I was about to post somthing like "Nice pod coffee machine you have there, shame if something happened to it." But really the reason that they are something I'd never buy, is that its totally dependant on the coffee pods being made by the manufacturer. I have a simple cafetiere and I can have whatever coffee I want, low maintainance, and I know I'll always be able to use it. Future proofing by going low tech..
Not totally dependent on it at all. You *can* use your own coffee in a pod machine -- every brand of pod machine I've ever purchased came with an adapter to allow the use of your own coffee, including my decade-old Keurig Platinum. I've been hosting bi-weekly cuppings at a local coffee market for three years, comparing various pod machines with a cafetiere (french press, for the non-cognoscenti) and the results are pretty unequivocal - only one person has ever correctly differentiated the brew processes, and that person was a ringer, a Level 2 master roaster from the Roasters Guild.:)
...I'm not real certain that information gleaned from an intelligence operative unprofessional enough to us a gmail account in the clear is really worth the effort.
...just an augmentation. And it neatly avoids the uncanny valley by not even remotely resembling our upright, bipedal, bi-laterally symmetric physiognomy. My friend owns three bars here in the old pueblo -- a college-centric meat market within stumbling distance of the UofA campus, a Cheers-type bar&grill in one of the most affluent residential districts in the city, and a trendy techno bar on 4th Avenue, which is Tucson's own Haight-Ashbury. The reception this system would get would largely depend on how it is wrapped for the patrons at each of these uniquely distinctive venues. I could see it being tucked away out of sight at the bar&grill, delivering the drinks to a mini-skirted waitress for the last mile delivery to the patron. Patrons at the bar&grill go there for (good!) food and drink, but also to schmooze with wealthy UofA alumni who have returned to their college town to dabble in local university and city politics. They will take passing notice of the pretty girl delivering their cocktails, but would not be interested in the slightest about the details of the guy (or robot) mixing their drinks. Ditto the meat market: patrons at the meat market are there to score, and my friend deliberately hires attractive female servers exclusively from the local topless clubs' labor pool to set the right kind of ambiance. It probably wouldn't have to be out of sight there, just out of harm's way. But it would probably pay-off in spades at the techno bar. Every techno trend on the planet eventually makes its way through a college town, and this system would be de rigueur, along with the live dub-step acts and wall-sized projection screens full of anime and machinima.
I think this system could have a beneficial ROI in these three diverse venues, so it could probably be beneficial in many others, as long as the proprietor incorporates it in a way that doesn't annoy his regular patrons or scare off potential ones.
You seem to think that making the world a better, cleaner place to live in is some kind of goal for our species. I'm trying not to call you a fuckwit for believing this, but the temptation is damn near irresistible. So, here's a newsflash for you, my fuckwit friend -- natural selection doesn't work that way. You live long enough to reproduce, or your genes die with you. Healthcare is expensive and inefficient right now because we have to use a risk model to fund it. Remove or mitigate the risk, and we might be able to use a different funding model, one that might be (and probably will be) less expensive and inefficient. That's why non-fuckwits invest heavily in genetic research and strenuously resist the idea that our funding model must also cover people with pre-existing conditions. Eventually, we are going to know exactly who is going to become sick with what disease by administering a cheap DNA test. We can already do this right now for a number of diseases, and the list of predictable diseases keeps getting longer, thanks to the enlightened self-interest of the individuals and corporations that fund this kind of research. I sure as fuck don't want to be on the hook for healthcare for someone that I know in advance is going to be a burden on the healthcare system. If you were rational, you wouldn't want to be on that hook, either. Non-fuckwits would focus on removing those diseases from the population, not redistributing wealth to accommodate them. It is not rational to redistribute your wealth in a manner that does not benefit you or your heirs -- only a fuckwit would think otherwise. In spite of highly entertaining conjectures to the contrary, genes are not altruistic. Natural selection is a bitch, dude, but it's the only game in town, so you'd better learn to be a player. Not that a fuckwit like you is capable of learning, though.
We can solve those traveling salesman problems that have been plaguing our society for hundreds of years!
I realize you're joking, but they actually are important problems to solve. If you have 10,000 solder points, and you need your equipment to solder as fast as possible, what route do you take?
Solving this type of real world problem with a mathematically perfect solution usually isn't necessary. A far simpler and quicker statistical method that produces a solution that is only 99.99% of optimal is generally more than adequate. Same applies to other areas of manufacturing such as quality assurance, in other disciplines such as physical layer communications systems, and even in mathematics such as prime generation.
It always comes down to how perfect the solution actually needs to be, and how easy it is to get close to or reach that perfect solution.
In many cases, practicality does trump elegance. But in many other cases, it does not. For a mathematician, some problems -- like the TSP -- are interesting precisely because we don't know (P=NP?) if the only practical approach we have for solving them is inelegant brute force. Factorization of large integers is another one of those interesting problems (you alluded to it as "prime generation.") The existence of an elegant solution to the factorization problem would considerably alter how we conduct secure transactions online, because the security model we use right now depends on the fact that, in the absence of an elegant solution to the factorization problem, it's harder for computers to divide than multiply. So, no, it doesn't always come down to how perfect the solution needs to be; rather, it comes down to how much effort the solution requires. Quantum computers offer the tantalizing prospect that all steps and decisions in a brute force approach to factorization can be collapsed to a single computational step, rendering the existing divide/multiply assymmetry moot.
So if one has any sort of ethical dilemma with harvesting stem cells from embryos under the notion that such willful destruction of embryos is equivalent to premeditated homicide, this particular technique shouldn't make those people breathe any easier, and in fact, may be cause for them to scream even more outrage at the notion that, to use words they might throw around, "they are creating even more people to deliberately murder".
Well, biologically, yes, a clone could be identical to an embryo, but biological definitions aren't the issue, are they? Leaving aside for the moment the simple fact that, unlike in the case of a human embryo, harvesting stem cells from a clone doesn't result in the destruction of the cell donor, you seem to be ignoring the social, cultural, and political definitions of a person that create the ethical dilemmas you are alluding to. Personhood is an extremely arbitrary and shifting concept, with thousands of years of social, cultural, and legal criteria that are still being refined today. In a bucket, the definition of a person is whatever the culture wants it to be. In the US, for example, it wasn't so long ago that a slave was defined as being 3/5 of a person, and women had no legal status at all, except relative to a spouse, or in the absence of a spouse, male members of her immediate family. Killing a slave was not homicide, because slaves were property, not people, and women couldn't vote or own property in their own name. Case in point, since you brought it up: as a result of Roe V. Wade, human embryos can and are being destroyed on a daily basis without triggering a homicide investigation -- until that definition of personhood is changed, pro-lifers can weep and gnash their teeth all they like. The social, legal, and cultural status of a human clone will have to be established via social, cultural, and legal precedent. Until that happens, debating the ethics or morality of harvesting stem cells from human clones is kinda pointless. Any controversy surrounding the issue will be generated for its entertainment value alone.
