YMCA camps Seagull and Seafarer come to mind (google them if you like) There are also "Summer at Sea" type things and Summer abroad, where students spend a month in a foreign country. My point is that there's a lot going on during the summer which would be foreclosed by year-round schools. Plus, if there's only a 3-week gap in the middle of the summer when kids can go to camp, (i) most summer camps would have to close, and (ii) those that don't are going to have absurdly high demand.

Unfortunately, that's a popular but incorrect myth. What does it mean to "Work in the fields?" Largely, it means planting, which generally happens in the spring, and harvesting, which happens in the fall. Summer isn't the time of greatest need on the farm. If you look back at the history of public education, you see that when we were more agricultural, schools had a summer and a winter session for this very reason. Instead, the traditional school calendar evolved as a coordination mechanism. It means that families could move from place to place without the children missing school on either end. It means that families can plan vacations together and that organizations which target activities for kids have a big chunk of time when they know that students won't be in school.

Eh.... The school system in Wake County, NC (the 12th largest in the US) has a number of year-round schools and the results are not as positive as you're painting them. For one thing, the on-again, off-again nature of the year-round system makes finding childcare harder. Secondly, we haven't seen the academic benefits that were supposed to happen. And, thirdly, the country is organized around the traditional school calendar -- want to send your kid to a 4-week summer camp? If you're on a year-round schedule, you can't do it.

If we can bring back a species that has become extinct, then do we have to worry nearly as much about keeping them from becoming extinct in the first place?

Cavemen used to carry their fire around with them, because if it went away, they had no way of recreating it. When they could create it whenever they wanted, they stopped worry about whether it should go away. Why shouldn't that be our approach to species?

If I had a dollar for every cockamamie topic for a law student's obligatory note in a law journal, I'd be rich.

Um... Osama Bin Laden . . . Taliban . . . Tora Bora . . . any of this ringing a bell? No coincidence that he was found in nearby Pakistan. You can make an argument that 9/11 didn't justify the war in Afghanistan, but you can't reasonably claim that Afghanistan had "nothing to do with 9/11."

Well, actually, I'm more wondering about the side of people USING the API. Oracle is suing google for implementing the API.

The API is only the interface. Why would it be copyright infringement to code to one side of the interface, but not to the other?

What is an API? It's basically an agreement about the ordering and identification of arguments either in memory or in series of network messages. If the judge actually finds that the API itself is copyrightable, then any computer program that writes to a standard interface is completely screwed. Write your own SMTP client? Sorry, that interface is copyright. Your own web server? Ditto.

APIs are the most functional part of computer programming -- they tell you 'this is how you communicate between parts A and B.' Yet, copyright is intended to only protect expression, not 'how' you do anything -- that's the realm of patent law. And while Oracle has patent claims mixed in here, Oracle isn't claiming a patent on the Java API.

Absolutely. The US people, through their elected representatives, have decided what the tax code is. Along the way, there were horse-trade made: "Well, I don't want X taxed, and you don't want Y taxed, so let's tax neither," "We want to encourage people to do Z, so let's not tax it," etc. . . It is absolutely moral to pay exactly what the country has agreed is appropriate.

Now, it may be that there's a consensus on changing the law. If so, exercise that consensus and change the law. If your congressman stands in the way, you're in luck -- it's an election year.

So, change the tax code, and watch what happens.

Nope. The could certainly hold board meetings elsewhere. And, anybody, foreign or domestic, can own US patents.

There's no such a thing as "fair share." Your fair share is whatever the tax law says it is.

Apple employs thousands of people. Those people pay taxes on their paycheck, and Apple pays payroll taxes on those individuals. Apple pays property taxes. It collects and pays sales taxes. It generates revenue for the music industry, which pays taxes. It generates revenue for the movie industry, which pays taxes. It pays rent to hundreds of shopping centers where the Apple stores are located; they all pay taxes. It pays advertising agencies, who pay taxes. It pays for medical benefits for its employees, and those doctors pay taxes. Its cafeterias purchase millions of dollars worth of food every year. And, what's more, Apple makes products which make the lives of tens of millions of people better.

Here's what happens when you try to start imposing some sort of "You're an American Company; pay American taxes" argument: Apple re-incorporates off-shore; its US operations are shunted to a US subsidiary, who works under contract with the main off-shore company. In the end, it pays a lot less tax, but is now a Cayman Islands company.

And pretty soon you're talking about real money. My kids are going to have to pay back $3.4M + interest for this study. Stupid.

There's a problem with your premise: speculators can NOT decide not to sell until they can "Get a certain percent profit." If they hold on to it for too long, then they will have 100 tanker trucks showing up at their front door. So, they eventually have to sell whether they get a profit or not.

Plus, consider that speculators aren't doing anything there that the original oil suppliers can't do. If it were possible to make money by refusing to sell a futures contract until the price went to a specific level, then the original oil producers (who the speculators bought from) could do exactly the same thing.