Larry Ellison paid a lot of good money for that placement!
PS. Were you aware two of Larry's kids are movie producers? His son produced MI: Ghost Protocol, and his daughter produced Zero Dark Thirty, True Grit, and American Hustle...
One of the many things that impressed me about Wargames (aside from showing social engineering and the actual hard work and research going into a serious hack) was that David could type fast, as you would expect from someone who spends all his time on a command-line computer
In the DVD commentary I think it's Walter Parkes who points out that the 8080 in the film was running a program that would always spit the correct character for the scene on the terminal, regardless of what keys he pressed. It only appeared that he could touch type.:)
Everything else in that movie, and the other film those two wrote, Sneakers, is remarkably accurate for a film. The drama comes out of the characters and the situations, not waiting for a dialogue box blinking decrypting...
The military industrial complex did not destroy Rome. It was the free bread and circuses and other freebies designed to buy the votes of the citizenry. This not only racked up the debt but it undermined the concept of citizenship.
OK, This is Mises's revisionism. Rome had corruption among the tribunes, but they also had praetorians killing emperors left and right; they had foederati and mercenaries defending the borders; they had a completely broken tax system which exempted most citizens from above-board taxation, which demanded a spoils-driven empire to merely sustain law and order. Rome also had a sclerotic civil administration that was never equal to the task of operating a vast continental empire, and lacked innovations even the Merovingians and Franks had, such as accounting of state appropriations.
We also have the multi-cultural development of the Roman state, it's long-term tendency towards centralization, it's failure to integrate foreign societies as it did in the Republican era. Gibbon's belief that the rise of Christianity depleted the state of its legitimacy and caused the elite to give up on civic improvement can also be studied with profit.
We also have the reorganization of the Roman state after the partition, and the Byzantine empire, which operated under approximately the same constraints as the Roman Empire, and would stage influence-buying sprees that made the Roman panem et circenses look like a church social, yet it lasted an extra thousand years.
It's also a point of argument wether or not the Roman imperial office actually fell, or merely just reorganized itself as the Catholic Church, which, again, used religion and the narrative of salvation as a replacement for panem.
The fact is that all states, or cultural orders, try to buy the consent of the masses; when they can, they do it with law and order, when they must, they do it with great feats of the state, military triumphs, evidence that whatever else may be wrong, we can beat the crap out of the Alemanni. If the Alemanni are no longer being defeated, worse, they're successfully sacking the city every couple years, the state tries to buy the people's obedience with "freebees." We moderns demand our government send men to the moon, and merely steal the oil of the barbarians and not slaughter them, so we might call that progress.
Are the two mutually exclusive? Call me naive, but would it be possible to protect national security within the law?
There's this whole legal commentary on the question of wether or not a nation's sovereign jurisdiction extends to those that fight its wars ("Most signs point to no"). It's bound up in the question of wether or not soldiers are bound to follow "illegal" orders ("No, but it's gotta be illegal in the first place"), and wether or not an officer of the government, in exercising this or that authority, is either executing an order or obeying the law.
National security is always going to be considered a superlative priority to the rule of law, because a state, secure to make, break and enforce whatever laws its polity may demand, is a precondition for the rule of law.
So yeah the FBIs exceeding it's ambit, but this is just a mission statement— it merely states what's been the de facto situation since the early aughts, and which nobody is really concerned about. The FBI is an internal security service, nothing more or less.
nobody on the late nineties shot on hd cams, they all used film for cinema and SD for TV.
Many TV shows also shot on film: Star Trek TNG and DS9 were shot on 16mm film (Super 16 aperture), and several prime time sitcoms and dramatic shows shot on 35 mm -- Frasier, Law and Order, and this had been a standard practice for high-quality pre-recorded content since the 70s.
Phantom Menace (1999) shot one scene on a high-def camera -- the midichlorians scene, God help us all. This was the first theatrically-distributed footage shot on an HD camera. Robert Rodriguez was aggressive and used a Sony/Panasonic F900 to shoot Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2001), which was the first film originated completely on a digital camera to show in theaters (strictly speaking Russian Ark was shot first).
