Civilization and civilized behavior has always been more about the social contracts (as in implied) than the legal contracts (as in laws). What makes my small town more comfortable, than the big town I winter in, is the social contract we all share and impose primarily through shame and shun. The Internet and global culture have revealed the weakness in social normative pressures when anonymity meets cultural relativism. The copy-paste examples are more noteworthy for the fact that copy-paste mentality overridesany social normative pressures we might exert. Yes, copy-paste examples abound, but do I just copy them and claim immunity from social pressures? I could copy-paste one word and a time and stand "immune" because I did not pen them myself?

We are in a dark cave, the wumpus is loose, and the only people with lights are lying religious fanatics whose reason is their sacred writings and whose swords are, more rapidly than we might wish, the actual swords they raise against the unbelievers. Chop. Chop.

Why apartheid "worked", why the Shah "worked", why Christianity "worked".

It is really too bad when science comes down on the side of the iron fist, but the studies show over and over that justice requires peace, and peace requires trust, and diversity reduces the social capital necessary to assure trust.

On the other hand, who wants to live under ISIL or similar diversity busting regimes? But one of the first prerequisites for a peaceful society appears to be a shared culture first, at least with respect to how people treat each other. It would be nice if we could use clothing to mark culture, so that when I see someone wearing a hoodie I could KNOW that indicated a peace-monger, but it just is not so, any more than someone wearing a sash with a swastika is identifying themselves as a keeper of the word of gawd.

The question has to be, how to get social capital higher and the science appears to suggest homogeneity. I don't like that answer, any more than I liked it when simulations showed "tit-for-tat" was the preferred strategy in cooperative games. I don't like that I cannot just flap my arms and fly either, but at some level all of these findings are our realities.

Go away.

Come back if/when you grow up.

It does to people who view the world through a specific jargon. I would prefer to read good cosmology with math to help my understanding, but that market is pretty small compared to simplistic "analogies" that feed and nurture the the public discourse. For an example, run down the virtual particle discussions until you finally get to the one (and it was deep when I found it) that explains that the classical virtual particles as used to explain Hawking radiation are not the virtual particles of the foundational theory, so a lot of effort gets expended trying to explain amateur "what ifs" that are founded on this simplistic analogy. Trust me, I sometime try to express my semi-naive questions knowing that what I really need to do is run down the equations and see if my question is a function of the popularizing analogies, or is it truly answerable (and needing said answer) in the mathematics.?

So, yes, popular jargon sells more books, why oh why are you surprised?

As a statistician, I am seriously annoyed with the usual Left-Right dichotomy we see in most press articles. While I like the Political Compass I am a bit nervous of their clustering algorithm, and the questions they use to feed the analytics. Even more interesting is Johathan Haidt who has achieved some TEDTalk fame describing a five-dimensional feature space (though he does try to reduce to two clusters - liberals and conservatives). So I pose a two part question, (1) do you think the public discourse is hampered by the popular press always reducing politicians and voters to "liberals" and "conservatives"? And if you are concerned, (2) what can we do to push back against such simplifications, especially here on Slashdot?

Collides particles we call "pool balls" because they are so large.

You must be experiencing Lorentz-contractions, and if you aren't careful she will experience contractions too!

Bugs are for the most part bad ... and NSA is probably quite happy keeping us all on a path we feel is safe. If they left the bugs in, they would face a combinatorially expanding complexity of problems to solve.

Meanwhile, I am toying with creating a pre-browser or embedded filter that removes all tags beyond what Slashdot permits, then feeds that reduced set to the display functions. I am sick and tired of trying to throttle back wacko behavior one fekking feature at a time. Or does such already exist (for Firefox or Chrome?)

Sheeze. I bet you thought that electric typewriters were for lazy bums too!

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.