IMHO these complaints are overly fastidious, and not just because it's just a silly show.

I always thought it was obvious, to science fiction nerds, that if you're writing about telekinesis or similar nonsense you simply assume that the bulk of the force is between the victim and some object (like the ground, or a wall) and that the energy comes not directly from Sylar's biochemistry but from some ability to tap into other energy sources. A normal human, as an analogy, can bring down the side of a mountain--by starting a landslide. Looked at simplistically, it "violates" the principles you mention (where does the energy come from? how does he exert the force?) far worse than tossing a guy across the room, but obviously if the conditions are right and you understand what's really happening it's not just plausible, but trivial to explain.

Good, fun hard SF for me is coming up with inventive, lively explanations of why the conditions are right for whatever cool thing they want to have happen. Not that I have any desire to have a good writer waste time on psychic powers these days, which are overdone, old and cliched, but there are other things just as superficially unlikely should still make appearances.

What makes Heroes non-science fiction is not any one example--which could hand-waved quite adequately by a good SF writer. The Heroes problem is their utter indifference to *any* explanation, which is partly tone and also leads to wild inconsistencies in logic and consistency.

Is anyone writing SF like that these days? It seems to have stopped in the '70s or early '80s. Maybe it's just what my reading habits are these days, but I'd love a writer with the approach to science (and a better approach to plot and characters) of a vintage Larry Niven.

Indeed.

Also, never before in the history of corporate America, has a small company make a predictable copy of product and then sued a bigger competitor for it's equally predictable product. This is all thoroughly uncharted territory. ;)

Absent a lot more information, there's really no way to figure if B&N is remotely guilty of anything at all. Talks about licensing do *not* prevent you from working on a similar product yourself; the practice is routine. If your internal project fails or is delayed, you want a backup--that doesn't commit you to buying or licensing before you've signed a deal. And Slashdot, of all places, should be sceptical of claims that a company "deserves" some space in the IP world just for itself because they thought about something similar.

Are they misrepresenting it? That would be the key question as to whether it is or should be illegal.

If they just say "These are customer reviews," there's no claim about completeness. Any more than review excerpts that appear on the inside covers of books purport to be a scientific sampling of critical opinion. Or audience snippets about some new musical that appear on TV ; they aren't really just broadcasting what everyone said.

This is plain caveat emptor; I can't believe anyone is surprised let along indignant about it. Do people really believe they don't need to visit a third party site to do research these days? Consumer Reports has stayed in business for a reason; I do my research on-line but the principle is the same. You can't expect someone who profits from making a sale to try and talk you out of it.

They are trying to sell you something, it clearly states it's their site, and you should probably be skeptical about everything you read on it. Especially for an electronics retailer, where "anti-advertising" existing stock presumably means eating a considerable loss (unlike, say, Amazon.) You can also hold it against them and choose not to shop there if you don't like it. (In my case, untrustworthy reviews give me an active reason to leave a site and do research, so vendors that post more-or-less unfiltered reviews get more business from me.)

If they are telling you anywhere it's "all user comments," then you have a case, but I've never seen that claim even on Amazon. And if they are telling the would-be poster that his comments will be posted independent of content, the poster has a claim. Otherwise? There are tons of review sites, aren't there?

If a sensitive package got delivered, by mistake, and it wasn't returned, and the resident of the house didn't respond to reasonable contact requests and showed no sign of being home, you might well see some analagous action. Not "burning down the house", but a court order to retrieve property that didn't belong to him. It certainly doesn't seem unreasonable to consider such action.

The "burning down the house" analogy, is vastly overstating things, as are most other posters. This is hardly a permanent deactivation--the account is down, you call Google, they explain the situation and you get it sorted out. If the gentleman did nothing wrong, it'd be a nuisance, but quickly resolved. If the account is one of the many abandoned or semi-abandoned ones floating around the internet, sealing it off is I think very prudent.

