For some reason, he didn't head off to Newfoundland; he went at tropical latitudes. If he was trying to follow a line of latitude due west to Asia, he was going the VERY long way. If he hadn't bumped into something along the way, he'd have been deeply screwed.

The direct route from Portugal to Japan would have taken him northeast. He probably had suspicions that the northeast passage wouldn't work, but the further north he went, the better. He'd have been better off going to Newfoundland. He would have failed to find the northwest passage, but he couldn't know that, either.

The explanation that he thought it was smaller would account for that. If he was going based on his suspicion that there might be something that far south, he had little evidence to support it, and was really staking his life it. It certainly paid off in spades, but that could easily have been a lie he paid for with his life.

"...In 2012, it insisted that the very idea of Net neutrality squished its First and Fifth Amendment right..."

As a foreigner I'm probably completely wrong. But isn't the Constitution getting to look very much like a Bill of Rights for immense corporations to enrich themselves by any means they choose? Just asking.

I think it's hilarious to see China losing jobs to a low-cost foreign competitor. How does it feel, bitch?! Not only that but it's a country they used to support militarily. The suck it double bonus.

And that kids is how mice first became intelligent and eventually took over the earth. Later the crew of an earth space ship from the past crashed on earth and were captured by the mice. When one tried to escape the mice netted him and he uttered the classic line, "Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty mice!"

All the mice really wanted was the recipe for cheese.

I feel the same way about some very prominent members of the US science and technology committees.

Ultimately, it comes down to the question "why do you care who Andy Canfield is?" Are they planning to exchange money for goods or services? Write you a mash note? Collect on a debt?

As you say, "Andy Canfield" is kind of a red herring there. It's really the operational/instrumental definition of "is there some connection between this key and some object or information I want?" I'm not sure there really is any meaningful way to do that in the general case. It needs to be reconsidered as an array of different questions about why we care about identity in the first place.

Right now a lot of the notions of identity are really badly defined. "Identity theft" happens because lending institutions are legally allowed to connect your physical body (which can be punished in a variety of ways) to various intangible measures of identity with extremely thin degrees of proof. That may be the worst possible case.

Unfortunately, I've found that increasing numbers of sites require those cross-site scripting just to render themselves. It's not uncommon for a site to require enabling literally dozens of other sites. It can be hard to tell which of those are content, which are navigation, which are ads, and which are tracking. At least some are starting to detect when you're selectively disabling the ad servers and metrics sites, and refusing to render at all.

In general, I'd prefer to avoid those sites entirely. I do understand their need to foist off ads on me, which is why I haven't run with AdBlock. I just want to disable antisocial behavior like animations, which make the content hard to read. But I can think of a few sites which have useful content that require me to let more things through NoScript than I'm really comfortable with.

Ultimately, his idiot opinion on astrology doesn't really matter, since he's not going to make much headway against hundreds of other MPs. In the US, a well-place committee member can make his personal biases and idiosyncracies matters of law. I don't know if this guy has similar power; he is on the Health Committee and Sci-Tech committee but I don't think he has a lot of pull there.

My bigger concern, though, is in the constellations. Not of stars, but of beliefs. Poor reasoning in one area doesn't have to mean he reasons poorly in every area, but I've found that certain kinds of stupidities tend to cluster together. If he's just a guy with a stupid idea about the stars, even a well-placed guy, there's only so much harm he can do, and his constituents can be forgiven for electing him despite a foible. But it would not surprise me to discover that he buys into other conspiracy theories and applies similar poor reasoning to other areas. If that's the case, yeah, I blame his constituents.

In this case, he's not being published in reputable journals. He's had some letters published, which are not subject to peer review. The few times he's gotten his papers into major journals, they've been savaged, and they don't publish him any more. His work is relegated to minor journals and letters.

The peer review process does provide a strong bar against junk science, but not all peer review is the same. Researchers in the field know it, but when the goal is to appeal to the public, it's easy to gloss over the differences. Even other scientists rarely know which are the reputable and high-impact journals outside of their own field.

Does signing up for premium change anything from the artist's point of view? Pandora loses the revenue they get from the advertising, and I suspect it's roughly a wash.

