you have to think in Russian! :)

Sid Meier, you rock.

Compromising safety and reliability in the name of performance is a tradition in car culture. "Jailbreaking" is a relatively new term; but functionally, I don't think it is all that different from what we called "hot rodding" back in the day.

Yes, it is hard to grind the beans, because it wakes up everybody in the house. If you are living alone, it's not an issue, but when you are sharing your life with somebody (especially somebody who likes to sleep late) It's hard to ignore the convenience factor of a Keurig. My wife brought a Keurig into my life when I first met her. The coffee tastes like boiled dirt, of course, but the ease (and silence) with which you can produce a cuppa is stunning.

No. You are wrong on both counts.

First, not all science is useful to the public, and in fact some science has the potential to harm it greatly, if it were furnished to the wrong people. I certainly don't want the science gained by government bio-warfare researchers, atomic weapons specialists, and neuroscientists studying torture methodologies to be readily available to anybody who wants it.

Second, climatology is not reproducible. It is a strictly observational science, like astronomy -- you can't do reproducible experiments on the climate, anymore than you can do reproducible experiments on a galaxy a billion light years away. It is still science, but it can never produce reproducible results. By demanding reproducible results as a matter of law, Schweikert is making it impossible for the EPA to cite climate models to support regulations aimed at curbing emissions. It will also make it possible for industries to challenge and overturn existing regulations that were supported by these now-illegal climate models.

:)

hmmm...you make a great point. But the change in viewing habits that you refer to has to be countered because it is eating into broadcast TV's primary revenue stream. The national broadcast companies can sit back and watch their profits get time- and/or format-shifted to oblivion, or they can do something about it. The writing is on the wall -- it seems pretty clear that people would rather pay a subscription to avoid commercials. As long as consumers can control how the content is presented to them at their end, they are going to continue to lose advertisers. Tivo's 30 second skip pretty much was the first nail in that coffin -- I haven't seen a broadcast commercial since I bought a Tivo a decade ago. Companies are not going to continue to waste their advertising dollars on broadcast ads. Pretty much the only option for broadcasters is to adopt a streaming model ala Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hulu+. Broadcasters are going to have to control the pipe from end-to-end for their revenue model to work -- they have to eliminate a consumer's ability to avoid commercials.

Hmmm. I'm not calling you a hypocrite (at least, not yet) but you'd be up in fucking arms if somebody violated the GPL, right? But not Apple's ToS -- that doesn't apply to criminals. It's just words on a page that a criminal has to scroll past to get to the "I Accept" button so that he can start cracking the device that he just agreed not to crack. You make some (weak) rationalizations for why it's ok for criminals to break the ToS, but you just highlight the real problem. Here's a clue: You can't maintain one ethical standard for hackers and a different standard for everybody else, dude. Not if you want to be taken seriously, anyway.

Simple rules that produce fascinatingly complex behaviors, to me, is more geeky than complex rules that produce fascinatingly complex behaviors. YMMV.

Boston Dynamics *is* a defense contractor, so by extension Google is one too, now. I am going to try to remain optimistic about the positive effects that Google can have on human advancement. Science and engineering seem to leap forward much farther and much, much faster when they are deployed in the service of armed conflict. Companies like Planetary Resources, Armadillo Aerospace, and SpaceX are going to have to be able to defend their extra-terrestial ventures, and NASA has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that robotic missions in space are far more cost-effective in terms of results than manned missions. The minute Planetary Resources starts exploiting the asteroid belt, they are likely going to need a way to defend against claim jumpers, and I'm hoping that by hoovering up all these robotic companies,Google is positioning itself to defend these companies in their (hopefully) peaceful occupation and exploitation of the solar system.

Vaidman, is that you?

This. So what if some company certifies the code as non-toxic? For every legit code certifying company that goes online, there will be a hundred phishing sites popping up over-night to take advantage of it. The problem is not toxic code --- the problem is the toxic levels of foolishness and naivete of the vast majority of users on the net.

Hmmm. Excellent post. But I'm having trouble reconciling these two assertions.

From the point of view of a warlord, superior military force confers the right to murder and rape. Indeed, it confers any right the warlord chooses to assert. Ditto your hungry lion -- his right to eat me stops at the muzzle of my rifle.

It would seem to me that you need something more than just the other party recognizing that you have rights. You have to be able to successfully assert those rights. In French, it is "preter main forte" or "show the strong hand." In English, it would be "might makes right."

And I always cringe when somebody makes an assertion that is counter to my experience and to my intuition. I think about death fairly often, dude, and so do *a lot* of other people. I like to participate in activities -- skydiving, motorcycle racing, and stunt flying, just to enumerate what I did this weekend -- which could reasonably be expected to be fatal if not done correctly or well. I like to think that my parachute is going to open *every time* I exit the aircraft, that there is no debris that found its way onto the track at the apex of a blind turn that is going to cause me to high-side at a buck fifty, or that I'm not going to pull so many negative g's that I red-out and auger in, so that my death remains firmly in the hypothetical. I want "if" and not "when" to remain the correct way for me to phrase thoughts about dying for many, many, decades to come. I will happily concede your point that dying is inevitable, but for some of us, getting close to death is pleasurable, and we would like to dance with it for as long as humanly possible. Yeah, we are probably not going to die of "natural causes" but we will be part of the tiny fraction of humanity that gets to at least have some say in the time and manner of our demise. Unlike Scott Adams' father, whose time and manner of death was dictated by the fiscal self-interest of the medical facility that was prolonging his life for financial gain.

"No heroic methods." That is the magic incantation that let's you die with dignity. At least in jurisdictions that allow advance healthcare directives, anyway. Run, do not walk, to your nearest legal professional and execute an advance healthcare directive, if you want to be able to die with dignity. If you don't live in a jurisdiction that allows advance healthcare directives, move to one that does. Period. BTW, morphine takes the edge off -- if you specifically allow the use of palliative measures in your directive, you can die with dignity and do it painlessly as well.