Of course we do ! Any savings from cheaper power goes directly into your pocket, while the extenal costs are shared with 7 billion people.

That's the problem with externalities. If I can make a deal that is a win of $10 million for me -- but that cauces a loss of $0.05 for every human being on the planet, then it's a huge win for me, so barring laws stopping me, I'll likely say yes. Meanwhile, the deal creates $10M of value, and does $350M worth of damage, thus for humanity as a whole, the deal is a huge loss.

Externalities is one of the biggest problems with capitalism. It explains why rational players can end up making decisions that are a net loss overall.

Yes, but the FIDE-incident seems to be the only one mentioned there where a serious attempt was undertaken to develop a communication-protocol designed to be non-noticeable.

They should ask stage magicians or "psychics" about it, it's *really* hard to notice that someone is receiving information from a random person among the spectators if the signaling is subtle enough.

Perhaps this happens all the time -- it's just that when it's reasonably well-done, it's seldom discovered.

Yes, we've been lucky. There's been quite a few incredibly close calls.

It's just that 99.35% is such a insanely high score. In the 70 years it's been maintained, it's never been lower than 11:43, i.e. 98.9%

This pretty clearly indicates that the scale isn't 0 to midnight, the actual scale they actually use, instead, is something like 11:40 to 12:00, thus our current score is 75% on the actually used scale.

It's all "think of a number you like" anyway. You choose 8000 - but why ? We're talking "doomsday" here, and humanity hasn't been capable of creating doomsday for more than 70 years.

The doomsday clock is maintained since 1947 - by the bulletin of the atomic scientists board -- this too clearly implies that they're primarily dealing with nuclear apocalypse type doomsday, so 70 years is clearly the right timeframe.

5 minutes to midnight on a 70-year-timeframe would mean that they expect there to be a greater than 50% chance of doomsday in the next half year.

My first thought was that it's not sufficient to search the -contestants- when there's spectators present, any of whom may be conspiring with the contestant. It's not as if having a "spectator" make barely-perceptible signalling in order to communicate information to a player is a new way of cheating.

At a guess, spectators could freely have any kind of comms-gear whatsoever. This hardly qualifies as "a mystery"

Personally, I think they should use math. If a reviewer reviews 50 video-games in a year on a 1-10 scale, insist that the rankings follow a bell-curve.

Or simple ask them to -sort- the games according to quality, rather than score them.

True, but there's 1440 minutes in a day, so five minutes to midnight is 99.35% which is a insanely high score.

Basically, by using a clock they claim to be using a 0-1440 scale and that the present value is 1435, but in actual reality, they're only using the last ten minutes of that scale, so the actual scale is 0-10 with a current value of 5.

The problem goes even deeper than that: Large parts of the conservative right-wing religious voting-block has fundamental problems with *reality* as opposed to fiction.

Reality demonstrates clearly that their recommended policies (restrict access to information, abstinence-only, shame, restrictions on access to contraceptives...) do not work, and infact result in more teenage-pregnancies, and more abortions - the precise opposite of the result they claim to want.

Meanwhile free condoms, open and honest sex-ed, the pill for any female over 13 who wants it, and a culture where teenage sexuality is (by most anyway) an *accepted* part of growing up, demonstrably works.

The latter is important: If teenagers need to *fear* the reactions of their parents if they notice contraceptives - how likely are they to have condoms available ?

My (then) boyfriend started sleeping over when I was 15. My parents reaction to the start of our sexual relationship can be summarized as "I guess it's not needed to put out an extra mattress for when X sleeps over anymore huh ? Would you like me to arrange for a pill-prescription for you, or have you taken care of it?"

Moral Panic is just that: panic.

No. No.

Glad to clear that up for you.

This thing is *also* not capable of hitting anything with reasonable precision, thus even if the answer to the previous two where "yes" it'd still not hit a barn without being lanuched inside it.

With cheap and guilt-free access to contraception that happens seldom, where anti-choicers don't run amok, there's also the option of abortion for the rare cases where birth-control fails. In contrast "purity balls" and bullshit like that don't work. USA is the outlier among first-world nations:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_tee_pre_sha-health-teenage-pregnancy-share

In USA, 22% of all 20-year-old females have given birth. The equivalent rate for Japan and Sweden are 2% and 3%. (and atleast for Sweden, most of -those- are conservative religious folks - drop that nonsense and the risk drops to sub-1% which is, if not ignorable, then atleast not a major reason for population-growth.

"purpose" ? Whose purpose ? Surely you're not implying that nature as such has a purpose ?

Sure they are ! If the projects are talked about at all, they miss deadlines more commonly than not.

When was the Dreamliner *supposed* to have it's first flight ? When where the first 20 supposed to be delivered ? When should the F35 be operational ? How many planes should be delivered by 2015. What should each plane cost ?

Projects take longer, cost more, and deliver less than hoped for. This happens regularly, indeed it's much more common than the opposite of a project that's completed before deadline, with more than promised features, under budget.

Anyone who's ever renovated a kitchen knows this. It's not news.

That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. No production isn't generally linear: it is generally *sub*linear.

Making 1000 of something, generally costs LESS than 4 times the price of 250 of the thing, not *more* than 4 times.

It's true that making 10000 in an efficient will likely take longer than making 250 - because the more efficient production requires a longer and more complicated setup-phase, but there's no problem putting this in the kickstarter-description: "The first batch will be 250 items, if we get more backers, then we'll make additional batches as required ..... "

You don't need to detect individual waves. The thing is, electrical hum is supposed to be spot-on 50hz or 60hz (depending on your location), but in reality it drifts around slightly with 50Hz or 60Hz being the *average* frequency. You might have several seconds of 50.01 hz followed by a minute of 49.998 hz and so on.

In other words, if you plot frequency versus time you don't get a straight line at 50 hz, but a line that rise and fall over time while staying on the average very near the goal-frequency.

People worry about the spectacular but unlikely rather than the common but nonremarkable. They worry about events that kill many people at once, in one location, especially if it involves explosions or words like "bioweapon" "chemical" or "radiation". (they aren't aware that water is a chemical or that light is "radiation")

Sitting on your coach. Eating too much sugar. Getting too little exercice. Smoking. These things are dangerous.

Terrorists, on the other hand, are essentially noise - unless you're living in something close to a war-zone, but even in Afghanistan or places like that, terrorism likely isn't among the top cauces of death.