Digital HDTV production uses the same cameras that film does, REDs, Arris, Varicams, and these came online with TV as the price came down (it should be said that more than a little broadcast HD content, and some films, are originated on Canon 5D and 7Ds, Nikon Ds, and GoPros.)
not really, most movies from the last few years were shot with 4K cameras.
But just about all television is shot 1080p, and the TV stuff is where the money is in terms of DVDs and streaming. That's yer Walking Dead, BSG, Mad Men, Orange is the New Black , all in straight HD.
the studios need to get the 4K masters and put them on a new format for 4K
Most films are shot in 4K now, which is to say their "originals" are in 4K, not their "masters." Many, many films have a 2K workflow and distribution pipeline, even if many of the original elements are 4K. Upconverting to 4K might require all-new color correction, opticals, onlining, and reauthored VFX.
Google has also learned the hardware partnership game and has already roped in hardware partners to use and showcase VP9 at CES. According to reports LG (the latest Nexus maker), Panasonic and Sony will be demonstrating 4K YouTube using VP9 at the event.
I work in film post-production in Hollywood and I'm not sure we've had any consultations on VP9, MPEG always gets SMPTE and the ASC involved in screenings and quality shootouts. Of course Google might just be trying to buffalo filmmakers, which would be nothing new, I suppose. "Content providers," as a term, rarely describes the people working the camera or doing the color (let alone syncing the sound). If you're a professional the licensing of the codec is completely irrelevant, it's a poor economy if the quality is even remotely compromised.
Panasonic and Sony were demonstrating Google TV STBs a few years ago and I we all know how that turned out. It's basically no-cost for these shops to turn out this gear for whatever marketing event Google cares to throw. What you want to hear is Sony Consumer Electronics saying they wouldn't support the next MPEG standard, or Sony Pictures Entertainment announcing they'd standardize their delivery format on VP9. SPE is one of my employers and the codecs that, say, Crackle.com uses is decided by a group of people completely independent from the consumer electronics folks, and Crackle will support whatever codec is optimal on the target STB/mobile/desktop platform.
Why would a provider want to go single-track with a codec which is "Open" in the way Android is, which is to say, you can download the source code, but the reference implementation that's distributed to millions of clients is controlled by a single vendor?
Bill Nye needs to powerfully understand both Science and the bible -- so that he can point out the biblical fallacies inherent in Creationism. -- such as the internal inconsistencies within the biblical bits
This stuff never convinces the dedicated fundamentalist, and tends to be beside the point for persuadable people. Ham has articulated presuppositional ideas, and serious evangelical theologians presuppositionalists nowadays; the basic posture of a presupp is that they are absolutely certain that the Bible is true, and that any Christian who truly accepts this premise is incapable of understanding anything without the Bible, and any beliefs anyone holds independent of the Bible may possible be true, but notwithstanding that, they are "groundless" because they lack Biblical certainty.
It follows that any contradiction one finds in the Bible is a failure in human reason, not the Bible. (If the Bible says 2+2=5, it's true, we are simply incapable of understanding how.)
Yeah but it's not about the evidence from Ham's side.
Anti-rationalists have completely different objectives in a debate than rationalists. The objective of a fundamentalist is not to convince the audience with his evidence, but to convince him with his certainty.
Ham's account of the 6 day creation and Jesus riding dinosaurs isn't designed to actually match up with the facts, or necessarily even to match up with the Bible: it's purposefully scandalous and strange, because for a fundamentalist, professing a strange belief despite the evidence is a kind of act of faith, it's saying "I don't trust my senses, I trust religious authority,, I trust God to not lie to me, and my trust of religious authority is stronger than Bill Nye's trust in reason and the senses."
