If an officer with a camera is in the presence of a man who facial recognition flags as a possible match for someone with an open warrant out on them, it would probably be a good thing for the officer to be alerted about the match.

Now, of course what I am thinking of is the situation where some guy with an open murder warrent in Florida is spotted laying low in Wyoming. Having that guy picked up is probably a good thing.

I wonder exactly what sort of abuse you foresee with that situation? I am sure there are things that can go wrong.

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Consider Spiderman.

The character was created in 1962, which puts it just over 50 years of existence. But the character is still being used in new and ongoing works. I expect that 100 years from now, the character will continue to exist in some form.

I think copyright laws need to recognize that characters used in ongoing works need different protection then something like a song (which is written once).

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I am personally not in favor of a the Death Penalty, but I can understand why it exists and the arguments for having it.

I would say that if your going to have Capital punishment, then the means of execution should be mechanical, and performed in such a way as to minimize suffering. To that end, I agree with the idea of a dropping a sufficiently large mass on the skull of the condemned man, sufficient enough to crush a skull like a grape.

Lethal injection primarily exists to make executions more palatable by making them less gruesome. I disagree with this. Even if justified, ending a human life should not be an easy thing for those who must decide that it must happen.

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Solitary Confinement is the sort of thing that should only be used for the following reasons:

  - The inmate is dangerous to both other inmates and to the prison staff
  - The inmate is guilty of crimes that call for very harsh punitive measures, but execution is not an option
  - The inmate is being punished for rules infractions in prison (in which case solitary should be used for a limited time).

You need to have solitary confinement as an option to punish an inmate, otherwise the inmate may become uncontrolable. If your in prison and have no chance to ever be released, then why not stab that annoying cellmate / guard? They cannot keep you locked up for 2 life times. Solitary is the 'things can still get worse' measure.

The guy who created pirate bay is guilty of copyright infringement. I am going to assume he is not a threat to himself or others. So what basis is there for dropping him in solitary confinement?

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Their names were never published, and only discovered in an illegal search. If I write down in my notebook 'Cowboy Neal has inappropriate sexual relations with his water bottle', and never tell anyone what I have written, and never publish it, than what exactly am I guilty of?

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Pokemon X and Y have sold 4 million copies worldwide in two days.

http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/10/15/pokemon-x-and-y-sales-figures-revealed

The retail price for those games is about $40.

If they license that content out to another platform, they lose a non trivial cut of that cash to the platform owner. If they release on the iPhone, I do not think the title would sell very well to an audience that expects everything to cost $1.

$40 * 4 million = $160 million in sales.

Do you think Pokemon would move 160 million paid sales on the iPhone?

Keeping that product on their own platform will give Nintendo the bulk of that profit, and it will help increase the size of the audience for other 3DS titles.

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The 4th Amendment of the US constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Generally, this can be taken to mean that the police cannot pull a random passer by aside and go wrist deep into your rectal cavity on the off chance you might have something illegal up there, as it is unreasonable. I think I will get no disagreement on that.

Now, the reason that the above example is an unreasonable search is that it is absurdly invasive and there is no warrant, and in that particular scenario, there is no way to easily verify that the police officer doing the search did not plant evidence (or basically lie about finding a quantity of drugs or contraband up there).

The above example might become reasonable if the authorities were to follow due process and had reasonable cause to believe that there is something deep inside the suspects rectal cavity.

I think most people get hung up on the idea that the only reasonable search is one that has a warrant.

If the authorities opt instead to data mine thousands of e-mails looking for evidence of random wrongdoing the assumption of many is going to be that it is an unreasonable search. But on what basis is it unreasonable? Lets say such a search of several thousand suspects the authorities identify a few potential suspects of legit crimes, and the authorities then prosecute them. The people that were not implicated in that search will probably never know they were under scrutiny, and they would be hard pressed to prove any actual harm from that search.

So why exactly is that kind of search unreasonable? I am not about to say that such a search is reasonable (at least not without a warrant to go looking for something specific), but the only argument against it is for an expectation of privacy. While such an argument is valid, I am not aware of any laws in the US that guarantee privacy from non invasive scrutiny.

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The big issue with Fukushima at the moment is the build up of radioactive water that they do not want to introduce into the ocean / food chain.

If one were to use Electrolysis to separate the radioactive water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, would the Hydrogen and Oxygen also be radioactive? Or would the radioactive matter be condensed?

