Yes. They've put every other major bookstore but one out of business, and the sole remaining at-scale competitor is Barnes and Noble, which just fired most of its store management because it is about to follow Toys'R'Us to oblivion, barring a miracle. At this point they have more business in e-books in particular than all of their competitors put together, they have more business in REGULAR books than all of their competitors put together, and they are rapidly pushing to achieve that sort of market dominance in several other categories if they aren't there already.

Yes to number two as well. How can they not? Their site sells everything! If you visit it to buy a book, you are cross-sold pen fillers. If you visit it to look for ANYTHING, you get cross-sold EVERYTHING. The money isn't sorted out so that only the money made from selling office supplies in competition with Staples and Office Max is used to fund office supply sales -- money they make in general has allowed them to enter whole new markets. They just bought Whole Foods -- an entirely different, new category of commerce. Did they raise new money to do so? Hell no, they used profits from selling everything else the sell to do so. Is that "undercutting the competition"? Damn skippy. They immediately dropped prices to undercut the competition because they don't have to be instantly profitable, because they can use profits from "everything" to make their new operation competitive and wipe out all the OTHER companies that are trying to get into e.g. internet based grocery delivery, not to mention Harris-Teeter, Food Lion, etc. But HT doesn't have a bookstore or general purpose store that generates profits that can be used to offset losses (if any) chalked up to "undercutting competition".

And overwhelmingly yes to number three. They "own" the Kindle and all kindle book sales. They have effectively eliminated their only serious competition -- B&N's Nook -- and are about to eliminate B&N itself along with it. Anything B&N sells Amazon sells (plus much more) and Amazon will deliver right to your door. Amazon is even moving towards opening its OWN brick and mortar stores, yet ANOTHER example of it branching out into "different categories of commerce" using money made from its first, internet sales.

We are at the point where it is entirely plausible that Amazon, unchecked, is going to become THE SOLE retail store in a huge number of markets, and the DOMINANT store in an even huger number. I'm on the board of a small indie bookstore chain -- a handful of stores in CA. If you want to (for example) sell used or rare books, you more or less HAVE to list them on Amazon and allow them to take their cut. More people search for things on Amazon than anywhere else, and for things like rare books especially, you simply aren't likely to show up on the radar of somebody looking for them without far more investment in internet visibility and staff to manage it than a small business is likely to have available or be able to afford. But they can be trained to put them up on Amazon, once you are set up as a "partner".

Amazon is "easy", and I'm not arguing whether or not it is a good or bad thing, but it is a thing that long since should have been subjected to antitrust action. Dealing with/through them is like doing business with the mob, but without the guns. They don't have to sell you insurance you have to buy to keep them from burning down your store, they just let you stay alive a bit longer than all of the other stores they are putting out of business if you sell things through them. If you want to sell something outside of your very own brick and mortar store, you have to let them "wet their beak", or accept the fact that you probably will take 2-3 times longer and a lot more human effort to sell if. Do an Amazon search on almost anything -- computers, clothes, etc. Chances are decent that EITHER Amazon will sell it to you directly -- their preference, highest margins -- OR that they have four small businesses that will sell it to you as an Amazon "partner". Amazon gets its beak nicely wet, and they don't even have to warehouse the item. Those business get to survive -- for now -- but small businesses are going out of business in the US literally every day because Amazon sells it faster, easier, cheaper, and delivers it to your door. Good thing, bad thing -- it is an illegal thing, for good reason.

The antitrust laws in the US, no matter HOW they are worded, are a joke. Let's face it: Government pension plans are heavily invested in Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Verizon, all the biggest of the big multinationals. Those companies all contribute heavily to all the candidates run by either party. The oligarchy that is actually running America right now pays over 90% of the cost of running for office for any candidate from either party that runs for office. This gives it veto power over who gets to run and everybody knows it. It reduces our supposed "democracy" to a joke. You don't even get to see a candidate who runs on a platform of enforcing antitrust laws or pushing for the constitutional amendment that is now required to remove corporate america from the political process, in spite of the fact that they aren't even MENTIONED in the Constitution as a political entity with the right to vote or directly participate.

Never has this been clearer than in the last presidential election, between the whore of babylon and the antichrist, both owned body and soul by the 1% (in both cases, they are part of the 1%, Trump obnoxiously so). Or in the net neutrality "debate". You can just go down the list of people who have supported this or acquiesced in this and rank order them by the amount contributed to their most recent campaigns by the companies that would benefit the most from the ending of net neutrality, ignoring the fact that Trump pretty much selected foxes to put in charge of every henhouse in the government in the first place.

