Hell, personally, I'd have settled with just a plaque, but if a few grams of ash has more emotional value with some people, why not? I certainly don't agree when people risk their lives to recover dead bodies, or waste valuable real estate on graveyards, but this is harmless. Plus, the inscription was purely factual.

There is something after death: the lives of everybody who didn't die that day, and their descendants. The possibility that what you did in your life might have a positive impact on your survivors, that they might even remember you or your work, is the real life after death.

Show me evidence that some valuable scientific experiment was bumped from the mission to accommodate this weight, or that a significant sum of much-needed money was diverted from elsewhere, and I'll agree with you.

Meanwhile, I Am Not A Rocket Scientist, but it seems like a no-brainer that you don't design a half-tonne space probe without holding a few grammes of capacity in reserve for contingencies. Something like the ashes could have been bumped at the very last minute with out consequence if the probe weighed in 0.01% over weight.

No, just that they had emotions and honoured their dead. In fact, you're feeding a Sky Fairy cult strawman (or rather straw Vulcan - see points #4 and #5).

You can't if you get punishment confused with consequences - but calling "punishment" "consequences" is a circular argument.

To use the cliche'd "Shouting 'fire!' in a crowded room" example: the 'consequence' is the risk of causing a dangerous stampede. Acceptable 'punishment' is what comes after you've convinced a court that the stampede actually happened, or presented compelling evidence that it was a serious risk. Unacceptable censorship is banning the discussion of combustion in a public place based on a hypothetical worst-case "stampede" scenario.

I think you're confusing laws like the 1st Amendment to the USA Constitution, or article 10 or the European convention on human rights with the wider, concept of freedom of speech as an ideal. Even the 1st Amendment goes further than you suggest, but I think you've hit on the original motivation behind it.

As a non-USAian it took me a while to work out that the spirit of the US Bill of Rights is to protect local government, corporations and organised religions against (specifically) the federal government, and that any benefit for individuals implicit in the letter of the law is a nice bonus.

The European convention of human rights, by contrast, seems to be mainly about enumerating all the exceptions to freedom of speech, so that the government can micro-manage your freedoms for you. Sounds cynical, but freedom is a paradox, and if you want to enshrine all human rights in law, that's the tarpit you end up in.

I think it is true, though, that both of these examples only prohibit suppression of free speech by government - they don't specifically oblige that government to prevent others from restricting your free speech (but then that really is a can of worms, and a lot of the people who pushed for Amendment 1 or Article 10 to protect their right to express their views really don't want to eat their own dogfood).

However, you should never rely on the law of the land as the last word on right and wrong, and general freedom of speech (insofar as it can be protected without descending into paradox) is a good thing.

The first step is to accept that it is a paradox, that no solution is going to be perfect and you're not going to fix everything. Politely ignore anybody who speaks in absolute terms or comes up with trite little not-even-wrong aphorisms like "you have the freedom to do anything you want except the freedom to take away freedom from others".

Then, before imposing any laws, you have to remember that the acid test is not how they will be interpreted by judges and juries, but how it will be interpreted by publishers, employers, landlords, public institutions, police, security guards etc. who will tend to interpret them in the broadest, most restrictive possible way to cover their own backs.

Everything is a risk/benefit tradeoff - and the risk can never be zero.

In the case of freedom of speech, though, it's possible to be almost absolutist if you insist that any activity you do want to control (harassment, incitement to violence, etc.) must involve actions or behaviours that go beyond the words that are said or published. So, if you want to prosecute someone you should not simply have to prove that they uttered the word "fire" in a public theatre, but show evidence that they intentionally set out to cause disruption*. You can prohibit "inciting violence" if you like, but it needs to be absolutely literal, or supported by other activities. Harassment should need to include a pattern of behaviour that shows victimisation. Once you start banning speech that might induce panic, could be interpreted as inciting violence or that made the victim feel harassed the slippery slope beckons.

Unfortunately, both religious extremists and politicians do like to pretend that they have the solution to everything, while lawyers lurk to apply 20:20 hindsight to anybody who takes a risk and loses, and lawmakers who seem to think that if a legal decision misinterpreting their law is put right on the third appeal then everything is rosy.

(* Of course, although this is a popular example, they're quite rightly going to that special hell reserved for people who talk at the theatre *anyway* so free speech isn't really relevant)

No, as a dozen people have posted before you, they decided to pull a book because of a technical typesetting error (Unicode minus signs in place of hyphens) that would screw up page formatting (hyphens are significant to text-wrapping and auto-hyphenation algorithms) and text-to-speech (or should I say 'textminustominusspeech'?)

That's exactly what a decent copy editor would look at (as well as knowing when to use an m-dash, a minus sign or a hyphen) and would be a valuable service to self-publishing authors. Bring it on.

...and words in sentences communicate ideas more effectively when they are properly spelled, punctuated and typeset. That doesn't affect the message.

