Spoken like someone who doesn't live downwind of a coal-fired power plant.

I'll tell you how much clean air I've got: roughly 142 billion cubic miles of atmosphere on our planet, depending on your definition of "clean" and assuming you're willing to push the definition of "atmosphere" all the way up to 620 miles. You put the current value of the entirety of Earth's atmosphere at $1.4 billion dollars? And you figure your children will value the entire atmosphere at $1.4 million dollars?

Of course talking about the atmosphere in terms of volume is a little strange because the density varies so much. Say we want to talk about *useful* atmosphere up to about 50,000 feet or so (I'm feeling generous). In that case I've got about 1 billion cubic miles to sell you, which you value at $10 million dollars right now or at $10 thousand dollars (!) in the future.

Yeah, that's the thing about stuff like "clean air": it seems like it's infinite and free . . . until it's not and it's gone. Then it costs a hell of a lot more fix it than it would have to save it in the first place.

I agree that things like subsidies aren't straightforward, and no, I'm not excited about wealth transfers either. But our fossil-fuel energy sources have *huge* problems with externalized costs that aren't being paid by the people consuming the energy, and that's a problem that needs to be addressed in one way or another.

Yes, air quality is generally better now than it was 50 years ago (in first-world countries, anyway), but that didn't happen magically or accidentally. That happened almost entirely due to the sort of government regulations and policies that conservatives and libertarians deride (not to make assumptions about your political leanings). It sure as hell didn't happen out of the goodness of any corporation's heart - pollution is an external cost, remember?

This isn't diamond in any sense that we usualy think of it. Yes, it's carbon atoms, and yes, they're "crystallized", but the core of a white dwarf is composed mostly of electron-degnerate matter where all of the electrons have been disassociated from their parent atoms and all the nuclei clump together, floating in a sea of electrons. This stuff has a density of roughly 1000 kilograms (2,200 lbs) per cubic centimeter. I imagine it would *catastrophically* decompress if you could teleport a chunk of it back to earth. It's not diamond.

Except that if you're skeptical of the government on this one, then a picture of a corpse won't help your skepticism one little bit, or at least it shouldn't. Thanks to Photoshop, the days of photos being reliable evidence are long gone. Really, anyone who seriously suspects that the government just made up the whole story to look good will be satisfied by nothing less than the opportunity to do their own DNA tests on the body, which according to the government isn't possible.

Ultimately, the proof will be if OBL shows up alive and well in the future or not. If he's not dead, I'm sure he'll be more than willing to announce the fact. If he doesn't pull a Mark Twain then he's obviously indisposed somewhere and in that case Occam's Razor kind of leads us to believe that it went down more or less the way the government says it did, rather than looking for crazy conspiracy theories.

I think you didn't read the article carefully enough. The point is that that the developer surrenders essentially all control over their own pricing when they put something in the Amazon store. Amazon can just unilaterally tell you, "Oh, by the way, we're giving away your app this month. Don't like it? Tough." Now, yes, Amazon still has to give you a little bit of money in that case, but the definition of "a little bit" is pretty darn small: 20% of the list price, where the list price *must* be the lowest price you've ever sold your content at, ever, anywhere.

The point isn't that Amazon might engage in volume-based pricing strategies. Yes, times are changing and old retailing strategies don't always work. The point is that when you put your app in the Amazon store you surrender any ability to make your own decisions about your pricing strategy. Instead you hand your pricing strategy to another party who has very different goals than you do and will likely choose a pricing strategy that will optimize for their goals, not for your goals. If you're ok with that, then fine. But be aware of what's going to happen.

The point isn't that Amazon will be battling competitors for marketshare. The point is that the terms of the Amazon store allow them to price *a developer's content* in a way that helps Amazon capture marketshare while simultaneously screwing the developer's revenue. The developer has to surrender any control over their own pricing. You just trust that Amazon will price your content in a way that ends up benefiting you, but the IGDA is pointing out that Amazon has little incentive to manipulate prices in a manner beneficial to the developer and every incentive to manipulate prices in a manner beneficial to Amazon, and the two aren't at all the same thing. Read the article.

