What's with the obnoxious, non-mutable autoplay ad for this movie? Half the sites I visit are playing this, some times more than once on a page so it comes out garbled because the copies don't sync. This has to be one of the biggest Internet ad campaigns ever.

And since when does Slashdot carry ads that autoplay audio? That's low-rent stuff. The worst thing with this ad is that the player presents a mute button that doesn't mute, it starts the replay over again. The only thing you can do is mute your entire computer, or close the tab with the ad.

Well, I'm not muting my entire computer. I'm closing the tab. So see you later, Slashdot, until the stupid ad campaign is over. And I'm not going to see the stupid movie.

See you later, Slashdot; I'm out of here until the ad campaign is off. And I'm not going to see the stupid movie.

I was making just this point about the Supreme Court striking down limits on campaign contributions. The Romans never quite admitted to themselves that their republic was defunct. They remained deeply attached to republican forms and institutions, even when those things had withered to ceremonial appendages of a corrupt imperial state. It was necessary for people to go through the motions of democracy; the ambitious plutocrats needed to maintain the fiction they were serving Rome, when in fact Rome was serving them.

FYI, non-profit organizations are usually supposed to turn a profit. Generating more revenue than you need to cover your expenses is a normal and necessary part of a sustainable organization. In practical terms that means you have to aim for a profit. So in practice a non-profit operates almost exactly like a for-profit, except there are no proprietors to distribute the profits to. In a non-profit you simply put the profit back into the mission, or into growing the organization.

A better name than "non-profit" would be "not-for-profit". In a for-profit, profit is the reason for the company's existence. In a not-for-profit, it is merely a financial constraint which determines whether the organization can survive and grow. It's like living to eat vs. eating to live. Eating might not be the purpose of your existence, but if you don't eat your existence will terminate.

In practice this means you do a lot more things in a non-profit that are un-profitable than you would in a for-profit. But this makes the remaining profit-generating activities all the more critical. I know, I've been there, working in non-profits. We took our public mission seriously, but we also generated all the profit we could manage so we could keep the doors open while doing good.

Or is it Ploor?

I don't see how holding patents in itself is intrinsically contrary to a university's purpose as a research and educational institution. The express purpose of the patent system (in the US anyway) is to advance knowledge, and the deal is this: you reveal publicly how your invention works in return for exclusive economic rights to the invention for a limited time.

While common law trade secrets are clearly in conflict with the a non-profit university's duty to advance human knowledge, patents are not because they require you to publicly disclose how the invention works.

Now there are *other* problems with the patent system, namely stupid patents that are granted (including business method patents as a whole). Term lengths for certain kinds of patents should be shortened (e.g., in fast-moving fields, patents that aren't commercially exploited by the holders, and design patents generally). But those are issues with the patent *system*.

Only if you're silly enough to buy smart bulbs for a chandelier. Practical LED bulbs these days cost about 4.5x as much up front, cost 1/4 as much to run, and last 10x longer. And within the available power ratings they're a plug-and-play replacement for incandescents, offering similar color temperatures and operating with dimmer circuits designed for incandescents.

A "smart" bulb is not particularly compelling for a consumer, but I can see why it's attractive for a manufacturer to offer. I've seen this kind of vendor-driven over-elaboration many times before, and the reason is usually that they hope to lock their customers in. You wouldn't care about having a half dozen different brands of plain old lightbulbs in your house, but you're not going to want to live with a half dozen incompatible smart bulb systems. You'll settle on one brand and stick with that. This is important because in the long run you're going to buy a lot fewer light bulbs. Not only will this ensure you buy the smart bulb vendor's brand, by selling a more complicated bulb they get to charge you more.

And a lot of those boys in the club are working out their Daddy issues.

Well, just to play devil's (!!!) advocate, because you don't *know* Baluchi is cooperating as fully as he might be.

Ammar Al-Baluchi was unquestionably involved with moving money and goods around for Al Qaeda and was clearly involved with helping many of the 9/11 hijackers. Although that does not necessarily mean he was an active *member* of Al Qaeda or knew exactly what the 9/11 hijackers were up to, he'd have to be remarkably incurious not to know something was up. And he was captured with correspondence that was destined for Osama bin Laden.

So this is a person who, even if he had no specific knowledge of imminent attacks, knows a lot of useful things. But that actually poses a challenge for interrogators. He can give them an impressive amount of useful stuff while holding back even *more* useful stuff.

But one thing is certain: if he *had* known more important stuff, it didn't come out under torture. Nor did torture produce *anything* useful that couldn't be produced using different techniques. And now Americans -- servicemen, agents, and innocent bystandanders -- face an increased threat of torture throughout the world at the hands of people who figure if America does it, Americans should get a taste of it too.

It's important not to be too glib about dismissing torture, because in the future we're going to find ourselves in situations where it seems like a pretty good idea. And the person we're thinking of torturing may be a very bad person -- I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize Al-Baruchi's crimes as "heinous". But if ever torture was going to break the back of an enemy it would have done so with al Qaeda after 9/11.

Well, we tried it and it didn't work. What *did* work was ordinary interrogation and intelligence tradecraft. Which should come as no surprise. We spent the 19th and 20th C perfecting those approaches, and the idea that we could do better by tearing a page out of the medieval playbook should, in hindsight, seem ridiculous.

Well, the very next speaker was a biologist who talked about 'net primary productivity' -- the total amount of energy plants capture from the Sun over and above what they need to maintain their own physiological function. Since all life on the planet relies on this energy (other than a few communities near deep ocean vents), this places *thermodynamic* upper limit on the carrying capacity of the planet.

This limit may still be shockingly high, if we do a few things. We can cover every surface of the planet (water permitting) with plants genetically engineered to produce a higher yield of calories per acre. We can genetically engineer *ourselves*, and live sedentary underground lives on a vegetarian or perhaps algae based diet. But there's still a limit, especially if we want to live more or less as we are, doing what we do and eating what we like to eat.

The green revolution enabled us to exceed carrying capacity limits based on our assumptions about crop productivity per acre. But estimates based on solar radiation per acre are a different kettle of fish.

Sure, because the *projected* figures branch out from the current *historical* trend. What else would you expect?

OK, now I see it. It looks like you're arguing from three or four years of data. That's weather, not climate, although it is *influenced* by climatic phenomena like El Niño/ENSO, which you ought to read up on. Two or three of these years in small slice of data were La Niña years. La Niña years tend to be substantially cooler than the trend.

Short answer, you aren't talking about enough data to amount to a climatic trend.

I once saw an economist get up in a symposium and claim that the carrying capacity of the Earth -- the number of humans it could support -- was infinite.

Observed temperatures of what time period are you talking about?

Ooh, ad hominem *and* strawman. Well done, but next time see if you can squeeze *three* fallacies of distraction into your argument.

Well, the point isn't priority of discovery, as it would be with a patent application. It is a question of whether Delphi engineers knew of a potentially fatal design flaw in the switch and failed to notify users whose life was endangered (including his clients' daughter, who was killed by a failure in that part, apparently).

A redesign is not necessarily a smoking gun, in my opinion. An engineer who worked on that kind of stuff could say whether a reasonable engineer would regard the original design as faulty, and make the changes seen to correct the fault.