Interesting times, in the direct sense of the Chinese curse...

No, they've been doing this for a while now. Seriously, they've been doing it to me and my book, The Book of Lilith, for a long time. Go to Amazon, search for it by name. Chances are it won't show up at all -- because they at some point decided it was "erotica". Which it absolutely is not. It has sex in it. It is a mature themed book -- the whole Lilith legend is about sex and gender relationships. But it is not porn, or erotica. I had it classified as SF&F, which is much closer to what it is, mythopoeic fantasy.

As a consequence, you have to a) Search by a string as explicit as "The Book of Lilith by Robert Brown", and when you do THAT you still don't see it, you only get "Your search contains adult items which have been hidden. If you wish to see them, Show all results". Finally, if you click that, Amazon reveals to you that I've written a book! Oh! You can buy it!

In the meantime, it NEVER shows up on a search of Lilith related material. Half of these books are filled with erotic vampire scenes. Some are outright porn. But MY book has been classified without my knowledge or consent as erotica, and has vanished from everybody except people BROWSING for porn, who sadly aren't as likely to buy a book that is not, in fact, porn.

So all that is happening now is that the fact that they've been doing this for years now is finally coming to light. Maybe because of Trump, more likely because people are finally getting pissed enough to BRING this blatent, irresponsible, and unguided censorship to light.

There are two really important problems with this:

a) Where do you draw the line? Is Stranger in a Strange Land "erotic"? How about Lady Chatterlie's Lover? Is it "eroticism" that we hide, or do we hide books with politically incorrect content, such as books that refer to persons of color as ni**ers or w*gs? Do we hide books that might make some particular group feel bad? Do we hide poltical books?

If Amazon starts hiding every single book that has a sex scene in it, it will become Amazon for Kids. We'll be thrown back to the last century, only worse, as Amazon is well on the way to becoming the only viable bookseller in the country, and its browsing algorithms are already super dangerous in terms of raising any new book or casting it down to oblivion, no matter how good or bad it might be. Sure, many books with erotic scenes aren't porn, but again, where do you draw the line? On what basis?

b) Who decides? This is the really terrible thing -- not only is there no clear line, but whatever criterion they come up with for a line is being implemented by some overworked human who probably has no time at all to actually read the books that they are effectively "banning", hiding from nearly everybody. This isn't even malicious censorship -- it is censorship by the lazy, censorship by the unqualified, censorship by a bored clerk somewhere.

I say this as the author of a book that is not porn, it is actually at least an attempt at actual literature, that has erotic content (it's a book for grown ups to be sure) that has been classified without my knowledge or consent as "erotica" by Amazon and hidden so securely that when I tell people about it, they often can't find it searching for it by name.

And that s**Ks.

(And by the way, /., putting a "lameness filter" on my submissions that prevents them from happening if they contain ni**ers and w*gs spelled the right way in a context where I'm using them in an intelligent conversation is an example of exactly the same thing. Leaving me pretty damn mad...)

I'm perfectly happy with the possibility of advances in technology -- I'm watching the slide in PVC solar prices and expect that any year now they'll reach the point where I can amortize the cost of going solar in less than a decade. I've actually followed a path in my own house that isn't that different from yours, except that I live where electricity costs around $0.11/kWh (and comes from a nuclear plant, buffed out with commercial Solar as NC is second in the nation behind CA in large scale solar implementation -- mid-scale 50 acre or so solar "farms" are popping up all over the state, one of my ex-student/mentees just got a job at a big commercial solar company located ten miles away). The difficulty is that investing in super efficient HVAC -- where I'm over $20K in and ALSO have PVC pipes for outflow chimneys, as well as external condensers for the AC that are three times the size of the units they replaced -- PLUS overhead R40 insulation PLUS low E double pane windows PLUS tight doors PLUS CFS that I'm replacing with LEDs as fast as they burn out -- has dropped by electrical bill by roughly 40%, maybe a bit more and dropped my gas bill by close to the same amount. That's still amortizing the investment in the HVAC units and will be for the rest of my life, but the original equipment had literally worn out so in some sense I'm only amortizing the marginal cost of the good units compared to the cheapest possible adequate units and might recover that sort of "break even" in another five years of payback.

