Since there are cross-cutting concerns between the platforms, the answer is yes. People know that this runs Linux, more people will spend time developing for Linux, some of those developments might have a positive impact on the desktop or people maybe more likely to install it as their desktop.

Uhh, I used QWES because I was a tank in WoW. I imagine many other tanks in WoW learned the same style. WoW had Q and E be the strafing keys and A and D were nonsense keys for turning. You were a BAD tank if you turned... Of course many bad tanks are going to respond to this justifying the ability to turn with the keyboard, but there was never ever a reason to do anything but strafe. To me, this de-emphasizes back peddling and makes it more likely that you want to move forward, a trait I've found positive in FPS's where I now use the style exclusively as well.

Due to inertia, the stars would continue to travel at their current speeds if nothing were pushing and pulling on them. As it is, whatever gravitational forces are acting upon them at the moment might be comparatively insignificant to their current inertia.

So how did they get their current inertia? They might have gotten it from the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core without setting their vector towards the core. They could do so possibly using a gravity slingshot effect. So it is surprising they're not coming from the core, as the article states. So what is interesting about these stars is they don't seem to be explained by the slingshot effect.

Further, gravity is a force of attraction and so does no pushing.

Also, I did a knapkin calculation of the speeds involved and it would be 1/700th the speed of light except the article says that this speed is relative to the movement of the galaxy and not an absolute speed like the slashdot summary intimates.

If the promise of self-driving cars includes the idea that the self-driving car will rarely ever be in error and will at least be far less likely to be in error than a human driver, then it seems probable to me that a human being being alert enough and able to correct the self-driving car may make things worse by trying to intercede both legally and in terms of actual outcome.

Also, market forces might cause insurance companies to offer lower rates for cars that are self-driving, and eventually much lower rates, because they know they will almost never have to fork over the money and they want that market. At some point, courts and the general public will figure out that it was almost certainly the fault of a human-driven car and as such, liability may end up being nearly always on the human driven car, driving up insurance for cars built for or intended to be used by humans drivers.

Human drivers might end up being priced out by the rising costs of gas (self-driving cars are probably going to be more economical), liability, and so forth. Once a car can really be self-driving, we can have probably pretty damn cheap self-driving taxis and "minivans" which use algorithms to pickup multiple people in a small area who want to go to a similar place, further driving down the costs of transportation, gas, liability, etc.

It might also have an impact on health care costs, as accidents cost the state, insurance, and patients, lots of money in hospital care for accidents. Certainly avoiding the negative economic impact of losing valuable people (aren't we all valuable?) to car crashes will also probably fuel legislation that makes it ever harder/costlier/illegal for a human to drive a car on a public road.

This seems too facile a statement. We don't know their cash flow or projected cash flow, whether the PR hit would quantitatively affect the bottom line worse than eating the bad press and recovering the funds, etc. For proof of a company having terrible PR but making windfall profits, look at Walmart. PR is, and always should be, just one consideration.

Interesting, however I would expect that certain individuals had a much broader platform, like Oprah. These days, I'm going to guess that people who regularly use yelp and write reviews, or people who have a lot of twitter followers, might have much broader power to affect consumer decision. There are people on the internet who are not famous whose output I have found and now regard as more trustworthy and interesting than a randomly selected newspaper article. Microbloggers with significant followers come to mind.

Except that the exposure of this error is much more contained in a brick and mortar. Websites can scale up rapidly before the error is noticed. If a store suddenly started selling the same thing at a tremendous discount and the store exploded to several hundred times its normal conversion or volume, probably the most dense cashier would notice that something was off quite quickly. Stores also often have a floor manager who would certainly notice this change in volume and probably react by figuring our there was a deal too good to be true.

Also, it is unclear whether Brick's business model took a greater hit, has less of a safety margin, or a greater method for making markups. Delta still may end up charging a fair bit and come close to recouping its costs on "value-added" things like luggage costs. Moreover, is the Brick's business model as driven by repeat business and reputation? We've seen plenty of businesses get negative attention and ultimately drive more traffic as a result. Some people love a good backlash. The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about.

Finally, there is the moral and legal justification. Why should a business be held to such a mistake? IANAL, but I remember a contract being considered invalid if there was insufficient consideration for one party. This seems appropriate, at least in spirit. The business made a flagrant, possibly very easy mistake, and I'm going to guess most customers reasonably assumed that it was a mistake and took advantage, anyway. If the argument is that the business should have installed safeguards against such eventualities, like algorithms to detect egregious discounts from the subtotal, then they are already well motivated by the PR issues that can result, as well as the loss in time it takes to recover or correct the problem for each second the discount is erroneously available.

I'm going to guess if these businesses were sole proprietors in a neighborhood climate that the people would have been less likely to take advantage, more likely to tell the proprietor, and less likely to grouse if asked to return the product or pay the difference. Hundreds of people make their livelihoods in these respective businesses and millions are affected by the cost offsets the businesses would have to do to recover from the errors. There is more to this story than the solitary consumer's point of view.

I suppose you believe Hoover didn't blackmail either Kennedy. https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/prospect-blackmail-nsa

You would be so right, if you weren't so very wrong. From this wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_of_theistic_probability or from his own mouth if you want to watch video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fUYUvvJiW0

Dawkins argues that while there appear to be plenty of individuals that would place themselves as "1" due to the strictness of religious doctrine against doubt, most atheists do not consider themselves "7" because atheism arises from a lack of evidence and evidence can always change a thinking person's mind. In print, Dawkins self-identified as a '6', though when interviewed by Bill Maher[3] and later by Anthony Kenny,[4] he suggested '6.9' to be more accurate.

