Fraud she certainly is, but the fraud was so transparent that clearly she's not right in her head.

While the financial aspect of this makes her culpable, building an outrageous fraud around readily disprovable details of your personal biography is a very bad idea in the long run if you're simply a con artist. Doing that suggests that there are short term needs that trump simple financial considerations. Perhaps she felt she deserved more sympathy, nurturance and nurturance than she'd gotten in life. That's common enough that there's name for it: Factitious Disorder.

Over the years I've read many stories of people who assumed false biographies. Most often this took obvious forms -- passing for white before the Civil Rights Era. But in some cases people chose to assume minority identities, particularly as American Indians in the early 20th C. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance was (by the terminology of the age) a negro with some Cherokee ancestry. He ran away to join a wild west show where he learned from Cherokee language from other performers, used that to get into Carlisle Indian School and later traded up his "Cherokee" identity for a Plains Indian one. Wenjiganooshiinh -- "Grey Owl" -- was an Englishman who was abandoned by his father in childhood then later adopted an Apache/Ojibwe identity.

What makes these two men relevant to this case is that they were both advocates of Indian rights. As outsiders, they understood what sympathetic outsiders wanted Indians to be better than an Indian would. And they would't have been able to pull it off if they weren't a little off their nut; if they didn't want to escape who they were for a more glamorous alternative.

If involves breaking the law -- not just some kind of namby-pamby administrative regulation but the basic stuff of civilization like like the prohibitions on assault or murder -- then I'll sure as hell tell what not to do.

If you're a veteran I'll gladly shake your hand and thank you for your service. I'd be honored to buy you a drink. But I won't hand you a get out of jail free card.

Have a little perspective. Yes it's wrong to impersonate a veteran, but it doesn't impugn the character of veterans. But claiming that all veterans will and should overreact to a breach of propriety with violence *does* impugn their character. Which is worse?

I don't mind e-books. But i refuse to pay so much for something that is not legally absolutely and completely mine. Even then, it's always a question if i want to pay for something not tangible.

And, books don't run out of power, can easily be flipped, and so on.

Well, the idea of copyright is to incent creators to create, not to reward them per se. So the sensible way of approaching is to ask how many years in advance a reasonable person would make economic plans for.

Corporations seldom worry about income streams ten years out; such future income is discounted to insignificance. On the other hand an artist planning on managing his own creations might very reasonable think about fifty years out. Seventy-five years is beyond the pale of reason if we're talking about incenting creation. So is any extension of pre-existing copyrights.

If we wanted to maximize the present value of future income to an artist contemplating creating or performing a song, I think a fifty year term would be reasonable, with the proviso that any assigned rights automatically return to him without encumbrance after ten or fifteen years. Such an arrangement would have no impact economic on his ability to sell the rights to his work immediately, and hold out the promise of getting a second bite of the apple in a decade or so.

There's a phase people go through in life where commitments pile up and play becomes something we intend to get around to. Look around. If you decorate your office space with posters of kayaking/rock climbing/whatever you're into, but you haven't actually done it in the last year because you don't have time, you have entered that phase.

The thing is, people in that phase still dress the part of their younger selves. And for a while at least they even still buy the stuff, until they don't have space for it.

People buy SUVs, even though they're ridiculously impractical for their situation, as a fashion statement. Turning a car from a utilitarian object into a fashion statement is what automobile marketing is all about. Look at SUV ads; what you're telling the world (or perhaps yourself) is that maybe on a whim you'll go off-roading or picnicking on the beach, instead of commuting to and from work, making runs to the supermarket, or chauffeuring your kids to soccer and music lessons. It could happen. Only it won't.

That's the reason SUVs back into parking spaces. Subconsciously their drivers are longing for a quick escape that will never come. SUVs would be the saddest of vehicles, or they would be if the people who bought them had a little more self-awareness.

ESRI is the Tomacco of GIS software. It's terrible, but they can't stop using it.

I was pulled onto a legacy application that was using ESRI, and after seeing what a disaster it was (the project was on the verge of losing funding) I trashed the whole thing and rebuilt it from the ground up using open source tools and libraries. What used to take weeks to months of hair pulling frustration from programmers now takes a couple minutes for a non-techie user.

Anecdotes are a dime a dozen though. I'm sure ArcGIS and friends have their uses, and in some cases may be the only game in town for some features. I just haven't found where'd I use ESRI vs. an open source equivalent.

The problem isn't that they share certain characteristics. The problem is that they share the same characteristics with healthy cells.

Killing cancer cells is easy. Killing cancer cells without also destroying everything else is a very hard problem to solve. If this protein can force cancer cells back into healthy cells (or at least self-destruct) WITHOUT negatively affecting healthy tissues then this would be significant.

You're quibbling irrelevant or implementation details. A lawmaker sponsoring legislation is part of his record; it has nothing to do with influence peddling.

