While the numbers fluctuate from year to year, the percentage of the population that isn't aligned with one of the major parties is around 30%. What they have in common with the two partisan factions is that they all like to make up numbers claiming that they're the majority. If any of them really were, we'd have presidential elections with much wider margins than the 1-5% we've seen in recent elections.

And while the parties are undeniably jealous of their power and work to crush third-party opposition, the two-party system is a direct consequence of direct, first-past-the-post elections in a presidential democracy. If you want more choices, you need to push for a parliamentary democracy, not beat your head against the brick wall of independent and third party candidates.

And not that I wouldn't be entirely in favor of having a modern parliamentary system here, I wouldn't hold my breath.

It is the same thing, but the scale is far different, with much the same consequences as going from discrete transistors to nanoscale transistors etched on silicon, i.e., it can (theoretically) store more data and retrieve it faster.

I know what you mean. I was going through a mass-market encyclopedia of science from the 1960's the other day, and stumbled across an article promising that holographic memory was right around the corner.

To be fair, though, the basic principles of most of the technology we use today were discovered decades, sometimes centuries, before their current applications. Most of the time, several technologies have to reach a certain stage of development before any of them can be given practical applications, and even then, if there's no demand for the technology at the time, it can sit on the shelf even longer. Lasers, for example, were greeted by yawns when they were first invented ("Great, it's a visible-light maser. So what?"), but now most people own multiple laser-containing devices, in addition to their use as pointers and cat toys.

The nearly endless variety of insulting phrases that begin with [name] [verb] [...] makes it impractical to register more than a tiny proportion of them, and no matter how extensive, it's easy to think of alternatives.

[name]stealsyourmoney.com comes to mind in the context of BoA long before it would occur to me to register [name]sucks.com, much less [name]sucksass.com, [name]sucksthebigone.com, and -- in the spirit of Bill Hicks -- [name]suckssatansscalycock.com.

I hate articles like this because they reduce higher education to a single metric: money. If your primary or only concern is making as much money as possible, the first thing you need to look at isn't which school you want to attend, it's your intended major. And if that major isn't business or finance, you're already off course. There are some exceptional cases where other majors lead to riches, but they are just that: exceptions. Now that that's settled, does it matter where you get your MBA? Yes, it does, not because of the quality of the education but because of the connections you'll make there. A degree from an elite university will more than pay for itself in that respect.

For anything else -- having established that making as much money as possible is not your primary goal -- you need to decide what is most important to you. Once you have a reasonably clear picture of where you want to end up in life, you'll actually have a rational basis for choosing a college to attend. That may or may not be an elite university.

But if it's just money you're after, you're going into finance, and you are interested in the school that gives you the greatest chance of being hired by Goldman Sachs.

If that's actually what you really want, anyway.

It sure doesn't help. Neither does the overall level of apathy and lack of awareness of current events beyond the heavily filtered TV news sources.

The real killer, IMHO, is that we're so physically isolated by the oceans that relatively few Americans visit other developed countries to see how other people live. When I first spent a few months in western Europe, I felt like those Soviet soldiers in WW2 that Stalin subsequently purged because they had seen how well people lived in the West, contrary to Soviet propaganda.

It's not just us. Visit Italy or Kampuchea or Nigeria, among others. The average guy practically anywhere is usually pretty decent, even if his government is unbelievably corrupt. Democracy can reduce the level of official corruption, but it's not a silver bullet, e.g., Italy or Louisiana.

FWIW, America's problem is its hypertrophied nationalism. People here identify so strongly with their idealized image of their country that when someone points out flaws or misdeeds by the government, they interpret it as a personal attack.

Right. That's why theorists who understand the heart write detailed lists of instructions so that any hourly temp worker can perform heart surgery without incurring the expense of employing an actual heart surgeon with a medical degree.

Adapting theory to the complexities and irregularities of the real world does require a thorough understanding of theory. Otherwise, the moment you step outside of the ideal case -- which is nearly always -- you have no way to make the necessary adjustments, and worse, you have no way of knowing that adjustments need to be made, what they could be, or what the consequences are.

This is like asking what the difference is between the detonation of a nuclear bomb and a film of the detonation. One is an event, and the other is an object. You can legitimately argue that replaying a recording is itself a performance in the sense that the condition of the viewers, the playback devices, the environment in which the playback occurs, and so on, vary from one replay to another, but that's quite different from saying that listening to a recording of Woodstock is the same as being at Woodstock. There's a similarity, which is the entire point of representation, but the differences are vastly greater than the similarities.

If we get to the point that we can produce VR that is indistinguishable from reality, then the line will blur at least from the point-of-view of the participants, but even then, there will still be an important difference between participating in the D-Day landings and participating in a 100% accurate and convincing simulation that one knows is only a simulation.