Music is further made odd by the amount of money being spent to create demand. There's an enormous amount of marketing and advertising. Although there is some interest in the "long tail" of music, most of what people are willing to pay for comes from a well-oiled machine that has focus-grouped and promoted the bejeezus out of it.

That costs a lot of money, and it's aimed at getting people to take part of their overall budget and put it into music that could otherwise be spent on many different alternative goods: different entertainment, food, materials, education, retirement, etc. They're also vying for a limited factor of people's time budget: while songs can be done in parallel to other things, there's only so much attention, and they can listen to only so many songs.

A lot of factors enter into the economic model, and it goes far beyond just "supply and demand" even before you get the thumb on the scale of artificially-produced (and highly imperfect) scarcity.

It's funny that the summary starts with "One of the cornerstones of any democracy is its judicial system". That's true of all forms of society/government; it is absolutely not limited to democracies. So why bring democracy into it - except that it's one of the holy words of our society, a word that stuns everyone into instant acquiescence and worship?

One can make a strong case that justice is particularly hard to come by in a democracy, as opposed to a monarchy or a true aristocracy. The distinguishing feature of real democracy is that the people as a whole wield supreme power. So a majority can carry out any act, no matter how illogical, unethical, or downright disgraceful. Such as the execution of Socrates, for instance. Or the decision to execute the admirals of the Athenian fleet after the battle of Arginusae - which was rescinded the following day, when the people changed their minds.

You can see a similar pattern in the USA, where many prosecutors are elected by the people. This leads them to pursue popularity at all costs - and, in a populous society where most electors will never get to meet the actual candidate, popularity is usually sought by lighting up the media with sensational news. How many miscarriages of justice have been perpetrated because a prosecutor wanted to make a name for himself? And of course the prosecutor is not held responsible, because his job is only to argue the case for conviction. If someone is wrongly found guilty, that is the fault of the defence, the jury, the judge, the police who made up evidence or concealed exonerating evidence... and anyway, it's all forgotten the next week.

Probably the best place to start constructing a good judicial system is with a genuine concern for justice. It has been well observed that, in any country that has a Ministry of Justice or something similar, justice itself will be conspicuous by its absence. (Just as any corporation that has an "ethics committee" has probably forgotten what the word "ethics" means). Honest people know what's right, but given enough bureaucracy and laws - assisted by thousands of career-minded functionaries - we get today's situation where any lawyer can tell you that the law has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with justice.

Code can, in theory, be made largely unhackable. The more features it has, the harder it will be, and there's always the five-dollar-wrench hack, but nothing in theory prevents people from securing the code.

The law is always going to be hackable. Any significant law is always going to be far more complicated than code. It's dealing with people, not computers, who have far more different modes of operation.

The law will always end up relying on a certain amount of goodwill from the people. We'd love to have the law say, "Look, just don't be an asshole," but defining "asshole" turns out to be tricky, and there will always be somebody willing to be just-asshole-enough to be legal.

Worse... the law is retroactive: if you break it, the courts do something. Computer security prevents you from doing the illegal thing. That inherent delay creates inherent injustice. The delay also costs money. We've seen time and time again that it's been cheaper for companies to pay the extortion than to defend against it.

So I think that yes, they are evil, and not merely hackers taking advantage of a broken system. Even the best possible system is imperfect. We rely on human beings to engage in a certain amount of decorum, if only for the game-theoretic reason that too much incivility results in a breakdown and they lose.

Frequently, the patent trolls are breaking the law themselves, and counting on the delay to get away with it. That's pretty directly evil. And taking advantage of ambiguities in a system that must inherently be ambiguous, I'd say that's equally evil.

Simply calling them "evil" doesn't really accomplish anything, of course. But it doesn't make them smart. The system is easily hacked. Anybody could do what they do. They're more akin to script kiddies than hackers.

Saying we need more people to code is like saying we need more writers. Not everyone is cut out for buidling apps and it takes a bit of experience to get right.

It's conflicting because fixing someone else's crap code is easy money and you can step in and look like a hero.