How can we plausibly restrict the sale of malware if the seller can point to the smoke shops for comparison? Seems like they only have to wink and say "don't tell us you plan to do anything illegal with it".

Well, it's like what we hear out of China. "The Chinese people don't want the freedom to look at dissenting political opinions. That's why there needs to be a massive censorship filter and widespread intimidation and oppression to stop any specific Chinese people who disagree." If there were really a consensus, there'd be no need for such a law.

So it's basically "The Elder Scrolls: Texas"?

Under what clause of the Constitution would you justify federal control over education standards?

Actually, American citizens are extremely generous as individuals. They give huge amounts of their effort and wealth to foreigners as charity, and sign up for voluntary military service knowing they'll be dropped into inept hellhole nations around the world, not even counting the benefits of American businesses to the world. We simply don't like having some gang of self-appointed do-gooders order us to be "social" in ways that involve granting them unlimited power over us.

"Efforts to put a more political spin" on textbooks? The article's summary assumes that before this round of meddling, the curriculum was perfectly objective and definitely uninfluenced by politics.

When asked what Constitutional authority she had for ordering us to buy insurance, Nancy Pelosi's reply was, "Are you serious!? Are you serious?!" CNS News covered a bunch of other Congressmen who were similarly stunned or indifferent to the question. If they'd been smarter, maybe they would have listened to you and used your argument -- but they didn't. They just declared they have "essentially unlimited" authority to impose "requirements" on Americans to do things and "fines" to punish them for disobedience. (Their words.)

That's why multiple states are already nullifying the illegal health care law and others are suing over it. If we let this law stand, then logically we accept that the feds can order us to do pretty much anything, and the 10th Amendment is even deader than it's been since FDR. My favorite example is that you'd have to accept a 99% income tax on any American who won't move to a collective turnip farm. "It's just a tax to cover our estimate of the costs you're imposing on society by not participating in our five-year plan!"

According to the actual text of the bill, no, the "penalty" for disobeying the (unconstitutional) "requirement" to buy insurance applies to anyone who refuses to buy. Regardless of whether they claim to have "opted out" of any government system or later "want back in"; the rule is just "Didn't buy what we ordered? You get punished." If you want to search for it in the actual bill, look for the terms "shared responsibility" and "requirement".

Back to the original Berkeley article: doesn't it say that there's to be a series of lectures on healthy living for those who choose not to hand over their DNA? Sounds like an attempt to start harassing those who disobey. At least it's less coercive than what this government is doing, by claiming what Pelosi called "essentially unlimited" power to give whatever orders she wants.

"And it's also about Nintendo, which was the first to require that all apps be approved by the device manufacturer."

That line points out that this battle for content control goes back to before Net-based software. In Nintendo's case the company relied on hardware controls such as the "10NES" system to (try to) prevent unauthorized cartridge games. But that was a dedicated gaming system (despite half-hearted marketing hype and a short-lived Famicom modem service in Japan), not something that was marketed as the Ultimate Amazing Shiny Computer Device.

Basically, I think we're grumping here that the iDevices are shiny, but that we want assurance that devices with more owner freedom aren't going to get crowded out of the market by the majority (?) that'll be content with locked-down gadgets. Nintendo was never really in the position to marginalize the computer market that way.

I've heard of various other approaches -- to two different things, and I'm not sure which one the researchers are mainly going for. Is the goal here to produce a useful vision system for AI, or to get a better understanding of how the brain works? It seems like while these are compatible goals, it's helpful to distinguish them and decide which you care more about.

Although that's a neat idea, it doesn't quite apply to American laws. If I understand right, you're thinking of a standard set of federal laws all states follow by default, with states just changing them a bit. But the legal system we had under the Constitution inherently had independent legal entities with different authority, state vs. federal. Federal laws wouldn't cover the same subjects, for the most part, so topics like labor law and pollution control would be stand-alone state laws rather than changes to a master federal law.

At least, that's how it used to be.

As another comment notes, the "Restatement of Torts" (and Contracts, &c.) series do that. It's important to note that those documents aren't just a "restatement" but an attempt to reshape the law. (See also the politics of the DSM in medicine...) That's grounds for eyeing those things with some skepticism, since the Restatements are slightly different from what you might think they are. Not just a helpful summary but a push in a particular direction, that is.

There are also a "Uniform Commercial Code" and "Model Penal Code". These are proposed laws developed by US legal scholars based on existing laws stretching back to English common law. The UCC and MPC themselves aren't law, but I believe every state has adopted some version of each. These things are explicitly offered as replacements for previous laws, while retaining the same concepts and cleaning up confusion. For instance, the MPC gives a standard scale of culpability definitions like "intentionally", "knowingly", "recklessly", "negligently", and "general liability". It also explicitly establishes that nothing is illegal unless there's a specific law against it -- very important in preventing oppression. And the UCC codifies older concepts about the default terms in a contract and how it's interpreted, like how a conflict between "I'll sell you 500 red widgets" and "Okay, send me 500 blue widgets" is resolved.

He's saying we're going to seriously pencil in a Mars flyby, a mere 25 years from now, right? Sounds like a vague, very-long-term goal, especially coupled with cancellation of the manned rocket program we already were working on. Constellation wasn't very popular even within NASA, so it's not too bad to see that program canceled, but there was at least one successful early test of it. Now we've got nothing, and we're still going to have nothing for many years to come. There's also Obama's short-lived idea during the campaign to get more money for schools by putting Constellation off for five years. (Reach for the stars, kids!) So while not every detail of the plan is a bad idea, I read it as this president punting on space exploration. Bush at least tried to get us to the moon by 2020, with a specific eye on Mars after that.

What I'd do to make a worthwhile version of the proposal is say, "Time out. Cancel Constellation. Take five years off for basic tech development, like perfecting a nuclear rocket. But after that we're going to do a 10-year program to get humans on the way to Mars." It's within our power to do that, if the feds aren't busy trying to take over the economy and claim Pelosi's "essentially unlimited power" for Obama's stated purpose of "spreading the wealth around".

In other news, "Skunk Announces It Won't Spray In Self-Defense". Also coming up: "Skunk Eaten".

"irrationally afraid of communists"? You mean, other than the track record that two of the main communist nations murdered millions of their own people just last century, and have an ideology that preaches expanding their system worldwide? And the fact that both of those countries (despite the fall of official communism in Russia) also have nukes which are probably, right now, aimed at American cities?