Sorry, I mangled that (by not paying attention to html rules):

The innumerate media and public share some of the blame for not being highly skeptical about a study involving a less-than-1% phenomenon based on such a small sample. This bastard deserved most of the blame, but our government schools are not doing their job either.

... whether fraudulent or not, was based on 12 subjects. The innumerate media and public share some of the blame for not being highly skeptical about a study involving a 75% of the blame, but our government schools are not doing their job either.

"And I will go with the latter not because I can prove it to be true, but because it's the only thing that can give me causality between action and reaction. "

But, given the rest of your statement, you can not possibly claim any certainty that a given action will result in a a given reaction. Or, is that not what you mean by "causality".

Rand explains this contradiction clearly, which is (I suspect) why those making ad hominem arguments against her do so - if Objectivism is correct, it invalidates so much philosophic babbling that people find to be so cool.

In this way: the government can point a gun at you to force you to behave in a particularly way. If you don't like what a corporation is doing, you can simply walk away. What? But you want the service the corporation is offering, you just want it your way? Tough.

If you are arguing against the government monopolies granted to (some) ISPs and TelCos, then you have my full support. But be clear that it is government action to which you are objecting, and that this action always comes with the threat of force.

The equivocation of government power with economic power is the equivocation of force with trade. It is a category error which leads to perverse conclusions.

You show little understanding of the Middle Eastern psyche. Read Bernard Lewis. Incompetence is not rewarded, it is is looked on with disparagement. Being strong and saving face are critical. Indeed, the regime has been extremely reluctant to admit *any* impact from the attack. If they were going to pursue your strategy, they would bemoan the actions of the "imperialists". I bet they never will, because of the culture of "face".

"A secretive government is a corrupt one."

In all contexts? Should the Allies have broadcast their D-Day plans, because the public has a "right to know"? If we have ops aimed at disabling the Iranian nuclear program, should the details of these ops be public knowledge? Is the FBI "corrupt" because it doesn't publish its trade craft in the New York Times?

This is sloppy thinking. A legitimate government is duty-bound to protect the individual rights of its citizens, and, in a world with bad (TM) people, this sometimes requires secrecy. Is there danger that this secrecy will lead ('down a slippery slope') to denial of some individual rights? Of course, but the hard work of political science and philosophy is to discriminate between the good and bad uses of secrecy. If you are unwilling to grant these principles, then you should stop calling yourself a "conservative" (or even a "libertarian"). You are an anarchist.

While this leak demonstrates Assange's malevolent nihilism, it is _not_ the one that should have prompted prosecution. If the U.S. state department feels the need for secrecy in its communications, it is _their_ responsibility to maintain that secrecy (of course, if we had a proper, rational foreign policy, there would be no need for such secrecy). That they were incompetent in this respect is a problem, but it would be crossing a very bright line for Assange to bear the responsibility for this incompetence.

However, the previous leak of _military_ communications, where he explicitly endangered the lives of pro-U.S. informants in Afghanistan, should have put a price on Assange's capture and lead to his prosecution. That was an act of blatant espionage, and he should be held accountable for the damage he did to freedom and the lives he threatened.

As for PayPal, if they are acting on their own initiative (and have not been coerce by the U.S. government), they are doing so too late, but better late than never. It is an expression of the freedom of the individuals who own and operate that company to cease doing business with a bastard like Assange. Good for them!

I agree that flying on a commercial airline is not a right (though there is a right to build one's own aircraft and fly it in "common" air space, so long as one obeys reasonable safety restrictions regarding other traffic, but that's another post).

What commercial flying is, however, is a contractual arrangement between the passenger and the airline, and the government has no business interfering with that contract. The entire regime of commercial airline security is a blatant overstepping of the power granted to the government by the U.S. constitution.

How could air travel be safe, without this intrusion, you ask? Um, who has more interest in striking the correct balance between security and convenience than the airlines themselves, and the passengers that choose to contract with them? Some airlines would install a completely laissez-faire regime, and passengers who value convenience (or are easily embarrassed, or whatever) will choose to take that risk. Other airlines will promise colonoscopies and the fearful or very extroverted will select that carrier. Most likely, the airlines will spend lots of money on hiring very good people to staff and lead this increasingly important part of their business, and we would all benefit greatly from the higher quality and choice that would ensue.

