It is always dangerous to refer to the "founding fathers" collectively, since they had many disagreements.

You can get a better idea what Madison intended by looking at his draft:

"The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any matter, or on any pretext, infringed."

"The people shall not be deprived of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments, and the freedom of the press, as one the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable".

"No State shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases".

The explicit reference to limiting State power surprises many who mistakenly believe that the Bill of Rights was intended only to limit the power of the federal government. Certainly Madison was aware of the danger of abuse of state government authority. Richard Labunski, in his book on Madison, has asserted that this was Madison's favorite amendment.

By the end of the ratification process for the Bill of Rights, Madison's text was substantially rewritten. We could reasonably suppose that much of what he wrote was already implicit in the 9th Amendment, and thus did not need to be made explicit.

The "official" 1st Amendment does in fact only apply to Congress under the "official" Bill of Rights (but since it is the only Amendment so explicitly limited, a reasonable person would infer the others apply to state and local government as well).

Hence, the slave states could in fact pass laws authorizing people speaking out against slavery to be put in prison, or have laws specific to particular religions (in some cases, this was prohibited by the state-level governing documents). In a sense, there is a loophole in the 1st Amendment.

It can be argued that a number of aspects of state law, such as libel laws, and laws authorizing coerced testimony in the courtroom, are only allowed to exist as a result of this decision to limit the 1st Amendment restriction to Congress. But nobody pays attention to this (which has interesting implications for the ethical practice of law).

The 14th Amendment is supposed to close this loophole, which in turn has interesting implications for all those things done when the loophole existed.

Madison's writing on "full and equal rights of conscience" seems particularly applicable to the issues of today when one considers some of the current controversy regarding so-called "whistle-blowers"...

Quite correct, as long as one has a rational definition of socialism.

Many people make the mistake of assuming that the choice is capitalism versus socialism, when both are merely abstractions that don't exist (and will never exist) in the real world. This is both historically and conceptually inaccurate. Even in Adam Smith's time there were government funded programs (e.g. the "Poor Law") that were essentially socialist in nature.

Any definition of socialism that requires it to be a complete alternative to capitalism is intrinsically wrong. The very word "socialism" comes from the Latin verb to share. Socialism is really about redistribution (i.e. sharing) of wealth. It's about society providing for those that are less successful than others, or who suffer from misfortune. Any program that does this is socialist in nature. The ability to provide for others depends upon excess resources being generated.

Many of the trappings that people associate with socialism are really ideas layered on top of this basic idea. Many (arguably most) of the ideas added to the fundamental concept of socialism have been created by delusional individuals with little understanding of the world or of human nature, and these ideas are generally impractical and worthless. This is perhaps why such as strong bias exists against "socialism" on the part of so many: they see only the impractical aspects of ideas layered onto the core concept by misguided individuals.

As you showed, there are many elements of USA government that are socialist in nature. Indeed, the lion's share of the US Federal budget goes to fund "entitlements", all of which are socialist in nature. Some state and local governments also have significant spending on socialist programs.

The real choice is, how much socialism can we afford? Or, in other words, what balance can we afford between capitalist freedom, and socialist programs, given that capitalist activities generate the surplus wealth needed to fund all socialist activity?

After we decide that, the next questions that naturally come up are:
1. How can we maximize the efficiency of operating socialist programs?
2. What form should those programs take?
3. What should the role of government be?

Given the size of the US Federal debt, and the debt of the more highly socialist state governments, an argument could be made that we're spending too much on socialism. I'm not sure that argument is entirely correct: it might be better to say that we're not managing the socialist portions of government spending effectively.

Probably a lot of the reason for that situation is the fundamental misunderstanding so many have that the choice must be capitalism or socialism.

This objection can be addressed quite easily, without invalidating the 14 year concept.

We have the following rules:

If any organization or person is getting money (or other consideration) for anything involving some person's creative work, that person has a right to get a share of the gross for their lifetime (excepting those uses that fall into the fair use rights category). The law specifies that share, and provides an easy mechanism to contact the author of a work. No transfer of this right to organizations is permitted.

Thus, any individual will get some money for any creative work they do: nobody else can every legally take all the profit from this work. Once the work stops selling, the public can copy it freely, provided they don't turn around and make money off those copies.

Some details would need to be worked out as to when this could be transferred to one's heirs in the event of an early death.

Penalties apply if a reasonable effort isn't made to contact the party whose work one is using. If a person can't be contacted, the money must be set aside in some protected manner (probably with an independent third party) for a LONG period of time.

