There is, arguably, a meaningful distinction between 'knowing' something(in the sense of being able to use that something in conscious cogitation) and 'knowing' something in the sense of 'exhibiting behavior that could not be accomplished without possessing some similarly capable mechanism; but not necessarily possessing any conscious knowledge, or even consciousness at all'.
It's an open question(that the paper isn't really interested in attacking) whether birds 'know' anything about fractal dimension in the first sense, or what if anything they know at all in that sense; but there is a much stronger case to be made that they do exhibit behavior that could only be accomplished with access to the results of such a computation, even if the processing is a total black-box. Much the same is true of humans: you don't need to take physics to play catch(and, indeed, even those who have generally don't start using conscious calculation to catch falling objects); but our ability to catch objects is pretty hard to explain without positing that we have some mechanism that gives us access(and rather fast access, no less) to good approximations of answers to certain classes of physics problems.
What? The world has come to this? Instead of how intelligent, strong, or attractive we are, the primary factor is socio-economic status?
Wow, I bet that realisation causes more than a few suicides.
At the level described in TFA(malnutrition leading to visible differences in development persisting into maturity) or similar(doesn't sound like they tested it; but parasite load and certain sorts of environmental pressures probably have the same effect) there really isn't a terribly strong separation of physical factors and socio-economic status(to the degree that birds have that). At the knife-edge-of-subsistence level, the fact that intelligence, strength, and attractiveness are paid for in calories and nutrient distributions really tightens the connection between personal virtues and economic status.
I'm sure that we know less than we would like to(since invasive chemical sampling of the brain isn't really an option in humans except after death or in exceptional cases, and even in animals you can chop up whenever you want the brain is absurdly complex); but it probably helps that GM2 is also associated with Tay-Sachs disease, so at least there has been some incentive, in the form of a fairly rare but dramaticly unpleasant human disease, to explore GM2 and associated processes.
Given that there is presently no treatment or cure for Tay-Sachs and victims usually die fairly quickly even with supportive treatment, though, I'm guessing that we haven't learned everything we might like to know about the matter(you know that a genetic disorder must be bad when a special Jewish eugenics group pops up to try to prevent it...)
Given how vital lipids are to proper brain function(cellular function generally; but nerve tissue has tons of the things even by comparison to other tissues), it seems like a very ominous sign that blast trauma too minor to cause injuries visible even with an optical microscope causes noticeable changes in the lipids floating around... Even if the neural network isn't structurally disrupted at a visible scale, interference with lipids involved in chemical or electrical nerve signalling would still cause changes in how the network functions(since the characteristics of the paths are still changing, even if connections aren't being severed outright).
Oh, compared to a real company, VIA's "support" isn't worth shit. However, they do at least have a 'support' apparatus that exists enough to mostly fail, and they have actually managed to work with other companies from time to time(a great many HP thin clients were or are VIA based, for instance, after Transmeta died and before Atom hit the scene). I'm not optimistic that they will; but if they actually want their fairly middling hardware to stand out against the cheaper fairly middling hardware that now infests the low-end-ARM-'n-Android scene, it would seem like 'support that isn't totally nonexistent' might be a good place to start.
Which strikes me as sort of an odd omission on VIA's part: competing on pure price with the seething morass of anonymous and ill-supported(I'm not talking about 'slow to update', I'm talking about things like "the firmware flashed on the unit when you got it is the only known firmware for the unit" and "The amount of RAM quoted on the package is a total fiction" stuff) is a sucker's game. That morass is risky, and a certain amount of willingness to shop around is needed; but damn is it cheap...
VIA, by contrast, isn't exactly god's gift to OEM support; but they do at least know how to do it, and that's the only aspect of their offering that could make them a more interesting comparison to the hordes of chinese cheapies.
PS potential purchasers, with an interest in video playback, may well want to ensure that the 'theoretical' support of 1080P is matched by available drivers that prove this ability. Video playback on ARM SoC parts tends to be through 'binary blobs', so you either have proper support from the company making the MB, or you are stuffed UNLESS the CPU has enough grunt for software decoding, and one A9 core won't (for HD).
