This has to be one of the most insightful comments here. Want more specific? How about the distinctive sound of a child with a serious and potentially fatal case of whooping cough?

Oh wait, the anti vaccination wackos are intent on bringing that one back....

I certainly hope you're wrong in this statement. Otherwise, it implies the "scientific community" is no better than a bunch of religious wackos when it comes to evaluating evidence.

There is absolutely no reason to believe one way or another that life should exist or should have existed on Mars. If you go back to the Drake equation, we have only one datapoint regarding the probability of abiogenesis. It could be that life spontaneously appears on every random planet and is even multiple places in our solar system. But, based on current evidence, it could also be that life only appears on 1 in 100 planets that seem to have "good" conditions to us based on our really vague theories about how it happened. Or it could be 1 in 1000 or 1 in a million or 1 in a quadrillion.

We have one data point. I sincerely hope that there are some in the scientific community who still allow for the possibilty that there may NOT be life on Mars... maybe even not elsewhere in our solar system... maybe even not elsewhere in our galaxy. Maybe it's really common. But we have absolutely no reason to think so at this time, and thus it is really not a very "scientific" attitude to have no "doubts" about it.

Speaking about design, why the heck are you using an electric carving knife in the first place? Just buy a decent actual (non-electric) slicing knife, and keep it sharp. You can probably use it for a half-century and then will it to the grandkids. Learning how to keep quality knives sharp is an easy skill and will save you hours in the kitchen, not to mention probable injuries. (Dull knives make any cutting or chopping take much longer and require more effort, and they are much more prone to slipping when you try to force them, thus creating accidents.)

I can't stand cooking at most other people's houses, because they often have no knives that are actually sharp. Food prep is annoying with bad tools, and I understand why most people just give up and rarely cook with tools like that.

Anyhow, the reason for this short rant about old-fashioned knife maintenance is because part of our "design" problem these days is that we think we need some "gadget" to do everything. Yes, many gadgets are helpful. But a lot of times they replace a perfectly straightforward non-complex tool that would last for years with a complicated electronic device or at least something with a very special design, a bunch of breakable plastic parts, and no easy way to repair when it fails.

If you asked me to a choose a useless gadget that I'd NEVER bother replacing because I could just use a simple tool that will last for generations, the electric carving knife would be near the top of my list.

I don't mean to be a jerk about this, but THESE are the two things you bring out regarding examples of difficult things your dad couldn't figure out how to do??

Churning butter only takes cream and agitation. You can do it in a mixer. You can even do it in a sealed jar just by shaking (though it will take longer). Eventually the proteins will separate from the whey, and you just form them into a glob, squeeze it out, and you have butter. That's it. There's no "secret" to churning butter.

As for "butchering" a chicken, I don't know if you're referring to the complete act of killing and prepping, or merely the work most butchers do these days, which is mostly a small amount of prep and then perhaps cutting the whole chicken into pieces like breasts and thighs. That later thing is anything any competent cook can do, and I could show you how to do it in about five minutes.

As for slaughtering, well, chickens are relatively easy. You can go for the messy way and just chop the head off, but if you prefer less mess and a calmer chicken, just use a killing cone, hang upside down, slit the throat, let the blood drain for a couple minutes. Dunk in scalding water, pluck feathers. The only mildly hard part is getting out the viscera, and that's only because you don't want to puncture the intestines (and get feces all over) -- so make a cut in the right place, then use you hand gently to yank them out. Cut off the feet and neck, and you're basically done.

Again, other than having someone show you how to cut to get the viscera out, this is a really easy process you can probably figure out pretty easily. It's not as hard as processing a large animal, where you actually want to produce useful cuts and such.

Sheesh. I mean, I understand that maybe your dad has no idea how to do these things, but he could basically become an expert on both of them in a couple hours. These aren't insanely complex tasks or anything that requires a lot of intuition and analysis coming from long experience.

