How about we ask the same questions about the people who stand to make huge amounts of money from "green" technologies and scams like carbon exchanges when they're mandated by governments in response to the "science" they've created. Or the "scientists" who falsify data, peddle shoddy work, or change the results to suit their own ideological biases. Or the insanely huge amount of government funding that they've appropriated by creating a regulatory environment that not only employs them, but only funds research devoted to one specific possible result?

I don't give a damn who funds what research. If the science is solid it doesn't matter who paid for it. Science that attempts to discredit research which may be contrary to their preferred results is not science. It's religion, and a bad one.

Maybe. But I suspect you're focusing on one threat while ignoring other dangers.

The consumer-level restrictions are more likely to be justified by the left. Watch for expansions of libel, "hate speech" and "cyber-bullying" restrictions (Hi, Canada!), and "fairness" laws. Because hate, unfairness, bullies, and lies are all bad, you know, and must be banned in order to have a free society.

At the next tier up, it's be the FTC and the FCC divvying up authority over everything from packet shaping decisions on major backbones to determining who is allowed to offer access to whom, and at what price. Oh, and seizing domain names without warning. To stop illegal activity and ensure a level playing field, you understand.

Oh, and emergency powers so one agency or another can shut it all down to save us from the threat of cyber-warfare. Because ISPs and network engineers who make a living in this field don't know anything about that important security stuff.

"You believe that having a creep know the town you live in is the same as the creep knowing your GPS coordinates?"

Sigh. If you're a homeowner that same creep can easily discover exactly where you live, when you moved in, and how much you paid. It's public information. Not secret. Never was.

And the fact that you have kids, and their ages? Also not secret. Never was.

And do you know why it's not secret, and never was? It's because this is most emphatically not "very private information". It's stuff that any reasonably observant or interested person can easily discover about anyone living in an open society. It's stuff the neighbors and the store down the street used to know when we talked to each other in real life.

Your faith in the magic of "net neutrality" is touching: Let's give the government unlimited access to monitor, regulate, and ration our electronic communications. That'll show those mean ol' corporations! And then we'll have real privacy, by golly!

"As opposed to the climate change deniers who release 900 page reports reviewed by the elite of the world scientific community with only 1 or 2 mistakes in them ?"

Please try to understand. It's not that they made "one or two mistakes". It's the sloppy and stupid nature of these errors, and the profound lack of scientific rigor that they revealed.

If you had a 900 page allegedly peer-reviewed report from "the elite of the medical community" which casually included a statement that cancer rates would rise because of increased demonic activity, would that make you wonder about the process? How about if a bunch of them then denied the possibility of a problem? Suppose it then became clear that a bunch of people had pointed this out in the past, but were ignored? Would any of that be enough to make you stop relying on faith, and start relying on thinking?

"Denialism also refers to a set of rhetorical strategies used to create the impression of uncertainty where none exists. Unsurprisingly perhaps, these bear a strong resemblance across the various species of denialism."

Ah, I see. "Denialism" is what zealots used to call "heresy":

"...but as for the others, since, in our judgment they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give to their conventicles the name of churches. They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation and in the second the punishment of our authority which in accordance with the will of Heaven we shall decide to inflict." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Thessalonica)

Since we're making up words, I suggest "scientism". That's the religious system practiced by people who pretend (even to themselves) they're practicing science, but who actually have no confidence in the scientific process, or the ability of others to make rational decisions based on the findings of that process.

Instead, they chatter about the need to enforce orthodoxy and limit public discussion of controversy, lest those who lack enlightenment become confused and lead others away from the true path.

There's no time to waste: Some may already be lost, actively in league with the evil which seeks to damn us all to eternal suffering. Left unchecked, that could require the defenders of the faith to resort to more drastic means of purging the seeds of doubt, beyond even excommunication and shunning. An unfortunate necessity, but this is Science we're defending, not some fanciful, power-hungry, and corrupt old belief system.

And when the world's salvation is at stake, is anything too extreme?

No, not really.

"Many user interfaces have been patented, including one of the most enduring, the QWERTY keyboard."

I may be mistaken, but I don't think that the two are comparable.

The patent which includes the QWERTY key layout is focused on the engineering specifics of one particular implementation of a mechanical keyboard. Sholes, the inventor, wasn't trying to claim a patent on "pressing keys to apply ink to paper", or even "rapidly pressing multiple keys". That had all been done before.

This seems very different from today's "user interface" patents, most of which seem to be a thin layer of design laid atop someone else's actual invention. Which is not to user interfaces are unimportant, just that they should not be patentable.

"Choose freedom first and interested parties will take care of attributes like security, ease-of-use, and compatibility over time."

You've made a common mistake, assuming that a particular combination of open-source "freedom" and the vague concept of "technical superiority" are the most important factors in everyone's decision-tree.

If you are willing to sacrifice your time and productivity waiting for "interested parties" to smile upon you, then that's fine. That's one valid point of view, but it's silly to insist that it should be everyone's point of view.

I have no problem with this. The state of Washington is not $2.8 billion in debt because corporate taxes are too low or because Microsoft makes too much money. The state government is in debt because they insist on spending vastly more money than they actually have available. The state could take every single penny MS owns and they'd soon find themselves back in the exactly the same situation, looking for someone else's money to take.

Creating a hostile environment for employers only encourages them to leave your state and set up shop somewhere else. Like another state where they're not punished for being successful.

I think that's exactly right. The White House cannot prohibit commercial use of these photos because they are inherently in the public domain. Copyright isn't waived or limited to certain uses, it just never applies. They have no control whatsoever over how the photo is used.

