The "making for the masses" aspect of 3-d printing is -- at least right now -- pretty overrated. I (the guy your post is replying to) spent some time this summer learning to use a 3-d printer myself. It's a great tool, and a useful addition to my toolset. But after I'd learned how to use Blender and other 3-d design software, figured out the various options for creating toolpaths in Skeinforge, and gotten to know how extruder temperature, room temperature, tool flow speed and plastic type affect the final results, I'd spent at least as much time learning how to use it as a lathe or milling machine. I had a ton of fun doing so, but it wasn't remotely plug-and-play.
Now, this is an immature technology that's getting better by the month, and maybe someday 3-d printing is going to be so easy, so flexible, and so cheap that everyone will be printing out Uzis in their basement. But in my experience, working with real-world materials requires a certain degree of training and skill, no matter how smart your tool is.
Guess I hit a nerve with my taunt. Just so you know a little about me: I can hack Python *and* use a milling machine. I can write a SQL query *and* use a tap and die.
I understand the value of computer-aided manufacturing, and I enjoy working with my 3-d printer. But because I know how to work with both bits and metal, I recognize that 3-d printing is a small improvement on existing techniques, and not a total paradigm shift.
Your comment actually demonstrates my point pretty nicely, now that I think about it. The geeky idea behind printable weapons is to use 3-d printing to hack firearms laws in the same way that digital media law has hacked copyright law. The problem is that the kinds of weapons you could print with modern 3-d printers are not restricted weapons under firearms law. It's as big a threat to gun policy as photocopying sheet music to "Octopus's Garden" is to copyright law.
Now, if 3d printing advances to the point where everybody has a machine in their garage that they can toss a few kilos of steel and brass in one end and get anything from fuel injectors to MP5s coming out the other, *then* we've got a serious threat to gun control laws. But since such a machine renders the ideas of "industry" and "labor" obsolete, the gun issue is small potatoes in comparison.
So, I would say to you: it's gotta be more than a single shot. Can you really make a repeater?
Beyond my skills. Well, I could make a pepper-box gun by drilling multiple holes in a block of metal with a separate firing pin for each, but no way I could make a semi-automatic. But I doubt you can make a workable multi-shot gun with a 3-d printer either, so it's a wash.
Nerds need to take more shop classes. Everybody on Slashdot thinks that 3-d printing represents the dawn of a new paradigm, where we can actually *make physical objects ourselves* rather than buying them at a store. Guess what? Making your own things is not some brilliant new hack, people have been doing it for centuries.
Give me a block of steel, a drill press and a.22 caliber drill, and in 20 minutes I'll make you a gun that's a hell of a lot more accurate and reuseable than anything you can print out with your RepRap. Give me a few more hours and a milling machine, and I'll make you one you wouldn't be ashamed to rob a bank with.
Hacking the physical world isn't something computer nerds just invented. It just seems new to you because you chose to take web design as a high school elective rather than metal shop.
Don't disappear, go public. If you fear people want to silence you, make silencing you pointless. Post the strange event on your Facebook, call and tell your friends, tell the police you fear for your safety, call the city paper, park your ass on a very public park bench with a sign saying "I saw X and now they want to kill me." Yes, you will look like a paranoid lunatic, but that's okay. Make it so that kidnapping or killing you won't gain the conspirators anything, and will make your crazy paranoid ravings ring true.
If the group out to get you is so big that they can silence every one of these communications, or so powerful that they don't care if your death attracts attention, you were screwed regardless. But if your enemy needs to lurk in the shadows, your best chance is to stand in the light.
We now how decades of cheap natural gas reserves with more being found all the time. That is about as long term as things get in this world.
Put this quote in your calendar so you see it again in 2020. I'm betting you'll feel pretty stupid. Fracked wells don't last nearly as long as conventional ones: their output declines exponentially with a half-life of a year or two. This exponential decline in productivity per well is currently being hidden by exponential growth in the number of wells, drilled with exponentially-increasing capital investments from clueless investors who don't realize they're getting screwed. As the wells start to run dry, so will the money needed to keep drilling; gas prices will shoot back up again, and in a decade we'll be back to square one.