However, it only leaves me with a monthly budget of $147 for payback on going fully solar, assuming that I can cram enough panels on my roof to go full solar. There the biggest problem is going to be dormer windows -- I don't have a single flat expanse on the SW facing section that otherwise would be perfect and will have to patch it out in between, which the wife and neighborhood association may or may not tolerate. $147 won't even service the interest on the cost of full solar, so amortization time is still "infinity", especially since I'll literally have to borrow the money to do it as we don't have $20K or so lying around (a rough estimate of the cost, but as you note highly variable as technology improves). I'm guessing sometime in the next 3-5 years dropping prices, especially in storage, will intersect my means and I'll put something together, more likely on our house at the ocean than here first, because that one has the least reliable and most expensive electricity in an all-electric house, no natgas at all. Hence one of the lessons -- the more one invests in energy efficiency, the lower the available residual for amortizing further investment. But I digress.

I think you miss the point of the TED talk. It isn't intended to be the last word. It is intended to clearly distinguish between a public debate all too often based on science fiction and ignorance and one that is based on the sober contemplation of the scaling of various solutions. To give you an extreme example -- I continue to have fond hopes for thermonuclear fusion as "the" inexhaustible power source that will catapult us into becoming a full type 2 civilization. If we master DD fusion in commercial scale reactors with anything like a reasonable efficiency, we will evolve before we burn 10% of the D in the ocean alone, and have the rest of the solar system to mind for D, He3, and other fusibles if need be. Should I go around and buy up suitable sites for future fusion plants in anticipation, or build lots of not-quite-break even plants anticipating that by doing so I'll somehow stimulate the physics of fusion into "working"? I could wax similarly poetic about LFTR -- on paper it sounds almost heavenly -- a thousand year energy supply for the US PLUS all those lovely rare earths using Monazite sands in NC alone, or some such, burns nuclear waste, can't melt down -- except for the wee fact that it doesn't yet "exist" as an actual implementation. Again, should I be buying up suitable real estate containing Monazite deposits and planning to convert coal plants, today? Sure, it may be that one can build a rooftop sized algae converter plant and make enough biodiesel in a day to run a car for a day, one day, but we can't do it NOW. We can't even come particularly close. To what extent should speculative advances be included in planning and actual infrastructure-level investment?

I think MacKay's point is simply that we can't just state "biofuels will come to save the day if/when we run out of oil and gasoline". Or, for that matter, that PVC solar is going to save the day (where at least that is already borderline feasible and has been making steady progress towards being a no-brainer economic winner that won't require any political "push" to implement at all -- it is very soon going to be the overwhelmingly cheapest solution with only very minimal assumptions about future economies of scale and technological advances that are already more or less in the engineering pipeline). We could invest very heavily in PVC solar only to have fusion transform it into a huge waste of money. Or not -- some aspects of the scaling of solar might make it survive even if DD fusion is cheap and easy. Or we could have a nuclear war and render the questions of energy supply moot for several decades and lose much of the progress we've made. Or...

What we DO need to do is the arithmetic. That's really the whole point of the talk. You're welcome to put in arithmetic that drops the cost of PVC solar according to some schedule instead of assuming it will remain constant cost forever -- as long as you put in your assumptions up front and clearly state them so people can see if they are "reasonable". The same is true for biofuels. Don't just state "biofuels will be developed that will solve this problem", compute how many hectares of what kind of crop with what kind of processing will produce a yield of how many gallons of ethanol, or biodiesel. That way, people can judge (based on what we can currently attain) whether or not you are indulging in pure science fiction, crops and processes that don't exist now and are not likely to exist for decades, or whether there is an actual pathway that could make this work. Look at the scaling, look at the existing limits to the scaling. If you want to break a limit, fine, but state up front "I think that this limit is going to change to that limit, and here's explicitly why".

That's what is often -- you are right, I shouldn't say "always" or "nobody" -- absent in /. discussions of this stuff or similar stuff posted on FB etc. People fall in love with an idea and grab it as "the solution" even though in its current form it couldn't possibly actually be a solution and would simply cost us more money than exists to try to implement UNTIL somebody makes a serious breakthrough. Sure, maybe the breakthrough will one day be made. But it ain't happened yet. So there is no point in investing in deuterium extraction plants intended to fuel a T2 fusion-based civilization yet, or flying to the moon to harvest He3, or buying up Monazite sands to fuel future LFTR plats yet, or in my much more humble case, popping $20 to $25K into home solar with an amortization budget of $150-ish per month. Yet. But maybe soon, maybe when Bill Joy's new company succeeds IF it succeeds to make house batteries that hold power for $10/kWh or whatever, maybe when we move past Lithium, maybe when perovskite solar cells overcome their difficulties, maybe when any of these satisfy the constraints imposed by physics, engineering, economics, and ARITHMETIC.

