Oh, god. Mel Gibson's 1990 Hamlet was awful. It was the most asinine thing I've ever seen. Shakespeare for people who really *are* dummies. Reportedly it was director Franco Zeffirelli's attempt to make Shakespeare "less cerebral" and more accessible to the masses. What a choice to try that with! The whole point of Hamlet is that he's so damned smart the only person who can really stand in his way is him.

My point was that you've got to find an actor who can give a knowledgeable performance. Not some meat-head action star stunt cast miles out of his depth. I'd rather watch Arnold Schwarzenegger Hamlet.

I think the best film adaptation of Hamlet I've seen was Kenneth Branaugh's 1996 version, although it is long, long, long at 242 minutes (to Gibsons' 134 minutes). Olivier's 1948 Hamlet is generally highly regarded, but it's too sentimental for my taste. Haven't seen Derek Jacobi's 1980 BBC performance, but I've heard good things about it. I've seen snippets of the David Tennant Hamlet, and it looks promising, although it's hard to shake the impression that it's Dr. Who playing Hamlet.

Exactly. Security screwed up, and then they HAD to deal with it. It's not mere security theater to have a security checkpoint. Those checkpoints are demonstrably important.

Not many of us remember, but until 1973 there was no baggage screening, no metal detectors, and no id requirements for getting on a commercial flight. The number of skyjackings had climbed rapidly since the mid-50s so that in 1972 there were 11 skyjackings of commercial flights around the world, seven in the US.

After security checkpoints were introduced in the US, there wasn't another skyjacking in the US for three years. Then an occasional one now and then, as people found loopholes. There was one passenger airliner hijacking of a flight FROM the US in all the 1980s and none in the 1990s.

My conclusion is that the security measures put in place by 1990 were highly effective. 9/11 fit the pattern of the early dribs-and-drabs hijackings, the difference is Al Qaeda made an effort to do multiple simultaneous exploitations of the vulnerability they'd found. There hasn't been a hijacking of a US flight since then, but given that the last passenger hijacking BEFORE 9/11 was in 1987, it's likely that this long dry spell is mostly if not entirely due to banning blades from carry on luggage. That's not to say that EVERY other change since then is security theater. I think reinforcing cockpit doors and changing pilot training was a reasonable response. But a lot of the enhanced pat-downs, magic scanners, no-fly list shennanigans and such are no doubt bogus.

Your analysis depends on two assumptions. First, that at the daily peak the amount of solar produced exceeds the total demand for electricity. That's actually quite likely to happen in the long term in certain locations -- sunny, densely developed residential neighborhoods for example -- but not in others -- in a neighborhood that has a steel mill. Maybe in the short term in a few places if the adoption of rooftop solar accelerates even more.

One of the ways to alleviate this would be to improve the distribution grid so that the excess supply could be sold further away. But lets say the day comes that the peak solar production exceeds the total electricity demand. That brings us to the second assumption.

The second assumption is that electricity is charged at a flat rate all day long. Clearly if lots of excess solar is being produced at noontime, you could easily reduce the cost you charge to electricity consumers (or pay back to electricity). We already do peak vs. off peak rates for industrial users.

This combination of grid improvements and reduced peak rates will encourage people and businesses to concentrate their power usage around noon. Maybe you'll charge our electric car at a higher rate, or maybe even charge large industrial or household batteries. The losses hardly matter, since we were throwing away the sunshine anyway. Increased noon usage will offset the tendency for electricity rates to fall during peak generation periods.

Am I saying the utilities won't lose a little money in a few isolated spots in the short term? No. What I'm saying is that we're hardly facing some kind of insurmountable singularity. Certainly not any time soon, nor in the long term if we can bring ourselves to prepare for it.

I actually don't think that's true. I think what you're reacting to comes with the epic scale of the novel (SoI&F really is just one, long, continuous work) -- both in word count and the enormous cast of characters. It's a kind of literary clutter. If you boiled Game of Thrones down to the story of Ned Stark's rise and downfall, that would be quite a satisfying (although grim) story arc. The fact that the story goes on and on after that dissipates the emotional impact of that one story line.

At over 1.7 million words currently, Song of Ice and Fire is more than six times as long as typical English translations of the Illiad and Odyssey combined. Think about that. In the time it took you to read just the first volume of Song of Ice and Fire, you could have read BOTH the Illiad and the Odyssey. And as a bonus you'd have read BOTH the Illiad and the Odyssey.

As works go further and further north of 200,000 words, they almost inevitably lose the tight, clockwork structure you expect in a 2 hour stage play or 70,000 word novel. Stories stop feeling like they have a beginning, middle, and end and start to feel more episodic. That happens to some stories well before they hit the 200,000 word mark (American Gods, 183 KWords).

At 473 KWords, Lord of the Rings is one of the rare exceptions. From Rivendell onward it's a marvel of complex yet tightly interwoven structure. But it's a hot steaming mess of false starts up until Ford of Bruinen. Tom Bombadil anyone? I think that it could probably be edited down to 400,000 words without losing much artistically. That's still almost miraculously long for a story that feels like one story.

I have a theory about episodic megastories like Song of Ice and Fire, which is that they aren't catharsis you get from a tightly plotted play or novel. They're about transporting a reader to a world he finds interesting to visit again and again. If so that bodes ill for the the Game of Thrones TV series now that Emilia Clarke has sworn off nude scenes.

You're assuming that getting your real name for their own use was ever Google's goal. I see no justification for that assumption. Even if you assume that Google cares to know your real name, those other options aren't new.

Some would say this doesn't deserved to be dignified with a response, but I disagree.

