we've evolved to fatten up when food is plentiful so that we don't starve when food is scarce

Not quite.

We've evolved to fatten up to a limited extent when food is plentiful, and to adapt our metabolism to a wide extent whether that supply remains plentiful or shortens up. That's what gives reproductive advantage. For hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years our ancestors lived a life of plenty as hunter-gatherers (see "Stone-age economics, by Marshall Sahlins) and "when food is scarce" was a rare occurrence that they hardly ever cared to prepare for.

Fattening up without limit, turning obese and diabetic earlier and earlier, and developping cardiovascular disease in ripe age, gives no reproductive advantage and is thus not an evolved trait. They're disease, or more accurately symptoms of a deeper disease of the human metabolism's hormonal regulation system, and it's most probably caused by the foods that did not play a role in our long evolution, foods that were introduced very recently and do affect our hormones.

And every single example in the list is etiher a legal monopoly granted by fiat by the state, or backed by stringent regulation that stiffly increases the cost to entry in their market.

Think.

Khanna wrote a brief suggesting the current copyright law might not constitute free market thinking.

Damn right it ain't. Free market applied to intellectual works is trade-secret protection. If you want your information non-disclosed, you only communicate it to people prealably bound by non-disclosure agreements. If there is a breach, the discloser owes you the indemnity that you had agreed upon initially, which represents the added value of creating the works in the first place. That's the whole of it.

That's how it works within the prestidigitation business. That's pretty much the model that the education world applies: teaching essentially IS a business of distributing non-copyrighted intellectual works. Even certification courses that teach things that the teachers do not want disclosed around, aptly have non-disclosure agreement requirements upfront.

Intellectual property only makes sense in auniverse where someone has to redo the work of (re)inventing the intellectual work over and over in order to sell it over and over - a universe where ideas are rival. That's not the universe we live in.

Reason had a great piece about how, historically, big business has never been pro-free-market. If you're interested in the difference between free-market advocates that consider public-private partnerships positively or negatively, have a look at the history of the "New Left", Murray Rothbard and the Kochtopus, maybe. There indeed are libertarian movements that consider capitalism neutrally instead of positively. Agorism is one such.

When there's just one guy in a market who bought out everyone else, that's a monopoly.

I'm still waiting on that one to actually happen.

Think mid-19th century industrial revolution, where people worked long hours, with no benefits, no labor restrictions (rampant child labor), no concern for safety, etc.

Oh please. Workshop labor was a major improvement over working even longer hours (child labor included of course) with no benefits, no labor restrictions, no concern for safety etc. in the fields as most of these people used to do. How else do you think child mortality went down so fast in this period, average lifespan grew, and the number of schools went up at the same time ? These people were trading truly horrid and stagnant conditions, for bad conditions that at least let their child have an improved future (which they got generation after generation).

So why do we now have so many vivid depictions of industrial revolution's labor conditions, but so little of the much worse conditions of peasants at that time ? Because the latter were hidden away in the country and left there to toil, suffer and die, while the factory workers were just down the street to the people writing those books and newspapers carrying those depictions.

Also, at that time, the ones who worried most and actually did something about those poor work conditions were not the governement, but employers. It's not the state that first installed childcare facilities, hospitals, schools and started mutual insurance funds for covering healthcare costs and retirement pensions, it was the "industry captains" of the time hand in hand with the Church.

It was the sad realization that I was becoming diabetic, that forced me into doing something about my weight and eating patterns. After a couple years of failing by following the Usual Advice(c) of eating less and moving more, avoiding fats especially saturated ones, etc... I decided to learn human biochemistry directly, discovered a lot my doctor apparently didn't know about diabetes, glucose metabolism, and yet some more... I successfully replicated Tom Naughton's "improving your blood lipid panel while eating fast food for a month by applying one caveat" experiment in April 2007, and picked up low-carb paleo by winter that year as I kept reading more. This cured all the diabetic symptoms I had suffered for years in a matter of days. Interestingly, I also went down from size 12 to size 4 over the following 9 months without any calorie counting or sport, cured myself of a long-standing depression, a creeping arthritis in my left knee, gastric reflux, insomnia and bruxism, and I regained the running endurance I had in my teenage years - without training.

