Archimedes Death Ray (which has been beaten to death). In virtually every experiment I've seen, they're eyeballing where the light is being reflected. That's pretty hard when you have a hundred lights doing the same thing. This page gives a simple, basic method to determine where your light is going, and if it doubled their consistency with the mirrors, the results would have been different. I'm sure the boy scouts have a training manual, too, if you're looking for a more formal source. I'm not even saying that the death ray would have worked. I'm just saying that their experiments sucked. And bad experiments give bad results.
If you had seen the follow-up you'd know that they modified their experiment by adding a fine netting in front of the mirrors to allow the "soldiers" to better aim their spots. This is a technical improvement on the method you suggest. They also increased the number and size of mirrors used. They learned from their experiment, listened to peer review and improved their methods. They performed additional experiments which gave similar results. They then published their findings publicly.
Exactly how is this not science? Other than the less-than-earthshattering nature of the questions they pose, they generally do exactly what research scientists at major universities do every day.
I'd say "scientist" is "someone who follows the scientific method" but that's just me.
Precisely. They design experiments (whether good or not) to test hypotheses. The show documents the engineering that is done to conduct the experiments. That is how science is done.
I used to do work in soft tissue transplant research (honest to goodness NIH and NCI funded scientific research!). As a part of that work I built liquid nitrogen freezers, designed auto-plating robots, wrote database synchronization programs, did statistical analysis... lots of different "professions". But the actual task at hand was scientific research.
Now I apply those skills in the financial world. The questions I apply my skills to are no longer in the realm of "science", but I still bring a scientific mindset to the work.
The Mythbuster's task at hand is entertainment. In the course of that task they test various hypotheses. The tests they design are scientific experiments. The engineering they do during the implementation of those experiments constitutes the bulk of the show. The very large percentage of time spent preparing to do an experiment on the show matches my experience in actual scientific research. The education that Mythbusters provides in approaching a question scientifically is immensely valuable, even if it is incomplete.
As full evidence of falsifiable tests and sciencey goodness, the Mythbusters made a car with golf ball dimples to prove that giant golf ball dimples won't improve car mileage. This experiment promptly demonstrated a fairly large improvement in cruising mileage by putting large golf ball dimples on a car. That's science! (and cool too.)
I thought it was the wedding ring that had that effect....
the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), one of the oldest, largest, and most respected UFO investigation organizations in the world
Announcement: I have justed founded MELFN.
The Mutual ELF Network is one of the oldest, largest, and most respected Elf investigation organizations in the world.
P.S.
Basic level membership dues are $20 per year.
Gold level supporter membership is $50 per year.
Adamantium level Lifetime Believer membership is available for a one-time $2500 contribution, a portion of which will fund the purchase of investigative hardware.
-
I think I can get a few bucks more for my MILFN memberships.....
Clearly Goa'uld....
A quick read about the null hypothesis will help you dealing with these "science" trolls. The null hypothesis is the basis of scientific inquiry. Read up and you can formulate a null hypothesis for evaluating UFO phenomena as examples of extraterrestrial visitors. That should make everything clear to these "science" trolls - you can speak their language then and properly defend ufology. Devise a correct null hypothesis and then you'll be able to articulate how the evidence supports alien presence in a way that these trolls can't refute. That's how science really works....
Be careful though... there are those who don't fully get what the null hypothesis means and try to apply the language without understanding it.
I'm with you! I can't figure out how a shape can be illegal anyway. Tommy Chong got arrested for selling bongs, which are essentially blown glass vases with a stem in the bottom. How in the world a particular shape of glass tube can be illegal is beyond me.
Same goes for shapes molded in latex. No clue in this world as to how you could rule a molded piece of rubber as obscene and therefore illegal.
Nannies of every stripe need to get over themselves and let other people govern their own lives. If you are really interested in what the negative consequences of banning drugs look like, just head to the US/Mexico border. 50k dead in the drug war there - 100% attributable to prohibition.
The GPL3 is causing the same sort of "all or none" lock-in via legal instead of technical means. It is becoming very difficult to mix GPL3 software with commercial software.
Not really, it isn't: I've got Unreal Tournament 2004 installed on the very same PC I use to develop software with GCC, no problems installing either whatsoever.
That doesn't have anything to do with the "mixing" they are talking about. Neither does "not contributing back". The mixing has to do with having a product that is partially open source and partially closed source which results in an overall product that cannot be modified. The prime example is the Tivo. It was primarily open source, and they contributed code back to the community - but it had a proprietary binary that was designed to render the hardware and software inextricably linked. So even though they were probably the most open (to modifications) hardware manufacturer in history, they were not 100% open and that pissed off the GNU tribe. So they changed their license to disallow this type of integration.
The "liberty" that the GPLv3 crowd is talking about is not the liberty of a person, but the liberty of the code. The code in this world is metaphorically a rights-holding free man. It cannot be restricted in its liberty by any interactions with people in the future (add-ons, code contributions, etc). It is a confusing nomenclature because the rational for code liberty involves personal freedom to access and manipulate products derived from "free" code. It is a weird and entirely philosophical argument that has major impacts in the real world.
The BSD version of freedom has great successes, as does the GNU version - yet they are basically diametrically opposed visions of what "open source" means. There's a ton of middle ground in the "open" definition as well - major example: Apache. Then you've got versions of "free" that don't include source - like MS SQL lite, Citrix Xen, Opera, etc.
So although your point is well taken, they aren't worried about your liberty, they are worried about their code's liberty. In fact I believe that the majority of the GPL team would have a different emphasis on the import of personal liberty. They seem to have a more collectivist mindset.
Their problem isn't with the "provide source" requirements. Version 3 was aimed squarely at Tivo and other commercial implementations. It is designed to be a "viral" license, requiring other components to become open sourced. Apple doesn't want to open-source OSX, so they quit using GPLv3 Samba code.
Actually, the Mediterranean Sea completely dried up about five and a half million years ago. The Straights of Gibraltar reopened at that point and reflooded the Mediterranean with a giant waterfall, or a huge river.
At that age no people would be around to watch the show, but some of our hominid ancestors could have taken their honeymoon at the Gibraltar Falls... maybe. Early bipedal hominids date to almost exactly that time period, maybe a little later.
A democracy... a real democracy... uses vote by eligible citizens for legislation.
Like California and Florida with their ballot initiatives. They provide ample proof that citizens can be brilliant and courageous and stupid and vindictive in the same way as elected representatives in the legislature. Even more so sometimes. For good or evil, I'd say that the evidence shows that direct democracy is more volatile than representative democracy.