In other words, we should raise the cost of all consumer goods, effectively taxing sales at a higher rate, which in turn hits the poor harder than everyone else, and also make it really hard for ANYBODY to know exactly how much tax they're paying each year (i.e. yet another hidden tax and thus another way for the government to hide what's really going on from a generally ignorant public).

Also: the higher you raise the tax, the greater the costs of enforcement, yet another burden on a government massively in debt.

No.

We should move in the opposite direction. Get rid of all sales, gas, and registration taxes, all tolls, all property tax, and have the sole source of government income be income tax (including inheritance as income). Have a simple formula, with no exceptions or deductions ("simple" doesn't mean the same thing as "flat"). It's the only sensible way to rationalize a highly defective tax code, and a good first step towards fixing a highly defective legal system.

If you want the short answer, the bombing was not very accurate.

To understand this in detail, it is best to be familiar with a little additional history.

The Luftwaffe had experimented with bombing an urban area during the Spanish Civil War. It was determined that this had little effect, and as a result Luftwaffe policy was to avoid primarily civilian targets. The British pursued a similar policy once WW2 started.

However, in the course of going after the docks and factories of London, some German bombs fell outside the prescribed target area.

This happened after many bombing raids had been going on for a long time, involving many different aircraft and crews, against a strenuous defence, and some kind of mistake along these lines was probably inevitable given the relatively primitive technology of the day and the chaos of war.

The German aircrew involved was immediately arrested after landing, but the damage had been done. The British decided to direct an air raid on Berlin in "retaliation", and even though it did little damage Hitler decided to escalate (one of his dumbest decisions in a career filled with them).

Since the Germans hadn't planned to attack civilian targets, they didn't have weapons, training, or doctrine to do it particularly well. Accuracy, in short, was poor. The British were equally limited. However, when attacking a densely populated city such as London it wasn't necessary to have good accuracy to do significant damage.

Estimates of casualties vary, but about 40k-50k civilian lives were lost during the Battle of Britain, with at least as many being injured. Total deaths for WW2 from all causes is around 55 million.

For both combatant's bomber arms, the attack built slowly enough, and was ineffective enough (in military terms) to give the defenders time to evolve an effective defence. Some of the defensive measures that were developed included the use of civilian shelters, radar, fighters, anti-aircraft guns, balloons, and considerable use of deception.

Defences such as anti-aircraft guns and balloons made bombing even less accurate as the planes had to attack from high up. Fighter interception often caused bombers to drop their bombs before reaching their targets (assuming they could identify those targets in the first place, not always a given). Deceptive measures often prevented bombs from being dropped on militarily significant targets, which probably wasn't much consolation to the people the bombs actually fell upon. In short, defensive measures tended to make inaccurate bombing even more so.

In both cases, the bombing effort eventually took such tremendous losses that each side concluded that they had to bomb at night, with huge losses in accuracy, if they were going to bomb at all (the Americans, in contrast, chose to bomb in the daylight, trusting to their Norden Bombsight to give them accuracy, a hope that was often foiled by the Northern European weather).

Some attempts were made by the Germans to use radio beams to guide planes to their targets, but these were quickly countered by the British.

The net effect of night bombing against defended targets was heavy civilian casualties. Over the course of the war the numbers of deaths from the inaccurate dropping of conventional bombs would dwarf the number of deaths resulting from the atomic bombs (well under 1% of the total wartime deaths resulted from the atomic weapons).

Recent books such as "The Bomber War" provide more detail, if you want it. Older books tend to have a lot of errors which have been corrected by modern scholarship, so while they sometimes provide useful data you have to be careful working with them.

A popular myth, but long since corrected by modern research (which you can readily find in references published in the last ten or so years).

In reality, the Germans were taking unsustainable losses and failing to inflict proportionate damage well before the decision to attack London was made. A lot of craters were made in runways, but these were easily filled. The "Home Team" advantage was decisive, given the relative parity of the fighters, and the limited range of the German fighters.

