You definitely need a medium, but the nature of the medium is highly questionable. (You need something to keep all distances from being in the same place, and a sea of virtual particles counts as a medium.)

More precisely to the point, any manifold can be considered a medium to those things that are embedded within it, as it applies constraints to what they can do, defines their neighbors, etc. And moving is done WITHIN the manifold. Please note that this doesn't even need to have a consistent metric to be true, much less any resistance.

Perhaps you use the word differently, but I'm not aware of any formal definition. (Dictionaries don't count, as they are never precise enough when talking about physical phenomena.)

I agree that the phenomena that the term Dark Energy is used to describe are real. The theory...not so much so. Is there even an agreed upon theory?

FWIW, recently the "standard candle" of supernova brightness has been called into question, so the data may not mean what people have thought they meant.

What do *you* mean by aether that you can assert that Dark Energy isn't neo-aether? I think what he meant was a sketchy theory that didn't have any really solid evidence, but was widely accepted before being disproven. And that he was asserting that it would eventually be disproven.

Your assertion that it isn't what he meant is questionable.

1) Different people mean different things by consensus. E.g. some people mean unanimous agreement.

2) You have correctly described much popular commentary in the general press, but there often is an actual consensus underneath what they are saying, they just aren't accurately describing it. And sometimes it's whole-cloth invention. And sometimes its "Many people I've heard from when I asked about it and could get someone to talk to me."

3) The checks and balances are monopoly ownership of the public media and the 1st amendment. Whoops!

That link starts off interesting, and by about the 5th or 6th page becomes just polemic. You need to rewrite every page after the 1st, giving more attention to your theory and less attention to lambasting others.

I *am* of the opinion that when you do this you will end up with many fewer pages, but quite possibly with some decent questions that need to be addressed. E.g., how does your theory account for the proportions of Hydorgen and Helium in the universe. Etc. Don't concentrate quite so much on problems that current theories have trouble with, and pay more attention to deriving the solutions that the current theories have apparently valid answers for. Yes, you need to point out places where your theory is better, but it's even more important to show that you can answer correctly everything that the current theories have correct.

With a gradation in punishment. Probably exponential. The current head of the NSA should be slowly boiled in tar. It's difficult to imagine something appropriate for his boss.

That is technical protection, but it doesn't keep someone from getting a patent on it. And the patent will be presumed valid, so you will need to prove in court that your use was prior art. And that's not only expensive, it's dangerous. The court may decline to accept clear, verifiable proof. The patent examiners only look in a few places, and often a trivial change is enough that they won't find the prior art. And this isn't even unreasonable. Consider the number of different terms used to describe running communicating programs simultaneously on multiple CPUs of a multi-cpu computer. Now invent a new term that's also appropriate. See how easy it is. Searching for "woven programming" won't find concurrent programming, or threads, or multi-processing, or... well, any of the other terms used by various groups to describe the same thing.

I'm sorry, but the USPTO is doing such a bad job that totally eliminating them would be an improvement. I will agree that a patent system is valuable, but it's also incredibly dangerous and prone to "corruption". (Not in the usual sense, but in the sense of knowingly not carrying out their explicit duties.)

The first step should mean to make patents be required to be sufficiently specific that those skilled in the art (being patented, not of legal interpretation) can reproduce the invention. The second step of the process, if you aren't just going to revoke all exising patents and close the USPTO would need to be to remove the judicial presumption that a patent is valid because it has been issued. I doubt if 50% of the patents should have bee issued. The third step should be to remove the special patent courts, which increase the cost of defense against an invalid patent dramatically, in foster a wierd language such that even normal lawyers aren't allowed to claim to understand what a patent means.

Passing patents up to a higher board of patent office officials will just enshrine the current mode of operation. If you must do that, pass the patent to a board of specialists chosen by lottery from those qualified in the specialty that the patent claims to cover. (Reasons for rejecting that patent by this board cannot include "that won't work" but may include "that's too unclear to understand". In fact, perhaps that should be their only reason for rejection. Perhaps one should also include a requirement for a working model, but I'm unsure about that. Plans for a working model, anyway.)

Excuse me, but what made you think this wasn't a part of the massive interaction called "global warming"...(which has very little to do with your current weather).

Ocean acidification is caused by CO2 being dissolved in the oceans, and the level of solution is in approximate equilibrium with the level of CO2 in the atmosphere (though you need to figure in lots of lag). While the oceans are relatively cool they can absorb extra CO2, as they warm it becomes more "eager" to get out of solution, but with the atmosphere levels of CO2 being high, instead of being expelled into the atmosphere it "tries" to dissolve things. (CO2 dissolved in water is carbonic acid ... H2CO3. A very weak acid.) When the temperature of the ocean is lower, not only is the CO2 more soluble, but the resulting H2CO3 is more stable, and so less acidic.