The "share" might consist of both a minimum and a percentage, to handle some of the obvious corner cases. In the event a team is responsible for creating a work, something would need to be done to determine who gets what (but everybody participating in the creative work is entitled to a share).

There are a few details that would need to be worked out, but on the whole this would be vastly superior to the current system (which, as it clearly involves all kinds of ethics problems with respect to the legal professional, can certainly be considered to violate the right to ethical practice of law and thus violates the 9th Amendment).

This rule works well with the 14 year term, but we might even have it apply from the moment the work is created. Starting it after 14 years means that an exclusive contract is possible for early distribution of the work, which has both advantages and disadvantages for the individual and society, and might require some regulation.

A similar approach can be taken with respect to patents.

It's not physically possible to remain in a public place for long periods of time without having to relieve oneself. For most of society, this period of time will be between 1 and 4 hours while awake. Many public places do not have bathrooms, and even those that do often have limited hours. If one is in rough terrain, or deep in a public wilderness area, it might not even be physically possible to get to a bathroom, even when they exist, are open, are available, and are in working order.

I think you'll find that most people don't want somebody recording them in any way while they are taking care of business. They can, and generally will, step into cover, as a matter of courtesy, but this doesn't prevent recording by hidden cameras, or long distance lenses, or by a concealed photographer. The expectation of privacy is still there, it is held by most of human societies around the world, and it is real.

You can readily observe all this for yourself. Perhaps you should get out more.

It necessarily follows that there is an expectation of privacy even in public places. Public is NOT the opposite of private. It's not just a matter of opinion, but rather a rational conclusion that flows inevitably from observed data.

To counter an argument, you must counter either the assumptions or the logic. Claiming that a point is invalid by calling it "a matter of opinion" is nothing but sophistry.

This issue has been discussed numerous times on Slashdot, have you been asleep? There are many situations where people are technically in public but nevertheless have an expectation of privacy.

Suppose, for example, you and a group of your friends are walking home at night on a public road, through the woods, with nobody in sight. Will the conversation reflect the technically "public" setting, or will it be more like what one will expect to find in a private setting?

For another example, suppose you are hiking through the woods on public lands, and decide to step off the trail to "use the facilities". You are technically in a public place. There is, nevertheless, an expectation of privacy. A hidden photographer (or perhaps somebody that isn't hidden, but is so far away that you don't know they can see you through their telephoto lens) that takes your picture is violating that privacy.

Public is not the opposite of private.

Once we acknowledge that there can be an expectation of privacy even in public places, it is entirely appropriate to determine what the limits of that privacy are.

It is important to remember that classical concepts of "public" and "private" reflect an era that existed before digital systems allowed recording of people without their knowledge, and with perfect recall of the recordings. The values, beliefs, and rules that societies developed with respect to the older concepts are not necessarily valid today.

It is entirely appropriate to bar recordings of people made without their permission, with some reasonable exceptions. Once a recording is made, it is also appropriate to limit what can be done with it.

For example, it should be possible to record government officials in the course of their official duties, without their permission. It should also be possible to have security cameras to protect a home or business. This does not mean that one should be able to post pictures of private moments of government officials, outside the scope of their duties, or be able to release arbitrary security camera footage to the press or the public.

If a private individual happens to be captured in a recording of a government official engaged in official duties, and that private official isn't involved in those duties, any publication of the recording should edit out recognizable portions of the image, unless permission can be obtained to include that individual.

False. A Roman Emperor created the foundation for the Byzantine Empire, and build Constantinople. The Roman navy connected the whole Mediterranean together, and evolved into the Byzantine navy after the fall of the West. The Roman army similarly evolved into the Byzantine army, and protected the Eastern Mediterranean, including Constantinople, from many enemies of the Roman state.

It is correct to state that the Eastern Roman empire diverged over time from the Western, especially after the West fell. Societies do that, especially over the a period of centuries. The late Roman Empire, even in the West, diverged quite a bit from the early Empire, which diverged quite a bit from the Roman Republic. But it is quite incorrect to state that the Byzantine state had "nothing to do" with Rome.

Part of the answer is economies of scale.

The computer you buy for your home is one of a huge number of identical units. This means the manufacturer can afford to make less profit per unit, and still gross enough money left to pay their workers, their property taxes, their maintenance costs, the regulatory and legal overhead costs associated with doing business, the R&D costs involved with developing and improving the units, and with luck still have some left to develop the business and keep the stockholders or owners happy.