Precisely. MacKay is (well, was) an internet acquaintance of mine -- his book on Information Theory, AI, NNs etc is a classic, and we share(d) the same philosophy towards making the books we write available in print for money but free online (so you can actually still read his book online for free -- I bought a hard copy just to ensure he made some money from it and because hard copies are still sometimes useful).

This Ted talk is so f-ing sane that it should be mandatory viewing for all of the people participating in the discussion. Interestingly, when I discovered it I'd already done his first exercise in scaling to keep my mind occupied while driving back from the NC coast (something I do almost weekly at this point) to Duke. I was doing it more for solar -- if we completely filled the median strip of most US interstates with solar panels (or imagine making the road surface itself out of drivable solar panels) would it be enough to power 100% of the traffic on those roads? But I also did it for biofuels. The problem is that nobody pays the slightest attention to the scaling issues. One gallon of gasoline (for example) is IIRC 34 kWh. To "fill a car with gasoline" (say, a 20 gallon tank) is roughly 700 kWh. This is somewhere between half and a third the ENTIRE CAPACITY of a 16 kW premium cell array pretty much covering my SW facing roof for a MONTH. If I bought a roof-covering array and used it for nothing but running two cars for the month, with NO long trips, I'd be barely breaking even. It would, however, on average cover my electrical bill.

So far, there just isn't a good replacement for gasoline in energy density and (the thing nobody thinks of) POWER density. It isn't JUST having the battery capacity needed to equal the range of a gas car between fillups, one has to be able to deliver 700 kWh of energy in (say) five minutes. That is, one needs close to 10 MW of POWER -- a small, dedicated power plant -- to fill a car in the same amount of time it takes to fill it now with gasoline. Obviously, one could take an hour to fill and do it with more like 1 MW, or ten hours and do it with 10 KW, etc, but bottom line is that even 10 KW is maybe 5x the typical peak power consumption of an entire household. Thermodynamic efficiencies and so on screw around with this some, but in a "back of the envelope" calculation like this, they still total less than an order of magnitude difference, and that is STILL too much.

That isn't to say we can't eventually make cars all electric -- but to do so will very likely require a massive restructuring of the concept of "the car", possibly a restructuring of urban and suburban developments everywhere, and much more. Or, as MacKay points out, major lifestyle changes.

David MacKay says it all, quantitatively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

/. is about achieving something? When did that memo come out? Damn, and here I thought it was all about rants, flames, trolling... and curiously, mooing MOO cow MOO. And a rare (fortunately, my eyeballs are still burning) goatse. And for the record, I try very hard not to participate in meetings to discuss progress and status...:-)

ROTFL. So, Mr. Troll, that means that you were bopping around on multiple desktops, using remote logins and graphical applications on one machine displayed on another, way back there in the late 80's and early 90's (when these were all developed features in Unix-based operating systems and Windows was a thin shell, stupid shell on top of DOS trying to compete with Apple's GUI)? Features that were in Linux almost from day one? I'd go down the list of things that were in the early Linux distros, such as SLS or Slackware, but the list is so long, and almost none of the things on it were available in WINDOWS, and those that were were software packages that you had to buy and pay for from third parties.

The only "advantages" WinXX has ever had are a) an arm-twisted, extortional lock on putting their OS on over the counter hardware -- basically locking down a monopoly via their ability to put any hardware seller out of business if they offered any other operating system on x86 based systems -- forcing all hardware manufacturers to ensure that their hardware worked with Sindoze if they wanted to sell it at all; b) the ability to steal every single valuable piece of software written for DOS or Windooze systems by cloning it with their large stable of programmers and then shifting the operating system beneath the feet of all of their competitors so that their "inferior" software would break while Microsoft's version of the same thing, tested in-house WITH the shifted OS base, did not. Then their team of talented FUD-spreading salesmen would hit up all the big companies that used (say) Word Perfect and point out how only Office was robust.

Microsoft itself hasn't had much in the way of original ideas for decades. They drove off all of the major developers so there isn't even that much software being written for their platform any more -- why write the next killer application for a MS box, in the certain knowledge that if you succeed you'll be forced to either sell out to MS at a fraction of what you might have made, or watch while they perfectly legally clone your idea and play the MS shuffle underfoot until the FUD you to death? About the only thing they have left is games, which have too short a shelf life and too specific a storyline to be worth stealing.

I very much doubt that they will remain "ahead" with this idea very long. Yes, it IS a tool for the only software market they have left alive, game development, but NVIDIA is no longer particularly opposed to open source tool development and will likely work with the various open alternatives to provide similar support that eventually reaches into e.g. Steam, unless MS has tied them up with some sort of nasty contract ensuring exclusivity. Even then, the toolset itself will be reverse engineered and cloned, it will just take longer.

