Unless you are building and maintaining your own systems off the grid, you have effectively forced society to support your habits, including using wasteful bulbs. An alternative to having cheap incandescent bulbs might be to have a carbon-tax like surcharge for the extra infrastructure ... then your "cheap" 40 and 60 watt incandescent bulbs would also carry a hefty excise tax that would make them less competitive. Of course, we all know that infrastructure is free, at least in the minds of the typical Walmart shopper.

Unless you use other people's vehicles to kill the deer.

Is the use of the term "hologram" designed to imply that an n-dimensional function can describe an (n+m)-dimensional object? The (n+m) dimensional object being a perceptual illusion similar to a hologram?

This gets to the right question ... how long will we have keyboard-mouse and big-screens for doing real work? As long as I am alive I hope. Point and click is okay, but touch and tap sucks.

We like to think that libertarian philosophies will save us ... it is not a shortage of libertarians in the West that is the problem, it is that they spend their time trying to stop the West from waging war rather than trying to stop the rest of the world from fighting dirty. But we are working on it (Syria DID back down, no?)

Prior to WW-I we were headed down a path that made warfare the province of specialists who only killed each other. This was the result of Western civilization slowly coming to terms with making war a set-piece event, primarily between armies on the field. But then ... (some examples only)

• * the USofA Americans showed how to use that set-piece mentality against a tyranny (ca 1776-)
• * Shaka Zulu converted from stylized tribal warfare methods to a similar guerrilla form of war (ca 1790)
• * Gen. Sherman applied a scorched earth strategy through the South to end slavery (go away if you want to argue revisionist histories) (ca 1860-s)
• * British and German forces in WW-I continued that tradition, declaring means of production to be valid targets. (ca 1910s)
• * Everyone came on board in WW-II, though there was debate over day-light precision bombardment (in daylight, targets=factories) vs carpet bombing (at night, targets=cities). Nukes made the distinction irrelevant. (ca 1940s)

Along the way, things like the Geneva conventions have been struggling to make doctors and engineers part of the solution by making some of their products illegal (as war crimes), so we have a precedent for this idea.

BUT

The hegemony we saw in late 1700s in Europe has stopped spreading (because colonialism is evil). So the Euro-centric model of limiting war by rules is confronted by a genetic algorithm based solution that is right now trying to find out which system is better. At the extremes: the Western trended "rules of war". A the other extreme, the guerrilla tactics and all's fair models of the new tribal societies. Hooray for science, we know how to model the question of which will win (see Prisoner's Dilemma ). The bad news is that the genetic algorithm does not reward "fair", or "just" or "peace". It rewards fecundity (see Idiocracy) whether genes or memes.

Really?

"Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle."

Add ... But far too many just piss in the fountain.

No, this just sets the precedent that outlets are not invitations to charge devices unless they are clearly marked for that use. It is simple courtesy that if someone puts out a bushel of apples with a sign that says "Free, take one", then you take one. Not two, not ten. RTFM

When I was taught evolution we started with creationism, then watched as the history unfolded through all the fits and start of the development of the theory of evolution. At the end I feel I understood the method (it wasn't really science until we started testing natural selection in the petri dish, till then it was all observational not experimental). I also feel it gave me a good foundation in what is science (falsifiable statements only, please) and what is faith. But I no longer look to creationism for anything but story lines for nursery tales.

Isn't that what Google Drive is doing?

And "based on a real story" often is simply a marketing ploy, while the movie is still just fiction. O-Stone used to be notorious for re-writing history to make better stories.

And earlier

we ban behavior that doesn't hurt anybody, allow people to hurt themselves, pay to fix people who have hurt themselves, have lots of people who are unemployable, etc. How do you reconcile the libertarian ideal of personal responsibility and freedom with the reality that many don't seem to thrive under those conditions?

Actually, libertarians may have to accept the dual-track society that Heinlein envisioned. The trick is keeping the "free" free (as a minority of self-aware people) and the proles fed and entertained in a world where we have one-person, one vote. Thank Decartes (my god this week) for the Car-trashians.

Then he forgot the passwords. Ooops.

I have a tendency to refer people to the ruthless fremen in Dune whenever they express an inability to understand how al qaeda functions.

This post, and its parent, show such a poor grasp of how to use statistics and modeling that I cannot even begin to discuss the merits of the statements ...