Pretty much, which is why real space battles are not on tv.

One show I think did do a good job was Babylon 5. The battles tended not to be overdramatic. In particular acceleration was used to accelerate.. There was use of kinetic bombardment which seems to be the consensus method to kill a planet.

I think we are seeing the beginning of what space battles will be like. Namely, drones controlled by remote operators. I am sure we will see autonomous. drones playing a key role.

Years ago I attended a lecture given by Ralph Nader. In it he talked about lawsuits. He asked how many in the audience had ever sued someone. Very few raised their hands. He then said that lawsuits were largely used by the powerful to get what they want, and they laws being passed were meant to make sure that only the powerful were able to sue.

We see this with politicians. Sontoram wants to limit the rewards of lawsuits, but when his wife injured her back and blamed a doctor, he was right there to request an inordinate amount of money. We see it with Gingrich now. He is lying as much if not more than anyone else in the presidential campaign, but what does he want to do, Sue. He can't take the attacks and defend himself like a man. He has to hid behind the threat of jurisprudence.

The fact i when consumer or employee is injured by the powerful, they are expected to bend over and take it. But when the powerful and often conservative are even inconvenienced, they feel they have been mortally wounded. I mean everyone knows that such people have been chosen by god to lead a guided life, and who would dare to deny them their special privileges.

Intel made it share of mistakes. Can anyone say the Pentium that could not do floating point division reliably? How about all the resources fighting the RISC/CISC war that would eventually end in a draw based on the engineering reality, not personal preferences. In spite of this much of what we are seing now is simple business cycles. Many of us can remember when Intel was the only game in town, and the others were merely used for niche products.

Here is one thing that happened in 2006 that many may not considered. Apple switched to Intel. That is 20 million more chips sold. More importantly these machines are not $500 models that require cheap low tech processors. No, Macs are high end models that require high end processors and Apple is a company that can help fund research to create those chips. Honestly, how much research and develop can be funded when most of the chips sold are going into bargain basement machines. If one's business depends on PCs, research and development has to be how to cut costs. If chips are going in Macs, the R&D will focus on performance.

I know many will agree, but remember this. A mac is built with matched components that work together to create a usable system. Many PCs are built to be buzzword compliant, putting on cheap components like USB drives and the like to make the machines look advanced while running slow front side busses and even lamer processors.

Again, what is James Randi doing.Taking a few anecdotal examples and condemning the whole religious organizations. That is what many of the comments are doing as well. When we talk about religion, we can be bigoted, but now when we talk about skeptics?

I am not bigoted against skeptics or religious people or whomever. Everyone can believe what they want to believe and I will support them in that right. What I am biased against are people who take selected a priori 'facts', molds it into a narrative that supports their beliefs, and then deny's the possibility that those beliefs could possibly be wrong.

A good example is the vaccination/anti-vaccination debate. Now, vaccination has certainly made the world a more hospitable place for children and have made parents life much easier, no longer having to deal with mumps, or polio, or the like. OTOH there are some concerns, and the pharmco should certainly spend some of that money to address those concerns rather than just depending on the government forcing parent to give their kids drugs that are probably safe but ay not be. In the free market, products that may not be safe are quickly replaced that products that may be safer. Take BPA, high fructose corn syrup, trans fat. Non of these are proven to be harmful, yet we see that due to consumer expectations, they have largely been removed from may products so that consumers have a choice.

Yet such a thing does not happen in the realm of skeptics. They scream that there is no proof that vaccines cause harm. They say that vaccines are important and unless children are dying en masse, there is no problem. They take an affront that anything would be done to placate the masses when something has been scientifically proven to be of no harm. The fundamentalists are screaming that only g-d can tell me what to do. They scream of some secular liberal agenda to remove the spirit from everyone so that everyone will forced to believe in nothing. Everyone else is the middle is being squeezed by the dogma. The expectation, as in the grocery aisle, is that the product that people want will be the product that people will be sold. That there will not be a necessity for government mandate, but a general perception that we are getting the best possible product erring on the side of safety. Most don't care about the skeptics defending the corporate power, or the fundies defending the church's power. We just want good products. I know such a want is delusional. No one cares about the masses.

There is probably nothing in oil extraction, refining, distribution, and use that cannot be done safely. The question is does the economics allow the process to be done safely. As another example, take coal. One gripe people have about coal is that it is transported in open containers and coal dust gets everywhere. One would think the cars would be covered, but they are not, presumable for economics reasons.

Fracking is similar. It is already a relatively expensive process. It may be safe, but likely cost pressures are going to minimize safety in an effort to provide cheap gas.

Either one agrees that people have the right to worship as they will, or you don't. It is not up to us to decide which organizations are religious, and which are not. In the US the only real concern is the IRS and tax breaks. This involves stuff like getting involve in politics.

Really, there should be no special religious exemption. Churches should be able to apply as a non profit, and get those benefits, but if they are not doing non profit work, they should not be able to have any special dispensation. I don't really see why I should be paying for someone else to have a private spa, or to preach that I am evil simply because i do not agree with them.

Otherwise people should be able to do as they please, believe as they please, and worship as they please. It is not up to me or anyone else to be so childish as to go and embarrass those I disagree with. You want my to come into your house and say you are wrong because you let your kids stay up too late, or pick their nose, or not hold their fork properly, or waste money on lunchables, or pay for cable TV instead of books. Of course not.

There is at least one thing that skeptics have in common with religious fanatics. Neither will rest until everyone believes as they do.It is like their personalities are so shallow that any hint of disagreement will set them off. Civilized conversation and debate are meaningless because they are right and everyone else is wrong.

