Exactly. There are many categories of planets, including but not limited to:

  * Terrestrial planets
  * Gas giants
  * Ice giants
  * Hot jupiters
  * Superearths

And so forth. Why does the concept of another category, dwarfs, enrage people?

Really, the only categorization issue that I'm adamant about is that Pluto-Charon is called a binary. The Pluto-Charon barycentre is not inside Pluto, therefore Charon is not rotating around Pluto, the two are corotating around a common point of space between them. That's a binary.

This is an interesting, but not quite valid argument. The reason is that corporations are *not* an assemblage of individuals. Associations are. The laws and privileges entailed in being a corporation are different. If associations, partnerships and corporations were the same thing, the rules would be the same. But thery're not. Stockholders aren't financially responsible for the debts of a corporation, nor are they legally responsible for the deeds of the corporation.

I hold stock in a number of companies. Were I a *partner* in the corporations I could walk onto any of the company's properties, because it's *my* property. If I own stock in Target I can't just have a shufti around the back room of the store; it's not my store. It belongs to the corporation.

Also as a stockholder in a number of corporations, when those corporations engage in political activity they are not exercising *my* rights. They don't represent me in any way, nor do I have veto power when I disagree with them. When the Sierra Club speaks out on environmental issues, you can presume they speak for me as a member, because they exist for that purpose, and I joined on that basis. When JP Morgan Chase buys a congressman, they are not speaking for me, even though I hold stock. I'd rather they don't. I bought JP Morgan stock many years ago as an investment. Insofar as they participate in politics they're usually working against my interests.

I've sat right next to people who see the dress differently than me. It's *the same image* on *the same monitor* at *the same time*. So it's not a case of the monitor calibration or the camera white balance that creates the discrepancy, although obviously manipulating those things will change our individual perceptions of the dress. What's interesting here is the differences between people presented with an identical image.

Color doesn't exist in the external world. "Purple" isn't a wavelength of light, it's a kind of "additional data" tag which our brains add to parts of an image that allows us to extract more information from it. Consider the famous "Rubik's Cube" optical illusion where the same square looks either orange or brown based on whether contextual cues make us think it is in shadow or not. There's an illustration here.

The only difference between the Rubik's Cube illusion and The Dress That Broke The Internet is that practically *everyone* experiences the paradoxical sensations of the Rubik's Cube Illusion; in the case of the dress the paradox is in how sensations *differ between people*. The dress image is a kind of borderline case where our brains can "tag" the "pixels" of the image in one of two possible ways depending on what it thinks the context is. Different brains are trained by different experiences to expect different contexts. If we saw the dress being worn and in person, chances are with all that context there'd be less disagreement.

but it doesn't seem to be a likely threat vector.

Do some traffic analysis on your target's porn habits at the ISP, leave a compromised disc about his favorite kink in a bag on the ground near where he parks his car, and use his "connected" player to zero-day the other equipment on his LAN, installing the APT without even needing to pretend about premesis warrants or anything.

Okay, so the submitter asked for "good" solutions, and this may not qualify, but it's what I do: A whiteboard at each location, with a camera pointed at it. I can't draw on your drawing, but I can see what you draw, and you can see what I draw. I've experimented with various web-based shared whiteboards, but they all require drawing on the computer. Even with a tablet (either Wacom-style attached to a laptop/PC or a mobile device) and a pen, a real whiteboard is better.

In my case, generally there are at most three locations in the meeting, and usually only two: My home office and a group of people in a conference room. Having more may make the "real whiteboards" solution less effective.

Damn straight. It's like all these stupid GUI interfaces. I mean, I can see using a graphical interface if you're editing photos or something, but for reading and writing text? It's ridiculous and just makes it so that stupid people can do it without having to understand anything.

It all started with visual text editors, you know? Line editing was good enough, heck, you could argue that it made things too easy, too. What was really good was when we used toggle switches to enter data and read the output from a sequence of lights. If you can't mentally translate binary to ASCII you don't deserve the power of computation.

</sarcasm>

I think this is just a further extension of the location bar vs search bar change.

I remember when I first saw the Chrome omnibox. It offended me. Mildly, but still. I know the difference between a search and a URL, and I am perfectly capable of clicking into the correct bar. Then I actually used the omnibox for a while (because Chrome was so blindingly fast compared to other browsers at the time) and found that when I jumped back to Firefox I got annoyed at the mental effort required to use the split location/search fields, even though it was trivial.

