...and to extract work while doing so. No? Which means converting it to some form where it has higher entropy.

Look, it seems like you are more or less just making stuff up based on your rather incomplete understanding of thermodynamics, which is why recommended you to actually read up on the subject. Setting aside the rather dubious claim that a perfectly isolated system can even exist, what you are describing is exactly how you could define a perpetual motion machine of the second kind: an isolated system that performs work using energy from a single heat reservoir, without transferring heat to an external cooler reservoir. Such a machine cannot exist, because it violates the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated(!) system never decreases. The system tends towards thermal equilibrium, where all the energy is converted to a uniform distribution of heat.

If you had bothered to look any of this up, you would have already known this, instead of speaking out of your ass based on what you think a perpetual motion machine is and why it must be impossible.

The key flaw in your reasoning is that you seem to think of energy as something that's equivalent regardless of its form. It is not so. In fact, whenever we use energy to perform some work, it actually isn't the energy in itself that we are using, but its state of being far from equilibrium. Its "order", for the lack of a better word. The energy is just a carrier. And when we are using heat energy, we are actually not using the heat in itself, but exploiting the temperature differential between the heat reservoir and a cooler reservoir. That's why all heat producing power plants need cooling water, and the reason jet engines get higher efficiency when flown through cooler air at high altitude (even if it's thinner). Conversely, it explains why a refrigerator requires external energy even though it is removing energy from its interior, and why a heat pump can have more than 100% heating efficiency whereas distributed heating can never reach 100%.

One physicist who have written a lot about these things is Ilya Prigogine, if you are interested to read more, although I'm sure you could find many others.

I think you should ask yourself what it actually means to "use" energy. What purpose can energy have that does not involve irreversibly transforming it to heat?

Or to put it another way: If you have a system that takes in a lot of useful energy, and it does not transform this energy to heat (which inevitably would be radiated as black-body radiation as the system's temperature increases), then you are either: 1) wasting energy, by not exploiting all the work it could have performed before releasing it, or 2) just storing it without actually using it (although the process of storing it would involve performing some work as well).

If, on the other hand, you have managed to build a magical system that can perform useful work without extracting it from the energy you are continually collecting, but can "reuse" energy like a perpetual motion machine, then why the fsck are you collecting more? You don't need it!

Honestly, though, I really think you should pick up a physics text book that covers thermodynamics if you want to understand these things. From your responses (assuming you're not just trolling) it's evident that if you ever read one, you either didn't understand it, or you've forgotten some pretty basic principles and need to refresh. Now the argument sounds more like "I don't really know, therefore aliens can do it. Easy peasy."

Not sure if I'm feeding a troll now, but, yes it does. "Using" energy specifically means transforming it such that the entropy increases. The energy doesn't disappear, you can only change its form. And the form where it has the highest entropy (i.e. where you have extracted all useful work), is heat.

All a Dyson sphere does is exploiting the energy difference between its interior and its exterior. All the energy passes through it; the sphere just maximises the entropy as it passes through, in order to perform as much useful work as possible. If it emits anything other than pure black-body radiation, that means it has inefficiencies.

Better for whom? I'm saying is that we agree that it probably would be safer, at least from some average utilitarian perspective. The point you are still missing is that for me as a driver, and most other potential buyers of these cars, it is pretty much pointless to ever switch it automatic drive if we have to be 100% alert all the time and be prepared to intervene to avoid the risk of being charged with manslaughter at any random moment. If whatever happens is on me, and the car company doesn't trust their own car enough to accept liability for what it does, then it sure as f*ck is going to be me who is behind the wheel. And this is how lots of people will reason, whether the car is actually a better driver than them or not. People may be overestimating themselves, but when it's their neck that's on the line, lots of them are going to want to be in charge. That's just psychology. So for these fully automatic cars to be widely adopted, for the benefit of us all IMHO, I think it is crucial that the legal systems ensures that the passengers are not held liable for whatever flaws the car has.

