You forgot massive and unnecessarily burdensome documentation of your identity to help make sure college students, the elderly, and the working poor don't vote.

This is something software engineers should have learned in school. Sometimes a software failure can kill. Did they make *you* study the Therac-25 incident? I bet they didn't, much less to do when confronted with a project which puts lives in danger.

It must have seemed like a no-brainer to go from making thermostats to fire alarms, but I would be very, very reluctant to work on such a project. There's something ethically questionable about replacing a simple, highly effective device that saves lives with a more complex replacement. Even -- or perhaps especially -- if the replacement offers conveniences that simple device doesn't.

How many species would we need? I don't think that question has an answer, because of the somewhat vague definition of what a species is. Culex pipiens, restuans, and quinquifasciatus are very similar mosquito species that readily hybridize to form completely viable offspring; would you need *all three of them*? You might; these are important disease vectors, both human (Saint Louis and Japanese Encephalitis) and animal (dog heartworm), and its quite possible that some genetic populations don't spread certain diseases nearly as well.

And why would you need that? It turns out that pathogens and disease vectors might play an important part in maintaining ecosystem diversity. Hantavirus is common in rodents for example. Differences in hantavirus strains might prevent one population of rodents from taking over the range of another. In effect by co-evolving with a pathogen, a population can use it as a natural defense. This diversity in turn contributes to the resilience of the overall population to environmental changes.

Suppose meadow vole populations A and B live next to each other, but invade the other's territory. There is an environmental change that wipes out one of them, say B. Then A is free to spread into B's territory, and overall the population of voles looks pretty much the same. But if B had previously overrun A's territory, then the voles would have been wiped out.

The operation of the biosphere is immensely complex. The more you know about it, the less plausible things like terraforming seem. I think it may be possible to create a self-sustaining generation ship, particularly if the enclosure is very large and energy is essentially limitless. But I think such an environment would be a dead end. I don't think it would be possible to bootstrap anything like the Earth's biosphere on another planet, at least not for millions of years.

The sky on Mars is blue during the daytime. Why wouldn't it be? Same Sun, same Rayleigh scattering, so you get a similar sky during the day, albeit somewhat darker than Earth's because of a thinner, dryer atmosphere. Mid-day martian landscapes look remarkably like barren Earth deserts.

The soil on Mars is reddish, but it's not because the Sun is reddish; it's because of minerals in the soil. If you brought a bunch of paint sample cards from the hardware store to Mars, they'd look exactly the same. On top of that, the Mars day is only slightly longer than a terrestrial day (by 37 minutes). That's actually *good* because most people tend to have circadian rhythms slightly longer than 24 hours.

A similar question about color arose in my sci-fi writing group. What would a landscape on a red star's planet look like? The answer is "different, but not red." You'd still have a blue sky, and you'd still have the same range of colors, but with the color *balance* is shifted. It's like going from a cold white LED bulb to a warm white incandescent bulb. Blue things will still be blue and red things red, but the blue thing will look more muted under the "reddish" light (which will still appear white because it has a broad spectrum of colors in it).

What's with the obnoxious, non-mutable autoplay ad for this movie? Half the sites I visit are playing this, some times more than once on a page so it comes out garbled because the copies don't sync. This has to be one of the biggest Internet ad campaigns ever.

And since when does Slashdot carry ads that autoplay audio? That's low-rent stuff. The worst thing with this ad is that the player presents a mute button that doesn't mute, it starts the replay over again. The only thing you can do is mute your entire computer, or close the tab with the ad.

Well, I'm not muting my entire computer. I'm closing the tab. So see you later, Slashdot, until the stupid ad campaign is over. And I'm not going to see the stupid movie.

See you later, Slashdot; I'm out of here until the ad campaign is off. And I'm not going to see the stupid movie.

I like that plan, it also means you don't have to worry about any potential impact if the strain enters the food supply.

I was making just this point about the Supreme Court striking down limits on campaign contributions. The Romans never quite admitted to themselves that their republic was defunct. They remained deeply attached to republican forms and institutions, even when those things had withered to ceremonial appendages of a corrupt imperial state. It was necessary for people to go through the motions of democracy; the ambitious plutocrats needed to maintain the fiction they were serving Rome, when in fact Rome was serving them.

FYI, non-profit organizations are usually supposed to turn a profit. Generating more revenue than you need to cover your expenses is a normal and necessary part of a sustainable organization. In practical terms that means you have to aim for a profit. So in practice a non-profit operates almost exactly like a for-profit, except there are no proprietors to distribute the profits to. In a non-profit you simply put the profit back into the mission, or into growing the organization.

