Are you saying the Nobels aren't political? I've nothing against Obama but awarding him the peace prize before he'd even done anything was a very clear political statement.

While I agree that awarding President Obama the Nobel peace prize before he had been in office long enough to accomplish anything was a bit emberrassing (for all parties, I suspect), that has nothing to do with what he was saying. He was saying in effect, that some right-wing wingnut with "socialism is slavery" as their signature line dismissing Paul Krugman as a political hack and only an economist as a 'distant second' is misinformation at best, and given the track record of the American right in recent years, probably closer to an outright lie. Krugman may be politically active, but having won the nobel prize for economics, he is most certainly an economist of note, whose opinions are worth considering whether or not we personally agree with them.

And by the way, as one who lived many years in countries with socialized medicine, as well as in the United States, I would say the system in America, where your health is tied directly to your employment status, is much closer to slavery than any of western European "socialist" systems, but I digress.

*50 Shades fans excluded, because they are a brain damaged lot.

Absolutely true! Not just the 50 shades reference, which is spot on, but the overall sentiment. The best reviews are done by the average public, though I would argue that said public should include authors of the Genre (perhaps marked with an icon as such). SciFi authors tend to be SciFi fans--I certainly am, and once my book comes out (shameless plug: Autonomy) next month, I won't be able to rate any of the hundreds of books I've read and enjoyed, which is a pity, because a fan of the genre, whether or not they write themself, is better suited to critiquing or reviewing a book in the genre than some random sampling of the broader populace.

It is supposed to mean it has height, width, depth and time.

By that definition, every "3D" movie we watch is actually "4D" (and I shudder to think how soon we'll probably see that marketing tripe in the wild).

What's next? 5-D, because we shower the audience with water when it rains on screen too? Absolute bullshit. It's a 3d moving image.

Maybe this case will make that happen. Would that be so bad?

This case will not make that happen. This is pure protectionism under the guise of patent law and court arbitration. It's no coincidence that Apple is being found guilty of violating Samsung patents in Korea, and in a travesty of justice, Samsung is being found guilty of violating Apples sacred monopoly on rectangles with rounded corners in the United States.

Welcome to protectionism 21st Century style, and another nail in the coffin of innovation.

sickening

Are governments allowed to assess a tax (or fee) outside of their own territory?

Yes.

Long Answer:

The US routinely assess taxes on its citizens everywhere in the world (it is one of the only, if not the only, country to do this to its citizens). When I lived in the UK I had to file returns in both countries. Had I lived in Hong Kong or Switzerland, I would have had to pay the difference between their tax rate and the higher US tax rate to Uncle Sam.

As far a fees go, just about anyone who has applied for any kind of visa will be able to attest that governments routinely charge fees outside of their borders. Visit any US consolate abroad to apply for an immigration visa to the US, or any other country's consulate abroad for the same purpose.

So yes, governments can and do assess taxes AND fees outside of their borders. I think it would be perfectly fine for the BBC to sell their service to viewers abroad...except they probably made the mistake of buying some of their content from other studios, and are prevented from doing so by the usual "splinter the market" contractual clauses that stem from the same outdated mindset that has given us region encoded DVDs and Blurays.

It is creepy, and a good reason not to register as a member of either party...no matter how much you may want to vote in the primaries.

Reality is not a wave function. It's a useful model, but it's absurd to think of it as real and physical.

The cat isn't really both alive and dead. It's either still alive or it died. It certainly knows.

Reality is reality and models are models.

Except that now we are finding the cat is both dead and alive. The question is, which universe do you inhabit? The only way for you to find out is to measure the result, collapse the probability, and determine which reality you inhabit. Your copy (the one you're so desparate to believe doesn't exist, perhaps because s/he threatens your sense of uniqueness, or free will, or whatever), if s/he opens the box and looks, will find s/he inhabits a universe with a different outcome.

As for self determination and uniqueness, this need not really trouble people. In an infinite set of universes, any outcome will be statistical in nature. Like predicting which atom will decay during the half-life of a radioactive material, no prediction can be made as to a particular state (or decision) you or I, as individuals in an indivual timeline, will make. We are still perfectly free to make decisions, and perfectly responisble for their outcomes, regardless of whether the decision we make matches that of 90% of our duplicates, or 0.0001%.

We may not be unique, but that doesn't mean we don't have free will. (Of course, we may not, but that doesn't follow from quantum physics, repetition in an infinite set, or any of the other variations of parallelism that appear more and more to be a fundamental property of our reality).

So people just need to chill, and see where the math and science actually take us. If it turns out we do inhabit a single, unqiue universe, then we get our uniqueness back and those bothered by parallelism are in luck (though it will be a short lived relief, geologically speaking, and ultimately fatal, astrophysically speaking). If it turns out otherwise, then so what? We still live our lives, with or without determinism. Whether we debate that in the context of a single unique timeline, or multiple, perhaps infinite timelines, doesn't really matter.

The only real loser is religion, whic presupposes just the one timeline. But then, religion has a long history of losing out to science and changing its teachings accordingly (like cockroaches, the memes don't die, they just adapt), so even that is unlikely to change if or when the multi-world hypothesis is proven.

