No, of course not, but I think we all need to keep our cool about these issues, which are unfortunately real. Not addressing them because of 'freedom ...' or 'privacy' is just another slippery slope; so we need to strike a balance between the measures we put into place, so we don't slide down either slope.

There are many, serious issues the threaten us today - terrorism and organised pedofiles are just two of them; other, current issues are things like people traficking and police corruption - one could go on at great length. We really must do something about solving these problems - what would you suggest? I'm not sure there is any solution that is right in every way, only solutions that are not too bad, if we are lucky.

Take the ebola crisis; if we had a vaccine, should we not go and inoculate everybody in West Africa, or something similar? But what if it turned out that a large proportion of people don't want it? Should we force them or should we respect their freedom and risk an epidemic spreading to Europe and America? The example may not be perfect, but the point is that our options may be limited to a choice of 'least bad'.

I personally know one American who works in China. Not for a Chinese company, though; he set up a software development business in the Midwest, bought something like a Skype call-in number (not Skype, but same thing), so his customers can call a local number and he can receive it anywhere in the world. Then he moved to Beijing, bought an apartment just before the prices sky-rocketed, and works nights. Makes a lot of sense to me.

- for everybody. That would make actual war meaningless, since it would only be robots destroying each other. Then we could move it on to being a spectator sport, and we can then concentrate on going after terrorists and other criminal gangs. Sounds perfect to me.

And you are surprised? Isn't this the kind of society you have chosen to build? Isn't revenge a very central theme in the American idea of 'justice'? I mean, you have not just the death penalty, but you make sure that people sit for decades on death row, going crazy, and you finish it off by putting them through a ritual sacrifice that is designed to cause suffering. And so on - is that not about revenge, simply?

I can't comment on whether that is 'justice', but when society is so focused on revenge, how can it NOT teach everybody that revenge is the right thing to do, whenever you feel you have been treated unjustly? And on top of that, you have also set yourselves up with a situation where firearms are everywhere - how can that avoid escalating out of control? Widespread mistrust, revenge as the first resort and lots of guns - what could possibly go wrong?

Self-driving vehicles? Well, they are almost here, so that's not too hard to imagine, but I think changes in society are going to drive us away from the amount of traffic we see today. One of the major factors in car ownership has been the fact that owning a car was the only way to easily get from your home to your workplace; we've have seen a trend towards working from home, which, although not ideal, still seems a better alternative to many people, and I think we will see an increase in variations over this theme. Perhaps we will see more something like small, local, shared offices, where people go to work near to home, but not necessarily with colleagues from your own company.

But aren't we now finding ways around the Fourier uncertainty? I believe there was a recent Nobel price for advances in microscopy.

That one is easy: QM is not correct. It is a model - ie. a best approximation etc, but there is almost certainly going to be something, somewhere that is not entirely covered by the model. Isn't that what we all hope for: that we discover something new and amazing?

Ah, but continuity is a matter of topology. If space itself is quantized, the topology would have to be restricted to fit space, and wavefunctions may well be not only continuous, but also smooth, if a suitable geometry can be constructed. This, in a way, illustrates the gripes I have with QM; there is almost a culture of mysticism surrounding it (or its interpretation), that stops you from reaching a deeper understanding, because you expect it to be fundamentally impossible - so you tend to lapse back into a classical mode of consideration. Thus, the typical line of thought becomes something like "1) What would the classical scenario look like?, 2) Construct the Hamiltonian 3) Apply The Magical Transformation and get a differential equation, 4) Solve to get the wavefunction". Nowhere in this process is an understanding deeper than classical mechanics required, and that, I suspect, is why people keep talking about space being discontinuous. Einstein's genius, IMO, was that he understood that physics must be intrinsic to space, and that the resulting geometry plays a dominant role in how the laws of physics work. So, even if space turns out to be a finely minced subspace of an embedding, Cartesian space, that is not actually relevant, since all the physics - the 'reality' if you like - is confined to the geometry of that subspace, and the geometry is the only interaction there is between physical space and the embedding space.