There are a couple of other posts that make essentially the same point. It's a variation on the theme of the cults of personality in the art world and the disdain that some people have for a work done in Painter versus a work done with oil paint. To me, that has always seemed like mistaking an art object for a performance.

If I'm going to see a musician perform live, as opposed to just buying a recording, then it had better be one heck of a performance, especially with today's ticket prices. But if I'm going to look at a still image, I don't give a rat's ass how it was made because it simply doesn't matter. If I like it, I'd also like to know the name of the artist so I can search for more of his/her works, but other than that, the artist might as well be dead -- most of them are, anyway. My appreciation of van Gogh's "Starry Night" has next to nothing to do with van Gogh and everything to do with the way the experience of seeing the painting interacts with my nervous system. If it was revealed that "Starry Night" was a forgery or the output of a machine, it would make no difference to me.

The same applies to movies. A play in a theater is a performance. A movie is not a performance; it is a finished art object like a painting or a sculpture. It is exactly the same every time you look at it. How it was made is entirely irrelevant, and arguably meaningless, since the past does not exist. What matters is the end result: do you like it or not?

In a series of films about an archaeologist who fights Nazis, Thuggee cultists, and Soviet psychics, and keeps unleashing vast supernatural powers stored in antiques, the monkeys are what struck you as implausible?

As much as I agree that programmers tend to overestimate their importance -- a trait that pretty much every job category shares to one degree or another -- I think the idea is of negligible importance compared to the marketing.

A lot of people like to think that having a good idea and having it first is terribly important. And while that is occasionally true, it's mostly wishful thinking. Henry Ford didn't get rich by inventing the automobile. Someone else did that. He didn't even get rich by inventing the assembly line. Someone else did that, too. He got rich by extending credit to his customers: he invented the car payment. And once he did all this, a bunch of other companies came along and did more or less the same thing, and they made vast sums doing it, too. And the story repeats itself through the following century with radio, television, computers, refrigerators, and all the other technological advances we presently enjoy. Even with patents, inventing something and inventing it first just doesn't matter all that much. (Which is not to say that it doesn't matter at all.)

The same applies to the myth of the indispensable man (or woman). By himself, Henry Ford couldn't have done squat. He needed a considerable number of people with a broad range of skills just to get off the ground. And quite likely, any or all of them could have been replaced by other people without materially affecting the outcome.

Those of us who aren't magnates believe these myths because they allow us to believe an even bigger myth: that we can, as lone individuals, change the world. This is almost never true, allowing for rare exceptions like assassinating an Austrian archduke. Those who are magnates believe these myths because they allow magnates to believe that they are self-made men, ignoring the labor and intelligence of the thousands who helped put them there.

If good ideas were all it took to strike it rich, almost everyone would be rich already.

It would be, except that our observations of the effects of gravity cover countless measurements over the entire observable universe.

Wow, I wish I'd thought of that sooner. Stuffing an Arduino with a battery pack and a wifi shield up my ass and asking to use the company john was really wearing on me.

Actually, that's pretty old logic at this point. The idea is to avoid having a permanent hereditary aristocracy and to require people to achieve success (or not) through their own merits and achievements.

That's really neither here nor there where copyright is concerned. The original goal of the American copyright system (as opposed to the British, which was government control of the press) was to encourage authors to produce more work by giving them a temporary monopoly. Since dead authors are incapable of producing more work, the purpose of the law is not served if their copyrights survive them.

That said, I have no objection to striking a balance between the interests of the public domain and the author's dependents, if he/she had any, by allowing the copyrights to endure a little beyond the lifetime of the author, but seventy years is absurd.

If I made a million bucks, approximately half would be consumed by taxes. An average of $300k would be consumed by nursing home and terminal care. That would leave $200k, which is equivalent to about four years' post-tax income for me.

In other words, if my kid is going to see any of that, I'd better get hit by a bus in the very near future.

I really wish people would figure out the difference between an actual fortune and merely more money than they've ever held in their hands at once.

This is an extremely unwise move for Project Gutenberg. While I am certainly opposed to the overly-long copyright terms we have today, and somewhat sympathetic to testing the boundaries of the often unclear copyright status of some works, PG is not the group to do it. They are nowhere near funded well enough to risk a legal confrontation with the major publishing houses or their star authors, and by taking that risk, they are endangering the good and unambiguously legal work they have been doing for so many years.

I don't know Greg Bear personally, but I am familiar with his position on copyrights generally, and he has always seemed to me to be one of the more reasonable authors in this area. Even if he's wrong on this point, Project Gutenberg should leave the grey areas for better-suited groups to explore. While it is deplorable that it is often prohibitively expensive to secure justice in the courts even when one is entirely in the right, that's the reality PG has to deal with if it wants to venture into this area, and it should not be done carelessly.