Because many bad parents would rather have a scapegoat to blame all of their troubles on than hear that they should have been parenting while little Billy was searching for filthy porn online.

Seriously, it may not be easy to raise kids, but don't blame the medium whenever your kid uses it to find questionable material. I like that the article mentioned an education program, which would probably be more effective and less costly than a massive filter anyway. It's just too bad that the knee-jerk reaction is always to censor.

Though this reminds me, aren't we supposed to be blaming Canada?

I fail to see how the fact that NASA will get the funding anyway makes this not hypocritical. The project in question has had a lot of money spent on it and hasn't really worked very well in the past few years. I think the comment about the tea parties from the parent came from them being mostly Republicans, which you're correct in saying that it doesn't necessarily make them agree with the Tea Party protesters. However, this does mean that five out of seven of their congressmen are from a party which ran mostly on the promise of reduced spending and belt-tightening in the last couple election cycles. This does raise some questions as to why it is they can do this and not have their fellow party members claim that they're socialists or spend-thrifts.

This also comes at the same time that one of Alabama's senators is holding up all confirmations of administration officials in order to block spending cuts in the state. Which seems to color these actions, perhaps incorrectly, as being intended to save their pork.

Now that's just stupid.

You think that kids are only called nerds or geeks in the U.S.? This is a global phenomenon, yet it doesn't stop everyone else from making progress. Hell, even in the rest of the Anglophone world there's Tall Poppy Syndrome, which isn't entirely unrelated to American anti-intellectualism.

It could definitely be argued that the politicization of anti-intellectualism is what really is driving downward, but it's a fairly complex issue. Education certainly has a hand in this. We've been falling massively behind in our science EDUCATION for a while now. I would say that we should try to increase the exposure of students to the sciences from a primary level, and then keep using more flashy or exciting demonstrations in the classroom. I mean, hey, it might be shameless, but I'd also be lying if I claimed that the fact that I like explosions didn't factor at all into my pursuit of Chemistry early on.

Now of course that doesn't solve everything, and I think anti-intellectualism plays a part in all of this, but it's certainly not everything.

Also, I have to make the obligatory comment that if you think evolution is about the survival of the "best" or "smartest" then you clearly learned about it in an American school.

To be fair, those are most likely due to copyright and license concerns, and not censorship, so it's not really the same.

Still, I don't think this is terribly surprising and I fail to see why people are shocked. China is a HUGE market, especially in technology. Any profit seeking entity has a lot to gain there, and would be extremely irresponsible to their shareholders if they weren't to do whatever they had to to get into the market.

I don't mean to say I approve of censorship, I'm just saying that it isn't surprising.

Exactly right, that's why when I accidentally grazed the stove top with my hand, I learned that next time I should slam my face on it repeatedly. I think that the advertisers that are dumb enough to continue or increase business practices that led to the creation of adblockers in the first place will die out like the dodo and the ones that adapt successfully to the changing paradigm will thrive. Though the scenario you mentioned with integration of content with advertising on the internet seems almost inevitable, as it occurs in just about every other medium, the more obtrusive ones will turn off consumers just like egregious product placement does.

It's mainly in case you ever want to sue any girl you knock up for patent infringement.

RTFA indeed, if you read as far as the third paragraph you'd know that it was also proven on mice, dogs, and baboons. That makes this pretty likely to apply to humans as well. Though I'm confused as to why the summary says that tryptophan also has this property, as the article doesn't even use the word. I couldn't find the original Nature article, but the linked one certainly said nothing about it.

Well, there's a concept called mens rea in the U.S. legal system (and appears in some form in many others) that states that this shouldn't be allowed to happen specifically because he had no intention of committing the crime. The actus reus (actual guilt of the crime accused)in most cases needs to be paired with the fact that they willfully and knowingly committed the crime. Barring negligence or recklessness most crimes in the U.S. do have some requirement of mens rea. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea for more details. So, not being a lawyer, I too think there would be a pretty decent case for the kid if they took it to court. Of course, not being a lawyer, I have a pretty damned limited understanding of this stuff. Though I'd really like to see the EFF take a stance on this.

I wouldn't say that Americans are particularly bad about anti-intellectualism. There is certainly some level of that present in our society, but I think that the same sensitivity to "elitism" can be found to varying degrees in any society. This really struck me during the presidential campaign in 2008 where elitism was made an issue. To say nothing of the political games involved, I think this worked primarily because no one likes to look or feel stupid, or hell, even inferior in any way to anyone else. Science can easily be perceived as threatening intellectually by those not well versed in it. It has come a long way in the last century or so and it is almost impossible to get a good grasp of any discipline in a short period of time. Because of this attainability of the knowledge for many, it is threatening and often ignored. I remember seeing many creationist videos using this for a political advantage. It is easy to demonize that which isn't understood. I just think we in the US get a little more militant about superiority issues because of a fairly aggressive attitude towards success. As mentioned by mpapet, we are a pretty individualistic society, and as such we might fear what could be threatening to our individual success, like the intellectual superiority of another.