The sorts of analyses that can be conducted using game-theoretic formulations can be used to see what happens when a population is unable to defend itself because it swears off retribution in kind. The numbers are pretty dismal, without strong cooperation by the good people there is a sort of inevitability that the nice go extinct. Until the mid 1800's outlier antisocial behavior ran a high risk of being met by termination, which might not be a deterrent, but it sure reduces recividism. Once we became too civil to retaliate in kind (or stronger) we run the risk of losing to the trolls.

The ability to be anonymous just makes it harder to stop trolls, and any strong efforts to prevent anonymity are met by claims that the internet needs to support anonymity if it is to deliver freedom in the lands of tyranny.

All of this is fodder for great movies (where the bad guys are pursued by the good) but only if the bad guys hit equally evil players will they find meaningful retribution. If the trolls were to accidentally cost the Russian mafie some serious coin, they might find a knock at their door that would be much worse than having the FBI come a-knocking. (This is the plot of one of my tech-fi stories).

A good part of how you get a Nobel is similar to how you get an Oscar. Someone works very hard to publicize your work to a voting committee. They vote.

So a Nobel prize, like an Oscar, is a function of two strong independent variables.

Computing coefficients is left as an exercise to the interested student.

Multi-stage heat to electricity systems can help minimize the local heat effect, though to the extent the earth is a closed system, if we are adding heat it might be like sticking burning candles into an oven.

Solution? MASERs tuned to frequencies that the atmosphere is transparent to, to pump excess heat out into space. I envision roof-top masers as the final stage of a buildings HVAC system (replacing the current simple heat exchangers). We could mandate that all AC units over a certain size must use same, just don't fly over them. Did Clarke get patent credit for his suggestion that satellites would be useful in telecommunications?

Early in the technology cycles of fax and copiers, totalitarian governments tried to regulate or ban them. Fascists gotta be fascists.

If I weren't at war with the Islamofascists, I'd change my sig block to this bit of brilliance!

Maybe having to learn odd measures is a good introduction to units analysis and the need to pay attention. As a discipline not a set of facts. Just sayin', there may be more going on here than just imperialistic rhetoric.

Yes, The Day After is a very good movie as it embedded some very real conversations we used to have while sitting alert (Minuteman I (Mod) in 1970's).

I also watch "United 93" the way Israelis visit Masada and vow, "Masada shall not fall again!". Not for the heroics at the end, but for the many presentations of people struggling to understand what was going on. A fight we all are waging all the time, nowadays.

A call to arms for the anhedonists of the World!!!!

... oh, why bother?

Bootable, non-writable CD, schedule computer to shut off every night at 2AM, forcing a daily reboot from said hardened safe CD OS. Leave one or two copies outside the computer where you can tell them to look if they phone and say they had to throw out the one they had been using.

Yeah, a lack of (internal) opposition has really helped the N Koreans, the Somalies and a few others, do freemen owe freedom and protections to societies and tribes who's oppressed are unable or unwilling to fight back? That is what we should decide first, then the rest is just strategy and tactics. But modern democratic institutions just do not do that discussion well in the presence of radical pacifists and war-hawks, who tend to see the world in black and white (sort of like the old TRS-80s did, due to its similarly limited capacity).

Only in the USofA is gun ownership specifically guaranteed because it is in our charter that the people need to be able to overthrow their government. All the rest of this discussion is just chaff.

The statistics presented are part of the PRICE of that guarantee, and it is a fair use to use those statistics to ask if that protection (against the government) is worth the price, and given the way governments tend to evolve, one can ask if the USofA is really immune to the sort of evolution the Constitution was trying to protect against. And it is fair to ask whether the guns we are allowed to own are capable of protecting us against drones, black helicopters and the NSA.

But I must say that if I were confronted with a government that suddenly decided that atheists were amoral gits who deserved beheading (to mix metaphors), then at least I would be able to take one or two with me.

As a mathematician I find that I am struck by the boundary between what mathematics and research tell me and what ethicists (religious and otherwise) tell me. The best example of the conundrum we rationalists face is how to claim that a behavior is moral when the underlying systems model tells us it is not. Consider the classic question of which is "better", the old testament (admittedly an arbitrary source, but bear with me) rule of "an eye for an eye" compared with the new testament rule to "turn the other cheek". Extensive exploration of the long term consequences of these two strategies for life are conducted under the guise of game theory, most specifically, the extensive simulations of the prisoner's dilemma (made famous by the book of the same name). The massive hoops and artificial framing necessary to make simulated evolution favor turning the other cheek are strong indications of the strength of the simpler, eye for an eye strategy. Perhaps what makes us most human (whatever that is) is when we embrace, for our own illogical reasons, turning the other cheek in the face of the systems models that tell us to exact an eye for an eye. But the price we pay is the price of the person who leaps from a bridge hoping to fly like a bird when the systems analysis says it won't work. Because evolution operating on memes will punish the society that follows the gentler turn the other cheek in the face of a society that exacts the eye for an eye. Is extinction the price we pay for the more "moral" and gentler turning the other cheek? I hope not, but keep the eye I have left wide open just in case.

Wish I could moderate this up. Nice point about the psychology of racists, which is that they fear "the others" because deep in their hearts they are afraid the others are superior (in the genetic, "breeding success==superior" evolutionary sense of the word).

You're a christian, what do you care about karma (it's from a competing meme)