Nice (old) strawman. Old actors can indeed act. Usually better than younger ones. But acting ability is not the primary focus for casting a role. I preferred Tom Baker when I was a (much) younger fan, not because he was a better actor than Hartnell, Troughton or Pertwee, but because he was the first doctor I could relate to age-wise. With that said, eye candy seems to be *way* more important now to content producers and sponsors.than acting ability or credibility in a role. Look what happened when Pierce Brosnan got the nod for Bond. He was the perfect fit for the role, eagerly anticipated by the fans, and an excellent actor, but he tanked almost as quickly as his predecessor, Timothy Dalton. Market demographics being what they are, I expect the next (last?) doctor to be well south of 25 with flawless skin, six-pack abs, and more than a little light on his feet, to broaden his appeal. Advertisers/sponsors will want an actor in the role who can appeal to the 18-25 demographic, because that is the target demographic they must appeal to -- the one with the most disposable income.

Indeed. But you can also work the refs. This is a viable strategy, as well, especially if used in tandem with your basic rule of deception. A ref that is willing to look the other way is just as valuable as one that has been deceived. Changing the rules is also another viable strategy, one that seems to be favored by large corporatioins, if the amount of money they spend to influence lawmakers is any indication.

Almost, but not quite. Nature is not about competing organisms or communities of organisms. It is about competing strategies. Nature indeed rewards winning strategies and punishes losing strategies, but the organism or community of organisms that employ them are just along for the ride. But nature is mutable; it is just the current context in which a given strategy or strategies are evaluated. If the context is allowed to change, then there is a new set of criteria against which strategies are evaluated, and if the strategy doesn't change, the organism or community of organisms employing that strategy might not make it into the next generation, which is the only criteria against which any strategy can be judged. In that sense, nature is indeed winner-take-all, and neatly explains what happened to Enron and the Roman civilization.. Thus, I would posit that preventing the context change becomes a viable strategy. The rise of human civilization is all about controlling nature, controlling the context in a way that preserves whatever strategy that is currently being used. The Romans failed to prevent a context change forced on them by the Visigoths, and so did Enron, a context change forced on them by having to live by the rules that they were discovered violating. What happened to Lance Armstrong can be read the same way: Armstrong's strategy of performance enhancing drugs was successful until other riders forced a context change on him, forcing him to compete on their terms, not on his terms. In finance, large corporations saw what happened to Enron, and are working very hard to make sure that the context change that killed Enron won't be allowed to happen to them. They are doing this by making sure they have control over the mechanism that controls the context in which they operate. In the US, that means successfully influencing lawmakers that make the rules and regulations they operate under, and by inserting people into positions of authority that control fiscal policy in this country. It remains to be seen whether or not they will be successful, but if they are, then there will be no more Enron-like disasters for them.

I share your political opinions (except perhaps on the death penalty; might be interesting to debate that with you, since we seem to be on the same page otherwise.) Granted, in the US's federated republican from of democracy, where people elect representatives to make policy decisions on their behalf, the democratic process has been hijacked by narrow special interests. In federal republics like the US, corruption can and will set in, because these representatives have to first get elected, and then remain in office long enough to be effective. The first rule of politics in the US is "get re-elected" and that is the source of the toxic culture you speak of.

Fortunately though, getting elected and remaining in office are issues that are entirely distinct from the process of creating the policies that will guide the society into the future. People like you and I who defy easy categorization often are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils on election day, effectively disenfranchising us, but you and I can still have a direct voice in the democratic process, because (at least in the US) we also have the initiative, the referendum, and the recall.

As you indicate, the initiative, the referendum, and the recall are not on the path of least resistence. They may not represent the minimum energy state of the system, but they do exist and are available to those of us who are a) aware of them, and b) willing to invest the time and money necessary to exploit them.

Yes, but if you want to preserve your coffee in quantity, keeping a a sack of beans around is probably not the best way. :) Try a simple ice-drip -- brewed coffee gets it flavor from oils extracted from the bean during the brewing process, but not all oils contribute equally to the flavor. Coffee goes bad in much the same way that butter and cooking oil go bad -- coffee will go rancid because it contains oils that degrade when exposed to heat and oxygen. The ice-drip brewing process removes most of those oils, and the result is a brew that will keep almost indefinitely in your 'fridge. You can nuke it or steam it up a bit if you like it hot. I host cuppings at a local coffee market, and people invariably are surprised when I tell them that delicious cuppa they just rated as excellent had been sitting in my 'fridge for a year. It definitely helps me sell ice-drip systems. :)

Not totally dependent on it at all. You *can* use your own coffee in a pod machine -- every brand of pod machine I've ever purchased came with an adapter to allow the use of your own coffee, including my decade-old Keurig Platinum. I've been hosting bi-weekly cuppings at a local coffee market for three years, comparing various pod machines with a cafetiere (french press, for the non-cognoscenti) and the results are pretty unequivocal - only one person has ever correctly differentiated the brew processes, and that person was a ringer, a Level 2 master roaster from the Roasters Guild. :)

...I'm not real certain that information gleaned from an intelligence operative unprofessional enough to us a gmail account in the clear is really worth the effort.