The best introduction to Shakespeares plays is to see them on stage, performed by actors who know how to perform Shakespeare. Because of the shift in language, there's special skill needed for presenting Shakespeare to modern audiences. You'll be amazed at how much you understand. Until you know the play's text you'll be missing a lot too, but in the performance you won't notice that.

I'd go so far as to say it's better to see a Shakespeare play performed first before attempting to read it. Then tackle the text with its footnotes on every line.

No, I don't believe there is any mechanism in AOSP that would allow Google to remotely re-activate apps. I can't speak for the code as modified by OEMs, of course.

I tried this once. I installed a rather obscure open source app that that turned out to be quite useful to me. But it took me a couple days to get to the point where I could do anything useful with it. And I was only able to do that because I can read source code and have lots of software installation and configuration experience. And because I enjoy a puzzle.

After using the app for a month or two, I thought to myself, "There's got to be thousands and thousands of people who'd benefit from this app, but I bet 99% of the people who try it give up before they have any success. What this project needs is documentation." So I contacted the development team with an offer to write some. I explain that while I'm a developer, not a tech writer, I had written early-adopter oriented documentation for several successful commercial projects, so I knew how to get those people up to speed while the app was still something of a moving target. I also offer to maintain that documentation for at least a year.

I got back a quite haughty response from the project leader stating that he *might* let me write documentation if I became a regular code contributor to the project. Now I'd assumed that his ideas of what documentation was needed might be different from mine, but it turned out he didn't seem interested in documentation at all. Also the response had a weird, hostile vibe; it was as if I'd asked him for hundreds of hours of his time rather than offered him hundreds of mine. So I thanked him for *his* invitation and declined it.

I guess the point is that there are other, social dimensions to choosing a project to contribute to. One of them is whether the project even wants what you have to offer. Another is whether the team seems like people you'd enjoy working with. There are some projects, like the Linux kernel, which are so prestigious that you might well take a lot of crap to be a contributor. But most projects aren't like that.

If you do start our own project, watch the TED video How to Start a Movement.

Yes, but I think BMW and Mercedes are better comparisons, at least with respect to price range.

I know several people who have Teslas, but no one with a Ferrari. I've not only seen, but test-driven a Tesla, but not a Ferrari. In fact, assuming you're not in a state that is making Tesla's life hard, getting a Tesla test drive is easy. A Ferrari, not so much.

Google does not do that.

Actually, Google eliminated it rather than just relaxing it.

Yeah, I've read the Belisarius series :)

In general, there's not much of Baen's top line that I haven't read, though I've slowed down since they changed the webscription model.

Google doesn't give any of your information to any advertisers, so a statement of this sort would be empty.

I think it would be really good for everyone, including Google, if Google could find a way to make this point clear to everyone. Google sells ad placement, not user information. Advertisers don't get to control who sees their ads; they don't even have much capability to target specific demographics. Instead, they rely on Google to do the targeting which works well because (a) Google is better at it then advertisers would be anyway, (b) advertisers don't pay except when the user clicks (speaking of adwords here; there's also a smaller display ads business which works differently, but without giving advertisers more information or control) and (c) Google provides advertisers with great tools to determine their return on advertising investment. (c) is really what has made Google the powerhouse in this space: by allowing advertisers to see exactly how effective their ad campaigns are or are not, Google solved one of the oldest problems in advertising, the "I know half of my advertising budget is working, I just don't know which half" problem.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google but I am speaking for myself.)

I agree that processor speed has little if anything to do with it. It's clearly about software. If it were about speed only, then we should, right now, be able to build an artificial intelligence that runs very slowly. Perhaps it would think at a millionth of the speed of a human brain, but the processes of creative thinking would still be recognizable as such. Then we could know that we just need a computer a million times faster to match a human brain, and that further performance improvements would surpass the human brain.

But we don't know how to create an AI running at any speed, because we don't understand how intelligence works.

Yes, that is clearly fiction: If we have the knowledge necessary to create intelligence, there's no reason at all to suppose that we will only be able to do it once. That would imply that we didn't really know how we did it. Technological advances almost never precede the understanding of their function. It's the other way around. In fact, that is the reason AI research in the past has traditionally failed: We hoped that we could create intelligence prior to actually understanding how it works. my point you have to reach beyond any possible logic to pure fiction, where it all kind of breaks down

You're assuming your own conclusion, AKA begging the question. You're assuming that AI could only exist in pure fiction, and using that assumption to argue that AI could only exist in pure fiction.

Yes, the human mind works and is a system... but why is it such a far-flung conjecture to assume it can be constructed? It is constructed, every day, via reproducible physical processes. It is not a "far-flung" conjecture to consider that it could be constructed via a different mechanism, or from different materials, on the contrary it is a "far-flung" conjecture to suppose that it cannot, because that would imply that in some way human brains violate the laws of physics, or at least rely on some physical processes that are impossibly specific.

For example -- and note that I'm not implying that this is the best, or most efficient way to accomplish it, in fact I'm quite certain it is not -- imagine a traditional computer running a fully-detailed simulation of a human brain. This simulation is an exact replica of a real human brain, and simulates every neuron, every chemical reaction, etc. It even simulates the quantum uncertainty effects at the finest level of detail.

Why would that simulation not evince "free will" (whatever that is)? Even if it did so with agonizing slowness. Unless you can conjecture some reason why it would not be able to think, then you must suppose that thinking machines can take on other forms. Further, there's no reason to expect that the "hardware" of brains, the specific structure of neurons and neurotransmitters, is inherently required to carry out thought. Information processing can be carried out in a bewildering variety of ways, all of which produce exactly the same results. This means that we should also be able to create thought by implementing the same information flows in other physical systems, without resorting to simulating the physical system of the brain.

Unless, of course, there is some element of human thought, or free will, or whatever you'd like to call it, that indeed does not derive from physics. Something supernatural.