There have always been limitations on "free speech" when it comes to pollution. Even an individual isn't allowed to rant about the lizard men with a megaphone at 3 AM.
The phone books are put on private property without permission. Is there some law that gives them permission? They're welcome, I suppose, to stand on the sidewalk and read the phone book at me, if they want, or even to stand there with the book open. I suppose they could pay the Post Office to mail it to me, since they have a special legal exemption.
If they've got some kind of blanket exemption, then of course an opt-out is going to violate privacy. And if this is the case, it sounds like they need to eliminate the blanket exemption, and I don't see "free speech" being a defense against that, since your right to speech ends where my property begins.
The lack of specifics comes from reading about it via a news aggregator in the popular press. Going to the horses's mouth gets you all you could possibly want:
Thank you: I do know the difference between a bullet and a cartridge but clearly had a massive brain fault.
I suspect that regulating only pre-made cartridges would suffice to reduce casualties considerably. I don't know what, if anything, can be done to regulate the illegal flow over the border, and it may be that all there is to do is give up, hand everybody a weapon, and hope that it saves more lives than it costs. I'm not hopeful on that score.
If the object is to limit firearms deaths, is it time to shift from regulating the weapons to regulating the explosives, such as gunpowder and ammunition?
I never understood why the ATF defined a "gun" in terms of its lower receiver. I assumed that it was because such a thing was difficult to make outside of a big gun factory, which would provide a decent point of control for ensuring that firearms would be sold only to people for legal purposes. (Yeah, that didn't work either, but that's a different question.)
But guns don't kill people: fast-moving bullets kill people. You're not going to regulate chunks of lead, but it seems not unreasonable to regulate the bits that explode, e.g. gunpowder and the bullets that contain it. I find it rather odd that I can walk into any gun store and buy explosives, in bulk, with few if any questions asked.
It seems to me that the notion of regulating the lower receivers has been a poor fit ever since milling machines became common, and 3D printers seem to make it completely pointless. Is it too late to try to regulate the explosives, or should we simply admit that it's time to wear Kevlar every time you leave the house and be continually prepared to pick off that guy behind you in the grocery store line before he pops you?
That solved a different problem, and isn't applicable here.
The federal budget isn't like your household budget. For reasons that surpasseth understanding, there's a two-step process, the "you may/must spend $X on these things" step and the "You are allowed to borrow $Y so that you can actually pay the bills" step. These are completely separate bits of legislation.
The trillion-dollar-coin was designed to work around a failure to pass the latter part. They were told to spend the money by appropriations bills, but there wasn't enough in the account and they weren't allowed to borrow. Through a loophole, they were able to make some up, though they didn't (and probably shouldn't have, though not because of "OMG inflashun!", because the government is actually borrowing money at less than the rate of inflation).
The problem we're facing now is in the first part: they said "Remember when we said to spend $X? Well, forget it. Spend $X-$85 billion, divided evenly over everything (except spending on old people, because we'd actually get blamed for that)." They actually have the money to spend, but they're not allowed to spend it.
The New York Times would rather not publish classified information if they don't have to. They're aware that it potentially puts people at risk. They're willing to overcome it if they think that there's sufficient reason. That's what they did with The Pentagon Papers, where something crucial was being kept from the public that would affect how they directed the government to act (both with public opinion and with votes.)
The New York Times doesn't rush to publish every piece of classified information it gets, just for being classified. They make a value judgment on whether the risks outweigh the public's need to know. They may even bring the government in to consult on that, though they're extremely wary about doing that because they don't want to risk their sources. (Which is actually one of the types of secrets that the government itself considers of the very highest priority in its own secret-keeping.) They've been known to sit on it until the information is no longer timely, then publish it.
So I'll be curious as to what the NYT has to say for itself. I half expect them to say, "We looked, felt that it did little good and possibly much harm, so we passed." Or they may say "We blew an important story". But I know they're not going to say, "We screwed up because we didn't fulfill our goal of publishing all the state secrets we lay our hands on", because they don't. They consider gatekeeping part of their job, in exactly the way that Wikileaks doesn't.
