Clearly our attempts to lead the commies out of the darkness and into the glories of the free market were not entirely successful. Surely a good, honest, American, defense contractor wouldn't even reply to an RFP for that kind of money, much less actually deliver, and comrade Putin wants a finished hack? The nerve...

I would certainly be (a lot) happier if medicine actually worked that way; but are there any examples of our successfully reverse-engineering a system as complex as we are robustly enough to make those sorts of determinations? I may be forgetting, or ignorant of, something; but I can't think of any aspect of science where we've taken on a problem of that scale without a whole lot of hacks, constants defined to make the numbers work out, simplifications, or just plain acknowledgement that we have the math to describe the problem but it is not computationally tractable for most real world targets.

Does the baseline healthy human enjoy targeted advertising, or does he really enjoy targeted advertising and find it to be an enriching aspect of his modern lifestyle?

Who are these people, that would give a damn about this change?

You don't need an intermediary not-you authority for this job. And in fact, using one can only possibly decrease the security, in the best case scenario. Even the worst most incompetent company in the world, would make a better CA for its internal servers, than the best, most trustworthy public CA.

The really depressing bit is not that they are drug tested(this part is depressing; but not really depressing); but that we currently don't have any drugs worth testing chess players for...

At least in more...muscular...pursuits team biology has done a sufficiently good job that there are plenty of actually performance enhancing drugs out there. For the mind we have some mediocre alertness aids and anti fatigue stuff that allow you to study a bit longer; but nothing nearly as dramatic as what you can do to muscle mass or blood oxygen transport if you aren't afraid of a few side effects and/or disqualification. It's a tragedy, really.

The (current, at any rate) lack of geographic identification probably hurts emotional engagement a bit. The more successful team sports have a nearly magical ability to grab the audience in some primitive part of their little hominid brain that used to handle inter-tribal combat and allow them to experience, by proxy, the emotional indulgence of victory or defeat against the away tribe. It's really pretty weird. Especially weird is how easily the affect of the game bleeds over into other things, like the traditional rioting and setting cars on fire, or the stock market...

Until they come up with a way of inspiring the same large-scale insanity in their audience, 'e-sports' are going to have a difficult time competing.

My understanding of time in physics and thermodynamics is that time-forward is the direction in which information spreads out in space (at least on average). That is the meaning of increasing entropy. Time is not symmetrical backwards forwards, once you take into account the spatial location of information.

What this would mean is that as time passes forwards, information about other things becomes less and less accessible/available to an observer at any particular point/trajectory, because the (same amount of i.e. universally conserved) information is being diluted and mixed into more spatial locations.

"Information radiates" (at max C^2, notably!!) is pretty much the same thing as "thermodynamic entropy increases".

Couldn't the information falling into black holes just be a part of that "information becoming less and less accessible to any particular observer" trend of universal entropy increase.

Interestingly, black holes (any mass, actually) would seem to be local concentrators of information, acting in opposition to the normal tendency of information to radiate/spread with forward passage of time. Note the close relationship also of density of mass and density of local mutual information. Very interesting.

 

If it was Japan, China etc doing the same thing they'd be charged with "dumping": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Whoa there. This was no mere bad judgement call. Having him thrown off the plane was over-the-top malicious, totally beyond what I ever expect from anyone who is "having a bad day." I sincerely believe such a person really shouldn't be in any sort of position where they might have that amount of power over other people.

Put a hundred random people in the same sort of bad-day position, and I don't expect one of them to behave like this one did. This one is truly exceptional, and does not merely "have bad days." This is the kind of person whose news stories are usually headlined something like "gunman kills five then self."

I might be willing to excuse them, if say, their psychiatrist were to explain how this was anomalous for their character and that their medication was defective, or something like that. OTOH that can be handled in their lawsuit against the medication manufacturer, and then this psycho will never need a job where they exercise power over other people again.

No, the web site needs a developer with a bigger brain. Screens come in all sizes and aspect ratios, and any developer who doesn't realize that is an idiot.

I'm not sure I want to live in a world where that statement doesn't imply sarcasm...

Yes, it very likely would. All those urban areas that grew as big and relatively healthy as they did, thanks to clean water and efficient sewage systems? If that wasn't brought back online, fast, they'd start moving toward their pre-sanitation population levels. The hard way.

Same would apply for agricultural areas and yields that depend on powered irrigation. Unless that was brought back online, and quickly enough to avoid damage to the crop, you'd see yields plummet toward historical levels, with population following suit shortly thereafter. Very unpleasant.

Hopefully there would be enough enough backup systems to restore function relatively quickly; but if not things would be unlikely to go well.

I happen to be the executive who works at Southwest and made the decision, upon seeing the tweet, to call the gate and have him kicked off. Please allow me to explain my decision.

I work in the PR department, and managing publicity is my job. When I saw the tweet, I realized it was bad publicity. I don't like my company getting bad publicity, and I seek to avoid it, or replace it with good publicity.

So I threw our tweeting customer off, thereby solving the bad publicity problem! See? Now do you get it?

...

(Why is everyone looking at me like I'm a idiot?)

How can you be so crass as to bring filthy, filthy, empiricism to a discussion about government?

Only people who lack faith in the a priori truths of Objectivism would be so base as to drag some nonsense about "what is actually happening" into the discussion. It's simply a fact that absolutely anything a government does is just a cover for expropriating the wealth creators and building a cadre of elitist bureaucrats to centrally mismanage things.