A better name than "non-profit" would be "not-for-profit". In a for-profit, profit is the reason for the company's existence. In a not-for-profit, it is merely a financial constraint which determines whether the organization can survive and grow. It's like living to eat vs. eating to live. Eating might not be the purpose of your existence, but if you don't eat your existence will terminate.

In practice this means you do a lot more things in a non-profit that are un-profitable than you would in a for-profit. But this makes the remaining profit-generating activities all the more critical. I know, I've been there, working in non-profits. We took our public mission seriously, but we also generated all the profit we could manage so we could keep the doors open while doing good.

Or is it Ploor?

I don't see how holding patents in itself is intrinsically contrary to a university's purpose as a research and educational institution. The express purpose of the patent system (in the US anyway) is to advance knowledge, and the deal is this: you reveal publicly how your invention works in return for exclusive economic rights to the invention for a limited time.

While common law trade secrets are clearly in conflict with the a non-profit university's duty to advance human knowledge, patents are not because they require you to publicly disclose how the invention works.

Now there are *other* problems with the patent system, namely stupid patents that are granted (including business method patents as a whole). Term lengths for certain kinds of patents should be shortened (e.g., in fast-moving fields, patents that aren't commercially exploited by the holders, and design patents generally). But those are issues with the patent *system*.

Only if you're silly enough to buy smart bulbs for a chandelier. Practical LED bulbs these days cost about 4.5x as much up front, cost 1/4 as much to run, and last 10x longer. And within the available power ratings they're a plug-and-play replacement for incandescents, offering similar color temperatures and operating with dimmer circuits designed for incandescents.

A "smart" bulb is not particularly compelling for a consumer, but I can see why it's attractive for a manufacturer to offer. I've seen this kind of vendor-driven over-elaboration many times before, and the reason is usually that they hope to lock their customers in. You wouldn't care about having a half dozen different brands of plain old lightbulbs in your house, but you're not going to want to live with a half dozen incompatible smart bulb systems. You'll settle on one brand and stick with that. This is important because in the long run you're going to buy a lot fewer light bulbs. Not only will this ensure you buy the smart bulb vendor's brand, by selling a more complicated bulb they get to charge you more.

And a lot of those boys in the club are working out their Daddy issues.

Well, just to play devil's (!!!) advocate, because you don't *know* Baluchi is cooperating as fully as he might be.

Ammar Al-Baluchi was unquestionably involved with moving money and goods around for Al Qaeda and was clearly involved with helping many of the 9/11 hijackers. Although that does not necessarily mean he was an active *member* of Al Qaeda or knew exactly what the 9/11 hijackers were up to, he'd have to be remarkably incurious not to know something was up. And he was captured with correspondence that was destined for Osama bin Laden.

So this is a person who, even if he had no specific knowledge of imminent attacks, knows a lot of useful things. But that actually poses a challenge for interrogators. He can give them an impressive amount of useful stuff while holding back even *more* useful stuff.

But one thing is certain: if he *had* known more important stuff, it didn't come out under torture. Nor did torture produce *anything* useful that couldn't be produced using different techniques. And now Americans -- servicemen, agents, and innocent bystandanders -- face an increased threat of torture throughout the world at the hands of people who figure if America does it, Americans should get a taste of it too.

It's important not to be too glib about dismissing torture, because in the future we're going to find ourselves in situations where it seems like a pretty good idea. And the person we're thinking of torturing may be a very bad person -- I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize Al-Baruchi's crimes as "heinous". But if ever torture was going to break the back of an enemy it would have done so with al Qaeda after 9/11.

Well, we tried it and it didn't work. What *did* work was ordinary interrogation and intelligence tradecraft. Which should come as no surprise. We spent the 19th and 20th C perfecting those approaches, and the idea that we could do better by tearing a page out of the medieval playbook should, in hindsight, seem ridiculous.

Neither. It seems a cogently argued point to me. Sony is a hardware company with its own fab resources and established relationships with manufacturer, and it controls a popular gaming platform.

What advantages does Oculus VR have that can match or overcome that?

Well, the very next speaker was a biologist who talked about 'net primary productivity' -- the total amount of energy plants capture from the Sun over and above what they need to maintain their own physiological function. Since all life on the planet relies on this energy (other than a few communities near deep ocean vents), this places *thermodynamic* upper limit on the carrying capacity of the planet.

This limit may still be shockingly high, if we do a few things. We can cover every surface of the planet (water permitting) with plants genetically engineered to produce a higher yield of calories per acre. We can genetically engineer *ourselves*, and live sedentary underground lives on a vegetarian or perhaps algae based diet. But there's still a limit, especially if we want to live more or less as we are, doing what we do and eating what we like to eat.

The green revolution enabled us to exceed carrying capacity limits based on our assumptions about crop productivity per acre. But estimates based on solar radiation per acre are a different kettle of fish.