"General purpose computing" is just a synonym for power, in the same way as violence, money, and land are.

When you had land, you could do whatever you wanted on your land, even if it was criminal. When you had money, you could get whatever goods or services money could buy, even if it was criminal. When you had violence, you could take others' land and money, even if it is criminal (it isn't always; Police, in principle, "claim" land and money using violence, but not criminally). Naturally, government came in to regulate all three.

When you have general purpose computing, you can have whatever the peripherals of your computer allow you to have, even if it's criminal. Such peripherals include, but are not limited to, recording devices and displays, CNC machines (fab), and telecom (the internet, VOIP, etc).

The funny thing about computing though, is that it is not consumed in the process the way money and land are. Those have to be invested, because you really can't build a factory on a plot today, and then change it to apartments for a few hours to meet demand. You can't have your paycheck pay for food today, and then have the same money pay for rent tomorrow.

So now users have this virtual land that isn't dedicated to a single purpose and can change at the drop of a hat from producing (or consuming) kitten videos to committing virtual crimes to emailing your mom and back again. It defies the concept of specialization of labor. It defies the concept of investment, because once you pay the overhead and produce something for that virtual land (software), everyone can use it without investing in it themselves.

In other words, it defies the models of money and land. It is its own kind of beast, and computing is our window into that world. What computers we use are our "avatars," to use a tired term, and GP computing is the only avatar that isn't artificially hindered. But an avatar that is unhindered is (for the purposes of law enforcement) no different from allowing all citizens access to weaponry, without even background checks. Maybe it will take care of itself, maybe it won't; the arguments could go on forever.

I would say that the argument for GP computing is more akin to the right to bear arms than the right to free speech. It's individually empowering, to the point of threatening other people. Either you respect that people will someday need it, or you get in the path of that train. Maybe you can derail it with your corpse, maybe not, I don't know, but there are a LOT of people who won't sit idly by as you take their (metaphorical) guns away.

Random? What are you talking about? Are you using the word because a nuclear plant accident can seem random to people not paying attention?

A car that's improperly maintained can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly." A driver that falls asleep behind the wheel can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly". An unexpected weather event can cause an accident that seems to happen "randomly". Are you counting those as "cars randomly blowing up"? Because when they happen at a nuclear plant, you would use the same word.

Or are you talking about areas affected? Do you really want to try to compare how much (surface area * time) is wasted by car crashes, or how many people lose time or property because of them, compared to nuclear accidents? Or how much manpower is put into cleaning them up? How many fatalities?

To be perfectly honest, we put up with cars because cars are individually empowering. Nuclear power is not individually empowering, not when compared to other kinds of power generation, and it won't be until we have some sort of cold-fusion device that lets you live off the grid. Power generation is about trust. And nuclear power (right or wrong) is asking us to trust them to deal with scarily powerful forces.

You can mistrust them. That's fine. But, please don't scaremonger. Voice concerns, by all means, but don't scaremonger. Some of us do trust it, and in a vast majority of cases, that trust is not misplaced. Being a dick to people who are actually trustworthy and going out of their way to be of use to us is kind of a dick move.

At last I, too, can dream of electric sheep!

The question you need to ask with regards to a carrier plane is, what fraction of the propellant mass becomes unnecessary, and can you really carry the rest on with a carrier plane? Remember that the Shuttle took two large solid rockets, and a huge tank of liquid rocket fuel just to get to orbit. Nobody in their right mind would suggest, let alone fund, a project where you launched that off the back of another flying craft.

Orbit is all about the velocity--the kinetic energy put into the vessel. You might get advantages from the high altitude, but unless they make an amazingly huge difference to the amount of propellant used, it's not going to be worth the money spent engineering the plane and the rocket.

Also understand, planes have issues with vibration and turbulence. So do rockets, but a rocket travels forward; this rocket will be strapped horizontally, parallel to travel and perpendicular to turbulence. If it hits a patch of bad air, it will have lateral gee stresses that I'm fairly sure no rocket to date has had to withstand.

Unfortunately, it really does have to work the other way around. It's a very unfortunate Catch-22. Until getting to orbit stops breaking the bank, there's not much you can do to put a livable space in orbit, let alone the moon or mars; until there is a place to go, it's not commercially viable to research spaceflight.

Getting to space is a cost-per-pound proposition. How many pounds of material does it take to make a sustainable habitat on the moon? How many pounds of fuel to get it there? How many pounds of fuel will they keep on the moon in reserve in case someone needs to come home? Without lifting capabilities that far surpass what we have, it won't be practical.