Not to worry: anybody who has had the...pleasure... of VIA's totally bitchin' and definitely not unstable at all "Unichrome" graphics on the x86 side won't come in to this expecting much more than a serial console...
If(and it isn't a small if, you run screaming from Dell software for a reason) Dell can get the software working properly, I'll give them that.
As you note, assorted Android-powered 'stick PC' products(the mk802 is sort of the 'kleenex' of the category; but the array of model numbers and knock-offs is frankly rather dizzying) are done to hell and back by now, and cheap too.
The quality of their firmware, however, might charitably be described as 'downmarket'. I'd assume that Dell will manage to clean things up a bit; but it would fail to surprise me if(once you've glommed on some CALs and VM rentals and assorted bullshit-as-a-service stuff, you'll be right back up to where corporate thin clients have always cost, only a bit smaller this time).
On the plus side, zit-shame might be enough to force the current 'dubiously-pubescent-assholes-screaming-obsceneties-into-the-mic' Xbox live chat demographic into hiding...
"(given that's a republican politician): how much for "law enforcement" and what proportion for "mental health"?"
I propose an excellent compromise, one so good that paleoconservatives, jackbooted neo-fascist boot boys, and aging flower children will come together in harmony!
Apparently, roughly half of the people shot by cops are mentally ill. Since being shot is one of the more severe possible cop reactions, and the homeless, erratically behaved, and otherwise troubled are more likely to end up in proximity to the cops, it seems quite likely that many of the ones being shot are among the more severely ill, and that cops also deal(somewhat less violently) with a wide range of the mentally ill population. Thus, we can simply spend all the money on cops and Tazers; but reclassify police as an arm of the medical community's 'mental health outreach' system(an hour-long training video and a simple multiple-choice test may be required here). At a stroke, we get more cops, more perp beat downs, and the biggest apparent increase in mental health resources in the entire history of public health!
Pigouvian taxation can be a valid strategy, if the externalities can be calculated with anything approaching accuracy; but it carries an implicit message that the 'externalities' being cleared up are simply matters of market efficiency, not subject to other considerations.
However, in a case like this one, the First amendment explicitly asserts that free speech is a right, not 'something you get to do if it doesn't bother anybody' or 'something you can do if you clean up after yourself'. Even if you were to come up with a reasonable argument that the externalities are, on the balance, negative, the law as it stands forbids imposing them on the people generating them.
(It could hypothetically run the other way, as well: Pigouvian taxation of a given externality generally implies that the externality is negative; but that the activity is generally acceptable, if subject to happening more often than is socially optimal. If you deem an activity simply Not OK, a violation of some party's rights Period, it may still be an 'externality' in a strictly economic sense(as, say, getting your pocket picked, is); but must be considered as a pure crime in the legal sense. The... touchiest... area for this sort of thing is probably in pollution controls: because everybody depends on industry so heavily, and because tracking damage from airborne or waterborne pollution is tricky, it's tempting to try to tax it down a bit and call it a day. However, on the more blatant end of the spectrum, 'pollution' is callous murder by poison, sometimes direct and gruesome. Where exactly on the line between "Epidemiologists estimate that SOx particulate accounts for approximately 10,000 excess cardiovascular mortalities per year" and "ACME Toxin Smelter, inc. flooded the slums with glowing green slime as a 'component lifecycle cost reduction' measure" is a somewhat sticky question.)
'Speech Products'(games, movies, books, etc.) already are taxed in the same way that equivalent goods are. If a state has sales tax, a copy of GTA will pay a sales tax just like the xbox you buy to play it on. If somebody derives income from being a musician or something, same deal.
'Freedom of speech' is no defense against taxation that isn't targeted at speech; but purely viewpoint neutral revenue generation. 'Freedom of speech' is seriously threatened if taxation applies differently based on what type of speech is at hand(ie. a tax on violent video games is an issue, a tax on software generally wouldn't be, a tax on music with 'parental guidance' stickers but not on radio edits, etc, etc.)