Republicans will see the list of suggested topics ("biosecurity, climate change, the safety of food and water supplies, vaccination, and environmentally sustainable energy") as unfair and biased toward the Democrats' agenda. However, this says more about the Republican party's interest in science than it does about ScienceDebate.org's political bias.
Financial trading has always sat at the crossroads between capitalism and gambling. Tying a gigantic roulette wheel to our economy is obviously risky -- and has led to real national disaster on countless occasions. So why do we allow it? Because the capitalists and traders have convinced most of us that free financial markets lead to optimal financial decisionmaking, reward for innovation, and prosperity for all.
But even if we take as a given, the argument completely falls apart when we're talking about speed-of-light transactions. The time difference between sending neutrinos through the Earth rather than lightspeed signals around it is 24 milliseconds. This is far faster than any voluntary human action. Humanity does not stand to gain anything by making money move from point A to point B 24 milliseconds faster. "All praise the invisible hand of the free market! Now we'll be able to start building our new factory 24 milliseconds sooner!"
This reveals high-frequency trading for what it really is: straight up gambling. Now, I've got nothing against gambling. But when the outcomes affect the global economy and the welfare of billions, it's a problem. Especially since you can gamble on the outcome of *any* complex system, it doesn't have to be the system that feeds us all.
So here's my modest proposal. Delay all financial transactions in all markets by a random time interval of roughly 10 seconds -- negligibly short by human standards, but long and unpredictable enough to destroy high-frequency trading. Instead, encourage open, unfettered, high-frequency speculation on the value of some other complex system -- the location and timing of earthquakes, supernovas, or the weather. At the very least, this will keep the economy safe from the pointless risks of high-frequency gambling. And in the best-case scenario, in their quest to beat the competition, the traders might make some great discoveries in geology, astronomy, or meteorology.
Check out an earlier post in this thread for the Apollo 15 video, which stays focused on the landing area. You see a lot more dust kicked up, and little pieces of the LM descent stage being blown off well after the ascent stage has departed, and dust stuck onto the camera lens afterward.
You're right that gas expansion into a vacuum is a tricky thing, but while the forward front of exhaust gas will move in a straight line, that gas will be moving outward at the speed of exhaust gas molecules (hundreds or thousands of m/s): within a fraction of a second, the entire landing area will be filled with gas -- a thin temporary atmosphere made of exhaust -- and everything afterward will be ordinary fluid mechanics. You're right that the breeze *could* be too gentle to keep the flag standing -- in fact, TFA shows that it was. But my post was trying to explain why it's not obvious either way.
Why wouldn't they be standing? Because of the exhaust from the lunar module ascent stage's rocket engine. The LM blew all kinds of crap around when it took off, and kicked up dust on the surface. Here's a video of the Apollo 17 lunar liftoff, taken from the lunar rover's remote controlled camera.
If, like me, you found it unlikely that DARPA would fund something like this and let you talk about it (or at least, suspected this might be a case of hacker braggadocio), check this out:
The answer to the manned spaceflight problem is simple: don't send people, send robots. As other here have argued, robots are cheap, robots can do the same jobs astronauts would do with much less mechanical complexity, and nobody cares much if a robot is destroyed.
The Mars Pathfinder mission was an eye-opener for me. It showed that most of the tasks that people had argued required a manned mission to Mars could in fact be done via robot. More slowly and awkwardly, but who cares about speed when the mission costs are negligible and nobody's life is at risk?
But what about the role of human inspiration and aspiration? Astronauts don't just do science, they get people excited about science and exploration, and inspire kids to aim high. How can robots do that? Pathfinder showed the way there too. That mission got more public interest than any of the actual astronauts in orbit at the time. People *loved* that little robot, they anthropomorphized the crap out of it, identified with its struggles, and put their heart into its success. Part of this was its design: with big "eyes" on top of a recognizeable "head", it was definitely cute. But NASA's PR managers also encouraged people to think of it as a person, or at least a pet. More recent Mars rovers have even been given genders.
This is the way forward. You don't need actual humans when people will treat almost anything with two eyes and hands as human, given half a chance. Let's put our souls into our machines.