That leaves us with two options for research and development: Convince government to waste money on something the majority of their constituents will never benefit from, or convince millionaires to part with their money for a joyride. As long as the latter works, more power to them. Personally, I wouldn't mind my tax dollars going to space research either, but there are a lot of people in this country who would be better served with a lower tax rate (let alone an actual public service, you know, like health care or the post office) than with space travel.

I have an iPod touch, and an old car that needs a cassette adapter to feed audio into it (so, obviously, no steering wheel controls or anything). From the first time I held the Touch, I knew that the lack of physical "Play/Next/Previous" buttons was going to piss me off royally, and in a car it's the worst. For short to medium rides, I'm usually listening to podcasts, not music, so I don't need to pull up the screen except when I start and when I arrive. The few times I've tried to dick around with the controls while driving, it was decidedly and obviously unsafe, even when it's only a few moments staring at the screen.

The touch also has a minor ability to control it with voice by holding down the home button (no, not Siri, it's pretty much just iPod controls), but it doesn't work well and is still distracting, because I have to be completely focused on listening for the audio cues to start talking, and listen for any sign that it actually understood what I said over the car noise. Less obviously unsafe, but still distracting enough to be capable of causing an accident.

I would be unhappy to have a full-electronics ban while driving, but it's not without merit.

You could, I dunno, remove the F* keys from the keyboard. There's approximately zero chance your java app is going to use them, and you can plug in a good keyboard if you need to do anything fancy with the machine later.

Bits and bytes are just the current implementation of digital logic. If I were to give a thousand-foot view, it would be more along the lines of hardware vs software, or a line of code vs a program, or computers versus networks, that sort of thing. The sort of introductory class that keeps a whole generation of kids from confusing 'the internet' with 'Google' (or AOL, or Apple if you prefer).

The number of bits in a byte, or the very fact that computer logic is based on binary, these aren't terribly consequential. If we found a way to make trinary computers tomorrow, both would change, but the human-facing half of it wouldn't.

Perhaps the manufacturers could man up and offer insurance on all of their vehicles, provided they were running autonomously at the time?

If their self-driving concept is sound, the number of times they're at fault will be small, and they can offer that insurance without going bankrupt. If their self-driving concept is not sound, they have a vested interest in getting those cars off the road until they find a fix, so that they don't lose every cent they have paying for every incident they caused. And when it comes to maintenance, well, it's an autonomous car. I'm sure it can phone home if you haven't kept it up to date.

Unless there is some other part of auto insurance that I don't get, it makes sense to me...

Irfanview is a legitimate product. We were talking about antivirus software.

Bam.

I don't hate America, but I do tend to hate its leadership. The two are distinctly different. Same with China--I don't doubt most of those billion citizens are great people who, language barriers aside, I'd be happy to be friends with. Same, indeed, with most nations that we're not politically aligned with.

If only the politicians, corporate officers, media moguls, etc, were the people in the trenches when the wars come.

There are very few other occupations that prepare you to keep cool and operate controls under varying gee-forces.

Admittedly, most of spaceflight happens with the thrusters off, but if you get spooked by the idea of sudden acceleration, you are not going to operate well in a spacecraft. And you may not think that you'll be spooked, but there's a reason acceleration is measured is Gees--that is, multiples of Earth's gravity. You'll suddenly, and briefly, weigh several times as much as you ever have before.

Jet pilots in particular experience abnormal gee forces with pretty much every flight. Test pilots have to train to recover from all kinds of ghastly aerodynamic fuck-ups. The sort of conditions they can recover from, or can't bur prepare for, would leave you horrified.

So you're thinking it's a time travel experiment?

It's also much easier to detect toxins in a lab, let alone track down the source.

If free-range animals suddenly start coming back as having say lead exposure, you have to look in the water, the wind, any plants they might have eaten, any fertilizers you may have used on any of those plants, any feed you gave them--and even once you find the source, you have to find a way around the problem, since farms aren't what you call mobile. Compared to that, looking at the tools you put in the lab to produce the product (also known as "quality control") isn't exactly going out of your way.

When I started learning programming in high school, I was exceptionally shy. I found that I understood it better than most, and would often help other people learn, which was a big thing for me. Part of the reason I latched onto programming since then is because I was able to be of value to the people around me. If I had understood it just as well, but had to sit there pretending to work together with imaginary people through bullshit code snippets, just so the teacher had an easier time grading my work, I probably would have chosen a different profession.