In their capacity as articles of commerce merely, the incidental speech character of some goods affords them no particular rights against taxation or other regulation. However, any regulation that explicitly addresses their speech content in order to apply a tax or regulation differently considers them primarily as speech objects and only incidentally as articles of commerce.
Pigouvian taxation applied against specific forms of speech, or specific positions, is about as 1st-amendment-unfriendly as a tax policy can be. A mere sales tax may or may not be a good idea; but it has minimal constitutional implications(at least at the state level, the feds might have other issues).
If anything, it assisted me with diving in to the world of UNIX
So THAT explains it! I've been looking at this all wrong. (sometime later) Yeah, like, everything's a file. See this? It does ONE thing, really well. Just ONE thing. Wow, man!
No, man, UNIX is just a gateway drug to Plan 9. That is where the everything's a file stuff gets deep and, like, totally networked.
A good guy with a gun. Anything else is handwaving bullshit."
talking point: Columbine had an armed guard, who was apparently not all that useful.
The term 'green-on-blue attack' refers to the (quite common) situations where an aghan security force member will launch a surprise attack on NATO military personnel with which he is supposed to be working. Again, it turns out to not be that difficult to kill a few armed, trained, soldiers if you just wait for their backs to be turned.
More broadly, the relationship to magazine capacity is one of time: Given enough time to muster a response, the cops do show up in overwhelming numbers and either kill the shooter or cause them to kill themselves This means that the main question is how efficient they can be during the time that they have.
The trouble isn't with polymers, most guns that aren't entirely metal or banged together in 1950's Soviet Russia People's 3rd Patriotic Machinery Plant, have polymer parts, it's that shitty extruded ABS filaments that are just about managing to stick to each other aren't even close to being in the same category as decent injection moulded parts, let alone glass-filled polymer composites and the like(and, if somebody does have a really classy 3D printer, the results probably cost more than proper parts prepared by the usual means).
That's why Columbine was an epic failure, right? And why the so-called 'green on blue' attacks on NATO servicemen aren't even close to being a weekly occurrence?
After an exhaustive modernization study underwritten in part by our good friends at Verizon, we have concluded that the future of digital voice should really cost ~$100/month and rely entirely on proprietary hardware and firmware. To this end, we will be lowballing every last scrap of spectrum we can to the nation's incumbent telcos as soon as possible.
XOXOXO,
The FCC"
I applaud modernization efforts, there is no reason why 'ham radio' should be forced to stick to ancient technology for reasons of sheer regulatory inertia when it could be fertile ground for experimentation; but I worry that (given the, um, limited war chests of ham nerds vs. other spectrum users) that perfectly sensible re-examinations of legacy rules might well end up becoming an exercise in malignant entities with better lobbyists using the rexamination of legacy rules to appropriate spectrum that was protected at the cost of a certain amount of anachronism...
I'm honestly surprised that my comment would be classified as a 'frothing-at-the-mouth atheist rant'. My point was merely that religions are perhaps the most perfected form of the 'pre-internet' information systems that TFA dismisses so casually. Thus, they are both unlikely to gain significantly from the internet(the number of people who've had an intense, emotionally affecting conversion experience; but are waiting for a statistically significant number of corroborating experiences to show up on youtube is Not Large); but also not obviously placed to lose(if you've managed to reconcile yourself to the problem of evil in your own life, a few more BBC articles about how the world is kind of shit aren't going to sway you much.)
If the internet has any substantial effect on religion, it will be almost entirely founded on what it does to community and social relationships, not anything so abstract as changing the availability of information...