It may not be the most efficient use of power to convert the amount of water at Fukushima, but it would probably be much easier to manage the waste if it were condensed.

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I wonder how air travel compares to rail when you also factor in the cost of the required infrastructure. Trains are much more fuel efficient, but laying massive amounts of rail is not cheap.

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Interesting question. I am going to guess no. Sports are surprisingly tied to modern culture.

While it is clearly not 'high culture' in the way that Opera, art galleries, ballet, and such manage to, sports are surprisingly important to modern culture. Humans are competitive with one another. Sports are one of the few acceptable physical outlets for that. Competition in sports allow humans to compete with one another, either individually or in groups, without resorting to violence. Humans are tribal, and sports teams push several psychological buttons for people (belong to a group, and lets kick the ass of those other guys from across the river).

Individual sports may increase or decrease in importance over time, but I expect that some form of sports will continue to be culturally relevant and important as long as humans are both competitive with one another and want to impress women by showing off how dominant they are.

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I have no idea who got voted off the island. But I am very satisfied with what I get from having Cable tv.

  - New episodes of good tv shows like Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead, Dexter, and Breaking bad show up on broadcast first. Streaming is absolutely more convenient. But running up against spoilers is too damn easy to do by accident if you use any kind of social media sites.

  - New tv shows like 'The Amerikans' on FX show up on broadcast long before going to streaming sites, unless they are Netflix Originals.
  - Live sports matter. Turns out I like watching people fight in a cage for money. The UFC puts out a surprising amount of events on free TV; 9 events on 'Free TV' (each being 6 hours (prelims and main card) plus an additional 9 events with prelim fights, and another event on Fox Sports 1 tomorrow. Watching these events legally through the official streaming service is much more expensive. Watching illegally is a pain in the ass. On top of that is more content from Bellator on Spike and regional promotions on Fight Network. MMA is not for everyone, but it is for me. And for others, its the NFL, or NBA, or NHL, or MLB.

  - Also, as far as social media + spoilers, as much as it can hurt the experience of seeing a show to know the ending, it fucking kills any kind of sporting event.

  - Not all content that you may wish to watch is going to be streamed easily. My wife is a fan of the Food Network. Not much demand for streams of those shows.

Personally, I love that Netflix and others are doing their own content now, but we are still pretty far off from being able to cherry pick only the shows I want to see and then pay only for that content.

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According to Wikipedia:
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Nagasaki, Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOL_Comfort

So when did Japan become a 3rd world country that lacked advanced and sophisticated systems?

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In order to displace something, the new thing has to be all that the old thing was and then some more (some more crucial features not just some more sugar). And then it has to be cheaper to top it. Until you can satisfy both requirements, trying to get someone to upgrade is probably going to be an uphill battle.

If a company invested a non trivial amount of effort into creating a web enabled system that was dependent on IE 6, it will likely continue to be used until it becomes nearly impossible to get IE 6 to run on newer computers. Can you guarantee that the new system will do something the old system could not do? If you cannot, then it is probably going to be cheaper at any given moment to fix / replace the few older computers that break down then to reimplement the entire system.

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Pulling a number right out of my ass, lets say a typical person needs to earn $35 000 to $45 000 a year to support themselves at today's cost of living. . Lets say that random person X, working at a creative class job might only be able to earn $15 000 a year simply because he is just not that good.

Now lets automate the shit out of everything. Lets say we have robotic lumberjacks, miners, farmers, prefabricated construction factories for building homes, the whole smash. Lets also say that some kind of wonder tech combo both reduces the energy requirements while also making renewable energies viable for a standard of living comparable to the american average. Pure science fiction bullshit sure, but lets set that aside for a moment.

The real cost of living is going to fall way the hell down. Rich and Poor still exist because humans suck and we compete for mates as much as anything else. But the cost for a person to secure food and shelter drops to something like $10 000 a month.

The guy who can only earn $15 000 in a creative type job is going to be able to live while doing that job. Maybe they aren't living the high live but they can probably get by as well as they would have before.

Also, lets not call it a 'creative' type job, and instead call it a 'cultural' job. Some people will create art of various forms. Some people will perform (art or sports). Some will teach. I am sure some people will just try to party all the damn time.

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Sounds like an optimal way to clear your mind.

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