Oddly enough that is exactly the position portrayed in the article - on a mattress. Without spilling your wine. Which is also on the mattress.

Good luck with that. Human energy production is directly a miniscule factor in global warming - it's the CO2 byproducts that's the problem. In the 90+ years it takes for a unit of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere it will capture roughly 1,000,000x as much solar thermal energy as was produced by the burning of fuel that created it. If we generated 1000x as much heat directly, but without producing the CO2, then global warming would be a non-issue.

> People have to be able to provide updates... and feel appreciated by doing so. BSD licenses allow companies to "appropriate" code,
Very true
>and then sue the original author for copyright violations...
Say what!?!?! Source code typically must be published before being appropriated, making it trivial to prove who had the prior claim.

Of course that doesn't stop a lawsuit from being *filed*, but then nothing stops me from filing a lawsuit against you for stealing my pink unicorn either.

Patent violation are of course another thing entirely - but even there the "publish early, publish often" nature of open source will very likely work very strongly in their favor if they are the original inventors.

Fair points. But if the recording had been made in a place where the participants had a reasonable expectation of privacy, as in not making a spectacle of themselves in a public area, then the "wiretapping" laws would likely have been applicable. As a rule "wiretapping" laws tend to be a bit of a misnomer, with actual wiretapping being only one of the specific situations where they come into play.

One of the key elements of a militia versus a standing army is that a militia generally cannot be turned against the populace, because it *is* the populace. And considering that the founders had just finished fighting a blatantly illegal war for independence in which the US militia fought against the British standing army you can be certain that they were perfectly aware of this fact. A militia contains the soldiers of last resort, drawn directly from the populace, and quite possibly against the wishes of the titularly legitimate government. How exactly can such a thing happen if the populace is disarmed?

The constitution itself makes provisions for supporting a standing army as necessary, so trying to equate the militia with the army is a fool's game. The founders clearly understood the difference, and clearly wanted both to be viable.

Anything weighing more than ten bricks.

As I read it battery involves physical violence, whereas "unwanted physical contact" could be interpreted to also involve anything from an ass-slap to grabbing your bag.

Sadly wiretapping laws have a long history of being used against recording of oral conversations. Most prominently when the police use them to shut down recordings of their abuses, though there has finally been some motion in the courts to reject that ridiculous line of reasoning.

The moral is: when you hear something ridiculously unbelievable about the application of a law, don't assume it's the story that's unbelievable.

Even better if we had even so much as a reliable lie detector: imagine if all politicians were required to be openly monitored whenever addressing the public.

Of course the reality would probably just be that they keep themselves even more ignorant and only listen to the carefully vetted narrative provided them by their handlers.

I would suspect that much bullying would legally qualify as assault. From Wikipedia:

It's not completely clear from that article whether physical contact is instead of, or in addition to, a threat of violence. But either way a great deal of bullying would easily qualify.

I did love my calculator watch back in the day....

I think a suitable smartwatch might have lasting potential, if only because it need not *look* like a smartwatch. At the retro extreme there's no reason you couldn't install a round screen behind a nice bezel and have the e-ink (or other low-power) screen normally display whatever clock face the user chose - presto, a styling wristwatch that can transform into a miniature smartphone at the touch of a button. And of course more modernistic and organic options are available as well, especially with bendable screens that could conform to a bracelet. Probably not as comfortable a form factor to use as a phone, but it might well appeal to enough people to give it a market, especially if it incorporated a micro-projector/camera combo capable of creating a much larger interactive touchscreen on any convenient flat surface. Or think of it as a fashion accessory - a smart bracelet could display any color, pattern, or animation at the touch of a button - fashion to suit your mood. Make them sufficiently cheap and I bet you there'd be a market for that, and once you've got that much hardware on your wrist you may as well incorporate all the other e-gadgets you might want to carry as well.

  What I don't see a realistic long term market for though is the current silliness where the smart watch is little more than a dumb terminal slaved to a smart phone in your pocket. The whole point of a wristwatch or wrist-calculator (other than as a fashion statement) is that it frees you from having to carry around (and inevitably forget) the pocket-sized version.

I mostly agree, except that smartphones will go out of style any time soon. Consider, it offers: a phone, a pocket watch, a still/video camera, a calculator, a GPS, an internet terminal, a media player, an event calendar/day planner with alarms, etc,etc,etc. All in one convenient form factor roughly the same size as a flip-phone and for under a $100 (for entry-level devices). Perhaps the form factor will change into a watch, glasses, or neural implant, but I have a hard time imagining them going away, or being broken back up into multiple devices. For the simple reason that the computer is *the* enabling technology of our time, and if you have enough of a computer to operate a cell phone it's only a small increment in cost to provide a general-purpose computer with all the bells and whistles, and odds are good that most people would like at least one or two of the other features that makes possible.

Certainly battery life is an issue, but one that's easily fixed with better batteries and/or much more efficient CPUs, screens, and radio technologies - all of which already exist in the lab or even in limited production runs, even if they are currently more expensive than what most manufacturers want to integrate into a phone.

Sure, intelligence has a strong genetic component, along with most every other biological attribute. But I would want to see evidence to back any claim that stupidity correlates with willful ignorance - I've known far to many extremely smart people who are willfully ignorant in certain realms.

Briefly, but usually the masterminds behind the revolution maneuver themselves into the position of being the replacement government, and things rapidly devolve into pretty much the original situation.

>ignorance is not inherited

True, but a predisposition toward willful ignorance might be. (ignoring experts in favor of celebrities or authority figures)