In short, the Germans had very poor intelligence regarding the location of key British facilities, and didn't understand what was necessary to knock them out. Like the Allies (both at that point, and later in the war), they massively underestimated the effectiveness of strategic air attack given the primitive equipment and training available.

In the short run, provided the British didn't let internal politics hamstring them, there was no real chance of a German victory from the air.

In the long run, of course, the Germans would have had to confront the same problem that the Allies would eventually have to deal with, namely the need for a long range fighter escort and appropriate doctrine. They were never given the opportunity to do this.

Specialization is a reality of the modern economic world, and has been for over a century. Few nations make everything needed to build the tools to build the tools to build the weapons, and even fewer have all the raw materials needed. This was true even when the weapon systems were much simpler.

Also, even when a nation can produce things in small quantities, it can't necessarily produce them in large enough quantities needed to make up for the attrition of war.

During WW2, for example, Russian manufacturing and logistics depending upon foreign aid for the vast majority of the supply of ball bearings, most of the machine tools, the vast majority of the rail and truck stock, the chemicals and chemical processing tools needed to produce high grade aviation fuel, enormous quantities of food and winter clothing, and lots of other stuff.

Many references exist if you're curious about this, such as the books by Weeks and Van Tuyll.

In short, without the aid of their capitalist rivals, the Russian armies would have gone into battle starving and freezing, and massively under-equipped in tanks, planes, artillery, and ammunition.

Dependence on other nations was by no means a solely Soviet phenomenon:

"The bleak historical truth is that those great symbols of British myth, the Battle of Britain Spitfire and Hurricane, and their Merlin engine, were largely fabricated on foreign machine tools; more, their armaments and much of their instrumentation too were foreign in design, and, in the case of their earlier production batches, foreign in manufacture as well." Correlli Barnett, "The Audit of War", pp 134.

In general, only a long lasting war, or the immanent threat of such a war, can force a nation to develop its internal resources towards self-sufficiency.

Nobody in science suggests that animals have magical abilities.

They do, however, have many remarkable abilities that human beings lack. There is evidence to support all of the following:

1. Some snakes, for example, can "see" heat (infra-red vision), allowing incredible resolution in targeting their attacks.
2. Bats and several other types of animal can use sound waves to navigate in the dark (echolocation).
3. Sharks, skates, and rays can sense electric fields (electroreception).
4. Some animals that are capable of long distance migration are able to sense magnetic fields (including sharks).
5. Some fish can communicate using electric fields (electrocommunication).
6. Bees have an interesting ability to detect electric charge on flowers.
7. Scorpions have vibration sensors tuned to the bands of vibration frequencies carried through sand by their usual prey.

Incredible variation exists from one animal species to the next in the sense we human beings think of as touch, smell/taste, hearing, and vision, which can take very exotic forms in animals.

In many cases, the sensory systems of animals greatly exceeds what human beings can do without the aid of tools (or even with the aid of tools!).

None of this is magic.

In the case of the sharks, for example, a specialization of the hair cell that works as an antenna has been evolved. Since the shark has lots of these antennas, it also has a sophisticated signal processing mechanism in the nervous system to allow the shark to resolve direction. Since all living creatures generate electric fields, this provides a guide for the shark in the final moments of its attack, permitting attack in murky waters or at night.

There are many chemicals that are responsive to electromagnetic stimuli, and biological entities have evolved a variety to mechanisms to produce and use these chemicals. Human eyes, for example, have chemicals that respond to visual light (a form of electromagnetic radiation), allowing vision. Similarly, plants have chemicals that respond to light, this permits photosynthesis. The idea that a chemical can be used as part of a sensory receptor for an electric field is simply another application of this idea: not all that strange when you think about it.

Magnetic sensing is still not well understood, but you can read about the current ideas on how this might work by doing a search on "magnetoception". Once you allow the ability to sense a magnetic field, you essentially have a tool for navigation relative to the Earth's magnetic field (a primitive version of which is the compass).