And that works for a lot of people. Science offers no such certainty or solace, and when someone arguing empirically caveats his observations, or a naturalist states that our knowledge is never complete and all scientific findings may be revised, a lot of people will see that as personal failure on the part of the arguer, and no one wants to follow a wet noodle who's constantly hemming and hawing about the exceptions to the rules, they want muscular Truth.
So the rationalist wins everyone that's comfortable with an objective metaphysical world view, and the fundamentalist gets everyone else, so the fundamentalist's primary goal is to destroy people's belief in objective reality, and this is why many of their debate tactics are meant to construct a confusing and contradictory natural history that doesn't make any sense.
It's odd that proponents of the free market (with its "invisible hand") can reject evolution -- suggesting that only intelligent design (or straight up creationism) can explain how life got this way.
No, you see believing in both is essential-- it's very hard to be poor and a free-marketeering Republican, unless you also believe that God is constantly putting his hand on the scale to make sure only really good people are getting all the money. You see, given that, government regulation is just interfering with God's Providence.
The mining rigs are what process the transactions. "Mining" is the act of taking a block of transaction messages, verifying that they're moving money that actually exists, signing them, and then appending them to the distributed ledger. The network pays the miners to do this by creating new BTCs, and people making transactions also pay for it by including processing fees in their transactions.
The truth is, many unions *are* in fact extremely powerful and often self-serving, one of them put Hostess out of business last year, remember?
And nothing of value was lost. Hostess Bakeries had been on the verge of bankruptcy since 2004, also note that it's still in business and making twinkles as we speak. The "Old" Hostess Bakeries used its long-developing bankruptcy to justify defaulting on its pension obligations– for some reason it's bad to stop paying on a loan, but it's okay to break a contract with a pension administrator. Hostess filled the news with stories about "unreasonable union demands" as a fig leaf to avoid talking about their own decades-long mismanagement. They then used the bankruptcy court to shed themselves of their contracted union obligations, and proceeded to sell the brand to a hedge fund.
That said, I do believe the German Amazon workers should get overtime pay if they work overtime.
Right. They just shouldn't get OT through collective bargaining. Rather, Amazon should just give it to them out of the kindness of its heart. You don't think workers have a right to overtime, you think it should be a gift.
The slashdot homage showed me an AdChoices/AdSense banner for GoPro when I checked just now. CNN presently has a very nice background image ad for Volvo presented by Doubleclick, a Google subsidiary.
Most 20th century "tyrannies" took power with the support of an armed general population.
Hitler famously banned guns, but what people don't mention is that he only banned guns for Jews, while restrictions for the population in general were relaxed— and this, more than five years after he took power. How could it have been any other way? Before World War II, the SA and SS were nothing more than private citizens engaged in gun clubs with very spiffy outfits. Radical authoritarian governments, from the French Revolution on, have needed the help of armed popular movements in order to disrupt normal political process and intimidate resistance. These movements are pointedly at-will, quasi-organized assemblies of people acting of their own free will who want to kill their neighbors. And while these movements would possibly coordinate with elements of the government, they were never subordinate to it, and authoritarian governments are constantly trying (and failing) to rein in their own hit squads.
Gun control laws in the general case don't seem to correlate with tyranny, it's only when certain classes of people are armed while others are not (wether by law or otherwise) that we've historically seen problems.
The Revolutionary War was about home rule, with specific points of contention over taxing of commodities, and the independence and impartiality of the judicial system. This is why most of the founders were importers, farmers and lawyers, silly.
Britons in the 18th century, with the exception of certain kinds of lese majeste, basically had free speech that any American would recognize.
You say "there are no known examples of harm" --- but that's because nearly no one has looked
Hardly no one looks for examples of harm from non-GMO corn either. All corn, really all agricultural products, are heavily genetically engineered, the difference is some is engineered with selective breeding and hybridization, and the other by resequencing. The only reason we pay attention to the latter is there's a contingent of motivated believers who think that "natural" food contains Maggi Health Fairies, and that Big Science and Corporations kill the fairies by Playing God(!!1!@1!).
it's really hard to get funding to try studying anything against Big Ag's corporate profit interests
If you buy a commodity, or any item with a static underlying value, with the expectation that you will profit from appreciation, you are a speculator. Having a years-long time horizon, or a moral commitment to the commodity, does not significantly change your status.