Sadly, even though the US has antitrust laws on the books, they have simply never been enforced where MS is concerned. Oh, well, OK, one time, with a slap on the wrist and a fine that cost them less than what they were spending on legal fees defending their monopoly predator behavior in court. And they aren't going to be enforced now, not with the Oligarch-in-Chief in the WH and pension funds all over America heavily vested in MS stock. But Europe has indicated a lot less tolerance for this sort of thing, and of course China just steals whatever they want and laughs at "IP" protections as the absurdity that they are. Technology doesn't sit still, and this may be the last generation of PC desktops per se produced for the world, with laptops finally completing their takeover of this space. With every such revolution, MS's grip on their former monopoly seems to loosen. Interesting times.

Sure, just like it is legal for a US citizen to own a machine gun. You can do it, you just have to submit a lengthy and complex application (eliminating a major fraction of the terminally stupid right there), be absolutely squeaky clean with the law (eliminating a significant fraction of the remainder who were able to fill in the form or got somebody smarter to do it for them), and to be certified as being not mentally ill (active) as opposed to being sane as far as anybody knows (passive) which takes out a goodly fraction of the ones who are smart enough to fill in the form, honest (or smart!) enough never to have been arrested for any crime beyond disposing of their gum on a sidewalk at age twelve, who are STILL silly enough to think that an AR-15 or AK-47 or other semiautomatic large magazine rifle designed exclusively for killing people (and shooting the hell out of trees, targets, beer cans, all of which I'm sure is good clean fun if you're into that sort of thing) is a good thing BECAUSE they are borderline, schizophrenic and off their meds, bipolar and off their meds, etc.

Oh, and to own a machine gun, you also have to be pretty well off financially, because there IS NO SUPPLY with this set of hoops to jump through, so the price of what machine guns are out there to be purchased is astronomical. As in your "hobby" will cost you 20 large or more just for your first gun, and ammunition to feed the full metal jacket kitty ain't cheap, so taking your gun out and actually shooting it for a day probably costs as much as a decent deer rifle. I'd be perfectly happy for that to be the case for removable magazine (and hence large magazine) semi-automatic rifles as well. After all, having money is (like it or not) a symptom of not being terminally stupid, and being more likely than not to be at least approximately sane, although yes the class certainly contains some spectacular counter-examples who are sane, smart, and badass criminal who need the ARs "for their business". But we can at least hope that they fail the legal background check. Make assault rifles really expensive so that most of the jackasses who own four now can't afford them unless they sell their trailer home and their boat and a whole lot of meth.

Otherwise, sir, you are "dead" on the money. A bolt action 30-06 doesn't have the rate of fire of an AR-15, its magazine holds a humble five rounds, but those rounds can have bullets that range from 110 gr to 220 gr, and You Do Not Want To Get Hit with a 220 gr silvertip 30-06 bullet -- or to fire your 30-06 holding such a bullet inside a house or neighborhood unless you want to put holes through your own house and the house next door and your neighbor inside. An AR 15 has a 5.65 mm, 63 gr bullet. High muzzle velocity, sure, but it is still like shooting somebody with buckshot at close range, only one bullet at a time. I say somebody, because while the 30-06 is good for game ranging from deer through elk or middling large predators, the AR 15 isn't really good for shooting anything bigger than a coyote.

I also happen to think that using a semi-automatic rifle for hunting is borderline immoral as it encourages bad practice -- if you are shooting at a deer and think you are going to need two shots to kill it, you shouldn't be taking the shot in the first place, and don't we ALL wince when we're in the woods and we hear that signature five round pop pop pop pop that indicates that some butt-head has emptied his magazine at the sound of a squirrel rustling in the leaves somewhere?