Those billions aren't being spent to save an astronaut's life. They're being spent to save face. Space missions that kill astronauts are politically deadly, putting NASA itself at risk, and reflect poorly on the U.S. as a whole. NASA and Congress are willing to spend tons of money to avoid that embarrassment: the astronaut's life is almost incidental.
Some here have asked whether a space program that spends so much money on safety that it can't get off the ground is a good idea. From NASA's perspective, and especially Congress's, the answer to that is an emphatic "yes".
To the extent that priorities are reflected by dollars, manned spaceflight absolutely is NASA's #1 priority. All the robotic missions, telescopes, fundamental space science, etc. add up to a tiny fraction of NASA's budget. The manned spaceflight investment is gigantic in comparison.
How is it that you learned to read in a different manner?
Practice. I read at least a book a week between the ages of 5 and 21. Now I read even more, but more online text and fewer books. I should mention that my wife reads faster than I do: for her, a 400-page novel is a couple of hours' distraction. (And don't say she's skimming rather than reading, she's not. I've quizzed her on details to make sure.)
Once upon a time, this wasn't unusual. Literacy is more than just knowing how to read, just like playing basketball is more than knowing the rules of the game.
What I posted above is a modified excerpt of a longer essay I wrote a few weeks ago. To keep things to Slashdot attention spans, I left out the paragraph where I said that video is great when it's more than just speaking to camera. If your goal is to communicate how a machine moves, or the pattern of sunlight through tree leaves, or the ironic quirk of an eyebrow, then absolutely use video. But if your goal is to communicate words, take the time to write, and write well.
And why do you think that anything worth reading is going to be read by multiple people is some kind of advantage over recorded video, or audio?
It's not. The point is that the extra time taken to write and write well is worthwhile because the time saved by reading is multiplied by many readers. If an idea were only written and read once, it'd be a wash.
Do you really think that the rate at which we consume information is any sort of limiter on how intelligent our society is?
"Intelligent", maybe maybe not. "Educated", yes. We've all got a fixed amount of time to learn things, and the faster we can do it the more we can learn, and the more time we can spend putting that knowledge to work.
Do you really think this indicates that the author is somehow contemptuous of the value of our time, or that it could be better explained through text?
Not all ideas are best explained through text. But if you choose to use words, take the time to craft them into legible text. If you don't care about communicating your ideas enough to do so, why should I care about them enough to read them?
when you write diatribes like this it sounds as if you'd like to eliminate every other form of communication.
What you call "clever traffic generation techniques" are properly called "yellow journalism". These ideas are not new, they've been around for 150 years. Ranting headlines are not a new idea for ancient media like the WSJ or NY Times: they've seen it all before, and have survived for 150 years by rejecting these unethical tactics.
I'm a liberal democrat, and I agree with some of what the Huffington Post is pushing. But what they do is not journalism.
Bear with me if this seems offtopic at first: Reading and writing are powerful not just because they store things permanently, but because they amplify the speed of communication. I can read five times faster than I can listen to someone talk. (This is one reason why video blogs, Youtube howtos, and other videos which are nothing but people talking are so annoying: it's frustrating to wait for someone to flap their mouthparts to make ideas come out, when I could get those same ideas much faster if they'd written them down.)
So reading is like a high-speed downlink to the brain. BUT, it only works if the author has taken the time to spell and use grammar properly. I can still read badly-written text, but puzzling it out slows me down, to the speed someone can talk, or worse. There's a tradeoff here: it takes a little more time for someone to write something down, and write it properly. But that pays dividends each time someone reads it, and with the exception of PhD theses, anything worth reading is read by multiple people. So if you make a video message instead of writing, or you don't take the time to write properly, what you're telling me is that your time is more valuable than mine. So don't be surprised if I'm insulted at your arrogance.
We seem to be heading toward a postliterate society. I have no problem with losing the art of writing per se: the problem is that by losing *reading*, we lose the single biggest accelerator of human thought ever invented. You've heard of the "last mile" problem: this is the "last two feet" problem. In a world where data flows through wires faster and faster, the last hop from screen to brain is getting slower and slower as we lose the art of writing well.