Can somebody explain why this line of argument is repeated?
1. People have really naive ideas about how inflation and price levels work.
1a. You have to take a college-level economics course before you'll get an explanation of how it works.
2. Divisible commodities have obvious intrinsic value. A cup of rice is plainly different from half a cup of rice, but a Bitcoin does not strike people as significantly different from half a Bitcoin, because vanishingly few people use Bitcoins to do anything other than...
3. Bitcoin price levels are set almost completely by speculators. If all you want to do is buy some amount of Bitcoins at the offered price, and all you ever intend to do is convert them back into dollars in the future for profit, obvisouly it's not going to matter how many BTCs you buy. It only matters if you're trading BTCs for actual goods and services, quoted in stable BTC prices.
BTC is somewhat different though. It is divisible to 8 decimal places (infinitely divisible in theory, just need to update the clients). So people can never be "priced out" of the market, they can just buy a smaller slice of the pie if they desire. This is unlike a house where I (typically) can't buy just a fraction of it.
This is a misconception. Despite claims, BTCs have intrinsic value, and while they can be subdivided, a quantity of BTCs is still required to accomplish a particular purpose, just as a house of a particular size is required to accomplish a particular purpose. People don't buy Bitcoins just to buy Bitcoins, they do it with an objective, and if that objective isn't available at the price a BTC is quoted, they won't buy.
The underlying value of BTC comes from the availability of things to buy in the Bitcoin economy. and speculation. Taking the first one first, there's a limit to which people are willing to pay a premium for access to the BTC economy, and if people are paying $10 for something with BTCs they think they can get for $8 otherwise, they won't pay.
Exchange for goods and services appears to be a relatively minor use of BTCs, though, most people that are buying right now are speculating, and as you say, there's no floor below which people cannot buy in order to speculate. However, if people value a BTC based on speculative future gain, they're going to value them less if they perceive their nominal value declining, which is why crashes happen: the expectation of decline causes decline, which causes the expectation of decline. If you have a BTC that you bought for $900, and you offer it for $1000, someone might accept that price if they think they'll profit from it still. However, if a buyer doesn't think he'll profit from a $900 BTC, he won't pay that price, and he'll be "priced out."
Slashdot Mirror
Larry Ellison paid a lot of good money for that placement!
PS. Were you aware two of Larry's kids are movie producers? His son produced MI: Ghost Protocol, and his daughter produced Zero Dark Thirty, True Grit, and American Hustle...
In the DVD commentary I think it's Walter Parkes who points out that the 8080 in the film was running a program that would always spit the correct character for the scene on the terminal, regardless of what keys he pressed. It only appeared that he could touch type. :)
Everything else in that movie, and the other film those two wrote, Sneakers, is remarkably accurate for a film. The drama comes out of the characters and the situations, not waiting for a dialogue box blinking decrypting...
This would make freebees symptomatic, not a cause.
The OP didn't make the civic virtue argument, he made the Roman welfare queen argument.
Point taken though: he did not make the currency debasement argument.
OK, This is Mises's revisionism. Rome had corruption among the tribunes, but they also had praetorians killing emperors left and right; they had foederati and mercenaries defending the borders; they had a completely broken tax system which exempted most citizens from above-board taxation, which demanded a spoils-driven empire to merely sustain law and order. Rome also had a sclerotic civil administration that was never equal to the task of operating a vast continental empire, and lacked innovations even the Merovingians and Franks had, such as accounting of state appropriations.