Similarly, there are many chemical receptors that can be used to sense the presence of other chemicals. Often these involve complex organic molecules with a three dimensional shape that responds to the shape of other molecules on contact, much like a lock responds to a particular key. Many variations of this idea exist, allowing huge variation in the ability to sense chemicals (which human beings call "smell") from one creature to the next.

The usual search engines will provide lots of information on this topic, or you might get a book on animal physiology.

The full limits of the capabilities of animal sensory systems are something we're not even close to understanding at this point, and there's a lot of active research going on. Since most people know there's a lot we still don't understand, there's a lot of speculation concerning what these different sensory systems (and doubtless others we haven't discovered yet) might be capable of.

Even within the human species, considerable variation exists from one person to the next with respect to the ability to use the standard human senses. Some of this is biological, some of this is a function of environment and habit.

You make some excellent points. An additional point comes to mind, and I apologize if it seems like hand waving ...

In the study of frequency dependent systems we often don't understand all the possible non-linear ways in which a given system can respond. As you mention, any system interaction with electro-magnetics is necessarily frequency dependent. It isn't clear to me how one would construct a medical study to take possible non-linearity of response into account.

In other words, a study might inject a signal at a particular frequency (yes, we can only approximately generate particular frequencies, but let's neglect that point) into living tissue, then vary the frequency to observe penetration depth as a function of frequency. But what if multiple frequencies are present at the same time? Might the system behave differently under some combination of signals than we would expect from the superposition of responses to the individual inputs?

It would seem that it would have to, since no real system is actually linear.

In medical studies of exposure to electro-magnetics, they are certainly exposing living tissue to some signal or combination of signals.

The question that then comes to mind is, what if the studies aren't generating the right combination of input signals to see a response that might indicate a problem? One could potentially do a lot of population studies without realizing that the inputs are wrong in every one, because we've made an unwarranted assumption regarding system linearity.

I think it's unlikely that any combination of low amplitude inputs would pose a problem, but who can be certain?

It seems like we would want some way of proving that any possible non-linear effect that can result is necessarily non-harmful.

Incorrect. There is no limitation on laws regarding slavery in general in Article 5 (where the 1808 reference is found) or Article 1 Section 9 (where the importation reference is).

What is ACTUALLY said is that amendments can not prevent migration or importation of persons under state law until after this date. This is very specific. NOTHING is said about what new amendments can do with respect to limiting slavery AFTER a person has been imported or has migrated. In other words, laws concerning slavery COULD be passed both before and after 1808.

With the wording given, the federal government could simply allow slaves to be imported, then require they be set free at some point after landing. This would, after all, not constitute interference with the "import" process, which is complete once the ship arrives.

The specificity of this wording was probably deliberate: it can be taken as recognizing the current political strength of the pro-slavery faction while setting up the means to overturn slavery at some future date should that faction weaken. Recall that some of the Founding Fathers were strongly opposed to slavery, and these were very intelligent men who could easily have recognized the need to comprise in the present while setting up mechanisms to make sure that things would get corrected over time.

The word slave does not even appear in the Constitution: it is implied by Article 1 Section 2 and Article 4 Section 2, but even here the wording is quite careful. Article 1 Section 2 can be taken as implying, "you can force us to count the slaves for now, but nothing prevents us from removing slavery at a later date" and Article 4 Section 2 can be taken as saying "we won't let one STATE interface with the laws regarding forced servitude of another, but nothing prevents the FEDERAL government from doing this".

It is also interesting to note that Article 5 prevents prevents future Amendments from altering Senate membership, but doesn't say anything about Amendments altering membership in the House of Representatives, essentially providing a wide open invitation to alter Article 1 Section 2 ...