Wikileaks considers openness the #1 priority, which means that "aiding the enemy" is a real possibility. Whether this actually did or not is something a court is going to have to decide, but I won't rule it out just because the NYT passed on the story. Possibly, exactly the reverse.
The impression I get from TFA is not that they're skeptical that it can be repeated. Rather, they're skeptical that there is any important advance here. They've been doing implants to send and receive signals for some time. Since only a single bit is being transferred ("Go"), it's a pretty poor sort of "mind meld". It's not really thoughts being transferred at all, just a mental button-push, which they've been able to do for quite some time on both ends. And the Internet connection in between is pure window-dressing; it comes as no surprise to anybody that you can transfer a bit over the Internet.
The complexities of behavior are not at all due to the signal being sent. Those were laboriously trained in. All that was needed was the single "go" signal. With all the extraneous factors, it's hard to tell what's actually novel here, and the razzle-dazzle of those extraneous factors suggests that the answer is "nothing".
I'm sure it's actually more than nothing, since there is a difference between "we knew that we could do that" and "we actually did it". But it's far, far less than the press release makes it sound.
It does strike me as unlikely, since other timelines of heat death put our doom on the order of 10^33 years (the half-life of proton) or perhaps 10^14 years (the end of star formation). A mere 10^10 or 10^11 is suprisingly quick.
Still, I can think of one precedent for it, the "turning on" of dark energy, about 6 billion years ago. That suggests that the universe could still be undergoing changes on scales in the ten-billion-year range, so "many tens of billions" isn't completely unreasonable.
I'd like to think so, though the longer we wait, the more expensive effective action will be. Which will make it easier for the well-funded special interests to declare that "OK, it's happening, and OK, it's our fault, but gosh darn if we didn't miss our window of opportunity so it's too expensive to do anything about."
We'll probably end up doing something anyway, likely something pointless and inconvenient, so that people can feel good about having done something without actually achieving much.
I agree; I think that 3 EVs is much too much for DC. Retrocession is a much better idea. They can technically leave out the area immediately around the Mall, where nobody lives, but contains the Capitol, Supreme Court, White House, OEOB, Dirksen, etc. just to satisfy the Constitution, if somebody insists. There are already plenty of government-leased office spaces in Md and Va.
That would balance out the disproportionate electoral votes with a vote in Congress. It'll boost Maryland's representation by 1, perhaps 2. Maryland is going to want rent money from the Feds, and that's going to make people cranky.
The rich will do just fine. Climate change is going to do huge amounts of damage, but it won't wipe all of the crops and fresh water off the planet. They'll still be available, and even the middle class won't have too much trouble getting them. It will be the poorest half of the planet, or so, who will suffer and die.
A long time, the next three to four decades. Even then there will be those who insist that it's due to things for which they have neither direct measurements nor a sound theory, but will nonetheless be sufficiently convincing for them because it affirms what they wish to believe.
They will, eventually, become a minority, but by then it will be much, much too late. Delaying successfully moves the costs to other people. We will not be able to come to these billionaires, asking for the money they should have been spending decades before, since (a) they will be dead, and (b) even if they were alive, the future costs will be several times more than they will have. And as I said, they'll continue to deny that they have any responsibility.
Except they're not fools, and they're not being parted from their money. They are making a wise investment, from their standpoint. They spend millions, but in doing so avert billions of dollars in lost profits that would otherwise have to go to more expensive energy generation or more energy-efficient but pricey production methods. They continue to reap large profits in industries that they control, and are able to suppress competition in their markets by continuing to take advantage of unpriced externalities.
The costs will be paid in the long term, over the next century or so, and will be covered by other people. Those people are being parted by their money, and it includes many of the people being convinced by the think tanks that are being funded here.
They're not states. One of his key design constraints was the Electoral College, and only states get to vote in the Electoral College.
Washington, DC gets included since it does have EC votes. That messes with the Congressional representation, but he didn't make than explicit design constraint.
That was my first thought as well. A working implementation of "one click shopping" won't take more than a few minutes to cobble together. The price is significantly lower than the costs in filing a patent.
