Sure, although it points a broader point about his willingness to engage in prolonged negotiations (for whatever reason) and willingness to drop the deal. It's kind of like trying to negotiate with North Korea -- the stated reasons they do anything are equally ridiculous, but you have to go along with it if you're actually looking to finalize those negotiations.

Names are indeed for communication, but 'name' here is mostly bad terminology, or at least The Fine Article leads me to believe these are meant more as serial numbers to supplement the existing system of nomenclature than anything else.

Which is actually somewhat useful. Any research project starts by looking at what other research has already been done. It's no good if your search terms don't bring up the relevant papers. I suppose this might be somewhat like the nomenclature system for chemistry, in which the IUPAC standard for naming molecules has replaced common names. Frequently used chemicals still are referred to by common names, but mostly even if a molecule you encounter has a common name you're not likely to know it off the top of your head. It's pretty hand to be able to figure out the standard name by its structure, so you can then search for it or look up its properties in the CRC.

Well, there remains the question of whether these limitations of our universe are limitations of the simulating universe. For example, if I am doing a molecular simulation I typically do it without considering quantum mechanics, which means any beings inside of the simulation (if it were big enough) would be unable to avail themselves of quantum computers.

Another trick I might use is to apply artificial driving forces to reach the desired configuration, e.g., in a Monte Carlo simulation I might artificially accelerate an approach to equilibrium by allowing non-physical moves under the condition that only moves which minimize the energy of the system are accepted.

What if "time" is an artificial driving factor towards the desired simulation end state? In the higher universe, any simulation completes instantaneously, but perhaps they have a simulation energy cost or something that makes them want to run the simulation efficiently anyway.

This follows a previous ruling:

-- Osborne Clarke

This second suit was prompted by a court case which found that the first sale doctrine ("doctrine of exhaustion") did apply to digital goods. However, it's not surprising this case was dismissed because it is not a question of what rights the consumer has over software they have purchased, it is a matter of what duties the software provider must guarantee to continue providing.

IMHO it is perfectly reasonable that if it is a matter of online support (cost of server maintenance, etc.) that the one-time fee charged to one person does not in turn mean that person can give their support contract to someone else. The one time fee is presumably calculated based on typical use for a single account holder.

But the single-player package should remain fully transferrable.

And as for companies making games require internet connnections they really don't need to abuse the ambiguity here, let's just say I'm not going to cry when they complain about piracy.

This is Alex Sink's actual website. This, as near as I can tell, is the "fake" website referenced. They do have similar color schemes, but apart from the domain name, all of the text and media on the website is calling for Alex Sink's defeat. It says: "DONATE: Help us stop Alex Sink from bankrupting us in Congress." If you click "DONATE" it takes you to a form which prominently says "Make a Contribution Today to Help Defeat Alex Sink and candidates like her." At the bottom of every page there is a footer which reads "Paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee."

If you're really intent on clicking through without reading anything, I suppose you might be confused. But at that point I'm not sure what can even be done to tip you off.

I completely agree that if, e.g., doing an illegal wiretap and then reconstructing the evidence through a more legitimate train is subservision of the system and should be prosecuted.

But confidential informants, undercover work, legal wiretaps, etc. are all things which should be protected, and for which parallel evidence is a means of doing. In many cases, it is the civilians who are being shielded, not the police.

My neighbors will want one, too, but they might just rent one because they'll only need it around 4am on Saturdays.

It's a great sentiment, but money is just the intermediary to the real political capital, which is speech. In our capitalist society, the latter can be bought to a degree -- radio, newspaper, and television adds, movies, books, endorsements, flyers, lobbyists, think tanks, push pollers, etc. -- which is how money becomes a problem. But these things still all exist if you say "candidates can only use government provided funds." So what do you do if, say, the cable networks all lean one particular way? Do they just get to de facto choose who gets to president? What if one person sees it as worthwhile to purchase all of them?

For that matter, what do you do about the funding of third party political commentary in general? It's just as easy to buy an ad or promote a movie or event saying "Candidate X is a great guy" as it is to hand him the money so they can do it themselves. IMHO it's less accountable because you don't see the purchaser on the published list of donors, and if the message is dirty or incorrect a third party probably doesn't care while a candidate saying such things can lose significant backing and reputation.

