Yeah because if people in Syria were allowed to carry handguns, they could just shoot those artillery shells out of the sky before they hit...

Argument: People cant revolt with knives and clubs improvised from things they find around the place, because the government has guns. So the people should be allowed to own guns too, so they can fight the government.

Corollary: People cant revolt with guns, because the government has tanks, helicopter gunships, artillery. So the people should be allowed to own tanks, helicopter gunships and artillery too, so they can fight the government.
Corollary 2: People cant revolt with tanks, helicopter gunships and artillery, because the government has nuclear weapons. So the people should be allowed to own nuclear weapons too, so they can fight the government.

Additional: When the people fight the government we will flip a coin, heads means they are terrorists and are evil, tails means they are freedom fighters and are good.

Doesn't this study assume that the US congress is inherently neutral? For this to work that would have to mean that the phrases used by the democrats represent an absolute average of human left wing sentiment and the phrases used by the republicans represent an absolute average of human right wing sentiment. If one were to hypothesise that the US congress has it's own inherent bias then this study is not measuring absolute bias but only a comparative bias, ie. does wikipedia have the same bias as congress. The fact that the answer is roughly yes, is very worrying to me as I don't think the US congress represents an unbiased debate in terms of the left/right spectrum, or any other spectrum for that matter.

Dude they might be reading this, don't give them ideas.

Well they may have found how to make penises harder for even longer, but osteoperosis is a sickness so they may not have discovered this specifically. It also mostly effects old women so not a big priority, it pretty much could only have come from accidental discovery, or from situation where people society actually cares about (like cosmonauts) suffer from it. There are also the hundreds of other scientific and technological advances that have stemmed directly from space program funding, it's not like we are discussing a totally isolated incident here.

Yes perhaps my comment about shills was a bit inflammatory. When I posted there were a significant number of abusive troll posts about how people who don't like nuclear power are all retards. I know that is trolling not shilling, so I guess I just got frustrated and it came through in my post. Apologies. My point was that this story is not really about nuclear power. Like you said the troll journalists try to make it about that to get more eyeballs, but the point is solar. Still I don't think the journalists being less sensationalistic and talking about the real issues would have prevented a dozen people here bringing up nuclear power anyway.

Yes, and we now have decent way to produce it on summer days. So that is 12-25% of the problem taken care of. Now for the rest.

It seems like 90% of this thread is arguing either for or against the notion that we shouldn't use solar power because it isn't always available. Rather than just mindlessly shouting about the relative price and reliability of solar vs. nuclear and the statistics about what times of day and times of year we have peak power usage, can we just examine this premise for a short moment?

We have a plentiful energy source which is sometimes (regularly) available to us. You are saying we shouldn't use it? Really? Your basis for that argument is that we can't use it all the time. This means we should never use it? I feel I must politely disagree with you there. Would you advise farmers not to grow seasonal vegetables because they cant grow them in winter? Would you advise people in a desert not to collect rainwater because it doesn't fall much in the desert? Would you advise me not to socialise with my friends because sometimes they have to work?

The article is about how an industrialised nation has demonstrated that it is economically and industrially feasible to harvest significant amounts of energy from the sun. Anyone want to talk about that? No? Well I do. I think this is great news. Good work everyone involved. Hopefully we can look forward to power bills going down in the future but what is money compared to the future habitability of the world? If a country like Germany can do this with the climate they have, this bodes very well for equatorial countries. Germany also has significant amounts of wind power, which also works at night and during the winter. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to start shutting down the coal plants first and the nuclear ones after. That debate on that has raged on this site for many pages, I myself am unsure about the answer. I want to see both phased out. Another important question is: How can we generate more clean, fuel independent energy? More solar farms and wind farms seem like a good idea. Geothermal and hydroelectric are nice for base load although hydro can be affected by weather as well. Osmotic power seems like an interesting variant, and Tesla's old idea of generating power from temperature gradients in the ocean seems worth a second look and maybe one day between the earths atmosphere and space, generation of electricity that is fuelled directly by global warming and works as a direct counter to it. I am getting too far into the possible future though now. The scientists have been doing good work though so far with solar and wind and I have every confidence in their abilities. Let's enjoy the good news for once, shilling for the nuclear power industry can wait till the next thread, and the next, and the next...

" what happened to the quest to develop a strong AI?"

There was no money in it. Voice recognition? yes. rudimentary understanding of specific query frames? yes. Real language engines? No.
The sad thing is that there was (is) a vast market for this, but the people involved in that market have no imagination. Computer games, especially roleplaying games. If game developers had continued with language at the same rate they worked on 3d graphics this would be an article criticising Kubric's movies because HAL was unrealistically stiff and mechanical and was unable to entertain the crewmembers with sparkling wit and repartee.

The rest of the world partly agrees with you. The US euphemism 'defence' really means 'offence' and the world could do with a lot less US offence. As far as medical research, whilst the US is a very valuable contributor, there are also areas where US patent law and laws about stem cells and similar actually impede the research of other nations. I think we will be alright without that too if it comes to that.

You speak the truth, but without proving your point. A few people are getting rich off tv shows, if the money is being unfairly divided or the people are getting worked too hard, the solution is not simply to charge consumers more. You are asking me to buy a dvd set for $100. How much of that will you see? How much of that will the writers or the people working ridiculous hours see? In most cases probably $0, they get paid an hourly rate. I want brilliant passionate people to make good quality entertainment and get paid a good living wage for it. There is virtually nothing I can do that would make that happen short of donating money directly to the people that are underpaid, which would involve a huge amount of research even finding out who they are. Also I am already getting paid less than the worst paid of them myself, and cannot spare the money.