Further, an extremely strong argument can be made that the acceptance of the Constitution was conditional upon a Bill of Rights being added (two states outright rejected the Constitution without a Bill of Rights, in others promises were made by men of honour whose word was trusted to the effect that a Bill of Rights would be added), and as such, the Bill of Rights can and should be viewed as superseding ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in the original document in the event of a conflict.

Also incorrect. The 9th Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights to address the objection of the Anti-Federalists that any Bill of Rights would necessarily be incomplete. By providing for the assertion of unspecified rights retained by the people, it allows the assertion of rights against government. Note that this is the assertion of rights against government at any level, not just the Federal Government. It is a myth that the Bill of Rights was only intended to limit the Federal Government: we know this 1) from James Madison's personal history, 2) from his original text for the Bill of Rights and 3) from the fact that the 1st Amendment specifically limits only CONGRESS and the other Amendments DON'T.

The Bill of Rights being open-ended, it could readily be argued that it implicitly gave the federal government the right to outlaw slavery. After all, some of the most fundamental rights the people might want to assert as being "retained by" them or "reserved to" them, and thus protected under the 9th and 10th Amendments, are the very same rights found in the Declaration of Independence, which are certainly not consistent with the institution of slavery. The protection of such rights could easily be argued to be a responsibility of the federal government in the event of infringement by the states.

It's more complicated than this. Many opposed slavery, even before the 1800s. Ben Franklin was the head of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery League and once justified the revolution as necessary because he claimed Britain would never end slavery voluntarily. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson freed their slaves (and Jefferson tried repeatedly to end slavery in Virginia). Gouverneur Morris gave a damning indictment of slavery at the Constitutional Convention.

So then, as now, there were people who realized what was going on was wrong and needed to change, but the forces of entrenched corruption were able to keep things going their way for a long time. Then, as now, it was -- as much as anything -- corruption in the legal profession that permitted the long term abuses of fundamental rights. It appears Judges swearing oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights find it inconvenient to acknowledge the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights (the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights retained by the people, the 10th Amendment for unspecified rights reserved to the people, thus requiring the government to NOT enforce any law that could reasonably be supposed to violate rights the people might want to assert, a check and balance over the system that many people overlook).

Presumably the people involved get offers to support them in their candidacy for higher positions in return for their decisions, though I suppose we shouldn't rule out straight cash payments or blackmail as motivators. The legal profession as a whole has an enormous vested interest in not acknowledging the open ended nature of the Bill of Rights, so that probably plays a role as well.

For some reason, judges and prosecutors are immune to retribution when they uphold laws that violate fundamental human rights, even when doing so is clearly contrary to the oaths that are preconditions for holding these offices (or for that matter, the oaths that are required to engage in the practice of law). One would suppose that a person acting contrary to an oath that is a precondition for office would, by their actions, immediately and permanently be disqualified from holding that office (or any other position of public trust or responsibility).

It is cleat that the lessons of Nuremberg regarding individual responsibility to do no wrong have yet to take hold in the US legal profession.

This one, at least, is easy: look up the work by biochemist George Armelagos on the tetracycline (antibiotic) found in mummies. Now we know why beer was found in all those ancient Egyptian medical texts ...

Not quite the result you were looking for, and it may only have applied to beer found in part of the world ...

There is some reason to suppose that workers in ancient Egypt may have been paid, at least some of the time, in beer and bread ...

As far as the beer vs dirty water question goes, it's probably fair to suppose that many people drank water.

However, consider the following: the locals for a particular area would have some immunity to the diseases caused by micro-organisms found in their local water. We see the same phenomenon today (aka "Montezuma's Revenge"). Traders travelling from other places would not have this immunity, and would likely prefer beer to unfamiliar local water, presumably supplemented by water taken directly from rocky springs whenever possible. Thus, as trade became more important, beer would have become more important as well.

It's also worth considering that many foods contain water, and thus any small amount of dehydration caused by beer would not necessarily be significant in the overall diet. Also, between the time the beer is drunk, and the kidneys secrete urine, presumably much of the water from the beer is available for the body to use. It's not as if the beer instantaneously caused dehydration everywhere in the body.

