After all, this will end all of the hassle of dealing with real people.

Maybe they can get virtual people to buy all of their products.

Virtual customers will be the next growth industry

that is exactly what the government does with the CAFE standards.

No, it isn't. The CAFE standards traditionally used the weighted harmonic mean of the mpg values, which gives exactly the same result as the weighted arithmetic mean of the economy expressed in gallons per mile. There are some other quirks- dual fuel vehicles are treated much more favorably than they probably ought to be, for instance- and the standards were recently changed to give bigger vehicles a break. But the larger point is that the EPA isn't completely stupid and does realize that the arithmetic mean is not the correct way of calculating average fuel economy.

One more case where SI units are easier to use. 1 liter/kilometer is 1 square milimeter. Isn't that so much simpler?

For what it's worth, the physical interpretation of this would be that a car with a fuel economy of a given area would be able to drive without needing on-board fuel storage if it were following a trail of fuel with that cross sectional area.

Employers want more to drive prices down, workers want fewer to reduce competition. Employers have more money and a better lobbying arm, so their opinion is the one we tend to hear.

Remember that these were the most obvious 700, the ones that are visible even in a smallish study (250,000 subjects). And these only got us 20% of the way to explaining the genetic components of height. I doubt that the next 700 we find will get us anywhere close to another 20%, because the genes left undiscovered have effects that are so small that they were invisible to this study. Somehow, the remaining 80% of the genetic contribution to height is made up of such genes. That means many thousands of genes are involved. Remember also that there are fewer than 100,000 genes in the human genome.

Somehow it sounds cool to have a flying car, but kinda stupid to have a driving plane. This was an observation made by Tyler Cowen on his blog. It's a good point. It reminds me of a survey of priests that emphatically showed priests are ok with praying while smoking, but not with smoking while praying.

When I install Windows, I work hard to set up everything exactly as I like on install day. Then I make a backup of the OS partition - which has only programs, no photos, videos, etc. - using Acronis TrueImage. Then I proceed as normal, and when something gets screwed up, I just restore from backup. This completely undoes any effects of winrot, and the system immediately feels like it was installed that day. What I usually do then is update my applications and settings, and immediately make a new backup. A full restore takes about 4 minutes, and a backup with max compression takes something like 12. I find this so convenient that I use no antivirus. When I start to suspect that I may have installed malware, I just restore from a backup, and four minutes later, my system is perfect. I've been doing this since Win2K days, and if this method weren't available to me, I wouldn't be using Windows.

It depends on the start mechanism of the ballast. Rapid start and programmed start ballasts give very good electrode life, but at the cost of reduced efficiency. Instant start is most efficient, but it substantially reduces electrode life. Given that lamps are generally rated for substantially longer life with programmed start than instant start, electrode life must be the limiting factor in at least some cases.

That's a useful chart, but it shows that the growth of coal in Germany is far larger than the total portion of solar. So if you want to call that growth a "fluctuation," you should call the contribution of solar a "rounding error" or something. What I learned from the chart is that in Germany, the burning of household trash produces twice as much power as solar, and this is growing much faster than solar. I bet it's also costing the customers far less and provides other benefits, like municipal hot water. So yes, Germany is having a bit of a trash burning revolution, and I applaud this. The solar thing though, I don't think that's going so well for Germany.

Soo, their CO2 output in increasing, their energy prices are highest in Europe, and a broad coalition, which includes the chancellor, is now pushing to have the program cancelled. ... SUCCESS!

Um, you tell me about the coal burning plants that Germany shut down, and I'll hunt down the links for the 12 ginormous coal-burning powerplants that have opened up since 2010. The largest of these are designed to burn fucking lignite (brown coal, the dirtiest thing we have ever used for power in the history of mankind). This is not 1812, it was 2012. CO2 emissions are growing faster in Germany than anywhere else in Western Europe, while US emissions are sinking over the same timespan. Germany acts like it's some model citizen because everyone loves to hear about solar this and that, but most of their power comes from coal. Also, most of their new capacity comes from coal. Every year this decade, even the proportion of German power that has come from coal has increased. Yeah, coal. For this I hardly think they deserve any congratulations.

Who thinks it's okay to sit on their phone?

You can flip this around and ask what company bases their product on theoretical ideas about how people ought to use it rather than watching the way people actually do? I don't think it's sensible to drop a phone in water, but that hasn't stopped companies from making phones that are water and drop resistant. People in the real world also tend to put their phones in their back pockets, especially bigger ones that may not fit comfortably in a front pocket, and that inevitably means they get sat on. A company that makes a phone that's likely to be sat on needs to make it durable enough to hold up when that happens, or they'll be rightly criticized for failing to produce a quality product.

Yes, that's a premium price for a 28" 4K display. Dell is currently selling theirs for $430. Note, though, that the relatively inexpensive 28" 4K displays are using TN rather than IPS, which is a big reason they're relatively cheap.

Increased efficiency could actually help with cost, even if it makes the actual LEDs more expensive. First of all, improved efficiency would reduce the number of individual LEDs needed for a given amount of light, which would counteract some of the increased cost. Second, the LEDs are only a small part of the package, and improving their efficiency would make everything else easier. It would mean cheaper power electronics, which reduces cost. It would also mean less waste heat, which would mean a smaller heat sink, which is the single biggest thing in most LED lights.