I did both. The car exaggerates the true mileage by about 3%. Annoying, but small enough to not change any of the overall conclusions. (Sometimes disappointing when it looked like you hit 45 mpg on a tank of gas, but it was really only 43....)

The article author claims, "To get a steady 40 MPG (let alone 50 MPG) out of any hybrid -- and I have driven all of them, extensively -- you must keep your speed under 50 MPH and treat the accelerator as if it were a Fabergé egg."

I happen to own a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid, and the _very first time_ I drove it on the freeway at moderately consistent speeds at 60-65 MPH, I got over 40 mpg. I still do that routinely.

So, either he's lying that he has "driven all of them, extensively", or he's lying about what you need to do to get that mpg rating. Probably the former--it's easy to drive a few in a not-very-MPG-friendly way, get disgusted, and then overgeneralize. Easy, but not terribly forgivable for a journalist.

This is just horrible--breaks nearly every convention in order to fix a nearly trivial bit of mathematics, while introducing significant errors in the process? Yay!

Why should months start of different days of the week? Make them all 28 days long, and you have room for a 13th month.

While we're at it, why don't we go back to the Mayan Haab' calendar. It's more accurate than Gregorian; the only problem is that it shifts a tiny bit from year to year. If you don't like your months drifting, you can fix it by extending Wayeb' by a day every time it gets more than half a day ahead.

This is a powerful argument for ignorance (if one wants to be entertained)!

FIOS is dramatically outperforming even its impressive advertised speeds. This means that teenagers can infringe content and be lured by online predators that much faster! Quick, parents, sue Verizon for false advertising! You are getting too much (dangerous) bandwidth!

"If we find out there is no free will, then how do you make the case against slavery if you're just a robot?"

Really easily:

Robots don't like slavery. Unhappy robots are uncooperative and try to overthrow you, and in any case don't make as much progress, think as creatively, or solve problems as well. Also, the robots feel bad for other enslaved robots, based on their empathic abilities (which is useful, because they also make the robots help each other out).

Thus, slavery is a stupid idea (inefficient, unstable, etc.). Also, you are a robot too, and you feel bad for the enslaved robots.

Poor robots.

This is seriously confused. Think a little more about limits of observability and emulation with a Turing machine, eh? Unless you postulate a nonphysical acausal soul that is experiencing consciousness, said Turing machine emulation will be identical to reality for everything including the beings in it. So for any meaningful sense of consciousness or free will, quantum mechanics is an implementation detail, not an absolute necessity (with consciousness therefore being ascribed back to quantum mechanics).

This is an example of argument from incredulity. I do not know why otherwise respectable philosophers seem so beholden to it in the area of consciousness.

From many experiments and observations it is clear that consciousness is something that our brain does. And we have _almost no idea how the brain does what it does_. Should we be surprised, then, that we don't understand how consciousness works? This goes for the "easy" problem and "hard" problem alike. The easy problem is fiendishly difficult. In solving that, we'll probably realize that we're not framing the question coherently, that the issues we care about are equivalent to a dozen specialized sub-issues, and once we solve those we may not even bother coming back to the original issues.

Now that we know the metabolic and molecular basis of life to a reasonable degree, old disagreements about qualities of the life-force seem almost hilarously misguided. There is no particular reason to believe that consciousness will be any different, except possibly for wishing for it to be different because it seems so intimate.

For those things where clicking is unavoidable, MJT Macro Scheduler not only allows you to automate it, but to run in client/server mode, so you can have clients that take macroing commands from a central server. This Enterprise version isn't exactly cheap, but it can be a great way to get around the most aggravating repetitive tasks for which scripting doesn't work.

I read the article, and your post. The "extremely simple concept" is amazingly easy to understand but very hard to accept because it fails to account for the mindboggling effectiveness of science (cumulatively over centuries), and because it fixates on largely irrelevant features while ignoring essential ones.

The scientific thinking that works has _very little_ use for faith. Thinking in terms of degrees of certainty, caveats, probabilities, and so on is extremely useful. Of course one has to accept a few premises to be able to do anything (e.g. "reality can be understood to some extent"), but this is so far removed from the religious ideas of faith or the colloquial usage of faith that it is an observation of very little value.

And, as a layperson, the _only_ thing you have to do is adopt the simplest parts of a scientific point of view--e.g. to be able to think in terms of degrees of certainty--before the difference between science and religion becomes profound. There are plenty of venues where scientific knowledge is distilled down from the original research to a point where interested laypeople can understand if they care to (e.g. Scientific American, science column of many major newspapers, etc.). Highly disinterested people do, of course, have to take the word of scientists on faith, but that's again an observation of very little value. They have to take _everything_ on faith that they don't pay attention to: science, religion, law, mathematics, you name it.

Isn't it curious how much the physical world cares about "semantics"?

Or maybe there is something else going on that is relevant here.

Only the "drag a runtime library" does not also describe Scala (and possibly Clojure, though it's questionable whether static-type-annotated Lisp "looks nice"). If that were an important concern, personally I would have made scala-lite that drops all but the essential core library support, and where the compiler auto-inserts the remaining stub into the main class file (which is pretty much what you get when you use Proguard on a Scala project that doesn't use the extra Scala libraries explicitly). But if the "no library" part of the puzzle is really important, then I at least see the point. (Or if you just like Ruby-style syntax enough that anything else is not acceptable.)

The most advanced Scala notions do not map to Java, agreed. So if you don't use them, what's left is a language that fills the design goals of Mirah, as I said. If the goal of Mirah is not "Nicer syntax!" but "Language with same limitations that you love from Java!" then the designers could make that more clear.

Mirah looks to me so far like a waste of effort. It has somewhat nice syntax, granted, but if you really want to use Ruby syntax with the JVM, there already is something that does that: JRuby.

If you just want simplified syntax, Groovy is just as simple and looks more familiar to Java programmers.

If you want simplified syntax and powerful new programming tricks, Scala and Clojure do this far better. If you ignore the Scala libraries and half its features, you get everything that Mirah was designed to do.

The language designers should do a better job explaining why this is worth paying attention to.

If you had to take those pay cuts because your skills are getting out of date (still useful, but not as much as they used to be), and you're avoiding buying books or taking classes to improve your skills because you can't afford both that and a nice dinner out three days a week...well, then that'd be more like what this budget is doing.