Oh come on. You think they are actively hostile to user experience?

It's one thing to think they are wrong about everything to do with user experience. Another to think that it's not a motivation for them.

Because it's not wrong.

There is no "absolute position". Anything running on inertia can be said to be said to be moving at any velocity you choose depending on your frame of reference, including motionless. Now, planets don't run solely on inertia -- they orbit because of gravity. But gravity folds spacetime, which is still what you're travelling through. Plenty of good reason to think you'll end up at basically the same position relative to the barycenter of the most significant gravity sources of your point of departure.

You wouldn't time travel to the "same location in a different time" because that doesn't exist. The current time is part of the coordinates in the time-space continuum. We ignore that in our everyday lives as we constantly time travel forward, because our position relative to the barycenter of the most significant local gravity source -- the Earth -- does not change substantially.

Where do you think they would go if it isn't the approximate same location as measured from the local planet/solar system/galactic center/appropriate scale alternative? Every other location in the universe save that one seems like an arbitrary choice to me.*

*Okay, I can imagine another location: perhaps if you worked out what would happen if you ran the universe backwards, but without gravity, such that everything is inertia, you could end up there. Seems unlikely though. How often does that sort of thing happen in physics where you basically have to backtrack through an alternate history to determine how real history happened? If we accept that time travel exists, we can accept that it's weird, but I'd go for a simpler answer while we're basically making shit up anyway. I think most people think of this as time travelling back 6 months in time and ending up on the opposite side of the sun, as if the sun were the center of the universe and time a universal constant.

You see you don't see a reason generation ships won't be practical in the next few hundred years. I would counter that there are incredibly many reasons, and it takes extensive optimism to think we'll overcome all of them. It's conceivable that we could, but the question isn't finding a reason they won't be practical. We know they aren't practical now. The question is finding a reason they will become practical. In a very abstract sense, we have the march of technology to support that claim. But in that sense you could make the "few hundred years" claim about everything that isn't literally impossible.

There's lots of specific things:

* Failure to make a closed ecosystem at that scale for even a short time.
* Failure to build out something of the scale it would have to be to actually be a generation ship.
* Propulsive system & guidance (we have to not just get there, but still have propulsion and/or guidance enough to brake ourselves into orbit and eventually on-planet at the destination, and the fuel can't have decayed in this time, nor the propulsive system broken down).
* Protection from interstellar debris at almost arbitrary relative velocity to your ship from almost arbitrary directions for a very long time.
* Keeping muscle mass through generations so that the resulting descendants can hop off.
* Creating a society that will itself be self-sustaining and remember for generations why they are on a generation ship and still have any reason to visit the planet when they arrive.
* Finding a reason to make this ship (seems expensive as hell even if we assume tech fixes the above).
* Reliable energy sources that will supply the generation ship the entire time
* Sufficient capacity (manufacturing or spare parts or whatnot) to repair anything that happens
* In all likelihood some communication back to Earth (or else why would this happen, short of the sort of nightmare apocalypse scenario which would itself be a reason this is unlikely to happen?).
* Lots more.

Generation ships travelling through merciless void to a destination that won't be readily habitable vs. 2-month sea ships with a habitable continent at the end (and which had been visited many hundreds of years earlier by boat by Europeans, whether or not Columbus knew it at the time) are not strongly comparable.

No it wouldn't. 2 is a prime number. Any positive integer multiplied by 2 is an even number, thus the result of multiplying "all" primes is an even number. Any even number, plus 1, is not an event number. QED.

They literally say it is a free update in the very first sentence of the article, which is cited in the second sentence of the summary (which says the same thing).

You might still need that with the vat-grown stuff.

That's not what he said. He said it's irrational to say that your arguments apply any more to software than they do to anything else. That might be what you're getting at with your strange rant against chemists, but it's pretty irrelevant. Whether or not they're spineless, your arguments work equally well for the patents chemists deal with.

I'm not sure yet whether I agree or disagree about software being a "special" category. I do disagree with it being special just because it's "just math" because nearly everything we do is reducible to math, so we have to find some discriminating factor and when we find that line, we can see which side software falls on. Separately, we can discuss whether there should be a line at all.

