Okay. Suppose that's true. This justifies graphic torture/death threats?

I've watched her videos too. I think her main problem is that she's a bit of a perfectionist—e.g., her criticisms of The Hunger Games (the book) are valid, but unnecessary: the book is more than good enough, even if there are things that could have been done better differently. But this particular video seems pretty accurate based on my experiences of video games. It's hard to find games I'm willing to play, because I am not willing to play through scenes like the ones depicted in her recent video.

Now, having said that, do you feel that I too should suffer death threats and threats of torture, or is the correct response simply to explain why you disagree with me, or why your experience differs from mine?

The topic, which you might get if you read the summary, is that she's received credible death threats. Do you think it's okay for people to receive death threats when they say something you don't agree with? E.g., was it okay when they put a price on Salman Rushdie's head?

Actually, the worst nuclear waste sites are all military. Well, not counting Chernobyl and Fukushima, of course.

That's phone service, not internet service.

Well, if you aspire to be (as opposed to eat) sous vide steaks, I guess there's no problem at all.

We haven't put a man on the moon since I was a kid. And putting a man on the moon isn't very useful if there aren't any women and there's no place to grow food. We kind of need to make things work here. Sure, some of us might survive. Or we might not. Get rid of our technological civilization by decimating the population and hence eliminating the people who know how to make the stuff that makes us a technological civilization, and suddenly the "we can go to the moon" story gets _really_ implausible.

Whoopee! Those of us who survive can eat insect meat and drive around in methane-powered death vehicles with mohawks and face paint! Yay!

You are basically making shit up here. Sorry. More heat doesn't necessarily mean more rain, and simple turbine systems are very inefficient and require a pretty high level of technology to maintain (you need to be able to smelt and machine steel).

Meanwhile, in ten years we might have the ability to safely grow replacement organs in peoples' bodies. We might be on the verge of building an amazing new world. Why are we throwing this away just so we can drive fucking humvees down the highway and live in poorly insulated homes with the thermostat turned up to 80 and buy stupid tchotchkes made in factories in China powered by coal?

You're thinking of the Articles of Confederacy, which preceded the Constitution. Study your history.

What? No they aren't. This isn't telephone service—it's internet service. There are no regulations requiring them to provide service out in the boondocks. Indeed, Verizon and AT&T received massive government subsidies to expand broadband service to rural customers, and then just decided not to do it and kept the money.

When I lived in rural southeastern Arizona, I got my DSL service from Valley Telecom, a local customer-owned cooperative that provides internet service, telephone and cellular to the poorly served areas of that rather sparsely populated corner of the state. I had 1.5mbps DSL in 2006 10 miles up a dirt road outside of Bowie, Arizona, pop. 300, for a very reasonable price, and VTC was doing just fine financially. It was a bit cheaper than my current service from Comcast, but that's precisely because Comcast only serves the areas where it can make a profit.

Meanwhile, back in Verizon territory, my mom, who is on the selectboard of her town (pop. 1200, small but much more dense than Bowie) could not get any kind of broadband in 2006, and the town wound up having to set up their own municipal broadband wireless service using Motorola Canopy radios and a microwave link to Mt. Tom because that's the only way they could avoid a massive drop in property values due to the lack of this essential service in the town, despite the fact that Verizon had been receiving money to pay for installing broadband to towns just like hers for the previous decade.

So maybe some shill from a cable company told you all about how supporting rural customers is why their service is so expensive, but that's a complete load of bullshit. Local and state governments don't currently have authority to impose regulations of this type on ISPs.

ISTM they are allowing others to be unethical, and profiting from that. I guess you could call that unethical as well, but it's a different form of unethical. Until we have a business model for open source software that works repeatably, I have trouble finding a problem with this. (And yes, I've been burned selling service on open source software in the past.)

Yup, I have the same problem. I think it's because you don't see the cover of the book every time you pick it up. This would be a really easy UI fix.

That wouldn't explain the different results among kindle folks versus paper folks, though.

I suspect that the lack of physical pages does make a difference in terms of knowing where you are in a book. I certainly know that I can often open a physical book to the location of something I remember and come really close, particularly if it's a book I'm studying, but even for novels.

But knowing exactly where you are in a book does not necessarily affect your comprehension of the book. I don't see any reason why it should. So yes, the lack of positional memory may make a difference in some test methodologies, but it doesn't mean people get less out of reading Kindle books. I mean, books on tape give you a completely different experience of the book than a paper book too; in some ways you probably get more, and in some ways less. This is the same sort of thing, I think.

I'm pretty sure they haven't accepted any contributions that didn't include a transfer of copyright. This is standard practice in a lot of open source projects, including traditional GNU projects like gcc and emacs.

That's correct. It's one of the more obvious and beneficial uses of GPLv3: anybody who wants to do open source gets to use it for free, people who want to use closed source have to pay, and the company that supports the software gets paid to make it better. Big win for everybody. The only downside to this model is that it requires Digia to hold the copyright, which makes accepting outside submissions difficult.

Fusion power research is being funded at least $20 billion/year worldwide, and has been for over 20 years. If you can point to some concrete areas where more cash would help?

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