A scenario is a three-player instance that doesn't require the dps-healz-tank triad that is necessary to successfully complete a five-player instance at level. Scenarios have less content, but typically can take more time to complete (more on that below.) They drop gear with iLevels comparable to the five-player instances. Scenarios can easily be done with any combination of classes, and a competently played class with a tanking pet (like a 'lock or hunter) or good self-heals (again 'lock, or a paladin) can solo them if you get stuck with a couple of idiots.
Scenarios were introduced in MoP to explicitly address the asymmetric waiting times for a random dungeon group in the looking-for-group dungeon finder. If you haven't played since BC, you might not have experienced the looking-for-group party finder that Blizz introduced in WotLK. Basically, you queue up your toon in LFG, and when LFG has 3 dps, a tank, and a healer, you are instantly teleported to the dungeon. The problem was (and still is) that there are way more dps on a given server than tanks or healers. In MoP on my server, Garona, typical LFG wait times for my 'lock and hunter are around fifteen minutes, but for my pally healer and DK tank the wait time is on the order of fifteen seconds. To make matters worse, you are penalized with a debuff preventing you from queueing up for any instance for 30 minutes if you drop group for any reason before killing at least one boss -- you are fucked as a dps if you get saddled with an incompetent tank or healer. It was the same in WotLK and Cata.
As you might suspect, the LFG system is easily gamed by hybrid classes. Players with hybrid classes that could off-spec as tanks or heals would queue up in their off-spec to get into LFG faster, even if they didn't actually *know* how to play a tank or healer. Frost DK's and boomkins were notorious for speccing into blood and resto just to shorten their LFG queue times. I learned pretty quickly to drop group and take the 30 minute debuff if there was a DK tank or resto druid healer in the group. It was almost always better than the wipefest that was certain to ensue otherwise.
Scenarios are timer-driven, though, which sucks for air. Instead of trash-trash-boss rinse-and-repeat like in a five-player, you have four stages that are basically waves of light-hitting trash mobs followed by a mini-boss while you do gimmicky Nintendo-like crap until the timer runs out for the current stage. A random group of experienced players can blow through MoP five-player instances much quicker than the three-player instances, because they aren't constrained by an arbitrary timer, but only by how fast the dps can knock down the trash to get to the boss. Presently, you can reach your valor point cap for the week in an hour or two just by running MoP five-player instances with a competent group of players. That is decidedly not the case if you are trying to reach your cap via the scenarios. If it weren't for the timer mechanic, scenarios would be a win-win for me.
Indeed. But streaming sports is available right now, if only for a subset of sports. I get all the streaming sports I need from Bein Sports, which for me amounts to the MotoGP and World Superbike races. They stream it from their site on a delay for free, or offer it up live for a modest fee. It's only a matter of time before an American entrepreneur puts together a similar service and inks a deal with the US-based sports-entertainment complex. Imagine being able to watch any game anywhere, anytime, on the device of your choice, free of commercial interruption. The non-sports entertainment complex was entrenched for decades, but it is all but gone, thanks to Netflix- and Hulu-like streamers. If Aereo is successful in the defense of their business model, they will be the first nail in the coffin, and Google is going to provide the rest. Google' acquisition of youtube several years ago and their recent announcement of subscription-based channels is, realistically, the death-knell for broadcast content on the planet.
Case in point: "Business plans" for internet service. I don't know about where you live, but I can tell you: the local telco will not provide "residential" $20/mo DSL service to "commercial" phone lines.
Well, yes they will, if you live in the US. One of the legacies of the Bell break-up thirty years ago was the establishment of a two-tiered tariff structure for telephone service. The regulation was very clear on this. If the line terminated at an address in a residentially-zoned area, the phone company that serviced that area had to charge the residential tariff. If it terminated in a commecially-zoned area, the phone company could charge the commerical tariff, which was 3X as large as the residential one. The location drove the tariff, not the class of consumer. It was for that reason that the dial-in servers for the ISP we started here in Tucson in 1995 were located in the garage of a residential house we rented in a quiet neighborhood. The tech support staff could live in the house and be available 24/7, and we avoided $28/mo/line on 30 lines, paying only $14/mo/line instead of $42. The phone company, US West, pitched a bitch but that was all they could do. Well, they did drag their heels for nearly a month and did try to charge us $12k to drag copper less than a hundred meters from their loop to our POP, allowing our rival to get online ahead of us. We were the second ISP to go online in Tucson by exactly 30 days as a result of their gamesmanship. When we realized they were just being assholes, we switched to MCI/Sprint, who charged us a token fee (around $200 IRRC) to drag copper nearly a klick from their loop, and got it done in two days.
Thanks for the response, though I think I should be more clear in what I was responding to in your original post. In your response to my post, I hear truth in what you are saying; humans indeed internalize the patterns they perceive in their environment that in turn act as checks and balances on their future behaviors. No argument there. Indeed, self-awareness -- the ability of an organism to model the environment and then insert itself into the model to better predict the value of a given survival strategy -- confers a decided competitive advantage over organisms lacking that level of cognitive complexity. Humans can and do evaluate the potential risks and rewards of a given strategy. Throw cooperative behavior (made possible by the ability to communicate with other members of the species) into the mix of potential strategies available, as you rightly do, and the ability to adapt at the group level becomes possible. The issue for me in your original post was your explicit assertion that there was something wrong with the current cultural context, not that it wouldn't lead to different survival strategies. I really don't disagree with anything you asserted, you made a well-reasoned argument and I enjoyed reading it. Rather, my heartburn was in the implication in one of those assertions that there exists some standard other than survival by which those alternative strategies can be judged. To wit: the assertion that our culture is "profoundly ill" implies that there is a privileged state that is non-ill. Unless you can provide evidence for this privileged state, I have to remain skeptical of its existence. The idea that there is some way, other than survival, to base a judgment about the viability of a strategy, be it individual or collective, is a non-starter for me. Your well-reasoned argument just became a theology at that point, and while remaining highly entertaining, as most theologies are, it thus lost some of its rigor for me.