Oh, I don't mean to deny the value of intuition generally; but just to note that mere 'knowledge' doesn't have the same ability to grab you by the amygdalae and squeeze until you sweat bullets. In suitably gifted and trained individuals it can deliver correct answers far faster than conscious thought, and without visible effort(observe any reasonably coordinated child who doesn't even know pre-calc compute the trajectory of a thrown ball in time to catch it); but if a hardwired response contrary to your analytical one is tugging at you, knowledge is an unfortunately feeble impetus. It's better than nothing, at least you know that you ought to be fighting; but it just doesn't have the same punch.
I think it's a "the first hit is free" theory applied to programming.
Especially for Those Damn Kids Today With Their 'X-Box' and 'Droid-Pad', there is a fuckton of (sometimes quite difficult, sometimes not; but definitely overwhelming) amount of boilerplate and support libraries and middleware and things behind even the most trivial applications they are likely to interact with before they are introduced to programming. Anything they are capable of producing will seem primitive by comparison, potentially causing loss of interest. If, so the theory goes, you provide them with an environment where doing at least some things is much simplified, you can draw them in and introduce the tougher stuff as you go along.
After all, between FOSS and crippleware or free-as-in-stolen proprietary tools, it's not as though the problem with programming education is lack of tools. This isn't the bad old days where getting Turbo Pascal for only $50 1983-dollars was a crazy good deal... The trick now is pedagogical.
You might want to spring for ballistic grade in that case(and definitely not the kind with aesthetically focused neon-dyed kevlar/carbon fiber weave, unless you are planning on blending in at an aquatic rave or something), and possibly choose a less stiff resin for your kevlar/resin composite, to reduce crack propagation and loss of hull integrity around impact sites. Some sort of layering, possibly including non-resin-impregnated multi-ply layers to contain spall and bullet fragments might also be a good plan.
If you think that people who understand statistics are immunized against magical thinking I have a bridge to sell you.
A suitable knowledge of mathematics allows you to calculate correct answers to problems that intuition provides lousy answers to; but that doesn't make intution shut up, unfortunately.
If you dangle somebody from a crane, hundreds of feet above the ground and all those teeny little figures walking about, does that person's heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline levels, and similar fear responses have any useful correlation to their knowledge of the tensile strength of the steel cable they are attached to?
I don't know about sci-fi; but I'd be inclined to doubt any significant effect on religion.
To the degree that religions bother with making truth claims about the world, they tend to focus on a very well-honed version of the sort of "stories a friend of a friend told, easily doubted and not really believed" that TFA contrasts with the new internet-enabled transmission. You tend to see belief spread, or at least persist, by means of strong social connections(the traces of 'to tie/bind together' in the latin root of 'religion' are not by accident), emotionally intense personal experiences and group ritual union.
For the assorted, somewhat irksome, 'something vaguely in my favor happened, it's a Sign and/or My Guardian Angel Intervened' brigade, the fact that humans don't know probability from a hole in the ground(even statisticians have trouble on a gut level, and everybody else doesn't have an alternative to the gut level) probably helps spice things up; but that phenomenon doesn't seem to scale: people who have already been influenced by the very old, affectively powerful, personal methods are more likely to interpret random events as possessing meaning or representing some sort of supernormal intervention(unlike, say, a gambler who also falls prey to nonsense about 'hot streaks' or 'my number is due to come up'; but doesn't experience their shoddy grasp of probability as metaphysically invested).
If anything, broad access to the improbable would actually seem to damage traditional attitudes and beliefs about 'miracles' and the like. "It was a head-on collision on an icy road and she was thrown clear, what a miracle!" will meet "I'm glad she's ok, here are 1800 dash cams of people escaping horrible accidents without a scratch, and it looks like the American road kills about 35,000 people a year, I guess god just hates them and their families, eh?"
(Now, I don't actually expect any change, a bunch of abstract numbers and facts are so pale and lifeless in the face of emotion and experience, so I doubt that there will be any major shift from this source.)
Slashdot Mirror
There is, arguably, a meaningful distinction between 'knowing' something(in the sense of being able to use that something in conscious cogitation) and 'knowing' something in the sense of 'exhibiting behavior that could not be accomplished without possessing some similarly capable mechanism; but not necessarily possessing any conscious knowledge, or even consciousness at all'.
