Next time you see some one doing an up-skirt don't look away, look right at the person and make it clear you see him (or her) and do not approve.

I have a friend who used to do shit like that. Not like super duper creepy, but opportunistically.

We were all out at a bar one time and he's walking back to the table, sees this girl in a short skirt facing away from with at a "good" angle.

He starts lining up the shot and his girlfriend goes up to the girl and says, "Excuse me, there's some pervert over there trying to take a picture of your underwear".
The girl looks around sees him calls him a pervert and we all bust out laughing.

Don't fuck with Lisa. They've been married a long time now ;-)
 

You do realize that math covers everything in our universe and BEYOND. Accordingly, I would be careful about what constraints you put on it. . . as it is statistically more likely that your mind is just creating artificial constraints.

Ah, the irony.

Math is a creation of the human mind, and by its nature can never go beyond the limits of human ability to understand. The universe, on the other hand, is not bound by the limitations of the nervous systems of a group of balding apes, and I have to agree with J. B. S. Haldane's suspicion that "the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

People do crazy things when money and power is involved.

Neither of which will be involved once the Bitcoin fad ends.

Sayeth TFA,

Video games are currently used in healthcare to teach some basic medical procedures, but as wearable and 3D surface technology improve, they will be used to practice complicated surgeries and medical methods.

Those are not games. They are simulations.

When I take a CPR class and use a mannequin to practice, is that a game? No. And it's no different than using a computer program to simulate a procedure. These are not games.

Society needs revenge for certain crimes, for the sake of all our mental health.

Quite the opposite, actually. The quest for revenge is detrimental to one's mental health.

Can you provide any rationale for why we should care so much about the comfort of a serial killer?

Because we're supposed to be better than serial killers, we're supposed to be humane individuals. Because maybe we got the wrong guy, and it's worse to torture the wrong guy than to just lock up the wrong guy (though that's still very very bad). Because if we're going to imprison that serial killer with other people, people who are not serial killers and will eventually return to society, it's important how that serial killer acts towards fellow inmates. Because if we're interested in how to keep people from turning into serial killers, it's important to study that serial killer, to interview them in an atmosphere of some trust.

Non-violent offenders shouldn't be facing prison time at all, let alone solitary.

No jail time for burglars, then? Or car thieves or bank robbers who bust in after closing time? Interesting.

and the patron's vision turns out to have been bad enough to bring the ADA into play.

The ADA doesn't justify a videocamera attached to prescription lens any more than it justifies a sword attached to a cane. If my (hypothetical) bar has a "no weapons" policy[*], your sword cane gets checked at the door. If my bar has a "no videocamera" policy, your Glass gets checked at the door or stays in your purse or backpack. If you neglected to bring a non-sword cane or a non-Glass set of eyeglasses, that's your own stupid fault. ([*]Putting aside the fact that your sword cane may be illegal under state or local law anyway.)

...the anti-technology brigade...

There's nothing anti-technology about being opposed to the rude and stupid use of tech. Or do you think being opposed to NSA wiretapping is "anti-technology"?

Customers have NO RIGHT to kick anyone out of a bar. Only the staff as the right to do ask you to leave. Has the staff asked the person to put way GoogleGlass that would have been fine.

Anyone can suggest to anyone else that they leave a place. I can't kick someone out of my favorite dive bar (unless the staff asks me to help remove an undesirable, and on one or two occasions when a fight broke out in front of me I've taken that request as implicit), but I can certainly say, "I think your behavior is making people uncomfortable and IMHO you ought to go elsewhere." If they don't like me saying that, they can complain to the staff, who can kick me out.

That said, if the situation went down as claimed, the other patrons stepped over the line in this case.

What idiot thinks he is private on a sidewalk, a bar, or a grocery store!

What idiot doesn't understand that one of these things is not like the others, that one of these places often has a large individual (or several such individuals) stationed near the door to control access and to remove -- by force if necessary -- undesirable patrons?

A city sidewalk is public property. A grocery store is private property but is not restrictive as to who may enter. A bar is private property and is restrictive as to who may enter. There are radically different social expectations as to how people behave in each.

I read this article and my reaction is I doubt this was about Google glass at all.

Funny, I read the article and my reaction was, gee, what a douchebag, reacting to people who displayed a desire not to be filmed by threatening to film them. I don't see how you can read that as not being about the social conventions, or lack thereof, regarding ubiquitous cameras (e.g. Google glass).

It's important so people should understand it [or at least STFU if they don't actually understand economics] and I want them to.

Economics -- or at least its mainstream theories -- believes in a world where there are no limits to growth, where the conversion of irreplaceable natural resources into useless consumer crap destined for the landfill is "progress", and where human beings are rational actors. The most importan thing to understand about economics is that it's as disconnected from reality as astrology.

Now, Dude...

You've been around these parts for some time and in my experience you always have something of value to add when you say something...

But

What the heck happened with your formatting there?

For example, the software can easily show that *none* of the students in a particular classroom have mastered a particular concept, such as adding fractions.