The kind of dirty tricks advertising you warn about is possible today, so I don't see this as a point of objection. The solution is an orthogonal approach to combatting influence peddling --transparency.

As foe the matching fund criteria, the need to set them is not an objection to the scheme either. You can set them however you like. You could do it on number of signatures (X% of the registered voters); or number of distinct donors (Y% of registered voters). Whatever your goal is for the candidate pool, you can set the criteria accordingly. As long as the candidates of the two major parties always qualify it won't be worse than the status quo.

I actually respect the principles behind this sentiment, but the only way to reduce the power of political office is by getting the politicians to vote to do that. As long as political power remains a valuable, readily purchased commodity then more power will accumulate in the government.

Of course I realize that my proposal *also* requires politicians to vote out the status quo. At least it's marginally more likely that they will vote out an aspect of the status quo that is miserable and degrading to them than they are to vote to marginalize themselves. After willingness to deliver favorable legislation to monied interest is no longer a qualifier for holding office, then there is a possibility of reducing the power of political office if that's what voters want.

That works great for really small donations, but those aren't the problem. If I had a ten million dollar donation chances are I know damn well where it came from.

Under my proposal you'd still be free to do anything with your money that you now do. You can give money to your favorite politician, although that would trigger a matching grant. You could take out a totally independent ad which would not trigger a matching grant, but experience has shown that such ads tend to reflect the political positions of the purchaser rather than the marketing message of the candidate.

Would rich people still be more influential under my proposal? Sure. I am not proposing the establishment of an egalitarian paradise; I am proposing throwing up roadblocks to government by cronyism.

Could the system be gamed in certain ways? Probably. The idea is not to make the purchasing of influence impossible, any more than safes make theft impossible. But as with a safe, the idea is to make misconduct more expensive, cumbersome, and risky.

Except that begging the question, isn't it? If chimps should be considered persons, then we're no more entitled to use them as non-consenting research subjects than we're entitled to use humans that way. In fact why not use non-consenting humans? Surely it would benefit the human race as a whole to sacrifice individual humans as research subjects, especially in the kind of numbers we use chimps for. A few thousand human is not that many when weighed against the seven billion on the plant.

Most of us would agree that experimenting on humans without informed consent is wrong no matter what the collective benefit, so there must be something entailed in being a human which makes that unacceptable. And it's perfectly reasonable to ask whether some other animals have that very same thing. This is a philosophical question. If persons have rights, then (a) those rights have to be entailed in our definition of "person" and (b) the criteria for that definition have to be applied impartially, not according to our preconceptions. It shouldn't matter if the subject is a member of an "inferior race", an artificial intelligence, an extraterrestrial visitor, or a familiar animal we simply haven't considered fully yet.

This is a little bit like math. Most people take the statement "1 + 1 = 2" as self-evident; but to a mathematician it's anything but. In day to day life we take human rights as self-evident -- we in fact "hold these truths to be self evident". But to an ethicist what we call "human rights" have to come from something more fundamental. If an ethicist simply assumes that human beings have a right to life and liberty, then he has to accept that the contrary assumption is equally valid. If the contrary assumption is not equally valid, then there must be some more fundamental principles by which we're evaluating these propositions.

So to show that chimps do not have a right to life and liberty, we have to define a category of beings that have such rights in such a way that all humans are members of that category, but no chimps are. I must confess this is beyond me as a philosophical layman just as algebraic fields are to mathematical laymen. I just go through life taking "1 + 1 = 2" and "humans have rights" for granted, and it works for me. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be people out there studying abstract algebra or ethics, or that these fields have no important practical applications.

Don't forget training and consulting. That brings in quite a bit of revenue too. In my experience most ArcGIS installations aren't actually functional because they don't have people who can work the software. Even after training most installations don't have the personnel to dedicate to keep up with it; they maybe produce a report or two, and then the software sits on the shelf, then they need to send someone else to training.

In this environment a lot of people using ArcGIS might as well be using QGIS. If there were training and support for QGIS, this would build a user base which would attract developers. I think a lot more could be done in getting users to adopt web based mapping -- WMS and WMF -- too. The web is such moving platform that the kind of desktop based entrenchment ArcGIS enjoys is less significant.

And what's more trying to restrict the flow of money has the perverse but economically predictable effect of making influence cheap to buy. The typical congressman spends five hours a day in fundraising related activities, and two hours a day doing constituent services. That alone should tell you who they really work for.

If you banned political contributions outright, then congressmen would just spend *more* time trying to drum up support for people to spend on their behalf. There's really only one way to eliminate the corrupting influence of money in politics: public financing. I don't particularly like that option, but it's the only one that is guaranteed to work, the only way to restore the status quo ante, before the rise of mass media campaigning, where elections were entirely a matter between the politicians running and the voters.