It's an open question(that the paper isn't really interested in attacking) whether birds 'know' anything about fractal dimension in the first sense, or what if anything they know at all in that sense; but there is a much stronger case to be made that they do exhibit behavior that could only be accomplished with access to the results of such a computation, even if the processing is a total black-box. Much the same is true of humans: you don't need to take physics to play catch(and, indeed, even those who have generally don't start using conscious calculation to catch falling objects); but our ability to catch objects is pretty hard to explain without positing that we have some mechanism that gives us access(and rather fast access, no less) to good approximations of answers to certain classes of physics problems.
What? The world has come to this? Instead of how intelligent, strong, or attractive we are, the primary factor is socio-economic status?
Wow, I bet that realisation causes more than a few suicides.
At the level described in TFA(malnutrition leading to visible differences in development persisting into maturity) or similar(doesn't sound like they tested it; but parasite load and certain sorts of environmental pressures probably have the same effect) there really isn't a terribly strong separation of physical factors and socio-economic status(to the degree that birds have that). At the knife-edge-of-subsistence level, the fact that intelligence, strength, and attractiveness are paid for in calories and nutrient distributions really tightens the connection between personal virtues and economic status.
I'm sure that we know less than we would like to(since invasive chemical sampling of the brain isn't really an option in humans except after death or in exceptional cases, and even in animals you can chop up whenever you want the brain is absurdly complex); but it probably helps that GM2 is also associated with Tay-Sachs disease, so at least there has been some incentive, in the form of a fairly rare but dramaticly unpleasant human disease, to explore GM2 and associated processes.
Given that there is presently no treatment or cure for Tay-Sachs and victims usually die fairly quickly even with supportive treatment, though, I'm guessing that we haven't learned everything we might like to know about the matter(you know that a genetic disorder must be bad when a special Jewish eugenics group pops up to try to prevent it...)
http://www.theonion.com/articles/worlds-scientists-admit-they-just-dont-like-mice,1256/
Given how vital lipids are to proper brain function(cellular function generally; but nerve tissue has tons of the things even by comparison to other tissues), it seems like a very ominous sign that blast trauma too minor to cause injuries visible even with an optical microscope causes noticeable changes in the lipids floating around... Even if the neural network isn't structurally disrupted at a visible scale, interference with lipids involved in chemical or electrical nerve signalling would still cause changes in how the network functions(since the characteristics of the paths are still changing, even if connections aren't being severed outright).
Oh, compared to a real company, VIA's "support" isn't worth shit. However, they do at least have a 'support' apparatus that exists enough to mostly fail, and they have actually managed to work with other companies from time to time(a great many HP thin clients were or are VIA based, for instance, after Transmeta died and before Atom hit the scene). I'm not optimistic that they will; but if they actually want their fairly middling hardware to stand out against the cheaper fairly middling hardware that now infests the low-end-ARM-'n-Android scene, it would seem like 'support that isn't totally nonexistent' might be a good place to start.
Which strikes me as sort of an odd omission on VIA's part: competing on pure price with the seething morass of anonymous and ill-supported(I'm not talking about 'slow to update', I'm talking about things like "the firmware flashed on the unit when you got it is the only known firmware for the unit" and "The amount of RAM quoted on the package is a total fiction" stuff) is a sucker's game. That morass is risky, and a certain amount of willingness to shop around is needed; but damn is it cheap...
VIA, by contrast, isn't exactly god's gift to OEM support; but they do at least know how to do it, and that's the only aspect of their offering that could make them a more interesting comparison to the hordes of chinese cheapies.
PS potential purchasers, with an interest in video playback, may well want to ensure that the 'theoretical' support of 1080P is matched by available drivers that prove this ability. Video playback on ARM SoC parts tends to be through 'binary blobs', so you either have proper support from the company making the MB, or you are stuffed UNLESS the CPU has enough grunt for software decoding, and one A9 core won't (for HD).
