The military aren't the only ones that could really benefit from this technology. I ride motorcycles for fun and profit, and I can assure you having gear, engine, and lap data displayed in my visor is pretty awesome. Adding location/terrain data in real time would be nirvana. If google can do it as well as or better than the existing offerings, and I'm fairly certain they can, then I can look forward to becoming a faster, safer rider with more (read: economically viable) commercial options for my HUD. I'm working with a friend who is passionate about aerial photography to hack together a way to stream video data from a gopro mounted on a quadcopter right to my visor so I can "see" over hills and around blind turns when I'm taking a ride on my favorite winding mountain road. Streaming it to a Nexus 10 bungeed to my tank works pretty good right now, even with the 2 second video lag that plagues the preview mode on the gopro app, but I'd *love* to be able to see the same data without having to take my eye off the road to glance down. As it is, being able to see that sheriff's deputy lurking in hull-defilade beyond the next rise five seconds before his lidar can see me is *priceless.* If google can help make that happen, more power to them. I think every snowmobiler, skier, kayaker, and off-road enthusiast would be a very likely target for this technology.

Stupidity is the only sin in nature. Judgment is swift; the punishment, harsh. And there is no appeal...you live and you learn, or you don't live long.

-Robert A. Heinlein, via Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love

This quote is more than just one SF author's take on the process of natural selection. It applies to *anything* humans do where failure is an option. Torvalds passed judgment -- swift and harsh -- and because Linux is *his* the authority to render that judgment as swiftly and as harshly as he did is his, as well. Stupidity needs to be called out whenever it occurs, period. The alternative is the cessation of progress toward whatever goal you are striving for, be it a stable community, a stable civilization, or indeed, a stable operating system.

Well, property rights != copyrights, so your attempt to conflate the two renders your assertion somewhat problematic, but I think you are headed in the right direction. Copyright preserves value by artificially preserving scarcity, but it can only work in a system where scarcity is *allowed* to create value. Under communism, products have their value assigned to them by the State -- scarcity is not necessarily a factor, so copyright isn't necessarily needed to preserve it. Ditto socialism. Under capitalism, however, products have their value dictated by a free market, where scarcity is a significant driver. As long as scarcity is a driver of value, copyright in some form or another has to be available to guarantee scarcity. If you want to be free of copyright, you have to be free of capitalism, or at least the free market-driven kind worshipped in the US.

uh...off-topic, I know, but seriously...you type in a raid? Ever hear of Ventrilo?

...all your space are belong to us?

...indeed. Excellent post. I would supplement it by adding that the only reason that marijuana dealers are of any interest to the Feds at all is the reference to marijuana in Schedule One of the Controlled Substances Act, passed by Congress in 1970. The CSA is the sole source of the authority for the Feds to override local laws when it comes to marijuana use. Removing marijuana from Schedule One of the CSA would remove the conflict between federal and state authorities over the decriminalization of marijuana.

Well, yes, in short, they do. Jurisdiction is co-terminal with the threat. If you find this "odd", I recommend that you run, not walk, to the nearest legal library and read up a bit. Start with the section on international law...

...the cost to the user is reduced privacy. Instead of giving money to Google, you give a little bit of yourself. Google is primarily a data mining company -- they profit from the data they gather from watching the way you use their products and services by selling it to other people who are interested in knowing how you use those products and services. NB: They also have entered the appliance market with the Nexus brand, and are taking on other appliance makers like Apple. There are two reasons I can think of that explain why Google is deprecating Calendar and Sync. It could be because they've decided that mining that particular data field is no longer profitable for them, or it could be they are interested in competing more directly in the appliance market by reducing interoperability with competitor's devices. Either way, it will be interesting to see where Google shifts resources that were until now dedicated to mining Sync and Calendar data, and to see what the market does to fill the opening left by this shift.

In America, how do you stop somebody from committing mass murder with a gun?

Can you do it with legislation outlawing guns? Presently, the answer is a resounding NO. You can't just pass a law taking guns away, because the right for a US citizen to bear arms is guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution. I think efforts to pass such legislation are a waste of energy because they will never clear the constitutional hurdle.

So, how about changing the Constitution? Well, there are two ways to do that. Get two-thirds, or 34 of the 50 individual State legislatures to request that Congress assemble a national constitutional convention to rescind the second Amendment. Failing that, get Congress itself to assemble a constitutional convention by getting two-thirds of sitting members of both the Senate and House to agree, but then you have to get three-fourths, or 38 of the 50 State legislatures to ratify it. The Founding fathers wanted it to be hard for the constitution to be changed on a whim by popular opinion -- that's the 2/3 part of the requirement for the State-initiated constitutional convention. And they wanted it even harder for the federal government to change it -- that's why a constitutional convention initiated by the US Congress requires 3/4, not 2/3, of the fifty State legislatures to ratify it. I seriously doubt the ability of any movement to accomplish those kinds of majorities in both the Congress and the State legislatures. Fwiw, the former method has been unsuccessfully tried twice, the last being with the Equal Rights Amendment in the early Seventies. I'd have to say changing the Constitution gets a pretty resounding NO, as well.

