While I don't know that this is the real reason, I do find this to be a persuasive justification:

The whole point of copyright is to make creative works more widely available to the public. That's its justification in the US Constitution at least. It was never meant to imply any kind of "ownerhsip" over ideas, just provide a limited monopoly for a limited time (perhaps half a lifetime, then) as an incentive to publish, which was really the only way for others to be able to enjoy these new works. Since publication and distribution tended to be expensive (in addition to the time to form the ideas), some form of incentive was felt necessary.

Now that, for most art forms, production and publication can cost little to nothing, there isn't much holding people back from "publishing" a massive array of artworks (as the Internet has CLEARY showed us), and hence little need for incentives such as sales monopolies. (Movies are a notable exception, as many films necessarily cost so much to produce that it's hard to imagine just giving them away.)

This means that logically, copyright probably ought to be re-examined to see if it could be made shorter in duration and more limited in scope (not that doing so would necessarily be wise or a foregone conclusion). Instead, the last 30+ years has seen a massive increase in the duration of copyright and penalties for infringement. This has also conincided with massive PR campaigns to try to convince people that intellectual works are "property", copyright infringement is "stealing", etc. - terminology that lawmakers and courts up through the US Supreme Court took pains to discourage for 200 years.

Sicne in the big bargain that is copyright, the rights holders have not held up their end of the bargain, it's little surprise that "the people" have begun fighting back.

First, are you serious? You think the government bailouts negatively affected your 401k? The market was already doing that, due primarily to a lack of regulation. Such regulation can only come from the government, but government = evil according to you, so I guess there should have been LESS regulation or enforcement, but then your 401k would have lost even more than it did and you'd probably never get any of it back since most of the companies would have gone bankrupt and ceased to exist. And they'd probably foreclose on your home (when you lost your job and savings, having been laid off by one of those bankrupt companies and with your investments worth 0), and without social security and medicare and food stamps and all that, where would you be then?

The other problem is that if you are in the bottom 95% of the population, income-wise, you're probably not going to gain much through increased dividends, etc., certainly not like you would from a modest pay raise. (The top 1% does because most of their income comes from investments, not labor, and they have such high holdings that even a few percent increase can mean hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of extra income each year.) You even stand to gain a lot more through better government services or lower personal income taxes (less income taxation of the poor is needed if more of the money can come from corporate, investment, or other high-end taxes).

Note also in case you weren't paying attention for the past 50 years: Republicans do not cut government budgets. (I don't know that you're a Republican, just wanted to point this out.) They just spend the money on bombs and spying on people and putting people in jail, instead of spending it on helping people or investing in the future. But since they cut high-end taxes, they do increase deficits, and hence interest payments on the debt. Which means even less services or investment for your tax dollar.

This is the Republican paradox: slash taxes on the rich so that it takes higher taxes on the poor to pay for the very necessary government services that 99% of the population demands (and with good reason, as spreading the cost and risk and centralizing such things is almost always the best and cheapest way to do them, and many government investments result in much greater return to society down the line). Then they complain about how high poor people's taxes are (since, surprise, poor people pay about the same percent of total income to taxes - about 30% - as wealthy people do, regressive sales and payroll and other taxes canceling out slightly progressive income taxes). And they're right: taxes on poor people are too high, when many poor people can barely even pay rent on a crappy apartment or buy food for their family, let alone give 30% of it to the government. People also then complain about how crappy government services are, now that they've been cut due to insufficient funds and spending the money on useless crap and interest payments instead, so that Republicans can then say government = bad, and try to ram through MORE tax cuts for the rich, cut services even more (while still not cutting the overall budget, or taxes for poor people, one bit), complain more, etc.

This results in a continuous increase in concentration of wealth in the richest segment of the population. Which was the whole point.

So why do poor people vote for Republicans when it's not in their interest to do so? Republicans realized that a large subset of the population is stupid, ignorant, uneducated, racist, sexist, nervous, fearful, angry, and generally emotional rather than rational. Many of them happen to also be highly religious or hold to certain hot-button views. So all the Republicans need to do is pander to these people's base emotional "needs" and religious proclivities and hot-button issues to get their vote. Then they (the ones in power, who ACTUALLY represent the top 1% richest Americans) can run away with the money (including from the people that voted for them). And for the most part, the people that voted for them remain ignorant (I wonder why, if they watch Fox news all the time), and vote for the crooks again in the next election.

