It should be noted that the City of London is a tiny part of London, like a square mile. Its the financial district, the Wall Street of London.

It isn't suprising they are taking a pro big business stance.

David Weber's approach for the Honor Harrington series is pretty good.

In order to make somewhat realistic space battles interesting (or even possible), he postulates "inertial sump" technology as well as gravitic drives which combined make possible ship accelerations measured in 100s of gravities, and missile accelerations measured in tens of thousands of gravities. Even with those incredible accelerations, he makes the point that the tactical opportunities provided by being able to navigate in three dimensions make it very hard to make an enemy fight if decides to run. So a great deal of strategy goes into manipulating an enemy into a position where he can't run (e.g. because he has to defend a fixed objective) or getting him to build a vector that brings him inevitably into range of your force because his maximum acceleration on any vector isn't enough to clear your missile range. Oh, and at the incredible speeds obtained (up to ~0.5c; inadequate "particle shielding" generally prevents higher velocities), passing engagements are over incredibly quickly, so you really need to match vectors fairly closely to have any sort of a slugging match.

The result is reasonably realistic, and also makes for interesting, dramatic battles. Only "reasonably" realistic, though, because Weber never explores the full implications of the gravitic technology. If you think too hard about the implications of those, you quickly realize that the fictional society is utterly ignoring 99% of the potential of either their gravitics or their power plants, or both. In that it's something like the transporters and food replicators of Star Trek, though not quite as severe. But ignoring that, Weber's physics are believable and set the stage for entertaining drama.

For fans of sail-age nautical warfare, Weber also manages to construct a scenario where many of the dynamics of wet-navy combat carry over, including, at the beginning at least, the use of the "line of battle", except that in 3D it becomes a "wall of battle". So rather than "ships of the line", you have "ships of the wall". Anyway, it all comes together pretty well.

Oh, and he tells a good story, too.

So... if free will isn't an emergent behavior arising from complex interactions which are nevetheless inherently limited to the laws of physics, then what is it? And, more importantly, what is it about free will that makes it impossible for a machine to acquire it? What, fundamentally, is special about the computations in human brains that constitute "free will" that makes it impossible to replicate them in different hardware? Or to replicate them in the _same_ hardware? Eventually we will be able to build a human brain from raw materials... will that manufactured brain have free will? If not, why not?

FWIW, I've never read Dawkins. His anti-religion crusade annoys me.

Apple bills its latest product as a premium phone and brags endlessly about the supposed build quality

So does Samsung, and HTC for that matter,

Care to show me where any of the Android makers explicitly state they build crap?

But don't you think it's kind of crappy that the iPhone 6 is so flimsy, especially for the price?

If it were flimsy, perhaps , but in reality it's not - some Android phones are worse, and if you pick one up you can tell "flimsy" does not describe it at all.

Are you sure you understand the interstate commerce? What you're describing sounds exactly like interstate commerce. Are you saying that Iowa could prevent a California-based internet company from selling products over the internet to be delivered in Iowa?

A single human on Mars could do in a week more than every previous rover on mars put together has accomplished to date.

We've done what we can with the robotic approach, at some point you need humans to take research to the next level rather than inching along for centuries.

Some people will die; some people always have died, will always die. That does not matter.

If you think it's gung-ho, well all I can say is it's side you decided to stop advancing the human race, not all of us share your pitiful lethargy. It's not gung-ho at all, it's a built-in drive that we still in the human race call humanity...

Android phones bend too.

As anyone could have found with Google before they tried to make this a thing about Apple.

Just be aware and it'll be fine, with any phone.

They denied many people had them but eventually fixed it anyway with a free bumper.

That didn't *fix* anything though. As was widely reported at the time, ALL phones lose signal dramatically with a death grip, iPhone or no, even with a case.

I never used a case or bumper with the "Antenna phone" and need had an issue dropping calls.

The free bumper was just PR.

I imagine somewhere in Apple's labs they are testing strengthened cases

Possibly, but I think that will only come into play with the iPhone 6s. I'm sure they will consider it more strongly.

The first mission or two is probably no return anyway so who cares if you can't abort?

I'd still sign on in a heartbeat.

We need to be WAY less cautious about manned space travel again, we aren't going to do much of import at this pace.

Exactly! Glad someone understands.

I'm basically someone who knows what he likes and is also not stupid enough to tie myself to a single party mindset or outlook, instead over time I've learned to think for myself.

It will slowly gain traction among iOS developers, and some will use it for new code, but that doesn't mean it will be dominant by any means.

I don't think you understand, for new projects it pretty much already is.

The fact remains that there are billions of lines of Objective-C code out there. If you honestly think that developers are going to rewrite all those billions of lines of code

Of course not but over time refactoring will rid you of much of that.

I'm not saying all of that is going to be re-written, but within a year I don't think many projects will be started that do not use Swift at the outset.

Now if Apple were to release an Objective-C to Swift translator,

In effect they already do by automatically generating Swift versions of any header files you want Swift to see. That means it's zero cost to call into any existing code from Swift.

If anything, they're usually not cynical enough to adequately model developer apathy and resistance to change..../em

You REALLY do not understand the iOS development community. I would agree with you in any other context, I have been a developer in a lot of worlds, from backend to front end dev. In any other community of developers you would be right; for iOS development you are so, so wrong - primarily because iOS developers are used to constant change anyway, the language changing is just one more change. If it makes you even a little more productive people will use it - and Swift does that quite well.

My predictions are also very, very conservative...

This contact is for carrying people in to LEO, not satellites or cargo. Your argument doesn't work for human rated launchers.

First, it is difficult and expensive to human rate a launch vehicle so not very many companies are going to do it without a reasonable chance of getting business.

It is also probably not a place you want a company cutting corners to low ball a contract bid. The first priority is keeping the cargo alive, not saving a few dollars by going with launch-by-night Rockets-R-US.

Yes and no.

I agree that it's likely that there's no specific line, at least not a sharp one, but there is a qualitative difference between machine learning as we know it now, and human learning. Human learning, at least the best human learning, is about the creation of knowledge, not the acquisition of facts, nor even the identification of key facts from a larger mass (which is what machine learning as done today is about).

A key difference is explanation. A human playing Breakout not only comes up with the strategy of tunneling and exploiting it to knock out lots of blocks from the top, but can explain why that strategy works. This sort of meta-learning, knowledge plus understanding of knowledge, is something that none of our algorithms can yet implement.

This point I don't know about. What you're saying is fundamentally religious, ascribing to people some element that makes us more than the mechanical and chemical interactions that comprise us. That may be the case, or it may not. Even for those who believe in God, it has proven tricky to assume supernatural explanations, because physics often finds natural explanations for them.