We also have the multi-cultural development of the Roman state, it's long-term tendency towards centralization, it's failure to integrate foreign societies as it did in the Republican era. Gibbon's belief that the rise of Christianity depleted the state of its legitimacy and caused the elite to give up on civic improvement can also be studied with profit.
We also have the reorganization of the Roman state after the partition, and the Byzantine empire, which operated under approximately the same constraints as the Roman Empire, and would stage influence-buying sprees that made the Roman panem et circenses look like a church social, yet it lasted an extra thousand years.
It's also a point of argument wether or not the Roman imperial office actually fell, or merely just reorganized itself as the Catholic Church, which, again, used religion and the narrative of salvation as a replacement for panem.
The fact is that all states, or cultural orders, try to buy the consent of the masses; when they can, they do it with law and order, when they must, they do it with great feats of the state, military triumphs, evidence that whatever else may be wrong, we can beat the crap out of the Alemanni. If the Alemanni are no longer being defeated, worse, they're successfully sacking the city every couple years, the state tries to buy the people's obedience with "freebees." We moderns demand our government send men to the moon, and merely steal the oil of the barbarians and not slaughter them, so we might call that progress.
There's this whole legal commentary on the question of wether or not a nation's sovereign jurisdiction extends to those that fight its wars ("Most signs point to no"). It's bound up in the question of wether or not soldiers are bound to follow "illegal" orders ("No, but it's gotta be illegal in the first place"), and wether or not an officer of the government, in exercising this or that authority, is either executing an order or obeying the law.
National security is always going to be considered a superlative priority to the rule of law, because a state, secure to make, break and enforce whatever laws its polity may demand, is a precondition for the rule of law.
So yeah the FBIs exceeding it's ambit, but this is just a mission statement— it merely states what's been the de facto situation since the early aughts, and which nobody is really concerned about. The FBI is an internal security service, nothing more or less.
Many TV shows also shot on film: Star Trek TNG and DS9 were shot on 16mm film (Super 16 aperture), and several prime time sitcoms and dramatic shows shot on 35 mm -- Frasier, Law and Order, and this had been a standard practice for high-quality pre-recorded content since the 70s.
Phantom Menace (1999) shot one scene on a high-def camera -- the midichlorians scene, God help us all. This was the first theatrically-distributed footage shot on an HD camera. Robert Rodriguez was aggressive and used a Sony/Panasonic F900 to shoot Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2001), which was the first film originated completely on a digital camera to show in theaters (strictly speaking Russian Ark was shot first).
Digital HDTV production uses the same cameras that film does, REDs, Arris, Varicams, and these came online with TV as the price came down (it should be said that more than a little broadcast HD content, and some films, are originated on Canon 5D and 7Ds, Nikon Ds, and GoPros.)
But just about all television is shot 1080p, and the TV stuff is where the money is in terms of DVDs and streaming. That's yer Walking Dead, BSG, Mad Men, Orange is the New Black , all in straight HD.
Most films are shot in 4K now, which is to say their "originals" are in 4K, not their "masters." Many, many films have a 2K workflow and distribution pipeline, even if many of the original elements are 4K. Upconverting to 4K might require all-new color correction, opticals, onlining, and reauthored VFX.
I work in film post-production in Hollywood and I'm not sure we've had any consultations on VP9, MPEG always gets SMPTE and the ASC involved in screenings and quality shootouts. Of course Google might just be trying to buffalo filmmakers, which would be nothing new, I suppose. "Content providers," as a term, rarely describes the people working the camera or doing the color (let alone syncing the sound). If you're a professional the licensing of the codec is completely irrelevant, it's a poor economy if the quality is even remotely compromised.
Panasonic and Sony were demonstrating Google TV STBs a few years ago and I we all know how that turned out. It's basically no-cost for these shops to turn out this gear for whatever marketing event Google cares to throw. What you want to hear is Sony Consumer Electronics saying they wouldn't support the next MPEG standard, or Sony Pictures Entertainment announcing they'd standardize their delivery format on VP9. SPE is one of my employers and the codecs that, say, Crackle.com uses is decided by a group of people completely independent from the consumer electronics folks, and Crackle will support whatever codec is optimal on the target STB/mobile/desktop platform.