THIS. Individual languages develop around culture and then take an active role in shaping it, though most people within that culture don't realize it until they step outside of their language and culture. It can lead to concepts that are truly untranslatable, in the sense that there is no single word or short phrase that could convey the concept precisely in another language.

Most people who argue that we wouldn't lose much if we all spoke the same language also seem to believe in the "dictionary model" of meaning, where atomic words with exact meanings are combined together to make language. But that's NOT how meaning actually works; it's just an illusion created by dictionary organization. (If it were true, we would have also solved the automatic computer translation problem decades ago.)

In reality, language and meaning is a complex network of associations, where word choice often conveys subtleties of meaning because of the various connotations and connected concepts in a language. Everyone makes a big deal about mostly mythical ideas like languages that could have dozens of words for snow or something... But it's not only the specialist technical terms where the distinctive character of a language resides. (And those can often be borrowed directly into other languages.)

Instead, languages often make subtle connections in even the basic core vocabulary. For some perspective on this, take a look at a comparative dictionary of Indo-European languages sometime. You would quickly see that while many basic ideas in a language may derive from the same roots, a specific concept may have a number of different strands of development in different languages. For example, three languages may all have different primary words derived from different roots for concept X, each with their own distinctive set of connotations. While it may seem like there's a simple A=B=C equivalence between words, the meaning that is conveyed in translation could be significantly changed or lacking in nuance.

In many cases, this may be a small thing -- but the reality is that language does shape thought and even perception of the world. If it's easier to make a particular connection between concepts in one language because of this network of meaning relationships, it can actually change the way people are able to discover new things or consider new possible ideas. Of course, it's not impossible to do this in another language... It's just less intuitive and thus perhaps less easy for people in another language to see the connection.

And of course there are the battery issues too. I know three people personally who have had an iPhone with a battery that would last them for a week or more with low usage, but they made the mistake of upgrading the OS. Suddenly they had to recharge their phone multiple times per day. I and other people have often refused to upgrade to avoid such potential issues, which often leads to problems because Apple will stop supporting things unless you upgrade, leaving you in a place where either some important system apps no longer work or you roll the dice and upgrade to discover you have a slow brick that can't go more than 8 hours without a charge. (For the record, I don't buy iPhones myself, but I inherit them when other family members upgrade; I would never voluntarily buy an Apple product for many of these reasons.)

I won't go so far to say that Apple degrades battery performance deliberately. Maybe it does, or maybe they don't give a crap anymore about testing such things on older generations before releasing the OS. Either way, all the Apple BS about how "we limit our hardware choices so we can give you a better user experience" clearly goes out the window when your device is more than a year or two old.

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I mean, there's no way it could have anything to do with the fact that flash memory prices have dropped significantly and the only way Apple can get away with charging its ridiculous premiums for slightly more memory is to prevent users from easily adding their own. (With micro SD prices now, I could find something costing less than $1/gigabyte, or if Apple supported USB OTG, I could even use a flash drive for about 30 cents/GB, but instead I have to pay about $2/GB if I want an iPad or whatever with more memory.)

And it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that those ridiculous premiums for lots of memory cause consumers to buy cheaper models rather than spending a couple hundred more dollars on an already way overpriced piece of hardware, and then are forced to upgrade to a new generation device in a couple years when they realize they don't have enough space.

Yeah, I'm sure you're right -- the huge profit motive here has nothing to do with it... It's just Apple being a good citizen and helping its users not up have to put up with some inferior piece of freakin' flash memory they might buy.

That MUST be it. Thanks for telling us.

(Obviously I meant "rights" not "writes.")

No, it wasn't. TFA is talking about American copyright law, which dates to the first copyright act of 1790. The statute you're citing applied in England, but it was certainly not the first copyright statute, whose concept dates back to the late 1400s in various Italian cities where certain publishers or writers were granted exclusive writes to publication, usually for periods of 7-10 years.