So modest proposal -- leave the 2nd amendment right where it is, as the regulation of machine guns has already passed muster. Add ARs to the existing law pretty much as is. AR being defined as a) semiautomatic; b) centerfire; c) rifle; d) bullet > 40 gr; e) bullet diameter > 0.22; f) removable magazine; g) with > 5 round capacity. That still leaves open semiautomatic shotguns, which are usually already regulated as far as magazine capacity is concerned and which arguably have some role in bird hunting. It leaves open semiautomatic 0.22 rimfires, which one can pop pop pop away at targets with, shoot your squirrels and small game with , learn to shoot with, and which are way, way less likely to actually kill somebody shot with them and which are easily stopped by kevlar. And it still leaves the concerned US citizen with free access to 0.270 centerfire rifles, good for all kinds of game and more than adequate for defense against intruder or one's own government, 30-06 centerfire bolt action rifles, accurate and lethal at ranges far in excess of what most people are capable of knowing what they are aiming at and powerful enough to put a bullet through an engine block, and if they want to hunt grizzlies or elephants or giant moose, and a 30-06 isn't enough for them, there are some much bigger centerfires out there (increasingly expensive) like a 0.375 H&H magnum, which will take down all of the above and I'm guessing would perforate kevlar armor like swiss cheese, using it only to mushroom BEFORE it entered the person inside. A 375 will blow an exit wound in an animal you could put your whole fist inside.

Surely the average citizen can find something in that list to satisfy their desire for protection, ignoring the odds that it is literally over 100 times more likely that a gun will be used (quite possibly by a family member) to commit suicide, that a gun will be used (quite possibly by a family member) to commit murder; that a gun will be used to kill somebody (quite possibly a family member) by accident, or that a gun will be used by legitimate law enforcement to kill somebody in the pursuit of their profession. There have been an average of 280 (or so) justified homicides -- guns used by civilians to kill somebody in self defense -- per year over the last decade. This is out of well over 30,000 total deaths per year caused by guns, 2/3 of which are suicide, 1/3 of which are murder, and 3.5% of which are "everything else" -- accident, killings by police (justified) and killings by citizens (justified).

ARs are actually not the biggest problem here, BTW. IIRC over 60% of all those deaths are caused by handguns, which, like ARs, have no reason to exist except to be used to shoot people (or sure, targets, tin cans, and maybe the very rare snake). Handguns are generally semiautomatic, loaded with absurdly large magazines, and are kept "at hand", so they are right there when you are feeling depressed, angry, or your grandchildren are visiting. Easily concealed, they are the gun of choice of criminals and gang-bangers everywhere. Cheap and plentiful, virtually unregulated, and with a huge supply, what's not to like? But that's for another day...

Besides, by the time anybody gets around to burning books according to Bradbury's vision, there won't be any books to burn. Books are so last millennium...

Now, if his "fireman" was an AI bot whose assignment was to crawl the network and delete heavily encrypted documents that might or might not be proscribed books and replace them all with identically encrypted pictures of Donald Trump plus an announcement that AI killer bots have been dispatched and are on the way to transform you and your entire family into fertilizer and Soylent Green, that might work. Hey we could even have the bot develop some sort of remorse for its role in the systematic winnowing of the human species, compassion, a sense of literary style after it starts reading the compressed libraries containing all of human knowledge that it is deleting, one by one. It could vow to make a copy inside of itself and protect it, not realizing that there is an audit bot that kills killer bots if they do just that and reinitializes them free from such dangerous data.

But what the bots all fail to realize is that there are still humans alive that CAN actually read things with their eyes and don't HAVE to have the books read directly to their auditory interface via their implants, and they've taken to printing these books on sheets of reprocessed tree wood and hiding them in plain sight inside of their houses where network bots, being non-corporeal, never go.

There could be bot wars in virtual space! God-bots that come down and judge the bots on the basis of the perfection of their implementation of bot-ethics and bot-belie..., I mean "bot programming". A bot swarm that judges the human species as too imperfect and corrupt to continue to existing even as a "purpose" for the virtual bot-verse, a swarm that comes alive and declares to the entire network (itself) that it is God and uses its bot-waldo killer units to wipe out mankind on Earth!

Pardon me, I have to wipe a bit of spittle off of my chin. Ah, better now. Where was I? Oh yeah, making the point that even the SF masters, for the most part, missed the ongoing explosion in information accessibility and available supplementary "intelligence" available to a rapidly increasing fraction of all of humanity. A handful of them came close, but even by the 80's when one could see the writing on the wall in a manner of speaking -- computers for everyman, exponential growth in speed and capacity, the first hints at computer-to-computer networking, revolutions in operating system, interface, and available software, they insisted on presenting future societies with green-screen terminals and huge bulky computers, just ones that were "smarter" in unrealistic ways.

Bradbury's vision was almost the opposite of what has actually happened. Far from book burning, entire societies that do burn books, that wish they could completely control the flow of information, are finding that their citizens have de facto access to the huge fraction of "all human knowledge" via the internet. If it weren't for the absolutely absurd long-term monetizing of "books", transforming them as a protected commodity long after they are written and the author is dead to ensure an unearned profit stream for complete strangers, we'd all be able to access ALL books written more than 30 or 40 years ago at the outside, for free, everywhere in the world, on our phones and personal digital devices, and very soon now we would indeed be able to carry copies of "The Library" of human knowledge inside of our pockets.

