Hey, the US could use some of those things too! http://www.infrastructurerepor...

They only read half of the sentence and assumed that was the complete second amendment. The full amendment reads "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It implies that they need to be a well regulated militia to have this right and in fact both the background for the amendment as well as early supreme court decisions show this to be the case. It's also clearly not saying unfettered access to arms, only that they can keep and bear arms; would anyone want a sociopath to have a nuclear bomb or automatic weapon anyways?

There's quite a bit of info on wikipedia about the amendment which is worth reading if you find this topic interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution.

Only antisocial people are afraid of eye contact. It's normal for non-nerds to look eachother in the eyes, especially if they're friends. If they're enemies then yeah, eye contact is intimidating but not as intimidating as looking at the club you're going to beat them with. See wikipedia for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_contact

You seem to be arguing against basic competitive economic theory. While your point seems logical the more likely case is that the low ROI colleges will starve until they lower their prices or increase graduation and post-education employment rates. I won't argue that the high ROI schools won't go down a bit once people start flocking to them for the best deal but to think the prices would only go up when people are given tools for finding the best schools doesn't make much sense.

I think everything else you wrote was good but in the case of disclosing security attack vectors, letting everyone know or only letting hackers know, before giving the company a chance to fix the security hole results in a great many more hackers using the attack vector than if it had been reported without public disclosure. We have no idea who figured out the attack vector first, the researcher could very possibly be first, or be one of the first, to discover it. Do hackers always share attack vectors with other hackers immediately after finding them?

Security bugs are very different from functionality bugs and should not be compared. Similarly the disclosure of these bugs should follow different paths.

" The NSA's job is securing our nation's communications, not unsecuring those of other nations." - you

That article is mostly about the NSA's responsibility to collect intelligence on foreign communications. They didn't going into comsec as much as comsint. The CIA collects intelligence through non communication interception methods such as infiltration, espionage, etc. All of our intelligence agencies have some degree of overlap but intercepting and decrypting communications is a primary responsibility of the NSA, not the CIA, as confirmed by your own source.

Really? The NSA has always been a spy agency. Even in the 60's they were decrypting communications of foreign governments. Wikipedia's opening paragraph on the NSA mentions spying before security as well. Where did you get the idea that they aren't a spy agency?

Have you heard of SLAPP suits. They are very much alive in the US but some states have taken measures against them at least.

The lollacup episode on Shark Tank had some interesting tidbits about contracts with marketing firms. To summarize, do not give your marketers exclusivity to profits for a market (asia for instance) and make sure they profit from their contributions to the market success of your product. The Lollacup creators had good business sense but still managed to make a contract with a marketing firm which took advantage of them.

I can't figure out the specific company that made a presentation video about this exact situation but it was posted here on slashdot about a year ago if anyone remembers it. I thought it was Pixar but searching the web for the video didn't turn up much. The gist of the process was that 10 CS Doctors worked on an algorithm for 3 years to greatly improve speed and believability of rendering light interactions with objects. They patented each promising attempt but it still took 3 years to perfect the algorithm and apply for their final patent.

If the evolution of the algorithm had no missteps then requiring code at each stage would have been fine for them but they had many missteps and not all of their patents are useful compared to the last one they published. Imagine someone got wind of what their abstract, non-coded idea was and hired a bunch of programmers to make a very poor version of it and then patented it. They would lose their economic incentive to finish the project and we'd all be stuck with a really bad implementation of their good idea. I guess alternatively they could just go ahead and waste time coding up a very bad version of their idea and then rewrite all the code correctly later.

The project I'm working on right now for a well known company has about 50 engineers working on it and has been going almost a year now. We had working code after 3 months for the basic idea but we still don't have code demonstrating the ultimate vision of our product. So that works out to roughly 5 man-decades before we'll have a fully coded implementation of the patent filed several years ago. The last company I worked for had a much larger software team working on an even more complex project but the basic idea had been patented long ago and we were just making small incremental improvements on it, some of which we patented.

Do you have some proof that people were thinking about creating a one-click checkout before amazon patented or implemented it on their website? A forum post or user group discussion would be sufficient. Many innovations appear obvious after they are invented, not before.

That's quite true that they're limited by their fingers but the difference of a few rounds a second is considerable if the spree goes on for a few minutes which most do; 2 extra shots per second x 60 seconds/minute x 2 minutes = 240 extra bullets. I don't think we should be comparing your fire rate to a pro like the guy in the youtube video but there has to be someone with equal pistol/file skill that has compared fire rates including reloads. It's such a simple thing to test and would put this whole argument about clip capacity limits to rest.

The guy in the video managed to average 3 rounds per second using his 6 round clip. This is much slower than what can be done by a carbine and that's not taking into account the fact that he can only store so many clips in a position on his body which can be quickly taken from without looking at it. You're argument also assumes that Torres was trying to shoot as many bullets as fast as possible which is dubious considering his firing speed. Finally, even marines and people who frequent firing ranges can't speed reload like that. It takes a lot of practice and most people will fail miserably at it when the adrenaline kicks in.

I'll admit that I was only thinking of the last couple shootings which were committed using carbines but overall pistols do come out ahead by a small margin compared to assault rifles/carbines. I say small margin because even though in many cases the suspects were also armed with pistols, their primary weapon was a rifle.
http://www.nycrimecommission.org/initiative1-shootings.php