You'll brook no argument from me on civil forfeiture. The reporting requirements are trickier; they were put in place because ongoing criminal enterprises were using cash to launder the proceeds of their ill gotten gains. There's a history there and if you want to drill down deeper into Constitutional Law the reporting requirements pass a strict scrutiny test. The State has a compelling interest in preventing criminals from laundering money and the policy is narrowly tailored. It does not represent a significant burden on or intrusion into your daily life.

I can see the philosophical objection, but in the hierarchy of infringements (real and imagined) on my personal liberty this ranks pretty damned close to the bottom. Such are the tradeoffs you make for being a member of civilization and I doubt that there are many people in the political mainstream (or even within Libertarianism) that think we should make it easier for criminal enterprises to launder money.

I guess we'll see on that. If these expansionist cultures make the Earth's surface uninhabitable somehow in a century or two (whether from pollution/climate change or nuclear war), then I think that would prove that the expansionist cultures were actually a failure.

I am not trying to argue that monogamy is good, but why it came about and for what reasons.

Sorry, I guess I read some implications in there that you didn't intend.

Also, historically divorce rates were at 0%. Does this prove that monogamy is good? No, it is just a single unrelated fact.

It's not unrelated, but it is debatable how it affects things. My contention is that divorce rates were 0% (or very low, after that) because women in previous centuries and generations were second-class citizens and couldn't leave bad marriages (and the same also went for men, but to a lesser degree; society frowned so much on divorce that it just wasn't done). The rates are much higher now because women have equal rights, and are able to have their own careers, so they don't need men to be meal tickets any more, so people don't stay in unhappy marriages like they used to. All this points to the idea that monogamy and life-long marriages are simply a bad and unworkable idea for most people. In fact, in centuries past, love wasn't even a factor in marriages, only convenience and politics.

the proven method of living like animals in small tribal units.

The problem here is this doesn't work so well with modern society. However, there are more and more people joining up into polyamorous groupings, which do resemble tribes, and have as one component resource-sharing. I think we'll see a lot more of this in the future. It's not at all unlike Robert Heinlein's "line marriages". In generations past, people used to rely on their extended families a lot. These days, people are more mobile, and also frequently don't really like their extended families, but with polyamorous groupings, people only associate out of freewill and interest, not because of blood relations.

But beyond that, I would argue that the family unit incentives and protects the post-fertile woman more than the tribal sharing society of old did.

I disagree. Some people are luckier than others and have better or bigger families. I know lots of people whose families don't give a shit about them. Tribes don't have this problem so much.

The problem with old tribal societies, of course, is that they don't really work in larger societies that were enabled by the development of agriculture.

You seem to be rather refuting your own arguments here. Was agriculture capable of providing more food or was it less food?

I think it depends on what exactly you're comparing. If you compare early agriculture to hunter-gatherer societies in their peak, it's probably less. Think about it: why would you expend so much effort sowing seeds and tilling dirt when you can just run around and pick plentiful naturally-growing stuff? The problem is that, as human populations grew, there wasn't enough naturally-growing food (flora or fauna) to support those populations, so people invented agriculture. Modern agriculture, of course, can provide enormous amounts of food.

The other problem is that agriculture doesn't provide a very good diversity of food; that's why people lost a foot of height when they switched (there's archaeological studies about this). These days, however, we've made up for it thanks to large-scale trade and transportation, so obviously a modern grocery store has an enormous variety of foods from all over the world. But in 2000BCE this wasn't the case, and in fact it's only been recently that people have gotten tall again.

I would argue that agriculture was the worst thing to ever happened to humans and the entire planet but that is mostly a personal preference not a fact.

That's definitely personal preference. Today's large societies are also why we have computers, the internet, smartphones, space travel, etc. Small societies simply cannot develop these technologies, nor can they develop medical technologies and knowledge which allow people to routinely live to 100 and not die of common infections.

I do agree we have a population problem at present, but it's because we don't use our resources well and we don't manage ourselves well; we still have to coexist with our natural environment, and we're screwing that up badly. We should be able to develop the knowledge and technology to coexist better with the environment, and later perhaps build our own habitats (including in space) instead of taxing the natural one here so badly, but for now we're acting like it's 1500 even though our population is far, far larger and our technologies far more polluting.

"The year of Net Neutrality"..... wait, we got that one!

Don't count your chickens before they are slaughtered.

You currently have no idea of what you "got", because only FCC commissioners have read the actual regulations they will be passing...

There are 300 pages of changes ready to change the internet you know today. Good luck with that.

What will make Windows Phone succeed is the same thing that will make OS X succeed and it mainly boils down to apps.

Microsoft already tried that though - they paid a lot of money to developers in order to bring many of the most popular titles to Windows phone from iOS/Android.

Even with that it will still not enough to track consumers...

Let me know when these dedicated gaming appliances support community-developed game mods.

There was a period in the early 00's when one of the my company's manager would periodically walk through my office door and the first words out of his mouth was "I just read about this patent..." and I'd stop him right there.