It's possible that seeing the trivial implementation might make it clearer to a reviewer that the patent is obvious to one skilled in the art. But then, that should have been obvious already, to one skilled in both the arts of writing software and patent law. (Which isn't the vast majority of people here, which is why we get "A Neanderthal flint flake is prior art for a Cuisinart" type comments here all the time.) Sadly, I get the impression that the reviewers seem to be similarly unskilled in programming. So maybe it'll help.
Certainly they need something, because while not all of the "bad patent" stories we see here are as bad as they sound, some actually are, and they're incredibly harmful.
The problem is that he planted seeds with patented genes only because they had infected his own cultivar. He did not purchase the seeds from Monsanto; he did not have an agreement with them not to replant. He would rather not have Monsanto's genes, but could not avoid it.
Much as I hate arguing by analogy, it's like the RIAA hacking into your computer, splicing Justin Bieber songs into your Audacity files, and then suing you when you play it. Unlike the analogy, it wasn't deliberate that Monsanto put its genes into Schmeiser's crop, but they were knowingly spreading pollen into the environment and it was unavoidable that it would affect somebody else's crop. They did not take any precautions to prevent their IP from being literally forced on other farmers.
The only way for Schmeiser to avoid replanting Monsanto's IP would have been to destroy his own seeds, an IP of Schmeiser's own that Monsanto negligently destroyed. Copying seeds is a lot harder than copying files; Schmeiser can't just restore from backup at no cost. If Schemiser owes money to Monsanto, Monsanto owes at least as much to Schmeiser.
Really? I would have thought just the opposite. Software is pretty easy to write. You do it, I do it, everybody on the site does it every day. The overwhelming majority of software patents are incredibly obvious to anybody with even a passing familiarity with the art, much less an expert.
Seeds, on the other hand... even if I'd had the idea to create a pesticide-resistant crop, I wouldn't know even the first thing about how to go about making such a thing. I'd have to get a PhD in biochemistry to even understand how they did it, and I'm sure that it took a large team many years to actually get it right.
And unlike a shopping cart patent, they then had to "prove" that it was safe to eat. I don't trust Monsanto any more than you do as to whether they've really proven it, but they didn't just throw those seeds out there. They spent millions conducting tests. They may not have done as much work as I'd like, but what they did sure isn't comparable to banging out a little PHP and then knocking off for lunch.
I'm not here to defend Monsanto, who have behaved like grade-A douchebags in many different areas, right up there with the **AAs. But I'm not going to pretend that their work is easy. Maybe intellectual property is so screwed up that that we might as well just ditch it in general, but if there's one part to go, I'd chuck software patents before I chucked work creating custom seeds. The latter is a lot harder than the former.
Then shouldn't he be shying away from this government invention? The domain name is of interest only by government fiat. Everybody has agreed to use ICANN's domain name servers, purely of their own free choice, even though practically all have no idea that they've made it. He's welcome to set up his own alternative system, completely free of government interference. ICANN happens to have a government contract, but it's up to every individual to set their computers up to use it. It just so happens that most people purchase computers set up to use ICANN, but it's easily changed. He can completely bypass the government's invented intellectual property.
Conceivably, the owners of RonPaul.com might sue him over using "ronpaul.com" on his own private (but publicly accessible) DNS, on trademark grounds, and then he'd have a legitimate right to complain about imaginary property. But that seems unlikely.
I imagine that they would be happy to provide the sale via some other mechanism. You can probably hit the web site and get roughly the same deal much of the time.
It's just that people spend a lot of time on Twitter, and they're looking for a way to get people to buy stuff in a single step. The easier you make it for people to buy, the more they'll buy. Twitter is all about people with very little editing, a constant stream of thoughts that enter their heads and go out their fingers, no matter how banal or ill-considered. A perfect marketing tool.
(That is, Twitter is the perfect marketing tool. But I suppose it's also the case that the users are tools, too.)
Except that instead of sending the text message to another person's phone, or some corporate address, you're sending it to Twitter, who broadcasts it to the entire world.
The canonical use case is: Advertiser: Hey, world! Buy a gizmo for $20 by tweeting #gizmo. You: Why yes! I would like a #gizmo! Amex: Did you really mean to buy a gizmo? If so, we're gonna charge your AmEx and send it to your house. You: Why yes! I do have poor impulse control!
