And! And: it says Snowden is "trapped" in Moscow, which is not very agitprop-friendly. Workable, but not exactly jingoism.

What does that really matter? Almost by definition, a demoscene prod involves clever choices in what to make and display on screen in order to achieve an effect. I'm pretty confident the winners of the competitions for the last few years (a) don't have the same flexibility for artists working with their demo engines as Square-Enix does and (b) would never be able to assemble enough assets and people to do the facial expression stuff with anywhere near the same quality (an area in which, AFAIK, Nvidia has been almost entirely pioneering.) The achievement of this video isn't diminished by the achievements of the scene, nor vice-versa.

Someone I know had to go in for basic hernia surgery. However this person was an avid flint knapper. He asked his surgeon if he could furnish obsidian blades for his scalpels since obsidian, when fractured properly, creates a edge just a few atoms thick, far thinner than the sharpest steel blade. The result is a perfect cut that leaves very little scar tissue, and no perceivable scar.

I don't know why there isn't a bigger obsidian scalpel industry.

Sure, if you want to kill someone, you're right. I think the argument against drones is that if you push a button and someone dies on the other side of the Earth and you didn't have to go to war to do that ... well, fast forward two years and you're just sitting there hitting that button all day long. "The quarter solution" or whatever you want to call it is still resulting in deaths and, as we can see here, we're not 100% sure whose deaths that button is causing. Even if we study the targets really really hard.

No, no we don't. You might say "Al Queda hit us now we must hunt them to the ends of the Earth" but it doesn't mean that diplomacy and sovereignty just get flushed down the toilet. Those country borders will still persist despite all your shiny new self-appointed world police officer badges. Let me see if I can explain this to you: If David Koresh had set off bombs in a Beijing subway and then drones lit up Waco like the fourth of July and most of the deaths were Branch Davidians, how would you personally feel about that? Likewise, if Al Queda is our problem and we do that, we start to get more problems. Now, that said, it's completely true that Pakistan's leadership has privately condoned these strikes while publicly lambasting the US but that's a whole different problem.

Yep, think of the children -- that's why we should use drone strikes, right? Look, war means death. Death doesn't discriminate and neither does war. If you're hung up on it being okay to take a life the second that male turns 18, you're pretty much morally helpless anyway. War is bad. Drone strikes are bad. There's enough bad in there for them both to be bad. This isn't some false dichotomy where it's one or the other. It's only one or the other if you're hellbent on killing people.

News flash: you can argue against drone strikes and also be opposed to war at the same time. It does not logically follow that since you're against drone strikes, you're pro war and pro killing children. That's the most unsound and absurd flow of logic I've seen in quite some time.

So you're saying everyone knew she was lying about her charity donations as well? Or was it only the charities that knew that? From the article:

So you're saying the 300,000 downloads are by people that knew they were downloading the app architected by a liar? And they were paying $3.79 to Apple and this liar for a recipe app that contain recipes that someone lied about helping her cure cancer? And you're saying that everyone at Apple that featured her app on the Apple Watch knew they were showing a snake oil app on their brand new shiny device? And that the people at Penguin did all their fact checking on any additional information this cookbook might contain about Belle Gibson's alleged cancer survival? And that everybody involved in these events know society's been parading around a fucking liar and rewarding her with cash money while she basically capitalizes on a horrendous disease that afflicts millions of people worldwide ... that she never had?

No, this is not the same as "water is wet" and it needs to be shown that holistic medicine is temporarily propped up on a bed of anecdotal lies ... anybody who accepts it as the sole cure for their ailment is putting their health in the hands of such charlatans and quacks.

There was a pretty good example last month. I don't think any musician listening to the two songs would say one is copied from the other. Maybe inspired by, but not copied. Nearly every march has horns playing upbeats, a trio section, and a stinger at the end. That doesn't mean the estate of John Phillip Sousa should be suing every composer of marches who came after him.

But even when you are "copying" the nature of copyright law still stifles innovation of transformation. I arrange music for a wind ensemble at my church. In order to even do that, I have to get written permission from the original copyright holder, which isn't trivial in most cases. That's time I could be writing music instead of doing paperwork. Yes, I could write my own tunes, but a congregation isn't going to connect with original music like they do with something they've heard 50 times before.

Then you've got companies who make a business model out of publishing public domain works, copyrighting the edition, and then suing anybody else who tries to publish the same public domain work. Not just music either, but books and photographs, too. Granted, this isn't a rampant problem, but it's enough of a concern/annoyance that some people drop out of creative markets altogether.

Obligatory xkcd

Why don't the automakers just seek refuge under the DMCA from all those evil automobile hackers? Clearly, figuring out how your car works is a direct attack on the very hard work and property of those automakers.

Time to pass a bill state by state. I'm the sure the invisible hand of the free market will line all the right politicians' pockets to rush those through. Hopefully someday we won't be able to own our cars and we can go back to the Ma Bell days when every phone was rented.

Sorry. My ignorance of Twitter shows. My understanding was that unless you "follow" somebody, their post will not be pushed to your device. Yes, it's searchable, but so is everything else on the Internet. It's nothing that could have caused panic on the plane or otherwise terrorized large numbers of people. If anything seeing the guy taken away in handcuffs was probably more horrifying for the people on the plane, than if they had seen a random string of letters with no inkling of what it actually meant.

The problem with flat tax, and what most people seem to misunderstand about tax law, is that most of the confusion and difficulty filing taxes comes from figuring out what is taxable income. That doesn't get fixed with flat tax. There will still be rules on what is and isn't income, what you can and can't deduct. If you're a business owner, it doesn't make sense to say all of your revenue is net income. You can't just say all the money people take home in a paycheck is income either, because then people will hide it in other places. The wealthy already do this to some extent, hence the AMT. I guess you could remove deductions and credits, but that seems like a shitty thing to do, and most people would never go for it.

Boys have a high tolerance for failure, eh? Try telling my son that. His teacher asks questions that either have more than one right answer, but she'll only accept one answer (which polygon can you make out of two trapezoids?). Or sometimes she's just dead wrong (deer do not hunt for food). But if he doesn't get 100% on everything, he's completely heartbroken. We've tried telling him it's no big deal as long as he tried his best. We've tried telling him his teacher made an error. But he becomes completely inconsolable. Nothing helps. Poor kid.

Funniest typo all day.

WTF? Did you even read the article? They're harassing the CTO of a security firm because he dared to point out security flaws in airplanes. Cracking a joke on Twitter to your friends is not the same thing as threatening to bring down a plane. Just because he does private sector research instead of publishing for peer review does not mean he's not a researcher. I do R&D in my job, but it's all trade secret. Am I not doing research since I don't publish? I think the FBI out-assholed this guy by a long shot, and I'm surprised to see a comment like yours modded to +5.