The people in your TV set

All are welcome.

I for one don't want to give Physics research a blank check to investigate some unobservable math fantasy.

Why not? And who exactly is asking for a "blank check"?

Could not agree more. We cut the cord over 8 years ago and time shift every program we take off air to delete the commercials. Only thing we have is internet, not even basic cable. It is via legal streaming services like Netflix and Amazon prime as well as off air that we partake of any entertainment. No Hulu since they expect that we pay for the service and endure commercials to boot, What a racket that one is! Off air programming in HD is far and away better than that delivered by the cable companies too. Sports, never watch them unless you consider F1 cars and bikes a sport, which I don't. More of a Nerd VS. Nerd competition with backing by really wealthy companies. Point is this, when I can choose the channels, AND ONLY THE CHANNELS, I want for a reasonable price then I may be enticed back. Now we all know this is not really going to happen from the cable and satellite companies. Sooner or later though the content providers will figure it out and simply bypass the cable and satellite companies completely by having the likes of Netflix or others host and serve up the content. The NFL, the NBA, the NHL, are all milking everyone for all they can get right now and this includes ESPN who in turn does that same the cable/satellite providers who in turn do the same to the average stupid subscriber to their crappy sub par service. In the end it is likely that if those that actually watch the sports now have to fit the vast majority of bill for the service at the ridiculously elevated rates charged right now, the viewership would fall very quickly indeed. If more were to cut the cord, really more of a paring down as it were, they all would have to adapt to the desires of the consumer.

But that all misses the point here. The point of the holographic principle is not that one can imagine a 3D encoding onto a 2D surface, e.g. a holograph, but that the maximum possible information in a volume is not proportional to volume, but to surface area. That implies the fundamental mechanics of the universe can't be something like "voxels". We observe a universe which we can measure in 3 spatial dimension down to the Plank length, in principle, but that can't be what's really going on, at least if the holographic principle holds.

"Falsifiable" is a better word here. You don't need to be able to do controlled experiments (tests) in order to have a solid theory - an influx of new observations of the universe as we find it works just as well.

And the holographic principle is certainly falsifiable.

1) It imposes a limit on the amount of entropy in any given volume - find a system which can be in more than the allowed number of states, and isn't inside a black hole, and this theory is dead.

2) It sets a really high value on the entropy of black holes. Black holes become the dominant source of entropy in our universe. This has consequences in cosmology that are fundamental, if the only reason entropy is increasing in our universe is this assigning of entropy to black holes. There are certainly physicists playing with that idea, as it could be career-making, true or false.

3) It has deep implications for the evolution of black holes - how they evaporate. This will be a lot harder to prove (I don't think we'll validate Hawking radiation in my lifetime), but might be possible to falsify by finding a black hole that's clearly not allowed by theory.

Heck, there are implications for particle physics that are still being understood, and lots there is testable now with the LHC. The more and farther you reason from a premise like this, the more likely it is to matter to something easy to measure, or at least possible to measure.

The reason the discovery of the Higgs boson was such a big deal is that it confirmed a bunch of really abstract theory in quantum mechanics that is very, very far from anything we can measure, except at the end of this very long chain of reasoning there's this prediction of this new oddball particle (that there's no other reason to expect - it come from deep in the abstract math of QM, not from anything else we measured). So finding that particle confirms that whole crazy chain of logic. Something similar will eventually happen for the holographic principle.

In a trade-off between speed for the user, and development time, there's never one 100% true answer. Everything depends on what you're developing. But a bias towards the user is a good mindset to cultivate.

I thought that I'd heard some pretty compelling OS sales pitches in my time; but "Perhaps the #1 choice of impoverished peasants buying their first finite state machine!, if we can get the OEM deals through" simply redefines my expectations of what is possible in the genre. What could possibly be more thrilling than that?

You seem to be arguing "it's doesn't matter what form the calories take" for weight loss, and many actually believe it's that simple. The "in" vs "out" is the final measure, sure, but the nature of the "in" matters a lot in practice.

IANAL, but afaik that is correct on both counts. Namely, the person who didn't write the contract can easily misconstrue what was written, so the burden is on the party that wrote it to iron out those ambiguities.

That said, I could easily see a situation where ESPN left something out.

Maybe I missed the whoosh, but there are definitely "VanillaJS jobs" out there - friend of mine recently got a nice job with Apple with about 10 years of "frameworks are for the weak" JS experience - built his whole career on vanilla JS.

if everything is automated, there is no more poor or middle class

besides, a poor country like the philippines: everyone has a maid and a driver. even the maids have maids and drivers

having people work for you is not proof of being rich. it's a proof of overpopulation

My current car (a 12 Infiniti) has the steering headligts - great in the parking lot, really makes a different, not sure how much it matters at speed. It's currently a luxury feature, but with time and technology it won't be.

I could certainly see these new additions (at some absurd price) being sold on top-tier luxury cars, where you can already get IR vision assistance with pedestrian highlighting for a few grand - adding this to that tech package would make sense, After a few years it might come down to more common luxury cars, which gets production up to where it can start the road to normal cars.

Backup cameras used to be just as "who needs that" luxury, after all.

I hear great things about that new-fangled VanillaJS framework. Very lightweight and fast, and already more popular than jQuery.

I would hardly classify ethernet as "necessary"; wifi serves the same purpose in most situations, and more conveniently. I honestly can't remember the last time I actually used the RJ45 port on a laptop (other than loading a software image as part of my tech support job).

And how often would you want to connect an external drive at the same time you need to connect the laptop for charging? I'll grant that only having a single multipurpose connection point (like the new 12" MacBook) could be a bit of a bother in situations like that, but I can't see it being an obstacle.

In the United States, contracts are understood by the letter, so if it isn't explicitly written, then it isn't enforceable (as opposed to say high context cultures, where there's strong enforcement of "implied" language.)

That said, it's entirely possible that Verizon's contract with ESPN is worded in such a way that they can get away with doing this. Verizon seems to think so, but ESPN seems to disagree. So that's where an impartial (theoretically) judge decides the result of how its worded, and how it will be enforced.