True, but your argument then is "by definition" (of a gamer girl) and your experience is not relevant.

The only thing you know "from experience" is that there is a gamer girl may in fact want you to wake up at 6 am for raids, etc.

(Right conclusion, wrong argument)

It seems really easy to sidestep this. Take the NSL to a judge, or use it as evidence to sue. If they come after you for revealing the existence of an NSL there is your proof that it has impacted you and you have standing. If the courts rule that states secrets are justified, and that your action was indeed illegal then you are basically in trouble -- you have admitted blatantly violating the law and will probably be imprisoned. But if you should win and you can have it ruled the law was unconstitutional then the law you violated has no power anyway (the constitution in the US granting the government limited powers). So challenging it is risky, and would take someone with very strong principles (and a strong stomach) to see it through, but it is not the Catch-22 you make it out to be.

Right, which is exactly what the other poster said: the electors in the US system are directly elected by the people, the electors in the German system are not.

I don't know about Germany, but in New Zealand we have a very similar way of voting in our members of Parliament so I will take a stab at why you would not want your president to be able to veto a law thing.

Unlike the US, we do not directly elect our head of state (I presume this is also true for Germany as well). Instead we vote for the party that we want to be in power, based on their policies and the party appoints a PM. This is actually quite common in many places, and it means that the Prime Minister can change inside a term. e.g. The United Kingdom had a PM change from Blair to Brown without an election. In the US if the president was to resign, the VP would become the president, it cannot be reassigned based on party politics. In practice the choice for PM is announced before the election, so many people do vote based on who they want their prime minister to be.

[The US is even stranger here, as you get the right to vote for your sentators, representatives and your electoral college member, but that is a whole different digression.]

The prime minister does have a fair amount of power, and does a bunch of figure head stuff (negotiate treaties, etc). But as it is not an elected position, the PM has fairly limited legislative power. The idea of one person vetoing a law that the other democratically elected MPs voted for would not be accepted, the PM already has a fair amount of unofficial power in the form of increased media time, and influence over the majority collation at the time. The fact that Germany has a system where the PM can overrule a law that violates the constitution is, in my opinion, a good thing.

[The closest NZ has to this is the governer general -- as a member of the commonwealth our official head of state is the Queen of the Commonwealth. She appoints the GG who then approves laws in her place. The GG could, in principle, turn down any law for any reason but that would quickly turn public opinion against being part of the commonwealth and would probably make NZ reconsider its position within the commonwealth.]

In contrast, ignoring the issue of the congressional college, the US populace votes directly for the position of president on the understanding that this one position will have a lot of legislative power in the form of vetos. Whether that is too much of a concentration of power for a single individual is up to you to decide, but at least it is an elected position. Ignoring our governor general (who theoretically has a lot of power, but would lose it is she ever tried to yield it) our system does not have as much power with a single person, and our elections for (psuedo-)head of state tend to be much more civil that the USA counterparts.

Hope this helped explain the origins / reasons for the differences!

Where does the number 2:1 come from (I take it we are just looking at the shuttle budget, not NASAs entire budget)?

As you rightly point out, if 1:1000 is achievable with the same budget as 1:129 then it would be evil not to do it.

What if it cost an extra $10 to go from 1:129 to 1:1000? How about $10,000? Or $10,000,000?

I agree that at some point it is no longer worth it, and that implicitly we do place value on a humans lives. But how much is it worth? That is maybe a better question than the ratio of "2:1", as I don't even know what quantity you are doubling.

(Possibilities are the entire NASA budget, the shuttle budget, or the actual budget for the launch. For the last of these, 2:1 does not seem particularly outrageous.)

Just to add a little to the parent.

The point is not to insult or get down on the level of "the other side". The point is to take an absolutely ridiculous statement (such as Glen Beck being insinuated of raping and murdering a little girl, but not actually accusing) that no reasonable person would actually believe, at least based on that "argument" alone. Instead the aim is to point out that using such techniques chave no logical or rigorous foundation.

So when a video is shown of the Nazi's goose-stepping down the promenade during a monologue on universal healthcare, after which Beck claims "now I am not calling the healthcare facist, but it makes you think", hopefully people will remember that the logical content of this argument is practically nil.

One of the best ways of showing that the logic of an argument is wrong is to start from things everyone knows to be true, apply the same series of steps and see if you get a result that is demonstrably false. In which case their is either a problem with one of the steps, or one of the things "everyone knows" is false. The hope (vain though it may be) is to show Glen Beck's fans that the method of argument often employed on his show can be used on anything, regardless of its real world validity.

And the 4th of July, 2010 ..... oh wait....

You must be thinking of that liberal la-la land that is Indiana.

As I wrote at the end of my post it is fine to argue that patents lessen the benefit to mankind as a whole. That is a fine argument and can be supported.