I completely agree with you that 20ish years is plenty before a work enters public domain. The original 1790 statute which had a default period of 14 years was also plenty.

However, I think there are some things overlooked in your arguments...

That's because you have a choice to get paid up-front. Most artists/creators don't. If someone offered you a contract: "Hey -- you can design my building for me, and I'll give you X% of the rents for the next Y years, but I'll pay you nothing now," would you do it? What if the building was in the middle of nowhere in a completely untested market? What if your design was also very unconventional and you didn't even know if it would work?

Those are the kinds of things a novelist or even a non-fiction author, say, has to deal with all the time. They invest their time and effort spending months or perhaps years generating a work, often with no money up-front. And unless they're an established author, they're often breaking new ground, perhaps trying out something new which may or may not sell well.

I suspect most architects and engineers here wouldn't take such a risky deal. They'd prefer to actually get paid when they do their work, as do most people. Most creators take much bigger risks in the hope that MAYBE some day down the line they might recoup their expenses and time.

And -- of course -- the vast majority DON'T. For every creator who makes millions of dollars off of their books or songs or screenplays or whatever, there are thousands of creators who never really make a profit. But they try anyway, and maybe they get something back.

I don't know why everyone is so obsessed with deaths of authors.

Look -- copyright is broken, but it's effectively a contract between creators and the public. If you signed onto a deal like I offered you above, where you got no money up-front, but I said you'd get a share of the rents on the building you designed for 20 years, that contract generally wouldn't void at your death. The rents would be paid to your estate or your heirs for the original term of 20 years.

Why should it be any different? The few creators who do actually make money often have kids to feed. If I spent a year writing a novel and with my family suffering without enough money expecting X years of possible revenue from my novel, why should they not get the expected years of revenue if I drop dead from a heart attack the minute after my book is published? Copyright terms should be fixed and short -- whatever they are. The death of the artist is irrelevant.

Not sure what this has to do with anything. Are you saying that we shouldn't pay anyone anything if they don't do something "essential" enough or something? Why the heck do we pay sports players or actors or whatever? Most people spend significant portions of their days listening to music, watching TV, etc. Just because something is viewed by you as "entertainment" or something doesn't mean that it isn't hugely important to you or society -- and if we don't have a system that rewards creators, art gets worse. Good artists choose to do something else with their time. And there are also writers who contribute significantly to new ideas, knowledge, etc. -- if these people won't get compensation, they may not choose to do it. That's potentially "somethign of consequence" happening.

Again, I think most artists/creators would LOVE to take a deal like most people and get paid up-front. But that's not generally an option, and it's not the way we seem to do things in our culture. The only people who can demand significant compensation up-front (commissions, book contracts, etc.) are generally the people who will already be guaranteed to get a significant return anyway. For artists who do things that aren't as high-profile or are less popular, they take big gambles. If they do succeed, they should be appropriately compensated -- otherwise, why the heck should anyone spend months or years of their time creating quality intellectual works?

Really? A list like this is just a "drop in the ocean"? And that's just Catholic clerics who made scientific contributions; it doesn't include other non-ordained folks supported by the church over the centuries. People who founded entire new major ideas in science (Copernicus, Mendel, Mersenne, Roger Bacon, etc., if you include non-clerics, people like Lavoisier, Descartes, Pasteur, etc.) are just a "drop in the ocean"?

The "times [I] mention" were the past 1000 years. It's true that European scientific advances were slower for maybe the first 500 years of that or so, and activity outside Europe was often greater. But the Catholic Church was the "best game in town" for supporting science and production of new research into nature, mathematics, etc. during Europe of that time.

But you'll also notice many, many scientists (mostly Jesuits) listed in the link above from the past couple centuries too. During the "Age of Discovery" in the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s, Catholic missionaries were a huge network of people who shared and then distributed new knowledge and findings around the world. There's also a reason why dozens of craters on the moon are named after Jesuit scientists -- who were incredibly active in astronomy for centuries (despite the common myths in the Galileo story about Carholics who supposedly refused to look through telescopes and believe what they saw).

