Yeah. So, the summary made it sound like evolution happens when new DNA elements occur which activate individual genes, as if you could take a fish cell, feed it the right programming and out would pop a walrus or an eagle. That entire model, though, is wrong -- DNA is not a program being fed into a machine. In many ways, it's both the program and the machine itself. Adding "new DNA elements" is actually the process of adding genes (or, more precisely, adding things which when combined with other parts of the DNA, become genes), which means that you're adding information about how to do something at the same time that you're adding information about when to do something. The verb "activate" does not adequately describe this.

Yeah, so I wasn't really trying to claim ID was involved (although I'm amused by how many people thought so -- see below). The point was that the idea that genes are sitting around waiting to be 'activitated' isn't really what happens. Thus, the need for a better way to explain what does actually happen.

The structure of my argument was "A or B." If A is absurd, then "A or B" -> B, where B is "need a new way to describe this." However, a lot of people apparently thought B was absurd and concluded A,

So, the hand genes were just sitting around, waiting to be 'activated' by specific DNA?

I think that means that either Intelligent Design is real or we don't have really good terminology to describe what actually happened.

That is a horrible idea. Think of what it does to foreign countries who have US operations -- they would have to pay US tax on their entire worldwide operations. For example, Bayer, a German company, would have to pay German taxes on its German operations AND US taxes on its German operations. If other countries adopted your rule, Bayer could easily end up paying its entire profits (or more!) in taxes because every dollar would be subject to taxation in every jurisdiction.

"No, no, no," you say, "this only applies to US companies." Doesn't matter, for two reasons: (i) Google would still have to pay both German and US taxes on its German operations, as well as taxes in any other country that adopted the same rule, and (ii) all that does is create an incentive for Google to re-incorporate in the Bahamas -- if the rule applies only to US corporations, it's easy to not be a US corporation.

What's really going on here is that the US tax code is keeping all those billions of profits from being distributed to shareholders. Instead, they sit in the off-shore subsidiary. Here's what the US should do: Give a one-time exemption from the corporate tax for money repatriated from foreign subsidiaries. That would do two things: (1) provide a huge bump in dividends, which would then be taxed to the shareholders, and (2) provide a lot of capital which the company could use to expand its US operations, putting a lot of people back to work.

I don't know about you, but as somebody who holds some Apple stock in my retirement investments, I'm happy if Apple is actually able to keep that $50. It means my investment, and that of millions of middle-class people like me, is worth more. Regardless, though, Apple still operates in a competitive environment even if you can differentiate their products from everybody else's. They sell more when prices go down. As a result, they'll keep some of that $50, and some of it will go into reduced prices.

That's a bit extreme. Of course some people still have jobs -- at minimum, you still need people to operate the machinery. The difference, though, is that the person who does this has far higher skills than the people who were sitting on an assembly line tightening the same bolt or screw day after day. And, you need people designing those machines; you need accountants, marketing people, operations specialists and . . . The fact that the act of manufacturing doesn't employ nearly as many people doesn't mean that there's no employment. It does mean that people will have to improve their skills if they want to find a job, because the jobs of tightening the same bolt day after day are all gone.

I can guarantee that the Swiss planned out their system in more than 2 days.

That would be more convincing if the pricing hadn't been set BEFORE the FCC told them that tethering had to be free. Typically, effects happen AFTER their causes, not before.

In answer to your first question, a lot of summer activities for students are staffed by college students, who do it for their summer job. That doesn't work well in, say, February. That's just one reason. There are lots of complications. On the last, you have a good point. And, in fact, many year-round school actually run their kids on multiple schedules (it helps maximize school usage -- run 4 different schedules of students, and have 1/4 of them on break at any given time.) You do still run into problems of "My son Johnny is in district A and has these 3 weeks off; his cousin Jimmy has a different 3 weeks off, so we can't schedule a family vacation together."

YMCA camps Seagull and Seafarer come to mind (google them if you like) There are also "Summer at Sea" type things and Summer abroad, where students spend a month in a foreign country. My point is that there's a lot going on during the summer which would be foreclosed by year-round schools. Plus, if there's only a 3-week gap in the middle of the summer when kids can go to camp, (i) most summer camps would have to close, and (ii) those that don't are going to have absurdly high demand.

Unfortunately, that's a popular but incorrect myth. What does it mean to "Work in the fields?" Largely, it means planting, which generally happens in the spring, and harvesting, which happens in the fall. Summer isn't the time of greatest need on the farm. If you look back at the history of public education, you see that when we were more agricultural, schools had a summer and a winter session for this very reason. Instead, the traditional school calendar evolved as a coordination mechanism. It means that families could move from place to place without the children missing school on either end. It means that families can plan vacations together and that organizations which target activities for kids have a big chunk of time when they know that students won't be in school.

Eh.... The school system in Wake County, NC (the 12th largest in the US) has a number of year-round schools and the results are not as positive as you're painting them. For one thing, the on-again, off-again nature of the year-round system makes finding childcare harder. Secondly, we haven't seen the academic benefits that were supposed to happen. And, thirdly, the country is organized around the traditional school calendar -- want to send your kid to a 4-week summer camp? If you're on a year-round schedule, you can't do it.

If we can bring back a species that has become extinct, then do we have to worry nearly as much about keeping them from becoming extinct in the first place?

Cavemen used to carry their fire around with them, because if it went away, they had no way of recreating it. When they could create it whenever they wanted, they stopped worry about whether it should go away. Why shouldn't that be our approach to species?

If I had a dollar for every cockamamie topic for a law student's obligatory note in a law journal, I'd be rich.

Um... Osama Bin Laden . . . Taliban . . . Tora Bora . . . any of this ringing a bell? No coincidence that he was found in nearby Pakistan. You can make an argument that 9/11 didn't justify the war in Afghanistan, but you can't reasonably claim that Afghanistan had "nothing to do with 9/11."