If someone who doesn't like me makes an "anonymous" call to 911 to report that I'm running meth lab in my garage, does that also give the cops the right to ransack my house looking for a meth lab?

Yes, if subsequent investigation leads them to believe you're running a meth lab, they'll get a warrant and ransack your meth lab.

Why the fuck are people acting like anonymous tips are a new thing? Do you actually believe they act on every tip and do so blindly? Does this magic 911 phone technology make it all too scary for you?

Is Scalia seriously suggesting police can act on a tip only after proving that tipster is telling the truth?

As much as I hate to find myself anywhere near Scalia (through he's joined here by Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan), police can legitimately act on a tip only after proving that a tipster is *likely* to be telling the truth. In this case, after following the car for five minutes and not seeing anything that gave them suspicion that the driver was drunk, there's no way that they could have reasonable suspicion this guy was a drunk driver. Given the documented existence of SWATing, anonymous tips cannot be considered credible grounds for intrusion into a person's liberty.

Interestingly, in this case the tip was not anonymous, but that fact wasn't brought up in the original prosecution and so the tip is dealt with as anonymous.

Lucky for Scalia most progressives still believe in elections, democracy, rule of law and that SCOTUS interpretation of the constitution is the only legal interpretation.

Really? You believe that most progressives believe that in 1857, no person of African descent could be a citizen of a state, despite zero evidence for this decision in the text of the Constitution? And that in 1896, states could comply with the equal protection clause via "separate but equal" bullshit? Well, it does seem that "progressive" has been defined downwards since Obama came into office.

Human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and SCOTUS decisions, are areas that overlap sometimes but not always. Genuine progressives put human rights before the others.

For all practical purposes, you're probably within 40 feet of a door that can never be opened. Or let's go the other way - hey, given enough time, you could probably find a crane and a wrecking ball, and destroy the building you're sitting in. Therefore, games without fully destructible environments are frustrating to you, because in real life, you can destroy everything? That's a silly line of reasoning. You're marking the line between what is reasonable and unreasonable that is clearly out of whack with the majority of players who accept that some level of suspension of disbelief is required in order to enjoy a video game. Game design conventions and art design directly addresses the concerns you're laying out in the vast majority of games with visual cues as to which objects are interactive and which are not. Anybody can be obstinate about those conventions, but to argue the point without acknowledging that they are a standard part of game and art design is being utterly disingenuous.

The vacuous thing about the slippery slope argument is we can't drag you out in public and have you admit you were wrong a couple of years down the road.

Because if the market for x86 is destroyed by ARM there will be no more high end x86 market. ARM would love AMD to take the sidelines and cede the market entirely. Then they'll try to sell you an ARM desktop.

Intel is wise enough to see that they need to be a competitor now or be a has-been later. But AMD might recognize this and figure that Intel can do the hard fighting for x86 continuity and then just reap the rewards.

That's not necessarily true. With a deep framebuffer you can have multiple ZSamples including occluded objects. For DOF that would be perfectly sufficient and a 2.5D point cloud. Conversely you could have a perfectly detailed 3D scene but use a per-pixel camera projection of your plate to refocus but have occlusion artifacts.

2.5D/3D isn't terribly important for DOF calculation. Then again even with the Deep image you still would have problems with reflections on curved objects and refraction etc.

The market is brutal. If he had said "I tried to get a job at Pixar, SPI, Dreamworks etc but I couldn't make the cut" I would give the guy some slack. But if you're going to claim that you're hot shit an award winning animator and the only unemployable because you didn't suck up to the right people then I'm going to call you on it. Plenty of people aren't employed due to lack of talent/practice/training in this industry. But don't say it's because you didn't go to the right parties or you didn't hold the door open for a recruiter.

How can you tell if the logic is "faultless" if you don't start with the sort of rigorous and objective definitions that you have in math?

There is nothing objective about mathematics. Trace a mathematical proposition down, and it rest on axioms and definitions -- social and linguistic conventions. Those conventions have historically proven to have pragmatic value, but the question of what's pragmatically valuable is a subjective one; you cannot objectively demonstrate the value of going to the moon, or building a bridge, or even developing a new life-saving medical treatment.

The idea that math is some pure realm of eternal verities is Platonic bullshit.

A modern artist has the ability to write about what a particular work is intended to mean.

If you can write what a work of art is intended to mean, then you don't need art to say it, you can use ordinary prose. (Taking poetry and literary writing to be art rather than ordinary prose.)

What if you have a rock band, and replace the members one by one, but then the original members re-unite to play their classic tunes, but then both bands go on tour together?

I was delighted to learn that my hometown has a real-life example of the Ship of Theseus conundrum: the USS Constellation.

"Identity" is nothing but a social and mental convention.

Which of those would be useful to Google or another company that writes a lot of software?

If you're writing software, you ought to be writing technical documentation. I think English majors would have some useful skills there. I greatly appreciated having tech writers around to clean up my muddied prose (and also to worry about what should be boldface, what should be italic, and the like.)

We knew you'd say that.

The difference being, the A in CS will usually be an objective measurement, whereas the A in English will be dependent on adopting the grader's ideological hobbyhorse and imitating the style of whatever postmodernist gobbledygook is currently popular.

Those upper level english courses require a lot of rigors thinking

I'm sure they did.

More importantly it ignores labor costs. Simply listing the price of the materials isn't an apples to apples comparison to the robotic hand which needs someone to setup the 3D printer, and then actually assemble the hand (Probably takes someone with a working hand to perform the threading of the cables etc.)