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!

In the article, Wilson talked about how making it through Calculus ended up giving him all the math he needed to do his own work, and would suffice for much other important scientific work. I frankly thought that his target was not simply the population of smart but "merely OK at math" students who are being deterred from scientific fields, but the gatekeepers of the fields themselves, who would probably reject someone like Crick for his C grade in Calculus. He's not arguing for lower standards, but for more diversity in how we see scientific talent. If the litmus test for the "promising future scientist" were based almost entirely on the verbal SAT score, I can imagine that Crick would be railing against that. But as it stands, he simply thinks the pendulum is too far in the math direction, and this is doing a disservice to science. I find that quite reasonable!

I disagree. What we will get is very expensive CGI, lots of regurgitated stock scenes and non-existent sets (because a greenscreen background is not a set).

Yup, I think you pretty much nailed it on all points, but I would add this: Whatever is produced, the kids are guaranteed to love it. It turns out that children are kinda stupid and have terrible taste. I think the "adult" reaction to all this is to just leave the Star Wars franchise to the children, and not to expect it to entertain us adults. This is our attitude to everything else that Disney does, so why an exception out of Star Wars? Let the kids have their cartoons (let's face it, that's how the franchise will continue: cartoons with some live action greenscreen acting pasted in). We'll always have Whedon's Avengers, Game of Thrones and other such fairy tales that are enjoyable by adults. I don't think that Disney will be making any of them.

I wasn't trying to give advice about whose computer to buy, but making a statement about the value of Dell the company. I think they're cruising on the inertia of their past corporate deals, but apart from that, they're having to compete on price in a very low-margin market. That does not make for a good financial outlook.

If I were to advise on computer purchases, I'd say this: For desktops, buy the parts you want from Newegg and plug them together. That's a no brainer. For laptops, figure out the sort of specs you like and then look at the reviews of individual models. Every company seems to produce a few winners and many stinkers. But gone are the days when it makes sense to give buying advice that includes a computer builder brand name, unless you don't care about quality or performance per dollar.