I assure you that they try. All the time.

We're not at the top of the food chain because the other species are nice to us. Or because we're nice, for that matter.

I agree with you completely. In my mind, it made Kirk less badass. In the original timeline he goes through some shit on his way to captain. As an ensign on the USS Republic, he had to make a choice between friendship and duty, and ended logging a bad mistake made by a friend that cost that friend the chance to ever be promoted to captain; As a lieutenant on the Farragut he encountered the cloud creature, which ended up killing his captain, something he blamed himself for many years afterwards; he spent some time as an instructor at Starfleet Academy, with a reputation for being an incredibly tough teacher; he was awarded several medals and distinctions and had an exemplary record as was read in the episode Court Martial...

By the time Kirk became captain, he had a proven record and the career and life experience to go with it. He was young, but he wasn't green. Then JJ Abrams just went and took all that away from him.

But even that I could forgive if it had been an otherwise good movie. There are actually some real life precedents for stuff like that. Nathanael Greene was promoted from private to Major General straight out. It was the Revolutionary War, and it was an army that was just formed in response to the Siege of Boston, not exactly a well established military, so a bit easier to understand.

You do realize that Google's car is already, right now better at handling random things popping up in front of it than human drivers, right? Go google info of specific tests, on actual streets, where people previously hidden by obstacles suddenly walk in front of the car, out of nowhere.

Does that mean it's always going to stop in time? No. It means it's going to stop in time more often than a human driver.

Does that mean the car will never make 'bad' choices, and enter into an avoidable accident? No. But it will be involved in less avoidable accidents than a human driver.

Does that mean it will be able to make choices such as, "child or dog" as to what to hit? At this stage, probably not, and it'll drive to avoid both, maybe hit the dog, maybe hit the child, maybe hit both. How often do you run into questions like that when you're driving in your daily commute? I'm going to say that ethically the number of lives that will be saved in the far more numerous, more traditional accidents that a driverless car can completely avoid better than humans are worth that child's life.

Which is it? Do you cerebral and intelligent so that you can have something to think about for a while, or do you want mindless fun?

There's nothing wrong with mindless fun movies. Sometimes I want to shut my brain off and be entertained by James Bond. But there is a place for cerebral movies. Now, to be honest, none of the Star Trek movies fit that bill, unfortunately. Even the original movies went the action route, they didn't really follow the footsteps of the cerebral star trek episodes. What JJ Abrams did was to turn the action into CGI-fest, which is ok, and turned the mindless action into something that will actively prevent you from suspending disbelief, which is not ok.

Seriously, if I could have turned my brain off and enjoyed the action, it'd be fine. But he kept jolting me awake with things like "a supernova that threatened to destroy the galaxy". Does he realize how big galaxies are? That stars go supernova and hypernova regularly? Because your average Star Trek viewer does. Or how about the second movie where they stop a volcano eruption with a "cold" fusion device. Where "cold" means it makes the volcano cold and freezes the lava. Which for some reason stops the eruption, because it's about temperature, not pressure, right?

I can't shut down my brain if the movie keeps saying stupid shit that forces me to analyze what they're saying. If they just had gone the other way and explained less, it'd be an improvement. But then, it would also be nice if they didn't fill it with plot holes. That also forces me to analyze the movie.

Look, you want to make a Star Trek movie that is pure action, to bring in the non-nerds to the theater? I'd rather have the cerebral Star Trek movie, but I'm actually ok with it, because that's the strategy that every other Star Trek movie took. We just have the ability for better special effects now. But the JJ Abrams movies were horrible. If they didn't have the Star Trek label to them, they would still be fucking horrible movies. I'm not raging against the reboot, I don't care that he rebooted the franchise. I care that he made two really bad movies. If they had handed over the franchise to Uwe Boll, they might have turned out better. Well, at least it couldn't be worse.

What about Star Wars? Could he make good Star Wars? Probably not, because he has no incentive to. The absolute crap he puts out is generally commercially successful, so that's what's he going to do again. What bothers me is that the best Star Wars stories are not the movies, but they're in the expanded universe. So here they have the opportunity to make Episodes 7,8,9 by making a movie version of the Thrawn trilogy (and yeah, recast the actors as younger people, give the old actors cameos if you want). Instead they go the opposite way and completely break with expanded universe. That doesn't bode well for what JJ wants to do with them.