In both the analogy and the actual case, context matters a lot. I'd certainly hope the judge grilled the bank about other options and how they'd tried to contact the account owner, and asked Google to try and contact him on the court's behalf first. Ask Google if any of the messages have been read. Plus the actual legal standing, how harmful the information could be, and a dozen other factors not described in detail.

But the outrage level over this seems *way* too high. There's this attitude around the internet that it's a rank injustice to be inconvenienced by anything that wasn't your fault. (Not attributing this to you, but many posters certainly channel this feeling.) Meh. Try out another analogy, some days you wake up and find your driveway blocked by firetrucks helping out a neighbor, or your street blocked off because police are investigating a crime. We live in a world with other people, sometimes their crises are more important than our daily routine. It happens.

Technically, "net neutrality" refers to the traffic being completely agnostic about what a packet is--phone, video, http, etc.

Most of the insidious scenarios painted by the loss of neutrality do relate to content filtering--ie, Comcast makes a deal with Amazon and gimps the connections to, say, Powell's dodgy enough customers just think Amazon is the place to shop.

If it's really as described in this case, for bandwidth management, I personally don't think it's all that scary. There are issues about transparency, and for some users this might mean their ISP isn't providing sufficient bandwidth anymore. But IMHO it's not automatically different than simple changing the maximum bandwidth available to a customer.

On the other hand, if a AT&T gimped VOIP to knock Skype out of business, or Comcast filtered video so you needed their cable services, you could get filtering-by-protocol that was just about as evil as the content filtering.

You may need to work on your interviewer mind melding skills.

Just ask yourself it that's what you'd think as a manager interviewing an employee. "I have two candidates, one who will understand what's going on in the workplace around him, and one who won't. I obviously need to hire the clueless one, since the smart one will recognize that I am an incompetent who will do nothing but feed him projects are destined to fail." I imagine probably not? Then why do you think anyone else would think that way?

You may be confusing a candidate's being able to distinguish good and bad projects with a candidate who's just a prima donna. The guy who projects a sense of entitlement, who will only want to work on the central aspects of high-profile projects, yeah, he's not going to get an offer. As I said in my grandparent post, you want to make sure you're not coming off that way. Explain why the project failed. Don't explain why it was "beneath you."

Also, this is distinct from concerns about someone being overqualified. Overqualified (ie, should be running a team on paper but is applying for a grunt job) is a concern. Then you're worried that they might leave; but you're also worried that they're apparent "underperforming" is because actually quite incompetent, so exuding cluelessness will not help.

"I wanted to work on a project that was going to be successful, and I left when I became convinced that I couldn't contribute effectively given the current set up."

Showing you know the difference between a good project and bad project, especially ahead of time, is a plus in an interview. Showing you care enough about the end result, and not just a paycheck, is a plus. You should be able to communicate both of these things pretty convincingly if you left a high-profile disaster ahead of time. Make sure you're professional enough to talk about these things without badmouthing co-workers or sounding like a legend-in-your-own-mind, but other than that you're fine

Even if a project was successful, interviewees should be able to explain what they learned from the things that didn't work well. If it was unsuccessful, they should have a long list of mistakes that they now recognize first hand--and if you're going to claim you recognized all these things at the time they were happening, why did you stay?

I'd be just as interested in hearing the answer to that question. It's not like either situation would make you start with a presumptive strike against you--both should be pretty easy to explain. But there should be some level of awareness demonstrated, shouldn't there? If someone's attitude is "I did what I was told, my section worked fine," you know (at best) you're dealing with someone who has a pure grunt mentality and will never take responsibility for the overall product quality. I'd find working on a project like that very frustrating, and would be suspicious people who didn't.

Well, we could also start cutting up death row inmates for organs, which is a much more certain benefit than what you describe. In terms of utilitarian logic this makes more sense. One of the many reasons not to be a strict utilitarian, IMHO.

