Sorry, I should have clarified my point after the except. Basically, what I was trying to point out is that, per the new policy, the addition of an 'apparatus' makes an idea novel. Thus, adding the word 'the internet' to another patent already granted is technically a valid, patentable idea. While anyone with common sense can see its not novel or can think of similar things that have already been done, the fact is the USPTO must follow these ridiculous policies and blaming them for this mess when there is little they can do about it, i feel, is unwarranted.

History paints a slightly different story. The Patent Office initially refused to allow software patents and the total number of patents granted per year was fairly small. After being overruled by the supreme court in Diamond v. Diehr, the Patent Office was forced to change its policies. From the wikipedia article:

I think this is actually a great analogy because, you see, the rental car company could install cameras and GPS in all of their vehicles to make sure that the people driving their cars were not breaking the law (speeding, texting while driving, driving under the influence,etc) and law enforcement could then subpoena these records anytime they think some rental car driver might have been breaking the law, but since the rental car companies don't do this, they are clearly being negligent (/sarcasm). This is very much akin to many of the arguments being made by copyright holders in court against ISPs / certain websites.

True but, as I tried to point out in my first post, evolution happening quickly (interference) does not prove ID. There are any number of things that could cause perceived 'interference'. For ID to be right though, God must be the source of that interference and I guess I don't see how you are going to prove or disprove that. I approach the argument from this angle because there are already known periods of 'interference' such as the Cambrian Explosion, so the likelihood of your statistical analysis showing no interference at moderate confidence levels is fairly slim.

I wish, but I really don't think that their claim is quantifiable in a useful way because random chance is exactly that, random. To use your slot machine analogy, it is entirely possible for every (fair) slot machine in the world to hit the jackpot at the same time. While this event is extraordinary unlikely, the fact that it happened doesn't lend support either theory because, according to both theories, it is possible. I also don't think that their claim is falsifiable either because even if you do show that beneficial mutations happen at random intervals and form an expected distribution, pro-ID people will just say that it does that because 'thats the way God wanted to do it'. I think an important part of the ID argument that you don't address is that their claim is more than just 'God is messing with the numbers', its really 'God guided evolution to produce humans' and 'features like the eye are too complex to have formed naturally through evolution' (aka. 'Irreducible Complexity). The latter seems to be the one you're trying to address but, to me at least, I don't think you can truly prove that its false without also proving the former is false as well. Richard Dawkins has made several arguments against ID along the lines you are talking about, you should give them a read if you haven't as well as the rebuttals given by the pro-ID folks.

I think you have a few misconceptions about evolution. First, evolution involves tiny changes over a vast period of time, there is no 'jackpot'. If you were able to look at every single link in a evolutionary chain, you would find the task of classifying them into species to be nearly impossible. Second, the rate at which evolution occurs varies wildly depending upon the environmental conditions of the time, how fast the organism reproduces, how the organism reproduced (sexually or asexually), natural selection, etc; so, with just the fossil record, it would be nearly impossible to determine, with any sort of confidence, how long it would take for any organism to evolve. Evolution happening quickly != ID.

If you are interested in this sort of stuff, I would suggest you check out the field of population genetics. Their models and statistical methods deal a lot with what you are talking about in your post.

PS3 hackers have already decrypted game executables and modified them with custom values. Its not gonna be much harder for them to find these "internet key check" calls and jump over them. Given Sony' previous record though, they will probably do something stupid like implement this internet serial key checking function as a syscall which the hackers will just patch over to always return "the key is valid" leaving legitimate game owners the only ones who will have to deal with this crap.

Because Amazon patented 1-click shopping they would have to license it from Amazon to offer a 1 click buying option just like Apple has to for iTunes.

No, I wouldn't say they were necessarily nice but one of the major reasons the Romans succeeded in creating such a vast empire was because they absorbed the culture of the people that they were conquering. This made the transition easier and made revolt far less likely because, in general, people don't care what ruler they are paying tribute (taxes) to; they only care if the amount goes up or it changes how they live their lives.

I think Oracle et al. could learn a lot from the Roman approach.

Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding of the problem was that there are a large number of fairly rich people who live in Washington along the south border and do most of their shopping in Oregon (which has no sales tax but a very high property tax). This has allowed them to 'dodge' a lot of the taxes that both these states rely on for revenue. One of the main reasons they were looking at an income tax was to alleviate this problem.

If this is the case, since this measure was shot down, what are the alternative proposals to make up for this loss in revenue?

As a pro-choice, pro-gay rights atheist, who was almost punched by his father (he missed) for saying "the government isn't inherently evil and neither is Obama", I have found that people do some stupid things when they are angry. The rhetoric behind this election has been unbelievable. How can we possibly expect any sort of sane, rational discourse on our problems when everyone is trying to make their opponent out to be Hitler (Godwin be damned). Gridlock for the next two years may help spending, we'll see, but I doubt it is going to calm the electorate at all and may help to polarize it further.

Yes, I'm sure many people here know the old adage 'If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail ' but I think you are misapplying it here. The first thing any real doctor does when faced with the unknown is get a consult (aka. get another doctors opinion). If the unknown occurs during a procedure (eg. surgery, etc) the response is this: Could not operate due to complications. Any other response than this (atleast in the legal world) is called: Malpractice. I'm sorry but doctors don't invent new procedures on the fly, there is simply too much to account for. Even emergency room doctors adhere to this as well (I know this because my neighbor is one and I just asked him about this).

Getting back to the main point of this thread (of which we are woefully offtopic) the debate that seems to be taking place is between conceptual and operational knowledge (aka. why vs how). Ideally, professors want to test conceptual knowledge because this is what best indicates your understanding of a particular idea. Open note tests are a great way to do this because, for instance, lets say you're being tested on some chemistry principles; you may understand all the principles but forget how many atoms are in a Mol (or any number of other unit conversions). In a closed note test, you would get the answer wrong despite understanding the principles but on an open note test, all non-conceptual (aka. only memorized) material is freely available and you can quickly check it. Operational knowledge is exactly like it sounds, follow a procedure to get an your answer. Any slight change in the problem requires a different procedure to be memorized, etc.

While this is certainly true, that list is more a matter of meeting the broad definition of religion and being non-profit rather than having to meet a focused set of criteria. For instance, there are many secular institutions on that list of 'approved churches'. This is only possible because there isn't a focused criteria of things like: must worship a god(s), must hold a worship service, etc that one must meet. If, to be a journalist, one only had to meet the definition of journalism (ie. the act of reporting news) then these two cases would be the same.

As I pointed out in another post later on, the physorg writeup of this story was much more thorough.

From the physorg article:

This is what makes the study interesting and why it can't be chalked up to 'I don't like people who disagree with me'. Its too bad the summery failed to mention this.

Physorg.com covered this story two days ago. Here is a link to the original article from Ohio State University which sponsored the research.