The absence of a command line is why the software for the original Mac OS was written and tested on systems that DID have a command line. It simply wasn't practical to do this work by bootstrapping a graphical system. Too many tools had to be built and integrated, and wrapping a GUI around the development process would have hugely increased the time it took to get to market.

ResEdit, BTW, has many limitations (it got better over time and many releases), and if you were a Mac programmer in the old days you would have rolled a fair amount of your own code to work around these limitations. It's much easier -- if you need to generate a large number of resources -- to do so programatically than to wander through the same gui windows over, and over, and over, setting each resource individually with lots of mouse clicks and typing. Talk about carpal tunnel! ResEdit is really more a tool for tinkering, or making small changes, or building simple prototypes, than a complete and full-featured tool for low level manipulation of the system.

More generally, integrating a large number of different tools using a GUI is difficult at best, and often a disaster waiting to happen.

There are an enormous number of scientific and engineering tools out there that only solve PART of a problem or accomplish PART of a task. To solve a whole problem, or do the whole task, it is generally necessary to tie together a wide variety of tools. Typically you don't want to have to reinvent the wheel by rewriting all the tools! This integration process is HARD to do within a GUI environment. It's not an accident that tools for scientific computing, such as Matlab and Mathematica, are command line based.

Part of the genius in the design of Unix lies in the recognition of this difficulty: the designers provided very clever mechanisms (by the standard of the time) to support integrating disparate tools.

A classic example of an engineering task is chip design, which in spite of decades of work in developing graphical interfaces to support the design process still requires enormous amounts of automation and scripting.

Even in situations where some available GUI is capable of solving a problem, it's often a lot more efficient to roll your own solution, by integrating individual tools at the command line. The GUI designer might not have the right data structures needed to efficiently to solve any given problem. It's hard for a GUI designer to envision every possible circumstance under which an user might want to do something!

For these reasons is why it is absolutely necessary for developers -- if there's any chance they'll be doing scientific or engineering computing (doing this is the reason computers were invented in the first place) -- to know how to use either a command line or a scripting language to be considered competent and well rounded.

Yes, I do have quite a few expectations regarding control over my vehicle, even when it's parked in a public place. I expect other people not to slash the tires, break the windows, siphon the gas, or key the doors. If I'm dumb enough to park in a heavily trafficked area (or near kids playing ball), I don't have any legitimate basis to complain over minor damage to the vehicle, but there shouldn't be major damage. I expect other people not to steal the engine, the electronics, the license plates, or anything else, even if I foolishly leave the doors unlocked. I expect not to have anybody park too close to me, or to do anything that blocks me from leaving. I expect nobody will "borrow" the car without permission.

There are lots of special cases and exceptions, of course, for some or all of the above.

Decent, competent human beings treat the possessions of others, even in public, with respect.

Many of the expectations we have with respect to the treatment of our possessions in public are protected by laws in many jurisdictions, others rely on the integrity and competence of the public, or on tradition and custom.

In the modern world we have considerable expectation regarding control over our person and physical possessions when in public, and decency with respect to such. This goes even further in those jurisdictions with slander and libel laws, which provide protection not just over physical objects in public, but something intangible, namely one's reputation.

That's a philosophy to live by. Courtesy is free, up to a point, but respect has to be earned. It doesn't come from a position, a title, a degree, age, or wealth.

Far more than ten thousand civilians died from the atomic bombs.

On the other hand, typical estimates for civilian casualties associated with the battle for Okinawa place the total between 140k-150k, depending upon the reference you look at (including suicides). Military casualties from this battle were about the same as the civilian casualties.

It was the most dreadful single battle of the war, by any standard I can think of. The deaths were by no means limited to "mostly military personnel".

The numbers for total casualties associated with the (conventional) battle of Okinawa and both atomic bombings are not all that different in magnitude.

