Hmmm... Does that mean we can take up a collection to fund it privately?

I think it's a very much more interesting question to ask what technologies we *can't* replicate in modern times, vs. ones that have just become obsolete.

Examples include: Stradivarius violins, Greek Fire, Damascus steel, etc.

Then there's another category of technologies where we could theoretically do it, but we've lost the necessary tools and designs, and it would take a big research project that probably will never happen because there are better solutions now. E.g. the Saturn V rocket.

Umm, guys... *even* if this mechanism didn't have all the problems described, there's still *energy* conservation. The energy to create those particle pairs *still* would have had to come from a terrestrial source (or extracted from a non-terrestrial source that would have otherwise increased the mass of the Earth absent this behavior).

Antimatter doesn't have negative mass. *If* the positrons *were* able to escape, that would imply that the world would become *less* massive, not more. Because some of its mass escaped into space. This is no different than if some regular matter were fired out into space.

Analogously, Hawking radiation makes black holes *less* massive, not more.

"Hypocrisy" is almost completely unrelated to "lying". The only overlap would be if you're telling other people not to lie, and are lying yourself.

Is anyone else skeptical that this experiment was *really* designed and performed by 8 year olds, and the paper written entirely by them?

I've met a lot of 8 year olds. Indeed, I've tutored a lot of them on science fair projects. I've also seen a *lot* of examples where motivated teachers and parents, ahem, "encourage" them a bit more than is strictly in accordance with the rules.

ISPs can't have it both ways. Either they get to control the data they are transporting based on content, *or* they can have the safe harbor legal provisions available to common carriers.

It's *logically inconsistent* for them to have both. If they control it, they are partly liable... that's a major part of the legal definition of the term.

If you make them liable for the data they transport if they control the data based on content, I can guarantee this whole net neutrality problem will go away. Regulations aren't necessary. Holding people accountable for their actions is. No free passes!

The problem isn't that ISPs want to filter content, it's that they want to filter content and still have common carrier safe harbor provisions that relieve them of all liability for the content they are controlling.

You can't have it both ways (well, logically, at least... of course ISPs may get it both ways, but they shouldn't). If you don't want to be responsible for content, you can't filter on content.

If this were made legally clear, I doubt many ISPs would touch content filtering with a 10' pole. They *want* freedom from liability.

They really should just have called this a tax in the first place, because it's indistinguishable from one. Raise taxes by $750 on everyone and provide a $750 tax credit for showing proof of insurance. Done. 16th Amendment.

The fact that it had to be disguised as a "penalty" or "fee" just shows yet again what incredible wimps the Democrats are in standing up to Republican bullying.

It would still take enough time for the fastest monkey to type it out. Monkeys are not of infinite speed, AFAIK.

For me the question is one of time. I don't mess around with websites that waste my time. It takes me maybe 5-10 seconds to decode and type in a ReCaptcha, for example. Less for some other flavors.

If the video shows the text in the first few seconds, I guess I wouldn't have a problem with that, but somehow I doubt that will happen.

I also doubt that it would be very hard to write a tool that breaks these, unless they go to some almost as hard to decipher text, which will just be even harder on a video background.

FWIW, that's 3 gallons ~= 13.5kg of gasoline plus approximately 38kg of *oxygen* for the same amount of energy. The energy density of gasoline+oxygen is only about 2.25 times that of TNT. Which is still impressive. It is true that the car only has to "hold" the gasoline. But it's just a bit misleading to reference the "energy equivalence" of TNT and gasoline this way.

It used to be that only porn sites had these warnings.

I think this entire discussion is unnecessary, and should be replaced by a different one: why do ISPs think they can filter data based on content and then have absolutely no responsibility for the content that flows on their network. That's not only unfair it's logically absurd.

Make it clear that they can filter all the data they want, but that they are therefore liable for damages caused by the data they carry and you will have net neutrality within a hour.

ISPs should *want desperately* to have common carrier status... the fact that this is even an argument only shows how much the political process has been twisted.

Yeah, it would have been *much* simpler and avoided most of this problem if Congress had just passed this as a new tax... with a corresponding tax credit if you have health insurance. The Constitution gives the federal government the power to tax income however derived without regard to a census or other enumeration.

Excellent. Perhaps now the physicists will get off their asses and get fusion reactors working.

Then they can relax about the helium shortage, right? (N.B.: yes, I know)