Nowadays I only weigh myself from time to time to make sure it keeps working, and so far it does.

This legislation was prompted by reports that Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza was a gamer.

Lanza was also a vegan, yet you don't see politicians clamoring for investigation on the potential mental health effects of veganism (B12 deficiency which is common among vegans can lead to mental disorders).

Lanza was on Prozac, yet you don't see politicians asking for investigation on the potential mental effects of Ritalin, Zoloft, Prozac and assorted powerful drugs.

Why this fixation on guns ? Why never investigate any other trail of evidence ?

It makes more sense to think in turn of accumulated deltaV instead of mere velocity, so you can take the potential energy from Sun's gravity into account. At the moment the fastest spacecraft ever made by Man reached 70 km/s and even that was by expending potential energy instead of building it up.

The solar escape velocity from low earth orbit is 30.9 km/s, this is how much velocity you need to turn into potential energy (altitude from the Earth then from Sun) to get out of here - the amount of velocity you need to build up right from the start, just to barely get started on the journey. So basically, your actual travel speed to your destination system will pretty much be your spacecraft's total acceleration potential halved (the other half of it being needed to decelerate once there, unless you're reasonably sure you can perform an aerocapture at the destination planet - so far this has never succeeded) minus those 30.9 km/s. You could also take into consideration the differential between the two systems but that's above my competence.

To travel those 12 light years, or roughly 10 kms, in, let's say, a millenia, you need that travel speed to be close to 3200 km/s, which is a couple orders of magnitude above our current technical ability. Even if you forgo any capacity to brake at the destination and opt for a single high-speed fly-by instead, even with the current highest-ISP engines we can build (likely a DS4G ion thruster: 21400 seconds ISP), you will need your spacecraft to start with an amount of fuel almost 10 million times its own final weight... including the ion thruster's own weight and the tankage for storign that fuel, of course. Staging can help you trim this down, but only by so much.

And even if you overcome this, your probe will most probably just end up feeding a pa'anuri somewhere en route anyway ;)

The funny thing is, pretty much every other sentient species in this corner of the galaxy already knows about us - Earth is known as "the planet of children" among them.

On a more serious level, I think that fear of attracting attention is very misguided. Civilisations capable of mass interstellar travel automatically have much better opportunities to pursue, especially given the crazy logistics involved, than to go torment younger single-planet civs.

If you really want to know, try it directly yourself by playing KSP ;)

I myself am a firm proponent of the Buzz Aldrin Standard of enforcing both freedom of speech AND common decency along: sometimes a punch on the nose *is* the proper answer.

Freedom is impossible to seperate from responsibility. If you want the freedom to not be vaccinated, accept the full libability for any outbreak of disease you may cause.

Piss off the doctors and medical industry, and either the docs will retire early, change career path, while disincentivizing the young from entering the field.

See France for an illustration. French doctors and nurses were on strike in mid-november over government's price controls. At the same time we have what many call "medical deserts", zones where actual medical care is far away and in short supply. But, hey, at least it's the gubn'mint paying in our place... in exchange for a third of our salary.

Assuming the person arrested is not guilty, it could just be a false positive match. DNA tests are not 100% precise, in fact I read they are 99.7% precise only, resulting in approximately 1-in-300 errors, so in any wide-ranging tests with thousands of different DNAs all coming from the same area (meaning most of them had a lot of common ancestors across them) it was almost bound to happen. Imagine the uproar if TWO 100% matches had been found (and I do not mean homozygote twins) !

Note that roughly 1 in 10-15 person has more than one set of DNA, through chimerism - rare - or plain mosaicism - which is much more common than usually thought: that's part of how you can get "surprising" results of >10% paternity tests turning out negative in countries where those tests are sold over the counter. There are documented cases of botched criminal cases due to this, the most famous being Linda "I'm my own twin" Fairchild's.

And if he IS guilty then it may be one way to work up doubt into a future jury, using precisely those arguments. So, it's not necessarily idiotic.