Absolute nonsense. Patents were supposed to 'promote the progress' of 'the useful arts.' Trade secrets had nothing to do with that because nobody who could practice something secretly indefinitely would bother getting a patent, which is costly and expires. If the goal was to reduce the usage of trade secrets, the first step would be to weaken trade secret law, but nobody ever brings that to the table because patents very little to do with trade secrets for proponents or opponents.

You seem to understand the differences better than many psychologists, but are missing the point I am making. A very important thing to get across is that many people with Autism can be and will be 'fine' even without help. However, the fact remains that they are different in a substantial way, and properly understanding this differences increases the chances that they will be fine. A good analogy for me is being left handed. There seems to have been some evidence that being left handed was once seen as incorrect or wrong, but to say that is quite ridiculous today. We understand that lefties work a different way and may need some degree of different treatment, but don't see that way as 'wrong' anymore. That's probably the right approach to take towards autism.

It still remains a question to what degree this is inherently a disadvantage and to what degree it is an advantage because of the structure of our society. From the perspective of an individual, it's probably not all that important, but in how to deal with this overall, it's profoundly important, as it determines whether we should focus on treating individuals or treating society.

I only recall playing video games as early as 4, but I don't recall with detail anything earlier than than that age, but I did have the ability to beat some of those games at that age, suggesting a fair bit of experience. So yeah, parent have been letting video games and televisions babysit their children about as long as they have been able to afford video games and television.

There's actually a pretty simple explanation. There's a cultural view that having sex with women is a wonderful, beautiful thing and having sex with men is a disgusting, horrible thing. Gay men have sex with men, therefore they are disgusting and horrible, and lesbians have sex with women, therefore they are wonderful and beautiful (at least as long as they aren't butch, anyway).

Except that there are still large differences in diagnosis rates in different places. You can largely explain this by having other parts of the country 'catch up' on the latest diagnosis methods.

TVs seem to be in decline as of late. You mentioned an iPad, but those tend to be at least as social as a video game console, while TVs aren't social at all. 20 years ago, those same kids would have been playing video games alone in their room.

Actually, the article states about half of those diagnosed have average or above average intelligence. Thus, autism is becoming less and less about intelligence and more about just having different behavior. I think this will likely be a great thing, as it will help separate the conflation of autism with mental retardation. This will benefit everyone across the spectrum of intelligence, and along the spectrum of what we consider severity for autism.

Facebook crushed myspace because myspace went to total shit faster than Facebook did, and arguably benefited a bit from learning from the mistakes of myspace and friendster. They have picked up some innovation in scalability and reliability along the way, but their success is more due to the incompetence of their competitors than their own competence.

We don't have to get the balance 'right', we just have to get the balance 'better' than it is right now. You are also making the bizarre assumption that health costs will go up, which doesn't seem to mesh with reality. Prohibition hasn't reduced usage, and a large share of the health-related concerns are due to impurities because these drugs are being made in environments not suitable for pharmaceutical grade production. Another concern is the lack of reliability of concentration, which is how a lot of overdoses happen. The biggest shift I would anticipate is going from alcohol to cannabis, which would be an overall reduction of health concerns.

Regarding civil forfeiture and militarization, while they might have happened through other methods, it's hard to argue that this wouldn't greatly reduce it by just changing it now. You can't buy your PD a tank if you don't have money, and the money comes largely from drugs.

I'm not saying that finding the right laws is easy. Far from it. I'm not saying that it will solve all of our problems. I'm just saying that it's not difficult to be less idiotic than we currently are. Stopping complete and total failure is an incredible step forward, and far beyond what most of our laws accomplish.

You can't actually know that, so stop deluding yourself.

Not conclusively, but we can speculate, especially since a number of places have significantly reduced enforcement and a few have legalized. We can also draw a number of parallels with alcohol prohibition.

Apparently it isn't, as seen by the lasts 35 years.

Is it tough politically? Yes. Is it tough to actually write laws better than our current ones? No.

Actually, it is a pretty simple matter. Legalization is going to be better overall than the current state. Moderate regulation may also be more beneficial, and would certainly be better than the status quo. Finding the ideal laws is no simple matter, but having better laws is a piece of cake.

And you really are downplaying the role the war on drugs has played on the militarization of police forces and the curtailing of our rights. Civil forfeiture is more or less due to prohibition (and the organized crime that it inevitably brings), and civil forfeiture funds local police departments to buy SWAT gear. Furthermore, it feeds into the prison-industrial complex, which is a concern in the same league. Fixing everything is not a simple matter, but making improvements over clearly awful problems is one.

As much as I dislike MS, they could probably actually do something with it and it al least sort of makes sense. Zuckerberg seems to just buy shit that seems cool without any regards for what to do with it or without any kind of proportinate assessment of value.

Like other federal agencies, the NSA is compelled by law to try to commercialize its R&D.

The closest thing I'm aware of is Bayh-Dole, which applies to grants from non-federal agencies. Such a policy would seem contrary to our philosophy on copyright regarding federal entities, which prohibits them from obtaining copyright on works created by the US government. I realize that copyright and patents are two different entities, but they have very similar intentions in their constitutional basis.

That's like saying it's a cop's job to shoot people.