Hmmm. Excellent post. But I'm having trouble reconciling these two assertions.

From the point of view of a warlord, superior military force confers the right to murder and rape. Indeed, it confers any right the warlord chooses to assert. Ditto your hungry lion -- his right to eat me stops at the muzzle of my rifle.

It would seem to me that you need something more than just the other party recognizing that you have rights. You have to be able to successfully assert those rights. In French, it is "preter main forte" or "show the strong hand." In English, it would be "might makes right."

And I always cringe when somebody makes an assertion that is counter to my experience and to my intuition. I think about death fairly often, dude, and so do *a lot* of other people. I like to participate in activities -- skydiving, motorcycle racing, and stunt flying, just to enumerate what I did this weekend -- which could reasonably be expected to be fatal if not done correctly or well. I like to think that my parachute is going to open *every time* I exit the aircraft, that there is no debris that found its way onto the track at the apex of a blind turn that is going to cause me to high-side at a buck fifty, or that I'm not going to pull so many negative g's that I red-out and auger in, so that my death remains firmly in the hypothetical. I want "if" and not "when" to remain the correct way for me to phrase thoughts about dying for many, many, decades to come. I will happily concede your point that dying is inevitable, but for some of us, getting close to death is pleasurable, and we would like to dance with it for as long as humanly possible. Yeah, we are probably not going to die of "natural causes" but we will be part of the tiny fraction of humanity that gets to at least have some say in the time and manner of our demise. Unlike Scott Adams' father, whose time and manner of death was dictated by the fiscal self-interest of the medical facility that was prolonging his life for financial gain.

"No heroic methods." That is the magic incantation that let's you die with dignity. At least in jurisdictions that allow advance healthcare directives, anyway. Run, do not walk, to your nearest legal professional and execute an advance healthcare directive, if you want to be able to die with dignity. If you don't live in a jurisdiction that allows advance healthcare directives, move to one that does. Period. BTW, morphine takes the edge off -- if you specifically allow the use of palliative measures in your directive, you can die with dignity and do it painlessly as well.

Hmmm. Bad medical decisions that *you* make stop when your heart stops. The alternative is for some other person to make medical decisions on your behalf. This other person is immune to the consequences of a badly grokked medical decision, which leaves him free to continue dispensing bad advice. How is this not a bad thing, as well? Is there a middle course between these two choices?

Don't be naive. Do you really think that some clever sociopath is *not* going to figure out how to exploit his/her augmented ability to "communicate and/or navigate" to enhance their ability to fuck with people? C'mon. By your line of reasoning, a gun just augments our ability to throw things. Why is there no downside to throwing things harder and with more accuracy? I suppose you live in a (fantasy) land where armed robberies never happen?

Well, okay. Changing my words to enable a (feeble) reductio ad absurdum, and then asserting I represent some "corner" of your carefully arranged delusion regarding Apple pretty much puts you firmly in fanboi status. For the record, I was bashing people who buy Apple products, not Apple products. Steve Jobs is lauded as a marketing genius -- he figured out how to sell smart machines to well-heeled idiots. A high school buddy of mine, Steve Goldberg, was the product line VP of the only real failure Apple ever launched, the Lisa. His analysis: Apple tried to push a system on its specs and the people who were supposed to buy them said, "Huh?" and immediately lost interest. Looking at the demographics of Apple's target markets, it's pretty easy to deduce Jobs' genius -- market the computer as if it was part of some desirable life style, like it was just another status symbol like a high-end car, or a high-end watch, or a high-end girlfriend, and you will have people lining up for days to buy them. People buy Apple products because Jobs managed to create the illusion that owning one is actually desirable and (like an expensive watch or high-maintenance girlfriend) difficult to replace. Dell, HP, Digital, Compaq -- they could only dream of the lock-in achieved by Jobs, but their target demographic was very much different. That demographic pretty much cared about things like performance per dollar, ROI, and scalability, and not so much about how pretty it was or how dumbed-down the interface was. A much tougher demographic to please than Apple's. There's genius in finding the barrel with all the fish in it to shoot, and that's exactly what Jobs did.

A morality play, indeed, and a book-long meditation on duty. RAH wrote ST largely because he was paranoid about communism. He felt betrayed by Eisenhower's parting shot at the military-industrial complex that, from RAH's POV, was our last bulwark against the Sovs. (Which is probably why he threw his support to Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 -- like Goldwater, he felt a nuclear war with the USSR was winnable and we might as well get it over with while we still had a slight advantage in nukes.) Check out his speech at the 1960 WorldCon, where ST won the Hugo, if you are in any measure unsure on this point. As far as the movie goes, Heinlein was *never* interested in presenting a balanced view of anything -- there is absolutely nothing thematically ambiguous in any of his corpus. I think this is why Verhoeven chose ST -- he was looking for a vehicle for an anti-fascist satire, and the crypto-fascist utopian society depicted in ST was *perfect*. And for what it is worth, ST was aimed at teenagers, not adults -- which is probably why so many adults are confused by it. Interestingly enough, Putnam actually refused to market it as a juvenile.

What is amusing is that the Nexus 5 costs half what the iPhone does. Apple's target demographic has always been people with more money than brains. Thwok....ball's in your court.