Now, all of this is only true if everyone reads faster than they can listen to someone talk. Sadly, that's not the case. The problems of a postliterate society are invisible to people who aren't all that literate to begin with.
Okay, it's official. Customer relations people are not human. They can't be, nobody with human emotions or personality could possibly think this was a good idea.
Nobody seems to have noticed the "best" thing about this test: it should be possible to use it on your partner. With or without their consent. So you can invite that random girl at the bar home for a drink and a swab, or secretly swab your boyfriend while he's sleeping, just in case he's lying to you about being clean.
Unethical? Yes. Unromantic? Yes. False sense of security? Yup. But potentially lifesaving? Also yes.
Could this be one of those "buy out a threatening technology and bury it" maneuvers? I don't know how Gaikai and friends pay for the rights to the games they offer, but I strongly suspect they're giving Sony and other rightsholders a lot less money than Sony would make selling the actual games to consumers. Gaikai's business model is a lot like the old video rental stores, and Sony and friends spent two decades trying to destroy those.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I don't think you're being pragmatic enough.
It sounds like you're arguing for a single-payer system with the health insurance companies out of the picture. I'd like that too: the problem is, it's politically impossible. If you abolish the way health care is paid for, you put every single person who works within that system out of a job. Everyone who works for an insurance company, everyone who works on the financial side of an HMO -- there are hundreds of thousands of these people, and they and the megacorporations they work for will do everything in power to sabotage your plan.
Now, the existence of these people is a big part of why health care costs so much, so firing some of them is good for all of us. But if you try to violently overturn their system, they will fight you to the end. Obamacare's strategy is to co-opt them, make them allies rather than opponents. They're unpleasant bedfellows, but you've got to have them in bed with you or you'll never get anywhere.
One other note:
I fear that the health insurance mandate will not stop this downward spiral, since it will be less expensive for healthy people to just pay the fine than to buy insurance. Eventually, the US government will have to intervene.
The folks who wrote the bill understand that. The fine is less than the cost of full health insurance, but it does provide enough money to provide bare-bones care for uninsured people when they do show up at the hospital with a broken limb. One way to put it: you can either choose to buy insurance, or be forcibly enrolled in a really crappy single-payer socialized medicine scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
The "making for the masses" aspect of 3-d printing is -- at least right now -- pretty overrated. I (the guy your post is replying to) spent some time this summer learning to use a 3-d printer myself. It's a great tool, and a useful addition to my toolset. But after I'd learned how to use Blender and other 3-d design software, figured out the various options for creating toolpaths in Skeinforge, and gotten to know how extruder temperature, room temperature, tool flow speed and plastic type affect the final results, I'd spent at least as much time learning how to use it as a lathe or milling machine. I had a ton of fun doing so, but it wasn't remotely plug-and-play.
Now, this is an immature technology that's getting better by the month, and maybe someday 3-d printing is going to be so easy, so flexible, and so cheap that everyone will be printing out Uzis in their basement. But in my experience, working with real-world materials requires a certain degree of training and skill, no matter how smart your tool is.
Guess I hit a nerve with my taunt. Just so you know a little about me: I can hack Python *and* use a milling machine. I can write a SQL query *and* use a tap and die.
I understand the value of computer-aided manufacturing, and I enjoy working with my 3-d printer. But because I know how to work with both bits and metal, I recognize that 3-d printing is a small improvement on existing techniques, and not a total paradigm shift.
At least, not yet.
Your comment actually demonstrates my point pretty nicely, now that I think about it. The geeky idea behind printable weapons is to use 3-d printing to hack firearms laws in the same way that digital media law has hacked copyright law. The problem is that the kinds of weapons you could print with modern 3-d printers are not restricted weapons under firearms law. It's as big a threat to gun policy as photocopying sheet music to "Octopus's Garden" is to copyright law.
Now, if 3d printing advances to the point where everybody has a machine in their garage that they can toss a few kilos of steel and brass in one end and get anything from fuel injectors to MP5s coming out the other, *then* we've got a serious threat to gun control laws. But since such a machine renders the ideas of "industry" and "labor" obsolete, the gun issue is small potatoes in comparison.