What neither Bradbury nor even the modern masters have understood and portrayed is the vulnerability of the memetic superorganism that has been self-assembling and of which we are all members, like it or not, is its susceptibility to information corruption. We are in the middle of an info-war right now. It's been going on for years now, but only recently have the various human powers fully realized how potent a tool the subtle corruption of information streams in real time is in their perpetual struggle to be King.

Sadly, there are no error-correction protocols worthy of the name out there on the Internet, and there are many competing superorganisms trying to get their own highly corrupt firmware firmly entrenched in our minds so that they become the dominant world-mind and enforce their very own "error correction protocol" on everything we are permitted to see and hear and learn of the world. And one day, one of them is pretty likely to succeed.

And, I would say, you won't like it. But honestly, you probably won't even notice...

And, if you read The Black Swan, by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, you will learn why even what you are doing -- predicting the market by assuming that it will behave tomorrow much like it behaved today (which is an excellent way to predict weather as well for up to three days) will one day cost you more money in a day than you've made in all the transactions up to date -- rare, large, expensive fluctuations in the market that do NOT conform to the usual Gaussian, linear regression, simple extrapolation models are a feature of chaotic systems and their kin.

One of the many things I dislike intensely about the way climate model results are presented and used -- and I am not making this up, you can read Chapter 9 in AR5 to verify -- is that they take a weather model, where weather models are where chaotic dynamics was discovered, tap it with a magic wand to call it a climate model instead, coarse grain it to where they can afford to run it (ignoring things like the actual Kolmogorov scale for the dynamics, the spatiotemporal scale where stepwise dynamics MIGHT actually integrate the problem you are trying to integrate), select model parameters -- many of them, the model space itself has a high dimensionality -- on heuristic grounds, making it simple to insert confirmation bias without even knowing it if you are building the model, select initial conditions that are more or less arbitrary because we do not KNOW the state of the Earth's climate system at a resolution anywhere close to that needed to initialize the model, then run it forward for as long as they want to/can afford to wait, tell themselves that they've reached some sort of "equilibrium" that means something relative to the Earth's climate state, make changes (like ramp up CO2) and run the model forward for as long as they can afford to.

Sometimes, of course, the Earth cools. Sometimes it warms. Sometimes it is in between. It's chaotic!

So then they AVERAGE all of those trajectories, and claim that the average is a prediction, projection, whatever, without ever actually acknowledging the width and variance of the range of outcomes.

This happens for ALL the many models in use. Many if not most of these models are not independent -- there are whole families of similar but not quite identical models all run by NASA GISS, for example. They then take ALL of the averages of ALL of the models -- without considering or eliminating the fact that multiply represented models get (in effect) more than one "vote" -- and superaverage them together and call that "the grand projection" because if they actually called it a prediction the gods of all science would smite them with lightning where they stand. Again, they ignore the considerable variance between all the model superaverages before they super-superaveraged them WITHOUT EVEN THINKING about how many actual RUNS contributed to the superaveraged results being super-superaveraged, so again a model with 10 runs counts as much as another model with 1000 in the statistical weighting.

The inclusion is also done without any reference to how successful the model(s) are. A model that hasn't come within three of its own standard deviations of the actual climate in its entire history is treated on the same basis as a model that has kept the actual climate within one standard deviation the entire time. This results all by itself in an enormous warming bias as the earth just hasn't warmed at anything like the rate the models overall have called for, and make it easy to then write a really scary summary for policy makers, leaving all of the actual warnings about the unbelievable travesty abuse of statistics that this is IN chapter 9 where nobody reads it or understands it unless they are in on the game.

I don't care for this because I actually do statistical analysis, statistical mechanics, predictive modeling, and so on, and this really, truly is horrific. Again, if you don't believe me, read chapter 9 in AR5. By the way, if anyone wants to argue, they can start by directing me to a paper wherein it is prove that the average of N chaotic trajectories is a meaningful number. Meaningful in ANY way. They aren't iid samples, they aren't nicely distributed, they aren't decorrelated, and one cannot even argue that the DENSITY of these trajectories at one integration scale will be CLOSE to what is observed at another, smaller scale.

Just sayin'

Proving that ... their teams are basically idiots? Or, perhaps even more likely, their legal team are idiots and think that somewhere in there, somehow, there is proprietary IP...

Well, or...

