But surely those customers are going to want some kind of Internet service. It seems unlikely that they're going to say, "Well, if I can't torrent Orphan Black, I don't need to get email."

They might even let them sign up for the same company. A few days lack of service, plus a reconnect fee, might convince them to cut out illegal downloads (or at least, try harder to hide it).

It might end up with all of the downloaders at the one ISP in town who tolerates them. But I suspect that the other ISPs might have ways of putting pressure on them. Especially if they're also the backbone provider, such as in Verizon's case. Even if not, they may be able to tell the backbone provider, "Look, we're losing customers because they're not playing fair, and we'll complain to your peers if you don't tell them to knock it off."

It does have a tactile feedback. It's done with vibration rather than depressing the keys. I don't know if it's any good; I'd need to try it. I suspect that one would learn a rather new typing style.

Huh. Anecdotally, I'm getting the same service with DVDs that I always have. I generally assume that if I put it in the mail Tuesday, they get it Wednesday, and get me the new disk Thursday. That seems reasonable to me.

I dropped from the 3 disc service back to 2 because I watch a lot more stuff on streaming, but there's a lot of stuff that's only available on disks. I generally have one disk on hand and another in the mail. (Actually, I often end up holding things for a few days, since I watch less stuff than I used to. Trying to get a life.)

So I'm pretty happy with the service. It's the only content I'm paying for; it provides as much as I need for the time I have to spend watching TV.

Sonny the Robot could tell jokes, and hit the timing for a punch line. If a robot can do that, I'll consider it my equal.

It's not the big stuff I'm looking for. It's the common, everyday stuff: telling jokes, folding laundry, telling a picture from a person... all at the same time rather than one algorithm specialized to it. Like people do. I really don't know how far we are from that; it feels like it's 20 years off, same as always. But the AlphaGo thing (using a neural network which just just possibly be able to be re-used for other things) does suggest that maybe it's only 18 years off.

It is surprising. I'd go so far as to say "stunning". This kind of ML is really, really fallible, in exactly the areas that humans do well. I'm kinda baffled.

I darkly suspect that it means that humans aren't really very good at Go. The combinatorial explosion is so fast that the vast majority of moves don't get any consideration at all. Humans apply a well-trained intuition, but there's reason to think that good moves are completely ignored.

In chess, the best computers play slightly better than the best humans; it's as though we're near perfect play even if we can't actually work out all of the routes for all games. In Go, it sounds as if in the near future humans won't even be in consideration; you'd no more ask a human to play Go against a computer than you'd ask one to race an automobile.

Which is to say: perhaps the explanation is that the computer still isn't very good. It's just better than the extremely-fallible human.

I think it's the theater popcorn and merch sales that figure into the price more than Netflix does. The theater owners are going to want to pay much, much less for movies if they don't have a monopoly on (legal) early viewings.

The total amount of money spent by consumers on the movies (including snacks) will probably about come out in the wash at this price point, but theater owners won't stand for 100% of it going to the studio. They'll demand a cut. I'm not sure in what form they'll get it; it might be a profit sharing on the tickets they do sell (rather than sending practically all of it to the distributor). But they won't survive long if they don't get something.

Exactly. It provides a tool for identifying criminals: if you're using bitcoins, then you're doing something illegal. They don't even necessarily have to enforce the bitcoin law, just investigate whatever you're doing for the bitcoins. And if they fail at that, they can enforce the bitcoin law, like putting mobsters in jail for tax evasion.

Not saying that's a good thing, necessarily. The same thing could go for criminalizing cryptography. Even without that, crypto does potentially make you a target, and I suspect that big comms providers like GMail have been specifically discouraged from making crypto too easy.

"Non-profit" is a pretty loaded term here. It implies charities or colleges or arts organizations. That's not really what's going on. It just means that they're not turning their profits over to any shareholders. There are tax consequences, but it's actually not all that big a deal, since even ordinary corporations are only supposed to be paying taxes on profits anyway, not revenues. Which theoretically lets them raise wages and lower prices, though they're not actually all that good at either. Mostly, they turn it into giant executive bonuses.

