Reducing recidivism is un-American, because it works against the greatest prison system in the world.

Email is not just the way of the future. My kids use imessage to communicate with their trendy friends with Apple gear. Indeed we needed to buy them an ipad touch just so they could keep up. My wife uses Facebook to communicate. Less fashionable people communicate with Kick, and a few neanderthals even use Skype.

The idea that somebody on GMail or Outlook or even Thunderbird cam communicate with an iPhone is an accident of history. Why would anybody want to support technology that can help others steal the customers that they own? Blogs and RSS are already dead, long live Facebook! Email will follow.

Given an average age in their fifties...

No, the US founding fathers got it right. 14 years from creation of the work, irrespective of the life of the author. Nobody produces content based on expected income in 15 years time.

But this is nothing to do with promoting creative endeavors. It is about protecting libraries held by corporates.

You are assuming that these negotiations are rational.

In practice a bunch of very ordinary bureaucrats have cosy chats behind closed doors. Someone says that they need to stop people stealing copyright. Everybody knows that stealing is bad. So they mindlessly agree and then move on to issues that concern them like agricultural subsidies.

The real issue here is the patentese that patents are written, that use a plurality of terms in order to confuse and obscure. Any normal person would write

"A vehicle which as 3 wheels and a motor." Simple.

+1. The reason that we have terrible spelling is *because* of teachers. They focus on the concept of right vs wrong, and make people petty minded about spelling. That in turn locks in the current horrible system. And requires more teachers to teach it ...

I doubt if they went to far, wherever that might be. Maybe they went too far...

Certainly biological neurons are much more complex than artificial neural net neurons. The simplest "Integrate and Fire" (IF) model of a biological neuron perform a leaky integration over *time*, and if the voltage ever reaches the trigger value the fire. So the timing of stimulations is critical, whereas most Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) does all its calculations (logically) at the same time. The ANN is both simpler and cleaner to work with. Biological synapses are very complex, but much of that complexity just reflects the wet technology that they are made from.

If you want to understand how the brain works, study biological neurons. If you want to understand how to build an intelligent machine, engineer ANNs.

I know that Canvas somehow got poked into the standard, but really you are just writing to a bit mapped display and happen to use JavaScript as the language.

+1. Our fast changing world is not stable over large timescales.

Or, just have stops along the way.

There only needs to be one lift that goes all the way to the top, and that is only for the King.

Another issue is that it takes more time for even a fast lift to get all the way to the top of a large building. So the number of transactions per hour goes way down.

A big building will have a lot of people and require a lot of lifts. If there is only one lift per well then there will need to be a lot of wells. Most of the building, in fact, would end up as lift well.

The solution is "simple". Allow multiple lifts per well, and allow the lifts to overtake each other. All while dangling on this new tech rope. Hmm.

Australia, Canada and the UK are hardly perfect. But this type of legal abuse is unheard of. Somehow the courts have remained independent of politics. There are no huge sentences handed down for trivial crimes. And plea bargaining is nothing like as bad.

Is it really true that the religious right are so law and order driven?

You should not talk about your wife in that way.

Looking from Australia we admire the focus of the US constitution on civil rights etc. None of that is in the Australian constitution, and the UK does not even have one.

Yet the US has these crazy laws. Civil forfeiture, way out of control plea bargaining, no legal representation for the poor, and, until relatively recently, slavery. I do not think that any other country in the western world has abuses to anything like that level.

Does the US constitution actually remove people's rights? Or would the situation be even worse without it?