They certainly are reluctant about it at times; but the military has the convenient 'reality is what shoots you even when you try to pretend it isn't there' incentive to remain members of the reality-based-community.

Would you prefer advice on escapist fantasy or birth control? I can provide either.

Because it hurts those poor ISPs so much when they are forced to charge you an overage fee...

Has anybody actually examined the difference in bandwidth consumption(obviously Netflix has; but I was hoping for a 3rd party)?

'4k' is four times the pixels; but your target bitrate is a different question. I doubt they'd be gutsy enough to keep it the same as for 1080p; but they could have concluded that 3 times the bitrate actually looks just fine (or, less likely but possible, that anything they can get in '4k' is more likely to have been produced at high resolution all the way from camera to final output and more than four times the bandwidth is needed to keep from munging the result).

It would also be interesting to know(but a lot harder to test yourself) how much of the additional cost is storage and bandwidth and how much, if any, is the "More Pixels Means More Premium!" content markup that we saw between DVDs and BDs, where the same title would cost more if you wanted it at higher resolution.

Netflix can certainly attempt to charge what they wish, and it's certainly possible that the difference in price closely reflects the actual difference in cost; but I'd be interested to know more about how much more costly the additional resolution is, and where the additional costs come from.

This 'study' is invalid on its face because Free Will. It simply must not be possible that behavior is driven by causal, physical, mechanisms because that would be philosophically inconvenient. Therefore, it must be false.

I'm...not exactly sure... that the clandestine services of the world are worried about legal exposure incurred in the course of their activities. I certainly can't think of any being bitten in the ass for deploying spyware and it's a matter of public knowledge that it has been done reasonably frequently.

If you just take them down, you get nothing, not even traffic data. If you distribute malware, you get continued tracking of people who visited, possibly keylogger data, dumps of address books and contact lists, credentials for other accounts, and other fun stuff.

It'd be childish if the 'malware' were just serving pop-up ads or sending herbal viagra spam. The stuff designed for surveillance of infected targets, though, would be an entirely logical intelligence gathering strategy.

There seems to be one major difference between this situation and your analogy:

In the case of the neighbor and the TV, the neighbor is a moral person with an interest in his TV (and even if he is dead, his 'estate' has an interest in it, and even if the TV is going to be destroyed, it is likely to have insurance coverage that he won't get if you salvage it and it isn't destroyed after all). It quite likely would be ethical for you to help him out by saving some stuff from the fire; but you'd be a total dick to save some stuff from the fire, then tell him 'haha, no, mine now!' rather than "Here, I got these out for you."

In this case, your 'neightbor' only exists if you treat the possible-future-child (that might have been produced from the embryo, if somebody was found who wanted to use it, most IVF surplus just stays on ice until it eventually gets tossed, since people tend to want either their own children, or go with adoptions of already-born children) as a moral person. This is a position that some take, and arguably a cogent one; but it's far from immediately proven.

If you don't consider the embryo to be a moral person(at least not this early in development, if it was chosen for cellular plasticity it probably doesn't even have a neural network yet), then there is no 'neighbor' analog to speak of. Simply an item of value that can either be used or be allowed to be destroyed.

Am I out of consideration if I refer to the polygraph as 'truth dowsing' while it is being administered? How about asking if it can detect witches?

The guys with the space program get to use the acronym. Those are the rules.

That's why I included the bit about "absolutely no loss of patents or copyrights, or grants of license to amazon, for anything related to the robot." bit.

The value of something that is good enough to win the prize is far larger than the prize. If you can compete without compromising your control of your entry in any way, it only costs the time of whoever you send to unpack the robot and participate. If touching the contest involves granting any right to your entry, you should probably run away screaming.

Even if they did, a cure is only less profitable than daily maintenance treatment if you price the cure such that the profit you make from selling it is less than the net present value of the profit made on all sales of the maintenance treatment across the patient's expected lifetime(future profits are discounted because you don't get the money upfront and because of risk: the patient might die, switch suppliers, be cured by someone else, lose insurance and just suffer without, etc.)

Given the lifetime cost of maintenance treatment for Type I diabetes, an equivalent-profit cure sure as hell wouldn't be cheap; but there's nothing magically profitable about selling consumables that somehow doesn't work for one-time purchases.

They may have other uses; but fetuses old enough to abort are not a good supply of embryonic stem cells (all those adorably baby-like features you see on the gory antiabortion posters? That's because the cells have already differentiated and lost most of the really cool capabilities of early stage embryonic cells...)

If you want to do your part for the stem cell industrial complex, get some IVF done.

Honestly, the hardest thing about subverting free will is actually chasing down a demonstrable instance of it to subvert.

The business of modifying people's behaviors and decisions, on the other hand, at least at the "all of the people some of the time or some of the people all of the time" population level is absolutely ubiquitous, rather effective, and at least as old as civilization.

It's hard to anticipate much of value from somebody who manages to cram so many terms that are both heavily loaded and almost totally vacuous into a single sentence.

In addition to your point (it's very, very, unlikely that the embryos were produced for this purpose at all, let alone solely, since most of the embryo supply is surplus from IVF work, which humans obviously do for other reasons), the rest of the sentence is little more than a fabric of implicit assertions padded with a few nearly meaningless bits.

"Destruction": This process only works because the embryonic cells are undifferentiated (any later in embryonic development and it'd be fun with cell reprogramming) and will only be medically relevant if the resulting beta cells form a reasonably long lived cell line(possibly not immortal; but the more frequently the patient needs new ones implanted, the lower the benefit over just injecting insulin). Does this change in developmental trajectory count as 'destruction'? Arguable; but hardly self-evident.

"Individual": As opposed to the other kind? Did I miss all those collective humans out there? Maybe a hive mind? What would a 'non-individual' human life even look like?

"Unique": Both irrelevant (would the procedure be somehow more or less ethical if it were non-unique? One of those creepy, soulless, clones?) and questionably accurate (very early stage embryos can, and sometimes do, split and form two cell masses that each continue to divide. We call them 'identical twins' and usually don't tell them that they are non-unique, or that a 'unique human life' was destroyed when the original zygote split into two). Given the age of the cells the researchers were working with, chosen specifically for their plasticity, it's actually somewhat tricky to argue that the embryo is 'individual' and 'unique'. In a terribly vacuous sense it is (this embryo is unique because no other embryo is also this embryo); but beyond that you really have to argue for it.

"Human life": This one is as old as the hills, and a classic of the abortion wars. Is it human? Yeah, sure, to the same degree that any other cells in my body are. Is it a 'human life' in the moral personhood sense that you are invoking? Arguable; but you certainly haven't argued it yet.

I sure hope that this bioethicist was either taken out of context or hasn't given up the day job.