You're right, people end up paying the taxes. But when corporate taxes a low, the people who benefit are the ones who are already rich. You think a corporation is going to reduce prices or increase wages as a result of lower taxes? Maybe, but only after they RICHLY reward their shareholders and top executives.

Level of lithium found in the water tested in the Japan study: "Levels ranged from 0.7 to 59 micrograms per litre."
Level of lithium typically used as a therapeutic drug: 300+ milligrams per day.

Even if your water were at the high end and you drank several litres per day, that's still 1000x lower than the low end of therapeutic use.

See also: http://grande.nal.usda.gov/ibids/index.php?mode2=detail&origin=ibids_references&therow=207599

"Using data for 27 Texas counties from 1978-1987, it is shown that the incidence rates of suicide, homicide, and rape are significantly higher in counties whose drinking water supplies contain little or no lithium than in counties with water lithium levels ranging from 70-170 micrograms/L... ...arrests for possession of opium, cocaine, and their derivatives (morphine, heroin, and codeine) from 1981-1986 also produced statistically significant inverse associations"

I don't disagree with you that the whole idea of sex offender registries is horrible, but if anything would get you on the list short of kidnapping and raping someone at knifepoint, I'd think this would be it, and so long as we have such laws, everyone involved in this should DEFINITELY be on it - particuarly considering the "abuse of power" and "in a position of trust" angles.

I'm actually kind of shocked that anyone who encouraged, perpetrated or had knowledge of this at the time wasn't arrested, convicted, thrown in prison for a year or two, and forced to register for life. (And I'd think it would be a slam dunk for the victim to win a few million dollars off the school district, too.)

It makes all the checking to make sure sex offenders don't work at schools COMPLETELY LAUGHABLE. If you already worked at the school and didn't have a previous criminal record, it seems it's OK to sexually abuse and humiliate children all you like, so long as you are actually at school when it happens and you can come up with some sort of flimsy justification.

n Code: A Mathematical Adventure
by Sarah Flannery

Autobiographical book by an Irish girl about how she learned cryptography, number theory, etc. and won competitions in high school for her work.

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Mathematical-Adventure-Sarah-Flannery/dp/1861972717/ref=ed_oe_p

And you BELIEVE these resumes from India?

Oh, plus I might add that with the rising amount of college debt due to rising tuition, not many people want to stay in school forever unless the payoff is very large. Hence the continued interest in professional schools, but less so in other graduate programs.

There are plenty of people to replace you, but kids do cost-benefit analyses (often informally, but they do) of what to major in to prepare for a good career. Enrollment in various majors climbs and drops dramatically in response to the job market. So it's no mistake that not many people want to study CS (for example) these days - the pay seems to be dropping rather than rising for most in IT or software development, it's intellectually tough but also tedious, and many in the field are not treated all that well in terms of hours, appreciation, or work-life balance. ("It seems like a simple task; why isn't it done? Do more with less! Oh, and here's your cell phone for 24-hour on-call in case the server farts...even though you're a programmer, not a sysadmin.") Even fewer get PhDs, because in most fields it's perceived that this only prepares one to be a college professor, and could actually be a liability in hiring. How many people want to spend 5 years working on a degree that won't increase their employability or earnings anyway?

As has been pointed out above, this is not the issue. The issue is that companies have more leverage over H1B employees than they do over American citizens or green card holders, and hence can get away with paying them less and working them harder. It's clear that such abusive practices occur widely despite being illegal.

If H1B workers were truly on a level playing field in reality, not just theory, there would be fewer complaints - and I'm sure fewer calls to raise the H1B caps.

While I agree with your point in general, you used a really bad example, which illustrate the slanderous tactics of Republicans in arbitrarily applying negative-sounding terminology to their opponents without any basis in fact, rather than saying anything truthful about Democrats:

"Tax and spend democrats"? The last democratic president BALANCED THE BUDGET.

This reminds me of things people did with Marathon 10 years ago, for example:
http://webwonks.org/Marathon/Forge/Harper/Clock.html