I'm not exactly sure how MITRE and some other Beltway bandits get away with being "non-profits". I think they call themselves "research". But really, they don't belong in the same category as charities.

The problem is that the places that most need to be "fixed" don't have the money to do it, now or in the future. Yeah, it'll be nice to fix up New York, Amsterdam, and Miami, but Bangladesh and the Maldives can't afford it. And I don't think we'll see Americans (or the Chinese, or the Europeans) rushing to pony up tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to build them new inland cities.

For that matter I don't see them rushing to pay to protect even first-world coastal cities. "The country" has enough money to pay for it, but who exactly is going to shell out the money? Donations? Taxes? Who's going to be put in charge of deciding whether it's spent on enormous dikes versus up and moving entire cities inland.

Reducing carbon emissions will be both cheaper and fairer. Or at least, it would have been cheaper 20 years ago, when people were screaming that things needed to be done. "Fair", to me, would seem to rest heavily on those who delayed implementation because of obviously bogus anti-scientific claims that it wasn't happening at all. Even today, every single one of the Republican candidates for President believes that climate change is some kind of scientific conspiracy. And there's just no way they're going to allow any American money to be spent on it, either preventing it or dealing with the consequences, either here or abroad.

I don't disagree, but this doesn't really affect the Kochs all that much. They're in oil and gas, not coal. It may even be helping them: a lot of the capacity shifts to gas plants, which they supply through fracking.

The drop in oil prices may be hurting them, and some of their fracking operations have as they're no longer profitable. So you can take that as a bit of cheery news.

Nobody serious is considering it, but there are a fair number of not-serious candidates running for President, and I wouldn't put a first strike past any of them if provoked. And NK does love to provoke.

Planck's constant itself is really just an artifact of having chosen units like meters, grams, and seconds, which are arbitrary products of a combination of numerology and the dimensions of the earth. In natural units, Planck's constant would be 1. So would the speed of light, Newton's gravitational constant, and several others.

The "real" constants of the universe are dimensionless constants that hold no matter what your units are, like the ratio of the mass of the down quark to the electron, and the coupling constants of the Standard Model (which includes the fine structure constant). Those appear to be the actual tuning knobs of the universe, at least as far as we can tell so far.

Physicists work in natural units all the time, which saves a lot of scratching on paper. Engineers, of course, don't like to work in them, so you have to convert everything back into meters and kilograms and such if you're going to build experiments. So you still need those arbitrary agreed-upon units and the constants needed to get there, with as much precision as you can muster.

Just a few months ago, actually. It's the new guy, Malcolm Turnbull. He's not quite a denialist, exactly, but the Liberal Party is the rough equivalent of Canada's Conservatives. ("Liberal" and "Conservative" mean different things in different places.) They've been kinda lukewarm on climate change (pardon the pun); his predecessor acknowledged it and even praised Obama's efforts to do something, but those efforts are heavily hamstrung by a Republican Congress and what he can do is heavily influenced by that. The new guy had made some noises in the same direction but is apparently being pushed in a Harper-like way.

Could it be useful in powering cars? Power density has been an issue for mobile power plants. It's only half the energy density of gasoline, and a bit less than ethanol, though perhaps it would be a good feedstock for making one or the other? (I'm not a chemist; I've never entirely understood why making fuel out of low-energy carbon compounds requires so much more than just the energy input.)

Those guys weren't sent for the joy of exploration. They were sent because somebody thought they could turn a profit. Magellan gave the Spanish a new route to Asia; Drake was looking for a way to circumvent Spanish (and Dutch) control of those routes. They were sent to bring back a load of stuff, as well as a route that would enable them to get more stuff cheaper. They had no plans to turn over the details to anybody except their employer.

They had very good reason to think that they had a profitable mission, and while they knew it was dangerous, they did plan to return. It was not a suicide mission.