The Shuttle's SRBs were reusable, and they reused them (or at least parts of them) pretty much every launch.

The big orange liquid fuel tank was not reused, though.
=Smidge=

I think you're misconstruing what is actually meant when physicists talk about the universe possibly being a hologram.

They don't mean the contemporary "Star Trek Holodeck" type of hologram. They mean that all of the information about the 3D volume of the universe can be contained and encoded within a 2D boundary.

This is not a mathematically rigorous concept of the universe, but if they can nail it down it might have some application in explaining how gravity works and the ultimate granularity of the universe (e.g. how small the smallest possible fundamental particles can be). But in no sense would this prove, or even really be evidence supporting, the notion that our universe is a simulation within some "larger reality."
=Smidge=

Actually... It is being rationalized on both sides of the debate, not one. Logic is being used, but only for one set of values, leading to a mistaken impression that one is right, as opposed to just having an opinion. Nobody is on any higher ground than "I have buddies here that agree with me". The reason for that is that this article was never about choosing which lives to save. The poster I replied to, in order to pose as a 'smarter than the rest of us' person, attempted to pervert it into that. But since he based it on a misunderstanding of why it came up in the first place, replying to my post about the actual value of the individual lives is fruitless. This scenario doesn't lend itself to this discussion.

None of what you said has any relevance to why the number of children and infants was brought up by the news outlet. If you want to have a hypothetical debate about the value of children, then let's talk about a scenario involving life boats.

It doesn't.

Yeah, you can tell how unknown he is by the fact a movie was just released about him.

I wish contrarianism didn't beocome so popular on this site. I mean, really, taking a shot at Hawking?

I heard your entire post in my head in Seven of Nine's voice.

Adults have lived some of their life. Kids have missed out on things most believe everbody should be able to do before they die, like their first kiss.

Everybody here actually understands this, I have no idea why you all picked now to suddenly act like you're Mr. Spock.

What's the value of an asshole that spends his evening judging the value of others he has never met?

"The cost savings is great, but isn't the biggest driver for me, it's mainly the principle that I don't own the device I paid for, and I'm really tired of having cat litter everything in my home."

So exercise your rights as a consumer to research beforehand and not buy it. Or return it. Or modify it, as you have. Or, for god sakes, ask your vet or friends with cats or reddit for advice on having cat litter everywhere (I believe the most common solution is a covered box with fairly high side.) You can also teach your cat to pee/crap in the toilet, believe it or not. There are little "litter box" inserts that reportedly make it pretty easy; the cat goes "oh, another litter box" and uses it for a week or two, and then you remove the insert, and if the cat notices, they go *shrug* and still use it. No more litter, no more stink.

But for god sakes....I was around on Slashdot when the fist inkjet printer companies started chipping their cartridges. I also learned about Gillette in...either middle school or high school. That was a century ago, if not more. The "handle is free, the blades are disposable and we have a very healthy profit margin on them" model is quite, quite old. Why are people surprised? Especially if you read Slashdot, why didn't you do research on it?

Your robotic, do-everything catbox would've cost substantially more if the company were not figuring on a continuing revenue stream. In fact, it might have cost so much that nobody would've bought it.

I don't know which distro, I just know my friend griped about me sending him links to sites that use Flash because they frequently crashed Firefox. Heh

Yes, if you substitute one belief for another you greatly change the outcome of the extrapolation. "I beleive AI will never exist so that won't happen." Thanks for supporting my point that this sort of extrapolation is not science.

The artist workstations at Sony Imageworks are Linux.

More like $20, and that's for people who don't look up how much they were actually charged.

And cash, not a voucher. I'm a former T-Mobile customer, and they looked up my new contact information and got in touch to let me know that this was available (how to ask them to research my actual charges, vs how to accept the default amount).

A lot of these settlements are BS, but you might do a bit of homework for claiming that this is just more of the same.

If you're going to commit to this exercise where you use extrapolation to arrive at a conclusion, then you're going to have to take things like 3d-printing into account and even just the general demand for machines that build machines that will lead to eventual technical advances.

Try to remember that when you cherry-pick what does and doesn't count when extrapolating stuff like this you're simply adding to the risk that earlier you implied was a bad thing.

If you apply that same extrapolation to what's happening here on Earth right now and you get right back to the super-robots being dominant. I'll give you a hint: robots are the dominant life-form on Mars right now.