Then, the government could focus on doing what it does best, which is bringing the fury of the U.S. armed forces to bear on the states that harbor and support the groups that actually perpetrate these acts, before they are able to organize and implement them.

Yeah, until you start voting for TEA party candidates because you've never heard of the Know Nothings.

Another self-referential.

You do know that the name of that movement stemmed from its secretive nature, right (when asked about their participation, members were supposed to reply that they "know nothing")?

So, yes, I support the "tea party" philosophy not because I agree that we should have a limited government and increased individual freedom, but because I didn't know that they were so secretive.

That's not funny at all. Or, it's so funny it hurts.

You forgot about land use opportunity cost. At this efficiency, they would need 6 x 10^6 square meters of land to reach 1 GW. That's 2500 meters on each side of the square! A typical nuke plant can *easily* be sited on a 500m x 500m square of land, and that counts parking lots, guard houses, etc. That savings of at least 4 x 10^6 square meters of land can mean lots of industrial or other productive capacity that you are forgoing with the solar energy source.

The point is the ~ 1kW/sqm from solar is way too dilute to be a practical source for our large scale energy needs.

Several fallacies here:

1) These are a *set* of models. But, there is only one actual system they are modeling. When do we get to hear which one of the models is _the_ one?
2) When do we get to hear about that one model predicting a real future temperature series, without any tweaks?
3) When these models predict the past, which data set are their results being correlated with? Whence the independent verification of that data set? Where is the raw data from which that data set was derived?

If you can start to answer these questions, then you can start doing real science.

All of the Supremes seemed to agree that Bilski's "invention" was not patentable on the grounds that it was an "abstract idea", and that is clearly forbidden by judicial precedent, along with "laws of nature" and "physical phenomena". Kennedy's opinion states that there was no need for the circuit court to go further in coming up with the "machine or transformation" test as being essential. So, it seems that those that oppose software patents on principle need - for now - to pursue the notion that all of software is really just an "abstract idea", which seems a hard sell given the software community's touting of the real life benefits of computers and the software that runs them.

Congratulations on this post. If it doesn't go up to a 5 very soon, there is no hope for Slashdot. The magnitude of radiation exposure and its comparison with other radiation sources, is the absolute essence of the issue. That neither of the linked articles contained one such quantity should completely disqualify them from being posted on a site which is supposedly concerned with nerd news.

I think he's wrong equivocating the invalidity defense with the prior art defense. My understanding is a patent can be invalidated - and rendered completely ineffective - if you can show that it doesn't actually teach a practicable implementation of a way to achieve the claims.

I had experience with this. We received a cease and desist letter from a (large) company saying we were infringing a patent they had claiming synchronizing audio playback with the movement of a cursor. After carefully reading the description, we realized that they were actually describing doing this synchronization by assuming that the real-time clock signal was all that you needed to know how much of the wave file had been sent to the audio output ... and we knew that this could not actually work. It didn't account for processing delays owing to CPU/memory/bandwidth limitations. Our lawyer wrote a letter back to them saying this and we never heard from them again.

Note that the _claims_ themselves did not describe the synchronization method - they were claiming the generality of doing the synchronization. It was in the _description_ that they explained _how_ to do the synchronization and this is where we found the flaw which invalidated the entire patent. I should note also that the description included words indicating that the method they were describing was "essential" to the invention - so it was actually a badly written patent. If they had carefully qualified the description with words like "this is one possible method ... there are others known to those skilled in the arts", we might not have been able to make this defense. And, of course, this never went to court (probably because they realized how badly the description had been written). But, I've seen other such flaws in patent descriptions - you'd be surprised how often lawyers make stupid mistakes like this.

And, if you do find such a mistake, you will have helped to move toward invalidating the entire patent, as opposed to just avoiding the particular infringement suit. It is lots more work to wade through entire descriptions, and I wouldn't recommend doing it unless, as the speaker indicates, you are in the cross-hairs of an infringement suit. But, it can be a very good feeling if you succeed!