The fact is that low effort is not the same as zero effort. I like the omnibox because I just click and type, no need to spend a millisecond deciding which box I should click into.

I can see what you describe as the next step, so people don't have to bother understanding, or thinking about if they do understand, the difference between "cnn" and "cnn.com". Or I suppose those who type slowly may prefer to omit the last four characters purely for that reason.

But much higher velocity, which can be combined with frequent runs to create high capacity.

That would provide massive throughput, but higher latency.

(I'm a Google employee)

Internal backlash was massive, and as far as I can tell hugely stronger than the fairly mild complaints outside the company. The strength of the internal opposition took me by surprise. I understood that while Google doesn't wish to censor the web it also doesn't wish to be the entity serving up sexual content. That seems like a reasonable position to me. I thought the 30-day notice was a bit short, even though the terms of service only offer 14 days, but other than that it seemed reasonable to me, basically bringing blogger into line with the policies in place for YouTube, etc., for years.

Many of my colleagues, however, vehemently disagreed, calling it censorship, application of one region's values upon the world and generally declaiming it as the beginning of the end for Google as a force for openness and access to information. Many called the decision deeply inconsistent with Google's stated mission, "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The internal memegen system was awash in anti-censorship memes, and one of the memegen team went further and more or less shut the system down in protest, replacing it with a complaint about the blogger shutdown. Eng-misc, a high-volume internal mailing list for random discussions of, well, anything, was overrun with threads complaining about it. The founders got hammered with questions and complaints in the weekly company-wide TGIF meeting (which is actually held on Thursday these days, so more Googlers around the world can see it live).

It's been quite the storm.

As soon as the internal reaction started I expected the reversal, though it went further than I expected. I thought the result would just be more notice, maybe 90 days. But I suppose that's because I thought the basic decision was reasonable, and only the short notice unreasonable. Many others felt differently, obviously.

It's going to be interesting to see if this provokes re-examination of the YouTube and G+ policies. I doubt it, but I was wrong about the nature of the reversal, too.

Did Musk ever propose transcontinental hyperloops? I don't believe he did. As I recall this was always intended as a regional transportation technology, something for distances short enough that air travel is inconvenient because of the airport delays at both ends, but long enough that traditional train travel is too slow.

Technically, yes, with the caveat that you'd need regular floating reboost platforms with significant power generation scattered all throughout the Pacific, and of course maintaining the track perfectly straight while floating (one presumes at a fixed depth under the water) provides its own engineering challenges. But room-temperature rarified hydrogen instead of rarified air would allow one to make the journey at about Mach 4. Faster if it's hot hydrogen.

Are you under the misconception that hyperloop is a pneumatic tube system?

Hyperloop is a magnetically-accelerated a ground-effect aircraft operating in the sort of extremely rarified air normally only found at high altitudes. The tube's purpose is to provide such a rarified atmosphere near the ground. It's not a pneumatic train. It's not a vactrain. It's not maglev. It's a ground-effect aircraft.

Branching would be really tricky, but there's no physical barriers. Note that even Musk's proposal isn't as far as you can take the concept. If you fill the tube with very low pressure water vapor instead of very low pressure air (via more pumping to overwhelm leaks, plus water vapor injection), your top speed jumps 40%. Fill it with hydrogen and it jumps 300% (normally hydrogen is a real pain to work with due to flammability, embrittlement, etc, but the densities in question are so low that such issues are mostly avoided). So we're talking the potential for hyperloop "speedways" for long distance runs that could blow airplanes out of the water.

The low numbers of passengers per capsule is really key to making the concept economical. Compare, say, monorail track with a full sized rail bridge. The former is vastly cheaper per unit distance because the peak loadings are so much lower, because the mass of the monorail trains are so much lower. A computer-controlled high launch rate of small, high speed capsules means you're spreading the loading out greatly, which means greatly reduced loading and thus materials costs.

Still, while Musk has been thinking of Hyperloop stations in the "airport" concept, he really needs to get out of that mindset. His proposed plan had them on the outskirts of cities. Airports are only on the outskirts of cities because they *must* be. You greatly reduce your utility by doing that, by making people catch connecting trains. Hyperloop can extend just fine into towns; with his two proposed endpoints in particular there are excellent rail routes into town that are quite straight that it could be built over.

I read about it yesterday at bbc.co.uk. But thanks for playing.