When you white-list your computer, the suggestions are something like "my home computer", and "office computer 1", and "vacation computer". This simply provides facebook with even more personal information to use in targeted advertising. If anything, though this does enhance security, it is at the expense of even more of the user's privacy.

yep. Anki. It's the way to go.

I just saw this professor speak in a lecture to his peers. His conclusion was that what is preventing his molecules from being 'alive' is their inability to undertake novel action. They only go so far as to maximize their sustainability environment and nothing more. Though the 'environments' he gave the molecules were in fact static. It is only a matter of time before we can test situations which really do test our definitions.

Also be careful how you think about cost - this is a true and completely electric car. It will have a completely different cost curve. FAR fewer moving parts. Many fewer consumables. And no gasoline or oil. A 50k electric (if all the bugs and R&D is done (which is exactly what we're 'paying' Tesla to do)) could cost substantially less than a 30k gasoline car over its lifetime. It's still hard to tell. But it is different.

It is a different situation when going backwards in performance in order to get ahead in the long run. There is a steep energy barrier (that only gets steeper in a truly capitalist market) that needs to be lowered through government funded catalysis. Going from horses to cars was simply a matter of investment. It was inevitable. Going from oil to electric will eventually become inevitable, but we can speed it and aid it to ease the transition.

Their target market IS the average person. But they realize that with the current state of technology that they can't get there. So they start with the premium stuff. Put their best foot forward, and do all the R&D with heavy numbers and package it in a snazzy roadster. Get some cashflow on the ridiculously expensive tech, and then as economies of scale kick in, use that tech to make cheaper and cheaper cars. They are not 80s-Honda-cheap, but neither are they intending to remain a Lotus/Ferrari style market.

Wikileaks has a proposal to get a bunch of different free-speech, safe-harbor, journalist-protection style legislation through Iceland so as to both spur this kind of development, as well as provide a political safe-haven for data. Apparently it has caught on pretty well locally, and with a small population it's not particularly difficult to get such legislation passed on short notice.

http://www.wikileaks.org/

The internet has an interesting barrier on entry though - a computer and an internet connection. If you can afford those things in China, you can afford what is being advertised to you. The 'average' wages tell you little about the distribution of wealth in China. There are a number of very well off people living in the large cities. Luxury cars have a 100% luxury tax, and yet you still see countless Ferraris, BMWs & Mercedes. And even if the proportion of the population that is wealthy enough to be a customer of Google is much smaller than in the US or elsewhere, you get to multiply it by their enormous population. I don't have the numbers, but I would wager that by number there are a great deal more (USD) millionaires in China than there are in particular smaller European states, and Google seems to do well in those places.

Youtube is already inaccessible in China and has been for at least 3 years.

Google as a search engine is not particularly interesting to the ordinary citizen in China.

I don't know enough about google's presence in China from their corporate perspective, but from the perspective of someone who lived in China and who works with many Chinese, much more importantly than their google.com, are their backend tools, their technical abilities, their industrial and commercial applications. And I think that is where the strife is taking place, not with the public at large.

While I lived over there I introduced a lot of my friends to gmail and gchat. They provided a means out of the Chinese ecosystem through which they could communicate with friends/others around the world. They liked those tools. I think google's decision may in fact affect mostly those people who are in the know, and have less affect on those who tow the common line.

I guarantee that there will be a 'Apple vs MS vs etc' column that will be posted shortly after each device's debut. Not only do MS and Apple want to be on that list, but a whole host of other companies are releasing products right now just so that they too can be on that list. It would be quite possible to suck up a decent amount of free market space by riding off of Apple's announcement. Apple released this device with these features at this price point, while CompanyA released a similar device with these features at this price point. CompanyA automatically gets free news, a shot at a market and possibly even sales all while riding Apple's momentum.

I'm pretty sure this article is the extension of the MagLev train for which the 'Shanghai Test Track' is a test. That track is to be extended from the shanghai airport all the way to Hangzhou. The land is all bought up. When I was living in Shanghai 2 years ago there was an unprecedented street protest in the city over the health affects the new train's electromagnetic track would have on the landowners near the track (none, actually, but the uneducated populace is weary of being poisoned and killed by political ambitions.

This is a MagLev train. It runs on a special line, not really rails at all. There is a 20km test track that has been around for a while now that takes you from the Shanghai airport to the city. And it does bend. But it banks. The whole train is at a 45-degree angle while it turns. Kinda scary, but it works.

A substantial reason for the existence of this train is political. It is not in any way cost-effective for the job it will be doing. It is a major PR stunt by the government to show its people it has technological prowess. However, they don't actually have that technological prowess as stated above, rather are just buying the products from someone else.

Equivalent by construction does not always imply reducibility. They are different concepts. Sure, results must be validated, and equations of motion are 'true' now as ever. However, as with your string-theory example, there are ways of describing old theories that don't necessarily subsume each other; equivalent logically (in the end), but not of the same construction/limits of each other.

But at least conceptually, there are ways to describe old experiments that don't follow the old rules at all. I'm not sure new theories *must* be reducible to their predecessors in the limit. It's often easiest that way, but I'm not convinced it's the only way.