Ya know... this is why I come to Slashdot: the comments that are more informative than the article. Doesn't happen often enough these days. Thank you.

There have always been strong-on-defense conservatives. Anti-communist zealots who were happy to sacrifice a lot of liberty for a little temporary safety had their biggest prominence during exactly the time that today's conservatives hold up as the ideal time of American values.

What I find interesting is the way it's costing them an opportunity to go against Obama. Obama's own party is largely unhappy about continued NSA spying. Even Dianne Feinstein, who is from very liberal San Francisco but has been a defender of the American intelligence community from her position on the Select Committee on Intelligence, finally got fed up with it last week.

Politically, it would be a good time for libertarians to try to pry liberals away from the Democrats. But the libertarians have made their primary political home with the Republicans for some time; there is a separate Libertarian party but it never fares well due to vote-splitting. Republicans won't easily be able to switch away from a position that put national security over liberty, even when they've got a golden opportunity to use it to embarrass Obama.

Since Obama himself is making proposals to limit (but hardly stop) NSA spying on Americans, in an ideal world you'd love to see everybody come together to try to reach a point where at least a majority can say, "Yeah, I feel OK about changing the situation, even if I'd rather have more security or more defense from intrusiveness." But sadly for the state of American politics, it seems mostly like an opportunity for both extremes to oppose the center.

It's interesting that they can have people so aware of the price difference when it's numerically comparatively small. It's about 2%: not trivial, but you need to be literally counting pennies to notice it.

There are, unfortunately, many people in America who do need to count pennies. But I wonder what fraction of Wal-Mart shoppers are in that position, and how many think "low prices" when they wouldn't actually notice the difference?

I mention this only because I suspect that Americans tend to put price over other considerations, including quality, convenience, and even conscience. I wouldn't tell people how to shop, but I wonder how many people might be better off (by their own measures, whatever they are) to say, "OK, I'll spend an extra eight cents to buy this package of crackers at a store where the employees seem happier" or "I've noticed that the reviews of the Wal-Mart vacuum cleaner aren't as good as the ones at the other department store; I'll spend the extra $10 and get one that does a better job."

Or not. There are surely plenty who truly do need to save the eight cents on the package of crackers, and there but for the grace of God go I. But I am genuinely curious how many seek to minimize the price simply because it's the easiest factor to optimize.

Interesting. Is that because hydrogen is diatomic, and thus always bigger than monoatomic helium even though the atoms themselves are smaller? Or does it have something to do with helium's inertness?

Like it or not, the government does exclude some speech from being "free". Threats and defamation are excluded, as is the ever-popular "shouting fire in a crowded theater". Even obscenity can be limited, though fortunately that exception has been narrowed in the past few decades.

Not that I want these to be the camel's nose under the tent. I'm just pointing out that the potential for abuse is already there. I think it's perfectly reasonable that you can't threaten somebody and call it "free speech", but it sets a dangerous precedent.

If you haven't read it, in the past couple of years his son published his fragmentary version of the Arthurian legend. His alliterative verse was better in some places than in others (I loved it when it appeared as Rohirric poetry, not so much in the plodding and interminable verse version of the Beren and Luthien story), but it really popped there. He was trying to craft, in that way he does, a version such as might have been written by the earliest Germanic invaders after the fall of Rome, and as absurd as that sounds, I thought that it worked.

Although Tolkien really was a gifted poet in so many ways, I often found his alliterative verse cloying. Modern English just doesn't have the right tone for it. His alliterative versions of Leithian and Children of Hurin don't, for the most part, do it for me.

I do wish he'd finished his Arthur story, though. That one came out last year, and it was genuinely great. He massaged various versions of the myths into one story that worked better than any of the existing tellings, and the alliterative verse really soared. (Plus, there were hints in his notes that Lancelot was destined to end up in Valinor, which would have amused the bejeezus out of me, but he never got around to writing it.)

So I'll be curious to see how I feel about this. Seamus Heaney's translation is going to be damned hard to beat. But regardless, Tolkien's version will tell us a lot about his thoughts on it, which will be fascinating. And from what I hear, he's using some archeological speculations, and I hope that there's commentary to see how much of that continues to be valid.

I respectfully disagree, but I can see why you'd think that. He has certainly made a career publishing the dregs of his father's work.

However, that's nowhere near as easy as it sounds. The handwriting is just the least of it. He's put in serious scholarly work on his father's material, comparing numerous revisions and tracing the evolution of the thought. He had collaborated with his father on the works for years: the famous handwriting on the Middle Earth maps is his, and they worked together to get The Silmarillion into a publishable form for over a decade. In fact, he really deserves coauthor, or at least editor, credit for The Silmarillion: the work was literally pieced together, paragraph by paragraph and sometimes sentence by sentence, from over a dozen different manuscript sources.