With any expensive high tech device, many fewer units will be sold. This means all those expenses have to be made up in a small number of sales. Cost per unit will necessarily be quite high.

You could, of course, reduce some of these expenses by moving the work to Asia, which is what the PC business has done for years. From the perspective of a US citizen, that's not necessarily an optimal solution.

The regulatory costs for medical test equipment are very high. There's a lot of inefficiency here. That in turn adds to the overall cost.

The R&D costs are particularly high for most of the new medical test and measurement equipment technologies (anything newer than an X-ray machine).

A lot of custom work needs to be done to produce medical test and measurement devices, and stay competitive with other manufacturers. You need to hire a bunch of super smart people to understand all the electronics and signal processing that goes into these things, plus you also need a team that understand biomedical stuff, and you need some software types. There aren't that many people that can do some of this stuff. In addition to hiring expensive people, the R&D requires buying super expensive test equipment, often custom stuff that deals with fundamentally different signals than mainstream test equipment supports (yet another case of economies of scale increasing price).

This is different from the PC world, where a board manufacturer can just buy a low-cost chip from AMD or Intel and let them take care of the heavy lifting.

AMD and Intel in turn are buying enormously expensive pieces of test and measurement equipment from companies like Agilent, Rhode, Tektronix, and so forth, in order to produce their products. They also have huge numbers of super smart people working for them. You simply don't see the true costs of producing the chips because, again, economies of scale.

Ignoring patents for the moment, if these businesses were really obscenely profitable, everybody would be moving into them. The patent system serves to reduce the freedom of the market, and, in its current form, probably does far more harm than good. The desktop PC business is relatively mature, and the medical test equipment business is not. This means that patents on fundamental ideas are far more likely to block the development of medical test equipment than PCs, so the patent system is likely to have far more impact on this business, reducing competition and increasing prices.

So, the other part of the answer is that it is highly likely that the policies of the US legal profession affect of the cost of the medical equipment more than they affect the cost of desktop PCs. Thank your lawyer for this.

Since the legal profession can artificially increase the complexity of the law to increase the demand for the services of their profession, they aren't necessarily as affected by the high costs of their policies as ordinary people. Did you think it was an accident that the Obama HealthCare law is over 2000 pages in length?

Nobody should be forced to read Shakespeare. It's far more important to put the social sciences and a little law into the high school curriculum. We also need to put physical education back into those programs that don't have it (but with a more modern emphasis, and allowing those who are doing physical activity outside of school -- things like martial arts, yoga, dance, pilates, etc... -- to opt out).

Judging from many of the comments on Slashdot, we badly need more of the population to have at least the basics of economics (and personal finance), sociology, and anthropology. We don't need or want to brainwash people on the current legal system (which needs revision on a massive scale, as a result of ethics problems in the legal profession), but at least some exposure to concepts and philosophy of law is also badly needed by most of the population.

I'd gladly get rid of high school Shakespeare and the rest of the typical required "Literature" or "English" courses to do all that. Some sort of writing course should be required, with a very small class size, but there are many ways such as class could be run without needing to include the "classics".

Let people come to Shakespeare as adults, as a basis of individual reading preferences. There are plenty of adult education courses readily available that cover Literature, even some that focus on Shakespeare. Typically these have FAR better lecturers than most folks would ever get in high school.

Perhaps some optional classes could be offered even in some high schools on these subjects. The key is to not make these subjects required.

There will always be some in society that value this particular kind of writing, such as those who like poetry (although the language keeps changing, which means some of the rhyming no longer works!), or those with an interest in period or linguistic history. Shakespeare played a huge role in the development of the English language, along with the King James Bible, but neither of these should be required reading for the average student.

The same applies to most or all of "the classics". Many of them are excellent books, but that doesn't mean they should be forced on people.

Exactly correct. The right to privacy is also supported by the 10th ("rights reserved to the people").

The only significance of Roe vs. Wade is that it is one of relatively few cases that explicitly recognizes the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights.

Rights retained by the people being, well, retained by the people, no legal precedent is technically required for these rights to exist and be asserted, of course. Further, they can not be taken away by any element of government (not even the Supreme Court).

Unfortunately, some elements in society (the legal profession comes to mind) have a vested interest in not recognizing the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights. Much of the mess in the US legal system (abuse of tort law, the patent mess, the copyright mess, abuse of fundamental rights by government agencies and legal professionals, massively long and complex laws, and so on) that has developed over the past century or so can reasonably be supposed to flow from this ethical conflict of interest causing inappropriate decisions.