Not to worry: anybody who has had the...pleasure... of VIA's totally bitchin' and definitely not unstable at all "Unichrome" graphics on the x86 side won't come in to this expecting much more than a serial console...
If(and it isn't a small if, you run screaming from Dell software for a reason) Dell can get the software working properly, I'll give them that.
As you note, assorted Android-powered 'stick PC' products(the mk802 is sort of the 'kleenex' of the category; but the array of model numbers and knock-offs is frankly rather dizzying) are done to hell and back by now, and cheap too.
The quality of their firmware, however, might charitably be described as 'downmarket'. I'd assume that Dell will manage to clean things up a bit; but it would fail to surprise me if(once you've glommed on some CALs and VM rentals and assorted bullshit-as-a-service stuff, you'll be right back up to where corporate thin clients have always cost, only a bit smaller this time).
On the plus side, zit-shame might be enough to force the current 'dubiously-pubescent-assholes-screaming-obsceneties-into-the-mic' Xbox live chat demographic into hiding...
Isn't it... funny... how the adorable little theories about 'contracts' and 'consenting parties' dissolve when they hit the ground?
"(given that's a republican politician): how much for "law enforcement" and what proportion for "mental health"?"
I propose an excellent compromise, one so good that paleoconservatives, jackbooted neo-fascist boot boys, and aging flower children will come together in harmony!
Apparently, roughly half of the people shot by cops are mentally ill. Since being shot is one of the more severe possible cop reactions, and the homeless, erratically behaved, and otherwise troubled are more likely to end up in proximity to the cops, it seems quite likely that many of the ones being shot are among the more severely ill, and that cops also deal(somewhat less violently) with a wide range of the mentally ill population. Thus, we can simply spend all the money on cops and Tazers; but reclassify police as an arm of the medical community's 'mental health outreach' system(an hour-long training video and a simple multiple-choice test may be required here). At a stroke, we get more cops, more perp beat downs, and the biggest apparent increase in mental health resources in the entire history of public health!
Pigouvian taxation can be a valid strategy, if the externalities can be calculated with anything approaching accuracy; but it carries an implicit message that the 'externalities' being cleared up are simply matters of market efficiency, not subject to other considerations.
However, in a case like this one, the First amendment explicitly asserts that free speech is a right, not 'something you get to do if it doesn't bother anybody' or 'something you can do if you clean up after yourself'. Even if you were to come up with a reasonable argument that the externalities are, on the balance, negative, the law as it stands forbids imposing them on the people generating them.
(It could hypothetically run the other way, as well: Pigouvian taxation of a given externality generally implies that the externality is negative; but that the activity is generally acceptable, if subject to happening more often than is socially optimal. If you deem an activity simply Not OK, a violation of some party's rights Period, it may still be an 'externality' in a strictly economic sense(as, say, getting your pocket picked, is); but must be considered as a pure crime in the legal sense. The... touchiest... area for this sort of thing is probably in pollution controls: because everybody depends on industry so heavily, and because tracking damage from airborne or waterborne pollution is tricky, it's tempting to try to tax it down a bit and call it a day. However, on the more blatant end of the spectrum, 'pollution' is callous murder by poison, sometimes direct and gruesome. Where exactly on the line between "Epidemiologists estimate that SOx particulate accounts for approximately 10,000 excess cardiovascular mortalities per year" and "ACME Toxin Smelter, inc. flooded the slums with glowing green slime as a 'component lifecycle cost reduction' measure" is a somewhat sticky question.)
One important distinction:
'Speech Products'(games, movies, books, etc.) already are taxed in the same way that equivalent goods are. If a state has sales tax, a copy of GTA will pay a sales tax just like the xbox you buy to play it on. If somebody derives income from being a musician or something, same deal.
