There are many, MANY reasons not to go to Best Buy...

Homeopathy is bigger in France than it is in the US. So if you're going to make snarky comments about Americans, be sure to throw in a few about the French as well.

I know. I sometimes go to Whole Foods for the rotisserie chicken, which is quite good, but that's about all I get there. The homeopathy boom is just silly. "Organic" is mostly an excuse for overpricing vegetables. The production cost differential is about 20% max. The retail cost differential is 50-100%.

Trader Joe's has equally good vegetables, nuts, grains, etc. without the Whole Foods ego trip, and with better prices.

Haha, you're probably right - I do remember throwing a lot of quarters at Donkey Kong, Bezerker, Asteroids, and the like when I was in college (yup I'm old).

Looking back, I probably should have saved that money and invested it!

Estimated time until the last of the responsible parties retires and no longer has even a nominal obligation to give a fuck?

Some tasks are difficult because of the assorted parameters that you have to adhere to while doing them. In this case, relatively low tolerance for irradiation of workers and human morbidity and mortality are probably major inconveniences.

This being so, it seems only logical to employ TEPCO management as decommisioning operators. It's not like they were good for whatever their existing job descriptions are, and we can safely value their radiation exposure as unimportant, or even a benefit.

I was listening to TWIT a few weeks back - one of the panelists said she'd spent something on the order of $400 playing Candy Crush. That amount floored me... I couldn't believe anyone would do that!

And now this - $10,000 a month is INSANE!

This filtration requires use of Monsanto's patented PureWood trees. Use of any other wood type for filtration will result in severe DMCA penalties.

Fixed that for you.

I'm sure that the 'parse natural language expression and then do some 3d rendering' library is epic fun to debug if it behaves unexpectedly...

Honestly, seeing that much power in a demo makes the hair on the back of my neck rise (and in the 'something vile beyond comprehension this way comes' sort of way, not the 'awe at technology indistinguishable from magic' kind of way).

If you can do extremely complex and powerful things with very, very, short commands, that suggests that all those commands have a lot of internal magic baked in, quite possibly including some might-as-well-be-nondeterministic guessing to paper over any ambiguity in commands, or in output from one command moving to be input for another.

In the context of a demo, where you can carefully test, and confine yourself to some highlights from the set of programs that are both cool and well behaved, fantastic. In the context of taking the language out into the wild, that sounds like every nightmare interaction with an unpredictable and opaque 3rd-party library that you'll never expunge from your nightmares....

I'm assuming that you don't spend north of 22 hours/day in your apartment, with thrilling breaks in the, similarly sized, exercise cage?

I mean, so long as we are ignoring salient variables, I was in this elevator the other day, and the thing was tiny and all just brushed metal, without even furniture or plumbing, just a few buttons like some sick science experiment. I probably wouldn't have made it out with my humanity intact, except that the trip took 90 seconds!

If this actually struck us(at a population level) as 'sad' rather than 'fuck yeah! tough on crime!', I suspect we'd be in better shape.

That statement evaluates to 'true' (one way of getting assigned to a supermax, or tossed in the hole, is shivving a few guards or doing something suggestive of a little of the old ultraviolence); but it's one of those 'true' statements that verges on a falsehood by omission: You aren't going to get a ticket to Florence ADX or anything without showing some character; but in 'mixed' prisons that have a general population and some isolation cells people can, and do, end up doing long solitary stints more or less at the power and merely pleasure of correctional staff. If the wrong person is in the wrong mood, there really isn't a 'floor' below which your infraction can't earn you a trip to solitary, nor, once inside, is there any real bother with 'process' similar.

Like getting sent to the principal's office, only with harrowingly high odds of psychiatric morbidity(including behaviors punishable by.....you guessed it More Solitary!, like self mutilation, a laundry list of alarming neuropsychological effects, extremely high suicide rates(despite conditions designed to make this quite difficult). Happy times.

I'm not generally accused of being a bleeding heart; but I'd be perfectly willing to argue that anyone willing to inflict prolonged solitary confinement, rather than actually-competent execution(unfortunately, this excludes most of the methods we use on humans, for some insane reason) is guilty of naivete at best, and overt sadism at worst.

It's... generally a bad sign... when a procedure is considered nasty enough that you aren't allowed to do it to lab rodents without specific justification and an IRB signoff on your protocol and that aspect specifically...

One annoyance, for a select group, would be that such offspring would toast the assumptions behind mitochondrial inheritance modeling(since you always get the mitocondria from mommy, and the thing still has nearly as much independent genome as it did in its free-living days, mitochondrial DNA is a good trick for tracking maternity over historical time, similar to the use of Y chromosomes for historical paternity tracking.

If some kid suddenly shows up with a random(but functional) stranger's mitochondrial DNA, rather than their mother's defective stuff, they and their descendants will give some future anthropologists a dose of Extra Challenge Mode.