His notion of rational isn't wrong, by the way, it's just that you seem to insist on misinterpreting it. We're talking about whether the argument is rational. Not whether it's rational for a person to make that argument. Those are different things -- you've correctly identified that the straw "greedy suit" is rational to make the "it's on a computer" argument, but the "it's on a computer argument" is still not rational.

You did have a choice, and you did write it. Determinism doesn't mean you didn't have a choice.

It means if we take our time machine back to before you posted this, and watched you do it again, without doing anything that could possibly influence your decision directly or indirectly, we'd observe you making the same choice. Over and over. Right up until we accidentally influenced you by stepping on that butterfly that caused that hurricane that caused the news crew to pre-empt that episode of the show you were recording last week that made you give up and go to sleep a bit earlier which made you less tired today which allowed you to consider the consequences more thoroughly and make the opposite choice. But until then, you're given the same inputs, and you're making the same choice. Every time.

Why is it that people seem proud if the idea that their choices are not based on their experience, learning, and environment? In other words, why is choice more meaningful if it's random and causeless? Why is it more valid to take credit for your random actions than your considered actions? I would think people would be more proud of the things they demonstrate they could do repeatably rather than the things that for all we know rely on them rolling a natural 20, as it were.

The human would itself have to be physically identical to William Shakespeare for the experiment to be valid.

And then my answser would depend on the lifetime accumulation of errors from quantum uncertainty. I expect they would be the exact same literary works though, word for word, and I don't see a good reason to assume not. The thing is, exposing a human to the same inputs as William Shakespeare goes well beyond merely impossible, so we're just flailing around guessing, and it makes it a terrible analogy to argue.

No, they really don't owe it to you.

How much do you pay Google anyway, and for what? Most people pay only by consuming the increasingly-obnoxious ads. I think the ads on youtube are atrocious. But I'm pretty sure they do not, in fact, owe you an ad-free youtube. What are you, majority shareholder?

I pay a lot of money for my Internet service. Doesn't mean they owe me grocery delivery, or any other random thing I'd like and that their service happens to enable in a tangential way.

I'm a product of the Ontario education system (last year to get OAC) and literally every point was addressed. Even the computer programming component back in 1993.

I know the "New Curriculum" as we called it at the time had some regressions but I have to think that this is partly a shitty school you went to or something, because I don't remember it failing that hard.

The United States: founded on the idea that you are obligated to spend money on things produced by people whose actions you find repugnant.

No, not really. It's when they start banning this from video stores that you get to make self-righteous proclamations on ideals of free speech.

I always find this argument self-defeating. Why is it worse to proclaim that you won't see the movie if it supports a homophobe, than to assert that using that as a criterion is tantamount to hating America and implying that's at the root of all the US's problems?

These are non-labour costs. Salaries are labour costs.

The exact breakdown depends on the industry. If this were purely sales (and it's not, because the summary did specify marketing) 3-10 isn't super crazy to cover a range of industries.

No, that's not reasonable, at least not without defining a new number system. Consider:

1/0 = infinity
This implies the following.
1 = infinity * 0
1 = 1/0 * 0

We know 1^2 = 1*1 = 1
We also know 0^2 = 0*0 = 0

Therefore, 1/0 = 1^2/0^2 = (1/0)^2 = infinity^2
Therefore, infinity = infinity^2
Therefore, 1/0 = infinity^2
Therefore, 1/0 = infinity * infinity
Therefore, 1/0 * 0 = infinity * infinity * 0
Therefore, 1 = infinity * 1
Therefore, 1 = infinity
QED

Any definition of 1/0 that leads to 1 = infinity is a vacuous definition that is incompatible with our general mathematics. There are number systems that define infinities, but you have to follow the rules of those number systems. In the one you know, 1/0 is not infinity. The reason the proof doesn't collapse mathematics normally is that dividing by 0 made the equation nonsense in the first place.

That said, notationally, writing 1/0 as actually meaning lim x->0 (1/x) is fairly reasonable, so long as you don't actually start dividing by 0 by actually defining the computation.

This ignores the fact that 1/0 is equally likely to denote negative infinity which is vastly different from infinity.

Same thing. Well, almost. Buying at $60 and re-selling at $20 is strictly worse than buying at $40, so secondary sales aren't as good as cheaper prices.

If there's a difference, it's in the amount of money recovered from sales vs. not spent in the first place. It's imaginable that you could resell at a higher price than you bought the thing, but it won't actually happen.