Most situations are "contrived" in some sense.

Now split-second emergencies aren't always purposely contrived, but notes aren't much use then, either.

If class more closely mimicked "real world scenarios":
Exams would be open note, open classmate, open textbook, open internet, etc.
A student that (without permission/notice) skipped five class sessions or came to class drunk would be expelled, possibly with no transcript.
A student could do everything right and still fail an exam because of the performance of a classmate.
Examples done in class would never directly apply to exams.
Lectures would consist of an office politician trying to "sell" a project that would increase his budget, and use inaccurate-but-impractical-to-falsify information to do it.
50% - 90% of class time would be spent on stuff that had little to do with the class title, description or syllabus.
Exams would often be on an entirely different subject with no warning to prepare.
Grades would depend on vague criteria that can always be used to justify any grade the professor chose to give you.

Not me. I want one that looks like it was built from Lego bricks.

> If you mean not the same for all positions, conservation of linear momentum goes out the
> window.

To be clear, that effectively means either Newton's second law (in it's generalized F = dp/dt form) or Newton's third law is wrong.

(bold added)
Don't you ever do anything for convenience?

You mean paragraph 13?

Having read the whole thing, it actually seems refreshingly balanced to me. The beginning of the part you quoted is really kind of a summary of the consequences pointed out by Kenneth Arrow. I'm willing to believe that, in a world with instant communication, the rate of invention might slow down somewhat if there was no IP.

In the next paragraph the author points out that IP rights are detrimental to consumers and that governments have to strike a balance between encouraging investment in knowledge generation and the detrimental effects from those policies (decreased competition, higher prices).

I can't imagine one of the regular IP organizations even suggesting that IP rights could be in any way detrimental to anyone.

I worked for a test-prep company and everytime we got someone with a visual or hearing impairment we dreaded it. Since the offices had their own budgets, it could be extremely expensive to get materials printed or provide sign interpreters for these folks (interpreters could run $100/hr with all their expenses). I don't wish the afflictions on anyone, but it was just so expensive to accomodate, and seems like there could be a better system.

Even scarier, my good friend went to a top 10 med school and there was a legally blind girl there that wanted to be a doctor. She had alot of problems and it was so expensive for the school to provide her with special equipment to be able to blurrily see things she couldn't see anyways. She had a really hard time getting a residency, and I don't think she ever got into a good residency program. Would you want a doctor examining you who couldn't see you clearly? I wanted to go to Med School too, but I didnt have the stomach for the smells and sights of it. If I have the grades and the MCAT scores, should the school allow me not to look at the corpses and not have to do the nasty stuff? I don't think so. How about I go and do something that I actually can do. People with visual disabilities can do so many things, and its not society's fault that there will unfortunately be a handful of things out of reach or prohibitively expensive.

Paying writers more won't get you better writers. The problem they have is that they are a sick little intellectually inbred nepotistic community. Paying more to writers just gets you the same writers, only now they can afford TWO antique espresso machines at their house in Pacific Palisades instead of just one.

Maybe that's because you missed the point.

See also: Negativland Interviews U2's The Edge

You're right.

I was responding to what I percieved as an attempt to imply that the correlation means something.

If there was no attempt to imply such, I apoligize.

You've fallen victim to THE classic statistical fallacy.
Now, repeat after me, "Correlation is not causation."

No problem, I just have to figure out all the URLs to whitelist... if I don't get around to it tonight, I should have it ready within the next couple days.

This one is VB.net.

Not ideal, but definitely an improvement over the old model.