You are missing the point. The point is that unless the liability is with the car manufacturer, you're basically a riding scapegoat for whatever might go wrong, and realistically with a minimal ability to actually do anything about a sudden situation. If you're smart you wouldn't want that as a car owner.

So it isn't a question of whether the driver-less cars can drive more safely or not; I'm sure they can. It's a question of who's in charge of the car. Is the car maker ready to accept responsibility for what the car maker has programmed it to do? If they're not confident enough to do that, then why would I let it drive for me, instead of just driving myself?

Aren't you underestimating the capacity of people to fuck up? The US accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 despite Mode III IFF squawks, so it wouldn't be the first time that happened. Maybe they figured it was imposing, or whatever. I tend to go for Hanlon's razor in cases like this.

Of course it's technically possible to transmit packets with essentially 0% loss, and I'm sure there are set-ups that would work under the right circumstances. That's not the point. The point is that each and every component involved, from hardware through firmware to software, is designed under the premiss that it is okay to drop a packet at any time for any reason, or to duplicate or reorder packets. Even if you get it to work, the replacement of any single component, or the triggering of some corner case you haven't tested for (some hardware counter wrapping around or whatever imaginable), might suddenly blow everything up. It's just an insanely fragile system, and you need to have complete and total control of the implementation of every involved component, not just their specifications, in order to ensure that your system meets your spec.

Either switch protocol, or implement something on top of UDP that adds the reliability. There is no other sane way.

Oh, you got that far at least? What I wonder is, why are people trying to do things that need guarantees using UDP with no back-communication, no redundancy built in to the protocol, and not even detection of lost packets? External requirement my ass, why do you accept a contract under those conditions? The correct thing to say is "this is broken, and it's not going to work". If they still want the turd polished, it should be under very clear conditions of not accepting responsibility for the end result, and they should be known and understood by all decision makers at the customer. And even so I would be wary.

Otherwise, you're in a prime position for getting hit by the blame when shit hits the fan, either because it doesn't work, or because you didn't tell them that in the first place, since you are supposed to be the expert.

I suppose this is the next Tick in Microsoft's equivalent of Intel's Tick Tock development model. In Microsoft's case, they get redesign hubris with every other version, then spend the following version back-tracking and undoing all the things they did wrong.

Much like Windows 7 pretty much was a fix-up of Vista, Windows 9 appears to be a "corrected" Windows 8.

Don't worry, this is my night job.

Obvious campaign slogan for his pursuit: "Yank Barry from Wikipedia!"

Obviously, you could say the same thing for any well defined tax curve, more progressive ones as well. It doesn't have to be X%+Y. What you're really saying is that you want all incomes to be treated the same way, and that there should be no deductions.

The reality isn't going to be that simple; for starters you need to define income in some way that is both fair and can't be evaded easily. And if you are too strict about everything being level, you have lost a whole range of financial instruments that are sometimes useful for fine-tuning a market (e.g. internalising externalities like the cost of pollution). But the principle of making the system as simple and transparent as possible I can agree to.

One reason why a progressive tax system is a good thing is the following: In general, you can get a higher appreciation on your assets if you have more of them. In other words, the richer you are, the faster you can increase your relative wealth. If you set up the differential equations for this, you will notice that the system is unstable, and will asymptotically reach a point where very few own almost everything. A progressive tax system counterbalances this effect, so that there can be an stable equilibrium where some are richer and some are poorer.

Incidentally, this kind of concentration of wealth to a small elite is exactly what we have been seeing in recent decades. Because in practice, the tax systems in most countries aren't really progressive all the way up to the top. If you are rich enough, you either get your income through other means than a salary, which is then usually associated with a lower tax rate, or you escape taxes through more creative measures, like moving your assets to a tax haven.

What people are saying here is that those claiming that increased gun ownership leads to lower crime rates are using utterly flawed logic. That does not mean that they necessarily argue for the opposite position. In fact, the person you responded to explicitly said that "I'm not arguing for one side or the other".

Why is it so freaking hard for people on Slashdot to understand the difference between a counterargument and making the opposite claim? There is such a thing as "we do not know".