'Freedom of speech' is no defense against taxation that isn't targeted at speech; but purely viewpoint neutral revenue generation. 'Freedom of speech' is seriously threatened if taxation applies differently based on what type of speech is at hand(ie. a tax on violent video games is an issue, a tax on software generally wouldn't be, a tax on music with 'parental guidance' stickers but not on radio edits, etc, etc.)
In their capacity as articles of commerce merely, the incidental speech character of some goods affords them no particular rights against taxation or other regulation. However, any regulation that explicitly addresses their speech content in order to apply a tax or regulation differently considers them primarily as speech objects and only incidentally as articles of commerce.
Pigouvian taxation applied against specific forms of speech, or specific positions, is about as 1st-amendment-unfriendly as a tax policy can be. A mere sales tax may or may not be a good idea; but it has minimal constitutional implications(at least at the state level, the feds might have other issues).
If anything, it assisted me with diving in to the world of UNIX
So THAT explains it! I've been looking at this all wrong. (sometime later) Yeah, like, everything's a file. See this? It does ONE thing, really well. Just ONE thing. Wow, man!
No, man, UNIX is just a gateway drug to Plan 9. That is where the everything's a file stuff gets deep and, like, totally networked.
My primary point was a response to the
"You know how you stop a bad guy with a gun?
A good guy with a gun. Anything else is handwaving bullshit."
talking point: Columbine had an armed guard, who was apparently not all that useful.
The term 'green-on-blue attack' refers to the (quite common) situations where an aghan security force member will launch a surprise attack on NATO military personnel with which he is supposed to be working. Again, it turns out to not be that difficult to kill a few armed, trained, soldiers if you just wait for their backs to be turned.
More broadly, the relationship to magazine capacity is one of time: Given enough time to muster a response, the cops do show up in overwhelming numbers and either kill the shooter or cause them to kill themselves This means that the main question is how efficient they can be during the time that they have.
The trouble isn't with polymers, most guns that aren't entirely metal or banged together in 1950's Soviet Russia People's 3rd Patriotic Machinery Plant, have polymer parts, it's that shitty extruded ABS filaments that are just about managing to stick to each other aren't even close to being in the same category as decent injection moulded parts, let alone glass-filled polymer composites and the like(and, if somebody does have a really classy 3D printer, the results probably cost more than proper parts prepared by the usual means).
That's why Columbine was an epic failure, right? And why the so-called 'green on blue' attacks on NATO servicemen aren't even close to being a weekly occurrence?
"Dear economically invisible 'ham radio' users;
After an exhaustive modernization study underwritten in part by our good friends at Verizon, we have concluded that the future of digital voice should really cost ~$100/month and rely entirely on proprietary hardware and firmware. To this end, we will be lowballing every last scrap of spectrum we can to the nation's incumbent telcos as soon as possible.
XOXOXO,
The FCC"
I applaud modernization efforts, there is no reason why 'ham radio' should be forced to stick to ancient technology for reasons of sheer regulatory inertia when it could be fertile ground for experimentation; but I worry that (given the, um, limited war chests of ham nerds vs. other spectrum users) that perfectly sensible re-examinations of legacy rules might well end up becoming an exercise in malignant entities with better lobbyists using the rexamination of legacy rules to appropriate spectrum that was protected at the cost of a certain amount of anachronism...
I'm honestly surprised that my comment would be classified as a 'frothing-at-the-mouth atheist rant'. My point was merely that religions are perhaps the most perfected form of the 'pre-internet' information systems that TFA dismisses so casually. Thus, they are both unlikely to gain significantly from the internet(the number of people who've had an intense, emotionally affecting conversion experience; but are waiting for a statistically significant number of corroborating experiences to show up on youtube is Not Large); but also not obviously placed to lose(if you've managed to reconcile yourself to the problem of evil in your own life, a few more BBC articles about how the world is kind of shit aren't going to sway you much.)
If the internet has any substantial effect on religion, it will be almost entirely founded on what it does to community and social relationships, not anything so abstract as changing the availability of information...