In addition to the right to privacy, there's another right arising under the 9th Amendment (and probably a more important right), namely the right to ethical practice of law. The implications of this right are staggering, since it implies much of current legal practice is actually illegal. Think about it.

There are huge amounts of material that is very hard to replace, and often irreplaceable.

For example, many instructional and educational DVDs produced in the last few decades for various subjects are completely out of print. Typically these are home-brewed DVDs that weren't professionally pressed. These have a fairly high rate of failure, which means every one has to be backed up. In some cases, various political and legal issues may prevent re-issue, even of professionally pressed disks.

Similarly, many VHS tapes are completely out of print, and either impossible to acquire, or only available at very high prices. For example, I would love to get a copy of "Out of the Fiery Furnace", even at VHS quality, but good luck finding that. Even when the tapes are available, there's always a question of quality: there's a big difference between converting a pristine VHS tape to digital form, and one that has been played too many times.

Then there's the issue of time spent organizing and editing video material to make it useful.

For example, effective use of instructional material requires random access to it. The simplest and most reliable way to do this is by extracting clips in full (as an exercise of fair use rights), as bookmark mechanisms tend to be quite primitive and incompatible between programs. It's often necessary to use multiple video processing programs when working with video, as each of them has it's quirks and limitations, so this is pretty important.

Another consideration: many videos edited by amateurs, and even some done by professionals, have serious problems (such as background noise) that need to be edited out (again, as an exercise of fair use rights) to make the video usable. Removing noise is not a linear process, and can require many hours of manual experimentation. Since techniques are likely to improve over time, it's important to keep the raw (unprocessed material) around.

Further, high compression video algorithms don't work well when one needs to be able to play things frame by frame or at reduced frame rates, without loss of detail, and keeping the audio comprehensible, in order to understand what is being demonstrated. This means high quality must be maintained in these clips. This effectively doubles the space needed to store this kind of material, as both the raw and processed data must be stored using relatively poor compression techniques.

Loss of the data, of course, means all the editing time is lost, and that's a lot of hours of human time.

Far more sensible than to take the risk of losing all this time is to keep both the raw and edited copies, but then you have to deal with backup issues for huge amounts of data. The best approach at present is to have at least two sets of disks, each with copies of everything. Having a third set off-site would be even better.

Many countries (or cities, or towns, or other organizations) throughout history have had no official currency, and others have used shared currencies. In the USA, the Spanish dollar and Mexican peso remained legal tender until 1857. At least six countries today use the US dollar as their official currency.

Even when an official currency existed at a national level, unofficial currencies often could be and were used by governmental or other entities below the national level (for example, look up the Worgl Experiment).

There is nothing in principle that prevents a country from accepting tax payments in forms other than its official currency, or issuing payments in the form of precious metals.

As such, "official currencies" are not unique, and are quite replaceable.

Further, non-official money (i.e. items that economics consider equivalent to money) has a long history. Even in the USA today, there are active local currencies (as economists define such things), such as the "Ithaca Hour" or the "Piedmont Plenty".

Otherwise known as Perl.

Wrong.

Mathematics is always done in a fantasy world. For a trivial example, there are no lines extending to infinity, or perfect circles: to work with these you must create a fantasy world in which they exist. A set of axioms and theorems creates a fantasy world. Being able to do proofs requires working within that fantasy world.

Programming, on the other hand, requires interaction with the real world. Programs will run in a certain amount of real time, and take a certain amount of real disk space, and real memory on real machines. It is possible to do experiments, and often necessary to do so ("proving" correctness of real programs is often impractical), and thus we can and must approach programming as a science.

Understanding and working with the real world calls for a very different mindset from that which is required to be a mathematician. For example, a mathematician might claim that it is impossible to determine "in general" whether a program halts, but a programmer knows that all real programs will halt due to entropy. In the fantasy world of the mathematician, thermodynamics does not exist. Further, only the mathematician cares about "in general", the programmer is never looking at "in general" as the mathematician uses that term, but rather is looking at a specific program.

Similarly, in programming, because we are dealing with the real world, we need to manage complexity. Much as the engineer or physicist uses approximations to allow mathematics to be applied to the real world, by simplifying the mathematics, so to does the programmer use abstractions and approximations to simplify his or her work. The goal is not the logical correctness of a proof, but creating something that a) gets the job done, and b) is maintainable and well documented. A proof need be neither maintainable nor well documented, and MUST be logically correct.

