A law that is violated in my garden every Spring as the seeds germinate, take root, send up leaves, and decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Plants are engines powered by the Sun. The very purpose of those leaves is to tap the flow of solar energy. When the giant celestial nuclear reactor is taken into account, the entropy of the entire system is increasing.

There is something fundamentally wrong about the fundamental "laws" of thermodynamics. Put succinctly, they fail to take into account that these "laws" do not apply to the observer, who is not necessarily decaying into his constituent parts during the process of observation.

Your body is using an external source of energy - the food you eat - to fight the decay.

Incorrect. Abstract mathematical objects are not "encoded within the observable universe"

Sure they are. The set of concepts that humans can conceive are those which human brains, either directly or through tools like computers, can handle. Human brains evolved in the context usually called "the observable universe", so all concepts - including but not limited to abstract mathematical objects - we can think about are encoded within it, just in a real roundabout way. In other words, you can not know anything that isn't encoded in your causal past; even the very notion of abstraction only exists because it's inherent in the physical universe to such a degree that evolution encoded the principle into your brain.

And besides, the notion that math is supernatural - something that exists above physical reality, independent of it - is an unproven and probably unprovable assertion.

I don't think the Mandelbrot Set itself persay is all that useful, but its 3d relatives like Mandelbox, Mandelbulb, etc sure generates some amazing landscapes... I could totally picture that used in games or movies. It's amazing the diversity it can do with some parameter changes - steampunk machinery and evolving spacescapes, reactors / futuristic computers, art deco, extradimensional beings, alien cities, floating viny landscapes, transforming robotics, things hard to describe, etc.

I'd love to have a house / secret supervillain lair that looks like this one ;)

Add to that the percentage of the population that actuall is a spy is incredibly small and the percentage of the population that gets squeamish under interrogation is really high and you have a total classification disaster on your hands. I mean, of the thousands of NSA or CIA or FBI employees, how many of them are spies? Sure, some of them probably are. But I'm guessing it's single digits in each agency.

I love watching a dog lose its shit whenever it sees something new. Dogs have a highly tuned, "That ain't right," sense and they love to share it with all of us.

"That's the tallest guy I've ever seen. That ain't right."

"That person has wheels instead of using his legs. That ain't right."

"A big person carrying a little tiny person in a bag? That ain't right."

What you are offering up is no different than the *I was just following orders* routine.

No, he's not saying that the hitman is innocent. He's saying that the hitman and his employer are both guilty.

You are assuming that they care. But what they're probably regretting is that they haven't killed all to ones convicted on fraudulent evidence.

O, wait, you said "people". You didn't mean officials.

N.B.: The laws are made and enforced by organizations composed of people who hold power. They *like* holding power. And they are quite willing to kill innocent people to keep it. Some of them would cavail at mass murder.

You left out 1 1/2 considerations:
1) Most of the antibiotics in use are essentially identical to antibiotics long existing in soil bacteria, and so there will have been a long development process where bacteria resistant to the antibiotic mechanism will have had an evolutionary advantage to compensate for the extra costs (which don't usually appear to be excessively high, probably due to long refinement).

another half) Most bacteria can freely share genetic mechanisms for things like coping with environmental stresses. So when one strain of bacteria develops a capability, it is likely to soon get widely shared with other quite different strains.

So, yeah, keeping resistant bacteria from appearing is going to depend on developing antibacterial mechanisms that there isn't a long history of pre-adaptive mechanism development. And since some of the adaptive mechanisms are pretty generic (like pumping out a wide variety of chemicals that you don't expect to have in your body [think kidneys]) this is likely to be quite difficult.

The majority of major, targeted hacks (rather than just sweeping the net for vulnerabilities) - aka, the kind of stuff that the US military cares about - involves sending emails or making phone calls and introducing yourself as Bob from IT, and sorry to bother you but there's a problem that we need to discuss with you, but first a couple questions...