However it is disingenuous to provide a quote that says one thing and present it as saying another. The quote does not mention the benefit to the inventor, except in the trivial sense that (depending on your definition*) their benefit may be part of mankind's benefit. We should also recognise that they are not penalised for the benefits they did not provide, so it is sort of irrelevant to argue that they could have done more (by not patenting) than they did. What the quote from Nobel instructs us to do is to compare the actual things they did to the actual things that others did in that year, and evaluate which of the things actually done confers the greatest benefit to mankind.

If discovery X bestows the most benefit to mankind out of all the discoveries that year, even factoring in the patent, then it is not relevant (at least within the context of the quote provided) that even more benefit could be provided by not patenting.

That is not to say that I agree with the patenting process. I am simply saying that the quote provided does not say what is presented here. If people instead wish to point out that the negative effects of patents are systematically being ignored or uncdervalued by the committee have that argument -- and we can support that arguments on the merits bought forward. If you want to argue that patents in Chemistry and Biology are always detrimental, then we can have that discussion.

All I am against here is taking one statement, out of context, and then claiming it says something it does not. There are issues worth debating here, but let us argue them accurately and consistently.

What happens if enough people get together and agree that certain people don't have rights?

It happens right here in the USA.

We call them "gays".

Or non-citizens.

(Not picking on the US specifically here; but pretty much all governments decide that you don't have certain rights. In the US even once you become a citizen you are "second class" in the sense that there are rights excluded by the constitution that other (American-born) citizens have that you do not. We are just so used to it that we don't see it as agreeing that others don't have the same rights as others.)

Except that from the quote form Nobel, the benefit to pockets of the inventors does not factor into it.

The piece of the sentence

"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes

states that
    i) that the prize should be distributed annually
  ii) some logistics dealing with the estate.

So Nobel's statement is, in essence, that we should give the Nobel prize to those who, in the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.

In comparing two discoveries we need to compare their relative benefit to mankind; the benefit of the individual is completely and utterly irrelevant. That is, it is irrelevant if the individual (or individuals) benefited more than mankind as a whole; nor does it matter when comparing the two discoveries which group made "more" out of their discovery pre-Nobel prize. Nobel's sentiment is solely concerned with the benefit to mankind.

To be blantent and explicit about it, pretend for a moment that "benefit" was an actual quantifiable measure. It is not, but we can still look at the logical structure of the statement. If we have two discoveries A and B with
A: mankind benefit: 500 personal gain: 800
B: mankind benefit: 505 personal gain: 2000
then "B" has greater benefit to mankind of these two discoveries. The last column is completely irrelevant. (BTW, personal gain will probably always exceed mankind benefit as the scientists gain the same benefit you or I would, plus whatever recognition etc. in their field, other prizes, awards, grants, etc. The only way I could see personal gain being less is if the personal sacrafices involved were worse than all the other benefits to the individual).

If you wish to argue that a patented discovery lessens the value to mankind as a whole, by all means go ahead. But the argument that you have presented simply does not hang together -- Nobel makes no comment (at least with the quote you have provided) about the discoverer's personal gain.

PS. If you did want to argue about something mentioned in Nobel's statement, it is that Nobel prizes typically don't go within a year of a device conferring the greatest benefit to mankind.

You missed that these three pieces of information only identify 87% of Americans:

"...in 2000, [researcher Latanya Sweeney] showed that 87 percent of all Americans could be uniquely identified using only three bits of information: ZIP code, birthdate, and sex."

For the other 13% there are the sorts of collisions you mentioned

Obama got 52% of the vote. Palin/McCain got 48%

Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2008

Obama: 52.9% of the popular vote. If you are going to 2 sig fig then you should be reporting 53%.
McCain: 45.7% of the popular vote.

Obama got 7.2% more of the popular vote then McCain, which is actually a significant margin. The "missing" 1.4% went to third parties. The only way the election is as close as you paint it is if you honestly and sincerely believe that 100% of the third party voters would have voted for McCain had there been no other option.

The margin of support that is relevant for elections (namely the electoral college) is significantly higher, which is presumably the one that the supporters would be concerned about if the motive is re-election.

Not entirely unknown. We have some pretty good lower bounds on what it can be =).

Except that there are some solutions that have real testable conclusions. And remember in science you don't get to test a theory directly, you test a set of experiments to the *solution* of a theory. e.g. we don't test Newtonian gravity directly, we test (for example) the solution it gives us for the gravitational force for a particular matter configuration (like the Earth). The reason this is important is because it is possible to find other theories that have the exact same solutions as the thing we have tested, or (like Einstein gravity) have solutions that are close enough that we need high-precision experiments to distingush between them.

So putting aside the whole "we can never verify a theory" [or adding "we can make it a working model if a sufficient number of solutions have been checked to describe reality without the existence of a counter-example"] then in principle we do have predictions from string theory. Now there are many solutions, many predicitions, etc. but this fact by itself is already enough to distinguish string theory from philosophy.