Karl Popper believed that even scientific knowledge does not qualify as the ultimate truth. Rather, scientific theories should be accepted as provisionally true as no amount of corroborating evidence can rule out the possibility that some contradictory evidence will turn up in the future.

Great quote, though I forgot where I found it…

Brought to you by the Ministry of Information.

The lower court’s decision is affirmed, and so no patent for Bilski. However, business methods are not found totally ineligible for patents, just this one. Not everyone on the court agrees in all particulars. So it’s complicated, and obviously not all we hoped for.

From Groklaw.

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

As told in Chris Anderson’s book Free.

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/CarsSearchIntro.shtml

…if you’re the type of individual that tends to get steamed up by larger and more intrusive government programs, you may want to take a few deep breaths and resolve yourself to the fact that this phenomenon is likely to get far worse before we see a return to celebration of individual rights. (And the cycle shows that we will see such a return — about 40 to 50 years from now, when the next Second Turning comes around.)

From David Galland.

Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert’s political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion.

The title of the original research paper was “The Irony of Satire“. It would certainly be ironic if The Colbert Report actually made conservatives more entrenched in their opinions.

This might also explain how Colbert was able to perform at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner back in 2006 without any of the event organizers thinking it was a bad idea…

More pictures here.

Source.

Source.