Beyond my skills. Well, I could make a pepper-box gun by drilling multiple holes in a block of metal with a separate firing pin for each, but no way I could make a semi-automatic. But I doubt you can make a workable multi-shot gun with a 3-d printer either, so it's a wash.
Nerds need to take more shop classes. Everybody on Slashdot thinks that 3-d printing represents the dawn of a new paradigm, where we can actually *make physical objects ourselves* rather than buying them at a store. Guess what? Making your own things is not some brilliant new hack, people have been doing it for centuries.
Give me a block of steel, a drill press and a .22 caliber drill, and in 20 minutes I'll make you a gun that's a hell of a lot more accurate and reuseable than anything you can print out with your RepRap. Give me a few more hours and a milling machine, and I'll make you one you wouldn't be ashamed to rob a bank with.
Hacking the physical world isn't something computer nerds just invented. It just seems new to you because you chose to take web design as a high school elective rather than metal shop.
Don't disappear, go public. If you fear people want to silence you, make silencing you pointless. Post the strange event on your Facebook, call and tell your friends, tell the police you fear for your safety, call the city paper, park your ass on a very public park bench with a sign saying "I saw X and now they want to kill me." Yes, you will look like a paranoid lunatic, but that's okay. Make it so that kidnapping or killing you won't gain the conspirators anything, and will make your crazy paranoid ravings ring true.
If the group out to get you is so big that they can silence every one of these communications, or so powerful that they don't care if your death attracts attention, you were screwed regardless. But if your enemy needs to lurk in the shadows, your best chance is to stand in the light.
Put this quote in your calendar so you see it again in 2020. I'm betting you'll feel pretty stupid. Fracked wells don't last nearly as long as conventional ones: their output declines exponentially with a half-life of a year or two. This exponential decline in productivity per well is currently being hidden by exponential growth in the number of wells, drilled with exponentially-increasing capital investments from clueless investors who don't realize they're getting screwed. As the wells start to run dry, so will the money needed to keep drilling; gas prices will shoot back up again, and in a decade we'll be back to square one.
Republicans will see the list of suggested topics ("biosecurity, climate change, the safety of food and water supplies, vaccination, and environmentally sustainable energy") as unfair and biased toward the Democrats' agenda. However, this says more about the Republican party's interest in science than it does about ScienceDebate.org's political bias.
Financial trading has always sat at the crossroads between capitalism and gambling. Tying a gigantic roulette wheel to our economy is obviously risky -- and has led to real national disaster on countless occasions. So why do we allow it? Because the capitalists and traders have convinced most of us that free financial markets lead to optimal financial decisionmaking, reward for innovation, and prosperity for all.
But even if we take as a given, the argument completely falls apart when we're talking about speed-of-light transactions. The time difference between sending neutrinos through the Earth rather than lightspeed signals around it is 24 milliseconds. This is far faster than any voluntary human action. Humanity does not stand to gain anything by making money move from point A to point B 24 milliseconds faster. "All praise the invisible hand of the free market! Now we'll be able to start building our new factory 24 milliseconds sooner!"
This reveals high-frequency trading for what it really is: straight up gambling. Now, I've got nothing against gambling. But when the outcomes affect the global economy and the welfare of billions, it's a problem. Especially since you can gamble on the outcome of *any* complex system, it doesn't have to be the system that feeds us all.
So here's my modest proposal. Delay all financial transactions in all markets by a random time interval of roughly 10 seconds -- negligibly short by human standards, but long and unpredictable enough to destroy high-frequency trading. Instead, encourage open, unfettered, high-frequency speculation on the value of some other complex system -- the location and timing of earthquakes, supernovas, or the weather. At the very least, this will keep the economy safe from the pointless risks of high-frequency gambling. And in the best-case scenario, in their quest to beat the competition, the traders might make some great discoveries in geology, astronomy, or meteorology.
Thank you! That's the video I was looking for for my earlier post, but couldn't find.