...just an augmentation. And it neatly avoids the uncanny valley by not even remotely resembling our upright, bipedal, bi-laterally symmetric physiognomy. My friend owns three bars here in the old pueblo -- a college-centric meat market within stumbling distance of the UofA campus, a Cheers-type bar&grill in one of the most affluent residential districts in the city, and a trendy techno bar on 4th Avenue, which is Tucson's own Haight-Ashbury. The reception this system would get would largely depend on how it is wrapped for the patrons at each of these uniquely distinctive venues. I could see it being tucked away out of sight at the bar&grill, delivering the drinks to a mini-skirted waitress for the last mile delivery to the patron. Patrons at the bar&grill go there for (good!) food and drink, but also to schmooze with wealthy UofA alumni who have returned to their college town to dabble in local university and city politics. They will take passing notice of the pretty girl delivering their cocktails, but would not be interested in the slightest about the details of the guy (or robot) mixing their drinks. Ditto the meat market: patrons at the meat market are there to score, and my friend deliberately hires attractive female servers exclusively from the local topless clubs' labor pool to set the right kind of ambiance. It probably wouldn't have to be out of sight there, just out of harm's way. But it would probably pay-off in spades at the techno bar. Every techno trend on the planet eventually makes its way through a college town, and this system would be de rigueur, along with the live dub-step acts and wall-sized projection screens full of anime and machinima.

I think this system could have a beneficial ROI in these three diverse venues, so it could probably be beneficial in many others, as long as the proprietor incorporates it in a way that doesn't annoy his regular patrons or scare off potential ones.

You seem to think that making the world a better, cleaner place to live in is some kind of goal for our species. I'm trying not to call you a fuckwit for believing this, but the temptation is damn near irresistible. So, here's a newsflash for you, my fuckwit friend -- natural selection doesn't work that way. You live long enough to reproduce, or your genes die with you. Healthcare is expensive and inefficient right now because we have to use a risk model to fund it. Remove or mitigate the risk, and we might be able to use a different funding model, one that might be (and probably will be) less expensive and inefficient. That's why non-fuckwits invest heavily in genetic research and strenuously resist the idea that our funding model must also cover people with pre-existing conditions. Eventually, we are going to know exactly who is going to become sick with what disease by administering a cheap DNA test. We can already do this right now for a number of diseases, and the list of predictable diseases keeps getting longer, thanks to the enlightened self-interest of the individuals and corporations that fund this kind of research. I sure as fuck don't want to be on the hook for healthcare for someone that I know in advance is going to be a burden on the healthcare system. If you were rational, you wouldn't want to be on that hook, either. Non-fuckwits would focus on removing those diseases from the population, not redistributing wealth to accommodate them. It is not rational to redistribute your wealth in a manner that does not benefit you or your heirs -- only a fuckwit would think otherwise. In spite of highly entertaining conjectures to the contrary, genes are not altruistic. Natural selection is a bitch, dude, but it's the only game in town, so you'd better learn to be a player. Not that a fuckwit like you is capable of learning, though.

In many cases, practicality does trump elegance. But in many other cases, it does not. For a mathematician, some problems -- like the TSP -- are interesting precisely because we don't know (P=NP?) if the only practical approach we have for solving them is inelegant brute force. Factorization of large integers is another one of those interesting problems (you alluded to it as "prime generation.") The existence of an elegant solution to the factorization problem would considerably alter how we conduct secure transactions online, because the security model we use right now depends on the fact that, in the absence of an elegant solution to the factorization problem, it's harder for computers to divide than multiply. So, no, it doesn't always come down to how perfect the solution needs to be; rather, it comes down to how much effort the solution requires. Quantum computers offer the tantalizing prospect that all steps and decisions in a brute force approach to factorization can be collapsed to a single computational step, rendering the existing divide/multiply assymmetry moot.

Well, biologically, yes, a clone could be identical to an embryo, but biological definitions aren't the issue, are they? Leaving aside for the moment the simple fact that, unlike in the case of a human embryo, harvesting stem cells from a clone doesn't result in the destruction of the cell donor, you seem to be ignoring the social, cultural, and political definitions of a person that create the ethical dilemmas you are alluding to. Personhood is an extremely arbitrary and shifting concept, with thousands of years of social, cultural, and legal criteria that are still being refined today. In a bucket, the definition of a person is whatever the culture wants it to be. In the US, for example, it wasn't so long ago that a slave was defined as being 3/5 of a person, and women had no legal status at all, except relative to a spouse, or in the absence of a spouse, male members of her immediate family. Killing a slave was not homicide, because slaves were property, not people, and women couldn't vote or own property in their own name. Case in point, since you brought it up: as a result of Roe V. Wade, human embryos can and are being destroyed on a daily basis without triggering a homicide investigation -- until that definition of personhood is changed, pro-lifers can weep and gnash their teeth all they like. The social, legal, and cultural status of a human clone will have to be established via social, cultural, and legal precedent. Until that happens, debating the ethics or morality of harvesting stem cells from human clones is kinda pointless. Any controversy surrounding the issue will be generated for its entertainment value alone.