If a photo is used to imply endorsement, in violation of another set of laws entirely, then it's up to that person to challenge that usage. And, actually, those laws can get pretty vague when dealing with prominent public officials. The White House staff would probably be smarter to simply use their massive communications infrastructure to issue a statement making it clear that the implied endorsement is false and ask for it to be stopped. No need for legal threats except as a last resort.

"His greatest failure was in trying to be bi-partisan."

That's nonsense. Obama made no effort to be bi-partisan, and the Democratic Congressional leadership did everything they could to avoid including the minority on anything.

Until Scott Brown's upset win in Mass the whole bi-partisanship was nothing but lip service anyway. The Democratic supermajority in Congress was enough to pass any legislation they wanted. But key Democrats were not in agreement on the bills, until bribed or coerced by the leadership. The rank-and-file had no idea what was even in the proposed bills.

But the Democrats did not want to pass this legislation without being able to say that the Republicans voted for it too. They wanted cover, and they wanted an excuse.

And in the end Congress worked exactly as it's supposed to. And this bit of stupid legislation, at least, was not passed. I'm thrilled.

"Asimov, President of Mensa and author of hundreds of books, thought that we should revamp the written word to spell things phonetically and do away with much of the silly grammar rules that only please those individuals so pedantic as to master them."

Many people have tried to do this. Most of them were very smart. Yet all of their attempts have failed completely. Can we perhaps conclude that such a project is best left as an academic exercise?

There are lots of problems with these attempts to "simplify" English. The most damning, in my opinion, is how most of them deliberately strip away layers of meaning, centuries of subtext and idiom, from the language. You throw in works from Shakespeare, Poe, and Dickens and out comes an ooze of identical pablum, like a coloring book without any crayons. And why? So lazy people can avoid learning some relatively simple rules of spelling and grammar that public school kids once easily mastered in elementary school.

Yes, English is complicated and occasionally contradictory. It's also incredibly flexible, very precise, and extremely resilient. A person with a poor command of the language can still understand and be understood, at least at a basic level. That's one reason why English is the standard language of air-traffic-control, for example.

And if you want to be able to communicate ideas of higher complexity, then you can demonstrate your ability to think by demonstrating your ability to speak and write clearly and precisely. If it's not worth your time to write well, then it's not worth my time to read.

"And whose standards are we talking about here? MLA style? Chicago? There are half a dozen different ways to place the commas in a list of items depending on the standard to which you are writing."

You exaggerate. But even if that were so, it makes little difference. Just pick a standard and stick with it. Really, it's not hard.

Seems to me the best way to proceed is for someone to just do it, and let everyone else try to catch up. Its not like people will stop using youtube.

Yeah, people here keep saying that, but it's wrong. HTML5 video won't be a viable alternative for at least a year or two.

If my mother-in-law's browser suddenly stops working on YouTube, she's not going to go download an HTML5 compliant browser, or click through four layers of "ARE YOU SURE?" warnings on her existing browser to install some mystery plugin. She'll just get angry at YouTube for breaking her cute kitten videos and find some better site with videos that actually work.

I think Flash has been key to YouTube's success. Almost everyone already has a version installed and it works (to some degree) almost anywhere, including on many embedded and handheld devices. Many, many, many other sites use Flash video. They're not using AVI or Quicktime, or any of the other clumsier video formats that never achieved critical mass on the web.

HTML5 fanboys aside, Flash is the best real-world alternative if you want your video to be viewable by a lot of people.

"The government subsidies may have encouraged a monoculture, but that's beside the point. The GM crops improve yield. Why would that have not been a success in a pure free market?"

First off, "GM products" are not the problem. This particular type of GM product may be a problem. If the summary of the study is correct and if conclusions of the study can be replicated.

There are many, many ways of increasing yields. The government subsidies created a situation where a rapid transition to GM corn was, by and large, the most practical and the most efficient choice. People make rational choices based on the incentives you give them.

For a timely discussion of how all this works in practice, read this:

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/01/12/pepsi-throwback-and-the-sugar-racket/

The major reason we're growing so much corn is because the government has, for decades, kept the price of sugar artificially high. (And to make subsidised ethanol, a more recent development.) And they simultaneously funnel money to the companies that make corn syrup.

In a real free market, one not distorted by the power of the government to redistribute vast sums of money at will, corn crops would have had to compete against other crops which might have been more profitable to grow. And the manufacturers of corn syrup (which would now be sold at true cost) would have had to compete on an even playing field against sugar growers on factors like price, taste, and mouth-feel. But by making sugar super-expensive and corn syrup super-cheap, the government all but ensures one single outcome.

Think about that the next time you want the government to "fix" something.

"The availability of the technology is not relevant to whether or not the government is stepping on your rights."

Sure, but the trick is figuring out what constitutes "stepping on your rights", and how that changes over time.

It sounds to me like the court is using price and "in general use" as proxies for how much privacy people can/should reasonably expect.

Thirty years ago things like compact wireless video cameras were nearly unknown. Now they're built into your sixth-grader's phone. So in 1978 an average person might reasonably object to being "filmed" in a public place without their knowledge. It's no longer reasonable today, or we'd all be de-facto criminals. Things change.

So what happens in five years, when (real) thermal imagers are sold as toys on Amazon?

"The technology to break into your house has always been cheap and available yet for some reason surveillance is treated differently."

That's because surveillance is different. Sitting outside your house and watching you come and go is not breaking-and-entering. Someone watching, even listening, to you in public is not the same as someone breaking into your home. They are different things with different rules and expectations.