Making traffic flow better will bring more traffic, even if you use false analogies. Every trip has an associated cost, and if you lower the cost for each trip by better flowing traffic, more trips will become affordable, and yes, making traffic flow better will generate more traffic that was non-existant before because of being too expensive.

Libertarians believe everyone has all the time of the world to do all the work of thousands of people all on his own everytime something is to decide. Somehow doing research and finding out things costs nothing in a libertarian world. No wonder they come up with such a fantastic economic value of a fully free, non regulated market.

The way to handle that is easy: Send a request for administrative assistance to Ireland, and then an irish judge will decide if Microsoft Ireland has to comply.

The uselessness of torture as an interrogation tool was conclusively described about 400 years ago in "Cautio criminalis" by Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld. You are free to ignore 400 years of knowledge though. But then you are just ignorant.

Voyager 2 made a pass at Uranus in early 1986. That's where we have most of our pictures of Uranus from.

He doesn't provide any evidence at all, just presents the current situation as some kind of natural state, which I doubt because I don't experience it as natural, but as a result of generations of propaganda. You might not notice this particular propaganda, because you grew up within without it ever being called so, but I do. I see U.S. movies, and I see movies produced in Europe, and sometimes I see movies produced in Asia. Only the U.S. movies have this strong accent on girls being princesses, on boys being rock musicians, and only in U.S. movies you will find the father "talking the talk" to his son about those mysterious women, and the mother warning the daughter about the boys only wanting sex. Only in U.S. movies I see those strong and unquestioned clichés how to be a man and how to be a woman. To me, they are a typical part of the U.S. culture. There is no evidence whatsoever that the dichotomy between boys and girls in topics to pursuit as a student is in some way a natural one, which cannot and will never be changed. I've seen the topics to pursuit change when the cultural environment changed. And this is more than "anecdotical" evidence, as it affects hundred of thousands of students. We actually had an experiment, and the experiment showed that within a few years, between 1989 and 1994, the ratio of males to females changed completely from a 50/50 ratio to a 50/1 ratio.

Even if you call the situation before a non-natural one, there is not a single reason to consider the situation afterwards in any way more natural.

I've grown up in an environment with not so much focus on "girlish" and "boyish" toys, and -- ta da! -- we didn't have this extreme separation of genders. Still today, when I see especially U.S. TV series aimed at children and adolescents, I often have an urge to switch off the TV because the settings seem to be so completely off reality and so loaden with cliché. There are some dogmata deeply ingrained in the plots, which are never questioned, and which play their own role as if they were real objects. Adolescent girls dream of marriage and boys want sex. It's a recurring theme everywhere in U.S. TV and so totally off anything I experienced myself. But I've yet to see the plot where this dogma is actually challenged. Maths and computers are a boy thing. In East Germany, computer science was a topic which had about 50/50 students. After 1989, the female student numbers fell dramatically. But at the mid level of the universities, all those women which started their academical career before 1989, still were present.

So contrary to you, I strongly believe based on the evidence around me, that the U.S. way of predetermining the roles of girls and boys in life in the U.S. culture and especially in toys and stories aimed at children plays a very important role in the roles they actually play in their later life. And it could be different, but in the current environment, where the actual buyers of those toys and story books are already predetermined by their own childhood, there is no business case in challenging the settings. Getting girls interested in being princesses works because the parents (and other grown up relatives) of the girls have the final say what they want their daughters to be interested in, and when they will agree that their daughter is so cute.

I've seen my own daughter playing with toy cars and toy trains as a very little child, because that were the toys her older brother played with. But then a family with two girls of her age moved into the neighborhood, and they had all the pink toys and castles and white play horses, and my daughter played with them and gradually wanted their own princess dolls and horses (she even started a collection of them), but this was several years ago, and now my daughter is in junior highschool. She chosed Robotics as her voluntary topic, she saved money to buy herself a PS4, and she's playing Second Son all the time - turning into a computer nerd like her father and much more than her older brother.

But then you had to slim down the hardware so heavily, that Windows will be nearly unusable, which in turn wouldn't make it into the device of choice.

Ok, lets start. The idea of a tabula rasa in the mind of a newborn child is wrong. We know that our minds have preconceived concepts. One example is the narrative. We tend to grasp information better if it is presented as a narrative with exposition, connected events and conclusion. Our intuition for example works narratively. We see incomplete information, and we fill in the gaps with intuitive ideas that complete the information to a rounded narrative. If we have enough narratives already in memory, we tend to be better at filling the gaps - experience makes for better intuition.

Another preconceived concept is the pattern. We tend to see patterns everywhere. If we spot several dots in a row, we tend to see a line. How strong this pattern spotting is, can be easily demonstrated by the well known optical illusions. Patterns allow for a compression of available information, we ignore slight derivations from the regular pattern, and still can mentally reproduce the situation almost completely. Those patterns don't need to have a counterpart in reality, they are mainly a mechanism of our minds. But they are a very powerful one.

Both narrative and pattern allow for inductive reasoning. From a information theory point of view, inductive reasoning never gives a warranty of being right (other than deductive reasoning), nevertheless it's a necessity to us, thus we have the concepts for it ingrained in our minds.

Ayn Rand's epistemology requires thought processes to be rational, but pattern and narrative are non-rational shortcuts, and they are much faster and in general "good enough" for us, and in many cases, they allow for survival, where a rational thought process would be much to slow or can't even yield a result because of incomplete information. Ayn Rand somehow conjures up the idea that an individual can have complete information and enough time for a rational decision. But this is wishful thinking, and she herself admits: wishing won't make it so. Ayn Rand never asks where the time required to gather information and to make decisions comes from.

But we as a group (society, culture...) have means to create a vast library of concepts, patterns and narratives that have proven to work most of the time. We call it education, science, laws, regulations, morality, ethics and knowledge. The library is there to support the individual in decision making, but enough individuals have to support the library for it to not deteriorate. Only because the group has this vast body of knowledge and tradition, the individual is empowered to make informed decisions. The group creates the freedom of the individual. An individual alone is not able to stay free. It needs the group and their preconceived ideas to stay alive, to have enough time to gather necessary information and to rationally decide. If the group doesn't provide this freedom, the individual can't exercise it.

Of course it was not complimentary to them -- they are exactly the boring, stubborn, bothering people we all like to complain about. But at least they managed to get the human society running, though with all the hickups, misconceptions, errors and catastrophes that are typical for humans.

The argument against Ayn Rand's philosophy is Douglas Adams' story of the people from Golgafrincham as told in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The Class A people try to get rid of all those people that make their life miserable(*) by insisting on rules and procedures and regulations, and to keep only the serfs and drones just like John Galt who withdraws to his island in an attempt to throw out all those pesky socialists out of his life.

The consequence Douglas Adams points out is that an incomplete society based solely on the egoisms of its members will die out from the next triviality -- in his case the infected telephone.

(*) For Class A values of "miserable"

You seem to fail to grasp the difference between criminal law and common law. Innocent until proven guilty is a criminal law concept and doesn't exist in common law. There the general benchmark is preponderance of evidence. And here we have a common law case.

Which is just the same as keeping religion (or church) and state separate. Thanks for supporting.

Making paper out of wood pulp became economic in 1843, when Friedrich Gottlob Keller invented a machine to produce groundwood to make paper. The oldest still existing groundwood paper plant was built in 1882 and is located in Verla, Finland.

I wonder what Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; means then. It is probably about Congress giving priviledges to some religions while reigning into the exercise of others and forcing religion down everyone's throat including that of atheists.