He was also a significant linguist in his own right. His work on the Saga of Hedrik the Wise is still referred to in the field. In order to be his father's amanuensis he had to speak several different languages, including all of the variations of Elvish that his father invented over the decades. (Every time the language evolved in his head, he turned the old version into Old Noldorin or Old Quenya or other such. It gives the language evolution tremendous verisimilitude, but is a massive headache for scholars.)

I'm not gonna deny that he's been prickly and has reserved a lot of the works to himself, which other scholars might have liked to have had access to. But I don't think it's fair to call him a "leech". His father made him literary executor, and I'm quite certain that his father would have approved of the course he's taken. He craved publication of The Silmarillion, and had tried for decades to get it into an acceptable form. Other papers weren't intended for publication, but they are of tremendous interest to scholars, and as a scholar himself Tolkien would surely have understood it. He specifically put many of his works in trust at Marquette for precisely that reason.

Boooooooooo ;-)

Given the loathing that Christopher Tolkien feels for the films, I doubt you have to worry about Jackson ever getting his hands on any of it.

Not that you really need to worry, I think. Jackson could use any other translation, but in the end it's just not a very cinematic story. Attempts to translate it to film have always failed. The story is "Guy beats up monsters", and if that's what you put on film, you utterly miss the point.

Given that that's what Jackson apparently saw in The Hobbit, there's no guarantee he won't try, but he sure won't have Tolkien's assistance with it.

This has been talked about for decades, but it has sat on the shelf for reasons I haven't been able to figure out.

I'd heard that it may literally have had to do with the handwriting: the man's handwriting was, shall we say, idiosyncratic, and it takes considerable effort to decipher. His son Christopher devoted a lifetime to it. John Rateliff, who did similar work for drafts of The Hobbit, consulted with a Tolkien graphologist in the process. (He was able to get a rough dating for one scrawl based on the details of the handwriting.) The fact that there even exists such a thing as a "Tolkien graphologist" is absurdly wonderfully.

Anybody know who edited this piece? Is it Christopher?

Regardless, I'm looking forward to this. "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was one of the most influential pieces of literary scholarship of the 20th century. It completely changed the way we look at Anglo-Saxon storytelling, and put fantasy literature on an entirely different footing. It's a magnificent piece of work, but not having his own translation of Beowulf available was maddening.

Thus far, the kind of nations developed enough to seriously field drones have all mostly figured that it was better to compete economically than militarily. Nukes and Mutually Assured Destruction have, at least so far, put an end to the kind of elbow jostling that dominated the world from the Stone Age to 1945. You get a few proxy wars in the third world, and the occasional land grab like Crimea, but most of the rest of it is saber-rattling.

Drones are definitely the weapons for asymmetric warfare, where poor groups go up against big countries over one grievance or another (sometimes valid, sometimes not). They can't actually "win" in the conventional sense, but they can aggravate people until things change. Not necessarily the change they wanted. Drones being a key example: developed nations can now kill from a distance with precision (compared to a full-on war).

Eventually somebody will try asymmetric warfare with drones, and I'm not looking forward to that. It's the beginning of a whole new arms race.

I feel at this point that it's not just the creativity, but that the machines themselves just aren't ready to do much novel work. Their shapes are one thing, but more importantly, they are very limited in terms of materials. Most consumer objects rely on other physical properties to do their jobs: hardness, stiffness, toughness, flexibility, heat conductivity... frequently different materials in different parts.

That's not to say that 3D printing has no uses, just that designers are working with one hand and four fingers tied behind their backs. I was very happy to find some 3D printed dice with various mathematical properties, for example, but try as I might I had a hard time finding anything else I could conceivably want on Shapeways. (There were decorative items, and we should see more brilliant things in that category, but I just don't have much need for items that are explicitly not functional.)

The technology is far from finished, of course. And guys like this are certainly developing their skills: when the technology matches their ingenuity, they will be experienced and ready. And when it happens, truly novel things will happen, not just new ways of doing the old things. But I'm not surprised that it's not happening all that much yet, and not because of lack of genius on the part of makers. I think the tech just isn't ready, and probably won't be for at least another five to ten years.

I do understand the concepts. Often, it's religious believers who seem to have missed it.

This conversation appears to be replayed on an infinite loop:

It's like they forget. Or they're deliberately forgetting. They can, in theory, make a case based on various Epistles, but it's hard for me to take their exigesis seriously when I have to start fixing the really obvious errors. I'm not supposed to have to be the one to have to point out that New Covenant stuff, or the obvious contradictions in picking and choosing from Leviticus.

Yes, I was counting only individual income tax. Thanks for the numbers.