Not quite. The software can easily show that none of the students in a particular classroom passed a section of some test. But whether that test actually measures the ability to (e.g.) add fractions, is another question.

Quantifying things is easy. You can do it with a random number generator. Quantifying things in a meaningful and useful way is hard.

The actual point of concern from fracking is not about the fluids, the water, or any of the bullshit you see people ranting about. The problem is that they are re-using old wells which were drilled a long time ago, and those wells go through the water table and natural aquifers in many cases. Those old wells tend to have shoddy and/or degraded casings (the walls of the wells are lined usually with some type of concrete or metal tubing to prevent them from collapsing), so when they are pumping the shit down the well they can tend to leak somewhat.

Well put. It's important to realize that by the very nature of there being trapped gas, that means that there is at least one (generally several) layers of highly impermiable cap rock above the natural gas, so thick and durable that they've contained a highly-mobile gas for millions of years (despite earthquakes and the like), all of which is several kilometers down - versus the groundwater which is a couple dozen to a couple hundred meters down. Creating cracks a couple dozen centimeters long several kilometers well below the cap rock down has essentially no effect on the leak rate from the reservoir up through *kilometers* of rock (which would take ages for anything they're injecting now to reach anyway). The problem is the well, which by its very nature must pierce through each layer on its way down - including your groundwater layers. Even new wells aren't perfect (as we well know). Reusing old wells is a recipie for leaks.

The solution to water shortages isn't to cry about frakking, it's to start advancing our de-salinization technology

I don't know... desalinization generally takes crazy amounts of energy to produce enough for agriculture, just by the very nature of the energy state of saltwater versus fresh. There is one concept I read about a few years back which I thought was pretty clever that might work around that, though - it was to use open evaporation pools to create super-saline water and to have it flow past two ion-specific membranes (one for negative ions, the other for positive) connecting to adjacent pools, creating a salt gradient pressure into those pools. Each of those pools in turn have their opposite ion-specific membrane connected to a final regular-saltwater pool. For an ion to follow the diffusion gradient and leave the super-saturated pool into an adjacent pool, that adjacent pool must suck an opposite ion from the final saltwater pool - which it will do if the gradient from the super-saturated pool is strong enough. The final pool stays balanced because ions are being lost to each adjacent pool. Eventually the final saltwater pool will become freshwater.

That which I find really neat about this concept is that it doesn't use electricity beyond basic water pumps and the like - the energy powering it is simply evaporation of seawater, which is ridiculously easy to achieve in many desert locations. In many places a mere jetty is enough to turn hundreds of square miles of ocean into an evaporation pool. The challenge is of course mass production of sufficient flow rate ion-selective membranes and keeping them from clogging.

I'm not sure I'd call a sodium reactor more safe. Heck, liquid sodium explodes in contact with concrete, and the very reactor itself is built out of concrete. They have to clad it in thick steel as a precaution, and after a sodium leak in Japan, the sodium ate over halfway through the steel. Liquid sodium is not nice, friendly stuff.

And I don't think there's anywhere *near* enough data on thorium reactors. All the happy-go-lucky stuff sounds all too much like the sort of sales pitches that accompany each new generation of nuclear reactor.

If I had to pick one that I thought had the most promise, it'd be lead-bismuth. Now, they have their own set of corrosion problems, no question. But at least there's a damned lot of data from the former USSR on how to prevent it. Beyond that, leaks are pretty harmless (apart from economically) - your worst case scenario is that your reactor entombs itself in lead, which most people would consider *desirable* in a worst-case reactor leak. There's no explosion risk from lead-bismuth. It's a breeder approach like sodium, so little waste and highly efficient fuel usage. And the emergency circulation in modern designs is mostly passive.

But honestly, the biggest issue I have with nuclear is cost. The nuclear industry is one of the few industries out there that has demonsingtrated a long-term *negative* learning curve in terms of cost. That is, the longer we run nuclear power plants, the more added risks we learn we have to address (which costs money), the higher the disposal cost estimates versus earlier estimates, and on and on. Scaling factors mean that plants usually have to be very large which means that you don't learn as much from building lots of them with varying approaches. And the generally best way to deal with a problem of escalating costs on a design - start anew with a radically different design - means you start the learning curve over, which takes decades on nuclear due to the slow pace. And the newer approaches are often more complicated in order to solve the previous problems, which introduces new potential avenues of failure.

It's a real problem. All issues of safety and the environment aside, if nuclear can't address the cost issue, it has no future. Cost kept investors out of nuclear more than NIMBY for three decades. They've been trying again with this latest round of nuclear construction (often with citizens picking up the financial risk if not outright the tab), but the results thusfar haven't been very appealing, with lots of cost overruns.

Cooked with natural gas, no doubt!

Seriously, though... I mean, "NEWS FLASH: Mass production of gas sought for its high energy and ease of combustion poses a fire risk!" Who here is surprised by this? Are there people in town going around saying, "My god, I knew they were producing *natural gas*, but I had no idea they were producing something that could *catch fire*!"