Why would a provider want to go single-track with a codec which is "Open" in the way Android is, which is to say, you can download the source code, but the reference implementation that's distributed to millions of clients is controlled by a single vendor?
Recent Peter Jackson films excepted.
This stuff never convinces the dedicated fundamentalist, and tends to be beside the point for persuadable people. Ham has articulated presuppositional ideas, and serious evangelical theologians presuppositionalists nowadays; the basic posture of a presupp is that they are absolutely certain that the Bible is true, and that any Christian who truly accepts this premise is incapable of understanding anything without the Bible, and any beliefs anyone holds independent of the Bible may possible be true, but notwithstanding that, they are "groundless" because they lack Biblical certainty.
It follows that any contradiction one finds in the Bible is a failure in human reason, not the Bible. (If the Bible says 2+2=5, it's true, we are simply incapable of understanding how.)
Yeah but it's not about the evidence from Ham's side.
Anti-rationalists have completely different objectives in a debate than rationalists. The objective of a fundamentalist is not to convince the audience with his evidence, but to convince him with his certainty.
Ham's account of the 6 day creation and Jesus riding dinosaurs isn't designed to actually match up with the facts, or necessarily even to match up with the Bible: it's purposefully scandalous and strange, because for a fundamentalist, professing a strange belief despite the evidence is a kind of act of faith, it's saying "I don't trust my senses, I trust religious authority,, I trust God to not lie to me, and my trust of religious authority is stronger than Bill Nye's trust in reason and the senses."
And that works for a lot of people. Science offers no such certainty or solace, and when someone arguing empirically caveats his observations, or a naturalist states that our knowledge is never complete and all scientific findings may be revised, a lot of people will see that as personal failure on the part of the arguer, and no one wants to follow a wet noodle who's constantly hemming and hawing about the exceptions to the rules, they want muscular Truth.
So the rationalist wins everyone that's comfortable with an objective metaphysical world view, and the fundamentalist gets everyone else, so the fundamentalist's primary goal is to destroy people's belief in objective reality, and this is why many of their debate tactics are meant to construct a confusing and contradictory natural history that doesn't make any sense.
No, you see believing in both is essential-- it's very hard to be poor and a free-marketeering Republican, unless you also believe that God is constantly putting his hand on the scale to make sure only really good people are getting all the money. You see, given that, government regulation is just interfering with God's Providence.
The mining rigs are what process the transactions. "Mining" is the act of taking a block of transaction messages, verifying that they're moving money that actually exists, signing them, and then appending them to the distributed ledger. The network pays the miners to do this by creating new BTCs, and people making transactions also pay for it by including processing fees in their transactions.
Caveat: GBPs have, for brief periods in the last 30 years, been pegged to ECUs and the German Mark.
And nothing of value was lost. Hostess Bakeries had been on the verge of bankruptcy since 2004, also note that it's still in business and making twinkles as we speak. The "Old" Hostess Bakeries used its long-developing bankruptcy to justify defaulting on its pension obligations– for some reason it's bad to stop paying on a loan, but it's okay to break a contract with a pension administrator. Hostess filled the news with stories about "unreasonable union demands" as a fig leaf to avoid talking about their own decades-long mismanagement. They then used the bankruptcy court to shed themselves of their contracted union obligations, and proceeded to sell the brand to a hedge fund.
Right. They just shouldn't get OT through collective bargaining. Rather, Amazon should just give it to them out of the kindness of its heart. You don't think workers have a right to overtime, you think it should be a gift.
The slashdot homage showed me an AdChoices/AdSense banner for GoPro when I checked just now. CNN presently has a very nice background image ad for Volvo presented by Doubleclick, a Google subsidiary.
They have a "you spend your own computer budget" policy, coupled with a company store, to save money.
