I don't see why you have to be a dick to cops. Why wouldn't you just talk to them like a polite person? They don't have an easy job, and when people think of them the way rebelling teenagers think of their parents, it only makes their job harder to do well. It also increases the chances of them making horrible mistakes. I think we all have a stake in cops having accurate information when they're investigating crimes.

The Japanese have solved air hockey. Now I'm waiting for Koreans to create the perfect AI computer to play Starcraft 2. (And I'm not talking about this guy.) The AI that comes with the game is inexcusably pathetic.

Maybe it's cheaper to sample a lot, rather than to sample less and extrapolate accelerations. They probably get away with a simpler prediction algorithm when their data points are so dense. Or maybe, the way the puck moves in air hockey is more sensitive to initial (impact) conditions than you realize. I'm guessing that in the 50th of a second before you hit the puck, you can do a lot of things to significantly affect its trajectory. Anyway, maybe that's what they discovered as they built this system - something about the game itself.

I wish somebody would stop and ask the following question: What is the ethical way to treat massive numbers of abandoned and unadoptable pets, if you don't have an endless farm somewhere upstate with endless food and veterinary care? I don't love PETA (for reasons unrelated to this) but I'm pretty sure that if they had alternatives beside euthanasia, they would use them. It's sad, but let's not be children about it. The alternative for those animals is a fate much worse than a humane death at the hands of PETA. I only wish that instead of sending the animals for incineration, they would donate them to local Chinese restaurants, to spare the lives of other animals that would not need to die to be on a menu.

Oh, I would be so happy if the internet killed car dealerships! Yes, there are some industries hurt by the internet age that I mourn, like local book stores. But if car dealerships just die, I won't miss them at all. I won't miss their loud, stupid advertisements on TV, but I especially won't miss the ugly way in which they use valuable real estate in populated areas. American cities would work so much better if they used space more wisely and became generally denser. Car dealerships are one of the most important plagues that is keeping that from happening. Fuck them and their useless sprawling parking lots. There is nothing socially redeeming about them at all. I hope that car companies in the future make a move like Apple, and have something like a Mazda store in the local mall. It would basically be a showroom in which the cars are presented like jewels, with salespeople and mechanic "geniuses" that could chat up customers, as well as curious mallgoers who got hypnotized by the shiny things. They could have a back exit to a portion of the mall's underground parking lot where they have a few more cars that can go out for a test drive. Their maintenance and repair could be done by an authorized mechanic shop with a contract. That needs some land, but much less than a dealership. Really, there is no reason for traditional parking lot car dealers to live, and many great reasons for them to die.

It's not just that. Talking about how everything good at Apple came from the brilliant mind of a now-dead guy actually is a dig at (present-day) Apple. It serves to undermine confidence in Apple's prospects, and feeds the meme of Apple's inevitable post-Jobs decline, without explicitly stating that.

Farmed carnivorous fish right now get fed bycatch, a slurry of little fish of no commercial value that fishermen pull out of the sea. There are many problems with this, one of them being the mercury that concentrates in the farmed fish and eventually humans. I wonder if they would be able to feed on farmed insects, which could be obtained in a much more responsible way, and clean of poisonous metals.

Would they add some sort of hard-coded serial number chip that phones home whenever the device is online? I strongly doubt that such a feature would remain uncracked for very long. At best, it might be something that an observant Craigslist buyer could use to distinguish a hacked device from an unhacked one. I think that's the first realistic goal to aim at. I was close to buying an iPod Touch on Craigslist, but backed out because the situation seemed shady, and I didn't know how to verify whether the device was stolen. I know it's tempting to hope that we can use the phone itself to catch thieves and prevent unauthorized transfers, but I don't think we should ever expect to succeed. Every decent phone thief can just power down a phone right after stealing it, and disable the security in a makeshift Faraday cage workshop. All this will do is to provide a perfect spy tool on legitimate phone owners.

The real fight is going to be about net neutrality. My cable company happens to own my internet pipe, and they're certainly not requiring me to buy their cable tv service. (I wouldn't consider it!) The streaming and VOD channels are already out there, and there will be many more. As long as the ISP doesn't block the packets from reaching me, there isn't much they can do to stop this. That's why I mentioned net neutrality.

I have a feeling this will all be moot soon. Youtube are about to unveil subscription channels, and we already have Hulu, Netflix, etc. All we need is an idiot-proof box for the living room so that grandma can surf all these channels with her "clicker" and we'll forget there ever was such a thing as cable tv.

I think that Google first proved that they are capable of delivering pretty 1080p video without stuttering, while leaving you the option for 720p if your internet or playback device can't handle 1080p. We'll see what content they will be offering, but I'm pretty sure about one thing: People are comfortable with Youtube as a video delivery system. You can bet that there will be living room devices that will seamlessly treat your subscribed Youtube channels as regular TV channels. Hopefully, future Youtube Android apps will allow you to pre-buffer the premium content so that you can watch it even when you don't have a good connection, for example, on a bus. If some of their subscriptions were things like Discovery Channel, ESPN and Comedy Central, how many people would drop their cable TV altogether? If these channels were on premium Youtube, the living room experience of watching them would be undiminished compared to cable TV, and all kinds of new options for VOD and watching on portable devices would open up. If Google does this right, the only people that will continue subscribing to cable TV will be luddites who can't be bothered to make Youtube work in their living room.

But at least we'll feel like we made a sacrifice for the sake of the bees, and that will make all this worth it!

I think that commenters here are misunderstanding the article linked in the parent post. The thesis, as I read it, is that the "new" hydrocarbons are not like the old ones, in that producing them will be incredibly expensive. And though the article doesn't say this, I think we can all understand the upshot: As extracting hydrocarbons gets more expensive and renewables get cheaper, the curves are bound to cross long before all the hydrocarbons have been dug up out of the ground. So in that sense we really never will run out of oil and gas, because there will come a time when nobody has the incentive to extract more.

Yeah, that was my first question: If not neonicitinoids, what will get sprayed instead? There's probably a good reason why we're not using that stuff now.

Oops, Google shows me that I did indeed miss something. I think my nerd card has been suspended for at least 30 days. Thanks for the heads up!