In other words, 3d isn't selling, so we have to come up with something else to make everyone upgrade their TV sets.

Yea, the article is quite disingenuous with the math.

Blu-ray player + 5 movies = $70 + $150 = $220
DVD player + 5 movies = $30 + $75 = $105

In other words, you get about 90% of what you want for about 50% of the cost. Heck, if you buy used, you can probably get 80% of what you want for 20% of the cost. It's pretty obvious to me that until blu-ray players charge a 10-20% premium instead of a 100-200% premium on their products, it's not going to be the dominant thing.

Seems to me a very strange division of faith and trust.

Here's something normall in the category of "science" that you can't verify. You can't "verify" that a proto-horse evolved into a giraffe without millions of years of observation. You can't very well say it's theoretically possible to verify something so therefore it's science. If it's not practically possible, it's not really verifiable.

Conversely, if you want to verify things that one would normally put in the category of "faith", there is a very simple way to do it. Kill yourself. You can find out then whether there is an afterlife or if there's reincarnation or nothing whatsoever. And you'll know conclusively so there is an option to verify it (though I imagine very few would).

You're proving my point. You can't get walk from Boston to London. Micro-evolution is walking in the analogy. Macro may include walking but is absolutely not the same thing as walking. Unless you want to posit that you can walk on water, the arguments/methods for the micro are not sufficient for the macro. As for the charge that "the original argument does not have any significant hurdles", I'll note two logical errors:

1. You did not make an argument. You asserted "micro is the same as macro" as fact. Where's the evidence that they're the same?
2. You again do the same by saying there are no significant hurdles. Where's the evidence that there are no significant hurdles?

I'm not aware of evidence for either so what you're stating is nothing more than faith.

By this logic if I can walk from my house to the store, I should be able to walk from Boston to London. They're just at different scales!

What evidence do you have that macro and micro evolution are the same thing? Your argument "it has to" is exactly no argument at all, but a statement of faith.

You're attacking a straw man here. I never said they shouldn't be allowed to do research. I just questioned whether all this research is always a good thing like you claimed. I'm saying that it's not.

For now, China seems satisfied to get scientific prestige measured by how much they publish. But it's not stopping there. All this research is to get an edge on the rest of the world, not for the good of the international community or science or whatever. Once they have the edge, are they going to use it benevolently? Either to the world or to their own citizens? I highly doubt it.

In my view, this large recent increase in research has as good a chance of being a bad thing as it is a good thing.

I understand the sentiment of this quote, but I have to disagree. Suppose they develop something harmful? An example might be a new biological weapon or technology to make government control more pervasive. We already know that their human rights record is horrifying. What makes you think that all the developments will inevitably be positive?

In such a world I see a few other consequences:

1. Number of lawyers goes down dramatically. So much of what everyone argues about is what did A say vs what did B say? A jury of your peers would be able to tell what exactly was an agreement based on first-hand evidence instead of second/third-hand evidence.
2. Every industry would be innovation-based. Now that your trade secrets are exposed as well as how you make money, I can go and make the exact same company but take a few cents less per unit. Just about everything would commoditize very quickly, so the main advantage would become innovation.
3. Everyone would get paid what they're worth. Bad employees would get fired all the time. Good employees would be seen for what they were very quickly and be offered better compensation until it didn't make sense to do so.

2&3 make it a perfect market economy. Everyone and everything gets the exact price it deserves.

This would require storage that's so ubiquitous that we can record literally every moment of everyone's life.

It's not hard to understand their thinking. They saw the amount of money that Apple was making and realized that the key piece to what Apple has is their own OS. They want their own iTunes, app store, etc.

Not saying it will work, but I can see where they're trying to go. The big advantage Apple has over all the other PC manufacturers is that they control everything from hardware to software. HP took a step in that direction so they can give the user a better experience.

I mean, Dell's acquiring AMD and that's pretty much the same play in the hardware direction.

Let's see. HP has a WebOS PC coming out. Dell buys AMD...

My guess is they're both moving towards Apple's model. Could a real Dell-customized Linux desktop be far off?

[sarcasm]Yep, it's all their fault. Not exploding deficits, corrupt unions, a horrible school system or stupid regulations. The religious right's fault, entirely [/sarcasm]

s/religious right/environuts/. Clearly, this is exactly what's happened with climategate.

Nice bait-and-switch. Religious people must be terrible at math then! Please do not put climatology and evo-psyche on par with 2 + 2 = 4, that's just offensive.

I, along with other Christians, would like to thank you for this. Clearly your Christophobia will not be spread into the next generation.

are you implying there will be a war due to global warming?

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you act as if one side is more virtuous than the other. totally not true. fact is it's a fight between evil corporations vs. incompetent government. i'd rather not have one side dominate, thank you very much.

I'm suing you for making your comments too entertaining!