Peter Bright has been sucking the MS cock since he first started posting on Ars Technica's forum back in the late 90s. His posts were always full of vemon and hate towards anyone who dared criticize MS (and therefore extension, himself) When AT was making new positions for editors, he whined and screamed for one, and if he didn't get it, threatened to leave AT. I am so glad AT implemented the "ignore" function. Now him, and Evil_Merlin are never seen by me. If only I could filter out his stories as well...

Not only that, we've produced the works of Shakespeare.

One of the really attractive things about a Steady State Universe is that it does not require a beginning. It can be infinite in both space and time. This leaves time for the nearly impossible to occur without resort to special circumstances. It is fine for a monkey to hand us the works of Shakespeare now, if there has been infinite time already for him and his friends to bang on typewriters, but if they've only had 14 billion years so far, we might have to suppose they at least read the Cliff Notes. Being able to avoid those special circumstances means that the origin of life is to be expected as a mere accident. However, there is a problem with this solution to the very complex existing in less than infinite time: the monkey should be handing us a large number of copies of the the works of Shakespeare, not just one. So, the Fermi Paradox would seem to indicate that the Steady State Universe is not occurring, independent of all the observational evidence confirming the big bang. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Consider a spherical dirtball.

Infinity divided by one million is infinity.

Another Hoyle cause, panspermia, which urges that the origin of life is so unlikely that a larger event space is needed, so life spreads through the galaxy as microbes once started somewhere, is getting somewhat of a second look. The idea that life may be hoping between planets in the solar system, hitchhiking on meteorites, is gaining adherents. While still a long way from a microbe populated interstellar cloud, or the solution to the statistical problem Hoyle was addressing, this is another echo of the importance of his thinking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

The question is: when does skepticism turn into shilling? There is a point when a subject area becomes so well explored that there is nothing to be gained by taking potshots at the fundamentals. Claims against the foundations become extraordinary and require extraordinary evidence. So, when you hear a lot of noise about a well explored field with claims that the experts are frauds etc... it is pretty easy to infer that the noise is coming from money being spent to raise doubt to protect commercial interests. The link between smoking and cancer was very well established, but many shills were employed to question it in public, as an example. That is not debate, it is a fraud perpetrated on the public.

I think basically Newsweek would claim "we did all this research and a lot of points to this guy as being the guy. Our news story doesn't say "this guy is the guy, our news story lays out the evidence and says we think this is the guy based on this evidence."

Fair? Maybe not, but I'm guessing the newspaper's free speech rights cover their ability to investigate and speculate as long as they are clear about the fact that they are indeed speculating. It's a question of ethics and credibility as to whether the evidence is of enough quantity and quality that they should publish a news story speculating.

This. And I think it's not even endgame, there's shorter time horizon strategic value to have surplus crude in the US where we're not needing to rely on imports in a crisis situation.

We can keep the tankers running in brushfire wars, when we start tangoing with the big boys that's not as good of an option. Being able to get it at home is a lot more appealing.

I don't follow bitcoin enough to know one way or another, but there's a commonly stated idea that the guy who invented bitcoin is sitting on a big stash of coins because he was able to mine them when it was much easier to do so.

If that's true or even if it's a strong maybe, if Newsweek could find him then presumably anyone motivated enough, good motive or bad, could find him, and the idea that he's sitting on a lot of bitcoin ought to be a big motivation for black hats to find him. And by black hats, I don't just mean networking black hats, but the kind of black hats operate on a more physical level, be they organized crime, intelligence service types or others of a similar ilk.

You could make an argument that publicity actually helps him in this regard, because it raises his profile enough that it makes it more difficult to use violence or intimidation against him.

None of this is necessarily an ethical argument for outing him on circumstantial evidence or outing him at all, but as bitcoin has grown in publicity the risk of being outed has only grown for him. He could have controlled the process by controlling his own public exposure instead of being "outed".

It's not because they are non-white racial groups, but that poverty and other social problems are so over-represented in those groups. This seems to have two effects, low parental participation (engagement in-school and engagement in homework, reading, and other similar learning reinforcement) as well kids who bring their at-home social problems with them to school.

This leaves teachers and schools struggling with a whole bunch of social welfare problems schools are ill-equipped and funded to handle as well forcing teachers to devote a lot of time on remedial learning, which hurts the educational opportunities for the kids who are more or less in the median.

And I think it drives well-meaning school officials into a hopeless struggle to close the "achievement gap" which is in actuality trying to solve the much larger social welfare problems. They end up dysfunctional from fighting problems of scale which greatly exceed their resources.

It looks to me like CarPlay exploits the iPhone (and iPad, AFAIK) ability to use an HDMI display as a second monitor rather than an in-dash computing device on its own. When plugged into the CarPlay interface, the home screen gets output to the in-dash display and switches to a dumbed-down, big-icon interface that only displays apps with CarPlay approved display/interfaces.

CarPlay hardware is probably just a custom Lightning HDMI dongle (more or less) that handles video and touch input, meaning that it probably will have an Android analog that somehow works with Android HDMI output. I'm not enough of an Android user to know if Android HDMI output works similarly as a "second" display the way iOS does or not or if Android has an external touch capability the way CarPlay apparently does.

I could be totally wrong about all this, but I can't see carmakers buying into iOS and Apple's control enough to actually let them own the infotainment system down to hardware & software or it being at all practical to actually have iOS run in the dash.