A scenario is a three-player instance that doesn't require the dps-healz-tank triad that is necessary to successfully complete a five-player instance at level. Scenarios have less content, but typically can take more time to complete (more on that below.) They drop gear with iLevels comparable to the five-player instances. Scenarios can easily be done with any combination of classes, and a competently played class with a tanking pet (like a 'lock or hunter) or good self-heals (again 'lock, or a paladin) can solo them if you get stuck with a couple of idiots.

Scenarios were introduced in MoP to explicitly address the asymmetric waiting times for a random dungeon group in the looking-for-group dungeon finder. If you haven't played since BC, you might not have experienced the looking-for-group party finder that Blizz introduced in WotLK. Basically, you queue up your toon in LFG, and when LFG has 3 dps, a tank, and a healer, you are instantly teleported to the dungeon. The problem was (and still is) that there are way more dps on a given server than tanks or healers. In MoP on my server, Garona, typical LFG wait times for my 'lock and hunter are around fifteen minutes, but for my pally healer and DK tank the wait time is on the order of fifteen seconds. To make matters worse, you are penalized with a debuff preventing you from queueing up for any instance for 30 minutes if you drop group for any reason before killing at least one boss -- you are fucked as a dps if you get saddled with an incompetent tank or healer. It was the same in WotLK and Cata.

As you might suspect, the LFG system is easily gamed by hybrid classes. Players with hybrid classes that could off-spec as tanks or heals would queue up in their off-spec to get into LFG faster, even if they didn't actually *know* how to play a tank or healer. Frost DK's and boomkins were notorious for speccing into blood and resto just to shorten their LFG queue times. I learned pretty quickly to drop group and take the 30 minute debuff if there was a DK tank or resto druid healer in the group. It was almost always better than the wipefest that was certain to ensue otherwise.

Scenarios are timer-driven, though, which sucks for air. Instead of trash-trash-boss rinse-and-repeat like in a five-player, you have four stages that are basically waves of light-hitting trash mobs followed by a mini-boss while you do gimmicky Nintendo-like crap until the timer runs out for the current stage. A random group of experienced players can blow through MoP five-player instances much quicker than the three-player instances, because they aren't constrained by an arbitrary timer, but only by how fast the dps can knock down the trash to get to the boss. Presently, you can reach your valor point cap for the week in an hour or two just by running MoP five-player instances with a competent group of players. That is decidedly not the case if you are trying to reach your cap via the scenarios. If it weren't for the timer mechanic, scenarios would be a win-win for me.

Indeed. But streaming sports is available right now, if only for a subset of sports. I get all the streaming sports I need from Bein Sports, which for me amounts to the MotoGP and World Superbike races. They stream it from their site on a delay for free, or offer it up live for a modest fee. It's only a matter of time before an American entrepreneur puts together a similar service and inks a deal with the US-based sports-entertainment complex. Imagine being able to watch any game anywhere, anytime, on the device of your choice, free of commercial interruption. The non-sports entertainment complex was entrenched for decades, but it is all but gone, thanks to Netflix- and Hulu-like streamers. If Aereo is successful in the defense of their business model, they will be the first nail in the coffin, and Google is going to provide the rest. Google' acquisition of youtube several years ago and their recent announcement of subscription-based channels is, realistically, the death-knell for broadcast content on the planet.

But...

THIS...IS...NETFLIX!

(apologies to Gerard Butler and Frank Miller)

Well, yes they will, if you live in the US. One of the legacies of the Bell break-up thirty years ago was the establishment of a two-tiered tariff structure for telephone service. The regulation was very clear on this. If the line terminated at an address in a residentially-zoned area, the phone company that serviced that area had to charge the residential tariff. If it terminated in a commecially-zoned area, the phone company could charge the commerical tariff, which was 3X as large as the residential one. The location drove the tariff, not the class of consumer. It was for that reason that the dial-in servers for the ISP we started here in Tucson in 1995 were located in the garage of a residential house we rented in a quiet neighborhood. The tech support staff could live in the house and be available 24/7, and we avoided $28/mo/line on 30 lines, paying only $14/mo/line instead of $42. The phone company, US West, pitched a bitch but that was all they could do. Well, they did drag their heels for nearly a month and did try to charge us $12k to drag copper less than a hundred meters from their loop to our POP, allowing our rival to get online ahead of us. We were the second ISP to go online in Tucson by exactly 30 days as a result of their gamesmanship. When we realized they were just being assholes, we switched to MCI/Sprint, who charged us a token fee (around $200 IRRC) to drag copper nearly a klick from their loop, and got it done in two days.