That doesn't even make sense. Do away with "the top" and you'll just create a new "the top" to deal with. Your view is a caricature so strange I don't even know where you got it from. From what I can see, anti-government people (which right now also include "government is good in general but right now we've got too much of it") pretty much do want to cut at all levels. I for one could live with fewer czars.

The Intellivoice sounds like a closer fit to what we're talking about, as it enabled a new form of game, rather than functioning as backwards compatibility.

No idea if that's what the original poster meant. But it definitely does show that augmenting consoles is a very old idea... older than many people reading about it. :)

Somewhere around here I still have an Intellivoice, and all four released games for it (I don't count the baseball one). You have not lived until you've heard a little 4KB cartridge (not a typo! in fact, 4KB was twice the usual size; and yes, I'm using bytes because I think measuring games in kilobits is a crock) babbling away at you. An amazing amount of voice was shoehorned into those things. Online MP3s that have samples of even a single thing it could say are themselves larger than all released games combined.

The problem you have is not that you have a wrong idea of programming, but that you have a wrong idea of mathematics. Most people only get educated into a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of mathematics and subconsciously think that something like the quadratic equation is the height of mathematical expression complexity.

However, nothing stops a mathematician from examining the consequences of much larger systems, such as might look like a program, and in fact mathematicians do. There's research into large numbers, research into large proof systems that make most programs look like small beans (go read the Principia Mathematica... or rather, go skim the Principia Mathematica and run screaming), research into all sorts of things that are definitely math but look a lot more like a program than you think if you've only been education with conventional primary school mathematics, or even if you've gotten a bachelor's degree in computer science, which does not generally cover the Curry-Howard isomorphism. (I didn't even get it in my masters program, I had to learn it myself.)

There is no feasible way of drawing a distinction between mathematics and programs. You might be able to draw a legal one, but as always happens when you try to introduce colors to bits, the coloring just won't stand up to the sort of sandblaster scrutiny that will be applied by the plaintiffs and defendants.

You might observe that few programmers appear to be thinking mathematically when they program, to which I'd follow up with an observation that no, no they don't and boy does it show! But note carefully that's a characteristic of the programmer, not the program. The programmer may not understand math, and may crank out a mathematical system of breathtaking worthlessness and with few or none of the properties the programmer would have found desirable (like "actually doing what it's supposed to do"), but it is not written into the definition of mathematics that something is only mathematics if it is "useful" or "good". It's still all just a term-rewriting system when you get down to it, and any attempt to draw a barrier around "term rewriting system" and "real-world program" is simply doomed to failure.

It's all just assembler, and all assembler can do is basic arithmetic, moving numbers around in memory in a manner very easy to characterize mathematically, and some very mathematical conditionals. You might be able to fool yourself into thinking you've somehow transcended these primitives into a "non-math" domain... but you haven't.

Who said anything about damaging to any life forms that evolved there? It doesn't matter, there isn't any sensory data available that will allow seeing anything like we see here.

Besides, it is possible to theorize about what life forms could exist there. If you agree that for any definition of life that is useful, it must be able to perform some computation (in a physical sense) that allows it to stay ahead of entropy, then information theory has a lot to say about what conditions life could exist in. High temperatures have too much entropy for any conceivable process to overcome them. While life on Earth itself demonstrates that we are not necessarily at the top end of the possible temperature scale, you're not going to see life in molten rock or in a star. There aren't any processes that could remove entropy from a system faster than the local environment is shoving it in, so therefore, no meaningful information-rich structure can survive.

Very high heat environments are not the places to be looking for life.

I would also observe that "molten rock" is not famous for its transparency, let alone "gaseous rock". It may be an "atmosphere", but there won't be anybody observing any sort of "rainbow". The word "atmosphere" may be deceptive in this context; think less "open sky" and more "sea of blindingly hot lava so hot it's gaseous, not that you have any reason to care about this distinction".

Mexican coke has been spotted at our corner convenience store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. If it's gotten this far, that pretty much proves it's not just a "Mexican" thing. There are Mexicans here, but they are a small minority compared to many other minorities here.

I'd imagine people would be willing to pay a premium for video games from other regions as well if it was possible to play them....

You don't need to imagine, I can tell you it's true. Import video game stores have been selling Japanese games for many years. If you look a bit, you can probably find one near you. And when I say "Japanese", I mean, the exact same discs you'd pick up over there, unlocalized for English. The localization situation has been improving, with more of the quirky exotics getting localized by companies like Atlus, but there's still a lot of good stuff that doesn't make it over for one reason or another.

So, you do apparently agree that the global warming predictions have been wrong over the past ten years?

Actually, I do understand what chaotic systems are. I don't think you do. It does not mean "random", nor does it mean "magic", and it certainly doesn't mean "Well, even if my predictions are wrong I know they will eventually be right again later", which, frankly, betrays a deep misunderstanding of chaos. Chaos means that once your predictions are wrong, they will keep getting more wrong! If you can't get 10 years right, you can't get 20 years right, and you can't get 30 years right, and so on. Chaos does not mean the system will eventually come back around to your previous now-outmoded predictions.

