Yup.

It's like these people have never heard of Handango. They're so ignorant it is funny.

This is the same mentality of those people who are scared of Google Glass and go all Internet tough guy about what they'd do to people wearing one.

People who believe in pecking orders, ie. bullies, identify with authority, even if they rebel against it, and those in authority believe in pecking orders, and so see bullying as enforcing the natural order.

The unifying attribute of all people like this is that they are ashamed of themselves. Not in any way that might modify their beliefs or actions, but in a way that they blame others for their faults and react belligerently to anyone who might capture evidence of them. So of course they're going to punish the kid for recording.

From page 212:

Credit Cards With Intelligence? The Battelle Memorial Institute is studying the feasibility of a credit card with a built-in micro-processor. Such a card has already been developed in Europe, and will soon be tested. It is expected that intelligent credit cards will provide added security without requiring large computer networks.

Everyone who shopped at Target last fall saw how well that was implemented here in the U.S.

Well if you could double the reach of your organization to include women that would seem to be a good long term investment on 25% of your budget.

If physicists don't have a proper answer to "Why is there something rather than nothing" then they should stop pretending they do by the deceit of changing the definition of "nothing".

The issue of whether anyone has a "proper" answer -- indeed, if there is a "proper" answer -- turns on the ambiguity of the word "why". We use that word in three very different senses.

When we ask, "why is the sky blue?", we are asking "by what lower-level phenomena is the sky seen as blue?" We want a causal sequence of explanations that is static (or very short duration) in time and varies over the reductionist depth of phenomena: photons are scattered by air molecules, some of them enter your eye, trigger certain receptors in the retina, this is processed by the nervous system causing a sensation that your brain has been culturally trained to associate with the symbol "blue".

When we ask, "why did the Challenger explode?", we are asking "by what causal chain of events, one after the other, did the Challenger explode?" We want a causal sequence of explanations that extends over time and is fairly static in reductionist depth: politics prompted a launch in cold weather, cold weather caused the O-ring to warp, the warped O-ring caused hot gas to leak, boom. We want a time sequence that (in this instance) stays at the level of everyday experience, doesn't go in to the quantum mechanics of the O-ring or the grand historical narrative of humanity's existence.

When we ask, "why did Alice go the dance with Bob?", we are asking "what motives and values prompted Alice's decision?" We want an explanation of the desires and actions of intelligent agents, not a story about the atoms that make up her body.

When we ask "why is there something rather than nothing?", some people are looking for "God did it" -- the third type of answer. But there can't be an intelligent agent before there is something, so the question in that sense is contradictory and meaningless.

Some people are looking for the second type of answer: they want some cosmological causal chain of events as to how space and energy came to be. But any causal chain of events would be a thing, not nothing, so again the question in that sense is contradictory and meaningless.

What we have here is a proposed answer in the first sense, lower-level phenomena.

If you're looking for cause-over-time or motive as an answer to "why is there something rather than nothing", you've fallen into a linguistic trap around the ambiguity of the word "why".

You are supposed to read it and think "people should act this way",

Yes, with the genocide and the slavery and the misogyny and the mock executions of sons by their fathers, what a fine world it would be if we followed the moral example of the Bible.

When the Boston Bomber was identified Russia was kind enough to provide investigators with all of his text messages and phone calls.

Of course they aren't surprised. They openly admitted that they were doing the same thing before Snowden was a household name. Every country is doing everything legally possible (and then some) to spy on anyone they can. That's not new. The only people surprised by Snowden's leaks were people who had a false sense of security.

Colbert noted. "I see the Norwegians gave Snowden 30 Nobel Prize nominations. The guy's practically a war criminal - I don't understand how they could put him up for the same prize they once gave to Henry Kissinger."

That whooshing sound you hear? That's Colbert's satire going right over your head. If the Kissinger/peace prize reference didn't tip you off, consider that he said it at the same event that he said "I'm sure that under enhanced liberty you can have all the privacy that you want, just like under enhanced interrogation you can breathe all the water you want."

There have been a small handful of truly major revolutions in the history of medicine (aseptic surgery, vaccines, antibiotics) and clinical genome sequencing will be such a revolution.

Clinical medicine is useful and all, but not great basic science.

Many Americans don't even accept evolution or global warming yet.

No germane to the point.

Pretending that where we are is the furthest we'll ever get is not constructive and not correct.

A curve which approaches a line asymptotically will make its big progress early (taking t as the horizontal axis) and small gains afterward. It will still get closer, but not in a way that makes a big change. It's a reasonable hypothesis that science will approach the maximum possible knowledge of the world in the same fashion.

There is a limit on how much human beings will ever be able to observe, and how much human beings will be ever to able to calculate. (If we blow it and ruin our spaceship and die off in the next century or two, which is quite possible, we may be close to that limit already.) If science is not approaching this maximum possible knowledge, it's a failure; if it is approaching this maximum possible knowledge, then there is less and less left to possibly know. The amount of possible knowledge is not infinite.

Basic science has gross increased. It's only decreased as a fraction of GDP. We're putting plenty of money into basic research--we just could be putting a lot more in.

Boy, if there's one thing that could ever kill Open Source it would be being held legally liable for a commit with a bug in it.

Which is why all projects are released AS-IS without any liability.

It depends on the portfolio. How am I supposed to verify a portfolio except to have the photographer shoot some new shots on a memory card I give them and supervise through the entire process of loading into the camera and handing back to me?

Lots of people don't know about reverse image searches. In fact it's a relatively new technology. And then how do I know that other people aren't ripping off *my* photographer?

So how pray tell do I verify that someone I'm about to pay is in fact as good as they claim? The only alternative I see is to have them prove their merit. But no photographer with any self worth should ever do "practice" shots to prove they can take good pictures. That would be like going to a mechanic and saying "Hey, change my tire.. and then I'll decide if you changed it well enough to get paid."

No, if you are on medicaid you are one of the 5.9 million added to Medicaid. That's a separate group.

The 7.1 number isn't in that paper because they based their numbers on the beginning of March before procrastinators joined en-masse.

It does not include Medicaid.

http://thehealthcareblog.com/b...