Ok, just a little pin prick, there'll be no more aarrrrrg, but you may feel a little sick. That's why, right there. Try not to attribute purpose and direction to anything that a society/culture does. That kind of teleological reasoning is flawed; cultures don't move with purpose towards any kind of goal, any more than species evolve towards some perfect form. Natural selection just doesn't work that way. Culture (I use culture interchangeably with society) i.e., the heterogeneous amalgamation of memes that we label as culture, simply adapts to the prevalent context and survives into the next generation, or it fails to adapt and extincts itself. Even a shallow examination of our species cultural diversity strongly suggests that there are no perfect strategies for cultural survival -- there are only things that sometimes work, but most of the time don't. An ephor from Leonidas' Sparta might recognize a Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh as a kindred spirit, but they wouldn't understand why Beck's and Limbaugh's tactics are successful, because modern American demagogues emerged from a different cultural context than he and his fellow Spartan demagogues did. No amount of Tylenol on the planet can numb me to the existential distress that lunatics like Beck and Limbaugh engender in me when they are trolling their user base. However, Tylenol and it's opioid-laced variants *will* keep me going for the show. C'mon, it's time to go.
and old guys love pinball. We grew up with it. I'm 66, and I've got 14 machines, a whole room full, all digital. Fun to play, fun to maintain. My kids love 'em too, but they prefer their MMO's.
yep. I'm half a generation behind you, but I do have fond memories (late Carter administration through early Reagan) of pwning the Charlie's Angels pinball machine in Louie's Lower Level in the basement of the Student Union at the University of Arizona. Slapped my quarter down in the line of quarters over the plunger and studied math until it was my turn. Prior to that (tail end of LBJ through Nixon and Ford) it was Spanky's Pinball Parlor at the strip mall two blocks from my house, where we would ditch jr hi to share cigarettes with older girls on the delivery dock of the El Rancho supermarket that anchored the mall, while we waited for an opening on our favorite table. There was a military recruiter at the far end of the mall next to a barbershop; the Marine Corps and Air Force guys would show up with a couple rolls of quarters and a seemingly endless supply of cigarettes (my 3-packs-a-day habit started at Spanky's) and would happily share both with the older teens and even us tweens. Spanky's died in the 80s, probably for the reasons other posters have postulated -- the rise of the home console. I joined the AF right after college, and it was the rare BOQ that didn't have a couple of pinball machines in the dayroom, right next to the vending machines stocked with beer instead of Coke. The enlisted guys had tables in their clubs; sadly the officers didn't -- just pool for us.
Hmmm. thanks for the stroll down memory lane. I prefer MMOs now myself, especially WoW. But still, pinball was a great way to waste time and meet girls. I do miss it.
It doesn't matter, you can't punch someone just for being annoying. That kind of thing can land you in jail.
A similar situation people are more familiar with is shooting an intruder. Just because he broke into your house doesn't mean you can shoot him. Just because he's filming you doesn't mean you can punch him.
lol. break in to my house, please. if I catch you, you will be dead. I *might* be charged with manslaughter, but you'll still be dead. I *might* have to pay a lawyer to make sure that the DA understands that uninvited guests are not entitled to the protection of the law, but you'll still be dead. I *might* face public scrutiny from the anti-gun folks, and have my name dragged around by them for awhile, but you'll still be dead. It might be inconvenient, expensive, and somewhat embarrassing for me to shoot you, but I wouldn't hesitate in the slightest.
Yet, out of the Apollo days, so many of the astronauts wrote very compelling books about their experiences. Lovell, Aldrin, Cernan, and others.
I suspect space tourism is not as great as its cracked up to be, otherwise we'd be hearing from those who went how awesome it was.
Well, yeah, but those guys had spent the better part of their lives training and preparing for those missions. They were hardcore fighter jocks long before they became astronauts, and fighter jock is a way of life, one that happened to mesh with the requirements that President Eisenhower set down for astronauts. Going into space was was the capstone of their existence, and thus worthy of a book or two to describe the experience. Space tourists like Diamandis and the others, on the other hand, were exceedingly wealthy individuals who purchased the opportunity to go into space, in the same way that they would purchase a fast car or an attractive spouse. They would be no more motivated to write about going into space than they would about any of their other extravagant purchases.
Wasn't all of this in "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" by Asimov?
heh...glad I'm not the only one who made that connection. That was a specific carbon compound, IIRC, that dissolved 1.12 seconds before water hit it, and Asimov's clever scientists and engineers figured out how to power a stardrive with it. Wonder what would happen if engineers figured out how to move energy into this time cube and then extract it later on. Might be a shipstone in the making...:) (I like Asimov a lot, but Heinlein is a better story teller.)
No, the problem pretty much is guns. There are moregunsthancitizens in the US; it's the fucking supply of guns and the easy access to them that is the problem, not the culture that glorifies them. I can buy a gun legally 24/7 in my state without ever disclosing my identity to the seller, and pretty soon I'll be able to print a durable, functional version of my beloved Mac 10. Until the gun-show and private-sale loopholes in gun laws are closed, and 3D-printing gets the draconian regulation it needs, easy access to guns is what you need to be worrying about. The existing supply of guns in the US is enough to meet any foreseeable demand for them in our violence-saturated culture, even if Glock, Beretta, Sig, and S&W go out of business tomorrow.
Why is it taking Virgin Galactic so long for development? Is it a financing or technical issue?
SpaceX was founded in 2002 and is already making re-supply missions to the ISS. Granted that's not quite the same as human spaceflight but it seems like there's a lot faster advancement occurring at SpaceX than at Virgin Galactic.
They are approaching it from a cost-is-everything perspective, instead of an orbit-is-everything perspective. The SpaceX supply missions run at least $20,000 per orbited kilo. For a person to buy a ticket, even if they were treated as cargo, would cost in the $1.5M range. For Virgin Galactic to say that they will get a human up and down (safely) for around 1/10th that price, requires approaching the problem a lot differently (for example, a multi vehicle setup).
For Virgin, I don't think it's a financing or technical issue, because the purpose of Virgin Galactic is marketing for the Virgin brand, not producing a fleet of passenger-carrying spaceships. It puts Branson's brand in front of geeks, and geeks are a legitimate market demographic who can be manipulated by marketing propaganda just like any other market demographic. After all, smart geeks like to think they are investing their money in smart, geeky ways. As long as Branson keeps up the appearance of creating that fleet, he wins -- geeks will be able to cite Virgin Galactic in defense of the presence of any Branson-tainted investment in their portfolio, even if Virgin Galactic never puts another single human in space.
For SpaceX, cost-is-everything is indeed one driving factor, but getting payload tariffs as low a possible is a means to an end, not the end itself. Unlike Branson, Musk is a neo-industrialist who is deliberately and successfully following in the footsteps of Harriman, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Rockefeller. He is using technology to create a self-financing infrastructure that will enable the (lucrative, he expects) exploitation of off-planet resources, in almost the exact same way his predecessors used technology 125 years ago to create the infrastructure necessary to exploit terrestrial resources (and along the way created the social, political, and economic system that put America at the top of the industrial food-chain for nearly a century.) Musk's game plan is thus materially little different than that of any robber baron from the late 19th century. It remains to be seen whether or not history will repeat itself -- I haven't heard any manifest-destiny claims being issued from Musk's PR department yet, but I imagine it's only a matter of time, if he sticks to his current plan.
