If shops could raise prices without any effect on sales, they would do that constantly. While I admire your cynicism, I despise your naivete.

That's not true. The point of granting exclusive rights through copyrights and patents is to encourage the creation of works which contribute to the overall good of society. We don't care about individual creators past the need to encourage their creations, and further, due to the transferability of intellectual property, any post-creation changes to copyright law would not only provide no additional incentive for creation, but would benefit copyright OWNERS, not copyrighted material's CREATORS (though I concede significant overlap).

Think of it like this: intellectual property is a bonus you receive at the creation of a good which is very cheap to copy. Changing the value of this bonus UP, retroactively, costs society for no societal goal. Changing it down is similar to breach of contract. There are strong arguments for fixing the length of the term at the time of copyright.

I love your enthusiasm, but I think you misunderstood - the National Center for Science Education is actually appropriately named, and supports the teaching of science. A forgivable error, since so many lobbying groups take deceptive names these days.

Perhaps you're unfamiliar with HIV?

I didn't do anything 200 years ago. And your second (most wrong) part needs a citation, perhaps something from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP

And now you will be paying to have police and roads and schools while you shop online, yay!

Assuming that this is true (and not just some random crap you picked up from Rush Limbaugh), I don't see the problem. George Washington lived a long time ago, and is less relevant to dealing with the modern world than Cesar Chavez is. Much, much less relevant. It's like complaining that people in a military college learn more about Schwarzkopf than Hannibal - Hannibal was clearly a towering figure in military history, but much less (though still a significant amount) can be learned from him than from Schwarzkopf about fighting modern war.

The second one, if you have read any news.

That's a reasonable expectation, but not a true statement about the iPhone line. My family has iPhones, still on the original contract, which didn't handle the rollout of iOS 4 very well and are never going to get iOS5.

On the other hand, Apple has always been good to me about replacing defective hardware fairly quickly, but with mobile OS development still happening very rapidly (read: demanding more resources as we try to cram 30 years of desktop development into our handsets), it's no surprise that long-term software support isn't as good as on equivalently priced desktop machines (my quite nice desktop cost me about the same as my wife's phone).

Data can show anything YOU or I want to prove - real science tries to eliminate the confirmation bias. That's why you make a prediction, get more data, and then compare the data to your prediction and throw out or keep the model that produced the prediction. Viola - science!

If confirmation bias is messing up your science, you're doing it wrong.