• There are way too many people going to college. Perhaps one-third of current college students are sufficiently prepared to learn anything and have the talents to make use of the learning. Society and most people would be better served if the enormous waste of people's time that is useless college would be eliminated in favour of people getting job experience.
• Not enough people understand the world in quantitative terms. This is a problem with the K-12 system, not the universities. Mathematics is the primary language by which we describe the world around us (yes, literature is another, but our society is based more on toasters and trains and lightbulbs than on novels). The problem is not "STEM education" but a fundamental rejection by most of society of the way of thinking that has created our civilization. What is needed is not more people who understand quantum physics, but more people who can understand basic economic reasoning and aren't fazed by designing a multi-step process.

WTF are the air quotes for?

The word right is used today to denote two very different kinds of things. People talk about the "right to freedom of speech" but also about "the right to a living wage". Unfortunately, these are two very different kinds of legal arrangements.

Rights of the first kind (exemplified by the freedom of speech) are negative rights: rights to be free from interference by others. You can do as you please as long as you don't harm anyone. Respecting and protecting such rights is, in my opinion, a principal function of government.

"Rights" of the second kind (exemplified by the "right" to have your employer buy you a specific form of health insurance) are positive rights: they amount to an imposition on someone else to do something for you. In other words, they cannot be fulfilled without infringing someone's negative right to be free from interference. Positive rights are properly aspirational statements ("wouldn't it be great if people could have X even if they don't have X now?"), and are called "rights" as a rhetorical device: since we all agree that negative rights ought to be protected by the government, calling something a "right" creates the impression that it should be protected too.

When speaking about positive "rights", I use the word in quotes to highlight this distinction, and avoiding the rhetorical trap set by the proponents of such "rights".

In the case at hand, the employees of Hobby Lobby have every right (without quotes) to use their salary to buy contraception. They don't (and shouldn't) have the "right" to have Hobby Lobby buy them contraception. The owners of Hobby Lobby (acting jointly through the company) have a right to freedom of thought, and a right to dispose of their property (Hobby Lobby and its money) as they please, including by refusing to buy someone contraception.

You are entirely wrong. The Hobby Lobby ruling said nothing about the workers submitting to the religious beliefs of the company owners. The workers retain full access to all medical serviced they wish. For example they are free to use their own money to buy contraception and abortion, and to buy health insurance that covers contraception and abortion. The only "right" the lost was the "right" to have the employer buy them contraception. The workers certainly have a right to be compensated for their labour (and they are!) -- but are not "submitting to the religious beliefs of their employer" by being paid their salary in cash instead of in medical services.

The only abuse here is that salary paid in cash is taxable, while salary paid in medical insurance isn't. But that is a problem created by Congress, and the solution is to remove the loophole. Decoupling health insurance from employment would automatically solve the religious liberty problem (if each workers bought their own coverage, the employer's religious beliefs wouldn't be relevant) and would mean losing your job wouldn't automatically mean you lose your insurance..

This is a software issue, not a hardware issue. Unless you propose to personally code the entire operating system and every application program, that is not practical.

That said, replacing the preinstalled OS with a free one is my first step when buying a new computer. Most recently I managed to buy a PC without an OS at all, but that's rare,

If you don't understand how university research is funded, please don't write article summaries for slashdot on that topic. This scientist is described as having "made a fortune" for receiving research funds – but this is research money, not personal money. In fact his institution was given the $1.2M, and he just got to direct how it the money was spent (hint: his mortgage in not an allowable expense). Possibly the grants were used to cover part of his salary (though TFA doesn't say so), but that is a normal use of research funds and there are limitations on that.

I agree that he should have declared this funding in the paper (because the journal asks that funding sources be disclosed), but this is not him getting rich. This is him getting his research funded. You have a missing link:

1. Get research funds
2. Spend them on research expenses
3. ???
4. Profit!

Specifically finding SUSY would be great for the people who predicted it. From the point of view of particle physics as a whole, the goal is seeing some physics not covered by the standard model. In any case unless you can write papers on the topic, it's useless to speculate what will be found. Since the accelerator already exists we don't need any hype about it.

However, if even this energy upgrade doesn't bring signals beyond the standard model, it will be very hard to ask for many billions of USD to build the next accelerator, based only on the hope of "we might see something".

Mickey Mouse (the character) is very much protected by copyright -- the copyright on the original cartoons featuring him (yes, as Steamboat Willie). The reason is that any work made today featuring this character counts as a derivative work of the original cartoon, and (fair use excepted) the right to make derivative works is vested in the copyright owner.

Once Mickey Mouse enters the public domain, anyone will be free to make their own Mickey Mouse cartoons, or Mickey Mouse lunch boxes, or Mickey Mouse theme parks. These may only be based on the version of the character in public domain works, but they'd still be competing with Disney.

In the abstract, the situation seems obvious. First, it's ridiculous to think that there are any marginal artistic works which are only created because the extra 20 years of protection in US law make them profitable, whereas they would not be made otherwise. Moreover, any such works can't be any good, so why worry about them? Second, it clearly makes no sense to extend the term of protection of already-existing works: they have already been created, so we don't need to provide the artists any extra motivation to create them.

What matters here, however, is not the setting of incentives for authors, but the incentives of trade negotiators. Here, the US is behaving rationally: if the US negotiators convince Canada and Japan to keep Mickey Mouse under protection for 20 more years, then more royalties will flow from Canada to the US. This may be bad for Canadians, but not so much for US citizens. More generally, since the US is a large source of popular entertainment but a (relative to its size) a small importer, it wants other goverments to fleece their own citizens in favour of US interests.

While I'm sad that Canada caved on this, Canada is a (relatively) small country next to a big one, and (for example) trade restrictions on lumber are far more significant to Canada than the copyright extension. I stil think they should have stood firm, but it's not such an obvious call as it seems.

Suppose you send me a snail-mail letter and my secretary reads it to decide if it deserves my attention. Has your privacy been violated? Suppose I take your letter and put in on the company bulletin board so everyone can read it. It may offend you, it may be socially gauche, but would it be illegal?

My e-mail secretary is called GMail, and I chose to let it read all my incoming mail. That's between me and Google, and I don't see why you (the sender of my incoming messages) has any right to complain. Moreover, the text of the incoming messages is only used to show me targeted ads, so I really don't see why you should care.

If (and that's a big if) Google put information from scanned incoming messages into its online profile of you (for ads on non-google websites), then there might be some cause for concern, but that's not what they do, and even if the did I don't see the problem. If you send me a message and I decided to let Google read it then Google should be in the clear..

People are shocked, shocked! to discover that the email service that makes money by showing them targeted ads based on their messages examines the content of the messages for this purpose.

I mean, come on: nobody was forced to sign up for gmail.

When the laptop was new, the battery would last about the indicated time. It's now 6 years old, and the battery capcity is about 80% of what it was originally. Of course, I only put the battery in the laptop when I use it away from an outlet, which only happens once every few months ...