There's a lot of uncertainty over the exact numbers in both cases, especially given that the word "casualty" may mean different things to different people, making it hard to know what is being counted.

Still, it's not unreasonable to assert as many people died during the fighting for this single island as from the use of one atomic bomb, and possibly as many died during this single battle as from the use of both atomic bombs put together.

If you like, as a thought exercise, look up the population of Okinawa in WW2, determine the ratio of civilians that became casualties to the total population, and extrapolate to the population of the remaining islands of Japan. This gives you one estimate of the civilian lives that might have been lost in the event of a conventional (non-nuclear) military campaign to finish Japan.

In the ancient past (i.e. the Pre-Digital Age) this was sometimes seen as a reasonable balance. Today we know better.

Even in the ancient past, this was a flawed policy. Even in public places there can be expectations of privacy. For example, if one steps away from a trail and goes behind a tree while hiking in a national forest, another person should not be able to take a picture of one relieving oneself, even though this is legally a public place.

Further, there have always been issues with the ability of advanced technology devices to spy into private lots or into private homes, or other clearly private spaces, even from locations far away, locations that may actually be public. Camera zoom capabilities, parabolic microphones, possibly even phased array or extended baseline systems can all potentially be used to intrude into spaces where people reasonably expect to be private. A seemingly empty beach, for example, creates a reasonable expectation of privacy, and a photographer hidden in the dunes nearby is violating that expectation when they take pictures of a woman sunning herself.

We can only expect sensor technology to get better over time, and who knows what new sensor modalities will be developed in the future.

Hence, a policy better suited to modern technology would be that one can only take pictures or make other recordings with the explicit permission of all the uniquely identifiable subjects in the sensory field of the recording device. An exception can be made for security cameras in appropriate settings, or for recording devices intended to capture other forms of sociopathic conduct (such as recording an attempt by a con artist to engage in fraud). Another exception can be made for recording government officials in the performance of their duties. Even in such cases, strict limits can be placed on what can be done with the recordings.

It is appropriate to recognize a right to privacy arising under the 9th Amendment, superseding the right to freedom of the press in many circumstances.

In reality, of course, people have to have money to live. They have to have jobs, and a place to stay. Their lifespan is finite and they don't necessarily have the time to become experts at all the obscure details of Contract Law. The whole philosophical concept of people freely entering into mutually beneficial contracts is thus flawed in many practical situations.

Further, in order to be able to get a job in the modern technological world, people have to be able to learn to modern technological tools, which in many cases means access to software and other electronic media. Many such tools are commercial, and even the ones that aren't often require other commercial tools (such as an operation system), and as the use of commercial tools is often governed by "shrink-wrap" contracts, thus we run into yet another situation where the myth of two parties freely entering into a mutually beneficial agreement simply doesn't work in the real world.

If you listen to a typical Bar Review audio course on Contract Law, you'll probably hear the instructor plainly state that the vast majority of contracts are never read. Thus, the legal profession knows full well that these "mutually-beneficial contracts made with the full knowledge of the involved parties", are in reality nothing of the sort.

In the USA, understanding the law relating to contracts is extremely difficult. It's not simply a question of reading a textbook on Contract Law (which would be a challenging enough task in its own right, just from the length of the typical textbook). There's also a significant consideration most people don't think about (which might not even be mentioned in the textbook): in the USA the highest law in the land is the Bill of Rights. Clearly, as the Bill of Rights is the highest law in the land, it necessarily supersedes Contract Law when the two come in conflict.

To further complicate matters, James Madison deliberately gave the US an open-ended Bill of Rights, with unspecified rights "retained by the people" (9th Amendment) and "reserved to the people" (10th Amendment). He did this to deal with the objections made by the Anti-Federalists to the original Constitution, which the Bill of Rights would then supersede, namely that any Bill of Rights would be incomplete and would leave out really important rights that the people would sooner or later need to assert. This in turn has implications for Contract Law as it is ultimately up to the people to determine the rights retained by them, and those rights will supersede the established principles of Contract Law.