Meanwhile, in the United States... research and development cut. NASA budget shrunk. Science and engineering degrees from new graduates at all time lows. And at least one state (Tennessee) has recently tried to pass a law to make our educational system an actual Hunger Games by witholding food assistance from poor families with students who do poorly on state-administered exams.
Thank you, Japan, for investing in us... because we sure as hell aren't.
Given that wealth in the US flows upwards, not downwards or even laterally, smart kids become lawyers, doctors, and hedge fund managers, not engineers or scientists, because smart kids know you have to go where the money is if you want to be wealthy. Certainly, wealthy people want innovative new products, but their demand for new technology and new knowledge about the universe is not nearly as constant (nor as profitable) as their demand for competent legal, medical, and financial services.
You are being sarcastic in your gratitude towards Japan, but I wonder if you realize just how much Japan actually has been investing in the US? By conceding a US military victory in WW II, Japan was able to survive as a nation, and focus it's still considerable national power on a different goal -- becoming a dominant force in the east-Asian co-prosperity sphere. Now, nearly seventy years down the road, Japan has achieved that goal, largely by investing in US assets. Japan actually owns nearly half of the $11T US foreign debt, just slightly behind China, their closest economic rival in the sphere, who owns almost exactly half of it. Japan has pretty much achieved its goal by investing in US assets on a large scale for a long, long time. $2B for a wind farm is not even pocket change in that context.
Well, foam is pretty much just air, so why not use just air, then? And that is exactly what companies like Alpinestars and Dainese have been producing for a while now for professional motorcycle racers -- air bag suits. When Carlos Checa clipped Marco Melandri last month in the opening race of the 2013 World Superbike season, they were both wearing air bag suits. Checa wears one from Alpinestars, and Melandri wears one from Dainese. Both companies have transferred their track-developed air bag technology to their street lines, so its available to the general public. Like you, I'd love thinner and lighter armor in my leathers, and air bags seem to address the flexibility and mass issues that pro riders (and amateur canyon carvers like me) care about. The key is realizing that you need armor only if you come off your bike. The real win with air bag technology is that it is deployable on demand, which means it is *way* easier for the suit safety engineers to work around the flexibility issues, because flexibility stops being an issue when you are not in control of the bike anymore. And as far as lightness goes -- a small cylinder of compressed nitrogen, the flexible bladders stitched into the suit at all impact points, and the multi-axis accelerometer to trigger it all masses about as much as a single CE-rated kevlar-laced knee slider.
Dude, I'll see your PL 112-95 and raise you HR 658.:) Make sure you check out section 332. This bill has already passed, btw -- it's the law of the land. The FAA has until 2015 to come up with rules to integrate civil drone use into US airspace. Until the FAA does that and publishes them, the commercial use of drones can't be characterized as illegal or legal. But that's okay, when it comes to liability torts -- liability can be established independently of the legality of the act that caused the damage. It doesn't matter if the driver that ran over your roses had a license or not -- he still ran over your roses and you can litigate them for compensation.
...and Hickson nailed it in one. The motion picture industry and the recording industry learned the hard way what happens when you lose control of the distribution channel. The RIAA and the MPAA are just ways of doing damage control until the those industries can get back into control of the distribution channel. As Hickson noted, the publishing industry learned from the recording and entertainment industry's mistakes -- it is embracing digital delivery via the net without surrendering control of the distribution channel by insisting on DRM in their content and requiring only DRM'd devices at the consumer end of the channel. The publishing industry is well on the way to making dead-tree fiction and non-fiction -- well, fictional, if you'll forgive the word play. That's what DRM is all about -- helping content providers maintain control of the distribution channel from end to end.
The doctrine of first sale is a limitation to copyright, in that it holds that the copyright owner's right to monetize a copy of the work ends with the first sale of the copy. For what it is worth, with the sole exception of the US, the doctrine of first sale is not recognized by any major nation on the planet Basically, what the first sale doctrine means is that US companies end up facing competition from their own products via the resale market, as the continued existence of used car lots, used bookstores, and used record, tape, and CD stores in the US amply attest. Those resales are protected under the doctrine of first sale. In my opinion, this SCOTUS decision means that book publishers in the US now have one more incentive to stop selling dead tree books, which can legally be transferred for monetary gain by a non-copyright owner under the first sale doctrine, and switch over to renting digital ones, which would not be protected under first sale doctrine. Thus, this affirmation of the first sale doctrine by the highest court in the land is probably not a good thing for people in the US who want to own the books that they are paying for, because publishers are just going to stop publishing books that can be transferred for monetary gain without their permission.
According to the EFF, Google has removed Adblock plus from the Google Play, citing that it violates Google's terms and conditions that stipulate that apps will not interfere with any other app on the store. This only affects android so far, but I imagine now that Google has decided that content blocking is a bad thing, I would imagine that the chrome and firefox extensions will follow. And, sadly, it's probably only a matter of time before Google turn their considerable talents to making sure that any method will fail. I'm not interested in starting a flame war here; I'm just pointing out that when the pre-eminent search engine on the planet weighs in on content blocking in such a heavy-handed way, it can't bode well for any of us.
Re:A Jesuit Pope -- this could be very interesting
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What? You are assuming science and religion are the same kinds of things.
Not exactly. I'm assuming "the belief that science can describe an objective, external world" and "the belief that an objective, external world exists at all" are the same kind of "the belief that God exist".
True, science is a method to study the external world; but you can also see religion as a method to study emotions and human relations. You can use religion to make assertions about reality in the same way that you can use science to make moral judgements - which is, by stretching the method outside of their area of validity.
Being beliefs, neither can be proven nor disproven merely by logic alone; beliefs are ultimately based on emotion, not reason. In that level, yes, they're the same kind of thing. I may believe that science is a better method to learn about existence, and I may even believe that it's incompatible with religion, but I can't prove it scientifically; that would be an infinite recursion.
Scientists make no such ontological claims about an objective, external world. Science is a methodology, and methodologies can't make a claim about anything. Science is just a way -- a methodology -- to make a map of the territory; it is neither the map nor the territory. Only the map can make any claim at all about anything. Scientists can and do claim their maps correspond to reality, but "belief" in the map is a non-starter for scientists, because the map is going to have to change to accommodate observations that conflict with the territory. Paradigm shifts in science happen all the time because of those conflicting observations. Aristotelian cosmology gave way to Copernican cosmology, and the physics of Newton gave way to the physics of Einstein. I think you can see why this makes science fundamentally different from religion. Paradigm shifts in religion just don't happen, largely because the religions themselves forbid it, dogmatically asserting things like "heresy" and "blasphemy" when their maps are challenged by some competing paradigm.
