You love this Czech-made car my friend.

It goes 60 hectares on a single tank of kerosene.

It's strange, I must be in some kind of culture jam, but my family, and everyone I know (IRL) steers clear of whitebread. We all eat 9 or 7 grain bread (the wholegrain stuff). I don't really know why. I grew up with it, and can't even stand the taste of whitebread. It's like there's nothing in it.

We aren't Amish or anything. I think there might have been some literature the family and friends read many years ago that must have made them jump the whitebread ship.

There are bakeries, and we go there for non-sandwich bread, but not that often.

Precisely. The universe doesn't change to accommodate us even slightly. Pockets of air will never spring up in the vacuum for our benefit. We are the ones who change in order to fit in the universe and scratch out our existence. The universe doesn't change to make us comfortable.

What's funny is that the anthropic principle by definition doesn't have much meaning. You can restate it as "the universe is the way we see it, because we are seeing it be that way."

The weak anthropic principle always boils down to simple tautology, while the strong anthropic principle flys in the face of biology and works out to puddle thinking. The universe isn't tuned for us, we tuned ourselves for living in the universe through evolution.

As to revenue generation, I'm more often seeing good websites put up "shameless commerce divisions" nobody goes to a website wanting to get spammed with 3rd party ads, but I'm sometimes elated to see a cool tshirt or neat plushie being sold by the site itself. That may not be quite as profitable, but it's a much less aggravating way to be advertized to, and has much better relevance overall.

BoingBoing's shop comes to mind. It's benefitting a site I like, while not constantly being spammy

It's as if there was a fundamental difference between moving "north" and moving "south" in empty space.

Would a ratchet favoring one direction serve as some kind of applicable metaphor, or is it too crude to make any sense at all?

I understand well the entropy side of things, in that, since the universe started at a low entropy (an unlikely configuration) it moves towards high entropy over time (toward more common configurations.)

Would it be worthwhile to think of the T violation (in terms of visualization mind, not really understanding) perhaps like moving through barbs in 1 dimension? The "safe" direction and the "anti-safe" direction? I just chose barbs as an example, not because one direction is necessarily prohibited, but simply different from the opposite direction in terms of effects caused by direction reversal.

The only way to do that effectively is to root the device and flash a custom ROM that may have any number of problems itself, and if you're unlucky might even brick the device altogether. Some devices aren't developed for very much. For instance most of the custom ROMs for my Droid Bionic have broken HDMI output, and don't implement USB-OTG, both of which I use regularly with the WebTop that it docks into.

How about the well worn "use it or lose it" rule.

Any company that gets a parent must also produce the invention.

If they don't start production within a set period after the patent is granted, the patent must either be transferred to anyone who wants to use it (no exceptions) or failing that, the patent reverts back into the public domain forever.

By Atheismo's great shaven face! I would so donate every discretionary cent to a SuperPAC set up to force congress into funding NASA better!

I'm not being sarcastic, quite the opposite. Although, a SuperPAC would probably just waste all the money on slandering JAXA and the ESA in order to make NASA look like the only electable cadidate XD

Utility foglets. A cloud of nanobots that'll be basically everything, computer, phone, network dropdown, AR, medical treatment/diagnostics, safety gear (instant helmet, seatbelt, car seat, bungie cord etc) anything really. Like little self-propelled FPGA computers.

Wait... WHAT?!

Are you saying that
1.) We'll somehow figure out what corporations and deep pocketed donors are secretly willing to pay politicians in order to BRIBE them.

2.) Then if we like what the same politicians do, just pay them the same amount?

3.) Then after they finish their terms in office, move into the revolving door and work in the cushy, high paying jobs they were promised by lobbyists, while still having a strong influence on the government where they built up their contact books?

This is a terrible idea. What you suggest is not an incentive in any way to do the right thing. The politicians will push through the exact legislation the lobbyists want using earmarks and tacking on other changes to unrelated bills at the last minute. They'll publicly proclaim that they're fighting the good fight. After they're done, they'll just be paid twice as much as what they're currently paid by lobbyists, for doing what's already being done by every Congressperson today.

What a fantasy.

Or did you have a different idea and I misunderstood you? If so, please elaborate, as I'm perfectly willing to listen, as long as it makes sense.

wouldn't the energy you get increase as you get closer to the speed of light and the mass of your fuel (assuming you're carrying it with you) increases?

That's an interesting idea that I haven't thought of. I'm by no means a trained physicist, but I have the feeling that as you jettison high mass fuel in order to go faster, the mass of the ship you're accelerating will still grow proportionally to the mass used as reaction-fodder. So it gets to a point where no matter how fast you're going and how much fuel you've got, if you try to accelerate more using that fuel, even if you jettison it, you'd still get less energy out of the mass reaction than would be necessary to push you over c.

It reminds me of the workaround used in Mass Effect, where element zero will decrease or increase the mass of other objects depending on the current applied to it. The explanation for FTL is that there's an element zero drive that lowers the mass of the ship as it approaches c, so it can go FTL without needing infinite energy or growing to infinite mass. But the element zero workaround still wouldn't pan out. You'd need to carry the energy on the ship to run a current through the element zero anyway. Would the effect of element zero apply to that mass-energy as well as the mass-energy of the ship, and the mass-energy being jettisoned to propel it?

String theory has a few testable predictions, but they would require particle accelerators the size of the solar system eating a whole Jupiter's worth of mass-energy every second they're running. And even then it would be testing only the string theories that have been found out mathematically to be wrong for our universe.

Yeah, Genes don't necessarily determine behavior, but they can play a big part in encouraging behavior.

My brother has genes for both a lean, athletic build, and ADHD, therefore he plays soccer due to his genes both giving him an advantage and a desire to run off steam.

I have a gene for very fair skin. I sunburn quickly, therefore my behavior is influenced towards wearing long sleeves or staying indoors on bright sunny days.

I know all living things including humans are just big, complex chemical and physical reactions, essentially deterministic. But we still have at least an illusion of free will, and that's good enough for me. Our brains are complex enough that we can't determine what anyone will do with a high level of certainty, unless we know they're operating in a very constrained system.

It's been ten years, so I don't remember every detail, but I don't think I remember ANYONE dying in the movie. Up till the end, when the normal pokemon are dukeing it out with the genetically enhanced ones, then the normals "die" temporarily.

It was definitely an English dub, and was the one shown in theaters, so it probably was cut. I think the reason why I was allowed to go was that it was rated PG, which also means the movie can't imply a human death in any way someone under 13 would understand, normally. At least according to the MPAA's ratings guidelines (Vomitbloodshitstain upon the MPAA)

Thanks but no thanks for the torrent. I've got a VHS of it banging around in some drawer already.