Most 20th century "tyrannies" took power with the support of an armed general population.
Hitler famously banned guns, but what people don't mention is that he only banned guns for Jews, while restrictions for the population in general were relaxed— and this, more than five years after he took power. How could it have been any other way? Before World War II, the SA and SS were nothing more than private citizens engaged in gun clubs with very spiffy outfits. Radical authoritarian governments, from the French Revolution on, have needed the help of armed popular movements in order to disrupt normal political process and intimidate resistance. These movements are pointedly at-will, quasi-organized assemblies of people acting of their own free will who want to kill their neighbors. And while these movements would possibly coordinate with elements of the government, they were never subordinate to it, and authoritarian governments are constantly trying (and failing) to rein in their own hit squads.
Gun control laws in the general case don't seem to correlate with tyranny, it's only when certain classes of people are armed while others are not (wether by law or otherwise) that we've historically seen problems.
The Revolutionary War was about home rule, with specific points of contention over taxing of commodities, and the independence and impartiality of the judicial system. This is why most of the founders were importers, farmers and lawyers, silly.
Britons in the 18th century, with the exception of certain kinds of lese majeste, basically had free speech that any American would recognize.
Hardly no one looks for examples of harm from non-GMO corn either. All corn, really all agricultural products, are heavily genetically engineered, the difference is some is engineered with selective breeding and hybridization, and the other by resequencing. The only reason we pay attention to the latter is there's a contingent of motivated believers who think that "natural" food contains Maggi Health Fairies, and that Big Science and Corporations kill the fairies by Playing God(!!1!@1!). it's really hard to get funding to try studying anything against Big Ag's corporate profit interests
"It's impossible to disprove Darwinism, because the Darwin lobby controls all granting in the life sciences!" "It's impossible to disprove general relativity, because the government suppresses that truth!"
If you buy a commodity, or any item with a static underlying value, with the expectation that you will profit from appreciation, you are a speculator. Having a years-long time horizon, or a moral commitment to the commodity, does not significantly change your status.
"At any time, every stock in existence is owned by somebody."
1. People have really naive ideas about how inflation and price levels work.
1a. You have to take a college-level economics course before you'll get an explanation of how it works.
2. Divisible commodities have obvious intrinsic value. A cup of rice is plainly different from half a cup of rice, but a Bitcoin does not strike people as significantly different from half a Bitcoin, because vanishingly few people use Bitcoins to do anything other than...
3. Bitcoin price levels are set almost completely by speculators. If all you want to do is buy some amount of Bitcoins at the offered price, and all you ever intend to do is convert them back into dollars in the future for profit, obvisouly it's not going to matter how many BTCs you buy. It only matters if you're trading BTCs for actual goods and services, quoted in stable BTC prices.
This is a misconception. Despite claims, BTCs have intrinsic value, and while they can be subdivided, a quantity of BTCs is still required to accomplish a particular purpose, just as a house of a particular size is required to accomplish a particular purpose. People don't buy Bitcoins just to buy Bitcoins, they do it with an objective, and if that objective isn't available at the price a BTC is quoted, they won't buy.
The underlying value of BTC comes from the availability of things to buy in the Bitcoin economy. and speculation. Taking the first one first, there's a limit to which people are willing to pay a premium for access to the BTC economy, and if people are paying $10 for something with BTCs they think they can get for $8 otherwise, they won't pay.
Exchange for goods and services appears to be a relatively minor use of BTCs, though, most people that are buying right now are speculating, and as you say, there's no floor below which people cannot buy in order to speculate. However, if people value a BTC based on speculative future gain, they're going to value them less if they perceive their nominal value declining, which is why crashes happen: the expectation of decline causes decline, which causes the expectation of decline. If you have a BTC that you bought for $900, and you offer it for $1000, someone might accept that price if they think they'll profit from it still. However, if a buyer doesn't think he'll profit from a $900 BTC, he won't pay that price, and he'll be "priced out."