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I was about to post somthing like "Nice pod coffee machine you have there, shame if something happened to it." But really the reason that they are something I'd never buy, is that its totally dependant on the coffee pods being made by the manufacturer. I have a simple cafetiere and I can have whatever coffee I want, low maintainance, and I know I'll always be able to use it. Future proofing by going low tech..
Not totally dependent on it at all. You *can* use your own coffee in a pod machine -- every brand of pod machine I've ever purchased came with an adapter to allow the use of your own coffee, including my decade-old Keurig Platinum. I've been hosting bi-weekly cuppings at a local coffee market for three years, comparing various pod machines with a cafetiere (french press, for the non-cognoscenti) and the results are pretty unequivocal - only one person has ever correctly differentiated the brew processes, and that person was a ringer, a Level 2 master roaster from the Roasters Guild. :)
...I'm not real certain that information gleaned from an intelligence operative unprofessional enough to us a gmail account in the clear is really worth the effort.
...just an augmentation. And it neatly avoids the uncanny valley by not even remotely resembling our upright, bipedal, bi-laterally symmetric physiognomy. My friend owns three bars here in the old pueblo -- a college-centric meat market within stumbling distance of the UofA campus, a Cheers-type bar&grill in one of the most affluent residential districts in the city, and a trendy techno bar on 4th Avenue, which is Tucson's own Haight-Ashbury. The reception this system would get would largely depend on how it is wrapped for the patrons at each of these uniquely distinctive venues. I could see it being tucked away out of sight at the bar&grill, delivering the drinks to a mini-skirted waitress for the last mile delivery to the patron. Patrons at the bar&grill go there for (good!) food and drink, but also to schmooze with wealthy UofA alumni who have returned to their college town to dabble in local university and city politics. They will take passing notice of the pretty girl delivering their cocktails, but would not be interested in the slightest about the details of the guy (or robot) mixing their drinks. Ditto the meat market: patrons at the meat market are there to score, and my friend deliberately hires attractive female servers exclusively from the local topless clubs' labor pool to set the right kind of ambiance. It probably wouldn't have to be out of sight there, just out of harm's way. But it would probably pay-off in spades at the techno bar. Every techno trend on the planet eventually makes its way through a college town, and this system would be de rigueur, along with the live dub-step acts and wall-sized projection screens full of anime and machinima.
I think this system could have a beneficial ROI in these three diverse venues, so it could probably be beneficial in many others, as long as the proprietor incorporates it in a way that doesn't annoy his regular patrons or scare off potential ones.
You seem to think that making the world a better, cleaner place to live in is some kind of goal for our species. I'm trying not to call you a fuckwit for believing this, but the temptation is damn near irresistible. So, here's a newsflash for you, my fuckwit friend -- natural selection doesn't work that way. You live long enough to reproduce, or your genes die with you. Healthcare is expensive and inefficient right now because we have to use a risk model to fund it. Remove or mitigate the risk, and we might be able to use a different funding model, one that might be (and probably will be) less expensive and inefficient. That's why non-fuckwits invest heavily in genetic research and strenuously resist the idea that our funding model must also cover people with pre-existing conditions. Eventually, we are going to know exactly who is going to become sick with what disease by administering a cheap DNA test. We can already do this right now for a number of diseases, and the list of predictable diseases keeps getting longer, thanks to the enlightened self-interest of the individuals and corporations that fund this kind of research. I sure as fuck don't want to be on the hook for healthcare for someone that I know in advance is going to be a burden on the healthcare system. If you were rational, you wouldn't want to be on that hook, either. Non-fuckwits would focus on removing those diseases from the population, not redistributing wealth to accommodate them. It is not rational to redistribute your wealth in a manner that does not benefit you or your heirs -- only a fuckwit would think otherwise. In spite of highly entertaining conjectures to the contrary, genes are not altruistic. Natural selection is a bitch, dude, but it's the only game in town, so you'd better learn to be a player. Not that a fuckwit like you is capable of learning, though.
We can solve those traveling salesman problems that have been plaguing our society for hundreds of years!
I realize you're joking, but they actually are important problems to solve. If you have 10,000 solder points, and you need your equipment to solder as fast as possible, what route do you take?
Solving this type of real world problem with a mathematically perfect solution usually isn't necessary. A far simpler and quicker statistical method that produces a solution that is only 99.99% of optimal is generally more than adequate. Same applies to other areas of manufacturing such as quality assurance, in other disciplines such as physical layer communications systems, and even in mathematics such as prime generation.
It always comes down to how perfect the solution actually needs to be, and how easy it is to get close to or reach that perfect solution.
In many cases, practicality does trump elegance. But in many other cases, it does not. For a mathematician, some problems -- like the TSP -- are interesting precisely because we don't know (P=NP?) if the only practical approach we have for solving them is inelegant brute force. Factorization of large integers is another one of those interesting problems (you alluded to it as "prime generation.") The existence of an elegant solution to the factorization problem would considerably alter how we conduct secure transactions online, because the security model we use right now depends on the fact that, in the absence of an elegant solution to the factorization problem, it's harder for computers to divide than multiply. So, no, it doesn't always come down to how perfect the solution needs to be; rather, it comes down to how much effort the solution requires. Quantum computers offer the tantalizing prospect that all steps and decisions in a brute force approach to factorization can be collapsed to a single computational step, rendering the existing divide/multiply assymmetry moot.
So if one has any sort of ethical dilemma with harvesting stem cells from embryos under the notion that such willful destruction of embryos is equivalent to premeditated homicide, this particular technique shouldn't make those people breathe any easier, and in fact, may be cause for them to scream even more outrage at the notion that, to use words they might throw around, "they are creating even more people to deliberately murder".
Well, biologically, yes, a clone could be identical to an embryo, but biological definitions aren't the issue, are they? Leaving aside for the moment the simple fact that, unlike in the case of a human embryo, harvesting stem cells from a clone doesn't result in the destruction of the cell donor, you seem to be ignoring the social, cultural, and political definitions of a person that create the ethical dilemmas you are alluding to. Personhood is an extremely arbitrary and shifting concept, with thousands of years of social, cultural, and legal criteria that are still being refined today. In a bucket, the definition of a person is whatever the culture wants it to be. In the US, for example, it wasn't so long ago that a slave was defined as being 3/5 of a person, and women had no legal status at all, except relative to a spouse, or in the absence of a spouse, male members of her immediate family. Killing a slave was not homicide, because slaves were property, not people, and women couldn't vote or own property in their own name. Case in point, since you brought it up: as a result of Roe V. Wade, human embryos can and are being destroyed on a daily basis without triggering a homicide investigation -- until that definition of personhood is changed, pro-lifers can weep and gnash their teeth all they like. The social, legal, and cultural status of a human clone will have to be established via social, cultural, and legal precedent. Until that happens, debating the ethics or morality of harvesting stem cells from human clones is kinda pointless. Any controversy surrounding the issue will be generated for its entertainment value alone.