There is a difference between zealotry and faith and basing results of life on physical experience. For instance, I follow the idea that the scientific method is probably the best way to acquire knowledge, and I will tend to reject any form of argument based on common sense or widely held assumptions. This, however, does not keep me from engaging with other people who believe differently, not does it keep from adjusting my opinion based on valid arguments based on empirical facts. I try not assume that people are wrong simply because I disagree with them. My faith is not diminished just because everyone does not hold the same faith. I do not see why it necessary to to personally attack those who disagree. One thing that skeptics and fundamentalists do the same is use the harm of children as an excuse to descend into personal and non productive attack.

My favorite recent example was a case where a cartoon was reinterpreted and linked to by a conservative website that did not share the values of the publishing website. Of course all creative work have only one interpretation, so anyone who interprets the work differently from the original author is simply wrong and deserves to be chastised and ridiculed. What made the situation really comical, however, and totally discredited the skeptics, was that they used the fact that the conservative site deep linked to comic. Of course the publishing site had text requesting that other sites directly link to the comic, and provided the link to so do. Of course none of this dismayed the skeptics from waging their crusade, rather than, as civilized people would, using the cross pollination as an opportunity to know one another. No, skeptics and fundamentalists know what they know, and have no desire to know anything different. This of course makes them different from scientist who go out discover new things, rather than simply use a existing fact base to prove all they disagree with as wrong.

A good example of talking to one another is the proposed agreement between chicken manufacturers and those who wish to make sure the chickens are treated humanely until actually slaughtered. Of course the former provides a product that many want and a low price, and of course the later might prefer that the product did not exist at all. Niether of those scenarios will happen, but there is a third compromise scenario that could happen if the law is passed in the us. Very little productive was going to happen while sides were insulting each other. No that conversation can occur, something might.

A big difference between a controlled market and a free market is that they free market depends on the availability of huge surpluses. In a controlled market on can say we need five units per person, there are 5 million people, so we need to make 25 million units, plus or minus for damage and the like.

In a free, market, however there cannot be that level of control. There may be several of firms producing similar, fungible, product. Each might be trying for 50% market share. That might mean that the actual production might be 5 times what is needed. With commodities such a surplus might be compensated for by increased consumption through more advertising or lower price, but such a thing is hard to do with drugs.

So really the only rational thing to do it to give the drug companies what they want, then insure that surplus product is destroyed. A free market demands surpluses so that consumers can have a choice, and firms have an opportunity to sell premium product. It makes not sense to compromise those values just because a few worry warts are scared.

I recall when MacWrite, and later MS Office for Windows came out, and all writing seemed to stop. People were playing with fonts, colors, kerning. While they made pretty pages, there was often no intellegible language on the page. The redeeming factor was that the Mac allowed a person with a few thousand dollars to publish quite professional looking product, instead of the tens of thousands previously required.

To write a book you need a text editor. To publish a book you need a page layout program like LaTex. It will print in PDF which most anyone can read or print. You can even sell them. if you want something more than a book, then something more than page layout program is required.

What we are mostly talking about now is how to publish more than a book and how to distribute that more than a book. Amazon already has a method to publish and distribute a book. What Apple is providing is an eBook that, if done correctly, will not translate well to a simple printed book. If we are talking textbooks, for instance, the simple printed book is no longer good enough. We have textbooks, we even have very good free textbooks in many subjects. What we need are more than books so the students can get the words, lectures, and simulations outside of class, and use class time for the modeling of the social interactions that are necessary for learning. Successful students instinctively forms groups, not so successful students thinks that such groups are only for partying or sports.

So I don't see how this is useful. LaTeX is open source and free and a very mature and reliable product. I do not see Booktype opening up any new distribution channels. I am only saying this because the summary started off by citing Apple. What Apple has done is provide a format that will let a writing create an e-book, not simply a book that read on a screen instead of paper, and a method of distribution. As I understand it, the EULA really is not going to effect a writer, since any real writer is going to lay down the text and generate the graphics outside of the publishing application. The EULA only says that the iBook is required to be distributed by Apple. This means that write can create a rich content e-book which must be distributed by Apple, but can also create a traditional book that can be distributed any way. This traditional book could be created by Booktype or Latex or anything else.

Going beyond the book is something that very few seem to want to do. The publishers certainly don't want to make their printing presses and large salary redundant over night. One company that did try this, push pop press, is not part of facebook and is no longer really in the book biz. Apple, as it did with music, sees profit in the disruption of books, and has the funds to not be concerned with the people they are going to piss off.

Quality of life is what medicine should be about, and increasingly is not about. Generally what we should be doing is if a baby can make it past the first few months of life, we should do everything to help it reach adulthood in a healthy and productive form, at which point random events and personal choices will take hold. Medicine can help compensate for some of those random events and personal choices, but really why keep a human alive that has not quality of life. It is often to score political points or prove that one has the power to make others suffer.

Vaccines, antibiotics, increasing advances in surgery, sanitation, safety programs, all allowed us to survive through childhood and become productive adults who then pay society back for the effort of raising and providing for us. Intensive intervention for babies who are going to die after a few years of suffering, while personally rewarding to some, can be argued as something that is not medically appropriate. Likewise keeping a suffering adult alive simply to saw 'we cannot condone suicide' while taking in massive quantities of public funds is arguably not the high moral ground.

Clearly there should be funds to pay for the sickly baby or infirm adult. Clearly if a 80 year old person feels that they need a million dollars to live another year, those funds should be available. Life is priceless. Once a life is gone it cannot be replaced. But to say that we are all required, by the dictate of the medical/political/religious establishment to keep the corporeal form and not meet out maker until they say we can is simply not acceptable. Quality of life has to be paramount, not profits, power, and presumption.