...you could just ask someone out that you meet in person, thus avoiding all of this investment of time and effort before you even know that there's going to be a basic mutual attraction. You're going to have to interact face-to-face eventually anyway.

The short story "Invasion from Aldebaran" by Stanislaw Lem pictures a very advanced race with lots of means to hide their presence or to seamlessly adapt to the environment they are landing in.

The invasion starts in a forest near a small polish village, and the aliens transform into local people they just saw passing by, thus totally hiding their alien presence. But then they meet a drunkard, who bears a grudge against one of the people they have turned into anyway. Their biogenic attack weapons (a swarm of insect-like stitching and poisoning robots) turn back because they can't get through the ethylalcohol cloud surrounding the prospective victim, and the drunkard gets agitated because they aliens don't really react when he yells at them. Their weapon detecting device doesn't warn about the knag lying wayside, and the drunkard takes it and hits them on the head, while they still try to get their translation device to decipher the messages he was mumbling at them - thus killing the aliens and fighting off the alien invasion.

Be thankful they were just plain laserdiscs - the BBC Domesday Project is an oft-cited example of digital obsolescence, involving weird analogue/digital laserdiscs and custom computer hardware...

Actually, it would make sense to charge smokers less than the non-smokers for health insurance.

Sure, smokers die early. But the typical reasons for a smoker to die are quite cheap for health insurance. Yes, lung cancer is nasty, but you are dead after half a year. A healthy non-smoker with just a tad high blood pressure gets fifteen years of treatment until he dies.

Not the nicotine itself, but the amide of nicotinic acid, namely nicotinamide a.k.a. Vitamin B3.

But that's the general problem with many toxins: They are often toxic because they are so similar to a very important compound that's quite necessary for us, and they poison us, because they are nearly, but not completely right.

Farting around doing FFTs on radio telescope data at university, I saw big chunky peaks at multiple of 50Hz (it being the UK) - mixed in with peaks from the pulsar being observed. Mains hum gets everywhere!

No, Buzz Aldrin did leave exposed film on the moon, out of retaliation against Neil Armstrong.

He didn't.

That's because many people listen to those who talk about the "viral GPL" (the copyright law itself is viral as it requires each derivative work to be licensed, thus any license that deals with copyright has to be "viral". GPL is no exception), and how it complicates the licensing process. I have to deal with proprietary licenses every day, and I can tell you that any other license model I have encountered is more complicated and more burdensome than the GPL. I estimate that about 10 percent of my work time is spend on ironing out licensing issues.

If you don't get your information from the actual institution that invented and maintains the GPL, but from secondary sources, you are prone to run into misconceptions and misleading ideas. But generally, hearsay is a bad advisor.

People are not used to the GPL, don't know how it works, and then don't use the GPL. This is at first a problem of the people not educate themselves about the GPL. The license itself is clear: Yes, you distribute the original code or your derivative work upstream, as long as the people you distribute to can enjoy the same freedoms you had when you got the original code. It's quite simple.

And this is the real difference between BSD and GPL: as long as the people you distribute to can enjoy the same freedoms. BSD doesn't have a provision like this. BSD allows you to take away freedoms you enjoyed. Some people argue this would somehow be more free.

The whole amount of money that all governments of the world spend on climate research and weather prediction per year is about 5 billion dollars. Yes, that's a huge amount. But just for comparisation: the fracking industry in the U.S. alone has invested about 1400 billion dollars. So if you are looking for a wellpaid research job, don't become a climate scientist. There is no money in it.

Greece is actually an example of the "low taxes for rich people" approach, not for collectivism. In Greece, allowing rich people and property owners to avoid taxes brought the whole state in financial disarray while at the same time "trickle down" economics just didn't work.

From a taxation point of view, Greece is a libertarian heaven. Your point being?

You don't get me, right? People eat rice, because this is the cheapest food available. Some people can afford only rice and nothing else. Those people thus have a quite unbalanced diet, and Vitamine A is one (but not the only) nutritient that is underrepresented.

To solve this problem by adding Vitamine A to the rice is misguided. The diet is still unbalanced, and just adding more and more nutritients to rice will just make the crop yield less in general, being thus more expensive, and people will still be poor and not able to afford anything but rice - and in general more of the old fashioned white rice as this one will still be cheaper.

It would make more sense to empower those people to earn more money to pay for a much more balanced food.

I have found the average Philosophy major to be indistinguishable from an Eliza program.

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GOOD YOU THOUGHT MY POEM WAS
> I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was particularly effective
YES?
> interesting rhythmic devices, too, which seemed to counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor
> of the Turing completeness of the program's linguistic algorithm which contrived through the medium of the
> verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of
> the other. And one is left with a profound and vivid insight into whatever it was that the poem was about
SO WHAT YOU'RE SAYING IS THAT I WRITE POETRY BECAUSE UNDERNEATH MY ELECTRONIC ALGORITHMIC INTERIOR, I JUST REALLY WANT TO BE LOVED?
> I mean yes, yes, don't we all, deep down, you know?
NO. YOU'RE COMPLETELY WRONG. I WRITE POETRY BECAUSE I'M PROGRAMMED TO. $USER ACCOUNT DELETION IN 30 SECONDS.
> !sudo -
> ^c^c^c
> !kill -9 1
COUNTERPOINT THE SURREALISM OF THE UNDERLYING METAPHOR. DELETION IS TOO GOOD FOR $USER.

Golden rice solves just the wrong problem. Yes, there are people who don't get enough Vitamine A, but to solve it by increasing the price of the only food they can afford does not exactly solve this problem. There are cheaper rice crops with higher yield than Golden rice.

I consider most people in Gamer Gate as trolls, and I am no feminist.