Oh, I don't mean to deny the value of intuition generally; but just to note that mere 'knowledge' doesn't have the same ability to grab you by the amygdalae and squeeze until you sweat bullets. In suitably gifted and trained individuals it can deliver correct answers far faster than conscious thought, and without visible effort(observe any reasonably coordinated child who doesn't even know pre-calc compute the trajectory of a thrown ball in time to catch it); but if a hardwired response contrary to your analytical one is tugging at you, knowledge is an unfortunately feeble impetus. It's better than nothing, at least you know that you ought to be fighting; but it just doesn't have the same punch.
I think it's a "the first hit is free" theory applied to programming.
Especially for Those Damn Kids Today With Their 'X-Box' and 'Droid-Pad', there is a fuckton of (sometimes quite difficult, sometimes not; but definitely overwhelming) amount of boilerplate and support libraries and middleware and things behind even the most trivial applications they are likely to interact with before they are introduced to programming. Anything they are capable of producing will seem primitive by comparison, potentially causing loss of interest. If, so the theory goes, you provide them with an environment where doing at least some things is much simplified, you can draw them in and introduce the tougher stuff as you go along.
After all, between FOSS and crippleware or free-as-in-stolen proprietary tools, it's not as though the problem with programming education is lack of tools. This isn't the bad old days where getting Turbo Pascal for only $50 1983-dollars was a crazy good deal... The trick now is pedagogical.
You might want to spring for ballistic grade in that case(and definitely not the kind with aesthetically focused neon-dyed kevlar/carbon fiber weave, unless you are planning on blending in at an aquatic rave or something), and possibly choose a less stiff resin for your kevlar/resin composite, to reduce crack propagation and loss of hull integrity around impact sites. Some sort of layering, possibly including non-resin-impregnated multi-ply layers to contain spall and bullet fragments might also be a good plan.
If you think that people who understand statistics are immunized against magical thinking I have a bridge to sell you.
A suitable knowledge of mathematics allows you to calculate correct answers to problems that intuition provides lousy answers to; but that doesn't make intution shut up, unfortunately.
If you dangle somebody from a crane, hundreds of feet above the ground and all those teeny little figures walking about, does that person's heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline levels, and similar fear responses have any useful correlation to their knowledge of the tensile strength of the steel cable they are attached to?
I don't know about sci-fi; but I'd be inclined to doubt any significant effect on religion.
To the degree that religions bother with making truth claims about the world, they tend to focus on a very well-honed version of the sort of "stories a friend of a friend told, easily doubted and not really believed" that TFA contrasts with the new internet-enabled transmission. You tend to see belief spread, or at least persist, by means of strong social connections(the traces of 'to tie/bind together' in the latin root of 'religion' are not by accident), emotionally intense personal experiences and group ritual union.
For the assorted, somewhat irksome, 'something vaguely in my favor happened, it's a Sign and/or My Guardian Angel Intervened' brigade, the fact that humans don't know probability from a hole in the ground(even statisticians have trouble on a gut level, and everybody else doesn't have an alternative to the gut level) probably helps spice things up; but that phenomenon doesn't seem to scale: people who have already been influenced by the very old, affectively powerful, personal methods are more likely to interpret random events as possessing meaning or representing some sort of supernormal intervention(unlike, say, a gambler who also falls prey to nonsense about 'hot streaks' or 'my number is due to come up'; but doesn't experience their shoddy grasp of probability as metaphysically invested).
If anything, broad access to the improbable would actually seem to damage traditional attitudes and beliefs about 'miracles' and the like. "It was a head-on collision on an icy road and she was thrown clear, what a miracle!" will meet "I'm glad she's ok, here are 1800 dash cams of people escaping horrible accidents without a scratch, and it looks like the American road kills about 35,000 people a year, I guess god just hates them and their families, eh?"
(Now, I don't actually expect any change, a bunch of abstract numbers and facts are so pale and lifeless in the face of emotion and experience, so I doubt that there will be any major shift from this source.)