I'm mostly surprised that goats were roaming freely through the exhibit.

Has anyone ever taken Randi up on his challenge? Or are they all chicken?

I enjoy his contributions to the field of skepticism, along with his fan Brian Dunning from skeptoid.com.

It stands to reason: Fairies flying out of the engineer's butt would more likely apply 50 micro-newtons of force to the engineer, not the experiment.

There are so many decent UPS / inverter-charger systems out there.

Posts should help, not just criticize. Mentioning *even one* would have been helpful. Your post is just Slashtrash as written and I know you usually do better. How about fixing that?

I heard the acute problem aptly summarized recently: "Patents are supposed to cover inventions, but what they're being issued for is mere engineering."

This is a better metric than the "obviousness test" - what is the essential and genius inspiration that led to a the idea of putting a delivery message in a SMS message? There is none - no patent.

I realize the entire system has evolved into one giant mechanism to enrich entrenched corporate interests, but it's still a good insight into how maybe the system could have been designed less-wrong from the beginning.

I'm only saying that the complaint is about hypocrisy; the public outcry against someone "defending traditional marriage" dwarfs the public outcry against someone supporting same sex marriage (despite popular support in the U.S. being roughly equal), when the fact of the matter is people should just shrug and move on. For the record, I'm not arguing on this guy's behalf because I'm against same sex marriage - I'm not, I really don't care (and as such you could put me in the "supports" category), I just agree with the opinion that the public outcry is hypocritical.

You are better off spending money on geothermal HVAC

Not that effective during a long power outage.

Is there a valid reason we accept studies that have not been reproduced at least one more time to truly vet them before the community?

The point of papers [in real science] is to say, "we did this, here's what we found". It's not to announce a beacon of new Revealed Truth. That's largely the fault of science "reporters" looking to sell advertising space.

The papers are themselves the invitations to replicate.

The problem is the government science-funding model is largely based on fame and popularity, and doing replication studies is felt to be beneath most researchers except for the most extraordinary of claims, or those that threaten the Orthodoxy.

None of these problems will go away until the incentives of the funding model change. To assume anything else would be economically ignorant.

Other posters have already demolished the idea that banks will do this voluntarily or by edict.

The engineering approach is to not involve them. The Finance::Bank collection is the closest you're going to find to a workable solution.

Anybody who has money to spend on a government "solution" should send it to these developers instead.

Think about it. You may love the open source movement, but how would you like it if you wrote software at your day job for a salary...and then one day the government said "Hey, we decided that all software is free now. So you can't charge for it, even if you worked hard to make it and invested tons of money in the software-making process."

That's a nonsense argument. Absent monopoly grants, software goes to the person who paid for it, and they have the choice of whether to release it or not.

It's when it's released to the public, do you have Men With Guns threaten the People for making copies of that software or not? That is the ethical question. Do predictions of purported benefit from social-engineering justify threats of murder?

You, or at least anyone reading this who fits this profile, should think carefully about the foundation of your own ethics.

*Yours* is based on threats of violence for duplication (not stealing) of information. It abolishes a portion of _real_ property rights for imaginary ones, when there is no demonstrable harm other than a postulate of diminution of earning potential.

The reduced argument is "murder for profit".

I agree... he did not lose his freedom of speech at all; freedom of speech != freedom from any and all ramifications. However, I think the point Anonymous Coward was making is that if it were reversed, and someone lost their job for supporting same sex marriage, you'd never hear the end of it.

I doubt it. Their vision for the future is sound, but they're not strongly connected to the reality of maintaining a good browser for the present at the same time. Mostly chest-beating rather than doing the hard work required.

Mozilla has gotten brazen lately about forcing questionable changes on users

Right. I have to manage $1200 PDU's that use SSLv3, so to use Firefox I had to re-enable SSLv3 for all sites. That's the only choice Mozilla felt like giving users. That's not bold, it's lazy and worsens overall security for the Internet.

If they think I'm going to get $30K to replace working gear "because Firefox" they're delusional.

and don't forget that most wealth is generated by engaging in activities with energy requirements.

That Tesla 80D Insane Edition that I want takes $115K worth of economic profit to acquire, which in most industries requires 5-20x as much revenue. So over a million dollars worth of economic activity on average to just get that Tesla before you can drive it. Is that greener than a Fiesta?

he is showing his value by creating crap for his handlers to screw up your future.

Yeah, I totally hate the Internet too. If only the FCC had been regulating it since it's inception, it would be so much better now!

Classic example of a market failure.

Just so you know, Microsoft did a lot of shitty deals back then and screwed over a lot of people.

Why wasn't the contact enforced when Vista or 7 came out? One party is a nuclear-armed sovereign - don't tell me Microsoft refused... the courts would surely order cooperation if that were the case.