This leads me to wonder if a good space based weapon wouldn't be to just dump heat into an enemy ship and cook the people inside without worrying about punching through the armor. If you can exceed their ability to radiate heat, wouldn't that cook them fairly quickly?

Unlike the above books, it's non-fiction, and people were actually killed for the crime of reading it. ("In Soviet Russia...")

Almost almost: Science often progresses by finding which things are false (that is the method of Null Hypothesis Testing), but the ultimate outcome is learning which things are true through this process.

I hear what you're saying but I think that you're a bit off target because you're ignoring the complex realities of living in a world where there is so much scientific knowledge.

Just because I do not understand at a subatomic level how an LED works, this does not mean that my belief in its ability to light up a room is a magical one. It is sufficient for me to believe that SOMEONE on this earth knows how it works, and that if, given a few years, I could learn this knowledge for myself. Whether something is magic or science is not a function of whether the information concerning its function currently resides in my head, but rather that it exists somewhere in the world, and could, in principle, be learned, if time were no obstacle.

For example, tell me this: imagine that a person used to understand the principles of flight, but is now in their 90's and has lost that information. Has their belief in airplanes switched from science to magic?

Disclaimer: I am a scientist. I have been running experiments and creating models for years. I have over 30 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

I read the summary and thought that this article might be on to something, but on reading it I don't think the author really understands science at all.

Here are some excerpts that I find particularly disagreeable:

"Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It's a form of engineering "

Absolutely not. Science is indeed in pursuit of Truth. The author criticizes Aristotle's form of "research", quite rightly, but then throws the baby out with the bathwater when he says this.

"Because people don't understand that science is built on experimentation, they don't understand that studies in fields like psychology almost never prove anything, since only replicated experiment proves something and, humans being a very diverse lot, it is very hard to replicate any psychological experiment."

This is factually incorrect. There are many Psychological phenomena that can be reproduced reliably. The Stroop effect, the Simon effect, visual illusions..

"What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things"

This is completely incorrect. A core goal of science is to understand the cause of things by developing abstracted understandings of them (i.e. theories).

I know nothing about this author, but from the article, I suspect that he is trying to reconcile his beliefs in science and religion by convincing himself that science cannot answer the big questions, it's just for making airplanes and computers. I could be wrong of course (--- very important scientific principle)

Actually, coffee may be part of that.

Turns out that coffee delays the build up of some chemical that makes you tired... i.e. it makes your body clock run slow, when taken in the morning.

However, if you take it late at night, before you go to bed, then the level of that chemical goes down more quickly and you'll wake up earlier the next day. Surprisingly it doesn't make it that much harder to go to sleep either, although if you're not already tolerant to coffee, all bets are off on falling asleep promptly.

Other things that affect the body clock are light, and food (big breakfasts are good for waking up early the next day, skipping breakfast = super bad).

> They can't simply trust users to appropriately mark packets - you'd have some who simply marked everything as high priority.

Last time I heard about it, and I don't think it's changed, Microsoft Windows marks all its packets as highest possible priority.

The immediate effect of them doing that, was that all ISPs immediately started ignoring the priority classes, which made them completely useless globally.

How about not quoting me out of context?

"... and take away that money and then some if they're partially or completely overturned"

It doesn't seem like a good idea, challenging patents in court is likely to be a lot more expensive than any patent clerk could ever be.

> Again this would lead to corruption with patent pre-screening and favoured people getting patentable stuff and unfavoured people getting junk and working for free.

No, I'm not saying that they would get paid only for passing patents. They would get paid for examining patents. It's just they would get paid more for being successful patent clerks; for passing patents that are enforceable and novel.

And the patents could be assigned randomly from the pool of patent clerks that accept the patents.

They should perhaps pay patent examiners some money annually for each patent that is passed, and take away that money and then some if they're partially or completely overturned. That way they've an incentive to work quickly, and a disincentive to do sloppy work.

Michael Totten did, and he found a police state overseeing wrenching poverty, complete with shortages for essentials and goods of retched quality.

In short: Communism.

Let's not forget that the best estimates for the death of communist regimes killing their own people is right around 100 million people. Both The Black Book of Communism and R.J. Rummel's Death by Government come up with roughly the same number of people killed.

Communism is incompatible with both human rights and a healthy economy, and never has, never can, and never will meet the needs of its own people or offer better lives than those under capitalism.

Embargoes have nothing to do with it...