"This is going to be one of those things where the extent of the filer's 'invention' was to take something people were doing with LORAN fifty years ago, cross out 'LORAN' and write in 'GPS', isn't it?"

"Well," he'd begin.

"I don't want to hear about it. It's guaranteed to be invalid on the basis of obviousness, but if they get lucky in court and I've actually read or even heard about that specific patent they'll be able to take us to the cleaners."

You'd be amazed at some of the technology patents the patent office grants. Stuff anyone who'd been a practicing engineer for more than a few months would laugh his ass off at if he were patent examiner.

This is insightful? The FAA has no ability to stop another 9/11. They can't reach out from their radar facilities and stop a nut in a plane from flying into a building. They can issue instructions, but have no way of forcing them to be followed. The controllers who had the flights of 9/11 on radar didn't "let" it happen, they watched it unfold without a way of stopping it.

What DOES happen now is that anything that is deviating in a significant way from ATC instructions is handed to the Air Force for an intercept mission. The Air Force has the authority to shoot down threats, and they practice this mission on a regular basis. But actually doing that means shooting down a planeload of mostly innocent civilians -- an act that cannot be taken lightly.

And browsing the web.

And where do I get in line for it because this sounds like the easiest job ever.

I think I'll make a virtual reality woman that you need to talk to... and then track people's eye movements based on breast size.

You can make the check out to cash.

That's just factually incorrect. Take for example Obama's special hot-rodded Blackberry, which he apparently uses for all sorts of direct personal e-communication. And of course there's the issue at hand (Hillary's email) which numbered in the tens of thousands ... but those are just the ones that her staff, after the fact, had laundered and decided under her direction were OK to pass along to the systems at State so there'd be copies. Thousands and thousands of emails is the opposite of "don't use email at all."

The newer law about such officials having to forward ALL such correspondence to their official mailboxes within 20 days is a direct result of it being apparent just how much government officials DO use email, all day, every day. It's why it's so fascinating to see tens of thousands of them being brought back to life from the abyss after the new director of the IRS swore there were no backups of Lois Lerner's comms during her supervision of the politicized treatment of non-profit applications. People in the bureaucratic food chain AND those at the tops of agencies and branches use email constantly, since they can do that asynchronously (compared to elaborately timed phone calls).

But Obama campaigned on changing every aspect of such things, and said that he would guarantee the most transparent administration in history. And here we have a person that he trusts enough to put in the line of succession to his office (Secretary of State) that - on being nominated - didn't just flub her way through a crappy email backup system (a la the career IT people in the WH during Bush, which were not appointees - these are permanent staffers, which you do understand, right?), but rather she immediately went about setting up a system to prevent her communications from being part of the official record.

Then she went around the world doing things like posing with giant plastic "reset" buttons to make everything wonderful with Russia and whatnot, even as she was soliciting millions in donations from foreign governments for use by her personal family foundation. But we'll never know what those emails looked like, and how such things might have been tied to or tangled up with her official duties, because she shielded all of those messages from FOIA requests by never having an official box. And when pressed, she had her own loyalists go through some of the message, and pass along those that SHE considered appropriate for the public archive.

Completely pre-meditated obfuscation of her communications as a senior official. No Sarah-Palin-style cluelessness about using her Yahoo account, no career IT people in the White House having a lame backup system ... no, the completely planned in advance absence of any records except those that Clinton decided, later, should be present. Today we see reports that the IT people in the State Department warned her that her not having an official State mailbox was going to endanger compliance with record keeping laws, but that her completely casual personal mail server was a huge, huge security risk. So we have not only premeditated law breaking to avoid transparency and accountability, but we also have horrible incompetence in understanding the risks of conducting top-level international diplomacy via a mail server set up by some guy with a fictitious name, paid in cash. One really can't make this stuff up.

The RFCs specifying what is needed before an IANA "designated expert" will accept a new Internet Media Type are a lot of documentation for a new programmer to read and understand, and my attempts to search the web for easier-to-digest introductory information from third parties weren't very fruitful. There's also a week's turnaround for this designated expert to make a decision. And if, say, the development of a new video game produces 20 different internal asset data formats used by the game and by its modding tools, would the designated expert appreciate having to review the registration of each of these formats as an Internet Media Type? I think I'm misunderstanding something very fundamental, and I know there's much I don't know.

Or io.github.some_username.some_projectname.some_type, right? I can get behind that in theory. But it'll take a lot of reengineering of container formats such as file systems and archives. Does FAT32, the default file system for removable storage media 32 GB or smaller such as USB flash drives and SDHC cards, support attributes such as content type? Wikipedia says FAT32 does not support extended attributes. Does exFAT, the default file system for larger removable storage media such as SDXC cards? Wikipedia does not say one way or the other. And Zip, a very common archive format, currently doesn't fully support extended attributes either and won't until Info-ZIP Zip 3.1 comes out.

This is another example of your partisanship. Every republican candidate (and democrat candidate, for that matter) in 2008 had a healthcare plan. Obama ended up implementing something that looked a lot like McCain's plan.