Bender was her copilot, and he wants his shiny metal ass back.

Those who do it for "convenience" I can understand. Almost all of us have "principles" we attempt to live within the bounds of. But those principles are breakable by anyone because we're human and nature isn't black and white, but fuzzy and indirect. In addition, my principles may not be yours. So I understand their decision at their current level of awareness, knowledge, whatever you want to call it. Whatever we are, we're a free country and people have to have the right to choose their own values.

The ones I don't understand are the ones who justify this in the name of "safety". Because history has shown that there is nothing more unsafe than a police state. And because you're human and nature isn't black and white, but fuzzy and indirect, what you get is a system for which everyone is guilty of something and you can no longer assume it's "if you have nothing to hide...".

I guess I think of it this way: Information is power. But power accretes unless periodically dispersed. The larger the accretion, the more energy it takes to disperse it. But we are human and the world is not black and white, but fuzzy and indirect, so when we apply this energy, we're often as likely to blow apart the system as we are to disperse it gently. So we fear stepping in when the accretions are small and the collateral damage easily contained (plus there's always that awful nagging free agency thing that has to be balanced), allowing power to concentrate until the stakes of dispersal seem too high and still we don't disperse it until the pressure builds up, the system blows apart and we start again from square one. It's fucking tedious and wasteful. Civilizations, countries, economies, organizations, all the little ways we group together follow this law: Power accretes unless dispersed. Period.

So, if you're making it easier for power to accrete, you are in one sense helping to bring about conflict and strife and destruction; contrawise, if you are dispersing energy to dissipate huge clots, then you're still bringing conflict and strife and destruction. If we all become wise enough to deal with these concentrations of power before they become too large, we will minimize conflict, strife, and destruction from this source and our lives will be happier. But we are all human and the world is not black and white, but fuzzy and indistinct, so all we all see different clots as too big. In the end, all you can do is laugh and do what we can to disperse the clots that look a bit too large to us. 'Cause that's what we do.

But a police state is about the hardest clot we've ever allowed to form. Hopefully ours is still small enough to dissolve without a lot of collateral damage, but those holding ever more tenuously to power really seem to like them some police state.

But the path towards education is pretty clear from this model... for those who trade safety for convenience, convince them that safety is more important. When you have them focused on the safety issue, then you can discuss short term vs. long term tradeoffs of relative safety.

How about we give points to both sides:

Points to GOP: The Earth's temperature is volatile such that man-made changes to it are not really anything new or unique*.

Points to Dems: Increases in CO2 provably cause the temperature to rise.

* Sub-counter-point: The changes will f$ck over human society either way.

all it requires is that users sign in

Or, all your base is belong to us.

Back then I didn't need to charge my electric fence to keep the kids off my lawn.

That's another 10 years in school :-)

It's not clear if this will work post-Jobs. Jobs was able to get people to wear dweebish white wires hanging out of their ears. Tim Cook can't do the Reality Distortion Field thing.

The same thing can be said for computers and smart phones.

What, I've got to keep my computer plugged into the wall!? WHAT A HORRIBLE PRODUCT!

I think that the devil is really in the details and we're sadly lacking any details. WatchKit SDK is coming out very very soon so. I'm really hoping that works out well.

Modern health care can improve chances significantly. As long as the half-dozen beds available for intensive care and organ support at a hospital aren't already busy.

If there was an actual outbreak with a significant number of infected needing treatment at the same time we'd do better than Africa with a few percent, and possibly a bit more by using antibodies from recovered infected which is probably easier to do in a modern setting, but barring actual cures it would fall apart completely faced with anything near the number of cases they have in Africa.

With the way she is behaving, it's obviously become a prestige issue for her so I don't think she could be trusted to report symptoms if she had them. Of course, if she's out to discredit the honour system of self-reporting she's certainly rather effective.

Hulu recently pulled an interesting stunt. The've been running WGN's "Manhattan" series, about the original A-bomb program. Anyone could watch it free, with ads, after a few days.

Then, for the final episode, they forced people to register with Hulu or sign in with Facebook to see the episode. Their message says "This video is intended for mature audiences. Use your Facebook or free Hulu account to continue." I checked with WGN. Hulu is lying; the last episode is not for "mature audiences". WGN says they'll try to get Hulu to fix it, but it's been over a week and it hasn't been fixed.

Hulu is learning from the cable companies how to put their boot on the user's face.

I didn't know. I knew he was the CEO of Apple and that's it. If you asked random people on the street "Who is Tim Cook?" and even if you gave them hints like, "He's a business man" a lot of them wouldn't know he is CEO. A good number of those people would be holding iPhones. It's not something that matters to them. I knew who he was because I care about the direction of technology. I didn't know his orientation because I don't care.

The total mass & gravity of the (ex) moon would remain the same if it became a black hole.

http://salvationarmynorth.org/...

It's even better than that. It turns out just giving homeless people homes saves money for states.

So...

Less dramatic than a ship. Sometimes you have to use showmanship to get people to pay attention, even if it's technically less accurate or logical.