Not really. I have a beer at lunch once in a while. I do so in plain view of my boss. The way some of you guys describe jobs, I really wonder why you don't leave. You're in a technical field, jobs really aren't that hard to find. Take a pay cut, go work for a startup, get more freedom. Still a ton of work and insane hours, but you're not going to get your boss writing you up for an official warning from HR because you had a beer during lunch.

Holy shit, tomorrow?? Yeah, I wouldn't blame them for firing you in that case, I would too. The guy you're responding to said a couple of drinks, not get plastered and blow the afternoon off. Somehow I think if you instead texted back, "sorry, I'm currently at lunch. I'll get to it as soon as I'm back in the office," it wouldn't be that big of a deal. It's still a workday, dude.

Well, you can't really prove you're conscious. I don't even mean proving it to me, I mean you can't prove it to yourself.

What if every decision you make is made before you realize it? What if what you think of as consciousness, what you think of as your decision making process, is merely a byproduct of packaging that decision up for dissemination to other parts of your brain that need to know about it, but weren't involved in the making of the decision. Maybe you didn't even make the decision for the reasons you think you've made it. You think you decided to get the high deductible insurance over the low deduction insurance because you have enough money saved up to pay the deductible if you have to, so paying a smaller monthly premium makes sense. In reality, your brain structure is wired up to prefer lower payments, and you would have made that decision whether you had the money available to pay for the deductible or not. In fact, you did make the decision immediately, but as your brain was packaging up that information, it consolidated it with other related facts you knew, like how much money you have saved up. That information happens to mesh with the decision that was made completely independently from "you", as you think of yourself, from your "consciousness." So it justifies the decision, and that wiring on your brain thinks it's now MAKING that decision as a result of it. If, in fact, you didn't have enough money to cover the deductible, you would have made the same decision, because the decision was already made, and simply have filed that information on the cons column of what you *think* is your decision-making process, but is really just a filing operation.

There's really no way for you tell the difference between your being conscious vs. a purely deterministic computation that has the side-effect of treating a high-level summary of a complex process as the actual driving component of all the process. I personally believe that's actually what happens, because otherwise it requires us to invent this weird concept of consciousness which nobody has a good strong definition for.

There's no reason it can't be both.

Picture this scenario. Last week you saw a green Tesla leaving your neighborhood as you were coming back from work. It's a sufficiently rare care that you noticed it, but it's not an interesting enough event that you gave it a second though. Today a friend of yours calls you up and says he bought a new car, a Tesla. He says, in fact, that he was so excited about it he immediately drove to your place to show it to you, but you weren't home. You haven't retrieved that memory in that whole week, but you immediately recall it now and say, "man, I remember that! I just missed you. Green, right?" That's when he says, "nope, it's blue."

This confuses you, so you start thinking about that memory. Could it have been blue? What are the odds it was another Tesla, when you know your friend dropped by with his at about that same time? Now you're going to be trying to picture that memory with the car colored blue, maybe you'll start with something that could be bluish green. You're constantly retrieving that information and trying to make it mesh with the new info you've received. This weekend, you actually see your friend's car. Now you try to put that blue together with your memory.

Eventually, you're going to actually remember a blue Tesla leaving your neighborhood. The act of thinking about it often and trying to make that memory agree with the other information you've acquired is going to change the actual memory. It doesn't matter why you saw a green car. Maybe it was a different Tesla. Maybe the sun was shining and the glare made you see a different color. Regardless your original memory was green...but it decayed to blue once you added that information and kept retrieving it over and over again.