Maybe you say, "No one in America is allowed to publicly say or do anything construed as supporting a candidate without giving equal time to the other candidate." Okay, what about financing which supports issues said candidate is backing, never mentioning him but clearly propping up his campaign platform? Are we going to ban all advocacy of any kind?

The nature of speech is to be too broad and adaptable to be regulated without inadvertently regulating it in its desired forms, and the point of the 1st amendment is that the benefits of its free exercise are too valuable to set aside. I tend to agree with that, personally -- I think we gain more from unrestricted speech than we lose from malevolent entities trying to use it to their advantage.

Thankfully, while it's easy to speculate better ones, the present system is actually not all that bad. Yes, it confers *some* advantage to be able to spend 60 million when your opponent spends only 30 million. But the return diminishes rapidly. It's a huge difference being able to convey your message to a voter vs. not being able to. But compared to that it's only a little bit better to convey the same message twice, etc. In general, it's possible for candidates to get their say in even in demographics where the other candidate enjoys home turf advantage. And as much as we like to bemoan the "uninformed voter," the overall effect is to inform voters. The system is definitely inequitable, but not horribly so compared to other systems, and I think with little susceptibility to extensive influence by individual players.

I'm all for precision in language, but in day-to-day speech a 'formation' is just something that is formed, and the grand canyon is indeed a formation even if it is not a 'geologic formation' proper. It's a bit like if mechanics decided to formally call washers 'round things' and then got particularly upset when a ball bearing was casually referrered to as a 'round thing' as well.

Food which provides all nutrients homogeneously is apparently used as punishment in prisons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

However, while it doesn't exactly sound enticing to me, I could actually see eating Soylent. I love to cook, but I've had a pretty demanding academic curriculum which not only makes cooking difficult, but sometimes it's hard even to remember to eat anything besides snacks. The days and work just kind of blend together. Also, I've taken up bodybuilding, and the recommended diet winds up being difficult and fairly monotonous anyway. I wind up eating an awful lot of chicken breast with some kind of vegetable side.

If I could just munch on some soylent during the week and treat myself to a full and delicious meal on the weekend, that would not be a bad arrangement.

Please raise your hand if you are planning on using a large controlled explosion to propel yourself into the oxygenless, -270 Celsius medium of space, return by crashing back down hundreds of miles, and your plan to do so is rooted in the belief that this is all fantastically safe and unlikely to result in your death.

I think the government space program has had an overall fatality rate of something not quite 10%. It's reasonable considering just what they've been doing, but even if commercial space flight is 10 X more safe than the program NASA developed, that's still going to be some guaranteed casualties for any widely implemented program. It's certainly nothing you would tolerate coming from an air liner. Anyone going up is going to have to be acknowledging the not-utterly-unlikely possibility of their death

That said, some oversight isn't bad -- as long it's reasonable and not based on the stupid and unquantifiable "We have the prevent the next Titanic" metric -- but what the government should *really* be offering is direct assistance. The program is still small enough that it's entirely reasonable to help out all the viable startups, and nothing is going to promote success and safety so much as direct cooperation with experienced persons at NASA.

Yes, well, I'm very concerned about this. With the NSA cat and mouse game, at least there was a chance of the mouse winning. More importantly, the mouse could win without being sent to the chopping block, because the cat didn't want anyone to know it was even playing.

Now what it sounds like to me is that we are going to publically require ISPs etc. to engage in long term storage of all of our activities so it can be accessed at request. I'm sure the logging requirements and the period the data is stored will only get longer with time. And agencies other than the NSA will want and receive access. And it will become illegal to do anything which bypasses this now-sanctioned spying.

I prefer the secret quasi-legal spying where the NSA couldn't really use the data in most ordinary cases for fear of revealing what they were doing to making the spying an acceptable part of our government and culture.

Isn't it usually the terrorists who make this argument?

"How did they know it was me!?" -- time traveling Hitler, participating in any online debate

According to the paper, studies were conducted in an open field and there was reportedly no bias based on whether data was recorded e.g., in the morning or in the afternoon. Due to the local weather conditions most of the time the skies were cloudy. When there chanced to be magnetic storms during the day then the dogs' North-South preference disappeared. They did a fairly good of controlling for other factors. The alignment of the magnetic field gave the best correlation.