You can't sell or import anything into the US unless you can prove that it complied with all labor and environmental regulations. It won't happen, but is perfectly possible.

Well as the saying goes, it's better to let 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be wrongly convicted. I have a feeling that the type of person who would vote not guilty for a man accused of killing another man, despite sufficient evidence, based on racial reasons is going to continue to do so regardless of if jury nullification is advocated or not. On the other hand there are probably a lot of people who would vote guilty for someone accused of a victimless crime simply because they are instructed to vote based on facts and not let their feelings of the silliness of the law weigh in at all.

This is a great idea. However, I think you are being too optimistic about how much it would reduce cases due to cost. Prosecution is already expensive, and rarely results in a profit for the government (criminal cases), with jail time it is very expensive indeed. There are a lot of prosecutions simply because the people deciding to prosecute or not are not footing the bill themselves.

I've always thought a good idea would be simple to force lawyers who want to practice criminal law in a state to occasionally serve as a public lawyer. Say every 5 years of private practice they would have to do 1 year of this public service. Both prosecutors and free defense lawyers would be drawn from this pool.

I suppose this wouldn't be good for lawyers, and they write the laws, so it's unlikely.

I always wear my seat belt, and think condoms should be given away in schools. However this statement reminded me of something interesting, the fact that seat belts may well cause you to drive more dangerously.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

This raises an interesting devil's advocate argument against birth control in schools. Wikipedia tells me that "women whose partners use male condoms experience a 2% per-year pregnancy rate with perfect use and a 15% per-year pregnancy rate with typical use" (the pill has an 8% failure rate with typical usage). Also, consider that incorrect usage is probably much higher among highschool students. With that in mind, what might be the effect of a false sense of security given by condom usage? The risk of pregnancy is pretty obvious without a condom (or another birth control method), but if people think that condoms are going to completely eliminate that risk, while only reducing it to 15% or so, might that actually lead to overall increased pregnancies? Consider that if we take the probability of not getting pregnant in a year with typical condom usage at .85, and figure four years of condom usage it gives a total probability of 0.85^4 = 0.52. This means that about half (48%) of couples will end up with a pregnancy at some point during those four years.

One might argue that this just means we must couple distribution with thorough education about proper usage. However, this might not be very realistic, particularly in areas where there would be resistance to giving out birth control in the first place.

The 21st amendment repealed the 18th amendment. The 21st was ratified via state ratifying conventions, Congress only proposed it. The Supreme Court never ruled the 18th amendment unconstitutional. Amendments can't be unconstitutional, as they amend what is constitutional. The only exceptions to this being making slavery illegal before 1808, or giving a state less senators than the others (although interestingly, the clauses that make those unamendable themselves could, in theory, be amended).

The Supreme Court wouldn't rule on the constitutionality of an amendment because of something called the polictical question doctrine, in which it has said it won't rule on issues it considers to be outside its realm of authority. Consitutional amendments are specifically included.

You may be remembering the Wikileaks cables.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-cables-china-reunified-korea

I know I've seen this idea before. I wonder why I've never actually seen it implemented anywhere. It seems pretty easy to do to. Collect images (either drawings or pictures), and assign tags. For example an apple might have the tags 'apple', 'fruit', 'food', and 'red'. Then when the system generates a captcha, it picks a random tag in its database, and finds 4 images with that tag, and 1 without. The user should be able to pick out which images isn't a 'fruit' or 'red'.

Users could even be used for assigning the tags, similar to how recaptcha uses users to tell it what words are in its images. Show the user several known images, along with a new one. Tell the user to give the images any descriptive tag (different tag for each image). If (most) the tags for the known images aren't in their lists then the user fails the test. If the user gives valid tags for the known images, assume they gave a valid tag for the unknown image (and confirm that by treating it as unknown until the same tag has been applied several times by different users).

I used to have a dog that ate its own shit. Personally, I am quite glad to have been born a member of a species that has developed tools like the scientific method for making decisions. The fact that we do things differently from other animals is the same reason we live in such comfort today.

While this is a common genetic modification, there are many more. It is quite possible to use GM crops without artificial fertilizers or pesticides.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food

I'd definitely argue that a large portion of the success is due to Khan's teaching ability. There are plenty of other videos on youtube explaining the same concepts, but Khan's are the best I've found.

I think there are several factors that make Khan great at what he's doing. To begin, he's a very smart guy, a MIT grad electrical engineer. While there are plenty of equally intelligent people in the world, not many of them are teaching K-12. On the other hand, he isn't arrogant or condescending, which tends to be off-putting to someone trying to learn something. Instead, he often makes it clear that he doesn't know everything. Then, there is his obvious passion about the subjects. Just watch some of the videos, and it becomes clear he is truly amazed by this stuff. This inspires the person watching to want to understand the material so they can also be amazed. He is also rather amusing, casual, and informal in his presentation, without wasting too much time or coming off as desperate to make the student laugh.

About the style of the videos, 10 minutes works very well. It's just enough time to cover one small concept. Plus it has the huge benefit of the 'just one more' effect. Similar to games that lead to 'just one more turn' and then it's 4am (Civilization), it's much easy to watch just a few more 10 minute videos than to start watching 40 or 60 minute video lectures.

Construction is already underway. Note this is on an existing nuclear plant site, which should help mitigate the red tape.

I beleive the point was a correlation between high birth weight and high intelligence.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1483134.stm

Accelerating at 1g allows you to get just about anywhere in about 10-25 years (in your time frame).
100,000 LY (diameter of Milky Way) 11.8 years
2.6 million LY (nearest galaxy) 15.0 years
46.6 billion LY (radius of observable universe) 24.5 years.

Some important notes: First this would get you to these places travelling at near the speed of light. If you'd like to arrive stopped you'll have to roughly double the travel time, as half would be spent decelerating. Second, you could accelerate as long as you had a source of energy (and a functioning ship).

As for the claim you could visit the observable universe in a human lifespan, you couldn't reach all the points of it. But you certainly could reach the edge.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html

I don't think the point is adding features. The point is getting the manufacturer to change a few insignificant details, and then give it an exclusive model number. Then people can no longer type in a model number and see the exact same TV online for less money. Sure they can compare features or find sites that list equivalent models, but the point isn't preventing anyone from every buying something online. The point is just to add another layer of annoyance in the hopes that the increased sales will outweigh the costs.

I'm pretty sure that it works quite similarly to the military already. Mayors and governors have authority over the police forces of their jurisdictions.