They don't need script kiddies, they need social engineers. Question number one in the job interview should be "Is your native language Russian, Chinese, Farsi, Korean or Arabic?" And even as far as the more traditional "hacking" goes, rather than script kiddies they're going to need people who are going to custom analyze a given system and assess it's individual vulnerabilities, people with real in-depth understanding. One would presume that in most cases that the sort of targets that the US military wants to hack are going to keep themselves pretty well patched to common vulnerabilities.

AIs doing hacking? What are you talking about? This is the real world, not Ghost In The Shell.

Meh. Didn't we hear the same argument when color TV was introduced? Or CDs, Digital TV, Digital cameras, Fly by wire, the Internet etc etc every other technology implementation ever?

Cassettes and analog cameras weren't banned. They simply fell out of favor because CDs and digital cameras were way superior as far as the end user was concerned. By contrast, digital tv and digital radio don't benefit the end user, they'll simply let parts of the spectrum be auctioned off; so they require legislation to force the end users to pay the costs for the transition so someone else can profit.

What is 'general intelligence'? (Anything like Colonel Panic?)

Self-metaprogramming, basically. You are smart if you can repurpose existing neural circuits to handle new problems (because that way your consciousness is freed to consider things like consequences, and specialized circuit is of course faster than general-purpose one), you learn fast if you can build such circuits fast, and you are insightful if you can examine your own mental subroutines and how they work - if you actually learn to reprogram them consciously you'll likely find a new religion or something.

It does not follow that being able to understand calculus gives you peace, happiness and longevity.

70 years is equivalent to 411,222,120,000,000 miles. It might not actually be longer, but it sure sounds bigger :).

It's not a debate that I mean to stir up 3-deep in a Slashdot thread, but just to say that the vast majority of people at most places on the political spectrum agree: Those that have the ability to succeed, should have the opportunity to. It's just the mechanics they disagree on that are sometimes, sadly, mutually exclusive.

The disagreement is about what happens to those who won't succeed, to Joe Average and Joe Hobo. Currently, Joe Average's position is getting worse and worse, which is a huge problem because modern economy can't actually work without them having money to act as consumers. And as the economy stalls and enters a tailspin, Joe Succesful shifts the blame to Joe Hobo, closing his eyes from the approaching ground because doing something about it would require taking a break from his personal interests to visit the cockpit, and getting Joe Average to get along with it because pretending bad things only happen to deserving people is a pleasant fantasy.

Of course such situations are always rectified eventually, the only question remains whether it's by recycling the wreckage.

These are well-established, well-tested, well-designed protocols with no suspect commercial interests involved. QUIC solves nothing that hasn't already been solved.

If pseudo-open proprietary standards are de-rigour, then adopt the Scheduled Transfer Protocol and Delay Tolerant Protocol. Hell, bring back TUBA, SKIP and any other obscure protocol nobody is likely to use. It's not like anyone cares any more.

I just want the search engine to stop changing what I'm searching for. I don't want to have to quote every word like I have to do with Google to make sure that the word is actually in the page, and by "the word", I mean "the word I type, not a word that Google things may be similar to the one I typed". It's worst when you're searching for foreign words, product names, acronyms, or whatnot and Google tries to treat them as if they're English words and declines them or chooses synonyms.

"Did you mean X?" is fine. Even "Searching for X (see original results here)", if you're very confident that the person made a common spelling error or whatnot. But just going in and swapping out words as if this is expected behavior? Terrible. At least let me disable it if you want to do that...

Beyond all this: I do like how one can do simple commonn operations on Google - math, conversions, etc. The more of these the better IMHO, so long as they have a standardized format - be they tracking numbers, flight lookups, whatever. It's okay in my book to be a bit Wolfram-y.

Keep the interface plain, simple, the sort of thing that'll work on any browser, from a modern Chrome to a simple text-only browser. Only use javascript where it's not essential for the site to work. Here's an example of something that would be a good use of javascript: if you need to track clicks, like Google does, do it through javascript rather than by having a link redirect like Google does. I hate how I can't just right click and copy link on Google without getting some massive Google redirect link.

Just my thoughts. :)

Apparently you don't know the meaning of the words "for fun".