This shouldn't be modded off-topic. This has been confirmed to be the bombing suspects, armed with assault rifles and explosives. One is dead, having used a suicide vest, and the other (supect #2, white hat) is still being hunted by over 9000 cops. That's not a lame joke. That's the actual number of cops on the scene.

That's a nice thought, and likely a side effect of his wagers, but is it really his intent?

I attended a guest lecture by Kip Thorne several years ago, and he made it seem that one of the early bets between him and Hawking (on the existence of black holes) was just a friendly wager between colleagues, the way you might bet a coworker a beer on the outcome of the Super Bowl, not some open challenge to all comers. The bet with Preskill regarding information loss in black holes seems similar - the prize was a book about baseball, after all.

Maybe this latest wager is different, but I doubt it. People were hard a work looking for the Higgs boson before Hawking offered his bet. I think a more likely explanation is that Hawking just does this for fun. Scientists are people, after all. They hang out at the water cooler, talk sports, complain about the weather, etc, just like any other office. Not everything they do needs to have some deeper purpose.

That's what the "free from government control" bit was about. Republicans wanted to sneak that nice sounding line in there so that they could kill off net neutrality. Democrats saw through their scheme and stopped it.

That's not true. Maybe you didn't know it was a lie, and are just stating what you honestly believe to be fact, but it's a lie all the same. I blame Romney for creating this ridiculous talking point in the debates last year.

You can review PBS's financial statements for yourself. They lost ~$30 million in the past year, and a similar amount the year before -- page 5, "Change in net assets" row, "Total" columns for both 2012 and 2011.

They've got enough money that they could last for a while without public funding, but not forever. Cutting executive pay wouldn't make a difference. Also, I find it funny that banks need to pay millions of dollars of tax payer bailout dollars as bonuses to retain "top talent", but it's outrageous when PBS or schools want to spend a fraction of that to keep their top employees.

And really, it's a trivial cost for tax payers to bear (something like $1 per person per year), and provides our kids with educational programming that doesn't smother them with ads or ADHD-inducing hyperactive crap.

Yeah, fun is irrational. We should all be good little automatons, just like our owners wish.

Who cares? That's just you, a random nobody on the internet (no offense). There is no deep insight to be had from pondering why you like looking at gifs of John Stewart. You like what you like.

Some people like dub step. There is no great understanding of the human condition that we can glean from that, except the very obvious one: "With seven billion people in the world, you can find an audience for just about anything."

As for why your interested changed, I would suggest it's simply because people change. You're not the person you were ten years ago, and the person inhabiting your body in ten years time won't be you.

Sure, but most people tweeting false info in a disaster are just stupid kids (or man-children) who think its funny. They're probably not going to put lots of effort into it, because then it wouldn't be fun.

According to this graph, in 1990, there were 120k deaths per 100k people amongst the 0-6 day age group alone. I could have sworn that there were at least a few children that survived the decade.

No, people think that because they've been force-fed propaganda for decades and are no longer able to make rational, evidence-based decisions about the world.

Having the robot factories here is good. We can tax the owners, tax the engineers, and use the proceeds to support all the unemployed people. Automation guarantees that we will, eventually, have 50+% permanent unemployment. We'll need to transition to a socialist economy to survive, and it will help if the factories are in our backyard.

5.6 million concurrent Steam users.

Google "concurrent xbox live users", and it looks like they set a record of 2 million a few years back. That's all users, not just the paying Gold users. I'm sure they've grown since then, but tripled?

Now, the obvious caveat is that it's more common to play on an Xbox without an internet connection than it is to play in Steam's offline mode. But Steam's user base is definitely at least comparable to Xbox's.

Very true. That is why, as a loving parent, I allow my infant children to roam freely in traffic, unwashed, unvaccinated, and unsupervised. I'm sure they will thank me as soon as one of them lives long enough to learn to speak.

As a fellow Seattleite, I used to think the same, but it's not actually true. Turns out other places get a lot more sun.

The total electrical energy consumption for the US is 4.1 TWh/yr, or 11.2e6 kWh/day. The insolation in the American southwest exceeds 5 kWh/m^2/day. So at 100% efficiency, it would take less than 0.9 square miles of solar panels to power the entire US. Even cheap solar cells tend to give at least 10% efficiency, so a 3x3 mile array of cheap panels in Arizona could power the entire country.

The real problems are distributing all that energy to darker places, storing all that energy for when the sun isn't out, and paying for all the panels plus the storage plus the distribution. The technology for all of that probably isn't cost effective yet, but it likely will be within my lifetime.

"Voted upon by everyone participating in the network"... So does that mean I can buy 0.001 bitcoins and have equal voting power? And therefore that I can create a million shill accounts? Or is voting weighted by total number of bitcoins possessed?

Either way, it seems like the hardcore devotees will have control. Not that that's a necessarily a bad thing, but don't pretend it's democratic if it's not.

The methods for increased productivity weren't invented by the current CEO or shareholders either. Why are they entitled to the extra profits?