NASA developed the technology, gave it to Elon Musk for free, and then poured some more cash over His Muskness. What are the American taxpayers getting back?

The US government loaned a huge amount of money to Musk to start his car dealership. They keep paying him for 'green' cars that do not fulfill the payment requirements.

Now, you can spend a shitload of money on a con artist's pet projects, but at some point of time, smart people ask if all that cocksucking and cash showering has a point. Let's hope this point has been reached.

You just compared 60 Hz EM from house wiring to multi-GHz microwaves. This is jumping more orders of magnitude than from microwaves to visible light. I know this is slashdot, but this level of ignorance is just staggering.

The civil war was not fought over slavery. It wasn't even fought over keeping the south in the union. It was fought to keep Brittain from reconquering the US.

The south didn't have any money. Slavery in the south made commodity traders in the north rich, not the slave owners. You may find that hard to believe... How can you own slaves and not be rich? How can you live in one of those huge plantation houses, and not be rich? The economics of slavery favor the slave trader, not the slave owner. And those plantation houses look huge until you realize it housed an extended family of 20-30 people, plus house slaves. There were white people working the fields right next to the slaves (and they were treated only marginally better).

The south didn't have any money, but war is expensive. So how did the civil war even happen?! Turns out the south had a friend across the ocean willing to lend them very very large amounts of money. Now what could the UK possibly want in return for funding a civl war? America split in two, that's what. Divide and conquer. The war of 1812 was only 50 years ago, and Britain had not yet given up aspirations of reconquest.

Lincoln didn't free the slaves because he's a nice guy. Lincoln proclaimed emancipation to make the British government's support of slave-owning confederates EXTREMELY unpopular with the British people, who were vehemently abolitionist. Lincoln turned a war about the economic oppression of the south into a war about slavery, and in doing so, isolated the south from the rest of the world. Without the support of the UK, or the industrial capacity of the north, the confederacy was doomed.

They don't this in schools because anyone who says the civil was wasn't about slavery is a racist confederacy apologist. The fact that you don't know the civil was was about keeping North America free of the tyranny of the British crown is DANGEROUS..... and the political correctness that lead to that ignorance is one of the tumors slowly killing America.

The civil war was not fought over slavery. It wasn't even fought over keeping the south in the union. It was fought to keep Brittan from reconquering the US.

The south didn't have any money. Slavery in the south made commodity traders in the north rich, not the slave owners. You may find that hard to believe... How can you own slaves and not be rich? How can you live in one of those huge plantation houses, and not be rich? The economics of slavery favor the slave trader, not the slave owner. And those plantation houses look huge until you realize it housed an extended family of 20-30 people, plus house slaves. There were white people working the fields right next to the slaves (and they were treated only marginally better).

The south didn't have any money, but war is expensive. So how did the civil war even happen?! Turns out the south had a friend across the ocean willing to lend them very very large amounts of money. Now what could the UK possibly want in return for funding a civl war? America split in two, that's what. Divide and conquer. The war of 1812 was only 50 years ago, and Britain had not yet given up aspirations of reconquest.

Lincoln didn't free the slaves because he's a nice guy. Lincoln proclaimed emancipation to make the British government's support of slave-owning confederates EXTREMELY unpopular with the British people, who were vehemently abolitionist. Lincoln turned a war about the economic oppression of the south into a war about slavery, and in doing so, isolated the south from the rest of the world. Without the support of the UK, or the industrial capacity of the north, the confederacy was doomed.

They don't this in schools because anyone who says the civil was wasn't about slavery is a racist confederacy apologist. The fact that you don't know the civil was was about keeping North America free of the tyranny of the British crown is DANGEROUS..... and the political correctness that lead to that ignorance is one of the tumors slowly killing America.

They're effective, efficient (per dollar), and badly needed. I spent some time looking for something I could be comfortable donating to monthly, and this is the one I concentrated all my charitable donations to (aside from my own volunteering in an unrelated area). http://www.msf.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Please mod parent up. The examination he cites has the potential to save countless developers from getting burned by this toxic crap "database".

Mod parent up. A cursory look at that reference is proof beyond a doubt that Mongo is the sheerest garbage (to borrow the infamous quote from the history of QCD).

Good thing, too. Your comment prompts me to remind readers the fact that China's repressive and amoral government is almost completely dominated by scientists and engineers: http://singularityhub.com/2011...

As W.F. Buckley quipped, "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."

Mod parent down for misrepresenting what GP wrote by dishonestly converting "just as reasonable" to "equal estimated probability". There is no reasonable argument for assigning probability either way because extrapolating backwards beyond a singularity at creation is not possible. Any assertion to the contrary is falling for the Bayesian bullshit epistemology that Popper and then other critical rationalists discredited time and again throughout the 2nd half of the 20th century. Selecting one option is no more or less reasonable than choosing another and, in the cases of those showing a preference, just reveals their biases.

While GP would have preferably written that it's just as (un)reasonable to say any one thing created the universe vs. any other thing whatsoever, rather than just mention the two ideas that he did, it's quite clear he did not intend to imply it's a dichotomy.

Both parent and GP failed to note that a creation event isn't necessary, because there is no contradiction to or evidence against a model without an initial singularity that posits an eternal pre-inflatinonary universe: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... (note that in this case, the Big Bang is not a discontinuity as in, say multiverse models where a quantum fluctuation may spawn another universe).

Yes, and unions don't abuse their power *rolleyes*. I live in what one of your few remaining old-school conservatives, Patrick Buchanan, with only slight hyperbole described as Soviet Canuckistan, and I beg to differ. The unions in Ontario and BC have caused tremendous economic damage. Their achievements are perfectly exemplified by virtually every group of road workers you pass by: one guy working, three-four people watching. I never saw such inefficiency in the several years I lived in the US (outside of government bureaucracy). Canada ranks very low in terms of productivity per capita, and it's clear why.

I'm with you if (1) you increase the threshold age to around 24, because, while cannabis' safety record is pretty good in adults, it does have significant negative developmental effects — and the prefrontal cortex of humans doesn't complete development until around the early 20s (for the same reason, I believe the voting age ought to be raised); and, (2) you likewise legalize psychedelic drugs (psylocybin/mushrooms, mescaline, DMT, LSD) as, unlike most other psychoactive drugs, they're non-addictive and have no dangerous side-effects in healthy individuals.

Whoops, I mixed up the order of the links. [1] is just Bandyopadhyay's commentary that links his experimental results to those theories of consciousness.

And this is the trick: continuity is a core aspect of the experience of consciousness; otherwise, this scenario is identical to killing the original and "activating" the cloned mind.

One thing that could throw a kink into the scenario, however, is the possibility (albeit, IMHO, less than even) that some core aspects of consciousness are encoded as quantum information, in which case it cannot be cloned (by the no-cloning theorem). Some hints that this may be the case are to be found in recent experimental research: the most important result is http://www.researchgate.net/pu... but also see http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... and http://iopscience.iop.org/1742... as well as, for an overview of this area, http://journals.sfu.ca/jnonloc...

No, you can't.

The $10,000 threshold was set in 1970, when it really was a large amount (over $60,000 in today's dollars). Now, not so much, and over the years, the number of people becoming ensnared due to transactions that are not in support of any crime has increased. What do you say to that, you statist scum? Do you seriously suppose that the threshold was not linked to inflation but left to have its real value fall continuously and indefinitely because of oversight? Because if so, you're either a bald-faced liar, or, well, I have a bridge to sell you.