So even the most dogmatic mind need not be threatened by either outcome...except perhaps for someone like the character in Star Trek, who is driven mad at the thought of another person in another universe just like them and spends eternity trying to hunt down and kill his duplicate. In which case, if reality is other than what they desire, tough shit.

Fuck that. If the populace keeps electing people who pass these laws, then representative democracy is working as it should. You don't withdraw your support from a government by "resisting". You lawfully withdraw your support from a government by expatriating (paying any required exit taxes on your way out the door), and denying it the revenue stream from your future taxes.

The US has a very effective financial Berlin wall built around the country. American Citizens and Permanent Residents (Green Card holders) are taxed on the basis of their citizenship/residency, irrespective of where they live. Want to renounce your citizenship? Fine. You'll still be taxed for an additional 10 years.

Good luck "sticking it to the man" through emigration.

It's GPLed, anyone can fork it. The trick is to get a critical mass of users and constributers to buy into your fork.

Take for example my fork of the GIMP, entitled QuitYourPurileBitchingAboutCallingTheGimpTheGimp. Exactly the same feature set as the Gimp, and it's even launchable via a shorthand symlink "QuitYourBitching".

Not much uptake, though.

However, in the current acquisition process, Motorola can take no action without the explicit consent of Google, especially for legal actions (suing or granting licenses) because those actions would be binding to Google after the acquisition.

True, but didn't Motorola start this litagion before the merger was agreed? In which case, they wouldn't have needed, or sought, Google's approval.

I can easily believe intelligence agencies have got a lot better over time, not to mention ruthless and focused, but it seems that if these guys can pull off a devastating attack then basically anyone can and we may as well give up now. No need for "training in Pakistan" for those guys.

Pakistan isn't a necessary venue to learn how to do this sort of thing, but it (or similar isolated areas where brainwashing can occur with no external influences to offset) appears necessary to warp people into being willing to commit these sort of atrocities.

"But Pakistan is our ally!" I hear someone saying ... well, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

e-books will not seriously take off until they are suitably cheap. Once they're like iOS "games", selling for $1-2, people will start to buy them when selling portals are integrated into the various ereaders.

That won't happen for a very long time, book publishers are terrified of losing control of the entire distribution and "scarcity" control.

That won't happen soon because of Amazon's pricing model. If you price a book for under $2.99, you only get 30% royalties (as opposed to 70% for $2.99 and greater if you organize your account right). If it were 70% all the way down, more authoris might be willing to price lower, but who wants to write a book just to give Amazon 70%?

You might as well go with the old guard publishers in that case (well, not really, they pay even less, but still, at leat they'll give you an advance, and some distribution muscle.)

Presumably, one could extend this cable to increase the amount of time between Alice and Bob's measurement and Victor's decision to entangle or not.

Presumably long enough for Alice and Bob to send the result of their measurement to Victor.

And then instead of an RNG, Victor chooses to entangle based on whatever would contradict Alice and Bob's measurement.

Come on, we have to try...

Unfortunatley, unless you know of a way to remove yourself from the causality timestream, you'll never see a contradictory result. Even if you tell Victor, and he does the opposite, history will simply rewrite itself to align the results, and you'll just end up with an argument with Alice and Bob lambasting Victor for not sticking to plan, and doing the opposite.

t0 Alice+Bob=Non-entangled
t1 Alice+Bob tell Victor
t2 Victor "does the opposite" and doens't entangle
--change propogates backward to t0
t0' Alice+Bob=Non-entangled
t1' Alice+Bob tell Victor ...
either you're stuck in an infinite loop, or more likely, t1' is muddled such that the communication to Victor remains the same (or doesn't happen) and Alice and Bob are pissed as hell at Victor for "spoiling" the experiment by not doing what was "agreed."

I'm more interested in the trading applications of this, particularly if you can put together a 24 light-hour loop of cable and respond to "go/no-go" trading decisions. :-)

I recall your post from the last time a meta-analysis was performed concluding 75%, then ~90% likelihood of life found on Mars by Viking.

This is the 3rd meta-analysis to conclude the same thing, yet even the science shows like CBC's Quirks & Quarks haven't addressed the issue.

I find it very frustrating that possibly the most significant discovery in history has been virtually ignored.

These results threaten the central dogmas of most Abrahamic-derived religions (certainly most Islamic and Christian dogmas). Some sects will adjust their beliefs to fit the new science, but many (probably most) will react badly.

Because NASA clearly violated protocols and made a point of issuing results that are antithetical to the experimental results, it is clear this decision was political. It may in part be a fear of issuing press releases only to have them debunked later, but that doesn't explain burying and ignoring mathematical analyses that clearly support the original, positive results. So clearly this goes beyond PR, and is deeply political. The only political segment of our society that benefits, or would insist, on a negative result is the religious right (or one or two powerfully placed individuals with that bent, as the overt political power of the right was not as readily apparent then).

The authorities at the very least appear to have feared public reaction to this, probably more from the religious right as most others find the possiblity fascinating. They may have also feared the broader debunking of religion in general, particularly as we were in the height of the Cold War, and such results would have vindicated the Soviet stance on religion over the western stance.

Embarrassing and humiliating to anyone with any scientific or intellectual integrity, to think these results were skewed by (at best) PR motives and (more likely) religious-political agendas. Of course, it could be something else entirely, but that seems rather unlikely.