Not sure how you can "assess demand" for something like this with a limited trial. The "demand" would be for a substantial network of swap stations that allowed people to treat EVs like gas cars and not have to plan long trips around meal breaks at superchargers. They might expand the market to customers who have currently rejected EVs because of the charging problem: if you already have a Tesla you probably looked into the charging situation and decided that it fits your motoring needs, so you're not going to be falling over yourself to pay for a battery swap instead.

Then, the battery replacement needs to be integrated with some sort of lease scheme whereby you don't actually own the battery which (some EVs use this approach anyway) which would make sense in many ways, but if you've already bought your car, complete with battery, are you going to want to swap it out?

The other issue is the long-term scalability of the "free supercharge" model - its fine with the current level of Tesla ownership, but if EVs go mainstream provision will have to ramp up dramatically (think: whole parking lots wired up for charging) or it will be common to turn up at a station and find all the bays occupied by fully-charged cars waiting for their owners to drift back from their leisurely lunches and shopping trips. A battery-swap system might be the only way to turn round enough customers. "Free charging" certainly isn't going to be long-term sustainable - but while its there, its going to be hard to persuade people to pay for battery-swaps.

What's more, people could choose not to use Apple's iTunes music store and still listen to music on their iPod. Reports of this case always seem to airbrush over the fact that the "lock out" only ever affected competing DRM formats: there was no problem with playing unprotected MP3 or AAC files from any source.

People with visas etc. sign away their right to contest deportation when they fill in their landing card (or click "I agree" on the new electronic system) - along with declaring that they're not a drug dealer, convicted felon, terrorist or war criminal (so, if you turn out to be any of those, they can book you for giving false information whether or not you've actually committed any other crime in the US).

...and if you can't get wood or coal, a horse is better than a steam engine. That doesn't make a wood-powered steam car a viable alternative for the daily commute (it might be carbon neutral but it sure as hell ain't smog neutral).

Until you use up your 36 exposures and have to change the film wearing thick gloves. Probably why they went digital with Rosetta and all those Mars probes - not many 1 hour photo shops out there.

You're kinda repeating my point, though: you can often find a niche market for which an old technology is a perfect fit, in which case that technology will stay around for ages. That doesn't mean that it is "better" for the vast majority of uses, though.

For the signal to survive being compressed to MP3, it would pretty much have to be encoded as a modulated audio signal that the encoder would treat as part of the music, and there's no technical reason why you couldn't include 'secret data' on a vinyl LP using the same technique... However, since thousands of copies are stamped out from each master (that applies to vinyl *and* CD) it wouldn't be much good as a way of tracing who made the copy.

Plus, it could interfere with the messages from Satan that you hear when you play your heavy metal LPs backwards, and He really wouldn't like that.

In other news, the last surviving makers of wax cylinders and shellac 78s are probably doing quite well from their own perspective. I'm sure that camera film will continue to be available for enthusiasts and specialist purposes for many years - just not in a high street near you. Since people still ride horses, I assume that there are still a few blacksmiths going strong. Then, a couple of years back, those people build a brand new steam locomotive... That doesn't mean that film cameras, Edison phonographs, horses or steam trains are coming back, or are better than their modern replacements.

I'd be quite unsurprised if "new" vinyl LPs end up being more widely available than "new" Audio CDs. Not because they're better, but they're more iconic and the machines that make them will be easier to keep running without huge economies of scale.

I don't think PKD's opinion counts, since the film was so hugely different from the book, and missed out lots of plot points like the "mood organ", the social pressure to own an animal (or an electric fake), the robot disc jockey and the whole Mercerist religion (which made the VK test look suspiciously like a test of religious dogma). Deckard was human and his memories hadn't been implanted, but everything he remembered and felt had, one way or another, been an artifice.

Yes - in the 1950s, nobody would have batted an eyelid at that (its probably a detail from the real-life memoirs the series was inspired by). My dad was in hospital with a lung infection in the 50s. They came round the ward with a cart handing out free cigarettes.

Really? It shows one aspect of how social practices and attitudes have changed in the last 50 years which is the whole bloody point of the show! Should they have quietly corrected all the now-discredited medical practices while they were at it? Perhaps they should have shown more women in senior positions instead type-casting them as midwifes and nurses?

Perhaps you should stick to watching Life on Mars instead - then you have a modern-day avatar to call the 1970s characters out on any behaviour which would not be acceptable in 2010, lest you thought the producers were endorsing it.

Just because they really are out to get you, it doesn't mean that you're not paranoid.

You seem to be mourning an mythical alternate universe where 50% of kids pestered their parents for a Nascom, UK101 or a Kim 1 so that they could learn programming or digital electronics. Sorry - that was just a handful of us nerds, it never had mass appeal.

What the 1980s games boom did was create mass-market demand for computer hardware, which brought the prices down for everybody. Plus, for those of us who were interested in programming, it ensured that there was money to be made from knocking out simple games or handy utilities.

The "death of programming" came later, with increasing sophistication, when games started having the development (and marketing) budgets of a major movie instead of something you could bang out over a wet weekend, and the rise of consoles that you couldn't program yourself or sell software for...