Check out an earlier post in this thread for the Apollo 15 video, which stays focused on the landing area. You see a lot more dust kicked up, and little pieces of the LM descent stage being blown off well after the ascent stage has departed, and dust stuck onto the camera lens afterward.
You're right that gas expansion into a vacuum is a tricky thing, but while the forward front of exhaust gas will move in a straight line, that gas will be moving outward at the speed of exhaust gas molecules (hundreds or thousands of m/s): within a fraction of a second, the entire landing area will be filled with gas -- a thin temporary atmosphere made of exhaust -- and everything afterward will be ordinary fluid mechanics. You're right that the breeze *could* be too gentle to keep the flag standing -- in fact, TFA shows that it was. But my post was trying to explain why it's not obvious either way.
Why wouldn't they be standing? Because of the exhaust from the lunar module ascent stage's rocket engine. The LM blew all kinds of crap around when it took off, and kicked up dust on the surface. Here's a video of the Apollo 17 lunar liftoff, taken from the lunar rover's remote controlled camera.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iziumcklDbM
If, like me, you found it unlikely that DARPA would fund something like this and let you talk about it (or at least, suspected this might be a case of hacker braggadocio), check this out:
http://www.cft.usma.edu/currentProjects.htm
The answer to the manned spaceflight problem is simple: don't send people, send robots. As other here have argued, robots are cheap, robots can do the same jobs astronauts would do with much less mechanical complexity, and nobody cares much if a robot is destroyed.
The Mars Pathfinder mission was an eye-opener for me. It showed that most of the tasks that people had argued required a manned mission to Mars could in fact be done via robot. More slowly and awkwardly, but who cares about speed when the mission costs are negligible and nobody's life is at risk?
But what about the role of human inspiration and aspiration? Astronauts don't just do science, they get people excited about science and exploration, and inspire kids to aim high. How can robots do that? Pathfinder showed the way there too. That mission got more public interest than any of the actual astronauts in orbit at the time. People *loved* that little robot, they anthropomorphized the crap out of it, identified with its struggles, and put their heart into its success. Part of this was its design: with big "eyes" on top of a recognizeable "head", it was definitely cute. But NASA's PR managers also encouraged people to think of it as a person, or at least a pet. More recent Mars rovers have even been given genders.
This is the way forward. You don't need actual humans when people will treat almost anything with two eyes and hands as human, given half a chance. Let's put our souls into our machines.
Those billions aren't being spent to save an astronaut's life. They're being spent to save face. Space missions that kill astronauts are politically deadly, putting NASA itself at risk, and reflect poorly on the U.S. as a whole. NASA and Congress are willing to spend tons of money to avoid that embarrassment: the astronaut's life is almost incidental.
Some here have asked whether a space program that spends so much money on safety that it can't get off the ground is a good idea. From NASA's perspective, and especially Congress's, the answer to that is an emphatic "yes".
To the extent that priorities are reflected by dollars, manned spaceflight absolutely is NASA's #1 priority. All the robotic missions, telescopes, fundamental space science, etc. add up to a tiny fraction of NASA's budget. The manned spaceflight investment is gigantic in comparison.
Practice. I read at least a book a week between the ages of 5 and 21. Now I read even more, but more online text and fewer books. I should mention that my wife reads faster than I do: for her, a 400-page novel is a couple of hours' distraction. (And don't say she's skimming rather than reading, she's not. I've quizzed her on details to make sure.)
Once upon a time, this wasn't unusual. Literacy is more than just knowing how to read, just like playing basketball is more than knowing the rules of the game.
What I posted above is a modified excerpt of a longer essay I wrote a few weeks ago. To keep things to Slashdot attention spans, I left out the paragraph where I said that video is great when it's more than just speaking to camera. If your goal is to communicate how a machine moves, or the pattern of sunlight through tree leaves, or the ironic quirk of an eyebrow, then absolutely use video. But if your goal is to communicate words, take the time to write, and write well.
It's not. The point is that the extra time taken to write and write well is worthwhile because the time saved by reading is multiplied by many readers. If an idea were only written and read once, it'd be a wash.