Climate predictions have been wrong, and they were wrong in a way that was never anticipated. A chaotic system couldn't even be predicted 10 years into the future, but somehow, the chaos will resolve itself on the 100 years span, through some sort of magic. I'd ask you this: If being wrong about the climate ten years away isn't enough to falsify global warming theories, what exactly is? Since the answer appears to be "nothing".

(Yeah, I ignored the rest of your post, because it really doesn't matter. Using theories that couldn't predict the past to extract "signals" is not valid mathematics. Before we can extract a signal we first have to make correct predictions, something climate science hasn't done yet. My "more science" isn't getting done anytime soon, since even if a perfect theory arose, we'd have to wait at least ten years to even guess if it's correct. Or perhaps more, since that would just be "chaos in action", right? Of course, bear in mind that whatever answer you give here should be applied to global warming theories too. They haven't managed 10+ years of correctness yet either.)

it's absolutely bonkers unless you know a priori (that is, before you see the data) what kind of curve you expect to see, and you fit against a reasonable sample of the data.

But we do have an expected curve. In fact, the expected curve is the entire point of this exercise! We expect that since mankind's CO2 contributions are the dominant factor in the climate on Earth that temperatures will continue up with CO2. I have endless IPCC reports that show this temperature line just going up; no error bars, no babble about "weather", just a line going up.

This line going up does not fit the data. Explaining why it doesn't fit the data doesn't change the wrongness of the predictions.

If the global warming advocates couldn't get the next 10 years right when they made their predictions in 1999, why are we still pretending that they can get the next 100 years right? If 10 years is "just weather", then so is 100!

The truth is simple. Theories based on global warming being the dominant factor in climate have failed to correctly predict the climate. This means they are wrong. No excuses, no complexity, no endless stream of words can get you out of that. That's science. Only by leaving science can you say that it was wrong, but it's right anyhow because it feels right or something. That's where we are right now with AGW. Maybe more science will find an AGW signal, but it's effectively impossible at this point that it will be even remotely as large as it has been claimed up to this point, and it seems pretty likely it'll still be swamped by natural variations.

You obviously didn't follow the link. The experiments are being done. It's military funded and they're not telling us everything, but clearly the results were good enough to continue ramping up. (Total failure would either cancel the project or move it in some other direction. Probably the former.)

and the physics dubious (the consensus is mainly on the "it's not going to work" side, but it's not clear cut)

The only such "consensus" that I know about is from a guy who used assumptions about how electrons behave based on equations based on preconditions that do not hold; I find Bussard's response compelling. I do not trust that analysis. Bussard fusion may yet not work, but not for that reason.

Besides, the time for posturing and insulting people for examining data and coming to their own conclusions is coming to a close; experimental data is at hand. It doesn't matter what theories say will or won't work when the experiment is done.

The latest Bussard fusion news, from yesterday. Fairly encouraging; it's hard to estimate exactly how successful the tests were but we can rule out total failure, I think.

I would currently place Bussard's success probability as much higher than ITER's.

You don't appear to have actually read my message, you seem to have read what you assume my message would contain instead. If they "understood perfectly" that they will reduce their net incomes with this move, they wouldn't do it. Therefore, they don't understand.

Read that link I sent; in fact, read the book. It's quite interesting. It's counterintuitive, but quite simple and you can see examples of this stuff where ever you look.

The game companies get their cut at the time of first sale. The selling cost of the game already includes in the price the value to the customer of the ability to resell the product. The assumption the game companies are making is that if they lock this out, they can sell more product at the current prices, but instead what will happen is that they will be have to drop their prices some amount to account for the fact that it is less valuable to the purchasers.

This is a fairly standard element of elementary economics; for instance, see this chapter of Price Theory, where virtually this exact problem is problem number 12 in chapter two of the book.

Which just goes to show that for all the supposed value of an MBA, people in business still routinely fail to apply even the simplest economics to their own worlds.

There is nothing magic about science just because it is big. If anything, it is more likely to be wrong, not less. A 30-year prediction in fusion research is exactly as valuable as a 30-year prediction about the progress of any other science, which is to say, worthless.

No, it is not a promise about the progress of the actually-useful grid. Rationally, saying that the actually-useful plant is 30 years away is only barely not equivalent to saying "We do not believe this will ever be practical.", once future certainty depreciation is taken into account.

If you want fusion in any sane timeframe, keep an eye on the alternate approaches like Bussard fusion. That may not work either, but at least they're honest enough to say so, rather than pretending that success is inevitable.

E100 fuel isn't being chosen by racing because it's a "better fuel". In fact, they don't really care; what matters to them is that everybody is using the same fuel. It's being chosen in an attempt to make a decidedly non-green sport look greener. No other reason.

I can't speak for IndyCar, but I know that one of the other race series is switching to ethanol, and in conjunction with that, the maximum permitted fuel tank size is rising, because it doesn't get the same mileage and they'd have to pit a lot more often, changing the balance of the race. I consider this less than a ringing endorsement.

Ah, the I want you to hit me as hard as you can approach?