This is why there's a problem with false memories in eyewitnesses. Once you tell them that a memory is important, and you start questioning them about it, they're going to retrieve that memory. Then they're going to have natural gaps in either the memory, or the information, because they didn't get a good enough view. But they're going to be under pressure to remember EVERYTHING. So they think about it. They subconsciously supplement what they remember and fill in the gaps with details from other memories, with deductions about what must have been happening at that time, with their biases, with whatever the person questioning them is trying to lead them to answer...in the end, their memory will have degraded into a mixture of what they actually witnessed and what they created in their mind. But they won't be able to tell the difference. They'll argue with you, they'll say, "I KNOW what I saw!" in the face of conflicting testimony, in the face of video evidence. Because, as far as they know, they remember it.

Refreshing memories in order to keep them alive is all well and good, but if every time you refresh them, they're a little bit corrupted, a little bit changed, then they're going to decay.

The factory isn't for Tesla vehicles only. Tesla and Panasonic (the factory is a join venture) intend to supply other electric vehicle manufacturers with cheaper batteries. So the potential market is much greater.

I suggest you try searching for used Model S prices, before just offering your reasoned-out guess as fact. Year-old vehicles are going for incredibly close to retail. So much so that it doesn't make sense to sell back to Tesla at their Best Resale Value Guarantee, which assures that the depreciation is going to be less than equivalent BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Lexus or Jaguar vehicles.

You might want to read that article. In particular, "But he added that distillers grains aren't likely the sole cause, because on some operations, the foam will emerge in some buildings but not others, even when all the hogs are getting the same feed mix."

I think far more disturbing than the feed the hogs are eating is their living condition. If the hogs weren't all jammed up in a building living atop their own manure, the foam wouldn't be particularly dangerous, even if its composition remained the same. Also, less problems with disease transmission between them. If we're going to raise the cost of meat, I'd rather do it by giving the hogs a bit more space than by making the feed more expensive.

What part of, "I've personally rebooted while driving" did you miss? Everything continues to work just fine. Headlamps, doors, regenerative breaking. The air suspension doesn't start suddenly doing anything. I can accelerate and slow down, as well as steer just fine. And when the touchscreen comes back online, it still has the powerplant data you're talking about, the watt/mile graph...it shows data collected while the screen was rebooting, because that functionality doesn't reside there.

The touchscreen computer, and the front panel computer for that matter, is the interface to that functionality, it doesn't control the functionality. My phone can control the headlamps and doors for the Tesla, but if I shut my phone off, it doesn't impact anything. Same for the center touchscreen. What you're saying is the equivalent of saying that an exploit in a browser means an exploit in the server you're connecting to with said browser. There *could* be an exploit to the actual important stuff in the car, but being able to execute code on the touchscreen doesn't imply that.

Bullshit. Tesla has stated that the computer that controls the 17" and panel LCDs are completely separated from the important stuff in the car. They'd be stupid not to. Case in point, you can reboot both systems by holding left and right buttons on the steering wheel. You can do so while driving, I've personally done it. The music stops playing, and you need to put your gps destination in again after it finishes rebooting. If you reboot the panel screen, you lose your speedometer until it boots back up. Steering, acceleration, braking, cruise control, it all continues to work normally.

Yes, you can change driving settings from that interface, but it doesn't mean the functionality resides in that interface. It just passes the message through to much more robust computer handling actual car functions, and I'm sure said messages are sanitized to the extreme on the receiving end.

A few other jobs that were lost to technology:

The knocker-up was a person whose responsibility was to go out to people's houses and wake them up so they could get to work on time. Alarm clocks eliminated the need for them.

Acoustic locators were people who listened to acoustic mirrors to detect incoming aircraft before radar was invented.

And sure, we can talk about buggy whips. The point is, quite a few jobs and entire industries no longer exist as a result of automation. We can start throwing our shoes at the machines like during the industrial revolution, or we can enjoy the benefits they bring us, accept the growing pains, and adapt to the new world. Personally I don't want to have to pay some guy to come knock at my window every morning so I can go to work. I hope I live long enough to talk to the younguns about all the ridiculous jobs that used to exist when I was their age.

People weren't really clamoring for creep. They were complaining about the lack of a hill hold feature, and we got creep instead. When I drive a stick, I can use the clutch to hold the car as I switch from brakes to accelerator. On the Tesla I'm going to run into the idiot who stopped an inch from my bumper behind me at the stop light as the car rolls backwards on the hill, if I don't have creep on.