>0 is the first index of a typical storage location, it isn't because it is useful for counting, it is because it is base10.

This is to bring your typo about base10 to your attention so you can correct it before you get flamed.

Iterating through offsets beginning with zero is simply not counting. The writer is confused.

If writers now feel it necessary to inform us when someone with whom any state employee is not perfectly pleased has not been arrested, we are in a sorry state indeed.

If I were a Brazilian, I'd be soooo relieved to know that now the data would be in the hands not only of Google, but the state.

Well, sure, you were able to take what has to be one of the most pathetic examples of muddiness I've ever seen, and by a rather sophisticated exercise of elimination of possibilities, construe what must have been the intent of its creator. That was a much more difficult problem than the arithmetic problem that it was intended to represent, and you are no 5-year-old.

Even if we conceded the utility of collapsing the US from four time zones to two, the Atlantic writer's proposal would certainly not be the way to go. One desirable characteristic of setting time zone boundaries is to minimize the difference, whether positive or negative, between the clock and solar time. If it didn't matter, she might as well have picked any two random zones in the world. She clearly is aware of that principle, but she blew it in the application. As her proposal stands, Central and Eastern would always observe Eastern. Okay. But Pacific and Mountain would observe Central! Think about it. Central does not get to observe its own true time, while two other time zones do observe it, with one of those having a two-hour offset! The obvious solution is this: Pacific and Mountain observe Mountain. Central and Eastern observer Central. Now you would be using the two time zones most central to the country, with no zone offset more than an hour from solar. And two of them would have no offset.

Witty, maybe. But not an argument.

if Google would slip them all those books.

Yours is surely the most Insighful comment here, modders notwithstanding.

You initially say (correctly) that the shutdown is about not spending money, but later slyly morph that into not being allowed to "run" facilities, and characterize failure to block access as "running", so as to prove that blocking access is required by the shutdown. Sorry, but sitting back and doing nothing is less aptly called "running" than is spending extra money to prevent access. And the additional spending clearly violates your original definition of a shutdown.

Evil.

Sadly, this case never reached the merits of the troll's ludicrous patent on the obvious.

If we're lucky.

self-censorship, not censorship or control by the state

The two are not mutually exclusive. I suspect that you are using "self" in an odd way. When you say that "the population made books illegal", what you mean is that a considerable portion of the population either demanded that the state make books illegal, or acquiesced in it. While that says something about how states become oppressive, it does not imply that the state is not doing the oppressing.

I appreciate the interesting ideas about the nature of the Myriad patents, and how obviousness could figure in. Now I'll have to revisit the decision again. I don't recall the court getting into those matters as part of its rationale.

I would still argue that the essence of a gene is its information content, in whatever physical embodiment, and thus that a human gene, even stripped of introns and embodied in cDNA form (or on a hard drive, for that matter), is naturally occurring. That's not at all to say that a non-obvious modification to a gene could not be patentable.