Each of these is a 140-char message, all of it showing up on Twitter. Since your twitter feed is (supposedly) locked with a password, it's authenticated to be actually you making the purchase, even though everything is happening in the open and literally broadcast. (Security people may now roll their eyes.)
It's basically taking another canonical Twitter use case and turning it around. Already you get cases like this: You (at Amazon web page): I want the mega pack of Ex-Lax. Amazon: Done. Would you like to tell all of your friends? You: Why, yes, of course. My friends need to know everything about me. Your Twitter Feed: [You] just bought enough laxative to unplug the Hoover Dam. Your mom (who follows you on Twitter): @[You], you should eat more fiber!
This kinda skips the intermediate step of buying the product in one place and then having to separately inform your vast army of followers. You combine both into one handy operation.
Sadly, the New York Times isn't all that much better at science reporting than other general newspapers. It's better than tabloid journals, of course, but they're still scanning science with an eye to making Big Exciting News rather than the incremental work that makes up the vast majority of science. Which makes them prone to blowing things out of proportion on the slow science news days (i.e. most days).
Honestly, when it comes to science stories, I wait until I see it in a dedicated science source such as Science News, where the writers have degrees in science fields instead of (or in addition to) journalism. Seeing something in the NYT may cause me to keep an eye out for that article, but I'm never surprised when it fails to make a more serious scientific medium.
Some holes? It's an argument that consists of nothing but hole. Pointing out actual holes would be missing the forest for the cellulose molecules.
"OpenOffice is really popular, and millions of people use it." That's all you had to say. If you felt the need to speculate to earn your blog hits, you could add, "Perhaps there's a way to monetize it, though obviously as with everything else open source that's fraught with difficulties, which I shall now recite as if they were novel observations."
Has there been any significant work on OpenOffice since the split?
I'm not crazy about having efforts diluted, but if they have to pick one and go forward with it, are there any advantages to going with OpenOffice rather than LibreOffice, aside from the less dreadful name?
Slashdot Mirror
Linux just doesn't work as a day-to-day end-user platform anymore
So, the Year of Linux on the Desktop finally came, and I missed it?
There have always been limitations on "free speech" when it comes to pollution. Even an individual isn't allowed to rant about the lizard men with a megaphone at 3 AM.
The phone books are put on private property without permission. Is there some law that gives them permission? They're welcome, I suppose, to stand on the sidewalk and read the phone book at me, if they want, or even to stand there with the book open. I suppose they could pay the Post Office to mail it to me, since they have a special legal exemption.
If they've got some kind of blanket exemption, then of course an opt-out is going to violate privacy. And if this is the case, it sounds like they need to eliminate the blanket exemption, and I don't see "free speech" being a defense against that, since your right to speech ends where my property begins.
The lack of specifics comes from reading about it via a news aggregator in the popular press. Going to the horses's mouth gets you all you could possibly want:
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmat3575.html
Thank you: I do know the difference between a bullet and a cartridge but clearly had a massive brain fault.
I suspect that regulating only pre-made cartridges would suffice to reduce casualties considerably. I don't know what, if anything, can be done to regulate the illegal flow over the border, and it may be that all there is to do is give up, hand everybody a weapon, and hope that it saves more lives than it costs. I'm not hopeful on that score.
If the object is to limit firearms deaths, is it time to shift from regulating the weapons to regulating the explosives, such as gunpowder and ammunition?
I never understood why the ATF defined a "gun" in terms of its lower receiver. I assumed that it was because such a thing was difficult to make outside of a big gun factory, which would provide a decent point of control for ensuring that firearms would be sold only to people for legal purposes. (Yeah, that didn't work either, but that's a different question.)
But guns don't kill people: fast-moving bullets kill people. You're not going to regulate chunks of lead, but it seems not unreasonable to regulate the bits that explode, e.g. gunpowder and the bullets that contain it. I find it rather odd that I can walk into any gun store and buy explosives, in bulk, with few if any questions asked.
It seems to me that the notion of regulating the lower receivers has been a poor fit ever since milling machines became common, and 3D printers seem to make it completely pointless. Is it too late to try to regulate the explosives, or should we simply admit that it's time to wear Kevlar every time you leave the house and be continually prepared to pick off that guy behind you in the grocery store line before he pops you?