Perhaps - although this is actually not uncontroversial. There are many things surrounding the interpretation of QM that are not entirely certain - I am aware that every so often somebody comes up with a 'proof' that Heisenberg is more fundamental than simply an effect of our mode of observation. We measure properties of microscopic matter by bombarding it with particles and measuring the statistical outcome of a large number of events; the observation that particles are waves and waves have a minimum 'resolution' led to Heisenberg's original proposal, and many arguments have been put forward to the effect that this is a fundamental property of nature and impossible to get around, but there are works going on trying to achieve exactly that: a better resolution than Heisenberg's uncertainty allows us.

OTOH, when this kind of news come out, people are usually not shy about mentioning China by name. In fact, a number of 'wealthy nation-states' in Europe as well as Israel have been mentioned on occasion when it comes to spy-ware. I don't remember the US coming up very often, so by exclusion, America does seem like a likely candidate here. And why not? it isn't as if Americans, American companies or the American state departments are particularly prudish compared to others, when it comes to this sort of thing.

Yes and no. Chaos theory concerns itself with problems that are, for all (or most) practical purposes, unpredictable. IOW, these problems are, in principle, deterministic, but in practice, very difficult to solve with any degree of precision. The weather, for example - if we know the starting conditions exactly for every point on the planet (and our models were perfect), we should be able to predict the temperature, wind speed etc exactly for any point in and time, ever, and for any spot on the planet. Unfortunately, small variations in start parameters result in huge variations in end results, which is why weather forecasting is so hit and miss.

One has to accept that, in common usage, the word 'random' simply means 'chaotic' in the above sense.

Rock star programmers? Seriously? When I was a teenager, some 40 years ago, computer programming was considered incredibly awesome, something on par with Einstein, but nowadays programmers are seen more like accountants, and rightly so: You have to know the sometimes very intricate rules, and you have to be the sort of person who likes to keep prodding at a problem until you get it right - and accountant, IOW. How many Rock Star Accountants do we know of?

Who knows? Who cares? I currently work for a large company, where they actively encourage staff to use Linkedin and also have an internal, social thingie. I have been there once; all I saw was sales account managers and similar - the ones who enjoy grazing on their own navel fluff, basically.

Because it is a rather good comparison. Although the Rosetta has thrusters, for most of the 10 years it has taken to get to the comet, it was not moving under power, and in fact, unlike throwing a hammer from London to New Delhi, its trajectory was nothing as simple as a ballistic curve; apparently it passed by the Earth twice, and the 'nail' it was supposed to hit, was moving rather fast. Perhaps a better comaprison would have been playing billiars on an enormous table that wasn't flat, where all the bumps and valleys moved around and the target roaring across at the far end. The chances of ending up a million miles away from the target were significant.

Nothing more precise than the news broadcasts on BBC4 on the morning when the probe actually landed. Lots of talk about how many of the scientists involved had been involved from the very beginning, 30 years ago. You should be able to get more precise answers if you email BBC4's newsteam, there are quite good at responding.

The planning for this mission was started 30 years ago - in 1984; 5 years before the Berlin Wall came down, 7 years before the Soviet Union was dissolved, 3 years after the first IBM PC was released. This mission has been compared to "throwing a hammer from London and hitting a nail in New Delhi".

Imagine that - the IBM PC with its 16 KB of RAM was advanced, for gods' sakes! It may be that it is easy to sit in front of your top-of-the-bloody-range games PC and imagine that 'it can't be that hard', but the fact is that it would be very hard even today, and the fact that we actually have anything man-made touching the surface of an actual comet at this moment is mindblowing. It was only really designed to run a few measurements on its main battery, and even that was considered beyond what we could reasonably expect; the secondary battery and solarpanels were more of a "you never know, we might get lucky". This mission has already been a huge success.

Sorry, I forgot to highlight my sarcasm once more, in the post you replied to.

And the difference is? Sarcasm generally involves mocking somebody gently, or sometimes not quite so gently.

I know of no such fact. While it is undeniable that the shootings normally stop when the shooter is subdued, I am aware of no data to suggest that this is the only way to prevent the killing of innocent victims. Howling your claims out in what appears to be a rather hysterical voice does not in itself constitute proof.

You do go on about 'facts', don't you? And 'rights' as well, I see. First of all, the American Constitution is only valid in America, and secondly, the claims about gun-ownership are not without dispute, I believe. The 2nd Amendment was introduced at a time when the state was yet mature enough to uphold the rule of the law everywhere; also, here is a quote from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_U.S._Constitution):