A scenario is a three-player instance that doesn't require the dps-healz-tank triad that is necessary to successfully complete a five-player instance at level. Scenarios have less content, but typically can take more time to complete (more on that below.) They drop gear with iLevels comparable to the five-player instances. Scenarios can easily be done with any combination of classes, and a competently played class with a tanking pet (like a 'lock or hunter) or good self-heals (again 'lock, or a paladin) can solo them if you get stuck with a couple of idiots.
Scenarios were introduced in MoP to explicitly address the asymmetric waiting times for a random dungeon group in the looking-for-group dungeon finder. If you haven't played since BC, you might not have experienced the looking-for-group party finder that Blizz introduced in WotLK. Basically, you queue up your toon in LFG, and when LFG has 3 dps, a tank, and a healer, you are instantly teleported to the dungeon. The problem was (and still is) that there are way more dps on a given server than tanks or healers. In MoP on my server, Garona, typical LFG wait times for my 'lock and hunter are around fifteen minutes, but for my pally healer and DK tank the wait time is on the order of fifteen seconds. To make matters worse, you are penalized with a debuff preventing you from queueing up for any instance for 30 minutes if you drop group for any reason before killing at least one boss -- you are fucked as a dps if you get saddled with an incompetent tank or healer. It was the same in WotLK and Cata.
As you might suspect, the LFG system is easily gamed by hybrid classes. Players with hybrid classes that could off-spec as tanks or heals would queue up in their off-spec to get into LFG faster, even if they didn't actually *know* how to play a tank or healer. Frost DK's and boomkins were notorious for speccing into blood and resto just to shorten their LFG queue times. I learned pretty quickly to drop group and take the 30 minute debuff if there was a DK tank or resto druid healer in the group. It was almost always better than the wipefest that was certain to ensue otherwise.
Scenarios are timer-driven, though, which sucks for air. Instead of trash-trash-boss rinse-and-repeat like in a five-player, you have four stages that are basically waves of light-hitting trash mobs followed by a mini-boss while you do gimmicky Nintendo-like crap until the timer runs out for the current stage. A random group of experienced players can blow through MoP five-player instances much quicker than the three-player instances, because they aren't constrained by an arbitrary timer, but only by how fast the dps can knock down the trash to get to the boss. Presently, you can reach your valor point cap for the week in an hour or two just by running MoP five-player instances with a competent group of players. That is decidedly not the case if you are trying to reach your cap via the scenarios. If it weren't for the timer mechanic, scenarios would be a win-win for me.
Indeed. But streaming sports is available right now, if only for a subset of sports. I get all the streaming sports I need from Bein Sports, which for me amounts to the MotoGP and World Superbike races. They stream it from their site on a delay for free, or offer it up live for a modest fee. It's only a matter of time before an American entrepreneur puts together a similar service and inks a deal with the US-based sports-entertainment complex. Imagine being able to watch any game anywhere, anytime, on the device of your choice, free of commercial interruption. The non-sports entertainment complex was entrenched for decades, but it is all but gone, thanks to Netflix- and Hulu-like streamers. If Aereo is successful in the defense of their business model, they will be the first nail in the coffin, and Google is going to provide the rest. Google' acquisition of youtube several years ago and their recent announcement of subscription-based channels is, realistically, the death-knell for broadcast content on the planet.
THIS...IS...NETFLIX!
(apologies to Gerard Butler and Frank Miller)
Case in point: "Business plans" for internet service. I don't know about where you live, but I can tell you: the local telco will not provide "residential" $20/mo DSL service to "commercial" phone lines.
Well, yes they will, if you live in the US. One of the legacies of the Bell break-up thirty years ago was the establishment of a two-tiered tariff structure for telephone service. The regulation was very clear on this. If the line terminated at an address in a residentially-zoned area, the phone company that serviced that area had to charge the residential tariff. If it terminated in a commecially-zoned area, the phone company could charge the commerical tariff, which was 3X as large as the residential one. The location drove the tariff, not the class of consumer. It was for that reason that the dial-in servers for the ISP we started here in Tucson in 1995 were located in the garage of a residential house we rented in a quiet neighborhood. The tech support staff could live in the house and be available 24/7, and we avoided $28/mo/line on 30 lines, paying only $14/mo/line instead of $42. The phone company, US West, pitched a bitch but that was all they could do. Well, they did drag their heels for nearly a month and did try to charge us $12k to drag copper less than a hundred meters from their loop to our POP, allowing our rival to get online ahead of us. We were the second ISP to go online in Tucson by exactly 30 days as a result of their gamesmanship. When we realized they were just being assholes, we switched to MCI/Sprint, who charged us a token fee (around $200 IRRC) to drag copper nearly a klick from their loop, and got it done in two days.
Thanks for the response, though I think I should be more clear in what I was responding to in your original post. In your response to my post, I hear truth in what you are saying; humans indeed internalize the patterns they perceive in their environment that in turn act as checks and balances on their future behaviors. No argument there. Indeed, self-awareness -- the ability of an organism to model the environment and then insert itself into the model to better predict the value of a given survival strategy -- confers a decided competitive advantage over organisms lacking that level of cognitive complexity. Humans can and do evaluate the potential risks and rewards of a given strategy. Throw cooperative behavior (made possible by the ability to communicate with other members of the species) into the mix of potential strategies available, as you rightly do, and the ability to adapt at the group level becomes possible. The issue for me in your original post was your explicit assertion that there was something wrong with the current cultural context, not that it wouldn't lead to different survival strategies. I really don't disagree with anything you asserted, you made a well-reasoned argument and I enjoyed reading it. Rather, my heartburn was in the implication in one of those assertions that there exists some standard other than survival by which those alternative strategies can be judged. To wit: the assertion that our culture is "profoundly ill" implies that there is a privileged state that is non-ill. Unless you can provide evidence for this privileged state, I have to remain skeptical of its existence. The idea that there is some way, other than survival, to base a judgment about the viability of a strategy, be it individual or collective, is a non-starter for me. Your well-reasoned argument just became a theology at that point, and while remaining highly entertaining, as most theologies are, it thus lost some of its rigor for me.