Look -- even if you believe that all of this is just a "drop in the ocean" of scientific discovery, I wasn't trying to argue that the Catholic Church was solely responsible for scientific discovery -- only that it has not been vehemently anti-science throughout its history, as some people seem to imply.

You want to know what is really a "drop in the ocean"? Give me a list of scientists who were supposedly actively persecuted by the Catholic Church during its history for their "scientific" findings. You have Galileo and maybe Bruno (if you even count him as a "scientist" -- his ideas were pretty wacky and his "methods" were more of speculative philosophy than anything like "science"). That's two people. Maybe a few other incidents in a thousand years, but somehow that's all most people seem to know about the Catholic Church and science. How does that square with the list of people in my links above? Church persecution and suppression of science is a "drop in the ocean" compared to its consistent support of science over the centuries.

Well, for most of the past 1000 years, the Catholic Church has been a leading force in scientific advancements of knowledge -- numerous scientific discoveries and theories came from priests, monks, and other church affiliates, and the church played a major role in the dissemination of knowledge. It's really only in the past 150 years or so that the church's role in science has significantly decreased. For every Galileo affair (which, though inexcusable, was more about politics and freedom of speech than scientific progress), there are dozens of other examples of significant scientists or ideas coming from Catholic sources.

(Full disclosure: I'm not a Catholic, but I have done significant research on the history of science. Want more info? Start here.)

Obviously there are issues where the Catholic Church seems "backward," but -- in contrast with many other conservative religious groups -- it has embraced things like evolution, the Big Bang theory was actually first proposed by a Belgian priest, etc. So while this may be a great announcement from the Pope, it isn't really a significant change from most Catholic roles in science. The idea that somehow the Catholic Church is opposed to science was created by radical revisionist historians in the 19th century. But it's not really accurate.

I'm assuming you meant "aren't" in that first sentence, and in that case, obviously you're right. Most TV is obviously fiction, for example.

On the other hand, reality TV trades on the illusion of realism -- and if no one thought the people in those shows were actually in scary situations, potentially involving supernatural phenomena, then no one would watch them... And they wouldn't be able to sell advertising.

I personally love a good ghost story, like I love a good fantasy or sci-fi story, but I'm able to enjoy the unrealistic aspects of such stories because I know they are fiction, and I accept that this is some sort of alternative world where weird things are possible. But I can't stand to watch "documentaries" or "reality" shows about ghosts because it's so obvious that they're complete BS. If you can't get past that and allow the possibility of belief (I.e. legitimacy), why would you watch?

Yeah, except... Take a look at the number of "real ghost-hunters" reality TV shows, for example, to see how a "kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices" has clearly contributed to people claiming to find all sorts of recorded "evidence" of weird crap. It's broadcast on TV every freakin' day, and clearly somebody must think some aspect of it is legit, or there wouldn't be so many shows about it.

Interest in UFOs was a particular kind of fad. Everything from the clear increases in human technology (making many UFOs more likely to be human origin, even to the average person) to various conspiracy theories to the X-Files has probably changed the way people pay attention to odd objects in the sky these days.

But, if anything, the interest in various kinds of cheap recording technology has led to even more wacky made-up supernatural crap, so much these days that there are entire reality TV genres devoted to it. Just because UFOs aren't of as much interest in the past few years doesn't mean there isn't stuff out there. (And actually, poke around on the internet -- you'll clearly find loads of people out there with new UFO reports all the time.)

Just want to say thanks for a adding something of substance to this discussion, even if it didn't get modded p. I think our copyright system needs a lot of reform, and things should go into the public domain much more quickly, but those who just blindly that copyright is a completely irrational concept generally haven't thought at all about issues you bring up or their consequences.