You know, by fixing elections.

You don't understand. If the system is closed enough, the designer never has to worry about these hypothetical audits you suggest. That frees him to make REAL money designing software.

Which doesn't mean that we are doing a good job; large governments breed corruption.

I heard about this one guy, he's the skinniest morbidly obese person in the world! Only 400 pounds.

Dissolve companies that are caught doing these things; force receivership and sell off the assets. The executives involved would be jailed, and 95% of the workers would continue wherever their particular business ended up.

RTFA.

There were contracts and delivered goods with 0-day kits to both government and corporate sources.

1. (comparative of `bad') inferior to another in quality or condition or desirability; "this road is worse than the first one we took"; "the road is in worse shape than it was"; "she was accused of worse things than cheating and lying"
2. (comparative of `ill') in a less effective or successful or desirable manner; "he did worse on the second exam"

How would you suggest running the patent office - the rest of the world generally does a worse job and/or relies on US patents.

You have a limited budget, and those skilled enough to investigate won't work for the money you can afford to pay them. Oh, and you have a legal requirement to deal with patents in a given time frame.

Nope.

The basis of ID is exactly opposed to the basis of Evolution. Evolution posits that the way to understand scientific truth is to use the scientific method. The basis for Intelligent Design is that there is something other than natural processes that caused life, and we can phrase it in a pseudoscientific language to mask the fact that it is unfalsifiable and not a scientific theory at all, simply an assertion. As a contrast with this, Darwin (On the Origin of Species) wrote: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Where Behe (Darwin's Black Box) says that falsifying intelligent design only requires replicating evolution in the lab. It's been done repeatedly. He insists on a "Evolution of the Gaps," where once something is shown to be able to evolve, there is something else that is irreducibly complex. Take hormone-receptor complexity; it is an example of "Irreducible complexity" frequently used. Or it was, until this:http://www.sciencemag.org/content/312/5770/97

Considered, examined, rejected.

Sorry.

Cumulative inflation over the 20 year period being discussed is over 50% (a bit over 2% per year). The absolute dollar wages for high school graduates is flat over the time period (~$50k), and the wages for college grads is up only 10%. (From ~$87.5k to ~96k, reading the graph)

Both groups are paid less - the relative wages are spreading, but only because high school grads are getting screwed more than college grads.

You then have a problem with caps, not speed. It's a real issue, but a different one.

And ratio? Operator? What are you using, some kind of ftp site? Torrents don't have ratios. (Unless you are using one of those private illegal sites, in which case, it's not your ISPs fault you don't want to follow the law.)