Hey, if you've got yourself a batch of suckers, why stop milking them before they leave? I think that would be a violation of the scammers code or something. Especially if you've got a choice situation where you haven't actually broken any laws while scamming them - all win, no risk.

Ah, but we do. We've landed probes on comets already, if we spot an asteroid that will impact the Earth in 20-50 years (orbital mechanics - one of the few fields where we really can see into the future with high accuracy) we could land a probe on it and fire all thrusters on full until out of fuel, deflecting it's path just enough so that it misses the Earth instead of hitting it. At a range of several billion miles it doesn't take much deflection to miss a target as small as the Earth.

> If you are talking about button presses, there is no direct event to line up.

Right. But if we're talking about using your hands/feet/etc. normally in VR space (or even via 6DOF "wands"), a.k.a VR interfaces, then there *is* a 1:1 event correspondence, and lag may become extremely disorienting and/or interfere with your real-world reflexes as your brain learns to compensate.

And what evidence would you require? There's a dismayingly large amount of research that suggests that free will may not actually exist.

Well, for "faux-VR" interfaces like the Wii you need to consider that it has to do a *lot* of procedural faking of response (gesture recognition), which adds a lot of extra lag since it typically can't recognize the motion and initiate it in-game until after you've already completed it in real life.

For more "hardcore" VR (well, at least not for most of the consumer-oriented stuff being done since the Oculus was announced, professional stuff has had different priorities) the problem is generally not that the lag is any worse than on a traditional PC - but that the same amount of lag is *much* more obvious. Your brain has a lifetime of experience correlating head motion and visual response to build a consistent map of the world, with continuous response times that make 60FPS look glacially slow in comparison. Insert more than the slightest amount of lag and it thinks something has gone very wrong and acts to correct it: the nausea/vomitting response - which helps correct the vast majority of lag-inducing effects in the natural world.

As for interaction: Consider - when you move a finger there's a roughly 1/8 second lag between when your brain sends the signal and when your finger actually moves - that's a hardwired signal propagation delay, but under most circumstances you'll never notice it because that lag is built into your brain's understanding of the interface and has been continuously updated as you've grown and the lag increased. Suddenly add another few milliseconds of lag though, and suddenly your brain is constantly saying "Hey, WTF!?! I just moved my hand, why isn't the damn thing respond... okay, NOW it's moving".

It's not that the interface is substantially more laggy, it's just that you're going from a completely artificial interface (button-presses, etc) to one that closely mimics what your brain already knows how to operate. Any discrepancy is going to throw it off-kilter. In fact I would suspect that hard-core VR enthusiasts are going to have some issues with real-world coordination. Maybe not to much of an issue if you're already a klutz anyway, but you may have to make a choice between being good at virtual or the real thing.

Actually the supply of diamonds haven't been small in a long time - if DeBeers put its stockpiles on the market diamonds would just be shiny gravel. Only the number on the market has been kept artificially suppressed by their global near-monopoly and some (rumored) underhanded business practices - I remember reading an article many years ago about the first fellows growing flawless synthetic diamonds (the kind identifiable as "fakes" only by the fact that they're far too perfect to be natural), and they were taking extreme secrecy measures about their plant's location, etc. for fear of "anti-competitive action" by DeBeers.

Think one half of a side of beef, only horse instead of cow.

Seriously though, it's a breed name - if we were talking Collies or Persian Cats would you still make such inane comments? (Incidentally it got its name for its ability to outpace other breeds in sprints of a quarter-mile or less)

So basically all the fun of a road trip, but nobody gets stuck driving. I'm down.

Hell, human consciousness may well just be complex automation of macro-scale behavior programmed by DNA, so what's your point?

The claims of her being sleepy comes from her own SMS history.

Sofia Wiléns testimony was edited by Irmeli Krans by order of Mats Gehlin, as shown by SMS's sent from Mats Gehlin to Irmeli Krans. Irmeli Krans also being a personal friend of Anna Ardin, and politically tied to Marianne Ny, Claes BorgstrÃm and Anna Ardin, as part of BroderskapsrÃrelsen within Socialdemokraterna.

"F*ing a sleeping girl is to work around her refusal to consent to one's preferred form of sex - entry #4 on Assange's EAW - is rape in almost every jurisdiction in the first world."

Except that Sofia Wilén has admitted that she wasn't actually sleeping. In fact, SMS's she sent indicated not only that she was actually awake, and that she didn't protest. Her SMS history afterwards also indicates that she didn't want to accuse him of rape or have him arrested, but was pressured by Anna Ardin and her friend, who just happened to also be the police taking up the reports. Those SMS's were later subjected to attempted deletion, but were recovered.(Same with Anna Ardins tweets from the night after she and Assange had sex, stating "Sitting here with wonderful people", including Assange in that statement. Those tweets were also recovered after the attempted deletion). Yet, despite her legal duty to do so, Marianne Ny refuses to acknowledge them, unlike the initial prosecutor.

And that's without even getting started on the political entanglements that lies behind it all, such as Anna Ardin, Marianne Ny, Claes BorgstrÃm and Irmeli Krans all being associated with each other politically(BroderskapsrÃrelsen within Socialdemokraterna) as well as personal friendships(Claes BorgstrÃm and Marianne Ny are personal friends. Anna Ardin and Irmeli Krans are personal friends).

Despite officially being taken off the case due to Conflict of Interest, Irmeli Krans is in practice still involved in the case, as revealed by a SMS sent from Mats Gehlin that orders her to make changes to Sofia Wiléns testimony, the day after Eva Finné has dropped the preliminary investigation.

And, if we're going to link to feminists, why not link to what actual respectable feminists have to say, rather than modern feminism extremists? You could have linked to Helen Bergman, for example.

Or, you could perhaps have paid attention to Juris Doktor Brita Sundberg-WEitman, a former justice of the Svea Court of Appeals that you mentioned, who has herself deemed the case to be without merit, and even reported the entire case to JO.

Actually rats are far faster and easier to train than dogs - you can even use an almost entirely automated system. In... India I think it was, trained giant rats are increasingly being used for mine detection (the boom kind), tuberculosis screening, and various other applications. Apparently their nose is considerably better than a dog's, as well as them being much quicker studies.

It's not a novelty.

As a general rule, it's preferable not to have continuous noise. I only ever spent a brief time in LA, but the helicopters were really disturbing. I wouldn't be surprised if the stress they cause increases violence and shortens lives. But the lives it shortens are civilian lives, so I guess it's okay.

It's not that complicated: it's really hard to make a profit selling people their own mind's ability to heal them.

We've known dogs and rats can readily detect lung and many other cancers just by smelling a person's breath since at least the 50s (or was it 20s), but when was the last time you saw a cancer-sniffing dog offering instant, non-invasive cancer screening at the hospital? You haven't - there's no profit in it. Plus I think doctors are a little insecure - they have a lot of centuries of leaches and snake oil to live down, and seem to prefer the soulless gleaming of technology over anything that might suggest they're not 100% competent today (and never mind the statistics showing how incompetent they generally are - hell, most don't even understand the basic statistics necessary to properly interpret the accuracy of a medical test - testing positive for X with a 90% accurate test does NOT mean you have a 90% chance of having X, unless X is so common that most people have it.)