So what's left? This may sound a bit like a certain modest proposal from Johnathan Swift, but I deliberately quoted everybody's favorite SF author in the subject because his pragmatic observations on an armed citizenry formed the basis for what I think may be (the only) possible solution to the problem of random citizens killing eighteen grade-school kids with guns they can legally obtain.

...content providers and the advertisers they partner with are not idiots. They will realize that trying to to legally force ad blockers off the net is not going to happen, no matter how much money they throw at it -- as long as every packet is treated the same way, ads can and will be filtered and their content pirated. They learned their lessons from the recording and motion picture industry, who lost control of their distribution channel thanks to recording and networking technologies. What they will do is take control of the pipe that is carrying the content, so that they can control the distribution channel from end to end, the salient lesson to be learned from the recording and motion picture failures to adapt their business model to the internet. The internet backbone providers want this, so they already have a major ally in making that happen. Eventually, and sooner rather than later, network neutrality will be lost, and the internet will become very much a walled garden for the vast majority of our species, which is terribly, terribly sad.

Uh, epic fail. Godel's theories on undecidable propositions only hold within the formal systems within which they are created. There exist perfectly valid ways to decide these kinds of propositions outside the formal system. Godel's method of proof of the Incompleteness Theorem itself should have been enough to establish that for you. So that suggests a question for you: Do you actually understand why what you are asserting is false, or is it OK to mock you for your ignorance?

Futility? Really? The SM is incomplete, in that you have to plug and chug 17 constants that can only be determined via observation. This incompleteness may not be wrong, per se, but it certainly means that refining the SM is unlikely to be the optimal path towards truth. What is the optimal path? You tell me. But spending a lot of resources on a theory that is known to be incomplete and can never be made complete, when there exist other theories that don't have those issues, sounds like the very definition of futilty to me, ranking up there with rain dances.

...so the future can be predicted, in theory, to within an arbitrarily small epsilon neighborhood. But...there is a difference between "predicting the future" and "extrapolating the present." The latter is just one of a myriad ways of accomplishing the former. SF is replete with interesting and intriguing attempts at extrapolating and correlating social/political trends with technological trends. The key, I think, is in identifying which correlations remain stable as the axes along which we are making the extrapolations vary in time. In chaos theory, these stable correlations are called strange attractors. For example, I would offer the the correlation between energy storage density and population density as a remarkably resilient strange attractor -- the correlation remains very significant, whether you are looking at a Neolithic encampment or a modern metropolis. As energy storage density rises, so does the social/political/economic infrastructure around it. This would suggest that the flow of energy and how we manage it will be strongly correlated with the social/political/economic trends at some future point. Models that incorporate this particular correlation will thus be more likely to model actual conditions than models that do not.

...I guess.

A CS degree, like any degree, is a means to an end. It's a tool, more or less, and you use it to help build what you want out of your life. One thing autodidacts don't have is the instant credibility that a sheepskin can confer. Not saying that sheepskin credibility is always legitimate (University of Phoenix, anybody?) but HR managers have been conditioned to prefer applicants with sheepskins over applicants without sheepskins. My CS sheepskin from the University of Arizona got my foot in the door with a large defense contractor in their IT department as a sysadmin. It also got me access to company Fellowship programs that my autodidact colleagues could not get, even though they were *much* better sysadmins than I was, or for that matter, than I even wanted to be. This created a lot of interpersonal friction between me and those autodidacts, especially around white sheet time. They were mostly ex-enlisted military computer operators, and they made up the bulk of the sysadmin pool. Eventually, I got a door and a mini-skirted buffer between me and them, so it was a lot easier to deal with their anger and frustration.

The thing is, though, and I think this is the point the OP is trying to make, I was completely self-taught as a sysadmin. My background in CS helped me abstract the individual quirks and idiosyncrasies of the OS's I had to support into something I could get my head around, to be sure, but riding herd on a bunch of users and their mish-mash of Linux, Unix, Windows and VMS platforms (and later managing those same frustrated autodidacts in pursuit of same) is not what I wanted out of life and is definitely not what my BS in CS prepared me for. But thanks to the sheepskin, I eventually had an office and a secretary, so I was no longer stuck in a a cube with a surly, sullen cube mate, and I got to take what were essentially multi-year paid vacations via the Fellowship programs to get More of the Same (MS) and then to Pile it Higher and Deeper (PhD) on the company dime -- a career track that was structurally denied to those angry autodidacts.

So yeah, a CS degree has been worth it to me, even if I ended up becoming self-educated in my career field, which, tbh, was just glorified tech-support monkeyism, and definitely not computer science. But I was a well-compensated tech-support monkey, and now that I've retired from that company (at the ripe old age of 50) with a good company pension and a well-fortified 401(k) to meet my day-to day living expenses, I'm looking forward to actually using my CS degrees in a constructive way as a private consultant, and maybe to even help pay for the toys on my bucket list that I haven't checked off yet. Have I really used any of the deep CS theory I was taught at this point in my life? No, at least not outside of trying to grok a few of the more abstruse posts here on slashdot. But the sheepskin did let me get a job that allowed me to create a pretty decent standard of living for myself, and which, two decades or so down the road, might now actually be used for what it was meant to be used for.