My understanding was that these tax breaks were intended to help encourage entrepreneurship, and thus make more opportunities for job creation etc. That's just the way I've always understood it anyway...

Also a fair point.

For the record, I'm not an American... I also don't oppose funding solar R&D! But in this case the money seems to have been grossly misinvested.

I think that the point of this piece was more to comment on how wasteful the expenditure of tax dollars has been. Not that that really excuses this particular gaffe, but they do actually make a valid point.

The torrents will only be slowed during peak hours though. MWeb is my ISP herein South Africa and they do it but they make it clear that they do. I have no problem with it because the connection is quite cheap, and I just do my torrenting overnight.

Most universities claim ownership of works created by students under the auspices of their classes. I encountered that while I was studying, and even queried the university's IP people, stuff which the students do on their own time is their own though. I think a school would probably get away with something similar.

If work done by a teacher at home because property of the school, then that work would become work for the school Then, any injury at home tangentially related to the work would become a work related injury.

A fair point, but the privileges of one group of citizens shouldn't be given at the expense of another group... I realise that this is a difficult balance to strike but I think it's quite clear to see that things are quite extreme in one direction right now.

This isn't capitalism. Under a properly capitalist system, laws such as the DMCA (which is what this is, if I'm not mistaken? I'm not American, I'm not sure) would never be allowed, in fact a capitalist government's purpose is to protect the rights of its citizens, so quite the opposite of this in fact.

Oops, that was supposed to be "except when you have a sitter." And then, unless you are insane, you will get the hell out of the house.

Everything will become so needy you will have no time at all.

Except when you h

There have been posts about the methodology of the trials, I don't think there's that big a problem.

Bear in mind that circumcision is a common tradition among African tribes, they do it at an initiation ceremony at around 11 years old or so. As to whether this is right or humane or whatever, I'm not going to venture an opinion.

But, there are also tribes which don't practise it, so there's more than enough opportunity to find a control group. The fact that it was performed years ago removes the influence of waiting for healing from the procedure to complete, and FWIW I've never come across any indication in my discussions with the Africans that being circumcised curbs their performance at all. They seem to think it's a good thing.

As to your comment about abstinence: Yes, I agree with you on principle, but try telling people to stop having sex. Not going to work.

Yes, exactly. For one thing, here in South Africa, where the government sponsors a lot of AIDS medication, if there was a cure it would save a heck of a lot of money to them, so they would probably even fund production of a cure if it was proved to be viable.

Trials here in South Africa showed that circumcision reduced the HIV infection rate, because apparently the skin on the inside of the foreskin is more porous, therefore without it there was less of a gap for the virus to get in. This only works one-way, naturally, and it's not 100%, but while no cure was in sight, I think it's better than doing nothing.