I did say Dawkins was obnoxious, but I still give him more personal integrity than you seem to imply.

No, it doesn't contradict my post. I didn't say I could prove my way was better. In fact, I think we may disagree about what the word "prove" means. To my lights, I can't prove my way is better because the only way I know how to prove things is with my way, and my way would call that circular reasoning. Some axiomatic thinking is required, I'll grant. It is unfortunate that you started to resort to ad hominems.

interesting

I don't think it is a stretch, I think its irrelevant. I think calling it a faith when the word is used to describe methods clearly exclusive to empiricism is a malapropism, but nonetheless, I do believe empiricism is the only correct way to seek "truth".

Over the course of what you've written, I suspect you've met people being militant about "atheism". Do you think people are condescending if they think you're wrong? I think you used non-empirical methods to believe something, and I think that line of thinking can be more dangerous than straight empiricism. As I understand it, that is Dawkin's grand point. If you feel emotionally invested in your method, I can empathize with that.

I don't need to be condescending or think about it as us vs them. I don't care what words are used, atheist, agnostic, whatever. It's not about believing in God or not believing in god. It's about the empirical method I used to start and maintain a belief and my continual willingness to examine and synthesize new beliefs with the method. I also believe that I, and everyone else, would be better off if most people agreed with me. I'm not sure I believe that Dawkins should be doing what he's doing, but I suppose he could be a net positive force.

In a way, you're as fanatical, as is everyone. Everyone thinks that morality is something. I'm a relativist, so the only point I'm fanatical about is that morality is different for everyone, and we should keep that in mind when constructing social contracts and trying to be good to each other. Yet, I'm absolutely fanatical about this point, because I live by it, and think other's should, too. Whatever it is, you have an actionable belief that you think is the proper one, which you have clearly indicated by suggesting that Dawkins is just as fanatical as "religious fanatics".

What does fanatic mean? Here's my definition, your reason for acting the way you are acting is absurd. It is a personal judgement. So I avoid the word. The problem is you don't agree, 100%, with Dawkins method, and you don't think he should be trying to convert people to his method. Also, I bet Dawkins is more flexible in his appreciation of slightly differing philosophies than many religions.

Because of the idea contained in this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot To overly clarify, the burden of proof should be on the person making the statement.

We throw the word science around a lot, but this is my view of what it really is: a method for choosing what to believe. Religion is a little bit more than this. It implies that certain methods are necessary, and states what to believe. Science does not do this directly. It does not enumerate what to believe. It only states indirectly, by saying you only should believe this if it follows these guidelines.

Some people who are rightly called scientists use the "scientific method" to choose what to believe about some subset of their life, while not using the scientific method to determine what to believe about metaphysics. IE, some people are scientists and religious. And, there are some people who would split hairs about what reason is vs what science is, whatever.

The punch line is, as a method for choosing what to believe, it comes into conflict with religions, whose implied methods are mutually exclusive with science. Not that people don't try to mix the two.

Dawkin's point is that science is a much better, by large margins, method for choosing what to believe. He might say, the only correct method. This was also the subject of Carl Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World. The difference is that Carl Sagan manages to make his point without coming off like an obnoxious twit. I do like Dawkins, but he can seem pushy and militant.

So, science doesn't have to disprove something to suggest that you shouldn't believe it. To overly simplify it, most people would say the method, science that is, says that religious people do not have valid reasons for believing what the believe. You don't have to agree with the point, that science is a much better method, to understand the motivation. Moreover, the meta point is that if all people had a much better method for choosing what to believe, then everyone would benefit. Carl Sagan makes the point, with many cases, that irrational thought, motivated by religion, caused mass suffering.

People might read his books because he could be right, that science is a much better method, and benefit as a result. Also, I believe you don't have to fully agree with someone to learn something from them. So, they might read his books to expose themselves to a wider range of philosophies. I literally die inside with disagreement with Descartes, but he was still worth reading. However, I would suggest Carl Sagan's book more than any other book in the genre that says theistic thinking is dangerous, because he is more articulate and less obnoxious.

Rush's books, on the other hand, are intellectually light polemics stuffed end-to-end with sophistry whose goal isn't to enlighten but possibly to entertain or to gratify by validating prejudices while simultaneously branding through anger so that the reader will purchase more media from Rush. I believe that Dawkins really does believe that society would be better off if they used science to decide what to believe and not faith.

At the risk of saying even more than I should say to convey my point, to put it on its head, the point is, if you didn't use science to arrive at your current belief, you shouldn't believe it.

Mass persuasion is a charged term. As is "ideology". Let us assume, probably correctly, that you believe a certain kind of culture is better than other cultures, then how do you express to people that they should agree? Persuasion on a large scale is a large part of what the United States tried to do when they printed a million common sense pamphlets. "Mass persuasion" is not a bad thing, surely, when we run ads to tell people to use condoms, wash your hands, avoid scams, etc.?

The point I'm trying to make is that Dawkins, and some other atheists, believe that theism is so noxious as to harm society relative to atheistic thinking. You can call it evangelism, or proselytization, or whatever you like. As to the eerieness of it all. How is it eerie if the arguments put forth for the persuasion are not agitprop but rather well-intentioned appeals to self-interest?