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The alarming thing is not that Fox News readers do not reflect upon the standard of intelligence at Fox News Studios, rather, it reflects upon the intelligence of the American Public in general. After all, this is a free market, and Fox News is only delivering the quality that people are demanding in that free market.

*That* is what frightens me.

No Child Left Behind is equivalent to No Child Gets Ahead.

This has always been blatantly obvious.

more genetic variation means more resistance to the weakness of monoculture

I live in Brazil where there are many types of bananas available. Any supermarket has at least three different types. Just off my head, I can name at least six types of Brazilian bananas: Ouro ("gold"), Prata ("silver"), d'Agua ("water"), Maçã ("apple"), Nanica ("dwarf"), da Terra ("earth").

You guys still dont get it. The whole idea behind trusted computing is to prevent such duplication. The TPM checksums the hardware and every piece of code from the boot-loader up to the application. The other end uses these checksums to verify that only valid pieces of code are running at each level. This makes it very hard to actually circumvent it by duplicating or modifying any code or running any modified hardware which could steal the keys used to encrypt these checksums. The major problem with trusted computing is not the possibility of circumvention but attestation. For example each new OS patch will cause your OS checksum to be differ, and for remote attestation to work the entity validating your OS checksum should be aware of this new patch. How do we keep track of so many OS versions? or each new BIOS version? and so on and so forth. This means that Linux users with modified kernels will not be able to run their kernels if they are using an application which uses trusted computing. If you want to watch a movie, you have to watch it on a player which can be attested to. This prevents you from running it on a player which might record the movie while it is being streamed for example. The other problem as you mentioned is that these fritz chips need to be really fast. Is trusted computing evil? In many ways yes. It has immense potential to be exploited and kill customer choice. But it may do some good too if used right (for example to ensure that you are not running malicious hardware or infected software unknown to you). Given that basic premise behind trusted computing is to come up with a foolproof DRM mechanism, I would place my bets on it being abused to run a virtual dictatorship. That said, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgFbqSYdNK4

If we assume that technology and communications is improving, and the pace of progress is increasing then logically the duration of monopoly should get shorter and shorter rather than longer.

Nowadays if a movie is good it makes a profit within a few weeks of its release. If it's not good, stop making bad movies then.

It is ridiculous that there should be a monopoly for > 100 years.

Think about it, if copyright only lasted 7 years, do you think Microsoft would dare release something as crap as Vista? They'd have to make something significantly better than Windows 2000.

If Microsoft won't want to play by those rules, I'm sure Apple or some others will be happy to take over.

As for patents and people talking about drugs needing long patent terms, the AFAIK drug companies spend more money on marketing (aka bribing doctors with goodies and holidays) than R&D, and FDA approval.

Let's just say the zombie brain surgeon didn't work out as well.