Consider the following: if any rights the people might want to assert as "retained by" or "reserved to" them could be taken away by the legal profession or by the government by any means, including some mechanism of Contract Law (or any court ruling or precedent), they would no longer be "retained by" the people: a contradiction.

For a concrete example, a right that might reasonably be asserted as being "retained by the people" is the right to long term oversight over business (we might also assert a parallel right to long term oversight over government, but that can be a discussion for another day). We don't, for example, want peanut butter companies letting rats get in their peanut butter that they sell: this used to happen, and hopefully as a result of public oversight over the conduct of businesses it doesn't happen any more.

A more modern example would involve the need for long term oversight over the environmental impact of a business. We don't want businesses dumping toxic waste and hence poisoning the environment, for example.

Note that the right to public oversight is not the same as government oversight. The whole point of having the Bill of Rights is that governments can be incompetent, or they can become corrupt. The presence or absence of government action does not preclude private action.

It is common to the legal profession put terms in work contracts that prohibit people from talking about their work (you might see the phrase "trade secrets") without any apparent consideration for whether or not, or to what extent, the presence of such terms infringes fundamental rights such as the right to long term oversight. This is a clear case of a conflict between Contract Law and the Bill of Rights (the existence of such terms does not say good things about the legal profession and it's relationship to the Bill of Rights).

Hence, to really understand contracts, you must also understand the Bill of Rights. However, it isn't sufficient to study what legal professionals think about the Bill of Rights, because the unspecified rights granted by the 9th and 10th Amendments are specifically retained by the people, not by the legal profession, and thus the views of the legal profession with respect to such matters are not binding. Putting this in other words: a government of the lawyer, by the lawyer, and for the lawyer is clearly not the same thing as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Once we add Constitutional Law to the mix of knowledge required to understand contracts, that in turn opens up a whole can of worms, not just from the complexity of having to master yet another area of law (and reading another long textbook), but also because it is far from clear that the US legal profession's current view of Constitutional Law is actually consistent with the Bill of Rights or with some basic concepts regarding the ethical practice of law.

Putting this in hopefully clearer terms, the legal profession, as a class in society, is in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system. Contract law poses particular problems as far as legal ethics is concerned, because a) so much of the business the average legal professional engages in is contract related, creating an incentive to do the wrong thing in situations involving ethical conflict of interest on the part of the legal profession with respect to what can legitimately be put into a contract, and b) there's this built-in propaganda inherent in contract law that both parties "deem" the contract to "mutually beneficial", which in turn means there's a tendency to assume that if something is in a contract it must be "ok", which makes it really easy to conceal the legal issues (and the ethical conflicts of interest on the part of the legal profession) that often arise in contracts.

For example, in many "shrink-wrap" software contracts there are terms prohibiting reverse engineering. Does this not seem like a violation of the right to long term oversight of business (or even a violation of the right of the human mind to be curious)? If so, what should we conclude from the willingness of the US legal profession to put such terms in so many of these contracts?

Clearly, the legal profession is in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to determining whether particular terms present in a contract are legitimate or actually violate fundamental rights. The widespread presence of these "do not reverse engineer" terms suggests that the profession is not doing a very good job in handling the ethics issue in this particular case, which in turn raises questions regarding the ethical conduct of the profession as a whole (this will come as no particular surprise to those familiar with the issues involved in so many other areas of law, such as intellectual property law or tort law).

In short, to really understand the law regarding contracts, one must understand not only Contract Law, but also Constitutional Law, and Legal Ethics. How many people have the time to do all that, especially given that many of the conclusions they reach when they start to examine the whole mess are likely going to be different from the "party line" or the "official propaganda" presented by the legal profession as a class in society? It's far simpler for the average person to just assume that things will work out ok even if there was something bad hidden in the contract.