That solved a different problem, and isn't applicable here.
The federal budget isn't like your household budget. For reasons that surpasseth understanding, there's a two-step process, the "you may/must spend $X on these things" step and the "You are allowed to borrow $Y so that you can actually pay the bills" step. These are completely separate bits of legislation.
The trillion-dollar-coin was designed to work around a failure to pass the latter part. They were told to spend the money by appropriations bills, but there wasn't enough in the account and they weren't allowed to borrow. Through a loophole, they were able to make some up, though they didn't (and probably shouldn't have, though not because of "OMG inflashun!", because the government is actually borrowing money at less than the rate of inflation).
The problem we're facing now is in the first part: they said "Remember when we said to spend $X? Well, forget it. Spend $X-$85 billion, divided evenly over everything (except spending on old people, because we'd actually get blamed for that)." They actually have the money to spend, but they're not allowed to spend it.
The question is, why didn't they follow through?
The New York Times would rather not publish classified information if they don't have to. They're aware that it potentially puts people at risk. They're willing to overcome it if they think that there's sufficient reason. That's what they did with The Pentagon Papers, where something crucial was being kept from the public that would affect how they directed the government to act (both with public opinion and with votes.)
The New York Times doesn't rush to publish every piece of classified information it gets, just for being classified. They make a value judgment on whether the risks outweigh the public's need to know. They may even bring the government in to consult on that, though they're extremely wary about doing that because they don't want to risk their sources. (Which is actually one of the types of secrets that the government itself considers of the very highest priority in its own secret-keeping.) They've been known to sit on it until the information is no longer timely, then publish it.
So I'll be curious as to what the NYT has to say for itself. I half expect them to say, "We looked, felt that it did little good and possibly much harm, so we passed." Or they may say "We blew an important story". But I know they're not going to say, "We screwed up because we didn't fulfill our goal of publishing all the state secrets we lay our hands on", because they don't. They consider gatekeeping part of their job, in exactly the way that Wikileaks doesn't.
Wikileaks considers openness the #1 priority, which means that "aiding the enemy" is a real possibility. Whether this actually did or not is something a court is going to have to decide, but I won't rule it out just because the NYT passed on the story. Possibly, exactly the reverse.
The impression I get from TFA is not that they're skeptical that it can be repeated. Rather, they're skeptical that there is any important advance here. They've been doing implants to send and receive signals for some time. Since only a single bit is being transferred ("Go"), it's a pretty poor sort of "mind meld". It's not really thoughts being transferred at all, just a mental button-push, which they've been able to do for quite some time on both ends. And the Internet connection in between is pure window-dressing; it comes as no surprise to anybody that you can transfer a bit over the Internet.
The complexities of behavior are not at all due to the signal being sent. Those were laboriously trained in. All that was needed was the single "go" signal. With all the extraneous factors, it's hard to tell what's actually novel here, and the razzle-dazzle of those extraneous factors suggests that the answer is "nothing".
I'm sure it's actually more than nothing, since there is a difference between "we knew that we could do that" and "we actually did it". But it's far, far less than the press release makes it sound.
It does strike me as unlikely, since other timelines of heat death put our doom on the order of 10^33 years (the half-life of proton) or perhaps 10^14 years (the end of star formation). A mere 10^10 or 10^11 is suprisingly quick.
Still, I can think of one precedent for it, the "turning on" of dark energy, about 6 billion years ago. That suggests that the universe could still be undergoing changes on scales in the ten-billion-year range, so "many tens of billions" isn't completely unreasonable.
I'd like to think so, though the longer we wait, the more expensive effective action will be. Which will make it easier for the well-funded special interests to declare that "OK, it's happening, and OK, it's our fault, but gosh darn if we didn't miss our window of opportunity so it's too expensive to do anything about."
We'll probably end up doing something anyway, likely something pointless and inconvenient, so that people can feel good about having done something without actually achieving much.
I agree; I think that 3 EVs is much too much for DC. Retrocession is a much better idea. They can technically leave out the area immediately around the Mall, where nobody lives, but contains the Capitol, Supreme Court, White House, OEOB, Dirksen, etc. just to satisfy the Constitution, if somebody insists. There are already plenty of government-leased office spaces in Md and Va.