Ok, just a little pin prick, there'll be no more aarrrrrg, but you may feel a little sick. That's why, right there. Try not to attribute purpose and direction to anything that a society/culture does. That kind of teleological reasoning is flawed; cultures don't move with purpose towards any kind of goal, any more than species evolve towards some perfect form. Natural selection just doesn't work that way. Culture (I use culture interchangeably with society) i.e., the heterogeneous amalgamation of memes that we label as culture, simply adapts to the prevalent context and survives into the next generation, or it fails to adapt and extincts itself. Even a shallow examination of our species cultural diversity strongly suggests that there are no perfect strategies for cultural survival -- there are only things that sometimes work, but most of the time don't. An ephor from Leonidas' Sparta might recognize a Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh as a kindred spirit, but they wouldn't understand why Beck's and Limbaugh's tactics are successful, because modern American demagogues emerged from a different cultural context than he and his fellow Spartan demagogues did. No amount of Tylenol on the planet can numb me to the existential distress that lunatics like Beck and Limbaugh engender in me when they are trolling their user base. However, Tylenol and it's opioid-laced variants *will* keep me going for the show. C'mon, it's time to go.
and old guys love pinball. We grew up with it. I'm 66, and I've got 14 machines, a whole room full, all digital. Fun to play, fun to maintain. My kids love 'em too, but they prefer their MMO's.
yep. I'm half a generation behind you, but I do have fond memories (late Carter administration through early Reagan) of pwning the Charlie's Angels pinball machine in Louie's Lower Level in the basement of the Student Union at the University of Arizona. Slapped my quarter down in the line of quarters over the plunger and studied math until it was my turn. Prior to that (tail end of LBJ through Nixon and Ford) it was Spanky's Pinball Parlor at the strip mall two blocks from my house, where we would ditch jr hi to share cigarettes with older girls on the delivery dock of the El Rancho supermarket that anchored the mall, while we waited for an opening on our favorite table. There was a military recruiter at the far end of the mall next to a barbershop; the Marine Corps and Air Force guys would show up with a couple rolls of quarters and a seemingly endless supply of cigarettes (my 3-packs-a-day habit started at Spanky's) and would happily share both with the older teens and even us tweens. Spanky's died in the 80s, probably for the reasons other posters have postulated -- the rise of the home console. I joined the AF right after college, and it was the rare BOQ that didn't have a couple of pinball machines in the dayroom, right next to the vending machines stocked with beer instead of Coke. The enlisted guys had tables in their clubs; sadly the officers didn't -- just pool for us.
Hmmm. thanks for the stroll down memory lane. I prefer MMOs now myself, especially WoW. But still, pinball was a great way to waste time and meet girls. I do miss it.
It doesn't matter, you can't punch someone just for being annoying. That kind of thing can land you in jail. A similar situation people are more familiar with is shooting an intruder. Just because he broke into your house doesn't mean you can shoot him. Just because he's filming you doesn't mean you can punch him.
lol. break in to my house, please. if I catch you, you will be dead. I *might* be charged with manslaughter, but you'll still be dead. I *might* have to pay a lawyer to make sure that the DA understands that uninvited guests are not entitled to the protection of the law, but you'll still be dead. I *might* face public scrutiny from the anti-gun folks, and have my name dragged around by them for awhile, but you'll still be dead. It might be inconvenient, expensive, and somewhat embarrassing for me to shoot you, but I wouldn't hesitate in the slightest.
Yet, out of the Apollo days, so many of the astronauts wrote very compelling books about their experiences. Lovell, Aldrin, Cernan, and others. I suspect space tourism is not as great as its cracked up to be, otherwise we'd be hearing from those who went how awesome it was.
Well, yeah, but those guys had spent the better part of their lives training and preparing for those missions. They were hardcore fighter jocks long before they became astronauts, and fighter jock is a way of life, one that happened to mesh with the requirements that President Eisenhower set down for astronauts. Going into space was was the capstone of their existence, and thus worthy of a book or two to describe the experience. Space tourists like Diamandis and the others, on the other hand, were exceedingly wealthy individuals who purchased the opportunity to go into space, in the same way that they would purchase a fast car or an attractive spouse. They would be no more motivated to write about going into space than they would about any of their other extravagant purchases.
Wasn't all of this in "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" by Asimov?
heh...glad I'm not the only one who made that connection. That was a specific carbon compound, IIRC, that dissolved 1.12 seconds before water hit it, and Asimov's clever scientists and engineers figured out how to power a stardrive with it. Wonder what would happen if engineers figured out how to move energy into this time cube and then extract it later on. Might be a shipstone in the making... :) (I like Asimov a lot, but Heinlein is a better story teller.)
No, the problem pretty much is guns. There are more guns than citizens in the US; it's the fucking supply of guns and the easy access to them that is the problem, not the culture that glorifies them. I can buy a gun legally 24/7 in my state without ever disclosing my identity to the seller, and pretty soon I'll be able to print a durable, functional version of my beloved Mac 10. Until the gun-show and private-sale loopholes in gun laws are closed, and 3D-printing gets the draconian regulation it needs, easy access to guns is what you need to be worrying about. The existing supply of guns in the US is enough to meet any foreseeable demand for them in our violence-saturated culture, even if Glock, Beretta, Sig, and S&W go out of business tomorrow.
Why is it taking Virgin Galactic so long for development? Is it a financing or technical issue?
SpaceX was founded in 2002 and is already making re-supply missions to the ISS. Granted that's not quite the same as human spaceflight but it seems like there's a lot faster advancement occurring at SpaceX than at Virgin Galactic.
They are approaching it from a cost-is-everything perspective, instead of an orbit-is-everything perspective. The SpaceX supply missions run at least $20,000 per orbited kilo. For a person to buy a ticket, even if they were treated as cargo, would cost in the $1.5M range. For Virgin Galactic to say that they will get a human up and down (safely) for around 1/10th that price, requires approaching the problem a lot differently (for example, a multi vehicle setup).
For Virgin, I don't think it's a financing or technical issue, because the purpose of Virgin Galactic is marketing for the Virgin brand, not producing a fleet of passenger-carrying spaceships. It puts Branson's brand in front of geeks, and geeks are a legitimate market demographic who can be manipulated by marketing propaganda just like any other market demographic. After all, smart geeks like to think they are investing their money in smart, geeky ways. As long as Branson keeps up the appearance of creating that fleet, he wins -- geeks will be able to cite Virgin Galactic in defense of the presence of any Branson-tainted investment in their portfolio, even if Virgin Galactic never puts another single human in space.
For SpaceX, cost-is-everything is indeed one driving factor, but getting payload tariffs as low a possible is a means to an end, not the end itself. Unlike Branson, Musk is a neo-industrialist who is deliberately and successfully following in the footsteps of Harriman, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Rockefeller. He is using technology to create a self-financing infrastructure that will enable the (lucrative, he expects) exploitation of off-planet resources, in almost the exact same way his predecessors used technology 125 years ago to create the infrastructure necessary to exploit terrestrial resources (and along the way created the social, political, and economic system that put America at the top of the industrial food-chain for nearly a century.) Musk's game plan is thus materially little different than that of any robber baron from the late 19th century. It remains to be seen whether or not history will repeat itself -- I haven't heard any manifest-destiny claims being issued from Musk's PR department yet, but I imagine it's only a matter of time, if he sticks to his current plan.
