What effect did Obama promising Billy Tauzig in his first few weeks in the White House, Obama would not allow the US people to be able to negotiate affordable drugs.? It doesn't matter if we are stuck in a private agreement with the Prsident and Tauzig(sp) if the prices will be artificially high to honor POTUS's agreements with the lobby?

Right on! For utility patents, the idea of limiting them to a few years would totally backfire. Far from speeding up innovation, limiting the life of patents to 3, or even 5 years would guarantee that only the largest, most profitable corporations develop the new ideas because only the ones that already dominate their markets would be able to recoup their investments in R&D AND make a profit within that small window. The idea of an independent inventor approaching them with a licensing deal (like they do now), would be laughable when they could just wait a little while until it’s in the public domain. If they steal the idea before that, what attorney would take your infringement case on contingency when there’s only a year or two of royalties at stake? For middle-class tinkerers like me, inventing would go from an obsession that might pay off to an exercise in futility. “American Ingenuity” would be dead. How would companies that literally started in garages like Apple or Hewlett Packard have ever been able to borrow the money to get started (or raise capital from investors to expand) if everything they were selling to pay it back would be available to their competition within 3 years. I would love to hear Steve Wozniak, or Dean Kamen (Segway) on the show to discuss this. Drug patents where universities or government agencies do most of the real R&D and lives are at stake are a very special case and should probably have different limits than mechanical utility patents like mine. Also, non-competitive practices like companies buying patents with no intent to develop them (like oil companies hoarding battery patents) are also special cases that need attention. Our current patent system literally got us to the moon and back. So don’t throw the baby out with the bath-water…

Rather than "consciousness", it would be more accurate to say "sentience". Consciousness is more the opposite of sleep (i.e. unconsciousness). Sentience is self-awareness. It's like the difference between pain and agony. Any animal can feel pain (so far as I know), which is just a sensation, but you have to be sentient to feel agony, which is the emotion that comes with pain due to the awareness that it may not stop or may happen again.

Thom, you should look into Edgar Cayce a little harder. There was very little feedback on whether his advice to people really helped. And any prediction of his that is yet to be fulfilled is so far false. So you should first question his veracity and then seek the answer to that question. (Doubt begets certainty.) CSICOP and JREF probably have abundant information on Cayce.

If you want to refresh your memory on the double-slit experiment, here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

Homeopathy is another thing you need to reconsider, Thom. Homeopathy was invented before Avogadro's number was discovered. Most homeopathic "medicines" involve diluting a substance in water to the point that you wouldn't expect to have even one molecule left in a swimming pool of that water. Once it was recognized that matter wasn't infinitely divisible, homeopaths came up with the idea that water "remembers" what's been in it. But apparently, somehow, it only remembers what the homeopath wants it to remember, and not all the urine and feces and micro-organisms etc. I am unaware of anything saying homeopathy is about vibrations.