That would balance out the disproportionate electoral votes with a vote in Congress. It'll boost Maryland's representation by 1, perhaps 2. Maryland is going to want rent money from the Feds, and that's going to make people cranky.
The rich will do just fine. Climate change is going to do huge amounts of damage, but it won't wipe all of the crops and fresh water off the planet. They'll still be available, and even the middle class won't have too much trouble getting them. It will be the poorest half of the planet, or so, who will suffer and die.
A long time, the next three to four decades. Even then there will be those who insist that it's due to things for which they have neither direct measurements nor a sound theory, but will nonetheless be sufficiently convincing for them because it affirms what they wish to believe.
They will, eventually, become a minority, but by then it will be much, much too late. Delaying successfully moves the costs to other people. We will not be able to come to these billionaires, asking for the money they should have been spending decades before, since (a) they will be dead, and (b) even if they were alive, the future costs will be several times more than they will have. And as I said, they'll continue to deny that they have any responsibility.
Except they're not fools, and they're not being parted from their money. They are making a wise investment, from their standpoint. They spend millions, but in doing so avert billions of dollars in lost profits that would otherwise have to go to more expensive energy generation or more energy-efficient but pricey production methods. They continue to reap large profits in industries that they control, and are able to suppress competition in their markets by continuing to take advantage of unpriced externalities.
The costs will be paid in the long term, over the next century or so, and will be covered by other people. Those people are being parted by their money, and it includes many of the people being convinced by the think tanks that are being funded here.
They're not states. One of his key design constraints was the Electoral College, and only states get to vote in the Electoral College.
Washington, DC gets included since it does have EC votes. That messes with the Congressional representation, but he didn't make than explicit design constraint.
That was my first thought as well. A working implementation of "one click shopping" won't take more than a few minutes to cobble together. The price is significantly lower than the costs in filing a patent.
It's possible that seeing the trivial implementation might make it clearer to a reviewer that the patent is obvious to one skilled in the art. But then, that should have been obvious already, to one skilled in both the arts of writing software and patent law. (Which isn't the vast majority of people here, which is why we get "A Neanderthal flint flake is prior art for a Cuisinart" type comments here all the time.) Sadly, I get the impression that the reviewers seem to be similarly unskilled in programming. So maybe it'll help.
Certainly they need something, because while not all of the "bad patent" stories we see here are as bad as they sound, some actually are, and they're incredibly harmful.
The problem is that he planted seeds with patented genes only because they had infected his own cultivar. He did not purchase the seeds from Monsanto; he did not have an agreement with them not to replant. He would rather not have Monsanto's genes, but could not avoid it.
Much as I hate arguing by analogy, it's like the RIAA hacking into your computer, splicing Justin Bieber songs into your Audacity files, and then suing you when you play it. Unlike the analogy, it wasn't deliberate that Monsanto put its genes into Schmeiser's crop, but they were knowingly spreading pollen into the environment and it was unavoidable that it would affect somebody else's crop. They did not take any precautions to prevent their IP from being literally forced on other farmers.
The only way for Schmeiser to avoid replanting Monsanto's IP would have been to destroy his own seeds, an IP of Schmeiser's own that Monsanto negligently destroyed. Copying seeds is a lot harder than copying files; Schmeiser can't just restore from backup at no cost. If Schemiser owes money to Monsanto, Monsanto owes at least as much to Schmeiser.
Really? I would have thought just the opposite. Software is pretty easy to write. You do it, I do it, everybody on the site does it every day. The overwhelming majority of software patents are incredibly obvious to anybody with even a passing familiarity with the art, much less an expert.
Seeds, on the other hand... even if I'd had the idea to create a pesticide-resistant crop, I wouldn't know even the first thing about how to go about making such a thing. I'd have to get a PhD in biochemistry to even understand how they did it, and I'm sure that it took a large team many years to actually get it right.
And unlike a shopping cart patent, they then had to "prove" that it was safe to eat. I don't trust Monsanto any more than you do as to whether they've really proven it, but they didn't just throw those seeds out there. They spent millions conducting tests. They may not have done as much work as I'd like, but what they did sure isn't comparable to banging out a little PHP and then knocking off for lunch.
