The closest we get to that is the airport, where rights have been considerably and visibly curtailed (as opposed to the comparatively invisible loss of rights due to government intrusion in electronic communications). People seem to have accepted that more or less gracefully: they bitch, but it's not seen as a massive imposition on most people's daily lives.

I don't know if we'd ever get to the point of rationing food. Even if we declared a full-scale war, technology means we grow a lot of surplus food in this country. Prices might rise, but I don't think we'd ever see "grow victory gardens" posters as we did in the last unlimited war.

Oil, however, would skyrocket, and technology might be severely curtailed. It would be interesting to see how people reacted to that. It's hard to say whether that would be a bigger factor than outrage at a draft of manpower. In Korea and Vietnam, a lot of the public seemed to take the draft with equanimity since it came without the kind of rationing we saw during World War II.

Yes, though not a general draft. Still a rather shocking thing to have happened, since it disguised the need for a general draft, that might have altered people's perceptions of the war.

I recall some talk during the lead-up to the Afghan war about the potential for a draft. It wasn't clear at the time just how big that particular conflict would get. It wasn't impossible to imagine it turning into World War-sized scenario against a lot of Islamic countries. The resulting conflicts were small compared to that, but we had to scale up the military substantially and if they'd grown any bigger we'd have had to have a draft.

Now that women are allowed access to combat positions, it's going to be very hard to exempt them from a draft should one be necessary. I can't conceive of the legislature passing any such bill right now (I can't imagine this Congress passing any non-trivial bill, and I don't see that changing), but a wise legislature would want to do that ahead of need rather than after the fact. If women are going to be drafted, you'd need to start registering them now.

I sincerely hope that it's never necessary. And if a war of that scope does happen again, we'll probably be a lot less selective with our weapons of war. (Afghanistan and Iraq were fought house-to-house, because as bizarre as it sounds that was a way of reducing civilian casualties, at least compared to just flattening entire cities as was done in World War II.) So we may well not have a draft even in a bigger conflict. But I think that, while it's politically impossible, a really good pragmatic case could be made for starting to require Selective Service registration for everybody right now.

To me, this seems to cut to the heart of it. AI is commonly conceived of as trying to mimic human intelligence, while there are cognitive tasks that cats and even mice can do that prove too hard for computers. A cat can recognize a mouse with essentially 100% accuracy, from any angle, in an eyeblink. No computer would come close, and the program that came closest wouldn't be a general-purpose object matcher.

Vertebrate brains are pretty remarkable. Human brains are an amazing extra step on top of that. We don't know exactly what that is in part because we don't really understand the simpler vertebrate brains. IMHO, we won't have a good mimic for sapience until we've gotten it to first do sentience. We don't have to rigorously follow the evolutionary order, but it seems to me that conversation-based tests are rewarding the wrong features, and even if they get better by that definition they're not getting us any closer to the actual goals of understanding (and reproducing) intelligence.

I did read the fine article, but I'm afraid I just don't get what's going on here. Are the players contributing something in some kind of crowd-sourced "Yes, that blob is a star, and its center is here" kind of way? Or are they using players' computers as a distributed processing system?

It's nifty either way, but I don't the New Yorker's audience has the same kinds of questions about the technology that I do. Can anybody in this audience (more like me) help me out?

Congratulations, that's one of the stupidest things I've ever read on /. I don't even know where to begin, except to say that it sounds like your thinking seems to be, "Let me pick a position which I know will be unpopular, which must mean it is more correct than the popular position, and then go through some inane line of reasoning to support said position."

"They are the only people who would have actually earned it."

Everyone here is dumber for having read that.

Well, that is where the instruments are.

IFR isn't an automated landing. The pilot is still flying. They're just using various beacons and displays instead of their eyes to see where they are.

I'd really like to see a stovetop with a thermostat. Bains-marie have recently become popular for certain kinds of low, slow cooking, but they're not common and they're unfortunately pricey (and usually require a vacuum sealer that adds even more to the cost).

I end up doing a lot of things in the oven instead, where I can simmer a pot roast at at a reliable 150F. But it's not as precise or consistent as I'd like, especially at the low end.

Getting the stove top to do both precision heating and ultra-high temperature blasting for searing would be a bit of a challenge, but I'd like to see it.

Something cookbooks harp on: most ovens do very poor temperature regulation. Baking books in particular recommend getting a separate themometer, and adding thermal ballast (such as stones) to your oven to get it to keep an even temperature.

That's not just for ultra-high-end stuff; that's for just making good bread. Bread is fairly sensitive to temperature, because you're trying to orchestrate a complex set of reactions including yeast production, internal steam, setting the internal protein structure, and browning the crust. Swings of 25F are enough to throw off that balance, yielding loaves that are too high or too low or too brown or other problems.

Most home ovens do it very badly. It seems to me that's a much more fixable problem without spending a fortune on the ultimate oven.

I could imagine, say, pastry chefs, who are already famous for being control freaks. Producing truly great pastry, reliably, is an extraordinary feat of both science and art. I could imagine them wanting this for a high-end patisserie.

But beyond that, it seems to be a solution looking for a problem. This is Myhrvold, who already wants to see you a $600 book containing a recipe for a hamburger requiring several thousand dollars worth of tools you don't already have in your kitchen (including a dewar of liquid nitrogen). To make a hamburger. I'm sure it's a very, very, very good hamburger... but in the end, it's a hamburger, and I do a pretty fine burger with a cast-iron skillet.

I guess the real question is going to be "how similar is similar?" Aereo won't want to pack up and go home; they're going to want to tweak their business model to see if they can get it just different enough to be not "extremely similar".

If they were a big company, I suspect they'd just make some trivial change and wait to be sued (and wait even longer while it works its way up to SCOTUS again). "Narrow rulings" tend to favor those with the power to claim that they don't apply. And I find it kind of annoying that SCOTUS never seems to recognize that: they pretend they're not laying down general rules, but since it takes so long to get them to issue specific rulings it acts like a general rule anyway.

It's like there's some strange black hole of information available on the internet that only happens around the super specific topic the Ask Slashdotter is interested in. I'm pretty sure all of these folks are the ones that were our best horses in Keener Bingo:

http://www.mathnews.uwaterloo....

Ding ding. Fuck, C# is fine and dandy and pretty fucking fast, if your target platforms and related asset and tool ecosystems are cool with it, and you're not boneheaded about what you're doing. Questions like these are so silly - if you do so much homework to know what you know and what you don't know, I'm pretty sure you're smart enough to find the right information, books, etc. What a passive aggressive inquiry. If you're convinced you can write an intelligently framed question with tons of context, then why on earth can you not do a little google mining for books that focus on C# game development? This discipline is hardly a secretive cabal.

Super PACs predated Citizen's United by some time; it's just that the term wasn't coined until then. People had been doing it for a while, including the group after which the decision is named. CU just made it legally certain and thus increased its popularity.

You are absolutely right about the way Super PACs work. Real change comes only from a concerted, long-term effort. Campaign finance reform is going to be a very hard sell, not just because of entrenched interests but also because it's easier to get people to agree to "something should be done" than "let us do this particular thing". It will take a steady, well-thought out effort.

I'm slightly less cynical about the ability to get media. The media sell air space, and they don't much care to whom they sell it. Capitalists will happily sell you the rope to hang them with. They do so because (a) they don't really believe you'll hang them, and (b) they know that if they don't, somebody else will. Their success won't impact this quarter's bottom line, or even next year's, and they're simply not going to worry about anything further afield than that. Too many other things change too quickly for them to forego cash on the barrelhead.