Meanwhile, in the United States... research and development cut. NASA budget shrunk. Science and engineering degrees from new graduates at all time lows. And at least one state (Tennessee) has recently tried to pass a law to make our educational system an actual Hunger Games by witholding food assistance from poor families with students who do poorly on state-administered exams.
Thank you, Japan, for investing in us... because we sure as hell aren't.
Given that wealth in the US flows upwards, not downwards or even laterally, smart kids become lawyers, doctors, and hedge fund managers, not engineers or scientists, because smart kids know you have to go where the money is if you want to be wealthy. Certainly, wealthy people want innovative new products, but their demand for new technology and new knowledge about the universe is not nearly as constant (nor as profitable) as their demand for competent legal, medical, and financial services.
You are being sarcastic in your gratitude towards Japan, but I wonder if you realize just how much Japan actually has been investing in the US? By conceding a US military victory in WW II, Japan was able to survive as a nation, and focus it's still considerable national power on a different goal -- becoming a dominant force in the east-Asian co-prosperity sphere. Now, nearly seventy years down the road, Japan has achieved that goal, largely by investing in US assets. Japan actually owns nearly half of the $11T US foreign debt, just slightly behind China, their closest economic rival in the sphere, who owns almost exactly half of it. Japan has pretty much achieved its goal by investing in US assets on a large scale for a long, long time. $2B for a wind farm is not even pocket change in that context.
Well, foam is pretty much just air, so why not use just air, then? And that is exactly what companies like Alpinestars and Dainese have been producing for a while now for professional motorcycle racers -- air bag suits. When Carlos Checa clipped Marco Melandri last month in the opening race of the 2013 World Superbike season, they were both wearing air bag suits. Checa wears one from Alpinestars, and Melandri wears one from Dainese. Both companies have transferred their track-developed air bag technology to their street lines, so its available to the general public. Like you, I'd love thinner and lighter armor in my leathers, and air bags seem to address the flexibility and mass issues that pro riders (and amateur canyon carvers like me) care about. The key is realizing that you need armor only if you come off your bike. The real win with air bag technology is that it is deployable on demand, which means it is *way* easier for the suit safety engineers to work around the flexibility issues, because flexibility stops being an issue when you are not in control of the bike anymore. And as far as lightness goes -- a small cylinder of compressed nitrogen, the flexible bladders stitched into the suit at all impact points, and the multi-axis accelerometer to trigger it all masses about as much as a single CE-rated kevlar-laced knee slider.
Dude, I'll see your PL 112-95 and raise you HR 658. :) Make sure you check out section 332. This bill has already passed, btw -- it's the law of the land. The FAA has until 2015 to come up with rules to integrate civil drone use into US airspace. Until the FAA does that and publishes them, the commercial use of drones can't be characterized as illegal or legal. But that's okay, when it comes to liability torts -- liability can be established independently of the legality of the act that caused the damage. It doesn't matter if the driver that ran over your roses had a license or not -- he still ran over your roses and you can litigate them for compensation.
...and Hickson nailed it in one. The motion picture industry and the recording industry learned the hard way what happens when you lose control of the distribution channel. The RIAA and the MPAA are just ways of doing damage control until the those industries can get back into control of the distribution channel. As Hickson noted, the publishing industry learned from the recording and entertainment industry's mistakes -- it is embracing digital delivery via the net without surrendering control of the distribution channel by insisting on DRM in their content and requiring only DRM'd devices at the consumer end of the channel. The publishing industry is well on the way to making dead-tree fiction and non-fiction -- well, fictional, if you'll forgive the word play. That's what DRM is all about -- helping content providers maintain control of the distribution channel from end to end.
The doctrine of first sale is a limitation to copyright, in that it holds that the copyright owner's right to monetize a copy of the work ends with the first sale of the copy. For what it is worth, with the sole exception of the US, the doctrine of first sale is not recognized by any major nation on the planet Basically, what the first sale doctrine means is that US companies end up facing competition from their own products via the resale market, as the continued existence of used car lots, used bookstores, and used record, tape, and CD stores in the US amply attest. Those resales are protected under the doctrine of first sale. In my opinion, this SCOTUS decision means that book publishers in the US now have one more incentive to stop selling dead tree books, which can legally be transferred for monetary gain by a non-copyright owner under the first sale doctrine, and switch over to renting digital ones, which would not be protected under first sale doctrine. Thus, this affirmation of the first sale doctrine by the highest court in the land is probably not a good thing for people in the US who want to own the books that they are paying for, because publishers are just going to stop publishing books that can be transferred for monetary gain without their permission.
According to the EFF, Google has removed Adblock plus from the Google Play, citing that it violates Google's terms and conditions that stipulate that apps will not interfere with any other app on the store. This only affects android so far, but I imagine now that Google has decided that content blocking is a bad thing, I would imagine that the chrome and firefox extensions will follow. And, sadly, it's probably only a matter of time before Google turn their considerable talents to making sure that any method will fail. I'm not interested in starting a flame war here; I'm just pointing out that when the pre-eminent search engine on the planet weighs in on content blocking in such a heavy-handed way, it can't bode well for any of us.
Not exactly. I'm assuming "the belief that science can describe an objective, external world" and "the belief that an objective, external world exists at all" are the same kind of "the belief that God exist".
True, science is a method to study the external world; but you can also see religion as a method to study emotions and human relations. You can use religion to make assertions about reality in the same way that you can use science to make moral judgements - which is, by stretching the method outside of their area of validity.
Being beliefs, neither can be proven nor disproven merely by logic alone; beliefs are ultimately based on emotion, not reason. In that level, yes, they're the same kind of thing. I may believe that science is a better method to learn about existence, and I may even believe that it's incompatible with religion, but I can't prove it scientifically; that would be an infinite recursion.
Scientists make no such ontological claims about an objective, external world. Science is a methodology, and methodologies can't make a claim about anything. Science is just a way -- a methodology -- to make a map of the territory; it is neither the map nor the territory. Only the map can make any claim at all about anything. Scientists can and do claim their maps correspond to reality, but "belief" in the map is a non-starter for scientists, because the map is going to have to change to accommodate observations that conflict with the territory. Paradigm shifts in science happen all the time because of those conflicting observations. Aristotelian cosmology gave way to Copernican cosmology, and the physics of Newton gave way to the physics of Einstein. I think you can see why this makes science fundamentally different from religion. Paradigm shifts in religion just don't happen, largely because the religions themselves forbid it, dogmatically asserting things like "heresy" and "blasphemy" when their maps are challenged by some competing paradigm.