What's been happening is that as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere rose, more was dissolved in the (colder) oceans. As things warmed up the ocean has become more reluctant to hold the CO2 that's already been dissolved. But the oceans have so much more thermal mass than the atmosphere, that they've been warming considerably more slowly. Over the last decade, however, their temperature has been increasing, and they can't emit the dissolved CO2 into the atmosphere faster than it's absorbed, because that level is also increasing, so the oceans have become more acidic.

So this is an expected part of global warming, and anyone who is surprised by it just hasn't been paying attention.

Sharks do have some bones, but it's not clear that they can't adapt to reducing the quanity, and with an internal skeleton the difficulty of laying down calcium reinforcements is an economic problem, so while I expect sharks to reduce the amount of calcium reinforcement in their skeleton, I don't expect it to sound their knell. Oysters are a different matter, similarly clams, corals, and plankton with calciferous reinforcements. They will probably be unable to do so.

Fish are in an in-between spot. An increasingly acidic ocean increases the cost of maintaining a calcium reinforced skeleton. Smaller fish, especially, may find the increased cost too much to sustain. Perhaps they will be able to adapt by switching most of their skeletons to cartiledge. Perhaps they won't. And larger fish are generally dependant on smaller fish for sustainance. Perhaps they can switch to jellyfish, but jellyfish are rather low in calories/cc.

It's not clear that plankton will suffer unduly with acidification. Some plankton depend on calciferous skeletons, but by no means all. Some even use silicon. Expect "carnivorous" sharks to get smaller, and subsist mainly on jellyfish. Whale sharks may do well...or might not. Baleen whales may do well, as they are slightly insulated against increased oceanic acidity, and live on plankton. Walrus and seals should expect to do poorly, unless they can adapt to living on jellyfish (unlikely?).

And fishermen should expect to do EXTREMELY poorly. I've eaten one decent sushi made with jellyfish eggs. It was expensive enough that I haven't ordered it again, even thugh it was good. I don't think I've ever eaten jellyfish...or been offered any. (FWIW, Jellyfish are mainly salt water, and that may be why.)

OTOH, a lot of the current reason for the increase in the number of jellyfish is overfishing. Ocean acidification, while it is happening (and destroying corals, oysters, etc.) may not be what's killing off the fish.

Yes, if the officer has the ability to turn off the camera, and it is off, then I'm not only going to side against the officer, I'm going to declare that he was actually off durty for the entire time it was off.

If it is under the control of the officer, then if it is off, I'm going to assume he turned it off intentionally, and because he didn't want something recorded.

Additionally, if his camera is broken, then he should either get a replacement or not be allowed on the streets. The reason for the demand for cameras is that a significant number of officers cannot be trusted to be honest, but the DA and Judge automatically believes them anyway. (I have no idea of what the percentage is among your acquaintances, or whether you honestly know. But the police where I live have been under orders to clean themselves up by the Feds for over a decade, and have made little progress. I suspect because putatively "good" cops are covering for the bad apples.)

Well, you're accepting that legal precdent equals justification, which, given some of the precedents that have been set, I find unacceptable. There clearly *are* cases that would be justifiable (as in the invader in the armory mentioned above) but legal precedent doesn't qualify, in and of itself, as justification. You need to explain why it's relevant, applicable, and should be accepted. (Actually, for "justifiable" you don't need to do any of those things, but rather need to do the justifying rather that say [effectively] "legal precedent".)

Python and Ruby became popular at essentially the same time, and were focused on different areas. Yes, both are complete languages and *can* do anything any other computable language can do, but the same is true of binary code. (It took awhile for assembler to catch on. Longer for Fortran and Cobol.)

FWIW, both Ruby and Python are better than Perl WRT intelligibility...but the same is true of APL.

That said, what a language would need to be to replace English is popular. Nothing else. So Chinese has a good chance, but it's sufficiently difficult to learn (especially to read/write) that the most likely language to supplant English is ... English. That's not quite a paradox, as English comes in multiple flavors, and the dialect that I'm proposing is the one in common use in South-East Asia to talk between people whose native languages are mutually unintelligible. It's a development from Pigin English, but in the direction of being a complete language. (OTOH, I haven't heard that anybody uses it as their first language, so that may knock it out of the running.)

OK. A few weeks. And we still couldn't predict the nature of the explosion. (Or, with any certainty, when it would happen. Or even, as *I* recall, that it would happen. Perdiction, yes, certainty, no.) That's really not enough to do much preparation for an eruption.

Remember, there were hikers on the mountain who had not been warned that this was dangerous. That doesn't sound like certainty to me. Perhaps a few people were certain, but nobody who had any public voice chose to use it (and was believed...it's likely *somebody* was claiming that an eruption was imminent, there usually is).