Ignoring ethics, the proposal is, I suspect, pretty weak practically. I don't know enough to do hard numbers. But the number of death row inmates (especially with exhausted appeals) in the US is pretty low, HIV transmission rates are naturally low, and if you try to make up by lots of sex (or even worse, direct injection) your experiment environment wouldn't model the real world system at all.

So it's quicker result, but not a quicker answer. Barring a very strong signal, and possibly not even then, you'd have nothing until you do the full size study anyway, and actions taken on interim results from prisoners could cause harm (by, e.g., encouraging risky behavior in recipients, or exposing people to side effects that have no benefits.)

The original smallpox immunization test was run on an orphan girl by exposing her to smallpox after she'd been immunized. Practices have been changed since then.

The 'ultimate' endpoint for a vaccine trials compares two large groups, one vaccinated, one not, over a long period of time and compare to infection rates. Since volunteers are assigned randomly to one group, if the overall rates are lower in the vaccine group than the control, and the difference holds up to statistical analysis, you have good evidence it works. The signal is weak, meaning the trials have to be long and large to tell the difference. They are expensive.

In the early stages of trials, you're looking more directly for markers that the vaccine might be working--are you stimulating antibody production of the type you intended to do? These are smaller and cheaper, and can at least tell you it won't work.

But you've now lost all correlation between the two cycles, which was the driving force for the hypothesis. Scientifically, this is like suspecting someone of a murder solely because an eyewitness placed him at the crime; proving the eyewitness was mistaken; then, insisting he could still be the murderer because no one has proven he wasn't there. I mean, sure, that's technically true, but it's not a very promising lead anymore, is it? Going back to the science, to support the original hypothesis you'd probably need hard evidence to validate that cosmic rays really do cause climate change, then additionally show it's at least plausible that the cycles do line up, best measurements to contrary. Incidentally, I don't have any great knowledge of astronomy, but I do suspect the 'models' of the Milky Way have smaller error bars than you imply. It'd take a lot of energy to change the momentum of something that big, and if we collided with something that big we should still be able to see it . . .

Not at all. Most homeowners do a lot more around the house with a lot less training, whether opening up the garbage disposal or trying to manage their retirement accoutns. The goal of these classes--especially for scientists--is the equivalent: Not to get people ready for programming a bug-free third party app; it's so they don't have to sit on their hands waiting for someone else to "build tools" to solve a perfectly manageable, one-off program that will let them move their research forward.

There may be things where there's a nice pre-built commercial or open source app; there will also be problems where there's a need for paid consultants. But there's a lot of ground in the middle, especially in specialized fields.

The most recent bad accident before the recent one--the one we actually know the cause of--was caused by pilots overriding their computerized safety systems: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124212789938210353.html

The plane iced up and lost speed, and the computer sent the plane into a dive to regain the critical speed. The pilots responded by thinking "Down? We don't want to go down!" and pulled up, which meant they lost the acceleration, the ability to stay airborne, and fifty-some passengers. The transcripts are chilling and gruesome.

Human nature apparently makes people more willing to trust human judgment than machines. I very much *don't* want to give the public, who may be perfectly sensible and intelligent in their areas of expertise but who are utterly ignorant of modern aircraft the right to override actual, scientific determination of what the safest way is to handle a specific emergency. Which is exactly what will happen if airlines need to pander to passengers going by zero knowledge and a ton of gut instinct about what makes them feel good.

Could be. On the other hand, a name is just "imaginary property", so we have no reason to assume the pro-piracy opponents would even consider this a crime, would we? ;)

At no point in any of the three articles did I see anyone accused of "lying" about class sizes or professor salaries. The number of classes less than 20 people actually did increase--at least partly by bogus 'load balancing'. And the professor salaries increased, both by raising them in reality and because the old reported numbers didn't include benefits (as they should have).

I also couldn't find the source for the claim about filling out fraudulent applications, though it's possible I missed it.

None of this is to defend the ranking gaming, but the summary gives an extremely different picture than I got from the source material, which mostly is in the category of 'administering to the test'