"Intelligent", maybe maybe not. "Educated", yes. We've all got a fixed amount of time to learn things, and the faster we can do it the more we can learn, and the more time we can spend putting that knowledge to work.
Not all ideas are best explained through text. But if you choose to use words, take the time to craft them into legible text. If you don't care about communicating your ideas enough to do so, why should I care about them enough to read them?
You're reading far more than what I've written.
What you call "clever traffic generation techniques" are properly called "yellow journalism". These ideas are not new, they've been around for 150 years. Ranting headlines are not a new idea for ancient media like the WSJ or NY Times: they've seen it all before, and have survived for 150 years by rejecting these unethical tactics.
I'm a liberal democrat, and I agree with some of what the Huffington Post is pushing. But what they do is not journalism.
Bear with me if this seems offtopic at first: Reading and writing are powerful not just because they store things permanently, but because they amplify the speed of communication. I can read five times faster than I can listen to someone talk. (This is one reason why video blogs, Youtube howtos, and other videos which are nothing but people talking are so annoying: it's frustrating to wait for someone to flap their mouthparts to make ideas come out, when I could get those same ideas much faster if they'd written them down.)
So reading is like a high-speed downlink to the brain. BUT, it only works if the author has taken the time to spell and use grammar properly. I can still read badly-written text, but puzzling it out slows me down, to the speed someone can talk, or worse. There's a tradeoff here: it takes a little more time for someone to write something down, and write it properly. But that pays dividends each time someone reads it, and with the exception of PhD theses, anything worth reading is read by multiple people. So if you make a video message instead of writing, or you don't take the time to write properly, what you're telling me is that your time is more valuable than mine. So don't be surprised if I'm insulted at your arrogance.
We seem to be heading toward a postliterate society. I have no problem with losing the art of writing per se: the problem is that by losing *reading*, we lose the single biggest accelerator of human thought ever invented. You've heard of the "last mile" problem: this is the "last two feet" problem. In a world where data flows through wires faster and faster, the last hop from screen to brain is getting slower and slower as we lose the art of writing well.
Now, all of this is only true if everyone reads faster than they can listen to someone talk. Sadly, that's not the case. The problems of a postliterate society are invisible to people who aren't all that literate to begin with.
Okay, it's official. Customer relations people are not human. They can't be, nobody with human emotions or personality could possibly think this was a good idea.
Nobody seems to have noticed the "best" thing about this test: it should be possible to use it on your partner. With or without their consent. So you can invite that random girl at the bar home for a drink and a swab, or secretly swab your boyfriend while he's sleeping, just in case he's lying to you about being clean.
Unethical? Yes. Unromantic? Yes. False sense of security? Yup. But potentially lifesaving? Also yes.
Could this be one of those "buy out a threatening technology and bury it" maneuvers? I don't know how Gaikai and friends pay for the rights to the games they offer, but I strongly suspect they're giving Sony and other rightsholders a lot less money than Sony would make selling the actual games to consumers. Gaikai's business model is a lot like the old video rental stores, and Sony and friends spent two decades trying to destroy those.
"Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat!"
"But that trick never works!"
"This time for sure!"
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I don't think you're being pragmatic enough.
It sounds like you're arguing for a single-payer system with the health insurance companies out of the picture. I'd like that too: the problem is, it's politically impossible. If you abolish the way health care is paid for, you put every single person who works within that system out of a job. Everyone who works for an insurance company, everyone who works on the financial side of an HMO -- there are hundreds of thousands of these people, and they and the megacorporations they work for will do everything in power to sabotage your plan.
Now, the existence of these people is a big part of why health care costs so much, so firing some of them is good for all of us. But if you try to violently overturn their system, they will fight you to the end. Obamacare's strategy is to co-opt them, make them allies rather than opponents. They're unpleasant bedfellows, but you've got to have them in bed with you or you'll never get anywhere.
One other note:
The folks who wrote the bill understand that. The fine is less than the cost of full health insurance, but it does provide enough money to provide bare-bones care for uninsured people when they do show up at the hospital with a broken limb. One way to put it: you can either choose to buy insurance, or be forcibly enrolled in a really crappy single-payer socialized medicine scheme.