Actually, a pair of undergraduate classes in abstract and linear algebra thirty years ago is all that I'm going on, and it seems adequate to get the gist of the Wikipedia article. Admittedly, I had to look up Bergmann-Komarr (I'm not a physicist; the dynamical evolution of Einstein's differential equations describing GR have only a limited, abstract appeal to me!) , but abstract groups in general, along with commutations, diffeomorphisms, and Hamiltonians were covered at the freshman level. So months, not years. :)

What about cases where the patient is under a doctor's care as the result of publicly visible, *voluntary* behaviors? I can't really feel solidarity with some overweight person who smokes complaining that her medical information is being disclosed to some third party. Unhealthy behavior should be discouraged, and a good way to do that is to punish these people in the pocket book by maintaining a database of people with unhealthy behaviors so that insurance companies can shift the risk of those unhealthy behaviors unto the shoulders of those that deserve it. Those of us who try to stay healthy should not have to bear the financial burden when some chain-smoking junk food junkie's coronary arteries eventually seize up and her lungs shut down. My insurance company created a tiered system where they charge smokers much higher premiums than they charge for non-smokers. Ditto for BMI. People who refuse to maintain reasonable height-weight proportionality should have to pay more for health insurance than the rest of us. I have to get swabbed and weighed once a month to prove I'm not smoking anymore and am maintaining a healthy weight, but it saves me over $2000 per year in premiums.

More to the point, I think I have the absolute right to determine *for myself* that the people I put trust in (teachers, bus drivers, cops, firemen, bankers, janitors, housekeepers) are not abusing the medications that have been prescribed to them -- a publicly accessible medical database would go a long way in making that possible.

Well, we've had lethal robots that meet this definition since the first time an anarchist connected an alarm clock to bundle of dynamite and hid it in the luggage compartment on a train. A human-class AI must have the capacity to kill, or it wouldn't be human-class. It also must have the capacity to make decisions based on probabilistic outcomes, and evaluate those outcomes against some nominal goal and change its behavior based on that assessment -- the same way humans do.

Fwiw, the Good Doctor changed the Three Laws to include a fourth law, which he called the "Zeroth Law" and introduced in Robots and Empire

The edge case he needed to fix was resolving conflicts where the death of a human or humans was necessary for the greater good. I think he realized that his pacifist take on conflict resolution as embodied in the original Three Laws was too much even for *his* fans' credulity. :)

But -- it also helped bridge the uncanny valley between his robots and the rest of humanity. Giskard and R. Daneel Olivaw became far more "human" after Asimov introduced the Zeroth Law, where their actions were not constrained by the inherent pacifism of the original Three Laws.

The problem with Feynmann diagrams is that they require a bit of mathematical trickery to actually work, so they are *at best* a flawed tool. In fact, the Standard Model itself is an incomplete (gravity, anybody?) flawed tool, for this and other reasons. Don't want to rain on the parade (as a mathematician, I'm excited by any interesting application of math to the real world) but this simply sweeps a large chunk of the renormalization problem under the rug, and doesn't address any of the other, very serious issues with SM. For what it is worth, the writing is on the wall for SM -- unless we see some genuinely interesting physics occurring at energies we can observe, I think SM is going to have to be abandoned for a less flawed, more fruitful model.

Bullshit. You, sir, have apparently never been to a track day. I may not hit 200mph, but I regularly get my Ducati 1098 (another example of Italian looks-good-goes-fast technology) to a buck eighty-five. There are three pro tracks within a two-hour ride (one is only forty-five minutes away) from my house that have track days nearly every weekend of the year. For a fee ranging from $40 to about $150 per day, I can drag a knee at 120mph and tuck in for a speed run on the straight-away for hours on end. There are plenty of racing venues that cater to well-heeled speed freaks so we can ride fast in a controlled, reasonably safe environment for a trivial amount of scratch. So fuck you, coward -- too bad you will never get to enjoy the thrill of piloting an exquisitely engineered machine at the edge of its performance envelope. That takes money and balls, two (three?) things you obviously lack.

Tyson, entertaining and astute as he is, seems to be missing the historical point. Musk is following in the footsteps of Astor, Harriman, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and the rest of the robber barons of the late 19th century, by building out a self-financing sustainable infrastructure for his industrial ambitions. And make no mistake, he may be a neo-industrialist, but he is still an industrialist, with all the negative baggage that goes along with it. And like his 19th century predecessors, Musk will eventually need resources that he doesn't already command. The robber barons of the 19th century created manifest destiny out of whole cloth to enlist the help of the US government in removing obstacles -- natives, geography, competing commercial interests, pretty much anything that stood in the way -- of pillaging the continent for its natural resources. Unlike his predecessors, though, Musk seems to be angling only for financial support from the US government in the form of guaranteed lift contracts once he's got a heavy lift capacity established. What Tyson seems to be saying is that Musk can't do it alone; nobody can do it without some kind of major (read: US) governmental support. The only governmental support Musk and his fellow neo-industrialists are likely going to need is somebody to scrape the claim jumpers off their asteroids and orbital habitats. That is going to require an armed force, and I'm certain there exist any number of polities on this planet willing to loan him theirs in return for a slice of Musk's pie in the sky.

Well -- nice red herring, but this isn't about why there is a conflict in Syria, or obtaining approval to do something about it.. This is about the use of WMDs. Whatever side you come down on in the conflict in Syria, the use of WMDs trumps your ideological bias. The message has to be clear, immediate, and overwhelming -- if you deploy WMDs, you will be denied existence. Whether that message is delivered by a single nation,or a collection of nations is also a red-herring -- as long as it is delivered in an open, transparent way, it doesn't matter who delivers it.