Bull. The moment you link income to victimless crimes, you create an adversarial relationship between the police and the public.

In this case in particular, you create a culture where it is tangibly to the police department's benefit to arrange that speed limits are set artificially low, where drivers will be likely to speed. In such a case, there's no safety benefit, only a cash benefit to the police.

Now, if these were mandated that they could only ever be used at spots where there were $RandomSensibleNum speed-related accidents a year, that might be different. Speed limits exist (purportedly) to encourage safety. Where they don't work, heftier solutions might be called for. Where there is no actual safety issue, there is no need for these cameras.

Just some numbers. The average person reads at between 250 and 300 words per minute. Let's call it 275.

Hobbit is 95,356 words long. That's 347 minutes of reading.

The first two Hobbit movies combined are 330 minutes long.

So basically an average reader will plow through the book in the time it takes to watch two of the movies plus some trailers before the third. Forget the extra 144 minutes of the actual movie!

That's the way you see it and you're trying to present it as fact. It's not. It's interpretation.

Don't believe me? Have your appendix burst. Suddenly you'll see a very real circumstance where removal of a body part is trivial and not a matter for ethical consideration.

You've decided that "personhood" begins at conception. Well, other people don't see a single fertilized cell as a human being. This isn't a topic that can be defined in rigid blacks & whites. At the single-cell stage, what you've got is a non-viable life form.

Here's another way to look at it... if you take a full-functioning adult human, scoop out their brain and leave the rest on life support, do you have a person anymore? I'd hope we can agree the answer is no. Well then, at the single-cell stage, you don't have a brain, so you don't have a person. Somewhere along the line, cell-division starts to specialize and eventually there's a little bundle of brain cells. Say there's... a hundred specialized brain cells. Nothing that is capable of cogitation, so again, I'd think we can agree that we don't have a person. Somewhere along the line, things gather enough complexity to support personality, thought, self-awareness, and personhood. That may - or may not - be at 9 months/birth. To allege that a person exists much prior to birth is... questionable, not a given.

As a government institution, they are also blessed with a focus on exploration and learning that does not exist in the private sector. Elon Musk will take us to Mars and colonize the solar system as long as it is immediately and sustainably profitable.

I wish you could see that your money going to an independent organization - wasteful or not - that is permitted to operate at a fiscal loss in search of raw knowledge has a benefit. Not every discovery has an obvious cash-cow application yet can still prove useful.

There is room for the private sector to research profit-driven techniques while a publicly-funded tinkerer organization researches general curiosity concepts and releases their findings to everyone for the betterment of all.

I dunno. Once I caught on that they were mostly pointing out how horrible humans often are to one another, even when faced with a common enemy, I found them very enjoyable. They rang true.

I get your point, and it's a decent one, but in this context it's the same as suggesting an octopus would figure out the printing press because it's good with ink.

You know, I wouldn't be surprised if beyond you being right, Sony has insurance that covers this situation. "Political turmoil preventing or delaying release of film." Could be a clause. They may actually make money by holding it back. Maybe.

It's fine to say that, but there's no particular reason to expect that's the truth. I mean, yeah, in the past it's always come back, but kind of by definition the number of places they can find refuge is diminishing each time. Doesn't it stand to reason eventually there won't be anyone willing to host them?

I'm pretty good about purchasing anything I consume - if it's any good - after any... grey-market downloads. I've got dozens of hardcover books that have never been opened because I first read them in ebook form. I've got unopened DVD and CD packages for much the same reason. Fact is that I wouldn't have bought nearly as much entertainment stuff if I hadn't sampled them first. Now I've got a bunch of authors, musicians, and the like who I buy their physical product on sight, unquestioned, because I originally found them at no risk, via... piracy. Yes, there are things I read/watched/listened-to that I will never pay for. But that's because frankly the stuff just didn't suit me. So hey. Live with it.

My meandering point is that I fear the day that piracy is no longer practical. It will be so much harder to find things I truly enjoy... and BUY.

Yeah, I won't dispute your experience because it happened. On the other hand, the only SMART warnings I've seen in our fleet of... four-digits worth of spindles... have ended up false-positives. As in, I contact DELL / IBM / HP / Lenovo and report the issue, they instruct me to flash some controller firmwares, reboot, and go away. If those drives ever fail, it's years later, well beyond any correlation with the SMART events.

The biggest sign that correlates to drive failure is: it's a brick and all your data is gone.

Let's be real here. You almost never get advanced warning from SMART. Maybe one in twenty. Almost without fail you'll go from a drive running properly to a drive that won't rotate the spindle or the heads smash against the casing or you've suddenly got so many bad sectors that it's effectively unusable. Failure prediction is almost (but not quite) valueless compared to the reality of how drives fail.

That's speculation; we don't know if (for instance) the anchors were doing their personal TwitFaceMyBookSpaceOGram whatever, or if they were "being productive". To start asserting that this was happening because Microsoft can't write software is just making stuff up.

I'm not sure what the future looks like for XPosed though... I recently updated my Galaxy Note (i717) to a custom KitKat 4.4.4 ROM from its stock 4.1 ROM. In investigating and learning things, I took a look at the ART runtime that optionally replaces Dalvik. I learned that XPosed evidently doesn't work with ART. Lollypop switches the runtime by default to ART and evidently deprecates Dalvik, so unless the developers change things, XPosed won't work on Lollypop.

AppOp turns out to be cooked into the custom ROM I got along with an insane pile of other awesome.

Not callous at all. But it sure as hell refutes the attacks on NASA that were saying "the private sector will do space flight cheaper and safer". Meh. This stuff is inherently dangerous, and isn't yet routine, so stuff will go wrong.

Condolences and thanks to the family and friends of the crew. Your loss was in the interest of enriching us all.

Excellent, then you agree that there it is not irrational to fear and plan for a future that may involve conflict.

Wow. I imagine all the theoretical intelligent alien races better hope they never stumble on planet Earth. I mean, the way you measure things, they'll immediately give us all their stuff. ALL their stuff. As much of their stuff as we want. Because we're humans. And they're not. And intelligent beings give their stuff to humanity. That's what you said.

Or do you think maybe... they might see things a little differently? Maybe they are willing to share, but only things that have no tangible cost to them? Math proofs? Here, have some. Maps of the galaxy? Here, have some. Knowledge of cosmic dangers? Here, have some. Planets they plan to live on? Fuck off, get your own.

As for AI, our use of resources is moronic, and we know it. We're doing it wrong, and we should be stopped. It would be benevolent to reallocate our industry, agriculture, and habitation so every human could have plenty, and comfort. And THAT is the moment WE declare war on IT.