We can't use the integers on computers, let alone the real numbers. All we can do is approximate these. In programming, we are constantly juggling approximations, without the luxury of dealing with the "perfect" or "ideal" quantities that are so characteristic of the world of the mathematician.

In programming, as in engineering or physics, mathematics is a tool, a means to an end, not an end in itself. Programming is not math.

Please read a few history books, particularly those that discuss economic issues (commonplace in histories written in the past few decades). Your ignorance concerning this issue is awful. You might try reading Adam Smith as well.

Pay particular attention to histories that describe everyday life for ordinary people, and compare things in the old days to today -- you'll be shocked at the long term progress that industrialization has led to.

As you'll find when you read Adam Smith, capitalism rewards people for specializing in things society needs. Governments can't do that because the world is too complex -- the Communists proved that in Russia and China, and the Socialists proved it in India (all of which are now heavily capitalist).

Even back in the 18th century when Adam Smith was alive the world was far too complex for governments to understand and manage all the details of the economy, and things are exponentially more complex today.

Please read some books on manufacturing and logistics, so you'll have some idea of the complexity of the modern world.

What governments can do is penalize people for doing harm while pursuing profit, and regulate dangerous practices (including reasonable protection of the environment). The vast majority of companies play by the rules: people don't hear about this because it isn't news. We get bombarded with all the bad stuff, and those who are poorly educated assume as a result that everything is bad.

There is NO "spiral to the bottom" and there are a horde of "exceptions" -- you simply haven't bothered to educate yourself.

It doesn't have a be a choice, one or the other. If you study successful instances of socialism, you'll inevitably find that socialism that depends heavily upon capitalism.

For example, socialist medical systems depend upon the "evil" capitalists to fund most of the research that leads to advanced techniques. Socialist medical systems depend upon the "evil" capitalists to build the advanced test equipment (MRI, Ultrasound, etc) needed to diagnose complex medical problems.

Socialist medical systems depend upon capitalism for the information, research, transportation, production, analysis, and logistics infrastructures needed to educate medical specialists, build the medical facilities, get the tools to the facilities, and get the patients to the facilities.

There is a huge difference between being able to produce small quantities of something, and being able to produce large quantities. Similarly, there is a big difference between doing many things on a small scale, and doing them on a large scale. There is no evidence that any socialist system can handle that jump in scale, and considerable evidence to the contrary (such as all the shortages experienced by the former Communist nations). If you don't understand this, educate yourself on the complexities of manufacturing and logistics, plus the Agricultural Revolution.

In short, successful socialism in the real world ALWAYS relies upon a capitalist foundation. You HAVE to have capitalism to build an excess of resources in order for some of those resources to be used in a socialist manner.

The error that is made in many place is to have more socialism than the capitalist production of resources can support. This leads to huge and unsustainable government debts. It's a problem for the US federal government, and a problem for many US state and local governments. It's also a problem for many other nations.

No. It isn't a religion. Read any economics journal and you'll see lots of articles where hypothesis are discussed in terms of evidence. Why don't you go to a college library, pick out some journals at random, and do some reading?

Examining hypothesis in terms of evidence IS science, and it is completely orthogonal to religion. Again, you are speaking out of ignorance. Presumably you don't like some of the things economists say, or which are attributed to economists, so you're rejecting everything about the science. No intelligent person would reject biology because of the rantings of a few Creationists that don't like evolution, it's just as foolish to reject economics.

Don't see that anywhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Nor does it fit my understanding of American history.

If you see somebody in government or a lobbying organization claiming that, I'd suggest looking carefully to see if it's a pretext hiding something else.

It's really hard in practice to define who "benefits the most" from something.

I am unaware of any evidence that supports that hypothesis.

Transportation systems have played a key role in trade for much of human history. Trade in turn has played a key role in generating wealth.

Further, while it might seem that corporate CEO's high salaries are not directly dependant upon things like roads, those businesses still need supplies and personnel to operate, and these will move in part by road. Without the road network, there's no corporation, and hence no high salary.

This is true not just for production industries, but also for those that work with information, or stocks. The people on top depend on the people below them being able to work. The computers, network equipment, and food these people eat all come by road. Even those that just gain wealth through stock manipulations still depend upon those companies whose stock they are buying being able to function, which means a dependence on the roads.