See, this is where Google goes off the rails and starts to believe its own press. Cutts said, in effect, "Our search engine tells us that our search engine is doing just fine." Yeah, well, ultimately Google's search engine isn't the center of the universe and the ultimate authority on everything. The users are. If the users say that the quality of search results are going down, then they're going down. Period. Google better figure out how to change their evaluation metrics to reflect what users are seeing rather than attempt to change user's opinions to match what their evaluation metrics say.

Yes. There's this persistent myth that smart game AI is hard to build. It's not. A really smart, impossible-to-beat game AI is easy to build (for most types of games). What's hard to build is a sort-of-smart-but-often-fallible AI that's just competent enough that it makes you feel like you're accomplishing something worthwhile when you finally beat it. For extra bonus hardness points you can try building an AI that makes the same kind of sub-optimal choices that a human would make so that it feels "alive". That's hard to do.

Game AIs have all kinds of advantages that make it easy (again, for most types of games) to build them to be unbeatable. They have always have instant reaction time, they can consider a large number of disparate data streams simultaneously, they always have perfect knowledge of their environment, they can have vast libraries of pre-computed decision trees, and their accuracy in moving, aiming, etc is limited only by the precision of floating-point data types. (An aside: the reason why real-world robotics is so hard is largely because real-world robots have really terrible knowledge of their environment, unlike game AIs.) The trick to writing a top-quality game AI is to figure out how to degrade and handicap all of those advantages in ways that leave them beatable while not leaving them looking stupid.

I'm not sure that the reaction we saw today clearly says that people don't like Bing's style. It says that people are used to Google's style and don't like change. It's quite possible that many of the same people who ranted about the Google homepage change would not find Bing's homepage offensive at all, because they have no preconceived notions about what it should look like.

That's the price of becoming a verb in the language: you no longer own your own product.

(Plus, honestly, Google's attempt at a picture background simply looked bad compared to Bing's implementation.)

What I want to know is, where did all the material go that used to be filling in the hole? I understand that groundwater can wash stuff away but that hole represents a ridiculous number of cubic meters of soil. Where is it now?

Gold may not go to zero but it's not at all clear that an ounce of gold actually has 1200 (or whatever it's at now) dollars worth of usefulness. Or if you want to get away from dollar valuations, then how about this: it's not clear than one pound of gold actually has as much usefulness as a very decent new car. Gold is in as much of a bubble right now as housing ever was.

No, he's saying that the optimal solution without patents would be to sit around waiting for someone else to dump money into developing new techniques, then trivially scoop them up and use them yourself. No one would be left in the dust. Unfortunately in that kind of situation the company that dumped money into developing new techniques gets absolutely nothing for their money because they can't leave anyone in the dust. The end result is that no one bothers to invest money into developing new techniques because there's no competitive advantage to do so.

The open-source model works well for ancillary tools where the people contributing to them and using them base more proprietory value-add businesses on top of them. Everyone contributes, everyone benefits. It's not clear to me how open-source R&D works when the topic of research *is* your business.

They didn't add programmers to a late project, they added programmers to a bunch of small, self-contained projects that hadn't been started yet. That's a very different thing.

The point of Fred Brook's argument is that if you take a project that's already late, that means it already has systemic problems of one type or another (or likely, several types at once). Adding bodies without solving the systemic problems just makes those problems grow, not go away. That's not the situation this company had and that's not what they did. Saying they "busted the mythical man-month" is just trolling.

So if a single magnestar can produce a truly massive gamma ray blast just by displacing its crust by a couple of centimeters http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/12/27/1639207/Fifth-Anniversary-of-a-Cosmic-Onslaught, what happens when two super-massive black holes finally merge?