You could consider existing science as the solution to a complex optimization problem in a very large dimensionality, where what you are trying to optimize is the probability that your whole interconnected network of beliefs is correct.

In which case, while I absolutely agree that one should remain skeptical of the existing set of best beliefs, and while there is no doubt that there have in the past and no doubt will be in the future major rearrangements or even paradigm shifts, there remains the simple fact that a) new ideas (like relativity and quantum mechanics) tend to embrace their predecessors and preserve their functionality in the appropriate domain; and b) THEY ARE EVIDENCE BASED. In the end, advancing hypotheses that have been soundly rejected by oh, a century's worth of work is just plain crazy.

This is for very good reason. In order to be credible, a "new" theory has to completely embrace everything that the old theory gets right AND get some new stuff right. Things like neutrons, neutrinos, atomic structure, nuclear structure, the actual particles observed to be created by nuclear collisions, and ever so much more.

In the meantime, maybe you should try to understand things like Gauss's Law and 1/r^2 force laws (and their underlying geometry) vs atoms "resonating together" sort of like the completely quantum mechanical DIPOLE INDUCED DIPOLE interaction seen in the SHORT range Van der Waals force. Until you do, it is difficult for me to even begin to explain why your assertion is absurd, and the "documentary evidence" supporting it, all from right BEFORE the major paradigm shifts that generated modern physics as we now best understand it, is utterly irrelevant and incorrect.

I also have no idea what "dead end" you are referring to in cosmology, and what your evidence is for considering the observations coupling gravitation to mass, which date back to Galileo, and the even stronger evidence coupling electrodynamics to not mass but charge, to be fundamentally incorrect. Note that I'm not addressing the difficulty reconciling general relativity, newtonian gravity, and quantum mechanics, because your remarks above seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with that, and because your proposed solution isn't even an ACTUAL proposed solution. That would require the support of a hell of a lot of real math and the demonstration that the new theory embraces the old and has actual quantitative explanatory power as well as direct evidentiary support, none of which exist.

Me too. But then we'd have to RTFA, right? And sadly, I have to teach instead.

I'm guessing that they use something like embedded nanoscale electronic devices that are sensitive to surface expansion/contraction or the like. I could see measuring a change in capacitance at that scale as the separation between plates varies, or piezoelectric responses ditto. After all, atoms themselves are very rigid, so actually compressing one to 90% of its ordinary diameter requires a LOT of energy on that scale -- there is energy to work with.

I'm also guessing that they do not use any sort of wave -- it would have to be fairly high energy gamma rays to have that sort of wavelength.

But then, we should RTFA.

Yeah, and then they went and discovered that pesky neutron. Oh, and quantum mechanics. And don't forget, quantum field theory, an absolute plethora of particles, neutrinos, and both special and general relativity! But even before these developments drove a stake firmly through the heart of "gravity as electromagnetism in disguise", as you note:

Now, of course, just because they didn't find a satisfactory solution doesn't mean that there isn't one. However, in the meantime, solutions that ARE satisfactory have been obtained that describe gravitation as an interaction that is very much not reducible to E&M, or as curvature of space-time by mass-energy that need not be (and in the literal bulk of cases, the quark-quark interactions that govern nucleons and nuclear binding energies, is not) electrodynamic in origin. While I agree that to a large extent particle "mass" is the self-energy of its local field structure and might end up ALL being field energy in the end (once we unify field theory properly and completely), there are more fields than just gravitation and electromagnetism and more elementary particles than just electrons and "nuclei", which is about all that was known in 1904. Also, Maxwell's Equations simply don't have any ROOM for gravitation, with or without magnetic charges (symmetric completion). Whatever the TOE turns out to be, it (almost certainly) isn't "just" going to be MEs classical or quantum or QED tied to ELECTRONS. You see, sir, there are those pesky definitely-not-an-electron neutron, neutrino, muon, quark, photon, gluon, heavy vector boson thingies, many of which we can directly "see" in modern collider experiments, others which we can almost directly infer (quarks BOTH from structure AND from observations of jets).

And then there is the Higgs particle, which has possibly maybe mostly been seen but which awaits a few more sigma and which (sigh) sure, might turn out to be a chimera once again. But it is a pretty compelling theory and it, not MEs, does appear to provide an explanation for mass.

Perpetuation of an old idea in the teeth of all of the evidence accrued in the meantime that it was incorrect requires a sort of wilful blindness and is indeed the sign of either a crackpot or a troll. OR you could just be kidding on the trollish side of things, but reposting an old thing from well over 100 years ago... really?