I'm not here to defend Monsanto, who have behaved like grade-A douchebags in many different areas, right up there with the **AAs. But I'm not going to pretend that their work is easy. Maybe intellectual property is so screwed up that that we might as well just ditch it in general, but if there's one part to go, I'd chuck software patents before I chucked work creating custom seeds. The latter is a lot harder than the former.
Then shouldn't he be shying away from this government invention? The domain name is of interest only by government fiat. Everybody has agreed to use ICANN's domain name servers, purely of their own free choice, even though practically all have no idea that they've made it. He's welcome to set up his own alternative system, completely free of government interference. ICANN happens to have a government contract, but it's up to every individual to set their computers up to use it. It just so happens that most people purchase computers set up to use ICANN, but it's easily changed. He can completely bypass the government's invented intellectual property.
Conceivably, the owners of RonPaul.com might sue him over using "ronpaul.com" on his own private (but publicly accessible) DNS, on trademark grounds, and then he'd have a legitimate right to complain about imaginary property. But that seems unlikely.
I imagine that they would be happy to provide the sale via some other mechanism. You can probably hit the web site and get roughly the same deal much of the time.
It's just that people spend a lot of time on Twitter, and they're looking for a way to get people to buy stuff in a single step. The easier you make it for people to buy, the more they'll buy. Twitter is all about people with very little editing, a constant stream of thoughts that enter their heads and go out their fingers, no matter how banal or ill-considered. A perfect marketing tool.
(That is, Twitter is the perfect marketing tool. But I suppose it's also the case that the users are tools, too.)
Except that instead of sending the text message to another person's phone, or some corporate address, you're sending it to Twitter, who broadcasts it to the entire world.
The canonical use case is:
Advertiser: Hey, world! Buy a gizmo for $20 by tweeting #gizmo.
You: Why yes! I would like a #gizmo!
Amex: Did you really mean to buy a gizmo? If so, we're gonna charge your AmEx and send it to your house.
You: Why yes! I do have poor impulse control!
Each of these is a 140-char message, all of it showing up on Twitter. Since your twitter feed is (supposedly) locked with a password, it's authenticated to be actually you making the purchase, even though everything is happening in the open and literally broadcast. (Security people may now roll their eyes.)
It's basically taking another canonical Twitter use case and turning it around. Already you get cases like this:
You (at Amazon web page): I want the mega pack of Ex-Lax.
Amazon: Done. Would you like to tell all of your friends?
You: Why, yes, of course. My friends need to know everything about me.
Your Twitter Feed: [You] just bought enough laxative to unplug the Hoover Dam.
Your mom (who follows you on Twitter): @[You], you should eat more fiber!
This kinda skips the intermediate step of buying the product in one place and then having to separately inform your vast army of followers. You combine both into one handy operation.
Sadly, the New York Times isn't all that much better at science reporting than other general newspapers. It's better than tabloid journals, of course, but they're still scanning science with an eye to making Big Exciting News rather than the incremental work that makes up the vast majority of science. Which makes them prone to blowing things out of proportion on the slow science news days (i.e. most days).
Honestly, when it comes to science stories, I wait until I see it in a dedicated science source such as Science News, where the writers have degrees in science fields instead of (or in addition to) journalism. Seeing something in the NYT may cause me to keep an eye out for that article, but I'm never surprised when it fails to make a more serious scientific medium.
Some holes? It's an argument that consists of nothing but hole. Pointing out actual holes would be missing the forest for the cellulose molecules.
"OpenOffice is really popular, and millions of people use it." That's all you had to say. If you felt the need to speculate to earn your blog hits, you could add, "Perhaps there's a way to monetize it, though obviously as with everything else open source that's fraught with difficulties, which I shall now recite as if they were novel observations."
Is it demonstrably more secure? Or is it just too obscure for anybody to target?
Has there been any significant work on OpenOffice since the split?
I'm not crazy about having efforts diluted, but if they have to pick one and go forward with it, are there any advantages to going with OpenOffice rather than LibreOffice, aside from the less dreadful name?