The problem with both parties is that we can't keep the dumbest 2% of us off the television.

The irony of this is while the law itself is very much a 1st Amendment issue, the enforcement is almost certainly revenue related. Just as traffic enforcement is "driven" by revenue generation rather than public safety (in which there is no real interest), this situation has the feel of a localized sin tax designed to fill the coffers of the enforcing districts.

In English, it boils down to a legalized shake down.

Unfortunately, most of the politicians on both sides of the aisle ARE stupid, evil or both. Do you seriously think the US Congress could withstand a combination IQ / US constitutional history competency examination as a prior qualification to hold office?

Do you go out of your way to find the way in which you can legally give the government the most possible tax revenue?

It is absurd to suggest that any public company not do the maximum they can to minimize their tax liability. You obviously have an ax to grind with MS, and that's fine, but digging up this kind of garbage is ridiculous. The same statements that you have made about MS can probably be made about 95% of the Fortune 500.

By what means does the patent system "encourage the development of new inventions, and in particular to encourage the disclosure of those new inventions" ?

When you quote "Inventors are often hesitant to reveal the details of their invention, for fear that someone else might copy it", to what do you ascribe the fear?

My post described the lower level mechanism of the goals to which you refer.

Remember: the primary valid purpose of patents is to allow the recapture of investment capital plus additional profits in proportion to the utility of the discovery.

If making these scientific discoveries is highly capital intensive, then patentablity is both useful and desirable because it encourages initial investment; eventually the patent will expire.

So, I would argue the key question isn't the nature of the discovery, but rather the necessary investment to make the discovery. A logical corollary is that most business process patents are a sham and are economically destructive ...

In all the patent hate, don't forget they have a valid use and purpose.

It would be interesting to emphasize how SF has evolved with society. From Vern and Wells in Victorian Europe, to Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land", which demonstrate both sides of American culture in the 1960's. John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" is a terrific period piece, and Zelazny's "Lord of Light" is also a blast.

In my view, SF took a serious downward turn from the early 1980's, but there are exceptions, to be sure. With the entire range of SF at your disposal, there's no reason to select junk when there are so many gifted authors to study.

Because so many developers develop Open Source applications for personal satisfaction, they tend to focus on scratching their own itches.

A characteristic of usability testing is that your goal is to scratch the itch of your customers; your preferences have very little significance in the context of the test.

It doesn't take a genius to see a potential conflict in the two goals; on the other hand, a developer likes to see his code in actual use by actual human beings. To maximize this use, a developer must at least pay lip service to documentation and UI testing.

Many developers never make this conceptual leap, however.

Actually, you are very wrong. Compare the Socialist "modernization" of Russia under Lenin/Stalin from 1917-1960 with the Capitalist modernization of Japan from 1870 to 1914.

There's simply no comparison between the two rates of social advance.

This wasn't a troll. It was a reference to a previous article.

This article is an ideal example of a social engineering crack. Consider the comparative difficulty of a technical cracking job and compare it to the simplicity and cheapness of what actually took place. The solution was actually quite elegant in a sordid way.

I once worked for a company that was experiencing a surge of highly organized fraud originating from Romania. Before I left, we were preparing to develop a major anti-fraud application, etc., at great expense. At one meeting I suggested that we just hire a few Romanian private detectives to knock on some doors and quietly suggest to the lowlifes that it would be healthier to leave us alone; the other people in the meeting looked at me as though I were green.

LOL.

The simple truth is that nuclear power is good technology that solves a variety of sticky problems. Anti-nuclear propaganda films irrationally scared the public in to rejecting a highly beneficial and useful method of power generation. With the passage of years, the public has come to the realization that the sky isn't falling and that a modern, safe nuclear power system is good economics and good social policy. We should celebrate this return to sanity: it's reason triumphing over irrational fear.

Was a simple metal hat with a (fiberglass?) liner. The current helmet provides far more protection than the previous model. Keep that in mind in the context of this criticism.

Also, as a minor quibble point, the airborne modification of the helmet has additional padding on the interior which may affect the dynamic of the air gap between outer shell and liner. My assumption is that the study was performed on the standard helmet configuration, but it's worth observing that there are non-standard configurations in wide spread use.

A more interesting question to ask would be this: since Google lives and dies by AdWords revenue, will they ever manipulate their search results to increase the click count of their paid AdWords results ...

For instance, if there is a search on "Apple iPhone", the logical first result is the Apple iPhone splash page. If, for the sake of argument, Apple were to have bought the #1 position for the search term "Apple iPhone", they would be displayed twice: once for the #1 unpaid result and once for the #1 paid result.

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realize that one could easily increase the number of clicks on the paid search result by suppressing the unpaid result.

Just a thought.